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

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

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

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

…

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

…

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

POSTSCRIPT:

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

 

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

…

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

 

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

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

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

…

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

 

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

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

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

PS 

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

a further thought on John Borstlap's simplistic invocation of Schleiermacher as positive and Herder as negative influences in history, dipping a toe into a contemporary discussion of latent Eurocentric and white supremacist elements in Schleiermacher's work

I have written in the past about how I find John Borstlap's references to Friedrich Schleiermacher and Johan Gottfried Herder troublesomely simplistic by way of writing about other things.  Borstlap valorized Schleiermacher as someone who used the idea of art religion and was a forebear of Wagner, who really got the idea going of art doing for religion what religion could no longer do.  Borstlap has claimed that religions don't make people people make religions.  Conversely, he has contended that Herder was responsible for developing a chauvinistic, jingoistic form of ethnic nationalism that led, eventually, to National Socialism.  

I found multiple levels of problems with Borstlap's approach.  First and foremost he treated two famous Christian theologians who were pioneers in the liberal Protestant tradition as if they were philosophers.  They were that, too, of course, but Borstlap's simple valorization of one and demonization of the other does not reflect an engagement with their respective works.  Now who am I to begrudge someone for not wanting to read Schleiermacher's Christian Faith since it is, in its recent 2016 English translation, at least a thousand pages long! Philip Bohlman's assembly of the writings of Herder on Music is much shorter and cheaper.  I have said in the past that I simply can't take Borstlap at his word when he claims Herder was a forerunner of chauvinist German nationalism.  Why?  Because I've read Herder and Herder specialists are swift to say there was a nationalist streak in his work but he was also, just as much, an aesthetic pluralist and translator.  Herder complained of his generation of Germans they were too busy doing garbage knock-offs of Greek and Latin poetry to benefit from knowing the Hebrew Scriptures better and he produced a modern translation of Song of Songs that was considered a landmark act of translation. 

My point today, however, is that if Herder was not necessarily as proto-Nazi as Borstlap implied in The Classical Revolution, Schleiermacher's influence has not been considered uniformly positive.  Even if contemporary liberal Protestants regard the neo-orthodox fusilades of Emil Brunner or Karl Barth against Schleiermacher to be unfair there are contemporary theologians who regard Schleiermacher's work as being full of latently Eurocentric and white supremacist defaults.  They were not as pernicious as those of, say, Richard Wagner, but they have come up for discussion just in the last few years.  

Theodore Vial's Modern Religion, Modern Race is a book that digs into the theological and philosophical writings of both Herder and Schleiermacher to argue that both men had Eurocentric and racist defaults.  Herder and Schleiermacher were (and are) considered significant contributors to the liberal Protestant Christian project and yet they both had Eurocentric and racist aspects to their work.  I haven't gotten to Vial's book and as my sympathies are more Swiss Reformed, Anglican and even a few Puritans I am not in a rush to read Vial's book.  I have, however, read that the book is out there and it's germane to my disagreement with Borstlap about what I regard as his simplistic take on Herder and Schleiermacher.  That Schleiermacher was influential can be attested by the fact that, for instance, even the orthodox Dutch Reformed theologian Herman Bavinck felt obliged to attempt to salvage from Schleiermacher the ideas he thought were actually good ideas.  

Guy Beck has contended that Schleiermacher's legacy via Rudolf Otto and Gerardus van der Leeuw has waned in the last century and that both Otto and van der Leeuw sustained Schleiermacher's aesthetic pluralism.  Ironically, Roger Scruton, who openly cited Otto as an influence, did not seem eager to embrace the aesthetic pluralism of Otto's approach.  It's one thing for a Swiss Reformed theologian like Emil Brunner to dissent from Otto's art mysticism because it abandoned any commitment to Christian scripture.  Among Christians writing about matters of Christian concern Brunner had every right to register that complaint. The Hebrew Bible is notoriously uninterested in discussing the nature of music, so most discourse on what the Bible does or doesn't say about music revolves around the presumed dualism of Orphic and Pythagorean traditions.  The world is far bigger than what the Greeks kept debating about.  When the African Christian bishop Tertullian rhetorically asked what Athens had to do with Jerusalem a contemporary Copenhagen school minimalist might say that the Hebrew Bible was a knock-off of Plato's laws and only came into being during the Hasmonean era.  But in his day Tertullian was arguing that Christians had the Bible and they didn't need to be beholden to categories of thought imposed by Greek philosophy.

