Editing Glenn Gould (section)

===Piano===
Gould was a [[child prodigy]]<ref name="archives.cbc.ca_5" /> and was described in adulthood as a musical phenomenon.<ref name="fnV" group="fn" /> He claimed to have almost never practised on the piano itself, preferring to study repertoire by reading,<ref name="fnG" group="fn"/> another technique he had learned from Guerrero. He may have spoken ironically about his practising though, as there is evidence that on occasion he did practise quite hard, sometimes using his own drills and techniques.<ref name="fnH" group="fn"/> He seemed able to practise mentally, once preparing for a recording of [[Johannes Brahms|Brahms]]'s piano works without playing them until a few weeks before the sessions.{{sfn|Bazzana|2003|p=326}} Gould could play a vast repertoire of piano music, as well as a wide range of orchestral and operatic transcriptions, from memory.{{sfn|Friedrich|1990|pp=17–18}} He could "memorize at sight" and once challenged a friend to name any piece of music that he could not "instantly play from memory".{{sfn|Friedrich|1990|p=17}}

[[File:Glenn Gould as a child.jpg|thumb|200px|Gould in February 1946 with his dog, Nicky, and his parakeet, Mozart{{sfn|Hafner|2009|p=[https://books.google.com/books?id=Dig5pUHMjIsC&pg=PT19 19]}}<ref>{{cite journal|last=Jorgensen|first=Birgitte|title=The Dogs of Pianist Glenn Gould: In the Key of Woof|journal=Modern Dog|year=2003|url=http://www.moderndogmagazine.com/articles/dogs-pianist-glen-gould/280|access-date=December 24, 2011}}</ref>]]

The piano, Gould said, "is not an instrument for which I have any great love as such ... [but] I have played it all my life, and it is the best vehicle I have to express my ideas." In the case of Bach, Gould noted, "[I] fixed the [[Action (music)|action]] in some of the instruments I play on—and the piano I use for all recordings is now so fixed—so that it is a shallower and more responsive action than the standard. It tends to have a mechanism which is rather like an automobile without power steering: you are in control and not it; it doesn't drive you, you drive it. This is the secret of doing Bach on the piano at all. You must have that immediacy of response, that control over fine definitions of things."{{sfn|Stegemann|1993a|p=15}}

As a teenager, Gould was significantly influenced by [[Artur Schnabel]]<ref name="fnU" group="fn"/>{{sfn|Bazzana|1997|pp=132 fn. 1, 137}} and [[Rosalyn Tureck]]'s recordings of Bach{{sfn|Bazzana|1997|pp=21, 120–121}} (which he called "upright, with a sense of repose and positiveness"), and the conductor [[Leopold Stokowski]].{{sfn|Ostwald|1997|p=28}} Gould was known for his vivid imagination. Listeners regarded his interpretations as ranging from brilliantly creative to outright eccentric. His pianism had great clarity and erudition, particularly in contrapuntal passages, and extraordinary control. Gould believed the piano to be "a contrapuntal instrument" and his whole approach to music was centered in the [[Baroque music|Baroque]]. Much of the [[homophony]] that followed he felt belongs to a less serious and less spiritual period of art.

Gould had a pronounced aversion to what he termed "hedonistic" approaches to piano repertoire, performance, and music generally. For him, "hedonism" in this sense denoted a superficial theatricality, something to which he felt Mozart, for example, became increasingly susceptible later in his career.{{sfn|Friedrich|1990|p=147}} He associated this drift toward hedonism with the emergence of a cult of showmanship and gratuitous virtuosity on the concert platform in the 19th century and later. The institution of the public concert, he felt, degenerated into the "blood sport" with which he struggled, and which he ultimately rejected.{{sfn|Friedrich|1990|p=100}}