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 2st 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]

 

HT Ethan Iverson on a new biography that has been published about James Price Johnson., a few thoughts for a Saturday afternoon

https://www.upress.state.ms.us/Books/S/Speakeasies-to-Symphonies

https://www.amazon.com/Speakeasies-Symphonies-Genius-Johnson-American-ebook/dp/B0GCNYWJVS/

 

Of note, Iverson points out that Scott Brown seems to be the first to bring to light that James P Johnson and Thelonious Monk had a piano teacher in common:

 

https://iverson.substack.com/p/james-p-johnson-1

… Alberta Simmons also taught Thelonious Monk. According to Monk’s biographer Robin D.G. Kelley, Simmons frequently played Eubie Blake’s “Memories of You,” and this may be why Monk played “Memories of You” so often in later years. At any rate, the fact that James P. Johnson and Thelonious Monk actually shared a piano teacher is a wonderful detail. I believe Scott E. Brown is the first to bring this detail to light: one of many revelations from Speakeasies to Symphonies.

Parts 2 and 3 of Iverson’s little series of posts are …

https://iverson.substack.com/p/james-p-johnson-2

https://iverson.substack.com/p/james-p-johnson-3

Ethan Hein on "How to learn to jam", a brief thought as a classical guitarist on how inimical much classical music education has become to the idea of jamming

https://www.ethanhein.com/wp/2026/how-to-learn-to-jam/

…

The best scaffolding is a participatory music community. For a present-day American, this can be difficult to find. Some subcultures are richly supportive of participatory improvisational music: the Black church, hip-hop cyphers, Latin percussionists, jazz jams, blues jams, bluegrass jams, the old-time music scene, the video game music scene. For other styles of music, though, you are probably on your own …

 

Paul Hindemith would propose, obviously enough, that a family interested in making music together would be a good option … if you have that.

 

I am reminded once again of Robert O. Gjerdingen's  Child Composers in the Old Conservatories: How Orphans Became Elite Musicians and Dana Gooley's Fantasies of Improvisation: Free Playing in Nineteenth-Century Music.  One of many reasons I dissent from Ted Gioia’s “we need a new Romanticism” is the history of Romanticism being against improvisation and jamming in “serious music”.  If anything Ted Gioia the jazz historian should be aghast at the prospect of a new Romantic era when Germanophile Art Religion and the cult of Beethoven played such outsized roles in purging classical music concerts of improvisation.

 

But I have often thought over the last ten to twenty years about how if you look at the isolated elements of avant garde movements in classical music it can seem as though each avant garde movement sought to transform one ingredient into a whole loaf of bread.  Let me extend the metaphor a bit. Let’s take microtonality.  Composers like Wyschnegradsky, Haba and others on through Harry Partch, Lou Harrison, Easley Blackwood and Ben Johnston and Kyle Gann have experimented with the microtonal path.  Stochastic processes?  Xenakis.  Free improvisation?  Eh …

 

Anyway, my idea I float for mere consideration is that a European avant garde movement would crop up pinning everything on some one element.  Conversely, in American popular music any and all of those constituent ingredients would already be all over the place in pop music.  You can hear microtonal inflections, flexible approaches to tonality, modal mixture and modal mutation.  I read Herbert Pauls’ Two Centuries in One book that was mentioned by John Borstlap over the years.  Pauls mentioned that the musical language of Romanticism and late Romanticism survived and thrived in popular music and jazz after post World War II avant gardists declared that those antiquated chords and scales were yesterday’s news.

 

So when I  try to sit through some guitar duet by Brian Ferneyhough I can’t help but think that it’s more fun to listen to Robert Johnson, Tampa Red, Charley Patton and Blind Willie Johnson than to listen to some guitar duo use slides to screech all over the strings of classical guitars.

 

A feat worth trying to accomplish, if only a tiny bit, would be to develop ways of writing music that could encourage classical musicians to feel like they actually can jam.

 

In reality classical musicians have been jamming but not necessarily in “classical” settings.  Brass players can switch from Hindemith to Monk and guitarists might switch from Sor and Britten to whatever strikes their fancy.

