An Ignoramus’s Guide to Classical Music: Early and Baroque

A bit of change of pace for this post and others to follow: I would like to share some of my favorite albums of classical music. I make no claims to be an expert – I can’t play an instrument and I can’t read music. There are huge gaps in my knowledge, but I know what I like, and these recordings have given me hours of pleasure over the years. As I feature them, it will become clear that I have some definite favorites in terms of composers, conductors, and performers. I’m sure there are better performances available; all I know is what I enjoy. I have a definite bias towards 20th century composers, because that’s the century I’ve lived most of my life. That said, I’m not a fan of atonal music – if it doesn’t have a nice melody, I’m not going to spend much time with it.

Let’s begin with the earliest composer in my collection: Thomas Tallis (1505 – 1585).

This recording of Spem In Alium (“Hope in Any Other”) is incredible. It is nine minutes of sheer heaven. Performed by 8(!) 5-part choirs, the music slowly develops and blends into a complex yet comprehensible polyphonic thing of beauty. If a gothic cathedral could be transformed into music, it would sound like this.

Next is probably one of the most well-known pieces of classical music ever: Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons.

There is usually a good reason a work is enduringly popular, and The Four Seasons proves it. This is an immensely enjoyable suite of music that never fails to satisfy. Melodic and delightful, it will be eternally popular. My favorite performance of this very familiar work is by Gerard Schwarz and the LA Chamber Orchestra with Elmar Oliveira on violin. It is on the Delos label, and I have always appreciated their attention to recording details. When I hit “play”, the music explodes out of my speakers (I still listen to music primarily via Lps and CDs on a conventional stereo system). This is a very lively and energetic performance that I never get tired of.

In the ’80s, Christopher Hogwood started a bit of a craze of performing classical works in an “authentic” manner using period instruments and appropriate numbers of players in his ensemble. Handel’s Musick For The Royal Fireworks was one of the first classical works that I “got”. When I was in eighth grade (1974), my family spent a semester in Cambridge, and the long-suffering music teacher at the school I attended tried to instill a love of classical music in me and my classmates. We were completely into David Bowie, Bad Company, Queen, and other rock artists. However, when she explained the context in which Handel composed this music and asked us to listen to it, I found myself really enjoying it. I still do to this day, and I will always be grateful to her. This album also includes Handel’s Water Music Suite which was performed on barges as King George I and his court floated down the Thames to a dinner party. He enjoyed it so much he had them play it twice (now we just hit <-)! I would do the same in the circumstances.

I’ll conclude this post with the composer whom I consider to be one of the three greatest in human history: Johann Sebastian Bach.

In 1955, a young Glenn Gould exploded on the classical music scene with his recording of The Goldberg Variations. They were written for a solo harpsichord – the piano hadn’t been invented yet – but Gould made them his own. According to legend, these variations were written to soothe a nobleman who suffered from insomnia. Whatever the true genesis, they are endlessly inventive and enjoyable. Gould’s performance is wonderful, and this album is one of the all-time classics of the genre. I also have the Variations as performed by Murray Perahia, and they are excellent as well, but this is album is the one I return to most often.

Bach was extremely prolific, so there is no way just a couple of albums could ever do him justice, but if you’re just starting out, having his Brandenburg Concertos is a perfect introduction. I could listen to these six concertos and never plumb their depths completely. It is such an immediately pleasurable experience to hear them, even if you don’t have any experience with classical music. The Academy of St. Martin in the Fields, conducted by Sir Neville Marriner is outstanding on these performances. They were recorded in analog in the late 1970s, but they sound crisp, clean, and clear. This album also includes Bach’s four Orchestral Suites and three Violin Concertos. What an embarrassment of riches!

As I laid out in the beginning, I am no expert when it comes to classical music; I just wanted to share some performances that I have enjoyed very much. In my next post, I’ll tackle Mozart, Beethoven, and a couple other classical composers.

Andrew Klavan’s A Woman Underground

Book number 51 of 2024

Andrew Klavan is one of my favorite writers and thinkers. He has written many mysteries, thrillers, and some very good nonfiction, as well as producing a weekly podcast on politics and culture. A Woman Underground is the fourth book in his Cameron Winter series, which just gets better and better with each installment.

