revisiting Grand Sonata I as work analyzing Grand Sonata II in progress

https://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2024/02/an-analysis-of-matiegkas-grand-sonata-i.html

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ReaD2tPWX6E

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6IlI3wl7zIo

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L4C7cLmh07s

 

Along the way I have discovered someone uploaded all of Diabelli's Op. 29 guitar sonatas to imslp.org!  Well, that means I should at least consider revisiting the work I did analyzing the Diabelli sonatas.  No. 3 in F major being public domain invites a great opportunity to get into the nuts and bolts of a Type 2 form, in Hepokoski and Darcy's taxonomy of Elements of Sonata Theory.  I like Matiegka's sonatas quite a bit more, which longtime readers will probably find obvious.  I don't feel much like going back to Diabelli's No. 1 or No. 2, honestly, but a detailed return to No. 3 would be worth doing.  

Ted Gioia on a recent thing with the Chicago Sun-Times, more about the troubles with AI.

https://www.honest-broker.com/p/a-major-newspaper-publishes-a-summer

I suppose Roger Ebert, at least, isn't around for this incident connected to the Chicago Sun-Times mentioned by Ted Gioia. 

AI is not something I have faith in.  AI is not artificial intelligence in any meaningful sense of the term, first of all,  and second of all, whatever it is, is like Clippy but Clippy^Clippy.  We don't need more of that.  Clippy to the power of Clippy is not what anybody actually needs. 

Does that mean there's no potential use for artificial intelligence?  I wouldn't say that but this reader of Jacques Ellul hardly needs to rehearse his concern that in a technocratic age people with the means to "do" tend to just go "do" things faster than they think about what they "should" do with the things they've done.

AI may not be the game-changer people fear and hope it will be.  I have heard talk about self-driving vehicles but Mr. T. would probably say that this is just jibba jabba.  Until one of those self-driving trucks introduces himself as Optimus Prime or Motormaster and helps offload the freight and agrees to sign shipping receipts I doubt that things are going to "change" as much as some idealists hope and fear.

A decade or more ago I recall reading about AI attempts to mimick Baroque counterpoint.  I tried listening to a few of the pieces and Emily whatever didn't really stick with me as bot-generated music went.  For want of a better way to put things the thing that stuck with me was the programs that try to replicate J. S. Bach get the linear part-writing elements down, sure, but they tend to fail at the high level of rhythmic independence in the contrapuntal strands.  George Oldroyd used to complain that the rookie mistakes of many would be contrapuntists writing their exam fugues is they fixate on the voice-leading when they should be considering how their subjects be given countersubjects that have sharply contrasting rhythmic profiles.  

from Leviticus 19 (the folks who complain about the SJWs often go for other verses in this chapter than the ones I'm going to quote)

Since it came up in the liturgical readings this Sunday ... a little observation that what some contemptuously refer to as SJW stuff is unavoidably in the Book of Leviticus

9 “When you reap the harvest of your land, you shall not reap your field right up to its edge, neither shall you gather the gleanings after your harvest. 10 And you shall not strip your vineyard bare, neither shall you gather the fallen grapes of your vineyard. You shall leave them for the poor and for the sojourner: I am the Lord your God.

11 “You shall not steal; you shall not deal falsely; you shall not lie to one another. 12 You shall not swear by my name falsely, and so profane the name of your God: I am the Lord.

13 “You shall not oppress your neighbor or rob him. The wages of a hired worker shall not remain with you all night until the morning. 14 You shall not curse the deaf or put a stumbling block before the blind, but you shall fear your God: I am the Lord.

15 “You shall do no injustice in court. You shall not be partial to the poor or defer to the great, but in righteousness shall you judge your neighbor. 16 You shall not go around as a slanderer among your people, and you shall not stand up against the life1 of your neighbor: I am the Lord.

17 “You shall not hate your brother in your heart, but you shall reason frankly with your neighbor, lest you incur sin because of him. 18 You shall not take vengeance or bear a grudge against the sons of your own people, but you shall love your neighbor as yourself: I am the Lord.

Yes, the clobber verses social conservatives zero in on are not far away.  That's obvious.  It can be just as obvious how swiftly some of those guys zero in on those verses as if all the ones I just quoted weren't in the same chapter. 

Jacob L Wright made a point in his book Why The Bible Began about priestly codes. Wright pointed out that the trade secrets of priests were generally precisely that, trade secrets. Making the levitical laws and practices an inextricable part of the Pentateuch entailed a process of making what in other priestly settings was a set of codes to be kept within the cultic coterie a standard of public record that was to be taught to everyone.  This might be easy to overstate but the Hebrew Bible is like other works from its idiom and dramatically different.  

