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.  

Can you imply a tonic that never shows up in the song? Yes. Ethan Hein discusses Fleetwood Mac's "Dreams" and examines harmonic/melodic divorce with reference to Matthew Hough

Ethan Hein has written about "Dreams" by Fleetwood Mac, one of Stevie Nicks' most famous songs.  There's a discussion of harmonic/melodic divorce in the song (see here for a working definition of the concept more generally) and of the question "what key is this song in?"

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.

the double binds of "art history"--Ted Gioia and Roger Kimball on the Western avant garde, a grand narrative that they want to keep for and against the sake of "rebels"

I present to you nine unadorned observations from Ted Gioia about the avant garde.  I say “unadorned” because I am citing the observations themselves minus all the other words appended to each of them:

 

(1) Avant-garde experiences allow rule-breaking—which should feel fun and liberating. But that doesn’t happen often enough.

(2) But the avant-garde still makes a vital contribution even when it is flawed.  

(3) The avant-garde has lost its ability to disrupt the system, because it’s now entrenched inside the system.

(4) The avant-garde today is too much about grant-writing, and cozy relationships with the wealthy. 

(5) Cutting edge art can’t cut anything unless it resists the allure of insider money and power.

(6) Why did we stop worrying about artists selling out? That’s a legit concern.

(7) Disruptive movements in the arts still occur all the time—but they’re now coming from tech companies

(8) A vital avant-garde community would fight against becoming content creators. In fact, this might be the true destiny of the avant-garde in our time.

(9) There so many ways art can transform the world—but we’re not even looking at the problem in the right way.

Ted Gioia suggests we need a new Romanticism. No, we don't, particularly not in "classical music".

There's a goofy little scene in Sam Raim's second Spider-man film where Peter Park tells Mary Jane Watson they should pick up where they left off.  "Where was that!?" she replied, "You can pick up where you left off if you were never on, Peter."  Lately Ted Gioia has written notes toward a New Romanticism and in this we are presented with the opposite scenario, which is that we won't have a New Romanticism if the ideals and dogmas of the old 19th century Romantics have never actually been cast aside.  Gioia obviously differs and believes there will be (or needs to be) a new Romanticism.

https://www.honest-broker.com/p/notes-toward-a-new-romanticism

Gioia quipped "We need a new Romanticism".   Then he decided to take his quip seriously ...

Alan Jacobs has had a few riffs on laments of art-deaths, lack of religious literacy in academic publishing (on a musical topic, no less), and I have a few thoughts on the failures of conservative philosophers when it comes to the arts

https://blog.ayjay.org/the-wisdom-of-sturgeon/

It seems that literary fiction is dead — it even has a gravestone. Capitalism? Also dead. Tradition and conservatism apparently achieved a murder-suicide pact, which I guess makes it inevitable that the Judeo-Christian tradition is equally defunct; the fact is pushing up daisies; a consensus of some kind has shuffled off its mortal coil; the metabolic processes of socialism have long been history; liberalism joined the Choir Invisible some time back; even Trumpism has expired and gone to meet its maker. At this point, wouldn’t it be simpler for someone to write to tell us what isn’t dead? Maybe something out there is merely pinin’ for the fjords? 

It’s a regrettable rhetorical tic, closely related to others, like the claim that “the internet” — all of it! All trillion pages! — is no fun any more, or the even vaster claim that “culture” — all of it! Everything that humans do together! — has come to a standstill. These vast sweeping hand-wavy universal assertions … is there no end to them? Why can’t they come to a standstill? Why can’t they shuffle off their mortal coil? 

You need a generalization you can rely on, and I’ve got one for you. It’s called Sturgeon’s Law: “Ninety percent of everything is crap.” You can do the hand-wavy thing and moan the words “over” and “dead” and “no fun,” or you can follow a better path: sift through the cascade of human productions that come your way to find, and then preserve, the small percentage of it that’s golden.

My name for that pursuit is the Gandalf Option, and I recommend it to you, because (to shift metaphors) it is always better to light a candle than curse the darkness. 

