Ethan Hein on how AI is harmful to learning (specifically musical learning) and I am reminded that Augustine of Hippo said that our ability to reason and our capacity for memory are essential to musical art

https://www.ethanhein.com/wp/2026/ai-is-harmful-for-learning-which-is-why-im-banning-it-in-my-classes/

…

Academic integrity is not my main motivation for the AI ban. It’s a factor, but it’s not the main thing. The main thing is that I want to help these students learn, and using AI is directly harmful to learning. Common sense says that prompting ChatGPT doesn’t have the same learning benefits as doing the reading and writing yourself, but if you need something more robust than common sense, here’s a sampling of the research literature.

…

There are two basic reasons for this and to make these clear I’m going to go way back to Augustine of Hippo’s ancient, uncompleted treatise De Musica.

Ethan Hein on "How to learn to jam", a brief thought as a classical guitarist on how inimical much classical music education has become to the idea of jamming

https://www.ethanhein.com/wp/2026/how-to-learn-to-jam/

…

The best scaffolding is a participatory music community. For a present-day American, this can be difficult to find. Some subcultures are richly supportive of participatory improvisational music: the Black church, hip-hop cyphers, Latin percussionists, jazz jams, blues jams, bluegrass jams, the old-time music scene, the video game music scene. For other styles of music, though, you are probably on your own …

 

Paul Hindemith would propose, obviously enough, that a family interested in making music together would be a good option … if you have that.

 

I am reminded once again of Robert O. Gjerdingen's  Child Composers in the Old Conservatories: How Orphans Became Elite Musicians and Dana Gooley's Fantasies of Improvisation: Free Playing in Nineteenth-Century Music.  One of many reasons I dissent from Ted Gioia’s “we need a new Romanticism” is the history of Romanticism being against improvisation and jamming in “serious music”.  If anything Ted Gioia the jazz historian should be aghast at the prospect of a new Romantic era when Germanophile Art Religion and the cult of Beethoven played such outsized roles in purging classical music concerts of improvisation.

 

But I have often thought over the last ten to twenty years about how if you look at the isolated elements of avant garde movements in classical music it can seem as though each avant garde movement sought to transform one ingredient into a whole loaf of bread.  Let me extend the metaphor a bit. Let’s take microtonality.  Composers like Wyschnegradsky, Haba and others on through Harry Partch, Lou Harrison, Easley Blackwood and Ben Johnston and Kyle Gann have experimented with the microtonal path.  Stochastic processes?  Xenakis.  Free improvisation?  Eh …

 

Anyway, my idea I float for mere consideration is that a European avant garde movement would crop up pinning everything on some one element.  Conversely, in American popular music any and all of those constituent ingredients would already be all over the place in pop music.  You can hear microtonal inflections, flexible approaches to tonality, modal mixture and modal mutation.  I read Herbert Pauls’ Two Centuries in One book that was mentioned by John Borstlap over the years.  Pauls mentioned that the musical language of Romanticism and late Romanticism survived and thrived in popular music and jazz after post World War II avant gardists declared that those antiquated chords and scales were yesterday’s news.

 

So when I  try to sit through some guitar duet by Brian Ferneyhough I can’t help but think that it’s more fun to listen to Robert Johnson, Tampa Red, Charley Patton and Blind Willie Johnson than to listen to some guitar duo use slides to screech all over the strings of classical guitars.

 

A feat worth trying to accomplish, if only a tiny bit, would be to develop ways of writing music that could encourage classical musicians to feel like they actually can jam.

 

In reality classical musicians have been jamming but not necessarily in “classical” settings.  Brass players can switch from Hindemith to Monk and guitarists might switch from Sor and Britten to whatever strikes their fancy.

UPDATE

6-26-2026

I have been thinking over how the score has been so sacralized in classical music that there must be some way to steer between Cagey aleatory or Xenakis stuff and cult of Beethoven specificity.  Suppose a composer wrote a sonata form in which there were, say, two different recapitulations?  Performers with little to no experience jamming could pick one recapitulation or the other and a path toward being able to jam could lay in learning both recapitulations and simply toggling between them, taking some elements from Recap 1 and other elements from Recap 2 but getting to the end and playing what is, technically, fleshed out in the score.  After centuries of Romantic and post-Romantic fealty to notes on the page asking people to just "jam here" is likely a bit much.  Yet throwing a chart of globs of music a la some Stockhausen scores where you pick fragments 4, 5, 2, 7, 8 and 11 of 12, for instance, most certainly won't teach a performer how to jam.

But writing out a score and setting aside 20 to 25 percent of it with instructions to jam if you want?  That might work. 

