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 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 who dissents 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.
“The 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 feats of isolation or deprivation: if you have gone on a twenty-two-day sled-dog journey, I have completed one of thirty days, a game with no theoretical limit. And yet, as he noted, “It’s not like there’s some special virtue or merit that comes from being in the north.”82 Another plays with the idea of natural beauty, remarking how often and how inevitably it is filtered through prior perception of reproduced images. All of them, speaking on radio, are aware of the structural irony that isolation at once removes them from the overwhelming volume of mass media and makes them available and connected to it.
More than four decades later, not much has changed. Indeed, if anything, Canadians are more indifferent than ever to the realities of life in the largest area of the country. Global climate change and fossil fuel depletion have made the region more significant than ever, with shipping and resource opportunities that are not being ignored at all by other sovereign powers, especially the United States, whose purchase of Alaska may be about to pay off once more with a viable Northwest Passage. Meanwhile, the great majority of Canadians have not visited the region and don’t intend to, huddling instead in the string of medium to large conurbations scattered across the country’s southernmost edge. It cannot be any surprise that policy with respect to the north is a mixture of embarrassing misunderstanding and condescension. This simply mirrors the attitude of most Canadians, which, when it even rises above indifference, tends to see only an abstraction wrapped in clichés tucked into a boring enigma.83
These matters were not really Gould’s concern, of course, especially the policy issues—he held no brief for Aboriginal land claims, environmental protection, or sovereignty. To that extent, he fell into the same romanticizing trap that afflicts many artists who try to speak for a region or people but instead end up creating an exotic image that cannot help but be partial or even demeaning. Gould was mostly fetched by the idea of north as a category of thought, a philosophical idea. The r
eal north was not the subject of his thinking, even if the subjects of the documentary hail from there; the subject was, instead, the metaphorical north. The title, indeed, tells us as much.
And it turns out that north is, more or less, a synonym for solitude: consciousness is here a function of latitude. North was not for Gould, as it is for some of us, a negative frontier, a pushing-down of hostile weight, the large uncharted fact of human-killing cold that defeated Hudson and Frobisher and the rest and, along the way, negatively defined Canada as a nation. In this common view, our cities are fragile bulwarks against the weather, contingent timeouts from the constant effort of the climate to obliterate us. Instead, what exercised Gould’s imagination, and ours as we try to follow the weave of voices in the documentary, is what it feels like to be isolated and often alone: to have no company other than your own thoughts. It is not a reference Gould would likely have known, I suppose, but here he echoed the adolescent dream of Superman’s Arctic headquarters, the Fortress of Solitude, paradigmatic secret clubhouse for one, complete with library, laboratory, chess-playing robot, and exercise equipment. (The last, at least, not on Glenn Gould’s wish list.)
The theme of solitude would continue with the second and third entries in the emergent trilogy. In a country as large as Canada, with so small a population, solitude, not company, would seem to be the natural condition. And yet, the vast bulk of the population not only does not live this way, it never even considers the places where people do. Thus the real subject of contrapuntal radio, a form that demonstrates incomplete or illusory dialectic resolution in ideas, is Canada itself. The country is unpacked by the documentary and revealed as a postmodern nation of widespread contrapuntal consciousness—postmodern because here there is no dominant Zeitgeist to escape, no hegemonic culture, only the proliferation and expansion of consciousness itself. This view of Canada, not unique to Gould, would remain influential during the last decades of the twentieth century and it is still a central piece in the never-ending puzzle called Canadian identity.
Is the preoccupation with isolation a psychic projection of Gould’s own desire to elude the company of others, the flesh-pressing presence of people’s bodies, their breath and heat crowding in upon him? Is it an excavation of a larger psychic cavern, the national unconscious, which keeps its own deep fear of loneliness at bay by constructing not just cities but the logic of survival that supports the frontier conception of the north? Is it, more existentially, a reminder of the essential solitude of every person, who must die alone because my death is something only I can enact—others can watch but no other can do it for me? Is it all of these, wrapped in contrapuntal layers not of voice and sound but of thought and its absence, the silences of solitude and of the final fact, the end of the piece, death? Yes.
But what of the implicit meaning of north, the need for hospitality? A harsh environment—any strange environment—throws us onto the thresholds of strangers, asking for food and shelter. In the ancient traditions of nomads and settlers, the demand for hospitality could not be refused: I had to admit the stranger to my home, had to offer him a share of my wealth and security. The stranger was my revered guest precisely because I did not know him. In Latin, hostis (enemy) and hospitis (guest) are rooted in the same otherness, the novelty of the unknown person—and thus the two hosts hosted in our own tongue, the one who welcomes his guests and the other that is the army, sometimes the heavenly one, which fends off the enemy. Hospitality, so often now removed to the hygienic realm of the service industry—the hospitality suites and hospitality mints of the hotel industry—retains in its etymology a hint of the real stakes.
