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. 

Alan Jacobs' against Ross Barkan on the idea that gatekeepers need to police art nostalgia, Berlioz 2.0 "Forget the classics, listen to MY stuff instead" for the 2020s

https://blog.ayjay.org/this-post-is-obviously-against-all-new-things/

May 1, 2026

this post is obviously against all new things

Ross Barkan:

The culture … does get stuck. We are too backward-facing already. The Metropolitan Review has run its fair share of retrospectives, but I’ve been in the mood, of late, to crack down on them. There is always going to be another anniversary of a great old work of art. There is always another famous dead writer we can celebrate. I’m as guilty of this as anyone, as I begin work, for this Substack, on an essay celebrating the 60th anniversary of Pet Sounds. But I want new musical horizons, too. Imagine if the rock musicians of the 1960s spent much of their day fixating on the pop of the 1940s. As a culture, we need less mimesis and less retrogression. A lot of this is the fault of the algorithmic internet, which rewards copycat trends and wearying groupthink. Cultural nostalgia is nothing new, though it can feel especially repressive these days.

Responses:

1) There is no art without “mimesis,” in the sense that Barkan uses the term here: all art responds to prior art in a thousand ways. And the problem, according to him, is not people copying older art but rather being too interested in it. He seems to want, as an alternative to mimesis, amnesia. 

2) Interest in and knowledge of the past is neither “retrogression” nor “nostalgia” — not does it constitute “groupthink,” because a staggeringly wide range of opinions is possible (and indeed extant) about pre–21st-century cultural productions.

3) It’s noteworthy that Barkan, because he edits a Substack publication, thinks of himself as a cultural policeman who can “crack down” on those overly attentive to the past. (Remember this day the next time you want to write a piece about an old book, comrade!)

 

4) Writing an essay on Pet Sounds is not, in my judgment, something to feel “guilty” about. …

5) Indeed, “There is always going to be another anniversary of a great old work of art” — which makes for a great opportunity to write about it, alert readers to its existence and its excellences, and maybe even inspire young artists to try to match it. Bob Dylan wasn’t “fixating on the pop of the 1940s,” but he was compulsively fascinated by and profoundly knowledgable about the long great history of demotic American music, what he calls “historical-traditional music.” And his absorption in that vast old musical world was absolutely essential to his greatness. When we write about great things from the past, we’re helping to feed future Dylans. 

…

This is the point at which I interrupt Alan Jacobs’ rebuttal to point out that Stevie Wonder’s masterpiece Innervisions has now been around for more than half a century and literally nobody on the planet has attempted to publish a monograph analyzing every track in musical and lyrical terms; situating the album in the historical and cultural context of the United States in the early 1970s as a way to convey its cultural impact; and a handful of essays I have come across discuss Stevie Wonder as a disabled black musician without really seeming to discuss his brilliant songs.  Now I have a visual disability myself so it’s not like I can’t connect at all to discussions of how disabled musicians handle music in ways that maybe other able-bodied musicians don’t.  It’s just that it would be nice if the music itself got discussed. 

A Farewell to Cinema from a Christian Who Loves It at Mere Orthodoxy seems like an archetypal contemporary American Christian thinkpiece about the state of an art in the 21st century but what is that state?

https://mereorthodoxy.com/a-farewell-to-cinema-from-a-christian-who-loves-it

...

For several generations, going to the movies was not just escapism; it was like watching a new Western canon being composed in real time.  ...

...

After Avengers: Endgame came out, I never again heard my students quote a new movie in class. The canon has closed. Nowadays, when I say “I hear [a new movie] is good”, I mean “someone online wrote this was good.” People don’t actually talk about movies anymore.

To add salt to the wound, the lovers of mainstream film who invited you to watch Casablanca and Singing in the Rain have been replaced by people who are arguing about the in-world consistency of the 9th Star Wars/Halloween/Aliens movie. Debates about the filmic canon have given way to debates about specific mythologies created so that studios can keep making movies with the same main characters.

...

