Wednesday, October 05, 2022
another hiatus
I had one earlier this year in the wake of the deaths of Joan Didion, Terry Teachout and Angelo Gilardino within a few weeks of each other. A couple of weeks ago Lief Moi died. That death is closer to home and I am thinking that it may just be best to take a break from blogging for the rest of 2022. Lord willing I'll come back to this in 2023 but we'll see how that goes. 5,390 posts since 2006 has been a decent run but flesh and blood has to take a break now and then.
Tuesday, October 04, 2022
Astor Piazzola: Histoire du Tango (for flute and guitar) [because I got Bob Seeger'ed one too many times this week]
Bob Seeger doesn't want to hear `em playin' tango? Oh, yeah.
Well, here ya go Bob, Histoire du Tango (1985)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=slrCsvifsAY
Well, here ya go Bob, Histoire du Tango (1985)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=slrCsvifsAY
Heard "Old Time Rock `n Roll" one too many times this week and had to do a little post highlighting one of the better-known composers of tango as contemporary chamber music. I think the second movement (1930 Cafe) has a good claim to being one of the best slow movements in a cyclical work for flute and guitar anyone has written.
Not wanting to hear tango is the loss of rockists. To everything there is a season, after all.
Marcin Dylla plays Villa-Lobos Prelude No. 2
because Dylla got me to temporarily not hate the Ginastera Guitar Sonata and because I haven't posted a video of a Heitor Villa-Lobos piece in a long time.
No one has bested Villa-Lobos for coming up with musically satisfying ways of vamping a chord shape in the left hand down the fingerboard while letting the open strings do their dissonant work.
As Leo Brouwer put it years ago in an interview, we guitarists have never viewed the boundaries between musical "high" and "low" as being nearly as fixed as they tend to be viewed and heard by the orchestral traditions of theory and pedagogy.
Ted GIoia on the nostalgic turn in contemporary music journalism
Nostalgia is bad for culture and bad for business. On paper I kind of agree with Ted Gioia's concern. We differ on a host of other things but his nagging sense that music journalism is doing music scenes no favors is still interesting reading.
One of the first things I thought of was Jed Esty's book excerpt over at The Baffler on the distinction between decline (inevitable for empires known as the United States and past tense for the United Kingdom respectively) and declinism (a kind of demise of the West that's been popular since at least Oswald Spengler's legendary sprawl and going all the way back to the ancient Greeks who supposedly were the Golden Age of European civilization.
Alan Jacobs and Freddie deBoer sound off on the NYU students and adjunct situation
Perhaps it's unsurprising that Jacobs has the far pithier synopsis of the situation as it's been reported.
Translation: “I’m not paying you to teach me organic chemistry, I’m paying you to tell medical schools that I know organic chemistry — and you’re not keeping your end of the bargain!”
Freddie deBoer wrote quite a bit more, as he has sounded off in the past on why and how he believes the whole concept of punching up/punching down is dubious. For deBoer the take-away is that students organized to the point of being able to get an adjunct professor fired.
Monday, October 03, 2022
Radames Gnattali Guitar Concerto No. 4: III. Ritmada
Gnattali sure liked composing dance movements in 7-based time signatures. His Sonata for cello and guitar is probably better known in the North American continent ... which is not to say that Gnattali is a household name or anything, but Brilliant Classics released a disc of his four guitar concerti a few years back I've been revisiting off and on over the last year or so. Here's a fun finale from the fourth Guitar Concertino/Concerto.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kWsm5O2BtFA
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kWsm5O2BtFA
Angelo Gilardino: Sonata "Lettere a Fryderyk" (a.k.a. Guitar Sonata No. 6?)
There were five solo guitar sonatas by Angelo Gilardino up until 2014 and this one counts as the sixth.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6hdACtobNQg
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6hdACtobNQg
as sixths go, Atanas Ourkouzounov has a Guitar Sonata No. 6, too.
Sunday, October 02, 2022
a link for the weekend, pastor's kid Samuel D James makes a conservative Baptist case against homeschooling as a weapon in culture war (i.e. don't do this to your kids)
For those who have never read Samuel D. James before the TL:DR summary is "If you want your kids to become apostates the second they interact with anyone else's views but your own, for the love of God and your kids never even think about using homeschooling as an instrument in `culture war' because I've seen plenty of kids homeschooled that way abandon religious beliefs at the first opportunity".
If you want to read the whole thing for yourself (which is actually not that long), head over here.
It reminded me of an old church I used to be part of called Mars Hill, if only in the sense that Mark Driscoll eventually seemed to cultivate an ethos within which faithful members who were not tagged as "potential leader" and even those who were seemed to get treated as ... well ... the best description I can think of is fire-and-forget human weapons in culture war politics. That didn't seem to be the real goal circa 1996 to the 1998-2002 period I encountered but by 2007-2014 it seemed to be a paradigm and, well, as much as Mark Driscoll might want to shill a tale of how a lot of "unbiblical energy" led to the demise of Mars Hill the former Mars Hill leadership culture/cult could be likened to a gigantic homeschooling project in which the people who got free of it wanted to go anywhere as far and as fast as possible from "home" as possible.
Mars Hill sought, as former pastor James Noriega put it, to create a cultural system within which nobody in it had to look to outside resources to help people, up to and including pastoral counseling for abuse victims. It would turn out that the plagiarism scandal Mark Driscoll was embroiled in showed that he and Grace Driscoll made obvious use of work by Dan Allender, which Mike Cosper discussed recently.
You can homeschool your kids to be the most America-loving conservative Baptists you hope and pray they can be and they can still become progressive and/or secularists. Eli's sons were terrible. Samuel's sons were so terrible they got compared to the sons of Eli. King Saul was a corrupt and then crazy man whose son Jonathan turned out to be heroic. The Bible is replete with stories in which apples fall very, very far from the tree which you would think would be something homeschoolers would pay more attention to ... .
But unmarried/never-married guys know absolutely nothing, as I semi-regularly heard during my years at Mars Hill. ;)
Saturday, October 01, 2022
Joyful Exiles: in memoriam Lief Moi (10-11-1962 to 9-22-2022)
Joyful Exiles has published the following:
Lief Moi has died.
I alluded to it last week the day of at the end of a post, but only regular readers with a ton of background on MH would've spotted that.
I've written a few things about my friend over the years and there's a tag for anyone who wants to read or revisit that. At the moment I don't feel especially inspired to write about the passing of my friend. I met all three co-founding pastors of Mars Hill but Lief was the one who became my friend over the course of the last twenty years. Later I may get it together enough to write something at Wenatchee The Hatchet that's more extensive but now is not the time.
Condolences to friends and family.
update 10-21-2022
https://www.funeralsandcremationswa.com/obituary/lief-winfield-moi/
Thursday, September 29, 2022
Dusan Bodganovic has a Sonatina homage to Haydn, played by Daniella Rossi
In what might be one of the jazzier homages to Franz Joseph Haydn, here's a sonatina for solo guitar by Dusan Bogdanovic, who does not just so happen to be one of my favorite living guitarist composers.
I'm not feeling nearly so inspired to write posts lately for reasons long-time readers may have inferred from an oblique and passing comment last week. 2022 has not been the best year IRL on several fronts.
This video reminds me that I've wanted to blog through the Bogdanovic guitar sonatas for years. We'll see ... and I hope to get to that.
