links for the weekend: Freddie deBoer and Nathan Robinson on the Harris candidacy; Douglas Wilson has a smashmouth incrementalist plan; Mere Orthodoxy has a piece on the realpolitik of Vance-ian stances; Ethan Hein discusses the distinction between F# and G flat in just intonation

Everything is after the break

https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/i-do-not-need-to-defend-myself-for

Some people really had opinions about my brief flash of unhappiness over the process through which Kamala Harris became the Democratic nominee for president - a coronation which did not require her to receive a single vote from an actual, normal Democratic voter. (It remains the case that she has never received a single vote from any voters outside of California, ever, in her political career, which some might suggest represents a wee bit of risk.) I remain disgusted but not surprised by the Democratic party and its machinations, where not even the smallest fig leaf of democratic process survived Harris’s blitzkrieg approach to the nomination. (That is, having it handed to her by her friends in elite Democratic circles.) And I think Democrats are essentially rerunning 2016, where their loyalty to the Clintonite center-right political machine compelled them to nominate an incredibly flawed candidate in a race in which any generic Democratic governor or senator almost certainly would have won. The party never learns. And so we have the confluence of strategic idiocy and rank elitist control. Well: I decline to obediently get onboard the way that (for example) the entire New York Times Opinion section has. Let me explain.

It’s not really about Kamala. As was to be expected, there was a loud response from a certain vocal faction of Democrats who have relentlessly policed any perceived slight against Kamala Harris, for years, saying that of course I immediately complained about the first Black woman presidential candidate of a major party!, but Kamala is a secondary part of the problem. The major problem is that I think the Democrats have essentially abandoned any pretense that the voters get to choose their candidates, which is part of a larger bad dynamic where the party is increasingly ruled by an utterly unaccountable aristocracy of cutthroat neoliberals. This is intertwined with the deepening gerontocracy problem in American politics, in which the only way senescent political leaders leave the stage is in a coffin. This trouble with elite overriding of popular sentiment is far bigger than Kamala Harris. I assure you that if everything had happened in the exact same way, but Mayor Pete was the one selected by the Politburo, I would be just as unhappy about it.

…

Primaries are the immune systems of political parties. You know how we’re in this big terrible mess because Joe Biden looked too infirm and compromised to win a presidential election? You know how everybody’s been freaking out for a month about it? Well, there was one way that we could have averted this disaster: holding an actual fucking primary. Had there been a primary, Biden’s weakness would have been made apparent months ago. Had there been debates, Biden’s vulnerability in that format would have been unmistakable. Had there been a primary, all of these decisions about how to replace Biden could have been made not just with democratic legitimacy but with the added data that a primary provides, with the knowledge of who performed better and who performed worse. I’ve said before, the fact that Harris looked so feeble after she was attacked by Tulsi Gabbard in the last primary cycle - attacked quite effectively, I might add, simply with an accurate representation of her record as a prosecutor - is the kind of thing that primaries reveal. They weed out weakness. They give us more understanding of how candidates perform on the trail and under pressure. We’ve been robbed of that information.

…

Since Freddie deBoer used the metaphor comparing primaries to the immune system of a party I’ll say that when Trump got the GOP nomination I took that to mean the party developed some kind of auto-immune disease. I’ve said a few times at my blog (and among friends and family) that I figured out I’m a Mark Hatfield Republican and if you don’t know who the Oregon Senator was go read about him. My friends and family from Oregon, at any rate, have no misunderstandings what that means. I am not sure Harris is going to win against Trump. I wish Trump had never managed to secure the GOP nomination to begin with but he’s obviously running again. I’ll pray for his safety and Biden’s whether or not I ever liked either of them.

Now lest deBoer seem to just be deBoer I feel some obligation to point out that Nathan Robinson has also registered a complaint that by running with Harris the DNC has abandoned the pretense of having held a real primary.

https://www.currentaffairs.org/news/the-kamala-conundrum

After weeks of pressure, Joe Biden has dropped out of the presidential race, fulfilling the prediction that Cenk Uygur recently made in this magazine. Biden is being hailed as a “hero” and a “statesman” who put his country before his personal ambition. That isn’t true, though. Biden put his personal ambition first, defying the majority of voters who thought he was unfit to run. He may have tanked his party’s prospects in November by preventing a real primary from taking place that could have produced the strongest candidate. He left the race only after the lies about his mental fitness had been exposed, when it became clear that he had lost the support of his party and would be unable to win in November. Nancy Pelosi had told Biden that he could be eased out of the race “the easy way or the hard way,” and that after three weeks of trying the easy way (explaining to Biden behind closed doors that he couldn’t win), Democrats were about to start on the hard way. 

