a brief analysis of German Dzhaparidze's Prelude and Fugue in C major (video-score posted by Esteban Colucci on YT)

Esteban Colucci has posted a video of Prelude and Fugue in C major by German Dzhaparidze, this time with a read-along score.  Naturally, Wenatchee The Hatchet, who has had a long-standing habit of discussing preludes and fugues for classical guitar, had to make a few notes.  The internet being what it is, my idea of a brief analysis is 1,607 words.  I am assuming that you not only watched the video link but read through the entire score.  If you haven't done that by the time you read what comes after the link then, well, this blog post wasn't written for you.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E7upUfeTXM8

Prelude             00:00 to 01:31

This is moto perpetuo prelude evokes both J. S. Bach's Prelude Number 1 from Book 1 of the Well-Tempered Clavier and, in my oblique way of hearing, Heitor Villa-Lobos' iconic Etude No. 1 from his 12 Studies.

 

Because I am more of a fan of guitar fugues I'm not going to say too much about the prelude.  I like it.  It sounds charming and has a fun vibe.

 

On to the fugue.

Fugue                           01:38 to 04:10

Exposition                     01:38 to 01:58 (measures 39-47)

The subject is stately, and gives off the vibe of an 18th century royal precession. The subject starts at middle C and spans the G below to the E above.  There’s kind of a Mussorgsky Promenade mood to this with a notably narrower melodic range and much squarer rhythms.

 

The subject is answered at the dominant by a higher voice and the third entry has the subject enter on the C below middle C.  This is a good case study for showing how fugues often do not present the voices in strictly ascending or descending order. 

 

As for what kind of fugue this is, it’s what many theory books would call a simple fugue.  There are no countersubjects and there is no convertible counterpoint.  Dzhaparidze freely introduces new material as he fleshes out his three-voiced texture without attempting to create melodic lines that interlock and can be presented in double or triple counterpoint. For an example of a fugue in C major for the guitar that has convertible counterpoint you can go here.

 

So, here’s the breakdown of the exposition.

Subject (C)                   01:38 to 01:43

Answer  (G)                  01:44 to 01:50

Bridge                           01:51 to 01:52

Subject (C)                   01:53 to 01:58

Let’s get to the first episode.

Episode 1                      01:58 to 02:08 (measures 48-53)

Dzhaparidze took a snippet from the second half of the first measure of his subject and creates an undulating episode of the G-A-G rippling riff alternating between the middle and lower voices under a high open E string.  Before long he’s taken us into A minor, which is where he gives us the first middle entry.

 

What’s a middle entry, you ask?  It is when the composer presents the entire subject of the fugue in a new key that didn’t appear in the fugue’s exposition.  The subject may appear in any voice but so long as it runs its full course you can count it as a middle entry.  Because Dzhaparidze has paired presentations of his subject in different registers I will talk about middle entries in an admittedly fuzzy way because entries of a subject don’t always indicate middle entries.  The cascade of subject entries in Bach’s C major fugue from Book 1 of the Well-Tempered Clavier come some fast and furious that fugue is often called a stretto fugue.  This fugue has what I would call middle entries but Dzhaparidze layers entries of the subject as he goes through keys.  Now let’s get to the A minor passage.

 

Middle Entries 1 & 2      02:09 to 02:21 (measures 54-59)

A minor (prime, middle) and E minor (prime, upper)

A minor             02:09 to 02:15

E minor             02:15 to 02:21

 

Here we get two middle entries, as it were, with the subject presented in A minor and then, just as it seems to have run its course a new form of the subject appears in an upper voice in the key of E minor. 

 

Dzhaparidze has either cut short the resolution of his first middle entry by abruptly changing keys or, another way to think of it, has introduced a second middle entry in a related key that is elided into the end of his preceding middle entry. This fugue subject is very square, maybe a bit too square.  It’s good that he introduced this gambit in his first pair subject presentations in this middle entry.  He thereby destabilizes both the key and the harmonic rhythm of the fugue by bringing in the second middle entry half a measure too early for where the downbeat of the prevailing meter is, and introducing a new key just as the first middle entry has resolved itself in A minor.

 

Episode 2          02:22 to 02:39 (measures 60-67)

 

To be honest, I don’t think the episodes are particularly mysterious and don’t feel much need to explain the composer’s compositional technique in them.  They’re fun episodes. 

 

What is interesting is where the composer goes next.  He sets up a middle entry in G major but is what he does next really a middle entry?

 

The first voice that appears to have the subject has a form of the subject, but it’s upside down.  Middle entries can be made of inversions of a subject and countersubject  But then we see that Dzhaparidze introduces the subject in a higher voice before the subject in the lower registered (in its inverted form) has finished.  That is a big tell that what we are looking at hear is not a normal middle entry.  When the subject appears across all the voices of a fugal texture and each appearance of the subject appears before the previous statement of the subject has been finished that is what is traditionally called a …

 

Stretto 02:40 to 02:54 (measures 68-73)

Entries 3, 4 & 5

G major (lower, inversion) and G major (upper, prime)

 

This isn't a grand stretto in the "strict" sense because the first entry of the subject, though in the lowermost voice, is presented in a free tonal inversion. The second entrance is in the middle voice and features the subject in G major in its prime form but the subject is revised so that when the third entry, in the uppermost voice, enters, the material is changed.  Actually, Dzhaparidze could have done a canon on this subject.  but just opted not to.

