A 19th Century Fascination: Doomed Lovers from the 13th Century

By Dale D. Dalenberg, M.D.

April 30, 2014

Francesca and Paolo on the hell-wind, frontispiece to The Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri, translated by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, volume I, The Davos Press (New York), 1909.  In The Dalenberg Library of Antique Popular Literature.  

This illustration, from the Longfellow translation, is similar to the Doré that inspired Tchaikovsky.  While we love Longfellow at the Dalenberg Library, his version of The Divine Comedy is not his best-remembered production.  It seems to suffer from a slavish devotion to transliterating the Italian lines into English, producing many examples of inverted syntax, often to the point where you cannot follow the story.  To be sure, there is some charming 19th Century language (such as when Longfellow characterizes the sinners of passion on Dante’s second level of Hell as “carnal malefactors”).  Longfellow botches the most memorable quote in Dante’s scene, where Francesca says “. . .There is no greater sorrow/Than to be mindful of the happy time/In misery. . . .” The same line is rendered much more poetically by Dorothy Sayers in her 1949 translation: “. . .The bitterest of woes/Is to remember in our wretchedness/Old happy times. . . .”

Freshly immersed in the theatricality of Wagner’s Ring cycle of operas--having attended the first full production of the Ring cycle in Bayreuth, Germany--Peter Tchaikovsky (1840-1893) briefly considered writing an opera on the theme of the doomed lovers Francesca da Rimini and Paolo Malatesta, based on the famous episode in Canto V of Dante’s Inferno.  Balking at doing it as an opera, he settled instead for turning the subject matter into his 1876 symphonic poem Francesca da Rimini.  Perhaps not as well known today as other early Tchaikovsky orchestral masterpieces, such as the Romeo and Juliet fantasy overture, Francesca da Rimini is a remarkable piece that has everything in it that people love about Tchaikovsky, sumptuous orchestration and the kind of expansive, gorgeous love theme melody that keeps Tchaikovsky on the greatest hits list.  

Tchaikovsky casts Dante’s Francesca da Rimini episode as a kind of frame story in music.  First, he depicts the gates of Hell that the shades of Dante and his guide, the Roman poet Virgil, must pass through.  Then, he depicts the swirling whirlwind that has trapped the doomed lovers, sentenced to be buffeted about for an eternity in Hell by the storms of their passion.  Then, portrayed by a solo clarinet, Francesca steps out of the whirlwind to tell the story of her passionate love affair with Paolo, the younger brother of her hideously deformed husband, and of how they were murdered together by her husband’s hand and condemned to an eternity in the Inferno due to their illicit passion.  The music swells from solo clarinet to full orchestral grandeur as the story is told, and then Tchaikovsky deconstructs the melody and the music morphs back into the roiling tune of the hell-wind.  

One does not usually think of Wagner and Tchaikovsky in the same sentence, but the hell-wind music of Francesca da Rimini is Tchaikovsky’s one true Wagnerian moment, and it is equally as effective as the grand love theme.  Interestingly, Tchaikovsky had his doubts at first.  Tchaikovsky was as much inspired by Gustave Doré’s illustration of the doomed lovers as he was by the Dante text.  He wrote to his brother Modest upon completing the draft for the symphonic poem, “As for the whirlwind, something might have been written to better correspond to Doré’s illustration, but it did not turn out as I had wished.  However, a true judgment on this piece is unthinkable until it has been orchestrated and performed.”  Listening to the piece today, it appears that Tchaikovsky was selling himself a bit short.  Final judgment is quite favorable.  

Apparently, Tchaikovsky was momentarily obsessed with the Francesca da Rimini story to the point where he had to get it out of his system by writing something based on it.  It is easy to think that brief obsession was fuelled by Tchaikovsky’s constant preoccupation with the doom inherent in his own love life, given the internal conflicts over his sexual orientation (about which he vacillated from a point of comfort to the guilt of characterizing it as a “vice.”) All discussion about Tchaikovsky these days is consumed with his closeted homosexuality.  It is easy to think that his fascination with this tale of doomed lovers has something to do with the maelstrom that constantly raged inside him about his comfort or discomfort (depending on the moment) with his sexual orientation, and the struggle in those days with public vs. private appearance.  I used to think that Tchaikovsky’s homosexuality was some kind of myth that was created by modern gays to show how many famous people used to be gay.  But, in reality, the more you read, it appears that Tchaikovsky’s homosexuality was most likely a major part of his personal identity and informed a lot of the events and struggles in his biography.  A very good book on the topic, and the one to which I owe the above quote in the letter to Modest, is Alexander Poznansky’s 1991 book Tchaikovsky: The Quest for the Inner Man. 

Aside from the question of whether one man’s fascination with this tale of doomed lovers related to internal struggles over his sexuality, it appears that this tragic tale held sway over lots of people in the 19th and early 20th Centuries.  An Internet search uncovers no fewer than 17 different operas based on Francesca da Rimini, as well as numerous stage plays.  The average art museum-goer may not know this, but Auguste Rodin’s famous sculpture The Kiss is actually a depiction of Francesca da Rimini and Paolo Malatesta locked in an embrace, their lips not exactly touching, as if they are poised on the very moment of their first transgression or possibly about to be interrupted before consummating their love.  The Kiss was originally planned for that other Rodin masterpiece The Gates of Hell, but the artist removed the Francesca da Rimini figurine from the finished sculpture and expanded it into its own piece.  

The source material for this tale of doomed lovers is based on actual history, enshrined by Dante Alighieri in Canto V of the Inferno, from The Divine Comedy.  The events were contemporaneous with Dante’s life and well known to him because he lived in the area.  Rimini is on the eastern Italian coast in the same province as Ravenna, where Dante died after having been exiled from his native Florence.  Francesca was the daughter of Guido da Polenta of Ravenna, who had been at war with Giovanni Malatesta of Rimini (Italian city-states were given to bickering in those days long before the unification of Italy.)  At age 20, Francesca was given to Giovanni, who was known for being crippled or deformed, in an arranged marriage as part of a truce between the warring families and their city-states.  It so happens that Giovanni had a younger brother, Paolo, who was more handsome, hearty, and hale.  Francesca and Paolo embarked on a 10-year affair under the nose of Giovanni, until about 1285, when Francesca was 30 years old. The lovers were discovered together in Francesca’s bedroom, and Giovanni murdered both of them by his own hand.  Apparently, there were no earthly repercussions to Giovanni, other than the local fame of the episode, because he lived until 1294, and went on in his warrior capacity to capture a local city, Pesaro, and rule it until his death.  

