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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.

— Glenn Gould

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More quotes by Glenn Gould

The mental imagery involved with pianistic tactilia is not related to the striking of individual keys but rather to the rites of passage between notes.

Never be clever for the sake of being clever
For the sake of showing off.

I believe that the justification of art is the internal combustion it ignites in the hearts of men and not its shallow, externalized, public manifestations. The purpose of art is not the release of a momentary ejection of adrenalin but is, rather, the gradual, lifelong construction of a state of wonder and serenity.

to Glenn Gould (1962)

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.

The prerequisite of contrapuntal art, more conspicuous in the work of Bach than in that of any other composer, is an ability to conceive a priori of melodic identities which when transposed, inverted, made retrograde, or transformed rhythmically will yet exhibit, in conjunction with the original subject matter, some entirely new but completely harmonious profile.

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Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Glenn Gould (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.