Glenn Gould's Toronto

Glenn Gould was born in Toronto on September 25, 1932, and grew up in the Beaches neighbourhood, studying piano formally with Alberto Guerrero at the Toronto Conservatory of Music, now the Royal Conservatory. He became one of the most celebrated and eccentric classical pianists of the twentieth century without really leaving home: Gould kept Toronto as his base for his entire life and rarely travelled once his international touring career wound down. In 1964 he gave up concert performing altogether, arguing that recording technology let him achieve a more controlled version of the music than any concert hall could. He died in Toronto on October 4, 1982, at age 50, and is buried at Mount Pleasant Cemetery, his headstone inscribed with the opening bars of the Goldberg Variations.

CBC recordings and Toronto tributes

Much of Gould's work after 1964 was made for the CBC, including ambitious radio documentaries such as The Idea of North (1967), which used overlapping voice recordings to explore isolation in the Canadian North. Toronto has memorialized him in a few concrete ways: the Glenn Gould Studio, a public recording and performance venue inside the CBC Broadcasting Centre, opened in 1992 and bears his name, and a bronze statue of Gould sitting on a bench outside the same building remains a popular photo stop for visitors.

Sources

• The Canadian Encyclopedia — Glenn Gould
• Wikipedia — Glenn Gould