Years later, when talking to John Jessop for The Canadian Music Book (1971), Gould said that the Sunday Night Stage broadcasts were likely the springboard for his own approach to radio. “I was fascinated with radio. A lot of that kind of ostensibly theatrical radio was also, in a very good sense, documentary making of a rather high order. At any rate, the distinctions between drama and documentary were quite often, it seemed to me, happily and successfully set aside.” Toronto’s theatre scene wasn’t particularly abundant, he added, “and being of sufficiently puritan temperament to be disinclined to theatre, even if there had been much of it, I was fascinated with radio theatre because it seemed to me somehow more pure, more abstract, and, in a certain sense, it had a reality for me that, later on, when I became familiar with conventional theatre, that kind of theatre always seemed to lack.” He continues: “In the late fifties, I began to write scripts for documentaries occasionally: and I was always dissatisfied with the kind of documentaries that radio seemed to decree. You know, they very often came out sounding — not square, because that’s not necessarily a pejorative word in my vocabulary, but they came out sounding — okay, I’ll borrow Marshall McLuhan’s term — linear. They came out sounding, ‘Over to you, now back to our host, and here for the wrap up is’ — in a word, predicable.”
Gould follows through with this thought, elsewhere, in his “The Idea of North: An Introduction,” writing: “… North, which, though technically a documentary, is at the very least a documentary which thinks of itself as a drama.”
Gould’s early radio work — and eventually his radio and TV work — was ubiquitous in Canada to the point where many Canadians might well have believed that broadcasting represented his real career, particularly if they were unable to see him live in concert. In fact, piano playing was Gould’s reality. Broadcasting was his desire. Before he made his debut recording in 1953 (on Hallmark, a small boutique Toronto recording outfit), Gould had appeared on CBC Radio’s Sunday Morning Recital on December 4, 1950, playing Mozart and Hindemith sonatas. The acetate tape of the performance given to him as a souvenir of the occasion became a memento he’d retrieve over the years from a shelf in his apartment to remember “that moment in my life when I first had a vague impression of the direction it would take.” He increasingly became a fixture at the CBC, with at least two recordings in 1951 and four more in 1952 — one featuring work by Alban Berg and Arnold Schoenberg — the same year he made his high-profile TV debut (on September 8), one of the select performers invited to celebrate the on-air opening of CBLT, the CBC’s Toronto station.
A good many tapes in the CBC archives are without dates. One recording in 1953 — one there’s a annotation for, that is — is followed by five more in 1954, three as part of the Distinguished Artist Series, then three more in 1955, and so on through the following years, the programs leaning to Bach keyboard work and Beethoven concertos. One CBC archivist told me years ago that there are “probably others things lurking out there, tapes without his name on, we don’t know of.”
Gould’s concert career was heating up over the same period, increasing from fourteen performances in 1955 to twenty-three in 1956 and thirty-six in 1957 to the peak of sixty-five concerts in 1958. His pill-popping kept pace with his gruelling schedule throughout, as did his panic attacks, concert cancellations, complaints about playing conditions, and general distaste for being a tourist. “You begin to feel your age,” he told an interviewer. He was only twenty-six years old at the time.
What got him through the night, so to speak, was imagining broadcasting potential and media. This was not a particularly long leap of the imagination in Toronto at the time, what with word spreading rapidly about Marshall McLuhan’s communication seminars at the University of Toronto, which were to lead to the formation of the Centre for Culture and Technology in 1963. By then McLuhan seemed to be everywhere. His book The Mechanical Bride, which appeared in 1951, explored the emergence of new cultural industries like advertising designed “to get inside the collective public mind.” Edmund Carpenter and Harold Innis were, along with McLuhan, the emerging generation of media-mavens centred on the journal Explorations, which went a long way to put the U of T and Toronto itself on the international map. “The intellectual excitement of endless dialogue between McLuhan and Carpenter had crystallized into a tangible project with their success in obtaining a grant from the Ford Foundation,” writes Canadian historian W. Terrence Gordon in Marshall McLuhan: Escape into Understanding: A Biography. It was the foundation’s first investment in Canadian culture, U of T president Sidney Smith told McLuhan in a letter.
With Yehudi Menuhin rehearsing for Duo, 1966 CBC TV special.
Indeed. It was an extraordinarily heady time in Toronto, with a flourishing literary scene, artistic collectives such as Painters Eleven, and a flood of new composers in from Europe, such as Oskar Morawetz, putting Canadian composition “at the cross-roads,” as Gould recognized at the time. The possibility of being part of such an overlay of media and art production, of controlling it to some degree, of being controlled by it, or a bit of both — and maybe the buzz that comes with the hair-raising sexiness of it all — contributes to the sense of pleasure exuded by most of Gould’s TV appearances.
April 13, 1956: Opening Video
GRAPHIC: People of the moment against the background of their lives
Joe McCulley: And now, another guest with decided views. A pianist … Glenn Gould, who, at the age of fourteen, made a solo appearance with the Toronto Symphony Orchestra. Now twenty-three, he’s just received international acclaim on the release of a single recording … Bach’s Goldberg Variations. Many critics have referred to him as the most astonishing and promising young pianist on the continent.
MUSIC ENDS
McCulley: Good evening, Glenn.
Gould: Good evening, Mr. McCulley.
McCulley: What were you playing just now?
Gould: [Tells him and explains that he’s rehearsing it for a new recording in New York.]
McCulley: Glenn, in the last few months you’ve received a lot of attention in Life magazine and various other publications. What are your comments about all this publicity?
Gould: [Replies that he finds it flattering; also that he is glad to say he was first noticed in his own country. Mentions the overplaying of his eccentricities by the press.]
McCulley: What eccentricities, Glenn?
Gould: [Mentions his need to stay warm and his precautions against cold studios.]
McCulley: Following the success of the Goldberg Variations recordings, what have you done apart from your concert work?
Gould: [Replies he has written a quartet to be performed at Stratford, his future as a composer, etc.]
Gould never looked happier than in the interviews he gave CBC producer Franz Kraemer in 1959 for Glenn Gould: Off the Record and Glenn Gould: On the Record. The settings for each were to his liking, particularly his family’s Uptergrove cottage, with his beloved Chickering piano close at hand, which allowed him to turn around dramatically and play a sparkling atonal passage to prove a point. The many water and landscape shots in the cottage sequences are used to underline Gould’s need to get away. But this was cottage country, with boats buzzing by and city executives rushing up on Friday afternoons for the first Scotch, neat. Gould was connected with the city as much as ever.
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