Gary Goldschneider (22 May 1939 – 5 October 2019) was a writer,

pianist A pianist ( , ) is a musician who plays the piano. A pianist's repertoire may include music from a diverse variety of styles, such as traditional classical music, jazz piano, jazz, blues piano, blues, and popular music, including rock music, ...

composer A composer is a person who writes music. The term is especially used to indicate composers of Western classical music, or those who are composers by occupation. Many composers are, or were, also skilled performers of music. Etymology and def ...

, and personologist. He is known for writing the ''Secret Language'' personological book series, based on

astrology Astrology is a range of Divination, divinatory practices, recognized as pseudoscientific since the 18th century, that propose that information about human affairs and terrestrial events may be discerned by studying the apparent positions ...

numerology Numerology (known before the 20th century as arithmancy) is the belief in an occult, divine or mystical relationship between a number and one or more coinciding events. It is also the study of the numerical value, via an alphanumeric system, ...

, and

tarot Tarot (, first known as ''trionfi (cards), trionfi'' and later as ''tarocchi'' or ''tarocks'') is a set of playing cards used in tarot games and in fortune-telling or divination. From at least the mid-15th century, the tarot was used to play t ...

, in which he studied and assessed character traits of over 14,000 people to generalize birth characteristics for each day of the year. In addition, Goldschneider has performed several "marathon" piano pieces, such as playing all 32 of Beethoven's

sonata In music a sonata (; pl. ''sonate'') literally means a piece ''played'' as opposed to a cantata (Latin and Italian ''cantare'', "to sing"), a piece ''sung''. The term evolved through the history of music, designating a variety of forms until th ...

s in one sitting. Goldschneider's most successful Beethoven Marathon took place in Amsterdam on August 19, 1984. Attended by an estimated 10.000 people it made front-page headlines all over the country. On other occasions in

Nevada City, California Nevada City is the county seat of Nevada County, California, United States, northeast of Sacramento, California, Sacramento, southwest of Reno, Nevada, Reno and northeast of San Francisco. The population was 3,152 as of the 2020 United States ...

, in 1984, and in Amsterdam in 1985, he performed all of Mozart's sonatas in one sitting. This took approximately six hours. Goldschneider also was a prolific composer.

Collaborations

Goldschneider has collaborated with W.P Julian Clef, another "marathon" pianist, during Clef's piano music tour in January 2003. Clef has also studied under Goldschneider.

Books

Goldschneider's published books are: * ''Astrologie Anders'', 1989, Gary Goldschneider, Bzztoh publishers, The Hague. Published in Dutch. * ''Wunderkind'', 1991, Gary Goldschneider, Bzztoh publishers, The Hague. This is the first volume of four published in Dutch. * ''The Secret Language of Birthdays'', 1994, with Joost Elffers and Aron Goldschneider, Penguin Studio Books. * ''The Secret Language of Relationships'', 1997, with Joost Elffers, Penguin Studio Books. * ''The Secret Language of Destiny'', 1999, with Joost Elffers, Penguin Studio Books. * ''Charting the Times of Your Life'', 2002, Gary Goldschneider, Atria Books. (Charting the Times of Your Life was initially released as a hardcover book entitled The Astrology of Time.) * ''The Secret Language of Luck'', 2004, Gary Goldschneider, Riverhead. * ''Personology'' 2005, Gary Goldschneider, Running Press. * ''Gary Goldschneider’s Everyday Astrology (How to Make Astrology Work for You)'', 2009, Gary Goldschneider, Quirk Books. * ''The Astrology Of Time'', 2002, Gary Goldschneider Atria.

Death

On October 11, 2019, Thomas Rezek, the co-author of Goldschneider's ''Secret Language'' books, tweeted that Goldschneider had died six days earlier, on October 5.

References

Notes

External links