a belated RIP Arleen Sorkin

for me the one and only voice of Harley Quinn. 

RIP

Ethan Hein on Stevie Wonder's "Don't You Worry `Bout A Thing" a couple of thoughts on harmonic language and contrapuntal variation in the song

So Ethan Hein has written about another Stevie Wonder song and while I don’t have a lot I am going to write I can’t not write about this masterpiece of a song, seeing as this year is the 50^th anniversary of the release of Innervisions and this song is on that album. First, go read Ethan Hein’s post:
https://www.ethanhein.com/wp/2023/dont-you-worry-bout-a-thing/

Ethan Hein has been writing about musical borrowing in and out of classical music and I can't not share a few case studies from liturgical vocal music and classical guitar repertoire

Ethan Hein has been blogging about musical borrowing in classical music and popular music.  He discussed the changing nature of musical borrowing of the Dies Irae (plainchant) as distinct from settings of the Dies Irae liturgical text (an important distinction to keep in mind that is a given for those of us who sing and do the church music thing in church life but which needs introduction for those who don't).

https://www.ethanhein.com/wp/2023/dies-irae/

https://www.ethanhein.com/wp/2023/musical-borrowing-syllabus/

a sprawling links for the weekend post, variations on a ground bass--counterpoint under fire in the 1470s. laments about a loss of Catholic liturgical music that was lambasted in the years it was being written, and how fifteen C. musicians defended their jobs at the expense of ordinary musicking people

https://mereorthodoxy.com/musical-localism-and-the-rebirth-of-culture

...

The ethnomusicologist Thomas Turino has written on this distinction, which he takes to be more fundamental than any genre distinction, between “participatory” and “presentational” kinds of music. “If we briefly consider the products of the music industry over time,” says Turino, “we can glimpse cosmopolitans’ gradual shift in thinking of music making as a social activity to music as an object.” He talks about what it was like interacting with Peruvian festival music of the 1980s, before (or athwart) the arrival of the various technologies that have enabled our presentational era. “For them,” says Turino, “a recording is to ‘music’ what, for us, a photograph is to the person in the snapshot: a representation of something else, not the real thing.”

 

It is worth asking for a moment where and how the change occurred in music. Here I depart a great deal from other traditionalists and conservatives who talk extensively about music, particularly the late Roger Scruton, as well as the various others who have written on the topic such as E. Michael Jones and Julian Johnson. For many of these thinkers, the moment of decline occurred somewhere in the twentieth century or perhaps the nineteenth, and the culprit was, variously, dissonance, a rejection of long-standing norms of form, professionalism, and, most of all, the rise of commercial recording technologies that allowed music to become abstracted from live, public performance.

 

Here I am much more radical: Classical music is not the solution to our problems; it is the problem. I consider the shift from Palestrina to Monteverdi, from Bach to Haydn, as far more fundamental than the shift from Wagner to Schoenberg or from tonality to atonality or from Rachmaninoff on shellac to the Beatles on vinyl.

...

Well, to go by Rob C Wegman’s The Crisis of Music in Early Modern Europea 1470 to 1430, classical music, in the sense of being elite music produced by elite for elites that was bankrolled by a system of indulgences has always been the problem.  I know John Ahern knows about this book because I discovered it reading a couple of his blog posts at Ad Fontes Journal online.