Hate Mozart? So did Glenn Gould

Just listen to the distorted perspectives.

The Fantasia and Fugue in C major K.394 is the source of the “vacuum cleaner anecdote”. As he recalled in an address to the graduating class at the Toronto Conservatory in 1964, Gould said that when he was 13 years old he became aware of a strange faculty when a cleaning lady interrupted his work by turning on her vacuum cleaner. “The result was that the louder passages, this luminously diatonic music (in the Fugue) became surrounded with a halo of vibrato, rather the effect you might get if you sang in the bathtub with both ears full of water and shook your head from side to side all at once. And in the softer passages I could’nt hear any sound that I was making at all. I could feel, of course –I could sense the tactile relation to the keyboard… and I could imagine what i was doing, but I could’nt actually hear it. But the strange thing was that all of it suddenly sounded better than it had without the vacuum cleaner, and those parts which I could’nt actually hear sounded best of all”.