a page with an index of posts on music and musical analysis--guitar sonatas and contrapuntal music for guitar and other musical stuff

This blog goes back to 2006 and along the way I've blogged a bit about music.

The music blogging here tends to focus on sonatas for guitar, fugues for guitar, chamber music involving the guitar and other assorted topics.  I like fugues and I like counterpoint. I also like sonata forms and am interested in sonata forms in the guitar literature.

Going through early 19th century sonata forms written by guitarist composers (2015)

Back around 2015 I wrote a lengthy series of blog posts analyzing sonata movements from the early 19th century guitarist composers Diabelli, Molitor, Matiegka, Giuliani and Sor. There are 22 posts in that series as a whole and there are tags for each of the composers.

https://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/search/label/a%20survey%20of%20early%2019th%20century%20guitar%20sonatas

https://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/search/label/diabelli
https://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/search/label/molitor
https://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/search/label/matiegka
https://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/search/label/Giuliani
https://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/search/label/sor

For posts more generally about guitar and sonata form, which will include the above in the tag.

https://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/search/label/guitar%20and%20sonata%20form

I've got a post about Leo Brouwer's Fuga.
https://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/search/label/brouwer

Another thing I've written about is the writings of John Borstlap in general and his book The Classical Revolution in particular.

https://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/search/label/john%20borstlap
https://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/search/label/the%20classical%20revolution

I've blogged about ragtime a little bit.
https://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/search/label/ragtime

This has included noting similarities between the reception history of jazz and ragtime and the reception history of rap.

https://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2019/01/ethan-hein-on-receptivity-to-ellington.html

A more esoteric, theory-laden thesis is

On the possibilities of spatial-temporal correspondence between the syntactics of ragtime and sonata forms


I'm refining that one as of early 2019.

For more general musical analysis not organized by sub-topics ...

https://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/search/label/musical%20analysis

Lest the tags give you the impression that it's all classical guitar blogging from the look of this page, that's not how it is.  I've had fun writing a few thousand words-ish on a Stevie Wonder song, for instance.

https://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2016/12/in-wake-of-slates-wonder-week-tribute.html

One of my soap boxes is my conviction that  music education has amplified rather than diminished a fracture between "high" and "low" musical arts.  I'm interested in composition and music theorizing and analysis that can be put towards the end of reducing that distance.  I write as a classical guitarist but I played in an aspiring prog rock band for many years and have some affection for early blues and jazz and some country (Johnny Cash, Hank Williams Sr. in particular).  So when this blog is about music it's not "always" going to be about what people might call classical music but that "is" a pretty dominant topic.

So ... I also have a tagged series of posts discussing at least some (and I hope, eventually, all) of Nikita Koshkin's 24 preludes and fugues for solo guitar.
https://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/search/label/Koshkin%2024%20preludes%20and%20fugues

Here is a review of a book on music by Roger Scruton that is up at Mere Orthodoxy
https://mereorthodoxy.com/book-review-music-art-roger-scruton/

and a review of a book by John Borstlap
https://mereorthodoxy.com/book-review-classical-revolution-john-borstlap/

3-20-2019
Borstlap left a comment at Mere Orthodoxy and it suggests he was not a very attentive or engaged reader.  Despite having referenced works and ideas by Joseph Kerman, Susan McClary (not that I agree with them); Edward A. Berlin; Charles Rosen; William E. Caplin; and Hepokoski and Darcy; and, yes, Adorno, Borstlap seems to have only noticed the writings that dealt with the political history of the arts in postwar Western life or those theoretical writings that he regards in some general way as "political".  The Caplin and the Hepokoski and Darcy books are not political works.  Neither is Charles Rosen's standard monograph on the Classic era.

