AtDTDA 32: Fantasia on a Fantasia of Thomas Tallis Pt. 1

[robinlandseadel at comcast.net]

I don't know about you, but "Classical" music means a lot to me. 
Ralph Vaughan Williams means a great deal to me, Thomas Tallis 
means even more---far more. If I had time enough, I would read 
all of "Meritorious Price" as it applies directly, but we will have to 
skim, I guess. This scene---'Pert's very public act of astral travel
----speaks directly to me, to personal experience. This scene is a 
biggie, both for me personally and for the book.  At one time
I was a recording engineer, the guy with the mikes and the recorders
and gaffer tape and whatnot, the official recording engineer of the 
San Francisco Early Music Society, and Thomas Tallis looms large 
in that scene.

What follows---all of it---directly applies to the written output of 
Thomas Pynchon, probably even more than I think, but we will 
have a number of logical leaps here. I like to call this method of 
logical [ha, ha, ha] determinism "Trancendental Logic',  an insight 
that comes on like a 2 x 4 upside the head, but usually eleven years later.

My advice is :"Buy the Ticket, take the ride."

I first heard Ralph Vaughan Williams' "Fantasia on a theme by Thomas Tallis" 
back in December of 1969, during a then rare visit to my Hippie mom. My sister 
Miki and myself were just settling in to Bea's little shack in Eagle Rock [found 
her stash in the most obvious of tea boxes]. There was the old Eugene 
Ormandy/Philadelphia Orchestra ["Columbia Masterworks", as if there would have 
been a trace of doubt in 1969] recording in an early vinyl incarnation, a 12x12 
cover promising verdant green fields---a pastoral scene---or as Sir Thomas 
Beecham was to call it: "Cow looking over fence music."

That shack---you say your unfaithful narrator is off ego-tripping, I'm grabbing 
you by the lapels and screaming: "Goddammit, for once listen!!!"---is where 
I got the tiniest little sliver of awareness of the by then fading hippie scene, 
as passed on by my mother as best as she could, in spite of mammoth 
resistance on all sides. That shack is where my mom read "Trout Fishing 
in America" to me, where Bea blew dope smoke at me [Thanks Mom!!!], 
where I saw my mom and sister and their respective significant 
others run through the shack skyclad in various states of high hilarity. It was 
my first direct experience of living with Hippies. Of course, my idea of a 
Hippie is of a Witch, but we'll come around to them apples soon enough. Just 
note, for the record:

Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis = Hippies.

My nervous system, but not only my nervous system.

If we move ahead two/three years, the LSD has drifted 
off into more obviously MKULTRA determined 
configurations. Good trips are hard to find. But during 
my science fiction class at McLane High, as the 
windowpane [rumored to Owsley's fwiw] is coming on 
in smooth streams of transcendent synesthesia the 
teacher sez she's gonna show us a film. 

Maybe it's too late for most of you, but the technocrats/pagans 
of 1969 were the ones who got to roll around the 16 mm. film 
projectors to and from the classrooms. I think it has everything 
to do with attraction to certain strange smells. Anyway this 
collection of addled [1971---check out the smoking zone near 
the dean's parking spot] youth were all going to watch "Omega", 
about sixteen minutes worth of hippies meditating under oaks in 
some sylvan glade and here's the kicker---rememberthat acid 
we were discussing previously?---the entire film is 
solarized/posterized into extreme psychedelia and the foley, in 
its enterity, consists of the aforementioned "Fantasia on a 
theme of Thomas Tallis." Oh yeah, this happened TWICE, as 
if to underline the whole point. Omega was an obvious 
expression of the Gaia concept, that little bit of Goddess worship 
that makes perfect sense no matter what, the first, the last and 
the most essential doorway into the Craft.

You have been paying attention, haven't you?

I'd bet anything OBA's seen that film.

Now, if I had time enough, and hopefully I will, I could tie this all 
together to Meritorious Price, but for the moment we'll skim. For 
the nonce, let's get into the music, shall we? All of you perfect 
Pynchonininians out there already know how to look up such 
things as descriptions, encyclopedia enteries. and reviews. I 
won't bother with any of that crap this thim, I'm commin' in the 
virtual world's essential skyclad posture, 100% subjective.

Here's the piece:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5y7nJL1hpUU

It's one of the prettiest things ever written. OBA's plugging into
a theme that pops up all the time in modernist fiction, weaving
some famous piece of music into the plot of the novel, like Hesse's
Steppenwolf---I say it's Mozart's Jupiter Symphony driving that 
Novel---Thomas Mann's "Dr. Faustus" and Beethoven's great c
minor sonata, his last. Then there's Huxley's "Point-Counter-Point"
and Beethoven's fantastic 15th quartet. Looming biggest of all in 
this fictional landscape is Proust..  Those who know, know.

But back to "Fantasia". It's a pretty, pretty, pretty piece and it's
modeled after the fantasias for viol consort that emerged out of 
the same cultural swamp that gave us the Courier's Tragedy---
or, as us Ren-Folk like to put it: "The Jacobian Torture Faire!!!"
To get to that level of "Fantasia" we have to look at the source,
the little Thomas Tallis work that so inspired Sir Ralph:

"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."

That's the text and it knots so well with Our Beloved Author's
thoughts for the very same reason that "Meritorious Price"
knots perfectly into all the writings of William's Greatest Grandson.
Now I'm gonna grab that copy of Meritorious Price.

And happy birthday to Friend Tom.