In The Divine Comedy, Dante (c. 1265-1321) put Francesca and Paolo in the second circle of Hell, buffeted about eternally by winds that are intended to mirror the passions to which they sacrificed their reason.  Their eternal damnation may seem unfair from a modern perspective, because a modern point of view would likely give Francesca a pass for being mere chattel in a political truce.  But to be fair to Dante, he does get modern credit for condemning Giovanni to the lowest circle of Hell for offing his brother.  Apparently, it was ok to Dante that he killed his unfaithful wife, but the real shame was that he committed fratricide.  

Giovanni Boccaccio (1313-1375), in his book on Dante, adds the element to the story that Francesca had been tricked into marriage with the crippled older brother, thinking it was the younger brother who was her suitor up until the moment at the altar.  Dante does not mention any such twist in Inferno and nobody before Boccaccio mentions it, and historians think it highly unlikely that it really happened that way.  But many of the 19th Century versions of the story include that plot element, which serves to make the story even more tragic, as Francesca gets tricked into marrying the cripple, gets seduced by the younger brother, gets murdered by her husband, then ends up in Hell for eternity. 

While Tchaikovsky did not make Francesca da Rimini into an opera, his greatest spiritual successor, Sergei Rachmaninoff, did produce such an opera, which premiered in 1906.  Modest Tchaikovsky had encouraged his brother Peter to write the symphonic poem;  but he went one step beyond encouragement for Rachmaninoff and actually wrote the libretto for the opera.  The opera is a one-act, with an intro, two scenes, and an epilogue, that takes about an hour to perform.  Modest’s libretto sticks to Dante almost word-for-word in the frame story, but in the two scenes that are flashbacks to the events that occurred during life before the damnation to Hell, he takes full poetic license and heaps on the 19th Century trappings of the story.  While it is not a masterpiece, there is a lot to recommend Rachmaninoff’s short opera.  The structure is closely modelled on Tchaikovsky’s symphonic poem, with a few special touches.  The whirlwind music in the Rachmaninoff is full of groans, howls, and cries of despair (provided by a choir).  The two central scenes provide a stark contrast to each other.  The first is a duet between Francesca and her husband.  The second is a duet between Paolo and Francesca, interrupted of course, by the murder.  In the first scene, Giovanni (called Lanceotto Malatesta in this version) regrets having tricked his wife into their marriage, since he knows that she does not love him. In their duet, she professes her devotion as a wife, but he begs for her love instead of just her submission.  In a stinging moment, she states that she cannot lie about being in love with him.  In the second scene, Francesca and Paolo fall in love while reading about Lancelot and Guinevere (which is straight out of the Dante version.)  In this version, typical of the 19th Century versions, Francesca rebuffs Paolo at first, objecting that she is another man’s wife, but in the course of the scene, he seduces her.  Also, typical of the Romantic Era, the 13th Century events of 10 years are compressed into a single moment, as the lovers are discovered and murdered either before or in the act of consummating their love for the first time.  Rachmaninoff’s love duet in the second scene is the centerpiece of his short opera, and it is the highlight, climaxing with the murder.

While Francesca da Rimini is no longer material for frequent adaptations, the story seems to stick around.  In 2013, the Metropolitan Opera revived Riccardo Zandonai’s 1914 opera version, which has never gone out of the repertory in Italy.  Interestingly, Zandonai (1883-1944) was director of the conservatory and spent the final years of his life in a town affiliated with this story, Giovanni Malatesta’s own Pesaro.  

A Sense for Nonsense: From Edward Lear to Lewis Carroll to Dr. Seuss.

By Dale D. Dalenberg, M.D.

April 1, 2014

Every now and then the Dalenberg Library of Antique Popular Literature gets ambitious and tries to live up to its name by buying something that is truly antique.  This month we are proud to announce the acquisition of a first edition of Lewis Carroll’s book-length nonsense poem masterpiece The Hunting of the Snark (MacMillan and Co., London, 1876.)  To be precise, the real first edition was a limited run bound in red that is very pricey to come by these days, but our copy is from the main press run bound between tan brown boards with front and back cover illustrations, gilt on all edges, and including nine interior panels illustrated by Henry Holiday (1839-1927), who was associated with the pre-Raphaelite group of Victorian artists.  Snark is Lewis Carroll’s most famous and popular work outside of the two Alice in Wonderland books.  The Holiday illustrations are priceless, quite unlike his other paintings, which were very much in the Edward Burne-Jones school of late Victorian sensual, romanticized realism. If you like the classic Tenniel illustrations for the Wonderland books, you will find the Holiday illustrations for the Snark poem to be in a similar vein, only more grotesque.  An added treat in this edition is a little leaflet that has been attached to the front endpapers, dated Easter, 1876, and titled “An Easter Greeting to Every Child Who Loves ‘Alice’.”  While I suspect that mostly adults with an interest in 19th Century literature read  The Hunting of the Snark these days, Carroll obviously intended it to be for the same youthful audience who inspired the Wonderland tales.  

Henry Holiday’s interpretation of “The Beaver’s Lesson” from The Hunting of the Snark, bearing more resemblance to something by Hieronymus Bosch than to his fellow pre-Raphaelites.  The lines that inspired this plate:  “The Beaver brought paper, portfolio, pens, / And ink in unfailing supplies: / While strange creepy creatures came out of their dens, / And watched them with wondering eyes.”

The Hunting of the Snark recounts a nonsensical voyage in search of a mysterious beast, and it builds to a rather unexpected climax.  As the story of a whimsical voyage, it is much more complex than but still very reminiscent of Edward Lear’s poem “The Jumblies,” which was written a few years earlier.  The Jumblies go to sea in a sieve, which of course allows the water to get into their boat, but they manage to sleep in a crockery pot, somehow stay dry and alive, get to their destination, go shopping, buy some strange things (including a monkey with lollipop paws), and they come back home in twenty years having grown somewhat taller.  In contrast, the crew of the Snark has a stranger, darker, more mysterious voyage, and the outcome is much less certain.  

Edward Lear (1812-1888) is chiefly remembered and endlessly anthologized as the author of two poems published originally as “nonsense songs” in 1871.  These are “The Owl and the Pussycat” (who also venture out to sea in the beginning of their poem) and “The Jumblies.”  During his lifetime, Lear was predominantly a painter of animals and landscapes.  He happened into writing by chance. While employed painting the avian collection and menagerie of the Earl of Derby, he took to writing nonsense limericks illustrated with pen drawings to amuse the children in the Earl’s family.  The limericks were not published for 10 years (appearing in 1846).  A second book didn’t appear until 16 years later (1862).  By then, Lear must have had a following, because he trickled out a steady stream of nonsense stuff after his second book until his death in 1888.  

