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

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

...

How do you fix this?

 

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

 

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

 

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

... 

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

Joseph Horowitz has been mulling over the state of US classical music across 250 years and it's predominantly musings on the state of orchestral repertoire

I am not going to attempt to summarize or describe Joseph Horowitz’ eight takes on the question of whether or not the United States has delivered on its classical music promise.  If you have read them you have read them, too, and if not, here are links.

 

https://www.artsjournal.com/uq/2026/06/at-250-has-america-delivered-on-its-classical-music-promise.html

https://www.artsjournal.com/uq/2026/07/jonas-kaufmann-vs-the-orchestra-of-st-lukes-take-two-mahler-steinbach-festival.html

https://www.artsjournal.com/uq/2026/07/american-classical-music-at-250-take-two-the-bam-experiment.html

https://www.artsjournal.com/uq/2026/07/american-classical-music-at-250-take-three-the-orchestra-gap-europe-vs-the-us.html

https://www.artsjournal.com/uq/2026/07/american-classical-music-at-250-take-four-the-orchestra-gap-contd.html

https://www.artsjournal.com/uq/2026/08/feeling-it-giuini-and-arrau-vs-george-szells-new-world-perfectionism.html

https://www.artsjournal.com/uq/2026/08/american-classical-music-at-250-take-five-the-disconnect-between-scholars-and-orchestras.html

https://www.artsjournal.com/uq/2026/08/american-classical-music-at-250-take-six-the-ford-foundations-misguided-philanthropy.html

https://www.artsjournal.com/uq/2026/08/american-classical-music-at-250-take-seven-another-boston-symphony-perspective-on-the-malaise-afflicting-orchestras.html

 

The thing that jumps out for me is that even the one time Future Symphony Institute is now the Foundation for the Future of Classical Music.  They don’t even call themselves the Future Symphony Institute anymore.  They still want a future for orchestral and symphonic music, of course, because while Roger Scruton has died many of the people at the core of the institution have remained.  I kind of started tuning them out after Scruton died but also after Douglas Murray got added on to the senior fellows roster.  I had my issues with Scruton but I do still own half a dozen of his books.  Writers like the late Roger Scruton and Theodor Adorno can benefit you when you don’t agree with them. 

 

Being a guitarist I find that I am more drawn to hearing what is going on now than in revisiting past glories.  Matanya Ophee is no longer with us but he dispelled the idea that the classical guitar ever had an actual golden age.  Do sonatas by Sor or Giuliani compare to the works of Schubert or Mendelssohn?  Most would say not favorably.  On the other hand, when Stephanie Jones gave a recital in Seattle a few seasons ago I enjoyed her program of contemporary Australian and Austrian composers writing for the guitar.  I am looking forward to the second half of Nikita Koshkin’s 24 Preludes and Fugues finally getting recorded.  I just noted recently the death of Frank Campo as reported at Slipped Disc. 

 

Jens Ibsen has floated some ideas that self-policing within genres can stifle innovation.  Ibsen has contended that within the United States classical music is functionally underground music now.

https://sfclassicalvoice.substack.com/p/classical-music-is-underground-let

 

I wonder if that’s a bit of an overstatement but for contemporary composers I think I can take the point as given.  Anyone who is attempting to build bridges between classical and metal is already interested in inter-canonical experimentation that I can be sympathetic to.  The concept of inter-canonical translation and exchange comes up inIbsen’s profile on Jon Batiste. I’m okay with a slow-drag reworking of a Mozart warhorse. Ragging the classics has been a thread of improvisational and compositional activity for centuries.  Batiste is also correct to say that improvisation was previously inextricably bound up in musical life and practice in the days of Mozart and got steadily purged out of classical music theory and practice. 

 

If arts non-profits are having a banner bad year then the future of classical music in the United States probably isn’t “entirely” bound up in the states of institutions.

