Ethan Hein blogs on D sharp and E flat distinctions, it reminds me of a Haydn's Op. 77, No. 2 string quartet as discussed by Ross W Duffin

One of many reasons music theory and acoustics are valuable fields of study is because each of us who plays and sings and writes and studies music will often have conceptual constraints we may not be aware of as we are beholden to the limits of what our bodies can do and perceive and (crucially for those us who play instruments with fixed tunings, keys and frets) the in-built conceptual and physical constraints of the instruments we play.

Ethan Hein, a music theorist who is (like me) a guitarist, describes how D sharp and E flat are different; why they are different; and how guitarists can sometimes not fully or immediately appreciate the distinction.

If memory serves there are now microtonal fingerboards for guitarists who want to be able to play the difference between D sharp and E flat.  John Schneider shows samples in the updated and revision edition of The Contemporary Guitar, which is a beauty of a book you should pick up if you’re a guitarist of any style or instrument.  If you want to see what such a fingerboard looks like on a real guitar Paul Davids (with Adam Neely as guest) has a video for you.

But it’s been in the last half century such innovations have come about and they are generally only known to guitarists who want to play stuff by, say, Alois Haba (who wrote a suite for guitar in quarter-tones).  It has a teensy bit of an Ivan Wyschnegradsky vibe for me … .  Haba also wrote a guitar sonata.

But for those of us who don’t play microtonal guitar music, D sharp and E flat are totally the same. Which is a reality Ethan Hein notes in his post.

http://www.ethanhein.com/wp/2022/why-are-d-sharp-and-e-flat-considered-to-be-two-different-notes/

Ted Gioia's Music: A Subversive History has a theory of Pythagoras that got debunked by Kyle Gann's history of tuning systems more than a month before Gioia's book came out

Music: A Subversive History

Ted Gioia

Basic Books, Hachette Book Group

Copyright © 2019 by Ted Gioia

ISBNs: 978-1-5416-4436-6 (hardcover), 978-1-5416-1797-1 (ebook)

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. [emphasis added] Even today, I see the Pythagorean spirit as the implicit philosophy undergirding the advances of digital music—the ultimate reduction of song to mathematics—and technologies such as synthesizers, drum machines, Auto-Tune, and the dynamic range compression of current-day recordings. From pages 48-49

Gioia's would-be subversive history of music was a fun read in terms of breezy style but exasperating in terms of its history. Gioia has a pejorative take on Pythagoras and anyone and anything he has bracketed into the category of Pythagorean. 

Ethan Hein on Wellerman, sea shanties, and folk idioms gives me an excuse to mention the most famous pirate tune you probably only heard as a shape note hymn

So the sea shanties thing has been happening and Ethan Hein has discussed Wellerman recently.  The ex-choral singer in me can't resist writing a few things that I hope may be of interest about the sea shanty genre. 

http://www.ethanhein.com/wp/2021/wellerman/#more-21976

...

Harmony is not the only thing that makes this sound like a folk song. The Longest Johns’ untrained singing style contributes to the folkiness too. Their backing vocals use some “bad” counterpoint and voice leading. For example, at the end of the chorus, on “take our leave and gooo,” the four singers all converge on C in octaves rather than spreading themselves out across C, E-flat and G. If I wrote counterpoint like this in graduate tonal theory, I would have flunked. But this tune would not be improved by “correct” voice leading. Classical-style choral arrangements of folk songs like this can sound smoother and prettier, but without the rough edges, the music loses its soul.

...

To this I can add a few first-hand observations about singing a variety of styles of choral music.

Robert Gjerdingen's galant schemas as an entry point for pop/classical fusions--tonal and modal variants on the Romanesca by way of the Beatles, the Eagles and TLC

In the era of covid-19 there are concerns, pretty serious concerns, that classical music in the orchestral idiom may not survive the policies that have been considered necessary for dealing with the pandemic.  The Music Salon blog features a few recent pieces that I'll be referencing as a kind of news cycle baseline for what I'm about to discuss: