Gould on the Record

Did Gould know that one of his recordings would be included on the Golden Record of the Voyager space probes? Do we know how he felt about it? Was he involved in the selection of the track?

I would be very surprised to learn that Gould knew nothing about the two Voyager space probes launched by NASA in 1977, or about the Golden Record affixed to them, which included, among its twenty-seven samples of Earth’s music, his own recording of the Prelude and Fugue No. 1 in C Major from Book 2 of Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier.

Yet, his papers in the Library and Archives Canada, in Ottawa, are silent on the subject: no evidence of any contact with NASA or the Golden Record project’s executive director, Carl Sagan; no evidence that he was involved in selecting his track; no evidence that his label, CBS Records, contacted him about it; no evidence that he owned or read Sagan’s book about the project, Murmurs of Earth (1978)

The Gould literature is silent on the subject, as are NASA’s Voyager website (voyager.jpl.nasa.gov) and The Vinyl Frontier: The Story of the Voyager Golden Record (2019), by Jonathan Scott. Unless information is to be found in The Voyager Record: A Transmission (2016), by Anthony Michael Morena, which I have not seen, we may never know what Gould knew about Voyager.

Why was his particular recording of the prelude and fugue selected for the Golden Record? It surely helped that one of the project’s music advisers, the artist and writer Jon Lomberg, had worked for the CBC and was familiar with Gould’s work. Indeed, Lomberg’s original suggestions for the record included two recordings by Gould: a different Bach fugue (Book 1, C minor) and the first of Schoenberg’s Six Little Piano Pieces, Op. 19.

And it was CBS Records that ended up putting together all the audio tracks for the Golden Record and (copyright law apparently extending beyond the solar system) securing the necessary legal releases—though only after Gould’s track had been selected.

But perhaps no special explanation is necessary, since by 1977 Gould had long been one of the world’s most celebrated Bach performers.

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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