#cowell

Intro Back in high school I fell in love with two things; classical music, and Edgar Allan Poe. I’ve always loved Halloween, October, spooky things, ghost stories, horror and slasher movies, etc. And I always loved finding classical music that was also spooky, or dark, or evocative of the same eerie experience of a cold and foggy October day. Thinking about these memories made me want to put together a short list of Gothic Classical music.

But what do I mean? There is no true “Gothic music” as in a specific movement in classical history, because the traditional Gothic refers to literature. Not all art movements have corresponding trends in all mediums. Even so I thought it would be fun to say, if there was such a thing as Gothic music, what would that include?

18th Century

John Henry Fuseli - The Nightmare (1781)

Music of the 1760s-1790s, corresponding with the first wave of “Gothic Novels” in the English language. Some names in this era include Horace Walpole (The Castle of Otranto), Ann Radcliffe (The Mysteries of Udolpho, The Italian) and Charles Brockden Brown (Wieland). The closest we have to music of this same era would be in the Sturm und Drang style. Sturm und Drang (Storm and Stress) was used to describe music written in a minor key that was restless, agitated, intense, emotional, and more extreme than the typical expectations for restraint and lightness/clarity, music that aristocrats in powdered wigs and velvet and lace could relax with. Strong changes of emotion and more emphasis on subjectivity, reflected by sudden modulations and pulsing rhythms.

The most famous piece that I associate with Sturm und Drang is Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s “little” g minor Symphony no.25, K.183 (1773). It is famously used in the opening of Miloš Forman’s Amadeus (1984). It is a fun piece, and that opening movement is full of fire, and probably the young Mozart having fun (he wrote it at 17. If you ever want to lower your self esteem, look up what music Mozart wrote at your current age.). Another major work would be Joseph Haydn’s “Farewell” Symphony no.45 (1772), written in the very unusual for the time key of f# minor. And of course, even though he comes later, anything Ludwig van Beethoven published in a minor key has a lot of muscular passion to it, and his early/classical era of the 1790s is no joke. Check out the final movements of his Piano Trio no.3 in c minor and his Piano Sonata no.1 in f minor, or his most famous early sonata, the Pathetique.

But if the Sturm und Drang style and Gothic genre also emphasize the disturbed and the psychological, we can include programmatic works that do the same. Mozart’s opera Don Giovanni (1788) has an incredible moment in the finale. The sociopathic hedonist is confronted by the ghost of the man he murdered in the first act, who possesses a statue and confronts Don Giovanni with his sins. Don Giovanni doesn’t repent, so he is dragged into hell with a chorus of demons. Always a good reminder that Mozart wasn’t the eternal child who wrote pretty melodies.

19th Century

Caspar David Friedrich - The Abbey in the Oakwood (1810)

Music of the early 19th century corresponds better with Gothic fiction because Romanticism in art brought greater interest in the supernatural, in the subjective, in emotional reactions to the universe… major names in fiction include the poetry of Lord Byron (Darkness), Mary Shelley (Frankenstein, The Last Man), and Sir Walter Scott (The Bride of Lammermoor). Greater emphasis is put on the anxiety of the unknown, supernatural fears beyond our control.

Of all Franz Schubert’s songs, Erlkönig (1815) best exemplifies the Gothic (and this is a bold claim because I only know about a fraction of Schubert’s extensive song output). In it, a father and son are riding on horseback. The son is sick with fever. As they ride, the son cries out that he can hear the Elf King calling out to him, some evil spirit or demon that wants to take the son’s life. The father tries to calm him down, but the Elf King gets closer and closer. By the time they reach home, the son has died. Was the Elf King real? Was the son hallucinating from fever? How literal should we take this text? The ambiguity of subjective experiences and how we interpret and understand reality is a major theme in Gothic fiction.

Many famous German operas lean into the supernatural and magical. In this period we get Carl Maria von Weber’s Der Freischütz (1821), considered to be the first Romantic opera. In it, our main character Max who needs to win a shooting contest so he can be allowed to marry his lover, Agathe. He is given a gun that can shoot magic bullets by another forrester Kaspar (who has his own plans). Kaspar tells Max to meet him in the “Wolf’s Glenn” in the woods at midnight for more magic bullets. In the Wolf’s Glenn, Kaspar calls for a spirit, the Black Huntsman Samiel, to help him curse the other characters, offering Max’s soul in exchange. Making deals with demons/the devil was another fascination in Romanticism.

