Ethan Hein on how AI is harmful to learning (specifically musical learning) and I am reminded that Augustine of Hippo said that our ability to reason and our capacity for memory are essential to musical art

https://www.ethanhein.com/wp/2026/ai-is-harmful-for-learning-which-is-why-im-banning-it-in-my-classes/

…

Academic integrity is not my main motivation for the AI ban. It’s a factor, but it’s not the main thing. The main thing is that I want to help these students learn, and using AI is directly harmful to learning. Common sense says that prompting ChatGPT doesn’t have the same learning benefits as doing the reading and writing yourself, but if you need something more robust than common sense, here’s a sampling of the research literature.

…

There are two basic reasons for this and to make these clear I’m going to go way back to Augustine of Hippo’s ancient, uncompleted treatise De Musica.

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

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

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

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

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

four scripts for writing sonata expositions using 12-bar blues for theme 1

It took a while to put this one together but I've finally written an essay on four basic scripts for writing sonata expositions using a 12-bar blues theme as a starting point.  

Ethan Hein discusses the fourths chord, and fourths-based harmony, which is the perfect excuse to mention Ethan Iverson quoted Herbie Hancock saying he played Paul Hindemith's Ludus Tonalis

So I'm coming to this ten days late, but Ethan Hein discussed quartal harmony and melody and I had to, eventually, write a response post.  

https://www.ethanhein.com/wp/2025/new-podcast-episode-on-mccoy-tyner-and-the-fourths-chord/

https://ethanhein.substack.com/p/the-fourths-chord

No surprise the musical soundworld of Star Trek came up.  Space, the final frontier ... I loved that opening music bit from the original series. When I got to college and started exploring music I stumbled upon the composer from whom that whole chain of rising melodic fourths probably came from.

Check out the second movement of Paul Hindemith's symphony Mathis der Maler (from 1934, drawn from the opera by the same name, which arguably makes Paul Hindemith's best symphonic work a sampler plate of moments from his opera)

The ascending stack of fourths in the oboe starts at 01:36 above pizzicato strings

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tFjgU2tT52E

Then check out 02:20 and tell me that the Star Trek TOS opener soundtrack didn't just rip this one off cold. ;) Not quite the famous Trek fanfare went up where Hindemith went down, and Hindemith being who he was he had counterpoint using melodies with stacked fourths.  Back in the day copyright lasted about twenty-four years (give or take) and if you didn't renew it whatever it was went public domain. Perhaps more important was that something that was copyrighted decades ago in Germany was not going to be regarded as an IP infringement if you "sampled" it thirty years later for incidental music for an American television show.  So my pet theory has been that it's hard to understand musical elements from the TOS Trek soundworld without having at least some reference to Hindemith's mid-20th century influence (he taught in the United States for years)

Now check out the fugal finale of Paul Hindemith's Piano Sonata No. 3 written in 1936. Here's a performance of the Hindemith by Maria Yudina (starts at 14:57)  A faster, spunkier opening version of the fugue was recorded by Glenn Gould. Gould uses virtually zero pedal in his performance and goes for a more brittle, staccato take on the double fugue.  Yudina swamps several passages with pedal. I actually like Hindemith's music by and large and enjoy both takes on this fugal finale.  

One of the things Hindemith played with in the 1930s onward was blending stacks of thirds and fourths.  Ethan Iverson did a three-part talk with Henry Threadgill who mentioned he met Hindemith briefly.

Iverson also quoted Herbie Hancock as saying he played Hindemith.  See here:

Herbie Hancock:  “When I was eleven, I performed at a young people’s concert with the Chicago symphony. I played the first movement of a Mozart concerto. In fact, I studied classical piano all the way through college, until I was twenty.”  [How are you preparing for a duo piano tour with Chick Corea?]  “I just got out my Oscar Beringer scale book, the Chopin études, Hindemith’s Ludus Tonalis, Bach’s Well Tempered Clavier, some Debussy and Ravel, and Slominsky’s Thesaurus of Scales and Melodic Patterns. I’ve heard that McCoy Tyner and John Coltrane used to practice out of that.”

Ludus Tonalis is a favorite of mine. Famously (if only for Hindemith fans) the second fugue in Ludus Tonalis is not only in 5/8 it is based on a subject made from stacked fourths. Hindemith wasn't the first to write a fugue in three voices using quintuple meter, the Bohemian-French composer Anton Reicha did that long before)

So when Iverson wrote:

Herbie Hancock mentions Hindemith. Fair enough, although I find most Hindemith pretty square, with the Ludus Tonalis being especially deadly…

…but, hey, nothing Herbie is going to play onstage in his own music will ever be square. The point is to rummage through stuff that you can use, stuff that can rattle around in your subconscious.

It would seem that Hancock and I don't quite share his sentiment about Hindemith being square or, if he was, so what? :)  The Italian guitarist composer Angelo Gilardino found useful inspiration in Hindemith's music and writings.  I realize that here in 2025 the German composer has been regarded as super-square and passe but part of music history and digging into chains of influences is going back and discovering that, back while he was alive, Hindemith was an actually important and influential composer.  

Yeah, yeah, I admit I'm a bit of a Paul Hindemith fan so when I saw Ethan Hein discussed fourth chords it jogged my memory about Ethan Iverson and, of course, the Star Trek tie-in jogged my memory about Mathis der Maler symphony's second movement, and got to thinking about the second fugue from Ludus Tonalis.  The thing about music history is that stuff we like can turn out to be indebted to stuff we hate.  Hindemith was influenced by Debussy (okay, he's okay) and both Hindemith and Debussy admitted to influence by Wagner (whose music drives me up the wall and who I admit I find to have been a reprehensible human being).  Iverson likes Hancock but not Hindemith?  Well, that's part of musical life, people whose music we love can draw inspiration from composers that bore us.  I like Shostakovich, for instance, but have just never warmed up to Mahler, whose influence on the Soviet composer is hard to miss.  

Probably because Hindemith became so wildly unfashionable even within classical music he's so square that he's cubed in jazz and non-classical scenes.  Nevertheless, as Iverson himself has shown, if someone like Herbie Hancock actually played Ludus Tonalis it's an influence to keep in mind.

Jan Miyake on the distinction between monothematicism and thematic saturation in finales by Haydn

Regular readers probably recall that one of Wenatchee The Hatchet’s favorite composers is Franz Joseph Haydn.  Well, Jan Miyake has a fun little piece onmonothematicism and thematic reuse in Haydn’s fourth movements. 

Matiegka’s use of V/V to V to IV chord progressions in Grand Sonata II (1808) and Sonata progressive Op. 31, No. 3 in G major (1811)

I have spent about ten years studying the solo guitar sonatas of Wenzel Thomas Matiegka (or Václav Tomáš Matějka), maybe longer.  Of course I have the wonderful edition published by Stanley Yates which I would urge any and all would-be students of the composer’s work go out and get.  

 

In the years I have studied his work I have noticed that when people discuss his work in music journalism at all there is agreement on how conventional and conservative his music style was in his time.  Let’s take Ralph P Locke’s appreciative write-up of David Starobin’s final commercial recording as a performing guitarist, Matiegka’s Op. 31 Sonate progressive:

https://artsfuse.org/253911/listening-during-covid-part-10-so-much-amazing-music-to-discover/

…

You can credit Schubert for, inadvertently, keeping the name of Wenzel Thomas Matiegka alive to our own day. Matiegka (1773-1830), born in Bohemia but active primarily in Vienna, was three years younger than Beethoven and twenty-four years younger than Schubert. His compositions are modest and conventional, as of course was true of those of many of Beethoven’s and Schubert’s contemporaries (with the exception of a few, such as Cherubini, Beethoven’s friend Reicha, and Étienne Nicolas Méhul). Schubert, to please his employer at the time, outfitted a Matiegka trio for flute, viola, and guitar (op. 21, entitled Notturno) with an additional part for cello; the resulting version has had a lively existence in performances and on recordings, sometimes misleadingly labeled “Schubert: Guitar Quartet.”