Ethan Hein's new post on that one weird chord in "Sir Duke" and my response post, on hearing the chorus of "Sir Duke" as a transformation of the opening chords of "Warm Valley"

Since I did recently ask if Ethan could do a post on "Sir Duke" I am very pleased to read his newest post. Maybe he was planning his post anyway, but this year there should be a ton of discussion of Stevie Wonder's music.  

https://www.ethanhein.com/wp/2026/that-one-weird-chord-in-sir-duke/

 

Sir Duke” is one of the greatest songs written in the last fifty years, bar none.  Yeah, I’m just putting my cards on the table about this.  Normally I actually hate music that sings the praises of music but Wonder gets away with it because his song is a tribute to Duke Ellington and to the big band jazz greats of the past who inspired him. To put this in staid Romantic terms, when a genius pays tribute to a genius the genius can get away with stuff that other people shouldn't even seriously consider trying. 

 

The chords in the chorus of “Sir Duke” are amazing in their simplicity and in the magnificent weirdness of that F minor 7^th chord. It’s not unheard of to have a tritone pivot in music like this.  I can think of a B minor to F major shift in the first theme of String Quartet No. 7 by Shostakovich, for instance (00:14-00:17).  But B major to F minor 7^th is a lot weirder.

 

I think the introduction sets up the chorus chord in a very simple, easily overlooked way.  The introduction moves from B major to G sharp minor to G natural major to F# major.  Right from the start we have a progression that goes from the tonic to the submediant and immediately flattens the submediant and drops to the dominant.  That chromatic modal borrowing plants a seed that Wonder is going to do whatever chromatic alterations will sound fun, and what sounds fun is chromatic mutation of roots and fifths while leaving thirds and (if applicable) sevenths) alone. We should also not forget those chromatic chains of chords in the pre-chorus.  The key has been so thoroughly destabilized by the time the chorus hits F minor 7 really does sound like the most natural chord to hear despite the fact that it could be read as a minor dominant chord built on a flattened fifth as easily as a sharpened fourth. 

 

Ethan Hein links to a video where Adam Neely discusses a couple of theories as to what is going on in the chorus of “Sir Duke” that is well worth checking out. 

 

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

The shadow chord thesis is interesting. The G#7 isn't how I hear it and I think there's a simpler and far more direct way to argue that Wonder was drawing on Ellington's linear/harmonic nexus of chord formation.

 

Stevie Wonder's "Sir Duke" has a chorus with chords that go as follows:

 

B major, F (natural) minor 7th, E major 7th, C# minor 7th, F sharp 7

 

I was looking at those changes and then it hit me, “Hey, wait a minute. I am pretty sure I know which Ellington standard has something like these chord changes in the first three bars.”

 

"Warm Valley" which has

B flat major 7th, E7,      E-flat 7 and so on ...

Now, just do a handful of individually simple things:

1. Kick the key up a half step into B major

2. Remove the major 7th from the first chord

3. Sustain the 7th factor of the E7 but

4. Drop the third into parallel minor (this will yield the F minor 7th chord of "Sir Duke"

5. Retrain the G# and D# and then let the bass and alto of the SATB texture drop by parallel fifths while the S and T factors stay in place. 

 

The oblique motion off-setting parallel motion in interlocked voices is what makes this voice-leading genius on Stevie Wonder's part.  It also manages to evoke a legendary Ellington standard.  Where “Warm Valley” is a famously languid ballad, “Sir Duke” is a buoyant tribute”.  The chordal kernel, if you will, can be heard in common across the two songs. 

 

I think the core of the shadow progression idea makes sense but I think it makes way more sense to just go straight from "Sir Duke" back to Ellington's "Warm Valley".  No "shadow progression" is needed to hear the connection.  We can just make the connection very directly by comparing the two songs. 

 

The “Warm Valley”/”Sir Duke” connection is an intuitive association on my part having listened to Ellington and Wonder for decades.  I didn’t start putting it together, though, until I read Ethan Hein and heard Adam Neely discuss the chord progressions and then it clicked for me that a half-step transposition and a gentle modal mutation showed that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. 

SECONDARY SECTION

Now ever since I slogged through that CT podcast series I've been loathe to mention podcasts.  What Ethan has done with "Sir Duke" is exceptional enough that I'm breaking my rule of not linking to podcasts because you should give him a listen as he walks through the chords that Stevie Wonder "could" have chosen that make more sense based on prescribed theories and why they don't actually work as well as what Wonder did.

https://ethanhein.substack.com/p/you-can-feel-it-all-over

Joseph Horowitz and Douglas McLennan at AJBlogs on the state of attention spans with regard to the high arts

Arts criticism in the trans-Atlantic world seems ever bent on ignoring the advice of the Preacher in Ecclesiastes 7:10.  Don’t say “Where are the older days that were better than these?” because it is not from wisdom that you say this.  Oh, but it is from wisdom that everyone pining for the glory days of classical music says it, and keeps saying it!