Now, regarding Schleiermacher, I think at this point I can add a few links for your consideration.

https://readingreligion.org/9780190212551/modern-religion-modern-race/

https://www.marginaliareviewofbooks.com/post/race-difference-and-religion-is-there-a-universal-humanity

https://brill.com/view/journals/pneu/44/2/article-p285_15.xml

It's obvious from the way scholars have interacted with Vial's book that they can take his point that Schleiermacher did have Eurocentric and white supremacist defaults and yet still regard Vial as having misread Schleiermacher on important issues (there are liberal theologians who have felt ardently Barth and Brunner misread Schleiermacher for about a century now).  

Even the concept of religion itself is, in contemporary scholarly discussion, something regarded as a scholarly invention of the long 19th century.  Jason Storm, for instance, has a book on the invention of religion in Japan. Piety can overlap with religion or religious customs but is not necessarily the same thing.  He also wrote a whole book called The Myth of Disenchantment showing that belief in spiritual and supernatural elements is more common now than in the past and that founding figures in the social sciences had substantial occult interests (Carl Jung perhaps foremost among them).

Now Vial's project may be stymied from the outset by a desire to demonstrate racist elements in Schleiermacher and then contend that the categories of religion he introduced have thus been problematized.  I'm slogging through an annoying book called The Music of Theology where three European theologians annoyingly mix metaphors and seem to take as given that Christianity is "Western" or "European".  No on both counts.  Christianity started in southwest Asia and made its way to Africa as well as Europe.  That trans-Atlantic academic norms take as given an Orphic and Pythagorean dualism is pretty obvious to me at this point even if Ted Gioia weren't jumping up and down on that soapbox at his Substack.  That Schleiermacher is important is basically beyond dispute, but at a lay level I think we can suggest that if Schleiermacher was a racist he wasn't the same kind of racist as H P Lovecraft, who was really virulently white supremacist.  As a half Native American and half white man I'm the kind of guy that Lovecraft would have regarded as an abomination.  

Even if Vial's work is tendentious that's literally a debating point for scholars of Schleiermacher and scholars of race.  I mention this all, of course, to highlight my simple point that when I read Borstlap's books over the years I knew enough to know that he was making claims about Herder and Schleiermacher that, alas, can't hold up under even the briefest possible scrutiny.  If anything Borstlap is more eager to valorize or demonize authors for what he imputes to them as their one big good or bad idea than Ewell does with Schenker.  

I've read Ewell and Borstlap so I'm not just saying this for purely rhetorical effect.  I've got my disagreements with both authors but Ewell is a self-identified atheist and a son of an atheist who stays in the wheelhouse of music theory.  So I don't take any offense that someone who has advertised he wouldn't know the first thing about liberal Protestant theology doesn't go there.  Borstlap, by contrast, implicitly takes the stance of a polymath without necessarily showing that he's ever done his homework.  What makes Schleiermacher good and Herder bad?  Can Borstlap cite works?  He hasn't, not in a decade, and has relied on sweeping generalizations.  It comes off almost as if he took survey courses in philosophy and religion half a century ago and took in those accepted norms.  People can do that but an academic consensus can change in a generation or two. If Herder was a Eurocentric chauvinist there has to be proof provided from the writings.  Borstlap never provided it.  The same can be said about Schleiermacher.  

Even the very category of "religion" that Borstlap has invoked is, here in the 21st century, regarded by anthropologists and historians of religion as an actually freighted and problematic concept itself.  Obviously religious convictions and beliefs have existed for some time but the way German writers in the long 19th century used the term "religion" has not escaped scrutiny.  

I wrote previously that one of the biggest problems with partisans of Art Religion is they never stipulate what kind of religion Art is supposed to be a surrogate for.  I grew up Pentecostal and am currently Anglican so I know the differences between high and low liturgical practices and I can tell you that within just global Anglicanism itself a wide variety of practices exist.  Borstlap's Art Religion seems tacitly tethered to the highest of highbrow forms of liturgy but that's not a sustainable assumption.  Chiara Bertoglio's monumental work on sixteenth century Christian debates on music and liturgical norms in Europe, all by itself, should disabuse anyone of the idea that Christian music and liturgy was uniform.  Not that Borstlap ever said that, rather, the European Christian musical norms of the sixteenth century (and before) were full of genres cross-pollinating across what we'd colloquially identify as folk, pop, art, and so on.  Particularly in nascent Lutheranism a lot of cross-form and cross-genre and stylistic exchange was going on.  

