Customer Reviews

Glenn Gould's Solitude Trilogy: Three Sound Documentaries

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Between 1967 and 1977 a frighteningly gifted concert pianist focused his formidable energies on creating a symphony of sound using no instruments beyond an odd cacophony of unrehearsed and unscripted human voices. I know of no other recordings like these three journeys.

If you listen with your analytical left brain to the ebb and flow of the overlapping, recorded interviews of Gould's carefully chosen cast of characters, you will become profoundly frustrated, irritated and confused. In passages, the voices are mixed so equally as to become equally unintelligible. At other times, the background noises are a bit too loud for us to clearly discern the precise content of what is being said.

But the mood. Ah, the mood. If you will but listen with your artistic right brain and simply let the sound of it wash over you without trying to determine what it "means," you will gain deep and profound insight from each of these 3, 1-hour masterpieces that will stay with you for life. And each time you listen, you "get it" better and deeper than the time before. These works are neither documentary nor commentary in any traditional sense, but a strikingly human conveyance of time and place.

You can only hate them or love them.

I dearly love them, and believe that you will, too.

this cd set is made up of three radio "documentaries" made by gould after he'd given up piano performance, ostensibly to pursue a career as a composer. while works such as his early string quartet are quite good, this is gould's real compositional output. critiqued as pieces of music, these could be called "sound collage", but a think a musical comparison that would give one a better sense as to where these could be placed are the operas of robert ashley. why? the original recordings are of speech, though there is no libreto -- all text is culled from interviews, collaged with other sounds, from ocean waves to janis joplin. the best of the three is probably, "the idea of north", which is glimpsed in "32 short films about glenn gould". if you liked that, get this!! -- one of the dearest recordings i own.

If you're the kind of person who enjoys sitting and talking with your grandparents about "the way things were," and if you think that the way things were then might've been superior to today's world, then you might treasure this recording. The first time I heard it I knew that it was going to be one to keep forever. Random snippets of utopian-minded conversations about the benefits of working hard, small town living, fishing, small government, etc. A perfect antidote to today's MTV world.

I had heard this material on the radio many years ago, and recently heard it again on the local college radio station, WRPI, and decided to buy the three-disk set, even though it was expensive. Still very happy to have it, but what happened was this: In the order when I bought the set I also bought a book, and later I was informed by Amazon that the order had been cancelled becasue the supply was gone, and so I re-ordered the Glen Gould set believing this what was being discussed as i had considered everyting as one order. It was my fault, but I did not realize that the book was a separate order from the CD set, and it was the book that was canceled, so now I own two of these CD sets. I wish Amazon had a place to respond to the overall scheme of how things get ordered as this is not so much a reivew of the CD set [which is great], but the ordering system at Amazon uses which might be improved so customers know that when somethig is "cancelled" it might just be part of what I felt was one order. My bad, I just am moving too fast to read and understand everyting flying past me. Now I am into farming out my 2nd Glen Gould set to friends. As this is great material, it is "all good" in the larger world.

Dick

At the moment I didn't received this CD! Why? It's a normal delay? (Remember that you sent me a wrong title, then I sent it back to you...and now? When I'll receive the right one, "Solitude Trilogy"?)