IN HIS EARLY 30s and on the top of his powers, Glenn Gould introduced in 1964 that he was retiring from public efficiency. Classical-music fans have been surprised. Lower than a decade earlier than, the maverick pianist had delighted followers along with his authoritative recording of J.S. Bach’s “Goldberg Variations”. Now, he declared, “the live performance is useless”. In 1965 he accepted a job with the Canadian Broadcasting Company (CBC) and rode the Muskeg Categorical so far as it might go, from Winnipeg to Churchill, Manitoba.
On the practice, Gould struck up a dialog with Wally Maclean, a retired surveyor who mixed a homespun folksiness with the soul of a thinker. Over breakfast Maclean taught Gould methods to learn the indicators of the icy land, to search out “in essentially the most minute measurement a suggestion of the infinite”. The cordial chat become a days-long, probing dialog.
Gould tailored this materials into “The Concept of North”, a radio documentary exploring Canada’s ambivalent relationship with its northern frontier, which the CBC aired in 1967. It was the primary of three experimental audio documentaries he produced about selecting to stay aside: “The Latecomers”, about Newfoundland, was broadcast in 1969 and “The Quiet within the Land”, which chronicles a Mennonite neighborhood, was launched in 1977. Gould would later name the reveals his “Solitude Trilogy”.
The theme of isolation resonates once more within the wake of the pandemic. What's extra stunning is how recent and experimental the programmes themselves sound, even within the high-tech, peak-podcast period. (They're obtainable to stream by way of Spotify, Amazon and the CBC’s personal web site.) Take “The Concept of North”, by which Gould organized the voices of 4 most important characters right into a single fugue. A technician recalled being handed a diagram by Gould, outlining which clips must be heard when; he was “orchestrating the voices” on the web page.
Gould thought that, in broadcasting, constancy to a single human voice was “nonsense”, sustaining that “the common particular person can absorb and reply to much more info than we allot him on most events.” He championed a layered type—considering of it in musical phrases, as “contrapuntal”—and experimented with it additional in “The Latecomers” and “The Quiet within the Land”. By the late Sixties the CBC had switched from monaural to stereo sound, and editors have been capable of weave voices into a fragile sonic tapestry.
The formal daring didn't simply make use of technical advances: it created a chic listening expertise. On the finish of “The Concept of North”, Gould units Maclean’s musings to the ultimate motion of the Fifth Symphony by Jean Sibelius, a Finnish composer who additionally withdrew from public life. Reflecting on “The Ethical Equal of Struggle”, an essay by William James, Maclean means that, in its arduous extremity, going north is, for Canadians, the fashionable equal of battle.
The trilogy is a masterwork of sonic innovation. It redefined the radio documentary and influenced generations of audio storytellers. Hearken to it on a practice—or in any second of blissful solitude. ■
Post a Comment