Glenn Gould Gives Us a Tour of Toronto, His Beloved Hometown (1979)

I write this from Toron­to, hav­ing come to explore, record inter­views in, write about, and gen­er­al­ly try to under­stand this big, busy, famous­ly diverse, and some­times form­less-seem­ing metrop­o­lis Cana­di­ans appre­ci­ate and resent in equal mea­sure. Despite the dif­fi­cul­ty of defin­ing or even describ­ing it, the city has nur­tured impres­sive minds. If not Cana­di­an your­self, you might strug­gle to come up with a list of notable Toron­to­ni­ans, but sure­ly names like Mar­garet Atwood, David Cro­nen­berg, Frank Gehry, Joni Mitchell, and Mar­shall McLuhan ring bells. Despite hav­ing passed in 1982, pianist-com­pos­er Glenn Gould may still rank as the city’s best-known cul­tur­al ambas­sador. “I’m not real­ly cut out for city liv­ing, and giv­en my druthers I’d prob­a­bly avoid all cities and live in the coun­try,” he said in 1979. “Toron­to, how­ev­er, belongs on a very short list of cities which I’ve vis­it­ed and which seem to offer to me, at any rate, peace of mind — cities which, for want of a bet­ter def­i­n­i­tion, do not oppose their city­ness upon you.”

He says it at the very begin­ning of Glenn Gould’s Toron­to, which spends the rest of its 50 min­utes explor­ing not just the city itself but Gould’s ideas of its nature. The doc­u­men­tary, which orig­i­nal­ly aired as an episode of the CBC series Cities, fol­lows him from the CN Tow­er which looms over Toron­to to the water­front (on what he calls “the least great of the Great Lakes”) to the grounds of the Cana­di­an Nation­al Exhi­bi­tion (a siz­able event with a “spir­it out of a small-town fall fair”) to the then-new city hall. Along the way, his mono­logue touch­es on the peace and qui­et Toron­to offers him, the reflex­ive dis­taste it can inspire in oth­ers, the “cul­tur­al mosa­ic” to which it plays host (some­times insis­tent­ly), the way it sur­vived the 1960s with­out endur­ing the dis­as­trous hol­low­ing-out Amer­i­can cities did, and the friend­ly rival­ry it enjoys with Mon­tre­al. Gould’s clear, ana­lyt­i­cal man­ner of speech deliv­ers a stream of point­ed obser­va­tions, dry jokes, and child­hood mem­o­ries, reveal­ing his nuanced life­long rela­tion­ship with the city: not the sim­ple one of a boost­er, nor the even sim­pler one of a detrac­tor. But then, Gould nev­er had any­thing sim­ple about him — nor, as I’ve come to find out this past week, does Toron­to.

You can find Glenn Gould’s Toron­to in our col­lec­tion of Free Doc­u­men­taries.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Watch Glenn Gould Per­form His Last Great Stu­dio Record­ing of Bach’s Gold­berg Vari­a­tions (1981)

Glenn Gould Explains the Genius of Johann Sebas­t­ian Bach (1962)

Glenn Gould Offers a Strik­ing­ly Uncon­ven­tion­al Inter­pre­ta­tion of 1806 Beethoven Com­po­si­tion

The Art of Fugue: Gould Plays Bach

Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture and writes essays on cities, lan­guage, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.