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. 

Adam Gussow's Beyond the Crossroads quotes Francis Grimké's 1892 address on the state of Afro-American clergy from a Crossway compendium. It's now possible to go straight to the source, but let's also rabbit trail on New Calvinism

In Adam Gussow's Beyond the Crossroads: The Devil and the Blues Tradition, he mentions Francis Grimké 's 1892 critique of his fellow African American peers in pastoral offices. Gussow cites a book edited by Thabiti Anyabwile and John Piper. 

 

The Faithful Preacher: Recapturing the Vision of Three Pioneering African-American Pastors

By Thabiti Anyabwile, Foreword by John Piper

https://www.crossway.org/books/the-faithful-preacher-tpb/

ISBN-10:          1-58134-827-4

ISBN-13:          978-1-58134-827-9

ISBN-UPC:        9781581348279

Published:        March 31, 2007

 

It turns out that now you can go straight to the source but I'll get to that after a few rabbit trails.

Variation on The Conventional Wisdom of Ted Gioia—what if the pundits who identified the Renaissance centuries later didn’t miss “it” because “it” was their invention all along?

Although I have been reading Ted Gioia fairly steadily for about ten years now I regard him as a symptom rather than the cure for many cultural conundrums. Despite the title Music: A Subversive History was the most annoying baker’s dozen of conventional wisdom I think I could have read from a jazz and blues historian about the entire world of human music. There was nothing subversive about it at all for me, and it was positively wrong about, for instance, Augustine of Hippo’s De Musica.

 

Eventually I learned that Ted Gioia, by his own account, has never taken a music theory class or a music history class. 

https://www.honest-broker.com/p/who-are-the-real-experts-now

… I don’t have a degree in music, and never took a single lesson or class in jazz—and that’s the area in which I’m best known, and consulted for my expertise.

 

Now yours truly doesn’t have a degree in music, either, and I get Gioia’s point, because I have had fun cross-referencing Thomas Torrance and John of Damascus on perichoresis and the circumincession of the persons of the Trinity in Christian theological reflections, and then use that as a frame of reference for recalibrating the ideas of musical time and space proposed by Theodor Adorno, George Rochberg, Roger Scruton, Jeremy Begbie, Hepokoski & Darcy, L Poundie Burstein, and Jason Yust as a way to work toward writing sonata forms based on blues and ragtime.  But here’s the thing, if Ted Gioia has not taken lessons how does he know his history of music is even subversive? 

 

There’s a more salient point, yet, though.

 

Ted Gioia’s polemics frequently hinge upon accepting the most conventional of conventional wisdoms; even his bids at subversive observations are predicated on what scholars have begun to regard as antiquated and even misleading scholarly supermyths.  Let’s give some specific for-instances:

 

https://www.honest-broker.com/p/the-ten-warning-signs

…

The biggest changes often happen long before they even get a name. By the time the scribes notice, the world is already reborn.

You can take this to the bank: If the New York Times notices the Buddha, the enlightened one has already left town.

For example, the word Renaissance got introduced two hundred years after the start of the Renaissance. The game was already over.

The same is true of most major cultural movements—they are truly the elephants in the room. And the elites at the epicenter of power are absolutely the last to notice.

…

So … was there a Renaissance? 

 

Enter Ada Palmer:

“If the Black Death caused the Renaissance, will COVID also create a golden age?”

Versions of this question have been going around as people, trying to understand the present crisis, reach for history’s most famous pandemic.  Using history to understand our present is a great impulse, but it means some of the false myths we tell about the Black Death and Renaissance are doing new damage, one of the most problematic in my view being the idea that sitting back and letting COVID kill will somehow by itself naturally make the economy turn around and enter a period of growth and rising wages.

…

She has, since, published an entire book called Inventing The Renaissance: The Myth of a Golden Age, which I am just starting into. People in a time and place who created great art could easily live in days that were miserable.  That part could be Captain Obvious but Palmer has gone to the trouble of pointing out that myths about the Dark Ages and the Renaissance have been pervasive, so much so that she wrote that most of the most barbaric practices of torture or book-burning that “we” impute to the Dark Ages reached their peak in the Renaissance.  How about that?  It’s possible for an entire era of European history to regard the era that came before it as some grand Girardian scapegoat. 

 

I take Ada Palmer’s point as worth thinking about precisely because it is so obvious.  I could just restrict myself to landmark works in comics and manga. I was revisiting Rumiko Takahashi’s slice of life manga Maison Ikkoku in the last year or so and it conveys a young man’s sense of endless wheel-spinning in Tokyo in the wake of a financial crash while he’s in love with his apartment manager but too broke to scrounge up the money to get her a ring or propose to her “properly”.  It’s a classic romantic comedy in manga but when it gets grim it gets really grim, at least for anyone who has been jobless for years.