UPDATE

6-26-2026

I have been thinking over how the score has been so sacralized in classical music that there must be some way to steer between Cagey aleatory or Xenakis stuff and cult of Beethoven specificity.  Suppose a composer wrote a sonata form in which there were, say, two different recapitulations?  Performers with little to no experience jamming could pick one recapitulation or the other and a path toward being able to jam could lay in learning both recapitulations and simply toggling between them, taking some elements from Recap 1 and other elements from Recap 2 but getting to the end and playing what is, technically, fleshed out in the score.  After centuries of Romantic and post-Romantic fealty to notes on the page asking people to just "jam here" is likely a bit much.  Yet throwing a chart of globs of music a la some Stockhausen scores where you pick fragments 4, 5, 2, 7, 8 and 11 of 12, for instance, most certainly won't teach a performer how to jam.

But writing out a score and setting aside 20 to 25 percent of it with instructions to jam if you want?  That might work. 

these look like fun ...

It doesn't get more niche than something like this ... 

Freddie deBoer on how recovered memories aren't real and yet belief in them remains popular

https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/recovered-memories-arent-real

Freddie deBoer has published a long-form case against recovered memory therapies and cultivation techniques.  Longtime readers of Wenatchee The Hatchet may not need a reminder that the salience of the decades-long arguments against recovered memories in counseling of any kind, secular or religious, is that it featured prominently if briefly in a 2008 presentation on spiritual warfare given by Mark “I see things” Driscoll back when he was in charge of what used to be called Mars Hill Church.

 

Back in 2014 I transcribed the majority of that 2008 presentation for the record and provided some analysis and discussion.  I asked whether any of the visions of discernment Driscoll claimed to have had ever had any, ahem, forensic outcome.  Of course, I also asked why Mark “I see things” Driscoll didn’t anything amiss about his friend and wise counsel Robert Morris.  For that matter, why would Mark Driscoll have ever felt any need, as was reported about him by Vince Manuele and relatives, to have people tail and surveil a fifteen-year old male if he had those super-powers of spiritual discernment? 

 

Mark Driscoll may have claimed to have witnessed molestations in real time but for practical purposes that was between him and his counselee.  There’s no record any arrests were made, not even in the case where, allegedly, Driscoll claimed he told someone that a  grandparent molested said person at age two and the grandparent, even more incredibly within the account, just admitted to the deed. 

 

deBoer gave a brief tour of cases with actual trials where people were found guilty on the basis of recovered memories that were never able to be forensically backed up.

 

deBoer’s tour is a fairly thorough debunking of the credibility and viability of recovered memory in light of research into the malleable and constructed nature of human memory, on the one hand, and the discovery that for victims of trauma the problem is never that they repress traumatic memories but that they can’t not remember them.

I had to familiarize myself with the whole multi-hour presentation Driscoll gave as a volunteer on the Mars Hill Theology Response Team  After slogging through roughly four hours of that content I discovered another nail in the coffin of my membership.  

The irony with a figure like Driscoll is that if mainstream and pop psychology had not made the concept of the repressed memory so easy to believe the man wouldn't have deployed it in his "pastoral counseling".  That may be a bitter irony indeed, kind of like how Driscoll has been wielding concepts from Murray Bowen's therapeutic work on family systems in newer self-help books.

It might be a sign of how pervasive the idea of the repressed memory is that even someone who could be regarded as a quasi-fundamentalist Christian nationalist like Mark Driscoll touted his capacity to help church members unlock recovered memories in pastoral counseling.  For actual mental health professionals, however, that idea has been set aside. 

 

 

two links for the weekend: Aaron Renn has the stupid idea that there should be a playbook for marriage, Anthony Bradley says that the era of private Christian colleges is ending soon

So, a short links for the weekend in terms of links.

more riff on AI and the arts from June 2026

 

https://thewalrus.ca/the-real-scandal-isnt-that-ai-wrote-a-prize-winning-story-its-the-response/

…

Granta, in an even more remarkable response, fed the accused text to Claude, asking if it was AI generated, seemingly unaware or unworried that they were submitting (potentially) literary work to the very kind of system at the heart of the scandal. Claude is a general-purpose chatbot and not an AI detector, but it nonetheless concluded that the text was “almost certainly not produced unaided by a human.” This is not striking, but what is striking is that Granta then included Claude’s cautionary note as if it were an expert opinion, surrendering to an AI its own opportunity to pass a reasoned judgment:

“The strongest evidence against pure AI authorship is the small number of passages that don’t fit the pattern . . . Those passages carry the kind of off-shape specificity that models still struggle to produce unprompted. If the story has a human core, it is concentrated there, and the AI has been used to elaborate around it.”

