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.
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