The accidental Gould researcher

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By Jason Winders
Thursday, February 10, 2011
(or a funny thing happened on the way to a dissertation)
 
 
 
Anthony Cushing didn’t set out to find Glenn Gould.
 
The Halifax, N.S., native grew up around the time of Gould’s death in 1982, a period rife with re-releases and renewed interest in the master’s work. And while he still remembers his father playing Gould on the stereo in their home, Cushing didn’t expect his interest to evolve much beyond that point.
 
A cellist by training, he went the composition route in graduate school and gained more appreciation for Gould’s performances for their stark nature and masterful arrangements. He studied at the University of Southern Maine, and then joined The University of Western Ontario for his PhD in 2007.
 
During his dissertation research, focused on musical mashups and counterpoint, Cushing stumbled across an underrepresented footnote in Gould’s career, the rarely revisited Solitude Trilogy.
 
The trilogy represents the least-known work of the 20th Century’s best-known pianist.
During a decade-long span, following his last public performance in 1964, Gould, along with Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) technician Lorne Tulk, produced these hour-long radio documentaries for the CBC.
 
The first, The Idea of North (1967), incorporates five speakers’ views – often differing – of Northern Canada. The second, The Latecomers (1969), speaks to life and provincially encouraged urbanization in Newfoundland.  The third, The Quiet in the Land (1977), showcases Mennonite life at Red River in Winnipeg, Man.
 
All three employ ambient sound, some music and use an electronic-music technique where several people are heard speaking at once—much like the voices in a fugue—manipulated masterfully by Tulk through the use of tape. Sort of a mashup of the time.
 
But listeners had no idea what hit them. “Reaction was overwhelmingly not good,” Cushing says.
 
Some believed the CBC was broken or their radio dials were bad and they were getting crossed signals across the clear night air. The CBC got flagged for too much silence, as well as logged for cross-talk. Neither was true, in reality, but few were calling for a repeat performance of Gould’s works.
 
“The point of the documentary was kind of lost,” Cushing says.
 
Gould branded the method “contrapuntal radio.”
 
“When you listen to the documentaries, they do make sense. The voices kind of align with weird little rhythms and cadences, ends of phrases where people are talking,” Cushing says.
 
He should know. Cushing’s dissertation centres on mashups, a blending of two songs into one, and counterpoint. His research has taken him from the artform’s medieval roots to Danger Mouse’s Grey Album to a chance encounter with the Glenn Gould Reader and an article entitled “Radio Is Music,” where Gould discusses his radio documentaries, especially the trilogy. In it, he outlines the concepts, discussing counterpoint in electronic media.
 
Cushing described this as his “missing link.”
 
Audiences were not the only ones to run cold toward the works. Academics and music historians have all but ignored the works which live in a world neither journalism nor music. A literature search conducted by Cushing on the trilogy and Gould turned up nothing. Zero.
 
“The more I got back to the Gould, I really, really did wonder why nobody was talking about this,” Cushing says. “In all the biographies, literally all of the biographies that are out now, they talk a little bit about reception of The Idea of North and The Latecomers. ‘Oh, it was weird.’ ‘Oh, it was experimental.’ ‘Oh, it was kind of off the wall.’ Period. Those are the descriptions of the documentaries. That’s it.”
 
Unsatisfied with what wasn’t there, he contacted Victoria Buchy, operations manager for Glenn Gould Foundation. She invited him to write an article for the Gould website, which generated a lot of interest and contacts. Then, Buchy introduced Cushing to Tulk, the legendary producer.
 
That’s when the research started rolling.
 
Cushing has met with him twice already. Tulk’s memories of those sessions are vivid and have become a treasure trove. In addition to the technical insight, Cushing can probe for exactly what Gould thought he was constructing with the trilogy.
 
Tulk still possess all the original scripts from the shows with notes as well as full notes from a full, never-before-seen scene cut from the final production. Oh, he also happens to have all the original master tapes.
 
“It’s pretty something,” Cushing says with a grin.
 
It’s not that these documentaries have been lost. (In fact, you can still find them on CD if you look hard enough.) But they certainly have not been elevated to the level of Gould’s other work. Are they music? Literature? Or just noise?
 
The pieces have lead Cushing to ask if the Solitudes, as the trilogy came to be known, should be considered part of Gould’s compositional body of work.
 
“It’s not that it has gone totally unnoticed. People know it’s there,” Cushing stresses. “But the media theorists would look at it and say. ‘Interesting ideas. … Oh well, isn’t that nice.’
 
But there really isn’t enough theory for them to hold onto. It really isn’t substantial enough for them. The musicians look at it and say, ‘I don’t really know what it is talking about. It’s not really music because it’s people talking.’ And they don’t get past that little bit. It kinds falls in an academic nether region.
 
“I don’t think people know how to tackle it. I don’t know how to tackle it.
 
But that won’t stop Cushing from pressing on. “Although I’m trying not to let the Gould stuff completely derail the dissertation,” he says.
 
And as to the question: Is this even music?
 
Cushing says, “I genuinely believe it is.”
 

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