Conversely, Borstlap concluded his book with a statement so overwrought it seems apt to quote the purple prose at moderate length:
High art is an exercise of what is best in the human being. It offers a learning process of the intellect and the emotions that can lead to an increased awareness of what we really are and should be, and, as such, a source of inner strength. It was exactly this role that the classical music repertoire played in World War II and in the period directly following this fundamental crisis; it would be unthinkable that people would scramble among the ruins of bombed city centers, desperate to hear a performance of Xenakis, Stockhausen, or Boulez (or in a later period along the glass and steel facades of modernist office blocks to hear the sonic art of Lachenmann, Widmann, or Birtwistle) hoping to be uplifted and to feel again what it means to be a human being. Their work is a product of, not an answer to, the devastation of war trauma and the emptiness of the modern world. If we allow sonic art to be music, we finish off the jobs of destruction set in motion by Hitler and Stalin. … (The Classical Revolution, page 123)
The idea that allowing the sonic art of Xenakis to be music somehow finishes off the jobs of destruction set in motion by Hitler and Stalin is a gambit to Godwin accepting any notion that Xenakis wrote music.  It's also casting a polemical point in the most explicitly political way imaginable in a Western context.  For Borstlap to demur that he was not writing a political book or a book with political polemics is in absurdly bad faith if the moment he encounters a sympathetic but constructively critical review of his book he hand waves a number of the criticisms with generalities about how the reviewer seems to have done a lot of political reading.  Elements of Sonata Theory isn't a political tract.  Other books I've read that didn't need to be brought in include George Oldroyd's The Technique and Spirit of Fugue; Verrall's monograph on counterpoint; Kent Kennan's monograph on counterpoint in 18th century style; Rosen's sonata forms monograph; Elaine Sisman's work on Haydn and variation form; Matthew Riley's monograph on the minor-key symphony in the age of Haydn and Mozart; and Ben Johnston's Maximum Clarity.  I could throw in books by Bruce Haynes and Leonard B. Meyer but some of those names got dropped into the Scruton review as relevant.

In sum, Borstlap's reading of the review and his comment in response to it dodged a fairly direct question as to whether or not he's ever read any Adorno's work at all.  That Adorno's polemics have had a pernicious influence on Western European arts patronage I don't really even intend to dispute. I dispute Borstlap's broadbrush blaming Adorno as somehow having caused the upsurge in sonic art.  Blaming Boulez and Stockhausen?  That I can understand, but I can quote Adorno at moderate length lambasting the integral serialists and John Cage in fairly equal measure.  If defenders of traditionalist classical music can't do better than inadvertently replicating Adorno's put-downs of integral serialism and aleatoric music without even seeming to have known he wrote those, a defense of traditional classical music will not benefit from these sorts of self-appointed defenders of traditions.

I tried to make a comment in reply to Borstlap but Mere Orthodoxy's comments box kept deleting them for reasons nobody can explain.  So ... sometimes a comment in some other context goes up.

This page is going to get updated and modified as new material gets completed.  To get a clearer sense of what stuff is incubating that hasn't quite made it to the point where it's tagged and shows up on this page the main page/blog is the place to go.

9-2-2019

Is "everyone always stealing" black music? Wesley Morris' NYT 1619 project piece flips the script of the German Romantic ideal but still seems to play by it


I found Morris' essay frustrating because, well, I explain why at length in the essay that you can read if you want.  

Analyzing Nikita Koshkin's 24 Preludes and Fugues for Solo Guitar, Volume 1 (2020)
2-8-2020
Here are the posts that discuss and analyze Nikita Koshkin's 24 Preludes and Fugues for Solo Guitar from Volume 1
https://www.edition-margaux.com/en/de/24-preludes-and-fugues
Koshkin's Preludes and Fugues posts

C major
https://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2020/02/nikita-koshkins-24-preludes-and-fugues_76.html
A minor
https://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2020/02/nikita-koshkins-24-preludes-and-fugues_88.html
G major
https://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2020/02/nikita-koshkins-24-preludes-and-fugues_83.html
E minor
https://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2020/02/nikita-koshkins-24-preludes-and-fugues_56.html
D major
https://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2020/02/nikita-koshkins-24-preludes-and-fugues_87.html
B minor
https://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2020/02/nikita-koshkins-24-preludes-and-fugues_60.html
A major
https://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2020/02/nikita-koshkins-24-preludes-and-fugues_36.html
F# minor
https://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2020/02/nikita-koshkins-24-preludes-and-fugues_12.html
E major
https://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2020/02/nikita-koshkins-24-preludes-and-fugues_25.html
C# minor
https://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2020/02/nikita-koshkins-24-preludes-and-fugues_8.html
B major
https://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2020/02/nikita-koshkins-24-preludes-and-fugues.html
G# minor
https://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2020/02/nikita-koshkins-24-preludes-and-fugues_28.html

