Baroque

Baroque (pronounced buh-rohk or ba-rawk (French)).

(1) Of or relating to a style of architecture and art originating in Italy in the early seventeenth century and variously prevalent in Europe and the New World for a century and a half, characterized by free and sculptural use of the classical orders and ornament, by forms in elevation and plan suggesting movement, and by dramatic effect in which architecture, painting, sculpture, and the decorative arts often worked to combined effect (often used with an initial capital letter).

(2) In music, of or relating to the period following the Renaissance, extending (circa 1600-1750) which tended to be characterized by extensive use of the thorough bass and of ornamentation to create dramatic effects. Johann Sebastian Bach, George Frederick Handel, and Antonio Vivaldi were great composers of the baroque era.

(3) In literature, a style of prose thought extravagantly ornate, florid, and convoluted in character or style.

(4) An irregularly shaped pearl (rare except in technical use).

(5) In pre-modern twentieth century design or engineering, objects intricately or ornately detailed in a way no longer financially viable.

(6) Descriptively (of any object where the technical definitions don’t apply), variously (1) ornate, intricate, decorated, laden with detail & (2) complex and beautiful, despite an outward irregularity.

(7) In stonemasonry & woodworking, chiselled from stone, or shaped from wood, in a garish, crooked, twisted, or slanted sort of way, grotesque or embellished with figures and forms such that every level of relief gives way to more details and contrasts.

(8) Figuratively, something overly or needlessly complicated, applied especially to bureaucracy or instances like accounting systems which either are or appear to be designed to conceal or confuse.

1765: From the French baroque (originally “pearl of irregular shape”), from the Portuguese barroco or barroca (irregularly shaped pearl) which was in some way influenced by either or both the Spanish berrueco or barrueco (granitic crag, irregular pearl, spherical nodule) and the Italian barocco, of uncertain ultimate origin but which may be from the Latin verrūca (wart).  The etymology is however murky and some suggest the Portuguese words may directly have come from the Spanish berruca (a wart) also from the Latin verrūca (a steep place, a height (and thus “a wart” or “an excrescence on a precious stone”).  Most scholars think at some point it probably conflated with Medieval Latin baroco, an invented word for a kind of obfuscating syllogism although one speculative alternative is the word was derived from the work of the Italian painter Federigo Barocci (1528-1612), a founder of the style, but most think this mere coincidence.  The comparative is baroque and the superlative baroquest, both thankfully rare.  Baroque is a noun & adjective, baroqueness is a noun and baroquely is an adverb, the noun plural is baroques.

Marble Court, Palace of Versailles.  Commissioned in the 1660s by Louis XIV (1638–1715; le Roi Soleil (the Sun King), King of France 1643-1715), the Palace of Versailles is thought one of the the finest example of secular Baroque architecture.

Baroque is one of those strange words in English which has evolved to have several layers of meaning including (1) a term which defines epochs in music & architecture, (2) a term referencing the characteristics in the music & architecture most associated with those periods, (3) a term which is a negative criticism of those characteristics, (4) a term which is (by extension) a negative criticism of the excessively ornate in any field (especially in literature) and (5) a term applied admiringly to things intricately or elaborately detailed.  In English, baroque began as an expression of contempt for the style of architecture which most historians believe began in early seventeenth century Rome and which shocked many with its audacious departure from the traditions of the Renaissance which paid such homage to (what was at least imagined to be) the Classical lines from Antiquity.  In architecture, baroque has never been exactly defined, something some explain by analogy with Clement Attlee’s (1883–1967; UK prime-minister 1945-1951) observation that it was as pointless to define socialism as it was an elephant for “...if an elephant ever walked into the room, all would know what it was”.

Karlskirche, Vienna.The Vatican's Saint Peter’s Square is often used to illustrate Baroque architecture and all those colonnades do make quite a statement but Vienna's Karlskirche better represents the way church architects took to the form.  It was commissioned in 1713 by Charles VI (1685–1740; Holy Roman Emperor 1711-1740) after the end of the last great epidemic of Plague as an act of memorial to Cardinal Carlo Borromeo (1538-1584; Archbishop of Milan 1564-1584), revered as a healer of those suffering from Plague.

Actually, although etymologists would say that's true, that’s not how the word is actually often applied because the terms baroque and rococo are often used interchangeably by non-specialists when speaking of just about any building adorned with the elaborate details not seen since modernism, functionalism & brutalism prevailed.  What distinguishes things is less the actual shapes than the feeling imparted, baroque and rococo both noted for asymmetry, luxuriant detailing, extravagant, unexpected curves & lines and a polychromatic richness but where baroque’s language is of grandeur, weight & monumentalism, rococo’s implementations summon thoughts of lightness, playfulness and frivolity.  Tellingly, rococo, when used as a critique is applied almost always in the negative, suggesting something fussy, pointlessly elaborate and overstated whereas baroque is often used admiringly, literature about the only field in which use is universally negative.  The other common use of baroque in the negative applies to bureaucracy or tangled administrative systems when it’s used as a synonym of byzantine.  For those seeking a rule of thumb, except in literature, baroque tends not to be used negatively and when describing objects which contain ornate or intricate detailing, it’s adopted usually to suggest something complex and beautiful, despite an outward irregularity.  Baroque suggests restraint and good taste (there are many other words with which to describe the garish, crooked, twisted or grotesque) and to damn something as silly, over detailed and laden with decorations with no functional or aesthetic purpose, there’s rococo.

