Pre AtD Group Read questions---Spoiler Soup

[robinlandseadel at comcast.net]

So here I am, 924---"Say, REMEMBER those little cactuses?"---pages into 
my second read (I loved the book on my first pass, racing through the 
novel as a series of unresolved cliffhangers---Dan Brown on 
Adrenochrome

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adrenochrome

or J. K. Rowling on "those little cactuses"---and it's better on a slower read, 
but I really wanted a fast first pass to get a general feel for the book's 
architecture) and now will provide a few questions/observations
mostly based on viewing the text with a magnifying lens, scrying for 
low-level or incidental detail. 

There's a juicy scene on 896 where Ruberta Chirpingdon-Groin levitates 
during Ralph Vaughan Williams' debut performance of his 
"Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis", and that leads to a number of 
questions, but first a personal anecdote:

In my Junior year of High School---1971-72---I recall being in a 
Lysergically elevated state in my Science Fiction class, when the teacher 
decided to play us all a short "underground" art film entitled "Omega" 
(not to be confused with Sci-Fi classic "The Omega Man, an entirely 
different can of flesh eating zombies). It consisted of nearly stationary slow
pans of a group of young people---let's call them hippies---sitting in 
various reverential poses under oaks and other such pastoral scenery. A 
suggestion of T.M. is in the air. There is throughout the film deliberate false
color registration produced by the then popular technique of "Solarization",
perhaps best known from a series of photos of the Beatles from 
Richard Avedon:

http://content.answers.com/main/content/wp/en/thumb/4/4b/300px-Beatles29ra.jpeg

All the while, the soundtrack consists of "Fantasia on a Theme by 
Thomas Tallis" and nothing else.

By the way, this happened TWICE!

Now, first off, I've got to wonder, did TRP see "Omega"? It seems 
possible to me, considering time and location---I was in the Central Valley 
at the time, he probably was somewhere above or below, on the beach or 
by the bay. The author makes a particular point of noting that the Fantasia
is modal, specifically in the Phygerian mode. Noting that musical modes are
cited throughout the novel, perhaps a definition is in order:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Musical_mode

Thing is, my Spidey sense tells me there must be a mathematical use of 
"Mode" or "Modal" that echos/parodies/reinforces the musical uses of the 
term "Mode".

Another thought: the description of classical music as a gateway to the
Divine appears in a number of "Early Modern" novels. There's "Dr. Faustus" 
by Thomas Mann, "Steppenwolf" and "The Glass Bead Game" by Hermann 
Hesse. I'm sure there's others as well. In particular, there's Aldous Huxley's
"Point-Counter-Point", evoking Beethoven's "Heiliger Dankesang" from
the A minor quartet, a work in the Lydian Mode, a mode used in part
to evoke a different time and a different sense of the sacred, 
the era of Palestrina and Tallis. It seems like that's what's happening to
'Pert, her moral compass/auto-gyro getting retuned during the
performance.

The lyrics of the Tallis tune used in the Fantasia. . . .

"Why fum'th in fight the Gentiles spite, in fury raging stout ?
Why tak'th in hand the people fond, vain things to bring about ? 
The Kings arise, the Lords devise, in counsels met thereto, 
against the Lord with false accord, against His Christ they go." 

. . . .seem perfectly relevant in the context of the novel. Not to mention
reflective of some earlier uses of old hymn-tunes by our author.

Part of the "Omega" connection, for me, can be found in all the varied
drug references---particularly those visionary agents being used as 
facilitators for communications with "out there", and in AtD "out there" is all
over (and sometimes off) the map. Lots of the book's episodes are what I'd 
call Shamanic, and sometimes the scenes feel purely Wiccan:

"I know everything," he laughed, "or maybe it is nothing, my English gets 
strange sometimes. But your friends Imi and Erno have gone back to 
Buda-Pesth, so you don't have to worry about them at least."

"Then you must know I'm not a Zaharoff girl either," said Dally, exercising 
her eyelashes.

"My mother, who still lives in Temesvar, would say your destiny is much 
more demanding than that." pg 

Note what is not explicitly said here---there's loads of "Ritual Reluctance" 
in "Against the Day", title included.

Finally, I've got to note that there's only one other time I can recall reading 
a novel and starting right up again as soon as I was done, and that was 
with "The Crying of Lot 49" way back in 1979. And the "Al-Mar-Faud" 
scene (757) is up there with Lawn Savants and De Mille's Fur Hench Men.