Lear was a pioneer of this sort of whimsical writing.  Lear is good, and in his time he had few if any competitors writing nonsense lyrics; but aside from a couple masterpieces, Lear is not great.  His two famous poems are really his best, and there are not a great many other hidden gems.  Mostly, his kind of writing has been improved upon by people who came along later and did his sort of poem better (such as Lewis Carroll, Eugene Field, Ogden Nash, and Dr. Seuss.)  

Easily half of Lear’s nonsense output was limericks.  He wrote more than two hundred.  He was an early popularizer of the limerick, but he did not contribute much to its creativity.  Most of his limericks are crafted in the old mold (going back to Mother Goose and before) of repeating the first line in the last line, often with a little variation.  Unfortunately, this structure rather has the effect of making the last line anticlimactic because you have heard it before, like a joke without a surprise in the punchline.  Lear’s limericks are silly and nonsensical, and the line drawings that accompany them are cute, but they are mostly not particularly funny.  

Here are three of Lear’s limericks as originally written.  Then I will follow with the Dale Dalenberg “improvements,” designed to demonstrate how replacing the repetitive final line with a new rhyming “punchline” can make the limerick both more interesting and more funny.  

Edward Lear:

There was an Old Man on whose nose,

Most birds of the air could repose;

    But they all flew away

    At the closing of day, 

Which relieved that Old Man and his nose. 

Dalenberg version:

There was an Old Man on whose nose, 

Most birds of the air could repose;

    But they all flew away

    At the closing of day, 

Leaving night’s share of bird-stuff to hose.  

Edward Lear:

There was an Old Person of Burton, 

Whose answers were rather uncertain;

    When they said, “How d’ye do?”

    He replied, “Who are you?”

That distressing Old Person of Burton. 

Dalenberg version:

There was an Old Person of Burton, 

Whose answers were rather uncertain; 

    When they said, “How d’ye do?”

    He replied, “Who are you?”

“Is he daft?” all would ask.  “No—impertinent!”

Edward Lear:

There was an Old Person of Hurst, 

Who drank when he was not athirst;

    When they said, “You’ll grow fatter!”

    He answered, “What matter?”

That globular Person of Hurst.  

Dalenberg version:

There was an old Person of Hurst, 

Who drank when he was not athirst;

    When they said, “You’ll grow fatter!”

    He answered, “What matter?”

They replied:  “Keep it up and you’ll burst!”

Limericks were around before Edward Lear.  Supposedly they first appeared in England in the early 18th Century.  It is said that as folklore poetry, limericks were always raunchy.  Lear took them out of the gutter and popularized the form as nonsense poems.  Despite moving from the pub to the nursery, ribald limericks do still persist today.  They are rather addictive to compose, and generally when you start, you keep coming up with more. I wrote a handful of raunchy ones for this blog, but I can’t publish most of them here, because we try to run a family-friendly blog. Still, I’ll push the limits with three of the cleanest of my naughty limericks, just to demonstrate and play with the form. These are my R-rated ones, not my X-rated ones (feel free to send me an e-mail request for those.) Two of these use the punch-line approach, and the other uses the repeated last-line approach (with a twist):                                       

There was an unsatisfied suitor

Who returned to the girl’s house to shoot her, 

    But his crime proved a botch

    When SHE aimed at HIS crotch

And inquired, “Is it better to spay or to neuter?”

There was a young man of Hong Kong

Who was oppressed by his over-sized schlong,

    ‘Til he sliced off his testes, 

    Took hormones, grew breast-ies, 

Now he is a young girl of Hong Kong.  

Two Sisters from down around Natchez

Turned tricks with their tongues and their snatches,

    And sometimes for fun

    They’d charge 2-for-1

And bang all the Brothers in batches.  

Hallmarks of the limerick include a general sense of irreverence, caricature, and a mockery of more serious academic devices.  Many limericks play fast and loose with geography and place names, for instance.  Rather than telling us anything about the place, however, they place name is usually just there for rhyming purposes.  Thus we have the classic limerick parody line, “There was a young man of Nantucket. . .”, which tells us nothing about Nantucket, but the place name is in the poem mostly just to rhyme with a variety of really vulgar phrases that can be used to end the next line.  The word-play of the limerick, and the fact that random things must be plucked out of the air and plunked down in the poem just to fit the rhyme scheme, lends the form to nonsense content.  Once you get into the idiom, it’s just as easy to write silly limericks as dirty ones. With apologies to the Japanese, here is one of my silly (non-filthy) limericks:

Drunk wrestler of sumo on saké

Ate way too much teriyaki, 

Kept feeding and feeding, 

Just wouldn’t stop eating—

And that’s how he got so damn stocky. 

Lewis Carroll (the pen name of Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, 1832-1898) improved on the nonsense poetry model that Lear established in poems like “The Jumblies.”  Carroll’s work incorporates mathematical puzzles, political allegory, and mysterious in-jokes into a more fully realized fantasy landscape.  Lewis Carroll’s “portmanteau words” are a lot like some of Lear’s nonsense words (e.g. “runcible spoon”), only with a more complex etymology.  

Not quite sure what it is about nonsense poetry and beavers, but the opening lines go like this:  “On the top of the Crumpetty Tree / The Quangle Wangle sat, / But his face you could not see, / On account of his Beaver Hat.”

Edward Lear’s influence can be felt far beyond Carroll, however.  With his simple line drawings, he is a precursor to more modern author-illustrators of childrens’ books, such as Dr. Seuss.  In fact, Seuss’s Thidwick, the Big-Hearted Moose is a fleshed-out retelling of Edward Lear’s poem “The Quangle Wangle’s Hat,” with a twist.  In the Lear poem, a creature called the Quangle Wangle wears a beaver hat that is a hundred and two feet wide, and numerous animals come to live on the brim of the hat.  In the Lear version they all have a grand old time, and the Quangle Wangle is perfectly happy to have guests.  But Dr. Seuss takes the material in a different direction as the animals take advantage of Thidwick’s good nature and become freeloader guests over-staying their welcome.  Lear’s emphasis is on nonsense.  That is also Dr. Seuss’s emphasis, even though Seuss usually tells a story with a moral—he just doesn’t lay it on too thick.  The moral is there in Thidwick—something like “don’t allow yourself to be a pushover and get taken advantage of by freeloader ‘friends’”—but the emphasis is still on the silly story, the whimsical illustrations, and the word-play.  

