My musical gods are Handel, Bach, Haydn, Mozart, Corelli and Scarlatti, and the old English composers. I find in music all the alleged consolations of religion, but it is becoming more difficult to hear since the B.B.C. adopted the idiotic method of counting heads in the matter and of substituting a quantity of jazz and some pretentious cacophony for their old programmes. Modern developments of discord are no doubt due to two wars and general unhappiness. I venture to say that Corelli's Christmas music reflects a higher civilisation than the music which is now called modern and which reeks of industrialisation.
"A peculiar anthologic maze, an amusing literary chaos, a farrago of quotations, a mere olla podrida of quaintness, a pot pourri of pleasant delites, a florilegium of elegant extracts, a tangled fardel of old-world flowers of thought, a faggot of odd fancies, quips, facetiae, loosely tied" (Holbrook Jackson, Anatomy of Bibliomania) by a "laudator temporis acti," a "praiser of time past" (Horace, Ars Poetica 173).
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Wednesday, July 03, 2013
My Musical Gods
E.S.P. Haynes (1877-1949), The Lawyer: A Conversation Piece. Selected from the Lawyer's Notebooks and Other Writings (London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1951), p. xlii: