What is Baroque?

This is the question that today's show—and all forthcoming shows in this
series—circle upon, use as a constraint and as prompt. In a sense it is a matter that can only be
circled upon and not defined normatively. We speak of baroque sensibilities, affects, styles and
tendencies; none can be inscribed neatly into the register of history or closure, of things that are
overcome and then relegated to a past. Baroque, for me, also strongly carries connotations of
detritus and waste. Picture, in your head, a baroque artwork or a building. How much of it lies
within excess or surplus of its functioning? If you look closely you would find a lot: spandrels and
flourishes on stone, precious pillaged metals on top of other precious matter. It is impossible to
see or take it in in its totality; it is transparent only to the distortion that its value has already
effected upon the world. Perhaps the only answer to this question of excess is that all of it is
excessive, and you wouldn't find me arguing against the destruction of the baroque worlds
around us. Yet within excess there is always refuge, the potential proliferation of alternatives in
misuse and abusing the imposed designs of power.

The poet Dom Hale writes 'I've got one foot sowed / In the cruelty of baroque conditions as they
stand'. Taking the baroque as the grounds of our emergence asserts that there is not any
'natural', 'simple' or 'clean' state we can return to, that the trajectory backwards is of even
greater complexity than making our way through the entangled disposessions, lacks and
cruelties of contemporary living. Perhaps the baroque sensibility allows us to confront this fact,
to generate our worlds of hopsitable counter-excess and monstrosity. If there is a loose theme
to today's show it may just be 'hospitable monstrosity'; I am interested in the muddying of what
is clean in the official baroque, like the metallic chimes of Wendy Carlos' Switched on Bach, the
histrionic physical devotion of the 17th century poet Richard Crashaw or Néstor Perlongher's
neobarroso—a portmaneau of the Spanish words for baroque and mud.

[Switched on Bach]
[Intro]
[Sor Juana?]
[Autechre - IO https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BtH1q587ZYE]
[Dom Hale - To a Friend]
[Vaughan - Magic - Excerpt? Listen to this tomorrow https://www.youtube.com/watch?
v=wQjLfrxsmIc]
[Deleuze - What is Baroque? (excerpt)]
[Genet - Divine's house https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kZlvf58ZsOA]
[Song?]
[John Berger - Watteau]
[Crashaw]
[Perlongher]
[Scarlatti - Sonata in Harpsichord https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ricjo8ihKs0]