On Photos of Gould at the RCM
December 19, 2020
Were any group photos taken of Glenn Could and his contemporaries when he studied music at the Royal Conservatory of Music of Toronto?
The Gould archive in the Library and Archives Canada, in Ottawa, holds five photographs from the early 1940s in which he is shown among the annual silver medalists of the Toronto Conservatory of Music (as the institution was then called). And the book Glenn Gould: A Life in Pictures (2002) includes (p. 72) a photo of the conservatory’s 1946 graduating class in which he appears in the back row—conspicuously younger and smaller than everybody else.
There are also photos of Gould in class at school, with various childhood friends, and with his conservatory piano teacher, Alberto Guerrero; samples of all of these can be seen in A Life in Pictures.
Toronto Conservatory of Music silver medalists for 1940
(Glenn Gould is in the front row, third from the left).
Source: Library and Archives Canada/Glenn Gould fonds/MUS 109-1199.
© Public Domain. Credit: E. Mackintosh. Courtesy of the Royal Conservatory of Music. Reproduced with the permission of the Estate of Glenn Gould and Glenn Gould Limited.
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).
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