Business
Column: 60 years ago in Los Angeles, piano virtuoso Glenn Gould revolutionized the music industry by ending his concert career
On the evening of April 10, 1964 — that is, 60 years ago Wednesday — the Canadian virtuoso Glenn Gould stepped away from the piano at the end of his concert at the Wilshire Ebell Theatre in Los Angeles and revolutionized the recording industry.
There was no announcement at that landmark moment in L.A.; only the ensuing circumstance would tell the story. For the Wilshire Ebell recital marked the end of the 31-year-old star’s performing career. He would never play another note in public.
He was the first — and possibly the only — classical musician to shun public performances entirely. Henceforth, his entire output would be heard only via records and videos.
Dial twiddling … is an interpretive act.
— Glenn Gould grants listeners the right to manipulate recorded sound
Gould was then a world-famous exponent of the music of J.S. Bach. His debut recording on Columbia, released in 1956, was an electrifying performance of Bach’s Goldberg Variations, which had been consigned to academic obscurity.
The album was a monster hit and established Gould’s worldwide reputation. In a doleful irony, his digital rerecording of the piece, taken at a more stately tempo and with other changes, would be the last Gould album released by Columbia before his untimely death at age 50 in 1982.
At the time Gould shifted to a recording-only career, his fellow artists doubted that he would stand by his decision. As late as 1971, Arthur Rubinstein told him, “You will come back to it, you know.” Gould replied, “If this is a bet, maestro, you will lose it.”
Gould demonstrated that recording technology need not come between artists and their listeners; in fact, it could enhance their relationship. His fans, of which I am one, find themselves in a uniquely intimate connection with the artist, in part because his astonishing technique and superb musical intelligence comes through so vividly in his recordings.
Gould in effect turned the economics of the music industry upside-down. Rather than seeing records as marketing adjuncts to concert tours, he showed that recordings could be the principal point of contact — in his case, the only point — between musicians and their fans.
Gould became the chief herald of the new era of digital recording, and of the power it gave artists — and audiences — to reconfigure even the most familiar classical warhorses to their individual tastes.
He foresaw that new technologies — including those not yet invented — could put creative decisions in listeners’ hands, allowing them to adjust the tempi and mixes of recorded pieces in the home, adjust the sound mix to individual preference and even splice a section from one conductor’s performance of a familiar piece into another’s. “Dial twiddling,” he wrote, “is an interpretive act.”
Recording could rescue whole musical genres from oblivion; Gould pointed out that recordings were a major factor in the postwar restoration of baroque music, especially on original instruments, to the marketplace.
“This repertoire — with its contrapuntal extravaganzas, its antiphonal balances, its espousal of instruments that chuff and wheeze and speak directly to a microphone — was made for stereo,” he wrote. Only after that pre-classical repertoire established its popularity in records did it find its way to the concert stage.
Gould was not exactly a pioneer in what his longtime producer, Andrew Kazdin, termed “creative lying.” The most famous early case involved a 1952 recording of Wagner’s “Tristan und Isolde” in which the aging soprano Kirsten Flagstad was unable to hit a high C.
The producer, Walter Legge, called on his wife, soprano Elisabeth Schwarzkopf, to record the note, which was dubbed in. The subterfuge was made public only years later.
Before Gould, such splices, inserts, dubbings and other tools of the recording engineers were generally seen as remedies for brief mistakes, sometimes of a single note. But he used them to fashion something new.
In 1966 he wrote of overcoming his dissatisfaction with two takes of a fugue from Book 1 of Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier, one take he considered “rather pompous” and the other overly jubilant — and both “monotonous.”
He solved the problem by using the first for the fugue’s opening and conclusion, and splicing in the second for the midsection, producing a version “far superior to anything we could at the time have done in the studio.”
Gould’s decision to abandon public recitals was brewing for years, possibly since the launch of his international performing career, which began in January 1955 with concerts in Washington and New York and would carry him across the U.S. and to Europe.