It would be laughable, if not such a bad omen, that Granta thought it was acceptable to ask a large language model—operated by a company sued for the widespread use of pirated books—to draft its response to allegations of AI-generated text in a literary prize. Is there no “human core” at Granta? Surely there are people there—editors, aspiring writers—who also have some skin in this game? Why has this storied literary organization been unable to answer a literary question in its own voice?

 

…

https://hedgehogreview.com/issues/humanism-in-a-posthumanist-age/articles/how-antihumanism-turned-on-its-authors

…

Generative AI, instead of liberating writing from the human, liberates textualist antihumanism from the theoretical edifice of poststructuralism. Derrida’s dictum il n’y a pas d’hors-texte (“there is no outside-text”) takes on an interesting new meaning in a world where all of reality has become so much training data for LLMs. With the launch of ChatGPT, moreover, the “death of the author” goes from scandal to banality; Foucault’s “indifference” to “who is speaking” goes from a liberating escape route from bourgeois individualism to a necessary adaptation to a world in which most text production is automated, bypassing the individual; and engagement in “automatic writing,” once an avant-garde pursuit, is integrated into the daily lives of average people as a form of entertainment, as well as a means of enhancing efficiency and productivity

…

The doctrine of the “death of the author” was not formulated to serve as a blank check for large language models more than half a century later but the zinger has its place. 

The Roys Report and Protestia report of an apparent potential split within Mark Driscoll's The Trinity Church

https://x.com/reachjulieroys/status/2062694959627501594

 

https://roysreport.com/threatened-split-at-mark-driscolls-arizona-church-prompts-warning-of-lawsuit-attack-on-former-mens-minister/

Threatened split at Mark Driscoll’s Arizona church prompts warning of lawsuit, attack on former men’s minister

By Daniel Silliman

June 4, 2026 7:02 pm CDT

 

Pastor Mark Driscoll warned his followers Wednesday of “fierce wolves … among you,” following the sudden departure of an associate minister and former security guard known as Driscoll’s chief henchman.

 

A mass email Driscoll sent at 7:44 a.m. accused Caleb Glennie of attempting to split Trinity Church, a Scottsdale, Arizona, congregation with reported weekly average attendance of 5,000 people.

 

“(He) took church members’ private information to solicit, urged staff members to resign and follow him … and announced a Men’s gathering on Tuesdays,” the email said. “Caleb has been lying for months. We rebuke Caleb and urge him to repent of sin patterns that have disqualified him as a pastor.”

The mass email link is at https://roysreport.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/Trinity-email-to-members.pdf

 

Of note is that if you donate $50 or more to The Roys Report you can elect to receive Vince Manuele’s memoir … which I have read and do not personally recommend you read for reasons I got into elsewhere.

 

https://roysreport.com/donate/

Donate $50 or more to The Roys Report, and you can elect to receive "Kiss and Tell: The Innocent Moment That Shattered Mark Driscoll's Cult" by Vince Manuele.

 

So there's that coverage. Then there's ... 

Ethan Iverson had some idle Sunday thoughts on tablature: scordatura, reentrant tuning, and pieces in natural harmonics are all arguments in favor of tab over against sight-reading snobs

I guess Ethan Iverson's idle Sunday thoughts as a pianist on guitar tab is a reminder that he's not a guitarist.

https://iverson.substack.com/p/idle-sunday-thoughts

 

As a pianist, I can sight-read almost anything within reason, including orchestral scores and choral music. I can’t get to first base with guitar tablature, which always struck me as the ultimate capitalist feint: “Here, we will give you something easy to start with that will ineluctably cripple your growth after a certain point and keep you walled off with the self-same community (other guitarists). Please don’t learn to read music, that is a distraction from our main interest, which is selling you more and more guitar gear to compensate for the fact that you can’t play in bands that use any conventional notation.”