Winter is a wonderfully deep and complex character – a professor of Romantic literature at a small midwestern college, he was an especially deadly counterintelligence assassin for some very dark and secret missions earlier in his life. Every novel in the series has flashbacks to Winter’s career as a deadly assassin, as he relates them to his therapist – a kindly, older woman who is very much attracted to him. Winter is incapable of maintaining any kind of relationship, because his parents, wealthy New Yorkers, had neither the time nor the inclination to care for him.

His nanny was a refugee from East Germany, and he never got over his childhood crush of her niece, Charlotte Shaefer. His unrequited love has served as an excuse to avoid any intimacy in his adult life. He is a deeply troubled man with a code of honor he tries to live by, even though he is not at all religious. Think of a Raymond Chandler character dropped into the 21st century.

A Woman Underground begins with Part 1: The Scent of Something Gone, Winter realizes that Charlotte may be trying to get in touch with him. One evening he comes home to his apartment and smells the lingering scent of her perfume in the hall. The next morning, he studies the building’s security video, and he sees a bundled up woman carrying a book. The book turns out to be a novel that is popular with right-wing extremists, and it features a heroine who is too similar to Charlotte to be a coincidence. Winter quickly tracks down the author. To avoid any spoilers, I won’t reveal any more details!

Klavan does a masterful job of balancing four(!) separate stories while keeping the reader glued to the page. First, there is the main plotline of Winter tracking down Charlotte. Then, there is a plotline involving an old mission Winter was assigned to bring back an agent who had disappeared in Turkey. When Winter is in therapy, he keeps returning to this story, even though his therapist knows he’s doing it to avoid facing what’s really causing his psychological distress. Third, there’s the plotline of the novel Charlotte was carrying when she tried to see Winter. In it, a small group of right-wingers try to decide what to do during the riots that caused so unrest and destruction in the summer of 2020. Cameron is reading this novel to try to pick up clues as to where Charlotte might be. The fourth subplot is some sexual shenanigans Winter’s colleague at the college gets himself into. Believe it or not, all four of these stories slowly come together into one.

A Woman Underground is a pivotal chapter in Cameron Winter’s development. Several things that had stunted his emotional and psychological maturity are dealt with and resolved. The path to that resolution, however, is a harrowing one. As Klavan describes him, he spends most of the book on the verge of a nervous breakdown. It is only through his therapist’s insightful and compassionate work that he is able to come out whole. By the end, it’s clear that Winter has emerged battered, but stronger and more resilient. I can’t wait to see what Andrew Klavan has in store for him. Bubbling under the surface of the various subplots is a potential global conspiracy that involves extremely powerful Americans who have been compromised. It’s enough to turn the most level-headed person into a paranoid lunatic, and the people Winter can completely trust are down to very few. Things are getting very interesting in Cameron Winter’s life!

Charles Williams’ Shadows of Ecstasy – Can Man Conquer Death?

Book number 50 of 2024

I continue to enjoy the dark fantasy of the Inkling Charles Williams. Shadows of Ecstasy is his fifth novel, published in 1933, and it has a very interesting premise: what would happen if the people of Africa – led by a “High Executive” – rose up and overthrew all of the Western Powers, inaugurating a “Second Human Evolution” based on an esoteric brand of paganism?

The story begins with a dinner at a British college honoring an explorer who has returned from his travels. Roger Ingram is a professor of literature, and his good friend, Sir Bernard Travers, is a renowned authority on the stomach. Ingram’s wife is Isabel, and her sister, Rosamond, is engaged to Sir Bernard’s son, Philip. At the dinner, Roger and Sir Bernard are introduced to Nigel Considine, a strangely charismatic figure who speaks in an obscure manner, quoting scripture and classic poetry. Sir Bernard can’t shake the feeling that he’s seen Considine before, and eventually he realizes that he photographed him 50 years earlier when he (Sir Bernard) was a little boy. Considine doesn’t appear to have aged at all.

Meanwhile, mysterious things are happening in Africa: communications are being cut off, and European forces are being driven out. Philip Travers is supposed to go to that continent to work on an engineering project, but it is put on hold. A Mr. Simon Rosenberg, one of the richest men in the world and main investor in Philip’s company, dies in mysterious circumstances. His estate will go to two nephews, Ezekiel and Nehemiah, who are Orthodox Jews committed to restoring the Temple in Jerusalem.

