Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow (1973)
Don't miss this amazing video about Gravity's Rainbow winning the National Book Award, including a recording of Professor Irwin Corey's hilarious acceptance speech.
Read Professor Irwin Corey's acceptance speech for Pynchon's 1974 National Book Award for Gravity's Rainbow.
Also, have a look at Douglas Kløvedal Lannark's exhaustive documenting of "love" in Gravity's Rainbow.
Music
ukelele chords, 18
rallentando [gradually slackening in tempo], 28
Frank Bridge Variations, 59
harmonica, 62-63, 65-66, 68, 256, 384, 562, 586 ("Mouthorgan temple"), 593, 622, 642, 643, 684, 693, 736, 742, 754-57 [Harmonica Website]
"high shiny opera hat" 69
"weeping at an E-major chord modulating to a G-sharp minor" 78
"adds an overtone to the game, which changes the timbre" 96
"long, dissonant cymbals" 120
the War's evensong, 130-36
"resonant as drumheads" 132
"[Poisson Distribution] is music, not without its majesty" 140
"arranger-style piano" 140
"opera of Balkan intrigue" 142
"fever-rondo" 143
VI b Group, 164
"distant gramophone playing rumba music, basses, woodblocks, wearied blown sheets of tropic string cadences" 168
clarinet, guitars and mandolins, 225
"mellow close-harmony reeds humming a moment in the air" 196
"How many ears smelling of Palmolive and Camay has he crooned song into, outside-the-bowling-alley songs, behind-the-Moxie-billboard songs, Saturday-night open-me-another-quart songs" 208
"The bridge music here, bright ith xylophones" 222
kazoos, 225 (Kazoo Band), 538, 593, 594, 745 ("brotherhood [with] all the captive and oppressed light bulbs")
"conga drums and a peppy tropical orchestra" 229
"Saxophony and Park Lane kind of tune, perfect for certain states of mind" 245
"what's the name of the song everybody's whistling these premature summer days" 257
"An organ grinder plays Rossini's overture to La Gazza Ladra (which, as we shall see later, in Berlin, marks a high point in music which everybody ignored, preferring Beethoven, who never go further than statements of intention), and here without snaredrums or the sonority of brasses the piece is mellow, full of hope, promising lavendar twilights, stainless steel pavilions and everyone elevated at last to aristocracy, and love without payment of any kind...." 274
"the tune is minor and precise" 282
Geli's balalaika, 289
"Wagner, the brasses faint and mocking, the voices of the strings drifting in and out of phase" 324
"the tune darts in and out of qobyz and dombra strummed and plucked" 356
"little German folk tune with some sliding up-scale on the word 'right'" 360
"windy strings and reed sections" 398
"planting swing notes precisely into the groove" 471
"an octave on B to be exact--or H, in the German nomenclature--the notes of the rejected Locrian mode" 434
Beethoven v. Rossini, 440-41
"thunder playing to a martial tune inside his head" 455
"the bleat of a trombone, a reed section, planting swing notes precisely into the groove between silent midpoint and next beat, jumping it pah (hm) pah (hm) pah so exactly in the groove that you knew it was ahead but felt it was behind" 471
"not operetta but dance music here" 477
death of Webern, 494
accordian, 502
"playfully and to some well-known swing riff" 523
"comical bassoon solos" 528
Wittmaier harpsichord, 533
"a thumb-harp whose soundbox is carved from a piece of German pine" 562
"the hard tessitura of those days" 578
"The Row is enlightenment" 621
"a soprano voice sings notes that never arrange themselves into a melody, that fall apart in the same way as dead proteins" 621
"there are harpmen and dulcimer players in all the rivers, wherever water moves" 622
bagpipes, 622
rocket attack ("thirds smooth as distant wind"), 627
blues, 643
oboe players, 708
"so the silences dance in this quartet" 713