 

This stretto is obscured by the two upper voices being active but it is definitely a stretto.  This is, however, an unusual placement for a stretto.  Traditionally composers tend to put a stretto at the syntactic or structural climax of a fugue.  They do not normally put something as grand  as a stretto right in the middle of a fugue and then move along to some other episode or middle entry.

 

Episode 3          02:54 to 03:08 (measures 75-80)

The tonic of G is destabilized by the introduction of an F natural.  Without further ado, the episode leads not to C, because the composer doesn’t want to “go home” yet.  No, instead we get a somewhat unusual modulation to the key of F major.

 

Middle Entries 5 & 6      03:09 to 03:19 (measures 81-86)

F major (prime, lower) and F major (prime, upper)

 

Like the first middle entry this has a double presentation of the subject in a lower and then an upper voice.  In contrast to the first middle entry that began with the subject in A minor and was followed by the subject in E minor, this is a monotonal middle entry.  What’s happening here is Dzhaparidze is making sure his paired presentation of the subject stabilize rather than destabilize whatever key he is in. 

 

Notice how in this middle entry the music seems stripped down to two voices and when the third appears it’s moving in nice, easy thirds?  That’s because every guitarist knows that F major is a devious key to play in for long stretches of time.

 

On to the next episode. 

 

Episode 4          03:20 to 03:35 (measures 87-92)

This episode moves from F major to what promises to be a half-cadence on A7 that resolves to D minor.  Are we going to get that?  No.  There’s a deceptive resolution to B-flat and before long the episode is wrapped up and we get to the syntactic climax of the fugue, the reappearance of the subject in the tonic key after a whole fugue’s worth of other keys.

 

Something I note in passing, if you’ve read along the score with me you’ll have noticed whole systems in which there are only two voices. That’s an easily overlooked lesson in composing fugues.  As George Oldroyd put it so memorably in The Technique and Spirit of Fugue (though I am freely paraphrasing), it’s rookies who think you have to have very voice in a fugal texture active at all times. 

 

Climax/Coda     03:36 to 04:10 (measures 93 t0 end)

The subject appears in C major in the lowest voice for the first time since the end of the exposition.  A nice touch with the end of the subject is how Dzhaparidze shifts into parallel minor at the very end of the phrase.  I like this fugue but a misgiving I have about the subject is how long that half note is at the end of the subject. It feels too firm, too final, and it's the end of the subject, which means I can understand why Dzhaparidze leaned so much into stretto and eliding subject statements across his middle entries.  At any given middle entry the finality of that half note on the second half of the fourth measure in relentless four-measure phrases would bring closure anywhere you land. 

 

This is a fun fugue and I had meant to do some analytical writing about it for years but the work has never been formally published in score form to my knowledge.  So much thanks to Esteban Colucci for revisiting this recording and sharing the score. 

 

I hope that German Dzhaparidze's 24 Preludes and Fugues for solo guitar gets published.  I have meant to do more analytical work on Nikita Koshkin's 24 Preludes and Fugues when the second half of that cycle should get recorded and released. 

POSTSCRIPT

For regular readers (I guess I might still have those), I realize my blogging has become sporadic in the last six years and I don't write as much here as I used to.  This kind of post, and the Matiegka series are technical.  When I roll out an entire public domain score and then include alternate ways of handling musical material in a sonata form or a menuet that's not just analytical work on published music, there's also new composition afoot, showing how there were unexplored possibilities in musical works I really do like.

If I had my druthers the entire Dzhaparidze cycle would have been published by now and I could ell you where to find the score.  We're living in an exciting time for the classical guitar.  There are several cycles of preludes and fugues out there in our time.  Maybe that kind of music isn't your jam but I am excited by the possibilities being explored in contemporary guitar music.  It's one of the reasons I kind of roll my eyes a bit when people talk about the state of classical music as if the plight of the orchestra were the "real" state of the art.

I still have to get to Matiegka's Op. 23, III and I mean to do that but this weekend had a surprise, a good surprise as far as I'm concerned.  So I felt I had to strike while the iron was hot, while inspiration was with me, and because a video with a read-along score is up, I had been wanting to write a blog post like this one for literally years and to finally be able to do so was a treat.  Thanks to Colucci for his YT post and I hope that the analysis may be of some interest to people who read it this weekend (or whenever they happen to read it). 

50 years ago today Stevie Wonder released Songs in the Key of Life

Because Stevie Wonder has been one of my musical heroes for practically my whole life I am, of course, going to make at least a tiny blog post noting the date. I don't exactly have any organized thoughts for the day but I do have a tag that can let you peruse posts I've written about Wonder's music over the decades (since you're here).

https://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/search/label/stevie%20wonder

Just to warn you, the tag is used for any and every post in which Stevie Wonder's music struck me as relevant, it's not a tag that will tell you that the tagged posts are "just" about his music.

Stevie Wonder's "Contusion" is the best rondo written in the last fifty years (a brief essay for the 50th anniversary of Songs in the Key of Life)

Okay, having done a fairly detailed analysis on Matiegka's Op. 23, II not too long ago, I wanted to really change gears, seeing as we're approaching the 50th anniversary of Stevie Wonder's epic double album Songs in the Key of Life, by discussing my favorite later 20th century rondo.