Legends of a diabolical nature were springing around great musicians. At the end of the 1700s, Giuseppe Tartini wrote his most famous composition, the “Devil’s Trill” Violin Sonata in g minor which is full of virtuosic passages. Tartini claimed that the Devil appeared to him in a dream, and that he sold his soul in exchange for the Devil to be his servant. He handed the Devil his violin, and the Devil “…played with such great art and intelligence, as I had never even conceived in my boldest flights of fantasy. I felt enraptured, transported, enchanted: my breath failed me, and I awoke” Source

Similar stories came about with violinist Niccolò Paganini, who astonished the audiences of the early 19th century with his (for the time) otherworldly technique, dazzling them with scales and leaps and scratches the likes of which you can hear across his 24 Caprices for solo violin. A young Franz Liszt was at one of Paganini’s concerts and he was enthralled and inspired to become the “Paganini of the Piano”. He too would dazzle audiences with his percussive intensity, glittering arpeggios, and dreamy modulations to possess women with the spirits of hysteria and other dated misogynistic diseases. Cliche to say but before Bieber Fever, before Beatlemania, there was Lisztomania.

The sense of Faustian bargains comes through in the pieces Liszt wrote after Goethe’s Faust. The Faust Symphony (1857) includes a movement for Mephistopheles, the demon/ the Devil that bargains with Faust. The Mephistopheles movement has no original theme, but takes and corrupts the themes of Faust and his lover Gretchen into a mocking tone. Later on, Liszt was inspired to write a tone poem “The Dance in the Village Inn” or Mephisto Waltz no.1 (c.1862). He also wrote it for piano around the same time. The story has Mephistopheles taking Faust to a wedding in a village and playing the violin so madly, the partygoers are intoxicated by the music and go off dancing in the woods. Emotions taking over and making one act irrationally was another fascination in Gothic fiction.

Liszt would go on in his later years writing a few more Mephisto waltzes, with a lot of forward thinking harmonies and piano writing, unfortunately not as popular. Mephisto waltz no.2 (1881) has moments that make me think of Debussy, and the third (1883) has glittering and ethereal moments. But the best example of Liszt’s interest in the Gothic would be his earlier concert piece Totentanz (1949), or Dance of Death (Danse macabre). In it, the piano and orchestra play out variations on the Medieval chant Dies Irae, always reminding us of the inevitability of death. The variations depict skeletons dancing wildly all while the Mephistopheles at the piano unleashes his seductive tones.

The Dies Irae chant goes across our pop culture, with one famous iteration being a synthesized version of passages from Hector Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique that Wendy Carlos wrote for Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining (1980) after Stephen King’s novel of the same name. And it was Berlioz’s symphony that enchanted audiences in 1830 with new, titanic sounds beyond what orchestra music had been before. In the story of the Symphonie fantastique, an artist has tried to overdose on opium after feeling rejected by unrequited love, but instead he has a vivid drug induced nightmare where he is sentenced to be beheaded via guillotine, which was still a traumatic living memory for the Parisian audience. He then sees himself among ghosts and monsters during a witches’ sabbath, the lovely woman’s beautiful theme is distorted into a grotesque mockery, the Dies Irae comes back among the cackling. It was a new degree of imagination expected from the audience. Later, Berlioz would depict demons in Pandæmonium (the Capital of Hell in Dante’s Inferno) at the end of his Damnation of Faust.

Through the mid to late 19th century we get authors of Gothic literature such as Edgar Allan Poe, Elizabeth Gaskell, Emily and Charlotte Brontë, Nathaniel Hawethorne, and Victor Hugo. We also get two more operas that have Gothic themes. First is Richard Wagner’s The Flying Dutchman (1843). In this opera, a ship on the North Sea collides with the Ghost Ship of the Flying Dutchman who is cursed to sail the seas forever, but is allowed to come ashore once every seven years and if he can find a wife, he will be freed. I’m sure you can guess how this opera ends. The overture is often played in concert for a condensed version of Wagnarian thunder and romance. The next important opera is Giuseppe Verdi’s Macbeth (1847), because Shakespeare was being revived and translated in different languages across Europe and Verdi loved his plays. In the opera, Macbeth comes across a chorus of witches that foretell his success and downfall. He is too ambitious and goaded by Lady Macbeth, plans to take the throne through deception and murder. Lady Macbeth is later haunted with phantom blood on her hands which only she can see. And Macbeth succumbs to his inevitable fate.

