On Gould’s High School Recordings

Do we have any early—very early—recordings of Gould? Maybe even from his high school years?

Indeed we do! Gould seems to have begun recording himself at the piano as early as 1947 or 1948, when he was in his mid-teens—in other words, as soon as tape recorders became commercially available in Toronto. Many such recordings survive among his effects in the Library and Archives Canada, in Ottawa, and a few have been played at Gould events and the like, but for the most part they remain unavailable to the public. Recently, however, one of the most interesting of these early private recordings appeared online. Below is a slightly edited paragraph from Wondrous Strange on the subject, followed by a link to the recording.

At Malvern Collegiate Institute, his high school, Gould was well known as a pianist. He performed at assemblies, holiday concerts, and other school functions, sometimes with his own works. In February 1949, as an overture to a school production of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, he performed a fifteen-minute suite of his own composition—four short pieces in very different styles intended to reflect the different styles of writing in various scenes of the play. A private recording of Gould playing the suite, with his own spoken introduction, survives from around this time, and reveals that the sixteen-year-old had developed real compositional skills in addition to a very impressive piano technique, though all four pieces call for arch-Romantic virtuoso display of the sort that the adult Gould repudiated. The first piece, “Nocturne,” in C major, is a strange, rhapsodic, often impressionistic mood piece. “Whimsical Nonsense,” in A minor, is a mischievous, jig-like scherzo in a Romantic style (think Mendelssohn, or perhaps Victor Herbert), full of scampering figuration. “Elizabethan Gaiety,” in D major, is a busy, jolly, Baroquish jig—an exercise in neo-Handelian pastiche. And the long finale, “Regal Atmosphere,” in A major, begins funereally but builds to a grandiose and highly ornate march. Incidentally, no score of the suite survives. According to a contemporary report on the subject published in a Toronto newspaper, “Miss Joan Dobe, of London, England, a theatre critic and writer, has asked for Glen’s [sic] composition for her own correlation of creative arts for children”—whatever that means.

Kevin Bazzana is a Canadian writer with degrees in music history from the University of Victoria, Stanford University, and the University of California, Berkeley. Since the mid-1980s, he has written prolifically about Glenn Gould and has worked on many Gould-related projects: CD and CD-ROM releases, radio broadcasts, conferences, websites. He is the author of Glenn Gould: The Performer in the Work (1997) and Wondrous Strange: The Life and Art of Glenn Gould (2003); edited the Foundation’s Glenn Gould Magazine (1995-2008); and consulted on the documentary film Genius Within: The Inner Life of Glenn Gould (2009).

Do you have a Glenn Gould-related question for Kevin? Submit it here.