'The Classical Style' reading group, Week Five

 Domenico Scarlatti

 2. The Origins of the Style 

By ERIC WAGNER
Special guest blogger

Pg. 47 –  Johann Sebastian Bach: born March 31, 1685, died July 28, 1750.  

George Frideric Handel: born March 5, 1685, died April 13, 1759.  

Giuseppe Domenico Scarlatti: born October 26, 1685, died July 23, 1757. 

Haydn composed his Op. 33 String Quartets in 1781.  

This chapter outlines the musical world of Robert Anton Wilson’s The Earth Will Shake and The Widow’s Son: continuing influence of Scarlatti, Bach, and Handel; a very young Mozart; and Haydn toiling away in relative obscurity in Esterhazy in the Austro-Hungarian Empire.  

Rosen writes: 

The idea of a Form striving to define itself, to become flesh in all these different ways, is attractive, but even as a metaphor it sets a trap. It leads one to assume that there was such a thing as ‘sonata form’ in the late eighteenth century, and that the composers knew what it was, whereas  nothing we know about the situation would lead us to suppose anything of the kind. The feeling for any form, even the minuet, was much more fluid. 

                                                - pg. 52 

This passage helps to address Oz Fritz’s comment, “I don't know why Rosen calls the sonata a texture and not a form. Perhaps he will explain that as we move along.” 

(It does bother me that Rosen always uses male pronouns when refering to generic composers or artists.) 

    In Sonata Forms Rosen writes: 

    In the eighteenth century, consequently, there was no notion of an isolated  sonata form as such: all that existed was a gradually evolving conception of     the composition of instrumental music – a pure instrumental style untroubled  by the exigencies of concerto, dance music, or opera overture, unhampered  by the old-fashioned procedures of fugue and variations. It is significant that     eighteenth-century accounts of sonata form are all description of     instrumental compostion in general. 

- pg. 14-15 

Hilaritas Press news -- from John Higgs!

 

The latest John Higgs newsletter has a scoop about my favorite small press:

"I’ve always loved The Trials of Arthur, C.J. Stone’s 2003 account of the biker who believes he is King Arthur. It’s a funny but profound account of his journey from squaddie to environmental campaigner, and it’s about to be republished by the good people over at Hilaritas Press. Give it a try, you won’t regret it."

I've provide full coverage when Hilaritas puts it out.

See John's newsletter for more news. There's still time to get his book of short pieces if you sign up for the paid version of his newsletter, and he appears in a new podcast episode with "lots of talk about David Lynch and Robert Anton Wilson."

Gerry Fialka interviews me

 I appeared yesterday on Gerry Fialka's interview show on YouTube, "I'm Probably Wrong About Everything." I was on for about 90 minutes. We talked quite a bit about Frank Zappa, I got to talk about my Robert Shea book, and we covered many other topics. When I admitted I collect radios, Gerry told me he dumpster dives for radios and explained which ones he prefers! 

Many members of the "RAW community" have appeared on Gerry's show, among them, Oz Fritz in 2024,  Eric Wagner two months ago, and also last year, with Bobby Campbell in 2021,  Peter Quadrino in 2016, Gerry asked me for some interview suggestions and I gave him some names. UPDATE: Here is an interview with Mike Gathers.  And here is the Steve "Fly" Pratt interview. 

Gerry Fialka is an experimental filmmaker and writer, has interviewed hundreds of people, and worked for Frank Zappa for ten years. Here is the official website. He led a book group that spent 28 years reading Finnegans Wake.  (From the Guardian article in the last link: "My phone interview with him [Fialka] lasted one hour and eight minutes, and its zigs, zags and sheer velocity were unmatched in my nearly 20-year journalism career. Was I writing about Finnegans Wake, or was I suddenly inside it?"

Music trivia note: You may have heard of the musical artist Stormin' Norman and Suzy. The "Suzy" is Suzy Williams, who is married to Mr. Fialka. 

'The Occult Timothy Leary': Two new reviews

 

Michael Johnson and Oz Fritz have both posted new reviews of The Occult Timothy Leary, the new book by Joseph L. Flatley that I've written about on this blog.

