Weird Studies

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. SHOW NOTES Glenn Gould, "The Prospects of Recording" Marshall McLuhan's Tetrad of media effects Ludwig van Beethoven, Concerto no. 3 in C minor Glenn Gould, "Glenn Gould Interviews Glenn Gould about Glenn Gould" Glenn Gould and Yehudi Menuhin, dialogue on The Music of Man Jean-Luc Godard, A M