Ted Gioia suggests we kill the four-chord song, Ted Gioia vs Adorno and Horkheimer on what the music industry has actually been for and does

https://www.honest-broker.com/p/lets-kill-the-four-chord-song

...

How do you fix this?

 

The answer is obvious. The music business needs to return to its original mission of finding artists with inspiring talent and fresh perspectives. It has to abandon the stagnant world of conformity and predictable recipes. It must take some risks.

 

Maybe the best place to start would be ditching the four-chord song.

 

Nothing contributes more to the stagnation of current hit radio than the abandonment of song form, and its replacement with repeating four-chord vamps. This approach to composition imposes deadening constraints—making it almost impossible for songwriters to develop material, and provide the surprises and contrasts essential to their craft.

... 

Was the original mission of the music business really finding artists with inspiring talent and fresh perspectives?  Was it really trying to abandon a stagnant world of conformity and predictable recipes by taking some risks?  

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.

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.

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.

Rick Beato has a video on "The Death of Music Genres" which reminds me that as the loss of mono-genre dominance goes Leonard Meyer called it back in 1967 with classical music

The Death of Music Genres

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D-h_OHhtvPU

 

As Kyle Gann put it, back in 1967 when Leonard Meyer published a book proposing the death of any single genre in music being the norm (in classical music) it was greeted with controversy.   Gann quoted Meyer saying the following:

I should like to suggest - and, considering the rapidity and frequency with which styles have followed one another in recent years, the suggestion will probably seem a rash one - that the coming epoch (if, indeed, we are not already in it) will be a period of stylistic stasis, a period characterized not by the linear, cumulative development of a single fundamental style, but by the coexistence of a multiplicity of quite different styles in a fluctuating and dynamic steady-state.

That was in 1967.  Gann noted a bit dryly that while this was a revolutionary suggestion that the “present” of music indicated a post-genre “future” academic musicology did not get together and hail Meyer’s idea as prescient or accurate.  Gann said that what actually happened was stuff like playing Handel on 200-year-old woodwinds and looking at Fanny Mendelssohn and looking at the influence of minstrelsy on Broadway musicals.  In other words, academics stuck to their ruts and lanes and did not think through the implications of every style and form of music the world over being able to exist simultaneously in a potentially synergistic poly-stylistic steady-state.

 

https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/M/bo3629352.html

Music, the Arts, and Ideas: Patterns and Predictions in Twentieth-Century Culture

Leonard B. Meyer

ISBN: 9780226521435

ISBN: 9780226521442

ISBN: 9780226521442

 

But suppose the paradigm which posits cumulative change and the discovery of a common style is no longer pertinent and viable? Perhaps none of the "revolutions" will be definitive; then astonishment would disappear. Suppose, too, that there are no "imperatives" of the sort that Boulez assumes (Whose imperatives? What is "our time" but the totality of actions, including art works, that take place in it?), and, consequently, that no style is necessarily superfluous. Suppose, in short, that the present pluralism of coexisting styles (each with its particular premises and even its attendant ideology) represents not an anomalous, transient state of affairs, but a relatively stable and enduring one.

 

I am suggesting not only that such a hypothesis is neither theoretically absurd no empirically impossible but that, once it is adopted, seemingly incompatible pieces of the puzzling present begins to form an intelligible pattern. If our time appears to be one of "crisis," it does so largely because we have misunderstood the present situation and its possible consequences. Because a past paradigm has led us to expect a monolithic, all-encompassing style, the cultural situation has seemed bizarre and perplexing. The "crisis" dissolves when the possibility of a continuing stylistic coexistence is recognized and the delights of diversity are admitted. The question then becomes not is this style going to be THE STYLE, but is this particular work well-made, challenging, and enjoyable.    pages 171-172

 

Kyle Gann has elsewhere noted (back in 2007) that it seemed after the mid-1980s the collective academic narrative stalled. Whereas composers and musicologists were holding forth on what was probably going to happen or “ought” to happen in the horizons of music by the 1990s and early 2000s there was not much of anything by way of sweeping histories or manifestoes.

https://www.kylegann.com/PC070425-NarrativeInterrupted.html

 

Okay, maybe, but Richard Taruskin’s Oxford History of Western Music was (and is) pretty sweeping. Of course it began as a funereal observance that mutated into a more chastened observation that classical music isn’t dying, just changing.

