With more free time on his hands, from the mid-sixties onwards Gould began to take long drives to northern Ontario along the recently completed Trans-Canada Highway. He would install himself for weeks at a time in quiet motels along the north shore of Lake Superior, in anonymous single- industry towns like Marathon or Wawa, to gather his thoughts and to write. The country in this region is bleak and impressive – ‘the most beguiling landscape in central North America’, as Gould himself described it – and, certainly, the emptiness of Superior and the endless boreal forest that sweeps down toward the lake seem to have spurred his imagination in the search for a subject that, above all others, would come to define his worldview.

By 1967 Gould had already made programmes on subjects as diverse as Arnold Schoenberg, the prospects of recording and, in that year, bizarrely, the pop singer Petula Clark. But these apprentice pieces may well have been forgotten by now were it not for what came next. The Idea of North is the first in a remarkable series of documentaries known as The Solitude Trilogy, which has since become a cornerstone of the genre and on which Gould’s reputation as a master of creative radio now largely rests.

On first hearing this amazing hour-long aural dream, it is easy to be reminded of the work of the British radio documentary maker, Piers Plowright, whose superb programmes from the 1970s, 80s and 90s are regarded as some of the finest pieces of radio ever broadcast by the BBC. Plowright himself acknowledges the debt in Gould’s Mind, a 2008 documentary he made about Gould’s radio adventures. He claims it was Gould who woke him up to the possibilities of radio, initially through The Idea of North, whose broadcast in December 1967 has acquired something of the same mystique among the medium’s aficionados as Orson Welles’s infamous docudramatisation of The War of the Worlds some thirty years earlier.

Two years before North Gould had made the long journey by train from Winnipeg in southern Manitoba up to Churchill on Hudson Bay, in the course of which he encountered the land surveyor Wally Maclean; it was a meeting that would supply the vital spark for this memorable programme. Taking one of the seminal myths of Canadian life, through a series of interviews with five people, including Maclean, who had spent long periods in the far north, Gould pursues its existential implications to their frostbitten limits. The interviews in themselves are so remarkable in their quality of insight into the human condition and in the vividness of the visual impressions they evoke that it is hard to believe they were not scripted. In part, this quality arises from Gould’s (and CBC engineer Lorne Tulk’s) masterful editing, a skill which served both Gould-the-composer’s quest for form and Gould-the-dramatist’s ear for meaningful utterance. But as one of the voices, privy councillor Bob Phillips, suggests in the award-winning docudrama 32 Short Films About Glenn Gould (1993), it also owed much to Gould’s profound interest in what his subjects had to say.

As if these dramatis personae were not fascinating enough, Gould-the- composer adds a further dimension of meaning by, at various times, layering the voices polyphonically, like a Bach fugue. This technique, which he referred to as contrapuntal radio, was only made possible by the nascent technology of multi-track recording, whose expressive potential Gould was quick to recognise. Ever aware of the nature of the medium, to advance the dramatic conceit that the five protagonists are indeed sharing a journey north, beneath the voices almost throughout Gould places the trundling ‘basso continuo’ of the Muskeg Express, the train on which he had travelled north in 1965.

The other two documentaries in this trilogy are also concerned in their own ways with the theme of solitude: in The Latecomers (1969) the physically isolated fishing villages of Newfoundland; and, in The Quiet in the Land (1977) the Mennonite communities who live close to Winnipeg while maintaining the sense of cultural separateness from mainstream life that their strict religion demands. These later pieces benefited from the greater spatial differentiation afforded by the introduction of stereo sound (whose virtues The Latecomers was commissioned to demonstrate) but also from Gould’s increasingly sophisticated handling of the medium. The Quiet in the Land is the most technically accomplished, a montage of disparate resources reflecting Gould’s post-modern sensibility: a background of ambient sounds, both worldly and devotional; the foreground reflections of various members of the Mennonite community on the tensions inherent in trying to live apart from mainstream society (‘in the world not of the world’, as the Mennonite motto has it); and a recurring middleground use of music (Janis Joplin’s Mercedes-Benz and a Bach cello suite played by Pablo Casals) meant to symbolise the opposing forces that play upon their lives.

Plowright regards this piece as Gould’s best, and it is certainly the subtlest of the three. Yet it is hard not to be drawn back to The Idea of North, whose technical shortcomings are far outweighed by the size of its artistic achievement. The last nine minutes in particular are extraordinary. As his four fellow travellers gradually conclude their own highly individual musings, the stage is left to Wally Maclean, who, in good-humoured (and superbly edited) fashion, delivers an extemporary monologue worthy of Eugene O’Neill on the true measure of human life as revealed to anyone who spends time in the north. Taking issue with William James’s dictum that there is ‘no moral equivalent of war’, Maclean proceeds to argue for the forces that prey on a person’s peace of mind at these inhospitable latitudes. This by itself would make for a memorable finale but, in a breathtaking coup de théâtre, Gould undergirds these closing minutes with the final movement of Sibelius’s Fifth Symphony, an expression of the north he confessed he could not live without. The total effect is thrilling – a euphoric marriage of speech and music that seems as natural as it is unexpected.

As another of the voices in North, geographer Frank Lotz, makes clear in Plowright’s tribute piece four decades later, these programmes are as much about Gould as their ostensible subjects. ‘He was trying to break out of the traditional way of doing documentaries … But at the same time, being the person he was, I think he was very conscious it was something about him – the loneliness, the emptiness, the silence. That might have been something in him that he was looking for in other people and in the north.’

Plowright, of course, gives Gould the artistic credit he deserves, concluding that he ‘had something that sets him apart from most of his musical and radio contemporaries: a grasp of what technology can do for us’. But he also concurs with Lotz, soberly adjudging Gould to have been more interested in ideas than people. That may be true but it is also a little unfair. Before anything else Gould was a musician, a great one, and these programmes inevitably draw from the same well. Taking the ordinary coin of the spoken word, at their best they make of it something sublime, like music, intensifying the words’ original meaning through brilliant use of the medium of radio. Gould loved the recording process for the opportunity it gave him to communicate his precise artistic vision to the individual listener. In works like The Solitude Trilogy, just as in his greatest classical recordings, he had the precious ability to illuminate the loneliest recesses of the mind, to reveal us to ourselves. Millions will go on thanking him for that.