so I WAS going to write about another guitar sonata from Matiegka but short incubation process (maybe)

Something has come up that is notable enough I've shifted gears to finally start getting back to writing about a set of topics I wanted to get to over the last few months.  Longtime readers probably won't have to wonder what.  If somebody is finally hosting an interview with a political figure actively running for office then the political history of somebody in the life and death of a 501(c)3 has a news peg too salient to just sit back and let incubate what can be written about.  

There's still going to be stuff about music, of course, and I've been wanting to write about Matiegka Op. 31, No. 3 for a while and to write a piece about how the "death of melody" in pop in the last thirty years has nothing to do with, say, rap, and a lot more to do with Kurt Cobain and Mariah Carey but that stuff can wait.  :)  

guest post at Bryan Townsend's blog by Jack on guitar counterpoint

As long-time readers of this blog will know, I've written about counterpoint, music for guitar, and counterpoint and guitar over the years.  I've also started reading The Music Salon blog in the last couple of years and so, of course, I'm going to link to this guest piece.

http://themusicsalon.blogspot.com/2020/10/guest-post-jack-on-guitar-counterpoint.html

Now I do have Dusan Bogdanovic's Counterpoint for Guitar and will, eventually, I hope, write about it. I've been meaning to blog about his guitar sonata cycle for years now but life is what it is, full of unexpected events and delays and sidetracks, so that hasn't happened yet.  But, while I incubate any number of blogging projects connected to music (like, say, an analysis of Matiegka's Op. 31, Sonata No. 3) I sometimes link to other stuff I read that I want to share.

against both Columbus Day and Indigenous People Day, the statue toppling in Portland of Lincoln and Roosevelt can be a reminder that no American heroes will be heroes to all Americans

Complaining that Columbus was a bad man is more than merely a fad because the vices and hubris of Columbus and the Spanish royal family would be hard to argue against in the twenty-first century ... but I don't see that alternately proclaiming an Indigenous Peoples' Day has any value since it is, of necessity, parasitically dependent on the pre-existing federal holiday. That Columbus Day is paradoxically a victim of its own success probably doesn't matter to people who have settled in their hearts that Columbus' legacy in the Americas is only bad and yet, well, here we are. If you live in the United States right now and you're not 100% Native American able to chart your ancestry down to an unbroken line of never-married-non-Native-peoples-even-once-in-five-centuries then you exist in the United States because, at some point, people who are now identified as "white people" show up.  

Not that they were necessarily that kind of white back then since the concept of whiteness has evolved and changed to the point where Italians and Irish got added into the mix which would not have been taken seriously in the days of, say, Abraham Lincoln or even Teddy Roosevelt, whose statues have been knocked down by protesters, apparently, in Portland as of last night. People from the Mediterranean didn't get viewed as white for quite some time.  Not that anyone has any reason to care what I think but I suggest the day get retired, whatever it is called.  

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/12/us/portland-lincoln-statue-roosevelt.html

A "day of rage" is a useless gesture and, if anything, gives 45 even more ammunition to agitate his supporters into action. This is the kind of thing that John Halle seems to have referred to off and on as "gifts to the right" made by progressives or people who think of themselves as left. Tawna Sanchez and others could point out, besides the fact that tearing down statues and damaging property isn't the same as going through democratic processes, there's also another point, which is that now is not the best time to take a symbolic action that, we're talking about tearing down a Lincoln statue, could just as easily have been done by neo-Confederates who think Lincoln was a power-made bloodthirsty war criminal.