Ted Gioia continues to say musicology originated in the study of spells but his just-so tale would make more sense as a battle between highbrow and lowbrow art religions

I was reminded of the progress of a book by Bryan Townsend's blogging lately.

At this point on April 1, 2023 it’s not surprising Ted Gioia’s latest book Music to Raise the Dead: The Secret Origins of Musicology has been getting self-published by Gioia at his Substack. By now GIoia has reached chapter 5 of 11. Lately he has held forth along the following lines:

https://tedgioia.substack.com/p/where-did-musicology-come-from

…
That shouldn’t be possible. Magic and science are total opposites. They shouldn’t rub shoulders. But music is the place where that strange meeting actually happens—in fact, an aware musician is always operating at a kind of crossroads where the known world meets a mystical realm. And that happens constantly, not just in ancient times but even today.
This is no empty claim. You feel it when you listen to music—perhaps not everyday, but at least on a few transformative occasions, maybe at a memorable concert you still think about years later, or at a dance or party or ritual. That’s why musicology, esteemed as the science of music, must also learn to embrace the ecstasy of music.
 
Musicology really ought to be a science of ecstasy. But instead, this magical stuff is feared and censored. That’s why conventional musicology is at a loss when dealing with the mystical writings of Sun Ra (which we discussed in chapter one). That’s why scholars try to sanitize the story of blues legend Robert Johnson, whose mythos has such deep supernatural elements. That’s why they gape in disbelief when I point out that the oldest active jazz venue in San Francisco is the Church of John Coltrane.
 
It’s no coincidence that we find ourselves discussing churches at this stage. That’s because magic and religion also intersect—and their dialectical merging is a crucial part of understanding the true scope of musicology.
 
At a certain point in human history, magical spells turned into prayers and religious music. You might think that those two things are very different, but they’re almost the same. Sometimes it’s very difficult to distinguish between a magic spell and a religious prayer. If you examine the history of witchcraft, you will learn that judges often made decisions of life or death on the basis of tiny word differences.
 
Sometimes inserting the name of Jesus or the Virgin Mary in the middle of a spell was enough to make it acceptable to authorities. But not always. As we shall see later in this book, many people were condemned as witches even though they thought they were aligned with formal Christian theology and practice.
 
This is a good juncture for us to look at how the hero’s journey—which is the central myth of musical magic—got turned into a religious concept. The oldest sources for musicology focus on this journey, which predates all organized religions but also permeates them. Sonatas and fugues and symphonies (and other formal structures) came later, but they retain these mythical and religious evocations.
 
That’s why the earliest theoretical commentaries on music—which are essentially guides to this journey—are permeated with metaphysics. The science of harmony didn’t exist at this early juncture. Or, to put it a better way, harmony was a much larger concept in this musicology than just the ways the notes fit together.
 
I could demonstrate this in many ways. For example, I could point to remarkable passages in Augustine’s Confessions where he describes ecstatic experiences, merging intense joy and painful hardship, that are almost like a Christianized shamanism—and they are initiated by singing or chanting the psalms. Or I could cite countless Pythagorean or Neo-Pythagorean texts on music that aspire to scientific accuracy, but keep on collapsing into the strangest mysticism. Or I could explore similar elements in Sufism and its whirling dances, or Tibetan Buddhism and its chanting and damaru drumming, or the ritualistic theurgy of the Neoplatonists.
…

Emahoy Tsegué-Maryam Guèbrou has died, and if you haven't heard her, Ted Gioia mentioned her work a few years back, Ethan Iverson further back, and in any case give her music a listen

https://www.theguardian.com/music/2023/mar/27/emahoy-tsegue-maryam-guebrou-ethiopian-nun-and-pianist-dies-at-99

https://www.theguardian.com/music/2023/mar/28/emahoy-tsegue-maryam-guebrou-the-ethiopian-nun-who-was-one-of-historys-most-distinctive-pianists

according to Pitchfork there's another album of her work slated for release later this year.

https://pitchfork.com/news/emahoy-tsegue-maryam-guebrou-ethiopian-pianist-and-nun-dies-at-99/

Gioia mentioned her back around 2021.

https://tedgioia.substack.com/p/the-honky-tonk-nun-of-ethiopia

Ethan Iverson mentioned her back in 2017

https://ethaniverson.com/2017/04/21/the-story-of-the-wind/

I only got around to mentioning her by name here in 2021 myself. I had forgotten Iverson mentioned her back in 2017 either because I just forgot or maybe I hadn't even begun linking to Iverson's blog (which I recommend you go check out). I mentioned her, in passing, at a links for the weekend post.

https://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2021/09/links-for-weekend-on-theme-ted-gioia.html

But she deserves a post of her own in case you had never heard of her or heard her work before. 

Someone's posted a video with audio of her music over here.

