Edition №7
I first heard Glenn Gould while I was working at a record store. It was Sound Warehouse in Dallas, near SMU, the one location that stocked nothing but classical and jazz. I couldn’t tell you which recording was playing. What stopped me was the humming. Under the Bach, a man’s voice is singing along, off-mic and not quite on purpose. Once you catch it you can’t let it go. Two coworkers with a deeper knowledge of classical music told me it was Glenn Gould. He hummed while he played, loud enough to end up on the records.
The more I learned about him, the more he pulled me in. He gave his last public concert in 1964, at 31, and never played for a live audience again. He called the concert a “blood sport” and something close to a force of evil, and he meant it. He walked into the recording studio instead and more or less never left, editing his own takes the way a film director edits a movie, which is close to how he described his process. I still don’t have a good grip on Glenn Gould the man. He was strange, private and complicated in ways I won’t pretend to diagnose. What I have is a deep respect for how unconventional he was willing to be, and a talent that has outlived him by decades with no sign of fading.
He recorded Bach’s Goldberg Variations twice, 26 years apart. Most people who love this music own one of them. Almost nobody tells you the rest: the two recordings were made in different technological worlds, and that gap decides which one you should buy, and on what. One of the two hides a surprise about which copy actually sounds best.
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