Dalenberg's Context Theory of Art Criticism

Sunset, 1916-1918, from the “Canyon Suite.”  But who painted it? The 5 Million Dollar Question:  deliberate fraud or accidental misattribution? 

By Dale Dalenberg, M.D.

March 2, 2014

Ok, I know this is supposed to be the popular literature blog, which means science fiction, mystery, westerns, and the like.  But, I’ve been doing this for over a year, and I think it is time to re-introduce Dalenberg’s Context Theory of Art Criticism, which I originally set forth in an article I wrote for the family literary newsletter back in September, 2000. But current events cry out for a re-introduction of my concepts, which I intend to return to from time to time in this blog.  By current events, I am referring to the ignominious demise of the once-venerable art house of Knoedler and Company on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. 

It turns out that Knoedler and Company has been selling art forgeries.  Some Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko pieces, among others, ended up being sold for millions of dollars that later turned out not to be the real thing.  How many stupid rubes have you overheard at art museums looking at modern art and muttering “What makes that art--I could draw something like that” ?  Well, apparently somebody did just that, and then they passed it off as the real thing.  Maybe the ignoramuses you overheard at the art museum aren’t so stupid after all.  Maybe one of them took the idea home and turned it into money.  I don’t think Knoedler and Company meant to sell art forgeries.  They were legitimate art dealers.  But they hadn’t read my article in the year 2000, and they hadn’t thought long and hard about these issues.  They could have. As long ago as 1993, modern artist Richard Diebenkorn’s family informed Knoedler and Company that some Diebenkorn drawings they were selling may not be genuine.  The problem isn’t that Knoedler and Company were intentionally perpetrating art frauds.  The likelihood is that they just got so wrapped up in the money aspect of the art deals (big money) that they let down their guard.  Now, they have a spate of big investors suing them for failing to vet the authenticity of works that they sold, and their once venerable name has gone to the dogs.   

The topic of art forgery is vast and interesting, and it is not as simple a story as you might think.  For instance, what is the difference between a forgery or a clever, well-executed homage to a famous artist’s work?  Is it a forgery if a work from a famous artist’s student gets accidentally attributed to the master?  What about forgeries that got so famous that they themselves inspired forgeries?  (That has actually happened, believe it or not.)  Were the works of the ancient Romans forgeries of the Greeks?  Or were they masterpieces in their own right? 

My interest isn’t specifically in art forgeries.  But my interest is in what forgeries teach us about art criticism and value of art in general. 

Now that I’ve invoked the recent forgeries that have destroyed Knoedler and Company, let’s go back to what I had to say in 2000, and lay the groundwork for Dalenberg’s Context Theory of Art Criticism.  Perhaps I won’t be able to say it all in this one blog, but the general, guiding principal of Dalenberg’s Theory is that most of what gives art value, indeed most of what makes art Art, subsists in its context, not in any inherent feature of the work.  This is not a put-down of modern art, or of any art.  It is just an important fact to know as we try to interpret, appreciate, understand, value, and create art.  And by art, I am referring to all the arts, from plastic arts, to music, to literature, to film. If we understand Dalenberg’s Context Theory, we just might be able to avoid spending millions on a forgery.  At the same time, we can begin to glean the difference between a Jackson Pollock and a 5-year-old’s scribblings that are magneted to the refrigerator at home.  

The legitimate art world is generally oblivious to Context Theory, and in fact is often actively threatened by such a theory.  Unfortunately, there is a lot of art in museums that would lose respect and be considered trash if we applied the principles of my context theory.  In fact, that just happened.  A tantalizing piece appeared in the newspaper only this week. As quoted in the Kansas City Star on Feb. 20, 2014:  “A cleaning woman in Bari, Italy, unwittingly threw away contemporary artworks that were supposed to be part of an exhibition.  Her boss said the woman ‘was just doing her job’ when she removed two artworks, including one involving pieces of cookies scattered on the floor.”  Dalenberg’s Context Theory understands this situation implicitly.  The cleaning woman threw away the artworks because she didn’t recognize them as art. She wasn’t aware of the context of the trash she was discarding.  The broken cookies were not art for her, because she had not been apprised of the context in which broken cookies scattered on the floor were to be interpreted.  For her, they were trash.  Someday, I’ll write a whole essay about why the broken cookies episode speaks volumes about the value of art and what makes art Art.  But for now, you get the basic point, which is:  Context informs the value and meaning of art far more than any innate features of the art. 

There were two big events in the art world in 1999-2000 that got me thinking about this topic.  Since then, I’ve had my notions reinforced in a thousand ways, from attending local galleries to something as seemingly unrelated as reading Glenn Gould’s comments on music, to the Knoedler and Company mess.  The events in 1999-2000 involved two modern artists and works of theirs that fell into questionable provenance:  Richard Diebenkorn (of whom, incidentally,  Knoedler and Company were major dealers) and Georgia O’Keeffe. 

In 1999, the art world received the shattering and embarrassing news of the questionable authenticity and provenance of Georgia O’Keeffe’s Canyon Suite watercolors. Those works were venerated as important rediscovered O’Keeffe’s until they were suddenly devalued as frauds.  The 90’s were good times for O’Keeffe and her legacy.  The opening of the Georgia O’Keeffe museum in Santa Fe was a historical event.  O’Keeffe was one of the few names in fine art who was almost a household word. 

But let’s divert from O’Keeffe for a second to talk about e-Bay, the Internet auction company.  During the same general time frame as the Canyon Suite debacle, there was some publicity over an ugly green and orange abstract expressionist painting that was put on auction on e-Bay.  The seller offered the story that he had purchased it at a garage sale in the Bay area.  Photos were put on-line showing the initials R.D. in a lower corner of the painting.  This stimulated furious bidding, because bidders were willing to speculate that this was a previously unknown work by San Francisco artist Richard Diebenkorn, whose paintings from the 1950’s had recently been selling for over 1 million dollars apiece. 

The Internet auction story became very muddy when inconsistencies were discovered in the seller’s story about the provenance of the painting.  For instance, the seller had claimed that a hole through the signature on the painting had been made accidentally by the handle of his child’s tricycle, but the truth came out that the seller was unmarried and childless. Then, e-Bay suspended the seller when they found that he had submitted shill bids (which is where a seller submits bids, usually under a false of concealed ID, on the item he is selling in order to drive up the purchase price or underscore the authenticity of the item’s value). 