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

sometimes I get frustrated by some pieces in Current Affairs in much the same way I get frustrated by Blog and Mablog

Since I'm a self-identified moderate conservative no one might be surprised at that, and I've only half-joked I worked out I am a Mark Hatfield style Republican in an era when the GOP has no use for people like that.  But sometimes I'll see something like this ... 

https://www.currentaffairs.org/2023/03/stalin-will-never-be-redeemable

... and I'll read a passage like this:

...  After being publicly shamed in forums like the United Nations, some postwar American leaders felt pressured to support the Civil Rights movement “out of a desire to promote a positive image of America abroad, particularly in the contest for support in developing and decolonized countries in Africa, Asia, and Latin America—principal proxy arenas for the Cold War.” (This much is, nowadays, admitted on official government websites.) As interventions in world history go, that’s not a small thing, and Stalin’s government won the support of several prominent African American thinkers and activists, including Langston Hughes (who poignantly noted¹ that “In the Soviet Union, dark men are also mayors of cities”), Paul Robeson (who visited the USSR in 1934 and said that “Here, I am not a Negro but a human being for the first time in my life”), and even a late-career W.E.B. Du Bois. Could these three men, each a genius in his own field, have been so completely wrong?

Well, yes. Sadly, they could. To an extent, they had good reason for being taken in—the extent of Soviet repression wasn’t yet well known, and when people like Hughes and Robeson toured the USSR, they were shown a carefully curated version that showcased only the best elements. (For the same reason, dignitaries visiting the U.S. do not see Rikers Island.) The Stalinists of the 20th century desperately wanted to believe in the promise of a new society, and they weren’t given the facts they needed to see through the illusion. In the 21st century, though, we have no such excuse. There is ample evidence from dozens of different sources detailing Stalin’s abuses and betrayals, and it has become impossible to view his time in power with any kind of admiration or nostalgia. Instead, it’s vital for today’s leftists to face the truth, horrible as it is, and avoid falling into the same old patterns of self-deception.

and ... how ignorant were they, according to the author?

Adam Neely and Ethan Hein bounce ideas back and forth on why the major sixth was considered a kind of dissonant interval in Renaissance music (or not), some rusty observations ...

https://www.ethanhein.com/wp/2023/why-did-13th-century-europeans-think-that-major-sixths-were-dissonant/

Okay, so the first thought I had, having sung a few choral works from the Renaissance is that we may want to back up the truck and ask not why a major sixth was considered a dissonant interval for "harmony" and ask why it may have been viewed as a dodgy interval in melodic writing.  It's been, I admit, decades since I have sung Renaissance vocal music and just as long since I fielded theoretical reading on that topic but ... I remember noticing that major sixths were not common melodic intervals.

Now imagine, if you will, that you are in a vocal ensemble performing music and you get your starting pitches but you have no instrumental back up or if you have instrumental back up you are singing with the notes (scholars have debated whether this is legit but I don't want to rabbit hole into historically informed practice and how Taruskin and others expressed doubts about how HIP the HIP could really be). Let's bear in mind that many of the singers may not be professionals and some of the singers may be professionals but there may be kids in there (boys singing parts that would eventually be sung by women or girls, not counting castrati).  Imagine that, with no back up for your pitches, you all have to sing a descending major sixth.  How many of you have done this?  In my experience large descending intervals like sixths are perilously easy to screw up.  

The warnings against major sixths in Renaissance treatment may, if memory serves, reflect some practical realizations that there are intervals that may be so badly bungled so often by less-than-ideal-singers it was better to warn composers to just not use those intervals.  Vile an loathsome discords can have practice-based reasons that are not "just" related to tuning systems, although surely tuning systems have played a part.  Even with college choirs if you have enough melodic sixths that get bungled by music majors a piece that was cued up in C major by the choir director at the start can end in A flat major even though there are no modulations specified in the work and no scored changes of mode.  I am not speaking hypothetically.  I was in a choir that screwed up in exactly this sort of way and I think it was some kind of Romantic era choral work.  Maybe.

Renaissance rules about vocal writing put a lot of restraints on melodic writing practices that can seem opaque and absurd to us because we're used to choral music where everyone has accompaniment and back up notes or can listen to practice tracks.  Imagine you have none of that, that you have to be able to sing what's on the page under not-so-ideal conditions, and that you got one shot at this.  Do you want to have some major sixth in your melodic line then?  Eh ... I hope you're getting an idea of why certain intervals were carefully handled in Renaissance music.  Bear in mind I'm not a professional musician and I'm not claiming more than rusty first-hand experience singing Renaissance era music, but I am thinking back about how, yeah, major sixths were handled with care.  It wasn't that you could never use them, it's that they had contextual preparations.  

If I wanted to end this with some pseudo-Marxist flourish I'd say the material means of production were hugely important and this would mean not just the tuning systems but also the sheer limits of the not-always professional human singing voices that had to perform this stuff.