…

There are relatively few attempts to describe Matiegka’s harmonic vocabulary so Locke’s description probably suffices. For those of us who actually know the music Matiegka did some genuinely weird stuff in his development sections and codas of his sonatas.  It’s hard to describe the comic whiplash of his getting through his recapitulation in Op. 31, No. 3 and seeming to nail down his tonic key only to swerve by way of a C sharp major chord in a first ending back to the start of his development section in F sharp minor.  It’s a little easier to describe how he prepares a great big dominant pedal point on E rather than G in Op. 31, No. 1 in C major and begins his recapitulation in A major; it’s only as he traverses the return of his Theme 1 that he modally mutates from A major to A minor and ends up in C major roughly in time for what you might think, at first hearing, is really his now non-modulating transition, his official Theme 1 double-return recapitulation wrecked by having brought the theme back in an obviously wrong key. 

 

But there’s a reason I mention the gap that can seem to exist between what people say about Matiegka (conventional and conservative for his day) and what he actually does that we can observe in his scores.

 

I mention all that because if there was a cardinal rule in classical music harmony that was never to be broken it was this, you never go from the dominant to the subdominant in any key.  If you’re in the key of C major and you have just gotten to your dominant chord (G major) you are never supposed to regress back to F major.  The error goes double, if you will, if you arrived at your dominant chord by way of a secondary dominant.  Any variation of ii-V-I is the apotheosis of “classical” harmony.  This is so given that I could give you a blog post by Ethan Hein wherein he discusses how normative ii-V-I is in conventional classical music harmony and jazz standards). I could cite Dusan Bogdanovic’s elegantly clear Harmony for Classical Guitar would say the same thing, we don’t follow the V with a IV in conventional tonal practice.

 

But the whole point of my current essay is to point out that Matiegka made use of a harmonic trope where he has a secondary dominant go to a dominant which then falls back to the subdominant, either moving back from that subdominant to another dominant or going through what Robert Gjerdingen would call a Prinner.

 

Here.  I’ll show what I mean.   

Matiegka, Grand Sonata II, I. Moderato (00:00 to 01:08)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gJo-rUgGCqI

The first V7/V to V to IV progression happens from 0:04 to 0:07; the second happens from 0:42 to 0:49 and the third happens from 0:58 to 1:03.  There are eight systems on page 1 and the first V7/V to V to IV progression happens within the first six measures.  The second and third cases of this harmonic pattern occur in systems 6 and the shift from 7 to 8.

 

So within just the first page of this sonata we have seen and heard Matiegka use a V7/V to V to IV progression at least three times. 

 

Now I realize what music theorists can do.  Someone could say that maybe that D and F# dyad stands in for a B minor triad.  Sure, but ii is a IV substitute as any first year theory student should probably still be learning by now.  That’s still a flamboyant harmonic progression and it’s made all the more regressive because the supertonic triad is not a secondary dominant.  Maybe we could say that the measure that seems to have B minor as the harmony is part of some dominant ninth chord and such a chord isn’t unheard of in 1808, sure.  But it sounds like an obvious and overt V to IV progression.  Even If we try to explain away this harmony as not really a IV chord because the next chord is a dominant we’ve still go the two next examples to consider.  On the whole I’d say there’s no getting around Matiegka using an obvious harmonic regression after his first big half-cadence that he’s prepared with  a secondary

dominant.

 

Okay, so how about the passage in the sixth system?  At this point I’d say we’re in a modulating transition but Matiegka has a penchant for starting his transitions in his new key and finding ways to reinforce it a few times before introducing his new theme.  If you want a discussion of Grand Sonata I I have done that previously.   Here Matiegka begins his transition by seeming to return to his initial idea and then he follows up his big V7/V to V progression with a continuation on E major. 

 

This, it turns out, becomes the new key but he spends nearly two thirds of a page affirming that key before he introduces his Theme 2.  Along the way we’ll see he has a couple of V7/V to V to IV progressions across systems six through eight.  From 0:46 to 0:52 we see him move from F#7 to B to … A major?  No, let’s call it F# minor because of the fact that there are no E’s in the harmony. 

 

Then again, what do we make of what seems like a really obvious Prinner. Matiegka has moving across these systems?  What’s a Prinner?    In Gjerdingen’s Prinner schema the upper voice has scale degrees 6, 5, 4 and 3 while the lower voice runs down 4, 3, 2 and then 1 of the scale.  Famous examples of this schema in popular song show up in Aretha Franklin’s performance of “Natural Woman” and at the end of major sections of “Let it Be” by the Beatles.    

 

Something to keep in mind about Robert Gjerdingen’s work on galant schemas is that they can elapse over a fairly long period of time, even entire phrases.  That means that the kind of melodic/harmonic schema that elapses in mere seconds in a song performed by Franklin or The Beatles could be stretched out across four whole measures in the transitions of a Matiegka guitar sonata.  What is important about the Prinner as a schema is the linear movement and not necessarily every little detail on the second half of the weakest beats of a measure.  If we keep that crucial rhythmic and metrical element in mind then it seems pretty obvious Matiegka follows up his V7/V and V chord progressions with Prinners. 

 

So that he did this seems obvious and as for why … alert listeners would sense the obvious harmonic regressions and so the question of whether or not the composer would “fix” this harmonic bad habit could be a question that runs through the first movement.  On the other hand, it could telegraph that something similarly odd might be coming up in a later movement, ,such as recapitulating half of the first theme of his slow sonata middle movement in the subdominant key but we’re not talking about the entirety of Grand Sonata II in this essay.  I think the most prosaic explanation makes the most sense, he liked the Prinner gesture and it had the great advantage of letting him move from B7 to E down to an open A string.  Why not use that note if it’s right there?  Prinners can create tonal closure within keys, after all, and so a series of Prinners after a strong half cadence, however regressive, will reinforce E major as the new key awaiting an actually new, clearly identifiable theme.  That doesn’t come until later.

 

For this particular essay I am simply making a point that V-IV progressions showed up three times on page 1 of a big guitar sonata.  For all of us who were music theory students who heard that the V never goes to the IV, well, The Mighty Monarch might declare that this bromide turned out to be nothing but lies and also lies.  Clearly a big guitar sonata by one of the most highly regarded guitarist composers in Vienna in the first decade of the 19^th century got away with a few V-IV progressions.  It isn’t even the only sonata in which he used the progression.

 

 

Remember that passage that described Matiegka’s harmonic language as fairly conventional or conservative for its day?  Keep that in mind.  If Matiegka’s musical language was so normal then we have to explain how and why so many V7/V to V to IV progressions showed up in the first first page of this 12-age three movement guitar sonata published by Artaria in 1808.  Didn’t all those engravers and proofreaders know that this was breaking one of the biggest rules in classical harmony?  Was this Bohemian guitarist just going to get away with it?  Obviously he did because here we are two centuries later looking at this sonata and seeing three V to IV shifts before the composer has even gotten to the second theme in his sonata exposition.

 

This brings us to the composer’s self-published Op. 31, Sonate progressive, six little three-movement guitar sonatas in C major, A minor, G major, E minor, D major and B minor.  Sonata No. 3 in G major features still more passages in which V7/V goes to V and is followed up by IV and it’s even more impossible to dispute than the cases we examined in Grand Sonata II. 

