links for the weekend: Ethan Hein on songs covered by Norah Jones and The Allman Brothers; Norman Lebrecht on the day the symphony died; Anglican high and low liturgy and why that matters with art snobs; Brad East on providence as a doctrine of consolation and Matt Jantzen on the same as doctrine of racial entitlement and theologians against that paradigm; Alastair Roberts on providence and ambition; riffs on Leviathan; and Jim West will be happy to know there are new books on Emil Brunner this year

We haven’t had a links for the weekend in a while and there’s some catching up to do.

some draw more pleasures
from their acts of appraisal
than what they appraise

a thought on closing words from Ted Gioia's Music: A Subversive History with a little help from Peter Beagle

 I have written plenty of my disagreement with Gioia's foundational assumptions and methodologies in Music: A Subversive History in the past. There is, however, an entirely different kind of rebuttal to his claims.

Take one of his closing manifesto points, that "through the power of music, we can all be wizards"

Are we talking Mommy Fortuna, Nikos, Mabruk or Schmendrick?  The Last Unicorn was published more than half a century ago and its central thematic point was that there are two very different kinds of magic, the kind that seems and the kind that makes.  Mommy Fortuna is the one skilled in the former kind of magic, the kind that can put one over on the gullible and can temporarily hoodwink even those with a gift for magic of the generative kind, but it's a magic of making things seem to have changed rather than actually changing anything.  The second kind of magic has the power to really change people and things but it is far harder to control or master. Schmendrick, famously, is so incompetent at this latter form of magic he has to have a protective spell to let him live long enough to eventually get any master of this second, more powerful and real kind of magic.

Gioia can say that through the power of music we can all be wizards but it can't be lost on him that for those of us who know Peter Beagle's story that's inviting the unavoidable follow up question, "Oh, really?  What kinds of wizards can we all be through the power of music?" The Last Unicorn was half a century old by the time Gioia's would-be subversive history came out, after all.

Something to consider.  

the Ahn Trio and Antigone Goni perform "Lamento" and "Rock Bulgare" by Atanas Ourkouzounov

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zn0lfVEB9nQ