The Bad Faith of the Honest Broker Revisited: Ted Gioia presents music as a way to transcend the binary impasse in 2026, having defined music in terms of binary impasse in 2019's Music: A Subversive History

To read Ted Gioia in May 2026 would lead you to believe that he is sure that the history of the world can be understood in terms of binary conflicts and that this terrible state of affairs can be ameliorated by music, at least a little bit.

 

https://www.honest-broker.com/p/how-to-tell-if-youre-living-in-a-8ee

How to Tell If You're Living in a Binary Crisis

And how to get out of it

Ted Gioia

May 11, 2026

…

Somebody should write a global history of binary conflicts—because no force has exerted more influence over human affairs.

Rome collapsed while its citizens fought over the colors blue and green. That sounds crazy, but it’s absolutely true.

I believe this is the single most significant fact about Roman history.

1.      The conflict between Blues and Greens lasted for a thousand years.

2.      During that period, each color enjoyed periods of dominance, and could have used its power to make tangible improvements and fix a broken system.

3.      But they rarely did this—because were obsessed with punishing the other color team.

They won’t teach that in history class. But they should. It ought to be the first lesson.

…

How can you tell when you’re living in a binary collapse? Here are seven warning signs:

1.      All conflicts are channeled into a single binary opposition between two teams. There is never a third team—if someone tries to create it, one or both of the two teams will work fervently to destroy the third option.

…

 

Naturally, in a Substack article published by Ted Gioia the answer to the great problems of the human condition comes from the arts.  We need a Romanticism 2.0, as Gioia has been saying for a few years, and we’re going to get one.  Yet I have been reading Ted Gioia’s work off and on for about ten years so I can’t quite forget that back when he published Music: A Subversive History with Basic Books in 2019 he had a chapter titled “Music History as a Battle Between Magic and Mathematics”.  Ted Gioia’s whole conception of music history has too often been predicated on the literal sell of the kind of binary impasse he suggests music can defuse.  Take this passage from the subversive history I discussed a few years ago:

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

Pythagoras’s attempt to define and constrain musical sounds by the use of numbers and ratios continues to shape how we conceptualize and perform songs in the current day, and even now we distinguish between melody and noise. Music, as it is taught in every university and conservatory in the world today, is explicitly Pythagorean in its methods and assumptions. And even when musical styles emerged from the African diaspora that challenged this paradigm, threatening to topple it with notes that didn’t belong to scales and rhythms that defied conventional metric thinking, the algorithmic mindset prevailed, somehow managing to codify non-Pythagorean performance styles that would seem to resist codification. (p. 48-49, emphasis added) 

Ted Gioia’s own history of music can easily be read as a triple binary impasse in which the paradigms of White-Science-Man vs Black-Magic-Woman is used to explain all of the world’s musical history.  Science vs magic, Europe vs Africa, male vs female, Ted Gioia embodies the worst elements of neo-Orphic thought about music.   Music can’t provide a way beyond the binary impasse as Gioia sketches it out if we use Gioia’s own history as the paradigm through which to understand music because his own understanding of music is so ostentatiously mediated through binary impasse.

At one level this is hardly surprising coming from a historian of blues and jazz, but at a more foundational level Gioia’s intellectual and ethical failure is predicated not on ill-will but on not being able to grasp that the history of neo-Orphic theologies of music have trafficked in essentialist paradigms since roughly the time of Schleiermacher, a point that gets touched upon by theologians now and then. Jeremy Begbie has registered a constructive complaint that Schleiermacher’s picture is helpful but partial.  Philip Stoltzfus' Theology as Performance: Music, Aesthetics, and God in Western Thought is more directly critical by noting that Schleiermacher’s art mysticism was neo-Orphic and that his form of neo-Orphic theology or art mysticism has been the norm for the last two centuries.  

 

Ted Gioia, by his own account, never studied music theorybooks.

At some point during my teenage years, I decided I wanted to be a jazz musician. But I didn’t have a coherent plan.

I just spent a lot of time at the piano. And when I wasn’t sitting at the keyboard, I listened to jazz—on records and in concert. I also read jazz magazines and books at the local public library (which had a subscription to Downbeat).

But here’s what I didn’t do:

·         I didn’t get a music degree.

·         I didn’t take any lessons after the age of 18—and never had a single jazz lesson.

·         I didn’t try to get gigs.

·         I didn’t network with influential people in the music business.

·         I occasionally glanced at a music textbook, but never really studied one.

·         I didn’t learn anything about music technology (except how to plug in my Fender Rhodes).

I noted this a while back, and it reminded me of an observation made by the philosopher Leszek Kolakowski on the problems of the autodidact:

https://wwnorton.com/books/9780393060546

Main Currents of Marxism

Lescek Kolakowski

Copyright © 2005 by Leszek Kolakowski

Copyright © 1978 by Oxford University Press

ISBN: 978-0-393-32943-8

Page 127

 

While Marx’s criticism was unjust and dishonest in some respects, he was intellectually far superior to Proudhon, who had all the faults of a clever autodidact: self-assurance, unawareness of the limitations of his knowledge, incomplete or desultory reading, lack of skill in selecting and organizing material, and the hasty condemnation of authors whom, for the most part, he did not properly understand.

