a short look at the most viewed post at Wenatchee The Hatchet of 2023, from 2021

The most viewed post of 2023 at Wenatchee The Hatchet turns out to be something I published in 2021.

Mark Driscoll and Doug Wilson were part of a panel debating censorship in the arts covered by WSU paper on 10-27-1992; revisiting Mark Driscoll's 2013 claim that he edited his college newspaper compared to his 2004 claim to have been an opinions editor.

812 views could be at least half bots for all I don't know but it's the most viewed post of 2023 for the blog.  The analytics further indicate that those 812 views were accumulated in the last three months.  

Traffic to the blog nosedived after later 2014 and spiked during the run time of The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill before nosediving again, which is all fine.  The quality of the readers is more important to me at this stage in life than the quantity.  If people enjoy the Matiegka posts, for instance, that makes me happy.

I don't regret, though, chronicling the life and times of Mars Hill or demonstrating that Wilson and Driscoll knew of each other going as far back as 1992 and that Driscoll made no secret about his being influenced by Wilson.  I had thought to write about No Quarter November and Kevin DeYoung's paradoxical worries about the Moscow Mood after having giving a glowing review to the first edition of A Justice Primer but I had more fun things to do like watching Godzilla Minus One and adding an appendix to my 2020 treatise of sorts. 

I might have to get around to stuff like that in 2024.  I found some fun links to a round table on Reed Carlson's Unfamiliar Selves I want to share later but it might be good to actually discuss Reed Carlson's book first.

We'll have to see how 2024 blogging goes and whether I feel up to returning to earlier levels of productivity.  The 30th anniversary of Mark Noll's The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind will be upon us, after all.  John Borstlap's book will be out and a new book by Oliver O'Donovan will be out of his Gifford lectures.  Stuff like that.

I never managed to blog about Ewell's book this year.  There is, I hope, time to get to that in 2024.  Matiegka 2023 is obviously going to sprawl into 2024 and maybe even 2025.  I admit it's a hugely ambitious and difficult project but I did at least get to Op. 16 and Op. 17.

Happy New Year from Wenatchee The Hatchet.  

Alan Jacobs on Wagner with a passing reference to Roger Scruton--some observations on the Scrutonian engagement with Anglican theological aesthetics that never was

https://blog.ayjay.org/on-wagner/

I don't need to rehearse that Wagnerians venerate Wagner as a genius and Wagner's detractors regard him as a repulsive human being.  Alan Jacobs doesn't need to do that either but he seems savvy enough to realize what he volunteers about Wagner is not informed by steeping himself in Wagnerian criticism.  Then again, the following observation wouldn't depend on being caught up with the sea of statements about Wagner. Get ready for an amusing little story about W. H. Auden and Benjamin Britten discussing the exigencies of setting verses to a fugue:

...

Wagner trusts overmuch in the power of his own verse, or is simply overly attached to it — which is a reminder that often it’s good to divide the labor of the librettist and the poet. When Auden was writing his Christmas oratorio, For the Time Being, he did so hoping that his friend Benjamin Britten would set it to music. But when he gave to Britten the magnificent fugal chorus on Caesar he had written, Britten couldn’t help laughing. He told Auden that if he wanted an actual fugue to be written, and a figure that would set a single scene in an oratorio with many scenes, then he should have written three lines, not seventy. So Auden kept the poem as written and gave up on the idea of having it set to music. By contrast, Wagner never had anyone to remind him of the necessary constraints; so he ignored them. 

And there’s another problem as well. Recently I read Walter Murch’s famous meditation on film editing, In the Blink of an Eye, and was taken by his articulation of one of his chief rules: “You want to do only what is necessary to engage the imagination of the audience — suggestion is always more effective than exposition.” It’s interesting that Wagner understands this principle so well in his music, which often is rich and deep with suggestion, without understanding it at all in his writing. Exposition often dominates. I think his addiction to detailed exposition has something to do with his belief in himself as a sage and a mythographer. 

... 

So there's that but the conclusion of the post is what has stuck with me:

I may have more to say as I move through this extraordinary work of art — though maybe not, because the experience is tiring. Right now I feel about it much as Virginia Woolf felt about Joyce’s Ulysses, which she called “a memorable catastrophe — immense in daring, terrific in disaster.” But it fascinates me as a myth, especially as a humanist myth — a myth about the ending of the gods and what Bonhoeffer would later call the “coming of age” of humanity. I think that is why Roger Scruton — a man convinced of the absolute necessity of religion to humans but without any firm faith in Christianity — loves the Ring cycle so much. His book about it is magnificent, I think, but also somewhat depressing, because as a Christian I certainly don’t think that a humanist myth has the power to sustain us. But Wagner put an enormous charge into his effort to make it do so. 

Since Scruton's passing I have read a couple of  books published before and after his death regarding his legacy as a conservative and the philosophy of aesthetics and the philosophy of religion.  A short version would be to say that Scruton was fond of what he called the English trait of being "loyally indifferent" within Anglicanism.  He regarded the feat of Anglicanism as rescuing the Church of England from the evil Calvinists so it could be English-ly Catholic in Our Church.  My take-away was that in 2023 there are probably more Anglicans in Africa than all of the United Kingdom and probably more orthodox Anglicans, too.  There was hardly anything in Scruton's version of transcendentalist personalism you couldn't get from neo-orthodox or dialectical theologians like Bultmann or Brunner who had a vastly great command of biblical texts and dogmatics.  Scruton seemed to be a kind of smells and bells Anglican who put stock in the rituals themselves and if they were opaque that was what made them profound.

And here I am gearing up to tackle Thomas Aquinas and Herman Bavinck on Trinitarian dogmatics in 2024, I who have the complete works of Richard Sibbes and am sympathetic to Zwingli's take on David's harp music rather than Luther's.  

That Scruton was a loyal Anglican I don't doubt, that he was fond of "loyally indifferent" Anglicanism was one of his failings as a public churchman.  There, I suppose there's no watering it down.  When I consider what the Anglican theologian and musician Jeremy Begbie has published in the last thirty years it kind of puzzles me that Scruton didn't think to interact with any of Begbie's work, or the work of David Brown so far as I could tell.  Scruton recognized that a chasm had come to exist between popular music and music from "the great tradition" but he did not seem as interested in finding ways to bridge those gaps or consider how they were sustained by journalists, music historians, and even performing and recording musicians (I don't say "constructed because Scruton read just enough Theodor Adorno to know who claimed popular song and dance from the United States was and is not "serious music").  