Winter Palace, Saint Petersberg.  Some do find the Winter Palace a bit rococo and there are elements of that in the interior but architecturally, it's an example of early baroque, albeit much modified by later renovations.  It was built as a residence of Peter the Great (Peter I, 1672-1725; Tsar of Russia 1682-1725) and remain an official palace of the Romanov Tsars between 1732 and the 1917 revolutions.  The present appearance reflects both the restorative work of the late 1830s when it was rebuilt after a severe fire and the restoration after the damage suffered during the Siege of Leningrad (1941-1944).

The use in the language of literary criticism is, like any application of “baroque” in the non-visual arts, inherently imprecise.  Even in music, it’s understood as a period and many of the compositions which emerged from the era do have a style which is recognisably “baroque” but there was also much which was anything but.  The same can of course be said of the European buildings of the same period, the overwhelming majority of which were neither “baroque”, nor memorable, the adjective in what is now called the “built environment” making sense only when used of representational architecture.  That’s a well-understood distinction in architecture and even painting but more contentious in music, something made murkier still by musicologists having divided the baroque into the “early”, “middle” and late”, mapped onto a range of styles which were sometimes particular to one country and sometimes popular in many.  Interestingly, although as a generalized descriptor it needs still to be thought of as something which began as a term of derision in architecture (and it is from there it gained its parameters), there is an earlier, anonymous piece of (not especially serious) opera criticism which labelled a work as du barocque (in the sense of the original meaning “pearl or irregular shape”), damning the music as un-melodic, discordant and a roll-call of just about every known compositional device; something more like a student’s assignment than a opera.  It’s a critique not greatly different from that made some three centuries later by comrade Stalin (1878–1953; leader of the USSR, 1924-1953) who’d been displeased by one of comrade Dmitri Shostakovich’s (1906-1975) operas, calling it формализм (formalism), "chaos instead of music", a self-indulgence of technique by a composer interested only in the admiration of other composers.

L'Estasi di Santa Teresa (The Ecstasy of Saint Teresa) by Gianlorenzo Bernini (1598–1680) is a sculptural group rendered in white marble, set in an elevated aedicule in the Cornaro Chapel of the church of Santa Maria della Vittoria in Rome.  It’s thought one of the sculptural masterpieces of the High Roman Baroque and depicts Teresa of Ávila, a Spanish Carmelite nun and saint, in a state of religious ecstasy, a spear-holding angel watching over her.  The installation in 2007 (briefly one supposes) gained baroque sculpture a new audience when it was used in a popular meme which noted some similarity with an early morning photograph of Lindsay Lohan resting in a Cadillac.

The last days of baroque: 1967 Mercedes–Benz 600 Pullman Laudaulet (left & rght) and 1971 Mercedes-Benz 280 SE 3.5 Cabriolet (centre).  There was intricate detailing on the W111 and W100s, the last truly coach-built Mercedes-Benz.  Most were produced between 1963-1971 although the W100s continued in a trickle, substantially hand-built, until 1981.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778), remembered as the philosopher who loomed over the French revolution, was also a composer and in his Dictionnaire de la musique (Dictionary of Music, 1767) declared baroque music to be that “...in which the harmony is confused, and loaded with modulations and dissonances. The singing is harsh and unnatural, the intonation difficult, and the movement limited...”, noting the term was a re-purposing of baroco (an alternative spelling of baroko (from a mediaeval mnemonic chant and a mode of syllogism used whenever some point seemed to be exist only pointlessly to obfuscate), used since the thirteenth century by philosophers discussing the tendency by some of their peers (usually those in the Church or university) needlessly to complicate simple concepts and arguments, just for the sake of grandiose academic gloss; formalism as it were.  Etymologists however remain unconvinced by Rousseau’s speculation and cite earlier evidence which suggests it was from architecture that the use in painting and music was derived, pondering that had Rousseau’s musicology been influenced by him being an architect rather than a philosopher, he too may have identified the source in brick and stone.  Anyway, baroque music as it’s now understood is a surprisingly recent construct, discussed as a thing only in the twentieth century, the term widely used only after the 1950s when the advent of long-playing (LP) records made the packaging and distribution of long-form composition practical and the industry became interested in categorizations, the Baroque something different from the Renaissance and the Classical despite the popular association of them all as one.

Mannerism

Mannerism (pronounced man-uh-riz-uhm)

(1) A habitual or characteristic manner, mode, or way of doing something; distinctive quality or style, as in behavior or speech; a distinctive and individual gesture or trait; idiosyncrasy.

(2) Marked or excessive adherence to an unusual or a particular manner, especially if affected; adherence to a distinctive or affected manner, especially in art or literature.

(3) A style in art, a principally Italian movement in art and architecture between the High Renaissance and Baroque periods (1520–1600) that sought to represent an ideal of beauty rather than natural images of it, characterized by a complex perspectival system, elongation of forms, strained gestures or poses of figures, and intense, often strident color (usually initial capital letter).