 

Don Baton reviewed Phil Ewell's book and this hobbyist composer considers a few things about arguments made and not made about tonal, racial and cognitive hierarchical appeals

Don Baton has reviewed Philip Ewell's new book on music theory education and is not ... positively ... impressed.

https://donb.substack.com/p/ewelldammerung

https://www.city-journal.org/article/ewelldammerung

Two excerpts of note to me first:

             ...

The connection between racism in music theorists’ social views and their theoretical frameworks—the part of Ewell’s argument that ought to be the most airtight—turns out to be the flimsiest. In his discussion of early-nineteenth-century French critic and theorist François-Joseph Fétis, Ewell cites Fétis’s opposition to racial miscegenation and his ownership of a book by scientific racist Arthur de Gobineau, but he makes no substantive link to Fétis’s musical theories.

Ewell accomplishes little more with his nemesis Schenker, asking us, with a suggestive wink and a nod, whether Schenker’s privately articulated belief in a hierarchy of races and his music theories’ reliance on a hierarchy of tones can possibly be a coincidence. And consider this spectacular non-sequitur: “Schenker believed that the fundamental structure must ‘govern’ and ‘control’ the middle-ground and foreground elements of the music composition. Similarly, Schenker believed that blacks must be governed and controlled by whites.”

And second:

Ewell fails to suggest any frameworks that might replace Schenker in the classroom, and he makes no attempt even to prove that Schenker’s theories are analytically unnecessary or unhelpful. The enduring prominence in academia of Schenker and other music theorists like Hugo Reimann arises from their analytical and explanatory power. But the musical knowledge we stand to lose by cancelling (or “decentering”) them seems not to concern Ewell. In one astounding passage, Ewell responds to Jack Boss, a music-theory professor at the University of Oregon who published an article in  JSS using Schenkerian techniques to analyze a piano solo by the black jazz pianist Art Tatum. Boss purported to show that Schenker’s analytic insights were by no means limited to white composers, or even to classical music. Providing no evaluation of Boss’s analysis of Tatum, Ewell offers a disconnected rebuke: “Whiteness not only does not honor blackness by applying white-male analytical methods to black music, it does immeasurable harm, since whiteness only profits and benefits itself.” He adds that, by analyzing Tatum, Boss is presuming to “elevate” his music to the realm of the great (white) composers, as if Tatum were not there already by his own merits. 

I am reminded that in my reading of Roger Scruton he, the conservative’s conservative philosopher on the aesthetics of music, was openly dismissive of the value of Schenkerian analysis.
https://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2020/08/roger-scruton-vs-schenkerian-theory.html
I hesitate to say there’s “no” value to Schenkerian analysis or theory but a lot depends on who is using the theory and to what end. Victor Zuckerkandl’s purple prose remains off-putting but he formulated an idea about musical time and space that George Rochberg extended in his own proposal of thinking of musical time and space in terms of timespace and spacetime and the question of the distinctions and definitions of musical time and space must at some point detain us who have interests in music theory because, well, Adorno claimed that in Stravinsky the “spatialization of music is absolute”. I am not even into Jason Yust’s Organized Time yet but thinking about the nature of what musical time and space are in human cognition is something that, for all his faults, Heinrich Schenker had some ideas.

Don Baton’s argument that is tacit in his review could, if I’ve read it rightly, be brought to the surface. Ewell’s case can be read as one that invites us to keep Schenker’s white supremacism conjoined to his advocacy that we think of music as organized by pitch hierarchies or tone hierarchies. I’m not interested in the pitch/tone distinction that has been propounded at this point, however.

The trouble Baton sees with Ewell’s conflation gambit is that it fails to account for directions Schenkerian theory has gone in the last century. Dismissing a Schenkerian analysis of Tatum as not respecting blackness may depend on a surmise that a white supremacist’s theory is incapable of being extracted from white supremacism. Baton notes Ewell makes nearly no mention of Christianity as a formative influence in Western cultures. Perhaps neither Baton nor Ewell are familiar with James Cone, with liberation theology, or with African biblical scholarship on powers and principalities in Pauline literature but contemporary Western scholars and musicians can seem to be even more illiterate on religious texts and their reception histories than average. How white supremacists wield Ephesians 5 on an plantation will not be the same interpretation of Pauline transformations of household codes as read by a 21^st century preacher in the United States or by 19^th century abolitionists. We might be confused into thinking that nothing Stuart Hall proposed about readings of resistance could be applied to Schenkerian theory, for instance.

