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[robinlandseadel at comcast.net]

I've got this interesting project going on right now. Have a I-Mac G-5 and got me a 250 gig hard drive for next to nothing. Have been working at a Border's for six years and other CD/LP stores for another 16 years before that. My classical music collection skews towards the historic, lotsa Schnabel and Furtwangler, Munch & Reiner. Anyway, have been reading Poust lately and have been keenly anticipating Against the Day. So I'm cooking up a massive I-Tunes playlist, centered around classical music of the 19th century, as background music and reference material. First off, got all of my CDs of French Romantic Chamber music onto the hard drive. That exercise made me realize that I need a whole lot more of Faure's chamber music. But now the playlist seems to have taken on a life of its own, with Bach's "Die Kunst der Fuge" as the underpinning---the cantus firmus, if you will---of the entire  playlist. There's lots of Mahler, lots of Schubert, and I'm beginning to see the whole thing as 
this giant Requiem Mass for western musical culture. Maybe it's the morbidness of the Schubert/Mahler thing, or maybe it's Swann's crappy social/sexual life, but having everything framed by the Art of Fugue seems to render the scenes in much darker colors. As far as I'm concerned, "Die Kunst der Fuge" is the summa, the apogee, of western musical culture. Anyway, I'm alternating larger works with individual sections of the Art of Fugue and so far I've got 4 different versions loaded up: Jordi Savall with Hesperion XX, Fretwork, the Emerson Quartet and a very nice Naxos CD I picked up today of Sebestian Guillot, a student of Christophe Rousset. There's two vinyl versions in my collection that I want on the list as well: Neville Marriner's re-orchestration and Charles Rosen's version on modern piano. I find Jordi Savall's version particularly interesting because it is so clearly anachronistic. Hesperion XX consciously adapts the music to instruments associated with an earlier pantheon
 of composers, such as Byrd, Dowland, Purcell, Orlando Gibbons and others, composers many generations older than Bach but whose musical thoughts are clearly echoed in the Art of Fugue.


Gustav's thoughts on the subject of Beethoven contra Rossini (he's a fan of the dodecaphonisicists, after all) represent the thought patterns of many academics and academic musicians in the fifties, thinking of music in terms of evolution, the will to reach upwards (Los!!!) and generally thinking that art should have some moral component. No doubt, Pynchon heard such screeds in situ. Our misnomered Herr Bummer, being the good-time cat that he is, sez "it's all good" and would have worked his kraft around any kind of social/political crisis anyway, so he represents, in some ways, the lowest common denominator as regards music and musical taste, thus Gustav's shredding as soon as Saure opens his mouth on the subject of classical music and culture. Kinda like I do when a customer comes in for a Charlotte Church CD. And yet, the insouciance of Dean Martin's offhand musical gestures beats out acres of Babbitt. If Webern wasn't a "Cultural Bolshevist", I don't know who was. But what real
ly kills me about this sequence in GR is the dope that frames it (the cantus firmus of these sequences in GR are the dope deals that frame the musical conversations). "May I see your papers, please?" In many ways the Gustav/Bummer dialogs are Pynchonoid transcriptions of all those half remembered Beatles/Stones, Toots/Marley stoned musical discussions our beloved author must have put up with thousands of times in his life. Apollonian/Dionysian arguments where each argumentor is describing themselves. Mason and Dixon, each half remembering popular tunes from the old country. -------------- Original message ----------------------
From: Heikki Raudaskoski <hraudask at sun3.oulu.fi>
> 
> Good post. However, accepted art in Nazi Germany was Rossinian indeed,while
> those great Beethovenian offspring Schoenberg, Berg and Webern - all referred
> to in GR - were despised by Nazis, and not only because Schoenberg was Jewish.
> With Schoenberg having emigrated to the States in 1933 and Berg having died in
> 1935, Webern was the only one alive in Europe when the Nazis took over Austria
> in 1938; they regarded him as "Cultural Bolshevist".
> 
> "Venice and Vienna"; I wouldn't be surprised if the abovementioned triumvirate
> of the "New Viennese School" that started in 1904 were touched upon in ATD, let
> alone their mentor Mahler, who (besides Thomas Mann himself) was a model for the
> Aschenbach character in "Death in Venice", as we know.
> 
> 
> Heikki