In the first chapter of The Homing Pigeons, the first book of the Schroedinger's Cat Trilogy, Frank Dashwood turns on the radio and hears a catchy Baroque tune:
Zelenka, he said. Who the hell was Zelenka? Same period as Bach, I'm sure.
I asked Eric Wagner if RAW was a particular fan of composer Jan Dismas Zelenka. Eric's reply is here.
The Allmusic bio of Zelenka makes the composer sound like someone RAW would like: "Zelenka was best known, in his own time as in ours, for his harmonic and dynamic daring. An indefatigable experimentalist, he pushed the often conventional harmonic language of the Baroque to its limits, frequently using chromaticism in general and unresolved chains of suspensions in particular. Zelenka's dynamic markings, quite unusual for the Baroque, bring to mind a composer of the Romantic era. It is to his credit that the unusual devices he employed were woven into a composition's basic concept, and not treated as mere tricks."
For more, see Discover Zelenka.
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