1795–1805: A compound word manner + -ism.  Manner was from the Middle English maner, a borrowing from the Anglo-Norman manere, from the Old French maniere, from the Vulgar Latin manāria (feminine form of manuarius (belonging to the hand)), from manus (hand).  In Romance languages, there was also the French manière, the Italian mannaia (ax, axe), the Portuguese maneira and maneiro (handy, portable), the Romanian mâner (handle), and the Spanish manera (way).  The –ism suffix was from the Ancient Greek ισμός (ismós) & -isma noun suffixes, often directly, sometimes through the Latin –ismus & isma (from where English picked up ize) and sometimes through the French –isme or the German –ismus, all ultimately from the Ancient Greek (where it tended more specifically to express a finished act or thing done).  It appeared in loanwords from Greek, where it was used to form abstract nouns of action, state, condition or doctrine from verbs and on this model, was used as a productive suffix in the formation of nouns denoting action or practice, state or condition, principles, doctrines, a usage or characteristic, devotion or adherence (criticism; barbarism; Darwinism; despotism; plagiarism; realism; witticism etc).  Mannerism & mannerist are nouns, manneristic & manneristical are adjectives and manneristically is an adverb; the most commonly use noun plural is mannerists.

After the Renaissance

Classic Mannerism: Madonna dal Colla Lungo (The Madonna with the Long Neck (circa 1537-1540)) oil on wood by Parmigianino (Girolamo Francesco Maria Mazzola, 1503-1540).

Historians of art use (sometimes a little loosely) the term Mannerism to refer to a style of painting, sculpture and even architecture which developed in Florence and Rome in the first two decades of the sixteenth century, the later years of the High Renaissance and although it’s a bit of a cliché, mannerism can be thought of as the transition between the idealized style of Renaissance art and the dramatic theatricality of the Baroque.  Early Mannerism (circa 1510-1535) tends to be known for what it was not: it was “anti-Renaissance” or “anti-classical” and a reaction against what had evolved to be a formal and prescriptive style while High Mannerism (circa 1535-1580) adopted a formalism of its own, intricate, self-referential and a visual language which focused on technique and an appeal to the sophisticated critics and patrons of the age.  A deliberate retreat or advance depending on one’s view) from the naturalistic traditions of Renaissance painting the artificiality became the an exaggerated idiom associated with the era and was applied to the strained poses, elongated human figures, distortions of scale, tricks of lighting or perspective which were often depicted in vivid, contrasting colors.  More than anything, it was an attempt to find a way in which the attributes of the emotions could be depicted by technique alone.  Because Mannerism is now so associated with its distinctive markers such as the wan-like necks and facial expressions suggesting something between bemusement and constipation, it’s often forgotten artists as diverse as Correggio (1489-1534), noted for his sentimental narrative paintings, Federico Barocci (1526-1612) the devoutly religious painter of sacred images and Giuseppe Arcimboldo (1527-1593) known for his monumentally bizarre portraits which were collages of fruit and vegetable (still popular as posters) were all significant figures in the mannerist tradition.  The best remembered of course remains Michelangelo (1475-1564) who influenced for centuries the portrayal of the Christ child by showing light radiating from the infant, his Sistine Chapel frescoes such as The Last Judgement (1536-1541) a landmark of the movement.

High Mannerism: El Entierro del Conde de Orgaz (The Burial of the Count of Orgaz, 1586) oil on canvas by El Greco (Domḗnikos Theotokópoulos, 1541-1614) 

Mannerism did not develop merely as an artistic novelty.  The idealized works of the High Renaissance were an expression of stability in society which had by the sixteenth century evolved into what at the time seemed to many not only the highest level of civilization ever achieved but the highest that was possible to achieve.  That didn’t last and the turmoil which followed in the wake of the religious war of the Reformation against the Catholic Church shattered the certainties of centuries, something exacerbated by what was discovered and uncovered by science; not only was it clear that Europe was not the centre of a flat Earth, but the Earth itself was not something around which all the universe revolved.  The ordered harmony of the world explained by the church was crumbling and the adventurism of Mannerism was there to reflects the new uncertainties.

Vista de Toledo (View of Toledo, circa 1599), oil on canvas by El Greco.  Although most associated with depictions of the human form, Mannerism also spawned a school of landscape painting.  Vista de Toledo is the best known of El Greco's surviving landscapes, a portrayal of the city in which he lived and worked in for most of his life.  Mannerist depictions of the built environment actually belonged to the long tradition of emblematic rather than faithful documentary descriptions of city views and here, there's also a bit of artistic licence; viewed looking north-east, the artist has shifted the cathedral to the left of the Alcázar (the royal palace), just to provide the desired compositional balance.  The ancient Alcántara Bridge and the Castle of San Servando are both faithfully represented.

Some historians have argued that although Mannerism wasn’t at any time inevitable, something was because the artistic forms of the Renaissance had been perfected by Old Masters like Raphael and Leonardo who had refined their techniques to the point where their ability to render the natural and realistic transcended the two-dimensional space in which they often worked; at what they did, they couldn’t be improved upon.  This wasn’t an attractive thing for younger artists who wished to be more than just imitative and foreshadowing the iconoclastic movements which centuries later would remake what art could be thought to be, the mannerists formed a new pictorial language, one which was individualistic and mapped symbolism onto a visual structure in which the symmetry and balance so prized by the Old Masters were replaced by a dynamism so challenging that a viewer might be uncertain where their gaze should be focused.  It was a confident and exaggerated artificiality.

Nozze di Cana (The Wedding Feast at Cana, 1562–1563), oil on canvas by Paolo Veronese (Paolo Caliari, 1528–1588).  Nozze di Cana is sometime used in fine art studies, lecturers asking students to identify the elements associated with the High Renaissance and those then exclusive to mannerism.

