The Bad Faith of the Honest Broker Revisited: Ted Gioia presents music as a way to transcend the binary impasse in 2026, having defined music in terms of binary impasse in 2019's Music: A Subversive History

To read Ted Gioia in May 2026 would lead you to believe that he is sure that the history of the world can be understood in terms of binary conflicts and that this terrible state of affairs can be ameliorated by music, at least a little bit.

 

https://www.honest-broker.com/p/how-to-tell-if-youre-living-in-a-8ee

How to Tell If You're Living in a Binary Crisis

And how to get out of it

Ted Gioia

May 11, 2026

…

Somebody should write a global history of binary conflicts—because no force has exerted more influence over human affairs.

Rome collapsed while its citizens fought over the colors blue and green. That sounds crazy, but it’s absolutely true.

I believe this is the single most significant fact about Roman history.

1.      The conflict between Blues and Greens lasted for a thousand years.

2.      During that period, each color enjoyed periods of dominance, and could have used its power to make tangible improvements and fix a broken system.

3.      But they rarely did this—because were obsessed with punishing the other color team.

They won’t teach that in history class. But they should. It ought to be the first lesson.

…

How can you tell when you’re living in a binary collapse? Here are seven warning signs:

1.      All conflicts are channeled into a single binary opposition between two teams. There is never a third team—if someone tries to create it, one or both of the two teams will work fervently to destroy the third option.

…

 

Naturally, in a Substack article published by Ted Gioia the answer to the great problems of the human condition comes from the arts.  We need a Romanticism 2.0, as Gioia has been saying for a few years, and we’re going to get one.  Yet I have been reading Ted Gioia’s work off and on for about ten years so I can’t quite forget that back when he published Music: A Subversive History with Basic Books in 2019 he had a chapter titled “Music History as a Battle Between Magic and Mathematics”.  Ted Gioia’s whole conception of music history has too often been predicated on the literal sell of the kind of binary impasse he suggests music can defuse.  Take this passage from the subversive history I discussed a few years ago:

At a certain point in Western history, music became a quasi-science. Or, to be more precise, those who theorized about music managed to impose a scientific and mathematical framework that would marginalize all other approaches to the subject. We can even assign a name, a location, and a rough date to this revolution. The alleged innovator was Pythagoras of Samos, born around the year 570 BC. The impact of the Pythagorean revolution on the later course of music is still insufficiently understood and appreciated. I believe he is the most important person in the history of music — although his `innovation’ has perhaps done as much harm as good — and I will make a case for that bold claim in the pages ahead. Yet he is often treated as little more than a colorful footnote in cultural history, a charming figure who appears in anecdotes and asides, but not the mainstream narrative of cultural history. […]

Pythagoras’s attempt to define and constrain musical sounds by the use of numbers and ratios continues to shape how we conceptualize and perform songs in the current day, and even now we distinguish between melody and noise. Music, as it is taught in every university and conservatory in the world today, is explicitly Pythagorean in its methods and assumptions. And even when musical styles emerged from the African diaspora that challenged this paradigm, threatening to topple it with notes that didn’t belong to scales and rhythms that defied conventional metric thinking, the algorithmic mindset prevailed, somehow managing to codify non-Pythagorean performance styles that would seem to resist codification. (p. 48-49, emphasis added) 

Ted Gioia’s own history of music can easily be read as a triple binary impasse in which the paradigms of White-Science-Man vs Black-Magic-Woman is used to explain all of the world’s musical history.  Science vs magic, Europe vs Africa, male vs female, Ted Gioia embodies the worst elements of neo-Orphic thought about music.   Music can’t provide a way beyond the binary impasse as Gioia sketches it out if we use Gioia’s own history as the paradigm through which to understand music because his own understanding of music is so ostentatiously mediated through binary impasse.

At one level this is hardly surprising coming from a historian of blues and jazz, but at a more foundational level Gioia’s intellectual and ethical failure is predicated not on ill-will but on not being able to grasp that the history of neo-Orphic theologies of music have trafficked in essentialist paradigms since roughly the time of Schleiermacher, a point that gets touched upon by theologians now and then. Jeremy Begbie has registered a constructive complaint that Schleiermacher’s picture is helpful but partial.  Philip Stoltzfus' Theology as Performance: Music, Aesthetics, and God in Western Thought is more directly critical by noting that Schleiermacher’s art mysticism was neo-Orphic and that his form of neo-Orphic theology or art mysticism has been the norm for the last two centuries.  

 

Ted Gioia, by his own account, never studied music theorybooks.

At some point during my teenage years, I decided I wanted to be a jazz musician. But I didn’t have a coherent plan.

I just spent a lot of time at the piano. And when I wasn’t sitting at the keyboard, I listened to jazz—on records and in concert. I also read jazz magazines and books at the local public library (which had a subscription to Downbeat).

But here’s what I didn’t do:

·         I didn’t get a music degree.

·         I didn’t take any lessons after the age of 18—and never had a single jazz lesson.

·         I didn’t try to get gigs.

·         I didn’t network with influential people in the music business.

·         I occasionally glanced at a music textbook, but never really studied one.

·         I didn’t learn anything about music technology (except how to plug in my Fender Rhodes).

