During the particularly intense years of blogging back in the 2012-2014 period there would occasionally be a comment from someone who might write something like "All you do at this blog is rip on Pastor Mark and Mars Hill." There was a lot of writing going on at this blog during those years and while a lot of people who have chosen to read posts at this blog chose to read about Mars Hill Church related topics there was plenty of other reading material, a bit of writing about animation (an art form I've loved since childhood), and also what could be broadly described as musicology, musical analysis, and music history.
Sometimes I think it might be a good idea to create a separate page that lists the extent of musical blogging I've done ... well, no, not the extent, more of a highlights page. I may create such a page later this year but often I feel it might be best to save it for 2019 or, at any rate, after I've managed to go through all 24 of a certain set of pieces in contrapuntal cycle for solo guitar I still want to write a lot more about.
I finished a hugely informative (though not cheap!) book by Matthew Riley on the minor-key symphony in the Viennese tradition during the time of Haydn and Mozart. It could, as some existing reviews have sometimes noted, have been more robust exploring a couple of composers but I think that's a small criticism to make in light of what the book has to offer about the minor-key symphony in Haydn's time. I hope to write about that at some point but it feels like I've been trying to write maybe too many things this year, not all of which are for this blog and not all of which is even essays. I've completed a pretty big chunk of musical composition this year.
My theoretical treatment of the possibilities for temporal/spatial correspondence between the syntactics of sonata forms and ragtime that I wrote last year seems like something I can refine as theoretical examination but in practice I've written a number of ragtime sonata works. Drawing on Hepokoski and Darcy's five types of sonatas as syntactic scripts and making use of William Caplin's observations about intra-thematic formal dynamics, I also drew some inspiration from George Rochberg's theorizing about the distinctions between timespace and spacetime; and, finally, thanks to some fine writing by Peter Burkholder about Ives I've used Ives' paradigm of cumulative form (which, I hasten to add, was not unique to Ives since Benjamin Britten used what amounts to "cumulative form" in his magnificent Nocturnal after John Dowland!) ... all that is to say I've read some fairly heavy theoretical writing about formal analysis and with a specific set of interests--I'm interested in formal analysis in which the end result can be ragtime sonatas.
Ragtime is what I consider an unfortunately overlooked or ignored genre in American musical history. In historical terms or musicological terms it is significant as a style of popular music and also as the precursor to what is now known as jazz. Yet it seems that in histories of jazz ragtime is in some senses sidelined, it probably doesn't help much that in mythologies of jazz ragtime as a background for dixieland jazz can be set up in narratives of jazz in which reactionaries embrace ragtime as roots jazz where bob and bebop explored new directions.
Thing is, as a classical guitarist whose musical education was anchored in choral singing I sometimes think that dixieland and bop and bebop were all reactionary movements in the sense that they were reacting to the perceived exhaustion, dilution and commercialization that happened to swing. Raymond Knapp merely touched on how rock criticism tacitly or even unknowingly assimilated the ideals of German idealism; it could be said of the bop and bebop styles that they were in many respects a "rockist" reaction to the commercialization of swing. In a way dixieland jazz was, too, but in the sense that it tried to go back to what were regarded as the historical roots of jazz in ragtime that move was possibly reactionary but ragtime was originally a much slower style and also a genre of popular song (not that you'd know this from truncated histories of ragtime that come up in music histories that don't deal explicitly with ragtime). If dixieland advocates felt that bop and bebop were moving in a direction where jazz was no longer dance music and becoming too complex and insular then ... well ... let me try putting this in a polemical way, the jazzbros of the last twenty some years may have proven the advocates of dixieland were right about something, after all.
This isn't to say bop or bebop is bad. I really enjoy a lot of that music, too, it's just that I've also loved ragtime my whole adult life and yet don't play jazz and am not in any kind of jazz scene. So at the risk of putting this in a still polemical way, I have not had much reason to buy into mythologies associated with different eras of jazz as emerged within its history. I like Armstrong. I like Tatum. I adore the music of Ellington. I admire Mingus and revere Monk. Davis is, eh, pretty good half the time but not my favorite. Coltrane is near where I begin to lose interest in jazz as a historical musical set of paths and I have to admit I haven't enjoyed Coltrane nearly as much as George Russell in some ways. I actually dislike a lot of jazz choral music! At the risk of bringing in what I've read about 18th century musical theory and practice one of the complaints made from that period was that lesser level singers spent so much time decorating and ornamenting melodies there was no recognizable tune left to hear beneath the filigree less prudent vocal soloists would add.
And that reminds me I want to write a post about Christmas songs as a great way to hear the differences between soulful (or would be soulful) singers who sound great or grating to me depending on how they ornament the core tune ... which I mention because over the last twenty years I've noticed that there's some interesting overlaps and correspondences between 18th century musical commentary and commentaries about popular singers now. The era of what's thought of as autonomous or transcendent instrumental music in the long 19th century was not, at the risk of pointing out the obvious, more than a sliver of the thousand years of Western musical history. Mahalia Jackson could brilliantly ornament a traditional song by adding her flourishes at the start or the end of a note's duration but she would articulate the duration of a note in a given melody in a way that would convey the duration of said note if she didn't decorate the note at all. What works brilliantly in a Mahalia Jackson Gospel song performance can be what works brilliantly in a thought-through and emotionally engaged performance of a Baroque era aria.