From Mannerism can be traced the path which led via almost a dozen different movements to the art of post-modernism in which the real & unreal, the spiritual world and the perceptible world, can not necessarily be distinguished, a notion which the masters of the High Renaissance would have thought absurd but just as Mannerism was once a disrupter, it became an orthodoxy so of course there were those who wanted to create their own unique things and the school begat “High Mannerism” which in the seventeenth century became “the Baroque” and, in a nice twist, the style (which at its core was illusionist) was with alacrity embraced by the Church which understood what needed to be done to make faith attractive.  It was at the Council of Trent (1562) when the framework for the strategy of the Counter-Reformation was first thrashed out that it was decided the mystical and supernatural would become a prominent part of the religious experience: Baroque art could do that like none other.

The mannerist tradition: Lindsay (2019) by Sam McKinniss (b 1985) (left), from a reference photograph taken 22 July 2012, leaving the Chateau Marmont in West Hollywood, LA (right).

A distinctive feature of Mannerism was the use of figurative serpentinata (serpentine figure) in the depiction of the human body with extended limbs and the elongation of forms, the figures presented an otherworldliness that departed from classical renditions and many Mannerist works presented individuals or scenes in non-naturalistic settings, oftentimes without any contextual basis, inviting the viewer to regard the work as something beyond the literal renditions of the Renaissance.

Variation

Variation (pronounced vair-ee-ey-shuhn)

(1) The act, process, or accident of varying in condition, character, or degree.

(2) Amount, rate, extent, or degree of change.

(3) A different form of something; variant.

(4) In music, the transformation of a melody or theme with changes or elaborations in harmony, rhythm, and melody.

(5) In ballet, a solo dance, especially one a section of a pas de deux.

(6) In astronomy, any deviation from the mean orbit of a heavenly body, especially of a planetary or satellite orbit.

(7) In admiralty use as applied to nautical navigation, the angular difference at the vessel between the direction of true north and magnetic north; also called magnetic declination.

(8) In biology, a difference or deviation in structure or character from others of the same species or group.

(9) In linguistics, any form of morphophonemic change, such as one involved in inflection, conjugation, or vowel mutation.

1350-1400: From the Middle English variation (difference, divergence), from the Middle French variation, from the Old French variacion (variety, diversity) and directly from the Latin variationem & variātiōn (stem of variātiō) (a difference, variation, change), from the past participle stem of variare (to change) (the source of the modern English vary).  The use in the context of musical composition wasn't common until the early nineteenth century.  Variation is a noun and the (rare) adjective is variational; the noun plural is variations.

The available synonyms themselves show an impressive variation: deviation, abnormality, diversity, variety, fluctuation, innovation, divergence, alteration, discrepancy, disparity, mutation, shift, modification, change, swerve, digression, contradistinction, aberration, novelty, diversification, mutation, alteration, difference.  Apart from the English variation, European descendants include the French variation, the Italian variazione, the Portuguese variação, the Russian вариация (variacija), the Spanish variación and Swedish variation.

Glenn Gould and the Goldberg Variations: 1955 & 1981

Published in 1741, JS Bach’s (1685-1750) Goldberg Variations consists of an aria and thirty variations.  Written for the harpsichord, it’s named after German harpsichordist & organist Johann Gottlieb Goldberg (1727-1756), thought to have undertaken the first performance.  The work is now thought part of the canon of Baroque music but before 1955, was an obscure piece of the Bach repertoire, a technically difficult composition for the hardly fashionable harpsichord and known mostly as a device for teachers to develop students’ keyboard skills.  Even for aficionados of the Baroque, it was rarely performed.

Glenn Gould (1932—1982) was a Canadian classical pianist, his debut album on the then novel twelve-inch vinyl LP an interpretation of the Goldberg Variations, played on the piano.  A quite extraordinary performance and a radical approach, played at a tempo Bach surely never intended and with an electrifying intensity; it was beyond mere interpretation.  The work was also his swansong, uniquely for him, re-recorded in 1981 and issued days before his death.  Eschewing the stunningly fast pace which made its predecessor famous and clearly the work of a mellower, more reflective artist, for those familiar with the original, it’s a masterpiece of controlled tension.

In 2002, Sony re-released both, the earlier essentially untouched, the later benefiting from a re-mastering which corrected some of the technical deficiencies found in many early digital releases.  Although critics could understand Gould thinking there were aspects of the 1955 performance which detracted from the whole and why he felt the second version a better piece of art, it’s still the original which thrills.

Rococo

Rococo (pronounced ruh-koh-koh or roh-kuh-koh)

(1) A style of architecture and decoration, originating in France about 1720, evolved from Baroque types and distinguished by using different materials for a delicate overall effect and by its ornament of shell-work, foliage etc.

(2) A homophonic musical style of the mid-eighteenth century, marked by a generally superficial elegance and charm and by the use of elaborate ornamentation and stereotyped devices.

(3) In fine art (with initial capital letters) noting or pertaining to a style of painting developed simultaneously with the rococo in architecture and decoration, characterized chiefly by smallness of scale, delicacy of color, freedom of brushwork, and the selection of playful subjects as thematic material.

(4) In sculpture, a corresponding style, chiefly characterized by diminutiveness of Baroque forms and playfulness of theme.

(5) Of or pertaining to, in the manner of, or suggested by rococo architecture, decoration, or music or the general atmosphere and spirit of the rococo.

(6) Ornate or florid in speech, literary style etc.

(7) In the abstract (almost always derogatory), relating to old traditions, which may be seen as foolishly outdated; archaic, old-fashioned, obsolete or backwards.