 

Rick Beato’s video lingers in my mind as a rock (though not necessarily rockist) variation on an observation about the “death” of genre Leonard Meyer observed in what’s colloquially called classical music back in 1967.

 

Bryan Townsend had some thoughts about Beato’s recent video and, among other things, wrote “I think it is better that we develop our own musical taste rather than have it curated for us.”  Sure, but as I hear Beato’s thoughts I think he’s coming at this more from the angle of exposure and not the angle of curation.  As William Deresiewicz put it in The Death of the Artist: How Creators Are Struggling to Survive in the Age of Billionaires and Big Tech it’s easier than ever to get published and harder and harder to get monetized for publication.  In yet another nod to the notion that artists are the prophet-priest-seer-king-moral-legislators of civilization we got an account of how part of the crisis in the humanities is that the writers and poets and artists who could tell us like it is and help us be those cussed individuals upon which free societies rely can’t make ends meet enough to keep doing what they do.

 

Part of me was sympathetic and part of me was curious enough to pick up Excellent Sheep but a big part of me thinks “Well, cry me a river.”  Larry Shiner has pointed out that the whole notion of fine arts as defined in art history is a recent innovation and invention that can’t even square with how the arts were actually practiced in, say, the Renaissance.  If the Artist as imagined since the Romantic era wasn’t even how Leonardo worked with other artists then the “death” of such an artist maybe isn’t as catastrophic or significant as vocational arts scholars and literary theorists make it out to be.  Sure, someone like Norman Lebrecht has been bewailing the death of criticism but Jacques Ellul pointed out in The Empire of Non-Sense that most of human history rolled along just fine with no arts critics to serve as brokers for patrons.  Who were the critics at newspapers who made Bach and Haydn and Mozart that musical touchstones they became in chamber music?  Well, hey, if autonomous art transcends constraints and all who needs to cheer for new music?  The good stuff will be found out and we could just gut music education and patronage systems and just trust all the hard-working musicians will just somehow get heard, right?

 

The reductio ad absurdum speaks for itself, and yet the death of genre hardly seems like it is necessarily a problem.  My own conviction has been that if there has been a death of genre over the last century in pop music there has been a diffusion of “focus” in classical music, too.  The simultaneous co-existence of every style and form is hardly a problem.  Richard Taruskin made a passing comment in The Ox about how back in the 18^th century there were tons of musical forms and styles and genres and yet nobody thought of the Baroque era as a rat’s nest of musical incoherence because every genre and form and style existed within and for a clearly socially articulated social use.

 

Social use, you say?  Isn’t that reducing art to mere servitude?  Adorno contended in Aesthetic Theory that the “liberation” of art from theology and from service to throne and altar created a crisis of purpose from which and to which “art” has zero answers.  Jacques Ellul, for his part, wrote that Adorno correctly grasp the aporia of modern arts, that they are either reduced to being propaganda on behalf of a state or cultural norm on the one hand or devolving into hermetically isolated technocratic experimentation for its own sake that can only ever appeal to insular coteries on the other.  “Pop”, however we define it, has always been music created in the sausage factory for writers like Adorno.  But Adorno created a double bind in which tonality was “used up” but pop music had no capacity for large-scale forms and yet the large-scale forms that had been the domain of “classical music” were obsolete because in the wake of the presumed death of tonality (and with the advent of the equal tempered tuning system) nobody could legitimately write rondos any longer. 

 

As I was saying earlier, Rick Beato’s concern is that nothing can become a big enough of a hit to create social cohesion if nothing is big enough to catch on.  I take Bryan Townsend’s point that Taylor Swift is popular and well-known and that a crack team of pop-meisters from Sweden tend to dominate.  This has been taking shape since the Clinton administration and got discussed a bit in John Seabrook’s The Song Machine.

 

Leonard Meyer floated a few ideas about what might happen moving on from 1967 in Music, the Arts, and Ideas: 

 

The ideal of individualism and the goal of intense personal expression have now been repudiated by two of the important ideologies of our time and have been derogated by some traditional artists. In their place has been substituted the concept of the work of art as an objective construct. Originality is no longer tied to the discovery of means expressive of an artist's inner experience, but to the ordering of materials; and creativity is seen not as an act of self-revelation, but as a species of problem-solving. Since any style can constitute a basis for objective construction and for the presentation of principles of order, such views are not incompatible with the use of past art works as sources for materials, relational patterns, and syntactic procedures and norms. Form and technique have thus superseded inspiration and expression. Logically, all modes of organization and all styles become equally available and viable.    page 188