Not that you really asked me, but if you did ask me “What is the most important rondo composed in the last fifty years?”, I would immediately say Stevie Wonder's "Contusion" from Songs in the Key of Life. 

 

Why?  Because it is a five-part rondo.  For those who don’t already know, a rondo is a musical form in which a refrain alternates with contrasting episodes.  People normally think of this as entailing something like ABACA or ABACADA, but that's not strictly required.  It's possible to obtain the effect of a five-part rondo just alternating a refrain with a single episode, which is exactly how Wonder organized "Contusion"

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4xDSTP3uecE

 

Intro:               00:00 to 00:24

Refrain (A)       00:25 to 01:04

Episode (B)      01:05 to 01:34

Refrain (A)       01:35 to 02:14

Episode (B)      02:15 to 02:44

Refrain (A)       02:45 to 03:18

Coda                03:19 to 03:47

 

The song ends on an unresolved half cadential gesture that prepares the entrance of the next track “Sir Duke”, which makes the end of "Contusion" the most spectacular transition in the history of American popular music, as far as I'm concerned.  Now "Sir Duke" was discussed earlier this year by Ethan Hein,  and I couldn't resist suggesting Ellington's "Warm Valley" as a possible inspiration for its chorus.  So "Contusion" is an amazing track within the context of its full album, but I want to mention that more in passing, because this is a piece that is fun to hear entirely on its own terms, too, and I'd like to explain a little of what I have come to love about it over the course of my life. Yet to do that I feel like I need to situate it between two different extremities in basically white rock musical trends. 

 

Across the 1970s you had the emergence of art rock or progressive rock (we’re not going to count jazz fusion here even if many could legitimately argue that “Contusion” is an example of jazz/rock fusion in the manner of Miles Davis or maybe Weather Report).  There was also the reaction movement known as punk.  We can think of the extremes as being exemplified by Yes and The Sex Pistols.  I didn’t warm up to either of those bands. While prog rock generally had so many ideas you couldn’t actually keep track of them all, punk embodied what was, for me, an essentially reactionary and punitive rubric of “authenticity” in which the more raw and simple the music the more “real” it was.  That is nonsense and has never been aesthetically compelling to me.  Both prog rock and punk erred in opposite directions.

 

This would be where “Contusion” has stood as an alternative.  If you’ve heard it you can hear that its surface is quite complex in terms of rhythm and modal mutations.  I will, frankly, leave it to someone like Ethan Hein (if he has time and opportunity) to tackle a more detailed analysis if that’s something he’s game for.  I’m a classical guitarist and hobbyist composer so I don’t have the score for “Contusion” on me, alas.  

But what I can tell you is that the sheer complexity of Stevie Wonder’s surface is balanced by the elegant simplicity of his approach to form.  You get a two-part refrain alternating with a two-part episode.  As each refrain is presented there is more room for improvisation or rocking out.  We’ve heard the refrain enough times that more liberties can be taken in performance without the listener being at a loss for “where” we are in the musical form.  In that sense it’s not at all like a song by Rush such as, oh, “Zanadu”, which you can’t even start mapping out without getting far enough into the alphabet to get to E through G.  Wonder’s rondo, by contrast, is as simply and perfectly put together as a rondo by, say, Haydn (and I am very much a Haydn fan).  Haydn’s complaint about many of his contemporaries was they swamped listeners with so many ideas there were none of them that stuck in the memory long enough for the listener to have any emotional resonance with any of those ideas.

 

I submit that Stevie Wonder has never had that problem.  He avoided the Scylla and Charibdys that were exemplified by prog rock and punk, styles of 1970s rock that strained too far in the direction of complexity and simplicity in the name of "seriousness" and "authenticity" without necessarily achieving either.  Wonder's formal instincts have always been impeccable, so impeccable, in fact, that when we listen to his music we are not likely to do “structural listening” because we’re having fun.  I think I can go out on a limb and say that both Haydn and Stevie Wonder would want you to have the fun first and then come back for a more analytical take on what’s going on in the music later.  

 

So in that sense, too, “Contusion” has been the best rondo written in the last fifty years.

 

Matiegka's Op. 23 Sonata, II: Comparing what Haydn did to what Matiegka did, a case study in music as rewritten music

Heads up for new readers, back when I was considering the possibility of grad school I was split between wanting to go into music theory and music history as a field of study and the other interest was theology and biblical studies.  So it will probably help you to know I've been going through Mark Boda's commentary on 1 & 2 Chronicles (with a very big HT to Jim West for mentioning Boda's commentary).  I also recently read NielsPeter Lemche's essay on Old Testament texts as rewritten literature.  But you will not have to worry about me hitting you with mountains of trivia about biblical literature.  

This little preface is to let you know that I run with the idea that Matiegka's reworking of Haydn's B minor piano sonata into the basis of his own Op. 23 guitar sonata can be thought of as a parallel to the idea of Chronicles being a reworking of material from Samuel-Kings.  This analogy turned out to be amusingly apt as within biblical studies many people consider Chronicles the boring, less inspired variation on the more interesting versions of the stories that were told in Samuel-Kings.  in a similar way, anyone who has even heard of Wenzel Thomas Matiegka might snort that there's no way what he did could be as interesting as a piano sonata by Haydn.  Well, just as I like Samuel-Kings and Chronicles, I like the Haydn piano sonata and I also like the Matiegka Op. 23 reworking of that sonata. 