 

Consider, too, that we’re also nearly forty years passed since Alan Moore’s Watchmen was published and, oh, look, here we are and the nukes didn’t fly just because Reagan was in office. I can go back and read the old Marvel Transformers comic book run these days and recall that, no, the Decepticon commander Shockwave wasn’t flying around Portlandia when I was a kid.  I knew that back then, of course, whenever I’d end up in Portland with family. I also had this vague sense that just because people were talking about the nuclear clock didn’t mean an actual nuclear war was going to start.  Not that one couldn’t … but Palmer’s point is applicable to any time in which a classic in the arts has been made.

 

If you want to go more incontestably classic in comics go read Peanuts and the Stan Lee/Steve Ditko run of Spider-man and you’ll see that times were not so great. I trust the point is understood—great art often reflects bad times, whether or not we agree what counts as great art. 

 

But the bigger and more dubious point is the grand survivorship bias that permeates Ted Gioia’s ideas. Ted Gioia’s point about how it took centuries for people to figure out The Renaissance was happening shows that his prognostications are build upon the foundation of scholarly super-myths that contemporary scholars warn have misled us about the nature of the past as we attempt to extrapolate from it what might possibly happen in the future.

 

Okay, so maybe Ted Gioia is wrong about the whole idea of the Renaissance as something “they” didn’t recognize until centuries later.  Well, that’s just one era of history, right? Should we move forward to The Enlightenment?  Doesn’t everybody know that human rights and freedom were invented/discovered during The Enlightenment?

 

Ah, well, here’s where reading Alan Jacobs’ blog has let me know that somebody regards The Enlightenment as yet another post hoc scholastic construction.

 

https://blog.ayjay.org/clarks-enlightenment/

This is a mere note about a fascinating book rather than a review or analysis. The book is  J.C.D. Clark’s The Enlightenment: An Idea and Its History, which makes a curious but in the end fairly compelling argument. You can get a sense of what Clark is up to from a passage near the end in which he summarizes a series of potential objections to his argument: 

First, that ‘the Enlightenment never happened’. On the contrary, this book has shown how ‘the Enlightenment’ was a concept that was widely adopted in the twentieth century in some countries and that persisted for several decades, influencing large numbers of people in the anglophone world and beyond to the point where the existence of an objective phenomenon to which the term appropriately corresponded seemed beyond question. 

Second, that ‘the Enlightenment happened but was unimportant’. On the contrary, this book has contended that, once conceptualized, the notion of ‘the Enlightenment’ was highly influential, and it has indicated how the term could be used (although with varying effectiveness) to promote a variety of causes both thematic and national. 

Third, that ‘the Enlightenment happened, was important, but was a bad thing’. On the contrary, this book has asserted the historian’s obligation to refrain from normative comment on the phenomena of the past, and has suggested how refraining in this way can better illuminate the normative forces that others have used to shape the development of knowledge, or supposed knowledge, in this field. 

For Clark, “the Enlightenment” definitely happened — but it happened in the 19th and 20th centuries as a scholarly concept, not in the 18th century as an intellectual movement. 

 

That’s over here if you don’t want to use Google Books as your reference point.

 

So … if Ted Gioia thinks we need a new Romantic era and we see that specialists in the history of Renaissance and Enlightenment era thought are telling us we’ve been sold bills of goods about those eras … maybe, just maybe, we should keep in mind that Ted Gioia could be full of it about Romanticism, too. 

 

Academics promulgated the myths that Ted Gioia takes for granted.  It can happen in any and every field.  Lutherans might say that Martin Luther made daring and innovative reforms by calling for vernacular liturgy but Chiara Bertoglio has pointed out in her giant door-stopper book Reforming Music: Music and the Religious Reformations of the Sixteenth Century that German Catholic churches had been using vernacular liturgy for quite some time before Martin Luther began writing.  Other scholars have floated the idea that virtually no one except the performers themselves heard any of those complex polyphonic masses paid for by indulgences in the Renaissance but for someone like Ted, here in the 21st century, the amazing artistic achievements of the Renaissance being available is taken to mean that people who could have died as young as 18 were, somehow, able to enjoy the musical beauty of Palestrina. 

Ada Palmer has proposed that what we call the Renaissance was a convergence of ideas that had roots in previous epochs.  She rolls out the observation that historians are dealing with questions about human behavior that a geologist or philosopher might call the question of “when does a river start?”  There can be many legitimate answers to a question like that, when a historian like Ted Gioia gets into futurist mode, however, he needs us to believe there is only one in order for him to have his ten points.

 

Cross Over Instead: a thought on Matanya Ophee’s Repertoire Issues since his passing--crossing over instead as the only viable path guitarists have after centuries of being marginal in the classical music mainstream

https://www.digitalguitararchive.com/2022/03/repertoire-issues/

 

From 1986 to 2000 the guitarist and music publisher Matanya Ophee gave variations of a lecture he called “Repertoire Issues”.  His core claims in the lecture were:

 

1) the guitar has never been taken seriously within classical music for the entirety of its history

2) this lack of regard manifested in the absence of guitarists from chamber music festivals across the world in what is colloquially known as classical music

3) this should not dissuade guitarists from doing their best to be taken seriously by not only audiences but other musicians within concert music. 