I may posts video links and ... maybe links for the weekend stuff ... but not feeling inspired lately to blog as I have in the past.
Friday, September 23, 2022
Alvaro Company: Las seis cuerdas performance w score
Alvaro Company died earlier this year. Where guitar literature goes his landmark contribution is "Las seis cuerdas" If you want to hear and find out just how far out extended techniques applied to composing for the guitar can go it's hard to get farther out than this work from 1965. The score was prepared and edited, if memory serves, by the great Italian guitarist composer Angelo Gilardino.
Thursday, September 22, 2022
Mark Driscoll sure seems to have scaled back his idea of divine sovereignty since he left Mars Hill
because the Driscoll I met twenty years ago is not the person I can imagine ever tweeting ...
https://twitter.com/PastorMark/status/1572768606995492864
for those who can't read the image it reads:
If God’s men don’t seek leadership and dominion, Satan’s men will.7:03 PM · Sep 21, 2022
But didn't Driscoll used to pour contempt on theonomists and reconstructionists back in Confessions of a Reformission Rev back in 2006?
Confessions of a Reformission Rev
Mark Driscoll, Zondervan 2006
ISBN-13: 978-0-310-27016-4
ISBN-10:0-310-27016-2page 130Some of the fired-up young guys went too far and started acting like young bucks in rutting season, wanting to Jock horn with me and the elders. Many went into extreme forms of Calvinism and wanted to debate things like theonomy and other dumb things that only white guys with high-speed Internet connections to bizarre websites could get into and were causing division. If you don't know what theonomy is, don't worry, becau e you aren't really missing anything. Basically, it is the belief that the church should rule the world, including the banking system, government, and so on, and enforce Old Testament law like Israel did. The young rabid Calvinists who were pushing for this doctrine did not yet own homes, most did not even have wives, a11d some still lived with their mothers. I tried to set them straight by telling them to get dominion over their room before they took over the world, but like most fools, they were not deterred.
Driscoll's recent stance may not mean he has become either a postmillennialist or a theonomistic reconstructionist but that doesn't mean you have to endorse either to have an essentially dominionist take on culture. In other words, he's still about "going upstream and influence culture" even if the new jargon has become "kingdom down and not culture up".
Wednesday, September 21, 2022
Angelo Gilardino: Sonata Mediterannea
Angelo Gilardino died at the start of 2022 and his death was depressing enough news for me that it was part of why I took a break from blogging as he was one of my favorite contemporary guitarist composers. I still hope to write quite a bit more about his five magnificent guitar sonatas. But if you've heard them you'll have an idea why I might balk at just rushing to say just anything about the works, which deserve more than just this or that saying.
Someone's posted the full score and a performance by Giulio Tampalini online.
Right off the bat you'll hear and see Gilardino creates his textures by playing melodic lines against open strings. When you commit to using open strings on the guitar you get a combination of quartal harmonies with tertian elements (EADGBE does that of necessity). Gilardino wasn't the only guitarist composer to leverage open strings and quartal harmonies with conventional triadic elements. Villa-Lobos played with open string sonorities plenty and the juxtaposition of tertian melodic lines against quartal accompaniment is central to the opening movement of Dusan Bogdanovic's gorgeous and surrealist Sonata No. 1. All masters of the guitar, they were, and part of mastering the instrument is working with what are in the hands of an amateur nothing more than the rudimentary observation of what kinds of sounds you get if you just use the open strings for your accompaniment notes.
Obviously I'll have to write more about Gilardino as I can manage in the future.
Ferdinand Rebay Guitar Sonata in A Minor: II. Ruhig und zart
This is one of my favorite movements from Ferdinand Rebay's seven sonatas for solo guitar. It's a straightforward ternary form that could be described as a minuet and trio if we wanted to pin it down to a "classical" form.
The more I listen to these sonatas the more I think the Rebay cycle of seven should get a chance to be heard as widely as the Ponce set of five sonatas that are, deservedly, the de facto touchstone of the guitar sonata literature for the instrument in terms of recordings. It does puzzle me no one has written a book length study of the Ponce sonatas by now in the English language but that's neither here nor there for Rebay's music.
Sunday, September 18, 2022
Ted Gioia has been publishing his new book at Substack, and I still disagree with the conspiratorial claim that musical inventors are "suppressed" from music history books
Ted Gioia has listed ten reasons why he has been publishing his newest book on Substack rather than through a more traditional book-publishing path. Samuel D James has written why he thinks you should not publish your book through Substack.
https://tedgioia.substack.com/p/10-reasons-why-im-publishing-my-next
For those who don't recall how or why James ended up getting mentioned at Wenatchee The Hatchet you can poke around with the search engine for that. I would venture that Gioia is well-established enough he can publish via Substack to his heart's content.
That said ... I still think Gioia tends to be speculative and tendentious outside his fields of expertise.
For instance, he's staying on the path he sketched out in Music: A Subversive History.
.... But, at a minimum, your achievement is removed from the history books. If you think I’m exaggerating, convene a group of music historians and ask them to name the inventor of the fugue, the sonata, the symphony, or any other towering achievement of musical culture, and note the looks of consternation that ensue, even before the arguments begin.
Sunday, September 11, 2022
Katelyn Beaty's Celebrities for Jesus--a solid core thesis that is stronger still if you've read Jacques Ellul on the danger of propaganda reducing Christian doctrines to political ideologies
https://www.bakerpublishinggroup.com/books/celebrities-for-jesus/406890/
Celebrities
for Jesus: How Personas, Platforms and Profits are Hurting the Church
Katelyn
Beaty
Brazos
Press a division of Baker Group
Copyright
(c) 2022 by Katelyn Beaty
ISBN
9781587435188
ISBN
9781493437030
ISBN
9781493437047
Celebrities for Jesus is a short read. I read it in a single day. Beaty’s central
thesis is that there are distinctions we should make between “fame” and
“celebrity” and that while the former has been around as long as human history
the latter is a recent innovation in parasocial relationships. There may be
readers who might propose that Jesus was a celebrity but this would be to
misunderstand celebrity. Beaty’s core
thesis seems clear and defensible enough but I couldn’t help thinking her
delineation of celebrity as the product of the mass media era and broadcast
journalism would have been substantially bolstered by reference to two books by
Jacques Ellul whose titles might be too obvious. The first would be Propaganda: The Formation of Men’s Attitudes
and the second would be The New Demons.
Sunday, September 04, 2022
Ferdinand Rebay Sonate No. 1 (in E major): I. Fliessend bewegt, aber nicht zu lebahft
Enrico Maria Barbareschi plays Rebay's first Guitar Sonata in E major. This one's a charmer, kind of like if Brahm's Symphony No. 2 first movement were scaled down to a guitar-sized work.
At this point all seven of Rebay's solo guitar sonatas have been recorded and/or filmed so I'm hoping to, at last, get around to blogging through the seven sonatas. I might be wise to save that for a 2023 project because I've also got all that Matiegka sonata blogging I want to do. And Bogdanovic, and Ourkouzounov, and Guastavino, and Gilardino and ... heh ... Koshkin ... and Dzhaparidze's prelude and fugues and you get the idea how extravagantly backlogged Wenatchee The Hatchet is writing about music. :)
Anyway, first movement of the E major. I had been hoping this one would get recorded and, lo, it has. How soon Wenatchee The Hatchet can realistically blog through all seven of Ferdinand Rebay's solo guitar sonatas remains to be seen but I hope to be able to do so sometime between now and the end of 2023 if nothing unexpected comes up. Ditto for Matiegka and the late great Gilardino.
links for the weekend a suit around a journal of Schenker studies, Alex Ross on how modern Rachmaninoff was or wasn't ... and other stuff
Alex Ross has a piece on how there was an event at Bard wherein people asked how radical Rachmaninoff was or wasn't.
