Chapter 1: Section 4: Page 27: Line 16 (388)

 "More of a medley, I believe, encompassing Hawaiian and Philippino motifs, and concluding with a very tasteful adaptation of Monsieur Saint-Saëns's wonderful 'Bacchanale,' as recently performed at the Paris Opera."

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This reads like a clue on how to read Gravity's Rainbow so that a reader might understand what's happening in the fourth part, "The Counterforce." But you have to replace "Hawaiian and Philippino motifs" with "German and British and American motifs" and replace "concluding with a very tasteful adaptation of Monsieur Saint-Saëns's wonderful 'Bacchanale'" with some other work which I can't name because I'm still having a lot of trouble with "The Counterforce." It might be something less high brow artsy and could simply be "concluding with a disgustingly lowbrow and hallucinogenic adaptation of Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster's 'Action Comics #1.'" I mean, a guy is shoved into a rocket and launched away from a world that seemed to be ending.

"tasteful adaptation of Monsieur Saint-Saëns's wonderful 'Bacchanale,'"
I just listened to this piece and now I'm picturing Pynchon listening to it and thinking, "I could see a woman practically stripping to this!" The opening movement and a few other movements within are evocative of "The Streets of Cairo," also known as the Snake Charmer's song, which became synonymous with belly dancing or the hoochie coochie. 

Chapter 1: Section 4: Page 27: Line 15 (387)

 "And is it authentic native music?"

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What Miles is asking without knowing he's asking it because he's living in 1893 is, "Do you have native Hawaiians in your band or are you a cultural appropriating scum-bag?" Of course he would have been using the term "scum-bag" to mean "a bag used in the refining of sugar" and not in "a condom." Also people almost certainly weren't referring to other people as "scum-bags" in 1893. All of this is to say that this book was written in 2006 so Pynchon was probably hinting at the idea of whiteness appropriating foreign native arts and ideas as their own in the only way an 1893 kid could: being truly passionate about Hawaiian music and wanting to know if Miss McAdoo's band reproduced it authentically. This entire bit about ukuleles and a white woman dancing foreign dances is a continuation of Pynchon's examination of the Chicago World's Fair and how it treated non-white arts and cultures. They were things to be curious about and maybe admire on their own merits, divorced from the context of the culture which created them, because looking too deeply at the culture and the people and how these arts and creations came to the shores of the white men bring up too many questions with nearly only depressing answers.