Ethan Iverson's second half of James P Johnson week, noting how familiarity with what was called "light classical" was normative in the jazz scene

There were more posts from Ethan Iverson on James P Johnson, so I wanted to get to those posts because they intersect with some of my own historic interests in the permeability of stylistic boundaries in practice in contrast to the pronouncements of theorists.

Slipped Disc announces that Alex Ross stepping down from his role at The New Yorker (which is presented as the last classical music critic in America steps down)--but now I'm realizing I kept coming back to Kyle Gann and Ethan Iverson more than Alex Ross' writing in the last 15-20 years

https://slippedisc.com/2026/06/americas-last-classical-music-critic-steps-down/

I haven't been reading The New Yorker in a while.  So this is sort of news to me but not exactly news.  I'd read Alex Ross and I enjoyed The Rest is Noise. Recognizing that styles outside the usual canonized placeholders in concert music exist doesn't make Ross a revisionist.  If anything it's a sign of his being a candidate for "the" classical music critic of the current American age that he could write about Sibelius and recognize that Bjork also exists.  And since I like Frank Martin's Mass for double chorus I hardly had a problem with Ross pointing out that the work exists.  There was a stretch in my life where I was soaking up Frank Martin's Mass and reading Emil Brunner, which could be jokingly presented as a dual pinnacle of Swiss Reformed Christian piety in the first half of the 20th century. 

Music critics inevitably soapbox and Ross had his favorites.  I still find Wagner's music annoying at best and the man himself to have been repellant.  But Wagner's influence is also inescapable and the music has stuck around in a way that has allowed for divergent readings and receptions of the work. Philip Ewell somewhat telegraphed this point in his book, but a big difference between a Richard Wagner and a Heinrich Schenker is simply in the fact that Wagner wrote music that can be "read" at a number of levels while Schenker promulgated a theory that dictated the rules of its reception as a matter of principle.  Scott Joplin could draw upon Wagnerian precedent when composing Treemonisha in a way he couldn't have if he were to have attempted to write a piano concerto based on some kind of Schenkerian ur-line. 

So Ross has had his ideas and interests but I don't think that automatically makes or breaks a critic.  Terry Teachout wrote a decade or two ago that a great critic can be more useful in being completely wrong than average or even good critics are in always being right (whatever that may mean).  

But ... most influential classical music critic of the last thirty years?  I mean ... influencing who?  Subscribers to The New Yorker?  No disrespect meant to Alex Ross at all but I realize as I'm typing this post that I read a whole lot more Kyle Gann in the last twenty years than I read Alex Ross.  Maybe for consumers of classical music Alex Ross was the bigger name but among composers (vocational or avocational) I wonder if the more widely-read classical music writer was Gann.  

You know ... Kyle Gann as composer and music critic could be interpreted as a throwback to the 19th century paradigm in which Hector Berlioz wrote music and music criticism.  The demise of the classical music critic as perceived by cultural gatekeepers and metacultural pundits in the late 20th and early 21st centuries might be explicable in light of a separation of tasks--if criticism is professionally separated from the actual production of music we won't get Berlioz or Wagner figures.  I mean I find Wagner repellant at many levels but he wrote music and he wrote about music.  

Which, as I'm idling about in a blog post on the eve of the Fourth of July, it gets me thinking about how I've read Ethan Iverson off and on over the last fifteen years.  I come back to people who write criticism and music side by side more consistently than I come back to critics who are "just" critics.  When Iverson wrote about having issues with Nikolai Kapustin I was able to intuit that the thing about Kapustin's piano sonatas that Iverson seemed to find wanting is the sense that Kapustin's piano sonatas are big on thematic presentation but fall short in the realm of thematic differentiation. I was later able to discuss Iverson's Clarinet Sonata and show that his own themes are clearly presented and clearly differentiated within his forms.  

And, of course, regular readers of Wenatchee The Hatchet know I have had a lot of fun interacting with the blogging of Ethan Hein.  So, I think it's a day to say that I did benefit from reading Alex Ross off and on over the years but that, in a way, maybe in a lot of ways, Ross' position at The New Yorker was symbolic for arbiters of what should or shouldn't count as "culture". That there are great rivers of populist and anti-populist sentiment among composers (Strauss and Mahler) is an interesting grand thesis ... but even in an allegedly post-Lyotardian era skeptical of grand narratives there's this penchant among culture writers for precisely the grand narratives that "we" are supposedly so skeptical about (a point I must credit to Andrew Bowie, who finds the whole Lyotardian claim that grand narratives are "over" to be absurd because Lyotard's own grand narrative is just that).

But if we recalibrate our perspective a bit and look back on the ways that jazz players mastered light classical music or how ragtime players would rag the classics during the early 20th century when composers would make a show of writing rags, it might be useful to consider that reconsidering the intra-critical super-myths established by the gatekeepers and scholars of the 20th century is just where we are at.  It's not just in classical music that the hoary received narratives of yore have come in for scrutiny and grilling, similarly revisionist work has been getting done in jazz and blues (I just finished two pretty good books by Adam Gussow on blues).  To the extent that Ross has played a part in recognizing that classical music in the last century has not only never existed in a vacuum but can be understood as co-existing alongside a panoply of styles then Alex Ross' contribution was to, well, this seems cheeky, the contribution was to simply recontextualize the observations of Leonard Meyer into the 21st century.  Democracy doesn't require that everyone like the same thing but that everyone is free to honestly like whatever they like, to paraphrase Meyer.  

HT Ethan Iverson on a new biography that has been published about James Price Johnson., a few thoughts for a Saturday afternoon

https://www.upress.state.ms.us/Books/S/Speakeasies-to-Symphonies

https://www.amazon.com/Speakeasies-Symphonies-Genius-Johnson-American-ebook/dp/B0GCNYWJVS/

 

Of note, Iverson points out that Scott Brown seems to be the first to bring to light that James P Johnson and Thelonious Monk had a piano teacher in common:

 

https://iverson.substack.com/p/james-p-johnson-1

… Alberta Simmons also taught Thelonious Monk. According to Monk’s biographer Robin D.G. Kelley, Simmons frequently played Eubie Blake’s “Memories of You,” and this may be why Monk played “Memories of You” so often in later years. At any rate, the fact that James P. Johnson and Thelonious Monk actually shared a piano teacher is a wonderful detail. I believe Scott E. Brown is the first to bring this detail to light: one of many revelations from Speakeasies to Symphonies.