 

I haven’t been to orchestral concerts in decades and I have nothing against orchestral music.  I went and heard the symphonic suite Mathis der Maler when it was programmed.  Yes, I am a bit of a Hindemith fan.  I went and heard Samuel Jones’ Tuba Concerto twice and even bought the score.  I liked Wynton Marsalis’ Violin Concerto, which I feel is several steps above what he was doing with All Rise (which I really wanted to like but couldn’t get into).  I even recently listened to a violin concerto by Kip Winger.  Don’t know who that is?  Well, I still hate the band Winger but Kip Winger’s violin concerto is solidly made.

 

But to me the present and future of classical music is in small-scale works.  It’s not going to surprise anyone if a guitarist feels the present and future of classical music is more likely to be found in guitar music than in orchestral literature.  I have made this point a few times over the last ten years but I think the symphony has gone the way of the votive mass for the dead; the prestige of the genre and form hasn’t gone away but the niche nature of the musical form means it has lost its place of prestige.  Richard Taruskin pointed out that the social role of opera was displaced by cinema and television and that’s basically not going to come back.

 

I have not written as much about Regaining Classical Music's Relevance: Saving the Muse in a Troubled World as I, at one point, planned to.  I have had concerns about how easily John Borstlap decided to valorize Schleiermacher and scapegoat Herder.  Both philosophers were not “just” philosophers but Christian pastors and theologians both of them advocated aesthetic pluralism as well as encouraged nascent nationalist projects.  It’s possible to admire Schleiermacher’s ardor for aesthetic pluralism and music while agree with Emil Brunner that the trajectory of Schleiermacher’s thought and theology was ultimately a dead end. 

 

It is possible to regard Herder as more complex than Borstlap has allowed for.  American fundamentalist preachers who think Song of Songs is chiefly about the joys of marriage and sex don’t give Herder any credit for having swept allegorical and typological readings of Song of Songs away for a newer interpretive approach.  I can think of Schleiermacher as having positive contributions to make in hermeneutics while also finding him an annoying panentheistic crypto-Marcionite. It has been hard to shake an impression that Borstlap is eager to valorize and scapegoat figures like Herder or Adorno than to wade into the complexities of their respective bodies of work to show how mixed their legacies are.

 

So, obviously, I’ve made it clear I differ with Borstlap on a few things.  But I have realized that right there in the subtitle may be he simplest point of divergence.  Borstlap seemsto think the muse needs to be saved, the muse of classical music.  I think the muse has moved on from orchestral repertoire. She might come back now and then to check in on the state of her previously favored idiom but where ever the muse has headed off to, you will not find her by trying to “save” her so that there can be another Beethoven’s Ninth.  She may have moved on to intercultural exchange projects.

 

What if the failure of the promise of American music has happened because people sought that future in the symphony?  What if by the time Americans were looking for the creator of the great American symphony the muse had already moved on? 

 

links for the weekend: a thread of Aaron Renn and Anthony Bradley on the lack of an evangelical elite, the failures of the YRR; and some links on alt-right publishing

Prepare for a bit of a weekend sprawl known as the links for the weekend.

haiku 6-30-2026

on internet prolegomena, in three movements

       (a parable on 21st century Anglo-American conservative Christian blogging

                  regarding cultural issues)

I.

The church organist 

has been preluding too long.

Let's hear the hymn now.

II.

Of the writing of

prolegomena there is,

verily, no end.

III.

Prelude on prelude, 

always hearing a prelude

but never a fugue. 

Joseph Horowitz and Douglas McLennan at AJBlogs on the state of attention spans with regard to the high arts

Arts criticism in the trans-Atlantic world seems ever bent on ignoring the advice of the Preacher in Ecclesiastes 7:10.  Don’t say “Where are the older days that were better than these?” because it is not from wisdom that you say this.  Oh, but it is from wisdom that everyone pining for the glory days of classical music says it, and keeps saying it!

