A Contrapuntal Fantasy

Some have said that the greatest novel of the 20th century is The Gulag Archipelago by Alexsandr Solzhenitsyn. I'm not a literary critic so I can't say yea or nay to that, but I am re-reading it and it is certainly a very powerful and important book.

First a little context from the Wikipedia article on the Old Believers:

Old Believers, also called Old Ritualists,^[a] are Eastern Orthodox Christians who maintain the liturgical and ritual practices of the Russian Orthodox Church as they were before the reforms of Patriarch Nikon of Moscow between 1652 and 1666. 

Old Believer theology is characterized by this strict adherence to pre-reform traditions, as well as the belief that the reformed church's heresy is coeval with the arrival of the Antichrist.

As a result of this eschatological belief, as well as the church and state's mass persecution of the Old Believers, many fled to establish colonies and monasteries in the wilderness.

Now to Solzhenitsyn:

The Old Believers--eternally persecuted, eternal exiles--they are the ones who three centuries earlier divined the ruthlessness at the heart of Authority! In 1950 a plane was flying over the vast basin of the Podkamennaya Tunguska. The training of airmen has improved greatly since the war, and the zealous aviator spotted something that no-one before him had seen in twenty years: an unknown dwelling place in the taiga ... What they had found were the Yaruyevo Old Believers. When the great and longed-for Plague began--I mean collectivization--they had fled from this blessing into the depths of the taiga, a whole village of them. And they lived there without ever poking their noses out ... In this way the Yaruyevo Old Believers had won themselves twenty years of life! Twenty years of life as free human beings... [The Gulag Archipelago, pp 431-2]

Now here is the fantasy part: in a world where the arts have been collectivized, including music, and the Swiftian dinosaurs, velociraptors of the backbeat, roam the land, crushing all before them, a small village of contrapuntalists, following the ancient rites of DuFay, Josquin, Ockeghem, and Bach flee into the taiga and for many decades preserve the tapestries of counterpoint, completely isolated from the world. Like the Old Believers before them, once a year they send a single representative by obscure woodland paths to the local WalMart to purchase salt, blank paper and HB pencils to continue their quest for salvation and really good music.

And, of course, once a year they perform Nuper rosarum flores by Guillaume DuFay: