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meta-satisfaction of deliberately dashing the expectation of resolution to the tonic, as in Goldberg Variation 15, with its three prolonged rising right-hand notes . . .
    In content, matters are more compelling. In a later recorded piece, a somewhat strained fantasy of Gould confronting his critics, one of Gould’s own personae, Professor Karlheinz Klopweisser, would suggest that the real counterpoint is ideological, between the exercise of individual freedom and the “tremendously tyrannical force” of the Zeitgeist . In freely seeking isolation, choosing to be “in the world but not of the world,” the various figures in Gould’s documentaries enact a “double counterpoint resolved at the octave.” 80 We can think of this, naturally, in terms of Gould’s own withdrawal from the world even as he remained fully engaged with it via sound recording and the telephone, those emblematic media of communication in McLuhan’s age of acoustic space.
    We could also think of it, more generally, as an example of what the critic Edward Said labels “contrapuntal consciousness.” This is the experience of anyone whodissents from a dominant world view, sometimes as a function of visible difference crossed with ideology (for example, skin colour interpreted as “race”). In both cases, however, it is not always easy to discern a resolution of the kind offered by clear contrapuntal musical structure; rather, we glimpse something that such structure, in music, only hints at, namely that the real lesson of all counterpoint is not that it resolves but that it only appears to—that the play of layered and contrasting voices must begin again, ever again, always renewed.
    â€œThe Idea of North” was the first of three pieces in Gould’s Solitude Trilogy, a suite of heavily edited radio works that also includes “The Latecomers” and “The Quiet in the Land,” about the inhabitants of a Newfoundland fishing village and a prairie Mennonite community, respectively. All three are documentary in a minimal fashion only. Gould was cheerful in his admission not only of elaborate editing but also of some manipulation in content, suggesting for example that the fourteen characters presented in “The Latecomers” were all related. The voices are, in fact, less real people than ideas or sentiments, aspects of thought— personae. They have been shaped, if not distorted, by the aims of the overall work, just as Gould the recording artist would treat the elements of a musical composition.
    And so Professor Klopweisser’s suggestion that Gould leaves the characters behind: “you create a dialectic in which their polarities are united,” he tells Gould in the later radio piece; “you create a collective recognition of the argument that binds them together.” This is placed in direct rejection of what another persona, Sir Nigel Twitt-Thornwaite, calls “integrity of the unique and unrepeatable moment captured forever” and which Gould mocks as, instead, “the embalmed concert moment” and “the permawaxed recording moment.” 81 As so often, the work is not, or not only, about what it is about. “The Idea of North,” indeed the whole trilogy, stands as another in a long series of Gould manifestos about the value of sustained artificiality over (alleged) captured authenticity. That this argument is delivered with Gould himself using at least three, and sometimes five, different voices is precisely the kind of irony he found excessively amusing.
    The voices that animate the first work are people who live in and know Canada’s vast northern territory. They speak of their experiences with humour, political sharpness, and sometimes weary familiarity about how the rest of the country ignores or neglects their home. One of them mocks the idea of “northmanship,” whereby a given person tries to outdo another with