What is more, if Scruton was committed to a kind of Rudolf Otto variation of The Idea of the Holy for his art mysticism he didn't even manage the generously pluralist moments achieved by the Dutch Reformed anthropologist/art historian Gerardus van der Leeuw, whether in Religion in Essence and Manifestation or Sacred and Profane Beauty: The Holy in Art.  One of the ironies of Roger Scruton the philosopher who was so loyally indifferent to dogmatics and theology was that he didn't engage with theology much and yet it was Dutch Reformed theologians and art historians who made a case for aesthetic pluralism grounded in Christian confessionalism while Scruton was defending a nebulous post-Wagnerian post-Otto kind of mysticism.  

Scruton was, to go by his collected writings, more an English Anglican than a confessional Anglican, for want of a better way to put it.  I read Puritans for fun and edification, though, so I'm precisely the kind of Christian Scruton thought the Anglican church probably needed to be kept safe from.  But, seeing as I got into the work of John Neville Figgis in the last year, Figgis had a question which goes like this--why do people believe that the greatest dangers come from believing too much and not too little?  No one would have expected the late Roger Scruton to become a liberation theologian, for instance, and yet Jacobs' post has reminded me that Scruton may have accomplished more as a churchman who happened to be a public philosopher if he had taken his Anglicanism more seriously in the sense of engaging with and interacting with other currents within Anglican thought in his own lifetime.  I just merely name-dropped Jeremy Begbie and David Brown and I don't feel like wading into the waters of either of those theologians.  That might be something to save for 2024.

As I have been reading theological aesthetics within Reformed and Anglican and Catholic traditions I have begun to suspect that one of the crises of contemporary liberalism is catholicity.  Pluralism is presented by conservatives and reactionaries as predicated on relativism but this is not necessarily so.  The scholars who published a monograph with Brill on John Neville Figgis identified him as a formerly liberal Anglican who became more evangelical and yet was known in his lifetime for championing a secular and pluralist state.  Scruton was not unaware of Figgis, but he seems to have read Figgis the historian of political ideas rather than Figgis the priest.  

I guess I am trying to put this another way, merely discrediting people in the left or new left is not the same thing as coming up with ideas that might potentially ameliorate problems or offer solutions to aesthetic problems of the sort that Roger Scruton could recognize but did not seem particular eager to solve.  Since he has died he obviously can't solve any aesthetic problems now but, as Gavin Hopps has written of Scruton, we can be critical of his elitism and snobbery precisely because if we take those elements out Scruton still had some salvageable ideas that can be worked with.  One of those ideas was the observation that we need take pop music more seriously, at least more seriously than Adorno did, as a way to consider a potential future path for a rapprochement between classical and popular idioms. 

In that sense Philip Ewell has been right to say that loyalty to highbrow art religion is unyielding ... but the same can be said of the alternate art religion of rockists and poptimists.  Coming at all this from a Reformed Christian position (Swiss, Dutch, Calvinist, etc) I come at this realizing that I don't subscribe to either the highflyer Anglican Scrutonian art religion or Ted Gioia's "magic" jazz-centric ethos.  Philip Stoltzfus would potentially guess that I reject both the Orphic and Pythagorean paradigms to explain what music can do.  Maybe ... but Roger Scruton has been dead a couple of years and an appraisal of the strengths and weaknesses of the Scrutonian music project is going to be a work in progress for a while. 

Still, if Scruton were alive today and had read Philip Ewell's book he would likely say that it is a shame Schenker has had so much influence on North American music theory education and there's nothing wrong with Ewell registering that complaint in itself.  Scruton was almost glibly dismissive of Schenker's legacy, though.  He could get like that.

Anyway, soe semi-organized thoughts for a post on a Saturday night.  

a new appendix to Ragtime and Sonata Forms, some practical approaches to ragtime/sonata synthesis

Over the years I have written about my fondness for ragtime and my interest in synthesizing ragtime with 18^th century galant approaches to large-scale form.  I wrote Ragtime and Sonata Forms back in 2020.  Since that time I have read a fairly big pile of books discussing musical time and space; concepts of form; and scholarly reconsiderations and renegotiations of what theorists would call sonata forms.  It has become clearer among scholars over the last two centuries that the whole idea of “sonata form” and “sonata forms” was and is a post hoc description of a very flexible set of practices that were never as schematic or rigid as 19^th century theorists made them out to be. 

 

As Leonard Meyer put it, in the eighteenth century sonata movements were conceived of and written as a flexible set of scripts, but in the nineteenth century they became works written according to plans.  I was telling a friend of mine that this distinction between a sonata as a “script” and a sonata as a “plan” has profound implications.  You can go “off script” any time you want and get back on script.  If you change significant parts of your plan then you may just need a whole new plan.  I enjoy Haydn more than Mozart or Beethoven and I have a fondness for thinking of sonata forms (since the term and the heuristic is still useful and unavoidable now that we’ve had it for two centuries), so I have been thinking of ways to play with sonata forms in a way that treats sonata forms as flexible scripts.  I have also attempted to cross reference approaches to the “punctuation” of musical themes in ways that allow for establishing temporal-spatial correspondences between ragtime and sonata forms. 

 

Ironically I have been helped not just by reading music theory treatises by Jason Yust, Yoel Greenberg, James Hepokoski and L. Poundie Burstein, I have particularly benefited from reading Charles Twombly on John of Damascus; Thomas Torrance on Trinitarian dogmatics; Roger Scruton on the philosophy of music; and then Ferdia Stone-Davis and David Brown’s respective critiques of Scruton.  In other words I dove into theology and philosophy.  Torrance argued that we need to drop the Newtonian conception of time and space in light of patristic witness that time and space are not absolute but are relationally contingent and part of the created order. 

