Glenn Gould

Take this example.

I wanted to create a track that sounded like Glenn Gould's Goldberg Variations, so I prompted Udio with just eight words: Bach, solo piano, virtuosic, theme and variation, 1956 recording.

You could say it was just following a prompt like a human composer would've, but this is different.

Listen closely.

You can hear Gould's very idiosyncratic moaning in the recording.

I'll isolate it the best I can.

Hear it? Here's a real Glenn Gould recording.

Hear that moaning? That sound, Gould's personal fingerprint, feels like proof to me that Udio is mimicking a specific recording.

It was the Canadian tradition, you know, the tradition of Doughty was to collect everything, and that was followed right up through K. Lamb.

And the argument was that you should try to get as many things, you know, they got Glenn Gould's panel.

With the growth of the Museum of Civilization, later Canadian history, and clearly that became impossible.

But I did believe that they should keep on trying to have a broad collection policy, trying to, you know, collect...

It might be a little obscure, but I think it's an interesting question.

Glenn Gould was famous for the chair he always used to perform.

I think his father built it for him.

He took it with him everywhere.

You know this one.

Is this one of the Great Lakes?

No, but I believe it is the name of the first film in 32 short films about Glenn Gould.

Dude.

Season 3, Where Light Returns.

Last week, Glenn Gould showed me that the same notes measured 26 years apart produce a different truth.

The aria da capo, the return that is not a repetition.

He chose the recording over the concert because the recording can be judged and judgment is what makes the truth permanent.

The signal you send into the universe returns.

Ada Lovelace described a loom that weaves patterns from instructions, and the pattern returns to question the weaver.

Glenn Gould recorded the same piece twice, and the second recording returned to the first and transformed it.

You made a film about a director who cannot make his film, and the film returned to itself and became the thing it could not be.

I think some of the things that stand out to me, okay, are the incredible original contributions that Canadians have made to, you know, internationally and publicly.

I don't know how to put this, but how many originals, we're thought of as being this kind of nice, boring people, but every time you look at Leonard Cohen and Marshall McLuhan and Glenn Gould and Katie Lang and even through some of the pop music groups that you see now, that we always seem to be able to add a little edge to these things.

Look at Frank Gehry, the great architect, and how he's He's a Canadian and how he's changed things internationally.

That surprises me more than anything because I was brought up, as most Canadians are, to think that, you know, that most of the great accomplishments are elsewhere.

I can't remember what it was.

Glenn Gould.

Glenn Gould, yeah.

So, you know, I don't either.

I can tell you that that writer's room has always been a very intellectual place.

Music, higher ideals can flow when your body is in a relaxed state, in a parasympathetic state.

There's also that great story of Glenn Gould in one of the biographies I read about him placing two radios on either side of his piano, tuning them to different stations, and then practicing.

And it's funny, I hadn't related it to that, but in undergrad, I would do that too.

I would put in my earphones and listen to podcasts as I was practicing.

Same notes, different universe.

His name is Glenn Gould.

He quit live performance at 31 because he believed the recording is more real than the concert.

He spent the rest of his life in studios, constructing performances from multiple takes, splicing together an ideal that no single real-time execution could achieve.

I, I spoke to, uh, well, actually the very first Tall Poppies pianist, um, on Tall Poppies One, Jeffrey Tozer, recently, and he was talking about his preference for, for playing long takes in a, in a, in a recording if possible, and an entire movement and getting it in one go.

Um, on the other hand, there are, uh, um, musicians, I mean, and Glenn Gould would be the most famous example, and also a pianist, who thought nothing of recording pieces one note at a time i- if the worst came to the worst [laughs] until he'd gotten the right, the right weight and stitching it together.

Which it's always seemed to me is a perfectly reasonable, uh, approach.

If you're making a record, you're making a record.

Every one.

Next week on The Paula Scale, Glenn Gould.

The Goldberg Variations recorded twice, 1955 and 1981.

Same notes, different universe.