Alan Jacobs' notes of a supply officer--making the obvious but necessary observation about the martial metaphor that very few soldiers are actually on the frontlines even if social media users may tacitly imagine otherwise

https://blog.ayjay.org/notes-of-a-supply-officer/

notes of a supply officer

August 25, 2025

Alan Jacobs

 

“You have to make your voice heard!” – so the exhortation goes, though the remainder of the sentence usually goes unsaid: “… on the issue that at the moment I think to be the most important.” Nobody thinks you have to make your voice heard about everything all the time, which in any case would be impossible. The same unspoken addendum fits onto “Silence is violence.” All these exhortations have the same essential meaning: If you do not care about what I care about in the way that I care about it, you are a bad person. The language of alliance works the same way: If you say what I want said and do what I want done you are my ally — and if not you are my enemy.

 

The problem with all these exhortations is their failure to understand how society works. A society or a culture is a vast corporation, a vast body of persons and things that functions only if the principle of division of labor is acknowledged and put into thoughtful practice.

 

Consider an army: Would an army function if everyone strove to fight on the front lines? Of course not. But that is just what the people who demand that you “make your voice heard” and “get involved” and “take sides” want us all to do: rush to the front and try to overwhelm the enemy with our sheer numbers. (One other unconfronted assumption of this way of thinking is that the other side won’t be acting the same way.) A successful army requires warriors but also generals, strategists, doctors and medics, supply systems, and, before all that, training systems. And a healthy society requires even greater diversity and specialization than an army does.

 

I often think of a woman I met some years ago whose life is devoted to rescuing abandoned or abused dogs. If she never thinks a thought or says a word about the issues that dominate social media, who cares? She is doing the Lord’s work. Not everyone should do what she does; but she should do what she does.

…

When I get the itch to shout or protest or condemn, I remind myself of my place: training and supply. And I remind myself of what is not within my power to control. …

a haiku (9-6-2025)

 nobody who asks,
"where have all the great men gone?"
will find (or be) one

it will likely be a while before I get to Matiegka's Op. 23 but a theme I hope to run with when I tackle it will be transformative imitation courtesy of Jerome T Walsh's work on Hebrew narrative literature and cross referencing Matiegka and Haydn

 After the sheer year or so it took to get the analysis of Matiegka's Grand Sonata II complete I was glad to deal with the tiny Op. 20, No. 21.  The Stanley Yates edition doesn't include Op. 20, No. 24 even though it could.  I've already analyzed Op. 20, No. 24 and could do that one again but the real next step is Matiegka's Op. 23, which is an arrangement/transcription of two movements from Haydn's Piano Sonata in B minor (III and II) and an original finale Matiegka composed.  

The divergences from Haydn's work are sufficiently numerous and significant that I'm going to need to discuss Matiegka's work with reference to the Haydn.  When two thirds of Matiegka's Op. 23 are Haydn movements adapted to the guitar that's a level of appropriation or, if you will, "sampling" that merits detailed discussion.  Matiegka's use of Haydn was pervasive in Grand Sonata II, but he significantly reworked a few themes and, as I argued, created new themes derived from Haydn's ideas.  Op. 23, by contrast, is thought of as a transcription project.  Given post-Romantic and modern rejection of works that are not "original" Matiegka's appropriation of Haydn is too large to ignore.  In the twenty-first century it can serve as an example to music students in general and guitarists in particular of how a composer can make a multi-movement work with comparatively little "original" work.

But Matiegka place Haydn's finale from the B minor piano sonata (the Presto Fugato) as his first movement in Op. 23 and kept the menuet as the second movement.  Matiegka reversed the order of Haydn's materials.  Rather than adapt Haydn's opening sonata form Matiegka favored an original rondo style finale.  These could seem like insignificant changes but deciding that Haydn's finale could just as easily be an opening movement could tell us something about the Bohemian guitarist composer's sense of possibilities in Haydn's sonata that were not explored in the famous composer's published work.  I may have to draw upon Jerome Walsh's commentary on 1 Kings regarding biblical literature and compositional traditions to suggest that Matiegka did his own kind of transformative imitation in Op. 23.  

If any of my readers have suggested reading for a detailed analysis of Haydn's Piano Sonata in B minor comment away.  I am going to need some suggestions because I am not as familiar with Haydn literature as I should be, particularly detailed formal analysis of Piano Sonata in B minor or the piano sonatas more generally.  Big caveat up front, I read English only.  My Spanish is absolute garbage and I can't read German.  So, no doubt, that limits the range of literature readers can suggest.  Sorry about those caveats (and they're big ones!) but I have to play the cards I've been dealt in terms of not having been able to go to grad school in music theory and having focused on Spanish rather than, say, German, when I was in college decades ago.  

It may be one of the paradoxes of my life that in my teens and twenties I thought rap was crap because it wasn't original creation.  Sampling wasn't really making something new.  It might be a big irony indeed that the more I steeped myself in biblical studies and theology the more sympathetic I became to the idea of sampling and strategic appropriation.  It does help you understand Amos' oracles better if you see his subversive use of liturgical and ritual forms, for instance.  As Jerome Walsh has put it, imitation didn't have to be slavish and it allowed room for creative divergence from genre norms.  

But this means that the Matiegka 2023 project might drag into not being done until 2027 at the rate I'm going!  I really don't know how long this project will take me but if I had gone to grad school in music theory, history or guitar I now realize that this project of going through all of Matiegka's sonatas would be the thesis I'd want to be doing, and so I'm doing it as a labor of love as a blogger here at Wenatchee The Hatchet.