Glenn Gould's artistry continues to be a rich source of academic study around the world. Two new published works are now available, offering fresh insights into Glenn Gould's legacy.
The unflinching aesthetic that permeated Gould’s work from beginning to end was one of solitude, purity, and spiritual transcendence rooted in the geographical and metaphorical north of his native Canada. This article explores Gould’s conception of North and seeks to show how his aesthetic not only belongs to the philosophy of the sublime but indeed reinvents its historical discourse for the technological age.
Anyssa Neumann is an American pianist, producer, and PhD student currently based in London, England. She has also lived in Germany and Canada, where she studied piano at Université de Montréal and held two Music Residencies at the Banff Centre. This article was published in December 2011 in the University of Chicago musicology journal, voiceXchange.
This book focuses on three aspects in Glenn Gould's (1932-1982) musical thought and practice: Gould's embrace of music technology, his notions of the ontology of music and musical interpretation, and the place of his thought in Canadian intellectual history. Focusing not only on Gould's writings on music technology but also on those of Marshall McLuhan (1911-1980) and Jean Le Moyne (1913-1996), this book provides a fresh perspective on Gould's thinking, which was embedded in and keenly alert to the intellectual world outside music. The book also touches on Gould's public reception, his national iconicity, in Canadian literature and Hollywood movies. Gould's stardom is discussed as a phenomenon more commonly associated with contemporary popular culture.
Juha Markus Mantere is a research fellow at Sibelius Academy, Helsinki (Finland). He is currently working on a scholarly book on the intellectual history of Finnish musicology. The Gould Variations is available from Peter Lang Publishers.
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Chris Young/Canadian Press