Parts 2 and 3 of Iverson’s little series of posts are …

https://iverson.substack.com/p/james-p-johnson-2

https://iverson.substack.com/p/james-p-johnson-3

Ethan Iverson had some idle Sunday thoughts on tablature: scordatura, reentrant tuning, and pieces in natural harmonics are all arguments in favor of tab over against sight-reading snobs

I guess Ethan Iverson's idle Sunday thoughts as a pianist on guitar tab is a reminder that he's not a guitarist.

https://iverson.substack.com/p/idle-sunday-thoughts

 

As a pianist, I can sight-read almost anything within reason, including orchestral scores and choral music. I can’t get to first base with guitar tablature, which always struck me as the ultimate capitalist feint: “Here, we will give you something easy to start with that will ineluctably cripple your growth after a certain point and keep you walled off with the self-same community (other guitarists). Please don’t learn to read music, that is a distraction from our main interest, which is selling you more and more guitar gear to compensate for the fact that you can’t play in bands that use any conventional notation.”

Yesterday: guitar tab. Today: A.I.

…

Counterpoint one: Henry Kaiser on guitar tab.

Counterpoint two: Joni Mitchell’s Blue is the one of the greatest albums of all time, and she wrote a lot of it on guitar.¹

 

The real counterpoint can be summed up as "scordatura".  There are several layers to this counterpoint, as would be fit a "counterpoint" rebuttal.

Ethan Hein discusses the fourths chord, and fourths-based harmony, which is the perfect excuse to mention Ethan Iverson quoted Herbie Hancock saying he played Paul Hindemith's Ludus Tonalis

So I'm coming to this ten days late, but Ethan Hein discussed quartal harmony and melody and I had to, eventually, write a response post.  

https://www.ethanhein.com/wp/2025/new-podcast-episode-on-mccoy-tyner-and-the-fourths-chord/

https://ethanhein.substack.com/p/the-fourths-chord

No surprise the musical soundworld of Star Trek came up.  Space, the final frontier ... I loved that opening music bit from the original series. When I got to college and started exploring music I stumbled upon the composer from whom that whole chain of rising melodic fourths probably came from.

Check out the second movement of Paul Hindemith's symphony Mathis der Maler (from 1934, drawn from the opera by the same name, which arguably makes Paul Hindemith's best symphonic work a sampler plate of moments from his opera)

The ascending stack of fourths in the oboe starts at 01:36 above pizzicato strings

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tFjgU2tT52E

Then check out 02:20 and tell me that the Star Trek TOS opener soundtrack didn't just rip this one off cold. ;) Not quite the famous Trek fanfare went up where Hindemith went down, and Hindemith being who he was he had counterpoint using melodies with stacked fourths.  Back in the day copyright lasted about twenty-four years (give or take) and if you didn't renew it whatever it was went public domain. Perhaps more important was that something that was copyrighted decades ago in Germany was not going to be regarded as an IP infringement if you "sampled" it thirty years later for incidental music for an American television show.  So my pet theory has been that it's hard to understand musical elements from the TOS Trek soundworld without having at least some reference to Hindemith's mid-20th century influence (he taught in the United States for years)

Now check out the fugal finale of Paul Hindemith's Piano Sonata No. 3 written in 1936. Here's a performance of the Hindemith by Maria Yudina (starts at 14:57)  A faster, spunkier opening version of the fugue was recorded by Glenn Gould. Gould uses virtually zero pedal in his performance and goes for a more brittle, staccato take on the double fugue.  Yudina swamps several passages with pedal. I actually like Hindemith's music by and large and enjoy both takes on this fugal finale.  

One of the things Hindemith played with in the 1930s onward was blending stacks of thirds and fourths.  Ethan Iverson did a three-part talk with Henry Threadgill who mentioned he met Hindemith briefly.

Iverson also quoted Herbie Hancock as saying he played Hindemith.  See here:

Herbie Hancock:  “When I was eleven, I performed at a young people’s concert with the Chicago symphony. I played the first movement of a Mozart concerto. In fact, I studied classical piano all the way through college, until I was twenty.”  [How are you preparing for a duo piano tour with Chick Corea?]  “I just got out my Oscar Beringer scale book, the Chopin études, Hindemith’s Ludus Tonalis, Bach’s Well Tempered Clavier, some Debussy and Ravel, and Slominsky’s Thesaurus of Scales and Melodic Patterns. I’ve heard that McCoy Tyner and John Coltrane used to practice out of that.”

Ludus Tonalis is a favorite of mine. Famously (if only for Hindemith fans) the second fugue in Ludus Tonalis is not only in 5/8 it is based on a subject made from stacked fourths. Hindemith wasn't the first to write a fugue in three voices using quintuple meter, the Bohemian-French composer Anton Reicha did that long before)

So when Iverson wrote:

Herbie Hancock mentions Hindemith. Fair enough, although I find most Hindemith pretty square, with the Ludus Tonalis being especially deadly…

…but, hey, nothing Herbie is going to play onstage in his own music will ever be square. The point is to rummage through stuff that you can use, stuff that can rattle around in your subconscious.

It would seem that Hancock and I don't quite share his sentiment about Hindemith being square or, if he was, so what? :)  The Italian guitarist composer Angelo Gilardino found useful inspiration in Hindemith's music and writings.  I realize that here in 2025 the German composer has been regarded as super-square and passe but part of music history and digging into chains of influences is going back and discovering that, back while he was alive, Hindemith was an actually important and influential composer.  

Yeah, yeah, I admit I'm a bit of a Paul Hindemith fan so when I saw Ethan Hein discussed fourth chords it jogged my memory about Ethan Iverson and, of course, the Star Trek tie-in jogged my memory about Mathis der Maler symphony's second movement, and got to thinking about the second fugue from Ludus Tonalis.  The thing about music history is that stuff we like can turn out to be indebted to stuff we hate.  Hindemith was influenced by Debussy (okay, he's okay) and both Hindemith and Debussy admitted to influence by Wagner (whose music drives me up the wall and who I admit I find to have been a reprehensible human being).  Iverson likes Hancock but not Hindemith?  Well, that's part of musical life, people whose music we love can draw inspiration from composers that bore us.  I like Shostakovich, for instance, but have just never warmed up to Mahler, whose influence on the Soviet composer is hard to miss.  

Probably because Hindemith became so wildly unfashionable even within classical music he's so square that he's cubed in jazz and non-classical scenes.  Nevertheless, as Iverson himself has shown, if someone like Herbie Hancock actually played Ludus Tonalis it's an influence to keep in mind.