1797: From the French rococo, a blended word from rocaille (an eighteenth century artistic or architectural style of decoration characterized by elaborate ornamentation with pebbles and shells, typical of grottos and fountains from the Vulgar Latin rocca stone) and barroco, pejoratively to denote a "rock" style which fell from fashion; coined by French Neoclassical painter Pierre-Maurice Quays (1777-1803), a pupil of Jacques-Louis David (1748–1825).  David and Quays, devotees of an austere neoclassical ascetic, were influential in nudging high-culture taste in the dying days of the Ancien Régime back from the frivolity of what they came to describe as the rococo.  Their efforts had little impact on the middle-class fondness for decoration and intricate ornamentation.  The adjective appears to have come into use in English in 1836, a direct borrowing from the French and was being used as a noun by 1840 and the general sense of "tastelessly florid or ornate" is from 1844, extended by abstract to just about anything by the 1860s.

Rococo has long been used as a word of disparagement.  It is a critique of stuff excessively ornate or fussy, things which rely on layers of ornamentation to conceal a poverty of elegance in the basic design.  It’s much associated with pretentiousness but that said, there’s often much to admire in the craftsmanship needed to product work of such intricacy and while the taste might be questionable, in painting, engraving, porcelain, stone-masonry etc, there can be a quaint, decorative charm.

Rococo inside and out.

Rococo fashion: Lindsay Lohan in a Gucci Porcelain Garden print gown (the list price a reputed £4,040) at the launch of the One Family NGO (non-governmental organization), Savoy Hotel, London, June 2017.  Although neither cutting-edge nor retro in the conventional sense of the word, the gown generally was well-received.  Some thought it Rococo and perhaps thematically it could have been done with just a ruffled collar, the pussy bow a detail too many, but the patterning was clever and accentuated the lines.  It was one of those designs where a color change would have been transformative, a rendering in scarlet probably would have been less aesthetically pleasing but would have been eye-catching; the blue was a good choice.

Concerto

Concerto (pronounced kuhn-cher-toh or kawn-cher-taw (Italian))

(1) A composition for an orchestra and one or more principal instruments (ie soloists), usually in symphonic form. The classical concerto usually consisted of several movements, and often a cadenza.

(2) An alternative word for ripieno.

1519: From the Italian concertare (concert), the construct being con- + certō.  The Latin prefix con- is from the preposition cum (with) and certō is from certus (resolved, certain) +‎ -ō; the present infinitive certāre, the perfect active certāvī, the supine certātum.  Concerto grosso (literally “big concert”; plural concerti grossi) is the more familiar type of orchestral music of the Baroque era (circa 1600–1750), characterized by contrast between a small group of soloists (soli, concertino, principale) and the full orchestra (tutti, concerto grosso, ripieno). The titles of early concerti grossi often reflected their performance locales, as in concerto da chiesa (church concerto) and concerto da camera (chamber concerto, played at court), titles also applied to works not strictly concerti grossi.  Ultimately the concerto grosso flourished as secular court music.  Concerto is a noun; the noun plurals are  concertos & concerti.

The origin of the Italian word concerto is unclear although most musicologists hold it’s meant to imply a work where disputes and fights are ultimately resolved by working together although the meaning did change over the centuries as musical traditions evolved.  Concerto was first used 1519 in Rome to refer to an ensemble of voices getting together with music although the first publication with this name for works for voices and instruments is by the Venetian composer Andrea Gabrieli (circa 1532-1585) and his nephew Giovanni Gabrieli (circa 1555-1612), a collection of concerti, dated 1587. Up to the first half of the seventeenth century, the term concerti was used in Italy for vocal works accompanied by instruments, many publications appearing with this title although initially, the Italian word sinfonia (from the Latin symphōnia, from the Ancient Greek συμφωνία (sumphōnía) was also used.  It was during the Baroque era the concerto evolved into a recognizably modern form.

Deep Purple and the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra under Malcolm Arnold: Concerto for Group and Orchestra, 24 September 1969.

Although pop groups playing with orchestras is now not rare, there’s never been anything quite like Jon Lord’s (1941-2012) Concerto for Group and Orchestra, performed on 24 September 1969 at the Royal Albert Hall by Deep Purple and the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra under Malcolm Arnold (1921-2006).  The work was a true concerto in three movements: Energico, Lento and Con Fuoco; an attempt to fuse the sound of an orchestra with that of a heavy metal band.  It proved a modest commercial success and has been performed on several occasions.

Cover of the original Tetragrammaton pressing of Deep Purple's second album The Book of Taliesyn (1968).

Although something very different from what most rock bands were doing in 1969, Jon Lord's concerto really was a synthesis of some of the material two of the bands previous three albums, both of which contained threads in the tradition of the German classical music in which Lord Had been trained.  Recorded during their early quasi-psychedelic period, the title of their second album had been borrowed from The Book of Taliesin (Llyfr Taliesin in the Welsh), a fourteenth century manuscript written in Middle Welsh which contains some five dozen poems, some pre-dating the tenth century while the third owed some debt to the seventeenth & eighteenth.  The Concerto for Group and Orchestra was very much in the vein of Deep Purple's early output but what was at the time unexpected was that less than a year after the performance, the band released the album In Rock, a notable change in musical direction and one decidedly not orchestral.  Prior to In Rock, Deep Purple's output had been eclectic with no discernible thematic pattern, a mix of influences from pop, blues and psychedelia, delivered with the odd classical flourish so suddenly to produce one of the defining albums of heavy metal was unexpected in a way the Concerto was not.  For the band however, it was the performance at the Royal Albert Hall which proved the anomaly, In Rock providing the template which would sustain them, through personnel changes and the odd hiatus, well into the twenty-first century.

