Glenn Gould

by Mark Kingwell

  1979 Gould and French director Bruno Monsaingeon begin filming a projected six-part work, Glenn Gould Plays Bach.

  The first Sony Walkman portable cassette tape player is available for sale.

  1980 The Glenn Gould Silver Jubilee Album is released in August, celebrating his twenty-fifth year as a Columbia recording artist; it includes the bizarre piece “A Glenn Gould Fantasy.”

  1981 Over six studio sessions from April through May, Gould rerecords and films the Goldberg Variations as the third instalment in Glenn Gould Plays Bach; the film is shown in France on January 2, 1982.

  1982 Gould completes his last recording sessions, of Wagner’s Siegfried Idyll, at St. Lawrence Hall in Toronto from July 27 to 29.

  Gould’s second recording of the Goldberg Variations is released in September.

  Gould suffers a severe headache and is admitted to the Toronto General Hospital at 8:44 P.M. on September 27; the preliminary diagnosis is a stroke with left-side paralysis caused by a blood clot.

  On October 4, after Gould experiences further complications and evidence of brain damage is discovered, Gould’s father decides to withdraw life support; Glenn Gould is pronounced dead at 11 A.M.

  Compact discs become commercially available in October.

  1983 Glenn Gould is inducted into the Canadian Music Hall of Fame. He wins a posthumous 1982 Grammy Award for Best Classical Album (Bach: The Goldberg Variations) and Best Instrumental Soloist Performance (without orchestra) (Bach: The Goldberg Variations).

  1984 Gould wins a third posthumous Grammy Award for Best Instrumental Soloist Performance (without orchestra) (Beethoven: Piano Sonatas Nos. 12 and 13).

  1989 In April, the first patent is issued for MP3 format for compression of digital audio files.

  1999 Starting in February, independent record company SubPop Records is the first to distribute music tracks in MP3 format.

  Apple introduces the iPod portable MP3 player in November.

  2007 On the seventy-fifth anniversary of Gould’s birth and the twenty-fifth of his death, worldwide iPod sales top 100 million units.