The late, great music impresario Franz Kraemer used to tell a story about going for lunch one warm summer day with Glenn Gould, who had a horror of being recognized in public. They went into a restaurant, and the whole place swivelled to look at the man in the doorway dressed in woolen mitts, overcoat and cloth cap -- Gould's usual summer attire.

"I think we've been noticed," Gould said, and walked out.

Gould, who would have been 70 years old tomorrow, was always being noticed, both for what he did and didn't do. He was famous for not playing concerts, for not liking Chopin and Schubert, and for not obeying every mark in the score the way that a good conservatory grad should.

He stood out, even while muffling himself up against the scrutiny of the world. And the world responded as it always does, by becoming even more curious about the guy who hummed while he played, wore gloves in all weathers and made polyphonic radio documentaries that celebrated the romance of solitude and the North.

Gould himself was a figure of deep romance, of a peculiarly Canadian kind. He was a late instance of the eccentric-genius type, illustrated by a famous anecdote about Beethoven, who once replied to a violinist's qualms about what could and couldn't be played on his instrument by snapping, "What do I care about your miserable fiddle when my God is speaking to me?" Gould's devotion to his own solitary course was heroic to some, but he wasn't a hotline-to-God kind of hero. He was too Canadian for that, too ready to see the self-deflating, ironic side of every gesture, especially those advertised as titanic.

It's significant that one of his all-time favourite composers was Richard Strauss, who wrote almost nothing for piano but who epitomized Gustave Flaubert's worldly prescription for a romantic artist's life: "Live like a bourgeois, but think like a demigod." Gould's version of this precept was to live a comfortably drab existence in a high-rise in north Toronto, while communing in solitude with the works of composers on his idiosyncratic A-list.

Gould not only played and thought about the music on that list, he pamphleteered on its behalf. He wrote donnish defences of Arnold Schoenberg and Paul Hindemith, and scathing attacks on Mozart, whose real tragedy, he said, was not that he died too soon, but too late.

Gould campaigned to ban applause, to edit classical recordings as though they were films, and to canonize Barbara Streisand and Petula Clark. Like John Cage, he became known in part because he was a musician with so much to say, about his art and about how it fit into a world increasingly absorbed with technology.

His reward was to become a figure of legend, even among people who may have heard nothing more than his first, career-making recording of Bach's Goldberg Variations. His life and ideas have provided fodder not just for scholars and biographers, but for playwrights, novelists and filmmakers.

But while Gould's influence is feted in the broad culture, it has almost evaporated among musicians. No major pianist follows his lead, either in performance style or in his cavalier attitude toward musical scores.

The leading Bach pianist of the day, Canadian Angela Hewitt, is practically his antithesis. Where Gould felt free to translate Bach into a mercurial modernist idiom and to zoom in on particular details like a filmmaker, Hewitt is the defender of immutable structural order.

Even Hewitt's recording of Bach transcriptions, released last year, chickened out when it came to reproducing the excesses of Bach's Romantic devotees. There has been a revolution in Bach performance since Gould's Goldbergs, but it has had almost nothing to do with him.

The period-performance movement represents an extreme form of the textual fidelity Gould rejected, and its cadres no longer care much for his or anyone else's performances of Bach on a modern Steinway grand.

Gould's less popular faves, including Webern and Schoenberg, haven't become any more loved as a result of his campaigns on disc and in print. Just as fans of Stravinsky's early ballets tend to ignore his later music, most Gould fans would rather not know about his recordings of the Viennese serialists.

In fact, Gould's tastes in contemporary music have never been more unfashionable than today, when rigid systems of note-juggling are out, and romantic quasi-religious fantasias are in. He was a real old-time modernist, of the kind that now exists mainly under tenure at universities.

His ideas on recording and technology have all been thoroughly absorbed and put into practice, not in the classical world but among pop musicians who found their way to the future without him. He predicted that consumers of music would seize the means to manipulate the product, but it never occurred to him that the leaders of this uprising would be hip-hop DJs (Gould's hunch was that some gizmo would allow listeners at home to tweak the mixes of their classical recordings). Pop producers accept as normal the extreme cut-and-paste methods Gould was advocating, but their forerunners were people like Berry Gordie and Phil Spector. Classical musicians, meanwhile, have largely reverted to the old notion that the best recordings should embrace what Gould called the lamentable "non-take-twoness" of live performance.

His recordings are still widely available, and still cherished by many as the prickly and beautiful artifacts that they are. He's much more prominent now than most of the pianists who, while he lived, scoffed at his claim that the gladiatorial event known as the live concert was doomed (although so far they were right to scoff).

But in terms of the current life of the art, he's a leader without followers, a cause without effect. In the end he was too jagged a spirit for the classical world, which rewards reverence and distrusts novelty.

That gives an odd resonance to some of this year's commemorative festivities, including today's Gould-a-thon on CBC Radio, and next month's Gould events at the Canadian Cultural Centre in Paris. The image of Gould as a visionary who spoke to the future sits awkwardly with the fact that the future turned out to have more use for him as a general cultural symbol than as a continuing musical force.

How surprising that in this one way he would fail to be noticed. Our favourite Gould is a mythology.