Top 52 Quotes & Sayings by Glenn Gould

At concerts I felt demeaned, like a vaudevillian.

I love the early sonatas; I love the early Mozart, period. I'm really fond of that moment when he was either emulating Haydn or Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach or anybody but himself. The moment he found himself, as conventional wisdom would have it, at the age of 18 or 19 or 20, I stop being so interested in him.

I detest audiences. Not in their individual components but en masse... I think they are a force of evil.

It's true that I've driven through a number of red lights on occasion, but on the other hand, I've stopped at a lot of green ones but never gotten credit for it.

Isolation is the one sure way to human happiness.

One does not play the piano with one's fingers: one plays the piano with one's mind.

When I broke 20, I said to myself, 'I will give concerts until I'm approximately 30.' And I made it a year and a half late, but, nevertheless, that's what I did. When I broke 30, I said, 'I think I should be recording until I'm about 50.'

I don't think any of the early Romantic composers knew how to write for the piano... The music of that era is full of empty theatrical gestures, full of exhibitionism, and it has a worldly, hedonistic quality that simply turns me off.

Concert pianists are really afraid to try out the Beethoven Fourth Concerto if the Third happens to be their specialty. That's the piece they had such success with on Long Island, by George, and it will surely bring them success in Connecticut. So first there's tremendous conservatism. And then stagnation sets in. Or it certainly did in me.

I think there's a fallacy that's been concocted by the music teachers' profession, to wit: that there's a certain sequence of events necessary in order to have the revealed truth about the way one produces a given effect on a given instrument.

I treat recorded tapes the way a film director treats his rushes.

Until I was about 13, somehow I managed to assume that everyone reacted to everything just about as I did. I took it for granted that everyone shared my passion for overcast skies. It came as quite a shock when I discovered that there were actually people who preferred sunshine.

Chopin, Schubert, and Liszt had no idea of how to write for the piano.

Fingers don't have much to do with playing the piano. The idea that they do must be unlearned.

I don't much care for the sunlight or bright colours of any kind.

Beethoven's reputation is based entirely on gossip. The middle Beethoven represents a supreme example of a composer on an ego trip.

Behind every silver lining, there's a cloud.

To me, the ideal artist-to-audience relationship is a one-to-zero relationship. The artist should be granted anonymity.

I'm fascinated with what happens to the creative output when you isolate yourself from the approval and disapproval of the people around you.

The purpose of art is not the release of a momentary ejection of adrenaline but is, rather, the gradual, lifelong construction of a state of wonder and serenity.

There's a very curious and - and almost sadistic lust for blood that overcomes the concert listener, and there's a waiting for it to happen: a waiting for the horn to fluff; a waiting for the strings to become ragged; a waiting for the conductor to forget the subdivide, you know? And it's dreadful!

I find myself more genuinely drawn to the essence of Beethoven in Schnabel than I ever have been by anybody.

By the time I was six, I made an important discovery that I get along much better with animals than humans.

Perhaps the most important thing that technology does is free the listener to participate in ways that in all previous periods of listening were governed by the performer.

I cannot bear assaults of any kind, and it seems to me that the Beatles essentially were out to affront and to assault.

There is a craft and a power in listening.

I tend to follow a very nocturnal sort of existence mainly because I don't much care for sunlight. Bright colors of any kind depress me, in fact. And my moods are more or less inversely related to the clarity of the sky, on any given day.... my private motto has always been that behind every silver lining there is a cloud.

The purpose of art is not the release of a momentary ejection of adrenaline but rather the gradual, lifelong construction of a state of wonder and serenity.

One does not play the piano with one's fingers, one plays the piano with one's mind.

Mozart died too late rather than too soon.

The prerequisite of contrapuntal art, more conspicuous in the work of Bach than in that of any other composer, is an ability to conceive a priori of melodic identities which when transposed, inverted, made retrograde, or transformed rhythmically will yet exhibit, in conjunction with the original subject matter, some entirely new but completely harmonious profile.

The nature of the contrapuntal experience is that every note has to have a past and a future on the horizontal plane.

[Bach is the] reason I became a musician

Theirs [the Beatles] is a happy, cocky, belligerently resourceless brand of harmonic primitivism... In the Liverpudlian repertoire, the indulged amateurishness of the musical material, though closely rivaled by the indifference of the performing style, is actually surpassed only by the ineptitude of the studio production method. (Strawberry Fields suggests a chance encounter at a mountain wedding between Claudio Monteverdi and a jug band.)

The purpose of art is the lifelong construction of a state of wonder.

A record is a concert without halls and a museum whose curator is the owner.

The mental imagery involved with pianistic tactilia is not related to the striking of individual keys but rather to the rites of passage between notes.

The justification of art is the internal combustion it ignites in the hearts of men and not its shallow, externalized, public manifestations.

I don't approve of people who watch television, but I am one of them.

The trouble begins when we start to be so impressed by the strategies of our systematized thought that we forget that it does relate to an obverse, that it is hewn from negation, that it is but very small security against the void of negation which surrounds it.

If an artist wants to use his mind for creative work, cutting oneself off from society is a necessary thing

The final, unfinished fugue from The Art of Fugue is the greatest piece of music ever composed.

Isolation is the indispensable component of human happiness.

u201Che G-minor Symphony consists of eight remarkable measures surrounded by a half-hour of banality.

I don't know what the effective ratio would be, but I've always had some sort of intuition that for every hour you spend in the company of other human beings, you need "x" number of hours alone. Now, what "x" represents I don't really know; it might be two and seven-eighths or seven and two-eighths, but it is a substantial ratio.

Whenever one honestly defies a tradition, one becomes, in reality, the more responsible to it.

Once I turned pro, so to speak, I put away childish things forever.

I think that if I were required to spend the rest of my life on a desert island, and to listen to or play the music of any one composer during all that time, that composer would almost certainly be Bach. I really can’t think of any other music which is so all-encompassing, which moves me so deeply and so consistently, and which, to use a rather imprecise word, is valuable beyond all of its skill and brilliance for something more meaningful than that — its humanity.

I think that if I were required to spend the rest of my life on a desert island, and to listen to or play the music of any one composer during all that time, that composer would almost certainly be Bach.

My moods are inversely related to the clarity of the sky.

I believe that the only excuse we have for being musicians and for making music in any fashion, is to make it differently, to perform it differently, to establish the music's difference, vis-a-vis our own difference.

I detest audiences - not in their individual components, but en masse I detest audiences. I think they're a force of evil. It seems to me rule of mob law.