Glenn Gould Quotations

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.

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

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

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.

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

[Bach is the] reason I became a musician

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

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