 

Unfortunately, Op. 31 No. 3 in G major does not currently exist in a public domain form that’s easily accessible.  I can share a link to a performance of the Matiegka work.

 

Matiegka Sonate progressive Op. 31, No. 3. I. Allegro moderato

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Uhpa99nxTk

 

Hearing is believing but seeing a score is even better.  What I “can” do, because I am myself a guitarist and a hobbyist composer, is dramatically recompose Matiegka’s Op. 31 No. 3 sonata exposition while retaining the basic harmonies and melodic gestures.  Being the ragtime fan that I am I’m just going to reconceive of Matiegka’s cheerful, plucky little sonata as a ragtime idea. 

 

As we heard, and now can see, Matiegka has yet another obvious case of a secondary dominant going to a dominant which is then followed up by a subdominant.  His Theme 1 doesn’t even end on a tonic!  Instead he ends on a half cadence which spins out, after a brief tonic rest, into a rather awkward half-cadence that sets up an arrival at D major.  Given how much of  Haydn fan Matiegka was I would venture to suggest this awkward modulation was probably chosen for comic effect, it’s too fast and too awkward and it would certainly make a listener realize that abrupt and not always “convincing” modulations were going to be a thing in this sonata. 

 

But as this essay is about just Matiegka’s use of the V-IV progression I am not going to rabbit trail into larger intra-movement and inter-movement patterns.  It’s enough to demonstrate that this Bohemian guitarist composer made no less than half a dozen uses of the V7/V to V to IV progression which is what you probably heard in some theory courses is exactly the kind of regressive harmony you’re never supposed to do.  I know I heard it.

But guess what?  Matiegka obviously didn’t care about that and neither did all of the people working at Artaria who published Grand Sonata II back in 1808.

 

Now I know that in blues a V-IV turnaround is a trope, and a trope that works great in Robert Johnson’s “Kind-Hearted Woman Blues”  To invoke Richard Taruskin, I don’t intend to have some race to the patent office claim that Matiegka did the V to IV change back in 1808 whereas Johnson didn’t get around to it until more than a century later because my real point is that guitarists don’t have to much wonder why guitarists would find it easy and pleasing to just drop down two frets and keep the same basic chord shape.  Whether the virtuoso guitarist was Wenzel Matiegka or Robert Johnson they both decided the fun thing to do would be to have the V followed up by a IV because that chord change sounded good to them.

 

I’m saying that it is obvious from Matiegka’s work that even if this progression was not normative within his work (and it really isn’t) he clearly felt at liberty to use it profusely when he liked how it sounded. 

 

Why does this matter?  I have argued that we guitarists should “cross over instead” when it comes to popular music and the reception of the guitar within the classical music world. The guitarist and music publisher Matanya Ophee used to say that the guitar was not treated as a serious instrument among classical music’s mainstream.  We should not, he urged us, have an inferiority complex about the guitar or its music but should show that we have contributions to make.  I agree.  His admonition that guitarists tended to cross over instead of finding mainstream success in classical music has gotten me thinking …

 

If, after so many centuries, no guitar music has made it into the proverbial Western canon then of what use is it for we guitarists to try to make music that will be considered as “serious” as the music of Bach or Beethoven?  I am ambivalent about the advice that guitarists go out and attempt to be taken seriously by other classical musicians.  It would be nice if that could happen but for so long as advocates of classical music keep acting as if their better taste makes them better people I’m going to say “no”.  This was one of the central points Richard Taruskin kept coming back to across his whole career, those of us who genuinely love classical music are not and have never been “better people” for having that love and we should stop acting as if it were the case. 

 

Furthermore, I have discovered after a lifetime of burrowing into the classical guitar literature that when it comes to stuff as rudimentary as whether your V chord goes to a IV chord Robert Johnson and Wenzel Matiegka have something in common that goes into the tips of their fingers.

 

We guitarists would be fools to not consider what that could tell us about the beautiful heritage of our instrument.  It’s not just in the morphology of how we even play, it comes through in music in different styles across two continents over two different centuries, the V chord can go to the IV chord and that’s fine.  Don’t overplay your riff’s welcome, but Matiegka’s sonatas show that even back in 1808 and 1811 nobody really raised a cry that he was breaking some truly inviolable rule.  It’s been true for centuries that if going from V to IV sounds good you do that.  You can ask Wenzel Matiegka that by way of going through his scores. I’ve shown that using V7/V to V to IV was something he did multiple times. 

 

The implications of this seem obvious, a path toward an approach to sonata forms that takes the vocabulary of blues seriously on its own terms is possible and desirable (and has probably already been done but it wouldn't surprise me if theorists have argued about it, if this is so).  If anyone claims that it isn’t possible because you never go from a V to a IV chord in “real” classical music I’ve just disproven that point repeatedly by looking at just two solo guitar sonatas by one Bohemian guitarist composer who was published two centuries ago. It's the simplest thing in the world to have a V-IV turnaround in E minor blues go from the tonic to the subtonic and thereby have a 12-bar blues theme serve as the basis for a continuous variation form that checks off all the structural points of a "textbook" sonata form.  Here is a potential outworking of such an observation, for what it's worth, and if we're looking at strictly monothematic sonata forms a further implication is that development sections can be written in such a way that a seasoned guitarist could create entirely new development sections over an established bass line as if the score were a partimento, jazz chart or figured bass passage. 

We have all the conceptual and theoretical tools we need to create blues sonatas and we have a precedent in the music of composers like Matiegka to see that the V-IV progression could be normative in his musical language which, as we've seen, has been described as conservative and moderately conventional.  Okay, then, if that's the case then all the possibilities for a synthesis of blues and ragtime with 18th century forms is practical.  Akaba is right over there, it's simply a matter of going. 

 

The classical purists and the blues purists, I dare to say it, can both be wrong. Music theorists, historians and journalists understandably find styles and eras they love and advocate for them but the more I study music, listen to it, play it and write it, the more I am struck by how the people who have the most to gain by segregating every genre into firmly delineated boundaries that are allegedly impermeable are the people with textbooks to sell and this is as true of blues and jazz and rock fans as of classical music fans and fans of “serious” music.  We don’t have to be constrained by those people and their lack of imagination.  In order to find out if we have points of contact and boundary-permeable musical phenomena we have to immerse ourselves in music, sometimes that will require us to consider that the bromides and canards of music theorists and historians get disproven by the actual notes on the page.

If I had confined myself to just studying the music most of the classical guitar community considered "worthy" of studying I wouldn't have spent ten years going through Matiegka's guitar sonatas and I would not have discovered how often he used the V7/V to V to IV progression in his work.  It's not a lot of instances, really, but as I've been saying the implications of how that usage could and should make us rethink what has been taught in textbooks about what actually "never" happens or "isn't good practice" should at least come up for some appraisal.  

Matiegka's solo guitar sonatas: his use of the V-IV progression and not resolving his leading tones upward--maybe nobody told him not to break those "rules" of counterpoint and harmony in 1808 and 1811

One of the staples of music theory courses has been to tell students that in classical harmony (more like 18^th century “common practice” there are a bunch of rules you aren’t supposed to break.  Avoid parallel motion or direct motion is one of the basics of bad counterpoint.  Another rule is, so many of us have been told, you always resolve the leading tone of a major scale upward to the tonic note.  The big one in harmony is that you’re not supposed to proceed from the V chord to the IV chord. 

 

Another staple in music courses has been that blues “broke all the rules” of classical music or just didn’t follow those rules. 

