... 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.
