Perhaps we should open with a poem, so we will. Here's a haiku I wrote a while back thinking about all the arts criticism and writing about arts criticism and writing about the arts I've been absorbing in the last few years. Perhaps it can be a little axiom to ruminate on as a prelude to what's coming next.
every arts critic
must consecrate consumption
to live with their craft
We had a lot of celebrity entertainers die this year. We've witnessed a lot of outpourings of grief. George Michael may have had more written about his passing and the extra-musical significance of his music than Roland Dyens may have had written about him. Pierre Boulez died this year but odds are pretty good vastly more has been written about Prince and David Bowie. Merle Haggard probably had more written about him than Boulez. Or perhaps Boulez had plenty written about him. But that's not necessarily where I'm going. The poem can suggest a direction, that the artists and entertainers that critics write about are those who are consecrated by the process of criticism. A. O. Scott can claim that the art of criticism is the art of the voice but what the voice says hasn't stopped being important, has it? Is the voice enough? The voice of the critic, certainly if we've surveyed the voices of criticism about arts and politics THIS year, is a voice that either nicely asks or forthrightly demands to be regard as articulating some kind of sacred oracle.
Years ago, back in my early 20s, I wanted to get into journalism, and I had fun writing arts pieces as a student journalist. It was fun to talk with artists and theater types and musicians about the ideas that animated their work. It was fascinating how very few visual artists seem to think in any way at all the way a writer or a musician would seem to think about thinking. Okay, that reads terribly on the page. Visual thinkers think deeply but not always in a way that can be articulated in words and so they could at times seem completely inarticulate when I'd ask them about elements of design or approaches to color. It went better asking VERY concrete questions about using knifework to paint or how to cultivate flooring materials for mosaics and murals. If the unexamined life is truly not worth living then many of the artists I tried to interview in my journalistic projects had alarmingly unexamined lives.
But the process of making art and interpreting art was beyond question. When you meet someone who is interested in being an artist, who is interested in being an entertainer, you can sometimes meet someone who regards themselves tacitly as being part of a priesthood, but a priesthood that most emphatically can and should be able to get laid!
Even if a person goes on to work in some not-so-artsy field after having majored in a liberal art they can go on to collect a paycheck somewhere but the real true love is ...
http://thesmartset.com/english-majors-twilight/
...
My real career as a librarian is all very well, but since it’s fundamentally a paycheck, I can’t muster excessive enthusiasm for an institution that provides a lifelong education free of charge for the broadest conceivable public and generally represents American values at their best. I didn’t major in English to serve American values. I majored in English so that I could spend the rest of my life arguing about books and culture, even if I had to do so in my off hours, even if the argument was chiefly with myself. I still think it was the best decision I ever made.
There are too many Americans writing too many memoirs these days. But then at the risk of interrupting this with more intermittent haiku ...
we yearn to be more
than one life can be so we
look to our heroes
and to go by what some people publish and admire ... to go by the way people like A. O. Scott have talked about the art of criticism being the art of the voice I ... just sometimes ... worry that when we look to heroes through whom we can vicariously live as full a life as we can that some folks nominate themselves.
if you're the hero
in the story of your life
pick a new hero
By the time I got done with an undergraduate degree in journalism I'd cast off as implausible the idea of majoring in literature or philosophy or music or biblical studies. I didn't feel any "call" to formal ministry and probably never will feel such a call, even though I have loved reading theological books. I'm slowly plodding through Emil Brunner, for instance. Adolf Schlatter's Romans commentary is hard-going but I'm still giving it time when I'm not reading musicology stuff. I'm also reading Calvin's commentary on the Psalms. I'm still curious about philosophical questions and literary stuff even if I haven't read much fiction and often set books of fiction aside for long stretches. The last work of fiction I remember going through was Jane Austen's Emma. In any case, I got to the end of my college days convinced that while it might be nice to one day get paid to do something artistic the expectation of being able to do so as a regular means of employment had to be regarded as nothing less than delusional. To put it in more 2016 terms, it takes a delusional amount of college-admitted-and-college-graduated privilege to think you not only "should" be able to be an entertainer for a living but that it's some kind of right.
... and the kinds of people who can pay the bills by writing or acting or playing music saw fit to tell their fans who they should back this year. The entertainment industry is a kind of priesthood and the priesthood, among many other priesthoods, had set their hopes on one and not another (though neither were particularly inspiring as far as the big two go).
...
Commentary from places like Slate withstanding, we couldn't have gotten to the place we've gotten in the United States in 2016 if the traditional left and right had retained their coherency. I'd read a book by D. G. Hart years ago on evangelicalism and conservatism. The thumbnail sketch is that the Reagan coalition was a one-off temporary alliance between traditional conservatives, libertarians and anti-communists that ultimately did not survive as a viable coalition in the wake of the end of the Cold War. The primary point of the book, though, was that if you looked at the sum of the history of what we call evangelicalism in the United States it's as much or more a progressive/populist tradition as a conservative tradition. Scholars and journalists who labor under the presumption that "evangelical" has always meant Republican will at little length betray an ignorance of both the histories of religion and politics in the United States.
But ... the contested loyalties and appeals of Clinton and Sanders in 2016 seems like an example of how within the blue scene whatever former unity there was for the liberal/left in the United States also fractured in the decades after the Cold War. Traditional liberalism, neoliberalism and more hard left elements in the blue America did not necessarily agree on anything any more than the traditional conservatives, libertarians or neo-cons agreed on things in the last decade. Trump was in some sense only possible because both the left and the right saw their internal coalitions and alliances of convenience fall apart.
It's fascinating how Ethan Iverson can link to Alex Ross who explained how the Frankfurt school predicted Donald Trump over at The New Yorker. Over at The New Criterion Fred Siegel can explain at length how Trump's capacity to upset the routine of American politics was the result of the elitism entrenched in high culture by the Frankfurt school ethos. I remain unconvinced by either. The New Yorker has been in some mode this last month where writers regale subscribers or readers with any number of books and films that somehow "predicted" Trump, which is in some sense a variant of book-of-the-month club advertising. The odds that the Frankfurt school "predicted" Trump seem ... low.
Conversely, when conservative intellectuals rue the lack of appreciation the uneducated masses have for Bach or Wagner (ugh!) it's as if the cultural elites left and right and whatever new variables may emerge seem committed to the idea that, whatever nominally populist movement happens the important thing is that if there "were" a class conflict that "we" are not even possibly on the wrong side of it. When someone at Slate laments that white women betrayed the sisterhood by voting for Trump that may be an example of writers writing for Slate as if they themselves were synchedoches for the entirety of human females across time and space.
... don't ruling castes and ruling empires regard themselves as the summation of all that is truly human? Were there no clerics in the medieval period willing to say they had some kind of right to universal political rule?
https://ethaniverson.com/2016/12/17/universal-remonster-4-or-to-click-or-not-to-click/
...
Perhaps a bit selfishly, I worry about high culture. This past year I noticed how much harder it was to pay attention to the more esoteric arts as the relentless political drama unfolded just a tab away.
...
Trust me, the bosses at every news organization know exactly how many eyes have seen any given dance review or poetry essay. Click! Share! We are all in this together. Click and share even if you don’t read the whole thing or if you disagree with certain aspects of any given article. At the top of the next century we don’t want Star Wars movies and video games to be the only culture left.
I don't know. Richard Taruskin has set out to aggravate, to be sure, but when he described in his Oxford History how what we now call the symphony was essentially aristocratic party music that eventually gained acceptance, for a time, as publicly accessible music art how swift should we be in saying that Star Wars movies and video games can't possibly qualify as "art"?
Besides, to go by how liberals and leftists have reacted to December 19 this year why are we sure there will even be a next century, exactly?
But then three decades ago the Terminator franchise was imagining a post-nuclear dystopia ushered in by military-funded artificial intelligence. There's a paranoid apocalyptic imagination for a liberal as there is for a conservative.
It was slightly surprising that the electoral vote came down to a result in which Clinton LOST pledged votes. It was not surprising at all that questions about the legitimacy of the Electoral College were brought up in venues like Slate. Nor is it even particularly ironic that having been aghast that Trump could say that he would accept the outcome of an election if he won that those aghast that Trump won the Electoral College votes would cast doubt on the legitimacy, necessity and viability of a process from an institution that chose someone besides Clinton for the Oval Office.
American red and blue state partisans, or at least a subset of theme, are simply totalitarian ideologues who only recognize something as tyrannical if it's done by the "wrong" team.
Whether writers at mainstream publications or people within the entertainment industry or academics it can seem as though the thing they have overlooked is the possibility that within a genuinely global market the gatekeepers of economic participation for adult participation in the life of a citizen may not recognize they are part of ruling castes. To put this in a very blunt way, members of the press did not anticipate that the Electoral College would select Trump because the members of the institutional press, as what Jacques Ellul described half a century ago as the aristocratic caste of propagandists
JACQUES ELLUL
Translated from the French by Konrad Kellen & Jean Lerner
Vintage Books Edition, February 1973
Copyright (c) 195 by Alfred A Knopf Inc.
ISBN 0-394-71874-7
from footnote on page 252
... The propagandist is a technician and a member of an aristocracy of technicians that establishes itself above the institutions of a democracy and acts outside its norms. Besides, the employment of propaganda leads the propagandist to cynicism, disbelief in values, non-submission to the law of numbers, doubts on the value of opinions, and contempt for the propagandee and the elected representative; he knows how public opinion is fashioned. The propagandist cannot subject himself to popular judgment and democracy. Finally, the propagandist is privy to all State secrets and acts at the same time to shape opinions: he really has a position of fundamental direction. The combinations of these three elements make the propagandist an aristocrat. It cannot be otherwise. Every democracy that launches propaganda creates in and by such propaganda its own enemy, an aristocracy that may destroy it
For such members of this aristocratic caste the worst thing that could happen would be for representation processes in a democratic state to arrive at a conclusion other than the one the propagandists would prescribe. The problem here is that red and blue state partisans only see each other and not also themselves as members of the propagandistic castes. Thus we have entertainers who won't perform for the Trump inauguration. To put it in a diplomatic way, it might be preferable to never perform at the behest of a head of state given the times, and that this might be the way to go whether the head of state were either a Trump or a Clinton.
But, in any case, after so many entertainers and journalists told so many people who ought to win it would seem that the tedious scut work of, say, redistricting in the wake of political defeat, was not a huge priority for one of the big two parties. The way the editors of The Stranger put it, the rural red-state people weren't really Americans and their voices and concerns were not legitimate. Okay ... but as the sorting of red and blue into their respective regions and districts played out ... what happened? Was the contempt of urbane urban technocrats and information brokers never going to boomerang? Would people who could afford to go to private colleges and Ivy league schools really never be able to imagine that compared to people in fly over states might not eventually come to view them as ... to just use Marxist terminology ... class enemies? No particularly affection for Trump being expressed here ... but it's interesting that whether in The New Yorker or The New Criterion the sort of populist resentment that is considered to have catalyzed the election of Trump is the sort of thing writers at both News can double down on.
Since it turned out Clinton won the popular vote the scapegoating done by the blue partisans of the demographics associated with a Trump victory seemed like ... scapegoating. Educated deployment of stereotypes by college-educated people is still ... educated deployment of stereotypes by college-educated people. There seemed to be more than enough bigotry from the red and blue to go around.
I managed to get more caught up on reading arts stuff this year and sometimes I'd read stuff I found immensely helpful (Hepokoski & Darcy's Elements of Sonata Theory, for instance). Other times ....
http://www.newmusicbox.org/articles/a-universal-music/
...
Composer/pianist Vijay Iyer gave me the first building block I would use to develop my ideas surrounding universal music. In a room full of workshop participants, he said something akin to, “Genres don’t exist. They were invented by record companies to sell albums. Genres are an attempt to categorize a community of people who come together and create something.”[3] [emphasis added] Once again, I was confronted with a paradigm shift. My musical training, rhetoric, and artistic upbringing had been a world of categories, styles, and genres hinged together. I thought of the countless hours spent trying to play a style correctly and how often I seemed to fail in that goal. At that time, I was already bothered by the mentality that our musical ancestors had somehow received the divine right to invent and that all the rest of us could hope for was to imitate. Yet I was encumbered with the popular notion that I needed to “learn the rules” before I could “break them.” At what point were the rules learned and the breaking could begin? The goal of stylistic execution was perpetually in conflict with my interest as I attempted to occupy both worlds. I embraced Vijay’s comment. He was giving me the words I needed to articulate what I believed and felt all along.
A paragraph like this makes me glad I couldn't afford to go to grad school to study music. The idea that genres don't exist is so patently idiotic on its face it reminds me of an axiom attributed to George Orwell, the axiom that holds that some ideas are so stupid only intellectuals can believe in them. Just a few weeks ago I made a long-form case that the boundaries between two musical idioms can be regarded as permeable but both 19th century guitar sonatas and ragtime exist as identifiable genres. Who could have an incentive to claim and even genuinely believe that "genres don't exist?" Why would music colloquially and conventionally identifiable as being in a genre really be a categorization given to "a community of people ... "? The recording process itself commodifies music, reifies it into something that can be bought or sold or pirated or gifted or checked out. The trouble is that for the sorts of people who write for New Music Box many of them are obsessed with categorizing people as belonging to this or that demographic. Or, conversely, to aspirations of a "universal".
There are plenty of complaints that have been and could be leveled at Richard Taruskin's Oxford History of Western Music. He has a not-so-hidden beef with what's called high modernism. He also can be construed as dropping the ball by writing a history rather than an encyclopedic survey but that's to forget he didn't set out to write an encyclopedia. However, one of the strengths of the history is that Taruskin builds a case that there were no ultimately benevolent empires of patronage yet each empire of patronage had benefactors and advocates and partisans and ideologues who were convinced that their particular dynasty of arts patronage and production represented the highest and noblest ideals and values regarding the human condition. Another way to put it would be to say that Taruskin shows how different empires regarded themselves as expressing in art the universal human condition.
We're closing out a year in which people have become more acutely aware that things that, so to speak, made sense ten years ago can't be brought back as was. For instance ... let's take Gilmore Girls.
http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2016/11/the-fault-in-stars-hollow/508841/
...
While Stars Hollow may embody some of the best aspects of life in a small town—the intimacy, the democracy, the sense of an “us” to be fought for—it can also, at times, embody the worst: the insularity. The exclusivity. The sense of a “them” to be fought against. [emphasis added] The mingling of all of those things, in the seven original seasons of Gilmore Girls, led to a show that is deeply concerned with questions of belonging—about who may be counted as “one of us” and who, by implication, may not. The show’s Netflix revival, Gilmore Girls: A Year in the Life, has only amplified those anxieties: The Stars Hollow of 2016 is place that, though it congratulates itself on its cosmopolitanism, remains deeply provincial.
http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2016/11/turns-out-rory-gilmore-is-not-a-good-journalist/508883/
Early on in Gilmore Girls: A Year in the Life, Rory gets some bad news: The Atlantic, she learns, has spiked one of her stories.
