#281

Hey hey! Album Week 2022! We're committing, dear reader, and I feel pretty good about it. Last Album Week, the year 2019, my relationship with music was only beginning to thaw after a fraught icelock. Grim, grim, a bad week, a bad time in my heart and brain. Since then, I have felt my way back to music as of old, a healing process I shall attempt to chronicle in some fashion throughout the week. Let the healing continue. 

Now then! What album shall I discuss today? I don't even know! Let me get another cup of coffee and mull it over. 

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In 2011, EMI released an album of  Leopold Stokowski's Bach transcriptions in their American Artistry Series. The title of this disc is Bach by Stokowski, composed of recordings made in the late 1957 and '58, and remastered and released in 1997.

In 1940, Disney released Fantasia--sort of--the Wikipedia article is worth a readthrough. Maybe I'm biased, but it is extremely fascinating stuff by my lights. The important takeaways as far as is relevant to Bach, by Stokowski, is that Stokowski conducted the musical score for that musical film as well as using some of his own transcriptions and abridgments; most relevantly, Bach's "Toccata & Fugue in D minor". The 1990 film release, basis for the 1991 home release, which I used to watch on videocassette practically every single day of my life from the ages of two to four, featured a restoration of those recordings, as opposed to the 1977 rerelease, which was rerecorded in its entirety by Irwin Kostal (seriously, read that wiki. It's a whole story).

My favorite section in Fantasia is and always was the first, the abstract animations set to Bach's "Toccata & Fugue in D minor", followed in my heart by the prehistoric tale set to Igor Stravinsky's "Rite of Spring". Stravinsky understandably hated what Stokowski did with his piece, but I stand by it as an effort towards a cohesive film.

All this to say, the last track on Bach by Stokowski is "Toccata & Fugue in D minor", last as in Fantasia it is first, and by 1957 is just ever so subtly different in tone and transcription than in 1939, which for me, is hugely significant and fascinating. And it was looking for other versions of "Toccata & Fugue in D minor" that I found Bach by Stokowski.

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This set of recordings, found through Apple Music, whose strictures and cost among its competitors I have bent to as the most amenable to my personal style (which is against such services in the first place, but, needs must concede), is what truly brought me back to feeling like myself in the liminal space of listening to music. 

When I am truly at my lowest, it is classical I need. More precisely and usefully, symphonic music and chamber music. But for a long time, Bach wasn't really a big part of my listening pool simply because I was leaning too heavily on a combination of listening to Beethoven's "Symphony no. 7" as much as possible, propensity to seek more new music out as a balance to that, and the feeling that Bach, along with Mozart, are overutilized and overrated (why Beethoven was exempt from this ruling is a personal thing--I really need that symphony). I'm over this now. But I didn't immerse myself deeply in Bach until last winter, when I started listening to each track on Bach by Stokowski every single morning on my way to work and on my way back, and also at work when I could get away with it.

The track list, annotated, is as follows. All pieces transcribed by Stokowski from Johann Sebastian Bach excepting 5, which is a Stokowski transcription of a Bach transcription of Martin Luther:

Passacaglia & Fugue in C minor, BWV 582: This shit is so good. My blood gallops just thinking about it. The last four minutes are just some of the most fucking incredible minutes of music ever. I am serious. I could break this whole baby down minute by minute is how good it is, but it's not specific track week, it's album week. Anyway kicking off with this piece is almost unwise, it's so epic and full and gorgeous, but what the hell. This piece is insanely great to walk a mile to all alone at four in the morning, and that is mostly how I have taken it in, but it is also excellent driving music.

Komm Süßer Tod (Come Sweet Death), BWV478: Man, who ain't been there?

Bourrée from Suite No. 2 in A minor, BWV 807 (The English Suites, BWV 806-11): I always think this piece is going to annoy me from how it starts but if I just hang on like forty seconds everything turns out all right, and then it's very beautiful.

Violin Partita No. 1 in B Minor,  BWV 1002 (Sarabande): Like track 1, this piece is very exciting once it builds up. A big favorite, very full.

Ein' feste Burg ist unser Gott (A Mighty Fortress is Our God) BWV 80?: I have a lot of problems with Luther, including even the lyrics to this hymn, but the music itself is not one my problems with Luther. Absolutely beautiful music, twice-strained to perfection like the finest clear spirits.

Christmas Oratorio, BWV 248 (Sinfonia): This piece is easy to get annoyed by, so it's smart to save it for a few listens at one part of the year.

"Little" Fugue in G minor, BWV 578: This is what we call a banger, without much more explanation. Fuckin' rock 'n roll shit.