Cover of the original Harvest pressing of Deep Purple's fourth album: Concerto for Group and Orchestra (1969).

Lord wasn’t discouraged by the restrained enthusiasm of the music press, describing critics as “…an archaic, if necessary, appendage to the music business” and pursued variations of the concept for the rest of his life.  The most noted was Windows (1974), a collaboration with German conductor and composer Eberhard Schoener (b 1938) which included Continuo on B-A-C-H (B-A-C-B# in musical notation), a piece which built on the unfinished triple fugue that closed Johann Sebastian Bach's (1685–1750) Art of the Fugue, written in the last years of his life.  Although not included with the original release on vinyl, the band did perform some of their other material just before the concerto began including a song which would appear on In Rock.  That was Child in Time, a long and rather dramatic piece with some loud screaming which must have been quite unlike anything which some of that night's older critics might previously have enjoyed and perhaps it affected them.  Unlike pop music’s fusions with jazz, attempts to synthesize with classical traditions never attracted the same interest or approbation, the consensus seemingly that while a cobbler could create a hobnail boot for a ballerina, it was hard to imagine why.

Ossuary

Ossuary (pronounced osh-oo-er-ee or os-oo-er-ee)

(1) A structure dedicated to the storage of the bones of the dead.

(2) Any container for the burial of human bones, such as an urn.

(3) By extension, a place for discarded or broken items or (figuratively), of abandoned concepts or ideas. 

1650-1660: From the Late Latin ossuārium (charnel house; receptacle for bones of the dead), a neuter of ossuārius (of or for bones) and variant of ossārium, the construct being oss- (stem of os) (bone (plural ossua)) + -ārius (the adjectival suffix giving the sense “of or related to”).  The Latin os was from the primitive Indo-European ost (bone).  The model for the word was mortuarium, and the alternative form remains ossuarium.  Ossuary and ossuarium are nouns and ossuarius is an adjective; the noun plural is ossuaries.

The Sedlec Ossuary at Starosedlecká, Kutná Hora, in the Bohemian region of the Czech Republic lies about 42 miles (70 km) east of the capital, Prague.  A medieval town, much of the baroque architecture was build between the thirteenth and sixteenth centuries from the wealth generated by the adjacent silver mine.  On architectural grounds alone Kutná Hora is worthy of its status as a UNESCO World Heritage site but, in the suburb of Sedlec is the Church of All Saints which probably deserves a separate listing.

Sedlec’s Church of All Saints is better known as the Sedlec Ossuary, the church of bones, said to contain the bones of between some forty and sixty-thousand dead.  Its origins were a mission by the abbot of the Sedlec Cistercian Monastery, sent by the King of Bohemia to Jerusalem.  The abbot returned with an urn of soil from the Golgotha, the place where Jesus Christ was said to be crucified and this earth he spread around the grounds of the church’s cemetery.  As word of the "Holy Soil" became known, from all over Bohemia, people began to ask to be buried at Sedlec’s Church of All Saints.

Such was the demand that by the fifteenth century, skeletal remains had to be exhumed from the cemetery, the town needing to expand and more space needed for the more recently dead.  In what may sound a little shocking (but must have been judged theologically sound), the bones lay stacked in the basement of the church until 1870 when František Rint (1835-circa 1895), a woodcarver and carpenter from the small town of Česká Skalice in northern Bohemia, was employed by the House of Schwarzenberg (the ruling family of the town) to organize and arrange them.  The results of his efforts were spectacular, the carpenter creating intricate sculptures, including several chandeliers and a copy of the Schwarzenberg coat of arms.  The most spectacular of the chandeliers is also technically interesting for anatomists, said to include at least one of every bone in the human body

The elaborate constructions may seem macabre but each is accompanied by religious displays arranged from bone, conveying to visitors the message that the chapel remains a respectful place of worship and indeed, regular masses continue to be held in both the upper and lower chapel.  Musical performances however are staged only within the church proper so what might prove the interesting acoustic properties of all those bones remains unexplored.  The site, opened to tourists early in the century proved popular, almost a quarter-million visiting in the last year before the pandemic and it quickly became the biggest attraction in central Bohemia.  The financial blessing has proved also a curse however, local residents complaining the volume of visitors often overwhelms the operations of what remains a functioning Roman Catholic church and cemetery.  It’s said there are tourists who treat the place as just another theme-park.

Still, such is the importance of the ossuary to the local economy, that the ancient site is often renovated, including some attention to the condition of the bones which sounds strange but it seems human bone is subject to discoloration over time and restoring them to a more brilliant white is thought greatly to enhance the tourists' visual experience.  Even if one’s taste doesn’t extend to the macabre, Kutná Hora remains one of the medieval treasures of Bohemia and within the same Cistercian complex as the ossuary is the Sedlec Cathedral, the Church of the Assumption of Our Lady and Saint John the Baptist.  Built between 1290-1320, the cathedral is one of the oldest remaining in the Baroque Gothic style and also enjoys a place on the UNESCO World Heritage list and a short distance from there is a truly secular attraction, the Kutná Hora's Chocolate Museum, a tiny homage to chocolate with exhibits dating from the early nineteenth century.  There are chocolate tasting sessions and private candlelit dinners can be booked.