Rory explains this turn of events to Lorelai as just one of those things: a story bumped for space—a common, if frustrating, occurrence. After watching the Gilmore Girls revival, though, I have come to a different, if totally self-serving, conclusion: Maybe The Atlantic has simply realized what Rory herself has not. Maybe our fictional editors simply discovered that Rory Gilmore, her gleaming résumé notwithstanding … is not a very good journalist. That she might even be, actually, an actively bad journalist.
Most publications have ethics guidelines that their reporters and writers follow. And almost all publications have basic standards that they lay out, which are in turn meant to lend some structure to the day-to-day doings of individual journalists. Here are some of the rough guidelines that Rory systematically violates in A Year in the Life ... [WtH it's a long and impressively dreadful list]
http://www.slate.com/blogs/browbeat/2016/12/16/jane_the_virgin_is_the_modern_day_gilmore_girls_that_the_revival_tried_to.html
Gilmore Girls, when it comes right down to it, is a show about white people in Connecticut spouting off pop culture references as rapidly as they can. [emphasis added] For some people, that might be part of the appeal, an escape to an idyllic New England town—or a nightmarish one, depending on your point of view—free from any kind of political turmoil or social unrest. But that’s the same quality that made the show’s 2016 revival feel like such a fossil
Just as Jack Bauer in 24 could be described as a hedonistic red state power fantasy Gilmore Girls could be described as a blue state power fantasy (or The West Wing). What seemed capable of entertaining and charming a decade ago (I did actually watch a handful of episodes of GG with my sister and Lauren Graham is nothing if not immensely charming on screen) seems to have trouble getting across now.
What changed? Trump? Or is it possible that the insular and self-congratulatory nature of the blue state power fantasy inherent in a show like Gilmore Girls had plausibility enough in the age of George W Bush that couldn't withstand 2016? Rory won't win the Pullitzer, it seems, because as one author put it, here personal and journalistic ethics are so disastrous it's only within the fantasy realm of the entertainment industry itself (which may only be capable of seeing any attempts at journalism as alternately advertising or to serve an adversarial role to demographics looked down upon by entertainers) that Rory could be imagined able to pay any bills writing for publications.
If you like Gilmore Girls as it was, no problem. But it seems the reboot had mixed results and one of the concerns fans of the old show came to express was that something felt off. Let's propose that what felt off about a show that imagined, so to speak, Al Gore won 2000, was that there was something in the self-congratulatory blue state power fantasy that seems "off" now, perhaps a discovery in the last ten years of what is now called white privilege, perhaps? Or perhaps the tide of superhero films is a problem? Or, what if even our allegedly naturalistic/realistic dramas are more suffused with a super-heroic sensibility than we've imagined? I couldn't get into 24 because Jack Bauer had cell phone reception that would be the envy of Batman and I figured this, if I was going to watch superhero stories I wanted the characters to officially wear capes.
A lot of what passed for realistic drama ... journalists in movies talk to people and write a few notes and then produce articles that "change the world". Generally that's not how it works. As TV show depictions go the closest thing I've seen to a presentation of how research tends to play out was Karen Page spending hours reading and reading every article in a week's worth of newspapers and finding nothing particularly interesting about what she wanted to find out. THAT is more like it. Of course we didn't get shown that, we got shown Daredevil and Electra fighting a bunch of people while the character Karen Page did all her research off-screen.
In the realm of entertainment there are ideas and processes and results that are regarded as best kept off screen. One of the laments in the wake of Trump's election is all the nasty resentment and loathing that, thanks to the Electoral College vote, liberals and progressives have had occasion to witness. But Oregon, for instance, was in many ways chartered as a white separatist utopia that forbade slavery and barred blacks from being able to contract. It's not as though racism across all categories ever went away, it was just, so to speak, off scene or off screen. There's a level at which those upset by Trump's victory may not understand there's a potential for self-incriminating judgment when they say, in far more words than this, that the wrong people have been allowed to have a voice in influencing the outcome of national politics. The majority should never be allowed to lord it over a minority in the political realm in theory but in practice blue state partisans are astonished that Trump won because of how districting played out. Gerrymandering should not have allowed for this to be possible because, well, Trump shouldn't have won, right? Maybe ... but had Clinton swept the Electoral College and the popular vote would there be any complaints about a numeric minority of rural/red state voters being treated as though they had nothing to contribute? Let's consider that the editorial staff of The Stranger declared in an earlier decade that the rural red-state people weren't Americans. If it's only a disaster that the red state electorate returned the favor then perhaps the problem is with both the red and blue state civic religions.
http://religionnews.com/2016/12/27/a-columnist-looks-back-and-looks-ahead/
...
Now that Donald Trump has been elected, it is the liberal schools that are worried about possible threats to their very survival based on the overweening power of the federal government.
So the overweening power of the federal government ONLY became a terrifying problem because ... Trump won? Why was it not terrifying during the Obama administration? Or was it terrifying? One of the reasons I regard the United States as a spent force culturally and economically and spiritually and intellectually is because it seems the partisans of red and blue don't seem to care about something being despotic unless the kool-aid being dispensed has the wrong food-coloring. In the age of the internet it seems that tyranny is only tyranny when "they" do something and not when "we" do something.
Unfortunately people who say they are conservative tend to fret only about the power of government as though that were the only means of a mass wielding of power toward a negative end. Do these people forget that lynch mobs involve mass action? Even William F Buckley could grant in his long life that Ike was right to send the Guard.
The more time I have had to think about the last Captain America movie the more a failure it seems to be. Cap takes a stance that organizations can be corrupted. So can individuals. The idea that a formal power like government can be corrupted doesn't mean groups can't be. The mere posing of the question of whether "power" leads to conflict is to forget that not all power is distilled into a readily identifiable individual. If anything the diffusion of responsibility allows groups to be far more vindictive than individuals would dare to be. This can be true of racists and white supremacists as well as progressive social justice warriors. The vindictive capacity is equally alive in both forms of herd behavior. In that light it's all too easy for educated entertaines to feel as though anyone dumb enough to vote for Trump deserves a disaster.
And perhaps the aristocrats of Europe had a similar disdain for populist insurgencies in the 18th century. If the crisis we've seen this year is that neither of the two party machines represented what people wanted the shock and embarrassment of 2016 might be explicable on the basis of a simple suggestion, that this was the year of the spite vote. People weren't so much unreservedly voting for someone as they were voting against the other, whether we were talking Trump or Clinton. Once the DNC demonstrated that it would not and could not allow its party to be hijacked by populist agitation (e.g. Sanders) the RNC may have won (for want of a better word) because they were pragmatic enough to decide they WOULD let a populist agitator hijack the heretofore conventional process.
It's hard to feel much antipathy toward the white evangelicals who are said to have voted for Trump. That the two party system gave us the options of Clinton and Trump signals the empire is doomed either way. It doesn't matter which of the two won in the sense that as "the" global empire any nation-state that seeks to rise will automatically have to be regarded as a threat by US and we will have to be a risk variable to "them", whoever "them" may be. Any attempt to blame Trump for an increased likelihood for us getting into a conflict or Russia or China should force people who think Clinton would have averted all possible military clashes in the next four years merely by dint of not-being-Trump about what stuff she backed in the last sixteen years that might possibly suggest otherwise. And what about the last two terms of Obama we've had? Trump may well be the disaster people on the left fear he will be but let's not forget that the United States is the big kid on the playground with nukes regardless of who the executive is. It seems as though red and blue partisans are only willing to say the President is the antichrist if the wrong party has someone sitting at the desk.
This was a year where we finally got to dig into technical stuff about music. The survey of early 19th century guitar sonatas was fun. In a way that's a commentary on what I wasn't seeing in academic publications that I felt needed to get written. If guitarist scholarship wasn't going to take Matiegka's work to be serious enough to discuss well, then, let a blogger do it. If guitarists HAVE (thankfully!) begun to write about different approaches to sonata form in the guitar literature there can (and should be) more written about that.
One of the things I've been exploring in my reading in the last few years is the disconnect between what I was told sonata form was back in college and what more recent scholarship has unearthed about what has been called sonata form. More recent scholarly work on 18th century music is basically saying there was no such thing as sonata form as the 19th century called it in the pedagogy of music in 18th century Europe. There was a grand binary form, for sure, and it had the features we ascribe to sonata form but 18th century music may have been less committed to a "plan" and more committed to a process. The way my recent favorite writer on music (Leonard B Meyer) put it was distinguishing between a script and a plan, and distinguishing between what he called a syntactic climax and a statistical climax.
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2016/08/a-riff-on-leonard-b-meyers-observation.html
Blogging about ways you can manipulate the syntax of sonata scripts and ragtime style so as to arrive as a synthesis or fusion of the ragtime idiom with what we call sonata form is admittedly esoteric. But in an era in which the presence or absence of jazz at Yale; and in which questions about the legitimacy or illegitimacy of jazz as high art music on par with the tradition of string quartets and piano sonatas; it seems that a way forward is not necessarily through the identity politics or critical theory that fixates on what seems to amount to extra-musical club membership rites. To try putting this more directly, I've come to have a couple of reservations about critical theory as an option in American academic is course. This seems to be a pet cause for the sorts of people who by using critical theory can exempt themselves from being a member of one of America's ruling castes. The second is that If we're going to arrive at a persuasive fusion of musical idioms in which something like a jazz or blues sonata can happen we won't get there through critical theory, not in the way I've seen it deployed. Journalistic/academic score-keeping about who counts as being able to write in a jazz or Anglo style won't help. This discourse needs to ratify the reification and boundary-making activities of club membership first and foremost. It has the illusion of asking questions around music in ways that can close off questions of surface.
Look, if I wanted to introduce kids to the octatonic scale and chromatic median pivoting I wouldn't do it through a Scriabin piano sonata or symphonic tone poem, I'd do it through Stevie Wonder's Living for the City". I agree with Taruskin the gap between the academic and vernacular/repertoire canon has gotten too big. Taruskin's contribution could simply be noting that. But if music scholars want to help rectify that problem then showing that octatonic linear movement and chromatic mediants can be just as fun in Stevie Wonder as they are in Stravinsky. Music isn't really a language we all understand (pace Stevie Wonder) but music education could play a role in showing that certain musical possibilities can exist across styles.
As I've been blogging this year, the boundaries between styles are permeable but if you don't set out to demonstrate they are permeable because you believe that there's really a "black" or "white" way to use augmented sixth chords you may just be part of the problem rather than the solution. We may have to set aside what the accepted scholarly conventions about sonata are in order to do this. You can say form follows function but if you misread either function or form you misread the whole thing. My interest of late has been in exploring what the syntax of musical styles is in a set of styles so that I can figure out which things to manipulate in which styles to increase the odds of arriving at a synthesis of blues, jazz, rock, country and 18th century approaches we tend to have labeled as forms. A ragtime sonata or a ragtime fugue is inherently plausible. People in music who set out to master styles so as to provide persuasive accounts of that style may be doing a worthy thing but as a composer I don't see what the point of mastering a style is unless you plan to compose in it. Given my essentially post hoc approach to theory, I find what I enjoy first and analyze it for what works afterward. So I love Stevie Wonder's music and then slowly work out what it is I hear that makes me love the music. Ergo, "Living for the City". Ergo, exploring the possibilities of overlap between early 19th century guitar sonata themes and ragtime strains along the way of analyzing a few pieces.
The gap between what an establishment says X is and what X can be observed to be might be the theme. When the gap between what we're told is going to happen and what happens is really big then it can seem like something went way, way off. Exploring the gap between the narratives characters tell themselves to convince themselves of their heroism and the way they treat people suggesting that they are not, in fact, heroic, has been a staple theme for both Nolan brothers for a while now. The more assiduously you convince yourself and tell others you're the hero the more you might ... possibly ... be the bad guy. Sometimes some simple thing changes that forces us to reassess what it was we saw. Did we see what was there or what we wanted to see?
Back in 2015 I blogged about an interesting thread of articles and blog posts on the subject of style in music and metrics in the popularity of styles.
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2015/09/tales-of-variance-and-invariance-in.html
anyone remember the old piece in The Atlantic about the shazam effect?
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2014/12/the-shazam-effect/382237/
Billboard replaced its honor system with hard numbers in 1991, basing its charts on point-of-sale data from cash registers. “This was revolutionary,” says Silvio Pietroluongo, Billboard’s current director of charts. “We were finally able to see which records were actually selling.” Around the same time, Billboard switched to monitoring radio airplay through Nielsen.When that happened, hip-hop and country surged in the rankings and old-fashioned rock slowly began to fade—suggesting that perhaps an industry dominated by white guys on the coasts hadn’t paid enough attention to the music interests of urban minorities and southern whites.
If you measure things based on intra-industry reporting rather than who actually picks what you can create an intra-industry echo chamber.
Perhaps ... that's what the American Fourth Estate did to itself on Trump. The old rock stars were not necessarily as popular as the intra-industry pep talks made them out to be.
Saturday, December 31, 2016
Thursday, December 29, 2016
a sort of informal review of the year that was 2016
You might have thought, longtime readers, that there was nothing new to say about a certain set of topics in 2016, what with that 2014 resignation.
But since Mark Driscoll has made a point of relaunching himself down in Arizona and in recycling old stuff from decades past there were things to take note of.
an agreement from February 28, 2011 between On Mission, LLC and Thomas Nelson regarding A NEW MARRIAGE WITH THE SAME SPOUSE, better known as REAL MARRIAGE
a 400k advance isn't chump change and the marketing strategy sent along to WtH articulated that ...
Driscoll marketing strategy doc from 2011 spelled out goal with respect to Real Marriage, "In short, the goal is to sell books around preaching campaigns ... ."
We did try to kick off 2016 with more than just a few updates on the crumbling empire that was once known as Mars Hill. There were other ideas, such as proposing a unified theory of American sci-fi movie nostalgia ...
Nostalgia and the Anxieties of Empire: Toward a unified theory of American sci-fi movie nostalgia
I floated the idea that if film critics stopped venting their spleen about nostalgia in general and looked more carefully at the clustering patterns in WHEN these franchises were launched that Hollywood can't let go of that there "might" be a clustering pattern as follows--Hollywood certainly goes back to whatever was "it" twenty years earlier, but the Star Wars, Star Trek, Terminator, Planet of the Apes stuff? That suggests clustering around the dystopian and utopian fantasies that were catching on during the New Frontier/Great Society era and the Reagan era, in other words the utopian and dystopian fantasies and sci-fi speculations of the mythological golden ages of the red and blue loyalists from the Cold War era.