Ethan Iverson Clarinet Sonata (with read-along score), a brief discussion of his approach to sonata form by way of the first movement

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Epp7ETqCxFU

Now here's the thing, when Ethan Iverson wrote that he wasn't into Kapustin's work I "did' point out that there were/are theoretical reasons to explain how Kapustin's piano sonatas can go in one ear and out the other without lodging in the memory (which, of course, was a complaint Haydn privately registered about a few of his contemporaries).  I suggested that what can misfire in Kapustin's piano sonatas is a lack of clarity in thematic presentation and thematic differentiation.

Now maybe Iverson will understandably not want to use his own work as case studies but I think the opening movement of his new Clarinet Sonata is actually a good example of how to present two themes that are clearly differentiated from each other.  There's even a score to read along with as the audio plays.

Theme 1 traverses 00:00 to 00:38 (let readers remember that I have invoked L Poundie Burstein's warning to never expect initial themes to end with tonics when they can just as easily end on non-tonic harmonies (often dominants)). So let's say, for discussion, Theme 1 ends at 00:38 and there's some transition by way of metric destabilization and harmonic stabilization. Iverson stops using steady eighth note patterns such as 5+4 over 8 and has 9/16 and other meters driven by the sixteenth note alternating with meters like 2/4 and 3/4.  This destabilizes the eighth note pulse driving Theme 2.  So that's why I regard that short section as transitional.

Theme 2 appears at 00:59.  How Iverson got there is, if I may, a sustained D flat major 7th chord with a sharp fourth that just rests a whole measure and is answered by languid E flat chords in a chorale style.  This kind of subtonic to tonic shift works perfectly well.  The new theme starts on E flat without any need for a dominant preparation chord in the galant sense of a dominant chord. Theme 1 had been a restless C minor and here we get a theme in the relative major, albeit with many jazz influences rather than 18th century ones.  This is an Ethan Iverson sonata and not something by Clementi or Kozeluch, for instance.  

Now this is the part where thematic differentiation comes in.  The presentation has been established by a sustained D flat to E flat shift that gives us a pitch-region (not to say "tonal" in the freighted way) distinction.  We've worked out we're in a new key.  There's also steady common time phrasing, which means that the meter and rhythms are far more stable than the asymmetric 5+4 pattern dominating Theme 1.  Iverson scores here on both presentation and differentiation with the two themes in his sonata exposition. 

The development kicks off at 01:36 and culminates in a recapitulation at 03:17. Most of the development could be described as derived from Theme 1 with interrupting asides evoking Theme 2 in the piano.  There's no "need" to have a sonata development make use of all the thematic materials in an exposition.  I wrote about how Beethoven dispensed with any development of his Theme 2 ideas in Op. 111's opening sonata form, preferring instead to shift the center of gravity for his secondary materials into the transitional passages of his recapitulation. So Iverson not even using his Theme 2 materials in the development of his opening sonata movement is fine.  There were a lot of fun possibilities to explore just with the Theme 1 and transitional materials.  

Theme 2 returns at 04:08 and is lent help by the clarinet this time, which is a beautiful touch since in the exposition we heard nothing from the reed instrument. A 04:47 we get a new episode (this would be in the Coda) of new material derived from an inversion of Theme 1. The Coda runs along to the conclusion by 05:20.

So, all in all, a fun little sonata form.  I don't say that with any derogatory intent.  One of the things I've most hated about 19th century music is how bloated and giant it is.  Iverson's exposition in his sonata comes off as just barely 01:30 but that's fine.  That's great, I say!  If you go back and listen to tons of Haydn you'll discover that very often his expositions in his piano sonatas and string quartets were actually not very long.  

One of the more tedious canards I have seen within classical music journalism and punditry is the implication, or direct statement, that you just "can't" make sonata forms with the materials of jazz or blues or country or ragtime or any American "vernacular" music or "pop".  The most brutal way to translate that is to say we've got a bunch of jerks who think American black music is inimical with "large scale form" or "musical argument".  Yeah, well, I keep coming back to the observation that Theodor Adorno could still explain why "Deep Purple" was good, as pop songs went, but "Two in Love" sucked because it was (to Adorno) an obvious cheap knock-off of "Deep Purple".  

Adorno contended that pop music didn't make sustained musical arguments and was full of identikit interchangeable parts (and, let's be fair, you could really substitute a few of Scott Joplin's V-I alternation B strains in a few of his rags and not lose the raggy effect, much as I love Scott Joplin's music).  It was Roger Scruton who took a step or two further and insisted that American pop music couldn't sustain musical arguments. Adorno didn't say "couldn't" he said "didn't" and I say that as someone who has slogged through Aesthetic Theory; Introduction to the Sociology of Music; Philosophy of New Music; and even hunted down Current of Music. I've read Adorno, okay!  "On Jazz" remains one of the most infuriating reads of my life but I have read him.  And all attempts to create jazz/classical fusions must, at some point, address in theory and practice that Adorno was completely, disastrously wrong.  I know what he said and I also know he was wrong.  Is Iverson's Clarinet Sonata one for "the ages"?  Does it have to be?  I have had fun listening to it and he clearly demonstrates an ability to present and differentiate his themes in an opening sonata movement.  I could even say that sometimes he reminds me of Hindemith's Clarinet Sonata (which I love, not that you asked!).

Iverson mentioned that figures like Bolling leapt in when maybe they should have hesitated.  I think I can intuit what Iverson has meant by that.  Too many people on the jazz side of the jazz/classical divide have not grasped how clearly and simply themes in something as putatively complex as a sonata form can be distinguished from each other.  

Since claims that jazz and classical are inimical tend to come from both sides of the divide but classical partisans say jazz is incompatible with "large-scale form" I've restricted myself to just discussing Iverson's initial sonata form.  I think it's fairly obvious that he pulls off sonata forms as a core concept.  

One of the things the classical purists tend to sniff about is that musical fusions must already be "for the ages" or "for all time" or "timeless".  Since most of them are not actually religiously observant types, in my observation, I'm going to roll out a punctuated equilibrium suggestion, that maybe a whole lot of jazz/classical fusion works made in the last century have been intermediate or transitional species and that a successful hybrid may take a few generations to emerge.  Classical snobs tend to presume that such a synthesis is not only categorically impossible but undesirable but they presume this upon dogmatic grounds.  I don't, and if it's just a game of dogmatics I've got books on Christian dogmatics by Emil Brunner, Herman Bavinck, Charles Hodge, and the history of Christian dogma by Adolf von Harnack I'm meaning to get to.  So nobody assume I don't know or care about dogmatics.  One of the most enjoyable reads I had in the last ten years was Ephraim Radner's brutal take-down of post-Moltmannian pneumatology called A Profound Ignorance.  So when I say that it seems purely dogmatic for classical purists to say jazz and classical can never be inter-married I am writing as someone who does have an interest in Christian dogmatics and biblical literature and ecumenical discussions between Christians and Jews and has been splitting the difference between the Calvinism of my Native American dad and the semi-Pelagian Pentecostalism of my white mom most of my life.  