Yesterday: guitar tab. Today: A.I.

…

Counterpoint one: Henry Kaiser on guitar tab.

Counterpoint two: Joni Mitchell’s Blue is the one of the greatest albums of all time, and she wrote a lot of it on guitar.¹

 

The real counterpoint can be summed up as "scordatura".  There are several layers to this counterpoint, as would be fit a "counterpoint" rebuttal.

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"

Since I did recently ask if Ethan could do a post on "Sir Duke" I am very pleased to read his newest post. Maybe he was planning his post anyway, but this year there should be a ton of discussion of Stevie Wonder's music.  

https://www.ethanhein.com/wp/2026/that-one-weird-chord-in-sir-duke/

 

Sir Duke” is one of the greatest songs written in the last fifty years, bar none.  Yeah, I’m just putting my cards on the table about this.  Normally I actually hate music that sings the praises of music but Wonder gets away with it because his song is a tribute to Duke Ellington and to the big band jazz greats of the past who inspired him. To put this in staid Romantic terms, when a genius pays tribute to a genius the genius can get away with stuff that other people shouldn't even seriously consider trying. 

 

The chords in the chorus of “Sir Duke” are amazing in their simplicity and in the magnificent weirdness of that F minor 7^th chord. It’s not unheard of to have a tritone pivot in music like this.  I can think of a B minor to F major shift in the first theme of String Quartet No. 7 by Shostakovich, for instance (00:14-00:17).  But B major to F minor 7^th is a lot weirder.

 

I think the introduction sets up the chorus chord in a very simple, easily overlooked way.  The introduction moves from B major to G sharp minor to G natural major to F# major.  Right from the start we have a progression that goes from the tonic to the submediant and immediately flattens the submediant and drops to the dominant.  That chromatic modal borrowing plants a seed that Wonder is going to do whatever chromatic alterations will sound fun, and what sounds fun is chromatic mutation of roots and fifths while leaving thirds and (if applicable) sevenths) alone. We should also not forget those chromatic chains of chords in the pre-chorus.  The key has been so thoroughly destabilized by the time the chorus hits F minor 7 really does sound like the most natural chord to hear despite the fact that it could be read as a minor dominant chord built on a flattened fifth as easily as a sharpened fourth. 

 

Ethan Hein links to a video where Adam Neely discusses a couple of theories as to what is going on in the chorus of “Sir Duke” that is well worth checking out. 

 

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

The shadow chord thesis is interesting. The G#7 isn't how I hear it and I think there's a simpler and far more direct way to argue that Wonder was drawing on Ellington's linear/harmonic nexus of chord formation.

 

Stevie Wonder's "Sir Duke" has a chorus with chords that go as follows:

 

B major, F (natural) minor 7th, E major 7th, C# minor 7th, F sharp 7

 

I was looking at those changes and then it hit me, “Hey, wait a minute. I am pretty sure I know which Ellington standard has something like these chord changes in the first three bars.”

 

"Warm Valley" which has

B flat major 7th, E7,      E-flat 7 and so on ...

Now, just do a handful of individually simple things:

1. Kick the key up a half step into B major

2. Remove the major 7th from the first chord

3. Sustain the 7th factor of the E7 but

4. Drop the third into parallel minor (this will yield the F minor 7th chord of "Sir Duke"

5. Retrain the G# and D# and then let the bass and alto of the SATB texture drop by parallel fifths while the S and T factors stay in place. 

 

The oblique motion off-setting parallel motion in interlocked voices is what makes this voice-leading genius on Stevie Wonder's part.  It also manages to evoke a legendary Ellington standard.  Where “Warm Valley” is a famously languid ballad, “Sir Duke” is a buoyant tribute”.  The chordal kernel, if you will, can be heard in common across the two songs. 

 

I think the core of the shadow progression idea makes sense but I think it makes way more sense to just go straight from "Sir Duke" back to Ellington's "Warm Valley".  No "shadow progression" is needed to hear the connection.  We can just make the connection very directly by comparing the two songs. 

 

The “Warm Valley”/”Sir Duke” connection is an intuitive association on my part having listened to Ellington and Wonder for decades.  I didn’t start putting it together, though, until I read Ethan Hein and heard Adam Neely discuss the chord progressions and then it clicked for me that a half-step transposition and a gentle modal mutation showed that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. 

