Read Online Glenn Gould by Mark Kingwell - Free Book Online

solid and unarguable manner, the relation of a piece of music to its score, and of its score to its idea, is under constant review. That dynamic is entailed by the nature of performance, and the inextricability of music from performance. When we speak of the architecture of a piece, then, we are speaking both metaphorically and transcendentally. The metaphor is powerful, but the transcendentalism is misleading. Unplayed music is not really music, and however much we might admire the intellectual beauty of Bach’s counterpoint structure, we cannot allow the reduction of music into mere thought.
    The philosopher and mathematician Gottfried Leibniz’s definition: “Music is a hidden architectural activity of a mind that does not know it is counting.”
    Arthur Schopenhauer’s counter-definition: “Music is a hidden metaphysical activity of a mind that does not know it is philosophizing.” 56
    Music may be mathematical, but it is not mathematics. It may be metaphysical, but it is not metaphysics. Play is not everything that music is; but without play there is nothing to hear. The thought of music is stillborn; the line of its composition goes unlimned.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN
North
    In 1967 Gould broadcast on CBC Radio, as part of Canada’s Centennial celebrations, a groundbreaking voice-based documentary called “The Idea of North.” It was to become his most famous composition.
    The idea behind “The Idea of North” was a mixture of form and content, also of dialogue and mood (much of the dialogue is inaudible because of deliberate cross-mixing). In form, this was the first example of Gould’s contrapuntal radio. The voices of the documentary would not be arranged in the usual linear way, one following the other, intermixing to create an overall narrative or logical whole. Instead, they would rise and fall over each, creating layered effects where a given voice might not be distinguishable. Gould described the desired effect as something similar to the experience of sitting on a subway car or in a crowded diner, hearing snatches of conversation, creating a whole not from a logical plan but from the intervention of listening as a creative act, as a sort of retrieval.
    In these terms, “The Idea of North” is at best a partial success, since the listener feels controlled and frustrated at the same time. There is no real chance of intervening as a listener, except in the sense of straining after a falling voice, losing its sense whether you like it or not. Nevertheless, the program is a remarkable piece of radio, brave for its time— complaints about its inaudibility, entered by casual listeners, indicate this much—and partly cogent in its background ideas. That is, it is always interesting, if not enlivening or enlightening, to test the bounds of linear construction.
    Inversions of linear expectation are arguably more illuminating in visual media, however, where we have a chance to arrange and rearrange the parts as we go forward in the temporality of the experience. The screen defines the edges of what is presented, even if the presentation is in montage or split screen. Radio, like music itself, is a medium of more sustained and rigid involvement on the part of the audience: it is a fundamentally intimate medium, an interior experience. (McLuhan was correct about this difference between visual and aural media, even if his language of “cool” and “hot” is misleading and imprecise.) In the face of Gould’s production some listeners are likely to feel helpless, if not vexed, by the constant rearrangement and fluctuating voice levels, even if they appreciate its roots in modernist experimentation. Contrapuntal is not quite the right word, either; despite Gould’s claims that the piece was constructed on the model of a fugue, it does not in fact offer the satisfaction of resolution to a tonic (whatever that would be in these terms) or even the