It seems necessary to consider in light of the fiftieth anniversary of Star Trek having come along this year. The possibility that fans of the franchise may not realize the cultural imperialism inherent in the brand has occurred to me a few times this year. What if Roddenberry's vision, optimistic and compelling as an alternative to the outright dread of nuclear annihilation that animated popular thought and dystopian stories in the Cold War, could stink of a kind of chauvinistic and condescending cultural imperialism in a post-Cold War context?
Star Trek as both propaganda and art, a proposal for the fiftieth anniversary of the original series premiere
more recently I was considering how in the most recent revamped iteration of the Star Trek franchise the central message is one, however much I agree with it, is parasitically dependent on the ethical teachings of Christ. Krall and Kirk both fight for what they believe is the benefit of humanity in Star Trek Beyond and the conflict they have centers on the question of "and who is my neighbor?" Krall is certain only humans are his neighbor while Kirk takes the path of saying that you have to discover who your neighbor is and be open to the possibility that your neighbor is someone you neither want nor expect. That's the parable of the Good Samaritan there, and Krall is, in terms of another of Jesus' parables, the older brother who won't accept the acceptance by the father of the dissolute brother. For a secular humanist franchise such as Trek to lean so heavily on an ethical norm so observably indebted to the ethical teachings of Christ seems a little surreal to note in 2016 but there you have it.
In an era in which the "Friend zone" is regarded as a dreadful symbolic place for some dudes, and in an era in which slash fic ensures that there's still pertinence to ... is it Rule 34 (?) it was worth revisiting the passing of Leonard Nimoy last year, by way of discussing that Kirk and Spock are friends.
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2016/09/for-50th-anniversary-bringing-back.html
In an era in which nearly all relationships revolve around eros or the filial bonds that eros tends to statistically be likely to bring out, depictions of friendship in popular culture can seem relatively rare by comparison. The Kirk/Spock friendship may stand as one of the most memorable on-screen friendships we've been presented with in the last fifty years, whether on the small or big screen.
We didn't just write about Star Trek, though ...
from the manic pixie dream girl through waif fu to the murderous ingenue: Ex Machina, The Witch and film critics who will fall for the manic pixie dream girl as long as she stabs the patriarchy
I don't think the problems with Rey in the Star Wars franchise are necessarily to do with her character being too perfect. I liked that Rey wasn't a trophy but the problem, as Film Crit Hulk expounded at length this year, is that the script and direction set up an expectation and then delivered on it IMMEDIATELY. Back in The Empire Strikes Back, as FCH noted so succinctly, Han Solo's bravado was always misplaced. We didn't get anything like that for Rey or Finn.
We did get that a bit more with Jyn in Rogue One but I'm going to hold off on writing about that until 2017, perhaps. Probably ditto for Westworld because although I would have thought that after literally decades critics would have caught on to the Nolan brother obsession with stories about men who tell themselves one story about their heroic selves while living actually villainous lives ... but not so much .... but that's more grist for 2017.
For better or worse the traffic was for the usual subjects.
HT Warren Throckmorton--Driscoll claims to have had a Malthusian past that he's repudiated, although it was ten years ago he bluntly articulated his "shoot your dogs" approach to practical ministry and eight years ago he said whole family lines could be demonically inspired
Having finally gotten around to reading Propaganda by Jacques Ellul this year, it was a book that was not only prescient about ... oh ... politics in the most official sense ... but also about what may be called megachurch cultural dynamics. That subject, for longtime readers, was what we obviously explored at some length here. Ellul's taxonomy of propagandas featuring agitation and integration made for a succinct and coherent lens through which to observe what was once William Wallace II's fusillade about a pussified nation.
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/search/label/Ellul%20on%20propaganda%20%26%20MH
While people have over the last fifteen odd years attempted to distill Driscoll's views on women and gays down to his Calvinism (not that any traditionally Reformed sort would consider the self-identifiably Amyraldian Mark Driscoll (for now) a what Internet Monk used to call "truly Reformed"), a far more plausible explanation, to go by Driscoll's own accounts ... would be his blue-collar nominally Irish-Catholic upbringing. The necessarily less delicate way of putting it ...
Mark Driscoll and the Gospel of [escaping] white trash
featured a lengthy overview of Driscoll quotes about himself, his family lineage, and events from his childhood and teens to establish that by his own account he was urban white trash, a redneck of rednecks. Driscoll's balancing act within Seattle was playing to stereotypes about and against rednecks. For every joke about rednecks he made he was simultaneously distancing himself from his own social milieu and pandering to the prejudices of Seattle audiences. For the time he was here in Seattle Driscoll was kind of a red state fundie mirror of Dan Savage. Both Driscoll and Savage are guys who grew up in Catholic homes and have gone on to appoint themselves multi-media pundits interested in telling other people what to think and how to live and reveling in select amounts of controversy.
and both have a penchant for talking about sex for the record. In Driscoll's case, it's not clear that his desire to talk to guys about the deleterious influence of porn has not been steeped in more familiarity with it than he may have, in the past, let on.
a whole lot of celebrities died this year. For we classical guitarists the most prominent passing in the last few months would have to have been Roland Dyens.
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2016/10/roland-dyens.html
It's only been in the latter half of 2016 we've finally had the time and energy to get the blog back to some admittedly kinda technical and theoretical analysis of music. In particular, we did a week-long survey recently on a survey of early 19th century guitar sonatas.
I was hoping to get around to writing about Ferdinand Rebay's guitar sonatas this year but stuff happens and stuff doesn't happen. Maybe in 2017.
But since Mark Driscoll has made a point of relaunching himself down in Arizona and in recycling old stuff from decades past there were things to take note of.
an agreement from February 28, 2011 between On Mission, LLC and Thomas Nelson regarding A NEW MARRIAGE WITH THE SAME SPOUSE, better known as REAL MARRIAGE
a 400k advance isn't chump change and the marketing strategy sent along to WtH articulated that ...
Driscoll marketing strategy doc from 2011 spelled out goal with respect to Real Marriage, "In short, the goal is to sell books around preaching campaigns ... ."
We did try to kick off 2016 with more than just a few updates on the crumbling empire that was once known as Mars Hill. There were other ideas, such as proposing a unified theory of American sci-fi movie nostalgia ...
Nostalgia and the Anxieties of Empire: Toward a unified theory of American sci-fi movie nostalgia
I floated the idea that if film critics stopped venting their spleen about nostalgia in general and looked more carefully at the clustering patterns in WHEN these franchises were launched that Hollywood can't let go of that there "might" be a clustering pattern as follows--Hollywood certainly goes back to whatever was "it" twenty years earlier, but the Star Wars, Star Trek, Terminator, Planet of the Apes stuff? That suggests clustering around the dystopian and utopian fantasies that were catching on during the New Frontier/Great Society era and the Reagan era, in other words the utopian and dystopian fantasies and sci-fi speculations of the mythological golden ages of the red and blue loyalists from the Cold War era.
It seems necessary to consider in light of the fiftieth anniversary of Star Trek having come along this year. The possibility that fans of the franchise may not realize the cultural imperialism inherent in the brand has occurred to me a few times this year. What if Roddenberry's vision, optimistic and compelling as an alternative to the outright dread of nuclear annihilation that animated popular thought and dystopian stories in the Cold War, could stink of a kind of chauvinistic and condescending cultural imperialism in a post-Cold War context?
Star Trek as both propaganda and art, a proposal for the fiftieth anniversary of the original series premiere
more recently I was considering how in the most recent revamped iteration of the Star Trek franchise the central message is one, however much I agree with it, is parasitically dependent on the ethical teachings of Christ. Krall and Kirk both fight for what they believe is the benefit of humanity in Star Trek Beyond and the conflict they have centers on the question of "and who is my neighbor?" Krall is certain only humans are his neighbor while Kirk takes the path of saying that you have to discover who your neighbor is and be open to the possibility that your neighbor is someone you neither want nor expect. That's the parable of the Good Samaritan there, and Krall is, in terms of another of Jesus' parables, the older brother who won't accept the acceptance by the father of the dissolute brother. For a secular humanist franchise such as Trek to lean so heavily on an ethical norm so observably indebted to the ethical teachings of Christ seems a little surreal to note in 2016 but there you have it.
In an era in which the "Friend zone" is regarded as a dreadful symbolic place for some dudes, and in an era in which slash fic ensures that there's still pertinence to ... is it Rule 34 (?) it was worth revisiting the passing of Leonard Nimoy last year, by way of discussing that Kirk and Spock are friends.
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2016/09/for-50th-anniversary-bringing-back.html
In an era in which nearly all relationships revolve around eros or the filial bonds that eros tends to statistically be likely to bring out, depictions of friendship in popular culture can seem relatively rare by comparison. The Kirk/Spock friendship may stand as one of the most memorable on-screen friendships we've been presented with in the last fifty years, whether on the small or big screen.
We didn't just write about Star Trek, though ...
from the manic pixie dream girl through waif fu to the murderous ingenue: Ex Machina, The Witch and film critics who will fall for the manic pixie dream girl as long as she stabs the patriarchy
I don't think the problems with Rey in the Star Wars franchise are necessarily to do with her character being too perfect. I liked that Rey wasn't a trophy but the problem, as Film Crit Hulk expounded at length this year, is that the script and direction set up an expectation and then delivered on it IMMEDIATELY. Back in The Empire Strikes Back, as FCH noted so succinctly, Han Solo's bravado was always misplaced. We didn't get anything like that for Rey or Finn.
We did get that a bit more with Jyn in Rogue One but I'm going to hold off on writing about that until 2017, perhaps. Probably ditto for Westworld because although I would have thought that after literally decades critics would have caught on to the Nolan brother obsession with stories about men who tell themselves one story about their heroic selves while living actually villainous lives ... but not so much .... but that's more grist for 2017.
For better or worse the traffic was for the usual subjects.
HT Warren Throckmorton--Driscoll claims to have had a Malthusian past that he's repudiated, although it was ten years ago he bluntly articulated his "shoot your dogs" approach to practical ministry and eight years ago he said whole family lines could be demonically inspired
Having finally gotten around to reading Propaganda by Jacques Ellul this year, it was a book that was not only prescient about ... oh ... politics in the most official sense ... but also about what may be called megachurch cultural dynamics. That subject, for longtime readers, was what we obviously explored at some length here. Ellul's taxonomy of propagandas featuring agitation and integration made for a succinct and coherent lens through which to observe what was once William Wallace II's fusillade about a pussified nation.
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/search/label/Ellul%20on%20propaganda%20%26%20MH
While people have over the last fifteen odd years attempted to distill Driscoll's views on women and gays down to his Calvinism (not that any traditionally Reformed sort would consider the self-identifiably Amyraldian Mark Driscoll (for now) a what Internet Monk used to call "truly Reformed"), a far more plausible explanation, to go by Driscoll's own accounts ... would be his blue-collar nominally Irish-Catholic upbringing. The necessarily less delicate way of putting it ...
Mark Driscoll and the Gospel of [escaping] white trash
featured a lengthy overview of Driscoll quotes about himself, his family lineage, and events from his childhood and teens to establish that by his own account he was urban white trash, a redneck of rednecks. Driscoll's balancing act within Seattle was playing to stereotypes about and against rednecks. For every joke about rednecks he made he was simultaneously distancing himself from his own social milieu and pandering to the prejudices of Seattle audiences. For the time he was here in Seattle Driscoll was kind of a red state fundie mirror of Dan Savage. Both Driscoll and Savage are guys who grew up in Catholic homes and have gone on to appoint themselves multi-media pundits interested in telling other people what to think and how to live and reveling in select amounts of controversy.
and both have a penchant for talking about sex for the record. In Driscoll's case, it's not clear that his desire to talk to guys about the deleterious influence of porn has not been steeped in more familiarity with it than he may have, in the past, let on.
a whole lot of celebrities died this year. For we classical guitarists the most prominent passing in the last few months would have to have been Roland Dyens.
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2016/10/roland-dyens.html
It's only been in the latter half of 2016 we've finally had the time and energy to get the blog back to some admittedly kinda technical and theoretical analysis of music. In particular, we did a week-long survey recently on a survey of early 19th century guitar sonatas.
I was hoping to get around to writing about Ferdinand Rebay's guitar sonatas this year but stuff happens and stuff doesn't happen. Maybe in 2017.
Saturday, December 24, 2016
in the wake of Slate's Wonder Week tribute to Stevie Wonder, let's discuss exactly why the chorus for "Living for the City" is a work of genius-a fusion of chromatic mediant pivot chords soaring above an octatonic bass line
"At least we still have Stevie" coming from Slate could be the most jinx-causing headline an online publication could possibly run with this late in 2016. David Bowie and Prince died, right? We lost Alan Rickman. Given the number of musicians who have passed this year Slate saying "at least we ... " could be asking for trouble.
We do, however, for the time being, still have Stevie Wonder around. There are some fun and fascinating pieces at Slate's Wonder Week but ... but ... it's disappointingly short on what we musicians call the shop talk of "what did he actually do?"
This post is going to try to rectify that by discussing what is easily one of the most justifiably legendary chorus in a pop song from the last fifty years, that chorus from "Living for the City". First we need to look at what's over on Slate about this chorus.
https://redux.slate.com/cover_story/2016/12/the-greatest-creative-run-in-the-history-of-pop-music.html
...
Innervisions also marked Wonder’s full ascendance as a composer. At 23 years old, the kid who could play every instrument on earth (including chromatic harmonica like it was Charlie Parker’s alto sax) was now writing like some combination of George Gershwin and Smokey Robinson. The bridge to “Living for the City”—“da-da-da DAH, dah dah, DAH …”—is among the more harmonically counterintuitive chord progressions in pop music, a bunch of sounds that shouldn’t fit next to each according to every rule in the book and yet somehow fit perfectly.
***
I'm going to make a slightly long-form case that this sentiment about how the sounds "shouldn't fit next to each other according to every rule in the book" is completely wrong. Music theory is a post hoc explanation of what works, not a prescriptive explanation of what you're allowed to do. Okay, maybe it became that in the wake of dodecaphonic and serial procedures but within the realm of more conventional tonal organization based on diatonic or non-diatonic scales ... the rules are less hard-and-fast prescriptions that aggregated summaries of the things you can reliably get to "work" in the sense of asking moderately trained musicians you've never met before to reproduce reliably for you from a score. Keep that in mind, because when you keep that kind of thing in mind you may find that Stevie Wonder didn't break the rules because those rules aren't necessarily there. I'm on a kick against 19th century era musical pedagogy creating double binds by laying down as a law the kind of rules it claimed to be against being stuck with. We were just talking last week about how in the 18th century there wasn't actually a thing known as sonata form. By extension, we can do in writing about popular music what we did last week talking about sonata procedures in early 19th century guitar music, we can take some time to look at what was actually done without feeling obligated to say it does or doesn't "break the rules".
So ...