 

So when Jason Yust proposes that we think of musical time and space overlapping in multiple dimensions that just strikes me as a conceptual transposition of the kinds of distinctions that, when Thomas Aquinas reflected on the Trinity, were explicable as filiation, procession and spiration in intra-Trinitarian relationships.  In other words, Christian theology going back to the patristic era and medieval theologies from Aquinas and John of Damascus dispensed with a conception of time and space as some absolute “receptacle”.  L Poundie Burstein’s advice that we avoid getting too rigid in thinking about musical blocks of space and time as fixed “containers”.  Christian theologians agreed with that concern centuries ago and Thomas Torrance was overt in advising us to drop that conception of time and space in the last century.  

some thoughts on readings in music theory in 2023 and theological arguments against Germanophile art mysticism within Christian traditions (updated 12-30-23)

I had planned to blog about Matiegka's Grand Sonata I by now but, eh, life happens. There's still time between now and the end of the year to tackle that but I'm not sure I'm going to.  I may try to write a bit about some of the reading I've done this year. Normally I don't do list posts but I read a specific set of books that stuck with me this year

Yoel Greenberg's How Sonata Forms (2022)

L Poundie Burstein's Journeys Through Galant Expositions (2020)

James Hepokoski's A Sonata Theory Handbook (December 2020)

Jason Yust's Organized Time: Rhythm, Tonality and Form (2018)

Philip Ewell's On Music Theory, and Making Music More Welcoming for Everyone (April 2023)

The Religious Philosophy of Roger Scruton  (2016)

Art and Politics in Roger Scruton's Conservative Philosophy (December 2022)

Frank Burch Brown's books Religious Aesthetics: A Theological Study of Making and Meaning (1993); 

Good Taste, Bad Taste, and Christian Taste: Aesthetics in Religious Life (2003); 

and Inclusive yet Discerning: Navigating Worship Artfully (2009)

Chiara Bertoglio's Musical Scores and the Eternal Present: Theology, Time and Tolkien (August 2021)

Ferdia J Stone-Davis' Musical Beauty: Negotiating the Boundary between Subject and Object (2011)

John W Kleinig's The Lord's Song: The Basis, Function and Significance of Choral Music in Chronicles

Philip E. Stoltzfus' Theology as Performance: Music, Aesthetics, and God in Modern Theology (2006)

Kwame Bediako's Jesus and the Gospel in Africa

I'm also half-way through The Extravagance of Music by David Brown and Gavin Hopps

That's not counting other books I've been reading by Emil Brunner or John Neville Figgis or any entries in the sprawling reading list on exorcism, diabology, spiritual warfare, and scholarship on the development of Enochic traditions and demonologies evolving within contexts of imperial occupation(s) in the Yehud.  These are books that I've read that I hope to draw upon as I work toward Perichoresis in Musical Time and Space as a follow up to the  ragtime series.

A good number of these books got published since I wrote the blog series Ragtime and Sonata Forms back in 2020.  Each book, in some way or another, added ideas and insights into conceptions of musical time and space that I have found useful.  I've been intrigued by writings from the neo-Calvinist tradition advocating aesthetic pluralism.  The short version is that these kinds of arguments are, I think correctly, adduced from the economic Trinity but the relevance of the immanent Trinity to discussions of overlapping forms of musical timespace varying with dimensions of musical time and space don't come up.  I guess I'm trying to say that Christian theologians have been doing a great job of drawing upon the Trinity in its social/economic form to advocate for aesthetic pluralism grounded in confessional unity whether it's a case presented by Nicholas Wolterstorff, Frank Burch Brown, Hans Rookmaaker, Maeve Louise Heaney, David Brown or others.  

But direct reflection on musical time and space and dealing with the dogmas of aesthetics that evolved in the era of Romanticism is more sparse.  I've mentioned this briefly in the past but when Christians can draw upon John of Damascus' discussion of perichoresis in Christology and Trinitarian dogmatics; or when Thomas Aquinas distinguished between filiation, spiration and procession within the Trinity it seems like the simplest thing in the world to transpose these theological-philosophical concepts onto the nature of musical time and space in ways that discard Romanticist notions of musical material having some "essential" nature.  If we consider the biblical prophets and their criticism of music as not being a denigration of music itself but of investment in music that overlooked injustice, we have a viable alternative to what Stoltzfus described as the problematic dualism of Orpheus and Pythagoras derived musical ontologies or mysticisms.  

One of the ironies of conservatives (such as the late Roger Scruton) who attempted to defend a form of highbrow culture that was purportedly grounded in some kind of Christendom is that Scruton was, to be blunt, so lazy regarding Christian dogmatics it would be more apt to say he embraced a kind of post Schleiermacher and post Rudolf Otto art mysticism.  Gerardus van  der Leeuw had a "kind" of art mysticism but his version included African diaspora music as well as the old canonized Western touchstones from the long 19th century.  Scruton's version of Anglicanism outlined in Our Church was (and is) so relentlessly, ethnically "English" with its "loyal indifference" that it cannot account for the probability that there are more Anglicans (and more orthodox Anglicans) in Africa than in the entirety of England. Because Kenyan Christians were some of the first friends I made in my early college years and some other friends were Christians from Japan I have not defaulted to any surmise that "Christendom" is either Western or Eastern or necessarily a really Christian conception of fellowship.  

The Scrutonian highbrow elite Anglican art mysticism is something that has been dismantled by the neo-orthodox theologians via Barth and Brunner a century ago.  Scruton was more committed to being a culturally conservative Anglican than a doctrinally attentive Anglican. Jeremy Begbie has been writing about theology and music as a musician and Anglican theologian since before the dawn of this century.  It wouldn't seem to have been too hard for Scruton to have compared notes with Begbie on a confessional basis for aesthetic pluralism as reflecting the Anglican commitment to a middle path.  Scruton, famously, was committed to his highbrow elitist art mysticism and regarded Calvin as having harmed "civilization" by not counting marriage as a sacrament the way Catholics do. Never mind Zwingli or Bullinger, Scruton's Anglicanism saved Catholicism from the evil Puritans.

But Aquinas' exposition on intra-Trinitarian relationships suggests to me that if such multi-dimensional timespaces can coexist in the Trinity and if Victor Zuckerkandl or George Rochberg or, on point, Jason Yust can imagine that timespaces for rhythm, tonality and form can co-exist, then just on the basis of Christian dogmatics alone the neo-gnostic elitist art religions of Eurocentrists can't even be plausibly defended on the basis of the purported "Christendom" that is invoked to defend the standard canonized works.  As Jaroslav Pelikan put it in The Vindication of Tradition, intra-tradition criticism of traditions that harm rather than help are the well-spring of Jewish prophetic literature. 