Baton only touches on the fact that Schenkerian analysis has been brought to bear on jazz performances. Ewell may dissent that Schenkerian analysis applied to black music is not going to be respectful to it, which Baton notes. But I’ve got Drew Nobile’s recent book Form as Harmony in Rock Music and while I’m only a few pages into it what becomes clear is that a Schenkerian analysis of a rock song can happen that does not even presuppose major and minor key scales. If Schenkerian analysis in theory and practice can branch out into modal mixtures or to mixolydian rock songs then the question of which tonal hierarchy is surmised to be the “ground” of analysis is open-ended.

To restate my point in another way, what Edmund Burke wrote is not the same thing as what William F Buckley or Russell Kirk told us Edmund Burke meant. The reason scholarship will go on is because these kinds of things happen. I would not for one second trust what Ted Gioia claims Augustine of Hippo said about music, having read Hippo’s work in translation myself. Rather than reducing music to “number” Augustine told us that memory is the faculty that is most important for the perception and interpretation and reception of music and number, with all the attendant tedium of neo-Platonic concepts of what it means, is relevant as a way to understand what makes it easier for us to remember. Rhythm and meter are mnemonic aids and catalysts. Augustine wasn’t writing about what we’d call music at all, he was writing about rhythm and poetic rhythm. Hip hop artists who could slog through De Musica might even get the impression that everything Augustine wrote about rhythm in De Musica could be about establishing “flow”. If you want to read through what I’ve written about Augustine and De Musica I think this tag may be handy

https://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/search/label/Augustine

Sure, someone like Ted Gioia can keep claiming Augustine reduced music to number; and Roger Scruton claimed that Augustine’s theorizing about music has no relevance to us since the neo-Platonic cosmology of yore has long since been dismissed (a paradoxical thing for a self-identified conservative to say). But the opportunity for those of us here and now in reading Augustine would be to take up his observation about the essential role memory and perception plays in hearing and loving music and understanding it, which often comes in that order. As I noted earlier, Augustine’s pedantic interest in poetic rhythm could be of interest to hip hop artists, or at least Christian hip hop artists, who might be able to translate Augustinian reflections on language, music and memory into new directions. Revisiting the classics and to use them as springboards for new explorations would be a pretty rote defense of tradition, and one that was noted merely in passing by Jaroslav Pelikan in his Vindication of Tradition. Baton didn’t “go there’ but he could have easily made the case that the problem with Ewell’s take on Christianity is merely mentioning it as instantiating white supremacist views when a majority of Church Fathers East and West lived in Asia and Africa. If you wanted to read an explanation of how and why Western literate music traditions emerged from Catholic liturgical practices Richard Taruskin’s first volume of the Oxford History of Western Music does a good job laying that historical groundwork.

As for memory and music and perception, I think Baton could have come up with a stronger argument against collapsing appeals to hierarchies in tonal organization with appeals to racial hierarchies.

That many 19^th and early 20^th century music theorists did do this is not prima facie evidence that appeals to hierarchical perception as part of the process of hearing music is always everywhere racialized.  I find it impossible to take seriously any insinuation that when Augustine of Hippo distinguished between rhythm and meter by saying all meter has rhythm but not all rhythm is metrical Augustine was, for those who don’t know of him, one of the most famous African bishops in the history of Western Christianity. He remains controversial even among Christians for a wide variety of reasons but I refer to him because he wrote one of the earlier treatises on music in antiquity that has survived and even if he never finished the work and probably did most of the writing of it before his conversion experience it’s still of historical interest.

