Piano radicalism  

There's a new Glenn Gould biography out, reviewed (as you might expect) in the Globe and Mail:

Bazzana is especially clever in focusing on Gould's early life, growing up in Toronto's Beach district, for two reasons. One is that Gould was so precocious that almost his entire musical and artistic being was formed by the time he was 14 or 15, that is by 1946 or 1947, and changed little after that. That's basically why, we now understand, Gould could be so forward looking and so backward looking at the same time, a radical musical mind that was fixated on the standard repertoire of classical music, a champion of the avant-garde of the 1930s who hated the avant-garde of the 60s. Gould stopped developing in many ways before 1950 and this insight alone explains much of what has previously seemed inexplicable in his life.