glenn gould, the vanishing performer and the ambivalence of the studio

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Leonardo Music Journal, Volume 18, 2008, pp. 77-83 (Article)

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Tim Hecker (musician, researcher), Department of Art History and CommunicationStudies, McGill University, 853 Sherbrooke Street West, Montreal, PQ H3A 2T6, Canada.E-mail: . Web: .

Glenn Gould, the VanishingPerformer and the Ambivalenceof the Studio

Tim Hecker

In 1964, Canadian pianist Glenn Gould shockedthe concert-going world by announcing his retirement frompublic performance. He was only 32 years old at the time,and at the height of his career. The significance of this move was amplified by his declaration that the concert hall wouldsoon be obsolete. Gould believed that the privileged positionof public performance, an institution he viewed as haphazardand prosaic, would soon be trumped by the recording studioas the key locus of creative music possibility. Thus, he led by

example and retreated toward thecloistered confines of the studio, thelaboratory of sound that affordednew calibrations of instrumental virtuos ity, studio techniques andsocial relations of creative labor. ForGould, the studio was an opening ofphysical and creative liberation, butit also became a vessel for ascetic

practices and a means to disappearfrom public life. It is the tension be-tween the transcendentalist view ofrecorded media in his writings and

A B S T R A C T

This article examines Canadianpianist Glenn Gould’s turn from

performance to the recording

studio as a means to realize

music’s utopian potential. What

emerged from these post-

performance years was a deep

ambivalence engendered by the

studio itself: a distinctly compel-

ling vision of the studio as a

monastic retreat, a site of total

control in music and a technol-ogy of self-erasure.

Fig. 1. Glenn Gould, tape-splicing schematics, 1979–1980. (© Glenn Gould Estate)

©2008 ISAST LEONARDO MUSIC JOURNAL, Vol. 18, pp. 77–83, 2008 77


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78 Hecker, Glenn Gould and the Studio

dio and as a public advocate for elec-tronic media. He was active in the causethrough published essays and radio inter- ventions, leading journalists to dub him“the philosopher of recording.” Gould’srecording philosophy was essentially anemancipatory strain of media futurologyinspired in part by Marshall McLuhan,

through which he promoted a mediatedform of creative expression as interactiveexperience. He argued for a new formof creative communication that wouldbreak down the creator/listener axis bygranting new interpretive agency to lis-teners and in turn liberating those listen-ers from the dominance of the artist assingular visionary. Gould was promotingan idea of cultural communication as an“invisible” network. This network was a vision of artistic dissemination wherebythe recording studio transmitted worksthrough media channels to “creativelisteners.” The creative agency of the

listener was to cycle back into the devel-opment of works as a feedback loop, gen-erating a “benign boomerang” of ideasthat would oscillate from the studio tosociety and back again [3].

Recorded music, for Gould, was viewedas a commodity propagated through tele-matic communication, which bridgedthe gap from the recording studio di-

this master pianist, who to Edward Saidrepresented a new era of “intellectual” virtuosity, chose the recording studioover performance at the height of hisfame [2]. His retreat came at a pointin which recorded music was at a cross-roads, where traditional compositional values were being matched and arguably

trumped by production aesthetics. Thestudio was increasingly viewed as an in-strument in its own right, with endlesspossibilities, invoking a state of bothliberation and anxiety. Gould providestexture to this dialectic. Furthermore,Gould’s studio practice of total controloffers a counterpoint to the prevalenceof Cagean aesthetics of chance and ran-domness within the avant-garde. Thetechnical precision and artistic potentialof the studio served as an antidote to theaccident-laden sphere of performance.Neither silence nor Zen mysticism hadmuch welcome here.

UTOPIAN THEORIES OF INTERACTIVITY AND NETWORK -MEDIATED CREATIVITY After Gould’s retirement from live per-formance, he spent the period of themid-1960s both in the recording stu-

the materiality of his studio practice thatis the focus of this essay.