I noted this a while back, and it reminded me of an observation made by the philosopher Leszek Kolakowski on the problems of the autodidact:

https://wwnorton.com/books/9780393060546

Main Currents of Marxism

Lescek Kolakowski

Copyright © 2005 by Leszek Kolakowski

Copyright © 1978 by Oxford University Press

ISBN: 978-0-393-32943-8

Page 127

 

While Marx’s criticism was unjust and dishonest in some respects, he was intellectually far superior to Proudhon, who had all the faults of a clever autodidact: self-assurance, unawareness of the limitations of his knowledge, incomplete or desultory reading, lack of skill in selecting and organizing material, and the hasty condemnation of authors whom, for the most part, he did not properly understand.

Ted Gioia can be thought of Kolakowski's Proudhon.  Gioia's autodidacticism has revealed that he isn't capable of producing a subversive history of music because his understanding of music is arguably the most conventional of post-Romantic conventional wisdom.

 

Still, Ted Gioia can be regarded as a person of goodwill even if many of his ideas about music history and culture don't rise to the level of idiosyncratic crackpot. Moving beyond a binary impasse does sound like a good idea in theory, as well as in practice, but Gioia’s whole career of publishing, whether in his books or in his Substack, reveals a performative contradiction at the heart of his work—he sells us on one binary impasse on top of another as the way to think about music, yet wants to back up and claim that music could be what allows us to transcend the binary impasse. 

POSTSCRIPT

One of the worst parts of Gioia's pitting magic against mathematics is that it shows how blinkered his grasp of the materials has become.  I recently finished Annette Yoshiko Reed's book Demons, Angels, and Writing in Ancient Judaism and in her conclusion she pointed out that one of the challenges of contemporary readers and scholars is to grasp that demonology was the cutting edge science of the ancient world from ancient Babylon up into even the Hellenistic period. Gioia's dualism of magic against science is predicated on an anachronistic post-Enlightenment dualism that does not pay enough attention to the territories of science and religion, territories that overlapped far more significantly in the ancient world than Ted Gioia's set of binary impasses can allow for. The binary impasses Gioia wants music to help us liberate from, then, are paradoxically the binary impasses he keeps imposing upon his understanding of music history. 

Alan Jacobs' against Ross Barkan on the idea that gatekeepers need to police art nostalgia, Berlioz 2.0 "Forget the classics, listen to MY stuff instead" for the 2020s

https://blog.ayjay.org/this-post-is-obviously-against-all-new-things/

May 1, 2026

this post is obviously against all new things

Ross Barkan:

The culture … does get stuck. We are too backward-facing already. The Metropolitan Review has run its fair share of retrospectives, but I’ve been in the mood, of late, to crack down on them. There is always going to be another anniversary of a great old work of art. There is always another famous dead writer we can celebrate. I’m as guilty of this as anyone, as I begin work, for this Substack, on an essay celebrating the 60th anniversary of Pet Sounds. But I want new musical horizons, too. Imagine if the rock musicians of the 1960s spent much of their day fixating on the pop of the 1940s. As a culture, we need less mimesis and less retrogression. A lot of this is the fault of the algorithmic internet, which rewards copycat trends and wearying groupthink. Cultural nostalgia is nothing new, though it can feel especially repressive these days.

Responses:

1) There is no art without “mimesis,” in the sense that Barkan uses the term here: all art responds to prior art in a thousand ways. And the problem, according to him, is not people copying older art but rather being too interested in it. He seems to want, as an alternative to mimesis, amnesia. 

2) Interest in and knowledge of the past is neither “retrogression” nor “nostalgia” — not does it constitute “groupthink,” because a staggeringly wide range of opinions is possible (and indeed extant) about pre–21st-century cultural productions.

3) It’s noteworthy that Barkan, because he edits a Substack publication, thinks of himself as a cultural policeman who can “crack down” on those overly attentive to the past. (Remember this day the next time you want to write a piece about an old book, comrade!)

 

4) Writing an essay on Pet Sounds is not, in my judgment, something to feel “guilty” about. …

5) Indeed, “There is always going to be another anniversary of a great old work of art” — which makes for a great opportunity to write about it, alert readers to its existence and its excellences, and maybe even inspire young artists to try to match it. Bob Dylan wasn’t “fixating on the pop of the 1940s,” but he was compulsively fascinated by and profoundly knowledgable about the long great history of demotic American music, what he calls “historical-traditional music.” And his absorption in that vast old musical world was absolutely essential to his greatness. When we write about great things from the past, we’re helping to feed future Dylans. 

…

This is the point at which I interrupt Alan Jacobs’ rebuttal to point out that Stevie Wonder’s masterpiece Innervisions has now been around for more than half a century and literally nobody on the planet has attempted to publish a monograph analyzing every track in musical and lyrical terms; situating the album in the historical and cultural context of the United States in the early 1970s as a way to convey its cultural impact; and a handful of essays I have come across discuss Stevie Wonder as a disabled black musician without really seeming to discuss his brilliant songs.  Now I have a visual disability myself so it’s not like I can’t connect at all to discussions of how disabled musicians handle music in ways that maybe other able-bodied musicians don’t.  It’s just that it would be nice if the music itself got discussed.