Ted Gioia can be thought of Kolakowski's Proudhon.  Gioia's autodidacticism has revealed that he isn't capable of producing a subversive history of music because his understanding of music is arguably the most conventional of post-Romantic conventional wisdom.

 

Still, Ted Gioia can be regarded as a person of goodwill even if many of his ideas about music history and culture don't rise to the level of idiosyncratic crackpot. Moving beyond a binary impasse does sound like a good idea in theory, as well as in practice, but Gioia’s whole career of publishing, whether in his books or in his Substack, reveals a performative contradiction at the heart of his work—he sells us on one binary impasse on top of another as the way to think about music, yet wants to back up and claim that music could be what allows us to transcend the binary impasse. 

POSTSCRIPT

One of the worst parts of Gioia's pitting magic against mathematics is that it shows how blinkered his grasp of the materials has become.  I recently finished Annette Yoshiko Reed's book Demons, Angels, and Writing in Ancient Judaism and in her conclusion she pointed out that one of the challenges of contemporary readers and scholars is to grasp that demonology was the cutting edge science of the ancient world from ancient Babylon up into even the Hellenistic period. Gioia's dualism of magic against science is predicated on an anachronistic post-Enlightenment dualism that does not pay enough attention to the territories of science and religion, territories that overlapped far more significantly in the ancient world than Ted Gioia's set of binary impasses can allow for. The binary impasses Gioia wants music to help us liberate from, then, are paradoxically the binary impasses he keeps imposing upon his understanding of music history. 

Alan Jacobs' against Ross Barkan on the idea that gatekeepers need to police art nostalgia, Berlioz 2.0 "Forget the classics, listen to MY stuff instead" for the 2020s

https://blog.ayjay.org/this-post-is-obviously-against-all-new-things/

May 1, 2026

this post is obviously against all new things

Ross Barkan:

The culture … does get stuck. We are too backward-facing already. The Metropolitan Review has run its fair share of retrospectives, but I’ve been in the mood, of late, to crack down on them. There is always going to be another anniversary of a great old work of art. There is always another famous dead writer we can celebrate. I’m as guilty of this as anyone, as I begin work, for this Substack, on an essay celebrating the 60th anniversary of Pet Sounds. But I want new musical horizons, too. Imagine if the rock musicians of the 1960s spent much of their day fixating on the pop of the 1940s. As a culture, we need less mimesis and less retrogression. A lot of this is the fault of the algorithmic internet, which rewards copycat trends and wearying groupthink. Cultural nostalgia is nothing new, though it can feel especially repressive these days.

Responses:

1) There is no art without “mimesis,” in the sense that Barkan uses the term here: all art responds to prior art in a thousand ways. And the problem, according to him, is not people copying older art but rather being too interested in it. He seems to want, as an alternative to mimesis, amnesia. 

2) Interest in and knowledge of the past is neither “retrogression” nor “nostalgia” — not does it constitute “groupthink,” because a staggeringly wide range of opinions is possible (and indeed extant) about pre–21st-century cultural productions.

3) It’s noteworthy that Barkan, because he edits a Substack publication, thinks of himself as a cultural policeman who can “crack down” on those overly attentive to the past. (Remember this day the next time you want to write a piece about an old book, comrade!)

 

4) Writing an essay on Pet Sounds is not, in my judgment, something to feel “guilty” about. …

5) Indeed, “There is always going to be another anniversary of a great old work of art” — which makes for a great opportunity to write about it, alert readers to its existence and its excellences, and maybe even inspire young artists to try to match it. Bob Dylan wasn’t “fixating on the pop of the 1940s,” but he was compulsively fascinated by and profoundly knowledgable about the long great history of demotic American music, what he calls “historical-traditional music.” And his absorption in that vast old musical world was absolutely essential to his greatness. When we write about great things from the past, we’re helping to feed future Dylans. 

…

This is the point at which I interrupt Alan Jacobs’ rebuttal to point out that Stevie Wonder’s masterpiece Innervisions has now been around for more than half a century and literally nobody on the planet has attempted to publish a monograph analyzing every track in musical and lyrical terms; situating the album in the historical and cultural context of the United States in the early 1970s as a way to convey its cultural impact; and a handful of essays I have come across discuss Stevie Wonder as a disabled black musician without really seeming to discuss his brilliant songs.  Now I have a visual disability myself so it’s not like I can’t connect at all to discussions of how disabled musicians handle music in ways that maybe other able-bodied musicians don’t.  It’s just that it would be nice if the music itself got discussed. 

a brief thought on a paradoxical aspect to Ted Gioia's Substacking--the MAGA streak at the heart of his project

 If you haven't read anything by Ted Gioia in the last twenty years this gnomic observation may be impossible to follow, and it may be impossible to follow if you have read things he's written in the last twenty years.