…

One of my relatives said that it sounded like people on the left were contending that anyone who objected to Harris’ candidacy was a racist and a misogynist.  No, based on my readings this month the left has complained more clearly about Harris’ candidacy than Clintonian centrists and other mainstream liberals. If the GOP candidate were Condoleeza Rice or Colin Powell I don’t suspect DNC partisans would be touting their candidacies as proof that “the system works”.

From more evangelical/socially conservative/Christian circles there’s a question I spotted at Mere Orthodoxy about Vance and company

https://mereorthodoxy.com/when-the-resistance-comes-to-rule-j.-d.-vance-and-the-apotheosis-of-postliberal-politics

…

Already, we are seeing postliberal politicos strain under the burden. Sohrab Ahmari—who once found it easy to dismiss David French and “Zombie Reagnaism” as overly procedural and pragmatic—is now busy carrying water for Vance’s embrace of the abortion pill. Where Reaganites and Buchananites once decried pornography as degrading and “raw sewage” from official party documents and platforms, the same Republican National Convention that hailed Vance is in complete moral disrepair, suffering decadence far worse than that subjected to postliberalism’s most withering critiques of the “old conservative consensus.”

The convention that raised Vance to the highest heights has razed the party’s pro-life platform, celebrated Satanism, normalized pornography, and embraced same-sex marriage—not exactly a reassuring sign of Vance’s and postliberalism’s promise that “social conservatives will always have a seat at the table.” Perhaps that table will be in Eric Trump’s metaphorical basement of low-priority policies? For the country’s sake, we should pray not.

In the wake of Reaganism’s greatest political victories, much of a subsequent generation of conservative Christians learned to blame Reaganism for society’s greatest failures. With postliberalism’s greatest political victory looking ever more inevitable, a series of political questions have begun to emerge: will the emerging generation of conservative Christians come to blame postliberalism in similar ways?

If Vance and other young Christians embraced postliberal streams of the faith in order to “join the resistance,” what happens when the resistance finally comes into power? Could the “fractious men” and “economic dissidents” who once flocked to postliberalism rediscover a compelling Christian politics in older, classical conservative sources? Could they find, between an individualistic libertarianism and a technocratic postliberalism, still richer accounts of political life? Will the next political movement—post-post-liberalism—mark a return to the fusionism of yesteryear or its further abandonment?

Only time will tell. As the saying goes, “history never repeats itself, but it often rhymes.”

Years ago D. G. Hart described Reagan as having pulled off the feat of getting social conservatives (or, say, Russell Kirk conservatives), libertarians and anticommunists (neo-cons, etc.) to actually collaborate on political goals. A comparable synthesis may have occurred among Clintonians with conservative Democrats, progressives and not necessarily any social democrats or democratic socialists (though among pundits on the right the propensity to collapse all of those groups into “the left” is inescapable).  I began to suspect around 2016 that both these ramshackle tripartite alliances had fractured but that, for the sake of internal agitation propaganda purposes the proverbial “left” and “right” or “liberal” and “conservative” power broker systems found it useful to present “them” as more organized than “us”.

A person might get a sense that on both sides of the aisle just plain winning trumps principle and procedure, pardon the at-this-point-hard-to-avoid-pun.

The usual suspect self-ordained preacher in Moscow, Idaho says he has a plan that’s part of smashmouth incrementalism on a single issue

https://dougwils.com/books-and-culture/s7-engaging-the-culture/smashmouth-incrementalism-and-the-trump-train.html

…

Now JD Vance said in his speech that social conservatives will always have a place at “this table” as long he is involved in the process, and so we ought to take him up on that. He said that Donald Trump feels the same way. This means that Trump wants to give social conservatives “something we want,” but has decided that he does not want to give us “everything we want” (as signaled by the platform change). This means we need to be shrewd about which “something” we ask for.

So we should sit down at this table, the one at which we were invited to remain, and we should bring up our plan. Did I mention that I have one? What “something” should we negotiate for?

Instead of walking away to nurse our hurt feelings, I believe that all those of us who are anti-abortion should make a point of offering to make a different deal. Trump really is a transactional man, and we, without compromise, can also be transactional—he, according to his principles, and we, according to ours.

But this really needs to be an offer to negotiate, doing so from a position of strength. It should not be a request. It needs to be an offer to deal.

A position of strength, you say? What strength? The answer is whatever strength we have—and we shall see if we have it.

…

This fall pro-life activists need to call upon every Republican senator and every Republican senatorial candidate to commit, on the record, that they will refuse to vote to confirm any nominee for the federal bench, and especially SCOTUS, however qualified, if that nominee is not absolutely committed to upholding Dobbs. If they refuse to commit, or if they take the pledge but then waffle on it, then they will be challenged in the next primary election.