So there.

What I think we're in the process of is cumulatively and collectively bringing forth jazz/classical fusions that, in the long run, will actually work out.  I think Iverson's work constitutes a viable step forward to that end.  I don't always agree with all of his stances or takes on things but that would be obvious to anyone who has read ten pages of him and ten pages of me!  

Anyway, Ethan Iverson's Clarinet Sonata is worth your attention.  I might get to writing thoughts about some of his other chamber sonatas.  Since I admit I'm a fan of Hindemith's giant cycle of chamber sonatas that might skew my perspective but it takes all kinds to make a world and I do actually like a lot of Hindemith.  I don't know if Iverson's chamber sonatas will get that extensive as to cover every instrument in the symphonic tradition the way Hindemith's cycle did.  But if Iverson goes there I would be willing to go along for the ride a while to see where he goes. 

some belated thoughts on Ethan Iverson on Nikolai Kapustin, fleshing out some potential ideas that were implicit in Iverson's brief remarks

 

https://iverson.substack.com/p/clarinet-sonata

I’m gonna dive into the weeds:

 

One name people have mentioned to me in connection with Playfair Sonatas is Claude Bolling, who had the big crossover hit Suite for Flute and Jazz Piano. While Bolling was obviously a talent, he is also the quintessential “classical composer trying too hard to be jazzy.” There is not much of an organizing voice there other than pastiche.

 

I’m not really a huge fan of Nicolai Kapustin, either, which is sort of like written-out Oscar Peterson for virtuoso pianists. God bless everyone who does that stuff, for it is certainly hard to do, but it is decidedly conservative.

…

Bolling, Kapustin, and Batiste go straight in with no hesitation. But hesitation is warranted. There’s more to aesthetics than just getting over with the audience. There should be a deeper, more internal reality to the notes and rhythms.

 

In Playfair Sonatas, the dedicatees of the slow movements are Carla Bley, Roswell Rudd, Ornette Coleman, Eric Dolphy, Joe Wilder, and Paul Desmond. They all thought about combining European and African idioms on a deep level. For those six, varied forms of sophistication such as irony, nonchalance, theatre, and stubbornness meet in the subconscious on the way to a finished personal aesthetic.

…

 

What that deeper, more internal reality to the notes and rhythms might be could be the subject of any number of books, couldn’t it?

 

But what does Iverson mean by writing that Claude Bolling or Nikolai Kapustin “go straight in with no hesitation”.  Hesitation regarding what?  What hesitation about “what” is warranted?  Now that Bley, Rudd, Coleman, Dolphy, Wilder and Desmond all thought about combining European and African idioms on a deep level is probably true but isn’t there a conundrum in that framing?  Why are Americans stuck with combining European and African idioms, or are they stuck with just these two options?  Lou Harrison wasn’t stuck with just those two options! 

 

Saying that Bolling and Kapustin didn’t quite pull off the elusive jazz/classical synthesis might be Captain Obvious but I have not seen anyone attempt to make a full or clear argument as to why they haven’t pulled that off.  This is really a case where you have to prove the negative, you have to explain what they did wrong.   The trouble is that in the history of jazz and classical fusion attempts it would seem as though mostly what we have our failures in a realm where many a partisan of jazz and classical would rhetorically ask what anyone would even guess “success” could even mean. 

 

I don’t think the problem with written-out Oscar Peterson is that it is “decidedly conservative”.  Was Oscar Peterson decidedly conservative? What does it mean to even say “conservative” about Peterson’s style if Kapustin overtly emulates it? Is it actually bad to do so? 

 

I think there is an intuition that something is off in Kapustin’s nods to Peterson but I would suggest, guitarist though I be and guitarist more steeped in classical guitar literature that I am, that the problem with Kapustin’s emulation of Oscar Peterson’s style is in the nature of Peterson’s style; Peterson’s style is anywhere between two, three or even four removes from the American songbook.  Think of the songs in the songbook as the bones in the skeleton and Peterson’s interpretations as sinew, gut, muscle, and skin.  Peterson’s work is the finished house and Kapustin copies the finished house without appraising the foundation. 

 

This is a problem with and within jazz itself.  Peterson’s embellishment and ornamentation of songbook standards is already multiple levels of remove from the bare-bones songs.  When Oscar Peterson played “Summertime” we know that he played Gershwin. We’ve heard the Gershwin hundreds or thousands of times in our lives, maybe, if we live in the United States and have heard the standards.  Someone like Peterson could take all the liberties he took because of the shared songbook.

 

The problem with Kapustin’s piano sonatas, which I don’t mind hearing whenever I’m hearing them but can hardly ever remember two or three days afterward, is that what Kapustin did is as if he transcribed Peterson’s vocabulary toward the end of writing piano sonatas but … how clearly can you sing the foundational tunes of any of the themes in Kapustin’s nineteen piano sonatas?  Another matter could be that if Kapustin has a sonata exposition that blazes away in a single key then how would you even recognize when one theme ends and another beings within all those fiery running scales?

 

Haydn used to complain of his contemporaries, as Richard Taruskin occasionally noted, that there were too many folks jamming too many ideas into their pieces.  Haydn didn’t say the ideas were bad ideas, just that there were too many of them.  Too many ideas and the audience won’t remember the piece long enough or well enough for it to touch their hearts.  The observation that music and memory are intertwined is an ancient one and it’s one of the first and most obvious points broached in Augustine’s De Musica. For music to touch your heart you have to be able to hear it and remember it.  At the risk of attempting to intuit what Iverson’s apparent unhappiness with Nikolai Kapustin’s post-Petersonian bravura is really pointing toward is this, Kapustin picked up the vocabulary as a finished idiom better than he went back behind that idiom to firmly grasp what Peterson was several layers of remove from; Kapustin faltered at the point of thematic presentation and thematic differentiation across his large-scale forms.

