On Gould’s Signature Chair

Why did Gould always use the tiny chair when he was performing or recording?

The most enduring symbol of Gould’s eccentricity began life as a high-backed, wooden folding chair that was part of a table-and-chairs set intended for card playing, manufactured in the 1930s in London, Ontario. (Details about this set were first reported by the Toronto-based musician and writer Colin Eatock.) Gould’s chair became unusually low because of modifications made to it by his father (with help from a friend) in 1953, including sawing a few inches off the legs and creating little contraptions that allowed each leg to be adjusted individually.

The result placed Gould about fourteen inches (36 cm) off the ground, so low that his knees were higher than his buttocks, but he wanted to sit this low because his piano style and his preferred repertoire (mostly contrapuntal, much of it from the eighteenth century) demanded a technique that benefitted from an intimate approach to the keyboard. He also wanted a chair that had the “give” he needed, front-to-back and diagonally, to accommodate his movements while he played; that had a seat that sloped forward (“I have to sit on the edge”); and that had a backrest at a greater than ninety-degree angle to accommodate the “leisurely angle” at which he liked to sit. No conventional piano bench met his needs, but the chair his father modified did.

He used this chair for the rest of his life, for practice sessions, rehearsals, concerts, and recordings. He carried and shipped it around as required, and by the later 1950s it was already seriously worn. Oiling and tinkering with it became part of his pre-performance ritual, though it still squeaked in his concerts and recordings. (There is even at least one scholarly study inspired by these squeaks, believe it or not.) The seat’s padding oozed gradually out of its green leatherette cover, which itself fell apart—you can almost date Gould’s photographs and films by the condition of the seat. Eventually he was sitting on a bare frame, with one wooden support running front-to-back along his crotch. Yet he was never heard to complain about the chair, and admitted a substitute only when, say, it was temporarily lost or damaged in transit.

Over the years, Gould, his manager, and Columbia Records made good-faith efforts to find a new, sturdier wood or metal chair. His friend Lorne Tulk, in an outtake from the 2009 documentary Genius Within: The Inner Life of Glenn Gould, displays one such alternative chair modified by Gould’s father, and says that Gould carried both chairs around for a time. But there is no evidence that he ever seriously used any but his original one, for no substitute was ever quite right in the end (no pun intended). There was surely an element of superstition at work here: the chair became a talisman, a Linus-blanket, for Gould, who routinely drew on familiar objects and habits and rituals in order to stave off anxiety.

Incidentally, in 2007, the Italian furniture maker Cazzaro began selling a replica of the famous chair, designed by René Bouchara and endorsed by Gould’s estate, at a price of 990 euros. These are no longer being sold, though one of them is housed in the Foundation’s office.

The original chair is now housed (along with Gould’s beloved Steinway piano, CD 318) at the National Arts Centre, in Ottawa. 

No, they won’t let you sit on it.

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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