 

https://www.artsjournal.com/uq/2026/05/are-we-rotting-our-brains-is-this-the-end-of-classical-music.html

 

JH (1:55):  People are not attentive to the arts. People don’t talk about the arts. And I think my understanding of this deterioration is mostly as a deterioration of cultural memory. If you don’t have cultural memory, you can’t have a flourishing arts environment. Traditionally, creative artists have relied on the past, have relied on forebears, have relied on tradition, have relied on cultural memory. We now are losing touch with the past because of cell phones and social media and artificial intelligence.

 

This is a new situation. We’ve never experienced anything like it. . . . Things can only get worse because the driving force, the major problem, is technology. And technology is not going to vanish from our world.

 

What does technology do? For one thing, it shortens attention spans. The music that we love and we grew up with and that we promulgate depends on an attention span of some duration. You can’t experience the Eroica Symphony, or even just the first movement of the Eroica Symphony, or even just the coda to the first movement of the Eroica Symphony without an attention span. If you’re talking about “Träumerei” by Schumann, fine. But if you’re dealing with a sonata form, it functions partly on the basis of memory—what the ear remembers, what the brain processes. Why is the coda of the first movement of the Eroica so long? Why does it introduce a new theme? Because there’s so much that Beethoven has to deal with and resolve that we’ve already heard. If you can’t experience that piece in time with sustained concentration, there’s not a whole lot going for it. It’s not about the tunes. It’s not even about the ambience or the mood. I think it’s fundamentally an exercise in structure.

…

I realize how readily this kind of appeal can tie back to Theodor Adorno’s riff on the contrast between the emotional listener and the structural listener from Introduction to the Sociology of Music or his riffs to similar effect in the never-completed in his lifetime Current of Music. The idea that people who can and do listen for structure are better people than the people who don’t is a long-standing claim in classical music appreciation and it is very probably a canard. If sheer length makes for greatness are we supposed to jettison Bach preludes and fugues in favor of a marathon of piano sonatas by Sorabji?  I mean, if you’re into Sorabji that’s you’re thing but I still kinda prefer Bach.

 

But there are counter-proposals at hand which warn us that the situation isn’t that the attentional capacity of humans has died a miserable death, it has shifted.  Douglas McLennan proposes we’ve witnessed a shift rather than a death in attentional capacities.

 

https://www.artsjournal.com/diacritical/2026/05/aj-chronicles-are-our-attention-spans-killing-culture-or-reassembling-it.html

…

So Horowitz is right: the formal apparatus that produced trained attention is in retreat, and the algorithms eating its place don’t care about throughlines. All they care about is engagement. When algorithms shifted value from the work itself, what Big Tech euphemistically calls “content,” to the traffic — views, clicks, likes, share — the content itself, from a contextual, historical, or cultural perspective, is irrelevant and interchangeable.

 

But here’s what this frame perhaps misses. Deep attention hasn’t gone away. It’s relocated. People are diving obsessively into the cultures they choose.  …

 

The proposal that the loss of one form of cultural literacy is answered by the gain of a different kind of literacy has been around.  George Steiner proposed that Western civilization had lost the literacy of literary fiction (prose and poetry) but that kids these days (back in his day) had picked up a level of musical literacy spanning centuries of styles and forms that he suspected was a new development.  That was in the book In Bluebeard’s Castle.  Answering the concern of Horowitz that attentional capacity has shifted has precedent.

 

The question itself of whether social media has rotted our brains begs the question of why the sign of attentional health would be a bunch of people sitting through a Mahler cycle.  Why regard Marvel fans as being unhinged for watching the entire Marvel cinematic universe when Wagnerians exist?  What’s the difference between watching five seasons of Mad Men and watching five seasons of My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic? If Discord has a redemption arc while what’s-his-name in Mad Men has a different arc is the difference a matter of art or imputed merit? It can be all too easy for academics to sneer at kids these days who keep track of the differences in Marvel timelines, for instance, but doesn’t the same thing functionally happen if an academic discusses the differences between Marlowe and Goethe on the Faust legend?  Why should I suppose that prestige American TV like The Sopranos or Breaking Bad is necessarily better than watching Death Note? 