 

Well, to that I’d say Meyer was wrong.  Ted Gioia has called for Romanticism 2.0 and the emergence of a new counterculture.  I say we don’t need Romanticism 2.0 because Meyer correctly said we never got out of Romanticism 1.0!  Meyer suggested that the kinds of artists he called formalists were most likely to become the heroes of their day but what would that entail?  I think inspiration and expression are not going to go out of style but I do think Meyer was on to something noting the loss of a shared vocabulary within which “expression” could be taken as given. If we look at this next suggestion by Meyer it could be read, here in 2024, as an anticipation of mash-up culture, sampling, pastiche and other recombinant approaches to genre:

 

If a work of art is an impersonal construct, and creation a kind of problem-solving, then experiments with mixtures of means and materials, either within or between works, need not constitute an imperfection. On the contrary, the skillful and elegant combinations of disparate styles (or of ideas borrowed from different works and different composers) within a single work may become a challenging and attractive problem.   pages 190-191

 

 

... if earlier styles and materials are employed in contemporary art, music and literature, it will most likely be done by those inclined toward formalism, rather than by those who still consider works of art to be vehicles for personal expression. One cannot "use" the expressive quality of a Bach, a Rembrandt, or a Donne. ... In like manner, it will probably be the formalist rather than the expressionist who delights in the possibilities of mixing styles and materials from different epochs within a work or in employing different stylistic models in successive works.

...

 

That this is indeed the case is shown by the fact that it has been avowed and explicit formalists, such as Eliot and Stravinsky, who have employed past procedures, models, and materials most patently and most extensively. And we are thus confronted with an amusing paradox: the end of the Renaissance--of belief in teleology, individualism, expression, and so forth--has made possible a return to the styles and materials originally fostered by those beliefs.   ...  page 191

 

 

...  If this analysis is correct, it should follow that in the future a particular past will be favored and explored because of the specifically artistic problems it poses rather than because of the ideological position it represents.   page 193

 

 

Star Wars hadn’t even happened yet and certainly not steampunk as a subgenre within manga.   Meyer’s examples of T. S. Eliot and Igor Stravinsky as the arch-formalists of the 20^th century in poetry and music were well-chosen because they were both fond of formal explorations and genre blurring gestures. 

 

My personal interest has been in looking at the ways in which “pop” and “classical” reception histories among academics have tended to balkanize.  Poptimist and rockist approaches exist in pop and classical.  The “back to roots” types want their pet genre “redeemed” by being purged of extraneous or defiling elements.  We don’t have to look too far within classical music for the formerly-named Future Symphony Institute.  Among fans of rock the back-to-basic guys tend to announce themselves. 

 

The death of music genres that Rick Beato has observed can certainly be a real thing but he noticed (I suspect) that this has been happening for a while.  Leonard Meyer noticed it had been happening in the mid-20^th century. 

 

We’re better off if we allow genres and styles to be treated as flexible realms of the possible.  The demise of grunge doesn’t see me shedding any tears.  I actually hated most grunge but I’m not going to hold it against Rick Beato if he loves the style.  He loves Stevie Wonder so we can agree on that.  And here we are half a century from Innervisions and people still love “Superstition” and if people are even listening to Cornelius Cardew or Stockhausen, well, okay.

Ethan Hein on Jason Yust's April 2024 essay on tonality and racism, some belated thoughts on books by Philip Ewell and John Borstlap as etiological narratives

A word of warning, this blog post is 12,318 words long and includes a rather hefty bibliography.  I am glad Ethan Hein got around to writing about Yust's essay on tonality because it spurred me to finally collect my thoughts about books by Philip Ewell and John Borstlap I read earlier this year and Yust's book Organized Time is a wonderful, challenging read!  I'm glad to read that it seems Ethan and I both found Yust's work challenging and rewarding.  So, here we go.  Warning you ahead of time this is long even by the standards of Wenatchee The Hatchet. 

links for the weekend: Ethan Hein on AABA form; Rick Beato asks why bands don't chart anymore; Richard Bratby writes on Mozart's God and Molly Worthen reviews a new biography on J Gresham Machen at First Things

It's been a while since I've done a links for the weekend post.  Here we go.