He had always detested traveling except by train, but hated even more what he saw as a “blood sport” pitting performer against audience. He saw concerts as “the frantic pursuit of a succession of daily events, momentary, ephemeral,” forcing performers to “calcify” their interpretations so they could be repeated over and over.
The recording studio, he felt, afforded artists the opportunity to perfect their vision of a piece in splendid isolation, and to rectify any flaws — and not only technical mistakes — in post-production.
Even while he was still giving concerts, Gould was known as an unreliable booking, prone to last-minute cancellations — he skipped a 1964 concert in Chicago three times before finally showing up. (It was his final public performance other than the Los Angeles recital.)
Indeed, when Leonard Bernstein came out on stage alone at the start of a performance with the New York Philharmonic on April 8, 1962, he felt constrained to notify the audience, “Don’t be frightened — Mr. Gould is here.”
The event became the most famous of Gould’s performing career. Bernstein’s purpose was to disavow Gould’s “unorthodox” interpretation of their program piece, Brahms’ Piano Concerto No. 1, though he said Gould was so important a musical thinker that he would perform it to Gould’s specified tempi anyway.
(Bernstein later revealed that when Gould visited him at his New York apartment before the performance, his appearance was so slovenly — another personal quirk — that his then-wife, Felicia Montealegre, pulled him into the bathroom to shampoo his matted hair and give it a trim. Moviegoers might recognize Montealegre as the character portrayed by Carey Mulligan in the 2023 Bernstein biopic “Maestro.”)
Gould’s onstage behavior tended to provoke controversy. He slouched at the piano, left leg crossed over the right, seated on an ancient piano chair that his father had built, which placed him so low that he almost had to stretch his hands higher to reach the keyboard.
During a concerto performance, when not actually playing he waved his hands about as though conducting the piece, enraging music critics accustomed to a more solemn bearing from tuxedo-clad soloists. Ever willing in his earlier years to critique himself with a self-effacing grin, he referred in a 1959 documentary by the Canadian Broadcasting Corp. to “the justifiable complaints that I sometimes hear about my platform manner.”
As it happens, some of those tics transferred themselves to his recordings. On many albums one can hear the creaking of his chair, or a “hiccup” in some notes produced by the tight keyboard action he demanded from his pianos to produce the percussive, almost harpsichord-like sound that was his hallmark. Above all, there is his humming and singing audible in the background.
Columbia technicians spent years trying to suppress these artifacts in post-production, without notable success. In another 1959 CBC documentary, Columbia recording director Howard Scott is seen pleading with Gould before a take of Bach’s Italian Concerto for “a straight piano solo, without vocal obbligato.” A hearing of the recording proves that he didn’t get it.
But those were all part of the Gould mystique, accepted and appreciated by his listeners as though they brought them face-to-face with the artist himself. When they were heard on a Gould take, Kazdin reported, “Glenn always greeted them as one would long-lost friends.”
The influence Gould exerted on his fellow artists and the recording industry generally is incalculable. Columbia and its successors have never let the Gould library go out of print; with every advance in technology, the company remasters the recordings (most recently in 2015) and they always sell.
It’s as if by forswearing the evanescent experience of real-life performing, Glenn Gould gave himself eternal fame. And it happened in Los Angeles, where he ended one chapter of his career so he could embark on the next.
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The U.S. Space Force announced Friday it has awarded satellite contracts with a combined value of about $1.6 billion to Rocket Lab in Long Beach and to the Redondo Beach Space Park campus of Northrop Grumman.
The contracts by the Space Development Agency will fund the construction by each company of 18 satellites for a network in development that will provide warning of advanced threats such as hypersonic missiles.
Northrop Grumman has been awarded contracts for prior phases of the Proliferated Warfighter Space Architecture, a planned network of missile defense and communications satellites in low Earth orbit.
The contract announced Friday is valued at $764 million, and the company is now set to deliver a total of 150 satellites for the network.
