Glenn Gould: The Politics of Music by Marco Gatto is one of the most stimulating texts in the entire dense literature on the great Canadian pianist. The most interesting aspect of the book, which Gatto's reflections point to from the outset, is the scientific analysis of the musician's figure, an analysis that aims to dismantle the typical trappings of sterile mythologizing to which several decades of sensationalism have more or less accustomed us regarding Gould's persona; that well-known cliché, based on the characteristics of eccentricity and mania of the Toronto pianist, the result, according to the book's author, of a very precise pseudocultural process, whose objective is the spectacularization and creation of the "case," and which feeds on them in a way that does not honor his true value as a thinker, humanist, and philosopher. This intensive research, which restores to the history of the piano an undeniable truth about the cultural and human qualities of one of its greatest exponents, is flanked, as is evident from the title itself, by a less obvious, if not entirely unexpected, but undoubtedly illuminating aspect for the attentive reader and the scrupulous scholar: the political, understanding "political" as that social function that every intellectual worthy of the name should perform within the community; a function that, in our contemporary world, seems so lost that it is not only nonexistent, but even unthinkable. Marco Gatto's examination of the relationship between the process of "aestheticization" carried out to the detriment of Gould and what the author defines as the "apolitical nihilism on which consumer society is based" is precise and exemplary, and it reaches a key element of the entire investigation (which is also key to the entire Gouldian experience): the sound of this performer, which from being an ornament (that is, more the fruit of extravagance than of a precise epistemological architecture), becomes a substantial and essential element, endowed with a "naked and unadulterated purity" (these are Gatto's own words); that highly recognizable sound, in other words, no longer represents the fruit of chance, of a mere technical approach to the keyboard or of an obstinate and strange break with a tradition worn out in its fixity (and falsity); That sound is a choice that opens a new conception of the art of music as a whole, imbued with surprising and highly eloquent meanings, almost a revelation, which highlights the key role that art, and music in particular, must play in everyone's life. Gatto, in his sharp and highly personal analysis, is on par with the authoritative philosophers, critics, and music historians he draws upon in this text, from Adorno to Edward W. Said, from Barenboim to Pareyson. An important and insightful book, therefore, that not only sheds direct light on a much-loved and much-debated figure in 20th-century music, but also traces a precise line of inquiry into the drift to which culture is now a victim as part of the perverse machinery of the most ruthless consumerism.