 

I regard both of these as unhelpful canards.  One of the curious things I’ve discovered after a decade of going through the solo guitar sonatas of Wenzel Thomas Matiegka is that he ostentatiously “broke the rules”, two of the allegedly big ones about the melodic direction of the seventh scale degree in major keys and particularly the one about how V never proceeds to IV. 

So let me demonstrate that these so-called rules were already being broken in 1808 and 1811.

Interpolation is the new contrafacta: on Rick Beato’s discussion of interpolation in pop music in light of contrafacta in 16th century Lutheran musical practice

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j_9Larw-hJM

Rich Beato recently discussed how recent popular songs display such obvious debts to songs from the last century that the question he asks is “Isn’t this just stealing?” I'm not going to address that question. Instead I'm going to ask a new question, "Has this kind of overt musical borrowing of existing musical materials and super-imposing a new text on old music happened before?"  The answer to that is yes and that this has happened for centuries in Christian church music traditions.  But first ... 

Rick Beato discusses a concept called interpolation, which in this case means to take a melody from an existing popular song, giving it new lyrics, and recording it from scratch without actually sampling the song from which the melody has been borrowed.
 
Beato describes interpolation as a bit of a puzzle, how it’s possible for you to take an existing melody that maybe someone else wrote, adding new lyrics and then “it’s yours?” This practice was so commonplace in sixteenth century German-speaking lands music historians refer to the practice as contrafacta, where German Lutherans might take a melody such as the chant Veni Sancte Spiritus and rework it into a German vernacular tune that preserves the core of the chant but makes it accessible to non-Latin speakers.  Now there is the old saw that Luther and Lutherans just transformed old bar melodies into hymns but that view has largely been dismantled. 
 
Chiara Bertoglio published a door-stopper of a book around 2017, summarizing research into how Lutherans in the sixteenth century did not necessarily just add Christian texts on secular tunes but what they did frequently do was adapt existing Catholic music into German vernacular.  Contrafacta was the practice of imposing a new text on an established musical work, which could even be a polyphonic work. A simple potential case study for an English-language contrafacta would be if someone took a slow Latin chorale setting of Verbum Caro Factum Est and rendered it into English with a vernacular text “And the Word Became Flesh”; the music itself would not be changed at all, only the text, but this could and would be treated as a “new” work and there were composers in the sixteenth century who specialized in this kind of re-composition or, if you will, “sampling”.  Not only was it not frowned up in nascent Lutheranism this kind of practice could be regarded as an act of musical heroism and public service, seeing to it that Lutherans would not deprive themselves of the best music the Catholic tradition had to offer in the process of differentiating themselves from Catholicism on doctrinal issues such as the nature of justification by faith and rethinking aspects of how liturgy “worked”.
 
If you have an extravagant amount of time (or are a lightning fast reader) I suggest Bertoglio’s book.  I’m only a few chapters into it but it’s a formidable survey of the practices of Christians in Europe in the sixteenth century and all the debates and practices and theories they had about music.
 
https://www.chiarabertoglio.com/reforming-music
https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/9783110520811/html?lang=en
Reforming Music : Music and the Religious Reformations of the Sixteenth Century
 
eBook
Published: March 6, 2017
ISBN: 9783110520811
 
Hardcover
Published: February 20, 2017
ISBN: 9783110518054
 
Paperback
Published: November 19, 2018
ISBN: 9783110636819
 
So when Rick Beato asks “Isn’t this just stealing?” an answer to that can be:

1.       In the sense of overt recycling, maybe but

2.       Modal mutation and reharmonization of known musical phrases isn’t that literal (I did listen to the songs Beato references)

3.       Per the Dua Lupa reference, contrafacta obviously still exists in the 21^st century, it just involves lawyers

Back in the sixteenth century lawyers were not arguing over musical borrowings.  Lawyers (if they were named John Calvin!) were arguing about literally more religious doctrinal issues in the sixteenth century.  What people call “interpolation” in 21^st century popular music has a precedent in early modern European Christian liturgical music. The differences, among many, between “then” and “now” is that in the long 19^th century (let’s say between 1780 and 1920) a doctrine emerged in northern trans-Atlantic philosophy and aesthetics that touted the power and value of originality among Artists who were supposed to be genius enough to come up with their own ideas and not just recontextualize, revise, or even literally recycle existing pieces of music with new texts and call it new music.  That was not how Lutherans rolled between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries.  Johann Sebastian Bach was not really the kind of person to feel bad about super-imposing a new cantata text on a previously written piece of music and calling the result a new musical work. 

If you want a short and fairly readable primer on Bach’s late career self-borrowing Daniel Melamed’s
Listening to Bach: The Mass in B Minor and the Christmas Oratorio is a good start.  And for a review …
https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2018/12/20/bach-master-recycler/
 
Historically the response of “they just don’t care” was the more normative response.  It was in the wake of Romanticism that “isn’t this stealing?” was more likely to become the musician’s default response.  This is not to defend all behaviors of musical borrowing without citation or credit.  Far from it.  But since Beato has obviously been baffled by what “interpolation” is supposed to be taken for and is asking, I think, in good faith, “Isn’t this stealing?” this would be exactly where people steeped in the history of what many call “classical music” in general and liturgical music in Christian European practice in particular, can jump in and discuss.  Happily adding new texts to old music was considered a good thing in nascent Lutheranism. Chiara Bertoglio tours the sixteenth century and has noted that within early Lutheranism the boundaries between what we might now call highbrow and lowbrow musical styles and forms were all considered permeable, endlessly negotiable boundaries and it was not considered a bad thing to make a new German chorale on an old Catholic plainchant, and it wasn’t even considered a bad thing to create a German vernacular liturgical text adapting a Psalm and super-imposing it on, say, an old Latin language choral work.  The whole concept of intellectual property as taken for granted in 20^th century Anglo-American popular music had not yet arrived. 

So if we ask "Isn't this stealing?" Well, if it is `now' it most certainly wasn't `then'.  A whole web of philosophical and economic and social customs emerged in the last few centuries to change how people might have construed the question "Isn't this stealing", more to the point, of even starting to conceive of music in such a way as to even allow Rick Beato's question to be conceived of before even being asked. In the sixteenth century the answer might have been "No, and if it `is' stealing it's the kind of shameless musical `stealing' that needs to happen if vernacular church music is going to move forward".  I won't attempt to flood your attention span with a list of Lutheran music historians and scholars on that topic because I'm more in the Anglican/Swiss/Dutch/Scottish Calvinist traditions and I'm not going to pretend Lutheran musicology is even remotely my wheelhouse.  But I've dipped my toes into it here and there.  

It looks like today's pop music `interpolation' maps with yesterday's German Lutheran `contrafacta', at least a little bit. 

POSTSCRIPT 7:24pm 

In U.S. contemporary Christian music it may be more common to create new music for old texts than to create new texts for old music because when so many beloved texts are already vernacular and in the public domain the cultural rewards of adding a contemporary musical sound to an established text are substantial.  

But I can't help mentioning that as contrafacta practice goes in church music in the United States there may be few examples more famous than Thomas Andrew Dorsey setting the next text of "Take My Hand Precious Lord" to the well-known tune Maitland.  Dorsey made a few substantial bluesy changes but here in 2024 I don't think anyone could mistake what he did "with" Maitland for earlier forms of the tune.  I have an older post discussing a book about Dorsey's development you can read, if you like.

So contrafacta, interpolation, the tradition of taking a known, even a legendary tune, and superimposing a new text on it is one of the more venerable practices in Christian music of the last, oh, four centuries.  It's in contemporary secular trans-Atlantic popular music that it comes across as possibly (or, sure, actually) stealing. 

