Re: GG: a question

[Katherine Lee <katherine@dnamedia.com>]

At 2:00 AM -0500 1/10/99, BilkwageJ@aol.com wrote:
>Hello.  I'm a new Glenn Gould fan/ convert.  I was reading some biographies
>about him, and one of the authors mentioned that he might have been a
>homosexual.  I was wondering about his adult social life. What I have read
>mostly deals with his childhood, which seemed to be a rather lonely time for
>him; was his adult social life was similar?  How did he handle the sudden fame
>that accompanied the release of the Goldberg variations (1955)? Can you
>recommend any books about him?  Thanks.

For our CD-ROM project, Kevin Bazzana and I spoke with some of the people who were perhaps the closest to Glenn Gould during the last half of his life, namely Stephen Posen (his lawyer and the executor of his estate), Lorne Tulk (a former CBC studio technician, whose whole family developed a close friendship with Gould) and Ray Roberts (Gould's personal assistant, whom Gould called to his side when he suffered his fatal stroke).  They have all denied that Gould was homosexual, and have mentioned that during his life, he had several relationships (however you wish to define this term) with women.  And in fact, no one has been able to find any evidence that Gould was homosexual, although it is easy to see how one might speculate, given his graceful, androgynous appearance during the early part of his career.

Re: Gould's "loneliness" ... What I understood, and related to in Gould the man, was that he needed a great deal of solitude (which he sought ... as opposed to having the condition of loneliness imposed upon him) in order to maintain his creative energy and develop his singular vision.  Although Gould read, listened to the radio, watched TV and talked to his friends on the telephone almost obsessively, he found that too much contact with the corrupting influences of urbanity and the social world dissipated his life spirit. Some of his favourite pastimes were to go for long drives by himself through the countryside of Ontario, retreat to his family's cottage on Lake Simcoe, and to immerse himself in his musical work.

The release of the Goldberg Variations in 1955 placed great demands on someone so attached to his own privacy.  It led to many tours of the North American continent, a couple of visits to Europe, and one to Russia.  During this time, he became ill consistently, and was known to cancel concert dates.  One time while he was in Europe he became so ill he had to spend time recuperating at a spa in Germany ... after which he referred to this time as one of the best, because most sheltered, experiences of his life.  He left the concert stage in 1964 not because he wasn't successful as a live artist, but because he couldn't stand (among other things) having crowds of people gaping at him.  He believed that concert audiences gathered to see if a performer would slip up, guaranteeing them the best "vaudevillian" spectacle of all.

Gould's whole approach to the recording and broadcast media highlights his philosophy of creativity.  For him, these media provided the listener with the most intimate, contemplative experience possible ... a kind of one-to-one relationship with the music/spoken word.  He didn't hate listeners, rather, he felt that eventually, he'd be able to provide people with the tools to "create" their own versions of his recordings, and dissolve the hierarchy of Composer --> Performer --> Audience.  He dreamed of gathering his many studio takes (repeated performances, with slightly different nuances of interpretation, dynamic, etc.) and releasing them as "audio kits" so that people could assemble their own edits of Gould's recordings, trying out different moods, slightly different tempi, and so forth.  Some versions of Gould's audio kit are contained on the CD-ROM, and perhaps over time, we will actually see the Gouldian "audio kit" right beside the commercial releases on the music store shelves ... giving you a selection of Goldberg Variations, or Mozart sonatas, or Wagner transcriptions, or CBC radio documentaries ... to play with and reassemble yourself ...

Books ... there are MANY!  Rather than trying to list them all, I'll point you to Mary Jo's F-minor page, http://erebus.rutgers.edu/~mwatts/glenn/fminor.html , which has a bibliography and links to other websites, and let others on the list comment on the various items they've read ... ;-)


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