We also get two significantly “Gothic” pieces of orchestra music. They are both tone poems, which also reflects the concert goers’ tastes. The one that has always been a quintessential “Halloween classical” piece is Camille Saint-Saens’ Danse Macabre (1875), opening at the stroke of midnight (softly evoked by the harp), a violin shrieks out the tritone (the “Devil’s interval” which the Romantics thought meant was cursed by the superstitious Medievals, really it was an idiom for “hard to use in music”) and introduces ballroom music along with the clacking bones of skeletons dancing in the graveyard (evoked by the xylophone). The skeletons dance through the night until the rooster crows at dawn.

The other great Halloween concert piece is Modest Mussorgsky’s Night on Bald Mountain (1867) which depicts another witches sabbath, this time on St. John’s Night, a major holiday in Slavic Eastern Orthodox culture. Walt Disney’s Fantasia (1940) would help bring this poem to life with an animated phantasmagoria of ghouls and skeletal horses and other demons flying around the mountainous demon Chernoberg.

[Here I want to give a quick shoutout to Cesar Franck’s Le Chasseur maudit (The Accursed Huntsman), a tone poem about a Count who doesn’t go to church one Sunday, and instead rides around to whip peasants for his own amusement, so demons drag him to hell. Not nearly as famous a concert piece as the others mentioned in this list but it has colorful orchestration so you should check it out.]

The initial idea for Fantasia was for Disney to repopularize Mickey Mouse by writing him into an animated version of Paul Dukas’ The Sorcerer’s Apprentice. The original poem by Goethe was a classic that Paul Dukas set to music in 1897. In it, we hear the Sorcerer leave his Apprentice to clean the floors of his workshop. The Apprentice uses magic to bring a broom to life so it can do the chores for him. The Broom mindlessly pours buckets of water all over the floor, and the Apprentice isn’t good enough with magic to stop it. He chops it up into pieces with an ax, but they regenerate into several brooms which go back to marching water in. The Sorcerer returns to clean the mess and scolds his Apprentice. This charming tale has a darker and more diabolically fun tone in Dukas orchestra.

20th Century

Harry Clarke - Illustration for "Masque of the Red Death" (1919)

In the same exact year of Dukas’ tone poem, we get Bram Stoker’s Dracula. At this turn of the century other major names include Gaston Luroux (The Phantom of the Opera), Robert Lewis Stevenson (Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde), Henry James (The Turn of the Screw), Oscar Wilde (The Picture of Dorian Gray). At this time, there are a few more pieces that continue trying to evoke Gothic subject matter. One comes from Gustav Mahler’s Symphony no.7 (1905), sometimes dubbed “Song of the Night”. Two of the symphonies five movements are titled “Nachtmusik” (night music), the first is more in line with Gothic anxiety and spookiness than the second which is more like a serenade. But the most Gothic movement is the Scherzo which sits in the middle of the symphony and is like a Viennese ballroom full of dancing corpses and skeletons as waltz music decays with them.

A surprising example (at least, because of how relatively obscure it is) comes from Claude Debussy with parts of an opera based on Poe’s The Fall of the House of Usher that he worked on between 1908-1917. Not too much a surprise on the one hand because French translations of Poe’s work became popular and influential. On the other hand Debussy is more known for evocative sound pictures, unique musical colors, and subtlety. Perhaps he was drawn to symbolist and psychosexual interpretations of The House of Usher, the same interests that preoccupied him with his only finished opera Pelleas et Melisande. Roger Orledge reconstructed the opera and tried to stay true to Debussy’s style, so what we do have is passable and as shadowy and vague as his other orchestral masterpieces.

