Gould of the North

We hear a lot about Gould and the Idea of North because he is so closely associated in the minds of many people with the northern part of Ontario, but I’m wondering what places in Ontario were meaningful to him. Where did he visit? How far north did he go? Where were the famous pictures of him walking in the snow taken, and of him walking with his dog on film, and conducting by a waterfall? Did he spend much time outside Toronto?

For Gould, the North really was more idea than reality. He admitted that, despite his lifelong love of the Canadian North, his longing to see it, and his frequent talk on the subject, he never actually visited anyplace more northerly than Churchill, Manitoba, to which he traveled by train, aboard the “Muskeg Express,” in June of 1965. Churchill, on the southwestern shore of Hudson Bay, is almost two thousand kilometres north of Toronto, and above the tree line, yet at latitude 58°N it is still hundreds of kilometres south of the Arctic Circle. At the time, however, it was the farthest north one could travel by train. (This was the trip that, two years later, inspired the radio documentary The Idea of North.)

Otherwise, Gould’s ventures northward extended not even to northern Ontario but only to the Great Lakes: Manitoulin Island, for instance, in Lake Huron, and various towns on Highway 17 (part of the Trans-Canada Highway) as it runs along the north shore of Lake Superior—Marathon, Terrace Bay, and especially Wawa, all around latitude 48°N. (He admired the “Group of Seven woebegoneness” of the rugged countryside in this region.) The sequence in which he conducts by a waterfall was filmed at Magpie High Falls, near Wawa, for the television documentary Variations on Glenn Gould, which aired in 1969 in the CBC series Telescope.

Those other two famous images of Gould are of even less northerly provenance. The photo of him walking in the snow comes from a series taken by Don Hunstein in Caledon, just northwest of Toronto, in January of 1970. One photo from this session graced Gould’s 1970 Columbia Masterworks album of three Beethoven sonatas, and he came to think of it as his favourite picture of himself. The sequence in which he walks his dog Banquo in the woods was filmed in 1959 somewhere around his family’s cottage on Lake Simcoe, near Uptergrove, Ontario, for the National Film Board of Canada documentary Glenn Gould: Off the Record.

Though definitely a homebody, Gould did get out of Toronto quite often. For much of his life, the family cottage was a place of frequent refuge, and though he was no longer using the cottage by the 1970s he still tried to get out of the city for an extended period at least once or twice a year, mostly on driving trips within Ontario. (Work, too, sometimes took him out of town—to New York, Newfoundland, Manitoba.) In the last few years of his life, he also became fond of certain remote islands off Georgia and the Carolinas, along the southern Atlantic coast of the United States. From time to time, in the last twenty years of his life, he expressed an interest in buying property in one of the rural settings he found attractive: Bonavista Bay, Newfoundland; Bras d’Or Lake on Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia; Grand Manan Island, in the Bay of Fundy off New Brunswick; the Carolinas. But he never did.

And then there was that one holiday in the Bahamas in April of 1956, which evidently supplied enough Idea of South to last him a lifetime.

Kevin Bazzana is a Canadian writer with degrees in music history from the University of Victoria, Stanford University, and the University of California, Berkeley. Since the mid-1980s, he has written prolifically about Glenn Gould and has worked on many Gould-related projects: CD and CD-ROM releases, radio broadcasts, conferences, websites. He is the author of Glenn Gould: The Performer in the Work (1997) and Wondrous Strange: The Life and Art of Glenn Gould (2003); edited the Foundation’s Glenn Gould Magazine (1995-2008); and consulted on the documentary film Genius Within: The Inner Life of Glenn Gould (2009).

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