SEPTEMBER,1992, marked the 10th anniversaryof Glenn Gould`s death; had the celebrated pianist not succumbed to cerebralhaemorrhage, the month would have provided the occasion for his 60th birthdayparty. To commemorate this doubleedged date, several public and privatecorporations and institutions convened a Glenn Gould Conference in Toronto,which attracted an international audience and witnessed the ribboncutting forCBC`s Glenn Gould auditorium and recording studio, the release of a flood of CDreissues of Gould`s recordings, the premiere performances of a number oftribute compositions, an exhibition of Gould memorabilia mounted by theNational Library Of Canada, numerous fringe concerts and visual displays, achildren`s parade, and the publication of a salient culling from Gould`samassed letters. When the conference speakers were notdilating on the karma of in-utero eardrum formation, possible syntaxes for 2 1 st-centuryworld music, melody as "a metaphor for the physical realities of theuniverse," and sound vibrations as a pathway to satori, Gould wascanonized as one of this century`s profound geniuses, a savant ofcivilization`s electronic reorganization, a hero of "post-modem montage,freed from responsibility to history [and] poised between imitation andinvention." The Jungian musicologist Austin Clarkson, in an elegant paperentitled "The Agony of Ecstasy: Gould`s Concept of AestheticReception," was one of the few speakers who tried to put into perspectivethe pianist`s debilitating neuroses. Many references were made to adulatorybiographies by Geoffrey Payzant and Otto Friedrich, but no one within myearshot mentioned a less than endearing book by Andrew Kazdin, the man whoproduced most of Gould`s records for CBS (Glenn Gould at Work: Creative Lying). WendyCarlos, of "Switched-On Bach" fame, professed that Gould`s death was"a big ouch for me, " while the multi-media performance artist DianaMcIntosh claimed that all this "languoquack" was too"religjuicy." Letter-writing would seem naturally tohave been an important form of communication for a man who withdrew from publicscrutiny and who insulated himself from the physical world. And indeed theNational Library of Canada owns, amid its Gouldiana, 2,030 letters, of which 184 have been chosen, edited, and annotated by John P.L. Roberts and Ghyslaine Guertin. Assuming that the published letters aresymptomatic of the correspondence in general, the reader can only conclude thatin fact Gould did not view letterwriting as an opportunity to let his hairdown or to confess to any private thoughts or emotions unmentioned in hispublic pronouncements. There are no surprises here; in his letters - in syntax,content, and purpose - Gould found it necessary to maintain, as in all otheraspects of his life, strict control. Of letters to family, there are but two,a childhood valentine to his mother and a curt note to his father, in which themature pianist declines to attend Gould senior`s remarriage to "Mrs.Dobson." There are no love letters, save one undated, unfinished memo toan anonymous "Dell" in which Gould states "I am deeply in lovewith a certain beaut. girl. Iasked her to marry me but she turned me down...." In effect, we learnnothing from these letters of Gould`s intimate, private life outside of musicother than that he may not have had one. Most curious are the letters directed toimportant musicians of the time. For one thing, there are remarkably few for anartist of Gould`s stature, and he seems to have addressed otherinstrumentalists, conductors, and composers primarily to solicit cooperationfor some project or to express thanks for having participated in such. Readershoping to find here substantial dialogue between Gould and various musicians,authors, artists, and philosophers on the subject of music or other topics ofbroad cultural interest will be sorely disappointed. Gould does not revealhimself here as a man with broad humanitarian interests; this is not to saythat he might not have been such a man, simply that he did not develop hisinsights or his compassions with his peers in theseletters. It is in his generous letters to fans that Gould seemed to find a safeopening for expatiation, if only, perhaps, because he held a safe vantage pointof authority and could pontificate to the devout. It is in these often lengthy,didactic, and sometimes humorous replies that he reveals many of his mosttelling opinions on music and his own relationship to it. For example, to oneKimiko Nakayama of Dusseldorf, Gould wrote that "...the music of Bach, inparticular, because of its curious combination of structural precision andimprovisatory options, encourages one to invest it with aspects of one`s ownpersonality." Eccentricity permitted within the parameters of strictcontrol is a modus operandi alluded to elsewhere; to the music critic B. H.Haggin: I don`t think that it`s just the longexposure to baroque entanglements that makes me unsympathetic but rather thatthe whole idea of a melodic attribute as distinguished from the component partsof a harmonic environment has always seemed to me antistructural and even,dare I say it, undemocratic. The lengthiest of these letters, and Ifear the most and for all but the Ph.D. candidate, are those that concernGould`s recording projects and his immense concern for detailed advance planningof every aspect of the event. ("However, I must point out once again ... that my own interview style ...lends itself best to occasionswhich involve -perverse as it may seem -minimum spontaneity and maximumdeliberation.") Invited by Boris Brott to serve as narrator for aperformance of Schoenberg`s Ode to Napoleon Buonaparte, Gould responds with alist of demands regarding the other musicians` preparation that can only bedeemed supercilious: It is understood that the members of thequartet will be given as much advance instruction in the work, from aninstrumental viewpoint and by their respective tutors as possible, and thatthey will all have made available to them a copy of the score well in advance. Gould`s letters attest to the fact thathis repudiation of the concert stage for the recording studio had little to dowith a McLuhanesque philosophy of media, but rather arose from a fear that somemomentary loss of control might break down the perfectly contrived order hesought in his music-making. Scattered throughout these letters are the famousopinions of disdain (e.g., Beethoven`s Violin Concerto is not"top-drawer") as well as many perceptive comments worth pondering.Gould had a special genius for responding to, and creating, intellectual structures;this genius manifested itself early, but, as the letters indicate, it was notenlarged by broad human sentiment as the man matured. A comment in a relativelyearly ( 1965) letter, written under a pseudonym, seems prescient: Psychology has taught us that the conceptof the alienated artist is not peculiar to the romantic novel, but is, rather,a continuing social phenomenon and that maturity and genius are, on occasion,mutually exclusive facts of life.