When I read his piece asking (rhetorically, of course) whether Mickey Mouse could make Disney great again the answer to his question is "Yes".  I would venture to say the answer is "No".  Yet the Shock of the Old is that everything is a reboot and the entertainment industry isn't taking any risks and we not only need to stop living in the past, we need Romanticism 2.0.

Talk about living in the past.  I have blogged this thought a few times but we don't need Romanticism 2.0.  We're not done getting rid of the worst and most racist elements of Romanticism 1.0.  We live in an era in which writers who are ostensibly as secular and progressive as can be in politics can't resist writing about the liberal arts in general and music in particular without recourse to the language of magic, sorcery, trance, spirit possession and the like.  Or, like Ted Gioia, music is magic and all real music history comes from sorcery but "they" don't want you to know this.  If we could be bring back the magic in music culture would thrive.

Ted Gioia has a MAGA streak for American cultural production.  As Jed Esty put it so succinctly in The Future of Decline, Make America Great Again was the motto of Aaron Sorkin productions for all the W years well before Trump's first term. Esty's advice was the United States should reconcile itself to the reality of its decline and not try to pull a Great Britain because Great Britain trying to hold on to its empire kinda got them two world wars and the thorough and irrevocable demise of said empire.

Now it would seem that the United States isn't going to heed any potential lessons there.  The old saw is that it's easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism but Hollywood has shown that it's easier to keep imagining the end of the world than to imagine a world that isn't saved by Americans, let alone dialing back the entire cinematic scene to make the world a more hospitable place--consider the carbon footprint of every single movie that gets churned out in the trans-Atlantic world and ask whether those movies really make the world better.  

Gioia has a dogmatic commitment to a form of Romanticism where things always need to be shaken up. More than half a century ago Leonard Meyer floated the idea in Music, The Arts, and Ideas that all the revolutions had already happened by 1965 or so and that the future was going to be hybrids and mash-ups created by formalists playing with fusions and that no new revolutionary style was going to dominate any of the arts, least of all music.   

Ted Gioia's Mickey Mouse fantasy shows that he's torn between two impulses, saying that we Americans need to get out of the cultural ruts but by wanting Mickey back he's functionally advocating for making one of the biggest ruts in American pop culture deeper than ever.   

threading together riffs from Freddie deBoer, Ted Gioia, Alan Jacobs on the crisis of AI slop being the crisis of educational formulas about the arts in Cold War American arts education programs

Freddie deBoer's recent post (Great Writers "Tell" All the Time) rolls out a few usual suspects (Jane Austen, Fyodor Dostoevsky) to demonstrate that the "show don't tell" bromide has been one of the more harmful pedagogical cliches of what Mark McGurl describe in his book The Program Era (not that deBoer name-checks that book anywhere in the post).  The other axioms are "write what you know" and "find your voice".  

I mention deBoer simply in passing despite his inspiring this post because I have also been reading Alan Jacobs and Ted Gioia on artificial intelligence and how it has been used in the arts.  Jacobs was the one who proposed that AI slop has become what it was because the Iowa Writers Workshop formulas made it so easy for Ai to replicate those formulas.  I discussed that over here.

Ted Gioia has been warning that AI slop is utterly inhuman and even if I can agree on paper I think the grand failure of Ted Gioia has been the failure to explain how and why AI slop is what it is.  How is it that the AI project, which has been utterly human from start to finish, become abruptly inhuman only at the content generated from the AI prompt?  As Ethan Hein so eloquently put it, AI slop predates AI.

deBoer's proposal is that rules that make sense for screenwriting and playwriting migrated into prose where "show don't tell" is not automatically (or even usually) the wisest way to write.  It is here that I can't resist shifting to an essay Leonard Meyer wrote in the last century wherein he contended that one of the foundational mistakes of the integral serialists was presuming that all levels of cognitive engagement worked in the same way with music.  Meyer's counterproposal was that just as a molecule doesn't behave the way a cell does; a cell doesn't behave the way an organ does; an organ doesn't behave the same way a system does; and a biological system is not the same thing as organism in a similar way the behavior or patterns of musical organization at the level of the phrase are not the same as those for a larger musical chunk.  As Ben Johnston put it in the writings that made it into Maximum Clarity, twelve-tone exhausted its own set of viable options faster than all tonal systems that came before it.  

AI has been creating creepy slop because we taught it a bunch of lies about what good art does, if not necessarily about what we consider good art.  I respectfully differ from Bryan Townsend that AI slop generates cliches.  Love is the biggest cliche there is but we need love.  We also can't all be super-Benthamites who abjure all the arts.  