SECONDARY SECTION

Now ever since I slogged through that CT podcast series I've been loathe to mention podcasts.  What Ethan has done with "Sir Duke" is exceptional enough that I'm breaking my rule of not linking to podcasts because you should give him a listen as he walks through the chords that Stevie Wonder "could" have chosen that make more sense based on prescribed theories and why they don't actually work as well as what Wonder did.

https://ethanhein.substack.com/p/you-can-feel-it-all-over

recent translation of Michel Krielaars' Music of Utopia has been published in 2026, and it's got a chapter on Zaderatsky (looks like this one will have to go on the "to read" pile).

https://artsfuse.org/328933/book-review-the-sound-of-utopia-music-in-the-shadow-of-power/

https://pushkinpress.com/book/the-sound-of-utopia/

The Sound of Utopia: Musicians in the Time of Stalin

Michel Krielaars

Translated by Jonathan Reeder

ISBN 9781805330042

Published 15th January 2026

I haven't picked it up just yet but longtime readers of Wenatchee The Hatchet know I've referenced Zaderatsky's 24 Preludes and Fugues for piano a few times over the years.  So this looks like something to add to the read pile later this year  I have a bit of a hobby now and then about Soviet era music and composers.  

If you haven't heard the Zaderatsky preludes and fugues they are worth a listen.  I've considered blogging about or through the Zaderatsky cycle and the Shchedrin cycle but flesh and blood can only pull off so much.  I'm still obviously not even half-way done with the big Matiegka guitar sonata project so there's hardly any point in biting off still more than I can chew in analysis.  

Joseph Horowitz and Douglas McLennan at AJBlogs on the state of attention spans with regard to the high arts

Arts criticism in the trans-Atlantic world seems ever bent on ignoring the advice of the Preacher in Ecclesiastes 7:10.  Don’t say “Where are the older days that were better than these?” because it is not from wisdom that you say this.  Oh, but it is from wisdom that everyone pining for the glory days of classical music says it, and keeps saying it!

 

https://www.artsjournal.com/uq/2026/05/are-we-rotting-our-brains-is-this-the-end-of-classical-music.html

 

JH (1:55):  People are not attentive to the arts. People don’t talk about the arts. And I think my understanding of this deterioration is mostly as a deterioration of cultural memory. If you don’t have cultural memory, you can’t have a flourishing arts environment. Traditionally, creative artists have relied on the past, have relied on forebears, have relied on tradition, have relied on cultural memory. We now are losing touch with the past because of cell phones and social media and artificial intelligence.

 

This is a new situation. We’ve never experienced anything like it. . . . Things can only get worse because the driving force, the major problem, is technology. And technology is not going to vanish from our world.

 

What does technology do? For one thing, it shortens attention spans. The music that we love and we grew up with and that we promulgate depends on an attention span of some duration. You can’t experience the Eroica Symphony, or even just the first movement of the Eroica Symphony, or even just the coda to the first movement of the Eroica Symphony without an attention span. If you’re talking about “Träumerei” by Schumann, fine. But if you’re dealing with a sonata form, it functions partly on the basis of memory—what the ear remembers, what the brain processes. Why is the coda of the first movement of the Eroica so long? Why does it introduce a new theme? Because there’s so much that Beethoven has to deal with and resolve that we’ve already heard. If you can’t experience that piece in time with sustained concentration, there’s not a whole lot going for it. It’s not about the tunes. It’s not even about the ambience or the mood. I think it’s fundamentally an exercise in structure.

…

I realize how readily this kind of appeal can tie back to Theodor Adorno’s riff on the contrast between the emotional listener and the structural listener from Introduction to the Sociology of Music or his riffs to similar effect in the never-completed in his lifetime Current of Music. The idea that people who can and do listen for structure are better people than the people who don’t is a long-standing claim in classical music appreciation and it is very probably a canard. If sheer length makes for greatness are we supposed to jettison Bach preludes and fugues in favor of a marathon of piano sonatas by Sorabji?  I mean, if you’re into Sorabji that’s you’re thing but I still kinda prefer Bach.

