Gramophone
Contexto: I think that if I were required to spend the rest of my life on a desert island, and to listen to or play the music of any one composer during all that time, that composer would almost certainly be Bach. I really can't think of any other music which is so all-encompassing, which moves me so deeply and so consistently, and which, to use a rather imprecise word, is valuable beyond all of its skill and brilliance for something more meaningful than that -- its humanity.
Glenn Gould: Frases en inglés
“Never be clever for the sake of being clever
For the sake of showing off.”
"So You Want To Write A Fugue", work's text
transcribed from The Life and Times of Glenn Gould
Glenn Gould Reader p5
Contexto: The trouble begins when we start to be so impressed by the strategies of our systematized thought that we forget that it does relate to an obverse, that it is hewn from negation, that it is but very small security against the void of negation which surrounds it. And when that happens, when we forget these things, all sorts of mechanical failures begin to disrupt the functions of the human personality. When people who practice an art like music become captives of those positive assumptions of system, when they forget to credit that happening against negation which system is, and when they become disrespectful of the immensity of negation compared to system — then they put themselves out of reach of that replenishment of invention upon which creative ideas depend, because invention is, in fact, a cautious dipping into the negation that lies outside system from a position firmly ensconced in system.
transcribed from The Glenn Gould Collection vol 13 (Sony laserdisc).
"So You Want To Write A Fugue", Glenn Gould Reader p240
Attributed to Glenn Gould (1962) in Payzant (Glenn Gould: Music and Mind), p. 64