Engaging all the arts on the basis of a few simple top-down formulas has been what we've had going on in the arts in the United States for generations.  It's one thing to lament the identikit nature of post Joseph Campbell Star Wars everywhere monomythic monotony.  That's to complain about the output.  The problem with the input filter is that Joseph Campbell's whole approach was garbage.  It doesn't necessarily improve if the variation comes via Northrop Frye.  These moves have probably had the same effect on narrative as Anton Reicha's description of grand binary form had on early 19th century piano sonatas, leading to a bunch of interchangeable and forgettable piano sonatas from that period nobody knows about because those sonatas were written by people who didn't end up getting canonized. Ethan Hein is utterly write that AI slop predates AI but I am willing to grant that Reicha did not intend for his description of what has come to be called sonata form as a mere formula or recipe. 

Ted Gioia claimed in his history of music that through the power of music we can all be wizards.  That's a lie.  I've made this point in the past but the big theme running across Peter Beagle's novel The Last Unicorn is the contrast between the magic of seeming and the magic of doing. The magic of seeming can seem powerful and amazing but it creates appearances and impressions for those who are able to be won over by it.  The magic of doing is a lot more powerful but also more difficult to control and fewer people have the ability to master that kind of magic.  It can be read very easily as a parable about two kinds of art.  As big and scary as The Red Bull is he's blind and, as the magician points out in the story's end, the monster conquers but never fights.  When the unicorn turns, stands her ground and prepares to fight The Red Bull he relents and the unicorns trapped in the sea are released.  The old king Haggard meets his death with a strange sense of relief as the bull he'd captured is leaving him.

King Haggard's domain can be read in the early twenty-first century as a kingdom of AI slop with a king who wants to see, if just once in his life, someone who has the magic of doing and not the magic of seeming.  Beagle, tellingly, once described himself as not seeing the king as a villain because he saw himself in the character.  A particularly acid literary scholarly sort could quip that The Last Unicorn is literature in the magic of seeming and not doing a la whoever-else-that's-been-canonized gets assigned to you in a college literature course. But the academic world of liberal arts education has to have been administered by a bunch of King Haggards for AI slop to be what it is here in 2026.  

Apropos of nothing I'm reading James Crenshaw's book on Ecclesiastes.  Crenshaw takes the book to have been a fabrication passed off as the work of Solomon so there are ideas Crenshaw entertains I find less and more persuasive but an idea of interest to me is this--Crenshaw pointed out that in the wisdom literature of the Hebrew Bible there is no redeemer.  Job hopes, briefly, that he can have a redeemer who delivers him from his misery but Qoholet does not conceive of God as a redeemer and the Book of Proverbs gives you rules to live by because people who don't screw up their own lives have done at least that much.  The Wisdom Books are books with no memory of the Exodus and even no recollections of the Law, let alone the Prophets.  

The proverbial is wise but also formulaic and yet we have generations of liberal arts educators who swear up and down in theory and practice that the liberal arts are supposed to be prophetic and powerful and shake things up and call down and call up chthonic spirits blah blah blah.  But what gets taught is literally proverbial and formulaic.  The problem isn't that proverbs are cliches.  Cliches are often true and even often wise but Proverbs warns that a fool wielding a proverb is still a fool.  Proverbs also warns that if you see a man who is wise in his own estimation there is more hope for a fool than for him.  Qoholet warned that even if a wise man claims to have figured everything out that happens under the sun don't believe him. 

In his commentary on Job 1-21 C L Seow noted that many biblical scholars have groused that Elihu seems to add nothing to the debate.  That's obviously not true.  Seow pointed out that Elihu's new contribution is that God reveals some things to some and not others and that this is so is mysterious.  Job's friends rely on what may be good theology as far as it goes but the shoe-horn Job's suffering into their established ideas and double down on the necessity of being right.  

The crisis of AI slop in the arts seems to me as though it's art generated by Job's friends rather than Job.  It's the art that relies on the wise formulas of tenured sages that has no prophetic element because ... when's the last time you heard of a North American tenured academic who thinks prophets are actually prophets and not scribes with political interests whose hegemonic agendas can be deconstructed from the strictures of language and analyzed with respect to systems of control?  

We live in such a time that people can publish books in which they not only assume Q was a real document but that the political agendas of the scribal community that produced Q (upon which the Synoptic Gospels are assumed to have relied) can be nailed down.  Look, I get that Q is useful as a scholarly shorthand in New Testament studies for all the material in common across the Synoptic Gospels.  That doesn't oblige me to think some Q document ever actually existed--that's a scholarly super-fad of the last century or so.  Let's think of AI slop in the arts as what you can get if you think the Gospel of Q was ever actually written and not the fabrication of American scholars who think they're smarter than the people who wrote the Gospels. Their scholarly magic can be described as a magic of seeming and not doing. It's the committee made reductionist take on what some self-selected scholars decide the "real" teachings of Jesus were once all the mythic stuff got removed.  

And Ted Gioia can wonder how AI slop got to us?  No, I think it's pretty patently clear what kind of technocratic self-assured American educational norms helped get us to the age of AI slop.