 

https://www.artsjournal.com/uq/2026/05/are-we-rotting-our-brains-is-this-the-end-of-classical-music.html

 

JH (1:55):  People are not attentive to the arts. People don’t talk about the arts. And I think my understanding of this deterioration is mostly as a deterioration of cultural memory. If you don’t have cultural memory, you can’t have a flourishing arts environment. Traditionally, creative artists have relied on the past, have relied on forebears, have relied on tradition, have relied on cultural memory. We now are losing touch with the past because of cell phones and social media and artificial intelligence.

 

This is a new situation. We’ve never experienced anything like it. . . . Things can only get worse because the driving force, the major problem, is technology. And technology is not going to vanish from our world.

 

What does technology do? For one thing, it shortens attention spans. The music that we love and we grew up with and that we promulgate depends on an attention span of some duration. You can’t experience the Eroica Symphony, or even just the first movement of the Eroica Symphony, or even just the coda to the first movement of the Eroica Symphony without an attention span. If you’re talking about “Träumerei” by Schumann, fine. But if you’re dealing with a sonata form, it functions partly on the basis of memory—what the ear remembers, what the brain processes. Why is the coda of the first movement of the Eroica so long? Why does it introduce a new theme? Because there’s so much that Beethoven has to deal with and resolve that we’ve already heard. If you can’t experience that piece in time with sustained concentration, there’s not a whole lot going for it. It’s not about the tunes. It’s not even about the ambience or the mood. I think it’s fundamentally an exercise in structure.

…

I realize how readily this kind of appeal can tie back to Theodor Adorno’s riff on the contrast between the emotional listener and the structural listener from Introduction to the Sociology of Music or his riffs to similar effect in the never-completed in his lifetime Current of Music. The idea that people who can and do listen for structure are better people than the people who don’t is a long-standing claim in classical music appreciation and it is very probably a canard. If sheer length makes for greatness are we supposed to jettison Bach preludes and fugues in favor of a marathon of piano sonatas by Sorabji?  I mean, if you’re into Sorabji that’s you’re thing but I still kinda prefer Bach.

 

But there are counter-proposals at hand which warn us that the situation isn’t that the attentional capacity of humans has died a miserable death, it has shifted.  Douglas McLennan proposes we’ve witnessed a shift rather than a death in attentional capacities.

 

https://www.artsjournal.com/diacritical/2026/05/aj-chronicles-are-our-attention-spans-killing-culture-or-reassembling-it.html

…

So Horowitz is right: the formal apparatus that produced trained attention is in retreat, and the algorithms eating its place don’t care about throughlines. All they care about is engagement. When algorithms shifted value from the work itself, what Big Tech euphemistically calls “content,” to the traffic — views, clicks, likes, share — the content itself, from a contextual, historical, or cultural perspective, is irrelevant and interchangeable.

 

But here’s what this frame perhaps misses. Deep attention hasn’t gone away. It’s relocated. People are diving obsessively into the cultures they choose.  …

 

The proposal that the loss of one form of cultural literacy is answered by the gain of a different kind of literacy has been around.  George Steiner proposed that Western civilization had lost the literacy of literary fiction (prose and poetry) but that kids these days (back in his day) had picked up a level of musical literacy spanning centuries of styles and forms that he suspected was a new development.  That was in the book In Bluebeard’s Castle.  Answering the concern of Horowitz that attentional capacity has shifted has precedent.

 

The question itself of whether social media has rotted our brains begs the question of why the sign of attentional health would be a bunch of people sitting through a Mahler cycle.  Why regard Marvel fans as being unhinged for watching the entire Marvel cinematic universe when Wagnerians exist?  What’s the difference between watching five seasons of Mad Men and watching five seasons of My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic? If Discord has a redemption arc while what’s-his-name in Mad Men has a different arc is the difference a matter of art or imputed merit? It can be all too easy for academics to sneer at kids these days who keep track of the differences in Marvel timelines, for instance, but doesn’t the same thing functionally happen if an academic discusses the differences between Marlowe and Goethe on the Faust legend?  Why should I suppose that prestige American TV like The Sopranos or Breaking Bad is necessarily better than watching Death Note? 

 

Fixating on the loss of attentional resources given to listening to everything in a body of work can be its own conceptual dead-end.  Back in the 19^th century it was a thing to brag about for a pianist to play all 32 of Beethoven’s piano sonatas, and a bigger deal if done from memory.  But who actually benefits from memorizing the 32?  Even if we grant the cult of Beethoven cultists every single one of their points, Beethoven solved problems of his time and place two centuries ago, which are not our problems.  If anything his solutions can be seen as having become our problems.  In the 20^th century some composers even felt obliged to shift from Beethoven back to Haydn (Schoenberg) to overtly say that Beethoven was one path music could take but there were others and it was possible to have taken a different path forward from Haydn’s precedent than the one Beethoven took.  