Maybe the hardest work to recommend (but I do recommend regardless, give it a chance) is a Modernist song cycle for chamber ensemble. Arnold Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire (1910) uses freely chromatic atonality to give a demented color of psychosis experienced by Pierrot, personified version of a stock character for old Commedia dell Arte plays, a clown who over time became the “sad clown”. Maybe a precursor to the demon from Stephen King’s It, or the demented clowns and jesters that laugh at the madness of the cosmos across Thomas Ligotti’s short stories.

This was only meant to be a small overview of works that could fit my own view of the Gothic in music. There are more examples I could include, so as a hint toward today, I’ll end with a piece that was written about a century ago, yet sounds as if it could have been written today. Henry Cowell’s The Banshee (1925) is a short piano piece, so if you can, at least listen to this one. Instead of playing with the keys like you’re “supposed to”, Cowell asks the performer to drag their fingers along the wires directly. This creates disturbing reverberations and scratching sounds that tingle the back of your neck, that feel like the otherworldly cry of a Banshee.

Yeah, I got back into the Wizards of Once series. How’d ya tell?

More under the cut, probably. They have eyes, I just didn’t draw them, and please don’t save to your device/camera roll. ⚠️ (Also spoilers for book 3.)⚠️

Tumblr butchered the quality. Squeezjoos has a pretty inconsistent number of legs throughout the series, so I gave him eight here and fluffiness. I wish we got more stuff about The Baby.

I’m giving Bumbleboozle the curlier tail and six legs. She’s basically the more insect-like hairy fairy anyway, so yeah. Also less soft.

And Cressida herself said that the Nuckalavee is part of the crocodilian family, and he didn’t really look like the ideal ‘fearsome lair shadow quest’ monster. So, yeah, crocodilian snouts.

Well reluctantly we had to say goodbye to Coffin Bay. We were so glad we had booked 4 nights there. When you sit at home making decisions about how far, however long, it is often a judgement made in the dark and gut feel. Also the quality of accommodation is so difficult to call. To date, on this trip, there really has only been one place that in Martine's assessment criteria has been below par. So after a brief stop in Port Lincoln to visit Coles for a rubbery chicken, the bottle shop, and a bakery for a couple pies, we were on our way proper. Most often when we set off in the morning we have no idea about what we are likely to see on route, so it was a very pleasant surprise to leave the main highway for a stop at Tumby Bay; a quite unexpectedly unique little town first named in 1802 of course by Matthew Flinders, Tumby after the town in Lincolnshire. It was renamed Harvey Bay in 1840, and then in 1900 it reverted to Tumby. Well at least it finally got sorted. The town grew due to it being an important grain loading point, so hence the jetty, naturally. Copper was discovered in nearby Lipson, and miners from Cornwall and Wales were brought in to excavate it between 1868 and 1875. Jetty number 1 was built in 1874 and was in use until 1999 when it was deemed unsafe. Happily they had a replacement jetty which we shall prefer to as Jetty 8 and remains in use today. What we liked most about the town was they managed, somehow, to hang onto so many of the original stone buildings such as the hotel, post office , police station, church. It really was a most fetching little town. After pie consumption time amidst a sea of interested seagulls, we set off on foot to explore the place. One of the towns claim to fame are its murals on such otherwise dull buildings like public conveniences, now not so dull. As we explored, we saw a extremely pretty 1900s cottage most expertly restored by its current owners whom we met sitting on the shaded verandah. In 1915, the cottage was used as a 'lie in' nursing home and its then owner and midwife, Maryanne Harris, offered her child birthing services as a cheaper alternative to the more orthodox facilities. It proved very popular and was quite well equipped, including a herd of milking cows in the back yard. It was a most entertaining hour we spent there being shown around the property as well the latest owner's renovation projects of vintage cars and caravans.

We extracted ourselves and on to our destination for the next 2 nights, Cowell, further north along the Lincoln Highway, but still on the Eyre Peninsula. This appears on first impressions to be another early pioneer town with some historic buildings, which we shall look forward to exploring tomorrow. Our house for this alloted time is most well equipped, 2 bedrooms, nice secluded garden, and most unusually, complete with garden chairs! No kangaroos likely.

ps. We took a stroll into town just after 8pm. Both pubs were initially open, but by the time we returned at 8.45, one pub had shut and the other was so empty, it was begging to be put out of its misery, and shut as well. The rest of the town was in darkness. Big Zs coming from everywhere. These Australians are real party animals!