I immediately thought of Richard Taruskin's "Not Modern and Loving It" from ...
for some modernists the Russian composer was a Romantic throwback. For others his music is full of cheap sentiment rather than "real" feeling (whatever that is). Any random commenter can declare that, for instance, Haydn was just conventional and predictable and not profound and deep and straining after the infinite like Beethoven and Mozart as was said at The Imaginative Conservative. To consign Haydn to "averageness" seems to misunderstand how Haydn was perceived in his own day. For that matter if Haydn is average then what term should be used for Vanhal or Ditters or Wagenseil or Kozeluch or, later on, Hummel? If Mozart felt obliged to openly insult people who spoke badly of his friend Haydn's work how do people who venerate Mozart get to the point where they think Haydn has "averageness"? That's where music educators, historians and theorists can get into interesting discussions ... or arguments.
Richard Ostling ponders what the future of Protestantism in the U.S. might look like after the mainlines finally spiral the drain.
Ostling points out that evangelical elements in the mainline were, to be blunt, where any level of intellectual heft within evangelicalism came from. I.e. as Alastair Roberts put it years ago, the Christian intellectuals evangelicals valorize today were all actually in the mainlines in the last century, not in any of the church movements we'd think of as evangelical
The thing is that in global terms Pentecostalism is far more prevalent and dominant. Pentecostalism is also primed to be a bugbear for secular progressives.
Where conservatives are wary of "cultural Marxism" secular progressives worry that Pentecostalism is going to become the new Christian Right. New? Like Pentecostal clergy haven't had an increasing influence since the Obama administration through to Trump? Anthony Heilbut, who has written a fair amount on Pentecostal music, Gospel music and their connection to rock and pop fielded this years ago. He's pointed out that black Pentecostals are often more vehemently anti-LGBTQ than even the most socially conservative white clergy but it isn't always clear that mainstream or progressive journalists field that.
On the theme of ruminating on inevitable decline and how to respond to it The Baffler has published an excerpt from Jed Esty's book about decline vs. declinism in Anglo-American cultural punditry.
Keith Evans via Heidelblog on the appeal of wolfish leaders (Doug Wilson and Mark Driscoll in particular as examples of trends)
R. Scott Clark at Heidelblog republished a piece by Keith Evans recently that discussed Mike Cosper's The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill and the appeal of wolfish leaders in churches.
Evans published his piece on August 23, 2022 which meant he could not have heard the entire series as Mike Cosper and company dropped their Dan Allender episode in the series ...
... on August 26, 2022 and there's assuredly one last wrap-up "where are they now" episode coming along.
I thought the CT series was going to actually be done with Episode 12 ("Aftermath") and yet here we are nearly a year later and the truly final episode has not yet hit. So it goes.
Wednesday, August 31, 2022
the theme at Mark Driscoll's twitter feed this week is fear (update 9-4-22, toward a proposal that the Driscolls now use forgiveness teaching as a form of apotropaic magic)
Although he's known to block any number of people on Twitter from viewing or responding to his tweets, the fact that Wenatchee The Hatchet isn't even on Twitter and never plans to be means, paradoxically, that it's never been that hard to keep tabs on his tweets.
For whatever reason, since the August 26, 2022 Mike Cosper interview with Dan Allender in The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill series came along ...
...Mark Driscoll's tweets are full of talk about fear.
https://twitter.com/PastorMark/status/1563601993246990336
Pastor Mark Driscoll
@PastorMark
Fear will come upon you, but you can't let it in you.
11:59 AM · Aug 27, 2022
Pastor Mark Driscoll
@PastorMark
Fear will come upon you, but you can't let it in you.
11:59 AM · Aug 27, 2022
https://twitter.com/PastorMark/status/1563964381196652545
Pastor Mark Driscoll
@PastorMark
There’s always something to fear. You can look out in fear or look up in faith.
11:59 AM · Aug 28, 2022
https://twitter.com/PastorMark/status/1564327027188056066
Pastor Mark Driscoll
@PastorMark
Faith and fear can't coexist.
12:00 PM · Aug 29, 2022·
https://twitter.com/PastorMark/status/1564689660672184323
Sometimes fear does more damage to you than the person or thing you're afraid of.
12:01 PM · Aug 30, 2022
https://twitter.com/PastorMark/status/1565052048160264193
When the spirit of fear oppress you it turns into false prophecy over your life.
12:01 PM · Aug 31, 2022
Other people can do the screencap thing if they like.
POSTSCRIPT ... 9-1-2022
Still running with the theme as of
https://twitter.com/PastorMark/status/1565414436038479872
You need to stop worrying about the outcome and instead worship through the process.
12:01 PM · Sep 1, 2022
POSTSCRIPT 9-4-2022
https://twitter.com/PastorMark/status/1566501851457019904
Forgiving others allows us to move on into the destiny that God has for us.
12:02 PM · Sep 4, 2022
In his post Mars Hill writings Driscoll has leaned heavily on a teaching that says we(you) need to forgive people in order to be free of demonic influence and that if you don't forgive you are saying you want Satan instead of Jesus to reign in your life. It's an idea he had back in 2008, too, for that matter but within a post-Mars Hill context via Win Your War and tweets there's a different element to it. Some Christians approach spiritual warfare as a set of instructions about how Christians corporately and publicly give witness to the reign of Christ as having already conquered the powers and principalities. This shows up in books by Esther Acolatse, Daniel K Darko, Robert Ewusie Moses and other pastors and theologians from Ghana and Kenya. Acolatse has noted that in some African church movements there is a tendency for Christians to treat spiritual warfare as a kind of medicinal individual one-shot deal. Another way to put it, since I've seen this pattern in my life back in my Pentecostal days is that there are a lot of Christians who regard spiritual warfare instructions in Ephesians 6 not as instructions for how Christian communities bear public witness to Christ together so much as a kind of anti-magic that is paradoxically magical.
In Driscoll's post-Mars Hill variant on teaching about the need for Christians to forgive it's hard for me to shake a sense that he prescribes forgiveness as a blanket "You need to forgive them so Satan doesn't have a ground to attack you". Yet to go by Mark and Grace Driscoll's statements in Win Your War and comments from people who have left The Trinity Church the Driscolls seem to still experience what they regard as spiritual attacks. As I've discussed in the past looking at Judges 9 and the afflicting spirit the Lord sent to King Saul in the Hebrew Bible we don't even find "demons" as conventionally understood from medieval European Christian diabology moving forward--instead we find the Lord occasionally sent spirits to afflict corrupt, self-serving and wicked leaders to torment them or deceive their prophets.