We really need to hold this line, in case someone like Thomas retires, and we absolutely need to strengthen our position, in case one of the liberal seats comes open, which is where the hot war will be conducted.

…

Smashmouth incrementalists want to take every gain we can take in the moment, but never want finally to “settle” until we have obtained an absolute ban on all human abortion. That is the goal, and we must never forget that this is the goal. The abolitionists want to go for the absolute ban now, with no agreed-to compromises on the way. I don’t see any reason why we could not cooperate on something like this proposal, which would permit us to pursue our respective strategies at the state level.

…

Look, I’m against elective abortion (go see my quick reference to being a Mark Hatfield Republican above, Hatfield was against abortion and the death penalty and voted against U.S. military intervention in Vietnam). Having said that, Douglas Wilson is every bit as much a self-designated activist elite celebrity preacher as Jesse Jackson.

I’ve planned on ending this links for the weekend on a happier note and the note could be fudged a bit, enharmonically, between F sharp and G flat. Ethan Hein has a new post on the distinction between F sharp and G flat in just intonation.  It gets technical fast when he gets into the tuning he used but it’s still a fun read.

https://www.ethanhein.com/wp/2024/f-sharp-vs-g-flat-in-just-intonation/

…

it’s important to know that Western note naming is a path-dependent kludge, not a flawless logical system. If you find it confusing, you’re right to! I come from the jazz world, where people are casual about their enharmonics, and from the rock world, where they barely even know what note names are, much less how to apply them correctly. When I learned my Western tonal theory properly, I found it oppressive. I tended to always call the note you play using the second fret on the guitar’s E string “F-sharp” regardless of context. Why bother remembering when to call it G-flat? When I learned about just intonation and meantone, I understood why the names mattered.

Just intonation is not just for music history class. Not everyone plays keyboards and fretted instruments! Singers and players of continuous-pitch instruments can play just intonation as easily as they can play 12-TET, and they often instinctively play more in tune than they are supposed to. Guitarists sometimes tune their B string a little flat so it plays the just third in the key of G. When blues musicians bend their notes, they are probably aiming to make them sound more in tune, not out of tune.

…

Taking another step back: what does it even mean for something to be “in tune” or “out of tune”? When you start reading about just intonation, you very quickly discover these guys (they are always guys) who use its mathematical basis to try to prove its objective correctness and profundity. These arguments inevitably lead to intellectual colonialism. Most cultures around the world have historically tuned by ear rather than through any kind of numerical system; sometimes they do arrive at just intonation that way, sometimes they don’t. Auditory experience is ultimately the only thing that matters, and the ear likes what it likes for reasons we can barely even articulate.

Even within Anglo-American pop, there is no consensus on what constitutes “good” tuning practice. Millions of Rolling Stones fans enjoy listening to wildly out-of-tune guitars and singing that is casually tuned at best. Fans of the Grateful Dead seem to prefer to hear out-of-tune singing paired with (more or less) in-tune guitars. Jazz fans have to make peace with a lot of out-of-tune pianos. Hip-hop and electronic dance music producers detune their synths and samples on purpose. Whether you are interested in the specifics of Western European tuning history or not, it’s good to know that 12-TET is just one possible system, and not necessarily the best one.

 

I suppose at this point it might be worth pointing out that while Ethan Hein is right that the just intonation guys tend to be guys they are not always (and have not always) been straight.  I hesitate to say the arguments always lead back to intellectual colonialism because Partsch attempting to retrieve what he believed were older Greek tunings was taken up as an anti-Western and anti-Christian move (Ben Johnston’s account). Partsch was also interested in non-Western musics.  Lou Harrison was perhaps even more steeped in non-Western music. If anything I would suggest that just intonationist composers attempting to retrieve the microtonal elements from ancient Greek, Native American, Balinese and other non-Western musics “could” be construed as a kind of colonialism but, if so, the rubric of appropriation itself might still need some interrogating.  I’m half Native American and half white. My Native American dad was a low church Calvinist Christian while my mom was a Pentecostal/charismatic Arminian. I have threaded the needle on varied theological and cultural traditions over the course of my life, finding things I appreciated and disapproved of from both halves of my family history.  