I regard what Hamilton calls "the bridge" to be the actual chorus itself. Everything in the harmonic and melodic activity of the song is building up to this point. Besides, if we're going to call it a bridge why is it the "bridge" that ends the song? It's not that you can't end a song with material that could be regarded as "bridge". I've done that myself, it's that I think it's fairly audible that what Hamilton calls "the bridge" is the chorus for Wonder's song. The bridge, I think, is where the recorded voice-over conversations are in the song, which can be omitted altogether during live performance. Composing a transitional bridge that only needs to show up on the album performance is another kind of musical shrewdness that could be discussed by someone else at some other time. On to the chorus ...
The justifiably legendary chorus shows up for the first time at 1:10
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rc0XEw4m-3w&t=1m09s
I'm going to enharmonically respell the descending bass line for those who think of this song as being in G flat.
CHORD
F#7 A Fr6 G D C C7 A G F#
BASS NOTE
E D# D C A# A G F#
Wonder's melody sounds pretty pentatonic because of that initial hook but he chromatically shifts from A sharp to A natural and then swivels in melodic fourths between A, D and E. The line is decorated, obviously, but in the movement from the D in the bass line to the C he's swooped through the interval of a minor seventh.
There are several things that can be highlighted about this little chorus. If we listen for perceivable root movement what this chorus has is a series of chromatic mediant relationships in which Wonder starts on one chord, uses oblique and parallel motion to leap to a chord with a root a minor third above the previous chord, and then uses that chord as a way to repeat the process with occasionally help from passing chords. The effect of that second inversion G (chord 3) is to set up an implied circle progression (D here is just a passing chord, albeit an amazing passing chord) from G to C. Wonder sets up a move to the tritone chord of G flat/F sharp major with help from a G-C progression that's the strongest root movement you can have in conventional tonal harmony.
But we're obviously not dealing with conventional tonal harmony. Most crucially nobody except music journalists and other people who write about music ever said we had to. Look at that bass line. Granting the D natural may potentially fuzzy the overall linear movement what makes that descending bass line remarkable for a pop chorus is that it's in the octatonic scale, the scale of alternating whole steps and half steps that divides the octave into eight rather than seven tones (i.e. the diatonic scale we're probably taught is the foundational scale in Western music).
So Wonder has a cycle of chromatic mediant pivots from F sharp to A to C natural and back to A and
back to F sharp. This set of root movements outlines a diminished triad. The majority of the notes in ths chorus are explicable in terms of the octatonic scale.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Octatonic_scale
One of the only times I'm going to regard a wiki as worth referencing because you're probably not going to trawl through many theory textbooks or music history surveys on this weekend.
The octatonic scale features prominently in the work of composers such as Rimsky-Korsakov and Stravinsky. It's a scale with a history of being favored by a number of early 20th century avant garde composers in the Western tradition. Chromatic mediant relationships go back fairly far. Schubert and Beethoven were playing with mediant relationship modulations in large-scale formal units in the early 19th century. Debussy and others played with chromatic mediants. Wagner had a chromatic submediant or two in a few of his works.
The short version of this point is that what makes Stevie Wonder's chorus to "Living for the City" so remarkable is that we can hear French sixth chords, octatonic bass lines, chromatic mediant pivoting by minor thirds from the initial tonic to the tritone chord and back through circular harmonic pivoting--and thanks to help from a neapolitan to tonic phrygian plagal cadence we're back to our opening chord like it was the most natural thing in the world.
Stevie Wonder's legendary chorus just took us through all the most durable harmonic innovations of the last two centuries of avant garde experimentation in tonal organization this side of the twelve-tone row and he did it in a merely twelve second chorus tagged on after what we thought (at first hearing) was going to be a pretty standard issue I-IV-V pop song. And he did all this in one of the simplest and most haunting chorus hooks in the 20th century.
But the genius of the chorus is that it does not, in fact, come out of the blue. Wonder has been preparing us for it calmly and steadily from the opening chords throughout that first full minute of the song. Those opening four chords move through a linear 1-2-3-1 in F sharp minor while harmonizing the chords in G flat major/F sharp major. This tension between minor mode linear movement and major mode tonality doesn't reveal its full range of possibilities for a minute, not until after Wonder's given us that classic IV-V-I conventional tonal resolution. He gives us the most by-the-book harmonic resolution for Western pop music and the high Classic era. Okay, now that we've got that done, bam, the music takes flight into that remarkable chorus.
And it's also the end of the song, obviously. It's here where the genius of the harmonic/melodic craft is also audible. What Wonder does is simple, he refuses to let the step-wise root movement in the octatonic bass line reach its by-now predictable end point. We're not going to go back to where we were before. We can stop at a higher, brighter, more shining place. That G major chord, the Neapolitan harmony, is allowed to do two things. First, remember how I mentioned that the G was set up as an implicit dominant that moves by circle progression to C? It gets to play that harmonic role, a kind of half cadence to a never-arrived-at C major triad that is as harmonically far away from the "ground" of G flat major as could be possible. The voices are striving ever upward toward a world in which no one has to live just enough or give just enough for the city (let's just throw in a direct reference to "the city" as Babylon or the City of Man while we're at it, that's not inimical to Wonder's approach).
But there's a second way in which this non-resolved G chord can function, as the new tonic. It's able to be heard or "read" as arriving at a new, higher, better and brighter tomorrow or as the aspiration toward it (the aforementioned function of the G chord as a dominant that pushes toward C major). The key of G flat major, in terms of extra-musical association and symbolism, can telegraph that the people who live in Wonder's song-world live in a world of all flats and the emergence of G major is the paradoxically "natural" world that does not yet exist, where things will be made right and the oppression of racism no longer exists. With either interpretation of the final harmony we're given a vivid musical image of an eagerly anticipated world in which injustice has been defeated. Wonder has deployed several of the musical tools of the trade of mystical apocalyptic of the sort we might also hear in Scriabin but puts it to more compelling and socially engaged use. Yes, I said that, it's not meant as an offense to Scriabin fans as such, I just enjoy Stevie Wonder more than Scriabin if I "have" to pick one of the two.
But in both cases we could propose there's the possibility, existing as a flame within the music itself, of apocalyptic that is not a thing predicated primarily on fear (more or less the base line for the super-majority of apocalyptic imagination in 20th century pop culture a la James Cameron's Terminator or Kubrick's Strangelove), but apocalyptic expressing the paradoxical but natural mixture of anger and hope. If that closing G chord is the new tonic it may just be a dream, if the closing G major chord is, as it has been up until the end, a quasi-dominant function preparing to launch us into C major, then the harmonic irresolution/resolution is wordlessly asking a question--we could be on the cusp of launching into C major, that bright shining realm in which the injustices of racism no longer define how blacks get treated in the city ... but will we get there? Not just "we" in the sense of Wonder addressing "his" people, but all of us in the United States who can hear his song. Wonder has made a song in which "we" can be read at different levels. He couldn't have been more direct about his voice of sorrow and his hope that what we hear in it will motivate us to make a better tomorrow.
This isn't a chorus that somehow breaks every rule in the book, it's a chorus written by someone who, however he opted to do it, familiarized himself with the panoply of harmonic innovations from avant garde music in the Western idioms over the last two centuries and distilled them into a twelve-second chorus that uses musical ideas we could also hear in Debussy, Scriabin, Stravinsky and other composers in what's known as the classical tradition, but all within Wonder's idiom of R&B/Motown.
As I was saying earlier about genres such as early 19th century classical guitar and ragtime, it's one thing to say that genre doesn't exist and another thing to say that genre boundaries are permeable. People who say genres don't exist in music are being morons of the sort who would have us believe a cinematic equivalent, that there's no such thing as superhero movies. But that the boundaries between and within genres are permeable is something we can be reminded of by those musical geniuses who show rather than tell us that this is the case. The octatonic scale isn't the exclusive property of Russian or French avant garde pianist composers from the late 19th and early 20th century. French sixth chords are just called that because the French were most observably likely to use them. Chromatic mediant pivoting well outside a previously established key was common in German music since the early 19th century. But there's no reason a black pop musician in 1970s America couldn't take all of these musical innovations and distill them into a single twelve-second tag in a pop song that sums up the greatest innovations in the Western musical traditions. That's not "breaking the rules" at all, except the most draconian and generally unwritten rules of musical styles, expectations of what "ought" to be in a genre on the basis of what writers write about music.
The thing is, too many writers want to keep the genius of what Wonder did mysterious. It's amazing but not necessarily mysterious in the sense that we can't work out what it was he did in that beautiful chorus and explain it in terms that at least musicians can understand.
But non-musicians can understand the affect of what's going on. While the doctrine of affect from the Baroque era won't really be applicable today we can at least say that the cyclical vamping Wonder lays down at the start of the song can be a kind of meta-textual tone-painting of the circularity and confinement black people deal with. Living just enough for the city is confining, we get that clearly from the words but we ALSO get it from the music. The plea to stop living just enough for the city abandons conventional words for the chorus, which bursts open the deliberate strait-jacketed I-IV-V in favor of letting the minor-mode linear pattern of the upper-voice in the keyboard guide the entire musical substance into the chromatic mediant shifting octatonic chorus. Wonder saves this explosion of harmonically expanded music, a musical symbol, perhaps, of what the music can be like if we don't live just enough for the city, until he's made the primary plea. All of this octatonic/mediant shifting music is the sort of thing we can also hear in Scriabin and, well, Stevie Wonder's kind of pan-spiritual 1970s New Age optimism and activism isn't "that" impossible to correlate to Scriabin's apocalyptic theosophical aspiration for universal human brotherhood, is it?
Maybe Stevie Wonder could be regarded as a kind of late 20th century pop-maestro American counterpart to Scriabin ...
if Scriabin wrote gorgeous, unforgettable hooks for pop songs that dealt with the plight of black people in the United States dealing with systemic racism.
That only took about 2,600 words to explain what's so brilliant about twelve seconds of music in a Stevie Wonder song. What's nagged at me this week is that Slate has been that when it came to explicating Wonder's genius there was a more telling than showing when it came to discussing that musical genius. Go ahead, tell us (again) that Wonder is one of the greatest pop musicians of the age. I've never disagreed! When I added love for Haydn and Bach to my musical admirations Stevie Wonder was in no way displaced. But let's not shy away from explaining, even in technical and theoretical terms, what it is that Wonder's done in his music that's so brilliant. If we don't do even this it's almost as though we pay lip service to the brilliance without showing we have to wrestle a bit with understanding it. When we're talking about a musician who called one of his albums Music of My Mind, the least we can do is take seriously that however schmaltzy some of those love songs are, there is also a vibrant intellectual substance to it. It's just that, perhaps, with Wonder the intellectual substance may be pulsating within the music itself and far too few people who deign to write about Wonder's music may have the technical and theoretical interests to discuss the genius of what the music does, preferring instead to use bromides about how it somehow breaks the rules. Well if it does break the rules, at least say what those rules are. If Wagner fans can write reams on the Tristan chord can't fans of Stevie Wonder spare a few thousand words for that twelve-second break in "Living for the City" to describe what it is that's so amazing about it? I think that's the least we can do.
POSTSCRIPT
04-26-2017
10.00pm
Here's something extra to consider about the chorus. The two chords that don't fit into the octatonic scale that would seem to explain the instrumental parts are G and D. These two chords would obviously not fit into the octatonic collection that would start on F sharp or, if one chord could the other one could not. It's known as the "diminished" scale because a dominant-tonic circle progression can't happen in the alternation of whole and half steps that characterizes the scale. Secondary dominant functionality obviously also doesn't happen. What the chords G and D have is that they have to be borrowed from the other two transpositions of the octatonic scale, a mode of limited transposition. So the sense of aspiration and transcendental grandeur that the song ends with can "still" be explicable in terms of octatonic sets if we take it to mean that Wonder sets up a chorus with an octatonic collection for the instrumental parts that uses passing chords to borrow chords from the other two transpositions that are available before pitch replication occurs in a way that precludes truly differentiated sets within the twelve-tones of the chromatic scale.
We do, however, for the time being, still have Stevie Wonder around. There are some fun and fascinating pieces at Slate's Wonder Week but ... but ... it's disappointingly short on what we musicians call the shop talk of "what did he actually do?"
This post is going to try to rectify that by discussing what is easily one of the most justifiably legendary chorus in a pop song from the last fifty years, that chorus from "Living for the City". First we need to look at what's over on Slate about this chorus.
https://redux.slate.com/cover_story/2016/12/the-greatest-creative-run-in-the-history-of-pop-music.html
...
Innervisions also marked Wonder’s full ascendance as a composer. At 23 years old, the kid who could play every instrument on earth (including chromatic harmonica like it was Charlie Parker’s alto sax) was now writing like some combination of George Gershwin and Smokey Robinson. The bridge to “Living for the City”—“da-da-da DAH, dah dah, DAH …”—is among the more harmonically counterintuitive chord progressions in pop music, a bunch of sounds that shouldn’t fit next to each according to every rule in the book and yet somehow fit perfectly.
***
I'm going to make a slightly long-form case that this sentiment about how the sounds "shouldn't fit next to each other according to every rule in the book" is completely wrong. Music theory is a post hoc explanation of what works, not a prescriptive explanation of what you're allowed to do. Okay, maybe it became that in the wake of dodecaphonic and serial procedures but within the realm of more conventional tonal organization based on diatonic or non-diatonic scales ... the rules are less hard-and-fast prescriptions that aggregated summaries of the things you can reliably get to "work" in the sense of asking moderately trained musicians you've never met before to reproduce reliably for you from a score. Keep that in mind, because when you keep that kind of thing in mind you may find that Stevie Wonder didn't break the rules because those rules aren't necessarily there. I'm on a kick against 19th century era musical pedagogy creating double binds by laying down as a law the kind of rules it claimed to be against being stuck with. We were just talking last week about how in the 18th century there wasn't actually a thing known as sonata form. By extension, we can do in writing about popular music what we did last week talking about sonata procedures in early 19th century guitar music, we can take some time to look at what was actually done without feeling obligated to say it does or doesn't "break the rules".
So ...
I regard what Hamilton calls "the bridge" to be the actual chorus itself. Everything in the harmonic and melodic activity of the song is building up to this point. Besides, if we're going to call it a bridge why is it the "bridge" that ends the song? It's not that you can't end a song with material that could be regarded as "bridge". I've done that myself, it's that I think it's fairly audible that what Hamilton calls "the bridge" is the chorus for Wonder's song. The bridge, I think, is where the recorded voice-over conversations are in the song, which can be omitted altogether during live performance. Composing a transitional bridge that only needs to show up on the album performance is another kind of musical shrewdness that could be discussed by someone else at some other time. On to the chorus ...
The justifiably legendary chorus shows up for the first time at 1:10
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rc0XEw4m-3w&t=1m09s
I'm going to enharmonically respell the descending bass line for those who think of this song as being in G flat.
