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.
Friday, September 23, 2022
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.
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