In the wake of Romantic dogmas about "originality" it may be all the more valuable to show, through a somewhat detailed comparison of Matiegka's sonata to Haydn's, how the concept of revisiting and rewriting older ideas is with us across all human artist endeavors. 

So you can think of that as the abstract, the analysis kicks off after the break.

links for the weekend 2026-09-06 on musical themes

A Labor Day weekend links for the weekend.  I could write a few thoughts about the passing of Peter Cullen but I might have to save that for later.  I'm enough of an animation buff that I probably have to write something about the man who was the voice of Optimus Prime, after all.  I have been working through Walter Wink's books and his passing reference to the Transformers cartoon as part of promulgating the myth of redemptive violence was laughable at a couple of levels but I am going to probably save that for the pending essay "Don't Wink at the Powers That Be".  

No, I think this weekend the thread will be music, music genres, and AI.

DG Hart on Aaron Renn on evangelicalism and elites

I had heard of Aaron Renn over the years and have generally heard about ideas that I consider bad ideas.  The idea that there’s positive world, neutral world and negative world is untenable to me as a Christian.  In apocalyptic and eschatological terms the current age has always been negative world.  Christianity is not the same thing as Christendom West or East, and so I just can’t take Renn’s categories seriously. When Renn wrote that there is no cultural script for marriage I have to scoff at this proposal because I was part of Mars Hill Church for about eight or nine years and have read evangelical and Reformed writers across about twenty-five years and there’s hardly anything they’re more concerned about than promoting a marriage and family script, unless we’re talking about some variation of political theology.

 

That Renn is on the right isn’t even especially hard to infer.

https://www.aaronrenn.com/p/the-curse-of-the-right

But as with McCarthy, Trump’s flaws risk discrediting many of his ideas, and harming some of his followers and supporters.

Alan Jacobs on bad arguments for the liberal arts that defend the funding of jobs and departments rather than the liberal arts themselves

https://blog.ayjay.org/bad-humanists/

N. Ángel Pinillos asks, Why Are Humanists So Bad at Defending the Humanities? — and his answer is that humanists’ defenses of the humanities fail when they argue that the humanities have any kind of intrinsic, as opposed to instrumental, value. Now, Pinillos says that he happens to believe in the intrinsic value of the humanities, but people outside the humanistic disciplines don’t, so the intrinsic-value argument, “deployed as a public argument, has lost us the public. …

…

Pinillos seems to think that this case has “been ignored,” though for half-a-century I have been reading essays about how a humanities education makes you a better citizen. He also says straightforwardly that we professional humanists “teach a set of skills that you cannot get anywhere else,” which seems to me … well, I started to say that it seems to me a debatable proposition but in fact I think it is demonstrably false. I know many people who can do all the things Pinillos lists in the paragraph quoted above who have never taken so much as one course in the humanities. 

…

He says that his essay is a defense of the humanities, when in fact it is an argument that universities should continue to fund humanities departments — because of their instrumental value. [emphasis added] If you could show that students can learn to read contracts and evaluate communications from doctors without the help of courses in the humanities, then nothing would remain [emphasis original] of his defense of “the humanities.” 

 

I say, in reply, that (a) the humanities are not to be conflated with courses in universities that bear the “humanities” designation, and therefore that (b) Pinillos has not defended the humanities at all, but instead has simply pleaded that university administrators and boards of trustees allow people like us to keep our jobs. [emphasis added]

…

Maybe Frank Zappa would say it’s like the advertising representatives and talent scouts saying that they are the people who need to keep their jobs in the music industry because if you don’t have them you don’t have the music industry.  The musicians?  Well, uh, anyway, never mind them for the moment. 

I can't help but be reminded of Jacques Ellul riffing on the role art critics came to play in technocratic societies, blogged about here and here.  Ellul observed that the arts critic has only been with us a few centuries, the implication obviously being that the super-majority of the history of human artistic activity has never required arts critics or arts departments for productive activity. At a more rudimentary level Theodor Adorno kicked off Aesthetic Theory with the observation that now that art had been liberated from service to throne and altar it was free, yes, but it has been stuck in an intractable crisis of purpose and legitimacy from which it can't possibly escape. Ellul, for his part, said that Adorno correctly grasped the state of the arts presented the Scylla and Charybdis bind, art either serves a state or is a hermetic technocratic cult that has no appeal to outsiders. 

I previously mused upon the idea that without a gatekeeping element to their role an arts critic is a super-consumer in a world of consumers.  The crises presented by AI-generated arts are crises for educators and gatekeepers before they are crises for consumers. Last summer I wrote "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"  An academic can talk to students about whether something is a duck or a rabbit. I have been suspecting in the last year that the crisis of AI-generated art is that it replicates at a massive scale the lies promulgated about the arts from within academic traditions.  To put this another way, if humans can be trained to create duck-rabbit drawings and taught how to interpret the same image as a duck or a rabbit and to toggle back and forth between them, the threat of AI may be that the AI slop people worry about has to be programmed to present just the duck or just the rabbit.  In chains of ones and zeroes there's not room for a 0.005, a 0.2341 or a 0.66666 is a way to put it, but those fuzzy and fudged cases are where art happens, to put it in a purely and slickly bromide way. 

