Stuff has happened in real life and I have felt less inspired to blog here compared to other times. The Matiegka project is a slow cooker project as is but sometimes things come up. As usual I'm not going to disclose details.
On the other hand, what I will say is that I've been playing around with musical ideas this year. The centennial of Scott Joplin's death was 2017 and it came and went with what I felt was too little consideration for the composer so I am incubating some stuff with an eye and ear toward showing that it's possible to do a juxtaposition of ideas from Scott Joplin and Johann Sebastian Bach. That Art of Fugue subject requires almost no modifications to become a staccato jump bass line pattern in a ragtime adaptation for the guitar.
For years I have considered Theodor Adorno to be catastrophically wrong about American popular music but I don't think it's enough to just contend he was wrong in theory. Andrew Bowie did well enough writing that the problem with Adorno's canards is that there has never been a "state of the material" from which to say tonality is used up and there has never been a "state of the technique" against which to regard tonal materials as no longer legitimate to use. Roger Scruton had his own disagreements with elements of Adorno but Scruton and Adorno were too similar in their snobbery.
I say that the real way to prove Adorno (and Scruton) were mistaken is to compose ragtime sonatas and introduce ragtime fugal work. Because ragging the classics is a known custom in the style there's nothing to keep a ragtime composer from composing a ragtime reworking of, say, Contrapunctus I materials that can culminate not just in a grand stretto but in a presentation of the Art of Fugue with the incipit of a ragtime strain as a countersubject with fully convertible counterpoint.
Since eveything Scott Joplin composed has become public domain composing ragtime sonatas drawing upon his work (or Joseph Lamb or James Sylvester Scott) is a way to show that before Adorno ever wrote "On Jazz" the materials of ragtime had enough possibilities within them for sonata forms. Sure, it's 2025 and all but this step would be a step that I think can plausibly and defensibly be made as a step Joplin was working toward during his life. We never got that piano concerto from him, alas, but exploring the possibilities of sonata forms with the vocabulary of ragtime can still be a way for those of us who like his music to explore formal and developmental possibilities he didn't live long enough to explore himself.
I am incubating, a bit more slowly than I thought, an essay on approaches to sonata expositions using 12-bar blues themes but other things have been happening in real life.
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