Ethan Hein discusses harmonics and that reminds me of Kyle Gann writing about how the 13th harmonic saved his music

https://www.ethanhein.com/wp/2024/what-are-harmonics/

Ethan Hein digs into the physics and frequencies of string harmonics as a primer on the topic of harmonics in music in general.

Four moveable goalposts--four canards some musicologists and philosophers got from Theodor Adorno to use against the idea that "pop" can be "serious"

I have been thinking about this for a while but have not, as yet, written anything about the matter but I have been considering how defenders of tradition, or The Great Tradition, who may have all sorts of things about the timeless and transcendental nature of serious music (or "serious music" depending on your perspective) have four core arguments (or fallbacks) on why some music is more worthy of consideration than others.  Much as I love a lot of music that has been situated in the "tradition" I have not been able to avoid thinking about how there are four arguments against American popular song and dance idioms as "serious" music that were essentially formulated by Theodor Adorno that have been taken up by men who might otherwise vilify Adorno as one of the great villains of the 20th century where music, and specifically classical music, is concerned.

Without trawling through the half dozen books in which Adorno presented his canards, I'm opting at this point to merely present the canards themselves.  Specialists will most likely already know where they are found!
 

Richard Taruskin's lifelong argument against music as sacrament, the legacy of Romantic art-religion, and music in the service of worldview vindication

I think I first became familiar with the writing of Richard Taruskin through the blogging of Kyle Gann, who also introduced me via his blogging to Leonard B. Meyer.  All three writers changed the way I think about music and the arts but over the years I gained a special fondness for Taruskin's openly polemical stance toward Germanophile art religion and art religion in general.  

Ethan Hein discusses Robert Johnson's "Kind Hearted Woman", and a theory of blues tonality deriving from overtone series on I and IV--barring Partchian otonality & utonality, the binding thread may literally be a series of harmonics

http://www.ethanhein.com/wp/2021/kind-hearted-woman-blues/

Ethan Hein references the mythologizing habits that have surrounded Robert Johnson as nonsense and I agree.  I know that many people want to believe the myth that Robert Johnson went to the crossroads to sell his soul to the devil to play guitar better.  Avoiding the physical ordeals of plantation work and getting formal training in music sounds far, far more plausible.  If you get too immersed in some times of work there's not a lot of time or energy left to do as much musical anything.  My earliest years working were in vegetable canneries down in Oregon and there's nothing like even an eight hour shift of doing that sort of work to leave you less than ideally situated to write a bunch of music, and that's cannery work replete with union benefits and the like, not plantation anything.

I finished Bruce Cornforth and Gayle Dean Wardlow's recent biography on Robert Johnson earlier this year, so their case that Robert Johnson apprenticed or studied guitar formally with Ike Zimmerman may be something the mythologizers want to contest and let them make their case. Johnson's music is too complex to be explained as the work of a man who did everything by "feel" and didn't think through what he was doing.  

Tuning is for Killjoys: Ted Gioia's pejorative take on Pythagoras and Augustine in Music: A Subversive History

Music: A Subversive History

Ted Gioia

Basic Books, Hachette Book Group

Copyright © 2019 by Ted Gioia

ISBNs: 978-1-5416-4436-6 (hardcover), 978-1-5416-1797-1 (ebook)

 

More than ever, we need a subversive history of music. We need it both to subvert the staid accounts that misrepresent the past as well as to grasp the subversive quality inherent in these catalytic sounds in our own time. This book aims to provide that alternative narrative. But the goal isn’t to be iconoclastic or controversial. I have no interest in adopting a provocative revisionist pose so I can stand out from the crowd. I simply want to do justice to the subject. I want to tell the story of music as a change agent, as a source of disruption and enchantment in human life.  

 

I started work on an alternative approach to music history more than twenty-five years ago, but back then I didn’t realize the scope of what I would uncover. My starting point was much simpler than where I ended up. My core belief back then—unchanged today, so many years later—was that music is a force of transformation and empowerment, a catalyst in human life. My curiosity was piqued by the many ways songs had enhanced and altered the lives of individuals throughout history, and especially the great masses of people who don’t get much visibility in surviving accounts.  I didn’t exclude kings and lords, or popes and patrons, from my purview. But I was perhaps even more interested in peasants and plebeians, slaves and bohemians, renegades and outcasts. What did their music sound like? Even better, what did it do?