Now, as for hierarchical cognition of sound and sight, we have some fairly standard works in the last sixty years to establish that hierarchical perception and interpretation is how our eyes and ears work with our brain. Robert Snyder's Music and Memory: An Introduction and Richard L Gregory’s Eye and Brain: The Psychology of Seeing have been around for some time and both books establish the ways in which our senses and brain interact in perception, cognition and memory formation in hierarchical ways. Leonard B Meyer, appealed to hierarchical ways of hearing and remembering music in tonal terms as an argument that integral serialism and post-tonal music would probably ultimately never catch on. 

MUSIC, THE ARTS, AND IDEAS

Leonard B. Meyer

Copyright (c) 1967. 1994 by The University of Chicago

ISBN 0-226-52143-5

From page 258

...

It is, as we have seen a serious mistake to assume that the principles or "laws" governing the organization of one hierarchic level are necessarily the same as those of some other level. As a rule, the forces creating structure and organization do not remain the same--are not uniform, from one level to another. "The fallacy of reductionism" writes on biologist, "lies in assuming a one-one relationship between different levels of organization."  ... Similarly in the theory and analysis of music it is doubtful that the several different hierarchic levels are governed by the same syntactical and grammatical principles of organization.

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Just as the forces governing the ways in which chemicals unite to form molecules are different from the forces involved in the organization of molecules into cells, so the ways in which tones combine to form motives are different from the ways in which motives are organized to create larger, more complex musical events.

From page 259
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The world is understandable, not because it is uniform and homogenous but because its rich variety can be organized into complex but functionally related structures.

None of which appeals to hierarchy in racialized ways. I would be surprised if Ewell didn’t know Meyer’s work and also surprised if Baton didn’t know Meyer’s work. Meyer contended that in the long run atonal music would not stick around because people had put pseudo-scientific theories ahead of heard sounds. Ironically, people who refused to accept that we humans hear and then interpret sounds according to hierarchical concerns consigned themselves to academic niche audiences. Meyer, along the way, does not come across as some white supremacist for pointing out that because the human brain relies on interpreting sensory date in hierarchical ways integral serialism and its rejection of tonal hierarchy was not likely to “catch on”. 

It's been hard to shake a sense that Baton's main interest was dismissing Ewell's conflation of hierarchical taxonomies in Schenkerian thought as unproven when a more robust counter-argument would be to point that however Schenker's views may have reflected taxonomies of racial and tonal hierarchies this is not necessarily where the theory and interpretive historical use of the theory has stayed on the one hand and, on the other, that research into cognition and the relationships between the senses and the brain suggest that hierarchical information sifting and interpretive patterns are built in to how humans see and hear. Writing music that keeps these aspects of humanity in mind can respect that memory works in hierarchical ways without being implicitly or explicitly as racist as Heinrich Schenker was. 

The trouble I've seen is that some of the traditionalists who contemptuously dismiss Ewell and scholars like him are equally contemptuous at the thought of leaning in to cognitive and sense integration research.  Roger Scruton came up with his philosophy of mind in aesthetic perception back in the 1970s, for instance, and had no real interest in letting his view be informed by or changed by any research over the last fifty years as far as I can tell. The strongest case that conflating one hierarchy with another is a sloppy move is in paying attention to research on how the eye and the ear and sight and hearing relate to the brain, cognition and memory but that seems to be precisely what the defenders of "tradition" have not wanted to do.  Dismissing someone like Ewell?  Sure, they can't wait to do that. It can feel as though there's too much bad faith and well-poisoning across the field.

Which would be a shame, if true, because we are living in an era of music theory in which the conceptual resources to broker a synthesis of American vernacular popular styles with 18^th century approaches to large-scale form is more possible in theoretical and practical terms than in possibly any previous era. Music theory has always lagged behind practice and Adorno noted that in earlier eras of treatise-writing authors gave instructions on ornament and style and only later did treatises on music become more concerned with matters of form and “substance”. That we are in all sorts of ways trying to shake off the worst elements of the long 19^th century and its legacy of theory, formal analysis and harmony I don’t need to belabor.

