10/31/2026
He was born in Toronto on September 25, 1932.
His name was Glenn Herbert Gould.
His mother was a music teacher, and she began teaching him piano when he was very young. It soon became clear that Glenn was no ordinary child. He could read music before he could read words. He had perfect pitch. He played with a depth and seriousness far beyond his age.
He studied at the Royal Conservatory of Music in Toronto. By the age of 12, he had earned the conservatory’s highest diploma, the youngest student ever to do so.
In his teens, he began performing with orchestras. People in Toronto knew there was something special about him.
The rest of the world was about to find out.
In 1955, at the age of 22, Glenn Gould recorded Johann Sebastian Bach’s Goldberg Variations for Columbia Records.
At the time, it was a work rarely recorded and not widely popular. It was considered difficult, even dry.
Gould played it in a way no one had ever heard.
His playing was fast, clear, intense and full of life. Every line of Bach’s music stood out like a separate voice. It sounded fresh, modern and thrilling.
The album was a sensation.
It became one of the best-selling classical recordings of its time. Almost overnight, a young pianist from Toronto became one of the most famous musicians in the world.
He toured North America and Europe. In 1957, he travelled to the Soviet Union at the height of the Cold War, one of the first North American musicians to perform there after the Second World War. Audiences in Moscow and Leningrad were spellbound.
He was also famously eccentric.
He hummed and sang loudly while he played. You can hear him on many of his recordings. Sound engineers tried to stop it. They couldn’t.
He sat very low at the piano, on a small folding chair his father had adapted for him. He used that same chair for decades, even after the seat wore through.
He often wore gloves, a scarf and a coat, even in warm weather. He was intensely worried about catching colds. He soaked his hands and arms in hot water before performing.
He disliked crowds, airplanes and the formal rituals of concert halls.
And then, in 1964, at the height of his fame, he did something almost unheard of.
He stopped giving concerts.
He was just 31 years old. He gave his final public concert in Los Angeles and never performed in front of a live audience again.
He believed that the recording studio was where music could be made most perfectly. He spent the rest of his career recording, experimenting with sound and editing, as well as writing, broadcasting and making radio documentaries.
One of his most famous radio works was a documentary for the CBC called The Idea of North, in which he wove together the voices of people talking about the Canadian North into a kind of musical composition.
He loved the North. He loved solitude. He loved Canada’s quiet, wide spaces.
In 1981, more than 25 years after his first famous recording, he recorded the Goldberg Variations again.
This time, his playing was slower, deeper and more reflective. Many listeners found it profoundly moving. It was as if they were hearing a young man and an older man speaking to each other across a lifetime.
A year later, in September of 1982, Glenn Gould suffered a stroke.
He died on October 4, 1982. He was just 50 years old.
Canada mourned him. So did music lovers around the world.
But his music didn’t stop there.
In 1977, NASA launched two spacecraft, Voyager 1 and Voyager 2, on a journey to explore the outer planets and then continue out beyond our solar system.
Each spacecraft carried a golden record, a message from Earth to any intelligent life that might someday find it. It contained images, greetings in many languages, natural sounds and music from cultures around the world.
Among the music chosen was a piece by Bach.
Played by Glenn Gould.
Right now, that recording is travelling through interstellar space, far beyond the planets, carried on a spacecraft that has left our solar system behind.
It’s one of the farthest-travelling human-made objects ever.
So if anyone out there ever finds it and plays it, one of the first sounds they’ll hear from our planet may be a young man from Toronto, sitting low on a battered chair, humming quietly along with Bach.
Only in Canada. 🍁
