Dark Horses vs. War Horses

The classical music you REALLY want! Free for all readers

(The inimitable John Marks is back to, Milton-like, explain the works of musical Gods to mere mortals. I invite all ACF readers to enjoy and comment — jb)

QOBUZ Part 1 Playlist:

https://play.qobuz.com/playlist/27468951

I am in favor of cultural literacy—at least in theory. In practice, though, problems can crop up.

“Cultural literacy” is the notion, fostered by thinkers such as Allan Bloom (The Closing of the American Mind), former Education Secretary William J. Bennett (The Book of Virtues), and E.D. Hirsch (Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know), that adequately-informed participation in a democratic society requires a basic familiarity with our shared cultural legacy, as much as it requires familiarity with the mechanics of our system of government.

I would stress the personal benefits, as well as the societal ones. Bad things, trying things, happen to people all the time, and our common culture—from the Book of Job through Hamlet through Richard Strauss’s Four Last Songs—allows us to tap into a larger community of fellow-sufferers, models, and archetypes.

The riches of culture—drama, painting, dance, poetry, music—enable us better to cope with life when times are bad, and more fully to enjoy life when times are good.

Therefore, the riches of culture should not be
the property of only the economically rich.

So far, so good.

However, the problems that crop up are at least threefold.

First, people inevitably will disagree about the contents of the minimally-required box-load of our “common” culture. You aren’t likely to get any two music lovers to agree about the 10 Greatest Rock Albums of All Time. Good luck getting consensus as to the 100 Most Important Works of Concert Music.

From the outset, you’ll get at least as much disagreement as agreement about what is both “great” and “common” (“common,” in this instance, meaning held in common, rather than ordinary).

Second, apart from the incontestable greats—such as King David, Bach, Mozart, Shakespeare, and T.S. Eliot—inclusion in someone’s proposed canon of cultural literacy will at times be the result of a self-perpetuating cycle of mass exposure.

This is often related to factors other than ultimate quality. If I were to have to choose a musical example of this phenomenon of popularity disproportionate to quality, I need look no further than Aaron Copland’s Fanfare for the Common Man (or, the Eagles song “Hotel California”).

BTW, upon learning that the piece of patriotic rah-rah Copland had been commissioned to write was to have its first performance days before March 15, Copland decided to dedicate the piece to the American Taxpayer—the “Common Man.” (During WWII, Income-Tax Returns were due on March 15.)

Third, once a work or creator is admitted to the canon of cultural literacy, he, she, or it risks being reduced to those elements (or the element) that are expected to “show up on the test,” so to speak. This is likely the most serious problem.

There appear to be two kinds of students: Those who are engaged by the subject matter, and those who are only interested in passing the course:

“John Coltrane? Who??? Oh, yeah! ‘Sheets of sound’! Next question!”

Multiple-choice testing only adds insult to injury. Reducing an unusually complex artist’s entire career to a three-word catchphrase does not enhance comprehension; it impedes it. However, that is what happens when 900 years of Western music account for less than 10% of the class time in a typical “Western Civ” survey course.

Thinking about the pieces that symphony orchestras across the United States can usually be counted on to play over and over again, it seems to me that the over-and-over-again-ness is the result of both Supply Issues and Demand Issues. Keeping a symphony orchestra up and running is an expensive game to play. Ticket sales are insufficient; you have to depend on the generosity of donors.

Furthermore, getting most orchestras (meaning, orchestras at nearly all levels of proficiency) up to speed on a demanding piece they have never played before (or, at least not played in many years) requires more rehearsal time than does playing again a familiar piece that had been programmed a few years previously.

To take one example: Most professional orchestras have Debussy’s tone poem La mer (“The Sea”) comfortably under their fingers. And, it is even possible that some players in the top-tier US orchestras will have their parts pretty much memorized.

Whereas, Jean Sibelius’ rarely-played tone poem The Swan of Tuonela will require more rehearsal time. Furthermore, there is an exposed and lengthy cor anglais solo. (Cor anglais means “English Horn,” a reed-woodwind cousin of the oboe.) The cor anglais represents the voice of a mystical swan that is floating around in the Realm of the Dead, as described in Finnish mythology.

So, your local orchestra’s Program Committee has to choose between two tone poems. In both tone poems, musical expressions of the idea or concept of water, in the form of an ocean or of lakes, significantly figure. Perhaps nine times out of ten, the Program Committee will choose Debussy’s War Horse rather than Sibelius’s Dark Horse.