The newspapers publish a statement from the High Executive of the African Allies proclaiming their intention of casting off the colonial powers and ushering in a new age that is anti-intellectual. Here’s an excerpt:

Assured that at this time the whole process of change in mankind, generally known as evolution, is at a higher crisis than any since mankind first emerged from among the great beasts and knew himself; assured that by an equal emergence from intellectual preoccupations, the adepts of the new way have it in their power to lead, and all mankind has it in its power to follow, not certainly by the old habits of reason but by profounder experiments of passion, to the conquest of  death in the renewed ecstasy of vivid experience; assured of these things the Allied Supremacies appeal to the whole world for belief and discipleship and devotion.

CHARLES WILLIAMS. Shadows of Ecstasy (Kindle Location 603). Delphi Classics. Kindle Edition.

In London, persons of color are targeted by mobs in reaction to this proclamation. Roger and Isabel shelter an African man in their home, who turns out to be a Zulu king named Inkamasi. An Anglican priest, Ian Caithness, is Sir Bernard’s good friend and is staying at the Travers’ home while attending a conference. Now all the main characters are introduced.

When Philip and Sir Bernard offer to escort Inkamasi back to his home, they are met by Considine, who exercises some sort of hypnotic power over the African king and takes him away. He invites Sir Bernard, Philip, and Roger to dinner at his home. When they arrive, Inkamasi is there, but is almost catatonic. In the course of the dinner, Considine admits he is the same man as Sir Bernard photographed fifty years ago. As a matter of fact, he states he is almost two hundred years old! He claims to have a discovered a way to channel all of his energies into himself so that he never ages. Things get a little vague here, but his method seems to boil down to denying himself any relationship with any other person and devoting everything to self-love.

‘So far’, Sir Bernard said, ‘both the stomach and the mind seem normally necessary to man.’

‘O so far!’ Considine answered, ‘and normally! But it’s the farther and the abnormal to which we must look. When men are in love, when they are in the midst of creating, when they are in a religious flame, what do they need then either with the stomach or the mind?’

‘Those’, Sir Bernard said, ‘are abnormal states from which they return.’

‘More’s the pity,’ Roger said suddenly. ‘It’s true, you know. In the real states of exaltation one doesn’t seem to need food.’

‘So,’ said Considine, smiling at him. ‘The poets have taught you something, Mr. Ingram.’

‘But one returns,’ Sir Bernard protested plaintively, ‘and then one does need food. And reason,’ he added, almost as an afterthought.

Considine was looking at Roger. ‘Will you say that one must?’ he asked in a lower voice; and ‘O how the devil do I know?’ Roger said impatiently. ‘I say that one does, but I daren’t say that one must. And it’s folly either way.’

‘Don’t believe it,’ Considine answered, his voice low and vibrating. ‘There’s more to it than that.’

CHARLES WILLIAMS. Shadows of Ecstasy (Kindle Locations 458-468). Delphi Classics. Kindle Edition.

His dinner guests react differently to his revelation. Roger Ingram, a committed Romantic who is constantly quoting Shakespeare, Milton, and other poets, is attracted to him. Sir Bernard, the medical expert, is appalled, while Philip, the young man in love, is conflicted. Considine concludes his soiree with a musical performance by a chamber orchestra that plays havoc with his guests’ emotions.

Later that evening, African forces attack London and cause some panic, but they are repelled. Ian Caithness and Philip decide to rescue Inkamasi from Considine’s house, and they take him to an Anglican mass where his consciousness and spiritual health is restored. Inkamasi tells them that Considine is the High Executive whose goal is to overthrow western Christian civilization and replace it with paganism.

The next day, Sir Bernard decides to tell the Prime Minister that Considine is the High Executive. When Considine visits the Ingrams to invite Roger to join his movement, Rosamond calls the police. When they try to arrest Considine, he waves them away and walks past them as they fall over themselves.

The raids on London intensify, and mobs of people are in a panic. African men wound and kill each other in their devotion to “the conqueror of death”, Considine. Ezekiel Rosenberg is lynched when an English mob tries to find where he and his brother have stashed the jewels supposedly left them by their uncle Simon. Nehemiah is rescued by Philip from the mob and brought to his home.

Philip’s engagement to Rosamond is falling apart, and he can’t understand why. She has suddenly gone cold towards him, even though he loves her with a devotion approaching worship. Where her sister Isabel is a peacemaker and she encourages her husband Roger in his exploration of Considine’s philosophy, Rosamond takes an instant dislike to Inkamasi and Considine. But at the same time, she is attracted to Inkamasi’s regal bearing.

