Singing along

“I can’t do without it. I would if I could.” It was Gould’s mother who taught him to sing along with the music when he was playing the piano at home. By the time he noticed that he had retained the habit when performing on the concert platform and in the recording studio, it was already too late. He could no longer rid himself of the habit, and it became one of his trademarks. Other musicians would sing or growl or hum along with the music – both Toscanini and Casals did so – but with no other musician is this contrapuntal accompaniment as noticeable as it was with Gould. (In spite of this, it remains difficult to make out exactly what he is singing.) He himself accepted the situation with good humour: when the producer Howard Scott once asked him in some desperation if he could somehow stifle the sound, Gould turned up at the studio for his next recording session wearing a gas mask from the Second World War. During the 1970s CBC producer Andrew Kazdin reports that “we erected a large, sound-absorbent screen just to Glenn’s right that partially shielded the microphones from an uninterrupted view of his face”. The idea of encasing the whole of Gould’s upper body, together with the keyboard and pedals, in a sound-absorbent box was abandoned only because “Glenn had to hear the sounds his instrument was producing as he played”.

Don Hunstein / Jan 61