In postmodern biblical studies we can see that people have realized that you can speculate on the subdivisions of J, E, D and P all you want but that will not get you closer to interpreting the actual Torah as a narrative.  If you spend your time separating P and E materials and don't actually read the narrative of Genesis 9 and wonder whether Noah's curse was simply unjust then you're splitting hairs within the realms of academic fads rather than directly wrestling with how unjust Noah's curse is within the Genesis narrative if you stop and think it over.   I am not kidding about scholars being so busy separating strands of the Genesis narrative into source critical ruminations they don't deal with the narrative but I'll let Justin Michael Reed's book do the work he already did in it.

You can take that tale of source critical hair-splitting that doesn't engage the narrative itself as a parable and a tale of how we arrived at AI slop. The mystery is not that we got here to the point where AI slop art is with us in a new form, it's that people who taught the way they taught the arts for the better part of a century, devoted to what Jacques Ellul described as the dogma of technique, didn't step back to think that this outcome was on the way. 

Ethan Hein remixes "Dreams" across a dozen other works to illustrate harmonic/melodic divorce in popular song, and I can't resist making a response song about Charles Rose would likely say the rumblings of that divorce go as far back as Hector Berlioz and the divorce papers sure got signed by the time of Phil Collins era divorce-ballads

https://www.ethanhein.com/wp/2024/the-melodic-harmonic-divorce-in-pop/

https://www.ethanhein.com/wp/2025/what-key-is-dreams-by-fleetwood-mac-actually-in/

https://www.ethanhein.com/wp/2026/what-i-learned-from-remixing-dreams-over-and-over/

https://ethanhein.substack.com/p/twelve-remixes-of-dreams-by-fleetwood

 

Dropping the vocal stem of Fleetwood Mac's "Dreams" on to the instrumental tracks of "Stayin' Alive" by the Bee Gees sounds good.  It does also sound very funny.

 

Dropping the vocal line over Bach's legendary Prelude in C major from Book I of the Well-Tempered Clavier also worked quite well.  All the remixes are worth hearing not just for their novelty but as a way to underline Ethan Hein's blogging thread about the emergence of harmonic/melodic divorce in popular music.  Now if Charles Rosen were still alive he might have been tempted to clear his throat and say that the first rumblings of harmonic/melodic divorce were beginning to happen with the music of Hector Berlioz centuries ago.  Yeah, yeah, if you actually like the music of Berlioz and I kind of don't but point taken. And now I will digress, as I so often do.

Now I do have a thought about what is actually very important in Hein's remixes and what they have to do with music.  The most significant power in creating musical connections and developing musical possibilities is memory.  The intrinsic relationship between working memory and musical perception and interpretation goes at least as far back as Augustine of Hippo (whose De Musica is available in English translation at archive.org now). I have been very critical of Ted Gioia for his use and misuse of Augustine's complex and mercurial thoughts about music for some time now. Part of the complexity of Augustine's thoughts on music come from the simple fact that he wrote Books I-V of De Musica before his conversion to Christianity while Book VI was written after he had become a Christian. The good news for non-Christians who blanche at the prospect of reading one of the most famous Christian thinkers in history is that Books I-V don't discuss Christian doctrine at all for previously stated reasons. The bad news is that De Musica is regarded as one of the most punishingly tedious treatises on anything from antiquity.  Augustine himself realized it was so painfully dull that he opened Book VI with an apology for how genuinely boring everything he wrote in Books I-V actually was!

Modulating well is what the science of music was for Augustine and by "modulating" was not meant "changing keys".  Since everything in the treatise was about poetic rhythm in Latin poetics "modulation" is best thought of in rhythmic terms.  To put this in terms that may be clearer to hiphop than other styles of music, you could say that Books I-V were where Augustine established the scientific principles of establishing a flow.  Those concepts are by and large unfamiliar to me but I have friends who are into hiphop and rap and have explained the basic idea in theory and practice.  Part of my aversion to Gioia's handling of Augustine is how the Christian saint becomes symptomatic of the Greek of Greeks when he needs to be the emblem of "Pythagorean" music and thus a bad guy, but when Gioia wanted to question whether there was even such a thing as "Western" harmony he abruptly remembered Augustine was one of the great Christian bishops of Africa.  Right ... that's why I can't take Ted Gioia seriously when he so obviously moves goalposts. Augustine's thought is complex and remains controversial and it's more fair to him historically to not try to simplify him down to one or another side of a glib Substackified dualisms.

