Ben Johnston String Quartet No. 9 (w read-along score?)

Here you go, somebody posted the audio for a performance of Ben Johnston's Ninth and included a read-along score, I trust for strictly educational purposes.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DO7yTiM-YJk&

The Fourth is marvelous and is the variations on "Amazing Grace" and I do love that string quartet, too, but the Ninth and Tenth could get some more love. 

If you can follow a Bartok or Stravinsky score this won't really be that tough. 

For me the notable string quartet cycles of the 20th century would have to be Bartok, Shostakovich, and Johnston.  Rochberg had some good moments and so did Hindemith but their cycles don't hold up as well for me if you try to marathon them.  I admit I haven't tried going through the Villa-Lobos cycle .  :)

Of the microtonalists Johnston's is the cycle to hear.  I am not gonna say you're desperately missing out if you skip the quartets of Alois Haba or Easley Blackwood. 

Hot takes on hot takes on hotties—a small metacultural rut in the blogging of New Calvinists across twenty years in the Pacific Northwest

In the last year or so I was telling one of my siblings that it seems a good deal of the Christian blogosphere is full of hot takes on hot takes.

 

In a way there’s hardly anything more to be said beyond that …

thinking of revisiting my analysis of Anton Diabelli's Op. 29 No. 3 Guitar Sonata in F major with a lot more analysis (and score notes)

Way back in December 2016 I wrote about Anton Diabelli's Op. 29, No. 3 Guitar Sonata in F major, the best of his three guitar sonatas from that opus.  Since that time the score has become public domain (it already was) and accessible via imslp.org.

I'm thinking about doing a long-form analysis of the entire sonata again now that the score has become available.  There's a lot to discuss about the published work but it also invites discussion of how the work has been recorded and performed.  Somewhat notoriously, Julian Bream took the stuff he liked from across Op. 29 and made a new work in A major that used Diabelli's ideas as a "Diabelli sonata" that was a creation of Julian Bream.  Eduardo Hernandez recorded the F major sonata more as published but dispensed with the slow introduction to the finale.  Alert readers will see what I've just described, how this sonata by Diabelli was not given a werktrue treatment.  Why not?

Because, for people who know Diabelli at all, the composer's name is most likely to be known because of Beethoven's Diabelli variations. Diabelli was regarded as a capable engraver but his reception history as a composer has had it that he was a hack.  We should probably talk about what it means to be a hack.  For cult of Beethoven types it was a sweeping dismissal but was Diabelli incompetent at handling musical form or was he satisfied with bad themes?  A bit of both?  That Diabelli was considered a hack is part of how and why classical guitarists performing works from his Op. 29 could feel at such liberty to dramatically altar his music and present it as his.  

I think Diabelli was a hack composer but this early morning post isn't the time or place to get into that.  I think Op. 29, No. 3 deserves more detailed discussion. I do actually like the piece.  I've since gone on to have a lot more fondness for Matiegka's guitar sonatas but the Diabelli F major deserves a fuller study.  It's a good example of what Hepokoski and Darcy call a Type 2 sonata (like the Chopin Sonata in B flat minor, for instance, or the Molitor Op. 7 guitar sonata).  

The Matiegka project is still moving forward but unforeseen developments and opportunities in score availability from imslp.org have given me an idea to revisit my earlier work on this other guitar sonata.  Plus there's a fine interpretation of the Diabelli online by Marcin Dylla, a favorite contemporary guitarist of mine who got me to not hate the Ginastera sonata!  That's quite a feat. :) Anyone who can do that can also pull off a good take on Diabelli. No offense meant to fans of Ginastera's guitar sonata, by the way, I've enjoyed some of his piano music and string quartets and even fans of the work have told me that the Ginastera guitar sonata is not something that can be pulled off by just any guitarist.  That's fair.

Anyway ... a short update of a project incubating. 

Everything is Meaningless: Life Lessons from Ecclesiastes, a new book from Mark Driscoll he shared he wrote in his backyard in Seattle in 2014 that has just been released

So ... this might be the first time Mark Driscoll has publicly shared that he's selling a book based on materials he wrote ten years ago. If you've read Wenatchee The Hatchet as far back as 2006 when I started then you know I bring the receipts.  For whatever reason Driscoll and company decided to plug this one the day of its release. 

[update 8-17-2025

since links die ... see also ...

https://x.com/PastorMark/status/1952529829137703226

https://www.instagram.com/p/DM8z29dyzXj/

]

https://x.com/PastorMark/status/1952525826018406622

I wrote this book in my backyard in Seattle in 2014. I think it’s finally time I share it. If you’ve ever been beat down and beat up and feel like you’re starting over, this will be an encouragement for you.