Big Louisiana, Willy Rafus & Arthur Davis - Let Your Hammer Ring--a digression on the norm of not ending on your starting pitch in unaccompanied vocal performance

One of my siblings ran this by me, found it (finally) decades after hearing it on a CD some time in the last century. There are a variety of versions of "Let Your Hammer Ring" out there but this was the specific one the sibling remembered.  

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3RIV5gP6u0Y

If you listen along and you don't have any training for this kind of thing you won't realize that the microtonally shift up a half step (minor second) across the roughly seven-minute story embedded in the work song.  Ending on a different pitch than you started on is one of the things that you don't tend to hear about from people who perform, study and teach instrumental music but in vocal music it's fairly normal.  It takes a ton of training both physical training and ear training to not modulate to a key that's different from where you started if you're getting into the music you're performing.  Sometimes you slide up and other times you slide down.  It's notorious in choral performance to overshoot descents and ascents.  

Ethan Hein's Joy to the Modes and a response post featuring Scott Joplin's The Entertainer in parallel minor, you probably have a really great melody on your hands if it can still sound good after modal mutation

https://www.ethanhein.com/wp/2024/joy-to-the-modes/

 

Ethan Hein has used “Joy to the World” as a way to demonstrate different modes running from Lydian to Locrian. He points out he’s not the first person to have done this but he has done it better.  I agree.

In his concluding paragraph Ethan wrote the following, “Does this have any musical value beyond music theory teaching?“  In a way the question to ask back is, “Does it have to?” Bit O remember when I was reading Elaine Sisman’s book on Haydn and variation technique I got to thinking about how frequently in 18^th century variation forms the major key theme showed up in parallel minor for at least one of the variations.  Minor key sets of variations have also featured parallel major variations, too, and Hein’s presentation of “Joy to the World” in every diatonic mode reveals just how indestructible the tune is.  

My take-away as a composer and musician is that subjecting your melody to the harshest and most abrupt modal mutations you can think of helps you figure out whether you have a solid melody or not.  If your melodic contour still sounds good in spite of being run through all the modal mutational paces that’s a good sign that you have a versatile tune with a memorable contour.  If you shift into another mode and you find the melody begins to swim a bit then it may be best as a constituent part of some musical thing with other ideas.  

I’ll give you an example off the top of my head, you can take the first two strains of Scott Joplin’s “The Entertainer” and play them in C minor and I submit (being the highly biased Scott Joplin fan that I am) that the music will still sound great.

I'll give you an example after the break. I've limited myself to strains A and B and I just whipped this up in the last hour and a half so if it doesn't look so great pardon the made-to-demonstrate-a-concept layout.

Ethan Hein discusses the mystery of why the bottom number in a time signature is what it is, and why there seem to be no good explanations for what that number actually indicates

https://www.ethanhein.com/wp/2024/the-bottom-number-in-time-signatures-has-always-confused-me/#more-29476

Explaining time signatures is hardly easy and why the bottom number is what it is is does seem stranger than the top number.  If you have a measure of 7/4 then you can say there are 7 beats and that they are quarter notes.  That's simple, but Ethan Hein points out that no one easily explains why that bottom number is what it is. I could say that the bottom number indicates, often, the foundational metrical unit that establishes pulse but the reason that becomes circular quickly is because there are so many ways to notate musical passages it's not a given that notation itself tells you what meter you're in.

Danuta Mirka, in her book Metric Manipulations In Haydn and Mozart : Chamber Music For Strings, 1787-1791, points out that in the 18th century composers would stick with the established meter no matter how many times or in what ways they actually changed meters in a written work.  In other words, you cannot assume that a composer won't shift out of 4/4 into 5/8 or 6/8 or 3/4 or even potentially 11/16 and 13/16 in a work just because they stay resolutely in 4/4 on the written page.  Thanks to accent marks and other articulations, as well as notational conventions, it was possible to create metrical changes in a work despite never changing the written meter.  Music in the 18th century was resolutely monometric in notation even though metrical changes and outright changes of meter happened in practice.  I'm still early into the book enough I can't share examples cited beyond the fact that she works with two of the biggest usual suspects in the history of music theory, Haydn and Mozart.

I had to go with a Theodore Front link because the Oxford University Press link kept having issues

https://global.oup.com/academic/product/metric-manipulations-in-haydn-and-mozart-9780195384925

Speaking from personal experience the other thing about notating meter is that not all composers feel it's worth it to notate something in, say, 11/4.  Shostakovich didn't always write out grooves in 5/4 or when he could switch back and forth between 2/4 and 3/4 as he does in the third movement of his Third String Quartet.  

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G27ERARI4z4&t=743s

Or you could have a passage where a cello barrels along in 2/4 while other strings in Bartok's String Quartet No. 4 shift into 3/4 before the music moves from meters like 2/4 and 3/4 (at the same time) to 5/8.  This part of Bartok's Third String Quartet has a killer pizzicato cello solo. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Knd04_iYTGc&t=290s

But you can see, if you read along with Bartok's score, he'll have whiplash meter shifts between 3/8 and 2/4.  My memory may be fuzzy here but I vaguely recall the composer Paul Creston, in his book Principles of Rhythm, complained that there were huge spans of music in Bartok's string quartets where he could have notated things in 4/4 and used judicious accent marks rather than endlessly changing meters in every stave for every instrument.  Good luck finding a copy of the Creston!  If I hadn't read it decades ago I couldn't even just allude to it now.  Creston's point stands, there are all kinds of ways you can notate a single passage and some composers go for the hard bordering on inscrutable way to write out a score and others stay four-on-the-floor in their scores even if they introduce meter changes.

That the bottom number in a meter conveyed tempo information would generally true right up to about the 20th century but from probably 1930 onward all bets are off.  For instance, take 3/2.  I know from my experience in choral singing, the Alice Parker arrangement of "Hark! I hear the harps eternal", which is scored in 3/2 but does not feel all that slow, at least for a choral work.  You can see the score in the link below.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fglrDoLN7nE

The arrangement has a light, airy element to it yet it doesn't sound slow, and it sure doesn't feel slow if you try singing it. 

Parker packs in contrapuntally dense call and response passages just barely over a minute into an already short arrangement.  There's such a thing as going with the larger numeric value (the half note) because you don't want to scare your sight-reading singers to death with needlessly small note values.  And if you want the music performed with swing (whether or not that happens varies from ensemble to ensemble and conductor to conductor and Parker's arrangement withstands either approach because she's that great a choral arranger), then going with the larger note value lets you gauge how much you want (or even can) swing in the arrangement depending on the exigences of how good your singers are.

For 5/8, I know he's hardly beloved even among fans of classical music but one of the more memorable entries in 5/8 I've heard is the Fuga in G from Paul Hindemith's Ludus Tonalis.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F4PATHcm5EM

But don't think he was the first or only composer to write a 5/8 fugue because Anton Reicha's Op. 36, No. 20 Fugue in A major predates Hindemith by more than a century.

https://imslp.org/wiki/36_Fugues_pour_Piano%2C_Op.36_(Reicha%2C_Anton)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ZYx_KHReQU

Reicha's fugues were so weird Beethoven reportedly said "the fugue is no longer a fugue".  Reicha also advocated the use of quarter-tones to embellish melodies in his Treatise on Melody in 1814

https://imslp.org/wiki/Trait%C3%A9_de_m%C3%A9lodie_(Reicha%2C_Anton)

For 11/8 I recommend a few pieces by contemporary Bulgarian guitarist composer Atanas Ourkouzounov, who has a Youtube channel that features his music, in some cases with read-along scores.  So if you want 11/8 here's a Chaconne.