My point is that we can very easily do work showing how ragtime sonata forms can be done in our day and age. We could just as easily discuss how to make a sonata movement out of tunes by Thelonious Monk. Give me the sloppiest take on the chord changes from the synth break in Stevie Wonder’s “Living for the City” and I could probably make a twelve-minute long sonata rondo form using those chords as a starting point. Theorists are fighting about matters that are academic in the most literal sense of the term but that’s not the same as opening up new possibilities.  I wrote this a while back in response to a Ted Gioia post but academics have the same problem as journalists, you cannot champion new and potentially liberative directions in music as an educator or a journalist inasmuch as the very nature of your job is that of a trainer or a gatekeeper.

I’m not saying don’t read Caplin or Hepokoski or Darcy or Burstein or Taruskin or Ewell or McClary or Kernan or Rosen or whoever. What I am saying is that academics tend to digress into turf wars and pissing contests about whose theoretical tools are better or best or bad or worse for what are generally academic concerns.

Long ago when I was considering seminary I got some advice from the late William Lane (let the reader understand). He said that he was troubled by the extent to which academics in biblical studies and theology (in the U.S.) continually displayed a guild mentality, particularly in the Ivy League and the high-powered institutions—the goal seemed to be impressing other academics rather than serving the local church. He believed that no matter how academic your pursuits you should still have rank and file Christian believers in mind as people to love and serve.  Anyone who has read Wenatchee The Hatchet since 2006 probably doesn’t have to guess that I have taken on that sympathy and have tried to write with that kind of ideal in mind.  No matter how abstruse and obscure I can get I hope that in some way I can be helpful to someone.

A Few months ago I tried reading Cynical Theories by James Lindsay and Helen Pluckrose and I couldn’t finish the stupid book. Merely being against critical theory says nothing about what you are for. James Lindsay comes across as one of those sorts of also-ran new atheists who had none of Christopher Hitchen’s gifts for writing and direct expression and none of the scientific knowledge of a Dawkins or a Dennett but all the smugness that those other authors sometimes displayed. Lindsay has become a name checked by conservative Protestants to the point that Mark Driscoll shared he was reading Cynical Theories via social media a few years ago. Why do I mention this?  Because if you disagree with Ewell you certainly can but coming up with an alternative theory or, better, an alternative practice or, better yet, new music that attempts to tackle the issues he has raised sounds better than just disagreeing with his polemic. As a guitarist I would propose that much of the academic fighting over the symphonic canon is moot as the very future of the symphonic canon is not clear. I suspect there are better odds for Florence Price’s piano music than symphonic music, for instance. Don Baton, I think, addressed that issue, too, at one point.

What Don Baton has not addressed at all (and probably won’t) is something Jeremy Begbie has been writing books about in the last thirty years—theologians, liturgists and musicians and music historians have started to actually compare notes.  For those who are not religious the prospect seems pointless but when I finished reading William T Dargan’s book on the history of evolution of the lining out tradition in black American churches I was struck by how inescapably the low church Calvinist traditions in Anglicanism in Scotland, for instance, informed the liturgical norms and musical possibilities of American low church musical traditions.

To put my point more starkly, partisans of art religion based on highbrow or lowbrow or white or black essentialism are not likely to explore these options if they only define religious traditions in strictly pejorative terms. Baton gets that part but that some interesting work on defining and defending aesthetic pluralism as a Christian liturgical discipline in the work of Nicholas Wolterstorff, Frank Burch Brown, Maeve Louise Heaney or Jeremy Begbie has clearly not come up in the Baton or Ewell neck of the woods. The reason may be that among theologians and liturgists and people concerned about church music the possibility of thinking about what might be beneficial and do reconciling work in the realm of not-church-music hasn’t been on the table.  I hope by now it’s obvious I think that should be on the table.

Paul Hindemith is largely nobody’s favorite composer these days but he contended that music educators can too often forget that their best audiences are the amateurs. Most music will be made by, with, for and for the sake of amateurs. If music educators only kept turning out music educators then that’s all the musical culture would be and Hindemith believed the biggest lie American music education sold to its students was that they would actually be professionals. He found that prospect troubling.

