The shift of attention from music to literature begun several volumes back becomes definitive in Revolving Lights. The two Swedish boarders, Engstrom and Sigerson, play at conducting an imaginary orchestra in Chapter One, but in the rest of the book, music play as an incidental, marginal role. Consequently, the playlist is the shortest of all so far:
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLEuwqhzbsAguB4qQZS5mf4rr1UUpxLiI2
- 250 – “So ear-ly in, the mor-ning,/My Belov-ed”
- “One Morning Oh, So Early,” words by Jean Ingelow from her novel Mopsa the Fairy, music by Alfred Gatty
- 285 – “that book of Dan Leno’s”
- Refers to Dan Leno: Hys Booke, written by himself, a Volume of Frivolities, first published in 1899. There are several recordings of Dan Leno doing his routines. This one is “The Tower of London,” where a guardsman tries to show off the Tower to a group of ladies more interested in the refreshment room.
- 347 – “Bach. Of all people. He had found a contralto laugh in Bach.”
- This may refer to Bach’s Cantata No. 15, “Ich Jauchze, Ich Lache” {I rejoice, I laugh)
- 365 – “a Clementi finger exercise”
- Muzio Clementi (1752-1832), an Anglo-Italian composer and student of the piano published Introduction to the Art of Playing on the Piano Forte, which included 50 pieces composed as finger exercises on the piano.
- 373 – “A young man at a piano picked out a few bars of Grieg and played them over and over.”
- It’s anyone’s guess what the tune might be, but one of the top three candidates has to be “”Wedding Day at Troldhaugen” from the Peer Gynt Suite