The $805-million contract awarded to Rocket Lab is its largest to date. It had previously been awarded a $515 million contract to deliver 18 communications satellites for the network.
Founded in 2006 in New Zealand, the company builds satellites and provides small-satellite launch services for commercial and government customers with its Electron rocket. It moved to Long Beach in 2020 from Huntington Beach and is developing a larger rocket.
“This is more than just a contract. It’s a resounding affirmation of our evolution from simply a trusted launch provider to a leading vertically integrated space prime contractor,” said Rocket Labs founder and chief executive Peter Beck in online remarks.
The company said it could eventually earn up to $1 billion due to the contract by supplying components to other builders of the satellite network.
Also awarded contracts announced Friday were a Lockheed Martin group in Sunnyvalle, Calif., and L3Harris Technologies of Fort Wayne, Ind. Those contracts for 36 satellites were valued at nearly $2 billion.
Gurpartap “GP” Sandhoo, acting director of the Space Development Agency, said the contracts awarded “will achieve near-continuous global coverage for missile warning and tracking” in addition to other capabilities.
Northrop Grumman said the missiles are being built to respond to the rise of hypersonic missiles, which maneuver in flight and require infrared tracking and speedy data transmission to protect U.S. troops.
Beck said that the contracts reflects Rocket Labs growth into an “industry disruptor” and growing space prime contractor.
Business
California-based company recalls thousands of cases of salad dressing over ‘foreign objects’
A California food manufacturer is recalling thousands of cases of salad dressing distributed to major retailers over potential contamination from “foreign objects.”
The company, Irvine-based Ventura Foods, recalled 3,556 cases of the dressing that could be contaminated by “black plastic planting material” in the granulated onion used, according to an alert issued by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.
Ventura Foods voluntarily initiated the recall of the product, which was sold at Costco, Publix and several other retailers across 27 states, according to the FDA.
None of the 42 locations where the product was sold were in California.
Ventura Foods said it issued the recall after one of its ingredient suppliers recalled a batch of onion granules that the company had used n some of its dressings.
“Upon receiving notice of the supplier’s recall, we acted with urgency to remove all potentially impacted product from the marketplace. This includes urging our customers, their distributors and retailers to review their inventory, segregate and stop the further sale and distribution of any products subject to the recall,” said company spokesperson Eniko Bolivar-Murphy in an emailed statement. “The safety of our products is and will always be our top priority.”
The FDA issued its initial recall alert in early November. Costco also alerted customers at that time, noting that customers could return the products to stores for a full refund. The affected products had sell-by dates between Oct. 17 and Nov. 9.
The company recalled the following types of salad dressing:
- Creamy Poblano Avocado Ranch Dressing and Dip
- Ventura Caesar Dressing
- Pepper Mill Regal Caesar Dressing
- Pepper Mill Creamy Caesar Dressing
- Caesar Dressing served at Costco Service Deli
- Caesar Dressing served at Costco Food Court
- Hidden Valley, Buttermilk Ranch
A Stanford software engineering degree used to be a golden ticket. Artificial intelligence has devalued it to bronze, recent graduates say.
The elite students are shocked by the lack of job offers as they finish studies at what is often ranked as the top university in America.
When they were freshmen, ChatGPT hadn’t yet been released upon the world. Today, AI can code better than most humans.
Top tech companies just don’t need as many fresh graduates.
“Stanford computer science graduates are struggling to find entry-level jobs” with the most prominent tech brands, said Jan Liphardt, associate professor of bioengineering at Stanford University. “I think that’s crazy.”
While the rapidly advancing coding capabilities of generative AI have made experienced engineers more productive, they have also hobbled the job prospects of early-career software engineers.
Stanford students describe a suddenly skewed job market, where just a small slice of graduates — those considered “cracked engineers” who already have thick resumes building products and doing research — are getting the few good jobs, leaving everyone else to fight for scraps.