CHORD
F#7 A Fr6 G D C C7 A G F#
BASS NOTE
E D# D C A# A G F#
Wonder's melody sounds pretty pentatonic because of that initial hook but he chromatically shifts from A sharp to A natural and then swivels in melodic fourths between A, D and E. The line is decorated, obviously, but in the movement from the D in the bass line to the C he's swooped through the interval of a minor seventh.
There are several things that can be highlighted about this little chorus. If we listen for perceivable root movement what this chorus has is a series of chromatic mediant relationships in which Wonder starts on one chord, uses oblique and parallel motion to leap to a chord with a root a minor third above the previous chord, and then uses that chord as a way to repeat the process with occasionally help from passing chords. The effect of that second inversion G (chord 3) is to set up an implied circle progression (D here is just a passing chord, albeit an amazing passing chord) from G to C. Wonder sets up a move to the tritone chord of G flat/F sharp major with help from a G-C progression that's the strongest root movement you can have in conventional tonal harmony.
But we're obviously not dealing with conventional tonal harmony. Most crucially nobody except music journalists and other people who write about music ever said we had to. Look at that bass line. Granting the D natural may potentially fuzzy the overall linear movement what makes that descending bass line remarkable for a pop chorus is that it's in the octatonic scale, the scale of alternating whole steps and half steps that divides the octave into eight rather than seven tones (i.e. the diatonic scale we're probably taught is the foundational scale in Western music).
So Wonder has a cycle of chromatic mediant pivots from F sharp to A to C natural and back to A and
back to F sharp. This set of root movements outlines a diminished triad. The majority of the notes in ths chorus are explicable in terms of the octatonic scale.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Octatonic_scale
One of the only times I'm going to regard a wiki as worth referencing because you're probably not going to trawl through many theory textbooks or music history surveys on this weekend.
The octatonic scale features prominently in the work of composers such as Rimsky-Korsakov and Stravinsky. It's a scale with a history of being favored by a number of early 20th century avant garde composers in the Western tradition. Chromatic mediant relationships go back fairly far. Schubert and Beethoven were playing with mediant relationship modulations in large-scale formal units in the early 19th century. Debussy and others played with chromatic mediants. Wagner had a chromatic submediant or two in a few of his works.
The short version of this point is that what makes Stevie Wonder's chorus to "Living for the City" so remarkable is that we can hear French sixth chords, octatonic bass lines, chromatic mediant pivoting by minor thirds from the initial tonic to the tritone chord and back through circular harmonic pivoting--and thanks to help from a neapolitan to tonic phrygian plagal cadence we're back to our opening chord like it was the most natural thing in the world.
Stevie Wonder's legendary chorus just took us through all the most durable harmonic innovations of the last two centuries of avant garde experimentation in tonal organization this side of the twelve-tone row and he did it in a merely twelve second chorus tagged on after what we thought (at first hearing) was going to be a pretty standard issue I-IV-V pop song. And he did all this in one of the simplest and most haunting chorus hooks in the 20th century.
But the genius of the chorus is that it does not, in fact, come out of the blue. Wonder has been preparing us for it calmly and steadily from the opening chords throughout that first full minute of the song. Those opening four chords move through a linear 1-2-3-1 in F sharp minor while harmonizing the chords in G flat major/F sharp major. This tension between minor mode linear movement and major mode tonality doesn't reveal its full range of possibilities for a minute, not until after Wonder's given us that classic IV-V-I conventional tonal resolution. He gives us the most by-the-book harmonic resolution for Western pop music and the high Classic era. Okay, now that we've got that done, bam, the music takes flight into that remarkable chorus.
And it's also the end of the song, obviously. It's here where the genius of the harmonic/melodic craft is also audible. What Wonder does is simple, he refuses to let the step-wise root movement in the octatonic bass line reach its by-now predictable end point. We're not going to go back to where we were before. We can stop at a higher, brighter, more shining place. That G major chord, the Neapolitan harmony, is allowed to do two things. First, remember how I mentioned that the G was set up as an implicit dominant that moves by circle progression to C? It gets to play that harmonic role, a kind of half cadence to a never-arrived-at C major triad that is as harmonically far away from the "ground" of G flat major as could be possible. The voices are striving ever upward toward a world in which no one has to live just enough or give just enough for the city (let's just throw in a direct reference to "the city" as Babylon or the City of Man while we're at it, that's not inimical to Wonder's approach).
But there's a second way in which this non-resolved G chord can function, as the new tonic. It's able to be heard or "read" as arriving at a new, higher, better and brighter tomorrow or as the aspiration toward it (the aforementioned function of the G chord as a dominant that pushes toward C major). The key of G flat major, in terms of extra-musical association and symbolism, can telegraph that the people who live in Wonder's song-world live in a world of all flats and the emergence of G major is the paradoxically "natural" world that does not yet exist, where things will be made right and the oppression of racism no longer exists. With either interpretation of the final harmony we're given a vivid musical image of an eagerly anticipated world in which injustice has been defeated. Wonder has deployed several of the musical tools of the trade of mystical apocalyptic of the sort we might also hear in Scriabin but puts it to more compelling and socially engaged use. Yes, I said that, it's not meant as an offense to Scriabin fans as such, I just enjoy Stevie Wonder more than Scriabin if I "have" to pick one of the two.
But in both cases we could propose there's the possibility, existing as a flame within the music itself, of apocalyptic that is not a thing predicated primarily on fear (more or less the base line for the super-majority of apocalyptic imagination in 20th century pop culture a la James Cameron's Terminator or Kubrick's Strangelove), but apocalyptic expressing the paradoxical but natural mixture of anger and hope. If that closing G chord is the new tonic it may just be a dream, if the closing G major chord is, as it has been up until the end, a quasi-dominant function preparing to launch us into C major, then the harmonic irresolution/resolution is wordlessly asking a question--we could be on the cusp of launching into C major, that bright shining realm in which the injustices of racism no longer define how blacks get treated in the city ... but will we get there? Not just "we" in the sense of Wonder addressing "his" people, but all of us in the United States who can hear his song. Wonder has made a song in which "we" can be read at different levels. He couldn't have been more direct about his voice of sorrow and his hope that what we hear in it will motivate us to make a better tomorrow.
This isn't a chorus that somehow breaks every rule in the book, it's a chorus written by someone who, however he opted to do it, familiarized himself with the panoply of harmonic innovations from avant garde music in the Western idioms over the last two centuries and distilled them into a twelve-second chorus that uses musical ideas we could also hear in Debussy, Scriabin, Stravinsky and other composers in what's known as the classical tradition, but all within Wonder's idiom of R&B/Motown.
As I was saying earlier about genres such as early 19th century classical guitar and ragtime, it's one thing to say that genre doesn't exist and another thing to say that genre boundaries are permeable. People who say genres don't exist in music are being morons of the sort who would have us believe a cinematic equivalent, that there's no such thing as superhero movies. But that the boundaries between and within genres are permeable is something we can be reminded of by those musical geniuses who show rather than tell us that this is the case. The octatonic scale isn't the exclusive property of Russian or French avant garde pianist composers from the late 19th and early 20th century. French sixth chords are just called that because the French were most observably likely to use them. Chromatic mediant pivoting well outside a previously established key was common in German music since the early 19th century. But there's no reason a black pop musician in 1970s America couldn't take all of these musical innovations and distill them into a single twelve-second tag in a pop song that sums up the greatest innovations in the Western musical traditions. That's not "breaking the rules" at all, except the most draconian and generally unwritten rules of musical styles, expectations of what "ought" to be in a genre on the basis of what writers write about music.
The thing is, too many writers want to keep the genius of what Wonder did mysterious. It's amazing but not necessarily mysterious in the sense that we can't work out what it was he did in that beautiful chorus and explain it in terms that at least musicians can understand.
But non-musicians can understand the affect of what's going on. While the doctrine of affect from the Baroque era won't really be applicable today we can at least say that the cyclical vamping Wonder lays down at the start of the song can be a kind of meta-textual tone-painting of the circularity and confinement black people deal with. Living just enough for the city is confining, we get that clearly from the words but we ALSO get it from the music. The plea to stop living just enough for the city abandons conventional words for the chorus, which bursts open the deliberate strait-jacketed I-IV-V in favor of letting the minor-mode linear pattern of the upper-voice in the keyboard guide the entire musical substance into the chromatic mediant shifting octatonic chorus. Wonder saves this explosion of harmonically expanded music, a musical symbol, perhaps, of what the music can be like if we don't live just enough for the city, until he's made the primary plea. All of this octatonic/mediant shifting music is the sort of thing we can also hear in Scriabin and, well, Stevie Wonder's kind of pan-spiritual 1970s New Age optimism and activism isn't "that" impossible to correlate to Scriabin's apocalyptic theosophical aspiration for universal human brotherhood, is it?
Maybe Stevie Wonder could be regarded as a kind of late 20th century pop-maestro American counterpart to Scriabin ...
if Scriabin wrote gorgeous, unforgettable hooks for pop songs that dealt with the plight of black people in the United States dealing with systemic racism.
That only took about 2,600 words to explain what's so brilliant about twelve seconds of music in a Stevie Wonder song. What's nagged at me this week is that Slate has been that when it came to explicating Wonder's genius there was a more telling than showing when it came to discussing that musical genius. Go ahead, tell us (again) that Wonder is one of the greatest pop musicians of the age. I've never disagreed! When I added love for Haydn and Bach to my musical admirations Stevie Wonder was in no way displaced. But let's not shy away from explaining, even in technical and theoretical terms, what it is that Wonder's done in his music that's so brilliant. If we don't do even this it's almost as though we pay lip service to the brilliance without showing we have to wrestle a bit with understanding it. When we're talking about a musician who called one of his albums Music of My Mind, the least we can do is take seriously that however schmaltzy some of those love songs are, there is also a vibrant intellectual substance to it. It's just that, perhaps, with Wonder the intellectual substance may be pulsating within the music itself and far too few people who deign to write about Wonder's music may have the technical and theoretical interests to discuss the genius of what the music does, preferring instead to use bromides about how it somehow breaks the rules. Well if it does break the rules, at least say what those rules are. If Wagner fans can write reams on the Tristan chord can't fans of Stevie Wonder spare a few thousand words for that twelve-second break in "Living for the City" to describe what it is that's so amazing about it? I think that's the least we can do.
POSTSCRIPT
04-26-2017
10.00pm
Here's something extra to consider about the chorus. The two chords that don't fit into the octatonic scale that would seem to explain the instrumental parts are G and D. These two chords would obviously not fit into the octatonic collection that would start on F sharp or, if one chord could the other one could not. It's known as the "diminished" scale because a dominant-tonic circle progression can't happen in the alternation of whole and half steps that characterizes the scale. Secondary dominant functionality obviously also doesn't happen. What the chords G and D have is that they have to be borrowed from the other two transpositions of the octatonic scale, a mode of limited transposition. So the sense of aspiration and transcendental grandeur that the song ends with can "still" be explicable in terms of octatonic sets if we take it to mean that Wonder sets up a chorus with an octatonic collection for the instrumental parts that uses passing chords to borrow chords from the other two transpositions that are available before pitch replication occurs in a way that precludes truly differentiated sets within the twelve-tones of the chromatic scale.
Saturday, December 17, 2016
some concluding remarks on a survey of early 19th century guitar sonatas--on scripts vs plans in composition and analysis, recovering a script-based approach as we see guitar sonatas don't follow the prescribed "plan" paradigm
This was supposed to be more comprehensive. Molitor was largely left out. Carulli was omitted altogether. Molino was merely referenced. Didn't even mention Darr or Luckner. If I'd wanted to expand out into chamber music that featured sonata form Matiegka would need more mention, as would, obviously Giuliani but also Christian Dickhut, whose trios for flute, horn and guitar may not seem very deep but have their charms.
If I'd dared to explore sonata forms as explored by 20th century composers the range of possibilities would explode. Ponce, Jose, other usual suspects, these have already been written about at least a bit here and there. Ponce's sonatas are probably going to remain at the top of the pyramid in terms of prestige and craft. I'd like to make a case that Ferdinand Rebay's cycle of solo guitar sonatas deserves a more than just sympathetic hearing but that's going to likely have to wait until 2017 for that case to be made. Probably ditto for sonatas by Dusan Bogdanovic, Nikita Koshkin, Guastavino and others. Someone was kind enough to send me Cristiano Porqueddu's five-disc box set of guitar sonatas and the Gilardino sonatas in particular are pieces I hope to write about in 2017. While they don't necessarily feature a traditionally recognizable sonata form the guitar sonatas of Atanas Ourkouzounov have been on me "to get to" list for blogging topics.
So you probably get the idea by now, this could have become and could perhaps still become part of a larger project. It didn't. It took years to put this together as it was. But it was nice to finally get something done and up on the blog.
If I'd dared to explore sonata forms as explored by 20th century composers the range of possibilities would explode. Ponce, Jose, other usual suspects, these have already been written about at least a bit here and there. Ponce's sonatas are probably going to remain at the top of the pyramid in terms of prestige and craft. I'd like to make a case that Ferdinand Rebay's cycle of solo guitar sonatas deserves a more than just sympathetic hearing but that's going to likely have to wait until 2017 for that case to be made. Probably ditto for sonatas by Dusan Bogdanovic, Nikita Koshkin, Guastavino and others. Someone was kind enough to send me Cristiano Porqueddu's five-disc box set of guitar sonatas and the Gilardino sonatas in particular are pieces I hope to write about in 2017. While they don't necessarily feature a traditionally recognizable sonata form the guitar sonatas of Atanas Ourkouzounov have been on me "to get to" list for blogging topics.
So you probably get the idea by now, this could have become and could perhaps still become part of a larger project. It didn't. It took years to put this together as it was. But it was nice to finally get something done and up on the blog.
Sor's Op. 30, Allegretto--the composer's last sonata form
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5U8I6MskQcQ
This is a sonata form that forms the finale of a set of
variations so at one level it is a sonata form and at another level it can also
be considered a kind of mass variation that resolves the variations that have
come before it.
Sor's Op. 29, etude 10 in E flat major--an elegant and efficient sonata form hiding in plain sight in a dozen etudes
For years I have heard and read the axiom that the guitar is by its nature ill-suited to a musical process as complex as what we call sonata form. This is nonsense. I've been demonstrating that this is nonsense all week but this little exploration of a sonata form in E flat major composed by Sor should really settle the matter forever. Whether we look at this etude through the scholarship of Charles Rosen, or William E. Caplin, or Hepokoski & Darcy this etude in E flat major is a sonata form. It's also beautifully made, I dare say it's the most compelling sonata form Sor ever composed and it is also, fittingly, the most "textbook" of Sor's sonata forms. Why wouldn't it be, nestled so comfortably in the middle of Sor's Op. 29 etudes? I've written about this etude before, but since this week has been devoted to discussing sonata forms in early 19th century guitar literature it's worth writing about again.
You'll be able to peruse the score with some in-score commentary after the break.
You'll be able to peruse the score with some in-score commentary after the break.
