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.
