Radio as Music. A Video Document by (and with) Glenn Gould

Few artists have ventured as far as Glenn Gould in the search for an increasingly close-knit relation between sound reproduction technologies and the control of aesthetic production. For Gould, as is widely known, the concert hall soon ceased being an adequate venue for such an undertaking. But the Toronto native’s legendary decision to renounce public concerts, as of 1964, exclusively in favour of the recording studio, was part of a wider experimental reorientation toward electronic broadcasting media. From the 1960s onward, and parallel to his studio work in pianistic recording, Gould began to produce a series of radio and television programs for the CBC which are still relatively unknown outside of Canada. It is primarily through these media and their technical evolution that Gould was able to strengthen his position as a producer, leading him to develop a new form of composition in the process. The previously unpublished conversation presented here is taken from an unedited video documentary, Radio as Music, which Gould produced in 1975. This document shows Gould explaining his programmatic vision of the specificities of radio musicality from within the studio. It also provides unique insight into the composer’s pioneering role as an intermedial artist using video techniques. It is worth remembering the importance of Gould’s correspondence with Marshall McLuhan, beginning precisely in 1964 with the publication of Understanding Media, in the development of Gould’s own conception of technology. This exchange led to McLuhan’s participation in Dialogues on the Prospects of Recording, a radio piece Gould produced for the CBC the following year. For this piece, Gould combined interview fragments celebrating the ubiquity of technical reproduction with other ones which, on the contrary, deplored losing the immediacy of the concert situation. This polyphonic “dramatization” of questions arising from the generalization of high fidelity also led to the publication of Gould’s seminal text, “The Prospects of Recording” (1966), which can be construed as a pendant of sorts to Benjamin’s reflection on the work of art in the era of its technological reproducibility. Gould seems to have made radio an experimental field for his textual production of the 1960s and 70s, which was largely based on pre-scripted programs, as in the previous example and also in his essays on Petula Clark or Stokowski. The studio production of his multivocal interviews also might have led Gould, who remained obsessed with the extension of our listening abilities, to conceive of the series of radio documentaries on the Canadian North that eventually composed his Solitude Trilogy. The first of these experimentations, The Idea of North, was produced in monophony in 1967; the second, The Latecomers, inaugurated the new stereophonic program of Ottawa’s CBO-FM in 1969; finally, Quiet in the Land, the most complex of the three, was completed and broadcast in 1977. All three pieces exemplify what Gould called the “contrapuntal documentary,” in which recorded voices, sounds and music are combined into a new genre that blends the pre-existing categories of documentary, composition and polyphony. After the first two episodes, Gould decided to add a television adaptation of The Idea of North; this was produced by Judith Pearlman and broadcast under the same title in 1970. The following year, Gould published “Radio as Music,” his programmatic conversations with John Jessop, which are primarily concerned with the expressive possibilities of radio. Gould points out how the temporal constraints of radio production simply led him to salvage sections of recorded material by superimposing different voices. In this interview, he also underlines the need to experience a “slow, grudging acknowledgment of the medium” at each step of …