 

I’ve already implied the nature of thematic presentation. You need to be able to recognize when you’re hearing a theme.  Kapustin’s piano sonatas can be full of dramatic flourishes that can promise that “something is coming! A theme is on its way!”  Well, when does it show up?  Iverson has written that many classical musicians can’t sing Armstrong solos but that is itself too many removes from the real issue, which is that people should know the songs Armstrong performed and if they get around to those solos that’s for a later stage in development.  Thematic presentation is the start of “Jumpin’ Pumpkins” or the head tune of “`Round Midnight” and not all those legendary solos.  Kapustin was scrupulous about replicating the effect of all the spur-of-the-moment improvisational embellishments but the price was creating a cycle of piano sonatas where each sonata could occasionally feel like it’s part of a big mega-sonata in an installment plan, which is roughly how Kyle Gann described the piano sonatas of Medtner.  Ironically, and it’s a good thing Kapustin isn’t with us to see me write this, Kapustin’s piano sonatas can resemble those of Medtner’s by dint of having a vibe so pervasive it blurs the identity of each of his piano sonatas. Kapustin really didn’t like Medtner’s piano music as I recall. 

 

As for thematic differentiation, this would be where Kapustin blasting through an exposition without any clear key changes can present a problem but the more basic concern I have had is he seemed reluctant to slow down enough to let his themes be themes.  Kapustin didn’t study composition at a formal level. It comes across. In the way his piano sonatas are full of flourish but can be muddled on structural clarity.  Scott Joplin mastered thematic presentation and differentiation even if he ran with AABBACCDD so much it became a cliché to talk about the structure of a Joplin rag as distinct from any and every other kind of rag.  His contemporaries James Scott and Joseph Lamb were able and willing to end rags with their A and B strains, which I think was a brilliant move on their part that I sometimes wish Joplin did more in his work. 

 

Don’t go back to Peterson without going back to ragtime and blues.  The problem isn’t with emulating Peterson but with not picking up blues and ragtime.  The hesitation that Iverson wrote about is, if I may suggest this, an intuition that nobody can just go and adapt a Petersonian idiom to sonatas and fugues without getting a firm grasp of what foundation Peterson was building on.

 

Paradoxically, I find I mainly like Kapustin’s 24 Preludes and Fugues.  The sheer demands of writing a fugue and the centuries of thematic/linear concentration the tradition demands forced Kapustin to be clearer.  Whether or not his cycle of preludes and fugues “makes it” into the repertoire canon or the academic canon remains to be seen but it’s the more effective work in Kapustin’s body of work for me than his piano sonatas because there’s no getting around Bach, for instance.  There’s no getting around Shostakovich, either. 

 

But jazz and classical composers who want to experiment with a jazz/classical synthesis need to trust in the possibilities latent within the simplicity of the materials.  You should be able to write a big sonata form using just themes from a Scott Joplin, James Scott or Joseph Lamb rag.  You could probably do it with something by May Aufderheide, for that matter.  You should be able to take a blues by Charley Patton or John Lee Hooker or Fred McDowell and have that be enough to make yourself a sonata form.  The same goes for Blind Willie Johnson, Lonnie Johnson, Tampa Red, I think the idea is clear enough at this point. 

 

Bach began the Goldberg Variations with a theme in which you never have more than two notes being actively played at any point in the initial presentation of the theme.  Jazz/classical fusion experiments should be able to start that bare-bones.  You don’t need jazz chords. You probably don’t even need jazz rhythm initially, because how many of the jazz standards from the great American songbook actually started off as jazz standards? You could go with a ragtime/Mississippi John Hurt take on “Just as I Am” and not even attempt to create some new theme whole-cloth.  In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries this “sampling” was part of the art of inventio in rhetoric.

There's also no long-term path to that capacity for choosing that doesn't go through a long circuitous journey into the mountain range of theory. If we want to chart a path forward in which jazz and classical synthesis has some chance to "work" we don't go back to Peterson, we don't even go back to Armstrong, we go back further to Scott Joplin and James Scott and to shape-note hymns and ragging the classics.  There's a lifetime's worth of possibilities just exploring how to take themes from Joplin's rags (or Lamb's or Scott's) and making those themes the building blocks of piano sonatas.  Somebody could take themes from Heliotrope Bouquet and make them the basis for a piano sonata, especially now that all of Joplin's work has passed pretty firmly into the public domain.  Take themes from Treemonisha and make a piano sonata out of that.  Play with strains of The Entertainer in parallel minor or flip the passages upside down to see how they sound.

Armstrong, even, is too far out into the history of jazz.  The most promising point at which a potential jazz/classical synthesis could start to be explored seems like ragtime because it's the style that existed before there even was jazz.

Anyone who can make a piano sonata or even a fugue in the style of Scott Joplin could probably move on to exemplars farther along into the history of jazz.  And if we go by Joplin's School of Ragtime nothing that jazz performers, fans or historians call "swing" is even necessary. No amount of swing in the world is going to salvage a tune that doesn't stick in your memory sung or played without it. 

Some thoughts for a fairly typical rainy Seattle evening. 

POSTSCRIPT 2-26-2025

I've seen Iverson write in a few places that he thinks most theory is bunk but how is he ever going to explain what's wrong with the actual works of Bolling or Kapustin if he doesn't, at some point, resort to music theory?  Absent a set of theories and aesthetic paradigms that actually get explained we're stuck with a situation like the one in My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic season one, with Rarity asking Rainbow Dash what she meant by saying "It needs to be about 20% cooler".  Particularly in light of ultimately negative appraisals of jazz/classical fusions the Rainbow Dash useless axiom couldn't possibly be more apt!

some reservations about Ethan Iverson's suggestion that symphonic musicians should learn how to play blues and a beat

https://iverson.substack.com/p/tt-468-identity-politics-postmortem

…

On the musical front, let me take this time of liberal bloodletting to mention Florence Price. In the woke era, the classical establishment decided that elevating this long dead black woman composer would expiate their sins.

 

Price’s ragtime-ish piece “Nimble Feet” has had new reach; I just counted 40 performances uploaded to YouTube in the last few years. The piece is attractive although a bit bland. However, that’s not my problem, for a basic argument for diversity is easy to understand. What I find so frustrating is that none of the performers I listened to treated “Nimble Feet” like common practice black music, meaning a situation where the pulse is ruthlessly even and the syncopations work in African opposition to the ground rhythm. Rather, the performances are full of a romantic European attitude.

 

Going one step further: Florence Price took the gatekeepers off the hook. The gatekeepers could fund the performance of an old Price symphony (or a new Concerto in Memoriam George Floyd or whatever), get the social justice kudos at the gala, then go home and watch their stock index go up. Meanwhile, nothing about common practice black music was learned within classical institutions.