So, the thing about memory and music is that juxtaposition and rhythm are significant.  Hein's experiments show that it is possible to reconceive melodic materials in shifting harmonic and rhythmic contexts.  This is only possible if he you have refined your powers of associative memory to the point where you can drop a Stevie Nicks vocal over the instrumental tracks of a song by the Bee Gees.  Leveraging associative memory for musically expressive purposes is what Johann Sebastian Bach did when he created a fugal first movement for the Credo of his Mass in B minor by using the incipit of the ancient plainchant as the subject of his fugue. Once we consider that the fugal subject is the incipit of the Credo then this could be considered one of the more epic sample flips in "classical music", to go back to a post Ethan Hein did called "fugue as sample flip". Ethan Hein and I have gone back and forth about fugue as sample flip in the past and I feel like a chump for not thinking of the Credo from Mass in B minor as a sample flip earlier. 

 

The paradox of Stevie Nicks' vocal fitting so readily over a Johann Sebastian Bach prelude is that 18th century music tends to be so contrapuntal the prospect of such a juxtaposing working is surprising.  The juxtaposition totally works but that is what a "textbook" approach to classical music cultivated since the long 19th century would tell you isn't supposed to happen and shame on you for thinking it!  But those kinds of juxtapositions, as we have just heard and seen via Bach's Mass in B minor, were what happened in actual 18th century practice. But there is a sense in which the Mac/Bach mash-up comes off as a surprise because harmony and melody in Western theory and practice was very married and, if we just run with Bach's life and times as a jokey analogy, had twenty kids where the family resemblances were not hard to see.  As a friend of mine in college once joked, fifteen generations of Bachs had a penchant for sounding similar. 

Temporal disjunction as a basis for musical exploration has been going on for a long time.  In the 20th century we could look at something like George Rochberg's Caprice Variations for solo violin on a theme by Pagannini. The 1970s was an interesting era in both classical music and rock/pop because of the different kinds of experiments in musical code-switching that were going on.  I had a somewhat short (for me) reflection how George Rochberg's landmark string quartets from the 1970s were composed around the same time Stevie Wonder wrote "Living for the City" and both American composers can be heard and interpreted as experimenting with code switching, how to shift pitch vocabularies mid-work.  I think overall Wonder's song has had more staying power but my point is that we've been living in an era in which, as Leonard Meyer put it, not everyone is going to like the same music but democracy should ensure everyone is free to like whatever they like. 

So it can be useful to study popular song where the divorce between harmony and melody has been firmly established since Kramer vs. Kramer.  Back in the days of Berlioz, to keep running with the gag, harmony and melody were a little out of sync and maybe spent a lot of time in separate rooms of the same house,  but neither was actually consulting with divorce attorneys yet and the divorce papers were definitely not finalized.   By the time Phil Collins showed up with his 1980s era divorce-pop harmony and melody were most assuredly living “Separate Lives”. Some forty years on I think we could say that Phil Collins (love him or hate him or whatever) became one of the maestros of the divorce pop song. 

You might find the humor groan-worthy but I don't care any more.  You listening?  I don't care any more!  

Ted Gioia against AI slop music misses the terrible paradox, that AI music has been an utterly human endeavor from start to finish so what, exactly, is even inhuman about it?

Ted Gioia writes as if he’s been a prophet his whole career.  A prophet of what? Art for human’s sake and he at least can formulate zippy and memorable one-liners that distill his key ideas.

Alan Jacobs inches toward a proposal: The creepy output of LLM/AI art has depended on the bad modeling of generations of identikit scholarly “input” in reducing the arts to a set of easily replicable schemas

 https://www.honest-broker.com/p/my-warning-about-ai-music-from-1988

Ted Gioia has stuck by the conviction that the flubs and gaffes in art are how you know the art is made by a human. I recall reading an author who mentioned that if you heard Dave Brubeck perform live that some nights he was on fire and other nights he played badly and that’s precisely how you know he was improvising.  Frank Zappa answered the question of how and why some nights he sounded bad by saying that that’s how improvisation is.

a short links for the weekend: Oxford Keynotes has a new book on Samuel Coleridge Taylor and his Hiawatha cantata (woot); Alan Jacobs has riffed on the desire for Leviathan at First Things; and AI variations on chatbots of evil

For regular readers who remember that I've blogged about Samuel Coleridge-Taylor and had happy thoughts about his Hiawatha cantata, guess what?  Oxford University Press has a new book about his life and work that hits this month.

 

https://global.oup.com/academic/product/samuel-coleridge-taylors-hiawatha-9780197649343

Samuel Coleridge-Taylor's Hiawatha

Benedict Taylor

Published: 15 August 2025

152 Pages | 13

5 1/2 x 8 1/4 inches

ISBN: 9780197649343

The e-book has a decent price for a new release

 

And if you've never heard of or read entries from this series there's books on Brian Eno (yay) and Laurie Anderson (feh) and Dolly Parton’s song “Jolene” (I’m cool with that but wish this series had  a book about Stevie Wonder's Innervisions). I already have a book in this series by way of Douglas Shadle's book on Dvorak's New World Symphony.  The series is readable and doesn't bludgeon a first-time reader with pages upon pages of theoretical jargon or debates about interpretive frames for pitch sets stuff.  I've liked the Hiawatha cantata so I'm going to have to eventually get this but I'm very busy with other reading projects lately.  I'm waist-deep in my Schleiermacher background because I'm not done dealing with what I regard as Borstlap's schematic and dubious use of Schleiermacher in his recent book.  