Both of them give the book and close reading, and both recommend it. In his review at his Substack newsletter, Michael writes, "Joseph L. Flatley’s invigorating research and lucid style in The Occult Timothy Leary has much to recommend it, beyond my own elaborations and predilections."

On his blog, Oz writes, "All in all, I thoroughly enjoyed the book and commend the author, a true Evolutionary Agent, for all the hard work and time he devoted to help bring the work of Timothy Leary to a wider and perhaps younger audience."

I agree with Brian's comment to Michael's review that Michael has "a fantastic reviewing style that would fit easily into a scholarly journal or a 'serious' newspaper such as The Guardian, but with a more knowledgeable and insightful take than one usually finds in such reviews."

Oz's review is full of fascinating details. He argues to my satisfaction that Gurdjieff also was a big influence on Leary, and points us to a movie about Leary, "Timothy Leary's Dead,"  currently available free on Tubi. 

In the comments to Michael's review, Oz modestly writes that Michael's review is "much better." While I also  have pointed out that Michael is good with book reviews (see my comment here), I think both reviews are very good, I disagree with Oz, you should read both.

If you missed it, I posted an interview with Flatley. 

Proud Miskatonic University alums

 The above is Gerry Fialka's recent interview of Eric Wagner. I watched the whole thing a few days ago, quite entertaining. As I was watching it, I noticed that Eric was wearing a t-shirt for Miskatonic University, although if Gerry spotted that, he didn't mention it. 

Miskatonic University, located in Arkham, Massachusetts, is featured in the work of H.P. Lovecraft. And as Illuminatus! makes use of Lovecraft's "Cthulhu mythos," there are references to the school in the text. "Miskatonic University, in Arkham, Massachusetts, is not a well-known campus by any means, and the few scholarly visitors who come there are an odd lot, drawn usually by the strange collection of occult books given to the Miskatonic Library by the late Dr. Henry Armitage."

I couldn't see Eric's shirt well enough to see what it depicted, but for many years, there have been quite realistic MU sweatshirts and t-shirts that look like the merch put out by more ordinary schools. 

When I went to the University of Oklahoma in the 1970s, an old friend of mine, once quite active in science fiction fandom but now gafiated, would wear an authentic-looking Miskanonic University sweatshirt around campus. When he showed up one day to economics class wearing it, there was a dialogue along these lines:

Professor: Miskatonic University? Where is that?

Old friend: It's a small liberal arts school in Massachusetts.

Professor: Huh, I thought I knew the name of just about every college in the U.S.

I should mention that when I texted my friend a couple of days ago to remind him of the incident, he had forgotten it. But I remember him quite well describing it at the time. 

Wednesday links

Art from the second link. 

 Prop Anon Bloomsday post. "In Chapel Perilous: The Life & Thought Crimes of Robert Anton Wilson I argue that Wilson presaged the future epistemic confusion of our current algorithmic maelstrom. However, Wilson would counter such an audacious, yet accurate, claim that James Joyce was the guy. He was the one who saw where it was going and then went blind." Scroll down on the piece for other links and articles. 

Part Two of the new RAW Semantics piece on "Right Men, Natural Law & Platonic Free Markets" that I blogged about a few days ago.

The Billionaire-Fueled Lobbying Group Behind the State Bills to Ban Basic Income Experiments. A link pointed out by Brian from RAW Semantics, who writes, "Some US libertarians are pro-UBI, but many seem hostile. FGA, a billionaire-funded group behind bills to ban Basic Income pilots, has a lot of donors (incl. usual Scaife, Koch, etc - small sum from Koch. Cato's Robert Levy served on FGA board)." 

Cat interrupts sad scene in "Romeo and Juliet" ballet. 

Leaders and followers. Includes reference to Aleister Crowley. "A decisive moment for these movements comes when the Teacher dies. While the truth of the teachings is the ultimate proof of longevity of any school of thought, efficient organization, as in the case of Scientology, may also hold a key." Via Jesse Walker.

A joke at the old RAWilson.com site.

Bobby Campbell news update [UPDATED]

 

Above, new cartoon from Bobby Campbell. (Well, I think it's new).