The ossuary vibe: Lindsay Lohan wearing Alexander McQueen skull scarf, 2012.

So entrenched in fashion has the skull been for hundreds of years that not even its use (as the “Death’s Head”) by the Nazi SS (the Schutzstaffel (security squad), 1925-1945, also stylized as ᛋᛋ with Armanen runes) tainted it sufficiently to discourage its appearance on clothes, accessories and jewelry.  Seasonally, the popularity ebbs and flows but skulls are seemingly always at least a niche and the appeal is also cross-cultural, the skull variously a good luck charm and a symbol employed to ward of disease and evil spirits.  In the English-speaking world, the widespread use of the skull symbol seems to have begun in the Elizabethan period (1558-1603) although most acknowledge the practice began in Bohemia and came to England via sea-farers and traders, the original items being skull rings, either carved from a human jawbone or rendered from metal.  An especially popular form was the skull ring with the jawbone disappearing to create the illusion of a finger piercing the wearer's mouth, still a widely used pattern today.  One curious aspect of the appeal is that Satanists and Christians alike have both embraced the iconography, skulls a likely to be seen among Devil worshipers as they are to be in the mix with images of saints and crucifixes.  Of late though, while they haven’t disowned the medieval art, Christianity seems now less keen on skulls.  The Satanists remain committed.

Caffeine

Caffeine (pronounced ka-feen, kaf-een or kaf-ee-in)

A white, crystalline, bitter alkaloid with the chemical compound C8H10N4O2.

1830: From the French caféine, the construct being café (coffee) + ine (the chemical suffix).  The earlier German was kaffein, from kaffee (coffee); the adjective is caffeinic.  Technically, caffeine is a trimethyl-derivative of xanthine, a coining as Kaffein in 1830, from German Kaffein, by German analytical chemist Friedlieb Ferdinand Runge (1794–1867).  He chose the name because the alkaloid was found in coffee beans; its presence accounting for the stimulating effect of coffee and tea.  The noun caffeinism was coined as medical jargon in 1880 to describe the "morbid state produced by prolonged or excessive exposure to caffeine" although the condition had for centuries been noted by doctors and others.

Of coffee

Caffeine's molecular structure.

Methyltheobromine (or caffeine) is a central nervous system stimulant and the most widely consumed psychoactive drug which works, inter alia, by reversibly blocking the action of adenosine on its receptor and consequently prevents the onset of adenosine-induced drowsiness.  Caffeine is a bitter, white crystalline purine, a methylxanthine alkaloid, chemically related to the adenine and guanine bases of DNA and ribonucleic acid RNA.

Human caffeine consumption is said to date from circa 3000 BC when, according to Chinese legend, the mythological Emperor Shennong (Divine Farmer) serendipitously invented tea, a story derived from an early book on the history of tea.  Coffee drinking first became common in the mid-fifteenth century in the Sufi monasteries of Yemenin Arabia and it spread first to North Africa and by the sixteenth century was widely consumed throughout the Middle East, Persia and Asia Minor.  The first European coffee houses were in Italy and they soon became common throughout the continent.

Voltaire (1760) by Théodore Gardelle (1722–1761); he doubtlessly agreed with de Fontenelle.

In its pure form, caffeine can be fatal in tiny quantities although in the form usually enjoyed, coffee, one would need to drink over a hundred cups in a day to approach toxicity.  Voltaire (1694–1778), often at the Café de Procope in Paris, drank sometimes as many as forty cups a day, enjoying it so much he ignored the advice of his doctors to stop.  He lived to eighty-four but there’s no evidence the often attributed quotation: “It may be poison, but I have been drinking it for sixty-five years, and I am not dead yet” was his.  The more likely source is French author Bernard Le Bovier de Fontenelle (1657–1757) whose actual words were: “I think it must be [a slow poison], for I’ve been drinking it for eighty-five years and am not dead yet.”   Fontenelle died a month short of his hundredth birthday.

Depiction of seventeenth century London coffee house.

Whatever the concern about coffee the drink, the coffee house the place attracted its own concerns.  There’s some evidence coffee houses were welcomed by the authorities when first they became popular in seventeenth century London because they seemed a desirable alternative to the ale house where men would drink beer and later gin, leading to all the notorious social ills.  However, it seemed soon to kings and ministers that while having drunken men brawl or beat their wives was hardly good, it was a more manageable problem than having them cluster, share the newly available cheap newspapers and pamphlets, talk and think.  Men taking and thinking might lead to them getting ideas which was worse than them fighting in the street and government made repeated attempts to suppress the coffee shops.  Ultimately, caffeine prevailed.

Johann Sebastian Bach (circa 1760) by Johann Eberhard Ihle (1727–1814).

On the continent, the Habsburgs were no more impressed than the Stuarts in England, the government there encouraging the idea of coffee was a subversive societal vice and there was something of a minor moral panic among good citizens disturbed at the corrupting influences of such places.  This didn’t amuse a German composer famously associated with the late Baroque, JS Bach (1685–1750) who was fond of taking his frequent shots in his favorite coffee shops and, although never noted for his light-heartedness, he took an amusing poem mocking the public’s concerns, written by his frequent collaborator Christian Friedrich Henrici (1700–1764; pen name Picander), and set it to music as Schweigt stille, plaudert nicht (Be still, stop chattering).  Composed between 1732-1735, it’s usually called the Coffee Cantata, although, it’s really a comic operetta.  A satirical commentary, the work makes fun of the concerns respectable folk had about coffee and coffee houses.  In Vienna as in London, caffeine triumphed.