I argue that Gould’s studio practicereveals significant insights into the waysin which musicians addressed the ter-rain of electronic media and that thestudio provided an opportunity for per-formance by other means. Gould viewed

his turn toward the recording studio asan opening towards an almost utopianform of artistic liberation and social pos-sibility. However, the reality of his studiopractice suggests a deep ambivalence—a vision of musical practice as monasticretreat, a site of total control and a tech-nology of self-erasure. In tracing some ofthe pathways of Gould’s studio practice,my goal is not simply to demarcate thefriction between theory and practice butrather to underline Gould as a key para-digm of this important and understudiedaspect of modern music [1]. The studiois in this sense a physical space, a field of

social relations and a frame of musicalconsciousness, one that encourages aes-thetic experimentation while providingthe possibility of a life of solitude.

Gould is helpful in approaching thestudio in part because of the seriousnessof his devotion to it, both as a vessel foraesthetic realization and as a means ofself-constitution. It is curious then that

Fig. 2. Glenn Gould, multitrack schematic, 1979–1980. (© Glenn Gould Estate)


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Hecker, Glenn Gould and the Studio 79

a broad shift toward its increasing use asan essential instrument of composition[13]. Gould had been practicing this no-tion for nearly 20 years before this point,employing techniques ranging from radi-cal tape editing to manipulations of reverb and microphone placement. This was anti-naturalist recording in its mostconceptually rigorous state, a challengeto metaphysical ideals of musical unity in

its rejection of the idea of recording asthe capturing of an original “live” pres-ence; this was rather recording as “docu-mentary cheating” aimed squarely at thepretensions of naturalist representation[14].

In his 1964 article “The Prospects ofRecording,” Gould shocked many read-ers by discussing his recording of Bach’sWell Tempered Clavier , a recording in whichhe was not completely satisfied with anyof the eight takes of a certain movement.He decided to combine portions contain-ing the “Teutonic severity” of take 6 withsome cuts from the “unwarranted jubila-tion” of take 8, the result being a hybridof two distinct moods and a creatively ac-ceptable postproduction editing decision[15]. In doing so, Gould was asserting thenotion of recording as artifice, one thatrecognized the process as inherently arti-ficial and viewed his role as a public advo-cate of that fact. This debate had alreadypersisted for some time [16].

Early debates aside, the general para-digm in classical music has continuedto be transparent documentary repre-sentation; Gould’s ideas have thereforemaintained an oppositional relevance.He vigorously opposed the idea of re-cording as representation, arguing that

important values such as analytic detailor precision need not be tucked insidethe cloak of naturalism, acoustic fidelityor the artificial reconstruction of live re-cordings through space-simulated reverb.He scorned the use of quadraphonic re-cordings that simulated the concert ex-perience by dedicating two of the fourchannels to concert hall crowd ambience,an idea Gould viewed as “utterly idiotic”[17]. He argued that there was no inher-ent reason why efforts in quadraphonicsound design needed to focus on realisttechniques such as space emulation atthe expense of other, unknown frontiersof sonic possibility. This field of possibil-ity, the aesthetic realms opened up inpart by studio technology, was an artisticimperative to pursue. His differences inthis regard with recording naturalists alsoput Gould squarely at odds with many inthe avant-garde. Boulez, for example, of-ten suggested that studio technology belimited to its originally reproductive role

network-mediated music to be realized,he viewed his retirement from the con-cert into the studio as an important steptowards this goal.

Gould’s utopian prophecy of recordedmedia posited a radical reconsiderationof the status of the artist. Other artists within the avant-garde musical commu-nity, such as Pierre Boulez, also wishedto overcome the trap of individualism

in creative practice, which he hoped torealize in his case through “global, gen-eralizable solutions” [9]. For McLuhan,this meant that the audience would in-creasingly become the composer [10].This challenge to the primacy of the art-ist during this era was mounted from a variety of fronts: music, literature, visualarts, as well as through the emergenceof poststructuralist thought and cyber-netics. What Gould repeatedly returnedto, whether it was in the context of thestudio as network, creative listening or re-configured individualism, was the notionthat art as the paradigm of masterworksdisseminated by a singular artist-genius was in need of transgression. Going evenfurther, the technological imperative,as facilitated by recording technology, would serve toward the end of art itself[11].