All these posts link to videos of the performed works and have time indications for where things happen so that even if you don't have a score to read along with you can compare what is being written about to what you can hear on the pertinent link to Youtube videos per post. At the moment there has not been, in my opinion, enough extensive writing on contrapuntal music for solo guitar, so I've been trying to remedy that situation.   When Volume 2 gets recorded the plan is to have a comparable set of analytic/descriptive posts that will complete my discussion of Koshkin's preludes and fugues and links for those will be posted to the blog and also updated here at this page.

when Volume II gets recorded I'll blog about that as I'm able.  Because I hope everyone can get ahold of the cycle that may want to ... there's the link for Volume II.

4-24-2020
Ragtime and Sonata Forms is finished, basically.  Maybe an appendix or two is eventually in order but the 18 part series with bibliographic references can be found by the end of today using the following tag.  As of 4-24-2020 it's posting as an 18 part series in reverse order for scrolling reading purposes.  It's about 50,611 words so it's not a small project. If you want the "bottom line it, show me how this lets me try it" read just part 18.  If you want the extended repudiation of the dumbest ideas Adorno came up with that are paradoxically intertwined with some of his most brilliant conceptual work on why he hated the music of Stravinsky and American popular music parts 1 through 15 are where you'll want to go (if you want to read such a project at all to begin with).

https://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/search/label/ragtime%20and%20sonata%20forms

If you want a chapter-by-chapter survey of what's in 

Ragtime and Sonata Forms
Ragtime as Musical Ice Cream

Arthur Weld’s plea to combat musical vulgarity, including rag-time and coon songs

A Case for Ragtime from Hiram Kelly Moderwell in 1915

Adorno’s “On Jazz” and his later polemics against the popular music

Adorno’s contrast between light and serious music: organic development vs prefabricated building blocks for prefabricated feeling

Adorno on Types of Listener, popular music as mood altering drug

Adorno’s legacy on aesthetics and popular music by way of Roger Scruton

Adorno's Philosophy of New Music and norms of musical cognition

Between forms of non-choice--Adorno's criticism of serialism and aleatory in his later writings, while still rejecting jazz (and rock) in his final work

Finding a 21st century future for ragtime in 18th century composition manuals with the help of Elaine Sisman

Ragging the Classics ... with the music of Giuliani and Sor

Adorno's modes of cognition, George Rochberg on time-space and space-time

George Rochberg on pluralism and questions of style

Leonard Meyer on pluralism, styles, and the ideologies of Romanticism in the late 20th century

Leonard B. Meyer on the shift from the 18th to 19th C from seeing sonatas as "scripts" to seeing sonatas as "plans"

Are we actually “done” with the Romantic era?: Meyer on the advent and replication of novelty Raymond Knapp on the German Idealism of pop music criticism
  
William Caplin’s Classical Forms--the building blocks of themes in the eighteenth century and possible application toward Scott Joplin’s themes in “The Entertainer”

Elements of Sonata Theory by Hepokoski and Darcy—syntactic scripts for the time-space of sonata forms, charting out the ragtime sonata

Appendix 1: recapitulation rag--on the return of B strains as closing themes in the literature

Appendix 2: Ragtime and cumulative setting or cumulative form

Bibliographic references [updated 4-27-2020]

Appendix 3 (12-26-2023)
a new appendix to Ragtime and Sonata Forms, some practical approaches to ragtime/sonata synthesis

8-3-2024 supplement
between sonata form(s) and double variation, a potential approach to creating sonatas based on American vernacular styles (a new addition to Ragtime and Sonata Forms)  

