Contrapuntal Radio and Very Rural Canadian Wisdom

Glenn Gould was commissioned by the CBC to produce a series of radio programs in 1967 to commemorate Canada's centennial. Specifically, he was asked to center the programs around the isolated communities in the northernmost and outlying portions of the country, where Canadian society in any modern sense had not yet reached.

The pianist took some [relatively] portable recording equipment and miles of tape and headed to Fort Churchill, a small outpost in Manitoba on the shore of Hudson's Bay. During this and several subsequent trips to similar settlements in and along the arctic frontier, he interviewed several dozen locals; geologists, meteorologists, mechanics, priests, and fishermen were his most common subjects. He discussed with them their experiences of the North, their thoughts on the nature of man and of isolation's effect on him, their assessments of Canadian society and culture, their economic and political philosophies, and even their favorite foods and music, and in the end had far more material than he could ever reasonably condense into a one-hour radio documentary. As a solution to this, Gould experimented with splicing bits of the recorded voices together in layers. His expertise at classical counterpoint no doubt aided him in this task; he managed to edit parallel voices, sometimes as many as five or six, such that pauses in some interlocked with words of others and all could, more or less, be clearly heard. Thus, "The Idea of North" was born.

And, because I'm such a nice guy, I've included an A/V sample (please forgive the [Korean?] subtitles):



(This is one of the Thirty-Two Short Films about Glenn Gould, which is sadly no longer available on DVD. The actor is Colm Feore, a superb Canadian artist and all-around congenial fellow.)

"The Latecomers" and "The Quiet in the Land," which explored similar ideas in, respectively, Newfoundland outports and Mennonite colonies, followed over the next decade. Unfortunately, Gould passed away in 1982, at the age of only 50, so contrapuntal radio, which had not, by his estimation, nearly reached its potential, more or less died with him. The three programs, aptly dubbed "The Solitude Trilogy," were not well received—practically everyone who heard them decided they were too difficult to follow. The experience of listening to them is not unlike trying to participate in multiple conversations at once at a party--the structures of the brain responsible for speech recognition work in concert with shortterm memory, focusing on one voice while storing the other for later processing. At times, it is quite confusing, and participation in each will likely be limited, but it is possible.

The first time I listened to "Idea of North" from beginning to end, I admit I was a bit overwhelmed—likewise with "Latecomers" and "Quiet in the Land." Each required several hearings to deconstruct the masses of sound and reassemble the ideas, and when I did so, I found that many of these interviewees, some of whom had little more than a middle-school education, were incredibly well spoken and insightful—even philosophical, in a casual, disarming way:

[Scotch-Canadian man]: "It sounded a bit ridiculous, but I was taught sufficiently by me parents that, 'The other guy knows something, too, so don't open your big mouth 'til ya find out what he's all about.'"

[Canadian/American man]: "I believe that people who are removed from the center of society are always able to see it more clearly…If you go back to the 19th century, there was nobody in the United States who saw the 19th century American society with such clarity and decisiveness as Thoreau, who saw it from the perspective of the cabin in the woods."

[Different Canadian man]: "It's related to the whole attitude of Mennonites to the arts, which is a complete temperance. For example, I can't imagine any congregation today hearing a 12-tone church anthem and then somehow suggesting that this could glorify God, too."

[Same Scotch-Canadian man, voice in tandem with Canadian/American's]: "I minds the time, shall I say, forty-five years ago, when one could go around this island, and everybody had a patch of potatay ground. People were growing the odd cucumber, and squash, turnips, cabbage. And most everybody had a cow, and a half a dozen sheep, and a dozen hens. And then we got the federation—then we got the dollars in our pocket. And Joe Blow figured, 'Why should I grow any more potatays? I'm gonna show that guy who got all the money next door to me...that I don't have to grow 'em! I can buy 'em the same as 'ee does.' Well then, they kill the cow, they kill the sheep, they bought their eggs at the grocery store, and the tin cans started to pile up, but they didn't pile up in the landwash--they piled up in a pile behind his house. And that's where, in my opinion, sir, the spirit of Newfoundland has died."

[Same Canadian/American, voice in tandem with Scottish-Canadian's]: "So that there was really a state of anarchy without any of the manifestations of government control, we lived in a sort of communal society in which all work was done jointly, but at the same time, there was a concession to private property, in that we had separate woodpiles—similarly, working on big enterprises required a whole community's effort. For example, if you had large boat to pull up in the fall or to launch in the spring, the word would go around that, on a certain day at high tide, so and so was going to pull up his boat. Well, on that date and time, with one accord, the whole community would be assembled, without any specific arrangement having been made."

[The following done in call-response form, though the interview subjects never met each other and did not pre-write any of their comments or expect their recorded voices to be used in such a way]:

Man: "I think there's too much emphasis placed on this business of mutual stimulation between artists. The artist who is really worth anything works best when he is alone, I think."

Woman: "I can sit in my bedroom alone and be very creative, but creativity is judged to a certain extent by what other people think, whether other people assume this is 'creative.'"

Man: "Any writer who isn't doing his own thing isn't doing anything worth doing at all, really. The idea that you have to know exactly what the current trends are—that the antihero is the thing that is en vogue this year, and the hero will be back next—this sort of thing is just nonsense."

Woman: "By being a total hermit, you can be creative for a while, but after a while, you have to get out in public to know whether you're being creative."

Man: "You have to write for yourself first of all, and then, if it happens to be relevant for other people, too, why, that's wonderful."

Woman: "Art is judged by people. Whether this is right or wrong, I don't know. It's judged by how much people will pay and who will listen to you or who will buy your work. Unless you're very well off, you can't sit and be creative for years and years on end. You'll eventually have to make money to keep yourself."

Man: "My novels pay for themselves."

Interesting stuff. It's refreshing, I think, that such desolate, inhospitable regions of the world can yield nevertheless progressively minded and even optimistic individuals (hence my similar fascination with Scandinavia, which boasts some of the most prosperous, happy nations in the world). For more samples, visit the CBC's archives at http://archives.cbc.ca/arts_entertainment/music/topics/320-1709/. The entire recordings are only available via Amazon.com or some online service similar thereto, but I'd be happy to share them with anyone interested.

It's a lovely Sunday afternoon, so I think I'll go for a swim.