 

But there are counter-proposals at hand which warn us that the situation isn’t that the attentional capacity of humans has died a miserable death, it has shifted.  Douglas McLennan proposes we’ve witnessed a shift rather than a death in attentional capacities.

 

https://www.artsjournal.com/diacritical/2026/05/aj-chronicles-are-our-attention-spans-killing-culture-or-reassembling-it.html

…

So Horowitz is right: the formal apparatus that produced trained attention is in retreat, and the algorithms eating its place don’t care about throughlines. All they care about is engagement. When algorithms shifted value from the work itself, what Big Tech euphemistically calls “content,” to the traffic — views, clicks, likes, share — the content itself, from a contextual, historical, or cultural perspective, is irrelevant and interchangeable.

 

But here’s what this frame perhaps misses. Deep attention hasn’t gone away. It’s relocated. People are diving obsessively into the cultures they choose.  …

 

The proposal that the loss of one form of cultural literacy is answered by the gain of a different kind of literacy has been around.  George Steiner proposed that Western civilization had lost the literacy of literary fiction (prose and poetry) but that kids these days (back in his day) had picked up a level of musical literacy spanning centuries of styles and forms that he suspected was a new development.  That was in the book In Bluebeard’s Castle.  Answering the concern of Horowitz that attentional capacity has shifted has precedent.

 

The question itself of whether social media has rotted our brains begs the question of why the sign of attentional health would be a bunch of people sitting through a Mahler cycle.  Why regard Marvel fans as being unhinged for watching the entire Marvel cinematic universe when Wagnerians exist?  What’s the difference between watching five seasons of Mad Men and watching five seasons of My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic? If Discord has a redemption arc while what’s-his-name in Mad Men has a different arc is the difference a matter of art or imputed merit? It can be all too easy for academics to sneer at kids these days who keep track of the differences in Marvel timelines, for instance, but doesn’t the same thing functionally happen if an academic discusses the differences between Marlowe and Goethe on the Faust legend?  Why should I suppose that prestige American TV like The Sopranos or Breaking Bad is necessarily better than watching Death Note? 

 

Fixating on the loss of attentional resources given to listening to everything in a body of work can be its own conceptual dead-end.  Back in the 19^th century it was a thing to brag about for a pianist to play all 32 of Beethoven’s piano sonatas, and a bigger deal if done from memory.  But who actually benefits from memorizing the 32?  Even if we grant the cult of Beethoven cultists every single one of their points, Beethoven solved problems of his time and place two centuries ago, which are not our problems.  If anything his solutions can be seen as having become our problems.  In the 20^th century some composers even felt obliged to shift from Beethoven back to Haydn (Schoenberg) to overtly say that Beethoven was one path music could take but there were others and it was possible to have taken a different path forward from Haydn’s precedent than the one Beethoven took.  

The path of Beethoven has played out as a dead end, a beautiful dead end but a dead end all the same.  This is not the same thing as pulling a John Cage and saying Beethoven was wrong, it’s saying that the kinds of problems and opportunities in the arts in the 21^st century do not have to be hamstrung by the imaginations of men whose business is symphonic and whose idea of cultural rebirth entails the revitalization of the prestige of the orchestra. Now I can appreciate Horowitz stumping for Arthur Falwell as an under-appreciated North American composer and still conclude that the era of the symphony has come and gone.  As a guitarist I have basically zero incentive to want yet more people to line up to hear Mahler symphonies, or even Haydn symphonies (and I am a Haydn fan for all that).

 

Since I mentioned I’m a guitarist, one of the more memorable bits of advice I got from a music professor back in my college days was simple, “Write for the musical resources you actually have, not the ones you wish you had.” The history of revolutionary developments of style and form could, at the risk of an obvious simplification, be articulated in this axiom. 

 

The history of the emergence of rap and hip hop as musical styles and forms can be described as having happened on the basis of people making music with the musical resources they actually had rather than pining for the musical resources they wish they had.  Rap is not exactly my thing but I can hardly think of a style of music in the last fifty years that better exemplifies the axiom with which I started this paragraph.  Rather than take a dismissive stance toward rap as being unmusical I prefer to take the approach of saying that Johann Sebastian Bach’s setting of the Credo from Mass in B minor can be heard as one of the grandest sample flips of an existing plainchant in the history of Christian liturgical music in the Lutheran tradition. 