This is a commonplace element in the Hebrew Bible when it comes to leaders being afflicted by the Lord for abuse or misappropriation of power but in the Driscolls' writings they chalk up any spiritual attacks they face to "intense seasons of ministry". The possibility that they opened themselves up to spiritual torment because of their abuses and injustices has, to the best of my knowledge, literally never come up once in their twenty years of being public ministry figures together. If Mark doesn't publicly confess he wronged people and leans on a forgiveness doctrine that functionally works as apotropaic magic the purpose of forgiveness may no longer even be about relational reconciliation or repentance at all in any Christian sense of the term, but a kind of protective spell-casting that is expected to protect the person who prays from being attacked).
Monday, August 29, 2022
Matt Chandler steps away from leadership at A29 and The Village Church for a leave of absence
There's a bit of coverage for this news
https://julieroys.com/matt-chandler-steps-down-after-admitting-inappropriate-online-relationship/
Hard not to think of this old post looking back on the people who at one time endorsed Real Marriage.
Of course Chandler didn't write an endorsement blurb for the book. Back in 2016 it was impossible to know that Patrick would later die of a self-directed gunshot wound that was ruled a suicide.
I'm not aware that Driscoll has commented on the Chandler situation yet but I'm reminded that at the time of Patrick's death Driscoll did post something to social media.
Between Darrin Patrick, Steve Timmis and now Matt Chandler (to say nothing of former leaders Mark Driscoll himself and, apparently, Scott Thomas) the top ranking leaders at Acts 29 have a track record of ... some kind. Like there's a pattern of being removed from leadership at some point for cause.
Sometimes I think that after months or years of not-much that this whole array of topics can be "retired" but, no, stuff comes up every now and then. Last year it was the kick-off of the CT series and this year, well, the podcast at CT has continued and now there's news about Matt Chandler.
POSTSCRIPT 9-1-22 5pm (ish)
I'm not going to try to wade into the swamp of stuff written and published about Chandler just yet. It's enough in my wheelhouse I'll read what I can but it's difficult to assess A29 related stuff. For longtime readers of the blog you may recall that between Scott Thomas, Darrin Patrick, Mark Driscoll and Steve Timmis the track record of Acts 29 top dogs has frankly not been great in the use of power and clear and honest disclosure stuff.
Ethan Hein blogs on D sharp and E flat distinctions, it reminds me of a Haydn's Op. 77, No. 2 string quartet as discussed by Ross W Duffin
One of many reasons music theory and acoustics are
valuable fields of study is because each of us who plays and sings and writes
and studies music will often have conceptual constraints we may not be aware of
as we are beholden to the limits of what our bodies can do and perceive and (crucially
for those us who play instruments with fixed tunings, keys and frets) the
in-built conceptual and physical constraints of the instruments we play.
Ethan Hein, a music theorist who is (like me) a
guitarist, describes how D sharp and E flat are different; why they are
different; and how guitarists can sometimes not fully or immediately appreciate
the distinction.
If memory serves there are now microtonal fingerboards for guitarists who want to be able to play the difference between D sharp and E flat. John Schneider shows samples in the updated and revision edition of The Contemporary Guitar, which is a beauty of a book you should pick up if you’re a guitarist of any style or instrument. If you want to see what such a fingerboard looks like on a real guitar Paul Davids (with Adam Neely as guest) has a video for you.
But it’s been in the last half century such
innovations have come about and they are generally only known to guitarists who
want to play stuff by, say, Alois Haba (who wrote a suite for guitar
in quarter-tones). It has a teensy
bit of an Ivan Wyschnegradsky vibe for me … .
Haba also wrote a guitar
sonata.
But for those of us who don’t play microtonal
guitar music, D sharp and E flat are totally the same. Which is a reality Ethan
Hein notes in his post.
http://www.ethanhein.com/wp/2022/why-are-d-sharp-and-e-flat-considered-to-be-two-different-notes/
Sunday, August 28, 2022
some thoughts on the Cosper interview with Allender, this is one of the episodes I think is both focused and helpful even if I remain ambivalent about the series overall
Yes, by implication I've suggested that some of the CT episodes of The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill were neither focused nor helpful across the series as a whole by giving this post the title it has. The new Allender episode, however, is one of the strongest in the entire series because it is shorter than average and by dint of having one subject who is recognized as an expert in counseling within evangelicalism the episode stays remarkably on focus.
Saturday, August 27, 2022
catching up with The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill Church--Allender states he wasn't aware Driscoll plagiarized him because he doesn't read the man's books; Sealy Yates told him it was plagiarism for sure; Driscoll has to date never apologized to Allender for what he did
I would have thought things would be done at "Aftermath" but there seem to be half again as many bonus episodes as the series itself ran.
links for the weekend: German museum removes Damien Hirst exhibit for animal cruelty (to flies); a two-part on state of Seattle arts; Michael Heiser reacts to John Walton on demons; Jon Askonas on how Stewart made Carlson etc
Traditionally I've published "links for the weekend" at the end of a weekend of blogging but this weekend is an exception and if you saw the other news of the weekend you'll know why.
We're opening with a "na na na" about Damien Hirst first.
Tuesday, August 23, 2022
a riff on title mashups for films and songs
One of my relatives and I ended up coming up with a verbal game years ago of mashing up titles to movies. The relative came up with “Sleepaway Camp Highlander” and I came up with “I Spit on Your Grave of the Fireflies” and it spiraled into song title mash-ups.
Hold Your Head Up Ben (the Black Dynamite cartoon catalyzed this one and, btw Ben is a bad movie)
Truckin’, Space Trucking (as in Bond, James Bond of course)
Suite:
Judy Blue Eyes Without
a Face (even if you haven't seen the old French horror film ... you can get this one)
You probably get the basic idea by now. Having songs terribly mismatched in style and content is supposed to be part of the game, or the thread can be musicians who wrote great songs or bad songs or who had some known friendship (i.e. Prince and Billy Gibbons) ... or bad songs with terrible songs is on the table.
from the Westminster standards, The Directory for the Publick Worship of God, on singing Psalms--William T Dargan's observation on how lining out first evolved in lower class Scottish Calvinist churches before migrating to what has become the U.S.
I'm afraid that in my enthusiasm to lend the book to a church music director/worship leader I have lent off Lining Out the Word by William T. Dargan. So I can't give you a strictly bibliographical citation as of the day of posting. I might have to update this post later. For now ...
a germinating idea, an analytical series of all Matiegka's solo guitar sonatas
It's been sticking with me lately that next July will be the 250th anniversary of the birth of Wenzel Thomas Matiegka, a.k.a. Vaclav Matiegka. To my knowledge no one has written any extended English language discussion of his sonatas and approaches to sonata form beyond the preliminary and very helpful comments of Stanley Yates in his preface to his complete edition of the Matiegka sonatas (published "as" sonatas, because Op. 20 No. 24 isn't included even though I think a case can be made that it, too, is a sonata form).
I've considered blogging through the guitar sonatas of Bogdanovic, Gilardino, Guastavino, Koshkin, Matiegka, Ourkouzounov and Rebay over the years. I still hope to blog through those sets/cycles of guitar sonatas! But in light of the upcoming 250th Matiegka may be the priority. I think I may already be halfway through the blogging project inadvertently.
There is a newer reason I have thought of blogging through Matiegka's guitar sonatas besides the fact that I actually like them. It has occurred to me that for we guitarists sonata forms can be even more opaque and inscrutable in analytical terms than the forms often are for student pianists. Sonata forms and sonatas make up a miniscule body of work proportionally of all the music that has been written on and for the guitar. It hardly helps that if a musician or theory student who may already struggle with the idea of sonata form(s) actually tries to go to the standard literature there's been little sustained analysis and no dedicated monograph on, say, Ponce's guitar sonatas. That seems like a scholastic crime that ought to be fixed!