Lucas Brar has made a Bach-style fugue on the main riff from Michael Jackson's "Smooth Criminal"

Its fun, go check it out.  Brar diagrams what goes on in the fugue as it moves along

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aKwXT33dVzY

I like that he inverts the theme in one of the middle entries. Of course there's a stretto because the riff from "Smooth Criminal" so very obviously lends itself to stretto (in three voices).

I've been saying for years the boundaries between "pop" and "classical" are far more permeable and negotiable than snobs on various sides of largely constructed divides make things out to be.  Sure, the fugue can be heard as a novelty piece but I think it would be unwise to hear it as "just" a novelty piece.  

Angine de Poitrine, because Wenatchee The Hatchet was going to have to have some kind of post about a microtonal progressive rock duo from Quebec

No offense meant to Rush fans but it is nice to be able to say that there's more to prog rock from Canada than just Rush. :) 

The chain of introduction for me can be charted like this--Rick Beato featured them to silence the flood of "Why haven't you featured .... ?"  Bryan Townsend shared the KEXP performance at his blog.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zO8bt94-ybg 

https://themusicsalon.blogspot.com/2026/03/todays-listening-angine-de-poitrine.html

 

Ethan Hein recently wrote about the duo at MusicRadar and I'd meant to do a blog post about the duo.

“They describe themselves as a Mantra-Rock Dada Pythago-Cubist Orchestra, and the band name translates to ‘angina of the chest’”: The microtonal music theory behind viral math-rockers Angine de Poitrine

https://www.musicradar.com/guitars/they-describe-themselves-as-a-mantra-rock-dada-pythago-cubist-orchestra-and-the-band-name-translates-to-angina-of-the-chest-the-microtonal-music-theory-behind-viral-math-rockers-angine-de-poitrine

 

…

Angine de Poitrine’s grooves are immediately distinctive. Sarniezz is in regular old 4/4 with a triplet-y 12/8 feel, but it has peculiar accents. Mata Zylek is in 10/4. Fabienk is either in very strangely-grouped 7/4 or conventionally-grouped 28/4. Finally, Sherpa is in 17/4.

 

The band constructs these wonky grooves using a loop pedal. Khn plays both the bass and all of the guitar parts on a Stratocaster-style double-neck guitar that’s half electric guitar and half bass, and he can only do that by layering them with the looper. This creates serious restrictions in song structures and arrangement choices. Once the loop is going, the only change you can make is to either add layers or mute them.

…

The loops’ constraints have several musical benefits. The songs have to focus tightly on a single idea, rather than wandering aimlessly. Because every song has to have essentially the same structure, it forces the band to be creative with the details. The loops also make the songs somewhat predictable, and that is a big help for listeners struggling to parse the odd time signatures and unusual tuning.

…

 

In classical music theory books you may come across the concept of the passacaglia.  The gist is that there is a ground bass and the form is an approach to variation technique. Anything and everything may happen around the ground bass but the ground bass never goes away.  

Defined very loosely, Angine de Poitrine can be heard as contemporary prog rock microtonal exponents of new possibilities in a venerable old form known as the passacaglia.  

Traditionally defined as being in triple meter there really isn’t any reason you can’t have a passacaglia in 5/4 or 17/4 or whatever meter you want.  Strip away the classical music genre and what it means is that jamming by way of riff bashing goes back centuries.  Calling what you do jamming over a riff-bashing exercise a passacaglia is a long-standing tradition and it’s a fun form to work with.  At the same time, we also don’t need to be especially snobby about the idea that jamming over a riff-bashing groove in classical music is somehow ontologically different from the same thing being done by a prog rock power duo.

 

It’s easier to catch the grooves in their work than it would be to follow some of the forms used by Alois Haba (String Quartet No. 3 from 1922) or Ivan Wyschnegradsky.  I lean slightly more toward the string quartets of Ben Johnston and the guitar music of Lou Harrison than Haba or Wyschnegradsky (although the latter’s 4^th piece from Op. 22 kind of has a proto-prog rock vibe to it for me).  