Why? Because they see that there is no Demand for The Swan of Tuonela; and even worse, creating a Supply will cost more money than a re-do of Debussy’s piece will cost. Not to mention (he said, as an apophasis): If there are any flubs in the live performances of the Debussy piece, they likely will not be as front-and-center as those risky cor anglais solos Sibelius wrote.

The sad part of the above is: I think that if a mid-tier regional orchestra’s patrons actually got a chance to hear a live performance of this neglected Dark Horse, during the Intermission, as they quaff “affordable” Pinot Grigio (that was sold to them at an extortionate mark-up), they will say to each other, “Wow! I had never even heard of that Sibelius piece, but it was so beautiful.”

Our Fearless Leader (yes, that really was a Rocky & Bullwinkle allusion!) Jack B. asked me to come up with a list of some of the orchestral War Horses that keep showing up in symphony orchestras’ next-season announcements. And then, for each War Horse, JB asked me to recommend a “delightful new discovery” Dark Horse alternate choice.

Here’s my list:

War Horse: Ludwig van Beethoven: Symphony 9, “Choral”

Dark Horse: Edward Elgar: The Dream of Gerontius

War Horse: Antonín Dvořák: Symphony 9, “From the New World”

Dark Horse: Roy Harris: Symphony 3

War Horse: W.A. Mozart: Piano Concerto 21, “Elvira Madigan”

Dark Horse Dmitri Shostakovich: Piano Concerto 2

War Horse: Pyotr Tchaikovsky: Violin Concerto

Dark Horse: Alexander Glazunov: Violin Concerto

War Horse: George Gershwin: Rhapsody in Blue

Dark Horse: Darius Milhaud: Le Bœuf sur le toit

War Horse: Gustav Holst: The Planets

Dark Horse: Arthur Bliss: A Colour Symphony

Let’s proceed…

1. Ludwig van Beethoven: Symphony 9, “Choral” (1824)

Dark Horse: Edward Elgar: The Dream of Gerontius, Op. 38 (1900)

Of course, it was always going to be a toss-up whether Beethoven’s Symphony 5, or his Choral Symphony 9 would be my top-of-the-chart “War Horse” pick.

My decision was influenced, first of all, by US orchestral-performance data that seemed to indicate that, in the US at least, Symphony 9 gets programmed slightly more often than Symphony 5.

Also, the Choral Symphony’s massive scale, and its last-movement “Ode to Joy” for vocal soloists and chorus are, in some sense, parallel or analogous to Edward Elgar’s The Dream of Gerontius.

Finally, “Ode to Joy” was the music for an automobile commercial (for Audi) featuring a “flash mob” of Car Crash-Test Dummies. Singing “Ode to Joy” in German. How could I resist?

In all candor, my first pick for the Dark Horse “delightful discovery” alternative to Beethoven’s Symphony 9 was US Avant-garde composer Morton Feldman’s Rothko Chapel (1971).

Feldman (1926 - 1987) wrote that piece of music for one specific room: A privately-funded interfaith chapel in Texas that had been designed to house and display massive paintings by Latvian-American Abstract Expressionist Mark Rothko (1903 - 1970).

However, as lovely as it is, Feldman’s Rothko Chapel is no match for the Choral Symphony, at least in terms of musical forces, running time, or sheer magnitude. That said, what those two works have in common is an unblinking focus on the Last Things. My “fix” is to append Rothko Chapel to the very end of the total Qobuz playlist.

I admit: Edward Elgar’s The Dream of Gerontius can be a bit overwhelming.

It is not too far off-the-mark to say that Gerontius is like-unto trying to set Dante’s entire Divine Comedy to 95 minutes of fin-de-siecle ultra-Romantic orchestral music. Therefore, the Qobuz playlist per se will include only the Gerontius Prelude, the Priest’s Blessing, and the Angel’s Farewell. (Those titles alone should tell you a lot.)

Gerontius is Elgar’s setting of Catholic theologian and churchman John Henry Cardinal Newman’s mystical poem that depicts the death of an ordinary fellow, and then reveals what happens to his soul in the afterlife. It might be a Musicological Urban Legend, but supposedly, earlier, Antonín Dvořák had been intrigued by the idea of composing his own setting of Gerontius.

But the Musicological Urban Legend goes on to claim that Dvořák’s publisher sternly warned him that Newman’s text was “Too Catholic.”