That's dithering when I should get to the point, the early 19th century guitarist composers hardly ever wrote "textbook" sonata forms and we shouldn't have expected them to because A. B. Marx and other theorists hadn't even codified "sonata form" in the years between 1806 and 1820. Virtually none of Matiegka's sonatas have sonata forms that are textbook. There's something in each one that has a "rug pull" move of some kind. It may have been David Leisner who said this year that Matiegka's whole approach to sonata forms is more unpredictable and full of surprises than his contemporaries whose approaches to sonata forms were pedestrian.
The discographic options are narrowly defined for Matiegka's work for solo guitar but the time is ripe for some long-form analytical writing about his sonatas and his approach to sonata forms. If doing that gives guitarists and guitar students some help in defining what sonata forms can be and have been then I'll be happy to see what I can contribute. Having said that, I might try to stockpile material and save the blog-through-Matiegka stuff for the actual 250th anniversary week early next July.
Monday, August 22, 2022
there's a new record label that intends to highlight overlooked female composers--a request that someone tackle a set of May Aufderheide's rags and songs
So ... would they be game to consider recording the complete rags of May Aufderheide? I haven't seen anyone do a project like that (that I know of). As Edward Berlin and other ragtime historians have noted over the last half century ragtime was a style that was pioneered by African Americans but many a middle-class woman also wrote rags and, as noted previously, I'm not aware that anyone has tackled the project of recording all of Aufderheide's published works.
Anyway, best wishes to the new label now that my little request has been registered. As much as I love Scott Joplin's music to say that almost any of his near contemporaries who composed rags were "overlooked" by comparison is probably an understatement even if I threw up James Scott and Joseph Lamb as names of known associates who were masters of the style.
Friday, August 19, 2022
Alan Jacobs revisits Jacques Ellul's Propaganda via quote
https://blog.ayjay.org/forgetting-and-propaganda/
Longtime readers most likely know how much I've drawn upon Jacques Ellul to explain things I observed at Mars Hill Church. Propaganda is certainly the main work I drew upon but The Politics of God and the Politics of Man has also proven useful, particularly when I relied on Ellul's work to propose that Mark Driscoll has not been a "King David" figure but a Jehu figure, a man who may have received some kind of divine commission at some point but swiftly transformed that moment into a blank check to do his own will--Ellul put it more starkly in claiming Jehu sought to do the will of God but everywhere used the methods of Satan. Of course I've also drawn upon Ellul's work to make a case that Mark Driscoll has never been a pastor or a shepherd in a traditional understanding of those terms but has been a propagandist. Ellul argued strenuously that contemporary (i.e. 20th century onward) evangelists were propagandists rather than traditional shepherds, pastors or priests who cared for the souls in their flocks and Ellul courted some controversy by singling out Billy Graham in The New Demons.
Longtime readers most likely know how much I've drawn upon Jacques Ellul to explain things I observed at Mars Hill Church. Propaganda is certainly the main work I drew upon but The Politics of God and the Politics of Man has also proven useful, particularly when I relied on Ellul's work to propose that Mark Driscoll has not been a "King David" figure but a Jehu figure, a man who may have received some kind of divine commission at some point but swiftly transformed that moment into a blank check to do his own will--Ellul put it more starkly in claiming Jehu sought to do the will of God but everywhere used the methods of Satan. Of course I've also drawn upon Ellul's work to make a case that Mark Driscoll has never been a pastor or a shepherd in a traditional understanding of those terms but has been a propagandist. Ellul argued strenuously that contemporary (i.e. 20th century onward) evangelists were propagandists rather than traditional shepherds, pastors or priests who cared for the souls in their flocks and Ellul courted some controversy by singling out Billy Graham in The New Demons.
Jacobs draws on Ellul's observation that propaganda depends on our innate tendency as humans to forget and the sheer speed of the news cycle to manipulate our responses so that we don't think about the headlines so much as viscerally react to them, to feel the news rather than think about it.
The excitement of Mars Hill going multi-site and multi-campus, for instance, could easily paper over the sheer debacle of the 50th street building purchase. Rather than try to dredge up all that history I'm including a tag to let you go down that rabbit hole if you're so inclined.
I know the CT series is continuing but the energy to tackle that is in short supply lately and there's other stuff going on but, I suppose, I can try to get back to it.
Sunday, August 14, 2022
Trio Ralchenitsa - Merry-Go-Round of Life [Joe Hisaishi arranged by Mie Ourkouozunov)
I've been following them and their music for years but this, man, has to be a post. :)
They've done an arrangement of Joe Hisaishi.
This trio is flute, accordion and guitar.
Petar Ralchev (accordion)
Mie Ogura-Ourkouzounov (flute)
Atanas Ourkouzounov (guitar)
For those who don't already know all the named names, the music is one of the key themes in Hayao Miyazaki's film Howl's Moving Castle.
Saturday, August 13, 2022
two versions of "Since I've Laid My Burden Down"--Mississippi John Hurt and the Richard Allen Singers
Last time I posted I compared a Blind Willie Johnson recording to a congregational singing of "Go with me to that land". Well for this post I couldn't resist posting two versions of "Since I've Laid My Burden Down". The first performance is from the great Mississippi John Hurt. I mean, how could I not post this one?
And now for a performance by the Richard Allen Singers.
Now off the top of my head my guess is the name refers to Bishop Richard Allen of the African Methodist Episcopal Church (i.e. AME for short). If you want to read his account of his role in the formation of the AME head over here.
I'm in the Presbyterian/Anglican/Calvinist wing of things so Methodism isn't exactly my wheelhouse but since I've been reading up on Baptist and Methodist hymnody via William T. Dargan I figure it can't hurt in terms of musical history and with an ecumenical interest to post Rev. Richard Allen's account. After all, plenty of people will not have heard of him at all but The Richard Allen Singers is not just some name you pick for no reason.
Both performances are lovely and I hope you enjoy both of them.
Sunday, August 07, 2022
Blind Willie Johnson's "Go With Me To That Land"/congregational singing of "Come and Go to That Land"
Regular readers know Wenatchee The Hatchet is a Blind Willie Johnson fan so, no surprise, here's Blind Willie Johnson's "Go With Me To That Land"
Thanks to reading William T. Dargan's Lining Out the Word I discovered a recording of lining hymns performed at a number of African American churches. So once I heard the following track I had to post a juxtaposition of Blind Willie Johnson's performance with a congregational singing form of the song.
from Wade in the Water Volume 2, ℗ 1995 Smithsonian Folkways Recordings
Saturday, August 06, 2022
over at Ad Fontes Brian Auten reviews Crawford Gribben's Survival and Resistance in Christian America: Christian Reconstruction in the Pacific Northwest:
Academic reviews of books take longer than popular-level book reviews. Sometimes a book gets reviewed a year or so after it has been published. Thus a new review of a not-quite-so-new book. I heartily recommend Gribben's book, by the way and consider it a necessary read for anyone who wants to get a clearer sense of the American Redoubt as the region within which Mark Driscoll had his conversion to evangelical Christianity from his ostensibly nominal Catholicism on the one hand and his calling to ministry on the other. I have also discussed how Gribben's book helped me get a clearer sense of how Driscoll's conversion and calling experiences/processes coincided with the emergence of Doug Wilson's brand. That the two men were documented interacting with and knowing of each other about thirty years ago was worth noting.