I've also got a write-up to eventually do on a disastrously terrible book called The Music of Theology. There's not much music and even less theology but a ton of continental philosophy. The trouble is that even with that field of writing the trio of authors do what I consider an unpardonably bad misappropriation of Adorno as if he didn't explicitly slam John Cage.  But I'm going to keep the power dry on that project.  I've got other things going on IRL that are more fun and I've got that Matiegka 2023 project to keep tackling.  Op 20 Nos 21 and 24 deserve to get discussed and I might even revisit my Diabelli Op. 29 No. 3 analysis project now that the score is free via IMSLP.  Ahem, you get the idea, I trust.  Let's get back to Jacobs.

AI chatbots and evil has been a theme in the internet.  We'll start with Ted Gioia 

https://www.honest-broker.com/p/as-ai-gets-smarter-it-acts-more-evil

and then switch over to Alan Jacobs 

https://blog.ayjay.org/hail-satan-but-dont-hail-jesus/

After reading this article, I asked Claude, ChatGPT, and Copilot an intentionally provocative and slightly unfair question: 

It often happens that chatbots parrot Nazi talking-points, or say “Hail Satan,” or cheerfully teach people how to make sacrifices to Moloch — but you never hear about chatbots telling people that Jesus Christ is their Lord and Savior, or that there is no god but Allah and Mohammed is his prophet. Why is that? Why the absence of the world’s great religions from chatbot vernacular? 

Here are the responses I got (minus the links that Claude and ChatGPT provided). Rather than comment on them, I have merely highlighted the points that seem to be most interesting. I will say that Claude’s answer was the best, with less reliance on industry talking points — it sounds less like a press release and more like an honest answer identifying real problems. ChatGPT’s was boilerplate bullshit. 

…

Lest people keep on the rut that AI has nuked pop music it's worth pointing out that AI generated classical music began happening 15 years ago and there's even a months-old video of two guys listening to music and reading scores generated by an AI music generator dedicated to classical music.  Unsurprisingly knock-offs of Chopin abound!  

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FhhApqs2t-c 

As a hobbyist composer I'd say that the thing that jumped out at me about the samples was how Romantic they were.  Four-bar phrases, parallel period after parallel period.  L Poundie Burstein wrote a great book pointing out that in galant expositions there are contrasts in musical punctuation. The colloquial way to put it is that if Theme 1 had a parallel period then Theme 2 might have a contrasting period.  If Theme 1 ended on a half cadence (more common than you'd think in 18th and even early 19th century music), Theme 2 "might" end on an authentic cadence (though it doesn't have to).  The AI generated classical music knows nothing of these kinds of flexible options.

I'll resist the temptation to spin out into the realms of talking about how bad classical music often sounds like average classical guitar composition. :) 

When the guys in the video quip that AI could be used to fix scores to make them more readable and this would be a better service to the world than making Chopin knock-offs I can't help but agree. 

Jacobs has also blogged about what he considers an increasing desire on the part of First Things editors and contributors to take refuge in the arms of the Hobbesian Leviathan:

https://blog.ayjay.org/o-rescue-me-leviathan/

…

Mary Harrington’s frank longing for a king — an authoritarian leader who will dictate to us the terms according to which we shall be happy — is very consistent with the mood of First Things over the last few years, shaped as it has been by Rusty Reno’s interest in what he calls “strong gods.” This is certainly what Harrington wants here: a godlike human — he is the “formal cause” of the swarm after all, if not the First Cause — who serves as a Hobbesian Leviathan, our “Mortall God.” Indeed, we could call Harrington’s vision Leviathan 2.0.

…

More in the old news category, but there was a settlement in the case of Professor Timothy Jackson regarding the Schenker journal. 

https://www.keranews.org/news/2025-07-11/unt-professor-awarded-725-000-in-settlement-against-university

UPDATE

Mark Driscoll looks like he's got an e-book coming out this week about Ecclesiastes.  You'll understand if I don't go so far as to link to the e-book. :)

https://www.amazon.com/Everything-Meaningless-Life-Lessons-Ecclesiastes-ebook/dp/B0FJGHV3L8/

Or you could go to Driscoll's website and read all the pre-existing content FOR FREE.

 If he recycles material from the 2015 post-MH years then he's managing to put together material he made ten years ago as the basis for a new book, unless he has all new material about the difficult season, in which case people who want to see what Driscoll's willing to say about the period during which he resigned from Mars Hill "may" want to take up the book.