 

Microtonality has been getting played with for a bit more than a century now and it’s been regarded as a theoretical possibility for literally centuries.  I came across Anton Reicha’s Treatise on Melody (HT Kyle Gann) and therein discovered that Reicha extolled the use of quarter tones in performances.  The thing about microtonality that is fun is that it’s not 12-tone equal temperament but there’s no real constraints on what not-12TET you go with.  You could do quarter tones or you could do extended just intonation.  You could do fifth-tone and sixth-tone tuning systems like Haba did.  As a guitarist with no access to bowed string instruments the closest I could get to doing something microtonal or using extended just intonation would be trying to write a whole set of works using only natural harmonics because nothing is more natural than using only natural harmonics. 

 

The internet being what it is, looks like someone went to the effort to do some transcriptions.  One of the advantages of riff-bashing and loop work is that transcription can be easier if you know what loops keep recurring.  Not that I would personally find it easy to transcribe quarter tone prog rock but there are transcriptions on Youtube.

 

Mata Zyklek (Angine De Poitrine) transcription

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wAtWy-s0FOY

 

Sarniezz (Angine de Poitrine) transcription

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FZW_NV-RIoc

Kyle Gann once wrote somewhere that although he did like quarter tone music he found that his capacity to listen to it in large chunks was limited.  If the twelve-tone equal temperament tuning system is artificial than slicing every half step in half is twice as artificial, right?  Still, I have heard music built around quarter tones that I've enjoyed and it's been fun to listen to this duo lately.  I'll reiterate a sentiment I shared over at The Music Salon, I'll take this duo's music over the annoying four-chord soul bro balladeers I've been stuck hearing on mainstream radio.

Adam Gussow's Beyond the Crossroads quotes Francis Grimké's 1892 address on the state of Afro-American clergy from a Crossway compendium. It's now possible to go straight to the source, but let's also rabbit trail on New Calvinism

In Adam Gussow's Beyond the Crossroads: The Devil and the Blues Tradition, he mentions Francis Grimké 's 1892 critique of his fellow African American peers in pastoral offices. Gussow cites a book edited by Thabiti Anyabwile and John Piper. 

 

The Faithful Preacher: Recapturing the Vision of Three Pioneering African-American Pastors

By Thabiti Anyabwile, Foreword by John Piper

https://www.crossway.org/books/the-faithful-preacher-tpb/

ISBN-10:          1-58134-827-4

ISBN-13:          978-1-58134-827-9

ISBN-UPC:        9781581348279

Published:        March 31, 2007

 

It turns out that now you can go straight to the source but I'll get to that after a few rabbit trails.

Janet Mefferd blogs about a book by Vince Manuele about The Trinity Church and his experiences there (update 5-2-26 do not waste your time on it)

https://www.janetmefferd.com/p/mark-driscoll-an-innocent-moment

Apr 25, 2026

It’s been almost 13 years since I confronted now-disqualified Pastor Mark Driscoll about his plagiarized book on my radio show and watched as the dominos of his celebrity-pastor con game began to fall, one by one. 

I last wrote about him in 2014, in a fit of frustration that this scandal-riddled charlatan was somehow still at the helm of Mars Hill Church, even after everything that I and others had revealed about him (he left Mars Hill soon thereafter to launch The Trinity Church in Scottsdale, AZ). 

I said in that article that I was done, and I have been done ever since. I can only take so much, after all. But I’ve decided to come briefly out of self-imposed Driscoll hibernation after reading Vince Manuele’s new book, “Kiss and Tell: The Innocent Moment that Shattered Mark Driscoll’s Cult.”

...

Huh ... kind of a weird title ... since it would sure seem like Mark Driscoll Ministries is plugging along pretty well if there's a new capital campaign announced for a recently acquired building and stuff like that.

Wenatchee The Hatchet has never said "I'm done" with this stuff. There's less to write about but sometimes something sparks up.  I reviewed Justin Dean's PR Matters ... so ... I guess I should get around to this one, too.  

