Glenn Gould! Glenn Gould! Glenn Gould!

Yes, it�s his seventieth anniversary. Most of you probably don�t know that I am a massive Gould fan. Those who do are probably scratching their heads and saying, �I thought she got over that. Isn�t this her third wedding anniversary? Shouldn�t she be blogging about marital bliss?�

My marital bliss today involves being thrilled that my significant other enjoys Gould as well, thanks to me. Our first official outing was to a Gouldian book launch at the NAC in Ottawa and a film festival on Gould�s work (duly reported to the F-Minor group!). And, of course, a couple of years later, completely by coincidence, we were married on September 25th: Glenn Gould�s birthday. (It meant that I had to miss the bi-annual international Gould conference that I had been planning on attending, but well, after weighing priorities, I think everything came out all right, don�t you?)

No, actually, my husband woke me up an hour before I had to be up and brought me breakfast in bed this morning, and a rose, and tea. Very sweet. I couldn�t eat it, mind you (I can�t eat until I�ve been awake for a good hour or so), but it was a lovely thought.

He left, I turned on the radio, and lo and behold, it�s all Glenn Gould, all day on CBC Radio Two!

The agonising and unfair reality of things, however, means that I am working at the store today and I can�t listen to it. Argh! They�re interviewing people he worked with, playing clips of interviews done with him, asking Canadian and international musicians and producers for their opinions of his work, and playing Gould, Gould, Gould� fourteen whole hours of broadcast. I�ll hear a couple of hours tonight, but I wish I could hear it all!

I discovered Glenn Gould by buying a copy of his 1955 Goldberg Variations in ye old Sam the Record Man downtown. The playing was rough, spilling over with emotion and drive, and I was hooked. I did research, bought academic analyses, acquired as many recordings by Gould as possible that wasn�t the work of twentieth century composers (Bach, Bach, Bach!), and ended up outlining and writing a third of a thesis on Gould�s dual use of performance/recording and the written word as communication about music, for he wrote many articles and many of his own liner notes as well. I was supervised by a professor of drama in the English department, who was excited about the project and foresaw an examination board made up of people from the music faculty and the English department. Everything was green-lighted� and then my advisor vanished from the face of the earth. He didn�t return e-mails, didn�t return phone messages, didn�t respond to the drafts I left for him in his mailbox. The project trickled to a stop as I lost confidence in myself and the thesis, and my life went to hell in a handbasket as my first wedding was called off and various other problems surfaced in my life. Ultimately the thesis was abandoned, replaced by my brilliant (yes, I reread it recently) thesis on Nostalgia in the British Academic Novel: Reconstructing the Past in Thatcher Britain (available on microfiche, by interlibrary loan, and somewhere federal in Ottawa where all theses written in Canada go to rest in glory). This means that I have the bare bones of a major Gould work somewhere on a floppy disk (I shudder� it could be anywhere).

In the meantime, I was an active member of F-Minor, a mailing list about Gould�s works. In fact, if I search my birth name on the Internet, the first thing that comes up is a post to F-Minor from the archive. I have in the past few years received e-mails from strangers asking me questions about Gould and Timothy Findley for school papers as a result of this archive still being up and available to the public, which is flattering and slightly time-warpish. I unsubscribed from the list not long after the thesis fell apart, being so very hurt by the callousness of the vanishing professor (who went on to retire and not inform several students he was supervising), but going back through it this morning has me convinced that I�ll re-subscribe, if it�s still active.

Since I can�t enjoy the festivities today, do it for me! Visit the official web site at http://glenngould.com/gg/; or listen to CBC Radio Two�s Variations on Glenn Gould via the airwaves or on the Internet (Radio Two, down on the lower left), even if it’s just for a few minutes to get a sense of who this man was; and read about it on the CBC web site. I�m going to be late for work now because I blogged so long about a topic that I love, but since I�m not the one with the keys� as Bill would say, �neener, neener�!