"Wells Hill" auxiliary discourse on the lives, works, and sweeping theories of Glenn Gould and Marshall McLuhan
Date/Time: Nov 25 2017, 1:00 pm to 4:00 pm
Vancouver, Goldcorp Centre for the Arts | Event calendarCost: Free
Curated by Richard Cavell, UBC professor whose research focuses on media theory and Canadian Studies, finding common ground in his publications on foundational media theorist Marshall McLuhan.
These events are free and open to the public.
Marshall McLuhan (1911-1980) was one of the most innovative thinkers of the 20th century. It is to McLuhan that we owe the concept that “the medium is the message,” which opened up the field of media studies and drew our attention to what would become the all-consuming focus of the 21st century—the century of Facebook, Google, Amazon, Pinterest, SnapChat, Twitter, and so on.
The one constant in McLuhan’s understanding of media was that electronic media are returning us to a condition that has much in common with oral cultures, leaving behind the certainties of print. He called this condition “acoustic space,” and as such it provided a powerful point of entry for McLuhan’s engagement with that other Toronto genius, Glenn Gould (1932-1982). Not only a brilliant pianist, noted for his recordings of keyboard music ranging from the baroque works of Bach to the atonal compositions of Schoenberg, Gould was also a prolific writer on musical topics, as well as a creator of sound documentaries which he conceived of as musical compositions. Although notoriously reclusive, Gould often visited McLuhan at his Wells Hill Road home in Toronto, and they collaborated on at least one essay about the future of music. The presentation will address the interconnected worlds of McLuhan and Gould through a screening of McLuhan’s 1968 film, Picnic in Space, and of the trailer for Wells Hill.
About the presenter:
Richard Cavell teaches at the University of British Columbia, where he co-founded the Media Studies program. He has published extensively on the work of McLuhan, and has written about the Gould/McLuhan nexus in McLuhan in Space (2002) and in GlennGould Magazine. The curator of the website spectresofmcluhan.arts.ubc.ca, he is currently completing the critical performance work Speechsong: the Gould/Schoenberg Dialogues.
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