 

Fixating on the loss of attentional resources given to listening to everything in a body of work can be its own conceptual dead-end.  Back in the 19^th century it was a thing to brag about for a pianist to play all 32 of Beethoven’s piano sonatas, and a bigger deal if done from memory.  But who actually benefits from memorizing the 32?  Even if we grant the cult of Beethoven cultists every single one of their points, Beethoven solved problems of his time and place two centuries ago, which are not our problems.  If anything his solutions can be seen as having become our problems.  In the 20^th century some composers even felt obliged to shift from Beethoven back to Haydn (Schoenberg) to overtly say that Beethoven was one path music could take but there were others and it was possible to have taken a different path forward from Haydn’s precedent than the one Beethoven took.  

The path of Beethoven has played out as a dead end, a beautiful dead end but a dead end all the same.  This is not the same thing as pulling a John Cage and saying Beethoven was wrong, it’s saying that the kinds of problems and opportunities in the arts in the 21^st century do not have to be hamstrung by the imaginations of men whose business is symphonic and whose idea of cultural rebirth entails the revitalization of the prestige of the orchestra. Now I can appreciate Horowitz stumping for Arthur Falwell as an under-appreciated North American composer and still conclude that the era of the symphony has come and gone.  As a guitarist I have basically zero incentive to want yet more people to line up to hear Mahler symphonies, or even Haydn symphonies (and I am a Haydn fan for all that).

 

Since I mentioned I’m a guitarist, one of the more memorable bits of advice I got from a music professor back in my college days was simple, “Write for the musical resources you actually have, not the ones you wish you had.” The history of revolutionary developments of style and form could, at the risk of an obvious simplification, be articulated in this axiom. 

 

The history of the emergence of rap and hip hop as musical styles and forms can be described as having happened on the basis of people making music with the musical resources they actually had rather than pining for the musical resources they wish they had.  Rap is not exactly my thing but I can hardly think of a style of music in the last fifty years that better exemplifies the axiom with which I started this paragraph.  Rather than take a dismissive stance toward rap as being unmusical I prefer to take the approach of saying that Johann Sebastian Bach’s setting of the Credo from Mass in B minor can be heard as one of the grandest sample flips of an existing plainchant in the history of Christian liturgical music in the Lutheran tradition. 

 

To bring this back around to my professor’s advice, the attentional resources of whatever audience you have is what you have to work with.  For a composer, or a composer-performer, the audience is a pretty significant musical resource.  If the contemporary audience doesn’t handle the epic lengths of a Mahler or a Wagner there’s no point in yearning for an audience that goes that epic. 

 

I think that what we need more of us not the good old days attention span of people listening to sixty-minute or seventy-five-minute symphonic works. The art canons seem fairly well established in classical and pop music in the last century and the attention spans of audiences are what they are.  What I think we can do, and keep doing, is foster an ecumenical dialogue across musical canons to encourage further mutual appreciation, respect and love.  That last part might be a very high ideal to shoot for but that is, allegedly, what partisans of the arts think the arts can at some point achieve.  None of that kind of musically ecumenical dialogue calls for people to listen to musical works that are nine to ninety minutes in length. I think Horowitz may be missing that the triumphs of musical achievement in the long 19^th century are the traps that some of us in the 21^st century think musical styles and forms need to be allowed to escape now.

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. 

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.   

some thoughts on twenty years of reading Mere Orthodoxy: think of it as a bicycle with two gears and one of them can be read as grad school variations on a William Wallace II theme

I think I have been reading Mere Orthodoxy since 2005, which would mean I’ve been reading it off and on for it’s whole two-decade run.