 

It is with that in mind I want to quote extensively from Ophee’s concluding remarks about what he saw in the classical guitar scene, particularly on the relationship guitarists (and their music) had in connection to the classical music mainstream.  Distinct from the chamber music mainstream scenes of classical music many guitarists were playing music influenced by (interacting with) non-classical genres and styles of music.  This was a phenomenon that has emerged since the 1970s or so and has been called “crossover”.  Ophee’s comments were as follows:

 

Repertoire Issues

Published by Legacy of Matanya Ophee on March 7, 2022

…

No doubt, attitudes have changed in the last ten years [the lecture was given in 2000]. There are more performances of chamber music with guitar today. I dare say though, that this activity have not yet resulted in a change of perspective in the general public. I read a lot of lofty pronouncements regarding chamber music with guitar in many interviews with guitarists. This is, for the most part, empty lip-service. I do not know of any leading guitarist-performer today who is willing and able to settle on a career which is dedicated to chamber music. There are no active professional chamber music ensembles today, which consist of more than two spouses and which include the guitar.

In my country, there are some 800 festival each summer dedicated to chamber music. You can see there the names of Itzhak Perlman, Yo-Yo Ma, Mstislav Rostropovich, Pinchas Zukerman, Rudolf Serkin, Murray Perahia, and scores of other leading instrumentalists and singers. I have never seen there the names of Andres Segovia, Julian Bream, John Williams or Alexander Lagoya. This unfortunate verity should not deter the leading guitarists to appear there on a regular basis. The inevitable question is: what do our virtuosi have to offer musicians and an audience who have been nurtured for generations on a steady diet of the Beethoven string quartets, the Brahms Clarinet quintet, and the Mendelssohn Piano trios, not to mention chamber music by Mozart, Haydn, Schubert and Dvorak?

Before we attempt to answer that, we must shed any inferiority complex regarding our repertoire and realize that even though the great masters of chamber music have not written for the guitar, we still have a great deal of valuable contribution to make. In evaluating chamber music for guitar, we must avoid judging it by reference to the guitar part alone. What matters in chamber music is the artistic worth of the composition as a whole, NOT the relative merits of the guitar part. Few guitarists are able to read a chamber music score, and few publications of chamber music with guitar, particularly those which date from the time of Heinrich Albert, not to mention the more recent spate of so-called “facsimiles,” actually have one. A guitarist who wishes to embark on a career of music making in public, and would like to achieve anything like the job security offered by professions such as the architects, engineers, doctors, airline pilots or college teachers, would better learn the tricks of the trade. Not memorization, but sight-reading, score analysis, and the ability to breath together, sometimes with total strangers. Look for those works who would offer your future colleagues something new and exhilarating. Even if this means that you have to go oom-pah-pah for a while. That too, can be a valuable and profitable contribution to your own economic survival and to the future of the guitar as a viable musical discipline. If we want to actually function “on the first rank, such as the violin, piano and cello,” we must break away from the restrictive mold of the solo recital, the guitar master-class, the guitar competition and the guitar festival and to propel our way into the general society of music.

I cannot leave this discussion without some words about the programming used by many guitarists today when they play solo recitals. The old Tarrega/Segovia type of programming has been replaced, for better or for worse, with a new type of programming which employs mostly music based on the cross-over phenomenon, that is to say, new compositions based on the popular genres of jazz, rag-time, tango, and country-western music. Thus, besides the leyendas and the Villa-Lobos pieces, we also get the Koyunbabas, the Sunbursts, the Usher Walses and the Piazolla pieces. In principle, all these pieces are actually very good music. But the number of times you get to hear them in the course of a guitar festival, makes them into hackneyed, unimaginative lollipops which might bring a good reaction from a guitar audience, and might even give pleasure to general public audiences. Many main line musicians do the same. Thus you get a cellist like Yo-Yo Ma playing Piazolla. But we must observe that main line musicians do cross-over, in addition to their normal serious repertoire. Guitarists do it instead. [italics original, bold added]

I have observed that in the last few decades the guitarists who made it to the top of the profession quickly, were those who came on the scene with a totally new repertoire, entirely avoiding the standards, the old and the new. There is a lesson to be learned here, and it is this: the main question the guitarist should place before himself is not what to play. It, what NOT to play. Think about it.

…

It has been just a few years since Matanya Ophee died and I have considered his ideas formatively influential.  I have spent decades writing chamber sonatas for the guitar in which it is paired up with woodwinds, bowed strings, plucked strings, piano, and brass.  I aimed to write a cycle of chamber sonatas using the guitar the way Paul Hindemith wrote chamber sonatas around piano accompaniment.  It turned out while I was tackling this compositional project over the last two and a half decades, inspired by Ophee’s “Repertoire Issues” that the Austrian composer (and pianist) Ferdinand Rebay had created a big cycle of sonatas for guitar with woodwinds and strings decades before I was born. This was a happy discovery at multiple levels, first of all because I have found I generally actually enjoy Rebay’s sonatas, and because it is a sign that Rebay, forgotten as he was in the last half century since his passing, has created a substantial body of work that merits further performance and study. 

