Glenn Gould (1932–1982) was a Canadian pianist, born and brought up in Toronto. He entered the Toronto Conservatory at ten, studied piano with Alberto Guerrero, and passed his final piano examination at twelve with the highest marks.

In January 1955 he made his American debut in Washington and New York, and that June he recorded Bach’s Goldberg Variations for Columbia. Released the following January, the record made his name. In 1957 he played in Moscow and Leningrad, the first North American pianist to visit the Soviet Union since the war.

On 10 April 1964, at the Wilshire Ebell Theatre in Los Angeles, he gave his last public concert. For the eighteen years that remained he worked for the microphone and the camera: recordings of Bach, Beethoven, Brahms and Schoenberg, and CBC radio documentaries built like fugues, the Solitude Trilogy. He sat at a low folding chair his father had made and, for most of his recordings, at a Steinway known as CD 318. His essays were gathered after his death in The Glenn Gould Reader.

In 1981 he recorded the Goldberg Variations again, slower, as one long arc. He died in Toronto on 4 October 1982, at fifty.

This is a demo site, a tribute built to show what a musician’s page on TJP can hold. Its dates are the demo’s own.