The path of Beethoven has played out as a dead end, a beautiful dead end but a dead end all the same.  This is not the same thing as pulling a John Cage and saying Beethoven was wrong, it’s saying that the kinds of problems and opportunities in the arts in the 21^st century do not have to be hamstrung by the imaginations of men whose business is symphonic and whose idea of cultural rebirth entails the revitalization of the prestige of the orchestra. Now I can appreciate Horowitz stumping for Arthur Falwell as an under-appreciated North American composer and still conclude that the era of the symphony has come and gone.  As a guitarist I have basically zero incentive to want yet more people to line up to hear Mahler symphonies, or even Haydn symphonies (and I am a Haydn fan for all that).

 

Since I mentioned I’m a guitarist, one of the more memorable bits of advice I got from a music professor back in my college days was simple, “Write for the musical resources you actually have, not the ones you wish you had.” The history of revolutionary developments of style and form could, at the risk of an obvious simplification, be articulated in this axiom. 

 

The history of the emergence of rap and hip hop as musical styles and forms can be described as having happened on the basis of people making music with the musical resources they actually had rather than pining for the musical resources they wish they had.  Rap is not exactly my thing but I can hardly think of a style of music in the last fifty years that better exemplifies the axiom with which I started this paragraph.  Rather than take a dismissive stance toward rap as being unmusical I prefer to take the approach of saying that Johann Sebastian Bach’s setting of the Credo from Mass in B minor can be heard as one of the grandest sample flips of an existing plainchant in the history of Christian liturgical music in the Lutheran tradition. 

 

To bring this back around to my professor’s advice, the attentional resources of whatever audience you have is what you have to work with.  For a composer, or a composer-performer, the audience is a pretty significant musical resource.  If the contemporary audience doesn’t handle the epic lengths of a Mahler or a Wagner there’s no point in yearning for an audience that goes that epic. 

 

I think that what we need more of us not the good old days attention span of people listening to sixty-minute or seventy-five-minute symphonic works. The art canons seem fairly well established in classical and pop music in the last century and the attention spans of audiences are what they are.  What I think we can do, and keep doing, is foster an ecumenical dialogue across musical canons to encourage further mutual appreciation, respect and love.  That last part might be a very high ideal to shoot for but that is, allegedly, what partisans of the arts think the arts can at some point achieve.  None of that kind of musically ecumenical dialogue calls for people to listen to musical works that are nine to ninety minutes in length. I think Horowitz may be missing that the triumphs of musical achievement in the long 19^th century are the traps that some of us in the 21^st century think musical styles and forms need to be allowed to escape now.

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. 

Angine de Poitrine, because Wenatchee The Hatchet was going to have to have some kind of post about a microtonal progressive rock duo from Quebec

No offense meant to Rush fans but it is nice to be able to say that there's more to prog rock from Canada than just Rush. :) 

The chain of introduction for me can be charted like this--Rick Beato featured them to silence the flood of "Why haven't you featured .... ?"  Bryan Townsend shared the KEXP performance at his blog.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zO8bt94-ybg 

https://themusicsalon.blogspot.com/2026/03/todays-listening-angine-de-poitrine.html

 

Ethan Hein recently wrote about the duo at MusicRadar and I'd meant to do a blog post about the duo.

“They describe themselves as a Mantra-Rock Dada Pythago-Cubist Orchestra, and the band name translates to ‘angina of the chest’”: The microtonal music theory behind viral math-rockers Angine de Poitrine

https://www.musicradar.com/guitars/they-describe-themselves-as-a-mantra-rock-dada-pythago-cubist-orchestra-and-the-band-name-translates-to-angina-of-the-chest-the-microtonal-music-theory-behind-viral-math-rockers-angine-de-poitrine

 

…

Angine de Poitrine’s grooves are immediately distinctive. Sarniezz is in regular old 4/4 with a triplet-y 12/8 feel, but it has peculiar accents. Mata Zylek is in 10/4. Fabienk is either in very strangely-grouped 7/4 or conventionally-grouped 28/4. Finally, Sherpa is in 17/4.

 

The band constructs these wonky grooves using a loop pedal. Khn plays both the bass and all of the guitar parts on a Stratocaster-style double-neck guitar that’s half electric guitar and half bass, and he can only do that by layering them with the looper. This creates serious restrictions in song structures and arrangement choices. Once the loop is going, the only change you can make is to either add layers or mute them.

…

The loops’ constraints have several musical benefits. The songs have to focus tightly on a single idea, rather than wandering aimlessly. Because every song has to have essentially the same structure, it forces the band to be creative with the details. The loops also make the songs somewhat predictable, and that is a big help for listeners struggling to parse the odd time signatures and unusual tuning.

…

 

In classical music theory books you may come across the concept of the passacaglia.  The gist is that there is a ground bass and the form is an approach to variation technique. Anything and everything may happen around the ground bass but the ground bass never goes away.  

Defined very loosely, Angine de Poitrine can be heard as contemporary prog rock microtonal exponents of new possibilities in a venerable old form known as the passacaglia.  

