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I heard both The Idea of the North and The
Latecomers on the radio when they were first broadcast. My strongest
recollections are of Idea of the North. I heard it
on the car radio while on a long drive in
Michigan. I've always felt since that the piece is most effective when it
is heard while driving. I caught on fairly early to the idea that the
different characters represented different voices in Gould's counterpoint.
It took me longer to realize that the character of the voices and the
personality of the speakers had as much to do with the piece as the substance of
what they were saying. At first I tried hard to follow and understand the
words each of the speakers was saying. I was frustrated when an
interesting commentary was faded out or voiced over so that it was hard to
follow. When I began to relax and listen to the voices abstractly, without
worrying so much about what the speakers were saying, the piece became quite
engrossing. I was able to apprehend more clearly its structure, formal and
rhythmic. One of the reasons I think it is best heard while driving is
because the act of driving occupies you so that it is hard to rivet all your
attention on individual lines and then try to follow contemporaneous lines
separately. What happens is your listening relaxes a bit and you start to
perceive the fabric, the texture of the piece. Having the act of driving
occupy part of your attention may be like practicing the piano with the vacuum
cleaner on in the background. You are less fixated on moment to moment
meaning, as you might be in listening to a popular song, for
example,
and you feel instead the whole piece, the
sensation of the sounds and its structure. The idea of ensemble
performance of separate vocal lines is present in many great operas and I
think we experience those moments in an opera production in much the same
way. Repeated hearings of the Gould pieces reveal additional meanings and
insights for me, but often those are more in discovering some new aspect of the
juxtaposition of the characters or the ebb and flow of the drama or emotion in
their voices than in hearing more of what they are saying. I always felt that I
understood enough of what they were saying to fix the character of each voice in
my mind and to appreciate the emotion that moves through the
piece.
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