Brian Auten's recent review makes a case that in some ways Gribben's book focused too much on Wilson and not on the actual kinist groups and other figures in the American Redoubt but his review is, overall, positive and he recommends the book.
Tuesday, August 02, 2022
Ethan Hein on Bach Anxiety--thoughts on debates about Bach's Lutheranism over time, the highbrow of art-religion, and a scholarly trope of dismissing a whole swath of Western Christianity as "anti-art" as an art-religious reflex
What is that absolute truth, though? Bach was an ultra-conservative Lutheran, so he would have understood himself to be pursuing a different set of truths than people are mostly seeking now. The music academy understands Bach to have been pursuing the truth of the Western tonal system, which he himself helped to codify as it evolved from the church modes. Bach did not write any music theory treatises, but he certainly understood theory, and his student Johann Kirnberger based Die Kunst des reinen Satzes in der Musik on Bach’s teaching.
The question of how devout or conservative J. S. Bach actually was or wasn't has been a surprisingly lively debate. It depends on who you ask in relationship to which parts of his overall body of work and what their reasons for saying so are. I'm still working through Pauline Fairclough's Classics for the Masses but she amusingly draws out a history of Soviet attempts to argue in the 1925-1930 period that Bach wasn't religiously observant at all; that he wrote music to order for church and court because that was his job; and there was no evidence he was religiously sincere and therefore it was acceptable to perform Bach provided you never made the mistake of performing a Bach piece in a way that corresponded to a liturgical calendar (i.e. a feast day of some kind).
Saturday, July 30, 2022
Freddie deBoer and Nathan Robinson suggest we need a reinvigorated skeptic movement--sure, skeptic movement, yes, New Atheism played itself out as Gulf War 2 cheerleading from jump
https://www.currentaffairs.org/2022/07/why-we-still-need-atheism
Robinson makes a useful distinction I think is worth repeating, that there is a dispositional and philosophical distinction to be made between atheist and anti-theist stances, a distinction John Gray articulated pretty clearly in Seven Types of Atheism a few years back. Gray's contention was that the New Atheists had views that were parasitically dependent on the liberal Protestant ideals formulated by Schleiermacher and that in philosophy they brought nothing new to the table and in geopolitical terms all they contributed was support for two of the more hotly contested United States imperial gambits of the last twenty years.
Robinson makes a useful distinction I think is worth repeating, that there is a dispositional and philosophical distinction to be made between atheist and anti-theist stances, a distinction John Gray articulated pretty clearly in Seven Types of Atheism a few years back. Gray's contention was that the New Atheists had views that were parasitically dependent on the liberal Protestant ideals formulated by Schleiermacher and that in philosophy they brought nothing new to the table and in geopolitical terms all they contributed was support for two of the more hotly contested United States imperial gambits of the last twenty years.
Ted Gioia gets into the weeds of how the composer of music for Dragon Ball Z had his wikipedia page removed
I couldn't get into the anime Dragon Ball Z. It drove me up the wall with the teeth-gritting constipated power-ups. I'm not talking about the Dragon Ball manga, which I enjoyed. I'm much more a fan of Rumiko Takahashi's work (you know, Ranma 1/2, Inu Yasha, Mermaid Forest (sadly never fully translated), and Maison Ikkoku). As anime soundtracks go I'm not sure anyone's beaten Yoko Kanno's work on Cowboy Bebop. I can't resist dropping in the opening theme music from Night on the Galactic Railroad while I'm at it (track 20 is glorious), so obviously I digress.
My distrust of Wikipedia has a personal element. For a time I was interacting with some bloggers on the topic of Mars Hill and when people would roll out the "Wikipedia says this about Mars Hill/Mark Driscoll" I'd have to internally sigh. Never mind that I met the three co-founding elders and attended from 1999 to 2009 and was a member of that church, people online would just go to a Wikipedia article that won't let you cite primary source materials and that supposedly settled things. I would sooner have people read Mark Driscoll's own shifting writings than read a Wikipedia article. Seriously, dig up the first edition of Real Marriage and later editions and see what the differences are.
Gioia's got another recent post on recent trends in music consumption that's worth reading.
His point that the gatekeepers of contemporary media are not doing anyone favors is a fair one to make, and the concern that cultural stagnation makes sense with a significant proviso that he's referring to the monetized arts. But one of the reasons I keep coming back to some of the crankier ideas of Paul Hindemith, for instance, is he pointed out that maybe we should not even be measuring the musical health of a culture by the activities of its paid professionals to begin with.
Sunday, July 24, 2022
some thoughts on what some people call watchdog blogging, Eccl 7:10 should always be your life verse, there has never been a golden age of watchdog blogging
I don't think of myself as a watchdog blogger and Wenatchee The Hatchet has never set out to be a watchdog blog but, for a time ... maybe about ten years ... the blog "has" been a storehouse of online documentation of problems at a local former megachurch.
I was reading something at Phoenix Preacher a while back that caught my eye.
3. The new era of watchbloggers do not seem
interested in redemption…nor does the surrounding culture. The objective
now is simply to eradicate the enemy. If you choose to have a culture where
redemption is no longer possible, you should understand that some day they will
hang you on the gallows you built for others…
Saturday, July 23, 2022
Toru Takemitsu, "All in Twilight", movement 1 performed by Shin-ichi Fukuda
Back in 1997 I got two CDs on an impulse buy that stuck with me. The first was the Fabio Zanon recording of the solo guitar music of Heitor Villa-Lobos, which was (and is) a great recording. Perhaps more fateful for me, much as I enjoy Villa-Lobos, was Fukuda's Denon label recording of solo guitar music written by Toru Takemitsu.
It has turned out after all those years that I made a fateful impulse purchase because among classical guitarists and Takemitsu fans that 1997 Denon recording has turned out to be hard to find. Fortunately Fukuda revisited Takemitsu's guitar music for the Naxos label! I've debated whether or not to wade into a set of blog posts about "All in Twilight" over the years because on the one hand I've got recordings and, far more importantly, the score! On the other hand, Takemitsu's music is hard to explain and I am not a vocational music theorist or musicologist and part of me thinks someone, after all these decades, should've just put together a monograph on his guitar music ... much like I would've thought by now music theorists and musicologists should've just put together a book about Stevie Wonder's Innervisions.
Ethan Hein on Led Zeppelin and the folkloric integrity of the blues and revisiting Anton Reicha's old 1810 treatise extolling quarter tone deviations from diatonic scales as part of a singer's art
...
But why do harmonica players bend their notes in the first place? Blue notes are a profound music-theoretic mystery. Why should it sound good to play certain notes so far out of tune? Performers in every kind of Western music inflect their pitches for emphasis and feeling, but outside of the blues and its descendants, no one intentionally plays notes that are a quarter-tone flat on purpose. It’s customary to explain blue notes by saying that they are harsh, weird, or dissonant. But this is not the way I and other blues lovers experience the music. Blue notes sound unusual and ear-grabbing, but they don’t sound “bad” the way that an extremely flat note would in a performance of, say, Mozart. How can this be?
...