So when I read Ewell's book I read it as making a contribution within that kind of intra-traditional critique of the poisonous impulses within a tradition. Ewell may be an atheist and that just makes it more paradoxical and amusing that when he writes about what anti-whiteness has done to blackness that it sounds remarkably similar to what African biblical scholars and theologians have described as the influence of powers and principalities.  For that matter, Ewell's working definitions of whiteness and anti-blackness could fit with ease into Walter Wink's working definition of powers, give or take a few caveats.

I'm entertaining quite seriously a proposal that Western art religion represents a power and principality in terms of writings on Ephesians interpretation from Esther Acolatse, Daniel K Darko, Robert Ewusie MOses, and even Clinton Arnold.  If contemporary anti-racists tend to be both secular and progressive they will likely not have bothered to read theologians and biblical scholars grappling with the Pauline concepts of powers and principalities because, eh, religion.  Yet both Jewish and Christian writings in the first few centuries of the common era grappled with shared identity amidst contrasting points of origin.  I'm working through Jacob L Wright's new book on why the Bible began, for instance.  

And all that is to say that I think it is possible to chart out a practical program within which vernacular and popular musical vocabularies can be fairly easily used as the building blocks of 18th century variants of large-scale form, thus Ragtime and Sonata Forms from 2020.  But I want to try to get more practical and map out ways in which ragtime and other popular musical vocabularies can be woven into different kinds of sonata forms.  I had no idea all the above books had been published around the time I was blogging my passion project in 2020.  Now that I have gotten a bit more up to speed on the range of theoretical/analytical options and tools at hand in United States scholarship on music theory and the intersections of "pop" and "classical" I think it would be benificial to draw upon that scholarship to synthesize a theoretical as well as a practical approach to making, well, ragtime and blues based sonata forms.  Maybe I"ll write a bit more about that next week when I have some time.  Meanwhile, that's a sampling of my reading from 2023 and some semi-organized thoughts on directions I'd like Wenatchee The Hatchet to move into in 2024. 

Plus blogging through Matiegka's guitar sonatas.  If none of that happens, happy holidays.  If it turns into blog posts between now and New Year's you'll know.  

UPDATED 12-30-2023

I figured I shouldn't have just put the title names in the post.  So here's an updated/expanded list of reading from the last two years with links to the books at their publication sites:

Johannes Quasten’s Music and Worship in Pagan and Christian Antiquity

Yoel Greenberg's How Sonata Forms (2022)

L Poundie Burstein's Journeys Through Galant Expositions (2020)

James Hepokoski's A Sonata Theory Handbook (December 2020)

Jason Yust's Organized Time: Rhythm, Tonality and Form (2018)

Philip Ewell's On Music Theory, and Making Music More Welcoming for Everyone (April 2023)

The Religious Philosophy of Roger Scruton  (2016)

Art and Politics in Roger Scruton's Conservative Philosophy (December 2022)

Frank Burch Brown's books 

Religious Aesthetics: A Theological Study of Making and Meaning (1993); 

Good Taste, Bad Taste, and Christian Taste: Aesthetics in Religious Life (2003); 

Inclusive yet Discerning: Navigating Worship Artfully (2009)

Chiara Bertoglio's Musical Scores and the Eternal Present: Theology, Time and Tolkien (August 2021)

Ferdia J Stone-Davis' Musical Beauty: Negotiating the Boundary between Subject and Object (2011)

Nicholas Wolterstorff’s Art in Action: Toward a Christian Aesthetic (1987)

                                    Art Rethought: The Social Practices of Art (2017)

John W Kleinig's The Lord's Song: The Basis, Function and Significance of Choral Music in Chronicles

Philip E. Stoltzfus' Theology as Performance: Music, Aesthetics, and God in Modern Theology (2006)

Jaroslav Pelikan’s Bach Among the Theologians

John Neubauer’s The Emancipation of Music from Language: Departure from Mimesis in Eighteenth-Century Aesthetics

Rob C Wegman’s The Crisis of Music in Early Modern Europe, 1470--1530

Percy Scholes’ The Puritans and Music in England and New England: A Contribution to the Cultural History of Two Nations

Kwame Bediako's Jesus and the Gospel in Africa

Richard Taruskin's Musical Times and Lives Examined (2023)

The Invention of Beethoven and Rossini: Historiography, Analysis, Criticism

Spencer Klavan's Music in Ancient Greece: Melody, Rhythm and Life

The Extravagance of Music by David Brown and Gavin Hopps

This addition doubles up as the bibliographic background to the new Appendix for Ragtime and Sonata Forms, too.

sometimes I wonder ... it seems like Christian nationalists in the Idaho realm want a fundamentalist diabology while having a Winkian exousiology

 Doug Wilson says he's a fundamentalist and believes there's a real Satan.  Something that's been nagging at me over the years is that the folks in Moscow, Idaho who are stumping for some kind of Christian nationalism seem to have a general commitment to a Merrill Unger style demonology for formal demonology ... but then for political theology they turn to conversations about how the powers (political powers) are created goods that are fallen but can be redeemed ... ?  If you take that kind of approach to political powers and empires and nation states aren't you pulling ideas out that are straight up Walter Wink?  

I'm not saying Wink's ideas came out of nowhere, they have some precedent in G B Caird's observations about an ambiguity about the powers and principalities in Pauline literature (the powers "could" be redeemed or reconciled, although given "reconciled" as a euphemism within Roman imperial parlance for "subjugated" there's a possibility that the powers being "reconciled" still fits snugly into a Christology within which the powers are overcome) ... but for self-identified Christian fundamentalists there's some explaining in order.  I can get mainline Protestants and progressive Christians staking out a Winkian spirit cosmology about the powers and how and why they arrive at that.  I can even give that a sympathetic reading via Anglican political historians David Nicholls and John Neville Figgis!  

But fundamentalists ... don't seem to have so easy a time explaining why they have their fundamentalist demonology (which largely developed into what it's known for being across medieval Catholic thought, an irony that was not lost on Jeffrey Burton Russell!) while also wanting to tout a Christian nationalism that seems to require an exousiology (theology of the powers) that comes straight out of Walter Wink.  I finished a pretty fun book by Matthew T Prior on Jacques Ellul's ideas about the powers (his exousiology) in the last month or so, and I read a really good book by Esther Acolatse on the reception history of powers and principalities in Ephesians interpretation with a proposal of an African realist approach to the powers.  I've been meaning to write about her book for a while.  I might have to finally write about it.  But I'm not as prolific a blogger as I once was.  Maybe it's a phase ... anyway ... I might have to write more about that set of topics some time later.  