GOULD’S A NTI-N ATURALIST STUDIO TECHNIQUEIt was a significant symbolic move forGould, widely recognized as one of thegreatest living virtuosos of the piano, toabandon performance in favor of theseemingly limitless opportunities of therecording studio. As a pianist, he was

considered technically and intellectuallyphenomenal; one New York critic stated,“Even at his worst [Gould] is a musicianso far in advance of most of his contem-poraries that there is no legitimate basisfor comparison” [12]. It is fitting thento view his subsequent move away fromperformance as the recalibration into anew locus of virtuosity, from a specificallymanual virtuosity to one of aesthetic-technological competence based on acombination of manual and technicalskills. The studio, in contrast to purelylive performance, was the proper venuefor this new locus.

In rejecting live performance, Gouldasserted the primacy of the recording stu-dio as the locale for creative music expres-sion. What was truly special was the extentto which Gould as a performer developedintellectually rigorous aesthetic prac-tices tailored for the studio’s confines.In 1982, Brian Eno, another prophet ofrecording, positioned the studio within

rectly into living rooms and promotedan abstract form of cultural experienceand performative possibility:

[the performance] undergoes a pro-found metamorphosis as a result of itsexposure to that chain, to that network,and the result is a performance trans-formed, a performance transcended, aperformance sent out into the world, if

you like, charged with a very special mis-

sion. In my opinion, that mission is to en-able the listener to realize the benefits ofthat invisible network, that climate of an-onymity which the network provides [4].

What Gould promoted was nothingshort of a utopian ideal of musical trans-mission and experience, which contex-tualized and prioritized listening as asingular, atomized, private form of audi-tion. This was in contrast to the inherentconformism of the concert hall, wherebecause of crowd dynamics, the con-certgoer was likened to an automaton[5]. Instead, his idealized individuatedhome listener was seen as a constructiveagent. Techniques such as do-it-yourselfhome tape splicing would encourage thelistener to conduct their own montagesthrough “splice prerogatives,” and thepossibility of manipulating pitch andtonal configurations through high-fidel-ity sound systems. Gould was forwardingan argument for recorded media as aliveand live performance as dead, in opposi-tion to the more common metaphysical view of recording, which usually suggeststhat the physical presence of live perfor-mance is the most vital, “alive” means ofmusical dissemination [6].

Gould invested great stock in inter-activity and listener agency, such that

beyond the vision of isolated listenersactively interpreting studio works wasthe more profound hope that the lis-tener might become involved in the cre-ative act itself. While it could be seen asa gesture of communal participation, italso reinforced the primacy and anonym-ity of the individual within the network:“[T]he more participants you permitinto the creative act, the more anonymityis automatically ceded to the individualparticipant” [7]. This network was notto serve a collective public, but rather tonurture a sense of inner experience andan individualist form of interpersonalcommunication [8]. For Gould, this in-spired, ethical paradigm of interactivity would liberate listeners from the burdenof the cult of the author in artistic cre-ation by ceding creative interpretation tothose listeners and affecting the diminu-tion or even erasure of the artist-as-ge-nius. Though it was not clear how Gouldexpected this creative feedback utopia of


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endless sonic malleability contained within the recording studio. Techniquessuch as the art of microphone place-ment, which Gould argued had alreadyforced performers to adapt their perfor-mances to encompass the microphone’s

against the dominant ideology of repre-sentational recording.

His answer to the challenge of docu-mentary representation was to develop a whole set of concrete aesthetic practicesthat would creatively embrace the nearly

[18]. Perhaps Gould’s humming, detect-able in many of his recordings and his in-sistence on his squeaky piano chair bothreveal the physical space and the artificeof the studio within the recording itself. As such both might be seen as reactions

Fig. 3. Studio visions: Gould with Lorne Tulk, Eatons Studio, 1971. (Photo: Walter Curtin. © Estate of Walter Curtin.

Courtesy of Glenn Gould Estate.)