Ever since I began to dig into writings by and about the history of microtonality in Western and semi-Western music it has seemed that even the idea that microtonal inflections in Western music might be more of a scholastic super-myth than something testified to within the literature of the time. Kyle Gann mentioned that Anton Reicha (who taught Lizst) openly speculated about quarter-tones. I had to do my own digging around to find that Reicha extolled the use of quarter-tones in aria performances in his Treatise on Melody going back to the earlier 19th century. Since Pendragon Press is no more (!) I have to get a little help to show you what Reicha wrote.
Ever since I began to dig into writings by and about the history of microtonality in Western and semi-Western music it has seemed that even the idea that microtonal inflections in Western music might be more of a scholastic super-myth than something testified to within the literature of the time. Kyle Gann mentioned that Anton Reicha (who taught Lizst) openly speculated about quarter-tones. I had to do my own digging around to find that Reicha extolled the use of quarter-tones in aria performances in his Treatise on Melody going back to the earlier 19th century. Since Pendragon Press is no more (!) I have to get a little help to show you what Reicha wrote.
Ted Gioia is campaigning for a posthumous Pulitzer for Duke Ellington for 1965
https://tedgioia.substack.com/p/lets-give-duke-ellington-the-pulitzer
https://tedgioia.substack.com/p/were-making-great-progress-on-the
https://tedgioia.substack.com/p/were-making-great-progress-on-the
One of the things I recall from Terry Teachout's biography on Ellington was that while Ellington responded publicly to the snub with grace he was privately bothered by the snub.
Wenatchee The Hatchet is not exactly a signer-of-things most of the time and, besides, in many important ways I'd say a posthumous Pulitzer would do far more for the prize than it could do for Ellington's formidable body of work. I'm not against the prize being given! I have liked Ellington's music since I first heard it in my late teens, so if the award is given Wenatchee The Hatchet will be happy. If it's not, well, Duke's music is its own reward for those who know it but I can't possibly fault Gioia for wanting the snub rectified. If the board does again what it did decades ago it might just re-confirm why Kyle Gann once said the Pulitzer prizes for music have been a joke for generations.
Then again, in passing, I thought the Scott Joplin centennial of the composer's death came and went with far too little fanfare considering the ragtime composer's colossal contribution to American music.
on pejoratively defining a buzzword as a shibboleth among defenses of classical music, attacking a "progress" that isn't even the coin of contemporary progressive musicology is a waste of time
Over the years I have noticed that there is an unimaginative approach to how conservatives engage questions of aesthetics. This pattern is neither surprising nor unexpected on the one hand but, on the other hand, what is surprising is the extent to which self-identified defenders of what has by now come to be called traditional aesthetics seem to do two things: 1) write and act as though the very idea of aesthetics is a "timeless" or "eternal" thing that didn't evolve during the eighteenth century in Western Europe and 2) mount defenses of the viability of what amounts to a Romanticist aesthetic that skips earlier views within the West or ignores alternative intra-Western views and settles in for bromides predicated on defining buzzwords, shibboleths attributed to their ideological adversaries real and imagined.
Rather than write an all-too conventional conservative screed that sticks with abstractions while naming criminals and charlatans like Cage or Duchamp I want to stick with a couple of writers whose work demonstrates how readily would-be defenders of The Great Tradition can't resist the buzzword definition as serious and competent thought gambit. For the purposes of today's writing we'll look at Michael De Sapio at The Imaginative Conservative and, of course, John Borstlap, at his blog.
Saturday, July 16, 2022
links for the weekend, Ethan Hein on Bjork's "Human Behavior", revisiting Princess Mononoke's tepid US reception
http://www.ethanhein.com/wp/2022/human-behaviour/
and for Venture Bros fans I have to post this link. The Might Monarch complaining "Why did you change the music?" has a cute fourth-while breaking moment where the show writers tell us they wanted to us a song and Einar was ready to sign but Bjork's lawyers would not budge.
and for Venture Bros fans I have to post this link. The Might Monarch complaining "Why did you change the music?" has a cute fourth-while breaking moment where the show writers tell us they wanted to us a song and Einar was ready to sign but Bjork's lawyers would not budge.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TQWsqnaUqZ4
We're many years along since the theatrical release of Hayao Miyazako's Princess Mononoke and there's a piece on how and why it had such a tepid U.S. reception.
We're many years along since the theatrical release of Hayao Miyazako's Princess Mononoke and there's a piece on how and why it had such a tepid U.S. reception.
https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20220713-princess-mononoke-the-masterpiece-that-flummoxed-the-us
There's reportedly a recording of music by Vicente Lusitano coming along later in the year.
Maybe Ted Gioia can see a silver lining in all this mining music from the past, the kinds of musicians and composers he said were "erased" from history in Music: A Subversive History are getting recordings now
Ethan Hein blogs about groove, Adorno and concepts of musical time some thoughts about the double bind Adorno has foisted on us that even his would-be adversaries don't reject
I see that Ethan Hein has been reading Adorno and criticism of Adorno. It's not like Adorno hasn't earned himself some sturdy criticism. Paradoxically there's a lot about Adorno's work I can respect even while I think he was in the long run catastrophically wrong. His advocacy for work-immanent analysis isn't a bad idea as a contrast to what he regarded as the pitifully schematic prescriptive patterns of much analysis and theory education.
Gioia on cultural stagnation and the triumph of old pop culture over new pop culture, I don't take as given the surmise that artistic stagnation LEADS to cultural stagnation
... I fully expect to see a septuagenarian Superman or Batman in the future.
Heh ... writing as a Batman fan ... I guess Ted Gioia doesn't know this happened in the last century.
Tuesday, July 12, 2022
Ted Gioia looks at one of the more notorious quack/hack eye surgeons in history, who ruined the lives of J. S. Bach and Handel
A lot of it wasn't hugely new information for me but it was fun to revisit. Snuffing out the lives of Bach and Handel without fixing their cataracts is butchery for the ages as arts history goes.
Cataracts are vastly easier to treat now than 250 years ago and yet there's a grim joke in the field about how the best way to give someone cataracts is to remove cataracts. Even if Dr. Taylor had somehow miraculously not butchered the eyesight of Bach and Handel the odds that they would have been subsequently blinded by secondary cataracts was still likely to have been a certainty.
Thanks to 19th century mythologizing J. S. Bach looms larger in our collective imaginations than he ever did in his own lifetime. I don't want to digress into all the history, aesthetics and associated stuff connected to that too much ... although I did recently finish Jaroslav Pelikan's wonderful little book Bach Among the Theologians recently and a while back I finished Laurence Dreyfus' compelling Bach and the Patterns of Invention. I gotta say of the second book that having read it, it's as though Gioia and I came to drastically different conclusions about what Bach was described as rebelling against and why. Gioia's take seems more Bach was some James Dean rockist rebel-without-a-cause whereas Dreyfus' proposal was that Bach was a singularly anti-Enlightenment thinker and musician who, however disinclined he was to dissent from the nascent Enlightenment in literary terms he did by way of musical/compositional method.
Now with Pelikan, obviously, he got into the literally doctrinal reasons J. S. Bach can't be considered any kind of Enlightenment sympathizer. What he got into, however, was what he described as J. S. Bach's "evangelical catholicity" and by the time you finish Pelikan's little book you'll see what he meant, that Bach was a confessional Lutheran who nevertheless drew inspiration from Pietist writings; had no qualms composing Mass in B minor (Pelikan wishes Bach had written a vernacular German mass as some scholars speculated Bach was considering); and pointed out that J. S. had an explosion of compositional work in secular concert and chamber music while employed by a Calvinist court. Which, to translate that for those who aren't religious themselves, is saying Bach was a sincere Christian who was neither more pious than usual nor less pious than usual for his time and place but who was willing to work across literally confessional boundaries as long as he regarded the teams as within the realm of orthodox Christianity.