 

So when I see a title like this …

https://mereorthodoxy.com/why-it-is-difficult-to-talk-about-ethics-of-the-body

I know that it’s never been difficult for any contributor or editor at Mere Orthodoxy to talk about the ethics of the body because that is functionally one of the only two things they ever talk about.  Marriage and concerns about marriage have been all over M. O since its beginning.

https://mereorthodoxy.com/forsaking-all-others
https://mereorthodoxy.com/the-case-against-in-vitro-fertilization
https://mereorthodoxy.com/kelly-loving-act
https://mereorthodoxy.com/gay-marriage-by-judicial-decree 
https://mereorthodoxy.com/special-feature-why-i-am-opposed-to-gay-marriage

Variations on this track can be found at the Theopolis Institute, which has some overlap with Mere Orthodoxy. 

https://theopolisinstitute.com/conversations/what-obergefell-did-not-and-could-not-do/

https://theopolisinstitute.com/conversations/obergefell-and-the-wisdom-of-the-old-law/

https://theopolisinstitute.com/conversations/obergefell-the-illicit/

https://theopolisinstitute.com/conversations/what-does-the-church-have-to-do-with-obergefell-a-response-to-shafer-stoner-and-farrow/

https://theopolisinstitute.com/conversations/the-pointy-end-of-the-sexual-revolution/

https://theopolisinstitute.com/conversations/obergefell-and-the-parts-whole-relation/

 

The other big track has been to assess the state of contemporary conservatism in the United States.

https://mereorthodoxy.com/after-nationalism-what-next-for-american-conservatism

https://mereorthodoxy.com/why-populism-is-a-problem-for-the-intellectual-right

https://mereorthodoxy.com/how-should-evangelicals-respond-to-the-vanishing-mainline

 

If the first track was set down by Matthew Lee Anderson the other track has, probably, been best articulated by Jake Meador.  That other track is some variation of political theology in light of the prospects of whatever comes next for American political life and the role evangelical Christians and socially conservative Christians are thought to (or expected to) play within the shifting terrain of pax Americana.

 

When arts critics have no real gatekeeping power they are nothing more than super-consumers--thoughts on reading Freddie deBoer's hatred of Stranger Things and the decline of the negative review

It's been a while since I've blogged about anything written by Freddie deBoer, whose Substack I do read semi-regularly. Since some of his writing intersects with thoughts I've been having about the state of criticism and laments about the state of the arts and the state of criticism I'm goingto go a bit long-form this weekend.

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

the newest death of literary fiction or a side effect of market over-saturation? Alan Jacobs pushes back on declinist laments about how people don't read novels these days

https://blog.ayjay.org/here-we-go-again-2/

…

Let me ride my old hobby-horse once more: The reading and writing of books — and when Krauss says “books” I think she’s primarily referring to novels — has always been a minority pursuit. Until recently Western cultures did not even aspire to universal literacy, and until quite recently no one imagined that universal literacy would extend to the reading and comprehension of novels and poems by all young people. The idea that Western culture as a whole should involve encounters with serious literature is largely a product of World War II and the period following.  …

 

What percentage of English people could have read Paradise Lost when it appeared? What percentage of Americans could have read Uncle Tom’s Cabin when it appeared? We have to know things like this if we’re going to make comparative assertions. But people make comparative assertions all the time without even thinking about such matters. 

 

I agree that novels, and other long narratives, have become less culturally central, less influential, than they were fifty or sixty years ago. (And I regret this.) But are they less culturally central than they were a hundred years ago? I’m not sure about that. Two hundred years ago?

Hard to say. 

How many ambitious and masterful novels can we reasonably expect our culture to produce each year? How many thoughtful and sensitive readers can we reasonably expect those novels to have? I don’t find these questions easy to answer. 

This isn't a "It was ever thus" response of the sort I have seen plenty of people make about concerns about cultural decline coming from conservatives (not that Jacobs isn't one, by the way); instead it's a more "I don't think we have reckoned with how recent apparent near-universal literacy and recreational reading of novels actually was".  Maybe various thinkpieces about the postwar consensus and pining for the moral certainties of the Cold War span the proverbial liberal and conservative branches of liberalism?  