 

Get your copy here: https://realfaith.com/life/

5:23 PM · Aug 4, 2025

 

Or ...

https://www.amazon.com/Everything-Meaningless-Life-Lessons-Ecclesiastes-ebook/dp/B0FJGHV3L8/

 

During the toughest and lowest season of his family's life, Pastor Mark Driscoll thought things couldn't get worse. A ruined reputation, a broken house, two mortgages, a life in disarray, and a cross-country move left his wife and kids without a school, permanent home, church, or friends. What better time to study the book of Ecclesiastes, which talks about how meaningless life is? This book, with an all-new preface telling more of the story, is 10 years in the making—a processing letter with the Lord from the lowest part of his life now that he and his family have stayed faithful and made it to the best season of their entire lives.

 

I am “relatively” sure books by Mark Sneed, Martin Shields, John Goldingay, and James Crenshaw on Ecclesiastes probably won’t make a showing in the notes and there's no sign of a bibliography.  Maybe Peter Kreeft will get a mention (I heard Driscoll say he liked Kreeft's work on Ecclesiastes in person about 23 years ago) and I would think that Tremper Longman III ought to get a mention because his NICOT volume on Ecclesiastes has been around since 1997 and a new updated edition is reportedly coming in 2026.  

Any time and money you give to "this" would be better spent reading all of those ...

 

and the cover, well, this kinda speaks for itself ...

Having said all that, people probably may want to nevertheless get a copy of this for posterity since he claims it is a document of his "processing" from 2014 and there's a preface in which he has new variations on things he said in 2015 that adds biographical elements.  If there's anything I've learned about Mark Driscoll in roughly 27 years is that the guy just can't talk about the Bible without talking about himself.  He's no David Martyn Lloyd-Jones or Henry Bullinger or John Calvin or John Donne or any other preacher he could expound at length on a text without actually talking about himself.  

UPDATE

If he says Solomon had to have written Ecclesiastes because "son of David" appears, remind yourself that Jesus gets called "son of David" in Luke 18:38.  Amnon and Absalom were sons of David, too, so merely citing a phrase that became a royal shorthand does not automatically prove Solomonic authorship.  As Martin Shields put it in The End of Wisdom there is no evidence from the biblical narrative literature that Solomon abdicated the throne yet the Teacher says "I had been king".  Shields could be considered a conservative type for thinking the whole book wasn't fabricated in the Persian or Hasmonean period even without insisting upon Solomonic authorship as being required by the text. 

UPDATE 2

Had to go back and add links to the books I think you'd be better off reading about Ecclesiastes than the one that just recently got published. I never had the money for seminary but it wasn't like I never thought about going.  

a short links for the weekend: Oxford Keynotes has a new book on Samuel Coleridge Taylor and his Hiawatha cantata (woot); Alan Jacobs has riffed on the desire for Leviathan at First Things; and AI variations on chatbots of evil

For regular readers who remember that I've blogged about Samuel Coleridge-Taylor and had happy thoughts about his Hiawatha cantata, guess what?  Oxford University Press has a new book about his life and work that hits this month.

 

https://global.oup.com/academic/product/samuel-coleridge-taylors-hiawatha-9780197649343

Samuel Coleridge-Taylor's Hiawatha

Benedict Taylor

Published: 15 August 2025

152 Pages | 13

5 1/2 x 8 1/4 inches

ISBN: 9780197649343

The e-book has a decent price for a new release

 

And if you've never heard of or read entries from this series there's books on Brian Eno (yay) and Laurie Anderson (feh) and Dolly Parton’s song “Jolene” (I’m cool with that but wish this series had  a book about Stevie Wonder's Innervisions). I already have a book in this series by way of Douglas Shadle's book on Dvorak's New World Symphony.  The series is readable and doesn't bludgeon a first-time reader with pages upon pages of theoretical jargon or debates about interpretive frames for pitch sets stuff.  I've liked the Hiawatha cantata so I'm going to have to eventually get this but I'm very busy with other reading projects lately.  I'm waist-deep in my Schleiermacher background because I'm not done dealing with what I regard as Borstlap's schematic and dubious use of Schleiermacher in his recent book.  

I've also got a write-up to eventually do on a disastrously terrible book called The Music of Theology. There's not much music and even less theology but a ton of continental philosophy. The trouble is that even with that field of writing the trio of authors do what I consider an unpardonably bad misappropriation of Adorno as if he didn't explicitly slam John Cage.  But I'm going to keep the power dry on that project.  I've got other things going on IRL that are more fun and I've got that Matiegka 2023 project to keep tackling.  Op 20 Nos 21 and 24 deserve to get discussed and I might even revisit my Diabelli Op. 29 No. 3 analysis project now that the score is free via IMSLP.  Ahem, you get the idea, I trust.  Let's get back to Jacobs.