 

Yet Rebay’s legacy highlights all the more Matanya Ophee’s observation that the great composers, or first-rate composers never wrote chamber music that included the guitar.  Sure, this could be a place to voice exception.  Don’t the Four Songs of Stravinsky include a guitar part?  They do and they are a blast but the point can still remain.  There could be an objection that Toru Takemitsu’s Toward The Sea for alto flute and guitar is a significant work for that pairing much the same way Astor Piazzolla’s Histoire du Tango for flute and guitar is a significant work.  But you don’t hear those works at festivals, do you? Ophee’s point has remained without substantial counter-examples and counter-arguments.

 

Let’s say for the sake of discussion the six-stringed classical guitar that was refined in Spain is only about 250 years old. That means that the instrument has been around for centuries and no works written for the guitar by guitarist composers have made it into the mainstream canon of concert music, often known as classical music.  The most significant canonical works for the guitar were either written for the instrument by non-guitarists (whether Rodrigo or Britten or Martin or Castelnuovo-Tedesco or Ponce or whomever) or were transcriptions of non-guitar music made by guitarists (Johann Sebastian Bach and Isaac Albeniz). 

 

For there to be no canonical works in chamber music or solo guitar in the classical music mainstream after no less than 250 years should force those of us who are guitarists to ask what it would take for a guitar work to gain canonical status in chamber repertoire.  If we decide the five-course guitar that anticipated the modern guitar counts as the guitar, too, then the history of the guitar can go back five centuries and this makes the situation worse rather than better.  If the guitar is half a millennium old and in all that time not a single work for the instrument and its variants has been regarded as worthy enough to become a canonical work of music theorists and historians consider important enough that non-guitarists have to know them the way singers and guitarists in music survey courses have to know who Mozart and Beethoven were, well, what are the odds the guitar and guitarist composers will ever buck the centuries long trend?  Ophee advised that we do not have an inferiority complex about our instrument and its repertoire and I do, frankly, agree.  At the same time, a case could be made that Ophee’s observation about the bias against the guitar as the companion of any Spaniard opens up the question of ethnic and racial biases within musicology and it’s not for nothing this was the topic of a recent book about the history of music theory and music history.

 

Since I’m writing in 2024 and in the United States (citizen born and raised) I probably don’t need to even name the author and title.  But I liked the book, honestly, and I think guitarists should take Philip Ewell’s often polemical On Music Theory, and Making Music More Welcoming For Everyone very seriously.  It is possible for traditionalists and defenders of The Great Tradition version of classical music to just say that Ewell has a chip on his shoulder or that when he remarked on the functional erasure of Spanish and Spanish-language derived music from classical music theory and history that this is part of some sour grapes campaign.  For guitarists, however, the prospect of functionally expunging Spanish and Latin American music from any consideration pre-emptively wipes out even the slightest chance that many of the most beloved works of the guitar literature will ever be taken seriously.  How high and low do you have to look for a truly detailed analysis of the formal, rhythmic, melodic and harmonic materials of Five Preludes by Heitor Villa-Lobos that could compare to an analysis of Beethoven’s Hammerklavier? 

 

Even if Ewell is wrong about many things he doesn’t seem to be wrong about how marginal Spanish music (and its adjacents) have often been in music theory and music history.  Why discuss the harmonic language of Albeniz if he’s consigned to having accomplished pianistic feats of post-Lisztian virtuosity, as a Grove entry put it decades ago?  That Britten’s Nocturnal after John Dowland is a fine piece of music doesn’t mean that either Britten’s work for guitar or Dowland’s lute music has been discussed very much in mainstream classical music theory and history.  I can’t recall seeing a single extensive study of Takemitsu’s magnificent suite for solo guitar All in Twilight in the last thirty years.  Discussions of guitarists and their approaches to sonata form have largely revolved around Sor and Giuliani and, understandably, Ponce.  There is room for more work to be done and that work is being done but what seems unlikely to happen is for a guitarist to have composed a piece of music so significant to mainstream classical music theory and education as to merit that nebulous but sought-after status of canonization.  There’s no chamber work written by a guitarist composer that has canonical status unless we’re going to go out on a limb and remind people that Hector Berlioz played the guitar.  But how has the status of Berlioz’ music held up in the last century? 

 

So when Ophee said that mainstream classical musicians establish themselves in the standards like Yo-yo Ma on the cello and embrace cross-over in addition to the standards, and guitarists did cross-over instead, that seems to be true, but it also reveals a possible double-bind at the core of Ophee’s questions and concerns.  If the guitar has never made it into the classical canon over the course of centuries why would it now?  If in the wake of 250 to 500 years of guitars being around literally nothing has been written that fits into the chamber repertoire of music festivals is the problem with the guitar or with the chamber music festivals?  Is it possible that the aesthetics and norms of the long 19^th century, often thought of as being the span between 1780 to about 1920, constitutes a set of standards the guitar could not possibly measure up to? 

