recent settlement between University of North Texas and Prof. Timothy Jackson, though I'm not sure I'd say anyone has necessarily been vindicated

Bryan Townsend posted an update on a suit involving Professor Timothy Jackson and the University of North Texas. He has a title saying Jackson has been vindicated. Settling so that a suit doesn’t actually go to trial may or may not be a “win” or a “vindication”.

Norman Lebrecht reports that Prof. Jackson has cleared Heinrich Schenker of Philip Ewell's charge of racism?

Now it may be as a guitarist who loves music by Haydn, Bach, Shostakovich, Stevie Wonder, Scott Joplin, Thelonious Monk, and Duke Ellington (among others) I ultimately can't be sure I care about these kinds of battles but when even legendary conservatives like Roger Scruton have wondered aloud for the record why people bother with Schenkerian analysis it's striking in 2021 to see that what Ewell started discussing awhile back has come up again.

https://slippedisc.com/2021/12/evidence-that-clears-heinrich-schenker-of-alleged-racism/

I finished John McWhorter's Woke Racism and will probably have some stuff to write about it, eventually, but I'm glad he was smart enough to steer clear of this music theory controversy with some help from his commenters at his Substack. 

I'm incubating some posts on preludes and fugues written for guitar but those posts will take some time.

There's also some unfinished posting on another more recent set of topics I might inevitably have to write through first.  Cosper has, to my befuddlement, said there's more bonus episodes. Episode 12 wasn't the end?  Anyway, so it goes. 

Alex Ross on "Switched on Pop" ends with a Captain Obvious observation about how pop music discussion often traffics in the same cult of genius as post-Romantic discussions of classical music's canonical works and people

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/03/08/the-musicological-zest-of-switched-on-pop

...

An irony attendant on contemporary pop is that the discourse around it recycles many of the grandiose formulas that have long beset classical music. Reviews of Taylor Swift’s 2020 album “folklore” routinely used the words “genius” and “masterpiece.” Sloan and Harding have called Swift “Beethovian.” Such genuflections may seem less problematic in pop than they do in classical music, where the grim weight of European history looms behind the idolization of Beethoven and Wagner. Yet American culture has its own engulfing shadows: white supremacy has shaped popular song from the minstrelsy days onward, and celebrity power mirrors the radical inequality of the winner-takes-all marketplace. I’d love to see an intelligent podcast like “Switched On Pop” push past the façade of triumphal innocence. The deepest kind of music appreciation takes music not as a divinely gifted art but as an agonizingly human one. 

It is a Captain Obvious observation but one that is worth making.  I've noticed that Wesley Morris' praise for African diaspora music within the United States (popular music, in other words) relied on what amounts to the same core script used in Romantic and 19th century discourse on musical authenticity. One of the reasons I identify as a "formalist" in Leonard B. Meyer's use of that term in Music, the Arts, and Ideas is because I'm not a Romantic and I'm not eager to talk about music in terms of concepts like "authenticity" and "roots too deep to steal" whether it's about German symphonic traditions of African American popular styles.  Why?  Because talking about those styles in terms of "soul" too easily risks replicating the same scripts of racial authenticity that can't be "stolen" by people who don't measure up to tacit or explicit ethnic or racial purity codes, that's why.

As for the Romantic era and its legacy ... some quotes from Leonard B. Meyer have been handy for me:

Schenker and counter-Schenker, coverage and counter-coverage

We've waded a teensy bit into Schenker in the past and I will say up front I'm not a Schenkerian and am grateful that I didn't go to grad school in music in the U.S. (didn't do the grad school path in music) and so was spared having to spend any time on Schenkerian analysis.  I've been interested in the last twenty or more years in fusions of ragtime, jazz, blues, country and American vernacular styles with late Baroque and galant era practices; in other words I've been wanting to write sonata forms based on ragtime strains and fugues based on riffs that could fit into songs by Muddy Waters or Thelonious Monk songs.  I like J. S. Bach and Haydn, Stravinsky, Messiaen, Hindemith (yes),, and contemporary guitar music from central and eastern European composers.  So let me admit up front I haven't been and don't plan to be a Schenkerian.  I have also written about how even the conservative philosopher on the aesthetics of music Roger Scruton (who died last year) concluded that Schenkerian visual analysis was simply not as cogent or useful as its advocates advertised.