 

To bring this back around to my professor’s advice, the attentional resources of whatever audience you have is what you have to work with.  For a composer, or a composer-performer, the audience is a pretty significant musical resource.  If the contemporary audience doesn’t handle the epic lengths of a Mahler or a Wagner there’s no point in yearning for an audience that goes that epic. 

 

I think that what we need more of us not the good old days attention span of people listening to sixty-minute or seventy-five-minute symphonic works. The art canons seem fairly well established in classical and pop music in the last century and the attention spans of audiences are what they are.  What I think we can do, and keep doing, is foster an ecumenical dialogue across musical canons to encourage further mutual appreciation, respect and love.  That last part might be a very high ideal to shoot for but that is, allegedly, what partisans of the arts think the arts can at some point achieve.  None of that kind of musically ecumenical dialogue calls for people to listen to musical works that are nine to ninety minutes in length. I think Horowitz may be missing that the triumphs of musical achievement in the long 19^th century are the traps that some of us in the 21^st century think musical styles and forms need to be allowed to escape now.

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

To read Ted Gioia in May 2026 would lead you to believe that he is sure that the history of the world can be understood in terms of binary conflicts and that this terrible state of affairs can be ameliorated by music, at least a little bit.

 

https://www.honest-broker.com/p/how-to-tell-if-youre-living-in-a-8ee

How to Tell If You're Living in a Binary Crisis

And how to get out of it

Ted Gioia

May 11, 2026

…

Somebody should write a global history of binary conflicts—because no force has exerted more influence over human affairs.

Rome collapsed while its citizens fought over the colors blue and green. That sounds crazy, but it’s absolutely true.

I believe this is the single most significant fact about Roman history.

1.      The conflict between Blues and Greens lasted for a thousand years.

2.      During that period, each color enjoyed periods of dominance, and could have used its power to make tangible improvements and fix a broken system.

3.      But they rarely did this—because were obsessed with punishing the other color team.

They won’t teach that in history class. But they should. It ought to be the first lesson.

…

How can you tell when you’re living in a binary collapse? Here are seven warning signs:

1.      All conflicts are channeled into a single binary opposition between two teams. There is never a third team—if someone tries to create it, one or both of the two teams will work fervently to destroy the third option.

…

 

Naturally, in a Substack article published by Ted Gioia the answer to the great problems of the human condition comes from the arts.  We need a Romanticism 2.0, as Gioia has been saying for a few years, and we’re going to get one.  Yet I have been reading Ted Gioia’s work off and on for about ten years so I can’t quite forget that back when he published Music: A Subversive History with Basic Books in 2019 he had a chapter titled “Music History as a Battle Between Magic and Mathematics”.  Ted Gioia’s whole conception of music history has too often been predicated on the literal sell of the kind of binary impasse he suggests music can defuse.  Take this passage from the subversive history I discussed a few years ago:

At a certain point in Western history, music became a quasi-science. Or, to be more precise, those who theorized about music managed to impose a scientific and mathematical framework that would marginalize all other approaches to the subject. We can even assign a name, a location, and a rough date to this revolution. The alleged innovator was Pythagoras of Samos, born around the year 570 BC. The impact of the Pythagorean revolution on the later course of music is still insufficiently understood and appreciated. I believe he is the most important person in the history of music — although his `innovation’ has perhaps done as much harm as good — and I will make a case for that bold claim in the pages ahead. Yet he is often treated as little more than a colorful footnote in cultural history, a charming figure who appears in anecdotes and asides, but not the mainstream narrative of cultural history. […]

Pythagoras’s attempt to define and constrain musical sounds by the use of numbers and ratios continues to shape how we conceptualize and perform songs in the current day, and even now we distinguish between melody and noise. Music, as it is taught in every university and conservatory in the world today, is explicitly Pythagorean in its methods and assumptions. And even when musical styles emerged from the African diaspora that challenged this paradigm, threatening to topple it with notes that didn’t belong to scales and rhythms that defied conventional metric thinking, the algorithmic mindset prevailed, somehow managing to codify non-Pythagorean performance styles that would seem to resist codification. (p. 48-49, emphasis added) 

Ted Gioia’s own history of music can easily be read as a triple binary impasse in which the paradigms of White-Science-Man vs Black-Magic-Woman is used to explain all of the world’s musical history.  Science vs magic, Europe vs Africa, male vs female, Ted Gioia embodies the worst elements of neo-Orphic thought about music.   Music can’t provide a way beyond the binary impasse as Gioia sketches it out if we use Gioia’s own history as the paradigm through which to understand music because his own understanding of music is so ostentatiously mediated through binary impasse.

