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.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0IYkYUBdfNo

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

http://www.ethanhein.com/wp/2022/led-zeppelin-and-the-folkloric-integrity-of-the-blues/

... 

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.

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

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.