12-28-2024
Practical steps toward a blues-based approach to sonata forms, using single and double-themed variation form as a way to blur the boundaries between sonata form and variation technique with strategic use of V-IV chord  movement.  https://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2024/12/practical-steps-toward-blues-based.html

Ethan Hein did analyses of two wonderful tunes by Thelonious Monk and I could not resist blogging some thoughts about why I also love "Straight, No Chaser" and "Rhythm-a-Ning"
https://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2021/01/ethan-hein-on-two-classic-tunes-by.html

also ... since he wrote about the early 2021 fad of sea shanties that got me thinking about how an old pirate song was transformed into one of the most famous and beloved hymns of the shape note hymnody tradition "Wondrous Love" and why, for choral singers, what is absolutely awful voice-leading practice in the tradition of William Byrd is just fine in Southern Harmony.
https://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2021/01/ethan-hein-on-wellerman-sea-shanties.html

Tuning is for Killjoys (a review at Mere Orthodoxy of Ted Gioia's Music: A Subversive History)

some extended quotes from Augustine's De Musica from the old English translation. I proposed that Augustine's often tedious discourse on rhythm in Latin poetry could best correspond to the concept of "flow" in hiphop and that rather than rehearse old debates about Platonism and Pythagorean ideas we who are alive right now can engage with Augustine's work in a more direct way and see what ideas we can glean from what Augustine wrote rather than just take the words for it from scholars who have told us about Augustine.

Thus ... 

In other words ... Ted Gioia's handling and understanding of Augustine was so egregious I thought it merited a rebuttal. I still like to read him but when it comes to Augustine he dropped the ball at multiple levels. 

more on Gioia's book

If you want to read a write-up on Kerry McCarthy's readable biography on William Byrd

musical posts from 2021, often reply posts to things Ethan Hein wrote that I liked
for instance, Ethan Hein had a different take on "Living for the City" than I did and he persuasively argued for a different take on the harmonies than I had considered in my own blogging.

He also discussed David Bowie's "Starman" and that got me thinking about how the song is structured and what makes it fun

Robert Johnson's "Kind-Hearted Woman" (and remember that there's a long-awaited biography of Robert Johnson coming along in April 2023

Hein's post on John Lee Hooker's "Boogie Chillin'" is worthy reading and inspired me to consider implied harmonies and oblique motion on the guitar as variables to consider in harmonic analysis (in contrast to the default of block-chord root movement reductionism that can happen in a more pianistic approach)

Going somewhat in reverse chronological order, Ethan wrote about "Green Onions" and that inspired me to propose that what makes the song great is its polytonal harmony, hidden in plain sight.


and we compared notes on Prince's guitar solo in "Kiss", which was fun.


We had a few posts on music in 2022 but the ones I'll highlight at this page are these:

2022 kicked off, for me, on some dour notes with the deaths of Terry Teachout and the Italian guitarist composer Angelo Gilardino.
I took a hiatus for a while.

Ethan Hein discussed a few Bjork songs and that inspired me to write some reply-posts because I also like Bjork.


also, from August 2022


the post "John Borstlap and the theodicies of art religion" explains itself clearly enough just by way of the title and that link is over here.
then ...



Richard Taruskin died in 2022 so ... 


I also wrote a piece on what I regarded as Richard Taruskin's lifelong argument against a sacramental view of music (i.e. highbrow art-religion of the Matthew Arnold variety).  I tried to go out of my way to explain how Taruskin (who described himself as a secular Jew) and I (a Calvinist Christian in the Reformed/Anglican wing of thought) paradoxically agreed on the long-term deleterious impact of post-Wagnerian art-religion.


2-4-2023
a sampling of most of German Dzhaparidze's 24 Preludes and Fugues for solo guitar as performed by Esteban Colucci can be found at this post, although to date I have not blogged through that cycle the way I have with the first half of Koshkin's 24 Preludes and Fugues for solo guitar.

Comments are moderated.  You can make them if you want but it doesn't necessarily mean they'll show up.  I do allow comments but, moderation but not here or the other MH related page.

