Gould Prize finds another creator moving culture forward
The Nobel Prize for the arts? That’s what Philip Glass called the $100,000 Glenn Gould Prize, which he won in 2016.
The celebrated American composer was the 11th winner of the biennial award, established by the Glenn Gould Foundation to honour the memory of perhaps the most influential classical musician Canada has ever produced.
The 2020 winner, announced this month in Toronto, is far less famous than her American fellow laureate, but in the opinion of an international jury chaired by performance artist Laurie Anderson, 88ay y belongs in the company of such past winners as Pierre Boulez, Yehudi Menuhin and Yo-Yo Ma.
As these names suggest, the jury aims high. In the words of a foundation document, “the Glenn Gould Prize is awarded to an individual for a unique lifetime contribution to improving the human condition through music and communication.”
In the case of Obomsawin, it recognizes a member of the Abenaki Nation who has spent decades chronicling through film and music the lives and concerns of First Nations people, producing more than 50 documentaries for the National Film Board of Canada.
Despite the international character of the jury (only three of whose 12 members wore the maple leaf ), Canadians have figured prominently among the winners, beginning in the first year with composer R. Murray Schafer and including jazz pianist Oscar Peterson, poet and singer Leonard Cohen and actordirector Robert Lepage — testimony to a former colony’s arrival on the world stage.
It can be argued that Gould himself, who died in 1982, has never left it.
As the foundation’s executive director Brian Levine explains, inquiries continue to pour into his office from around the world, Sony Classical keeps selling Gould’s albums at a brisk rate, and visitors keep asking why Toronto, his lifelong home, has yet to establish a Glenn Gould museum (although commemorative plaques do ornament his childhood house on Southwood Dr. and his final residence on St. Clair Ave.).
The foundation regularly sponsors Glenn Gould events, many of them associated with the presentation of the prize. When Jose Antonio Abreu, founder of Venezuela’s El Sistema musical education program, won in 2008, at least 15 events accompanied the presentation, including a visit by Venezuela’s Simon Bolivar (Youth) Orchestra, conducted by Gustavo Dudamel.
Dudamel, now music director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic and one of the leading conductors of his generation, was Abreu’s nominee to become the $15,000 City of Toronto Protégé Prize, awarded to a young artist of exceptional promise, personally selected by the Gould Prize laureate.
Cohen’s choice was the children of Sistema Toronto, one of the many educational centres around the globe inspired by the Venezuelan original. Yo-Yo Ma’s nominee was a virtuoso on the pipa from the People’s Republic of China.
In aid of its ongoing informational work the foundation recently established a new arts and culture podcast, “The Gould Standard,” launching it with Brian Levine’s two-part interview with the near-legendary pop star Petula Clark.
And in case you may be wondering what an 87-year-old British singer has to do with a 28-years deceased Toronto pianist, it should be remembered that Gould once penned a scholarly article in the magazine High Fidelity on Ms Clark and her then-hit single, “Downtown.”
Curiouser and curiouser, as Lewis Carroll’s Alice used to say. But then, Gould was something of an autodidact, led by his imagination.
It’s my hunch that he would have had mixed feelings about having a prize named after him, but Levine gently reminds me is that this is not a competition prize. (Gould himself entered only one competition in his lifetime, the Kiwanis Music Festival, and hated it.)
Instead, this is a salute by a carefully selected panel of peers — who communicated with each other uniquely in this plague time by Zoom — to recognize a special artist who has moved us toward the future.
In his all too short 50 years among us, Glenn Gould consistently turned to the latest technology to communicate his musical message. One of his Bach recordings is currently hurtling through outer space.
So in a sense the Glenn Gould Prize is an investment in those who are leading the way ahead. May their tribe increase.