yet another semi-incubation period

I've been writing a bit less in light of recent developments irl, i.e. the whole global pandemic has led to lockdown conditions in Washington state that have ... to borrow a phrase Brain said to Pinky in a charming episode "... that would alter our plans ... ". 

So there's some projects I meant to have gotten  to by now that I haven't gotten to yet because things happen.

That said, I am still incubating a pretty long-form project that's been near and dear to my heart called Ragtime and Sonata Forms.  I'm only a few thousand words into the project as yet and it's probably only fractionally done.  When I finally, Lord willing, finish the project, I plan to post the whole thing in a series of posts here at the blog.  The key concept is demonstrating on formal and theoretical grounds how easily ragtime lends itself to sonata forms and how, as a genre of popular song in the 1890s through 1910s that is now better-known as a style of piano music, any fusion of ragtime as popular music (whether song or dance) and sonata forms has practical applications for post-ragtime styles of American popular music (which, in the United States, is functionally nearly every type of popular music style ever since 1897).

I've intended to eventually get around to Win Your War but there's nothing quite like a pandemic to help clarify how unimportant Mark Driscoll has thankfully become. He can peddle self-help books to the quasi-prosperity-charismatic scene and that is disappointing in light of what he has not really dealt with from his time in Puget Sound, but while I still consider it potentially important to eventually get around to addressing the ways in which his approach to spiritual warfare demonized dissent from getting his way back in 2008 and how his newer book recycles large swaths of that he's ... just not very important now. 

By contrast, I've finally had time to get the blog to the music and music history and musicology related stuff I wanted the blog to be about from the beginning, way back in 2006.  I'm still open to comparing notes with people on Mars Hill history stuff, however, which is why there's a big separate page with indexed posts and I notice that much of the traffic (such as it is) to the blog is related to that.  Glad to be of help to those who want to explore the history of the place but, as mentioned above, my incubating project for the blog this year is Ragtime and Sonata Forms.

Which still roundaboutly gets me back to something I noticed in chronicling the peak and demise of Mars Hill Church, which is a point I feel I have to stress a bit, that despite certain accounts that Mars Hill was taken out by liberal secular media or by Christians shooting their own depending on the podcast or interview context, the demise of Mars Hill involved a wide swath of people including Buddhists, secularists, and, yes, Christians with confessional convictions and political convictions ranging across what's popularly thought of the left-right spectrum.  My tendencies as a self-identified moderate actual conservative (as opposed to a neoconservative or reactionary) are sufficiently rehearsed here I hope I have merely to allude to them, but my hope is that pursuit of truth and knowledge can be conducted in such a way that whatever our various differences we can nevertheless find some common ground. 

My convictions are still Christian although I have come around to repudiating various forms of Christendom ... not that I want to bore you with that if you aren't already familiar with it, just that I have in the history of this blog taken time to stress my objections to modes of Christendom that have been embraced not only by the religious right that is more easily identified but forms of triumphalist Christendom that saturated the mainlines in earlier eras. 

So I'm not exactly sure when Ragtime and Sonata Forms will be ready to go but at least a good chunk of the writing has begun.

I also still want to get around to blogging about:

Matiegka's Op. 31 guitar sonatas

Angelo Gilardino's guitar sonatas (which are magnificent)

Dusan Bogdanovic's four guitar sonatas

Koshkin's two big solo guitar sonatas
plus the second half of his preludes and fugues although, honestly, likely to put that off until Selyutina records Volume 2

So, anyway, it's not that I anticipate not blogging so much as that the kind of writing I'm doing requires more time and care to put together.  The Nadia Bolz-Weber and Mark Driscoll comparison post, for instance, took quite a while to put together.  So I might post once or twice a week, maybe, but have the posts be several thousand words long.