Obviously I haven't blogged much in a while. Or it just feels like that compared to, say, the amount of blogging I was doing ten years ago.
I'm incubating a few posts, the most obvious one being an analysis of a certain composer's Op. 23 guitar sonata. It won't be enough to just analyze that sonata, though, I'm going to do at least some discussion of Haydn's work upon which Op. 23 is based. So far as I know there's no significant English-language discussion on the extent of Matiegka's appropriation and alteration of Haydn's Piano Sonata in B minor. As a case study of "sampling" within classical music it's a fascinating prospect for me. It's also interesting that Matiegka's Op. 23 we published in 1811. This was early enough in the 19th century that the variants on the Beethoven cult had not been fully consolidated and "sonata" had not been standardized.
There's also a couple of posts incubating on books I read in 2025 that I found exasperating; books where authors mention earlier books by other authors and I found that author X claimed author Y said Z but it seemed more like author Z really said A ... ; and because somebody who used to yell at people purportedly teaching from the Bible has a "show" and talked with a stated influence I might have to dust off a few things and discuss that. There are some thoughts I've thought about setting down about reading Mere Orthodoxy across twenty years and some thoughts about Ted Gioia's claim that we need a new Romanticism and that we're supposedly going to get one.
But ... this will also be the year Wenatchee The Hatchet hits its 20th anniversary and so maybe there can/should be an anniversary post.