Ourkouzounov - "Chaconne" d'après une improvisation de Petar Ralchev (youtube.com)

hear also ... 

Ourkouzounov - Chaconnitsa (2022) (youtube.com)

hear also Asymmetrical Improvisations where the first movement is in 11/8 and the second is in 7/8

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rsoep3f-VM0

But the thing about 11 anything is you could also go 4+3+4 over 8 or 3+3+3+2 over 8 or you could notate it as 4/4 and 3/4 and 4/4 or three measures of 3/4 followed by a measure of 2/4.  Because asymmetrical meters break down into smaller units (i.e. Brubeck going 2+2+2+3 within 9/8) some composers just don't use the less conventional meters when they can (they hope) inspire players to play their music by staying with simpler meters for the sake of reading.  It's possible to cram 3/8, 6/8, 5/8, 13/16 and 11/16 into a work that's officially 4/4 for most of its run.  

It's that reality, and examples I have semi-randomly grabbed from the classical repertoire that I think helps explain why the bottom number in a meter can seem so ambiguous.  Maybe back in the day when people used the concept of tactus it was possible to talk about a stable undergirding rhythm without attempting to use notated music to confine performers to what we call measure but the horse left the barn a long time ago on that front.  

Ethan Hein discusses harmonics and that reminds me of Kyle Gann writing about how the 13th harmonic saved his music

https://www.ethanhein.com/wp/2024/what-are-harmonics/

Ethan Hein digs into the physics and frequencies of string harmonics as a primer on the topic of harmonics in music in general.

a new appendix to Ragtime and Sonata Forms, some practical approaches to ragtime/sonata synthesis

Over the years I have written about my fondness for ragtime and my interest in synthesizing ragtime with 18^th century galant approaches to large-scale form.  I wrote Ragtime and Sonata Forms back in 2020.  Since that time I have read a fairly big pile of books discussing musical time and space; concepts of form; and scholarly reconsiderations and renegotiations of what theorists would call sonata forms.  It has become clearer among scholars over the last two centuries that the whole idea of “sonata form” and “sonata forms” was and is a post hoc description of a very flexible set of practices that were never as schematic or rigid as 19^th century theorists made them out to be. 

 

As Leonard Meyer put it, in the eighteenth century sonata movements were conceived of and written as a flexible set of scripts, but in the nineteenth century they became works written according to plans.  I was telling a friend of mine that this distinction between a sonata as a “script” and a sonata as a “plan” has profound implications.  You can go “off script” any time you want and get back on script.  If you change significant parts of your plan then you may just need a whole new plan.  I enjoy Haydn more than Mozart or Beethoven and I have a fondness for thinking of sonata forms (since the term and the heuristic is still useful and unavoidable now that we’ve had it for two centuries), so I have been thinking of ways to play with sonata forms in a way that treats sonata forms as flexible scripts.  I have also attempted to cross reference approaches to the “punctuation” of musical themes in ways that allow for establishing temporal-spatial correspondences between ragtime and sonata forms. 

 

Ironically I have been helped not just by reading music theory treatises by Jason Yust, Yoel Greenberg, James Hepokoski and L. Poundie Burstein, I have particularly benefited from reading Charles Twombly on John of Damascus; Thomas Torrance on Trinitarian dogmatics; Roger Scruton on the philosophy of music; and then Ferdia Stone-Davis and David Brown’s respective critiques of Scruton.  In other words I dove into theology and philosophy.  Torrance argued that we need to drop the Newtonian conception of time and space in light of patristic witness that time and space are not absolute but are relationally contingent and part of the created order. 

 

So when Jason Yust proposes that we think of musical time and space overlapping in multiple dimensions that just strikes me as a conceptual transposition of the kinds of distinctions that, when Thomas Aquinas reflected on the Trinity, were explicable as filiation, procession and spiration in intra-Trinitarian relationships.  In other words, Christian theology going back to the patristic era and medieval theologies from Aquinas and John of Damascus dispensed with a conception of time and space as some absolute “receptacle”.  L Poundie Burstein’s advice that we avoid getting too rigid in thinking about musical blocks of space and time as fixed “containers”.  Christian theologians agreed with that concern centuries ago and Thomas Torrance was overt in advising us to drop that conception of time and space in the last century.  

I'm halfway through Jason Yust's book Organized Time--Yust's ideas of musical time and space for rhythm, harmony and form could've easily been filiation, spiration and procession in a thinker like Thomas Aquinas in a very different field of study

Organized Time: Rhythm, Tonality & Form is a dense but fascinating read.  His proposal that different elements in music such as rhythm, melody, harmony and form have overlapping and interpenetrating yet simultaneously identifiably distinct forms of time in a single musical work is heady, to say the least.  

At the same time ... I found myself thinking that if Thomas Aquinas could write at length on the

 distinctions between filiation, spiration and procession in intra-Trinitarian relationships between God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Spirit in Questions 29 through 43 of Part One of Summa Theologica, then Jason Yust's observations about musical time(s) in his conclusion (I did skip to the end) seem weirdly mundane.  Different kinds of times evoke a kind of timeless stand against temporality?  Okay, but this is something I could just as easily read from Chiara Bertoglio.  I'm going through two of her books lately: Musical Scores and the Eternal Present: Theology, Time and Tolkien, and her gigantic Reforming Music:Music and the Religious Reformations of the Sixteenth Century on the other.  Not that I'm not loving Jason Yust's book, but his wrap-up on time and music seemed a bit of a let-down. The analytical insights are spectacular and the musings on time and temporality less so.

But then I was considering graduate school in both music and biblical studies at one point in my life.  Compared to even third-rate theologians music theorists speculating about temporality and human perception can seem pedestrian by comparison.  What could we infer from the simultaneity of different forms of musical time?  If Yust's thesis is plausible, and I think it is, then any attempt to describe any musical experience is predicated on what amount to a perichoretic set of timespaces.  perichoretic relationships between different elements of musical time Yust proposes and look back on the work of theologians like T. F. Torrance on Trinitaran ontology and time and space as created things in Space, Time and Incarnation.  There Torrance advised us to reject a ham-fisted embrace of Newtonian "receptacle" concepts of time."  

Charles Twombly wrote a wonderful little book called Perichoresis and Personhood: God, Christ, and Salvation in John of Damascus.  The title pretty much tells you just what you get from the book! For the uninitiated, perichoresis (or circumincession if you're more Catholic than Eastern Orthodox, I guess) is what theologians describe as the intra-Trinitarian relationships of union and distinction between the Father, Son and Spirit.  John of Damascus picked up work done by his predecessors such as Maximus the Confessor, refining generations of transforming the Stoic concept of perichoresis into something that can describe the nature of the personhood of the persons in the Trinity as well as the mystery of Christ's divine and human natures. 

So when L Poundie Burstein advised in Journeys Through Galant Expositions that we either abandon the receptacle concept of musical time and space or modify it so as to not imagine these musical containers of timespace can only hold one thing at a time I agree!  But it's also patently obvious to me that admonitions against constrained concepts of timespaces as receptacles that hold either this or that but not these are those is something anyone with a decent amount of theological reading on the immanent and social Trinity would keep in mind as a matter of course.  