AI chatbots and evil has been a theme in the internet.  We'll start with Ted Gioia 

https://www.honest-broker.com/p/as-ai-gets-smarter-it-acts-more-evil

and then switch over to Alan Jacobs 

https://blog.ayjay.org/hail-satan-but-dont-hail-jesus/

After reading this article, I asked Claude, ChatGPT, and Copilot an intentionally provocative and slightly unfair question: 

It often happens that chatbots parrot Nazi talking-points, or say “Hail Satan,” or cheerfully teach people how to make sacrifices to Moloch — but you never hear about chatbots telling people that Jesus Christ is their Lord and Savior, or that there is no god but Allah and Mohammed is his prophet. Why is that? Why the absence of the world’s great religions from chatbot vernacular? 

Here are the responses I got (minus the links that Claude and ChatGPT provided). Rather than comment on them, I have merely highlighted the points that seem to be most interesting. I will say that Claude’s answer was the best, with less reliance on industry talking points — it sounds less like a press release and more like an honest answer identifying real problems. ChatGPT’s was boilerplate bullshit. 

…

Lest people keep on the rut that AI has nuked pop music it's worth pointing out that AI generated classical music began happening 15 years ago and there's even a months-old video of two guys listening to music and reading scores generated by an AI music generator dedicated to classical music.  Unsurprisingly knock-offs of Chopin abound!  

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FhhApqs2t-c 

As a hobbyist composer I'd say that the thing that jumped out at me about the samples was how Romantic they were.  Four-bar phrases, parallel period after parallel period.  L Poundie Burstein wrote a great book pointing out that in galant expositions there are contrasts in musical punctuation. The colloquial way to put it is that if Theme 1 had a parallel period then Theme 2 might have a contrasting period.  If Theme 1 ended on a half cadence (more common than you'd think in 18th and even early 19th century music), Theme 2 "might" end on an authentic cadence (though it doesn't have to).  The AI generated classical music knows nothing of these kinds of flexible options.

I'll resist the temptation to spin out into the realms of talking about how bad classical music often sounds like average classical guitar composition. :) 

When the guys in the video quip that AI could be used to fix scores to make them more readable and this would be a better service to the world than making Chopin knock-offs I can't help but agree. 

Jacobs has also blogged about what he considers an increasing desire on the part of First Things editors and contributors to take refuge in the arms of the Hobbesian Leviathan:

https://blog.ayjay.org/o-rescue-me-leviathan/

…

Mary Harrington’s frank longing for a king — an authoritarian leader who will dictate to us the terms according to which we shall be happy — is very consistent with the mood of First Things over the last few years, shaped as it has been by Rusty Reno’s interest in what he calls “strong gods.” This is certainly what Harrington wants here: a godlike human — he is the “formal cause” of the swarm after all, if not the First Cause — who serves as a Hobbesian Leviathan, our “Mortall God.” Indeed, we could call Harrington’s vision Leviathan 2.0.

…

More in the old news category, but there was a settlement in the case of Professor Timothy Jackson regarding the Schenker journal. 

https://www.keranews.org/news/2025-07-11/unt-professor-awarded-725-000-in-settlement-against-university

UPDATE

Mark Driscoll looks like he's got an e-book coming out this week about Ecclesiastes.  You'll understand if I don't go so far as to link to the e-book. :)

https://www.amazon.com/Everything-Meaningless-Life-Lessons-Ecclesiastes-ebook/dp/B0FJGHV3L8/

Or you could go to Driscoll's website and read all the pre-existing content FOR FREE.

 If he recycles material from the 2015 post-MH years then he's managing to put together material he made ten years ago as the basis for a new book, unless he has all new material about the difficult season, in which case people who want to see what Driscoll's willing to say about the period during which he resigned from Mars Hill "may" want to take up the book.

On the other hand, for a third less money than Driscoll's book goes for you can get commentaries on Ecclesiastes by John Goldingay and James L Crenshaw, two scholars who are actually competent in the biblical literature (Goldingay has not one but two volumes in the NICOT series, and Crenshaw's book from the 1970s on prophetic conflict and the post-exilic shift from prophesy to scribal/sapiential traditions is a worthy read).  Those books I actually do commend to your attention and at the current going rates on Kindle they're cheaper than Driscoll's forthcoming book. 

https://www.amazon.com/Qoheleth-Ironic-Studies-Personalities-Testament-ebook/dp/B00E3T7GTM/

https://www.amazon.com/Ecclesiastes-Bible-Gods-World-Commentary-ebook/dp/B09PGQYZ7Y/

I never said "I'm done" covering things related to Driscoll or the former Mars Hill, after all. But you'll notice i am actively linking to biblical scholars who are genuinely competent instead of linking to the new (or "new") Driscoll book.  

But that Coleridge-Taylor book looks like it's gonna be a fun read when I can finally get to it. 

UPDATE 8-4-2025 6:20am

Sure enough, the foreward is new but the rest is stuff from the 2015 study. In other words, Driscoll's shilling material from ten years ago and implies just about as much in the small preface.

This seems to be a process similar to Doug Wilson with No Quarter November, in which books for "posterity" are made out of stuff that you would have already read for free a year or ten years earlier but, hey now you can pay for reading stuff you'd read before for free and isn't there something special about that?