links for the weekend: bits on free speech questions in the age of social media, quotes about journalism (or postjournalism?), a Schenker-related lawsuit? and some links that show how the right and left can paradoxically overlap on "plandemic" class theories, maybe

At Los Angeles Review of Books Stephen Rohde reviews books that are, broadly speaking, for and against "free speech" in light of social media dynamics
https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/free-speech-and-the-question-of-race 

Alan Jacobs has three quotes on journalism.  The last quote topic of "post-journalism" 

In the last year conservative friends have taken to talking about the "plandemic" and how it is, though they never use the term, a kind of elite class war against normal Americans.  Postmillenial Reformed types may really just never read outside their bubbles because if they did they might find out how leftist/socialist they sound if they, say, read Leila Mechoui's and Alexander Davidson's riff on the pandemic as class warfare at The Bellows.  Along the theme, there's also Alex Gutentag's "The Great Covid Class War".

Let nobody hold their breath waiting for Doug Wilson to preach from Exodus 22:28 now that Biden has been sworn into office.

There's ... actually litigation going on over the Philip Ewell presentation that sparked controversy about Schenkerian analysis?   Having neither studied Schenkerian analysis nor felt any need to ever study it but having read Roger Scruton's criticism of it, it's a surreal thing to see that there's actual litigation going on in connection to it now.  I suggested a while back that if even conservative philosopher and author on the aesthetics of music Roger Scruton concluded that we'd be better off not bothering with Schenkerian theory that granting it's not the "only game in town" would be easy.  But this would be the point at which I concede I never got into academic music theory or musicology (and the two fields aren't really the same, as I have seen stated in conversations online in the last few years).  So, uh, anyway, that's something that may keep making headlines. 

1-30-2021 4:26pm

Throwing this one in

https://www.rollingstone.com/pro/news/music-instruments-sweetwater-reverb-guitar-center-1119868/

Kyle Gann's "Make Way for the Guitar Era" still seems relevant.  As a guitarist, of course, I readily admit my bias!  Not that I'm gonna stop reading Doug Shadle on symphonies, for instance, but just about any North American guitarist could point out that American music has probably always been an era defined by the guitar more than by the symphony. 

Roger Scruton vs Schenkerian theory circa 1997, a review of Scruton's extensive argument against the relevance of Schenker's theory and of all `deep structure' theories of music

I admit that I am not an academic and so academics will have every reason to ask why I would bother commenting on an academic dispute or a range of disputes that have emerged in the wake of Philip Ewell’s polemic regarding the theory and person of Heinrich Schenker. Truth be told, I am glad I never bothered to study Schenkerian analysis; the last few weeks have featured debates that have reminded me why I was glad that I never got around to such study; and that all of this has transpired in the wake of Roger Scruton’s death has reminded me that Roger Scruton made a lengthy argument against the relevance and viability of Schenkerian theory in all its forms as far back as 1997.

John Halle's take on the Ewell presentation, two of the three claims about Schenker are easily proven but the third is more debatable

John Halle's apparently initial response to Ewell is moderately long but a relatively quick read.  While I suspect that liberals, progressives and leftists may differ on a number of points Halle makes I try to keep the three categories very distinct, much like I try to maintain a distinction between Buckley style conservatives, Pat Buchanan types, Glenn Beck types, Ayn Rand types, etc.  Halle's overall case that Ewell's approach to Schenker misconstrues which invidious ideology is most responsible for Schenker's most ghastly ideas (I couldn't resist pulling a Taruskin by using "invidious", sorry); and that rejecting Schenker's hierarchical presuppositional approach in music analysis risks becoming what Chomsky has called "a gift to the right" could certainly be subject to spirited debate.  That's obviously not what I plan to have go on here, just to be clear, but I want to mention that preliminary summary of Halle's writing before getting to extensive quotation after the break:

