Glenn Gould Quotes

• 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.

  Glenn Gould

  Art, Serenity, Purpose

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• Isolation is the indispensable component of human happiness.

  Glenn Gould

  Isolation, Indispensable, Humans

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

  Glenn Gould

  Art, Purpose, Wonder

  Commencement address at York University, Toronto, Canada, 6 Nov. 1982

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• 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.

  Glenn Gould

  Life, Music, Being Alone

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

  Glenn Gould

  Play, Piano, Mind

  "Biography/ Personal Quotes". www.imdb.com.

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• 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.

  Glenn Gould

  Meaningful, Moving, Thinking

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• 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.

  Glenn Gould

  Fashion, Believe, Differences

  56 Copy quote

• There is a craft and a power in listening.

  Glenn Gould

  Listening, Crafts

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

  Glenn Gould

  Cutting, Artist, Creative

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• 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.

  Glenn Gould

  Depression, Depressing, Color

  "The Life and Times of Glenn Gould". Documentary, March 13, 1998.

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

  Glenn Gould

  Reality, Tradition, Responsible

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• 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.)

  Glenn Gould

  Cocky, Musical, Style

  49 Copy quote

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

  Glenn Gould

  Sky, Clarity, Mood

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• 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.

  Glenn Gould

  Thinking, Law, Evil

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

  Glenn Gould

  Art, Men, Burning

  Attributed to Glenn Gould in "Glenn Gould: Music and Mind" by Geoffrey Payzant, (p. 64), 1978.

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• Mozart died too late rather than too soon.

  Glenn Gould

  Musical, Too Late, Late

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• [Bach is the] reason I became a musician

  Glenn Gould

  Musician, Reason

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

  Glenn Gould

  Art, Finals, Pieces

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• 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.

  Glenn Gould

  Void, Doe, Forget

  "Glenn Gould Reader". Book by Glenn Gould, p. 5, 1984.

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• 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.

  Glenn Gould

  Music, Keys, Individual

  "Glenn Gould Reader". Book by Glenn Gould, p. 445, 1984.

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

  Glenn Gould

  People, Watches, Television

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

  Glenn Gould

  Past, Notes, Planes

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• 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.

  Glenn Gould

  Two, Numbers, Intuition

  Glenn Gould, Jonathan Cott (2005). “Conversations with Glenn Gould”, p.103, University of Chicago Press

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

  Glenn Gould

  Museums, Records, Curator

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• 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.

  Glenn Gould

  Art, Identity, Matter

  "Song: 'So You Want To Write A Fugue'". 1997.

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