Solitude Trilogy

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The Solitude Trilogy is a collection of three hour-long radio documentaries produced by Canadian pianist Glenn Gould (1932–1982). While the documentaries have individual titles and were produced separately over a span of ten years, the name for the collection is Gould's. The title reflects the theme of "withdrawal from the world"^[1] that unites the pieces. "[They are] as close to an autobiographical statement as [I intend] to get in radio,"^[2] Gould wrote. Each was produced for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.

All three pieces employ Gould's idiosyncratic technique of simultaneously playing the voices of two or more people, each of whom speaks a monologue to an unheard interviewer. Gould called his method "contrapuntal" radio. (The term contrapuntal normally applies to music in which independent melody lines play simultaneously; this type of music, exemplified by J. S. Bach, was the major part of Gould's repertoire.)

The first and most well-known of the documentaries is The Idea of North, produced in 1967, in which five speakers provide contrasting views of Northern Canada. Gould introduces the documentary:

"I've long been intrigued by that incredible tapestry of tundra and taiga which constitutes the Arctic and sub-Arctic of our country. I've read about it, written about it, and even pulled up my parka once and gone there. Yet like all but a very few Canadians I've had no real experience of the North. I've remained, of necessity, an outsider. And the North has remained for me, a convenient place to dream about, spin tall tales about, and, in the end, avoid. This programme, however, brings together some remarkable people who have had a direct confrontation with that northern third of Canada, who've lived and worked there and in whose lives the North has played a very vital role."

In 1969, Gould made The Latecomers, about life in Newfoundland outports, and the province's program to encourage residents to move to more urban areas. The third documentary, 1977's The Quiet in the Land, is a portrait of Mennonite life at Red River, near Winnipeg, Manitoba.

In addition to speech, the documentaries employ sound and music. The rumbling of a train is heard frequently in The Idea of North; the ocean in The Latecomers; and a church choir in The Quiet in the Land. Making an analogy again to musical devices, Gould called these sounds ostinatos. In addition, The Idea of North ends with the last movement of Sibelius' Symphony no. 5 (Karajan recording), the only use of a complete movement from the Classical repertoire in the trilogy.