 

After so many centuries maybe the wiser thing for guitarists to keep doing is to cross over instead. Don’t even bother with seeking mainstream acceptance within classical music in chamber festival settings.  It’s not that I didn’t hear guitarists at the Ice Breaker festivals in Seattle over the decades, I did hear chamber music featuring the guitar and I liked the pieces I heard, but the Ice Breaker festivals show that the guitar has some compelling music from the Baltic states but you have to search high and low for it.  There are niches within niches in classical music, which is itself a niche. 

 

There may be a case to be made that crossing over instead is a more rewarding path for classical guitarists. You and I who play the guitar may have more in common with Blind Willie Johnson, Luigi Legnani, Heitor Villa-Lobos, Tampa Red, Lonnie Johnson, Bukka White, Lightning Hopkins, Fernando Sor, Wenzel Matiegka, Napoleon Coste, Nikita Koshkin, Dusan Bogdanovic, Angelo Gilardino, Bob Dylan, John Lennon, Leo Brouwer, Elizabeth Cotton, Joni Mitchell, Ida Presti, Nadia Borislova, Annette Kruisbrink, Rosetta Tharpe, and Bonnie Rait than we will have with Mozart, Haydn, Beethoven, Stravinsky, Schoenberg, Mahler, Webern, Handel, Buxtehude, Bach, Schutz, Albeniz, Schubert, Liszt, Brahms, Prokofiev, Shostakovich, Medtner and Scriabin.  We guitarists have more in common with each other that we all play the guitar than we may ever have with the canonized composers of classical music.  

 

John Williams the guitarist has to be differentiated from the John Williams who gave us soundtracks to the films Jaws, Star Wars and Superman.  A lot of people in the United States know who John “Star Wars” Williams is even if they can’t stand his music whereas far few people probably know John Williams as the guitarist who played Nikita Koshkin’s Usher Waltz, one of those works Matanya Ophee published and considered was in danger of being turned into a new lollipop in the guitar literature. 

 

Now I eagerly await the second half of Koshkin’s 24 Preludes and Fugues for solo guitar getting a commercially available recording! I have already written extensively about the first half of this formidable and outstanding cycle of contrapuntal works for solo guitar written by a guitarist.  To go by mainstream classical music theory and history it can seem as though after a few centuries pianists and organists regarded the usual suspects as having contributed all there ever was or is needed for fugues and consigned the genre to the school exam room and the dustbin of history.  Even if Koshkin’s work merits serious and continued study; even if his work is a substantial contribution to the tradition of preludes and fugues; I have not seen his cycle discussed very extensively in the realm of guitar scholarship, let alone in the “mainstream” of classical music.  Ewell is a Russianist by specialization so I can hope, at least, that maybe one day he could write about Nikita Koshkin’s cycle of preludes and fugues.  If Ewell did that I would so buy that book!

 

Which is why, in a way, I agree with Ewell but am ambivalent about aspects of his case.  As a guitarist with a fondness for the music of Wenzel Matiegka I know of literally no significant English-language writing on his roughly twenty solo guitar sonatas even if I count the helpful essays in the Stanley Yates edition.  The guitar has not only never been admitted into the musical mainstream it probably never will be.  This is why it may make sense for guitarists to not only keep crossing over instead but to make that path the new default moving into the future.  We have more to gain by taking seriously all the styles and forms and genres of music our guitarist peers have made and are making and will make than to hope after centuries that somehow one of us guitarists will write something that gains the status of Beethoven’s Hammerklavier sonata or his late B flat major string quartet.  Koshkin’s life and work may be instructive precisely here since scholars who have discussed his music and work have pointed out that he steeped himself in Stravinsky and Shostakovich but also listened to Led Zeppelin.  Crossing over instead is probably what we guitarists have been consigned to having no choice but to do within mainstream classical music history and theory.  If that’s the case, let’s just keep doing that. 

 

If the last few centuries have shown us how seriously non-guitarists in classical music have taken the guitar we have nothing to gain and everything to lose attempting to create musical works that don’t take seriously all the musics written on and for our instrument by our fellow guitarists in the quest to write something that could ever appear alongside Haydn string quartets and Beethoven piano sonatas.  By this I don’t mean to say “Don’t bother”, it’s more like Johann Gottfried Herder’s admonition to fellow Germans to trust in their own regional folk traditions for source materials rather than to continuously and continually make worse and worse knock-offs of the pinnacles of the arts in Greek and Roman antiquity.   

