Les Preludes

Franz Liszt was a long-lived Jimi Hendrix of the 19th century, a virtuoso of the piano instead of the six-string. Tinkling them ivory bones he made the ladies swoon and the men all want to be him. Then, as he lived past age 27, that temporal speedbump that proved too much for our Hendrix to handle, he matured as a composer. Nothing groundbreaking and genre-bending as, say, a Beethoven, Wagner and a Mahler, but he wrote for the masses. And the masses loved him.

Disappointed and disenchanted after six or seven years listening solely to grunge, I needed to cleanse the palate. Alice in Chains will do that to you. So I opted for as radical a shift as possible, not just 180 degrees, but 180 degrees into another spatial dimension. From the late-90s to somewhere in the mid-2000s, all I listened to was Classical Music. Capital C, capital M.

One of the first pieces of music to hook me was Liszt’s Les Preludes. Here, take a listen, and see if it grabs you, too.

Now, for the longest time, I had a hankering to play the main theme, the “Grand Theme” or “Majestic Theme” as it’s sometimes called, from Les Preludes with a full, modern, rock band. That’s the part you can hear at 2:33 and repeating at 14:54 in the above video. Don’t you think that would be neat? I’ve heard bands play Wagner, like Ride of the Valkyries, or Grieg’s In the Hall of the Mountain King (The Who did that, I believe), but I always thought this would be the tune to play.

Well, I heard Les Preludes at work a few days ago so I googled the music. Surprisingly difficult to find. But find it I did. At least, the chords for the Grand Theme. They are:

C – F!

F – Bb!

G – C!

Ab – F – C!

Ab – F – C!

But that didn’t sound quite right on my acoustic guitar. So I shifted everything down a step-and-a-half, and this resulted:

A – D!

D – G!

E – A!

F – D – A!

F – D – A!

Sounds awesome. Look at me, I still have goose bumps writing this.

Next: figure out the melodic runs up and down over the above mentioned chords …

To Be Continued …

Tolkien and Dickens

So, adult me discovered about fifteen years ago that I really enjoy reading Charles Dickens. A thousand years ago, back in high school, my class was assigned A Tale of Two Cities to read but I, either through laziness or indifference, decided to wing it and only read the Cliff Notes the night before the test. Think I got something like a B, but the incident rested heavily on my heart for many years. So much so that I decided it would be a good way to equilibrialize the karmic multiverse to finally read the book cover-to-cover on my daily train commutes into NYC.

I did, and relished it so much I may have actually kicked myself for faking it twenty years prior.

Recently I started reading a Dickens story every Thanksgiving. I did the Pickwick Papers, Great Expectations, and now I’m about a quarter through David Copperfield. I enjoy this new tradition of mine immensely.

Now, just a few nights ago I read the following passage and thought immediately of J.R.R. Tolkien. See if you can figure out why:

“Oh, what do you want?” grinned this old man, in a fierce, monotonous whine. “Oh, my eyes and limbs, what do you want? Oh, my lungs and liver, what do you want? Oh, goroo, goroo!”

I was so much dismayed by these words, and particularly by the repetition of the last unknown one, which was a kind of rattle in his throat, that I could make no answer; hereupon the old man, still holding me by the hair, repeated –

“Oh, what do you want? Oh, my eyes and limbs, what do you want? Oh, goroo!” – which he screwed out of himself with an energy that made his eyes start in his head.

“I wanted to know,” I said, trembling, “if you would buy a jacket.”

“Oh, let’s see the jacket!” cried the old man. “Oh, my heart on fire, show the jacket to us! Oh, my eyes and limbs, bring the jacket out!”

That’s right. Gollum.

Oh, goroo, goroo!

… a kind of rattle in his throat …

“show the jacket to us!”

I wonder: did a young Tolkien read David Copperfield (published in 1850) as a lad and did this scene subconsciously imprint itself upon his wondrously imaginative mind, till years and years later the poor pitiable creature once called Smeagol drew itself out upon the printed page, 87 years later in The Hobbit?

An interesting piece of literary archaeology, no?

N.B. Above scene occurs near the beginning of Chapter XIII, where young David decides to flee his degrading employment at Murdstone and Grinby’s to travel uplands to throw himself upon the mercy of his never-seen miserly spinster Aunt. David is all of ten years old.

What We Need; What I Need

“If He is what He claimed to be, a Savior, a Redeemer, then we have a virile Christ and a leader worth following in these terrible times; One Who will step into the breach of death, crushing sin, gloom and despair; a leader to Whom we can make totalitarian sacrifice without losing, but gaining freedom, and Whom we can love even unto death. We need a Christ today Who will make cords and drive the buyers and sellers from our new temples; Who will blast the unfruitful fig trees; Who will talk of crosses and sacrifices and Whose voice will be like the voice of a raging sea. But He will not allow us to pick and choose among His words, discarding the hard ones, and accepting the ones that please our fancy. We need a Christ Who will restore moral indignation, Who will make us hate evil with a passionate intensity, and love goodness to a point where we can drink death like water.”

- from The Life of Christ, by the Venerable Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen, chapter 2.

And, if I may be as bold to add, One Who will obliterate the Church of Nice and the nests of vipers who make their lair within it.