Eventually the fake Diebenkorn sold for over $135,000 to a buyer in the Netherlands, who had purchased it sight unseen.  Ultimately, the seller and two accomplices pled guilty to federal wire and mail fraud charges, because of placing the shill bids.  They never actually claimed that the work was a Diebenkorn, but the seller later admitted that he had forged Diebenkorn’s initials to the work in order to give that impression, then he and two buddies placed bids to drive up the price. 

My point in telling this strange tale is that the art collecting community was all in a dither over this rediscovered painting, and art collectors were willing to bid hundreds of thousands of dollars on it just because of the initials R.D. and the fact that it was “discovered” in the Bay area where Diebenkorn lived and worked.  Investors were willing to risk hundreds of thousands, just so that maybe they could make a million.  Crazy?—you tell me.  These bids were being made, some by foreign investors, sight unseen.  Nobody had seen the painting, other than a photograph tantalizingly suggesting that it might be a Diebenkorn from the 1950’s.  The thing was unattractive; it was green and orange and had a hole in it.  The price didn’t reach $135,000 because of anything intrinsically valuable about it but two forged initials in one corner of the work which put it potentially in the context of other works that had sold for a million dollars.

Now, on to Georgia O’Keeffe:  The Canyon Suite were a group of watercolors that were allegedly painted by O’Keeffe in 1916 to 1918 while she taught at a small Texas college.  She developed a friendship with Ted Reid, a student, cattle drover, and nature lover, some say her lover, at the time.  She allegedly gave the paintings to him in 1918 before he departed for service in World War I.  Later, after O’Keeffe had left Texas, he returned home, married, and had a family, and he hid the paintings away.  They were passed on to friends or family members and eventually allegedly rediscovered for what they were in 1987.  At that time, when they surfaced, experts in the art world heralded a major rediscovery and authenticated them.  They were purchased for 5 million dollars from a reputable New York art dealer by R. Crosby Kemper, Kansas City collector and philanthropist, in 1993.  They were a central feature of the opening of the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art in Kansas City in 1994 and displayed in a much ballyhooed exhibit. 

A book was published in 1997 devoted just to the Canyon Suite.  In light of what we now know, the hyperbole devoted to the paintings shows how silly and how wrong much art criticism can be when works are uprooted from an artificial context and evaluated for just what they are, splashes of watercolor on cheap paper.  The book Intimate Landscapes: The Canyon Suite of Georgia O’Keeffe includes such passages as: “The remarkable paintings work on two levels:  they present a stirring vision of the majesty of a vast landscape while simultaneously delving into intimate personal territory.  For the first time we see the solitude and meditation that characterize much of O’Keeffe’s later work.”  But the paintings do not bear up under the weight of so much praise.  The fact is, the ONLY reason for such praise is the O’Keeffe name, not anything intrinsic to the works themselves. 

The excrement hit the rotating blades when an official catalog of O’Keeffe’s work, based on meticulous research, was published and failed to list 210 works on paper, including the entire Canyon Suite, which had previously been regarded as genuine O’Keeffe’s.  Some of the same experts who persuaded Kemper to buy the works in 1993 went on record denying their authenticity.  Using information not available in 1993 about the paper the works are painted on, and referencing against extensive catalogs of paper varieties from around the world, it became possible to determine that the Canyon Suite papers date most likely from 1930-1965.  Also, newer research showed that O’Keeffe did not use a wide variety of papers and tended toward light cream colored paper, whereas the Canyon Suite employed a variety of papers, even a tan-brown construction paper and one Italian paper that wasn’t available in the U.S. until 1965. 

The Kansas City gallery ended up returning the paintings to the dealer for a refund.  The announcement was made that the Canyon Suite paintings were essentially worthless, although I supposed that they would have some value for being at the center of such a controversy.  The dealer apparently made some type of restitution (I believe he gave a couple of paintings to the gallery that were supposedly worth something by current art community criteria, although I submit that such criteria are called into question by the entire Canyon Suite incident.)

Now, tell me:  how is something that was worth 5 million dollars, about which books were being published and much praise was being heaped, now be worth nothing, zilch, nada???? The answer is, because context is everything.  The works were only worth 5 million because of their context.  Deprived of their context, they were worth very little. 

Dalenberg’s Context Theory says that there are two aspects to every work that require evaluation before coming to a meaningful critical appraisal.  Those two aspects are essentially the intrinsic and extrinsic attributes of the work, what I call the Innate Value and Contextual Value of the work.  I am not chiefly concerned with the price of fine art, but price is one aspect of value. If you understand Dalenberg’s Context Theory, you begin to understand the ins and outs of the sometimes crazy pricing of art.  One of the reasons art prices can be so crazy (going from zillions to zero like the Diebenkorn and O’Keeffe examples) is that the art world fallaciously values the Contextual (extrinsic) factors over the Innate (intrinsic) factors.  Thus, a crappy Diebenkorn of doubtful authenticity (with a hole in it, no less) can sell for $135,000, while a really fine piece by an unknown artist can be extremely affordable; and a 5 million dollar set of O’Keeffe’s can suddenly be almost worthless. 

The critics who praised the O’Keeffe paintings and waxed eloquent about their artistic attributes committed a critical fallacy.  They thought they were responding to the Innate Value of the works, but in reality (and unbeknownst to them) they were really responding to the Contextual underpinnings of the works.  When the Contextual Value of the works changed suddenly, the works became monetarily valueless and critically condemned.  If the works had had any Innate Value in the first place, the changing of the Contextual Value should not necessarily have resulted in such a gross devaluation, monetarily or critically.  What should have happened, if the works had been full of Innate Value, is that an all-out search should have begun for the genius who really produced the works, since it was somebody other than O’Keeffe.  But that didn’t happen.  The art world felt that the works had little Innate Value, so nobody is searching for the unsung genius. 