Orchestral Suite No. 3 in D major, BWV1068 (Air [Air on a G String] BWV 10066-9): Not much to say about this piece, but it's a good 'un. You can listen to it whenever.

Mein Jesu, was vor Seelenweh (My Jesus, What Agony of the Soul), BWV 487: Takes patience to get the reward, and it's not for every day, but this is a beautiful peace when the mood hits you right. 

Violin Partita No. 3 in E, BWV 1006 (Preludio): Maybe they just put this in to let you breathe before the T&F, but it is a fine piece in its own right--just that by this time, my body is ready for the finale. 

Toccata & Fugue in D minor, BWV 565: Objectively one of the greatest things ever made. I read or heard that a dude tripping very heavily was asked by machine elves/aliens to justify human existence and he said that all he could think of were the works of J.S. Bach. Bearing this piece in mind alone, that's good enough for me. Dude said it was good enough for the elf/alien, and I believe it. I've listened to this one piece of Bach's--I mean, listened, my whole self bent on it, brain churning and frothing--as arranged by Stokowski probably one thousand times and I will never get tired of it. 

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My love for classical music burns exceeding bright, but the "classical community" is thickly thronged with the kind of viruses it's only possible to find in petri dishes. These assholes are not born, they are forged by a culture that doesn't give a fuck how bloody their diamonds or what goes extinct where as long as they have the most money and the last word. Some people believe Bach should never be trascribed, recorded, or performed except for on the pipe organ as "originally intended", but while acknowledging that these people are entitled to their feelings and opinions, I assert that anyone has the right to do whatever they want with music whoever might like it or not. It's music. You really have to be some kind of perverse to tell people that they shouldn't make or listen to or like music because of some made-up standard that you can't mathematically justify. Music is real, opinions are fake. Music is useful, opinions are useless. Music is free, opposition to music being free is slavish. Feel what you want, also listen to what you want, and don't listen to what you don't want, but don't waste my bandwidth telling me I need to be more like you, or that the world ought to conform to how you think it ought to sound. I won't, and it won't. Suck your own dick and praise the flavor however much you feel the need to, just leave me out of it.

The following Ludwig van Beethoven quote, perhaps inelegantly translated, perhaps victim to the man's own strangeness, is my favorite of his, so far as I have found, and runs as follows:

"Music is the single, the immaterial entry into a higher world of knowledge which envelops man but which he cannot understand...what the soul receives through music through the senses is spiritual revelation incarnate..."

It is my firm conviction that he is perfectly correct in this, and therefore, I contend that music cannot be wrong of itself, whatever issue you can take with it personally or intellectually.

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Ok, think that'll about do it. The only other news I have for you is that I did indeed finish that book I was reading: The Stone of Heaven: Unearthing the Secret History of Imperial Green Jade, by Adrian Levy and Cathy Scott-Clark. Hell of a ride. My friend Aiden gave me The Gospel According to Tony Soprano: An Unauthorized Look Into the Soul of TV's Top Mob Boss and His Family, by Chris Seay. He might have meant it as a combination joke gift and symbol of appreciation for me, since I often casually pontificate on the spiritual value of The Sopranos and Tony in particular, but it's pretty good. I could fight Seay on a lot of stuff in there but he also gets the show, which is very valuable, and seems like a relatively open-minded guy, which is even more valuable, especially in a pastor. I am also reading Paradise Lost, by John Milton, which is a surprisingly heavy metal poem. Someone should do a music video. But a long one, something like maybe Fantasia.

Oh! Oh, man! Back in the nineties I got the second book in The Seventh Tower series, Castle, by Garth Nix, in a Scholastic Fun Pack (those things absolutely rocked my freaking socks, more on them someday). On the strength of the writing, characterization, and worldbuilding of that one-sixth of the story, I read that little paperback to a fine wornness. Only much later did I acquire the third book, Aenir, and later still, the first book, The Fall, each of which I read just a couple of times. Later I acquired the last three books (Above the Veil, Into Battle, and The Violet Keystone) bound in one hardcover, which I believe I mentioned in the summation of a haul here in the blog. Well, I finally brought myself to read it to the end earlier this month, and am pleased and relieved to report that it was absolutely awesome all the way through, so cool, so beautiful, so well-conceived and awesome, worth the twenty-year-plus journey. Wow. It is simply amazing to be alive and to continue living. Wow. Good shit.

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Day one! Woop woop! See y'all tomorrow with something pretty different. Unless a minor change I just made in the laptop causes everything to crash again. By now, who gives a fuck. All the passion in my breast regarding this eventuality has burnt to a smudge.

--JL