Joseph Horowitz has been mulling over the state of US classical music across 250 years and it's predominantly musings on the state of orchestral repertoire

I am not going to attempt to summarize or describe Joseph Horowitz’ eight takes on the question of whether or not the United States has delivered on its classical music promise.  If you have read them you have read them, too, and if not, here are links.

 

https://www.artsjournal.com/uq/2026/06/at-250-has-america-delivered-on-its-classical-music-promise.html

https://www.artsjournal.com/uq/2026/07/jonas-kaufmann-vs-the-orchestra-of-st-lukes-take-two-mahler-steinbach-festival.html

https://www.artsjournal.com/uq/2026/07/american-classical-music-at-250-take-two-the-bam-experiment.html

https://www.artsjournal.com/uq/2026/07/american-classical-music-at-250-take-three-the-orchestra-gap-europe-vs-the-us.html

https://www.artsjournal.com/uq/2026/07/american-classical-music-at-250-take-four-the-orchestra-gap-contd.html

https://www.artsjournal.com/uq/2026/08/feeling-it-giuini-and-arrau-vs-george-szells-new-world-perfectionism.html

https://www.artsjournal.com/uq/2026/08/american-classical-music-at-250-take-five-the-disconnect-between-scholars-and-orchestras.html

https://www.artsjournal.com/uq/2026/08/american-classical-music-at-250-take-six-the-ford-foundations-misguided-philanthropy.html

https://www.artsjournal.com/uq/2026/08/american-classical-music-at-250-take-seven-another-boston-symphony-perspective-on-the-malaise-afflicting-orchestras.html

 

The thing that jumps out for me is that even the one time Future Symphony Institute is now the Foundation for the Future of Classical Music.  They don’t even call themselves the Future Symphony Institute anymore.  They still want a future for orchestral and symphonic music, of course, because while Roger Scruton has died many of the people at the core of the institution have remained.  I kind of started tuning them out after Scruton died but also after Douglas Murray got added on to the senior fellows roster.  I had my issues with Scruton but I do still own half a dozen of his books.  Writers like the late Roger Scruton and Theodor Adorno can benefit you when you don’t agree with them. 

 

Being a guitarist I find that I am more drawn to hearing what is going on now than in revisiting past glories.  Matanya Ophee is no longer with us but he dispelled the idea that the classical guitar ever had an actual golden age.  Do sonatas by Sor or Giuliani compare to the works of Schubert or Mendelssohn?  Most would say not favorably.  On the other hand, when Stephanie Jones gave a recital in Seattle a few seasons ago I enjoyed her program of contemporary Australian and Austrian composers writing for the guitar.  I am looking forward to the second half of Nikita Koshkin’s 24 Preludes and Fugues finally getting recorded.  I just noted recently the death of Frank Campo as reported at Slipped Disc. 

 

Jens Ibsen has floated some ideas that self-policing within genres can stifle innovation.  Ibsen has contended that within the United States classical music is functionally underground music now.

https://sfclassicalvoice.substack.com/p/classical-music-is-underground-let

 

I wonder if that’s a bit of an overstatement but for contemporary composers I think I can take the point as given.  Anyone who is attempting to build bridges between classical and metal is already interested in inter-canonical experimentation that I can be sympathetic to.  The concept of inter-canonical translation and exchange comes up inIbsen’s profile on Jon Batiste. I’m okay with a slow-drag reworking of a Mozart warhorse. Ragging the classics has been a thread of improvisational and compositional activity for centuries.  Batiste is also correct to say that improvisation was previously inextricably bound up in musical life and practice in the days of Mozart and got steadily purged out of classical music theory and practice. 

 

If arts non-profits are having a banner bad year then the future of classical music in the United States probably isn’t “entirely” bound up in the states of institutions.

 

I haven’t been to orchestral concerts in decades and I have nothing against orchestral music.  I went and heard the symphonic suite Mathis der Maler when it was programmed.  Yes, I am a bit of a Hindemith fan.  I went and heard Samuel Jones’ Tuba Concerto twice and even bought the score.  I liked Wynton Marsalis’ Violin Concerto, which I feel is several steps above what he was doing with All Rise (which I really wanted to like but couldn’t get into).  I even recently listened to a violin concerto by Kip Winger.  Don’t know who that is?  Well, I still hate the band Winger but Kip Winger’s violin concerto is solidly made.

 

But to me the present and future of classical music is in small-scale works.  It’s not going to surprise anyone if a guitarist feels the present and future of classical music is more likely to be found in guitar music than in orchestral literature.  I have made this point a few times over the last ten years but I think the symphony has gone the way of the votive mass for the dead; the prestige of the genre and form hasn’t gone away but the niche nature of the musical form means it has lost its place of prestige.  Richard Taruskin pointed out that the social role of opera was displaced by cinema and television and that’s basically not going to come back.

 

I have not written as much about Regaining Classical Music's Relevance: Saving the Muse in a Troubled World as I, at one point, planned to.  I have had concerns about how easily John Borstlap decided to valorize Schleiermacher and scapegoat Herder.  Both philosophers were not “just” philosophers but Christian pastors and theologians both of them advocated aesthetic pluralism as well as encouraged nascent nationalist projects.  It’s possible to admire Schleiermacher’s ardor for aesthetic pluralism and music while agree with Emil Brunner that the trajectory of Schleiermacher’s thought and theology was ultimately a dead end. 

