Glenn Gould gave his last public concert at the Wilshire Ebell Theater in L.A. 56 years ago. He was 32. Two years later, he predicted in a magazine article that “the public concert as we know it today will no longer exist a century hence, that its functions would have been entirely taken over by electronic media.”
The famed Canadian pianist was beginning to experiment with radio as a musical form. In 1967, he produced the first of what would become, with seemingly astonishing prescience for our pandemic predicament, the “Solitude Trilogy.”
One the greatest and most original and shockingly unconventional musicians of the 20th century, Gould went even further in his antipathy to live performance. He called it downright immoral. For him, the immediacy of art could best be achieved through the artist’s significant social distancing from the public. Technology was the most efficient delivery system.
Given that the episodes of the “Solitude Trilogy,” which Gould produced between 1967 and 1977, are already among the finest radio of all time, we have more than enough reason to revisit them. Gould’s gripping radio documentaries, moreover, make essential listening for an era of creative podcasts in which the medium offers new interest in how radio pioneered experiments with narrative.
An isolationist at heart who had always been more at home in the recording studio than in the concert hall, Gould often sought refuge outside his native Toronto. In “The Idea of North,” the first episode of the “Solitude Trilogy,” he traveled to the farthest reaches of north Manitoba that Canadian rail would take him and where “all who spend time there are changed by the experience.”
Gould then turned to villagers on Newfoundland island for “The Latecomers” to explore the illumination of isolation along with its attendant ills. With “The Quiet Land,” he sonically sewed together the existential struggles within Manitoba’s rural Mennonite communities to remain in the world but not of the world as modern urban life threatens.
Between Gould and Marshall McLuhan at the University of Toronto, the city had become a magnet for new-media thinking in the 1960s, abetted by the open-minded and well financed Canadian Broadcasting System, or CBC. At precisely the time Gould stopped performing, McLuhan published his influential “Understanding Media,” in which he characterized radio as a hot medium, capable of vividly taking over the listener’s imagination.
It was surely no coincidence that just a couple of weeks after Gould stopped concertizing, he had lunch with McLuhan, who admired the pianist enormously and went on to encourage his radio projects and assure him that all sound sources are music at heart. “Bless Glenn Gould for throwing the concert audience to the junkyard,” a delighted McLuhan later wrote.
Gould approached “The Idea of the North” as though a musical score. Voices of a surveyor, a geologist, a nurse, a government official and a writer intertwined as though contrapuntal voices in a Bach fugue or suite. Several could be sometimes be heard at once, each artfully edited, syllable by syllable, so that their rhythms made a certain sense as one emerged and another faded.
Wally Maclean, the surveyor whom Gould characterized as “at once a pragmatic idealist, a disillusioned enthusiast,” serves as a guide to the travails of limitless expectation in limitless space. But when the other voices of northern experience in all its wonder and wrenching disenchantment intrude, you hear both sides expressed at once. You may chose which to follow, but you can never completely filter others out. Without becoming aware of it, you find concentration is the art of rapt intent.
And what lines! Maclean quotes Pascal in having said that most of humanity’s troubles would be done away with if we would stay in our room. There is another’s observation of feeling cooped up in wild open spaces because of the danger of getting lost.
Sound effects for Gould are not just atmospheric but also compositional. Radio technology developed rapidly during the decade of making the trilogy, as did Gould’s studio skills. “The Idea of North” is mono, although Gould does a marvelous job in creating the illusion of space in the way he manipulates sound. With “The Latecomers,” he had the advantage of stereo, allowing for greater contrapuntal complexity for the voices.
Newfoundland, Gould found, is a place of idealism but not always satisfaction. Solitude is said to be the source of real knowledge. In villages with no locks on doors, no crime, no police, there is no need for government. Isolation fosters creativity, one resident tell us, because an “artist who’s worth anything works best alone.”
But the ever-presence of isolation, which Gould represented by a continual backdrop of breaking waves, inhibits creativity, all energy going into survival. Having to deal with the harsh reality of the surroundings, it is “hard for students to come to grips with abstract thought,” one resident says, making isolation “fifty percent good, fifty percent bad.”
