Glenn Gould at work in a CBC recording studio in 1974. (CBC Still Image Collection)
Since his death 25 years ago, the interest surrounding Glenn Gould has far outgrown the world of classical music. Today, even staunch head-bangers recognize the appealingly brilliant and eccentric pianist. He was a Canadian icon who famously quit the concert stage in 1964 to pursue a recording-only career, stating that within a century, the public concert as we know it would no longer exist.
Gould’s titanic musical influence didn’t extend to studio engineering — why is that? His records sounded better than those of his contemporaries and often sold better, too. No other classical artist worked as hard to make great recordings. His arguments against public concerts as pretentious and tyrannical were lucid and entertaining. But it seems that the classical industry is bound to remain a bit backward, recording-wise, because its emphasis continues to remain on concert-style execution.
Gould was meticulous about his own recordings, though he would sometimes sing tunelessly over his playing and then, during editing, craft a track that included his vocal obbligato. That final rendition would be the result of Gould trying out many different interpretations, recorded over and over, frequently spliced together in the editing room to produce the ideal result. The editing room was often where he spent most of his recording hours.
The classical music producer’s interest “has always been in capturing the essence of a live performance in a single take, instead of creating an ideal art document,” says electro-acoustic composer and sound engineer Paul Dolden, who was nominated for a Grammy in 1999 for his engineering on Immersion, an avant-garde compilation released by Starkland Records. “That’s why most classical recordings sound so bad.”
Pop producers make musicians in a band record separately in studios, instead of recording entire ensembles performing on a stage. They take time to mike the players optimally, often experimenting with different locales or microphones to record a certain track. Top-end pop producers like Brian Eno (U2), George Martin (The Beatles) and Quincy Jones (Michael Jackson) get directly involved in the sound and become integral to the creative process.
Few classical recordings measure up to the clarity and warmth of quality pop recordings. Classical discs are often flat and distant. Few Beethoven recordings equal Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band in punch; no Brahms disc matches the richness of Paul’s Boutique by the Beastie Boys. Meanwhile, Gould’s recordings sound fresh and infectious. And it’s not because he reinvented the recording process. It’s because he applied as much intelligence and energy to studio editing as he did to the performance itself.
“For the most part, Gould wasn’t an innovator in the studio,” Dolden says. “Except for his Solitude Trilogy, Gould was using studio techniques that were just variations on editing methods used in the world of pop music production: splicing different performances together, creative miking and such.
“But to classical musicians, these techniques were a slap in the face,” Dolden says.
Talented classical sound engineers are usually handcuffed by time and money constraints, because the music they’re recording doesn’t generate much cash. But Gould enjoyed special treatment. Thanks to CBS, Columbia Records and the CBC, he had all the studio time and financial sponsorship he needed.
Gould, left, fellow producer John Thomson and violinist and conductor Yehudi Menuhin, far right, confer at a recording console in 1979. (Fred Phipps/CBC Still Image Collection)
Most importantly, Gould had a creative attitude toward the studio, comparable to Wall of Sound inventor Phil Spector or guitar legend Les Paul, who was the first to multi-track and manipulate live performances in the editing room. For these guys, the recording studio was a laboratory, wherein musical events that weren’t physically doable could be realized. Spector and Paul shared a straightforward commercial mandate to sell a ton of records. Their studio edits suffered little resistance. Arty backlash from pop stars wasn’t a problem.
Classical performers have a different mindset, sometimes less practical, and are often afflicted by a romance with history. Most violinists will not want any more “help” from studio wizards than, say, Jascha Heifetz, the Russian-American fiddle genius who touched millions with his breathtaking conception and execution. His recordings sound amazing as performances but dismal as recordings.
Traditionalists feel that editing corrupts the performance’s purity the way steroids enhance an athlete; it’s about authenticity. To Gould, technology was a friend to art, providing new avenues of creativity. He spliced together different renditions of a piece not to cheat, but to create a more fully realized conception of a score. For example, in his recording of Bach’s A-minor fugue from Book One of the Well-Tempered Clavier in 1964, Gould begins and ends the fugue with a cool and confident style, but for the middle part, he splices in a version that is edgy and nervous. This suits the fugue’s structure, because the middle part’s harmony is less stable. The final product is more arresting than the two separate takes on their own. Gould’s keyboard chops were arguably the best ever recorded, but it’s unlikely that even he could have switched gears that way in mid-performance. The attitude shift is too sudden for human reflexes to emulate, but the final recording sounds fantastic, jarring and absorbing.
Gould likened advanced recording techniques to filmmaking. He used different takes in order to assemble a narrative, whereas a concert was more like a stage play. Another film-inspired idea of Gould’s was to place various microphones at different distances from the piano. He dubbed this technique “acoustic choreography.” Gould composed a shot list of microphones ranging from inside the piano’s body to five feet away, nine feet away, at the back of the room, etc. This way, he created audio panoramas. Unfortunately, they didn’t influence recording standards.
According to classical radio producer Sylvia L’Ecuyer, “Gould’s studio techniques haven’t really affected classical recording much. But the radio [counterpoint] pieces possess a beautiful balance of form and content, completely organic and unique.”
She’s referring to the Solitude Trilogy: three documentaries made into music by weaving together monologues and sounds. The Idea of North is about what “true north” actually means; The Latecomers is about the gradual loss of Newfoundland and Labrador’s unique culture; and The Quiet of the Land is about a Mennonite prairie village situated on Highway 1 (the Trans-Canada) at Red River, Man.
But even if this sublime trilogy realizes Gould’s studio exploration, it proves how wrong he was about concerts. Sales of the three-disc set were negligible, while classical performances abound worldwide. Classical disc sales remain nominal in comparison with pop, and most new composers barely sell anything. Live performance is the one branch of classical that keeps the art form breathing. The power of live music simply cannot be reasoned away. Not even by a much-loved genius who put Canada on the map musically. Any metal-head could have told us that.
John Keillor is a writer based in Toronto.
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