I’ve never been a professional musician and never anticipate being one. I’m a hobbyist, an amateur.  I may be an amateur who has had a lot of fun reading Elements of Sonata Theory and thinking through how readily Type 1 Sonatas lend themselves to rock `n roll vocabulary but for all that I’m still an amateur. When it comes to religious studies I’m an amateur and a layman.  Yeah, I might be excited by books by Richard Bauckham, Ephraim Radner, John Neville Figgis, Francis Young, Christoph Heilig, Gordon Fee, Graham Twelftree, Loren Stuckenbruck, Jaroslav Pelikan and others but I’m an amateur there, too. Ewell’s proposals for changing music education ultimately don’t concern me because I’m not anticipating getting more music education in a formal way than I have gotten so far. I didn’t even major in music. I got a journalism degree and before this century began realized I would never land steady work in journalism. I’ve slogged away at a variety of dead end office jobs ever since but I’ve had time after I’m off the clock to write stuff like this.

Which is another way of saying that whatever the future of music is, we may find that the role academics play in that future is hard to anticipate, which is why debates about what academics say about the nature of academic study of humanities remains a largely in-house affair.  Perhaps there is a permanent crisis in the humanities and perhaps John Guillory has a point that criticism was the avocation of amateurs before it never quite gelled into an actual academic discipline.

Ted Gioia looks at the bad reviews music critics gave to The Beatles--some thoughts on the self-imposed double bind of gatekeepers trying to be tastemakers

https://tedgioia.substack.com/p/why-did-the-beatles-get-so-many-bad

The album for Sgt. Pepper is still fugly.  I don't care if people have anointed the album of music itself a classic (a point I grant), that album cover is a mess.

I'm going to float a counter-proposal, that The Beatles were not really re-inventing themselves every single album. Their songwriting craft didn't change "that" much, however much production approaches and the mechanics of specific song production processes varied.  Critics may have disliked that the band was changing too quickly but songcraft was stable.  Gioia obviously had fun doing a short Lexicon of Musical Invective for the Beatles comparable to invective about Beethoven. 

But let's play with Gioia's proposal that critics were like soldiers who were trained to win the previous war.  What does that mean?  Well, in lieu of Ted Gioia giving his own explanation beyond "it was ever thus" I want to go back and quote Leonard Meyer, who proposed what he thought was the problem with musicology attempting to "read the times" back in the 1960s.

something a little old, Freddie deBoer's ardent "Everything is not a remix, against popular deepity", a sideways riff on pastiche eclecticism as the aesthetic question or challenge of the modern era according to Leonard Meyer

https://medium.com/i-m-h-o/everything-is-not-a-remix-c6f04e442305
It's no surprise at all that a socialist with openly Marxist interests would argue against Jungian and neo-Jungian archetypes.  I mean, talk about reification!  :)  But, somewhat more seriously, his objections to the propensity of our age to peddle "deepity" seem worth reading.  

Is Convention Really the Deadliest Threat to Art? A response to John Borstlap

http://subterraneanreview.blogspot.com/2021/07/the-threat-of-convention.html

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This means that convention is always the deadliest threat to art, also today where convention simply has taken other forms than in the past but functions in the same way.

 There are two terms in this axiom that are left undefined. While “art” is ultimately the most critical term I’m restricting myself to discussing the term “convention”.  I’ve read Borstlap’s work for a few years now and can make a case that his pat axiom quoted above belies the way he actually references convention in his polemics against specific strands of modernism in music or, as he more often prefers to call it, sonic art. 

To get something out of the way immediately, I’m neither a fan of John Cage nor of the New Complexity nor of most variations of integral serialism.  In other words, if you know who Borstlap is then this is not going to be a defense of the kinds of sonic arts he doesn’t regard as even being music.  What this will be, as I noted above, is an examination of a tension between Borstlap’s axiom and his actual arguments about specific avant gardists from the last century. 