 

… My aim is to celebrate music as a source of creation, destruction, and transformation. I affirm songs as a source of artistry, but will also insist on taking them seriously as a social force and conduit of power, even as a kind of technology for societies that lack microchips and spaceships. I want to cast light on the neglected spheres of music that survive outside the realm of power brokers, religious institutions, and social elites, and explore how songs enrich the day-to-day lives of small communities, families, and individuals. Above all, I hope to show how music can topple established hierarchies and rules, subverting tired old conventions and asserting bold new ones. 

Ted Gioia’s would-be subversive history of music is the most conventional wisdom an American historian of jazz and blues could have written.  Gioia believes that music is magical and has the power to shake things up and that music, when it taps into what he regards as its shamanistic powers, can heal people and, according to the ancient Greek figure Empedocles, raise the dead.  Gioia has read the history of American popular styles of music pioneered by African Americans as a synecdoche for the history of music the world over and molded the rest of music history to fit that American mythology.

The Conventional Wisdom of Ted Gioia’s Music: A Subversive History

Part One: The ostensibly subversive premise

Music: A Subversive History

Ted Gioia

Basic Books, Hachette Book Group

Copyright © 2019 by Ted Gioia

ISBNs: 978-1-5416-4436-6 (hardcover), 978-1-5416-1797-1 (ebook)

 

Pages 1-2

The real history of music is not respectable. Far from it. Neither is it boring. Breakthroughs almost always come from provocateurs and insurgents, and they don’t just change the songs we sing, but often shake up the foundations of society. When something genuinely new and different arrives on the music scene, those in positions of authority fear it and work to repress it. We all know this because it has happened in our own lifetimes. We have seen firsthand how music can challenge social norms and alarm upholders of the status quo, whether political bosses, religious leaders, or just anxious parents fretting about some song bellowing ominously from behind a teenager’s bedroom door. Yet this same thing has been happening since the dawn of human history, and maybe even longer—although you won’t get told that side of the story in Music 101, or from the numerous well-funded music institutions devoted to protecting their respectability and the highbrow pretensions of their mission statements. …

Page 3

Musical innovation happens from the bottom up and outside in, rather than vice versa; those with power and authority usually oppose these musical innovations, but with time, whether through co-optation or transformation, the innovations become mainstream, and then the cycle begins again. 

Page 5

… The songs of outsiders and the underclass have always posed a threat, and thus must be purified or reinterpreted. The power of music, whether to put listeners into a trance or rouse them to action, has always been feared, and thus must be controlled. The close connection of songs to sex and violence has always shocked, and thus must be regulated. And the narratives that chronicle and define our musical lives are inevitably written and rewritten in recognition of these imperatives.

Gioia makes his thesis plain that the history of all music is a battle between superego and id; between masculine music of order, discipline and the state and the feminine music of eroticism, emotion and passions; and between the ideal of music as the decoration of luxury and the healing magic of song by, for and from the downtrodden.  For Gioia music has always been a source of magic and revolution whose real history has been suppressed by all the powers that be since basically the dawn of history as we know it but now, here in the 21^st century, he’s going to give us the real history of music.  Gioia’s history overtly apocalyptic literature, a story that will tell us the previously hidden truth about the history of music as a cosmic battle of dualities that has been written in “official” stories by the side of technocrats who want to suppress the magic of music.

Ted Gioia's Music: A Subversive History has a theory of Pythagoras that got debunked by Kyle Gann's history of tuning systems more than a month before Gioia's book came out

Music: A Subversive History

Ted Gioia

Basic Books, Hachette Book Group

Copyright © 2019 by Ted Gioia

ISBNs: 978-1-5416-4436-6 (hardcover), 978-1-5416-1797-1 (ebook)

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

Pythagoras’s attempt to define and constrain musical sounds by the use of numbers and ratios continues to shape how we conceptualize and perform songs in the current day, and even now we distinguish between melody and noise. Music, as it is taught in every university and conservatory in the world today, is explicitly Pythagorean in its methods and assumptions. And even when musical styles emerged from the African diaspora that challenged this paradigm, threatening to topple it with notes that didn’t belong to scales and rhythms that defied conventional metric thinking, the algorithmic mindset prevailed, somehow managing to codify non-Pythagorean performance styles that would seem to resist codification. [emphasis added] Even today, I see the Pythagorean spirit as the implicit philosophy undergirding the advances of digital music—the ultimate reduction of song to mathematics—and technologies such as synthesizers, drum machines, Auto-Tune, and the dynamic range compression of current-day recordings. From pages 48-49

Gioia's would-be subversive history of music was a fun read in terms of breezy style but exasperating in terms of its history. Gioia has a pejorative take on Pythagoras and anyone and anything he has bracketed into the category of Pythagorean. 

