The Art of Glenn Gould: Reflections of a Musical Genius

Desmond Maley is the music librarian at the J.W. Tate Library,
Huntington College, Laurentian University, and the editor of Newsletter
of the Canadian Association of Music Libraries, Archives, and
Documentation Centres.

The documentary record on Glenn Gould receives a quantum boost with this
impressively edited collection of his writings. John Roberts has
assembled 45 papers by or featuring Gould, including interviews, essays,
addresses, lectures, and extracts from television and radio scripts. The
pianist’s life and work is assessed in the introduction, and each
piece is prefaced with an insightful vignette that, along with the
detailed endnotes, puts the reader in the proper context and helps to
form a narrative. The pieces range from a few paragraphs to full-length
essays. Most of the material is drawn from the Glenn Gould Fonds at the
National Library of Canada and is previously unpublished or uncollected.

The highlight is “Forgery and Imitation in the Creative Process,” a
lecture Gould first presented at the University of Toronto Summer School
in 1963, in which he ruminates on the incremental nature of creativity,
the psychology of criticism, and the impact of technological change.
There are illuminating dialogues between Gould and Yehudi Menuhin and
Marshall McLuhan, warm appreciations of musicians like Sviatoslav
Richter and Josef Krips, and provocative and stimulating commentaries on
an array of composers and works, as wel as on music in the electronic
age. Gould’s description of his practice methods is also interesting,
notably the role played by mental visualization in creating ecstasy.
Roberts also discusses the maladies and performance-related injuries
that threatened Gould’s career, about which Gould kept diaries in the
late 1970s.

Roberts is a former CBC producer who worked with Gould and was a
longtime friend. He is also founding president of the Glenn Gould
Foundation. “Gould,” says Roberts, “is best thought of as a
musical experimenter and public educator.” This anthology is a worthy
companion to The Glenn Gould Reader (1984), edited by Tim Page.