Traditionally defined as being in triple meter there really isn’t any reason you can’t have a passacaglia in 5/4 or 17/4 or whatever meter you want.  Strip away the classical music genre and what it means is that jamming by way of riff bashing goes back centuries.  Calling what you do jamming over a riff-bashing exercise a passacaglia is a long-standing tradition and it’s a fun form to work with.  At the same time, we also don’t need to be especially snobby about the idea that jamming over a riff-bashing groove in classical music is somehow ontologically different from the same thing being done by a prog rock power duo.

 

It’s easier to catch the grooves in their work than it would be to follow some of the forms used by Alois Haba (String Quartet No. 3 from 1922) or Ivan Wyschnegradsky.  I lean slightly more toward the string quartets of Ben Johnston and the guitar music of Lou Harrison than Haba or Wyschnegradsky (although the latter’s 4^th piece from Op. 22 kind of has a proto-prog rock vibe to it for me).  

 

Microtonality has been getting played with for a bit more than a century now and it’s been regarded as a theoretical possibility for literally centuries.  I came across Anton Reicha’s Treatise on Melody (HT Kyle Gann) and therein discovered that Reicha extolled the use of quarter tones in performances.  The thing about microtonality that is fun is that it’s not 12-tone equal temperament but there’s no real constraints on what not-12TET you go with.  You could do quarter tones or you could do extended just intonation.  You could do fifth-tone and sixth-tone tuning systems like Haba did.  As a guitarist with no access to bowed string instruments the closest I could get to doing something microtonal or using extended just intonation would be trying to write a whole set of works using only natural harmonics because nothing is more natural than using only natural harmonics. 

 

The internet being what it is, looks like someone went to the effort to do some transcriptions.  One of the advantages of riff-bashing and loop work is that transcription can be easier if you know what loops keep recurring.  Not that I would personally find it easy to transcribe quarter tone prog rock but there are transcriptions on Youtube.

 

Mata Zyklek (Angine De Poitrine) transcription

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wAtWy-s0FOY

 

Sarniezz (Angine de Poitrine) transcription

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FZW_NV-RIoc

Kyle Gann once wrote somewhere that although he did like quarter tone music he found that his capacity to listen to it in large chunks was limited.  If the twelve-tone equal temperament tuning system is artificial than slicing every half step in half is twice as artificial, right?  Still, I have heard music built around quarter tones that I've enjoyed and it's been fun to listen to this duo lately.  I'll reiterate a sentiment I shared over at The Music Salon, I'll take this duo's music over the annoying four-chord soul bro balladeers I've been stuck hearing on mainstream radio.

Adam Gussow's Beyond the Crossroads quotes Francis Grimké's 1892 address on the state of Afro-American clergy from a Crossway compendium. It's now possible to go straight to the source, but let's also rabbit trail on New Calvinism

In Adam Gussow's Beyond the Crossroads: The Devil and the Blues Tradition, he mentions Francis Grimké 's 1892 critique of his fellow African American peers in pastoral offices. Gussow cites a book edited by Thabiti Anyabwile and John Piper. 

 

The Faithful Preacher: Recapturing the Vision of Three Pioneering African-American Pastors

By Thabiti Anyabwile, Foreword by John Piper

https://www.crossway.org/books/the-faithful-preacher-tpb/

ISBN-10:          1-58134-827-4

ISBN-13:          978-1-58134-827-9

ISBN-UPC:        9781581348279

Published:        March 31, 2007

 

It turns out that now you can go straight to the source but I'll get to that after a few rabbit trails.

Ethan Hein remixes "Dreams" across a dozen other works to illustrate harmonic/melodic divorce in popular song, and I can't resist making a response song about Charles Rose would likely say the rumblings of that divorce go as far back as Hector Berlioz and the divorce papers sure got signed by the time of Phil Collins era divorce-ballads

https://www.ethanhein.com/wp/2024/the-melodic-harmonic-divorce-in-pop/

https://www.ethanhein.com/wp/2025/what-key-is-dreams-by-fleetwood-mac-actually-in/

https://www.ethanhein.com/wp/2026/what-i-learned-from-remixing-dreams-over-and-over/

https://ethanhein.substack.com/p/twelve-remixes-of-dreams-by-fleetwood

 

Dropping the vocal stem of Fleetwood Mac's "Dreams" on to the instrumental tracks of "Stayin' Alive" by the Bee Gees sounds good.  It does also sound very funny.

 

Dropping the vocal line over Bach's legendary Prelude in C major from Book I of the Well-Tempered Clavier also worked quite well.  All the remixes are worth hearing not just for their novelty but as a way to underline Ethan Hein's blogging thread about the emergence of harmonic/melodic divorce in popular music.  Now if Charles Rosen were still alive he might have been tempted to clear his throat and say that the first rumblings of harmonic/melodic divorce were beginning to happen with the music of Hector Berlioz centuries ago.  Yeah, yeah, if you actually like the music of Berlioz and I kind of don't but point taken. And now I will digress, as I so often do.