Sor's Op. 29, etude 5 in C major--a sonata with a hybrid recapitulation (Theme 1 comes back but only as a gestural accompaniment to Theme 2)
I've discussed Sor's Op. 29 etudes featuring sonata forms in the past, here. But it's worth discussing again.
When scholars discuss Sor's sonata forms we tend to read discussions of the usual suspects: Opp 14 and 15, Op. 22 and 25, and Op. 30. That's as we should expect and delineating the types of sonata forms we see in the multi-movement works of Sor has some valuable scholarly work given to us by Rattanai Bampenyou in a 2012 treatise called A Performance Guide to the Multi-Movement Guitar Sonatas of Fernando Sor and Mauro Giuliani. It was through Bampenyou's dissertation I learned of James Hepokoski and Warren Darcy's Elements of Sonata Theory and William E Caplin's Classical Forms, both fantastic scholarly resources that should inspire debate and further research.
When scholars discuss Sor's sonata forms we tend to read discussions of the usual suspects: Opp 14 and 15, Op. 22 and 25, and Op. 30. That's as we should expect and delineating the types of sonata forms we see in the multi-movement works of Sor has some valuable scholarly work given to us by Rattanai Bampenyou in a 2012 treatise called A Performance Guide to the Multi-Movement Guitar Sonatas of Fernando Sor and Mauro Giuliani. It was through Bampenyou's dissertation I learned of James Hepokoski and Warren Darcy's Elements of Sonata Theory and William E Caplin's Classical Forms, both fantastic scholarly resources that should inspire debate and further research.
Friday, December 16, 2016
Sor's Grand Sonata Op. 25, 2--the big sonata that the last sonata was but a prelude for, also featuring a truncated recapitulation
Sor Op. 25, second movement
This is a large sonata but with an incomplete
recapitulation. The exposition may be
construed as follows:
Sor's Grand Sonata Op. 25, 1--when a gloomy sonata movement is a prelude based on a single rhetorical pattern ... you can afford to have an incomplete recapitulation
Sor Op. 25, first movement
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PmSwKaG62LU
Theme 1 is merely eight measures long and leads into a
modulating transition in the second half of measure 8. As short as this theme
appears to be on the page the Andante Largo tempo has to borne in mind. The harmonic rhythm is explicable in terms of
half notes so that one measure of 4/4 at this tempo could cover what would
proportionally be two measures of 4/4 in a livelier tempo.
With that proviso in mind the first theme is a
straightforward call and response. The
first phrase starts on the tonic and ends on the dominant, the second phrase
starts on the dominant and resolves to the tonic. By beat 2 of measure 8. The spare texture shouldn't dissuade us from
affirming that Theme 1 resolves in the first half of measure 8 with an
authentic cadence of the sort we would expect in a first theme in a sonata form
in the early 19th century. There's no
requirement that the authentic cadence be on a downbeat or be a perfect
authentic cadence of the cumulative development and resolution of thematic
ideas is explicable in such a direct, call and response eight-measure pattern.
You'll be able to consult the score below.
Sor's Grand Sonata Op. 22, 2--a slow sonata movement with a significantly truncated recapitulation
Op. 22, movement 2 (Adagio)
Theme 1 is a binary form cast in aabb (internal repeats for
two eight-measure phrases).
The second group begins abruptly in E flat and spans from
measures 17 to 59. We're talking about a Group 2 that's quite a bit longer than
Group 1 in terms of sheer measures.
However, let's recall that by repeating the two halves of Theme 1 that
the full playing time for Theme 1 is still 32 measures so the disproportion
between Group 1 and Group 2 is not necessarily as great in actual performance
as it looks to be on the page.
Having written so much about the first movement I'll try to
keep things fairly brief here. The most
striking aspects of this movement are that we're looking at a slow sonata form
but one in which the themes have a binary construction. This is most obvious with Theme 1 but it is
also in evidence for Theme 2, aka Group II.
The E flat major material can be said to open with an overture gesture
before the sequentially developed lyric phrase appears in the fifth system of
page 1 (noted in orange). This idea is
repeated with embellishments and then presented a third time with more
pronounced harmonic movement driving toward a half cadence. Once this half cadence is reached it is
prolonged through the entirety of system 7 of page 1 before finally reaching
its resolution in system 8.
Sor's Grand Sonata Op. 22, 1: on the distinction between a "script" and a "plan" for a sonata (you can't really break rules that haven't been written yet)
We've been climbing the prestige ladder here in discussing sonatas for solo guitar written by guitarist composers. Anyone familiar with the instrument and its literature would know that Giuliani and Sor would top the list here and they do.
We're finally at Sor and it will be fun to discuss his work (even if I actually, personally, prefer Matiegka's approach to sonata form) because extensive English-language scholarly work on Sor's handling of sonata form has been relatively recent. More importantly, I have believed for years that Sor's approach to sonata form has left out two entries in his work I will probably discuss tomorrow (Op. 29 etudes 5 and 10).
Today we'll be discussing the Grand Sonatas Op. 22 and Op. 25 and there's a lot we could discuss. The most important and simple thing we'll be looking at is how Sor tends to favor incomplete recapitulation. It's been one of the most basic reasons theorists and historians who have tried to grapple with his sonatas have been stymied by the basic question of whether Sor even used sonata form and whether or not, if he did use sonata form, he composed "good" sonata forms.
Thursday, December 15, 2016
Mauro Giuliani, Op. 150 Gran Sonata Eroica--another incomplete recapitulation in one of the more epic-scale sonata forms
It would be tough to find a sonata form for solo guitar bigger and grander than Giuliani's Op. 150. They do exist but not everyone would necessarily find them as grand or charming as Giuliani's Gran Sonata Eroica.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vh9RI0aLidQ
You can give it a listen first if you don't already know this piece and/or you can read the analysis after the break.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vh9RI0aLidQ
You can give it a listen first if you don't already know this piece and/or you can read the analysis after the break.
Giuliani Op. 61, Grand Overture--a great big single-movement sonata form with everything where it's expected to be
Since others have discussed Giuliani's Op. 15 well enough elsewhere we'll go for the later sonata forms.
Thus, Op. 61.
Thus, Op. 61.
Wednesday, December 14, 2016
Wenzel Matiegka's Grand Sonata II, 2: a slow sonata in which Theme 1 comes back but not in a way that would count as a formal recapitulation
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UnfTmjshYuE
This slow movement is, essentially, a sonata form. It may not seem like a sonata form at first hearing or at first glance, but I think a case can be made that it is, in fact, a sonata form. A few observations to this end can be drawn from William E Caplin's book Classical Form (Oxford University Press, 1998, ISBN 978-0-19-510480-6, PAGE 209)--in slow sonata forms we can observe that the subordinate theme and transition are fused together; that the transition itself can be omitted altogether; or that the development section of a slow sonata is significantly curtailed. These will be matters to keep in mind when looking at this slow movement in Matiegka's Grand Sonata II.
This slow movement is, essentially, a sonata form. It may not seem like a sonata form at first hearing or at first glance, but I think a case can be made that it is, in fact, a sonata form. A few observations to this end can be drawn from William E Caplin's book Classical Form (Oxford University Press, 1998, ISBN 978-0-19-510480-6, PAGE 209)--in slow sonata forms we can observe that the subordinate theme and transition are fused together; that the transition itself can be omitted altogether; or that the development section of a slow sonata is significantly curtailed. These will be matters to keep in mind when looking at this slow movement in Matiegka's Grand Sonata II.
Wenzel Matiegka, Grand Sonata II, 1: incomplete recapitulation featuring the second quarter of Theme 1 and skipping to the transition
Having proposed that Matiegka derived his Theme 1 from his Theme 2, and that his Theme 2 is indebted to Haydn, we can get to the development (which will include the coda from the exposition).
It's very important to note that Matiegka calls for a repeating exposition. Remember what we discussed earlier in this series about how an incomplete recapitulation may be informed by things like high intra-expositional development, and that when this happens in the context of a repeating exposition we may find "redundant" content sliced out? That's going to be borne out in this sonata form, too.
The exposition ends robustly in the key of E major and the development starts with a C dominant seventh that takes us into F major for the start of the development process. The Theme 1 derived material is quickly followed by a development of the Theme 2 material. This is followed by a call-and-response passage in D minor drawn from the Part 2 material of Theme 1. Next Matiegka uses the florid sextuplet transitional passage as the basis for continuing the development. You'll be able to see all this after the break.
It's very important to note that Matiegka calls for a repeating exposition. Remember what we discussed earlier in this series about how an incomplete recapitulation may be informed by things like high intra-expositional development, and that when this happens in the context of a repeating exposition we may find "redundant" content sliced out? That's going to be borne out in this sonata form, too.
The exposition ends robustly in the key of E major and the development starts with a C dominant seventh that takes us into F major for the start of the development process. The Theme 1 derived material is quickly followed by a development of the Theme 2 material. This is followed by a call-and-response passage in D minor drawn from the Part 2 material of Theme 1. Next Matiegka uses the florid sextuplet transitional passage as the basis for continuing the development. You'll be able to see all this after the break.
Wenzel Matiegka's Grand Sonata II, 1: on the possibility of deriving your Theme 1 from your Theme 2
In our earlier post we looked at some themes by Haydn ...
and a theme Matiegka included in his Grand Sonata I, movement 1.
That theme ...
and a theme Matiegka included in his Grand Sonata I, movement 1.
That theme ...
Wenzel Matiegka's Grand Sonata II: preliminary discussion of Matiegka's use of Haydn's themes.
For those who are already familiar with Matiegka's Grand Sonata II you may know that the finale is a bravura set of variations on Haydn's setting of "Liebes Madchen, hor mir zu" (pardon the lack of proper modifiers to the German alphabet there). This is a particularly cheeky lied in which the singer is a man who has headed out to a convent to serenade a maiden he regards as too beautiful to be confined to a convent, serenading her on his zither and requesting the more or less stereotypical reward for his efforts.
The Haydn lied ... with help from IMSLP.
The Haydn lied ... with help from IMSLP.
Wenzel Matiegka's Grand Sonata I, 1: recapitulating Theme 1 in the subdominant key before re-establishing the tonic
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ReaD2tPWX6E
Along the way this post will go through the entirety of the first movement of Matiegka's Grand Sonata I, 1 and will include a cadenza composed by ... somebody. This is one of my favorite sonatas and it might be evidence enough for readers to see that I put together an edition of this sonata that includes a composed cadenza. This was work I'd largely done last year and it was a lot of fun to do but it was also a lot of work. I like this sonata and I feel it could be better represented in the repertoire and that Matiegka's approach to sonata form deserves more attention from guitarists. Sure, the guitarists already familiar with Matiegka's work probably don't need to be told this, but there's a point at which Sor and Giuliani can be ever so slightly overplayed. :) Matiegka may not rise to the heights of Sor or Giuliani at their best but I would suggest in a moment of blatant advocacy, neither could we say that Matiegka was apt to the kind of hackwork that has been characteristic of Diabelli in popular recollection.
I'm going to revisit some ideas I presented last year about this sonata regarding the modulating transition. A number of guitarists consider the G sharp that appears in the Boije 349 plate to be an error. The contested G sharp appears as a purple note below (the break, along with the rest of the analysis ):
Along the way this post will go through the entirety of the first movement of Matiegka's Grand Sonata I, 1 and will include a cadenza composed by ... somebody. This is one of my favorite sonatas and it might be evidence enough for readers to see that I put together an edition of this sonata that includes a composed cadenza. This was work I'd largely done last year and it was a lot of fun to do but it was also a lot of work. I like this sonata and I feel it could be better represented in the repertoire and that Matiegka's approach to sonata form deserves more attention from guitarists. Sure, the guitarists already familiar with Matiegka's work probably don't need to be told this, but there's a point at which Sor and Giuliani can be ever so slightly overplayed. :) Matiegka may not rise to the heights of Sor or Giuliani at their best but I would suggest in a moment of blatant advocacy, neither could we say that Matiegka was apt to the kind of hackwork that has been characteristic of Diabelli in popular recollection.
I'm going to revisit some ideas I presented last year about this sonata regarding the modulating transition. A number of guitarists consider the G sharp that appears in the Boije 349 plate to be an error. The contested G sharp appears as a purple note below (the break, along with the rest of the analysis ):
Wenzel Matiegka's Grand Sonata I, 1: observations about the exposition, initial observation about Matiegka's appropriation and recomposition of works by Haydn and Mozart
Matiegka's Grand Sonata I was first published in 1808 and is one of my favorites of the early 19th century guitar sonatas. While the historical and textual case for Matiegka's debt to Haydn could be made on the basis of his Op. 23 sonata alone (which opens with a guitar transcription of the finale from Haydn's B minor piano sonata), the larger case for the extent to which Matiegka appropriated and developed ideas that can be traced to Haydn's work is more readily fleshed out in a pending discussion of Grand Sonata II. Grand Sonata I is, by far, the better represented of the two grand sonatas in terms of commercial recordings and, of late, a print edition. I've retained that contested G sharp note in the transition that has been omitted in some performances and a print edition. I've also added a potentially redundant sharp for an A sharp in the transition you'll get to see soon enough.
Tuesday, December 13, 2016
Molitor Op. 7 Grand Sonata, movement 1: observations about the development and the recapitulation of Themes 2 and 3 without Theme 1
The development section begins with embellishments derived from the modulating transition. Eventually we get to material in G minor derived from Theme 1. The development, not particularly long, draws most from Theme 1 and the modulating transition before preparing the recapitulation section.
Molitor Op. 7 Grand Sonata movement 1: initial observations about the exposition themes
Simon Molitor's Op. 7 Grand Sonata, first movement.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IOCS3kB5vAM
At the risk of being every so slightly lazy I'm not bothering to analyze the introduction. It's an introduction and so it does what it's supposed to do. Instead I mean to discuss the exposition, development and recapitulation of Molitor's Op. 7 guitar sonata.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IOCS3kB5vAM
At the risk of being every so slightly lazy I'm not bothering to analyze the introduction. It's an introduction and so it does what it's supposed to do. Instead I mean to discuss the exposition, development and recapitulation of Molitor's Op. 7 guitar sonata.
Monday, December 12, 2016
Diabelli Op. 29, No. 3 in F major: Diabelli reaches his peak and provides a fine example of a sonata that only recapitulates the dominant key themes
Diabelli, Op. 29, No. 3 in F major
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EPxsEBA86mY
This is the most ambitious and effective of Diabelli's Op. 29 guitar sonatas. It also threw me off when I was studying it because it's the best example of an exposition that presents a Theme 1 that never comes back in the recapitulation.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EPxsEBA86mY
This is the most ambitious and effective of Diabelli's Op. 29 guitar sonatas. It also threw me off when I was studying it because it's the best example of an exposition that presents a Theme 1 that never comes back in the recapitulation.
