Journeys Within and Without

Photo courtesy of the estate of Jock Carroll.

As the world hunkers down to the second month of worldwide social distancing, the sense of confinement that many of us are experiencing can start to weigh upon the mind and spirit. Fortunately, we have a way out. Through the power of imagination, we can transport ourselves to places we know or have never seen, construct scenarios of parties, crowds, gatherings, and pretty much any other journey we like. We get to be both the playwrights and stars of our own internal dramas.

Glenn Gould vividly illustrated this point in his 1980 “Silver Jubilee Album,” a two-LP set consisting of previously unreleased material and an extended but completely staged “interview” in which (with the notable exception of CBC broadcaster Margaret Pacsu, who plays Hungarian Marxist pedagogue, and music theorist Márta Hortávanyi) Gould plays both the interviewers (including his stock characters, Theodore Slutz, Sir Nigel Twitt-Thornwaite and Prof. Karlheinz Klopweisser), and responds to their decidedly antagonistic interrogation.

When challenged by the critics to stage a “Historic Return” concert in the manner of Vladimir Horowitz, Gould demurs, but finally spins an audio fantasy about the kind of “Hysteric Return” in which he’d consider performing.

Instantly we’re whisked to the deck of an oil rig in the Beaufort Sea courtesy of Geyser Petroleum Company, where Gould, accompanied by the “Aklavik Philharmonic” performs the Weber Konzertstück (an actual CBC Gould broadcast performance from 1951 was used) to an audience of members of the company’s board. The orchestra, itself, performs from two miles downwind on the deck of the nuclear submarine “Inextinguishable” connected by closed circuit satellite feed, with the sound fed to “Mr. Gould and [conductor] Maestro von Schlumpp through specially developed inner ear sonic trans-com mikes attached to their floatation collars, and which also serve to reduce the frostbite.” During Gould’s encore, Ravel’s La Valse, news breaks of a major oil find, leading to a quick exodus of his audience (also on the Inextinguishable), leading him to take his bows to the clapping and barking of a solitary seal.

Even in constructing his own fantasy journey, Gould embraced the North, solitude (and the company of animals!).