page_title: Glenn Gould
section_title: Early life
hierarchical_section_title: Glenn Gould / Life / Early life
caption_attribution_description: English: en:Alberto Guerrero (standing) with en:Glenn Gould, his most famous student, circa en:1945. Image Archives Canada
context_page_description: Glenn Herbert Gould was a Canadian classical pianist. He was one of the best known and most celebrated pianists of the 20th century, and was renowned as an interpreter of the keyboard works of Johann Sebastian Bach. Gould's playing was distinguished by a remarkable technical proficiency and a capacity to articulate the contrapuntal texture of Bach's music.
  Gould rejected most of the standard Romantic piano literature by Chopin, Liszt, and others, in favour of Bach and Beethoven mainly, along with some late-Romantic and modernist composers. Although his recordings were dominated by Bach and Beethoven, Gould's repertoire was diverse, including works by Mozart, Haydn, and Brahms; pre-Baroque composers such as Jan Pieterszoon Sweelinck and Orlando Gibbons; and 20th-century composers including Paul Hindemith, Arnold Schoenberg, and Richard Strauss. Gould was known for his eccentricities, from his unorthodox musical interpretations and mannerisms at the keyboard to aspects of his lifestyle and behaviour. He stopped giving concerts at the age of 31 to concentrate on studio recording and other projects.
  Gould was also a writer, broadcaster, composer and conductor.
context_section_description: Glenn Herbert Gould was born at home in Toronto, on 25 September 1932, to Russell Herbert Gold (1901–1996) and Florence Emma Gold (née Grieg; 1891–1975), Presbyterians of Scottish, English and Norwegian ancestry. His maternal grandfather was a cousin of the Norwegian composer Edvard Grieg. The family's surname was changed to Gould informally around 1939 to avoid being mistaken for Jewish, given the prevailing anti-Semitism of pre-war Toronto and the Jewish associations of the Gold surname. Gould had no Jewish ancestry, though he sometimes made jokes on the subject, such as "When people ask me if I'm Jewish, I always tell them that I was Jewish during the war." His childhood home has been named a historic site.
  Gould's interest in music and his talent as a pianist were evident very early. Both his parents were musical, and his mother, especially, encouraged the infant Gould's early musical development. His mother, hoping for him to become a successful musician, had exposed him to music during her pregnancy. She would later teach him the piano. As a baby, he reportedly hummed instead of crying and wiggled his fingers as if playing chords, leading his doctor to predict that he would "be either a physician or a pianist". He learned to read music before he could read words, and it had been observed that, at age three, he had perfect pitch. When presented with a piano, the young Gould was reported to strike single notes and listen to their long decay, a practice his father Bert noted was different from typical children. Gould's interest in the piano was concomitant with an interest in composition. He would play his own little pieces for family, friends, and sometimes large gatherings—including, in 1938, a performance at the Emmanuel Presbyterian Church (a few blocks from the Gould family home) of one of his own compositions.
  At the age of six, he was taken for the first time to hear a live musical performance by a celebrated soloist. This profoundly affected him. He later described the experience:
  It was Hofmann. It was, I think, his last performance in Toronto, and it was a staggering impression. The only thing I can really remember is that, when I was being brought home in a car, I was in that wonderful state of half-awakeness in which you hear all sorts of incredible sounds going through your mind. They were all orchestral sounds, but I was playing them all, and suddenly I was Hofmann. I was enchanted.
  At the age of 10, he began attending the Royal Conservatory of Music in Toronto (known until 1947 as the Toronto Conservatory of Music). He studied music theory with Leo Smith, the organ with Frederick C. Silvester, and piano with Alberto Guerrero. Around the same time, he injured his back as a result of a fall from a boat ramp on the shore of Lake Simcoe. This incident is almost certainly related to the adjustable-height chair his father made shortly thereafter. Gould's mother would urge the young Gould to sit up straight at the keyboard. He used this famous chair for the rest of his life and took it with him almost everywhere. The chair was designed so that Gould could sit very low at the keyboard, and allowed him to pull down on the keys rather than striking them from above, a central technical idea of his teacher at the Conservatory, Alberto Guerrero.
  Gould developed a technique that enabled him to choose a very fast tempo while retaining the "separateness" and clarity of each note. His extremely low position at the instrument permitted him more control over the keyboard. Gould showed considerable technical skill in performing and recording a wide repertoire including virtuosic and romantic works, such as his own arrangement of Ravel's La valse, and Liszt's transcriptions of Beethoven's Fifth and Sixth Symphonies. Gould worked from a young age with Guerrero on a technique known as finger-tapping: a method of training the fingers to act more independently from the arm.
  Gould passed his final Conservatory examination in piano at the age of 12, achieving the highest marks of any candidate, and thus attaining professional sta
caption: Gould with his teacher, Alberto Guerrero, at the Royal Conservatory of Music in Toronto, in 1945. Guerrero demonstrated his technical idea that Gould should "pull down" at the keys instead of striking them from above.
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