In the art world, this Fallacy of Confused Value (mistaking Contextual Value for Innate Value) is common.  A related critical fallacy is something that I call The Emperor’s New Clothes Fallacy.  Suffice it to say that the Emperor’s New Clothes (in the Hans Christian Andersen story) had no Innate Value, because they did not even exist.  Their only value was a kind of Contextual Value, because it was fashionable to praise the clothes, either because you had to pander to the king’s whims or because everybody else was praising them too.  It took an innocent with no understanding of the context to look at the clothes themselves, fail to see any Innate Value in them as clothes, and point out the truth. The child in the Andersen story is the same as the cleaning woman who threw out the scattered cookie pieces.   The Emperor’s New Clothes Fallacy is a little different from the Fallacy of Confused Value, but you can see how it is related.  One might also call the Emperor’s New Clothes Fallacy by some other name, such as the Fallacy of Popularity or The Fallacy of Expected Critical Opinion.  After all, newly discovered O’Keeffe’s!—what a marvelous thing!—how could any self-respecting critic fail to jump on the bandwagon of praise?  Does that mean that if some self-respecting critic had been give the chance to buy an O’Keeffe for, say, $100 in 1916, that he or she would have jumped at the chance?  Probably not, and therein, my friends, lies the critical fallacy of praising the Canyon Suite as if you would have liked it without knowing it was by O’Keeffe or bidding hundreds of thousands on an orange and green garage sale find because of two little letters you find forged in the corner. 

In future blogs, we’ll look at how Dalenberg’s Context Theory will help you wend your way through any modern gallery and sort out the quality from the junk, the priceless from the preposterous.

Twenty Years and Still Going Strong: The Hyperion Romantic Piano Concerto Series

By Dale D. Dalenberg, M.D.

February 12, 2014

I was a terrible piano student. At age 12 or 13, in the mid-1970s, when I am sure we could ill afford it, my mother plunked down something like $12.00 per half-hour lesson, and week after week I would show up at my teacher’s studio having practiced almost none of my lessons. I dreaded those lessons, because I loved my teacher, Mr. Jan Kwant of the Netherlands, and I hated to let him down. But I had some kind of block about practicing thepiano.  I was actually a good music student, having learned to read music early and achieving a certain mid-level virtuosity on the recorders (those end-blown Renaissance and Baroque flutes) and later on the concert flute. I got to where I could sight-read the piccolo or flute part of a Sousa march, which is no small feat. By the time I was a senior in high school, I played the Chaminade flute concertino with the concert band backing me. But I was never more than an advanced beginner on the piano. Perhaps that is why I idolize great pianism, because true pianism is something I could never achieve. Somewhere around 25 or 30 years ago, when I resolved to collect “classical” music in order to hear all the other stuff that wasn’t Beethoven’s 5th, I resolved to make a cornerstone of my collection the Romantic-Era piano literature.  

I started with Rachmaninoff’s Elegiac Piano Trios and Mendelssohn’s Songs Without Words, and I have been collecting ever since.  

Nowadays, I am still listening avidly to everything from Bach to modern-day piano jazz. But, the Romantic era was when pianists were truly rock stars, and those were the days (from roughly mid to late Beethoven through Scriabin and Rachmaninoff) when piano was in its prime. The British label Hyperion Records has done more than any other company to keep the legacy of Romantic era pianism alive. Their Romantic Piano Concerto series is now twenty years old, and they keep digging up forgotten piano concertos to revive, many of them once famous but fallen into obscurity, many of them never before recorded, some of them previously existing only in manuscript.  

The piano as an instrument lends itself to a million varieties of musical expression. Glenn Gould showed how Bach could be brought to life on an instrument that Bach himself barely knew by taking pieces written for the clavichord or harpsichord and giving them a whole new set of nuances and expressions made possible by interpretation on the pianoforte. The rock star pianists of the Romantic Era composed amazing showpieces to show off their prodigious talents. Ragtime was a composed music that foreshadowed jazz and was dominated by the piano. Piano jazz has gone through a thousand iterations, from boogie woogie to stride piano to Thelonious Monk and Bill Evans. There is even a piano presence in rock and roll thanks to artists like Elton John and Billy Joel. But it was during the Romantic Era that the piano reached its peak as the pre-eminent musical instrument, capable of the subtle delicacy of Chopin, the impressionism of Debussy, the sweeping big melodies of Rachmaninoff, or the bombast of the Gottschalk monster concerts.  

Hyperion set out 20 years ago to prove that Tchaikovsky’s 1st and Rachmaninoff’s 2nd were not the only Romantic era piano concertos. Along the way, they have unearthed a lot of amazing material. The latest addition to the series is Charles Gounod (1818-1893), The Complete Works for Pedal Piano & Orchestra, which is Volume 62 in the series. That there was ever even an instrument called the pedal piano is typical of the kind of piano trivia the Hyperion series teaches us. It turns out that the pedal piano had a bit of a small vogue in the 1880’s when certain companies, like the French piano maker Érard, offered an organ-like piano with pedal-notes that could be operated by the feet. These instruments were of use for organists to be able to practice at home. But aside from practicing the organ literature, certain composers wrote pieces dedicated to the pedal piano. Thus, we have four works for the pedal piano from late in the career of Gounod, who is otherwise remembered today mostly as an opera composer. Interestingly, rather than using a dedicated pedal piano, this Hyperion recording was made on two stacked Steinway piano keyboards using a pedal piano system that is operated by the feet to depress the keys on the lower piano that is on the ground under the primary keyboard. The Gounod pieces are light, accessible, and entertaining. I suspect that it is more interesting to watch a pedal piano performance that to merely listen to one, however. Gounod himself was fascinated and inspired to write for the pedal piano by a young lady named Lucie Palicot who was compelled out of necessity to wear a short knee-length skirt to prance about on the pedals while she played, much to the delight (no doubt) of the male onlookers.  

Hyperion’s back catalogue from the Romantic Piano Concerto series is replete with wonders, but two of my favorites are worth mentioning. Volume 18 (from 1998)  features a pair of late Romantic works from the 1920’s by a couple of composers who were close friends and who were very well aware that they were bucking the current trend toward modernism as typified by Schoenberg’s new atonal music. The Hyperion disc contains the First Recording of Joseph Marx’s Romantisches Klavierkonzert in E major, which is a grandly exuberant late Romantic symphony with fiendishly difficult piano part that enjoyed numerous performances in its day in Austria and Germany in the 1920’s but was totally forgotten after 1930. The other piece on this disc is Erich Wolfgang Korngold’s Piano Concerto in C sharp, Op 17, for the left hand. This piece is notable for having been the first commission ordered by famed left-handed concert pianist Paul Wittgenstein, who had lost his right arm to a gunshot wound to the elbow during World War I.  Wittgenstein had numerous works inspired by or dedicated to him during his lifetime, and he commissioned a handful of them. In fact, it could be said that Wittgenstein is responsible for the majority of the piano literature for the left hand. The most famous of these pieces is Ravel’s piano concerto for the left hand, but the Korngold piece preceded Ravel’s. In the way of fun piano trivia, Wittgenstein and Ravel never reconciled after Wittgenstein made edits to Ravel’s concerto for performance, and Ravel was unhappy with the changes.  And more fun trivia: Wittgenstein commissioned Prokofiev’s 4th piano concerto but he never got around to playing it, because he claimed not to understand the piece.  Wittgenstein did the same thing with a Hindemith concerto, which was believed lost, until it was found amongst Wittgenstein’s papers after the death of his widow in 2002 (Wittgenstein died in 1961). As for the Korngold piece, it is worth a listen, as it blends the late Romantic with the early modern and comes off not unlike a Richard Strauss work in several flashes. Nowadays, Korngold is chiefly remembered for his historic film scores.   