 

It is possible to regard Herder as more complex than Borstlap has allowed for.  American fundamentalist preachers who think Song of Songs is chiefly about the joys of marriage and sex don’t give Herder any credit for having swept allegorical and typological readings of Song of Songs away for a newer interpretive approach.  I can think of Schleiermacher as having positive contributions to make in hermeneutics while also finding him an annoying panentheistic crypto-Marcionite. It has been hard to shake an impression that Borstlap is eager to valorize and scapegoat figures like Herder or Adorno than to wade into the complexities of their respective bodies of work to show how mixed their legacies are.

 

So, obviously, I’ve made it clear I differ with Borstlap on a few things.  But I have realized that right there in the subtitle may be he simplest point of divergence.  Borstlap seemsto think the muse needs to be saved, the muse of classical music.  I think the muse has moved on from orchestral repertoire. She might come back now and then to check in on the state of her previously favored idiom but where ever the muse has headed off to, you will not find her by trying to “save” her so that there can be another Beethoven’s Ninth.  She may have moved on to intercultural exchange projects.

 

What if the failure of the promise of American music has happened because people sought that future in the symphony?  What if by the time Americans were looking for the creator of the great American symphony the muse had already moved on? 

 

Frank Campo 1927-2026 (composer, in case you've never heard of him before)

https://slippedisc.com/2026/08/us-composer-dies-at-99/

The distinguished composer Frnak Campo has died six months short of his century.

 

Unfortunate spelling mistake but I knew whose name I was looking at.  Decades ago I couldn't resist grabbing a chamber score Campo wrote that included guitar.  Folks who know me in person (or as a blogger) know that I have an interest in chamber music for classical guitar.  I think it was actually the score for this trio I grabbed when Capitol Music had a clearance sale in order to leave their 9th Avenue location decades ago.  I just saw that whoever Frank Campo was he wrote a trio for an instrumental combination I couldn't resist.

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xfqwgLmtBWE

 

Bruce Duffie did an interview with Frank Campo way back in 1991.

https://www.bruceduffie.com/campo.html

It's a somewhat long interview and Campo has a funny yet sad observation about the problem of writing contemporary music and how that comes across in performances. There are musicians who perfectly execute note-for-note what is on the page and all that does is just get them to the starting point of the notes on the page.  The performer may not resonate with, understand, or even necessarily like the music itself, but they can play it note perfect.  Orchestral performances can be a risky proposition because so often your new work (whoever you are, composer, who wrote something to share with the world) will be programmed alongside some war horse.  As Campo put it, the rehearsals focus on the warhorse because everybody knows that is the music upon which the night's music gets judged and that all too often means that your music gets sloppier and less careful attention; the music can come off badly and the audience feels they got a bad piece even if you know, as the composer, that the music didn't get a fair shake.

Sounds like a reason to stick with composing for the guitar to me, but then I'm a guitarist, as just about anyone who's read this blog in the last twenty years probably already knows.  :)  

 

So, I eventually grabbed another Campo score, which by now might be kind of hard to find.

Two Studies for Trumpet and Guitar

Anthony Plog recorded the two studies a long time ago and I got that CD back when it was still feasible to get. Here's the information in case you want to hunt down the disc, which has a solid interpretation of the Hindemith Trumpet Sonata.

Crystal Records CD663: ANTHONY PLOG, TRUMPET.

 

Because the disc is kind of hard to find these days I'll refer you to a performance filmed in 2023 with Anne McNamara on trumpet

and Angelo L. Favis on guitar.  It's not a commercial recording, by the way.

 

Favis' channel

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZnCamW3Bvvk

McNamara's channel

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tRELgryfwpU

 

To go just by the two Campo works I've been able to study his a composer who isn't a guitarist himself but who has given the guitar some rewarding and challenging music.  

Dolly Parton, 1946-2026

I have not been a country fan overall but I came to admire and respect a number of songwriters in the country tradition, generally the most obvious candidates.  I abominated new country and back in college I told one of my music professors that about as late as I could go with country songwriter/singers was probably Dolly Parton.  After her I hadn't managed to hear a country singer/songwriter who had "it" when it came to songs.  I could, obviously, be wrong. :)

https://apnews.com/article/dolly-parton-death-country-icon-87156f3e6a1547b88bf414529b644ad3

https://www.theguardian.com/music/2026/aug/25/dolly-parton-obituary

Even Norman Lebrecht has a few generous words for the recently departed queen of country.

https://slippedisc.com/2026/08/dolly-parton-rip/

I wasn't a super-fan of Parton so I mention her death briefly, but her death is also a reminder to me that there can seem like a chasm between those who listen to and study music and those who write about music.  Sometimes it just feels like we live in an era in which gatekeepers (or would-be gatekeepers) want to just keep gatekeeping and insist that everybody stay in their lanes.  Parton's life and career may be another of many musical lives showing that cross-over has been more of the musical norm than purist genre policing in the last 80 years. Whitney may have made a song her own but Dolly still had to have written it. 

