Pop only plays with ideas of Evil for cheap thrills, though I suppose there
is a market for self-destructive teenage angst which is certainly very
negative.
For truly occult music we need to go a bit further off the beaten track. It's a
huge subject and very much akin to mathematics and numerology. Some
strict vocal canons were appended to Michael Maier's Atalanta Fugiens and
can be found as an appendix to John Read's Prelude to Chemistry, 1936. They
have catchy titles like "The Earth is the Nurse of the Philosopher's Stone" and
some have suggested that they were intended to be sung to help the
transmutatiion process.
For a sublime opera steeped in occult lore, try Busoni's Doktor Faust, based
not on Goethe but the original Faust legends and puppet plays. It was left
unfinished on the composer's death and at least two completions are in
circulation, one by Busoni's pupil Philip Jarnach.
For many, an air of the diabolic still hangs over the twelve-note system of
atonal composition developed by Arnold Schoenberg. He was himself fascinated
by the occult, specifically in connection with the Seraphita of Balzac. The
manipulation of a twelve note series to remove all sense of a tonal root was
regarded by many as a crime against nature. Thomas Mann took the system
and attibuted it to his fictional Adrian Leverkuhn, whose pact with darkness in
the novel Doktor Faust was seen as symbolic of German culture in the
twentieth century. Schoenberg, needless to say, was not well pleased.
Incidentally the English serial composer Humphrey Searle, whose interesting
memoirs are on the web somewhere, actually wrote the works of Leverkuhn
according to Mann's descriptions for an impressive Radio Three feature in the
nineteen eighties. Ah, those were the days!