We may have a lot more to gain by taking all the music written on the guitar by and for guitarists seriously across all styles and genres since the birth of the modern guitar than we are likely to gain in the centuries that have elapsed without a single solo or chamber work for classical guitar making any notable appearance in any festival setting. It’s not that I wouldn’t love for chamber works including the guitar become staples in the classical music mainstream, it’s that Matanya Ophee died a few years ago and I read his lecture decades ago and here we are, and the guitar and guitarists are no less marginal to classical music’s mainstream than seemed to be the case back in the Reagan years.  Maybe crossing over instead is the only actual path forward we have not just due to anti-guitar prejudices but also because a whole lot of those canonized works from the long 19^th century were running with Herderian ideas of being true to your people’s folk roots as the basis for making Art.  Guitarists may need to do more of that and not less before we collectively make something that “makes history”, and doing “more of that” may entail taking a whole lot more seriously the kinds of musics that have habitually been consigned to the influences that go into “cross-over”. 

 

If guitarists, even classical guitarists, take this approach, it will also be taking up one of the main points of Ewell’s book and his aims, making music theory more welcoming to everyone

 

If guitarists who love to listen to and play John Lee Hooker meet a classical guitarist who respects that tradition rather than insisting the only guitar music worth talking about are old recordings by Segovia and Yepes that would be better public relations for our instrument, particularly if we are guitarists who love both the classical guitar literature and blues.  There may be more guitarists like that among us even in the realm of classical guitar than there are guitarist composers who are ever going to have works that show up in the chamber music festival circuit.  Crossing over instead has been what we're stuck with but we don't have to act as if that's actually a bad thing.  If he Norman Lebrechts and Roger Scrutons  and Kimballs keep saying classical music is dying and with it whatever passes for "civilization", crossing over would be how a small part of "classical music" survives because its practitioners (classical guitarists) choose to take more than their own repertoire to be the be all and end all of good music.  It's also the more neighborly attitude to boot. 

The Bad Faith of The Honest Broker (on the sham dualisms in Ted Gioia's rhetoric)

When I started reading Ted Gioia’s work years ago it was initially through his trilogy of books on Work Songs, Love Songs and Healing Songs.  I got around to his writings on jazz and blues and found that more interesting. I also read Music: A Subversive History and that has been the point past which I have found it increasingly impossible to take him seriously.  I still read him, though, because he is a lucid writer and in part because I may have a weakness for feeling obliged to keep track of the pronouncements of men given to pat and patently dubious dualisms.

 

There can be any number of tells that you’re reading the work of a fan of dubious dualisms. One of them can be a sweeping invective against an entire category of people that moves to discussing someone’s life and work who, on closer inspection, might not easily fit into the category introduced in the initial ad hominem. Such is what we find from The Honest Broker in the following:

https://www.honest-broker.com/p/a-2000-year-old-argument-over-the

 

Economists have strange opinions about musicians. For example, Adam Smith claims in The Wealth of Nations (1776) that music ranks among the “most frivolous professions.”

At different points in his book, he compares musicians to buffoons and prostitutes. Even slackers who can only make the head of a pin get more respect from him.

Mr. Smith especially hates opera singers—which is interesting, because they were the most highly paid performers in those days. During the 18th century, opera singers earned more than the most successful composers.

So Smith pursues a strange view of economics. He loves the marketplace—except when it rewards musicians.

He insists, contrary to all evidence, that a song must be worthless because it “perishes in the very instant of its production.” In other words, a transformative musical experience possesses no value, no matter how powerful.

And it’s not just Adam Smith who thinks so. Even today, some economists will tell you that music has no economic value.

 

The sheer bad faith of Ted Gioia’s polemics in his Substack blogging impress me, not positively, but they do, at least, impress me.

 

That eighteenth century philosophers had a low view of music was the norm rather than the exception.  Calling Adam Smith an economist for the sake of an ad hominem introduction without situating him in his time is, by now, fairly boilerplate rhetoric from Gioia, which is unfortunate. As careful as he can be about blues and jazz history he reliably proves himself feckless on many other topics.

 

In the past Ted Gioia painted Augustine of Hippo as some terrible guy whose De Musica reduced music to numbers in Music: A Subversive History, an exemplar of the worst traits of the Pythagorean impulse in music.  Then in a Substack post he’d abruptly remember that Augustine of Hippo was a North African Christian bishop and adduce from that that Western harmony has roots in Africa.   You’d never know De Musica was one of the first great treatise on music from Gioia’s book because he presented it in his book as something bad but when he needs or wants to make a flamboyant rhetorical point about Western harmony being influenced by non-European writers and thinkers all of a sudden Augustine’s influence is taken for granted as both salutary and formative.  I’ve read De Musica. There’s a reason Augustine apologized in Book VI for the punishing tedium of the writing in Books I through V!  An academic edition of the Latin text of De Musica editor Martin Jacobson had no qualms writing that Augustine’s work is considered a historically important but punishingly tedious and technical treatise.

