Gouldberg Variations:
Glenn Gould’s Polyphonic Art and Life
11:00 a.m., Thursday, Oct. 8, 2009
Corley Auditorium in Webster Hall
Admission: free

Perhaps no performer so decisively polarized audiences as did Glenn Gould, the Canadian pianist who stunned both his fans and his critics by retiring from the concert stage at the height of his career. Gould, who had revolutionized the way people listened to the keyboard music of J.S. Bach with a now legendary recording of the Goldberg Variations, gave up performing to devote himself to recording and to exploring the “counterpoint” or play of diverse voices through a range of media, including radio, film and writing. Brilliant, quirky, probing, outrageous and always inventive, Gould, despite his premature death in 1982, continues to challenge the ways we hear music and each other. This presentation will provide a concise overview of Gould’s life and art and also introduce the two feature films, Glenn Gould: Hereafter and 32 Short Films About Glenn Gould, that will be shown later in the day.

Dr. William Kumbier is a professor of English at Missouri Southern State University, where he has taught primarily writing and world literature since 1989. He has researched and written extensively on interactions between music and literature, publishing essays in Studies in Romanticism, Criticism, Comparative Literature and elsewhere. He is currently working on a manuscript on subjectivity and dispossession in music, literature and film, including a chapter on Thomas Bernhard's The Loser, an obsessional novel in which a fictionalized Glenn Gould plays a decisive role.