Please, please, please, do not “write off” Gerontius, until you have heard the three tracks at the top of the Qobuz playlist. I think that today’s audiences, by and large, will listen past the theological and apologetic texts and subtexts, so they can just revel (or wallow) in the orchestral lushness, and in the vocal drama.

Famous operatic tenor Ben Heppner’s 2008 Sir Colin Davis/BSO singing of the character Gerontius’s line, “Some Angel, Jesu! such as came to Thee in Thine own agony” remains the single most electrifying vocal utterance I have ever heard live and unamplified, in my entire life. I get tears in my eyes, writing that.

So, please, listen to the excerpts. And then, if you are intrigued (and, if you have 95 minutes or so to spare), please dig in to the whole thing.

BTW, I corresponded with (but never met) British motoring journalist L.K.J. Setright. I had real respect for him. He wrote about cars, but he was also a music critic. He also was an observant Orthodox Jew.

LKJ memorably wrote that Elgar’s The Dream of Gerontius was the only thing that could turn him into a Christian—but only for about 90 minutes or so.

What a brave and honest thing to say!

Here are YouTube embeds of the musical selections that are on the main Qobuz list—but not necessarily by the same performers. As per the usual, the YouTubes I choose to embed in these articles are almost always of performances that are not available in Qobuz’ library.

BTW, if you want to listen to the entirety of the Gerontius that is on the Qobuz Playlist, just click on the album-cover icon of the album that the top-tier Qobuz excerpts are from. That album is of Sir Colin Davis, the London Symphony Orchestra, David Rendell, Anne Sophie von Otter, and Alistair Miles in a live performance from 2005.

Also, all the Colin Davis 2005 Gerontius tracks are linked to, at the end of the short-form Qobuz playlist.

The following YouTubes are (obviously) unauthorized audio excerpts from the 2008 Sir Colin Davis/BSO revival. (I was in the audience for both the Thursday-night and the Saturday-night performances. I was and am unworthy. Unmerited Grace; as the Lutherans would say.)

Prelude with score:

Finley: Priest

Connolly: Angel

2. Antonín Dvořák: Symphony 9, “From the New World” (1893)

Dark Horse: Roy Harris: Symphony 3 (1939)

Antonín Dvořák spent one of the precious few untroubled times of his adult life vacationing in the Czech community in Spillville, Iowa. Dvořák was in America both teaching and conducting. Dvořák’s Symphony 9 was influenced not only by what he heard in America, but also by what he saw.

Somehow, using the European tools of classical composition and orchestration, Dvořák managed convincingly to convey the emotions that arise from beholding America’s “Wide-Open Spaces.” The audience at Dvorak’s 9^th’s 1893 Carnegie Hall première was totally ecstatic.

In 1978, it was reported that the “From the New World” symphony had been programmed more often than any other symphony in Royal Festival Hall in London. And, if that were not enough, Astronaut Neil Armstrong took a mix tape including Dvořák Symphony 9 along during the Apollo 11 mission (the first Moon landing, in 1969).

Roy Harris’ Third Symphony is the greatest piece of American orchestral music that hardly anyone (today) seems to know about. Just as being anthologized becomes a self-fulfilling cycle, falling off the radar screen makes it that much harder to get back on again.

Part of the reason might be that parts or passages of Harris’ third symphony are unusually demanding to play in terms of rhythm and ensemble, even for a top-tier orchestra. With a playing time of only about 20 minutes, Harris’ Third Symphony is awesomely concise.

Through-composed, it proceeds by organic rather than formal development. And, most importantly, however it happened, Roy Harris got access to the Magic Formula for Musically Conveying America’s Wide-Open Spaces. (Perhaps because his wife was Canadian?)

But enough of that—one listen to its first three minutes should hook you. Harris’ Third Symphony is a wonderful example of what I call “Non-Toxic Musical Modernism.”

3. W. A. Mozart: Piano Concerto 21 (1785), “Elvira Madigan”

Dark Horse: Shostakovich: Piano Concerto 2 (1957)

In terms of being a musical “All-Rounder,” it would be hard to out-round Mozart. Although his father was the most famous violin teacher of his time (his violin-pedagogy book is still in print), and Mozart was proficient on the violin, the piano was Mozart’s instrument. But no one-trick pony, he. In addition to music for piano, Mozart wrote sacred music, operas, concert arias and songs, symphonies, concertos for instruments other than piano, and chamber music.