To the best of my knowledge, there have been no memoirs about being at churches founded or co-founded by Mark Driscoll.  I can't seriously count Mark Driscoll's own books because memoir and anecdote are so inextricably woven into his self-help volumes they can't really be considered memoirs or autobiographical accounts as such.  Every story gets rolled out to make a fairly literally dogmatic (it runs in the family and is part of the family business).

I could be wrong.  Maybe somebody has published a memoir about their time at Mars Hill Church already and I just never heard of it.  

UPDATE 5-2-2026 (after the break)

Doug Wilson was on some show and though he doesn't give a rip he still felt obliged to write 1,346 about having been on that show.

First off, HT to Jim West for linking to a post by Du Mez.  It's important to chronicle how and where you hear of things.  Longtime readers know that's kind of a thing with Wenatchee The Hatchet. 

https://kristindumez.substack.com/p/false-prophets-without-clothes

…

When I was finishing Jesus and John Wayne, a scholar I respect very much questioned my inclusion of Wilson: “Who is this guy? I’ve never heard of him, and I don’t think he’s that important.” Wilson’s Amazon sales numbers at the time seemed to suggest the same. But I knew Wilson wasn’t selling his books on Amazon, and I’d heard too many people attest to his influence to dismiss him. I kept my sections on Wilson in Jesus and John Wayne.

 

I added more in Live Laugh Love, where I also share the perspectives of women caught up in his orbit. More on that in September, but here’s a taste: “…fitting within no established tradition, Wilson started his own school, college, publishing house, and eventually his own denomination. [emphasis added] (Wilson never attended seminary and was not traditionally ordained; placing himself at the top of the chain of command, he wielded authority but answered to no one.)”

…

Now I have not bothered to read Jesus and John Wayne (despite actually having the book) for reasons I have explained elsewhere.  It’s very easy to scapegoat white Christian nationalist evangelicals at this stage and the somewhat obvious demise of not only pax Americana in general but any sense of stability in the current administration. Doug Wilson claims to be a Burkean conservative.  Curiously, Wenatchee The Hatchet considers himself to be a Burkean conservative but whereas I have described myself as a Mark Hatfield Republican after the Oregon Senator from the last century, Wilson has described himself as a theocratic libertarian. 

 

If we’re going to indulge in playing Doug Wilson’s kind of word games (and, fair warning, at the level he plays them at) then a "theocratic libertarian" comes off sort of like a virgin prostitute who is technically a virgin only by way of the most technical of technicalities. Wilson couldn’t resist having a hot take on hot takes on hotties by way of commenting on Sydney Sweeney.  It seems to be one of the traits of the New Calvinist types by way of Doug Wilson and Mark Driscoll that Wilson can discuss Sweeney, and Driscoll could discuss Adriana Lima and Jenna Jameson, but if some lowly tithing peon were to admit he knows who those women are, well, the subordinate pastors would tell the guy it’s time for a heart check moment.  

It’s something to keep in mind about how pervasively these kinds of guys have moving and movable goalposts for their metacultural punditry. They get to pontificate about blonde bombshells, models and porn stars for sake of cultural commentary about how bad things are. If you’re an ordinary guy you’re probably not supposed to even know who these women are.

 

Stuff that I don’t doubt Du Mez is familiar with.

a brief thought on a paradoxical aspect to Ted Gioia's Substacking--the MAGA streak at the heart of his project

 If you haven't read anything by Ted Gioia in the last twenty years this gnomic observation may be impossible to follow, and it may be impossible to follow if you have read things he's written in the last twenty years.

When I read his piece asking (rhetorically, of course) whether Mickey Mouse could make Disney great again the answer to his question is "Yes".  I would venture to say the answer is "No".  Yet the Shock of the Old is that everything is a reboot and the entertainment industry isn't taking any risks and we not only need to stop living in the past, we need Romanticism 2.0.

Talk about living in the past.  I have blogged this thought a few times but we don't need Romanticism 2.0.  We're not done getting rid of the worst and most racist elements of Romanticism 1.0.  We live in an era in which writers who are ostensibly as secular and progressive as can be in politics can't resist writing about the liberal arts in general and music in particular without recourse to the language of magic, sorcery, trance, spirit possession and the like.  Or, like Ted Gioia, music is magic and all real music history comes from sorcery but "they" don't want you to know this.  If we could be bring back the magic in music culture would thrive.