Meanwhile, The Boy and the Heron is fun.  I might have to write some thoughts down about Miyazaki's latest film but I have a kind of holiday dithers about blogging this year. 

Annette Kruisbrink's Dances Nos. 1 & 2 from Five Dances for guitar and doublebass

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VGY75yiEwP0

These are as fun on amplified instruments as they are on unamplified instruments, no surprise. I have the scores for these and think of blogging through them now and then but I'm too backlogged on blogging through music stuff as is for the time being.  Still, I like to share links to Kruisbrink's music from time to time.  Hope you enjoy it. 

two pieces from Current Affairs discussing Philip Ewell's book, some semi-organized thoughts on epistemic trespass that happens when musicians and music theorists opine about religion

https://www.currentaffairs.org/2022/03/can-music-theory-education-overcome-its-whiteness-problem 

https://www.currentaffairs.org/2023/12/a-music-theorist-on-how-white-supremacist-assumptions-have-shaped-the-evaluation-of-music

...

But when people in the United States say “European” music, it’s really just a few places—German-speaking territories, prime among them—and we present it as the way we should think about music. And of course, the idea that pitch, the piano, and 12 tones in a system that emanated—to be blunt—from the Catholic Church is the system that represents all music, that’s kind of what we’ve been teaching. And, of course, colonization: you have to immediately think about the idea of presenting what were essentially white supremacists and patriarchal ideas across the globe in a colonial context. Of course, Christianity played a massive role.

I’m teaching Theory 1 currently, and to just look at all the music theory textbooks, literally last night I thought, Oh, my God, all of these hymns, all of these chorus, all these “Jesus, my pain and suffering”—there’s a lot of Christianity in the music theory textbooks, which I didn’t really dig into in my book. Maybe that’s the next project because that’s what we’re talking about: Catholic traditions morphing into German Protestant traditions of making music.

...

As Taruskin pointed out in The Ox, consolidating and ratifying liturgical music within Carolingian Catholicism is more or less why we began to have the musical notation traditions we have.  Now, obviously, just because those were the historical seeds of what Taruskin called the literate musical traditions of Europe and the United States doesn't mean for a second things stayed that way. Although Taruskin name-checks him, he doesn't mention that Charles Garside Jr. made a case that Zwingli and Bullinger, by banning music from church services, functionally created the realm of fully secular music that was not automatically in service of throne or altar.  

...

Ourkouzounov - Bulgaresque No. 1 for flute, guitar and doublebass

Atanas Ourkouzonov has written a chamber trio for flute, guitar and doublebass you can hear over here.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xL1D_3HobSQ

HT Jim West "Revenge Drives Lots of Research"

https://zwingliusredivivus.wordpress.com/2023/12/18/revenge-drives-lots-of-research/

John Borstlap's new book coming in 2024

Longtime readers know I have disagreed with Borstlap on a variety of topics over the years.  Nevertheless, I plan to read his forthcoming book and whether or not I agree with anything he says in it, congratulations on the new book. :) I read (and genuinely liked) Philip Ewell's book On Music Theory even though I disagree with a few things he said in that book.  I am looking forward to reading Borstlap's forthcoming book in 2024.

https://subterraneanreview.blogspot.com/2023/12/new-book.html

https://www.cambridgescholars.com/product/978-1-5275-5314-9

Regaining Classical Music's Relevance: Saving the Muse in a Troubled World

John Borstlap

ISBN: 1-5275-5314-0

ISBN13: 978-1-5275-5314-9

Release Date: 1st January 2024

Pages: 120

Price: £59.99

I might just have to save up my thoughts on both Ewell's book and Borstlap's book for later in 2024.  This year has been a kind of trippy year IRL. 

Alan Jacobs has a "Hey, wait a minute" moment reading Ted Gioia

https://blog.ayjay.org/multiple-social-diseases/

...  the various examples that Ted gives of this “deadly new lifestyle” point in varying and in some cases opposite directions. Some of these developments show people succumbing to Technopoly; others involve resistance to Technopoly. And that’s a big difference.

Remember that the self-published book Gioia has been running as a series at his Substack has a central thesis that musicology, all of it, has its real "secret" roots in sorcery.  Bryan Townsend once commented at his on blog (The Music Salon) that outside his genuine fields of expertise Gioia comes across like a writer who will torture the evidence until it gives him what he wants. 

Alan Jacobs may have not read it, but the grand dualism that fueled Gioia's book Music: A Subversive History is a glib one that assumes and presumes that the Pythagorean and Orphic traditions of music are all there is to be said about music across the world from the dawn of humanity.  Philip Ewell may have overstated the extent to which 19th century surmises among music theorists in European nations leaned on understandings of ancient Greece that were wishful thinking.  

On the other hand, in the realm of theology and theological aesthetics Philip E Stolzfus wrote an entire book pointing out that there have been fatal flaws in the Orphic and Pythagorean traditions from the beginning.  The Pythagorean speculations about music and number ratios reflecting cosmic order can't account for things like irrational numbers or quirks of the overtone series (of course Kyle Gann pointed out that the overtone series wouldn't be discovered until a century and a half after any Pythagoreans were speculating.  The Orpheus tradition is characterized by lots of blunt stereotypologies about gender and ethnic or racial authenticity on the one hand, and traffics in violent language or cults of violence on the other.  Just because Ted Gioia has more or less thrown in with Team Orpheus doesn't mean the version of Orphism he is peddling is historically plausible is probably the most diplomatic way to put it.  

I used to really enjoy reading Ted Gioia's work but these days I read him hardly at all, and it's as if any post he writes it's a coin toss whether it's going to be some version of "With horns like these you will gore the Arameans!"  Let the reader understand. 

Daniel Read's Sherburne on Nahum Tate's text "While Shepherds Watched Their Flocks By Night" a shape-note Christmas hymn

This is a Christmas song you have "probably" not heard but if you have heard it you'll not soon forget it.

Daniel Read wrote this a long time ago as a contribution to the North American shape-note tradition of hymnody.  It shows up often enough in recordings of shape-note hymnody.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IaET8SQ-RAU

What's tougher to find, though, is a performance of the text beyond the first verse.  For that you sometimes have to go to a more "classical" presentation of Read's work.  