At one level this is hardly surprising coming from a historian of blues and jazz, but at a more foundational level Gioia’s intellectual and ethical failure is predicated not on ill-will but on not being able to grasp that the history of neo-Orphic theologies of music have trafficked in essentialist paradigms since roughly the time of Schleiermacher, a point that gets touched upon by theologians now and then. Jeremy Begbie has registered a constructive complaint that Schleiermacher’s picture is helpful but partial.  Philip Stoltzfus' Theology as Performance: Music, Aesthetics, and God in Western Thought is more directly critical by noting that Schleiermacher’s art mysticism was neo-Orphic and that his form of neo-Orphic theology or art mysticism has been the norm for the last two centuries.  

 

Ted Gioia, by his own account, never studied music theorybooks.

At some point during my teenage years, I decided I wanted to be a jazz musician. But I didn’t have a coherent plan.

I just spent a lot of time at the piano. And when I wasn’t sitting at the keyboard, I listened to jazz—on records and in concert. I also read jazz magazines and books at the local public library (which had a subscription to Downbeat).

But here’s what I didn’t do:

·         I didn’t get a music degree.

·         I didn’t take any lessons after the age of 18—and never had a single jazz lesson.

·         I didn’t try to get gigs.

·         I didn’t network with influential people in the music business.

·         I occasionally glanced at a music textbook, but never really studied one.

·         I didn’t learn anything about music technology (except how to plug in my Fender Rhodes).

I noted this a while back, and it reminded me of an observation made by the philosopher Leszek Kolakowski on the problems of the autodidact:

https://wwnorton.com/books/9780393060546

Main Currents of Marxism

Lescek Kolakowski

Copyright © 2005 by Leszek Kolakowski

Copyright © 1978 by Oxford University Press

ISBN: 978-0-393-32943-8

Page 127

 

While Marx’s criticism was unjust and dishonest in some respects, he was intellectually far superior to Proudhon, who had all the faults of a clever autodidact: self-assurance, unawareness of the limitations of his knowledge, incomplete or desultory reading, lack of skill in selecting and organizing material, and the hasty condemnation of authors whom, for the most part, he did not properly understand.

Ted Gioia can be thought of Kolakowski's Proudhon.  Gioia's autodidacticism has revealed that he isn't capable of producing a subversive history of music because his understanding of music is arguably the most conventional of post-Romantic conventional wisdom.

 

Still, Ted Gioia can be regarded as a person of goodwill even if many of his ideas about music history and culture don't rise to the level of idiosyncratic crackpot. Moving beyond a binary impasse does sound like a good idea in theory, as well as in practice, but Gioia’s whole career of publishing, whether in his books or in his Substack, reveals a performative contradiction at the heart of his work—he sells us on one binary impasse on top of another as the way to think about music, yet wants to back up and claim that music could be what allows us to transcend the binary impasse. 

POSTSCRIPT

One of the worst parts of Gioia's pitting magic against mathematics is that it shows how blinkered his grasp of the materials has become.  I recently finished Annette Yoshiko Reed's book Demons, Angels, and Writing in Ancient Judaism and in her conclusion she pointed out that one of the challenges of contemporary readers and scholars is to grasp that demonology was the cutting edge science of the ancient world from ancient Babylon up into even the Hellenistic period. Gioia's dualism of magic against science is predicated on an anachronistic post-Enlightenment dualism that does not pay enough attention to the territories of science and religion, territories that overlapped far more significantly in the ancient world than Ted Gioia's set of binary impasses can allow for. The binary impasses Gioia wants music to help us liberate from, then, are paradoxically the binary impasses he keeps imposing upon his understanding of music history.