I think it’s rather impossible to get a complete view of Mozart without taking the Enlightenment into account. My little witticism is that, as a true Child of the Enlightenment, Mozart wanted to “Return to Nature.” But, of course, only in the most sophisticated ways imaginable.

To put that into context: Over and above (or aside from) Marie Antoinette’s deep inner need to dress up as a poverty-level rustic shepherdess, I think we can all agree that Bach’s music was more “complex” than Mozart’s. And, after Bach’s death in 1750, Bach’s complexity immediately transmuted into obscurity.

By the mid-1770s, when France was bankrupting itself to help we, the Colonies, get a divorce from England (the financial stress of which was, in my view, the Sine Qua Non cause of the French Revolution), normal regular people in Europe just wanted to have their anxieties soothed. And, they wanted to be soothed, a lot more than they wanted to be challenged in any intellectual way.

The slow movement of Mozart’s 21^st piano concerto (to write three piano concerti is praiseworthy; to write more than twenty is mind-boggling) completely fills that bill. Mozart’s 21^st piano concerto’s sophistication is disguised as simplicity. Which makes me think of the witticism that is often attributed to my mentor Boris Goldovsky’s piano teacher Artur Schnabel:

Mozart is too easy for amateurs, but too hard for professionals.

An Amazon delivery truck could metaphorically drive between the right-hand and the left-hand parts of Piano Concerto 21’s second-movement solo part.

But that, which, in the hands of a lesser composer, might have come across as a mistake; in Mozart’s hands, it makes so much sense, that one is tempted to ask why nobody had thought of it sooner.

The Swedish anti-war, art-house movie Elvira Madigan (1967) told the tragic, sadly true story of a 19^th-century slack-rope circus performer of that same (stage) name, who died the victim in a murder-suicide.

The Deutsche Grammophon LP of Géza Anda’s Mozart Piano Concerto 21 performance that had been used in the film soundtrack was reissued with a still photograph from the film as its cover art. That reissued LP was so immediately popular that, ever since then, the film’s name has been linked to Mozart’s 21^st piano concerto. Which is a magnificent work; and therefore, often overexposed.

When most music listeners think of Shostakovich, they think of gloomy or anguished music that was written in the shadow of Stalin’s menacing critical glower. Furthermore, much of Shostakovich’s music was written during wartime. Yes… but.

In much the same way as Mahler worshipped Bach, I think that Shostakovich aspired to reach Mozartean heights. Which I do think Shostakovich achieved (at least at times); but, unquestionably, in his second piano concerto.

As far as I am concerned, if Mozart were suddenly to reappear, and take his place in the audience of a performance of Shostakovich’s second piano concerto, during the slow movement, Mozart might just have to take out his hankie. (Or, Mozart might want to whip out his cell phone, and start searching for a good Copyright lawyer.)

(That was just my little attempt at humor. There are no “stolen notes” from Mozart’s “Elvira Madigan” concerto in Shostakovich 2 that I can discern. However… the exact same yearning for “the simplest elegance possible” is very plain to me.)

I also think that parts of the first movement of Shostakovich’s second piano concerto might have been the inspiration for parts of John Williams’s score for the first-released Star Wars movie. Rilly. Just listen!

(As a pianist, John Williams is solidly in the pedagogical tradition of the St. Petersburg Conservatory—the “Russian School” of pianism(!!!). Williams’ teacher Nadia Reisenberg knew Rachmaninoff; and Rachmaninoff publicly praised her playing.)

The second/slow movement of Shostakovich’s second piano concerto employs the device of triplet notes in the left hand versus (mostly) half notes, quarter notes, and eighth notes in the right hand. That reminds me of the “Four beats in one hand, but three beats in the other” rhythmic complexity that Brahms built into his solo-piano Op. 118, No. 2. Which is one of Brahms’s last works.

Have you ever tried to play the piano with 3/4 with one hand, and 4/4 with the other? I have; and I have always failed.

It has crossed my mind that one reason for Shostakovich’s second piano concerto’s undeserved obscurity might be that it is insufficiently complex and insufficiently challenging in terms of piano technique. Therefore, it isn’t much of a “knock-’em-dead” virtuoso showpiece.

It’s merely some of the loveliest music anyone ever wrote, that’s all.

4. Tchaikovsky: Violin Concerto, Op. 35 (1878)

Dark Horse: Alexander Glazunov: Violin Concerto, Op. 82 (1904)

Tchaikovsky’s violin concerto is technically demanding; and, it ends with a bang.