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former/producer, which coupled bothperformative and tape editing/produc-tion decisions. He referred to this newstudio archetype as a “forger,” which hedescribed as “the unknown maker of un-authenticated goods,” a term saturated with the rhetoric of artistic liberation anda yearning for anonymity [24]. However,old studio hierarchies and roles did notdisappear overnight. This new “forger”

was increasingly reliant upon technicalassistants for consultation and help withthe messy, confusing and technically de-manding tasks of many of the new rolesfound within the liberated studio (Fig.3). Tape splicing, for example, was acomplicated routine that required sig-nificant organization, attention and tech-nique; assistance was required. Thus, theemergence of this forger also suggests anautocratic paradigm of the composer inthe electronic age. This paradigm was apush toward total control, the reassertionof the artist-genius through involvementin “some portion of each procedurethrough which his intention is made ex-plicitly in sound” [25]. The studio was ina sense, then, the site of a new, techni-cally broadened, visionary performer/editor/producer who was also increas-ingly reliant on expertise and labor tomaterialize those visions—someone who was needed to organize tape reels, workpatch bays and run the multitrack equip-ment and the plethora of other technolo-gies present.

This “autocracy” of the studio can beseen as a reinscription of the 19th-cen-tury mental-manual distinction, a divi-sion of labor bifurcating mental culturefrom manual labor, but in Gould’s case

relying upon a semi-invisible underclassof studio technicians. This is evident inthe constant reinforcement of his s ingu-lar vision and negation of the possibilitiesof a new means of collective authorship,despite his involvement in collective stu-dio projects. It is telling, then, that forthe cover image of his Silver Jubilee Album(1980), Gould chose to pose in front ofstudio controls he may have normallydelegated to others (not to mention thelabyrinthine self-referential video screensbehind). Andrew Kazdin, a long-timeproducer for CBS Masterworks and col-laborator on many of Gould’s recordings,noted that while Gould had an innate un-derstanding for many technical aspectsof recording, he was profoundly reliantupon his assistants. In particular, he re-lied upon people within his inner circle,such as Kazdin, to conduct the mixes, setup microphones, attend to the minutiaeof fragments of tape splicing, solve prob-lems and exorcise the “gremlins” from

The Idea of North , an exercise in “contra-puntal radio” and a robust expressionof multichannel technique. For all ofGould’s aversion to “sensual composi-tion,” his Idea of North and the broaderproject, named the Solitude Trilogy, wereessentially narrative mood pieces, impres-sionistic washes of cascading confessionsand testimonies of the loneliness andcreative possibilities of the experience

of solitude—a meditation on the “darknight of the human soul.” These dreamdocumentaries used multitrack montage,done with razor, tape and a multitrackrecorder graphed out in a schematicapproach in a form also akin to musicalcomposition (see Fig. 2 for a later exam-ple). Unlike his Scriabin work, his ideasof editing voice were based on distinctlymusical analogies: rhythm, texture, dy-namics, pace and the use of silence [22]. Viewing these multitrack assemblages asscores, his structural thinking also wasmodeled by musical paradigms—sonata,fugue, crescendo and decrescendo, forexample. Part of the significance of theseimpressionist radio pieces was that they were highly technical studio works com-ing from one of the foremost virtuososof the piano.

THE L ABOR OF R ECORDING AND THE EMERGENCE OF THE STUDIO V ISIONARY Indeed, Gould’s practice and proselytiz-ing for the virtues of studio-mediatedartistic expression occurred during aperiod when the social stratification in-side the studio and its roles and respon-sibilities were under increasing scrutiny.

On one hand, this scrutiny resulted inthe realization of new roles that couldbe acted out and the transgression ofold ones, such as the possibility of theengineer acting as more of a creative me-diator between performer and producer[23]. On the other hand, this was alsothe point of a new closure, as seen byGould becoming intimately involved inall aspects of recording, be it in perform-ing, producing or engineering. This wasin essence a singular push toward totalcontrol—control of both the artistic andthe technical aspects of the recorded ar-tifact as well as the social relations of thatcreative production. The liberation expe-rienced in other studios by these creativesound shapers, the “recordists,” was notadvanced to the same extent in the studiopractice of Gould.