Now I do have a thought about what is actually very important in Hein's remixes and what they have to do with music.  The most significant power in creating musical connections and developing musical possibilities is memory.  The intrinsic relationship between working memory and musical perception and interpretation goes at least as far back as Augustine of Hippo (whose De Musica is available in English translation at archive.org now). I have been very critical of Ted Gioia for his use and misuse of Augustine's complex and mercurial thoughts about music for some time now. Part of the complexity of Augustine's thoughts on music come from the simple fact that he wrote Books I-V of De Musica before his conversion to Christianity while Book VI was written after he had become a Christian. The good news for non-Christians who blanche at the prospect of reading one of the most famous Christian thinkers in history is that Books I-V don't discuss Christian doctrine at all for previously stated reasons. The bad news is that De Musica is regarded as one of the most punishingly tedious treatises on anything from antiquity.  Augustine himself realized it was so painfully dull that he opened Book VI with an apology for how genuinely boring everything he wrote in Books I-V actually was!

Modulating well is what the science of music was for Augustine and by "modulating" was not meant "changing keys".  Since everything in the treatise was about poetic rhythm in Latin poetics "modulation" is best thought of in rhythmic terms.  To put this in terms that may be clearer to hiphop than other styles of music, you could say that Books I-V were where Augustine established the scientific principles of establishing a flow.  Those concepts are by and large unfamiliar to me but I have friends who are into hiphop and rap and have explained the basic idea in theory and practice.  Part of my aversion to Gioia's handling of Augustine is how the Christian saint becomes symptomatic of the Greek of Greeks when he needs to be the emblem of "Pythagorean" music and thus a bad guy, but when Gioia wanted to question whether there was even such a thing as "Western" harmony he abruptly remembered Augustine was one of the great Christian bishops of Africa.  Right ... that's why I can't take Ted Gioia seriously when he so obviously moves goalposts. Augustine's thought is complex and remains controversial and it's more fair to him historically to not try to simplify him down to one or another side of a glib Substackified dualisms.

So, the thing about memory and music is that juxtaposition and rhythm are significant.  Hein's experiments show that it is possible to reconceive melodic materials in shifting harmonic and rhythmic contexts.  This is only possible if he you have refined your powers of associative memory to the point where you can drop a Stevie Nicks vocal over the instrumental tracks of a song by the Bee Gees.  Leveraging associative memory for musically expressive purposes is what Johann Sebastian Bach did when he created a fugal first movement for the Credo of his Mass in B minor by using the incipit of the ancient plainchant as the subject of his fugue. Once we consider that the fugal subject is the incipit of the Credo then this could be considered one of the more epic sample flips in "classical music", to go back to a post Ethan Hein did called "fugue as sample flip". Ethan Hein and I have gone back and forth about fugue as sample flip in the past and I feel like a chump for not thinking of the Credo from Mass in B minor as a sample flip earlier. 

 

The paradox of Stevie Nicks' vocal fitting so readily over a Johann Sebastian Bach prelude is that 18th century music tends to be so contrapuntal the prospect of such a juxtaposing working is surprising.  The juxtaposition totally works but that is what a "textbook" approach to classical music cultivated since the long 19th century would tell you isn't supposed to happen and shame on you for thinking it!  But those kinds of juxtapositions, as we have just heard and seen via Bach's Mass in B minor, were what happened in actual 18th century practice. But there is a sense in which the Mac/Bach mash-up comes off as a surprise because harmony and melody in Western theory and practice was very married and, if we just run with Bach's life and times as a jokey analogy, had twenty kids where the family resemblances were not hard to see.  As a friend of mine in college once joked, fifteen generations of Bachs had a penchant for sounding similar. 

Temporal disjunction as a basis for musical exploration has been going on for a long time.  In the 20th century we could look at something like George Rochberg's Caprice Variations for solo violin on a theme by Pagannini. The 1970s was an interesting era in both classical music and rock/pop because of the different kinds of experiments in musical code-switching that were going on.  I had a somewhat short (for me) reflection how George Rochberg's landmark string quartets from the 1970s were composed around the same time Stevie Wonder wrote "Living for the City" and both American composers can be heard and interpreted as experimenting with code switching, how to shift pitch vocabularies mid-work.  I think overall Wonder's song has had more staying power but my point is that we've been living in an era in which, as Leonard Meyer put it, not everyone is going to like the same music but democracy should ensure everyone is free to like whatever they like. 

So it can be useful to study popular song where the divorce between harmony and melody has been firmly established since Kramer vs. Kramer.  Back in the days of Berlioz, to keep running with the gag, harmony and melody were a little out of sync and maybe spent a lot of time in separate rooms of the same house,  but neither was actually consulting with divorce attorneys yet and the divorce papers were definitely not finalized.   By the time Phil Collins showed up with his 1980s era divorce-pop harmony and melody were most assuredly living “Separate Lives”. Some forty years on I think we could say that Phil Collins (love him or hate him or whatever) became one of the maestros of the divorce pop song. 