I think that “Ending with a bang” often results in a piece of music’s getting more applause than it actually deserves. I think it’s a simple matter of, loud music energizes people, and then they want to join in on the noise.

So, yes, I really do think that Tchaikovsky’s violin concerto does not deserve its place in concert music’s Pantheon. When you get right down to it, Tchaikovsky’s violin concerto is a tone poem about a rustic fair, complete with half-drunk peasants starting and stopping and falling all over each other, as they try to dance in a circle.

Peter Bruegel the Elder, The Wedding Dance (1566); Detroit Museum of Art.

Doubtest thou me? Read the contemporary reviews! A famous example:

“…[A] finale that transfers us to the brutal and wretched jollity of a
Russian holiday. We see plainly the savage, vulgar faces; we hear
curses, we smell vodka.”

Ironically enough, Glazunov’s violin concerto was given its first performance by none other than Leopold Auer, the rather unenthusiastic first-but-not-final dedicatee of… Tchaikovsky’s violin concerto.

(Auer famously had declined to give the first performance of Tchaikovsky’s violin concerto. Tchaikovsky, thereupon, was unsmiling.)

I think that Glazunov’s violin concerto has the same Russian sentimentality; but, with a bit more musical depth, and less musical corniness. Also, there’s no shortage of technical sparkle in Glazunov’s score, especially in the first-movement solo cadenza.

I probably should mention that my initial leaning for this Dark Horse was Samuel Barber’s sublime Violin Concerto. But, a look at the performance stats shows that today, Barber’s violin concerto is a lot more popular than it was 30 years ago. Therefore, it is not really a Dark Horse. My favorite recording is that by the (perhaps underappreciated) Elmar Oliveira.

And, on the subject of a work’s not ending with a bang, I think that the worthy violin concerto that has suffered most from that phenomenon, has been Antonín Dvořák’s.

Dvořák’s violin concerto does not end with a bang; so, the audience applauds more quietly. Then, the risk is that the hosting orchestra’s “Bored” will therefrom draw an erroneous conclusion, that the patrons had loved Dvořák’s concerto less than they loved Tchaikovsky’s. (The seeming typo was intentional.)

5. George Gershwin: Rhapsody in Blue (1924)

Dark Horse: Darius Milhaud: Le Bœuf sur le toit, Op. 58 (1920)

Rhapsody in Blue is great music, as well as uniquely American music. New parents should be given a copy of it, along with their child’s birth certificate. However, Rhapsody in Blue also might be a teensy-weensy bit overexposed.

I understand that United Airlines still uses Rhapsody in Blue as a core part of its branding efforts. Even though that work, which United first licensed in the 1980s at an annual fee of $300,000 (in 1980s dollars!), is today, in the Public Domain.

For any orchestra that wants to offer a piece of music with jazz roots that has not (yet) been featured in an airline commercial seen on television, let me humbly suggest Darius Milhaud’s Le Bœuf sur le toit (literally, “The Ox (or Steer) on the Roof”).

Le Bœuf sur le toit is a short piece (20 minutes or so) for small orchestra. Le Bœuf sur le toit was later used as the score for a ballet of the same name. Darius Milhaud had spent two years in Brazil, in the French diplomatic service during World War One. He really soaked up Brazilian folk and popular music. In Le Boeuf, Milhaud borrows from more than a dozen Brazilian tunes.

However, Milhaud’s slightly off-kilter, quirky, and very memorable nine-measure opening motif (which recurs throughout the piece) is entirely of his own devising. Here’s a piano reduction of the opening theme:

At one point, Milhaud had hopes of getting Charlie Chaplain interested in using Milhaud’s new piece as music for one of Chaplin’s silent comedy films. (I am not sure how that would have worked, in actual 1920s practice. Surely not via crank-up acoustical 78rpm record players. Perhaps as a piano two- or four-hands score, to be played by “silent-movie pianists”?) For whatever reason, or no reason, that never happened.

It seems that my childhood memories, of hearing the opening motif of Le Bœuf sur le toit used in Warner Brothers Bugs-Bunny cartoons, were implanted by evil Thetans. But it sure sounds like cartoon music.

My first pick for this Dark Horse analog to mirror Rhapsody in Blue actually had been a different Milhaud jazz-inflected work, La Création du Monde (The Creation of the World). La Création du Monde also is a ballet score. The ballet tells the story of the creation of the world, according to African folk mythology.

