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Saturday, March 19, 2011

RAW musicology

From "The Wilderness Diary of Sigismundo Celine," chapter 7 of Nature's God.

Vivaldi: The Neapolitan heat, the Neapolitan eroticism, the Neapolitan paganism invading their "Christian" festivals.

Mozart: The planets revolving in Newtonian orbits, while children play and birds sing.

J.S. Bach: a naked goddess, a compass, a mason's square.

J.C. Bach: black opium in a lush and expensive brothel.

C.P.E. Bach: you see the loveliest woman in the world and then notice she has a nervous tic.

I plan to download some Johann Christian Bach next week; Wilson's description did make me wonder what his music sounds like.

3 comments:

Eric Wagner said...

Thanks for posting this, and happy J. S. Bach's birthday! I love Nature's God, and I love the use of music in all three of the Historical Illuminati Chronicles. I particularly like to read The Earth Will Shake while listening to Horowitz play Scarlatti.

Oz Fritz said...

The studio I'm currently working at, La Fabrique in the South of France has a 3000 plus collection of vinyl. On a table in the back is a beautiful 39 record boxed set of J.S. Bach's L'Oeurve D'Orgue by Lionel Rogg. I'm going to try to peruse it if time allows.

Eric Wagner said...

Howdy Oz! I love Sigismundo's response when he discovers Bach's Goldberg Variations in The Earth Will Shake. I think Wilson does a great job of making the musical world of the 1760's and 1770's come alive in that series. I imagine Sigismundo traveling to Vienna in the 1790's and meeting Beethoven.