3-1-2023
the obligatory 50th anniversary post on Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon, with a discussion of the harmonic patterns and structure of "Great Gig in the Sky".

3-18-2023
a roughly 3,600 word analysis of Nikita Koshkin's Sonata II for solo guitar

11-23-2023
Ethan Hein discussed Thelonious Monk's "Bemsha Swing" and that inspired me to write a contrapuntal analysis of Monk's use of similar, oblique and contrary motion in the piece.

4-27-2024

6-15-2024
on why AI has not changed everything when it comes to music, drawing upon arguments from Gordon Graham, Andrei Orlov, and Guy L Beck on the distinctions between statues and idols in cultic activity

6-23-2024
You can't fix a cracked window by staring at it through a mirror--a riff on metaphors used to describe the arts and criticism by way of windows, mirrors and lamps

7-7-2024
Theories of aesthetic judgment; art critics as theologians assessing spiritual food; and the problem of advocating theories of judgment when James 2:12-13 teaches to live and act as those who will be judged by the law of liberty

7-13-2024
Joseph Horowitz on The Propaganda of Freedom--too much book for too small a point about Cold War canards about the artist in free societies

7-27-2024
The Bad Faith of The Honest Broker (on the sham dualisms in Ted Gioia's rhetoric)

8-25-2024
the double binds of "art history"--Ted Gioia and Roger Kimball on the Western avant garde, a grand narrative that they want to keep for and against the sake of "rebels"

8-31-2024
Interpolation is the new contrafacta: on Rick Beato’s discussion of interpolation in pop music in light of contrafacta in 16th century Lutheran musical practic

9-2-2024
Cross Over Instead: a thought on Matanya Ophee’s Repertoire Issues since his passing--crossing over instead as the only viable path guitarists have after centuries of being marginal in the classical music mainstream

12-15-2024
Ethan Hein on Jason Yust's April 2024 essay on tonality and racism, some belated thoughts on books by Philip Ewell and John Borstlap as etiological narratives
Fair warning, this one is 12,000 words long.  I finally got around to writing about books by Philip Ewell and John Borstlap published in 2023 that discuss etiologies of music theory and classical music. I get pretty far into the weeds in theological topics like diabology, exousiology, Black theology, European reflections on providence (special rather than general, per Richard Bauckham) and how all these topics are related to debates about the nature of the reception history of European classical music.
TL:DR Christian theological reflection in the last two centuries has plenty of ammo for demolishing Eurocentric Art Religion in both its highbrow and lowbrow forms (and Amerocentric Art Religion, too) as both bad theology and as harmful to art.  The worst thing the Romantics did was to try to transubstantiate the arts into sacraments while pretending that they "moved on" from Christendom.  I think in the long run Eurocentric art religion is parasitically dependent on Christian doctrines its partisans claim to have transcended while in actual Christian (and Jewish) theological aesthetics there's a more robust case to be made for aesthetic pluralism within confessionalism than there is real advocacy for aesthetic pluralism within art mysticisms that have historically devolved rapidly into racist and Eurocentric or Amerocentric agitprops.  

Or, if you're a glutton for punishment, you can read the whole post. :) 

something of a sequel because, providentially, I came across a discussion of Article 26 of the 39 Articles of the Anglican communion, no less!

Thoughts on Art Religion by way of Article 26 of the 39 Articles from the Anglican Communion

An actual sequel to the 12-15-2024 post

a further thought on John Borstlap's simplistic invocation of Schleiermacher as positive and Herder as negative influences in history, dipping a toe into a contemporary discussion of latent Eurocentric and white supremacist elements in Schleiermacher's work

7-5-2025
Why the priests of Art Religion can't accept an AI-generated offering on its altar: remainder humanism; AI-generated music; and a figural reading of Levitical rites on the question of whether The Velvet Sundown is even a real band

7-19-2025
In the wake of The Velvet Sundown let’s recall Emily Howell, David Cope's AI composer that made an album's worth of music released by Centaur Records in 2010