Ethan Hein on how AI is harmful to learning (specifically musical learning) and I am reminded that Augustine of Hippo said that our ability to reason and our capacity for memory are essential to musical art

https://www.ethanhein.com/wp/2026/ai-is-harmful-for-learning-which-is-why-im-banning-it-in-my-classes/

…

Academic integrity is not my main motivation for the AI ban. It’s a factor, but it’s not the main thing. The main thing is that I want to help these students learn, and using AI is directly harmful to learning. Common sense says that prompting ChatGPT doesn’t have the same learning benefits as doing the reading and writing yourself, but if you need something more robust than common sense, here’s a sampling of the research literature.

…

There are two basic reasons for this and to make these clear I’m going to go way back to Augustine of Hippo’s ancient, uncompleted treatise De Musica.

Deion Cho plays Sonata Homo Ludens No. 8 (2021) by Leo Brouwer

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RDyV319Zw5A

Per my recent post I don't know if it's realistic to try to do a set of analytical posts on the Brouwer guitar sonatas but I have thought about doing one.  Naturally it's a little tough to do a set of blog posts about Brouwer's sonatas if I didn't even know until recently that Sonatas 7 and 8 happened.  :)  

Sonata Cubana n.7 by Leo Brouwer, performed by João Luiz

So ... I lost track of Brouwer's compositional output for a while but it turns out Guitar Sonatas 7 and 8 have happened.  I have 1 through 6 and have thought off and on over the years about blogging through them.  Now I'm not sure how realistic such a goal is but ... hey ... I can share a performance of Sonata No. 7.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qq9JwGSa6l4

I've stalled in the middle of Matiegka Op. 23 because I can't just write about Matiegka's sonata without doing at least some analytical work on the Haydn he reworked.  Embarrassing but such is life and the limits of mortal flesh.  I am not aware if anyone has done a book-length treatment of the Leo Brouwer guitar sonatas but somebody really should at some point.

links for the weekend August 2, 2026

This links for the weekend will kind of sprawl and also have a strong unifying thread.

links for the weekend: a thread of Aaron Renn and Anthony Bradley on the lack of an evangelical elite, the failures of the YRR; and some links on alt-right publishing

Prepare for a bit of a weekend sprawl known as the links for the weekend.

Ethan Iverson's second half of James P Johnson week, noting how familiarity with what was called "light classical" was normative in the jazz scene

There were more posts from Ethan Iverson on James P Johnson, so I wanted to get to those posts because they intersect with some of my own historic interests in the permeability of stylistic boundaries in practice in contrast to the pronouncements of theorists.

Slipped Disc announces that Alex Ross stepping down from his role at The New Yorker (which is presented as the last classical music critic in America steps down)--but now I'm realizing I kept coming back to Kyle Gann and Ethan Iverson more than Alex Ross' writing in the last 15-20 years

https://slippedisc.com/2026/06/americas-last-classical-music-critic-steps-down/

I haven't been reading The New Yorker in a while.  So this is sort of news to me but not exactly news.  I'd read Alex Ross and I enjoyed The Rest is Noise. Recognizing that styles outside the usual canonized placeholders in concert music exist doesn't make Ross a revisionist.  If anything it's a sign of his being a candidate for "the" classical music critic of the current American age that he could write about Sibelius and recognize that Bjork also exists.  And since I like Frank Martin's Mass for double chorus I hardly had a problem with Ross pointing out that the work exists.  There was a stretch in my life where I was soaking up Frank Martin's Mass and reading Emil Brunner, which could be jokingly presented as a dual pinnacle of Swiss Reformed Christian piety in the first half of the 20th century. 

Music critics inevitably soapbox and Ross had his favorites.  I still find Wagner's music annoying at best and the man himself to have been repellant.  But Wagner's influence is also inescapable and the music has stuck around in a way that has allowed for divergent readings and receptions of the work. Philip Ewell somewhat telegraphed this point in his book, but a big difference between a Richard Wagner and a Heinrich Schenker is simply in the fact that Wagner wrote music that can be "read" at a number of levels while Schenker promulgated a theory that dictated the rules of its reception as a matter of principle.  Scott Joplin could draw upon Wagnerian precedent when composing Treemonisha in a way he couldn't have if he were to have attempted to write a piano concerto based on some kind of Schenkerian ur-line. 

So Ross has had his ideas and interests but I don't think that automatically makes or breaks a critic.  Terry Teachout wrote a decade or two ago that a great critic can be more useful in being completely wrong than average or even good critics are in always being right (whatever that may mean).  

But ... most influential classical music critic of the last thirty years?  I mean ... influencing who?  Subscribers to The New Yorker?  No disrespect meant to Alex Ross at all but I realize as I'm typing this post that I read a whole lot more Kyle Gann in the last twenty years than I read Alex Ross.  Maybe for consumers of classical music Alex Ross was the bigger name but among composers (vocational or avocational) I wonder if the more widely-read classical music writer was Gann.  

You know ... Kyle Gann as composer and music critic could be interpreted as a throwback to the 19th century paradigm in which Hector Berlioz wrote music and music criticism.  The demise of the classical music critic as perceived by cultural gatekeepers and metacultural pundits in the late 20th and early 21st centuries might be explicable in light of a separation of tasks--if criticism is professionally separated from the actual production of music we won't get Berlioz or Wagner figures.  I mean I find Wagner repellant at many levels but he wrote music and he wrote about music.  