 

Our symphonic musicians should just finally learn to play the blues and a beat! It’s not that hard! If you can learn to play Mahler, you can learn to play the basic blues and a basic beat. Once again, this was the point of my New York Times essay about Rhapsody in Blue, “The Worst Masterpiece.”

…

Related post: Philip Ewell’s musicological book from 2023 is peak woke, and I found plenty to criticize.

 

The question begged in Iverson’s comment is why “symphonic musicians should just finally learn to play the blues and a beat”? 

 

What does Iverson really mean by common practice black music?  Which blacks?  In the United States?  In Kenya?  In Indonesia? In Ghana? I pick Kenya and Ghana non-randomly because I’ve benefited greatly from books by Christian pastors and theologians from Ghana and a few of my friends in my college years were fellow Christians from Kenya.  I can intuit what Iverson really means by common practice black music but if I intuit correctly then Samuel Coleridge-Taylor’s Hiawatha is emphatically not part of that common practice black music.  There are a variety of questions begged behind two claims and I don’t consider it hair-splitting to ask what assumptions have gone into the claims.

 

What does Iverson think symphonic musicians have to gain from learning to play blues and a beat?  The ability to improvise? Well, no, they won’t learn anything about improvisation from blues and a beat that didn’t exist in the centuries of figured bass usage or in the Italian partimento practices that span centuries.   Blue notes? If by blue notes we mean notes that can only be found “between the keys”, well,  Anton Reicha was extolling the use of quarter-tones in his Treatise on Melody back around 1810.  False relations where G natural and G sharp show up at the same time or in close temporal proximity?  Those show up in English liturgical music from around the time of Tallis and Byrd.  The trouble is that you could pick almost any random element Iverson might potentially propose symphonic musicians could learn by learning to play blues and a beat and not a single one of those elements, taken in isolation, is something that hasn’t been around within concert music traditions.  Sure, the combination of ingredients in blues is different but there’s a more foundational question that is begged behind the question what is to be gained.

 

Whatever common practice black music Iverson means it is clear that just playing more Florence Price somehow fails to convey the secrets and wisdom contained in common practice black music.  But if Lorence Price, a black woman composer, is bereft of those qualities in such a way that playing her music adds “nothing” whose music would?

 

But which common practice Iverson means leads to another question, whether common practice black music and common practice white music are necessarily different.  We know this isn’t the case when it comes to, say, Christian hymnody.  Thomas Andrew Dorsey made very few changes to “Maitland” when he composed his most famous and justifiably beloved hymn.  This is well-known and gets mentioned by Michael Harris in a book about Dorsey’s Gospel blues legacy.  

 

William T. Dargan wrote about the lining out tradition and showed fairly persuasively that the lining out tradition began in the seventeenth century in low Anglican parishes where literacy was low.  The lining out tradition among poor English and Scottish parishes was so commonplace that the tradition of lining out metrical psalmody migrated to the American colonies. There it flourished for a time until nascent black American churches used it and higher brows contended that white churches should switch to shape-note hymnody so as not to have the same kind of lined out metrical psalmody and Dr. Watts idioms in common with their black churchgoing contemporaries.  At different stages in the American experiment white and black churches in the low liturgical scenes had so much in common there were edicts against the shared vernacular.  There have been periods among white and black communities where there were shared musical practices and yet one side or another decided that for the sake of some kind of racial differentiation or pursuit of distinction commonalities needed to be de-emphasized or a tradition needed to be overtly sidelined. 

 

While in predominantly white churches in the 1970s through 1990s there are accounts of worship wars it might be precisely on this topic of Christian battles over what liturgical music is or isn’t suitable that we learn these battles happen in age after age.  In the United States in the early 20^th century a case can be made that was in black churches in what religion scholars would probably call the mainline in which worship wars were fought in the early 20^th century.  You won’t get a very fair take on the situation Richard Allen faced in founding the African Methodist Episcopal Church if you only read something like Michael Harris’ book on Thomas Andrew Dorsey and the birth of Gospel blues.

 

On the other hand if you read Mark Burford’s magisterial Mahalia Jackson and the Black Gospel Field you will learn something, the triumph of Gospel blues and the whoop-it-up Gospel shouter singers was so complete that figures among black classical music who openly expressed reservations about this new popular direction in black American church music were functionally sidelined.  William Levi Dawson was doubtful about the new direction because it would pave the way for pastors and church music directors to just run with the least trained and least talented musicians who knew how to work crowds.  But were those reservations informed by Eurocentric highbrow pretenses?  You could choose to read Singing Like Germans that way. 

 

But the salient point I am trying to make here is that people choosing to reject entire bodies of music in the interest of preserving a perceived racial distinction goes in every direction.  One of my personal reservations about Ewell’s book was that he wrote as though the erasure of BIPOC composers within classical music were done by white theorists.  Doubtless this would be the majority pattern, I surmise, but Mark Burford’s work suggests another possibility, that the triumph pf black popular musical styles entailed a parallel rejection of musical styles and forms that were construed as too Euro-aspirant.  In other words, if Burford’s observation that men like William Levi Dawson had reservations about nascent Gospel blues as the purview of musical hacks it’s not a foregone conclusion that blues and ragtime and jazz were all there is or was to a common practice black music.   The violin works of Joseph Boulougne will be sidelined if those whose idea of black music is Armstrong and Davis keep calling the shots just as much as it will be sidelined if people of the cult of Beethoven keep doing their thing.  Classical music by black composers may have been sidelined by black communities choosing to stop backing composers of symphonic and operatic music as by white hostility. 

 

The triumph of blues and jazz as “the” common practice black music may be an overlooked part of the failure of Florence Price’s music to have gotten more traction.  It’s not that her work is badly made it’s that we’ve already got Scott Joplin and I just think it's patently obvious Scott Joplin’s music is more memorable than the music of Florence Price. I recall Iverson had a few words about Harrison for the centennial of the composer’s birth but I don’t recall a similar post that same year observing the centennial of Scott Joplin’s death.  Harrison’s music for guitar using just intonation octatonic scales is fun and I recommend you give it a listen.  That said, is there some kind of tell in Iverson having not written much about Joplin’s death and his influence back in 2017?  What was it about Harrison that got a post but not the King of Ragtime? 