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fIGpydEwwes

https://hymnary.org/text/while_shepherds_watched_their_flocks_by/fulltexts

The text was written by Nahum Tate

multivalent terror and guilt in Godzilla Minus One

Godzilla Minus One rocks.  I'm going to write about it with no regard for whether or not this spoils things for you.  That's how Wenatchee The Hatchet writes about films.  If you don't want spoilers and have been thinking of maybe seeing this one go see it!  This is the Godzilla movie to watch if you've never watched a Godzilla movie before in your life.  

This is the kind of Godzilla movie Americans couldn't make if our lives depended on it.

So off to a spoiler-laden discussion of the film.

Godzilla Minus One rocks

There are benefits to living in the Emerald City, such as being able to catch a great Godzilla movie.  Will write about it later but for the time being gonna bask in the fun of having watched the newest one.  :)  

Alan Jacobs on the blogosphere "bring back the blog". Some of us never stopped blogging

https://blog.ayjay.org/bring-back-the-blog/

Anyone who has read this blog for a year knows that comments hardly ever get made here.  In some cases it was because I published posts and did not allow comments (and if you saw those posts you would know why).

What blogs lack in institutional vetting in most cases they can at least potentially make up for by being chronicles of events at the time those events happened.  In an age in which everything on the internet was never "eternal" and could be purged and redacted rapidly one of the unintentional providential quirks of Wenatchee The Hatchet was chronicling the scope and extent of Mars Hill Church leadership purging and redacting materials as different controversial elements, statements and policies came up.  But more pointedly for me, since I used to attend Mars Hill Church for years, was that I ended up documenting the "season" of chronic resignations and firings that may have made it impossible for Mars Hill public relations to spin the fact that the men who were leaving Mars Hill leadership weren't flakes or firebrands but men who had faithfully served for years with no controversy.

This early 2013 post comes to mind.

https://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2013/01/announcement-from-mark-driscoll-that.html

That one got 6,500 views or so since publication. If memory serves (and it may not a decade later) what probably got people's attention was breaking the news the day it was announced.  Thanks to a network of sources with access to The City I got the news and ran with it the week it was announced.  Eventually Team Driscoll presented the assertion that they got hacked but Wenatchee The Hatchet doesn't hack.  There was at least one private meeting associates got dragged into where Mars Hill leadership expressed an interest that they get me to stop blogging about Mars Hill or give up sources.  The associates, I understand, let it be known that that wasn't going to happen.

Citizen journalism has its limits but it has its values and for all their constraints (and they are considerable) blogging can fulfil citizen journalism well provided you have built trust with a network of sources and, crucially, make sure to document things for the record.  In my case it was documenting things for the record before things got purged that turned out to be valuable.  Alan Jacobs' points are noted but the benefit of the sheer tonnage of information published in blogs, and also sometimes in comments, is that people can cumulatively chronicle things before the people who can pull the strings on websites decide to do mass redaction or pull material completely.

you know ... I "could" write about a few somewhat usual topics per this blog

No Quarter November has come and gone and I have had some thoughts on that kind of stuff.  Philip Ewell has a conversation in Current Affairs that I might have to link to later.  I wouldn't trust either Philip Ewell or John McWhorter on the topic of Christianity like I would Esther Acolatse (ordained Presbyterian that she is and her book on the reception history of Ephesians 6 interpretation from the apostolic era up through Walter Wink and Clinton Arnold is fantastic).  

Because I'm threading music theoretical speculations about time and space across medieval theological treatises on Trinitarian dogmatics by Aquinas and John of Damascus I might be an unusually harsh reader for anything Ewell might have to say about Christianity if I'm drawing on Syrian Christian theology as a corrective to post-Schleiermacherian Germanophile art mysticism.  Some of the most robust cases I've seen in theological aesthetics published in the last fifty or so years of scholarship have come from Catholic and Dutch Reformed/neo-Calvinist circles.  But reading Ewell at Current Affairs I pretty much worked out he hasn't read a single sentence from either Frank Burch Brown or Nicholas Wolterstorff.  And Philip E Stoltzfus' analysis of the Orpheus and Pythagorean schools in Hellenistic philosophy as a false dualism that ignores other approaches to music?  

Pretty sure Ewell hasn't read it.  Pretty likely Ted Gioia hasn't read it either but I'll get to Stolfzfus' analyses of Schleiermacher as Orpheus cheerleader and Barth as neo-Pythagorean after I finish the dense but intriguing book.  The short version is that a theologian has proposed the contrast between Orphic/Pythagorean ideals of music is a false binary because both views have severe weaknesses and are simply not representative of not-Greek approaches to music in theological terms.  I do think Ewell would appreciate that point, though. :)  

I have meant to blog about William T Dargan's great book on the lining hymn tradition in black American churches but the music director at my church still has it and there's been some logistical issues with office pivots.  But I hope in 2024 to get to blogging about Dargan's wonderful book, and it's exciting that Hans Rookmaaker's work is back in print in English because Dargan's account, though he regarded it as speculative, is a speculation mirrored in key ways by Rookmaaker on how it was the low church Calvinist strands of Anglicanism and incipient Methodism that seemed to give room for the lining out of metrical psalmody to evolve as it did in primitive Baptist and Methodist churches in African American communities.  So I do hope to finally blog about the Dargan book but call that a resolution for 2024 blogging.

I have been thinking about writing a supplementary chapter to Ragtime and Sonata Forms dealing with practical approaches to ragtime/sonata fusions for months.  I might have to take a stab at that.  Some of the comments by Ewell and Jason Yust on how Schenkerianism botches the reality that musical repetitions have to be considered truly structural really applies to attempts to adapt ragtime to what would probably have to be called 18th century approaches to form and musical timespace.  

Also ... Hayao Miyazaki has a new movie coming out!  Woo-hoo!  Also ... word of mouth from friends is that Godzilla Minus One is pretty good and not just "pretty good ... for a Godzilla movie".  

I have not done any friendly writing about either Death Note or Spy x Family yet, both lovely anime I've belatedly discovered this year.  

So while part of me wants to get around to some thoughts on some stuff related to Wilson's influence on a Richard Nixon of megachurch preachers and historical influence I'd rather do something more fun, and I hear fun stuff about the new Godzilla movie.  

In other words, some showboating in Moscow, Idaho "could" still be a topic for blogging but ... you've seen there are so many more fun and productive things I could be writing about.  I almost wrote some stuff this last weekend on some of that stuff but thought better of it.  