Diabelli Op. 29, No. 2 in A major: the one in the three solo guitar sonatas that actually has a "textbook" sonata form
Diabelli Op. 29, No. 2 in A major
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q4kcx9IGYHk
Diego Milanese does some fine work on Matiegka's Op. 23 guitar sonata, by the way, but we're discussing Diabelli here so that's just a passing comment for folks interested in listening to more early 19th century guitar sonatas.
Diabelli's opens this bright and glittery sonata with a descending major scale that's reminded me of a similar descending scale-line in a B flat major piano sonata by Haydn. We get the tonic scale-run, and then we get the dominant scale-run. This is another case where the theme is, to my ears, two-thirds of the way to being ragtime material. There are some fun, almost Giuliani-worthy tunes in this sonata movement. Theme 1 and the transition are moderately easy to hear for what they are.
Diabelli, Op. 29, No. 1 in C major, movement 1: an incomplete recapitulation that brings back Theme 2 because there's only ever half of Theme 1
Diabelli Op. 29, Sonata in C major
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J6kM2pcxjXE
This is the first and weakest of the three Op. 29 sonatas for solo guitar composed by Diabelli. The first movement may provide the simplest evidence for my assertion. Movements two through four are solidly made (rounded binary, menuet and rondo forms) but the opening sonata sticks out like a sore thumb. It's on the basis of the opening sonata form that I regard this as the weakest of the three guitar sonatas but it may be a useful case study through which to demonstrate that even in the early 19th century it was well within compositional norms to have a sonata form with a Theme 1 in an exposition that never comes back in the recapitulation. The fact that Diabelli botched this where Chopin didn't shouldn't distract us from the fact that if both Diabelli and Chopin tried their hands at this approach to sonata form that it may not have been as non-normative as would later be implied by the prescriptions of books promulgating ideas about what sonatas should be.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J6kM2pcxjXE
This is the first and weakest of the three Op. 29 sonatas for solo guitar composed by Diabelli. The first movement may provide the simplest evidence for my assertion. Movements two through four are solidly made (rounded binary, menuet and rondo forms) but the opening sonata sticks out like a sore thumb. It's on the basis of the opening sonata form that I regard this as the weakest of the three guitar sonatas but it may be a useful case study through which to demonstrate that even in the early 19th century it was well within compositional norms to have a sonata form with a Theme 1 in an exposition that never comes back in the recapitulation. The fact that Diabelli botched this where Chopin didn't shouldn't distract us from the fact that if both Diabelli and Chopin tried their hands at this approach to sonata form that it may not have been as non-normative as would later be implied by the prescriptions of books promulgating ideas about what sonatas should be.
Sunday, December 11, 2016
A survey of early 19th century guitar sonatas, starting at the end with this year's reading on sonata forms and a preliminary proposal about recapitulatory processes in sonata forms
ELEMENTS OF SONATA THEORY:
Norms, Types, and Deformations in the Late-Eighteenth Century Sonata
James Hepokoski & Warren Darcy
Copyright (c) 2006 by Oxford University Press
ISBN-13:978-0-19-977391-6
CLASSICAL FORM:
A Theory of Formal Functions for the Instrumental Music of Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven
William E. Caplin
Copyright (c) 1998 by Oxford University Press
ISBN 978-0-19-510480-6
ISBN 978-0-19-514399-7
Five years ago, when I was blogging about "an overview of structural concerns in the sonata forms of Sor, Giuliani, and Diabelli" I was unfamiliar with either of these books or their authors. I only discovered these two books in the last year thanks to a couple of doctoral dissertations on the guitar sonatas of Sor (and Giuliani, in one of the cases) that can be read over here:
https://arizona.openrepository.com/arizona/bitstream/10150/268374/1/azu_etd_12490_sip1_m.pdf
http://scholarlyrepository.miami.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1889&context=oa_dissertations
The two books are treasure troves of study for 18th century sonata forms and they have different strengths and weaknesses. The strength of the Caplin book is that Caplin explored each level of formal development in a sonata form; whether it's the four to eight-measure sentence or period, or compound thematic modules at the lower level; or ranging up to the highest intra-movement and multi-movement cyclical patterns. The weakness is that such a general survey of music can skip over interesting details such as variants of forms.
Norms, Types, and Deformations in the Late-Eighteenth Century Sonata
James Hepokoski & Warren Darcy
Copyright (c) 2006 by Oxford University Press
ISBN-13:978-0-19-977391-6
CLASSICAL FORM:
A Theory of Formal Functions for the Instrumental Music of Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven
William E. Caplin
Copyright (c) 1998 by Oxford University Press
ISBN 978-0-19-510480-6
ISBN 978-0-19-514399-7
Five years ago, when I was blogging about "an overview of structural concerns in the sonata forms of Sor, Giuliani, and Diabelli" I was unfamiliar with either of these books or their authors. I only discovered these two books in the last year thanks to a couple of doctoral dissertations on the guitar sonatas of Sor (and Giuliani, in one of the cases) that can be read over here:
https://arizona.openrepository.com/arizona/bitstream/10150/268374/1/azu_etd_12490_sip1_m.pdf
http://scholarlyrepository.miami.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1889&context=oa_dissertations
The two books are treasure troves of study for 18th century sonata forms and they have different strengths and weaknesses. The strength of the Caplin book is that Caplin explored each level of formal development in a sonata form; whether it's the four to eight-measure sentence or period, or compound thematic modules at the lower level; or ranging up to the highest intra-movement and multi-movement cyclical patterns. The weakness is that such a general survey of music can skip over interesting details such as variants of forms.
Saturday, December 10, 2016
incubation phase 2
Five years ago I published a post
"an overview of structural concerns in the sonata forms of Sor, Giuliani, and Diabelli"
I was still immersing myself in the sonatas of those composers and getting into Matiegka, Carulli, and even some Molitor. I've significantly updated and revised my take on Diabelli since then. I still love the F major sonata from his Op. 29 but the other two sonatas conform more to the conviction expressed by (or at least attributed to) Beethoven about Diabelli being an uninspired hack. :) Still, Diabelli's Op. 29, No. 3 guitar sonata is a thing of beauty and shows WHY the rest of his work was so often hackwork but that's getting ahead of ourselves.
The plan was, years ago, to get into more detailed analysis of specific sonatas to show the ways the composers handled sonata form in more practical ways in specific works. Back in December 2011 it seemed as though everything that had been worth saying about a certain local megachurch scene had probably already been said and what more could possibly come to light?
Ha, well, OBVIOUSLY that was a severe misunderstanding of the situation! So for the last half decade Wenatchee The Hatchet wasn't writing about formal and compositional processes in early 19th century guitar sonatas! Nope, we were discussing the life and times of what used to be called Mars Hill because it seemed as though the mainstream press mainstream or Christian had otherwise failed to keep up with what was going on. But now that Mars Hill has been dissolved and the Richard Nixon of megachurch pastors has moved on to hotter climes we can finally (maybe) get around to detailed discussions of the evolution and variety of sonata forms in early 19th century solo guitar sonatas.
The plan is to present a series of analysis posts this month that go through the sonata forms that appear in the following works:
Molitor Op. 7
Matiegka Grand Sonatas I & II
Giuliani Opp 61 and 150
Sor Op. 22 and 25
Op. 29 etudes 5 and 10
Op. 30
Now you'll notice I skipped Giuliani's Op. 15. Not that I don't like it, it's just that it's so obvious a case of sonata form it doesn't necessarily add more to a discussion of early 19th century guitar sonatas to discuss that if I can devote more time and energy to Molitor and particularly to Matiegka. I would say Matiegka's guitar sonatas are severely under-represented in scholarly discussions in the English language. I can find doctoral dissertations on Sor and Giuliani and some of the scholarship about those two has been great, but I'm not able to comment on Christopher P Calvet's
https://arizona.openrepository.com/arizona/bitstream/10150/268374/1/azu_etd_12490_sip1_m.pdf
http://scholarlyrepository.miami.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1889&context=oa_dissertations
Both treatises date from 2012 and were completed and published the year after I wrote my general overview on formal concerns in Sor, Diabelli and Giuliani's guitar sonatas.
For the few of you who even remember way back when I wrote that blog post you might remember I pointed out that there was a pattern of incomplete recapitulation in Diabelli, Sor and Giuliani. THat's to say that each of these composers could write large-scale sonata forms in which Theme 1 was omitted in the recapitulation while Themes 2 and 3 would be brought back in the tonic key. The plan was to have presented the case for how this was done and to go further. I wanted to propose, as a guitarist composer myself, WHY this kind of recapitulatory process may appear in solo guitar sonatas. With some more time and work this month I hope to finally get around to addressing that but laying some groundwork as to what this "incomplete recapitulation" concept is in sonata forms for solo guitar may need to be done. For that I've been gratefully indebted to the dissertations linked to above.
My hope is to contribute to the discussions begun by the dissertations above by making a case that what is called a "Type 2" sonata form is as prevalent in the solo guitar literature of the 19th century masters as the more conventional "textbook" sonata form. I want to take a step further and propose that there are patterns of intra-expositional repetition and development that can signal whether or not a truncated recapitulation is likely. To this end I've found it useful to study piano sonatas by Chopin and Liszt in addition to the usual suspects.
So later this month the plan is to roll out a blog post series that will get pretty technical. If you can't read music then your eyes will glaze over but if you can read scores comfortably and are familiar with the repertoire about to be discussed it will make for breezy reading.
It's not like I'm necessarily going to get into John Murray's The Imputations of Adam's Sin and discuss how and why the doctrine of natural imputation or federal imputation would make it important to Christian theologians to address the issue of whether or not Adam and Eve could be regarded as historic figures. I mean ... I "could" and for a moment was tempted to do so in response to a recent blog post by some other guy in Arizona on the historicity of Adam and Eve but if Driscoll an't explain the significance of imputation of sin and its relevance to the question he deigned to semi-answer then, well, he wasted his money on that master's in exegetical studies and wasted everyone's time who signed off on giving him that degree. Maybe it's just because it felt like yours truly spent months assembling what amounted to some kind of master's project length analytical series on a local figure in church culture in Puget Sound, but there's a lot here at this blog that takes a while to put together. That Murray reference wasn't just for kicks, I actually own the book and found it pretty helpful but it might signal the level of nerdery you'd have to deal with to address some of the issues that a certain guy in Arizona these days won't address, apparently.
BUT ... hoping to resist temptation there. This year the whole corporate entity has been dissolved and perhaps in 2017 we can get back to blogging about the stuff we'd set out to blog about before certain local current events circa 2012-2015 happened.
So, ahem, back to the musical stuff, hoping to have a series of blog posts up this month that will be an analysis of sonata forms for solo guitar by early 19th century guitarist composers. Looking forward to it but these kinds of projects take time.
PS, also thinking of blogging about Legend of Korra (finally); the Nolan Westworld series; and maybe throw in a few thoughts about franchise extension and the red state and blue state power fantasies endemic to 24 and Gilmore Girls. But we'll see. The music stuff really is a higher priority this month.
"an overview of structural concerns in the sonata forms of Sor, Giuliani, and Diabelli"
I was still immersing myself in the sonatas of those composers and getting into Matiegka, Carulli, and even some Molitor. I've significantly updated and revised my take on Diabelli since then. I still love the F major sonata from his Op. 29 but the other two sonatas conform more to the conviction expressed by (or at least attributed to) Beethoven about Diabelli being an uninspired hack. :) Still, Diabelli's Op. 29, No. 3 guitar sonata is a thing of beauty and shows WHY the rest of his work was so often hackwork but that's getting ahead of ourselves.
The plan was, years ago, to get into more detailed analysis of specific sonatas to show the ways the composers handled sonata form in more practical ways in specific works. Back in December 2011 it seemed as though everything that had been worth saying about a certain local megachurch scene had probably already been said and what more could possibly come to light?
Ha, well, OBVIOUSLY that was a severe misunderstanding of the situation! So for the last half decade Wenatchee The Hatchet wasn't writing about formal and compositional processes in early 19th century guitar sonatas! Nope, we were discussing the life and times of what used to be called Mars Hill because it seemed as though the mainstream press mainstream or Christian had otherwise failed to keep up with what was going on. But now that Mars Hill has been dissolved and the Richard Nixon of megachurch pastors has moved on to hotter climes we can finally (maybe) get around to detailed discussions of the evolution and variety of sonata forms in early 19th century solo guitar sonatas.
The plan is to present a series of analysis posts this month that go through the sonata forms that appear in the following works:
Molitor Op. 7
Matiegka Grand Sonatas I & II
Giuliani Opp 61 and 150
Sor Op. 22 and 25
Op. 29 etudes 5 and 10
Op. 30
Now you'll notice I skipped Giuliani's Op. 15. Not that I don't like it, it's just that it's so obvious a case of sonata form it doesn't necessarily add more to a discussion of early 19th century guitar sonatas to discuss that if I can devote more time and energy to Molitor and particularly to Matiegka. I would say Matiegka's guitar sonatas are severely under-represented in scholarly discussions in the English language. I can find doctoral dissertations on Sor and Giuliani and some of the scholarship about those two has been great, but I'm not able to comment on Christopher P Calvet's
“Structure and Development in the One-Movement Guitar Sonatas of Fernando Sor”
(Master’s thesis, California State University, 1992), because, alas, I have not been able to read it. If someone wanted to get it on behalf of Wenatchee The Hatchet as a Christmas or New Year's gift then, hey, sweet! I HAVE been able to read the following dissertations on Sor https://arizona.openrepository.com/arizona/bitstream/10150/268374/1/azu_etd_12490_sip1_m.pdf
http://scholarlyrepository.miami.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1889&context=oa_dissertations
Both treatises date from 2012 and were completed and published the year after I wrote my general overview on formal concerns in Sor, Diabelli and Giuliani's guitar sonatas.
For the few of you who even remember way back when I wrote that blog post you might remember I pointed out that there was a pattern of incomplete recapitulation in Diabelli, Sor and Giuliani. THat's to say that each of these composers could write large-scale sonata forms in which Theme 1 was omitted in the recapitulation while Themes 2 and 3 would be brought back in the tonic key. The plan was to have presented the case for how this was done and to go further. I wanted to propose, as a guitarist composer myself, WHY this kind of recapitulatory process may appear in solo guitar sonatas. With some more time and work this month I hope to finally get around to addressing that but laying some groundwork as to what this "incomplete recapitulation" concept is in sonata forms for solo guitar may need to be done. For that I've been gratefully indebted to the dissertations linked to above.
My hope is to contribute to the discussions begun by the dissertations above by making a case that what is called a "Type 2" sonata form is as prevalent in the solo guitar literature of the 19th century masters as the more conventional "textbook" sonata form. I want to take a step further and propose that there are patterns of intra-expositional repetition and development that can signal whether or not a truncated recapitulation is likely. To this end I've found it useful to study piano sonatas by Chopin and Liszt in addition to the usual suspects.