Despite the joys of a Bach cantata and the persuasive (if misattributed) endorsement of Voltaire, the killjoy editors of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) weren’t sure ordinary folk could be trusted to decide how many cups of coffee daily to enjoy and declared more research was needed.  They often conclude more research is needed.  Strangely, the DSM’s editors appear to be less trusting than most clergy, caffeine a drug to which even normally condemnatory priests, rabbis and mullahs don’t object, the only famously abstemious among the major faiths being the Church of Latter-Day Saints (the Mormons), the Seventh-Day Adventists and the Rastafarians, the last perhaps a surprise given how well a long black complements some good weed.

Simple pleasure: the long black.

Widely consumed, caffeine is a psychoactive drug which produces its psychomotor stimulant and reinforcing effects through antagonism at adenosine receptors and indirect effects on dopaminergic neurotransmission.  The editors of DSM-5 (2013) were prepared to concede consumption of caffeine at recommended dietary doses is usually at least harmless and may even have some benefits such as the enhancement of analgesia but do caution some may experience caffeine-related health effects and functional impairment and that this can manifest in different people at different levels of consumption.  Higher doses can produce dysphoric subjective effects and caffeine intoxication, including restlessness, nervousness, insomnia and an irregular heartbeat.  It’s also associated in some with gastrointestinal problems, urinary incontinence and anxiety, use during pregnancy said to be associated with especially poor outcomes.

Lindsay Lohan leaving Coffee Bean, Los Angeles, December 2007.

Cold turkey may not be the solution either, the editors documenting withdrawal symptoms which some may experience if abruptly discontinuing regular use, including headaches, fatigue, irritability, a depressed mood, difficulty concentrating, and even flu-like symptoms, the DSM-5 codifying the conditions as (1) caffeine intoxication, (2) caffeine withdrawal, (3) caffeine-induced anxiety disorder and (4), caffeine-induced insomnia.  These are listed as the potential diagnoses when symptoms cause clinically significant distress or impairment and, because some individuals report an inability to reduce their consumption despite clinically significant problems even after seeking treatment, caffeine consumption can be said to lead to substance dependence.

Caffeine is an essential part of the recommended pro ana breakfast.

Thus the DSM-5 proposed three necessary diagnostic criteria for caffeine use disorder: (1) a persistent desire or unsuccessful efforts to reduce or control caffeine use, (2) continued caffeine use despite knowledge of (it’s not specified if an explicit acknowledgment is needed) having a persistent or recurrent physical or psychological problem that is likely to have been caused or exacerbated by caffeine and (3), withdrawal, as manifested by the characteristic withdrawal syndrome for caffeine, or caffeine or a closely related substance being taken to relieve or avoid withdrawal symptoms. Six additional diagnostic criteria included in other substance use disorders, such as craving, tolerance, and taking caffeine in larger amounts or over a longer period of time than intended, were also included as markers for greater severity beyond the three key criteria for caffeine use disorder.  Because caffeine is so widely consumed, to reduce any potential for over-diagnosis, the proposed diagnostic strategy for caffeine, despite sounding onerous, is actually more conservative than for other substances.

One can see the attraction of energy drinks.

The editors did note the paucity of data relating to the prevalence and clinical significance of caffeine use disorder and the suspicion is the interest may have been triggered not the usual suspect, coffee, but the newer generation of energy drinks and diet supplements.  Previous research was apparently too focused on specific, small-subsets rather than the general populations, some of the studies so specialized as to be thought unrepresentative of the general population.  One (very small) study of caffeine use disorder in the United States (reported in the DSM-IV (1994)) found that 30% of caffeine consumers fulfilled the generic DSM-IV criteria for substance dependence as applied to caffeine but this fell to 10% under (the supposedly more realistic) DSM-5 criteria, a hint the concerns of clinical over-diagnosis do need to be taken seriously.  Again, the point was made that more research is required, the extent to which caffeine use disorder is associated with markers of clinical significance such as self-reported caffeine-related distress or impairment, psychological distress, sleep problems, or other drug use is wholly unknown.

The documented study the editors reviewed was the most thorough evaluation yet conducted of the prevalence, clinical significance and correlates of meeting proposed criteria for caffeine use disorder yet it was extensive enough only to inform future research and considerations regarding risk and differential diagnosis, technical points about the parameters of control group populations especially noted.  Despite the apparent lack of robustness, the editors were persuaded the findings did support the inclusion of caffeine use disorder in future editions of the DSM.  Although only a small percentage of sampled caffeine consumers met the proposed key diagnostic criteria, where the standards were met, there were clinically meaningful effects.

All reputable authorities recommend a caffeine intake of not more than 400 mg a day, or two long black coffees.  Many coffee fiends exceed this before breakfast is over.

Caffeine has become more interesting as a drug because of the late twentieth-century phenomenon of the energy drink, the interest not so much in the caffeine content which, can be much more or much less than a cup of coffee but because the pattern of consumption is, in certain sub-groups, so associated with strong alcohol, often on a 1:1 (ie 30-60 ml spirits to 250 ml energy drink) basis, a pattern well known with long-established mixers like Coca-Cola but now in both much greater volume and a much higher caffeine content.  It’s difficult to tell whether a problem has emerged because while the deaths associated with the combination attract attention, the aggregate numbers, impressionistically, seem small and may not be statistically significant.  There's even been the suggestion extreme variations in ambient temperature may have been an at least contributory factor in some deaths.