Glenn Gould Gives Us a Tour of Toronto, His Beloved Hometown (1979) — openculture.com

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.”

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