You might find the humor groan-worthy but I don't care any more.  You listening?  I don't care any more!  

Ethan Hein's "Free Improvisation" reminded me of all the books I've read that showed how improvisation was normative within "classical music" until European guys in the 19th century said "This cannot be!"

https://www.ethanhein.com/wp/2026/free-improvisation/

Free improvisation

Posted by Ethan February 16, 2026

 

...

It’s strange to think of improvisation as a thing you can teach, because the mythology is that you just open your mouth and, like, let it flow, man. But people who can improvise effortlessly have been immersed in a certain musical vocabulary, and they know the standard riffs, the cliches and tropes. These are the raw material that makes spontaneous expression possible. If improv exercises creates a motivation in the kids to develop a vocabulary of the riffs and tropes, then I am doing my job. Beyond aural skills class, improvisation is a necessary skill for any would-be songwriters, producers, and performers of many pop styles where nobody is handing out charts or telling you what to play. But it’s also an opportunity for creative growth more generally, and for the personal growth that comes with it.

 

One of the things I’ve noticed in the last twenty or so years of reading about classical music is how it keeps coming up that in earlier periods it was not only normal to expect improvisation in performance, it was expected in basically every era until the mid-19^th century onward.  The great English Renaissance composer William Byrd couldn’t have been reprimanded for improvising too much if nobody was improvising.  Improvising over stock bass lines was intrinsic to the Italian partimento tradition.  Partimento even included approaches to fugue.  Musicians during the Baroque era were certainly expected to improvise.  There’s even a book out there on how to approach improvisation within medieval music. Jazz partisans need to understand that when it comes to improvisation there’s all the evidence in the world that people within “classical music” improvised and jammed right up to about the time that the big dogs of 19^th century “serious music” forbade improvisation.

 

As Taruskin put it in The Ox, the 19^th century concert music tradition took away as much as it gave and whether what we lost should have been deserves to be a live and seriously discussed and debated question.

Ethan Hein on jazz as an outgrowth of pop; Dylan's Tambourine Man; and a comment on how the music of The Rolling Stones feels like it has aged like milk (I have theories about the actually pretty good reasons for this intuition, despite liking a lot of Stones' songs)

I have been overdue to catch up on a links for the weekend type of post.  I have been reading Ethan Hein’s blog, of course, as I regularly do and a few thoughts from him from late 2025 got me thinking.  I am particularly struck by his observation that jazz was an artistic outgrowth of popular song. 

links for the weekend: a chiasm of links from Ethan Hein and Kyle Gann about notation, vernacular music, kleinmeisters and AI-slop

This is a links for the weekend with a dual thread of blogging about music by Ethan Hein in the present and Kyle Gann from the past.

when a lament is written "to" one person but really "about" someone else, a thought on Ethan Hein's discussion of Pinkfloyd's "Wish You Were Here" in light of the reception history of Ezekiel 28 in Jewish and Christian interpretation

This probably couldn't be more literally academic a riff, despite my not being an academic, but I couldn't help thinking about a comment Ethan Hein made about the Pinkfloyd song "Wish You Were Here" in an article he published recently.  Hein mentioned that the lyrics for the Pinkfloyd song have formally been "to" Syd Barrett but he interprets them as really being "about" the failed relationship between Roger Waters and David Gilmour.  

The album Wish You Were Here is supposed to be about Syd Barrett, Floyd’s original frontman and main songwriter. Barrett had mental health problems, and as he became more erratic and unreliable, the band replaced him with Gilmour. While that was probably unavoidable, they felt intensely guilty about it afterwards – Gilmour included. However, I don’t hear the song Wish You Were Here as being about Barrett; I hear it as describing the failed bromance between Gilmour and Roger Waters.

This is the perfect opportunity to consider that "Wish You Were Here" is "to" Syd but "about" Gilmour. 

Now Hein didn't exegete the lyrics of the song because he was interested in the hypermetric ambiguity of the melodic line against the accompaniment, but for people who might consider it odd that he takes this interpretive stance about the lyrics, this is not unheard of.

In fact, in biblical interpretation Ezekiel 28, with its lament over the king of Tyre, has a literally biblical precedent for a text that can be interpreted as "to" the King of Tyre but has been interpreted "about" either Adam or Satan.  These are two dramatically different interpretations that reflect rabbinical and patristic differences of reception within Judaism and Christianity and there is literally a book on this topic that I've been reading lately by Hector Patmore.  

Adam, Satan, and the King of Tyre: The Interpretation of Ezekiel 28:11-19 in Late Antiquity

Texts that can seem straightforward to a casual reading can turn out to be either vague or invite extravagant variations in interpretation.  I am also, it doesn't quite just so happen, working through Andrei Orlov's Supernal Serpent: Mysteries of Leviathan in Judaism and Christianity.  Was Leviathan a monster representing the chaos of the sea; a dead-but-not-forever corpse who was the foundation of the cosmos; the devil; or, paradoxically, a theophany?  Each of these interpretations gained some traction in the Abrahamic religions.  Far be it from me to suggest that a Roger Waters lyric is on par with any biblical text from Ezekiel or Job, but I did want to mention that among biblical scholars the precedent of interpreting texts with an understanding of a contrast or ambiguity between the "to" and "about" has a pedigree going back thousands of years. 