Sometimes intellectual colonialism, if I may, takes paradoxical forms.  In Kika Kila John W Troutman pointed out that there was a scholastic supermyth in the mid-20^th century that slide guitar evolved from an African monochord zither tradition despite there being literally no evidence produced for such claims. By contrast, he found it easy to find thousands of advertisements in newspapers for Hawaiian Native produced pedagogy on slide guitar techniques; early blues masters of slide playing described themselves as playing “Hawaiian style”. A combination of Hawaiian disdain for the style of guitar playing they pioneered and a shift in black power scholarship made it seem as though African American guitarists invented slide guitar playing.  Troutman doesn’t contest their role in promulgating and dispersing the style of playing, but he suggests that we should reconsider the ways scholarship from the past elevated African American contributions at the price of erasing the formative contributions of Hawaiian Natives to the art of slide guitar.  Philip Ewell’s essays about colorasure are worth reading but it’s possible to make a case from John Troutman’s work that there have been cases in which black (and white) scholars have been so eager to highlight black innovations that indigenous American contributions were unintentionally sidelined or overlooked.  We should try to be as careful as we can, granting that we’re all frail mortals, charting the histories of musical styles.  What I have read of advocates of just intonation suggests to me not that they were attempting to be colonialists of any kind but, whether successfully or not, retrieving and advocating for whole approaches to tuning that were no longer considered “Western” or were designated “Oriental” rather than “Occidental”.

The sticky wicket I’ve been thinking about is that many a musicologist in the United States would be aghast at Christian nationalisms predicated on ethnic essentialist narratives don’t seem to have many qualms about standing on such ethnic/racial essentialist surmises when the issue is musical “authenticity”.  I have read “just” enough critical race theorists to appreciate Charles W Mills’ contention that race is socially constructed but no less real for being a social construct and that, with this, laboring to overcome the impact of those social constructions can entail rethinking things. If race is a socially constructed social reality how much more is music socially constructed? A more trenchant constructivist stance will, I suspect, stake out the implications of this observation to the point that colonial/imperial terminology may have limits.  For those of us who have never been ethnically “pure” enough to be Native American or white in some blood quantum sense, and who have never valued that approach, we’re stuck in the proverbial no man’s land if we have to measure up to some schematic race/ethnos essentialist pattern. 

Kyle Gann made an observation in The Arithmetic of Listening that stuck with me, pointing out that there is a cosmic joke in sound.  You will never be able to get to the Pythagorean purely tuned simple number ratios by drawing upon “nature” if by “nature” you mean the overtone series. If just intonation could be construed as the music of heaven where perfect ratios exist the music of the overtone series we have in our physical world is what is available since Adam and Eve were cast out of Eden.  It is hubris to surmise that we can so perfectly tune our instruments that some heavenly set of number ratios will be in our music.  Against the Pythagorean hardliners but from within Pythagorean traditions, Aristoxenus and others advocated tuning by ear.  Does it sound good?  Great, stick with that.  Idealist and pragmatist conceptions of tuning and temperament have co-existed for millennia.  This could be where, for instance, Jewish mystical literature may have a role to play.  The earthly copy may not be exactly like its heavenly counterpart but the copy is still worth making, isn’t it? I’ve been slowly going through some Andrei Orlov books on the development of modes of knowledge and embodiment in Jewish apocalyptic and mystical writings.  Orlov’s not always easy to read but I find his work interesting.  It may be of some use in mediating the kinds of polarities that tend to get trundled out by the likes of Ted Gioia who want to sell people versions of music history predicated on the most strident and often dubious kinds of dualisms.

Anyway, I am not planning to be a just intonation composer myself but I appreciate the role just intonation and microtonal composers have played in highlighting the recency of equal tempered tuning.  It’s a recent innovation that is not representative of most of even Western musical history and it’s when 20^th century figures ranging from Theodor Adorno to Roger Scruton (not that that’s a wide swath!) write as if there was some “natural” trajectory in Western music “toward” this single tuning system that we have good reason to reject the claims of both men.  There have been more options on the table since the beginning of time than the one industrial level trans-Atlantic standard we currently have.

As a classical guitarist with a background in choral singing I got used to the idea that enharmonic pivots happen in choral music and sharps tended to be used in rising lines and flats in descending lines, unless we’re in flat keys in which keys an A natural could be a secondary leading tone to B flat in the key of E flat major.  Hein is right that the norms are post hoc conventions building on other conventions and that it is inaccurate to surmise that there is some comprehensive thought-out-in-advance system at work in how these conventions developed. 

Among guitarists we could talk about the mystery of why we notate everything in the treble clef yet play things an octave lower than written despite the fact that we could have run with a tradition of scoring guitar parts in a grand staff the same way pianists do.  Stravinsky tried that for a guitar part at some point in his Four Songs for voice, flute, harp and guitar.  Hardly any guitarists I know of play that guitar part, though, and some of that may be because guitarists are not used to reading grand staff notation, let alone anything written in a C clef.

So … that was a more sprawling links for the weekend post than I anticipated writing.