 

Whereas Gioia hand-waved away Augustine’s treatise as reducing music to number and being part of the big bad Pythagorean anti-magic take on music I found the treatise tedious but also promising.  Augustine took as given that music exists in performance but we perceive it and understand it with our memory. Rather than pull a Roger Scruton and dispense with Augustine’s thoughts as informed by a cosmology that has been discredited by science I suggest that we take the half-way good ideas in Augustine’s thought which tell us that music and cognition are intertwined. In an era in which we can even discuss proprioception and the ways in which the senses interact with the brain a potential neo-Augustinian retrieval based on using his ideas about memory and musical perception rather than neo-Platonic or neo-Pythagorean cosmologies could potentially show us that Augustine’s De Musica still has some potentially helpful ideas to give us.

 

Additionally (HT to Phoenix Preacher contributor Dr. Duane Arnold for this) Carol Harrison’s work on Augustine’s evolving thought about music would be vastly more worth your time than anything Ted Gioia has said about him even if you have doubts about Augustine as philosopher, theologian and thinker.  Ted Gioia’s Augustine is essentially a sock puppet for whatever point he wants to make at exactly the time of the point he’s making.  I now suggest that Gioia has pulled  a similar stunt with the work of Adam Smith. Even if we take as given that Adam Smith was an “economist” the fact that an eighteenth century philosopher might have doubts about how powerful and sublime music actually was can be considered normative among philosophers and humanists going back a few centuries before anyone began to talk about ‘economics”.

 

There were doubts about the possibility that music had “timeless value” going back to the fourteenth through seventeenth centuries. The core problem music had was that it existed for so long as it was performed.  Once the performance was over the music was over.  It might be likened (and was) to the beautiful smell of a beautiful flower.  Music without text was music that had no propositional content and displayed no mimetic capacity.  In eras in which the capacity of an art to mimic nature was prized music was going to be found wanting, and so it was.  If you want to read about the shift from the eighteenth to nineteenth centuries in European philosophy with respect to music being weak or strong for lacking mimetic content there’s a book you can get.

 

The Emancipation of Music from Language: Departure from Mimesis in Eighteenth-Century Aesthetics

John Neubauer

https://archive.org/details/emancipationofmu0000neub/page/n5/mode/2up

https://www.amazon.com/Emancipation-Music-Language-Eighteenth-Century-Aesthetics/dp/0300035772

 

Leading humanists from the fourteenth through sixteenth century regarded music with skepticism. It was a discipline that called for a huge amount of time, attention, physical training and for all those demands of the discipline it was tough to justify musical training when that was “all” the trained musicians had to offer in most cases. They were not advancing any scholarly disciplines and were not of use to the societies of their day in other respects.  The most beautiful piece of music was not like a work of architecture, a painting, a sculpture, a well-researched book.  A musical work such as a dance lingered in the room much like a fart and dissipated in a similar way.

 

A dense but valuable survey of humanistic and ecclesiastical skepticism about music was published years ago.

The Crisis of Music in Early Modern Europe, 1470--1530

By Rob C. Wegman

https://www.routledge.com/The-Crisis-of-Music-in-Early-Modern-Europe-1470--1530/Wegman/p/book/9780415964746

Right off the bat Ted Gioia impugns economists as implicitly inimical to the value of music when it was the leading humanists and philosophers (and not just clergy) of fourteenth through eighteenth century Europe who had some doubts about the value of music if “timeless verities” or the capacity to emulate Nature was concerned.

But what does that matter?  Gioia has a point to keep making:

…

So we shouldn’t be surprised that the CEO of Spotify recently made a claim very similar to Adam Smith’s. He insisted that the cost of making music is “close to zero.”

But here we encounter the same contradiction that undermines Smith’s view. Many musicians tell me that they need to spend ten thousand dollars or more to release a professional recording.

So how can music cost nothing if it requires so much investment (and I’m not even counting the time involved in practice and developing mastery of a musician’s craft)?

I have a different view of the value of music. I believe music is a source of enchantment and a change agent in human life. So in my economics, a song can possess great value.

I suspect that many of you feel the same.

…

Naturally Gioia has to go back to ancient Greece to see how they “solved” the problem of whether music was precious or worthless.  At this point I am going to skip Gioia’s take on Plato and the Greeks because he’s moving to a foregone conclusion:

…

In other words, songs aren’t just means to an end—like a manufacturing process—but are complete in themselves. Just by existing, they do something magical, even without proving their exchange value in a marketplace.

As such, they rank higher than any mere consumer product, destined to be used up (and hence not achieving remembrance).

This is how I perceive music. This is probably how many of you cherish music, too.

Anybody who loves music, knows how powerful these songs are. They really are like drugs—Plato wasn’t wrong in comparing them to intoxication. Aristotle wasn’t wrong in claiming that they are dangerously exciting.

…

The effects of drugs wear off.  That does not make drugs of no value but it does mean, to stick with the analogy Gioia has offered, people keep going back to get a new fix.  As the use of drugs go not all drugs and medications are good for you.  It was because philosophers regarded the impact of music as both evanescent and yet real in its moment that they expressed doubt about the long-term value of music and reservations about the kinds of things people would do while listening to music.  If a doctor prescribes the wrong kind of drug to a patient it harms them. The use of music in the workplace to blunt the tedium of any number of jobs would fit into Ted Gioia’s work on work songs, for instance. Muzak has a use, however mildly it registers as a kind of social and market narcotic. 