In assembling a tape-spliced pasticheof Bach’s Well Tempered Clavier, Gouldpersonally bore witness to the develop-ment of a creative and interpretive per-

powers, became a pliable field of inquiry.Thus, he utilized a multitude of micro-phone and mixing techniques, includingthe development of “acoustic orches-tration,” where multiple microphonesplaced at different points in the studio were blended and dynamically mixedthroughout a piece to achieve a desiredeffect. The inspiration came in part fromcinema, which was viewed to be as dis-

tant an art form from theater as record-ing was from musical performance. InGould’s eye the work of Jean-Luc Godardand some of his contemporaries, withtheir progressive montage and cameratechniques, made contemporary musicproduction appear antiquated [19]. Cin-ematic tropes, for example, were used inabundance in Gould’s acoustic orchestra-tion of Scriabin’s Two Pieces, in which hereferred to different acoustic perspec-tives as the “long shot,” “medium shot”and “close-up.” These shots were mixedtogether in an unorthodox combinationof smooth fades and sharp cuts, distinctlyin the irreverent spirit of the nouvelle vague [20]. These cinematically influ-enced audio techniques helped push therealm of the studio further toward thedomain of artistic practice.

Perhaps most significant was Gould’sadvocacy of the seemingly infinite po-tential of magnetic tape, both for thedisjunctive rupture-like quality of thetape splice as well as for the textural pos-sibilities of multitrack assemblage. Whileseemingly cavalier about the practice oftape splicing, in one instance bragging ofhaving over a hundred splices contained within a single piece, Gould was some- what conservative regarding music-based

splicing [21]. He spliced less than someof his contemporaries, apparently dueto his unparalleled technical executionof pieces, such that they often requiredlittle cleanup. It was his radio work in which the materiality of multiple reel-to-reel tapes mattered, where the assem-blage process and tape splicing requireda compositional template and notationsystem different from that of traditionalpiano works (Fig. 1). Thus, tape and itsseemingly infinite combinatory and col-lage-like possibilities presented an openterrain of aesthetic options, somewhatakin to the wide spectrum of possibilitiesavailable in interpreting music scores so well displayed in his creative deconstruc-tions of Bach.

Multitrack recording, in particular, en-couraged Gould to posit a break from astrictly musical practice to the strikinglyoriginal narrative-based audio style of hisradio pieces. In 1967, the CBC broadcastGould’s meditation on Canadian solitude


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development: “It’s, quite literally, an en- vironment where time turns in upon it-self, where, as in a cloister, one is able to withstand the frantic pursuit of the tran-sient, of the moment-to-moment, day-by-day succession of events” [29]. The

availability of the studio allowed Gouldto continue his musical career by othermeans, being both a radical break as aphysical liberation from performance,and business as usual in the sense of aperformative transmigration. Yet duringthe post-performance years, his aversionto the physical public grew to the point at which he would only pick up the numer-ous awards offered to him if there wasno public ceremony. According to Gouldhistorian Kevin Bazzana, Gould wouldonly interact with the public throughthe prosthesis of electronic media [30].Hence solitude, the overarching para-digm of his beloved “creative listener,”also characterized the monastic innerlife of his studio practice.

Following Michel Foucault, then,Gould’s studio solitude might be seenas a technology of the self, as an instru-ment that provided the conditions forself-constitution and personal salvation.For Foucault, these technologies are ac-

assistance as brought on by a state of end-less sonic malleability.

The importance of the studio was alsoreflected in Gould’s relationship with hisown body. The studio saved Gould fromthe burdens of performance and the

physical toll it took on a person increas-ingly at odds with his biological realities. As much as the studio itself could be seenas a venue for total control, Gould’s bodyitself was a venue for surveillance. Dur-ing his performance years, a poster wassometimes placed on his dressing roomdoor instructing well-wishers to avoidshaking his hand and to avoid physicalcontact altogether [28]. What began as aretreat from physical contact turned toward a deeply pathological monitoringof biorhythms and pharmaceutical drugaddiction, recognized as a likely cause ofhis untimely death. His physical unease was greatly documented.

Gould’s deep ambivalences renderedthe studio the only possible site of artis-tic expression and personal salvation. He viewed the studio as a sort of embryonicinsulation from the world, a laboratoryof the late night that rewarded experi-mentation, sheltering him from theexternal pressures that stifled creative

within the studio itself. His reliance on as-sistants apparently even extended to ba-sic household chores; someone neededto attend to the gremlins lurking withinhis neglected homestead [26].