The other Hyperion Romantic Piano Concerto disc that I always return to is Volume 22 (from 1999), the incredible Piano Concerto in C major, Op. 39, by Ferruccio Busoni (1866-1924).  There is, quite simply, nothing else quite like this piece. It is massive (coming in at around 75 minutes), bombastic, and unclassifiable.  It is best described as a 5-movement choral symphony with piano obbligato, rather than a typical piano concerto. The Busoni Piano Concerto was composed in 1902-1904, and it stands as a summation of the Romantic era, at least as that era regards the Piano Concerto.  (It seems to me that the Gustav Mahler symphonies hold a similar place with respect to the Symphony.)  Much like we have guitar gods in the rock world today (like Eric Clapton, Pete Townshend, or Joe Bonamassa), Busoni was a piano god in his day. The championing of his solo piano works (and of this particular piano concerto) falls to a small clique of super-elite pianists who just happen to be able to play this stuff proficiently.  This Hyperion recording is by the supernaturally talented Marc André Hamelin, who can apparently play anything no matter how difficult. Prior to Hamelin, the late great John Ogden made a splash with Busoni’s piano concerto. It is no coincidence that both Hamelin and Ogden are among the few who have attempted to play and record the notoriously eccentric and difficult piano works of Kaikhosru Sorabji or that Sorabji himself worshipped Busoni, actually got to meet him once and play his 1st piano sonata for him. There is a lineage of post-Romantic pianism by composer/pianists that goes back to Franz Liszt and Ferruccio Busoni, and continues on through Sorabji, John Ogden (whose own piano concerto is astonishing), and continues today in composer-performers like Hamelin (who has recently released a disc of his own 12 Études in all the minor keys). I listen in wonder. Makes me wish I would have practiced more.    

Why collect physical music?

By Dale D. Dalenberg, M.D.

January 13, 2013

As long as there are physical copies of music, there will be unique collectors’ items.  We have a smattering of such things in the Dalenberg Library.  One of my favorite is this French import blue vinyl pressing of The Buzzcocks’ 1979 album A Different Kind of Tension.

Apparently I am a dinosaur when it comes to my collecting habits, because I still buy music CD’s.  In fact, I even buy LP’s, usually used ones, especially if I think I won’t be able to find the music on CD.  Back when file-sharing was all the rage, I never participated (although I was aware of the phenomenon, thanks to the young  people in the household who didn’t have the money to buy music and would prefer instead to steal it.)  I have never been an MP3 fan—I always felt that MP3 was an inferior sound preservation medium, even back when I didn’t understand the scientific basis for why I felt that way.  I rarely download music, even today.  However, I have warmed a bit to streaming music services (I have a paid subscription to Spotify), but I tend not to “collect” music that way, preferring instead to use Spotify only for research. I do have an iPhone, but I only use it for phone calls, e-mail, and text messaging.  It purports to be a telephone, but sometimes it’s hard to actually find the icon that turns it into a phone.  Despite that little problem,  I do own the iPhone, and I do manage to make and receive telephone calls on it-- but I do not keep any iTunes on it.  

In short, I belong to a dying breed.  Which begs the question, “Why collect physical music?”  Why not just stream the music you want to hear, when you want to hear it?  What is the purpose of owning physical copies of music?  

I have thought a lot about this issue, and I have read what others have to say about it. Frankly, I think that music collectors like me are a little threatened by this topic.  For years, we collectors could claim to possess this awesome, wonderful trove of obscure stuff that nobody else had.  Only to find out now that everybody else can suddenly access most of our collection, even for free, by going on Pandora or Spotify.  I’ve been cataloguing my music collection, item by item, a little bit at a time, since 2011.  The current printout of the Dalenberg Library collection is a Word file that goes on about 50 pages, and even at that I have thus far only catalogued less than 20% of the music holdings.   Suddenly, with the advent of services like Spotify, such cataloguing seems rather pointless.  It seems as if nobody would care what I own if all they had to do was a quick computer search and play whatever tracks they wanted to hear whenever they wanted to hear them.  My valuable collection of a lifetime seems on the surface to suddenly have no value, because anybody can listen to anything from the collection for free at the touch of a button.  

I have taken steps to resolve this dilemma in my own mind. My reasoning through the problem doesn’t make me feel any less the dinosaur, but at least I can still justify spending money on the collection (I think.) 

As a collector, I cling to the concept of ownership, which is linked to the concept of being a steward of important cultural artifacts.  To be sure, I must own hundreds of CD’s that aren’t important artifacts, that went gold or platinum and aren’t all that difficult to find—the world doesn’t need me to be a steward of any of those.  I might as well stream the latest CD by Bruno Mars, unless for personal reasons I just can’t live with not buying it.  At least for the next few years of his sure to be fleeting fame, you’ll be able to find his CD’s everywhere.  On the other hand, it was only a few years ago that I bought Rhino Records’ set of British Invasion compilations.  Those have gotten scarce, and it takes a few hundred dollars in purchases from on-line used CD purveyors to put that collection back together again.  Furthermore, if I had the good fortune to have all the original recordings of all the songs on original vinyl, the collection would be worth many thousands.  However, it may well be that all the songs are available on Spotify, which must diminish the value somewhat (at least for the time being.)

There is a collecting impulse that only other collectors understand.  Keeping playlists off of a streaming music service just doesn’t cut it for a person with the collecting bug.  Some people collect old bottle caps.  Some people collect those squashed pennies you can buy at tourist sites, where you pay 51 cents, and your penny comes back squashed into an oval shape with a souvenir stamp on it of the tourist site you are at.  It just isn’t good enough to those collectors to look at pictures of other peoples’ collections of bottle caps or squashed pennies. They must possess the tangible objects themselves.