 

Gioia is not unusual in trafficking in glib dualisms but he is unusual in the zeal with which he presents his dualisms as the only options in writing about music. His rhetoric depends on the most sublime rather than the most quotidian examples he can find. Would Gioia say there’s something intoxicating about “Baby Shark”? How about the hold music you listen to waiting for a customer service representative to talk to you about an order?  What about hold music while waiting on the phone to set up an appointment?  I remember a day when I was on hold and the music I heard while being put on hold was Kind of Blue.  Gioia can go on all he wants about the magic and power of music and write as though the corporate suits and economists don’t know the value of music.  So what?  I could hear “So What?” as hold music over the course of my life and Miles Davis’ music can have all its magic and verve used to be a substitute for abject silence while I’m waiting for someone to talk to me about something.

 

The bad faith lurking within Gioia’s dualism is he pins all the magical power he believes music has on the music itself and not on the plethora of social, cultural and literally ritual contexts within which music has historically had a role. Let’s do a thought experiment.  Suppose that Mahalia Jackson singing “Take My Hand Precious Lord” is used as hold music (may it never be so but work with me here). Would hearing her singing as hold music effect you the same way it would as watching her and hearing her sing the same song at Martin Luther King Jr’s funeral?  No and I would think the reason is too obvious to have to point out. That Ted Gioia can’t factor these kinds of contextual ritual variables into his dualism suggests he thinks like a corporate suit even when he’s attempting to inveigh against corporate suits.  His wind-up is to this pat dualism, the kind of rigid either/or he has made his bread and butter at his Substack for years:

…

We have two camps, and you really need to pick a side:

(1) The dominant view in the economy treats music as something of little consequence or value. You shouldn’t even have to pay a penny to hear it. And if it can be replaced by an AI track—or even a podcast or twerking video or some other form of ‘content’—that’s perfectly fine. That’s because musicians don’t create sufficient value to deserve better treatment.

Or you can align yourself with the other view:

(2) Music is our most trusted pathway into a world of beauty and enchantment. It transforms our lives in a way that everyday products of consumption can’t replicate. And even though it is intangible, it endures longer than these consumer goods. At the end of your life, you will still turn to your beloved songs for comforts, long after other products have worn out and lost their value.

…

Guy L Beck would probably say that Ted Gioia is an advocate of the idea that music is a Window that opens up to a divine realm.  If you’ve never heard of Guy Beck I’m telling you about Beck right now.

https://sunypress.edu/Books/M/Musicology-of-Religion

Musicology of Religion: Theories, Methods, and Directions

By Guy L. Beck

Hardcover : 9781438493114, 368 pages, May 2023

Paperback : 9781438493107, 368 pages, November 2023

 

Beck summarized two ways of approaching music and explaining it, with the central metaphors being that music is a Window and that music is a Mirror.  The Window of music is what Ted Gioia endorses, it is seen as his most trusted pathway into a world of beauty and enchantment; it transforms his life in a way that other things can’t. It is “timeless”.  It is literally magical.  The Mirror, by contrast, reflects the world around it.  Art is a Mirror in general but music is viewed as a mirror that reflects the means of production and can tell educated people about the base and the superstructure of given cultures.  Unsurprisingly the Mirror metaphor is preferred by sociologists and critical theorists and anthropologists who are hesitant to endorse the Window because in order to believe in the Window version of music you kind of have to affirm some supernal realm toward which music could be that Window which you can see through or which can be opened. 

 

The way Beck approaches the history of musicology, however, is more coherent, competent and responsible than the glib dualisms Ted Gioia keeps selling his readers via Substack. In our day Ted Gioia’s blogging about music via Substack may be the single easiest example to choose of what Philip Stoltzfus described as the vice of most neo-Orphic partisans of music, a propensity to peddle the glibbest of glib dualisms predicated on surmises about gender, sex, race, ethnicity, class and so on.

 

Because I reject the dualism Gioia presents as being historically, philosophically and literarily irresponsible and dubious I don’t have to pick a side in his would-be fight.  I would be better off thinking about whether Wolverine could beat Batman in a fight. Or I could wonder whether Brock Samson could stand the slightest chance in a fight against Ranma Saotome or Yor Briar. Would Emperor Palpatine be able to defeat Sakura, Lum and Shinobu in a scenario fight?  All of those are pure fantasy fights but more plausible on their own absurdist terms than the two camps Gioia says we have to choose between.  Clearly he’s over-egged the pudding to the point where the only “real” and “moral” decision to make is the one he’s been trying to lead you by the nose to favor through his essay.

 

The problem is that the dualism Ted Gioia presents is a sham.  If he knows his two camps constitute a false dichotomy he can't honestly call himself The Honest Broker.  If he doesn't know his dualism is a house of cards the problem still stands. After all, the most honest broker in the world can still, honestly, sell you junk bonds.