F ROM A POINT OF R EFUGE TO A G ATEWAY OF DISAPPEARANCEStudio practices were amenable to Gouldin part because of his deeply ambivalentrelationship to the outside world, hisartistic practice and his body. Yet thediscord between his utopian theories ofcreative technological practice and thereinforcement of the artist-genius sug-gests an inherently ambivalent view ofthe studio itself. This ambivalence inher-ent in the studio is, as suggested by BrianEno, likely due in part to the multitudeof options contained within its space, anirony of limitless technology that in actu-ality contributes to a loss of freedom. Asympathetic reading might be that Gould was anesthetized by the overload of op-tions and the loss of the intuition thatcomes from tactility, familiarity and theimposition of technological constraints[27]. A reading in this direction givescredence to his reliance upon technical

Fig. 4. Hotel Studio, Inn on the Park, 1982. (Photo: Lorne Tulk. © CBC. Courtesy of Glenn Gould Estate.)


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12. Quoted in Kevin Bazzana, Wondrous Strange: TheLife and Art of Glenn Gould (New York: Oxford Univ.Press, 2004) p. 233.

13. Brian Eno, “The Studio as Compositional Tool,”in Christoph Cox and Daniel Warner, eds., AudioCulture (London: Continuum, 2004).

14. Colin Symes, Setting the Record Straight: A MaterialHistory of Classical Recording (Middletown, CT: Wes-leyan Univ. Press, 2004) p. 56.

15. Glenn Gould, “The Prospects of Recording” inGould [11] p. 338.

16. See Andy Hamilton, “The Art of Recording andthe Aesthetics of Perfection,” The British Journal ofAesthetics 43, No. 4 (2003).

17. Gould [11] p. 381.

18. Pierre Boulez, “Technology and the Composer,”Leonardo 11, No. 1 (1978) p. 60.

19. Gould [11] p. 369.

20. Kevin Bazzana, Glenn Gould: The Performer in theWork: A Study in Performance Practice (Oxford: OxfordUniv. Press, 1997) pp. 247–252. For more on Gould’sgeneral approach to recording, see pp. 238–252, as well as Andrew Kazdin, Glenn Gould at Work: CreativeLying, 1st Ed. (New York: Dutton 1989),

21. Kazdin [20] pp. 19–35.

22. Bazzana [12] p. 303.

23. See Horning [1]; Mark Katz, Capturing Sound:

How Technology Has Changed Music (Berkeley: Univ.of California Press, 2004) p. 44.

24. Gould [15] p. 343.

25. Gould [15] p. 346.

26. Kazdin [20] pp. 48, 56.

27. Brian Eno, “The Revenge of the Intuitive,” Wired 7, No. 1 (1999).

28. NAC, Glenn Gould Fonds, MUS 109, Keepers/18.Bazzana [20] pp. 247–252.

29. Gould [3].

30. Bazzana [12] p. 237.

31. Michel Foucault et al., Technologies of the Self: ASeminar with Michel Foucault (Amherst: Univ. of Mas-sachusetts Press, 1988) p. 18.

32. Letter dated 19 September 1966. NAC, GlennGould Fonds, MUS 109 31:30:31.

33. “Forgery and Imitation in the Creative Process”in Gould and Roberts [5] 219.

Manuscript received 2 January 2008.

Tim Hecker is a composer/musician andwriter. Since 1998, he has released over a dozenaudio works for a variety of musical imprintsand has presented his work extensively abroad.His work has included commissions for contemporary dance, collaborations for video and

film, sound-art installations and various writings. Currently, his research interests centeraround the cultural history of sound in the19th century. He is a Doctoral candidate inCommunication Studies at McGill University,Montreal.

ries laced with nostalgia, rejection and withered dreams. Very few proactivelysought that retreat, with the view thata new technology would afford greaterexpressive capabilities and new aestheticpossibilities while offering a simultane-ous life of solitude. This was a route tothe “clinical ecstasy” of performance byother means. Of course there were costs:the unrealized utopian aspirations and

the lurking creative desires of studio en-gineers.

Acknowledgment

Many thanks to Jonathan Sterne and Cornelius Borckfor their helpful comments on this paper.

