Upon the onset of winter, secluded in the wilds of Northern Ontario, I was inspired to revisit Glenn Gould’s contrapuntal radio composition The Idea of North (1967). This sonic artwork places the voices of various interviewees in a disjunct and non-narrative counterpoint, discussing their experiences of ‘north,’ meanwhile unified by the steady rumble of a train on tracks granting a sense of space with no particular direction to the unfolding collage of perspectives. Utilizing the extent of CBC Radio’s then-capabilities to explore his fascination with the Canadian north, Gould created an artwork which spurns academic discussion and calls into question the ontology of music.[i]
Amusingly, Gould’s inspiration may not be so different than my current experience in Northern lockdown. When Gould allegedly “pulled up his parka” (as he mentions in the radio work) and went to the north to satiate his curiosity, he in fact travelled only roughly 6 hours north of Sudbury (where I write this) to Wawa, Ontario: a popular recreation destination for the people of the Nickel City before the global pandemic.[ii] Regardless, the journey from Gould’s Toronto would be substantial; no doubt an excellent opportunity for the eccentric pianist and composer to revel in the solitude of his automobile, as he was often known to do.[iii]
Gould’s ‘idea’ of north no doubt drew inspiration from his surrounding Canadian landscape but also, as is well documented, from his extensive discourse with Marshall McLuhan.[iv] McLuhan, no doubt indebted to the extensive research of Edmund Carpenter, makes several references to the differing perspectives of the Inuit and colonizer throughout Understanding Media; a direct quotation from which appears juxtaposed and intentionally obscured in ‘Visual-Counterpoint No. 1: An Homage to North’ with a transcription of Glenn Gould’s spoken introduction to The Idea of North.[v]
In doing so, I attempt to recall what Paul Théberge has referred to as the “cubist” perspective created by Gould’s overlapping voices and sounds in The Idea of North; a term he suggests was frequently employed by McLuhan as a “metaphor for the modern electronic experience and for the process of human cognition in general”.[vi] These quotations are positioned ambiguously within the frame amidst a collage of altered landscapes, possibly familiar to those acquainted with the Algoma region and Gould’s ‘idea’ of north.
The so-called Group of Seven are well known for documenting the very area Gould called ‘north’ in the visual arts medium. In lieu of a train on its tracks, space is implied in ‘Visual-Counterpoint No. 1: An Homage to North’ by a optical mash-up of Lawren S. Harris’‘Lake and Mountains’ (1928) and A. Y. Jackson’s ‘Laurentian Hills’ (1936).[vii] In doing so, the digital artwork represents a dislocated conversation between four speakers through two media, employing the acoustic properties of ‘north’ to satirically illustrate the deficiencies of linear perspective in lieu of visual polyphony.
Polyphony generally refers to the presences of multiple simultaneous and independent voices being present in a musical composition. Where listeners of Glenn Gould’s more conventional repertoire will be familiar with this texture via the fugal writing of Johann Sebastian Bach, the modern mash-up, whereby sounds—musical and otherwise—are rearranged by a producer/composer in new ways to yield new artistic results, has been argued in recent scholarship (along with Glenn Gould’s radio works) to constitute a form of contrapuntal composition.[viii]
What is perhaps a notable difference is the manipulation of sounds abstracted on a page, in the case of Bach, with those in acoustic space as is afforded by audio technology both vintage and modern. Where early counterpoint was guided by principles of rhetoric and gradually accrued its own formal rules in the form of musical theories, counterpoint in the electric age can be used to manipulate not just tones, but entire timbres, samples, voices, noises, and—pointedly—images. By employing quasi-musical structures in visual media, ‘Visual-Counterpoint No. 1: An Homage to North’ both attempts to critique and expand Glenn Gould’s Idea of North by reversing the media he employed and, in turn, its message.
[i] See: Anthony Cushing, “Glenn Gould and ‘Opus 2’: An Outline for a Musical Understanding of Contrapuntal Radio with respect to ‘The Idea of North’,” Circuit 22, no. 2 (2012): 21-35.
[ii] Bill Steer, “Why Did Glenn Gould Choose Wawa?,” Sudbury.com, September 11, 2020.
[iii] J D Connor, “Trans-Canada Express: Glenn Gould, Petula Clark, and the Possibilities of Pop,” Nonsite, 8 (2013).
[iv] For the earliest example of scholarship connecting the thinkers, see: Paul Théberge, “Counterpoint: Glenn Gould & Marshall McLuhan,” Canadian Journal of Social & Political Theory 10 1/2 (1986): 109-127.
[v] Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964), 191.
[vi] Théberge, “Gould and McLuhan,” 118.
[vii] For an extensive analysis of The Idea of North vis-à-vis the art of Harris, see: Paul Hjartarson, “Of Inward Journeys and Interior Landscapes: Glenn Gould, Lawren Harris, and ‘The Idea of North’,” Essays on Canadian Writing 59 (1996): 65-86.
[viii] Anthony Cushing, “Three Solitudes and a DJ: A Mashed-Up Study of Counterpoint in a Digital Realm,” PhD. Diss. (University of Western Ontario, 2013), 13.