8-16-2025
Ethan Hein on "Iron Man" and "Wish You Were Here"--formal complexity in a riff-basher and hypermetrical ambiguity in a ballad--and I half-jokingly suggest that "Iron Man" is a masterpiece of thematic (riff) differentiation within a nine-part rondo pattern

8-30-2025
Samuel Coleridge-Taylor setting of Psalm 137, a brief discussion of the setting musically and in terms of textual reception history

10-4-2025
Ethan Hein on AI slop and musical creativity, relying on AI can pre-empt the creative processes people take up to crank out a product, the processes are where the joy of music-making has always been

11-23-2025
four scripts for writing sonata expositions using 12-bar blues for theme 1

12-13-2025
When arts critics have no real gatekeeping power they are nothing more than super-consumers--thoughts on reading Freddie deBoer's hatred of Stranger Things and the decline of the negative review

1-31-2026
Perichoresis in Musical Time and Space: a draft toward thinking through Trinitarian ontological reflection, sensory integration, and the process of sensory integration as a metaphor for coordinating theories rather than setting them against each other (like sight against hearing)

2-21-2026
Ted Gioia against AI slop music misses the terrible paradox, that AI music has been an utterly human endeavor from start to finish so what, exactly, is even inhuman about it?

3-28-2026
some thoughts on Yoel Greenberg's "bottom-up" approach to sonata forms as applied to ragtime sonatas--respect the modularity of the themes rather than try to impose 18th century galant syntactic norms upon the material

5-16-2026
The Bad Faith of the Honest Broker Revisited: Ted Gioia presents music as a way to transcend the binary impasse in 2026, having defined music in terms of binary impasse in 2019's Music: A Subversive History

5-17-2026
Joseph Horowitz and Douglas McLennan at AJBlogs on the state of attention spans with regard to the high arts
TL:DR version, complaining that audiences have shorter attention spans is normal in classical music metacultural punditry, but a corresponding proposal that you compose for the musical resources you HAVE and not the ones you WISH you had might conclude that you write for the attention spans you have because the attention span of your audience (if you have one) is also a resource.  Being a guitarist rather than a symphonist I should make sure my cards are on the table about this.  It was Fernando Sor who proposed that guitar music is to a symphony in scale and detail as a postage stamp is to a big painted landscape, to exaggerate his point a bit.

5-21-2026
Ethan Hein's new post on that one weird chord in "Sir Duke" and my response post, on hearing the chorus of "Sir Duke" as a transformation of the opening chords of "Warm Valley"

Matiegka 2023 project
I started this project in 2023 but it's just going to sprawl onward into other years but it will be tagged as Matiegka 2023 anyway.  The idea is to blog through all of Wenzel Thomas Matiegka's solo guitar sonatas and analyze them in terms of their forms and explore how the Bohemian guitarist composer played with sonata forms, among other things.

some interviews at Jeffrey Goodman's YT channel with Stanley Yates, David Starobin, and David Leisner on the guitar music of Wenzel Matiegka

Wenzeslaus Thomas Matiegka (July 6, 1773 to January 19, 1830): sources for public domain scores, a select discography, and a recommended edition of his complete sonatas for solo guitar


an analysis of Matiegka's Op. 16 Sonate facile (9,600 words or so with in-score commentary and musical examples)
an analysis of Matiegka's Op. 17 Sonate progressive (10,272 words not counting in-score commentary across the entire work)

an analysis of Matiegka's Grand Sonata I (9,982 words and 28 pages long, which includes full score with in-score comments)

Matiegka’s use of V/V to V to IV chord progressions in Grand Sonata II (1808) and Sonata progressive Op. 31, No. 3 in G major (1811)
This post is comparatively short and is exactly what the title says it is.

an analysis of Matiegka's Grand Sonata II (12,765 words and 36 pages long)

Analysis of Matiegka’s 24 Pieces progressives, Op. 20: XXI. Allegro – in the form of a symphony (3,506 words and 10 pages long)

Matiegka's Op. 23 Sonata, I: using Haydn's Piano Sonata in B minor as a project for transformative transcription

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