1. Following a rabbit hole from the latest Michael Johnson Substack, I looked at the Fifth Path Magazine interview and found this bit:
What are your musical interests?
Robert Anton Wilson: My musical tastes are very conservative. I like the classics — Beethoven, Mozart, Vivaldi, … Helgar. He’s not on most peoples list of favorite composers, but I like him.
A search on a couple of search engines doesn't reveal a classical composer named Helgar. Is that maybe a corruption of Elgar? I've gotten interested in a couple of composers via RAW, such as Johann Christian Bach and Jan Dismas Zelenka (mentioned in Schroedinger's Cat) but I'm confused here.
2. As I may have mentioned before, I have a Substack about music, mostly focusing on Russian classical music of the 20th and 21st centuries, concentrating largely on composers you might not have heard of. I have a new post up on my favorite piano player, Yury Favorin.
Perhaps I can explain the point of the Substack via analogy. Let's say the only two British Invasion bands anyone knew about were The Beatles and the Rolling Stones. The Who, the Searchers, the Moody Blues, Yes, Cream, Led Zeppelin, etc. were obscure and most people didn't know who they were. Not only that, but the British government tried to suppress them. My Substack certainly mentions the two biggest Russian composers, Dmitri Shostakovich and Sergei Prokofiev, but I genuinely believe that Alexander Mosolov, Gavriil Popov, Boris Tishchenko and others also deserve a listen.
3. New Tyler Cowen podcast on classical music, with transcript.
2 comments:
I know Bob Wilson liked to watch old Universal horror movies with the sound off while listening to Elgar's Enigma Variations.
In terms of twentieth century Russian classical music, I wonder why people whose opinion I really respect, like Charles Rosen, don't like Shostakovich.
Yea when I read that a long time ago I immediately assumed (<---y'all know the peril there) RAW had said "Elgar" and it was a typo from the transcript, or whoever transcribed it didn't know of the composer and just guessed. What was weird was that I didn't recall RAW ever mentioning Elgar before.
I told him I can't listen to music while I write, or read. Music tends to be too interesting to me, and diverts my attention; I'm whistling while I'm pissing; it quashes a zen mind, etc. He said he tended to agree, but sometimes put on "light jazz" while writing: some streaming service he had; I don't think he was talking about CDs.
Post a Comment