Didn't know until this week that the chair was his father's carpentry. Bert Gould took a folding chair and sawed the legs down so the boy could sit about fourteen inches off the floor, chin near enough level with the keys, and Glenn dragged that thing around the rest of his working life until it was mostly frame and screws and stubbornness.
Four days in June of 1955, in a deconsecrated church on East 30th Street that Columbia had made into a studio, ceiling doing work no reverb unit ever quite managed. Born in Toronto in '32, so he was twenty-two sitting down to the Goldbergs. And he hummed. The engineers went after it — placement, screens, asking him kindly, I'd guess, the way you ask a man who isn't going to stop. Listen for it under the aria, that second voice just off the piano.
They never got it off the tape.
He was just as interested in the razor blade as the piano. Gould wrote about tape editing as a creative act, and he was open that some released performances were assembled from more than one pass — the A minor fugue from the Well-Tempered Clavier being the one he described, two takes of different character spliced into one.
Otis, he walked off the concert platform in 1964 at thirty-one and never came back — the rest of it was studios, splices, takes. A projectionist understands that entirely: you'd rather work where you can run the reel again than stand in front of a full house once and live with it.