Peter Goddard - The Great Gould

Timeless.

Gould and Peterson never played together, although both said they thought about it. But Gould knew about Janis Joplin, who was on the Festival Express. He included her song Mercedes-Benz alongside Bach and simple hymns in The Quiet in the Land , his 1977 radio documentary about Mennonite life.

I think of my father, stopping a bit west of here with me, so that I could get out of the car to see a bit of the city before I went on to my piano lesson at the Royal Conservatory of Music, then at the corner of College Street and University Avenue, since moved to Bloor Street.

Canadian sculptor Ruth Abernethys Glenn offers up a solid, handsome icon that reminds us that the slumped figure was taller in life than is often remembered. The work catches many signature Gould tics: he seems bent into the bench itself just as he melded with his piano stool; his right hand on his cap gives the impression it might fly off at any moment in a gust of Front Street wind; and his expression proclaims a stagey seriousness that might be, maybe, just a little over the top. Hmm, yes, but, ah, speaking, as well one might, in Schoenbergian terms

You can practically hear a professorial Gould muttering on and on pedantically like this as visitor after visitor sits next to the master, deliciously aware that their rendezvous is a camera-ready setup.

Theatre is the key. Its my theme, in a way. It was Goulds theme, too. Media awareness: the star knowing where the camera was, where the microphone was. A familiar enough figure on Toronto streets back in the day, Gould could be found performing his own hobo lumpy young/old guy act, padded against the wind as if in a wintry battle scene in a vintage Soviet movie. Walking can be a subversive act, particularly if done with intent. And it certainly was for Gould, private and purposeful all at once. Wheres he going? Whats he thinking? might be questions people asked as he passed. Whats that hes humming? This memory is now only the property of old-timers, and theyre unlikely to be walking those same streets as often if they still exist at all, those streets.

Glenn Gould is always in motion in my lasting memories of him, although these images are always in black and white, like the National Film Board newsreels we were shown at school before any of our parents had a TV. Film rolling from the early fifties, when I might see him charging through the halls of the old Royal Conservatory of Music the Con, as my father, a teacher there, called it. He was hugely famous just about everywhere in the world already, but not here, not really, as the rest of us struggled away with our iffy talents in cold practice rooms. I remember seeing him in the Cons tiny cafeteria arguing away with someone, people coming up and talking to him. Its still black and white in my memory from almost twenty years later, in the early 1970s, when Id find myself crossing Glenn Goulds path late in the afternoon around the old CBC building on Jarvis Street, where I worked for some years. In these memories, and in retelling them, I cant simply say Gould its too detached from the way one felt about him but certainly not Glenn as in Hey, Glenn. It had to be Glenn Gould.