Ted Gioia has a MAGA streak for American cultural production.  As Jed Esty put it so succinctly in The Future of Decline, Make America Great Again was the motto of Aaron Sorkin productions for all the W years well before Trump's first term. Esty's advice was the United States should reconcile itself to the reality of its decline and not try to pull a Great Britain because Great Britain trying to hold on to its empire kinda got them two world wars and the thorough and irrevocable demise of said empire.

Now it would seem that the United States isn't going to heed any potential lessons there.  The old saw is that it's easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism but Hollywood has shown that it's easier to keep imagining the end of the world than to imagine a world that isn't saved by Americans, let alone dialing back the entire cinematic scene to make the world a more hospitable place--consider the carbon footprint of every single movie that gets churned out in the trans-Atlantic world and ask whether those movies really make the world better.  

Gioia has a dogmatic commitment to a form of Romanticism where things always need to be shaken up. More than half a century ago Leonard Meyer floated the idea in Music, The Arts, and Ideas that all the revolutions had already happened by 1965 or so and that the future was going to be hybrids and mash-ups created by formalists playing with fusions and that no new revolutionary style was going to dominate any of the arts, least of all music.   

Ted Gioia's Mickey Mouse fantasy shows that he's torn between two impulses, saying that we Americans need to get out of the cultural ruts but by wanting Mickey back he's functionally advocating for making one of the biggest ruts in American pop culture deeper than ever.   

MATIEGKA, W.T.: Guitar Sonatas (Complete), Vol. 1 (Ilie) released 4-10-2026

Naxos just released the first volume in what looks to be a series of discs of Wenzel Thomas Matiegka's solo guitar sonatas. 

https://www.naxos.com/CatalogueDetail/?id=8.574662

https://www.naxos.com/MainSite/BlurbsReviews/?itemcode=8.574662&catnum=574662&filetype=AboutThisRecording&language=English

Track listing as follows:

Grande Sonate No. 1 for Guitar in D Major

1 I. Maestoso                07:47

2 II. Andante molto                  03:47

3 III. Rondo capriccioso: Allegro non molto         08:46

Guitar Sonata in B Minor, Op. 23

4 I. Presto. Fugato                 04:25

5 II. Menuetto - Trio                 04:31

6 III. Rondo: Allegro non tanto        07:03

Grande Sonate No. 2 for Guitar in A Major

7 I. Moderato                  09:09

8 II. Andante con espressione          05:38

9 III. Variations sur l'air allemande par Haydn 08:58

Sonate progressive for Guitar in G Major, Op. 17

10 I. Cantabile                 07:05

11 II. Andante                  02:58

12 III. Rondo: Moderato                 06:06

This is a fun release and I recommend it.  If you have never heard Matiegka's guitar sonatas before and would like to hear them I think this is probably the best introduction disc you could ask for.  There have been several other releases of Matiegka's guitar sonatas in the past and they each have their good points but I like that this release puts Op. 23 between Grand Sonata I and Grand Sonata II.  It allows the shorter Haydn-based sonata to interrupt the flow of the grandness so it isn't all "grand" across the board.  I like all of Matiegka's guitar sonatas but alternating them across Op. 23 and Op. 17 is a good programming decision.

Grand Sonata I is understandably the opener because it's arguably Matiegka's best known work and one of his strongest pieces.  Following up with the Op. 23 Haydn arrangement is a good move, too.  I like that Dragos Ilie introduced embellishments in the repeats across the dance forms and even in the sonata forms.  Knowing that early 19th century composer performers would do this kind of thing adds to the performance.  Fastidious note-for-note performances were more, dare I say so, post-cult-of-Beethoven norms than what would apply to performing something by a Bohemian guitarist composer (who did, it must be said, arrange some Beethoven).  If you know the score like the back of your hand you can hear where the embellishments happen but if you don't they're pleasing.