Philip Ewell: "Exactly seven persons have written to me ... mean commentary about my work ... all pianists", because white guy pianists committed knowingly or not to a Germanophile art-religion would have the most to lose from Ewell's proposals

https://www.icareifyoulisten.com/2020/07/5-questions-philip-ewell-author-music-theory-white-racial-frame/
...

HOW HAVE YOUR COLLEAGUES RESPONDED TO YOUR WORK, AND HAS ANYONE PLEDGED TO MAKE CHANGES TO THEIR OWN RESEARCH AND TEACHING BECAUSE OF IT? 

The response has been overwhelmingly positive. Over two years ago, when I began this work, I knew that I’d lose some friends and colleagues once it came out. I speculated that, for every friend/colleague lost, I’d gain two or even three more. I was wrong. For every friend lost there have been more like 20–30 friends gained. It’s not even close. Exactly seven persons have written to me with angry, sarcastic, and mean commentary about my work. None of them engage my scholarship, but just call me an “idiot,” “racist,” or “inept.” They are all white men. And, also significant I think, all pianists.   ...

Norman Lebrecht gets Phil Ewell on my radar by ranting about him, reminds me why I'm glad I didn't go to grad school in music

Well ... it's as though Norman Lebrecht has this penchant for introducing me to musicologists by ranting about them that, had he not ranted about them, I might never have heard of them.  Whereas I think Haydn is the bee's knees and that both Beethoven and Mozart were above average but terribly over-hyped, Lebrecht seems to treat it as actually blasphemy against art-religion to say Beethoven was a better than average composer who benefited from fitting into the mainstream of his time and place (i.e. by being a white guy).

Ethan Hein discusses "Fugue as sample flip"--explanations of sampling techniques remind me that "looping" might fit Schenkerian "knupftechnik", and other ways in which the compositional techniques across hip hop and fugal writing may potentially overlap, with a pitch for the idea that a fugal language can be built from Stevie Wonder songs

http://www.ethanhein.com/wp/2020/fugue-as-sample-flip/

...

In the video that Deb links to, DJ Dahi says that three are three main techniques you can use to flip a sample: looping it, chopping it, and reversing it.

• Looping is the simplest of the three techniques, but its musical significance is deeper than you might think. In his must-read book Making Beats, Joe Schloss points out that looping a sample juxtaposes the sampled material with itself by connecting the end of a phrase with its beginning. In so doing, “looping automatically recasts any musical material it touches, insofar as the end of a phrase is repeatedly juxtaposed with its beginning in a way that was not intended by the original musician. After only a few repetitions, this juxtaposition… begins to take on an air of inevitability. It begins to gather a compositional weight that far exceeds its original significance” (p. 137). Looping can take an idea that was meant to be linear and turn it into something circular, and that act can have political valence.
• Chopping means splitting a sample into segments (e.g. individual drum hits or notes) and then recombining the segments out of order, and/or removing some of them. Audio Two’s “Top Billin'” beat is a chop of the “Impeach the President” drums. Pete Rock created the beat in “They Reminisce Over You (T.R.O.Y.)” by chopping the drum intro to James Brown’s “Say It Loud (I’m Black and I’m Proud).”
• Reversing is the least common technique of the three, but when it appears, it’s conspicuous. The best example I can think of is the chorus to “Work It” by Missy Elliott. She follows the line “Put my thang down, flip it and reverse it” with that same line backwards, repeated twice.

...

Now what's intriguing about this is that coming at things from the perspective of being a classical guitarist who studied what could be called Eurological compositional techniques each of these techniques arguably has correspondences with gestural transformation in what's colloquially known as classical music.