Ethan Hein on music not being a universal language, Leonard Meyer back in the 20th C on the Western theoretical scholarly penchant to synthesize Romantic ideology with 20th C scientistic positivism in music theory

http://www.ethanhein.com/wp/2021/music-is-not-a-universal-language-and-this-klezmer-song-proves-it/

...

Anyway. The idea of “musical universals” very quickly devolves into “Western European music is universal”, and that is some white nonsense. There might be some broad overlaps between disparate forms of human music, just as there are similarities in our cooking and clothing and languages and so on. But the particulars are always going to be culturally specific.

Back in the last century Leonard Meyer made some comments about the legacy of Romanticism and its quest for musical "oneness": 

a history of religion riff on Western art-religion: a Donatist controversy in art-religion and a progressive push for the priesthood of all believers in art-religion

In order for what I'm about to propose to make any kind of sense it will help to establish that I've been writing about thesse ideas for years.  These ideas may have started with a difference of opinion I had about a piece published in 2017 at Mockingbird 

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:

Ted Gioia's history of music as Europe vs. Africa traffics in an artificial binary--exploring the Native Hawaiian ancestry of slide guitar and Anton Reicha's advocacy of microtonal melodic ornament in 1814

… No matter what the political structure one advocates, the wrong music can apparently send it toppling. Perhaps the strongest aspect of this evolution is its reversal of the ancients’ philosophical dichotomy. The guitar, a kind of modern lyre, is now the dangerous source of disorder, while the flute is seen as a prim, subdued instrument evoking respectability and orderliness.  This is one of the most striking examples of the dialectic at play in music history in which things turn into their opposites.

 This is not mere happenstance. The guitar shook things up in the twentieth century because it was the focal point for the African diaspora’s attack on the Pythagorean paradigm that had dominated Western music since 500 BC. As blues guitar techniques entered the mainstream, they validated the use of bent notes and introduced sounds outside conventional scales. This assault on Pythagorean notions of playing in tune—which for centuries had required musicians to keep within the boundaries of carefully delineated scales and maintain a proper tone—threatened to overturn all the hierarchies of established music, both social and aural. [emphasis added] …

 … This African counter-paradigm represented the most forceful attack in more than two millennia on the codification of music into a system of discrete notes. The knife could bend a guitar note in a way that a hand or finger could not. With a weapon in hand, the subversive performer could rediscover music’s origins in unconstrained sound. As such, the modern guitar represents the exact danger that Plato had perceived in the flute more than two millennia before: an untuning of the universe. Music: A Subversive History, page 106

 The rise of the blues may offer the most powerful test case we could devise for assessing a key thesis of my book, namely, the assertion that musical innovation comes from the underclass. This hypothesis, if it could be proven, would show how different music is from other art forms.  Innovation in painting and sculpture, for example, has almost always happened in close proximity to rich patrons—even today, a couple hundred affluent collectors set the tone for the visual arts economy. The rise of the novel drew momentum from the wealth-creating enterprises of the Industrial Revolution. The new artistic mediums of today—video games, virtual reality, and probably whatever is coming next—appear inextricably connected to profit-generating businesses in Silicon Valley. Only music plays by different rules, almost defiantly so. Music: A Subversive History, pages 335-336

Being a guitarist I’m flattered that Gioia thinks the guitar has been so revolutionary in music in the last century. I’m tempted to agree but …   is Ted Gioia imagining that all post-Pythagorean bids at tuning system represent repressive norms?  Did blue notes really defy the established order by not obeying “the rules”, whatever those are of “properly” ordered scales and notes?  Are we talking about the rules of sixteenth and seventh century species counterpoint grounded in the performing traditions of acapella vocal music? Those rules emerged for some practical as well as theoretical reasons. 

Or is Ted Gioia trying to say that blues riffs with notes a quarter-tone away from the notes E flat or A natural on a keyboard is subversive?  String players who perform Haydn string quartets already know that E flat and D sharp are not the same pitch, which was why when Haydn went to the trouble of saying to play a passage scored in E flat starting from the pitch of D sharp that was because he felt he needed to.