Music Glenn Gould’s Uninvited Guests Toronto-Based Team Reimagines Pianist’s Vision—With Hip Hop By Barbara Schultz
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hirty-eight years after his death, the great pianist, brilliant Bach interpreter and classical iconoclast Glenn Gould remains one of Toronto’s—and the classical music world’s—favorite sons. So, in a sense, a producer is taking some serious chances in sampling Gould’s recordings. “He’s a national hero. There are buildings named after him and statues of him in Toronto,” says producer Billy Wild. “But when a DJ I know, DJ LRS, asked me to do a dance remix using some of his samples, I didn’t know that much about Glenn Gould. “This was seven years ago, and there was a symposium retreat that was going to happen
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where a bunch of different people were going to speak, perform, and do demonstrations,” he continues. “Bob Ezrin was going to be there and Lang Lang—lots of people doing different things, all based around Glenn Gould’s vision for the future.” Here’s where some irony creeps in, because Gould’s interpretations of Bach are held to be sacred by many. Yet, Gould famously predicted that technology would increasingly render music the domain of the listener: “In the future, the audience will become the artists and their life, the art…. they will become the uninvited guests at the banquet of the arts.” “For the symposium, we put together a
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