Our little shack in Coffin Bay

In Tumby Bay

The little 'Lie in' cottage

Jetty 8, Tumby Bay

Hello loves, a lot of us think and know that the contract One Direction signed in 2010 will be over this year. Some of you expect everything to be over once and for all. Unfortunately, I do not think that is the case. I am going to explain it all. :)

Please understand that this post is filled with information that is on the internet. I also want to say that I have no proof for some things in this post, for example, my thought on One Direction’s hiatus. If you have any questions/suggestions, do not hesitate to ask me or tell me. Have an amazing day! Enjoy! 

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First, I would like to start off with a paragraph about the labels One Direction are signed to:

You might wonder why Sony is not on the list. Well, they are. Syco (Simon Cowell’s label. When you win the X factor the artist automatically signs to his label) is owned by Sony. Columbia Records is also a part of Sony. Legacy Recordings are also a part of Sony. This leaves the boys with one ‘good’ label. Universal Music Groups has no ties to Sony Entertainment or Syco. 

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See, in 2010 One Direction signed an X Factor contract. Harry was 16 years old and not all the other members were 18 as well, but they also signed it, even though the legal age to sign a contract is 18 in the United Kingdom. This is evidence that one way or another Harry did sign the contract, I think his mother gave permission and the rest of their parents did too. 

Several news sites confirmed that the boys signed a contract with Simon Cowell’s label in December 2010. This is their FIRST contract.  

Now we have the 2nd contract One Direction signed. One Direction signed with Columbia Records in November 2011. The mother organisation of Columbia Records is Syco (Simon Cowell’s label). Syco is partly ruled by Sony too. Which means that both Simon and Sony will, indirectly, have access to 1D and their lives. 

There is a big difference between the boys signing as a group and as solo artists. When the boys signed their contracts as a group, they all are stuck in the same contract. When they sign as solo artists, each member might have an other label. 

One Direction also signed to labels, but not as a group, they signed as solo artists. This means that Simon Cowell and Sony Entertainment are the only ones who ‘own’ One Direction as a band (Columbia Recordings and Legacy Recordings too, but in the end they both work for Sony anyway). 

All I am actually implying, my loves, is that after the contract with Syco ends, One Direction can still get affected by the influence of Sony. That is why I think the boys will be fully free at the end of 2021. 

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If 1D will leave Simon Cowell, Simon will suffer from a big money loss. Of course Simon does not want that, so I think he is definitely doing something to make 1D sign with him and Sony again. I genuinely think Simon used the hiatus as leverage. I am going to explain, shortly, what that means.

So, I hope all of you know when an artist signs to a label the label OWNS the voices of the artist. It does not make sense that One Direction sign to Syco and Sony as a group, only to ‘break up’ in 2015, not even fulfilling their (assumed) 10-year contract. Simon Cowell knows that 1D solo would earn him less money than them as a group. So why would he let them do so? 

This question can be answered with several answers. As you can see, the hiatus was not even wanted by Louis. The rest of the boys also miss one another. The hiatus was not ever planned, they just did it.

I think Simon is telling them they can not go through with One Direction unless they sign with him again. This is a similar case to what happened to an artist called JoJo. 

Of course it does not have to be that way, and I am only sharing my thoughts on the hiatus. Though, it does sound familiar. Why let a billionaire boy band go on hiatus? What advantages would Simon have? None. Simon knew from the start if he would let them go on hiatus they would earn less money for themselves and it could put them in financial trouble, especially when your label does not even want to promote your solo album and when it tries to ruin your image (Louis, Liam and Zayn). But it would also put Simon in financial trouble, so why would he take that chance? In the long run he could pressure 1D to sign with him again, using the hiatus as leverage. This would mean another 10 years of 1D with Syco and in the long run that would give him all the money he ‘temporarily lost’ from their hiatus.

These are just my thought, but it is a possibility.Thank you for your attention. Have an amazing day and stay safe!!

Loves,

Queensgaybeach1D