Borstlap and folks at the formerly called Future Symphony Institute have committed to a future for the symphony. But that's precisely the problem, the symphony is a mere fraction of what is retroactively called The Great Tradition of Western European classical music.  Before that there was Byrd or Palestrina or Josquin or Perotin or Schutz or, ah, right, we're seeing a ton of overly liturgical music in that history.  But there was also dance music.  Charles Garside Jr. contended in Zwingli and the Arts that, by banning music from church services altogether Swiss Reformed notables like Zwingli and Bullinger paradoxically created a realm of secular music that was not tethered to either the throne or the altar.  What liberated music in Europe, depending on which scholars we read, was the process of being desacralized.  It's hardly a surprise that a scholar of Swiss Reformed theologians would regard that as an innovation of the likes of Zwingli, much like fans of the Enlightenment want to believe that it was their pet movement that liberated music. 

Maybe the zeitgeist has it that liberal theologians are doing handwringing about the unexamined racism of their heroes.  This would, if anything, mightily underline Ewell's point in On Music Theory that confronting racist legacies is happening in seemingly every other field of academic except music theory.  

For my part I am just coming back to my earlier point that I can't take Borstlap's claims about Herder and Schleiermacher as given.  My reading on contemporary debates about theologians in the liberal Protestant tradition has just underlined my hesitation to take Borstlap as having any authority (or even basic competency) on matters of Christian theology. 

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. 

recently finished reading from Jeremy Begbie and Jason Ananda Josephson Storm

I haven't put together my thoughts on John Borstlap's newest book to the point where I could write about it here, for instance, but I can say that if you want to read a book that takes traditions of spirituality seriously and makes a case against materialist reductionism in the arts more effectively than Borstlap has in his new book (and is much cheaper!) you could read Jeremy Begbie's newest book, which I finished reading this week.

http://bakerpublishinggroup.com/books/abundantly-more/410871

Abundantly More: The Theological Promise of the Arts in a Reductionist World by Jeremy Begbie

two pieces from Current Affairs discussing Philip Ewell's book, some semi-organized thoughts on epistemic trespass that happens when musicians and music theorists opine about religion

https://www.currentaffairs.org/2022/03/can-music-theory-education-overcome-its-whiteness-problem 

https://www.currentaffairs.org/2023/12/a-music-theorist-on-how-white-supremacist-assumptions-have-shaped-the-evaluation-of-music

...

But when people in the United States say “European” music, it’s really just a few places—German-speaking territories, prime among them—and we present it as the way we should think about music. And of course, the idea that pitch, the piano, and 12 tones in a system that emanated—to be blunt—from the Catholic Church is the system that represents all music, that’s kind of what we’ve been teaching. And, of course, colonization: you have to immediately think about the idea of presenting what were essentially white supremacists and patriarchal ideas across the globe in a colonial context. Of course, Christianity played a massive role.

I’m teaching Theory 1 currently, and to just look at all the music theory textbooks, literally last night I thought, Oh, my God, all of these hymns, all of these chorus, all these “Jesus, my pain and suffering”—there’s a lot of Christianity in the music theory textbooks, which I didn’t really dig into in my book. Maybe that’s the next project because that’s what we’re talking about: Catholic traditions morphing into German Protestant traditions of making music.

...

As Taruskin pointed out in The Ox, consolidating and ratifying liturgical music within Carolingian Catholicism is more or less why we began to have the musical notation traditions we have.  Now, obviously, just because those were the historical seeds of what Taruskin called the literate musical traditions of Europe and the United States doesn't mean for a second things stayed that way. Although Taruskin name-checks him, he doesn't mention that Charles Garside Jr. made a case that Zwingli and Bullinger, by banning music from church services, functionally created the realm of fully secular music that was not automatically in service of throne or altar.  

...

a sprawling links for the weekend post, variations on a ground bass--counterpoint under fire in the 1470s. laments about a loss of Catholic liturgical music that was lambasted in the years it was being written, and how fifteen C. musicians defended their jobs at the expense of ordinary musicking people

https://mereorthodoxy.com/musical-localism-and-the-rebirth-of-culture

...