Also, Matiegka's Grand Sonata I really does need some heavy-duty blogging at some point but I've resigned myself to the fact that the Matiegka blogging project is going to have to roll into 2024 and maybe even 2025 if I'm going to keep the musical analyses at the level I want them to stay at. 

PS for that one reader who commended it, I did try getting into Outlaw Star but the art style just bugged me for reasons I can't really explain.  

could the prince of the kingdom of Persia from Daniel 10:13 be reconciled with God? An exousiological question regarding contemporary bids at Christian nationalism in the circles of Douglas Wilson and Mark Driscoll's current social media writings

https://heidelblog.net/2023/10/three-congregations-that-grew-during-the-covid-lockdown/

Three congregations that reportedly grew during the Covid lockdowns in 2020: Christ Church in Moscow, ID; Grace Community Church in Sun Valley, CA; and Trinity Church in Scottsdale, AZ. These three congregations have a few things in common. Each is led by a powerful personality: Doug Wilson, John MacArthur, and Mark Driscoll respectively. Each of these pastors has been controversial in one way or another, some of which have been chronicled in this space. All of them, to one degree or another, generated controversy over their reaction to the Covid mandates. All of them too took a very public stand in defiance of public health regulations. Comments in a recent article on Driscoll’s congregation in Scottsdale capture well what happened: …

…

We are to live quietly because, Paul says, God desires that all people be saved and come to the knowledge of the truth. The Jews had engaged in rebellions before Jesus. Many of them, Judas among them, expected Jesus to lead a political rebellion against the empire. Bar-Kochbah led a rebellion against Rome in the AD 130s. Paul wanted nothing of it. Paul, like Peter, wants the congregations to be good citizens, but to mind their business so as to do nothing that interferes with the advance of the Kingdom of God.

 None of the Apostles give the slightest hint that they expected the visible church, as a church, to resist the civil authorities, let alone lead a rebellion against them, and yet it was acts of defiance that attracted great numbers of people to these congregations during the Covid regime.

I have been thinking about something that Clark does not necessarily mention but which seems more than tangential to his topic, the influence Doug Wilson and John Macarthur had on a young Mark Driscoll, and a pair of questions that linger over bids by Mark Driscoll and Doug Wilson to stump for some variation of Christian nationalism, questions that, ironically, center on whether or not either of these men have coherent and cohesive exousiologies (not quite the same thing as demonologies).  First, let’s get to Wilson, who has been contending that real men have been shown the door by the pussified society whether or not he’s willing to use Driscollian wording to make the point:

 

https://dougwils.com/books-and-culture/s7-engaging-the-culture/little-old-ladies-of-both-sexes.html

...

The problem has been a dearth of biblical masculinity, and the solution is naturally going to require a restoration of biblical masculinity.

...

Men will always be dominant, in the very nature of the case. They are capable of being dominant in incredibly constructive ways, in ways that are a true marvel. But we, in the grip of a very peculiar frenzy that has a death grip on our little lizard brains, have decided to outlaw constructive dominance.

...

Would this be the kind of biblical masculinity where King David had eight wives and ten concubines?  Between 2 Samuel 3 and 1 Chronicles 3 we get the names of David’s wives, not counting the first:

 

Alan Jacobs briefly considers the possibility that we will have a future of the humanities that is not tethered to the university--considering a history of scholars developing the arts myths we don't always know we've lived by

https://blog.ayjay.org/45702-2/
…

As I have often written, these are good times for the humanities; they’re just not good times for humanities programs in universities. This is why I keep thinking about Emily St. John Mandel’s Traveling Symphony. Even as we try to keep the humanities-in-the-university afloat, I think we need to spend a lot of time imagining the humanities without the university. 

Jacobs is floating the idea that the humanities and the liberal arts will continue even if they are no longer defined by their relationship to university systems.  There is not necessarily going to be a death of the artist, even if there may be what William Deresiewicz has called The Death of the Artist by way of vocational, paid full-time artists.  But let's consider how many centuries the arts pre-dated Anglo-American educational systems and bear that in mind as we face a potential (not actual) future in which the post-industrial university liberal arts programs stop being "the" or even "a" primary way through which people learn the tools of the trade and the crafts of the arts.

Ethan Hein discusses Thelonious Monk's Bemsha Swing

Happy Thanksgiving. One of the things I'm thankful for this day is for the music of Thelonious Monk and that Ethan Hein discussed another one of Monk's pieces. :)

https://www.ethanhein.com/wp/2023/bemsha-swing/

I might have to write more at this spot after holiday festivities but for the time being enjoy Ethan's discussion of this wonderful piece. 

November 24, 2023 4:30pm 

My own approach to this musical gem is, perhaps ironically, to jettison any discussion of harmony except as background for the linear writing.  Yes, we're totally looking at two-thirds of a twelve-bar blues that recursively turns around on itself ad infinitum.  If we don't know about what a twelve-bar blues is supposed to sound like do we even hear the relentless momentum that tacit expectation creates?  I'm going to say probably not.  

For those of us who know "Bemsha Swing" leverages the expectation of a 12-bar blues that is never released this overt manipulation of a conventional expectation is what gives the song its relentless drive.  For people whose musical experience doesn't draw from either jazz or blues they can't hear an expectation subverted that they don't know about to begin with.  Thus music education is immensely valuable for understanding what Monk has done in this song.  

Granting that, I did say I was going to discuss Monk's linear writing.  Because this piece is so short I've taken the liberty of borrowing Ethan Hein's score to highlight the places where Monk uses chains of oblique, contrary and similar motion in the two voices in the score to create compelling counterpoint.  The voice-leading in this song is as solid as granite.  

In "traditional" contrapuntal studies you'll be told that it's dangerous to rely on too much of one kind of motion, especially similar motion, when you're writing out two voices.  It is best to switch things up between oblique, similar and contrary motion.   Since, if I recall correctly, Ethan has discussed the distinctions between these forms of motion I don't want to belabor terms.  Instead I want to highlight Monk's elegant shifting back and forth from oblique to contrary to similar motion within his four-measure phrases and how he uses contrary motion out to multi-octave strong beat arrivals at the start of each of his four-measure phrases on the roots of his core harmonies.