Bobby tells me this comes from a quote from the Book of the SubGenius, ""Don't just eat that hamburger, eat the HELL out of it!" But it also comes from this Eric Wagner anecdote (pages 85-86, Straight Outta Dublin):

In 1988 a group of us brought Bob Wilson to Arizona to give a talk and a workshop. I wanted to make Thursday a Finn day, so we took him to see the new film of The Dead, which he loved because it reminded him so much of Dublin. We went to a vegetarian restaurant that night which one of our group recommended, but afterwards Bob asked me to take him back to the hamburger joint we had enjoyed the day before. That night Bob came over to my house and we had a raucous Finn session enhanced by Guinness Stout.

Also, Bobby has responded on Bluesky to my post from the other day, reminding everyone that the Kickstarter for Tales of Illuminatus! #3 expires on June 22.  Bobby says, "Hoping to get those contributor numbers up :))) If you have $3 and want to see the series continue, do please hit us up!"

UPDATE: Also, happy Bloomsday to my readers. 

Mr. Campbell noticed, too, and posted an early drawing on Bluesky:

Bobby says, "HAPPY BLOOMSDAY!

"He proves by algebra that Hamlet's grandson is Shakespeare's grandfather and that he himself is the ghost of his own father.”

"(My first Joyce based artwork circa 2005)"

If you click on the drawing on Bluesky, you get a secret message! Bobby is too clever for me, I don't even know how to do secret messages on this blog. 

'The Classical Style' reading group, week four

 Frédéric Chopin

2. Theories of Form 

By ERIC WAGNER
Special guest blogger

This parenthetical passage on page 34 really intrigued me when I first read The Classical Style in 1991:  

 (The greater the composer, the larger the terms of his control over the significance of his ideas, even when the range of his conception is deliberately narrowed: that is why Chopin must be considered in the company of the greatest in spite of the limitations of genre and medium that he imposed upon  himself.) 

I started playing string bass in fourth grade, and I tended to value composers who composed orchestral music since I got to play their music in orchestras. I started playing piano in third grade, but bass quickly became my main instrument, and I never played any Chopin on piano. 

In 1995 Charles Rosen’s The Romantic Generation came out, and it floored me. I remember that one sentence from The Classical Style, and roughly one third of Rosen’s large new book made clear why he considered Chopin “in the company of the greatest.” Since 1995 I have learned to love Chopin’s music, and I have come to completely agree with Mr. Rosen. 

Rosen frequently mentions Donald Francis Tovey (1875-1940) and Heinrich Schenker (1868-1935). I had heard music major friends mention Schenker in the 1980’s, but I don’t think I heard of Tovey until I read Kerman’s The Beethoven Quartets. Kerman and Rosen both had a ton of respect for Tovey’s writings on music. Kerman wrote a wonderful tribute “Tovey’s Beethoven” available in Kerman’s Write All These Down. Tovey has become less popular with younger musicologists. As Rosen mentions in this chapter, the arguments can get very nasty. Ethan Iverson quoted Sayre’s Law that “"Academic politics is the most vicious and bitter form of politics, because the stakes are so low." Despite Kerman’s love of Tovey’s writing, he included a famous nasty attack on Tovey in his Norton Critical Score of Mozart’s Piano Concerto in C major, K. 503 (#25) along with a famous Tovey essay on that concerto. 

I enjoyed Jan Swafford biography of Beethoven, but something seemed missing to me. About halfway through I noticed that, although he frequently mentioned Kerman and Rosen, Tovey did not appear in the bibliography or the index. Swafford only mentions Tovey once in a dismissive footnote. The decline in Tovey’s reputation seems to have happened because post-Rosen musicologists tend to overemphasize the similarities between different motives in a piece of music (in my opinion). Tovey emphasized caution in this regard (as do Rosen and Kerman). In Tovey’s long analysis of the Hammerklavier Piano Sonata, he writes: 

The movements of this Sonata, and of Op. 110, show a subtle and elusive relation in their main themes. Such subtleties ought not to be imputed to classical sonatas without very cogent evidence; when people see more than is there they will be very unlikely to see all that is there. But the evidence, both         internal and external, is quite adequate here. 