Which is why I think Ethan Hein's use of this distinction is fine. It has plenty of scholarly precedent even if casual or ardent fans of Pinkfloyd who don't like that he didn't treat the lyrics of the song as really worth talking about in themselves don't necessarily know this. 

But if someone "did" want to discuss the lyrics ... this would be the kind of thing a scholar could bring up.  

Ethan Hein on "Iron Man" and "Wish You Were Here"--formal complexity in a riff-basher and hypermetrical ambiguity in a ballad--and I half-jokingly suggest that "Iron Man" is a masterpiece of thematic (riff) differentiation within a nine-part rondo pattern

https://www.musicradar.com/artists/i-dont-hear-the-song-as-being-about-syd-barrett-i-hear-it-as-describing-the-failed-bromance-between-david-gilmour-and-roger-waters-a-music-professor-breaks-down-pink-floyds-wish-you-were-here

 

If these lyrics were presented to you as a poem in a book, you probably wouldn’t be impressed, but the music elevates them. This is true of a lot of Pink Floyd songs, and songs generally. If your melodies, harmonies, arrangement and production are this excellent, it can make whatever words you’re singing seem vastly more profound.

 

That was kind of a thing in 1970s rock and pop, though, wasn’t it?  If I took lyrics from songs by Stevie Wonder, Pinkfloyd and David Bowie and tried to analyze them the way I would with songs by Bob Dylan or poems by Donne or Eliot or Wallace Stevens then Wonder, Waters, and Bowie would come off far the worse for wear.  But … the musical settings of pedestrian texts elevates them whether we’re talking about a Stevie Wonder song or, ahem, a John Dowland song (some of those texts he set to music were just not that inspiring).

Ethan Hein's discussion of hypermetrical ambiguity and phrase elision is fun and does a lot to explain how the Waters/Gilmour song is not nearly as simple as it sounds if you start breaking it down by phrase-lengths and harmonic rhythm. Pinkfloyd may have had to leave Syd behind but they got more ambitious with their musical forms and interest in long-form songwriting.  They peaked (and overdid it) with Animals.  I think "Dogs" holds up because the band didn't do what Yes so often did, which is bludgeon you with riff after riff without giving you a cognitive through-line; instead Pinkfloyd's "Dogs" can be heard as a massive double binary form like "Great Gig in the Sky" (ABAB).  

If you have a parade of mercurial riff-switches in six minutes this isn't an obstacle to the song being indelibly seared into the memory.  This gives me my transition into Ethan Hein's other classic rock song analysis, Black Sabbath's "Iron Man".  Earlier this year I blogged about how I thought Ethan Iverson's reservation about the piano sonatas of Nikolai Kapustin was based on a sound intuition and proposed that the concepts he may have been looking for are thematic presentation and thematic differentiation. Kapustin's piano sonatas have thematic presentation to spare but he wasn't so good at differentiating them.  Conversely, you can cram in riff after riff in a harmonically static soundscape but if every riff is unmistakable ... you get "Iron Man".

 

https://www.musicradar.com/artists/they-were-unfairly-dismissed-by-critics-and-listeners-with-good-taste-as-mindlessly-primitive-a-music-professor-breaks-down-the-theory-behind-black-sabbaths-iron-man

Ethan Hein breaks down “Iron Man” riff by riff and I can’t but make a half-joking and half-serious reply.  If we substitute the riff names with letters then we get a structure that looks something like this.

      iAB AC AC AD—DC AB Ai--E

In classical music there’s an axiom that repetitions can be collapsed to simply the analysis of a form.  If the main riff functions as a “chorus” then let it be the “refrain” in a rondo form.  For a rock song we can dispense with the idea of tonal discursiveness and key regions as superfluous to form; what we don’t get rid of is the idea that melodic and rhythmic profiles and tempo changes count for variables in thematic presentation and differentiation. 

 

      AB AC A  D    AB A (Coda)

 

If you squint your ears, so to speak, you can hear “Iron Man” as an elaborate nine-part rondo. It’s at the outer limits of formal complexity but it still works.  Most theory courses don't even mention that rondos can have up to nine parts but nine-part rondos do exist (I read a case that one of the giant movements of a Sor guitar sonata should be interpreted as a nine-part rondo so making giant riff-bashing musical forms at the outer limits of what non-guitarists want to listen to happens in classical music at least as often as it has in metal a century afterward. ;) 

One of the canards in art song vs pop song is pretending that the materials are somehow foundationally different in terms of music and in terms of text.