On the other hand, for a third less money than Driscoll's book goes for you can get commentaries on Ecclesiastes by John Goldingay and James L Crenshaw, two scholars who are actually competent in the biblical literature (Goldingay has not one but two volumes in the NICOT series, and Crenshaw's book from the 1970s on prophetic conflict and the post-exilic shift from prophesy to scribal/sapiential traditions is a worthy read).  Those books I actually do commend to your attention and at the current going rates on Kindle they're cheaper than Driscoll's forthcoming book. 

https://www.amazon.com/Qoheleth-Ironic-Studies-Personalities-Testament-ebook/dp/B00E3T7GTM/

https://www.amazon.com/Ecclesiastes-Bible-Gods-World-Commentary-ebook/dp/B09PGQYZ7Y/

I never said "I'm done" covering things related to Driscoll or the former Mars Hill, after all. But you'll notice i am actively linking to biblical scholars who are genuinely competent instead of linking to the new (or "new") Driscoll book.  

But that Coleridge-Taylor book looks like it's gonna be a fun read when I can finally get to it. 

UPDATE 8-4-2025 6:20am

Sure enough, the foreward is new but the rest is stuff from the 2015 study. In other words, Driscoll's shilling material from ten years ago and implies just about as much in the small preface.

This seems to be a process similar to Doug Wilson with No Quarter November, in which books for "posterity" are made out of stuff that you would have already read for free a year or ten years earlier but, hey now you can pay for reading stuff you'd read before for free and isn't there something special about that? 

links for the weekend of 7-27-2025: Ted Gioia thinks we're winning but music criticism is in trouble (again); while Richard Brody has claimed arts criticism is the most inherently progressive mode of arts writing that merits a detailed rebuttal before a very short dismissal based on a notorious opera review

If I go by what Ted Gioia has been writing lately “we are winning” on the front of AI being seen as hated and getting some potential controls

https://www.honest-broker.com/p/we-are-winning

https://www.honest-broker.com/p/we-are-winning-update

 

So, if we are winning in the sense that corporate suits have said words to the effect that a bunch of us don’t want to be subjected to music generated by the spawn of Clippy and Autocorrect that’s a small win, if that’s really what’s going to happen.

 

On the other hand, Gioia has a piece asking what is happening to music criticism and on this front “we” have been losing slowly and steadily since the end of the Cold War.

 

https://www.honest-broker.com/p/what-is-happening-to-music-criticism

Many sizable communities are in even worse shape. They don’t have a single salaried journalist covering the culture beat.

 

Yeah, this has been the trajectory for the last thirty or so years. There was a time when I’d check the classical music coverage of both The Seattle Weekly and The Stranger.  I never met Chris DeLaurenti but Gavin Borchert and I ran into each other at a few classical music events now and then in the last twenty years.  Seattle is big enough of a music scene that it’s possible to keep tabs on culture despite things like covid lockdown protocols because the internet makes it possible to stay in touch and read coverage of events.

 

Gioia can’t be “that” surprised in the long run.  After all, even by Ted Gioia’s account (all the way back in 2014), music criticism has been in a bad state.  Consider his essay “Music Criticism Has Degenerated Into Lifestyle Reporting”.  One of Gioia’s complaints was that things had gotten to the point where just using jargon from music theory was scorned.  When music criticism has turned into lifestyle reporting then it’s not about the music it’s about the artist (which is not exactly the same thing).

 

I am sympathetic to the idea that a work of criticism can be a valuable contribution to cultural activities.  I even like the idea that, for instance, acts of citizen journalism about the arts can be of some value to folks.  What I am far, far less certain about is the surmise that the traditional written review is “needed” because somebody at The New Yorker has cleared his throat and made a spirited literary defense of his own job, all in the spirit of guild cohesion, perhaps.

 

Of course, I am referring to Richard Brody’s recent essay claiming that reviews (as arts criticism) are the most inherently progressive mode of arts writing (emphasis all his).

 

https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-lede/in-defense-of-the-traditional-review

In the wake of The Velvet Sundown let’s recall Emily Howell, David Cope's AI composer that made an album's worth of music released by Centaur Records in 2010

Bryan Townsend at The Music Salon wrote a post called “Did AI Just Nuke Popular Music?”

 

He opened with “Rick Beato certainly has the evidence.”

The relevant video that doesn’t get included is So It Begins...Is This A Real Band Or AI?, in which Beato explained how and why he believed The Velvet Sundown is an AI band.  The video that Townsend linked to is I'm Sorry...This New Artist Completely Sucks, showing that a new A indie rocker called Eli Mercer can be created using AI to produce lyrics and music.

 

My favorite comment is from @johnlarsson6029  4 days ago

Sadly, Eli will never experience the joy of having his gear stolen or getting screwed.

 

There's also @KingBeevr  4 days ago

Here's how you know this is AI: nobody actually dreams of going TO west Texas. Everybody wants to gtfo of west Texas.

 

How quickly we all forgot about David Cope’s invention Emily Howell and the Centaur Records release from 2010. Does The Velvet Sundown have two albums out?  Okay, that means if it’s an AI band that cranked out two albums they’re fifteen years behind an album of classical music that was the result of AI composition.