I'd recommend the Pelikan for anyone who wants a short and to the point overview of the major theological and philosophical currents of Bach's life and times who doesn't also have anything like a seminary or divinity school education. I kinda want to read more about Lutheran worship wars from the time of Bach and there look to be some fun books on that topic but that's straying off topic for what is supposed to be a short post.
Saturday, July 09, 2022
I Heard the Voice of Jesus Say · The United Southern Prayer Band (amazing stuff I'm hearing thanks to reading through William T Dargan's book on the lining hymn tradition in African American churches)
For Blind Willie Johnson fans you'll already know "I heard the voice of Jesus say ... " as a text from his song repertoire
and you will also know that "Dark Was the Night" is an instrumental adaptation of the lining out hymn singing tradition. But in case you've never heard what that singing tradition among African American churches actually sounds like, well, then you need to listen to this.
Wade in the Water, Vol. 2: African-American Congregational Singing
℗ 1995 Smithsonian Folkways Recordings
You can hear the song leader/deacon "deaconing" the words for the well-known lyrics before each wave of responsorial heterophony. Dargan put it well saying that it's neither a prescribed harmonic pattern nor a simple unison melody. It most certainly sounds nothing at all like the tune Blind Willie Johnson famously recorded and Dargan explained that there's a propensity to "flatten out" melodic contours along a series of revolving and recycling melodic tropes which you can vividly hear in this remarkable performance.
Because it's an old lo-fi recording you might not hear the foot stomping and hand clapping rhythms at first but that's another element that you can hear in this tradition where a completely non-measured set of congregational phrases emerge and are progressively given firmer rhythmic accompaniment that has a tempo shift about half-way through.
I learned of this album from William T. Dargan's book
Lining Out the Word: Dr. Watts Hymn Singing in the Music of Black Americans
and if you want an even more radically different variation on a popular text from the African American Christian music traditions check out this recording by Doris Akers!
I'm still working through Dargan's book but I intend to blog about it once I'm done. Meanwhile, I can't resist sharing tracks from albums he recommended for listening. Fortunately the Wade in the Water series is Smithsonian Folkways which means it's not some wildly out-of-print thing you'd have to impoert or order from a university press you might not have heard of before like a couple of other albums Dargan recommends.
Friday, July 08, 2022
The McIntosh County Shouters, "Lay Down Body"
As I've been working through William T Dargan's Lining Out the Word I've been enjoying the music he mentions in the discography. So I want to share a tiny sample of what I've been listening to as I keep reading up on the history of lining hymns, the ring-shout tradition in African American churches, and associated history of how they developed and expanded on customs and norms available within the low liturgical options of the American scene.
Part of the joy of this performance is how the people start off in one key and rapidly (!) microtonally shift up a whole step. I've been in choral performances where in the excitement of singing together the key veers way off from the starting pitch (shooting upward). I've also been in lethargic performances where we started in C and ended the song (where no modulation was supposed to happen!) in A flat.
It's especially common in no-instruments vocal performances and it's interesting to consider how in many church traditions instruments are not allowed either because of a strict regulative principle (which shows up in the Reformed traditions, especially some old-line Baptist); lack of resources (ditto, though separate); or custom (the Orthodox liturgies ban instrumental accompaniments which was why Stravinsky made his Mass for Catholic rather than Orthodox settings).
Saturday, July 02, 2022
John Borstlap and the theodicies of art religion
If
Richard Taruskin’s career has been characterized, as I have written previously,
in taking aim at Romanticist art-religion and views that music, serious music,
has a fundamentally if nebulously sacramental role then a case could be made
that the Joker to his Batman might be someone like John Borstlap. There are many writers who subscribe to a
notion that music, serious music; art music has a special function that
catalyzes, in a deep and mysterious way, the emotional order of the listener
who attentively listens. John Borstlap
and the late Roger Scruton might be the easiest contemporary examples, via
their work at the Future Symphony Institute of a throwback to sacramental
listening and a sacramental view of the musical fine arts of the sort that
Richard Taruskin so often took aim at.
Richard Taruskin's lifelong argument against music as sacrament, the legacy of Romantic art-religion, and music in the service of worldview vindication
I think I first became familiar with the writing of Richard Taruskin through the blogging of Kyle Gann, who also introduced me via his blogging to Leonard B. Meyer. All three writers changed the way I think about music and the arts but over the years I gained a special fondness for Taruskin's openly polemical stance toward Germanophile art religion and art religion in general.
Friday, July 01, 2022
Richard Taruskin (1945-2022)
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/01/arts/music/richard-taruskin-dead.html
I don't have anything more to add at the moment but I will blog about Taruskin's work and how he's influenced my thinking about a few topics in music history later. I will say that it's thanks to Kyle Gann I discovered both Richard Taruskin and Leonard B Meyer.
I don't have anything more to add at the moment but I will blog about Taruskin's work and how he's influenced my thinking about a few topics in music history later. I will say that it's thanks to Kyle Gann I discovered both Richard Taruskin and Leonard B Meyer.
I know for certain Alex Ross is going to have something to say.
UPDATE 7-2-2022
UPDATE 7-4-2022
Of course with Taruskin's passing it would be a given not all posthumous commentary would be laudatory.
The questions of what would constitute a proper leftist musicology, however, play into precisely one of the core questions Taruskin posed in his polemical style--whether a proper musicology of the right, left or center was necessarily going to "work". I notice people who have talked about Taruskin being "neoconservative" and if that means the more conventional anti-Marxist or former Trotskyist who became anti-Marxist then a long-form case might be in order.
But the larger question of proper leftist musicology ties pretty directly into what I have subsequently called the impetus for "worldview vindication" that I think, at his best (and worst) Taruskin so openly and vehemently challenged.
That may ultimately consign him to a footnote in proverbial history but as John Halle put it a few years ago:
...f I were an important person, I can imagine myself being asked why I regard Taruskin, along with Chomsky, as one of my major influences, even though his politics are frequently dubious, not to mention his having, on at least two occasions, personally attacked me in print. This review [here] should give a good indication why. Namely, that he routinely exercises the capacity to, as Orwell put it, “face unpleasant truths.” That’s what’s made him enemies over the years, and that’s why, while finding him a plenty disagreeable person, I regard him as an unlikely albeit problematic ally. (He would never describe me as one, needless to say.)
For it is this capacity, after all, which is fundamental to any chance we have of digging ourselves out of the hole we are in. The fact that much of “the left” has demonstrably abandoned it at various points of its history, including now, suggests to me that the kind of intellectual honesty Taruskin embodies is a much better foundation on which to build a political movement than the delusions of those who self-identify as on the “revolutionary” left.
...
If the histories of Socialist Realism and advocacy (or academic prescription) of integral serialism as the musics of "freedom" could tell us anything one possible epiphany we could have is that music can do a lot of things but worldview vindication has rarely been one of them. But I have, at length, made a case for why I think Taruskin at his best and worst made a point that we should take to heart.
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