One of the things I sometimes wonder is whether musicology types have been so entrenched in their respective stylistic and, er, historical or cultural trenches they don't cross-study enough even within the realm of musicology to fully appreciate points of overlap and correspondence. Jazz people study jazz without studying Baroque music and vice versa, yet some of the more exciting musical possibilities I've been hearing and reading happen when contemporary writers and musicians explore how, once you set aside the often literally academic turf wars, lots of musicians in practice can revere the music of Stevie Wonder and Haydn in pretty equal measure. They have displayed their respective musical gifts in different ways and that's wonderful.
When Raymond Knapp suggested that the ideological tendencies of German idealism got replicated in rock and jazz criticism he went so far as to suggest that the archetypal or stereotypical "authentic" was shifted from white German Romantic era instrumental music to black American vernacular styles ... provided those black musicians checked off the right boxes of authenticity in terms of race of socioeconomic class and gender. Another way to put this is that the photo negative of German idealism as it emerged in rock and jazz criticism could be of the same face--a mythological Beethoven or a mythological Byrd or a mythological Berry can still perform the same cultural mythological role and even within the same basic taxonomy of a mode of German idealism.
I was trying to get at and express those frustrations when I wrote something called something like "hegemony may be in the eye of the complainer". Having more time to have thought about it the jazzbro and the Beethoven mythologizer are very often the same kind of person and it may be that many a jazzbro venerates Miles Davis and also even Beethoven. It's not bad to love the music of either Davis or Beethoven, I'm just finding myself annoyed by the ways in which ostensibly "opposite" poles in narratives tend to mimic elements they may recognize clearly enough in the musicology and mythologizing of another style than the style they're committed to.
But I have felt like I'm alternately trying to write more than I practically can and not writing enough. One of the better axioms I heard from a teacher in high school was that sloppy writing was generally the result of sloppy thinking. Sometimes attempts to "complicate the narrative" don't complicate a narrative so much as complicate language while leaving core narratives alone or simply offering alternative simplistic narratives. I am tired of white liberal guys saying blues "broke all the rules" of classical music. Which period? The 18th century? The 19th century? It's not as though false relations can't be found in the music of William Byrd or Gesualdo.
There are things that make blue notes unique within blues, absolutely, but when blues and jazz writers say that their favorite styles roke the rules of classical that very often shows they don't know enough music history about those styles to understand that, as Haydn once put it, the "rules" are whether it sounds fun to you if you have a well-trained ear. It seems a good chunk of the "rules" that blues supposedly broke were rules formulated by 19th century theorists and pedagogues rather than composers and practical musicians. Let me see if I can put it this way, there are moments in Haydn string quartets that have moods similar to a Hank Williams Sr. song. There are moments in Stevie Wonder songs I find more harmonically complex and sublime than anything I've heard in Scriabin.
I've been rambling through a lot of words to say that I don't think of myself as a poptimist or a rockist because I can't shake the sense that these two camps aren't as different in practice as they think they are in theory. I've been moving toward a proposal that there are battles between purists and fusionists because I think that may be a more accurate description of the kinds of things I've been reading in musicology and music history. I'm not on the side of purists as a composer even if purists historically make formidable scholars! I just don't want the music I compose to ever be beholden to the interests and rules of purists. Haydn didn't either which is why he's one of my musical heroes. Richard Taruskin once quipped there's a J. S. Bach for the left and one for the right. In a similar way there's a J. S. Bach for the purists and there's a J. S. Bach for the fusionists. I don't have any hesitation to say that latter Bach is what interests me in historical terms and in terms of what inspires my own thoughts as a composer. As Manfred Bukofzer put it in his monograph on the Baroque era, back in that day if you melded Spanish, English, French, German and Italian styles into a synthesis that was praiseworthy.
It is with the hindsight of musicology that a panoply of divergent forms and styles could be read as a monolithic late Baroque culminating in J. S. Bach. Of course I love the music of J. S. Bach. :) But the German Idealist legacy of a pure J. S. Bach that embodies the greatest music of the Western tradition I don't contest on the ground that I don't think of Bach as an amazing musician and composer, it's the German idealist part I reject. I love German language music before it became self-consciously so "German" about stuff, kind of like how I love American music composed by Americans who did not have some existential battle of definition and delineation as to what American is. So I love music by Johnny Cash and Duke Ellington and find Copland to be kind of a pretty bore. I also don't particularly enjoy Leonard Bernstein's compositions. I can respect the craft of their work, to be sure, but I don't exactly thrill to their music.
if I do set up a page of collected music essays this post is not going to likely end up getting a link on that page. This is too sprawling.
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