On Microphones, Music, and Our Long Year of Screen Time

Pianist Glenn Gould proved long ago that an existence heavily mediated by technology is not nonexistence.

Cover art for Everywhere at the End of Time.

THERE IS A music-tech controversy that rivals Bob Dylan's choice to plug in his guitar at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965. A year earlier, on April 10, 1964, the pianist Glenn Gould made a radical exit from live concerts.

Gould played seven pieces to a packed house at the Wilshire Ebell Theatre in Los Angeles…