The Tarot Room – Georgianna

More Tarot inspired music from Thomas Oboe Lee . . .

Just a couple of weeks ago I posted an MP3 of one of Lee’s marimba pieces from Eight Tarot Cards for Madam Rubio.

Here you can see and hear all eight cards as performed by Stephen Klunk and Isabelle Huang at a BGSU recital this past April.

Really nice.

#0 – The Fool

#2 – The High Priestess

#3 – The Empress

#10 – Wheel of Fortune

#13 – Death

#16 – The Tower

#19 – The Sun

#21 – The World

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Billy Corgan of the Smashing Pumpkins loves the Tarot. And of all the cards, the Fool speaks to him the loudest. While talking about his newest release, Teargarden by Kaleidyscope, Corgan told Albequrque’s Local IQ,

“We are all, in essence, on the fool’s journey. So the inspiration for the [new] album is the story of the fool, which is the story of life as we all struggle towards transcendence.”

Corgan is releasing Teargarden like a Tarot reading, dealing out one card/song at a time. By the time he’s done, the entire work will have 44 songs. The 22 majors and each of their shadows?

The first six songs are available for free download on the band’s website. Corgan plans to release all of them like this, getting constant feedback as he records the rest of the album.

Listen here to the songs available so far. Or download them if you like. He wants you to.

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Asked to create a duet for piano, Thomas Oboe Lee was initially inspired by numerology. He was reading Annemarie Schimmel’s, The Mystery of Numbers, when the number 22 especially drew his eye. That led him to the Tarot deck with its 22 Major Arcana and eventually to the creation of a piano opus dedicated to the cards.

Lee wrote The Visconti-Sforza Tarot Cards (22 Salon Pieces for 2 pianos), Op. 66 in 1996. Each piece was inspired by a different card starting with Il Matto. The Fool entertains the gathered guests with a tarantella, and ending with Il Mondo. The World would be a happier place if we all dance together. It’s like a musical Tarot deck.

Lee just posted this short video of a George Rhoads’ sculpture with his own Il Giudizio. On the Day of Judgement, the angels blow their trumpets… as soundtrack. The pianists are Robert Levin and Ya-Fei Chuang.

And listen here to Lee’s Eight Tarot Cards for Madam Rubio – La Ruota della Fortuna with Nancy Zeltsman and Janice Potter on marimbas.
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For more music and Tarot, check out the Cascade Jazz Ensemble backing up the Tower card.

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