PHRASE 1 (I)

measures 1-4, measure by measure 

oblique motion, contrary motion, similar motion, oblique motion

from measure 4 to 5 contrary motion outward to two-octave interval on tonic

PHRASE 2 (I)

measures 5-8, measure by measure

oblique motion, contrary motion, similar motion, oblique motion

from measure 8 to 9 contrary motion from upper C natural and lower G flat to four-octave interval on subdominant

PHRASE 3 (IV)

measures 9 to 12, measure by measure

oblique, similar, similar, oblique

from measure 12 to 13 contrary motion from upper G natural and lower D flat outward to two-octave interval on C, the tonic

PHRASE 4 (I)

measures 13-16, measure by measure

oblique, contrary, similar/contrary

Of course you shouldn't just take my word for it. I should show you what I mean.  

A point of clarification for how and why I have designated certain measures as having oblique motion is in order. The G naturals on the second half of the fourth beat of each measure of 4/4 are so metrically weak they function as anacruses. In other words, for harmonic/linear considerations we could cut them out altogether and they don't change the overall linear progression of the two voices.  Thus from measures 1 to 2 in Phrase 1 I consider the movement to be oblique.  The C natural stays where it is while the bass voice descends from C down to A natural and reaches A flat by descent at measure 2. If you fixate on that G in the treble clef at the end of measure 1 and try to think of it as a harmony or as a metrically significant tone you'll get thrown off.  Think of it this way, if you literally don't play that G on the last eighth of measure 1 does the harmony change?  No.  Now melodically it's a necessary part of the song. as it reaffirms the rising perfect fourth interval that permeates the melody and is reinforced by the I-IV harmonies.

What makes Monk's linear writing so great is that within each phrase he continuously cycles through varied forms of motion but at each "arrival point", the transition from a measure 4 to a measure 5 or the transition from a measure 8 to a measure 9 he uses contrary motion to hit octaves on the roots of the core harmony of each phrase, the proverbial I and IV in the two-thirds blues turnaround.  Across the phrases he uses a sequence of oblique then contrary then similar the oblique to contrary motion for his tonic phrases.  He uses oblique to similar to oblique motion in his subdominant phrase and uses contrary motion to shift from Phrase 3 to Phrase 4, with Phrase 3 recapitulating the oblique to contrary to similar to contrary sequence of forms of motion.  

The reason you can go with the barest of bare bones harmony of spiral out into more complex options in "Bemsha Swing" is because Monk's linear writing is so immaculate the song is indestructibly great as long as you respect the melody and the bass line as the foundation for whatever it is you want to do.  As Ethan pointed out, there's also the fact that the head tune lends itself so beautifully to imitative procedures.  A melody that can be played against itself with a measure's separation (or two) is, colloquially speaking, the apotheosis of good contrapuntal writing.  Having said that, here's an annotated image of the score to show Monk's linear writing you can find at Ethan Hein's original post. Thanks to Ethan for writing about Monk again.  

Warren Throckmorton revisits the demise of Mars Hill on the tenth anniversary of Mark Driscoll's fateful interview with Janet Meffered

https://warrenthrockmorton.substack.com/p/a-decade-ago-janet-mefferd-accused

If Warren Throckmorton publishes a book about Mars Hill I would definitely be interested in reading it.  I have not written about Making Christianity Manly Again much yet but I am afraid I did not come away with a favorable impression of it.  It seemed to be rehashing observations and ideas that were made more cogently and with far more formidable documentation by Jessica Johnson in Biblical Porn.  McKinney's reference to Jesus and John Wayne may be a clue to readers that you'd be better off reading Kristen Kobes du Mez for yourself.  If you want a sociological treatment of Mars Hill as part of the larger New Calvinist movement skip McKinney's book altogether and go read Brad Vermurlen's Reformed Resurgence.  As frustrated as I was by Mike Cosper's sprawling, diffuse, and overstuffed The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill I would sooner recommend you listen to all of that then read McKinney's book.  Actually, now that I recall, you should read Katelyn Beaty's Celebrities for Jesus before you read McKinney's book, too.

McKinney's book had several profoundly aggravating elements to it that I am probably not going to express my frustrations about until 2024 because while it was an exasperating and tedious book I'm not sure it's worth talking about here in 2023.  She did nothing to situate Driscoll's ideas in light of his Charismatic Catholic family members or his conversion to Protestantism and she couldn't even bring herself to quote Doug Wilson except via Kobes du Mez.  That's absurd for a scholar.  It's not like Doug Wilson isn't relentlessly giving away material each November these days as part of his No Quarter November give-aways.  Leaning on the secondary sources of scholars writing about Doug Wilson when you could cite primary sources seems ... unscholarly.  Particularly since Doug Wilson was openly cited as a major influence on Mark Driscoll by Mark Driscoll himself a sociological take on Driscoll that doesn't try to situate him as having his conversion experience in the American Redoubt (see Crawford Gribben's pretty readable overview of the American Redoubt published by Oxford University Press) seems like a bungle. 

Having kept track of other books that touch on topics dealing with Mars Hill by way of geographic region or doctrinal movement it amazes me that Making Christianity Manly Again is as bad as it is.  At the risk of revealing my alma mater, when I went to the little school by the canal I met an older guy who told me that he attended Seattle Pacific University because of its favorable student to teacher ratio.  He liked being able to be taught by professors with thirty or so fellow students rather than being in a room with five hundred people at the UW in a class that was being taught by a teaching assistant because the actual professor was busy working on another peer-reviewed project or seeking tenure-related stuff.  That said, he told me, SPU was not a research school and never would be.  That was the very big opportunity cost of the school being so good at being an actual teaching institution.  I didn't think about that observation he made for decades until Jennifer McKinney's book came out and then the full implications of his observation really struck me this year.  There are and have been capable scholars at the school, but McKinney's book ... I'll probably wait until 2024 to discuss it.  

Meanwhile,  Throckmorton seems well-positioned to write a book about Mars Hill.  I would also, frankly, like some people who were part of Mars Hill who are also not Mark Driscoll to write books if they feel up to it.  I even have Justin Dean's PR Matters.  It was alright, actually.  I would sooner recommend you read that than Making Christianity Manly Again and I never would've imagined writing that after I first finished reading Dean's book but it's true.  :)  

UPDATE

Given how few books there have been on the topic of Mars Hill I suppose there's the old proverb that beggars can't be choosers.  But McKinney's sermon selections turned out to be from series I documented underwent some significant purges so even I wonder whether or not the versions of the sermons she accessed for her book weren't redacted in some way by the time she got the audio.  That Team Driscoll would purge, redact and re:release material is something even the most fastidious scholar couldn't exactly control for.