“There’s definitely a very dreary mood on campus,” said a recent computer science graduate who asked not to be named so they could speak freely. “People [who are] job hunting are very stressed out, and it’s very hard for them to actually secure jobs.”
The shake-up is being felt across California colleges, including UC Berkeley, USC and others. The job search has been even tougher for those with less prestigious degrees.
Eylul Akgul graduated last year with a degree in computer science from Loyola Marymount University. She wasn’t getting offers, so she went home to Turkey and got some experience at a startup. In May, she returned to the U.S., and still, she was “ghosted” by hundreds of employers.
“The industry for programmers is getting very oversaturated,” Akgul said.
The engineers’ most significant competitor is getting stronger by the day. When ChatGPT launched in 2022, it could only code for 30 seconds at a time. Today’s AI agents can code for hours, and do basic programming faster with fewer mistakes.
Data suggests that even though AI startups like OpenAI and Anthropic are hiring many people, it is not offsetting the decline in hiring elsewhere. Employment for specific groups, such as early-career software developers between the ages of 22 and 25 has declined by nearly 20% from its peak in late 2022, according to a Stanford study.
It wasn’t just software engineers, but also customer service and accounting jobs that were highly exposed to competition from AI. The Stanford study estimated that entry-level hiring for AI-exposed jobs declined 13% relative to less-exposed jobs such as nursing.
In the Los Angeles region, another study estimated that close to 200,000 jobs are exposed. Around 40% of tasks done by call center workers, editors and personal finance experts could be automated and done by AI, according to an AI Exposure Index curated by resume builder MyPerfectResume.
Many tech startups and titans have not been shy about broadcasting that they are cutting back on hiring plans as AI allows them to do more programming with fewer people.
Anthropic Chief Executive Dario Amodei said that 70% to 90% of the code for some products at his company is written by his company’s AI, called Claude. In May, he predicted that AI’s capabilities will increase until close to 50% of all entry-level white-collar jobs might be wiped out in five years.
A common sentiment from hiring managers is that where they previously needed ten engineers, they now only need “two skilled engineers and one of these LLM-based agents,” which can be just as productive, said Nenad Medvidović, a computer science professor at the University of Southern California.
“We don’t need the junior developers anymore,” said Amr Awadallah, CEO of Vectara, a Palo Alto-based AI startup. “The AI now can code better than the average junior developer that comes out of the best schools out there.”
To be sure, AI is still a long way from causing the extinction of software engineers. As AI handles structured, repetitive tasks, human engineers’ jobs are shifting toward oversight.
Today’s AIs are powerful but “jagged,” meaning they can excel at certain math problems yet still fail basic logic tests and aren’t consistent. One study found that AI tools made experienced developers 19% slower at work, as they spent more time reviewing code and fixing errors.
Students should focus on learning how to manage and check the work of AI as well as getting experience working with it, said John David N. Dionisio, a computer science professor at LMU.
Stanford students say they are arriving at the job market and finding a split in the road; capable AI engineers can find jobs, but basic, old-school computer science jobs are disappearing.
As they hit this surprise speed bump, some students are lowering their standards and joining companies they wouldn’t have considered before. Some are creating their own startups. A large group of frustrated grads are deciding to continue their studies to beef up their resumes and add more skills needed to compete with AI.
“If you look at the enrollment numbers in the past two years, they’ve skyrocketed for people wanting to do a fifth-year master’s,” the Stanford graduate said. “It’s a whole other year, a whole other cycle to do recruiting. I would say, half of my friends are still on campus doing their fifth-year master’s.”
After four months of searching, LMU graduate Akgul finally landed a technical lead job at a software consultancy in Los Angeles. At her new job, she uses AI coding tools, but she feels like she has to do the work of three developers.
Universities and students will have to rethink their curricula and majors to ensure that their four years of study prepare them for a world with AI.
“That’s been a dramatic reversal from three years ago, when all of my undergraduate mentees found great jobs at the companies around us,” Stanford’s Liphardt said. “That has changed.”
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