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Tuesday 2 December 2008

Pipeline power

Dancing with the Russian Bear (BBC Radio 4); Gould's Mind (BBC Radio 4)

This is a fascinating series, focusing on a vital piece of the geopolitical jigsaw, but it’s been somewhat chaotically put together. There was no sense of narrative structure, or of an unfolding of ideas. In fact, I couldn’t help wondering whether Whewell, who also reports for BBC2’s Newsnight, would rather have made the programmes for TV. He gave us so little time to take a breath and catch up with him as he darted about from the inner sanctum of the Kremlin, where he took afternoon tea with Putin’s chief foreign policy adviser, to the streets of Kiev to find out about the Orange Revolution of 2004.

Glenn Gould, in contrast, lovingly prepared his documentaries for CBC (the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation) specifically as radio pieces, for listening only, preferably while lying down in a darkened room, eyes shut and all attention focused on an electronic transistor enclosed in a small plastic box. In Gould’s Mind (Radio Four, Saturday) the veteran producer Piers Plowright resurrected some of Gould’s archive recordings.

Born in 1932, the Canadian pianist was of the first generation to grow up listening to the radio, and when he gave up performing in public (hating what he called ‘the blood sport’ of live performance) he turned to radio almost as if it were another way to make music, excited by its audiophonic possibilities. For The Idea of the North, a celebration of the Canadian wilderness, he took five people on a journey by train into the bleakest landscape, and then multitracked their free-flowing monologues about the silence, the solitude, the emptiness of that experience. Hundreds of hours were spent by him and his producer in the recording studio whittling the interviews he had made down to exactly the right pulse, the right beat, the contrapuntal harmonies that he heard continually in his mind and wanted to make real.

Gould was way ahead of his time — making a drama out of documentary material, using the spoken word as a musical instrument like today’s hip-hop artists, taking the new technology to its limits to see what it can do for our perceptions of the world. And Plowright’s celebration (produced in its turn by Michael Surcombe) echoed his innovative techniques, weaving together Gould’s own words with Joplin’s ‘Mercedes Benz’ and a Bach suite for violin and cello. It was like being taken on a weird journey through Gould’s mind as we burrowed into his strange programme about Petula Clark (in which he suggests that she’s the unlikely heroine of the Sixties’ pop scene) and his demolition of the Beatles: ‘the indulgent amateurishness of the musical material is surpassed only by the ineptitude of the studio production method’. I wish I’d heard that in 1967.

More articles from: Kate Chisholm | this section

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