Roger Ingram is an interesting character – he is a true believer in the power of art to change lives:

Oppression lay, Roger thought, on him alone, perhaps because he alone was yet unused to a deliberate co-habitation with belief. The past popularity, the long tradition of religion supported its diverse champions against a present neglect. But art had never been popular, and its lovers in all ages were few and solitary. His own belief was as passionate as that of the Jew or the Christian, but it was more often thwarted and more greatly troubled.

CHARLES WILLIAMS. Shadows of Ecstasy (Kindle Locations 2448-2451). Delphi Classics. Kindle Edition.

Shadows of Ecstasy is probably the most difficult of Charles Williams’ works, because it gets bogged down in lengthy philosophical discussions that are vague and obscure. Roger Ingram drops many references to poems that I’m simply not familiar with, and I’m sure I missed a lot of meaning there. As I was reading, I couldn’t tell if Considine was the Antichrist or a heroic figure, which I suppose was Williams’ point. It’s Williams’ style to never overtly state what is happening, but rather use oblique and unfinished conversations to make important points. I learned to just keeping reading and get into “the flow” of his prose.

That said, Williams drops quite a few true gems into his writing. I loved this passage:

He [Roger] found a certain relief in talking to the priest, however different their views of Considine, as an ordinary Christian might find it easier to talk to an atheist than to a saint.

CHARLES WILLIAMS. Shadows of Ecstasy (Kindle Locations 2764-2766). Delphi Classics. Kindle Edition.

Events inexorably build to a horrific climax involving human sacrifice, petty greed, and betrayal. At then

end of the novel, things have returned to “normal”, but after a man who seems to be immortal has made himself known, how normal can the world be? Shadows of Ecstasy is a very thought-provoking and troubling tale, where every character is changed forever. It takes a real effort to read and understand, but it is worth it in the end.

Ray Bradbury Megapack – Some Early Gems from a Master

Book number 44 of 2024

One of my all-time favorite authors is Ray Bradbury. Beginning with The Martian Chronicles, which I read when I was in junior high, I fell in love with his imaginative writings. Wildside Press has collected 15 science fiction tales that Bradbury wrote early in his career for pulp magazines, circa 1944 – 1951. While the first few stories aren’t the greatest things he’s written, for $0.99 the collection is still a great bargain. 

Included is a stone-cold Bradbury classic, The Creatures That Time Forgot, the story of a group of humans and their descendants who are stranded on a planet with properties that cause them to live their entire lives in the span of eight days. Born one day, reaching adulthood by the third day, they die of old age on the eighth. Even though it sounds implausible, even for science fiction, Bradbury makes it entirely believable and paints a realistic picture of the struggles a community would undergo to survive under such conditions. 

The collection also includes a novella co-written with Leigh Brackett, Lorelei of the Red Mist. It is a sword and sorcery tale that, to be honest, isn’t very good and is very unrepresentative of Bradbury. Much better is the next story, Zero Hour, which is a short one about an alien invasion that is enabled by small children playing a “game” which opens up an extra-dimensional portal. It is very creepy and could have been an episode from the classic television series, The Twilight Zone.

There is a another rather long story, Pillar of Fire, that shows glimmers of Bradbury’s future greatness. In it, William Lantry wakes up in the year 2349, to find himself “the last dead man in the whole damned world!” In its quest for cleanliness and elimination of risk, humanity immediately cremates anyone who dies. Old graves have been dug up and their human remains incinerated. Lantry’s grave was in the very last cemetery, and he managed to escape his fate. Motivated by hatred of the safe, antiseptic lives humans live now, he tries to reintroduce fear and crime. He goes to a library and asks for a book by Edgar Allen Poe, but his works have been scrubbed, as has H. P. Lovecraft’s (when Lantry asks for a book of Lovecraft, the librarian thinks he means a sex manual!). In this story, one can see the first flickerings of the themes Bradbury would develop in Fahrenheit 451.

While most of the stories in this collection are fair to middling, it is definitely worth shelling out $0.99 if you’re a Bradbury fan. His mordant sense of humor comes through, even if none of the tales has a happy ending. You can also tell that he had been reading a lot on general semantics at the time he was writing them: there are several uses of “referents” and “labels”; one story is even entitled Referent. One last observation – no matter what we imagine the future to be, it will probably be nothing like it. In every single story, at least one character smokes multiple cigarettes. I seriously doubt any astronaut today is a chain smoker!