This piece concludes the Solitude Trilogy, and is the only installment with any religious quality. The Quiet in the Land is a sound documentary that features nine speakers from a Mennonite community at Red River, Manitoba. Its general gist is to demonstrate the challenges of solitude while one is a member of a distinct society, and a society that attempts to live without technological benefits when said benefits are often tempting. (To emphasize this point, Gould frequently includes moments of Janis Joplin singing her song "Mercedes Benz," sometimes heard in counterpoint with extracts from Bach's cello suites.) This is also slyly and humorously emphasized with occasional appearances of an urbane jazz piano rendition of My Foolish Heart, which further demonstrates a distinction between secular urban life and the rural, prairie religiosity of the documentary's subjects. As in the first two parts of the Solitude Trilogy, the voices are heard either separately or overlapping in a technique Gould called contrapuntal radio. The 53-minute work also includes the sound of the Mennonite boys' choir beneath discussions about the dissonance of William Walton's Belshazzar's Feast, about what music means to this community in its quest to serve God, and about the contradictions of being Christian and being isolationist. Listeners will not be offended by any heavy-handed evangelicalism. The speakers are thoughtful, compassionate, and genuinely interested in sorting out the quandaries of existence and faith. The work is a blend of music of sound and music of idea, presented in a way that is strange, compelling, and always very humane.

© John Keillor, Rovi