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.
Saturday, July 02, 2022
John Borstlap and the theodicies of art religion
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.
Monday, June 27, 2022
Ted Gioia on the hot mess of Fair Use for music education videos
https://tedgioia.substack.com/p/the-hot-mess-of-fair-use-for-music
Copyright infringement is no joke and it's something you have to consider when you post videos online or if you're like Wenatchee The Hatchet and have had a history of blogging about Christian celebrities like Mark Driscoll.
Copyright infringement is no joke and it's something you have to consider when you post videos online or if you're like Wenatchee The Hatchet and have had a history of blogging about Christian celebrities like Mark Driscoll.
If you happened to get an undergraduate degree in journalism then you can know a bit about what Fair Use will and won't protect but if you don't, well, watchdog blogging about ministries might not be something you want to do.
But even less than watchdog blogging about your local Christian celebrity would you ever want to run afoul of a major record label, recording artist or their legal counsel.
Even though I personally think the time is ripe to compose solo guitar sonatas based on themes by Thelonious Monk ... I'm not in any rush to do that until I get the requisite permissions. I know exactly what kind of sonata I would want to write if I did have those permissions but I'm not in a rush.
Conversely, writing sonata movements based on the old Joplin/Stark masters of ragtime is pretty feasible more than a century after Scott Joplin's death and the publication dates of most of Joseph F Lamb's most famous rags.
Of note for those of us in the Puget Sound area Sherman Alexie commented about there being a whole realm of work that exists for just so long as a problem is not solved.
Now the thing about copyright notices that's relevant to journalistic blogging is if you use a platform that is monetized in any way at all via advertising you can find that a megachurch issues a complaint. Warren Throckmorton discovered this back in 2014. He was on Patheos back then but preserved the coverage from that era.
Wenatchee The Hatchet never has gotten a take-down notice for IP related to either Mark Driscoll or Mars Hill. As a defense against alleged libel goes the truth is the best defense but as defenses against copyright infringement claims or demonetization requests go the best defense is to never monetize to begin with. But what works great for a blogger who did watchdog blog work on a former megachurch spells nuisance-at-best to disaster-at-worst for educational music videos.
POSTSCRIPT
It's not really worth a separate post at this point but ... in a predictable move ...
https://realfaith.com/AbortAbortion/
Cue up the Margaret Sanger angle again.
Driscoll did the Sanger was a racist case years ago and that progressives could be (and even were) racist is hardly a surprise. But I'm going to let someone else wade into the new free book. I wondered whether, given his claims in his 2008 spiritual warfare marathon session, if he'd really altogether abandoned a quasi-Sangerian or pseudo-Sangerian Malthusian concept.
But I have kind of drawn a line at Christian Theology vs Critical Theory. Besides being under-sourced, it struck me as such bad faith ranting even from Driscoll I'm not sure I've got the patience to read whatever he's got in his latest salvo. I am not really pro-abortion or pro-death penalty and the gun culture strikes me as the flip side of the pro-choice scene, Americans venerate the power of pre-emptive lethal force in defense of lifestyles in blue and red variations. But I get tired of white progressives and reactionaries framing discussions of birth control and abortion in terms of each other being the "real" enemy. David Treuer had a point noting that the men and women at boarding schools who hoped to "save the man by killing the Indian" were the progressives of their time. Merely noting that does not let right-wingers off the hook for their own variations of racist ideas. But that seems to be the industries at play in mainstream and even some alt publishing when politics are involved.
As for music education stuff, I have tried to avoid getting or inciting any trouble discussing musical works where there's a score that isn't in the public domain or has no commercial-free format as yet. Thus I didn't get into the score-level details with Diabelli sonatas in the past. But things do change and so maybe I can tackle some music blogging that gets into more details of Diabelli sonatas if there's a way to show rather than tell. But the next set of blog posts on music will likely favor the sonata forms of Matiegka and then, later, after I've got time for it, a score-less survey of the guitar sonatas of Angelo Gilardino. I've been overdue to blog about a bunch of guitar sonatas for years but this has not been the year to get to that IRL, at least not yet.
Meanwhile, I sure won't be doing music education videos discussing contemporary guitar sonatas.
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