For instance, you could read Divination, Politics, & Ancient Near Eastern Empires and learn that Hebrew prophetic books are pretty different from the divinatory practices from Israel's neighbors.  The differences between the Prophets and prophets is so great scholars have proposed that the canonized biblical prophetic books can't even be used as a reference point for divinatory practices anywhere else in the ancient near east.  One of the reasons is because the Prophets spent so much time denouncing the monarchy and the priestly cult for their injustices it highlights how other empires had divinatory cults where the diviners would preserve an oracle as it ought to be interpreted and then presented a kind of airbrushed variation acceptable for the king, which, if memory serves, was a pattern noted in neo-Assyrian divinatory practices.  

True, many a scholar regards the narratives of the Hebrew Bible as fabrications (it's not like I have never read minimalists over the course of my life) but the narrative of Ahab and Naboth is worth thinking about for more reasons than to imagine (as some scholars really do) that Jezebel was wildly misrepresented by the biblical narrative literature and that she was an amazing, strong and misunderstood woman as if scholars could go back and interview her for her take like we're all watching an episode of 60 Minutes.  1 Kings tells us Ahab wanted Naboth's vineyard and was rejected from getting it by Naboth on the grounds that it would be wrong to just sell off the land that was a family inheritance so a king could have a vegetable garden.

I may be a moderately conservative sort on religion and politics but when right-leaning Christians complain about social justice warriors and the woke it comes off like there are people who skip the Pentateuch in favor of endlessly recycling their soteriological schemas built upon their interpretations of Pauline epistles.

After all, this blog is not delimited to one or two things. :)  I have probably indicated somewhere here that I do actually like the Book of Leviticus.  

Anyway, happy weekend.  

the Matiegka project still incubates and a post about Ted Gioia and The Atlantic and Romanticism is incubating, too

Stuff just keeps coming up IRL and for the analysis of Grand Sonata II.  The more I have gone through the slow central movement the more I realized that cross referencing to works by Haydn is necessary and, to date, I know of no English language scholarship that has done any deep dive into how pervasively Matiegka drew upon ideas from Haydn in his guitar sonatas.  Grand Sonata II could be construed in poptimist terms as an epic feat of composing a new work on the basis of strategic paraphrase and sampling.  There's also a trippy descending passage in the slow movement that I can't help but compare to Stevie Wonder's "They Won't Go When I Go".  Yes, I am intending to do a big analysis of a Matiegka sonata where I talk about Haydn and Stevie Wonder in the same space where I talk about Matiegka's flexible and at times actually weird approach to sonata forms.

But this has meant I had to go back and redo a bunch of preliminary work because of issues with the literally two reference recordings.  This is a good sonata that deserves detailed study and yet, I'm afraid, I realize this is a guitar sonata where nobody among commercially released recording artists has recorded what's actually in the published score.

Not that I intend to let this stop me.  This makes the sonata a useful case study for how in classical music, at least for the guitar, there are all those endless debates about whose editions are to be trusted and whether so-and-so's performance is "authentic".  I don't want to bang on about authenticity, I am just noting that Matiegka's Grand Sonata II has turned out to be a classical guitar work where doing what he actually says to do in the score is something performers take or leave.  

If that's how it is then maybe guitarist composers can (I trust they do) work in room for performers to deviate from whatever is in the official score as a matter of course.  I "know" someone who does take this approach ... . 

I'm hoping to finally have something put together by the start of June.

It's one of many reasons I haven't blogged as prolifically as I used to.  I do have a few thoughts on The Atlantic's rather weird take on Ted Gioia at some point, too. 

Henry Cowell's "The Banshee" performed by Sorrel Hays (with score)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XNQFOpYC0BY

Theodor Adorno had a mostly dim take on the music and influence of John Cage, whom he seemed to regard as having an influence via aleatory mostly as a relative reaction to the hegemony of integral serialism.  Adorno cited Gyorgy Ligeti's terse judgment that the integral serialists and the aleatorists were basically alike in that they cranked out sonic constructions that never actually sounded like music to him. 

I know Cage fans reference his innovations and I even like a decent chunk of the prepared piano sonatas and interludes but ... don't we already know that as invention of techniques go Henry Cowell did interesting stuff in the 1920s?  I don't mean a race to the patent office approach to modernism so much as an observation that Charles Ives had done a piano work with pianos tuned a quarter-tone apart and Cowell was Cowell.  I'm suggesting that in the pantheon of the avant garde John Cage can be within it what Jim West has said Karl Barth has been in Swiss Reformed theology, good, sure, but also wildly over-hyped by his fans. 

It's the kind of music that must've ended up as the soundtrack in some kind of horror movie by now.  I mean a lot of time has elapsed since 1925.