 

Since I’m on the matter of ragtime now might be a time to ask whether or not a common practice is actually an accurate handling of a musical style.  Jazz pianists may say you ought to play rags with swing.  I don’t recall Joplin ever mentioning swing in his School of Ragtime.  For ragtime composed and published before the Jazz Age it’s not a given that you should swing the sixteenth note or any note values.  We know that Scott Joplin’s contemporary Joseph Lamb did not exactly play with swing. There’s nothing in Joplin’s School of Ragtime to suggest swing was a concept to apply to his music. “Play slowly until you catch the swing” is not proof that “swing” as jazz players define it was what was meant. Joplin elsewhere said that Exercise No. 2 would be screwed up by pianists who liked to vamp.  When a jazz pianist says that ragtime should be played with swing it’s okay to be skeptical, especially if you’re familiar with the primary sources (Joplin and Scott and not any jazz musicians from 1917 onward who played Joplin). 

 

Let’s say symphonic musicians would benefit from learning to play blues and a beat.  Should blues players be expected to know how to handle a partimento exercise, a figured bass or writing a fugue with triple counterpoint? Dismissing a blues guitarist for not playing one of Bach’s two-part inventions would be obviously dubious and yet Iverson’s case, as he’s made it, simply flips a script. Iverson’s suggestion is simply saying their music would be better if it took my music more seriously and were informed more by the musical values of my music.  But hasn’t this been precisely the script used by symphonic musicians to cast aspersion on popular music made by black American musicians? How is flipping the script rejecting the script?

 

Ethan Iverson’s prescription is very simple, “Their music would be better if they learned to play my music.” If he means that pop and classical could benefit from synergistic interaction and affection, I agree. If that’s not what he actually meant his prescription risks being, dare I say it, a bit Roger Scrutonish.

POSTSCRIPT:

There are times when Iverson writes about American popular music in a way that can read as if he’s nudging and winking to fellow initiates about the things you could only see if you were part of some mystery cult.  Take these excerpts, which again touch on the recent work of scholars to highlight the work of Florence Price. These comments from Iverson’s writing about Philip Ewell’s book:

 

https://iverson.substack.com/p/tt-257-new-book-by-philip-ewell

…

Masters of American music know that their art is too esoteric to be written in a book; they know that trying to explain some basics about the mechanism to the committee is casting pearls before swine. A whole lot of college professors need to prove that they are worthy of receiving a few secrets before any of this gets much better.

 

The road for respect is long. Sometimes it feels like we take two steps backward after one step forward. The last decade has seen the elevation of minor romantic symphonist Florence Price to something like sainthood in the classical music academy. The academy thinks it is paying off some dues, but those dues are still waiting to be paid. Celebrating Florence Price offers little currency in the actual fight against racism down in the subconscious where it really matters.

I strongly doubt that any of Price’s recent advocates can sing one Louis Armstrong solo.

In his book, Ewell discusses Price, of course, but the few pages on jazz are an afterthought. Indeed, nowhere in On Music Theory does Ewell mention African-influenced rhythm as a theoretical organizing principle.

…

For the violinists and the conductors, swinging at the drums will help them play Mozart and Mahler. Guaranteed. Indeed, new horizons of expression will be right there for the taking, for there can be a kind of stiffness in classical musicians, a way the beat can be uptight. Jazz drums teaches the triplet, the luminous three within the two that is such a marvelous feature of the formal music descended from Mother Africa. And this also might quell some of the lingering racism in elite musical institutions, where some of the practitioners still think jazz and other black music is “easy.” If it’s easy, let’s hear the first violinist and the conductor play a bit of drums with a decent jazz pianist and bassist.

 

Knowing basic jazz drums is a quick fix for a variety of issues. But apart from renovating the room, an entry-level command of the drum set would unlock new forms of compositional creativity. What fresh combinations of sounds might appear from the best and the brightest if our elite ensembles understood rhythm as well as they understood notation?

 Masters of American music know that their art is too esoteric to be written in a book, huh?  So why teach it? Worthy of receiving the secrets?  Yeah, that resembles a gnostic cult!  To whom are the dues to be paid and how does Iverson know for certain the dues are outstanding?  To whom are the dues due to be paid?  Violinists and conductors should play jazz drums?  

This extended excerpt I've quoted is a more overt form of “their music would be more legitimate if they took my music seriously.” It’s in these kinds of paragraphs that Iverson comes off as a flipped script to the paternalism of Roger Scruton.  This time around it's the symphonic musicians who aren't worthy of the raw realness of blues and jazz musicians and not the other way around.  I made this same point in response to Wesley Morris' 1619 Project piece, flipping the script is not the same as rejecting it outright and rejecting the script outright is what we most seem to need. It's as true on the jazz/blues/rock/country/pop side as it is on the classical music/"serious" music side. 

PS 

None of this means I won't be blogging about Iverson's sonatas because I really have been enjoying those lately.  But sometimes Iverson's writing reminds me that practical musicians would do well to take seriously that the theories we think by become all the more harmful if we've never examined them.  As Charles W Mills put it, the theories we least examine that govern our thinking are the ones that most bind us, whether it was in The Racial Contract or Black Rights/White Wrongs escapes me at the moment.  That Ewell's book was not an equivalent to the work of Mills' work in political philosophy with respect to music education doesn't mean I have to take the worst account of Ewell's motives.  I agree with Iverson that the possibilities of a synthesis of classical forms with the vocabularies of American popular music are worth exploring.  I more than agree with that.  It's all the glib potshots he feels obliged or entitled to take along the way that I find off-putting. 

HT Ethan Hein, Ethan Iverson plays his Piano Sonata

1-28-2024 1 pm

This weekend I commend to your listening attention the new piano sonata by Ethan Iverson.  Thanks to Ethan Hein for mentioning in comments here at the blog recently.  I've listened to the sonata just a couple of times and want to listen to it more and read through the scores in-video before I write more but I did, at least, want to share it with readers of Wenatchee The Hatchet this weekend.

Ethan Iverson - Piano Sonata: Allegro Moderato

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pbY3Vp3aTLU
Ethan Iverson - Piano Sonata: Andante
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fSI_bpQJDF8
Ethan Iverson - Piano Sonata: Rondo
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XPe_j-gnfko

I'll have more detailed thoughts after I've had more time to listen to it and read the scores but the short and quick impression is:  I like this sonata.  The second movement is touching and the third movement is funny,, in the zone of Haydn funny.  :)  I had to get my bearings a little on the first movement but I like it, too.  I hope Iverson writes more piano sonatas.  Often when jazz musician/composers tackle sonatas and "classical" forms the works don't always come off within those idioms, much like a lot of classical composers attempting jazz end up pretty cringe.  Iverson, however, is the kind of pianist who can interview (and did) George Walker and talked with him about his works.  I've got Iverson to thank for introducing me to George Walker's piano sonatas, which swiftly came to be among my favorite late 20th/early 21st century piano sonatas.  All that to say I repeat my hope that Ethan Iverson keeps writing more piano sonatas.  