So later this month the plan is to roll out a blog post series that will get pretty technical. If you can't read music then your eyes will glaze over but if you can read scores comfortably and are familiar with the repertoire about to be discussed it will make for breezy reading.
It's not like I'm necessarily going to get into John Murray's The Imputations of Adam's Sin and discuss how and why the doctrine of natural imputation or federal imputation would make it important to Christian theologians to address the issue of whether or not Adam and Eve could be regarded as historic figures. I mean ... I "could" and for a moment was tempted to do so in response to a recent blog post by some other guy in Arizona on the historicity of Adam and Eve but if Driscoll an't explain the significance of imputation of sin and its relevance to the question he deigned to semi-answer then, well, he wasted his money on that master's in exegetical studies and wasted everyone's time who signed off on giving him that degree. Maybe it's just because it felt like yours truly spent months assembling what amounted to some kind of master's project length analytical series on a local figure in church culture in Puget Sound, but there's a lot here at this blog that takes a while to put together. That Murray reference wasn't just for kicks, I actually own the book and found it pretty helpful but it might signal the level of nerdery you'd have to deal with to address some of the issues that a certain guy in Arizona these days won't address, apparently.
BUT ... hoping to resist temptation there. This year the whole corporate entity has been dissolved and perhaps in 2017 we can get back to blogging about the stuff we'd set out to blog about before certain local current events circa 2012-2015 happened.
So, ahem, back to the musical stuff, hoping to have a series of blog posts up this month that will be an analysis of sonata forms for solo guitar by early 19th century guitarist composers. Looking forward to it but these kinds of projects take time.
PS, also thinking of blogging about Legend of Korra (finally); the Nolan Westworld series; and maybe throw in a few thoughts about franchise extension and the red state and blue state power fantasies endemic to 24 and Gilmore Girls. But we'll see. The music stuff really is a higher priority this month.
Monday, November 28, 2016
HT Warren Throckmorton--Driscoll claims to have had a Malthusian past that he's repudiated, although it was ten years ago he bluntly articulated his "shoot your dogs" approach to practical ministry and eight years ago he said whole family lines could be demonically inspired
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/warrenthrockmorton/2016/11/28/mark-driscolls-malthusian-past/
Throckmorton has a clip of Driscoll preaching recently with a tale of how he was once a Malthusian and was for abortion and contraception and how he was wrong. We've already discussed at some length the slippery aspects of Driscoll's ways with narrative. There are six not-always-subtly different narratives as to how and why and when he made the decision to resign from Mars Hill, for instance. We've also explored how, depending on the rhetorical/polemical context Driscoll at times saw fit to tell the story of his conversion to Christianity without any recourse to mention (even once) of Grace Martin. In the tagged series of posts "Mark Driscoll and the power of the sob story"we took a survey of Driscoll's stories of woe from the 2007-2014 period and noted that as controversy swirled around him his appeals for sympathy shifted from "here's how rough I had it" to "here's how rough my wife and kids have had it". All that review is to say that it's very, very difficult to simply accept a narrative asserted by Mark Driscoll at face value even when the core facts of the narrative can, actually, be basically agreed upon.
Now if one were to attempt even a guess as to what on earth could inspire an ambitious young sort like Mark Driscoll that some people simply didn't deserve to reproduce his urban redneck background might have been what inspired this observational approach. That got discussed at some length in the series "Mark Driscoll and the Gospel of [escaping] white trash" earlier this year. Driscoll's description of his working class Irish-Catholic family travelled in just enough jokes about rednecks and living in the ghetto that the only plausible explanation for any former Malthusian convictions he may claim to have had in his teens and early twenties would have to at least partly consider those alleged views in light of his self-described urban redneck milieu.
So even if Mark Driscoll sincerely held to what he thinks of as Malthusian ideals this doesn't mean he's necessarily fleshed out WHY he embraced those views. After all, a Malthusian view, albeit defined pejoratively, tends to worry about the unworthy reproducing than the more-than-worthy reproducing. That he viewed himself as one of the superior sorts is easily considered even if he DIDN'T say he viewed himself as a superior being. The sort of guy who backs out of a restorative disciplinary process at the church he co-founded because he claims God gave him permission to is someone who is arguably STILL living and speaking as though he's a genuinely superior being not bound to live by the rules he'd admonished just about everyone else in the history of Mars Hill to live by.
Which reminds me ... ten years ago Driscoll articulated a practical philosophy about ministry that included the axiom "shoot your dogs".
Confessions of a Reformission Rev
Mark Driscoll, Zondervan, 2006
ISBN-13:978-0-310-27016-4
ISBN-10:0-310-27016-2
Copyright 2006 by Mark DriscollFrom pages 34-35
Question 9
Do you have the courage to shoot your dogs?
Dogs are idiotic ideas, stinky styles, stupid systems, failed facilities, terrible technologies, loser leaders, and pathetic people. Most churches know who and what their dogs are but simply lack the courage to pull the trigger and shoot their dogs. Therefore it is vital to name with brutal candor the people, programs, structures, and ministry philosophies that are dogs needing to be shot. Be sure to make it count and shoot them only once so that they don't come back and bite you. [endnote 35 here]
Page 202
35. I took the concept of shooting our dogs from a conversation I had with a friend named Jon Phelps, who is the president of DC-3 Entertainment and the founder of Full Sail College.
Jon Phelps is co-credited with Mark Driscoll for Reverse-Engineering Your Life
Mark Driscoll, Zondervan, 2006
ISBN-13:978-0-310-27016-4
ISBN-10:0-310-27016-2
Copyright 2006 by Mark DriscollFrom pages 34-35
Question 9
Do you have the courage to shoot your dogs?
Dogs are idiotic ideas, stinky styles, stupid systems, failed facilities, terrible technologies, loser leaders, and pathetic people. Most churches know who and what their dogs are but simply lack the courage to pull the trigger and shoot their dogs. Therefore it is vital to name with brutal candor the people, programs, structures, and ministry philosophies that are dogs needing to be shot. Be sure to make it count and shoot them only once so that they don't come back and bite you. [endnote 35 here]
Page 202
35. I took the concept of shooting our dogs from a conversation I had with a friend named Jon Phelps, who is the president of DC-3 Entertainment and the founder of Full Sail College.
Jon Phelps is co-credited with Mark Driscoll for Reverse-Engineering Your Life
So whether or not Driscoll actually rejected Malthusian thinking for humanity itself it's not entirely clear he didn't embrace a kind of practical quasi-Malthusian approach to ministry.
POSTSCRIPT 11-28-2016 0800p
One of the simpler problems with Driscoll's account of Malthusian eugenics is the implicit presumption in his account that people weren't concerned with overpopulation and that people weren't necessarily advocating measures to prevent overpopulation. This was one of many concerns held by Catholic political leaders and theologians in the medieval period, for instance. Given how Jack a Jack Catholic Mark Driscoll has often said he was it's no surprise if he once again proved his ignorance.
So ... let's take a gander over to this old book.
A History of Political Thought: The Middle Ages
Walter Ullman
Penguin Books
first published 1965
ISBN-10: 0140207783POSTSCRIPT 11-28-2016 0800p
One of the simpler problems with Driscoll's account of Malthusian eugenics is the implicit presumption in his account that people weren't concerned with overpopulation and that people weren't necessarily advocating measures to prevent overpopulation. This was one of many concerns held by Catholic political leaders and theologians in the medieval period, for instance. Given how Jack a Jack Catholic Mark Driscoll has often said he was it's no surprise if he once again proved his ignorance.
So ... let's take a gander over to this old book.
A History of Political Thought: The Middle Ages
Walter Ullman
Penguin Books
first published 1965
ISBN-13: 978-0140207781
The continuator of his commentaries on the Politics, his [Thomas Aquinas'] pupil at Paris and later Bishop of Claremont, Peter of Auvergne, struck up quite radical naturalist chords, particularly in connexion with social and economic questions and problems connected with marriage. For instance, he held that, since the State had to be self-sufficient, it was imperative to limit the number of citizens, otherwise poverty would follow. Hence he advocated limitations in the size of families. Aristotle's suggestion of abortion was not endorsed, but in order to avoid over-population he suggested restrictions of procreation between the ages of 37 and 55 with men and 18 to 37 with women, because then fewer children would be born. Beyond these age groups there should not be sexual intercourse with a view to procreation, but simply for the sake of health or some other valid reason.
So advised restrictions on how often to have children so as to forestall over-population that could lead to systemic poverty was something people were concerned about back in the medieval period. Driscoll's implication about population control and eugenics could be mistaken as saying these were relatively recent concerns. They aren't and they weren't. Whether or not you have particular issues with Planned Parenthood the case that poor people should refrain from birthing children faster than they can produce enough food to feed them or home enough to shelter them goes back as far (and obviously farther back then) the middle ages.
In all of Driscoll's spiel on Malthusian eugenics did he mention that Thomas Robert Malthus was a cleric? The topic of whether or not Malthus' views have been misunderstood or misrepresented would be fascinating for someone else to field. For the sake of this blog post it's merely sufficient to highlight that when Driscoll tries to unfurl what he seems to take to be wisdom about Malthusian eugenics he highlights yet more gaps in his knowledge about how far back concerns about over-population go and misses the boat on the extent to which the origination of Malthus' ideas could be construed as being founded on an evolutionary or materialistic paradigm.
POSTSCRIPT 2 0824PM
One of the other reasons to doubt whether or not Mark Driscoll really put what he calls his Malthusian eugenics ideas behind him comes from the 2008 spiritual warfare session he gave to leadership at Mars Hill.
http://download.marshill.se/files/MH%20Vodcast%20Video/2008/20080205_christus-victor_vodcast.m4v
Spiritual Warfare
February 5, 2008
Pastor Mark Driscoll
Christus Victor (Part 3)
34:54ish
I then ask them to confess sins and cancel ground and command leaving one at a time. `s all before we start, "How did you open the door?" proverbially speaking? "Well, it was I committed adultery then after that I started having nightmares."
"Well, guess what? Probably a connection there, huh? Probably opened the door with adultery. Have you ever really repented of that to Jesus and asked him to forgive you?"
"Not really."
"Well let's do that right now. Let's stop right now and have you repent of that sin, ask Jesus to forgive you. He died. Receive forgiveness."
Let's get--cuz, see, Satan and demons, with a believer, in addition to external torment and such, most of what they have is what we've given them by opening the door through sin.
"Well then, confess it is a sin. Let's kick `em out, lock the door but you gotta straighten this out with Jesus. You gotta repent."
So a good chunk of time is just spent on repentence of particular sin. It's all it is. Getting rid of those handholds and footholds.
...
36:00
I then ask them a series of questions. This is where we start, number ten. I'll usually check with ancestral sin. I'm looking at their past.
Now if they come from ten generations of third degree Masons I'm startin' there. If they're grandma was into witchcraft and their mama was into witchcraft and they have some demonic issues it shouldn't be shocking to think that this has been an issue in their family for a while. [emphasis added]
I know one family where incest was just part of the family. They actually had very intricate rules to control incest. The grandfathers and uncles could molest little girls but daddies couldn't and you could only do that once they hit the age of ten. You couldn't molest any child before that. I get these complicated rules that have been passed down for generations for the sexual abuse of the children. You're like, this, your struggle here, your temptations, your issues, they have generational lineage.
There are whole family lines that are just demonically inspired. You ever wonder why, in the Old Testament, God will occasionally tell his people, "When you go to war against that nation kill ALL of them. Don't let one of them live." People say, "Oh, oh that's terrible." Not if that whole line is demonized. Not if that whole line of people exists for the express purpose of fighting God and killing his people. The issue is either you get rid of them or they get rid of you. Satan is inspiring them to destroy you and you gotta get rid of them. Satan DOES work through family lines. There are family lines like the Herods who, just from one generation to the next, they're trying to kill Jesus and his people. Some of the family fights in Genesis, they continue all the way to this day. Not saying every person in the family line is demonized, but it seems like Satan likes to work through family lines, ancestral sin. [emphasis added[
So ... if Mark Driscoll asserted in 2008 that there were whole family lines that were demonically originated and inspired and that in the Old Testament it was not wrong for God to command Israel to massacre entire nations, would there have been any consideration of whether this would still be an approach in the present? In other words, how could a Mark Driscoll who could make these assertions still have a moral basis from which to argue against what he describes as Malthusian eugenics. If entire family lines could be described as demonically inspired what's the remedy? This hardly seems like a great set of assertions for a guy like Mark Driscoll to make about whole family lines being demonically inspired if his long-term goal is to repudiate whatever he regards as Malthusian eugenics.
POSTSCRIPT 3
Even assuming that the writings of an English cleric from centuries ago could somehow be conflated with what Driscoll describes as ideological evolutionary thought ... let's never forget that in 2007 Mark Driscoll still had his comment about the pile of dead bodies behind the Mars Hill bus.
http://004f597.netsolhost.com/Vision/10%20Throw%20Them%20Off%20the%20Bus%201.mp3
http://joyfulexiles.files.wordpress.com/2012/06/preaching-paul_edits1.mp3
October 1, 2007
... Too many guys spend too much time trying to move stiff-necked obstinate people. I am all about blessed subtraction. There is a pile of dead bodies behind the Mars Hill bus and by God's grace it'll be a mountain by the time we're done. You either get on the bus or get run over by the bus (those are the options) but the bus ain't gonna stop. I'm just a, I'm just a guy who is like, "Look, we love ya but this is what we're doin'."
There's a few kind of people. There's people who get in the way of the bus. They gotta get run over. There are people who want to take turns driving the bus. They gotta get thrown off cuz they want to go somewhere else. There are people who will be on the bus (leaders and helpers and servants, they're awesome). There's also sometimes nice people who just sit on the bus and shut up. They're not helping or hurting. Just let `em ride along. You know what I'm saying? But don't look at the nice people who are just gonna sit on the bus and shut their mouth and think, "I need you to lead the mission." They're never going to. At the most you'll give `em a job to do and they'll serve somewhere and help out in a minimal way. If someone can sit in a place that hasn't been on mission for a really long time they are by definition not a leader and so they're never going to lead. You need to gather a whole new core. [emphasis added]
I'll tell you what, you don't just do this for church planting or replanting, you know what? I'm doing it right now. I'm doing it right now. We just took certain guys and rearranged the seats on the bus. Yesterday we fired two elders for the first time in the history of Mars Hill last night. They're off the bus, under the bus. They were off mission so now they're unemployed. This will be the defining issue as to whether or not you succeed or fail.
If those were the words of a guy who repudiated the Malthusian eugenics views he claims he had earlier either Malthusian thought doesn't seem to mean what Driscoll has lately claimed it means ... or a person could repudiate the allegedly Malthusian views he claimed to have earlier and STILL say with an apparently clear conscience that you could either get on the bus or get run over by the bus but the bus ain't gonna stop.
Of course there isn't a Mars Hill bus NOW, is there?
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