Re: Did Gould sing in public ?

["Michael Mogensen" <mogensen@post6.tele.dk>]

Denis Dutton, New Zealand, said:

I saw Gould twice.  We all know about his recordings, but he was 
absolutely silent in the recitals I heard. 

Did Gould sing in public?  Any views/knowledge out there?

A: I agree about this public silence, although I don't have any firsthand
impressoins like yours. When looking in Otto Friedrich's G.G-bio. "Glenn
Gould A Life and Variations", page 61 you find:

"Looking back on these difficult early years on the concert stage, Gould
said that he had originally been quite unconscious of the physical
mannerisms that many critics regarded as an attempt to attract publicity.
(In surviving tapes of Gould's concerts, the most disturbing distraction is
actually the ceaseless coughing from the audience.) "I had not regarded any
of the things attendant upon my playing - my eccentricities, if you like -
as being of any particular note at all," the pianist told Bernard Asbell.
"No one made any fuss about them. Then suddenly a number of
well-meaning...pepole in the arts...said, 'My dear young man, you must pull
yourself together and stop this nonsense...' The fact that I tend to sing a
great deal while I'm playing, that I tend to conduct myself with one hand -
all that sort of things...I have never given any thought to the importance,
at least to some pepole, of visual image. When I suddenly was made aware of
this in about 1956, I became extremely self-conscious about everything I
did. The whole secret of what I had been doing was to concentrate
exclusively on realizing a conception of the music, ragardless of how it
was physically achieved. This new self-consciousness was very difficult.""

I guess that's a supportive statement.

All the best.

Michael, Denmark.