References

1. For writings on the studio, see John Mowitt, “TheSound of Music in the Era of Its Electronic Repro-ducibility,” in Richard Leppert and Susan McClary,eds., Music and Society: The Politics of Composition, Per- formance and Reception (Cambridge Univ. Press, 1987);Susan Schmidt Horning, “Engineering the Perfor-mance: Recording Engineers, Tacit Knowledge andthe Art of Controlling Sound,” Social Studies of Science34, No. 5 (2004); Louise Meintjes, Sound of Africa!:

Making Music Zulu in a South African Studio (Durham:Duke Univ. Press, 2003).

2. Edward W. Said, “Glenn Gould, the Virtuoso asIntellectual,” Raritan 20, No. 1 (2000) p. 4.

3. Glenn Gould, “What the Recording Process Meansto Me,” transcript from CBS Masterworks July 26,1982, National Archives Canada (NAC), GlennGould Fonds, MUS 109 16:76.

4. Gould [3].

5. Glenn Gould, “An Argument for Music in theElectronic Age” (1964), in Glenn Gould and JohnRoberts, The Art of Glenn Gould: Reflections of a Musi- cal Genius (Toronto: Malcolm Lester Books, 1999)p. 230.

6. For one variant of the metaphysics of recording,albeit in the (degraded) digital versus (more pres-ent) analogue context, see Jonathan Sterne, “TheDeath and Life of Digital Audio,” Interdisciplinary

Science Reviews 31, No. 4 (2006).

7. Gould and Roberts [5] p. 231; Nicolas Collins,“Ubiquitous Electronics: Technology and Live Per-formance 1966–1996,” Leonardo Music Journal 8 (1998) p. 30.

8. “La technologie au service de l’extase diony-siaque,” in Ghyslaine Guertin, Glenn Gould Pluriel(Verdun, Qc: L. Courteau, 1988) p. 235.

9. IRCAM publicity ca. 1976–1981, quoted in Geor-gina Born, Rationalizing Culture: Ircam, Boulez, and theInstitutionalization of the Musical Avant-Garde (Berke-ley: Univ. of California Press, 1995) p. 1.

10. Gould was a catalyst and to be the subject ofan unpublished manuscript on this issue: National Archives of Canada, McLuhan Fonds, M631 D156 V99:24.

11. Glenn Gould, “The Grass is Always Greener onthe Outtakes,” The Glenn Gould Reader, Tim Page, ed.(London: Faber and Faber, 1988) p. 358.

tions that permit individuals to effecttheir own means of attaining “a certainstate of happiness, wisdom, perfection orimmortality” [31]. His analysis traced anotion of retreat back to the Stoics, whospiritualized the notion of the retreat asanachoresis . A retreat into the country be-came a spiritual retreat into oneself, as adaily ritual, not to get in touch with innerfeelings or introspection, but rather to

reinforce and remember rules of action.So, these positive technologies are alsodialectically coupled as a mechanism ofascetic domination as well. Gould neverquite realized the renunciation of iden-tity he argued should be an imperativeof the artist in cultural life; however, theinscription of mechanisms of domina-tion, such as the increasing divorce fromhis own body, became more apparent ashe executed a near total disappearancefrom public life. The studio was eventu-ally the only possible mediator betweenperformance and audience. In a letterto an apparent stalker, Adele Knight of Watertown, New York, Gould expressedshock that she had showed up uninvitedat his country house in Canada. He askedto be free of bother from the outside world:

I am not about to change, or further jus-tify my preference for a life of solitude. . . .I do believe that we may all reasonablyexpect a life free of intrusions from out-side, and, I am, therefore, going to ask

you to reconsider very calmly the natureof your actions these last several yearsand to refrain all together from your at-tempts to visit or contact me [32].

Gould’s striving for the “cloak of ano-nymity” that the recording studio pro-

vided was realized in an increas inglyprofound sense as his disengagementfrom the world continued. In 1976 hetook up part-time residence at the Innon the Park, a hotel deep in the suburbsof Toronto (Fig. 4). Up until the time ofhis death Gould used the hotel as an ed-iting suite and occasional living space inorder to work uninterrupted on projectsof various sorts. Indeed his withdrawal tothe studio was a pioneer move that ledtoward and ended in the relatively newterritory of the bedroom studio, a moveforeshadowed in his writings years before[33]. The history of literature and thearts are replete with examples of reclu-

sive artists. The majority have been sto-

glenn gould, the vanishing performer and the ambivalence of the studio

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