2025, Media, Music, Uncategorized

Esoterica

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For the last several weeks I have been plagued with an ear worm of Oh, Canada. Don’t ask me why. It is a nice enough tune, but it was getting annoying. I woke up at 3:00 am Sunday with another tune going through my head. I was sleepy and had to think for a minute but recognized it as Polka and Fugue from Schwanda the Bagpiper by Jaromir Weinbeger.

I pride myself for an ability to identify pieces of classical music by ear. I had the advantage of playing the Schwanda piece in college concert band, so it wasn’t too hard to identify it. I challenge myself as I drive or listen to Classical MPR to name the piece or composer before the announcer does. I still have some trouble discerning between Poulenc and Milhaud, as well as all the Spanish guitar composers, but on most other composers I think I am pretty solid.

This knowledge, as well as $5.00, will get me a cup of coffee, but it is pretty satisfying to be able to say, if anyone asks “Oh, that is such and such by so and so”.

What area of esoteric knowlege or skill do you pride yourself on? What long running 1960’s television program made repeated use of a composition by Brahms? What classical music are you most familiar with?

28 thoughts on “Esoterica”

  1. Bugs Bunny taught me classical music.
    And Hooked on Classics was a fun recording. And Switched on Bach.
    But I never learned the names.

    70’s rock and roll I can name!

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  2. i am a mile wide and half an inch deep. i have lots of useless information i carry around with me to use whenever it applies and often times even when it doesnt.
    classical music… thats violins and no words right. ive heard of it

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  3. I don’t have any sort of emotional response to orchestral classical music. It’s all just background for the most part. I am more attracted by individual instruments—piano or strings—and pieces like Chopin’s Nocturnes or Massenet’s Meditation. I’m not so discerning that the musician matters. Any competent artist will do.

    My areas of esoterica center on nineteenth century America. Curiously, perhaps, that does not especially include the Civil War or nineteenth century politics, both of which I am only sketchily familiar.

    For a time, I was engrossed in nineteenth century theater and collected information about the players and their plays. I still have an extensive collection of biographies and autobiographies, as well as a substantial collection of original photographs of actors and actresses from that period. I can identify many of them on sight and often relate other information about them, though it has been years since my focus was on them and I sometimes struggle to recall all the names.

    I have other areas of nineteenth century concentration. I have collected an extensive library of 19th century writers of humor. This is not an area that enjoys a broad fan base. In fact, I am almost entirely without correspondents with which I can share any observations or gossip on the subject. I guess that’s what makes it esoteric.

    I also have dug extensively into the Concord Mass. Transcendentalists, the various utopian and socialistic experiments, spiritualism and the spiritualists, the early surveys of Native American mound structures, enclosures and effigy formations.

    As a diversion from the nineteenth century, I have read extensively about the rich bohemian culture in and around New York’s Greenwich Village in the period leading up to WWI (but also in the 1850s).

    I’ve given up expecting to share any of that with anyone. Even at the academic level, that interest doesn’t seem to exist.

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    1. The book Spellbound by Molly Worthen would be something you’d enjoy. It is about charisma and includes a lot about famed spiritualists, animal magnetism, faith healers, Rhode Island agitators of the Puritans. I’m about halfway finished. The evangelists at the St.Louis Worlds Fair 1906(?) is where I’m at now.

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    2. Several of those sound at least mildly interesting – especially the bohemian culture before WWI – maybe I’ve brushed up against that in a novel or two, but I couldn’t tell you which one(s). Any “starter book” you’d recommend?

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      1. For Greenwich Village bohemia in exactly that period, from the turn of the twentieth century to the First World War, I like American Moderns by Christine Stansell. I’ve read it twice.
        Republic of Dreams by Ross Wetzsteon is a history of Greenwich Village from 1910 to 1960, so it includes the Beats, but I especially appreciated the thumbnail biographies Wetzsteon included.

        Even broader, The Village by John Strausbaugh covers 400 years of Greenwich Village, including the bohemians.

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    1. Wasband was a French horn player. We must have had at least three or four different recordings of Mozart’s 4th horn concerto. His favorite was this one, featuring Dennis Brain on horn:

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        1. Flanders & Swann were great. Flanders’ verbal agility was astounding. How do you wrap your tongue around that many syllables so quickly?

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  6. Finally, A MInute to Join the Discussion, Baboons!

    Mozart’s Clarinet Concerto in A Minor was my sophomore recital (with piano, no orchestra). At one time I knew it like the back of my hand.

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  9. I am often annoyed when I hear a familiar piece on MPR Classical, and can’t place it… occasionally I can.

    Every day some other tune is spinning in my head – besides the Beethoven symphonies, there are also snippets of folk dances I have known, and sometimes I can figure it out if I get up and start trying to dance it. These are some of my esoteria.

    I remember some of the rules from my music theory/harmony classes in college. I know an awful lot of song lyrics, and since I play by ear, can play for you on the piano any tune I’ve ever heard, whether or not I can tell you what it’s called.

    I’ll use Renee’s clue and see if I can identify the Brahams.
    I had a Mantovani movie themes album that included the theme to The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse that I just love – turned out to be from Brahams’ 3rd Symphony, 3rd movement:

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  11. I once impressed a co=worker by being able to identify an instrumental from a cassette he’d recorded off a radio show. This was in the 90’s, long before the days of the Shazam app.

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    1. That ABD is me…also, tangentially related, Bobby Whitlock died yesterday. I thought he might have played on that track, but after looking it up, it doesn’t appear that he did. He was a member of Derek & the Dominoes and played on a lot of Delaney & Bonnie stuff. I had a crush on him when I was about fifteen…I think…

      Linda

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  12. In one of my favorite movies, Laura, the Vincent Price character says “I don’t know a lot about anything, but I know a little about just about everything”. That’s what I feel like sometimes — a lot of scattered knowledge, but I don’t know if I could claim any esoterica as my own. And I’m absolutely terrible at placing music, classical or otherwise.

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