Books in Brief: The Glenn Gould Reader

The Glenn Gould Reader, edited by Tim Page (Knopf, 476 pp., $20)

“Glenn Gould,” B. H. Haggin once grumbled, “prefers talking nonsense on anything anywhere to playing the piano marvelously in the concert hall.” For the benefit of those who appreciated Gould’s particular brand of nonsense more than Mr. Haggin did, Tim Page has put together a lengthy collection of essays, speeches, and interviews called The Glenn Gould Reader. Gould’s prose was as uneven as his piano playing; some of these pieces (particularly “The Prospects of Recording”) are startlingly provocative, some embarrassingly sophomoric, one or two just plain dull. Virtually all are more or less perverse: Gould calls Richard Strauss “the greatest musical figure who has lived in this century” on one page and dismisses the Mozart G Minor Symphony as “a half-hour of banality” on the next. But all are worthy of your closest attention—for despite his extreme (and self-conscious) eccentricities of taste and thought, Glenn Gould was the most gifted pianist of his generation, and his best writings on music were as thoughtprovoking, closely argued, and compelling as his best performances. Avoid the dragged-out spoofs and parodies; savor the liner notes, which are to recorded classical music as Paul Desmond’s triple sec jacket essays were to jazz. A wonderful, irritating book.