The dwellers in Canadian towns and cities know this still, if only in crisis. When a stranger’s vehicle is stranded in the snow. When a pet or child is lost in a storm. When we recall that the security of reliable shelter and ready supply of food is a collective achievement, though deployed under the sign of the isolated individual. The north bespeaks solitude only against the backdrop of shared risk. To be alone requires that we share, that we achieve together, the conditions of solitude’s possibility. Did Gould appreciate that, making all those late-night telephone calls to distant friends, his shadowy interlocutors? Was that his form of welcome?
If so, was it enough?
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Communication
In his Piano Quarterly review of Geoffrey Payzant’s 1978 book about him, Gould faced down the mild psychoanalyzing in which Payzant had indulged here and there within the pages of his mostly philosophical study.
Citing psychologist Anthony Storr’s now-classic study The Dynamics of Creation, Payzant had made this suggestive point: “Since most creative activity is solitary, choosing such an occupation means that the schizoid person can avoid the problems of direct relationships with others. If he writes, paints, or composes, he is, of course, communicating. But it is communication entirely on his own terms. … He cannot be betrayed into confidences which he might later regret. … He can choose (or so he often believes) how much of himself to reveal and how much to keep secret.”84
Gould retorted: “This citation seems indicative of Payzant’s own attitude in regard to his subject and adroitly summarizes Gould’s abhorrence of city life, his distaste for public appearances, his predilections for telephonic communication, his belief that solitude nourishes creativity and that colleagual fraternity tends to dissipate it.”85
Later in the review, he mentioned in wry tones Payzant’s hint—it is no more—that Gould’s fondness for psychoanalytic imagery might indicate a history of analysis. “Given that Payzant and Gould are both residents of Toronto,” Gould noted, “and that this sort of speculation could presumably have been settled with a simple ‘yes’ or ‘no’, such inconclusive testimony—verging, indeed, on idle musing—can produce a rather comical effect.” Except, one wants to interject, that there is no simple yes or no here. “But its obverse,” Gould went on, “is that quality which lends to Payzant’s book its greatest strength—the author’s obvious determination to prepare his portrait without being interfered with, or influenced by, the conversational connivance and media manipulation at which Gould is allegedly a master.”86
Alleged by whom, exactly? By Gould, in a review of a book about himself ? By that book, or by some other, unnamed, book? By some generalized anonymous “they,” Martin Heidegger’s das Man? In the end, Gould praised Payzant with the full force of his habitual irony of uncertain direction. Any critic could, he said, simply accept “the conventional image of Gould as an eccentric and erratic pianist-pundit.” Payzant had wisely chosen, instead, to “harmonize” Gould’s “musical predilections, moral persuasions, and behavioral extravagances,” in the process fashioning “a texture as structurally secure and chromatically complex as the baroque fugues which first awakened Glenn Gould to the wonder of the art of music.”87
The review itself surely has fugal elements, even if the book in reality does not. Gould’s play here is multilayered and self-conscious to a degree well beyond the easy use of that solecism of the media age, referring to oneself in the third person. That is merely part of the review’s basic conceit. In addition, he is indulging media images of himself even as he—apparently—ridicules or distances himself from them. The concluding show of praise is itself a fiction of the review’s performance, for at least two obvious reasons. First, there is no clear substantial difference between the so-called conventional view and the one he attributes to Payzant: both work to explain Gould’s eccentricities in the context of his music, explaining one by reference to the other. Thus, Payzant’s view is tarred with the same brush—or, perhaps, accepted as equally valid; it is not easy to say—as the usual ones. Second, even supposing a clear difference, the attribution of structural harmony to Payzant’s view is heavily backhanded, carrying a strong whiff of mockery. Payzant, Gould suggests, has imposed on his life the same sort of “cheating” structural narrative resolution that Gould brings to a recording, or that a composer brings to a counter
point composition.
What is being communicated here, then, beyond Gould’s routine show of cleverness?
His competitive streak, for one thing. Gould slighted Payzant for mentioning family reminiscences of his childhood will to win at croquet on the cottage lawn in Ontario, his fondness for driving powerful cars aggressively, his penchant for playing the piano with tour-de-force prowess—this despite the repeated claims that competition was anathema to him, and to music. On croquet at least, the critic had a point. Anyone who has played croquet, especially at a summer cottage or in the garden of an Oxford college, knows that it is among the most vindictive of games. Among other things, it is fair play to choose to send your opponent’s ball rocketing into the undergrowth in place of attempting to advance your own. “Payzant seems determined to uncover inconsistencies in Gould’s attitude,” Gould remarked mildly. But of course this is the ultimate competitiveness, that of ever having to have the last word, the higher forms of which tendency Gould displayed constantly in his late written work and conversations. Gould was a player in more than one sense: he was devoted to the disinterested possibilities of art’s openness, sure, but he was also a ninja master of literary one-upmanship and sly evasion. Whenever confronted by a contradiction, he slid smoothly by it, ideally while delivering a sneaky counterpunch to his accuser in the form of feigned offence—the feigning as important as the offence, since he would not wish to be pinned down even to being offended.
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