By Pete Welsch from Washington, DC, USA via Wikimedia Commons
By Alex Dalenberg
September 29, 2013
Greetings from your editor. I’ve been meaning to put up a post on this for a while here, but a friend of mind bringing home a copy of Philip K. Dick ‘s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968) from the The Strand in Manhattan inspired me to log into Squarespace.
Spotify users, behold: The Philip K. Dick Playlist.
Jason Boog over at publishing blog Galleycat compiled this playlist of Philip K. Dick’s favorite music based on this two-year-old blog post from a fellow named Andrew May . Bottom line: the great science fiction author was a lover of classical music.
Read the whole post, but here’s the general idea, via May:
For an icon of popular culture, Philip K. Dick had a decidedly uncool knowledge of classical music. In an article written several years ago I mentioned his interest in Wagner’s opera Parsifal, and the numerous references to it in VALIS. But classical music features in one way or another in many of Dick’s works. Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen is mentioned in the introduction to A Maze of Death as the source employed for some of the material in the book. Mozart’s Magic Flute is described, in considerable detail, in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (the hard-boiled cop Rick Deckard is an opera buff, naturally). In Ubik, a helicopter plays Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis (one of the most sublime musical works of the nineteenth century) as background muzak. In The Game-Players of Titan, a teenaged kid forks out 125 dollars for a vintage recording of a Puccini aria. And so on.
According to one biography, Dick said he worked as a host of a classical music program on KSMO Radio in California 1947. On another note, Dick led the list of Library of America backlist bestsellers last year.