More detailed comments may emerge at this post later.  For now I want to just get my initial thoughts into words and share the music with you.  

Ethan Hein on Led Zeppelin and the folkloric integrity of the blues and revisiting Anton Reicha's old 1810 treatise extolling quarter tone deviations from diatonic scales as part of a singer's art

http://www.ethanhein.com/wp/2022/led-zeppelin-and-the-folkloric-integrity-of-the-blues/

... 

But why do harmonica players bend their notes in the first place? Blue notes are a profound music-theoretic mystery. Why should it sound good to play certain notes so far out of tune? Performers in every kind of Western music inflect their pitches for emphasis and feeling, but outside of the blues and its descendants, no one intentionally plays notes that are a quarter-tone flat on purpose. It’s customary to explain blue notes by saying that they are harsh, weird, or dissonant. But this is not the way I and other blues lovers experience the music. Blue notes sound unusual and ear-grabbing, but they don’t sound “bad” the way that an extremely flat note would in a performance of, say, Mozart. How can this be?

...
Ever since I began to dig into writings by and about the history of microtonality in Western and semi-Western music it has seemed that even the idea that microtonal inflections in Western music might be more of a scholastic super-myth than something testified to within the literature of the time.  Kyle Gann mentioned that Anton Reicha (who taught Lizst) openly speculated about quarter-tones.  I had to do my own digging around to find that Reicha extolled the use of quarter-tones in aria performances in his Treatise on Melody going back to the earlier 19th century.  Since Pendragon Press is no more (!) I have to get a little help to show you what Reicha wrote.

Steven Beck has recorded all five of George Walker's piano sonatas (HT Ethan Iverson via Do The Math)

I'm still taking a bit of a break from blogging but I've come out of the blogging sabbatical for a couple of things.  Ethan Iverson has mentioned that Steve Beck has recorded all five of George Walker's piano sonatas.  If you've heard of George Walker and want an introduction to his work this is basically "the" album to get.  

https://ethaniverson.com/2022/02/07/george-walker-played-by-steve-beck-scott-joplin-played-by-lara-downes-and-a-little-benny-golson/

I've thought about writing about Walker's work over the years but I can't really do better than some of the scholarship that's been done on his music in the last ten years that I've alluded to or referenced in other blog posts in the past.  So, anyway, go get this album and happy Valentine's Day for those who are into that. 

Ethan Iverson on jazz, classical music, and Mary Lou Williams' History of Jazz Tree and some thoughts about why I find Nikolai Kapustin's preludes and fugues more compelling than his piano sonatas

I've written about Nikolai Kapustin's music in the past and maybe one day I'll even blog about his preludes and fugues, which I have really enjoyed over the years.  But right now I want to talk about how I have found that I enjoy his piano sonatas okay while I'm listening to them and then can't remember most of them after the fact. 

One of the reasons I suspect Kapustin's piano sonatas go in one ear and out the other for me is a problem of thematic differentiation.  Kapustin would have hated having his sonatas compared to the piano sonatas of Medtner but I think the comparison is apt, at least in the sense that both composers seemed to write one gigantic sonata in an installment plan, as Kyle Gann sort of put it about Medtner years ago. 

But I think there might be another way to describe the difference between Kapustin's piano sonatas and his preludes and fugues. A fugue is an elaborative process for a riff, or, if you will, the fugue subject often has a groove it can be used to explore and Kapustin's fugues work better than his piano sonatas do for me because the fugal composition process is so inherently open-ended and groove-driven (if you're any good at it) that it is in some ways more compatible with jazz than too many of the post-A. B. Marx approaches to sonata forms in the West.  After all, Russian theorists don't necessarily seem to think about sonata forms the way Germans do.

But let me finally get to Ethan Iverson's old blog post because I found it helpful.

Ethan Iverson notes the passing of Chick Corea and mentions the jazz pianist's conversion to Scientology, (early) Corea admirer Terry Mattingly at GetReligion notes how few obits have much to say on that topioc

https://ethaniverson.com/2021/02/12/chick-corea/

...

A lot of what Chick Corea played came directly from McCoy Tyner, but his approach had a freshness and a lightness that was distinctive and seductive. There was some kind of basic and intuitive grasp of uptempo clave that sparkled like nobody else. Corea also had serious knowledge of modernist classical music. Indeed, of all the top-tier jazz pianists, Corea may have been the best “student,” someone who checked out and assimilated countless genres from Brazilian to Bartók to the blues on a deep level. On “The Brain”– especially with DeJohnette large and in charge — the balancing act is simply beautiful.

The style on “The Brain” could have been one of the next steps in the music, but other factors intruded. All four of these musicians would be on Bitches Brew later the same year; eventually Corea would be a high-profile Scientologist. (In 2016 Corea completed Scientology’s highest auditing level, Operating Thetan Level 8, for the second time, apparently a rare “feat.”) Chick Corea’s life and music deserves a historian/critic willing to make some tough calls.

Terry Mattingly has noticed that obits mention the Scientology but without little explanation as to what Scientology is or how obit authors think it influenced Corea's music.

https://www.getreligion.org/getreligion/2021/2/17/chick-coreas-life-and-music-if-scientology-informed-his-art-why-not-offer-a-few-examples

... What puzzled me, of course, was this statement: “Corea converted to Scientology, and the religion’s teachings informed much of his music from then on. …”

The word “informed” is interesting. However, my journalism question, in this case, was practical, rather than philosophical.

Hear me out. If the science fiction of Hubbard and the religious teachings and methods of Scientology played such a major role in Corea’s art, maybe the Times team could have included a sentence or two explaining that? Maybe a few practical examples or, perhaps, a quote from Corea (or Hubbard) demonstrating what this influenced looked like, in practice?

These religious teachings shaped “much” of his music? That implied some pieces composed by Corea were influenced by these teachings more than others (as opposed to J.S. Bach signing “Soli Deo Gloria” at the end of every piece — from, logically enough, sacred choral music to solo organ masterworks).

This was, apparently, an important force in the life of a great artist. Maybe it was worth a few sentences?

...

So, throwing that out for consideration.