There are cellphones in the world of today, and so they must also be in fiction. Many writers don't know how to handle this fact, but Ramsey Campbell does, at least in his story "Concerto in Five Movements." Instead of going to ancient libraries and consulting dusty tomes, his character Claudia carries out her researches in the comfort of her own home, or on the bus, with all of the world's knowledge (except for the source of the Lovecraft epigraph) in the palm of her hand. Mr. Campbell is also good in writing about music, which is not an easy thing to do.
On the opposite end of technology in this story are a pair of "prehistoric monoliths known as Adam and Eve," so again there is Lovecraftian content in "Concerto in Five Movements." More follows: the singing of "solo themes in an unknown language"; visions of strange "asymmetrical" and "out of proportion" landscapes; dark forests, copses, mountains, caves; a fictional author of the occult, Gahariet le Bon, and a grimoire, the Book of Daoloth; a very oblique allusion to "The Rats in the Walls" by Lovecraft; and words such as shamble, pallid, gibbous, foetal, and so on.
The cosmic horror in this story comes from a legend among some Medieval cultists that they could summon an entity that had arisen in the infancy of the cosmos, in other words at--or was it before?--God's act of creation. There are references or allusions to Adam and Eve, Calvary and the Crucifixion, to God and Christmas, but no one in this story seems to be much of a believer in God or Jesus Christ. Maybe they would rather spell it cruci-fiction. Ramsey Campbell himself is supposed to be an atheist. It's no wonder, then, that these people feel horror when contemplating the universe. This weekend we will have the last full moon of the year and an occurrence of the Geminid meteor shower. For any reasonable person--for any fully human person with a soul, a heart, and a mind--there can be only awe and wonder and feelings of great mystery in contemplation and witness of this vast, beautiful, wonderful universe. Horror is, I think, an inappropriate response, as is the cosmic loneliness so often expressed by astronomers.
An old god returns in "Concerto in Five Movements" to lure away children and to destroy not just a concert hall full of musicians but also any random member or members of humanity as it afterwards wanders loose upon the earth. Mention of "solo themes in an unknown language" makes me think of Lovecraftian gibberish, or gibberish as the language of the void. Reference to the origins of this old god in the infancy of the cosmos makes me think of the void as that which preceded and was banished by God's initial creative act. Somehow this old god survived, though, or, like Cthulhu, it lay sleeping until being revived or resurrected by occult forces. Only Claudia in her sensitivity seems to be aware of its return. On the other hand, she is the only survivor of the disaster at the concert hall. By the way, one of the movements of the title is "Tanz der Geburt Gottes"--"Dance of the birth of gods."
There appears to be a vast pun in "Concerto in Five Movements." A cult can be called a movement, as can, of course, a division in a musical work. The composer in the story is named Keppel. I wonder if his name is a play on that of Johannes Keppler, who, as it so happens, further developed the concept of musica universalis, or the music of the spheres, which "regards proportions in the movements of celestial bodies." (Quoted from Wikipedia, emphasis added.) Note that in Ramsey Campbell's story, there are descriptions of the moon as "asymmetrical" and of a moonlit copse as "out of proportion." There appears to be, then, a contrast made between the ordered and proportionate music of the spheres, and the asymmetrical and disproportionate music of the world inhabited by that nameless old god originating in the early universe.
There may be significance in names. Keppler refers to a maker of cloaks or hoods. It comes from the old German word kappe, "cloak," which still exists in Danish. Kappe is no doubt a cognate of our word cape. The name of the composer Keppel would seem to indicate, then, a diminutive form, in other words, a small cloak. His is a small cloak, while the nameless god from the beginning of the universe wears a large one, for in the story Claudia dreams "of a shape cloaked by clouds above a wooded hill." This is a "colossus restless with anticipation," a phrase that makes me think of Yeats' poem "The Second Coming," which closes with these two lines:
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
There is in "The Second Coming" a description: "A shape with lion body and the head of a man," in other words, a sphinx. Enkidu, from the Epic of Gilgamesh, may also be part man and part beast, a chimera. Claudia has a similarly named friend, Ekondu. Their names are practically anagrams. Finally, there is reason to believe that Yeats was inspired by Shelley in his composition of "The Second Coming," and so that long-ago British Romantic poet shows himself again in this two-part series on Ramsey Campbell and his story for Weird Tales.
There is far more involved in this concept of the music of the spheres. I'll let you look into that on your own. I'll point out, though, that the phrase "the music of the spheres" is in "The Horror of the Museum" written by Hazel Heald and revised or ghostwritten by H.P. Lovecraft:
He wished that his senses were not so preternaturally keen. Something in the darkness and stillness seemed to have sharpened them, so that they responded to faint intimations hardly strong enough to be called true impressions. His ears seemed at times to catch a faint, elusive susurrus which could not quite be identified with the nocturnal hum of the squalid streets outside, and he thought of vague, irrelevant things like the music of the spheres and the unknown, inaccessible life of alien dimensions pressing on our own.
In this, Hazel's and Lovecraft's character Rogers is like Claudia, or vice versa. Both are like the sensitive artists in other works by Lovecraft, too, including "The Call of Cthulhu." The next paragraph after the one describing Claudia's dream begins with Finley the conductor's announcement of the movement "Tanz der Geburt Gottes." As for Claudia, her name means "lame" or "crippled." In other words, she cannot dance: she cannot take full part in the concerto in five movements, each of which is in the form of a dance. Maybe that's what saves her, that and her sensitivity to disturbances in the proper order of things.
"The Horror in the Museum" was published in Weird Tales in July 1933, or ninety years before the Cosmic Horror Issue of the magazine--if you can call them the same magazine. That's a really big if. "Concerto in Five Movements" is the most Lovecraftian of the stories so far in this issue and one of the least Nietzschean or Fortean. In fact it's not Nietzschean or Fortean at all as far as I can tell. Ramsey Campbell may be immune to the influence of Charles Fort.
Updated on December 16, 2024.
Original text copyright 2024 Terence E. Hanley
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