I ended up with Le Bœuf rather than La Création because the Le Bœuf score uses the usual orchestral string sections. Whereas, the score for La Création only calls for four string players (2 violins; and 1 each, viola and cello), out of a total of 18 musicians.

Therefore, programming La Création du Monde (and, playing it as Milhaud intended it to be played) means that a lot of orchestral string players will be hanging around backstage (or wherever they hang around), waiting for the concerto and the big symphony that will take up the rest of the evening.

The General Managers of some orchestras just might say “Ixnay” to that.

(This one’s available on YouTube direct only, not embedded.)

6. Gustav Holst: The Planets, Op. 32 (1917)

Dark Horse: Arthur Bliss: A Colour Symphony, Op. 24 (1922)

One might speculate that Gustav Holst had sold his soul to the Devil, in return for a Satanic Guarantee that Holst would then write the orchestral suite that today, is recognized as one of the most accessible works of classical music for symphony orchestra. And perhaps, The Planets is simply the single most-accessible classical orchestral work.

(Hmmm… perhaps someone could write a modern or post-modern opera about “Satan Tempts Gustav Holst.” How strangely familiar! I think far worse things have been done in the name of Opera.)

I am sure that Richard Strauss’s “Sunrise” from Also Sprach Zarathustra (“Theme from 2001: A Space Odyssey”) has had more exposure. But the ubiquity of “Sunrise” does not seem to have translated into widespread love for Also Sprach Zarathustra as a complete work.

Whereas, with Holst’s The Planets, people listen to the whole thing. Of course, Holst’s “Jupiter” movement has taken on something of a life of its own. British semi-Glam band Mott the Hoople used Holst’s “Jupiter” as concert walk-on music, as heard on the 30^th-Anniversary reissue of their 1974 live album, and also on their 2013 live reunion album.

(My guess is that “Jupiter” might not have appeared on the original LP release of Mott the Hoople’s 1974 live album because The Planets was then still in Copyright, as a result of the many interim extensions that led up to the Copyright Act of 1976.)

Arthur Bliss (1891 – 1975) studied at the Royal College of Music, where he was influenced by the “modernists,” such as Ralph Vaughan Williams and… wait for it… Gustav Holst! Well!

World War One interrupted Bliss’s musical education. He served with distinction in France, but his brother Kennard was killed, which affected Bliss deeply.

After the war, Bliss was influenced by Ravel, Stravinsky, and the young French composers of Les Six. Bliss was a hard worker, and a prolific producer. In addition to concert works, he composed many works for films and ballet.

The famous English composer Edward Elgar invited the young Arthur Bliss to write a composition for a music festival to be held in 1922. Bliss decided to write a symphony, but he was a bit stuck for a theme—or even a mood.

Browsing the bookshelves at a friend’s house, Bliss took down a book about Heraldry, which is the study of Coats of Arms and so forth. In reading about traditional heraldry’s associations of certain colors with various objects or attributes (e.g., “Red—the colour of Rubies, Wine, Revelry, Furnaces, Courage and Magic”), Bliss found his inspiration.

There’s definitely something “cinematic” about Bliss’s style. My guess is that you could easily fool your music-loving friends into thinking that the movement “Red” from A Colour Symphony was a forgotten score from the pen of film-music supremo John Williams.

Indeed, Bliss wrote the film score for the UK’s first major-studio “talkie” science-fiction film, which was based upon H. G. Wells’ 1933 book The Shape of Things to Come. Which, full circle, was a decisive influence upon Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Co-script-author Arthur Clarke, whose 1951 short story “The Sentinel” was the basis for 2001, made Kubrick sit down and watch the entire Things to Come movie. (The movie title is different from the book title.)

That’s it for now, Kiddos! Any outrageous statements are entirely my own, and do not necessarily represent the opinions of Avoidable Contact’s management.

Part 2 will appear in about a week or two. But if you are hungering and thirsting, you can get a peek at the “Dark Horses” for Part 2, here.

Pax, Lux, et Veritas,

john

John Marks is a multidisciplinary generalist and a lifelong audio hobbyist. He was educated at Brown University and Vanderbilt Law School. He has worked as a music educator, recording engineer, classical-music record producer and label executive, and as a music and audio-equipment journalist. He was a columnist for The Absolute Sound, and also for Stereophile magazine. His consulting clients have included Grace Design, the University of the South (Sewanee, TN), Steinway & Sons, and the Estate of Jascha Heifetz.