The Dalenberg Library has the digitally remastered Apple CD boxed set of The Beatles that was such a splash in 2009, as well as an older vinyl boxed set of the original British Beatles releases on Parlophone. But you will find that there are no Beatles on Spotify, except for the early recordings with Tony Sheridan.  There are a few other major acts that have not inked deals with Spotify, including AC/DC, Metallica, and Pink Floyd.  Even today, if you want to listen to the Beatles catalog, it’s best just to own the discs.  

The other thing about streaming music, or file-shared MP3 files for that matter, is that they seem so transient.  The music could easily be here today, gone tomorrow, depending on the shifting currents of cyberspace.  If your computer crashes, the files might be gone.  You can back stuff up on a cloud these days, but how secure is a cloud?  It might rain someday—afterwards, no cloud (bad metaphor, sorry.)  Back when Napster-style illegal file-sharing was all the rage, my ex-stepson Sean had proudly amassed a collection of 10,000 songs.  Where did all the songs go after Napster got sold and the record company finished suing a random selection of file-sharing music thieves?  Those 10,000 songs apparently vanished into the ether.  I myself had a bunch of downloaded songs on the later iteration of legal Napster—they ended up disappearing too, eventually, never to be heard again.  So, after you get your playlists and downloads and files all tweaked just how you like them, and there is then some kind of financial or electronic upheaval in the streaming music world, what happens?  

Lots of people say that they like physical music because they want to hold it and read it and study it.  They like to see the art, read the lyrics, get the entire package, aside from just the listening-to-the-music part of the experience.  I think there is merit to that argument, although nowadays you can often assemble most of the overall “package” from available on-line sources.  I own a scanner, and a printer, and pretty much all the technology I need to experience the extra-musical aspects of on-line music.  But I still prefer the real thing, whether it be in a CD or LP format.  Actually, I mostly prefer LP’s to CD’s for that physical aspect, because the art is bigger and splashier. But having made that point, the truth is that getting my hands on the art is actually NOT a big part of why physical music is better.  In reality, my larger worry is electronic warfare.  

It’s only a matter of time before the terrorists set off an electromagnetic pulse bomb that fries all of our electronics.  My vinyl records are going to play just fine, especially on my old hand cranked Victrola.  While I am spinning records, the rest of you are going to be stuck in a dystopian nightmare, devoid of music, devoid of a lot of things we take for granted, that puts the former threat of Y2K to shame.  Actually, I’ll be stuck in the same mess too, because I won’t be writing this computer blog, or doing much else that requires technology for that matter, but at least I can while away the time cranking my old Victrola.  

A big argument that some people advance against digital music downloads or streaming music has to do with the loss of quality of the music with each new generation of sound reproduction.  Such people believe that analogue recording is the standard, because it is a more faithful depiction of the original sound that is being recorded. They believe that LP’s had richer, fuller sound, and that CD’s dumbed down the sound of LP’s, and that digital files (like MP3s) are even worse, and so on.  However, if you really research this topic, you’ll find that there is only a limited, shifty truth to this line of reasoning.  Fact Number One is that ALL recorded sound is only an approximation of the real sound that is being recorded.  LP records make compromises recording the full dynamic range of sounds that are recorded.  Read about RIAA equalization.  Read about turntable rumble, wow, and flutter.  And even if you don’t follow all the audiophile tech geek details, remember why LP’s gave way to CD’s in the first place—the quest to eliminate snaps, pops, crackles, scratches, and skips.  Fact Number Two is that much of the lushness and richness of listening to vinyl that people talk about is just the noise between the music notes. Sometimes, all people are really saying when they find digitally recorded music too austere is that there is too much space between the notes, which often just means they are missing the tape hiss, whether they recognize it for that or not.  And Fact Number Three is that analogue recordings have one big deficiency that digital recordings do not have:  analogue recordings degrade with each subsequent re-recording or copy, whereas digital recordings remain true to the original regardless of the number of times they are reproduced.   

Just like analogue recordings and their preservation on LP’s represent compromises on the original source sound, CD audio is also just an approximation of that sound.  There is also DVD audio, which is a better approximation that CD audio, but it’s still an approximation. CD and DVD audio are both subject to the limits of sampling frequency and accuracy of the recorded sound.  The sampling frequency of CD sound is 44,100 times per second.  CD cannot record the exact soundwave, but at 44,100 samples per second, that’s a lot of snapshots of an analogue soundwave.   And the accuracy of those snapshots is pretty good.  If recorded sounds were colors, the 16-bit audio recording of a typical music CD allows for a choice of 65,536 colors to characterize every sound, sampled 44,100 times per second.  Your ear would have to be pretty damned discerning to pick up a wrong “color” out of all those data points that make up the whole “picture” of the sound being recorded.   

MP3 and other shared or transmitted files rely on data compression algorithms, which are supposed to produce an approximation of the music file that has already been laid down on CD or DVD (which, given the numbers in the previous paragraph, is a damned good approximation of the original source sound.)  The data compression algorithms are supposed to be designed to “fool” the human ear, but there is some evidence that MP3 data compression doesn’t quite achieve that for some listeners.  However, the MP3 standard is going away, and now we have Advanced Audio Compression (AAC) and others, with certainly more advances to come in the future.  There is no question in my mind that digital audio, and the ability to transmit it over the Internet to wherever we want to hear it, will get to the point (and is largely already at the point), where it is indistinguishable from the original source sound, even by the most discerning of listeners.  

So all the arguments about music losing its richness in the digital era are lost on me.  What it comes down to is that I like collecting music the way people collect bottle caps or squashed pennies.  Plus, it’s a hedge against electromagnetic pulse warfare.  Not that I won’t have bigger things to worry about if an EMP bomb goes off in my neighborhood.

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It is estimated that Spotify offers so much music that it would take over 80 years of non-stop listening to hear all of it. In an effort to see how Spotify’s offerings measure up against the Dalenberg Library, I chose three vinyl LP’s from the Library  that I thought would be enough out- of- the-ordinary that Spotify might not have them.  It turns out that Spotify stood up very well to this challenge: 

The Dalenberg Library has a 1982 Stax Records re-mastered reissue of Albert King’s 1971 blues guitar album Lovejoy.  Spotify has the album available for streaming.  #2: The Dalenberg Library has Lene Lovich’s 1979 Stiff/Epic Records release Stateless. Spotify has a later reissue of the album with bonus tracks.  #3:  The Dalenberg Library has this circa 1959 pressing of The Delta Rhythm Boys Jubilee/Jay-Gee LP Delta Rhythm Boys in Sweden.  Spotify did NOT have this album, but they do have an impressive selection of the Delta Rhythm Boys’ other recordings.