Which, as I'm idling about in a blog post on the eve of the Fourth of July, it gets me thinking about how I've read Ethan Iverson off and on over the last fifteen years.  I come back to people who write criticism and music side by side more consistently than I come back to critics who are "just" critics.  When Iverson wrote about having issues with Nikolai Kapustin I was able to intuit that the thing about Kapustin's piano sonatas that Iverson seemed to find wanting is the sense that Kapustin's piano sonatas are big on thematic presentation but fall short in the realm of thematic differentiation. I was later able to discuss Iverson's Clarinet Sonata and show that his own themes are clearly presented and clearly differentiated within his forms.  

And, of course, regular readers of Wenatchee The Hatchet know I have had a lot of fun interacting with the blogging of Ethan Hein.  So, I think it's a day to say that I did benefit from reading Alex Ross off and on over the years but that, in a way, maybe in a lot of ways, Ross' position at The New Yorker was symbolic for arbiters of what should or shouldn't count as "culture". That there are great rivers of populist and anti-populist sentiment among composers (Strauss and Mahler) is an interesting grand thesis ... but even in an allegedly post-Lyotardian era skeptical of grand narratives there's this penchant among culture writers for precisely the grand narratives that "we" are supposedly so skeptical about (a point I must credit to Andrew Bowie, who finds the whole Lyotardian claim that grand narratives are "over" to be absurd because Lyotard's own grand narrative is just that).

But if we recalibrate our perspective a bit and look back on the ways that jazz players mastered light classical music or how ragtime players would rag the classics during the early 20th century when composers would make a show of writing rags, it might be useful to consider that reconsidering the intra-critical super-myths established by the gatekeepers and scholars of the 20th century is just where we are at.  It's not just in classical music that the hoary received narratives of yore have come in for scrutiny and grilling, similarly revisionist work has been getting done in jazz and blues (I just finished two pretty good books by Adam Gussow on blues).  To the extent that Ross has played a part in recognizing that classical music in the last century has not only never existed in a vacuum but can be understood as co-existing alongside a panoply of styles then Alex Ross' contribution was to, well, this seems cheeky, the contribution was to simply recontextualize the observations of Leonard Meyer into the 21st century.  Democracy doesn't require that everyone like the same thing but that everyone is free to honestly like whatever they like, to paraphrase Meyer.  

haiku 6-30-2026

on internet prolegomena, in three movements

       (a parable on 21st century Anglo-American conservative Christian blogging

                  regarding cultural issues)

I.

The church organist 

has been preluding too long.

Let's hear the hymn now.

II.

Of the writing of

prolegomena there is,

verily, no end.

III.

Prelude on prelude, 

always hearing a prelude

but never a fugue. 

Alan Jacobs on Noah Smith on blogging and influence--choosing between being an influencer or an Influencer?

https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/does-anything-i-write-matter-anymore

Does anything I write matter anymore?

Punditry in the age of populism, AI, and monetization.

Noah Smith

Jun 18, 2026

 

About three years ago, someone asked me why, with my physics undergrad background and a PhD in economics, I had decided to become a professional blogger. I told him that blogging seemed like the highest-leverage thing I could do, in terms of actually having an impact on the world.

...

Providence … providence …

 

Alan Jacbos is a bit stymied by Noah Smith’s belief that blogging is the highest leverage thing a person can do. Injecting ideas into discourse may look like it provides immediate results but Jacobs contends that Noah Smith’s zinger quote from John Keynes gets Keynes’ point precisely wrong. Why?

 

https://blog.ayjay.org/idea-injection/

June 24, 2026

idea injection

...

If Keynes is right, then the ideas that Smith “injects into the discourse” won’t be his, but rather those of thinkers from decades past — the people who weren’t worried about having “something out within hours,” but rather cared about making arguments strong enough to last. Instead of seeking to be quoted by Substackers and podcasters, they rely on “the gradual encroachment of ideas.”

 

It may not be possible to have both immediate currency — quotability — and long-term significance. You might have to choose between Smith’s model and Keynes’s.

 

Or it's not even in your hands.  Providence ... providence.

Still… here’s an observation from John Neville Figgis back in 1900 about the contrast between the influence of the practical and the theoretical bent among writers. Let's call it the distinction between the influencer and the Influencer:

 

https://archive.org/details/studiesofpolitic00figgiala

Studies of Political Thought From Gerson to Grotius 1414-162

John Neville Figgis

The Birkbeck Lectures delivered in Trinity College, Cambridge 1900

Cambridge: at the University Press 1916

 

... The existing arrangement of political forces is dependent at least as much upon ideas, as it is upon men's perception of their interests. If we allow little to the theorist in momentary influence we must admit, that his is the power which shapes the "long result of time." The normal value, in fact, of political theories is a "long period value." The immediate significance of an Algernon Sidney or an Althusius is small and less than nothing as compared with a practical politician, like Maurice or Jeffreys. But his enduring power is vast. Hildebrand, Calvin, Rousseau, were doctrinaires, if ever there were such. Yet neither Bismarck, nor even Napoleon has had a more terrific strength to shape the destinies of men. In literature as in life, the thinker may be dull; but it is with a significant dullness. [emphasis added]