Mere Orthodoxy has a review up of Ted Gioia's Music: A Subversive History that contests his pejorative take on Pythagoras and Augustine

https://mereorthodoxy.com/tuning-is-for-killjoys/ 

The review has a deliberately narrow focus, contesting Gioia's pejorative take on Pythagoras and the Pythagorean legacy in Western music by way of pointing out that Pythagorean cosmology was abandoned as far back as the sixteenth through seventeenth centuries and referencing Roger Scruton and Daniel Chua's work as evidence. The other focus of the review is on Gioia's even more pejorative take on Augustine's never-finished treatise De Musica.  

I've been thinking of posting excerpts from De Musica here at Wenatchee The Hatchet for a while.  I was telling some friends of mine who are hip hop fans that having read Augustine's unfinished treatise dealing with the rhythm and meter of poetry that if we wanted to try seeing how Augustine's actual writings might be relevant to contemporary music that Augustine's self-admittedly tedious and pedantic discourse on poetic rhythm and meter and pulse best corresponds to the concept of "flow" in hip hop.  

We don't have to agree with everything Augustine wrote about music, or anything for that matter, but if we're going to do any kind of history or historiography on Augustine on the subject of music we need to accurately present what Augustine did and didn't say; that's something Ted Gioia completely failed to do in Music: A Subversive History.

The review, by the way, doesn't just make a case for why Gioia's book has problems by way of Pythagoras and Augustine, it also commends Kyle Gann's The Arithmetic of Listening, which debunked Gioia's myths and misrepresentations regarding the Pythagorean legacy in Western music and is a great read on the history of tuning systems ... and which was also published five weeks before Gioia's book.  Gann's book is magnificent and you should go read it!  I do enjoy reading Gioia but I enjoy reading Gioia even when I think he's completely wrong!  But if you have to pick just one book between Gioia's and Gann's go for Gann's, especially if you want to learn anything at all accurate about the ancient Greeks and their debates about tuning.  The Gann book really is wonderful.

Ethan Hein on Wellerman, sea shanties, and folk idioms gives me an excuse to mention the most famous pirate tune you probably only heard as a shape note hymn

So the sea shanties thing has been happening and Ethan Hein has discussed Wellerman recently.  The ex-choral singer in me can't resist writing a few things that I hope may be of interest about the sea shanty genre. 

http://www.ethanhein.com/wp/2021/wellerman/#more-21976

...

Harmony is not the only thing that makes this sound like a folk song. The Longest Johns’ untrained singing style contributes to the folkiness too. Their backing vocals use some “bad” counterpoint and voice leading. For example, at the end of the chorus, on “take our leave and gooo,” the four singers all converge on C in octaves rather than spreading themselves out across C, E-flat and G. If I wrote counterpoint like this in graduate tonal theory, I would have flunked. But this tune would not be improved by “correct” voice leading. Classical-style choral arrangements of folk songs like this can sound smoother and prettier, but without the rough edges, the music loses its soul.

...

To this I can add a few first-hand observations about singing a variety of styles of choral music.

by way of Ethan Iverson, Steve Reich's Tehilim; Kyle Gann on the history of minimalism; some thoughts on a style that had any interaction with the pop of its era and the post-war Pax American context that made that possible

A week late but ... Steve Reich had a birthday recently ... 

 https://ethaniverson.com/2020/10/07/steve-reichs-tehillim/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hf2qDuMyWHg

Ethan Iverson rightly points out that it would be hard to find someone more eloquent on the history of minimalism than Kyle Gann but I'm going to go so far as to point you to the chapter where Gann discusses the movement because, as I hope long-time readers know, I've referenced Gann's writings on a semi-regular basis here, at least when the blog is dealing with music.

https://www.kylegann.com/AM20C-8.pdf

Robert Gjerdingen's galant schemas as an entry point for pop/classical fusions--tonal and modal variants on the Romanesca by way of the Beatles, the Eagles and TLC

In the era of covid-19 there are concerns, pretty serious concerns, that classical music in the orchestral idiom may not survive the policies that have been considered necessary for dealing with the pandemic.  The Music Salon blog features a few recent pieces that I'll be referencing as a kind of news cycle baseline for what I'm about to discuss: