After Half A Century, Glenn Gould’s Radio Documentaries Still Seem Avant-Garde

Shortly after the pianist abandoned live performance for good, he started making nonfiction radio programs for the CBC, the best-known of which are called the “Solitude Trilogy”: The Idea of North (about life in sub-Arctic Manitoba), The Latecomers (Newfoundland outports), and The Quiet Land (an isolated Mennonite community). The voices of those he interviewed are “intertwined as though contrapuntal voices in a Bach fugue or suite. Several could be sometimes be heard at once, each artfully edited, syllable by syllable, so that their rhythms made a certain sense as one emerged and another faded.” – Los Angeles Times