The ethnomusicologist Thomas Turino has written on this distinction, which he takes to be more fundamental than any genre distinction, between “participatory” and “presentational” kinds of music. “If we briefly consider the products of the music industry over time,” says Turino, “we can glimpse cosmopolitans’ gradual shift in thinking of music making as a social activity to music as an object.” He talks about what it was like interacting with Peruvian festival music of the 1980s, before (or athwart) the arrival of the various technologies that have enabled our presentational era. “For them,” says Turino, “a recording is to ‘music’ what, for us, a photograph is to the person in the snapshot: a representation of something else, not the real thing.”

 

It is worth asking for a moment where and how the change occurred in music. Here I depart a great deal from other traditionalists and conservatives who talk extensively about music, particularly the late Roger Scruton, as well as the various others who have written on the topic such as E. Michael Jones and Julian Johnson. For many of these thinkers, the moment of decline occurred somewhere in the twentieth century or perhaps the nineteenth, and the culprit was, variously, dissonance, a rejection of long-standing norms of form, professionalism, and, most of all, the rise of commercial recording technologies that allowed music to become abstracted from live, public performance.

 

Here I am much more radical: Classical music is not the solution to our problems; it is the problem. I consider the shift from Palestrina to Monteverdi, from Bach to Haydn, as far more fundamental than the shift from Wagner to Schoenberg or from tonality to atonality or from Rachmaninoff on shellac to the Beatles on vinyl.

...

Well, to go by Rob C Wegman’s The Crisis of Music in Early Modern Europea 1470 to 1430, classical music, in the sense of being elite music produced by elite for elites that was bankrolled by a system of indulgences has always been the problem.  I know John Ahern knows about this book because I discovered it reading a couple of his blog posts at Ad Fontes Journal online.

John Borstlap on the need to define words properly, such as modern and modernism

While throughout his blog and his comments at Slipped Disc and in his book The Classical Revolution he has hinted that he found it a bit unfortunate Roger Scruton put as much stock as he did by traditional religion, there are moments when I read John Borstlap write about music, aesthetics and ideas ... and, if you’ll pardon the joke, I wonder how many neo-Calvinist presuppositionalist Christian polemics he has read in his life. Bear with me, I’ll explain things soon enough. I read Borstlap’s blog post from last month in the last few weeks and will quote all of Borstlap’s text and skip the Krier quotes:

 

http://subterraneanreview.blogspot.com/2023/07/progressive-conservative.html

In the culture wars concerning modernity and tradition, concepts like 'modern', 'tradition', 'conservative', 'progressive', 'value' and so forth, appear to have different meanings in different contexts, with the result that meaning is often blurred by political motivations in the background. In fact, their meaning is shifting all the time, and thus become tools for other meanings which are different from their origins.

Tradition: simply the sum of successful solutions to problems of aesthetics, practices, value. 'Our heritage has come down to us without a testament' (René Char), which means: we should never stop being critical of what we have inherited of our civilisation. This critical stance is the motor of development and keeps traditions alive and accessible.

Progress: anything which means an improvement. This is entirely dependent upon context.
Modern: that which is contemporary, which is 'now'. It is a historical category and has no meaning as to value.

Modernism: the ideology which has, in the last century, created a world view which is very different from most of the past, and in which technology, science and progressiveness for its own sake have taken priority over humanist values as were developed since the Renaissance. It is a prescriptive ideology (hence its nature as 'ideology') and often not open to critique, which is discarded as 'conservative'. But attempts to recapture successful solutions to problems, which have been discarded because of not fitting within a modernist world view, can be progressive in terms of improvement, when a civilisation has developed towards extremes which undermine its capacities for development. With conservatism in the sense of wanting to freeze historic moments, it has nothing to do. Nothing has done classical music more damage than the misunderstanding that this art form is a 'conservative' one.

…

Only if notions like modernity, modernism, progress and tradition are understood in their original and true meaning, can a vision be developed which offers a perspective on improvement: the only serious meaning of progress.

so I got Ewell's book and am looking forward to reading it

given all the stuff IRL I haven't gotten far into it but I read the preface and it is crammed full of acknowledgments.  Poundie Burstein shows up and that reminded me that Journeys Through Galant Expositions is a magnificent book.  I saw Joshua Clement Broyles get a nod and that reminded me of a commenter who commended Beyond Schenkerism to me, which I "do" have but IRL stuff got so rough in the C19 period and since I have it "started" but temporarily on hold.  I know that McWhorter did some kind of write up about the book but since I think McWhorter was and is foundationally wrong about ragtime (longtime readers don't need to ask why) and that Don Baton had a harsh appraisal but ... 

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.

...

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
...
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.