Philip K. Dick’s Favorite Classical Music: A Free, 11-Hour Playlist

What did Do Androids Dream of Elec­tric Sheep? and A Scan­ner Dark­ly author Philip K. Dick, that vision­ary of our not-too-dis­tant dystopi­an future, lis­ten to while he craft­ed his descrip­tions of grim, psy­cho­log­i­cal­ly (and some­times psy­che­del­i­cal­ly) har­row­ing times ahead? Mozart. Beethoven. Mahler. Wag­n­er.

Yes, while look­ing tex­tu­al­ly for­ward, he lis­tened back­ward, sound­track­ing the con­stant work­ings of his imag­i­na­tion with clas­si­cal music, as he had done since his teenage years. As Lejla Kucukalic writes in Philip K. Dick: Canon­i­cal Writer of the Dig­i­tal Age:

After grad­u­at­ing from high school in 1947, Dick moved out of his moth­er’s house and con­tin­ued work­ing as a clerk at a Berke­ley music store, Art Music. “Now,” wrote Dick, “my long­time love of music rose to the sur­face, and I began to study and grasp huge areas of the map of music; by four­teen I could rec­og­nize vir­tu­al­ly any sym­pho­ny or opera” (“Self-Por­trait” 13). Clas­si­cal music, from Beethoven to Wag­n­er, not only stayed Dick­’s life­long pas­sion, but also found its way into many of his works: Wag­n­er’s Goter­dammerung in A Maze of Death, Par­si­fal in Valis, and Mozart’s Mag­ic Flute in Do Androids Dream of Elec­tric Sheep?

At his Forteana Blog, author Andrew May cred­its Dick with, giv­en his pop-cul­tur­al sta­tus, “a decid­ed­ly uncool knowl­edge of clas­si­cal music.” He cites not just Wag­n­er’s Der Ring des Nibelun­gen in the intro­duc­tion to A Maze of Death, Beethoven’s Mis­sa Solem­nis in Ubik, or the part of The Game-Play­ers of Titan where “a teenaged kid forks out 125 dol­lars for a vin­tage record­ing of a Puc­ci­ni aria,” but an entire ear­ly sto­ry which func­tions as “(in my opin­ion) a pure exer­cise in clas­si­cal music crit­i­cism.” In 1953’s “The Pre­serv­ing Machine,” as May retells it, an eccen­tric sci­en­tist, “wor­ried that West­ern civ­i­liza­tion is on the point of col­lapse, invents a machine to pre­serve musi­cal works for future gen­er­a­tions” by encod­ing it “in the form of liv­ing crea­tures. Unfor­tu­nate­ly, as soon as the crea­tures are released into the envi­ron­ment, they start to adapt to it by evolv­ing into dif­fer­ent forms, and the music becomes dis­tort­ed beyond recog­ni­tion.”

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