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All Things Cage: Arnold Schoenberg: The First Hundred Years (Audio)

Mar 12, 2022
Hosted by Laura Kuhn, Executive Director of the John Cage Trust.

Tonight’s “All Things Cage” features a “documentary-fantasy” entitled “Arnold Schoenberg: The First Hundred Years,” produced in 1975 for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation by the celebrated Canadian pianist, Glenn Gould. For this broadcast, Gould separately interviewed the French musicologist and Gustav Mahler biographer, Henry-Louis de La Grange, composers John Cage and Ernst Krenek, conductor Erich Leinsdorf, and conductor-musicologist Denis Stevens about Schoenberg, his compositions, his impact on the future of music. Gould matched up fragments from each of the interviews with other conversational fragments or appropriate musical accompaniment, balancing voice and musical levels, carefully fading the Brahms-Schoenberg Quartet into the Mahler “Resurrection” Symphony using the note G as a pivot. A few days later, in his office in downtown Toronto, Gould and engineer Don Logan pulled the proper switches to transform De La Grange, Cage, Krenek, Leinsdorf, and Stevens into the “actors” in his hour-long drama about the musical life of Arnold Schoenberg. Cage studied with Schoenberg for a time in Los Angeles, and he remained faithful to him to the end of his life.

This aural landscape is an example of what Gould called “contrapuntal radio” – a concept resulting in radio that is experientially comparable to sitting on the IRT during rush hour, reading a newspaper while picking up snatches of two or three conversations as a portable radio blasts in the background and the car rattles down the track. In the ten years after his retirement at the unlikely age of 32, Glenn Gould led a most unretiring existence in Toronto, creating contrapuntal radio documentaries; producing television programs, writing book reviews and magazine articles; conducting “self” interviews (“Glenn Gould Interviews Himself About Beethoven"); transcribing orchestral works for the piano; acting in commercials; and making records for Columbia (over 30 disks).

-- --text adapted from Robert Hurwitz, “The Glenn Gould Contrapuntal Radio Show”, The New York Times Archives, January 5, 1975