Episode 31: Scarcely Human at All: On Glenn Gould's 'Prospects of Recording'
Most people know Glenn Gould as a brilliant pianist who forever changed how we receive and interpret the works of Europe's great composers: Bach, Beethoven, Schoenberg... But Gould was also an aesthetic theorist who saw a new horizon for the arts in the age of recording technology. In the future, he said, the superstitious cult of history, performance, and authorship would disappear, and the arts would retrieve a "neo-medieval anonymity" that would allow us to see them for what they really are: scarcely human at all. This episode interprets Gould's prophecy with the help of the Canadian media theorist Marshall McLuhan, the Chinese Daoist sage Zhuang Zhou, and the German philosopher Martin Heidegger, among others.
\n\nSHOW NOTES
\n\nGlenn Gould, "The Prospects of Recording"
\nMarshall McLuhan's Tetrad of media effects
\nLudwig van Beethoven, Concerto no. 3 in C minor
\nGlenn Gould, "Glenn Gould Interviews Glenn Gould about Glenn Gould"
\nGlenn Gould and Yehudi Menuhin, dialogue on The Music of Man
\nJean-Luc Godard, A Married Woman (A Married Woman)
\nHeidegger, Der Spiegel interview (1966)
\nDaoist sage Zhuang Zhou
\nWalter Benjamin, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction"
\nStanley Kubrick, A Clockwork Orange
\nMarshall McLuhan, The Playboy interview
\nMarshall McLuhan, The Mechanical Bride
\nMarshall McLuhan, Understanding Media
\nDouglas Rushkoff and Michael Avon Oeming,\xa0Aleister and Adolph\xa0
\nJoyce Hatto
\nLionel Snell, My Years of Magical Thinking
\nKevin Bazzana,\xa0Glenn Gould: The Performer in the Work
\nPhil Ford, \u201cBlogging and the Van Meegeren Syndrome\u201d
\nDavid Thompson, Have You Seen...?: A Personal Introduction to 1,000 Films