Grand Sonata II comes off very well.  Ilie brings out a lot of contrasts in loud and soft passages that helps accentuate the humor of the music.  If I could zero in on something specific to this recording it's that Ilie gets that Matiegka was heavily influenced by Haydn and peppered his music with musical jokes--maybe these were all jokes that only fellow musicians might recognize as jokes but they are there and Dragos Ilie does a good job of bringing those out.

I admit I prefer Massimo Agostinelli's take on Op. 17 a tiny bit more because he accentuated the contrasting tempi between Themes 1 and 2 in the opening sonata movement, but Ilie conveys pretty well how Theme 2 bursts in before Theme 1 can finish its full expositional form from the exposition within the recapitulation.  Ilie also gets the long-form joke in the closing Rondo of Op. 17 where it ends like a sonata recapitulation despite being called "Rondo".  

Many of Matiegka's jokes come from the way he slices up or slices off large sections of his themes where you would expect his recapitulations to be "textbook".  By now we have enough theoretical treatments of 18th century and early 19th century sonata forms the very idea of a "textbook" sonata is pretty misleading.  Steeping myself in Matiegka's sonatas over the last ten years has helped me appreciate how true it is that the idea of a "textbook sonata form" is a scholarly fantasy.  

Every Matiegka sonata form is different and features some formal quirk.  Grand Sonata I kicks off the recapitulation in the subdominant key and doesn't course-correct into the tonic until half-way through.  Op. 23's first movement is a Haydn transcription that blurs the boundary between sonata and fugato (because that's what Haydn did).  Grand Sonata II only brings back the second half of Theme 1 in the recapitulation of its sonata form and when it seems Theme 1 is going to come back for real it's grand gesture only kicks off a non-modulating transition that leads to Theme 2 and Theme 3 (Theme 3 itself comes from one of Haydn's E-flat major piano trios).  Op. 17 has a sonata form where Theme 2 cuts off Theme 1 half-way through and forces the recapitulation into an earlier end, and the closing Rondo, as I mentioned before, concludes like a sonata form and dispenses with what should have been the final refrain if Matiegka were really going to go full rondo.

Dragos Ilie is clearly aware of all of these abstract but still very real musical jokes in the way he interprets Matiegka's music so it makes for funny and enjoyable listening.  Years ago I saw a disc that had a title that described Matiegka as the Beethoven of the Guitar.  That title need not detain us too long in 2026 and, in my ten years of studying the composer's work I would say it's more accurate to suggest Matiegka was the Haydn of the guitar, not least because quoting and repurposing Haydn's musical ideas turns out to have been central to two of the works featured on this disc.

I'm not going to get so detailed as to mention phrase-by-phrase decisions but I like that Ilie accentuates and contrasts phrases and sub-phrases by using ponticello and tasto in several places across the sonatas. He's also good at keeping track of the contrapuntal strands in Matiegka's music. 

Since I've been blogging through Matiegka's guitar sonatas for years, and since the Matiegka 2023 project is still slowly ongoing I am going to re-link to my earlier work discussing the sonatas because it doesn't just so happen this disc features the sonatas I've already discussed in some detail!

For Grand Sonata I go here. 

For Op. 23, I go here.

For Grand Sonata II go here.

For a more specialized discussion of Matiegka's use of the V7/V to V to IV chord progression go here.

For Op. 17 go here.

If Ilie is in for the rest of the Matiegka sonatas then I'm definitely on board getting the future discs. I certainly agree that the time has come to revisit and evaluate Matiegka's music as part of the guitar literature since I've written maybe 128 pages worth of material on it and am only half-way done. 

I still have to get to discussing movements 2 and 3 of Op. 23 later this year.  Then on to all six of Op. 31.  For regular readers I probably don't have to tell you that blogging through the Matiegka sonatas has been a long and intense project.  It's good to interrupt things a bit because life happens and because, along the way, I get to listen to a release like this new Naxos disc to let me know that other guitarists have gone back and found that Matiegka's work is fun enough to bring to life on disc.