                    - A Companion to Beethoven’s Pianoforte Sonatas, pg. 221 

Jeff Riggenbach interviews Timothy Leary

Jeff Riggenbach

Reason magazine has a 1977 interview with Timothy Leary. It was carried out by Jeff Riggenbach, a libertarian who was interested in some of the same revisionist historians that interested Robert Anton Wilson (see this earlier post.)

This is from the period when Leary was claiming that Bob Dylan is a pernicious  influence on the nation's youth, and it's interesting to see how Leary responds when Riggenbach presses him:

LEARY: Well, sure that's a metaphor. And anytime I use a metaphor, it's a risky operation. Metaphors are like forward passes. Anytime I say anything in terms of symbols I expect I'm wrong half the time, or wait long enough and I'll be right, or if you're right now you'll be wrong or left tomorrow—maybe left. So I won't defend that metaphor. But it got you thinking.

REASON: It certainly did.

LEARY: And I see ideas not as heavy, static concepts, but as electric charges and if someone can prove me wrong I'm the first one to be delighted because that means some signal I sent out got whacked back and jolted me. That's what I want you to do.

Here is my Riggenbach obituary. 

'Tales of Illuminatus' Kickstarter ends soon

 

I want to take a moment to remind everyone that the Kickstarter for the Bobby Campbell-Todd Purse comic book opus Tales of Illuminatus #3 will end on June 22. Bobby says, "The Kickstarter campaign officially ends on June 22nd, at which point the discounted pre-order prices will no longer be available, but we'll take late pledges right up until the book goes to press in the Summer :)))"

So yeah, you can still buy it after the Kickstarter campaign ends, but the bargain packages will be gone. For example, the $42 "MGMT SPECIAL!" I opted for provides the comic book, a trade paperback of the first three issues, a Michael Johnson zine discussing the series, three separate music releases, a video game and a PDF of Michael's zine. (If $42 is too much, packages and offers start at $3).

More here. 

Is 'Pale Fire' a 'lost father' of hypertext documents?

 

Pale Fire, Vladimir Nabokov's 1962 novel, is an unusual work that consists largely of footnotes to a long poem. We did an online reading group for the book back in 2018, partially because of the influence the book had on Robert Anton Wilson's novel, The Widow's Son, which makes extensive use of footnotes. (Scroll down the right side of this page for the reading group.)

The Boing Boing website has a piece by Ellsworth Toohey reporting that a new paper says that Nabokov was ahead of his time:

"Rowberry maps 504 explicit links inside the novel — notes pointing to other notes, an index pointing only to notes — and finds Kinbote's vain cross-references uncannily modern. His self-serving self-indexing, Rowberry writes, resembles 'Search Engine Optimization and inserting unnecessary keywords into an index.' Nabokov built some of the web's worst habits decades before the web."

More here. 

RAW, the 'Wonkette' obituary

 While I knew that Robert Anton Wilson had a New York Times obituary, after he died in 2007, I only recently learned about the obituary penned by Ken Layne that appeared  on the Wonkette website.

As you can see, it focuses on Wilson's brand on libertarianism. Layne certainly seems familiar with RAW: "Wilson was a cult writer's cult writer with the kind of fans who re-read his Cosmic Trigger and Illuminatus! series as annual ritual."

I wouldn't say every year for me, but "often" would  fit!

'Osiris is a black god!'

An illustration of Osiris from the Wikipedia article. The caption says, "Osiris was sometimes depicted with black skin, symbolizing the underworld deities and fertility of the Nile floodplain." Creative Commons illustration by Eternal Space. Source. 

One of the most mysterious sentences (at least to me) sentences in Illuminatus! is this one: "Anybody who wants to go to the trouble can find out, for instance, that the 'secret' of the Eleusinian Mysteries was the words whispered to the novice after he got the magic mushroom, 'Osiris is a black god!' "

In his latest Substack newsletter, Overweening Generalist, Michael Johnson writes about the phrase, sharing his considerable research into Robert Anton Wilson's work. He convinces me that, at least in part, the phrase traces back to an Aleister Crowley passage.