Gould and the Recording Studio
Few entities are as pivotal to Glenn Gould’s musical career as the recording studio. Gould became distinguished as a classical piano player who was an early advocate of the supremacy of the recording studio over the live concert hall as a site of music production—to the point of it becoming his only site of (publicly accessible) music production in the latter half of his career, when he decided to permanently depart from the concert hall.
Our “Audience” exhibit, which is located in the ‘Producers & Consumers’ room of our museum, discusses Gould’s views on how recorded music would positively transform the habits and role of the listener; here, we seek to shed light on his perspective on the significance of recording to those operating from within the studio.
Gould, in his capacity as a professional piano player, frequently positioned himself as the kind of person who would be a central beneficiary of recording culture. The recording studio afforded him a safe, isolated space within which he could exercise his performer’s prerogatives to his heart’s content, play a piece on the piano however many times he felt he needed to, apply however much editing was necessary to achieve an interpretation that satisfied him—and all while hidden away from the prying, judgmental eyes of the public. Gould was especially partial to a technique called “splicing”, which entails taking the best parts of multiple recordings of a piece and reassembling them into a cohesive, final record that approximated his ideal interpretation of the piece far more closely than what he could typically achieve in any single, continuous performance.
Not everyone warmed to recording and splicing techniques as much as Gould did. What Gould touted as the epitome of creative freedom, frequently deploying emancipatory rhetoric (and the metaphor of filmmaking) to describe the process—“one should be free to “shoot” a Beethoven sonata or a Bach fugue in or out of sequence, intercut almost without restriction, apply postproduction techniques as required” (Page, 1984, p. 359 [emphasis added])—others regarded as “dishonest and dehumanizing” (Page, 1984, p. 337). The consensus among Gould’s dissenting contemporaries was that recording was “never going to take the place of the concert” (Page, 1984, p. 355); only, at best, serve as a lackluster substitute for it. By likening the process of “chip[ping] off and replacing” “one wrong note … so it sounds right” to “fixing a false tooth” (Page, 1984, p. 287), pianist Arthur Rubinstein, in a conversation with Gould, reluctantly acknowledged a use for splicing, while in the same breath underscoring its purportedly disingenuous nature. He further emphasized its limited utility in remarking that the “labored” quality that a musical recording takes on by virtue of being heavily edited renders it “not persuasive” and “not art anymore” (Page, 1984, p. 287). To such charges of edited recordings as being somehow less “real” or less “genuine” than its live counterpart, Gould would retort that they misapprehend the essence of technology; it should not be regarded as a “noncommittal, noncommitted voyeur” (Page, 1984, p. 355), confined only to the role of passively capturing information, to begin with; its very generative potential should be embraced and exploited to produce new kinds of works.