Now how and why might any of this stuff even matter?  I have a proposal for why it matters, when cultural conservatives write and speak as though X or Y musical vocabularies are incompatible with large scale forms or "argument" they are witlessly repeating canards by that arch-Marxist Theodor Adorno on the one hand, and claiming that there are types of music that cannot be "redeemed" by Christians for any use. I am still incubating an expansion of Ragtime and Sonata Forms after all these years.  It doesn't matter if Catholic polemicists claim that ragtime was music made in red-light districts and can't be used in church services. One of the greatest composers of ragtime, Joseph F Lamb, was by general account a loving father and husband and regularly attended Mass (which wouldn't be a shock to hear about an Irish Catholic in the early 20th century).  Maybe you wouldn't want to hear a ragtime variation on "Just As I Am" but I personally wouldn't mind, and if it was for hausmusik and not liturgy I don't see what the trouble could be.  The more music theorists play with ideas of what music time and space might be the more their speculations converge on what turns out, in my own life of reading, to be tip-toeing up to some of the most ordinary and long-standing reflections on the mystery of the Trinity in Christian dogmatics spanning Catholicism, Eastern Orthodoxy, and Reformed thought. 

Jason Yust's proposals about what amounts to a perichoretic approach to musical timespaces "is" fascinating and it's fascinating to me precisely because it reinvents a wheel that was refined centuries ago in a different context. Aquinas' ruminations on the distinctions between filiation, spiration and procession could as easily have been making distinctions between rhythm and melody and form and harmony and timbre in musical timespaces had he set his mind to another set of topics.  He didn't, of course.  

One of the canards I keep seeing from cultural conservatives who don't abide "pop" is they claim the musical materials are organically incapable of being congruent with "serious" music, let alone liturgy.  The case is asserted rather than proven.  Johann Sebastian Bach had a historically specific fusion of "ancient" church music and then-modern dance forms.  Synergistic dynamics between "high" and "low" have run through music history for some time.  It was the advent of Romantic art religion that seems to have been the start of a newly dogmatic phase of segregating "high" from "low", at least in reception history and teaching about canonized masterworks.  

Roundaboutly what that means is that I distrust the confident judgments of the jazzbros as much as I disagree with the pat conclusions of Roger Scruton and contemporary Catholics who pine for the return of a Tridentine rite which, based on the Cardinal Ratzinger I've read so far, may be more the dream of revanchists than a historical reality.  These men (and so often they are men) instruct us in philosophies and stances of aesthetic judgment rather than creation.  It's easier to get them to go on and on about the "timeless" nature of the "eternal" masterworks than to discuss musical time.  Meanwhile, in music theory and philosophy of aesthetics reflections on the embodied nature of time are legion.  That's great.  I like to read Ferdia Stone-Davis pick apart the problems in Roger Scruton's notion of acoustic vs. acousmatic audiation and cognition.  One of the canards I have been thinking about a lot is the idea that the obstacles to having blues sonata forms is that allegedly blues material cannot be wedded to sonata form.  The Harlem Symphony disproved this canard in the last century, ditto the symphonies of William Grant Still, yet a conclusive argument against the "organicism" fallacy has not been made, and I have begun to suspect one of the key reasons for this is that people get sidetracked on questions and dogmas regarding musical vocabulary without considering the nature of musical time.

Roger Scruton contended that music is more like architecture than language. 

... But it seems to me that, in the haste to squeeze music into the framework suggested by linguistics, writers have not always been careful to distinguish the two kinds of hierarchy. Music, in my view, is more like architecture than it is like language, and this means that repetition, amplification, diminution and augmentation have more importance in creating the musical surface than rule-guided transformations of some structural ‘source’.

Fair enough, let's consider that idea.  Actually, precisely because I consider that idea I find it absurd Roger Scruton kept coming back to his one-dimensional notion of musical time. When is the last time anyone saw a one-dimensional building?   Never.  If the foremost philosopher of the aesthetics of music, at least in conservative circles, committed to such a dubious idea we might be better off sticking to the speculations of non-philosophers.  I could consider writers whose work Scruton mentioned and passed over briefly because they weren't philosophers: Victor Zuckerkandl had a very three-dimensional concept of musical time and space in Sound and Symbol Volume 1: Music and the External World!  George Rochberg built upon Zuckerkandl's precedent to distinguish between "timespace" and "spacetime" in The Aesthetics of Survival!  There are times when philosophers make blunders non-philosophers can't even think of.

Worse yet, Scruton was a lay Anglican.  In other words, he should have been conversant in all the conventional Trinitarian doctrines from Aquinas to know what filiation, spiration and procession are and why those matter to Catholics.  He did say he thought of himself as an Anglo-Catholic, after all, Sir Roger.  

So let's turn back to this idea of music as being like architecture.  We drop the mono-dimensional idea because Christ became flesh and blood.  Through the Incarnation time and space are part of what He took upon himself.  Gregory Nazianzus contended that that which was not taken up (by Christ) is not healed. Christ is fully human and fully divine.  In Pauline literature we read that through Christ God is reconciling all things to Himself.  Yet conservative philosophers and philosophers who state that they are Christians can keep coming back around to this idea that musical styles X or Y cannot be redeemed?  Why not?  We're just told so.  The path from perichoresis being a Stoic philosophical concept to being the term John of Damascus used to describe the hypostatic union of Christ's divine and human natures took centuries.  Partisans against a synthesis of blues, ragtime, rock, country and other "low" styles with the "high" of complex musical forms keep coming back to the canard that these materials are incommensurate with a de facto "divinity" of classical music.  These people, if they are professing Christians, need to go back and review their dogmatics some more.  Was flesh and blood so lowly and irredeemable Christ could not take it upon Himself?  Why, then, do some Christians claim that the music of African American popular song and dance styles have no place in the church?  Have these people talked to any black church historians, musicians or theologians or liturgists?  

Having finished Philip Ewell's On Music Theory one of the things I have been struck by is that musical punditry for and against his book defaults to race and "civilization".  I have seen a canard among some defenders of "the great tradition" that pluralism is relativism is rejection of hierarchy.  But as I'm reading Joseph Ratzinger or Nicholas Wolterstorff or Maeve Louise Heaney or Frank Burch Brown or David Brown (note the spread of Catholic, Anglican and Dutch Reformed in that list of names) I see that there have been cases for aesthetic pluralism as an outworking of the spiritual discipline of Christian hospitality in theological aesthetics going back for a century.  

When I read music historians say anything about Richard Allen it tends to be a bit negative since he and other black clergy did not like the nascent popular sounds that are venerated by rockists, jazzbros and others.  But I think theologians, at precisely this point, have a more sympathetic reading of Richard Allen's life and times, he was the seminal figure in the African Methodist Episcopal Church who had to deal with the reality of aesthetic pluralism in congregational life.  The fact that many fans of Gospel blues have decided that some of the clergy who were cautious to denigrating about their favorite styles of music does not mean we have to read their concerns uncharitably. What I appreciated about Mark Burford's magisterial Mahalia Jackson and the Black Gospel Field is how seriously he took the reservations William Levi Dawson had about the emerging Gospel blues singers. He worried that the emergence of Gospel blues might led black churches to hire cheaper and less trained musicians.  Burford also pointed out that while in rock historiographies Sly and the Family Stone are rightly celebrated for being a racially integrated rock group he points out that hardly anyone remembers that Doris Akers had a racially integrated Gospel choir in the 1950s. 

It can be far too easy on "our" side of musical history to remember that there were quite a few voices in black churches who were not happy with what came to be known as Gospel blues and it's to Burford's credit that he went back and found the writings of these black musicians and clergy to give their perspective, which has long since vanished into music history as the objections of the losing side.  The winning side was the side that had Mahalia Jackson, Rosetta Tharp and, later, the early soul and rock singers.  As Anthony Heilbut put it in his landmark work on the contributions of black Pentecostals to early rock, the history of how the sounds of the underground went mainstream was through black churches. 