Something similar to the perceived/real demise of the prestige of the novel has been going on with the symphony and orchestral music over the last half-century, too.  Even Ted Gioia, a jazz and blues fan of fans, has lamented that attention spans are dropping and people are more distractible. But the needed remedy is apparently, among some classical music partisans, to get rid of all DEI as fast as possible (trust me, there's a post about this in the making), and to try to get people to expand their attention spans to the point where Mahler symphonies and Wagnerian operas are in the offing.

The prospect of conceding attention spans are short and composing in such a way that people can process music in clearly delineated chunks of 2 to 3.5 minutes even within large forms (the kind of thing that was known to happen in music composed by J. S. Bach, Haydn, and Mozart)?  Nah, don't even bother with that.  Music education is supposed to get people to be as attentive to music as music journalists comparing a Furtwangler Beethoven's 9th to a Reiner Beethoven's 9th.  

I am back to reading novels but I have not bothered reading contemporary literary fiction or "serious novels" since ... Bill Clinton was in office.  I haven't read Infinite Jest and I'm not going to waste my time doing so.  I'd sooner revisit Lee/Ditko Spider-man.  I wouldn't be surprise if Te-nehisi Coates might hypothetically say, "That's probably more worthwhile reading anyway." 

I've been going back to usual suspects, Melville, Dostoevsky, Kafka, Austen, I have copies of The Master and Margarita and We I need to get to. I have heard Coates has written novels but I'd sooner revisit Ellison because Invisible Man is a work of genius. Alan Jacobs has a couple of points worth pondering and they tie into a point that is maybe more awkward to discuss, that the perceived deaths of literary fiction may not just be a function of some downward trajectory in quality or quantity but the opposite, the sea of what is out there, regardless of quality or quantity, makes things more and more likely to be unseen in the sea of books and poems and short stories. 

"That is why you fail" some thoughts on the failure of Rawlsian contractarian liberalism to have produced a cohesive vision for the arts during and after the Cold War, by way of thinkpieces about the state of the arts in the new Trump administration

It may be necessarily characteristic of this new administration that it has begun with artists (and writers on the arts) contemplating the essential role the arts can/may/should/must play during these times.  Jonathan Blumhofer had a somewhat long piece at ArtsFuse this February in which he concluded:

https://artsfuse.org/305462/arts-commentary-art-music-and-the-new-age-of-anxiety/

...

Knowing this, let us contend with the future bravely. However late the hour and however long the road ahead, the cause of standing for justice, knowledge, and freedom isn’t yet doomed. Along the way, let the arts comfort, inspire, instruct, and help lead. That’s what they’re here for.

 

At ArtsJournal Michael Rushton had a response:

https://www.artsjournal.com/worth/2025/02/art-in-turbulent-times/

...

 

Arts organizations do not need to “respond” to the election of Trump in their programming, any more than they would have needed to respond to the election of Harris. Museums and orchestras have unique roles in our cities in their abilities to provide the public with great art – lots of people can organize political protests about Trump, can hold meetings, can try to persuade people to vote the other way the next time. But only your orchestra has the ability to perform Mahler’s Fourth; nobody else can.

 

“Let the arts comfort, inspire, instruct, and help lead. That’s what they’re here for.” But they’re not. And, as we have seen only recently, those exact same words can be said by the most despicable political actors.

 

The arts won’t save you from the political situation you hate.

 

This rejoinder has a point worth considering but, first, we have to deal with a question.  If the arts are not around to comfort, inspire, instruct and help lead then what are they for?  What are the arts good for if they don’t do these things? Blumhofer concedes that the arts have some civic religious, cultic purpose even if it’s by way of #Resistance during the second Trump administration.  Rushton’s point that the arts have served despotic regimes is worth considering but it begs the question of why, whether and how arts in the service of despotic regimes would be worse (however we even define that) than arts made in free societies.  You can conceive of “free” in scare quotes even if I hadn’t just provided them in this sentence.

 

Yet Rushton’s response is still salient simply for its timing.  Would artists and arts communities be writing the same way about how artists and the arts can speak truth to power if Harris had won?  No, they probably wouldn’t be.