Gould rejected most of the Romantic piano literature by Chopin, Schumann, Liszt, Rachmaninoff, and others, in favour of Bach and Beethoven mainly, along with some late-Romantic and modernist composers.

[5] She taught him the piano and as a baby, he reportedly hummed instead of crying, and wiggled his fingers as if playing a keyboard instrument, leading his doctor to predict that he would "be either a physician or a pianist".

[7] The chair was designed so that Gould could sit very low and allowed him to pull down on the keys rather than striking them from above, a central technical idea of Guerrero's.

Gould showed considerable technical skill in performing and recording a wide repertoire including virtuosic and romantic works, such as his own arrangement of Ravel's La valse and Liszt's transcriptions of Beethoven's Fifth and Sixth Symphonies.

Gould worked from a young age with Guerrero on a technique known as finger-tapping: a method of training the fingers to act more independently from the arm.

[15] Gould passed his final Conservatory examination in piano at age 12, achieving the highest marks of any candidate, and thus attaining professional standing as a pianist.

"[25] As a teenager, Gould was significantly influenced by Artur Schnabel[fn 10][26] and Rosalyn Tureck's recordings of Bach[27] (which he called "upright, with a sense of repose and positiveness"), and the conductor Leopold Stokowski.

The music critic Paul Hume wrote in the Washington Post, "January 2 is early for predictions, but it is unlikely that the year 1955 will bring us a finer piano recital than that played yesterday afternoon in the Phillips Gallery.

[37] His concerts featured Bach, Beethoven, and the serial music of Schoenberg and Berg, which had been suppressed in the Soviet Union during the era of Socialist Realism.

[38] On 31 January 1960, Gould first appeared on American television on CBS's Ford Presents series, performing Bach's Keyboard Concerto No.

[42] One of Gould's reasons for abandoning live performance was his aesthetic preference for the recording studio, where, in his words, he developed a "love affair with the microphone".

He was once arrested, possibly being mistaken for a vagrant, while sitting on a park bench in Sarasota, Florida, dressed in his standard all-climate attire of coat, hat and mittens.

On a visit to Steinway Hall in New York City in 1959, the chief piano technician at the time, William Hupfer, greeted Gould with a slap on the back.

[53] He was known for cancelling performances at the last minute, which is why Bernstein's aforementioned public disclaimer opened with, "Don't be frightened, Mr. Gould is here ... [he] will appear in a moment."

In his liner notes and broadcasts, Gould created more than two dozen alter egos for satirical, humorous, and didactic purposes, permitting him to write hostile reviews or incomprehensible commentaries on his own performances.

Probably the best-known are the German musicologist Karlheinz Klopweisser, the English conductor Sir Nigel Twitt-Thornwaite, and the American critic Theodore Slutz.

As early as two weeks after leaving her husband, Foss noticed disturbing signs in Gould, alluding to unusual behaviour that was more than "just neurotic".

[69] Gould's public funeral was held in St. Paul's Anglican Church on 15 October with singing by Lois Marshall and Maureen Forrester.

[79] But he was progressive in many ways, promulgating the atonal composers of the early 20th century, and anticipating, through his deep involvement in the recording process, the vast changes technology had on the production and distribution of music.

Mark Kingwell summarizes the paradox, never resolved by Gould nor his biographers, this way: He was progressive and anti-progressive at once, and likewise at once both a critic of the Zeitgeist and its most interesting expression.

Although there was some controversy at Columbia about the appropriateness of this "debut" piece, the record received extraordinary praise and was among the best-selling classical music albums of its era.

[100] Schwarzkopf believed in "total fidelity" to the score, and objected to the temperature: The studio was incredibly overheated, which may be good for a pianist but not for a singer: a dry throat is the end as far as singing is concerned.

[101]Gould recorded Schoenberg, Hindemith, and Ernst Krenek with numerous vocalists, including Donald Gramm and Ellen Faull.

Gould also collaborated with members of the New York Philharmonic, the flutist Julius Baker and the violinist Rafael Druian, in a recording of Bach's Brandenburg Concerto No.

Notable productions include his musique concrète Solitude Trilogy, which consists of The Idea of North, a meditation on Northern Canada and its people; The Latecomers, about Newfoundland; and The Quiet in the Land, about Mennonites in Manitoba.

All three use a radiophonic electronic-music technique that Gould called "contrapuntal radio", in which several people are heard speaking at once—much like the voices in a fugue—manipulated through overdubbing and editing.

5 and the cantata Widerstehe doch der Sünde from the harpsipiano (a piano with metal hammers to simulate a harpsichord's sound), and Gustav Mahler's Symphony No.

His unique pianistic method, insight into the architecture of compositions, and relatively free interpretation of scores created performances and recordings that were revelatory to many listeners and highly objectionable to others.

[119] One of Gould's performances of the Prelude and Fugue in C major from Book II of The Well-Tempered Clavier was chosen for inclusion on the NASA Voyager Golden Record by a committee headed by Carl Sagan.

(Gould grew up in Toronto at the same time that Canadian theorists Marshall McLuhan, Northrop Frye, and Harold Innis were making their mark on communications studies.