In other words, if contemporary polemics back and forth about race and class and music forget church music then a globe-spanning field of shared faith gets ignored.  I thnk about this stuff, obviously, and part of why that is is because I had a Native American Calvinist dad and a white Pentecostal mom.  I made friends with Christians from Kenya and Japan in my college years.  I came to a relatively early and formative understanding that Christianity is not "Western" or "Christendom" or a Western concept of "civilization".  I might have more in common, in doctrinal terms, with African Anglicans than Boston Episcopalians.  There have been many a black musician who has suggested that if you don't even try to understand black American church music there are many things about black American you won't understand.  Conversely, if conservatives only invoke a "Christendom" that has no black churches in it I can't take them seriously for even one solitary second.  

In the praise and blame for Ewell's book (which I actually like quite a bit) I notice that virtually no one who has complained about his brief against the white supremacism in U.S. music education thinks outside the box of Wagnerian art religion, whether they call it that or not.  Conversely, it's one thing for Don Baton to rip on Philip Ewell for having a brief and negative swipe at Christian complicity in approving of black slavery and another thing for Don Baton to display any working knowledge of Christian dogmatics.  I have been contending, at some length, that because Christianity began in Asia and Africa before it become European, fidelity to the earliest Christian writings does not obligate us to defend a "Western" sense of "civilization" or "culture" or "Christendom".  To defend those things is to defend a set of idols that are not worth defending.  It is at precisely the nexus of church music that people for and against Ewell's thesis seem to want to talk entirely about race.  We should talk about race, of course, but the irony I'm seeing around me is that writers like Ewell and Baton do us no favors by only talking about Christianity as "for" or "against" blackness or "Western civilization".  Augustine of Hippo was born in Africa. Ditto Tertullian.  As Esther Acolatse has put it, even many Western scholars have come around the re-affirmation of Christianity as a religion with Afro-Asiatic beginnings.  

Black pastors, theologians and musicians and churchgoers were all, in their own ways, contending with the conundrum of aesthetic pluralism in liturgical life.  People who want their highbrow or lowbrow race music (whether white or black) seem too often too eager to pick their favorite side and overlook the larger discourse, the centuries of negotiation, definition and recalibration involved in aesthetic changes in liturgical musics.  It's at this nexus of issues that theologians, church historians, music theorists, music historians and practical musicians and clergy could potentially have a lot to share with each other.  The "crisis" of pluralism can be read in political or racial terms but for thousands of years Christian thinkers could think of it as the challenge of catholicity, and not necessarily the explicitly Roman Catholic kind of catholicity.  The Protestant Reformations erupted in part because of the conviction that Roman Catholicism was far too Roman and not catholic enough. That is, in a very palpable way, what Philip Ewell has highlighted as a problem in music theory education.  What is proclaimed to be "universal" has been anything but.  

I don't think Christians should jump on some bandwagon of denouncing the "woke joke folk".  That is stupid because a lot of these allegedly "woke joke folk" are brothers and sisters in Christ.  If you can't love them who you have seen then you can't love Him who you have not seen.  I don't write that as a political or religious progressive, I write that as a Christian, a low-church Calvinist Anglican to be specific, but as a Christian.  I think Ewell's book is well worth reading and there's a lot about it I like.  I also think, drawing a bit on Adolph Reed Jr., that there are pitfalls in making conversations on music theory about race.  The injustices we should discuss, but at several points we can't talk about the damaging impact of post-Wagnerian art-religion without discussing the bad faith and bad arguments and theological incompetence of the men who claim that highbrow art does what "religion" can no longer do.  If anything we live in an era in which theologians and musicians are more interested in aesthetic pluralism than in earlier epochs of "Western" civilization or "Christendom".  We have a broader and bolder grasp of how truly global the Christian faith is.  Even Ratzinger granted aesthetic pluralism as a reality to be incorporated into Catholic liturgical life (I'm slowly going through The Theology of Liturgy alongside my neo-Calvinist binge).

So I am having fun reading Jason Yust's book and it has gotten me thinking a lot about the ways people have tried to describe music in time and space.  Yust's book has also gotten me thinking about polemics against "pop" made by Christians, whether Catholics, Anglicans, evangelicals or other.  The old Christian doctrines about perichoresis can be instructive to Christians at this point. If we take perichoresis seriously in Trinitarian dogmatics and Christology, it should tell us it's the dumbest thing in the world to claim that you can't make a ragtime sonata or a blues fugue because, oh, that material doesn't "fit" the form-follows-function axiom.  Music is a kind of architecture?  Well, you can build a house from wood or clay or paper or what-have-you.  For anyone claiming to be some kind of theonomistic Christian the proposal is even more patently idiotic.  Why would Christ reconcile people to Himself but not their music?  

If Scruton took his own idea that music is like architecture more seriously he should have abandoned his one-dimensional concept of musical time and space.  Part and parcel with that mono-dimensional idea would be the claim that the materials are "unfit" for some musical "argument" or "structure".  Architectural principles might tell us that this or that won't support the weight that's going to be put on it but then the comparison breaks down.  Is the "house" of a symphony made of "German" materials so different from the "house" of a symphony made from American materials?  If "art cannot be learned" and conservatory education is stifling then if conservatory-trained musicians claim that you can't create ragtime or blues-based sonatas and fugues then, hey, these conservatory trained Romantics testify against themselves.  

If I have a proverbial hat to throw into the ring I want to write on behalf of ideas for sparking creativity.  The scholastically created and journalistically sustained boundaries between a "high" that defaults to "white" and a "pop" music that is "low" which tends to be defined by innovations from musicians who were (or are) not white does seem to be a chasm that some want to cross and others want to be left as is. I'm firmly in the camp of wanting to make that Jimi Hendrix dream more feasible for anyone, that Bach, Handel, Muddy Waters flamenco sound he aspired to. 

Seemingly inseparable from art-religious fanaticism is a commitment to a highbrow or lowbrow art mysticism.  I've made this point before but there are the Ted Gioia advocates of "sorcery" and the Roger Scruton advocates of "sacrament".  Since I hail more from the Reformed (Swiss, Dutch, Scottish, and American) traditions I don't have a sacramental view of music.  As an ex-Pentecostal I came from a tradition that recognized music was and is powerful but the Spirit decides when music does or doesn't have the anointing.  You feel it or you don't and it's not a matter of some magic formula or some fool-proof schematic.  One of the things I don't miss about my Pentecostal days was the sometimes verbalized sentiment of "the music I like is anointed and the music I don't isn't" but that's the low church variation of the kinds of screeds for and against various styles of musics I've read over the course of my life.  

I thank God the Scriptures don't include anything remotely useful or clear about what "biblical" music actually sounded like. If I did want to go hear music from the apostolic period I'd take a cue from Xenakis and listen to Greek Orthodox chant, or maybe Syrian psalm-singing or the Psalms sung in Aramaic, literally none of which would sound like Tallis or Palestrina or Beethoven's Ninth.  The rockist, the jazzbro, the classical music elitist, the partisans of "authenticity" are not the people I take seriously.  There have been scholars who have raised questions whether the mystical perfect-church-music-of-the-past eras really existed.  The only people who may have heard those amazing votive masses were the performers.  The golden age of Lutheran congregational music may have existed in the minds of the scholars who were looking for it rather than in Johann Sebastian Bach's actual lifetime, because he came in for some trenchant criticism in his flesh and blood life.  The providential benefit of having virtually no clear idea what the sacred music of "then" sounded like in the apostolic and post-apostolic era is that we have some freedom to figure out what works now. 

A few semi-organized thoughts the night before Thanksgiving.  If it applies to you, happy Thanksgiving.