Ragtime and Sonata Forms, Part 12: Adorno's modes of cognition, George Rochberg on time-space and space-time

12.     Adorno's modes of cognition, George Rochberg on time-space and space-time

Adorno categories of the dynamic-expressive and rhythmical-spatial listener are, obviously, not the only ways we can think about how people think about music.  The American composer George Rochberg approximated Adorno’s categories in an essay published in 1963. Since it’s easier to let Rochberg explain Rochberg:

THE AESTHETICS OF SURVIVAL: A COMPOSER'S VIEW OF TWENTIETH-CENTURY MUSIC

GEORGE ROCHBERG

Copyright (c) by The University of Michigan 1984

ISBN 0-472-10037-8

The Concepts of Musical Time and Space  (1963)

pages 97-98

... For it must follow from the two terms which comprise the conjunction that only two orders are possible: time-space and space-time. This type of verbal logic is no idle exercise, for it is completely corroborated, as we shall see, by the evolution of music, particularly twentieth-century music. The two conjunctions, time-space and space-time, may be viewed as prototypes of fundamental significance. As prototypes, they will serve as the basis for penetrating structural relationships which resist traditional approaches. These prototypes will permit us to comprehend structural relationships which define totally different types of music and, at the same time, provide us with insights into the reasons for the crisis which has driven the audience of our own time from the music composed contemporaneously with it--a problem which cannot be taken lightly.

Until the twentieth-century, Western music was rooted in one prototype--time-space.  ...

page 100

To appreciate fully the essential difference between time-space and space-time it becomes necessary to discuss first "direction in music." Essentially, direction in music is the creation of an integral order which is perceived or sensed as structural goal or purpose. This is to say that when a composer creates an order in his music which defines its own form as it emerges in concrete sound, one can sense its direction, or, as we say, "we know where it is going." Direction in music derives from a clear perception of, and therefore corresponds to, the clear presentation of temporal and spatial points of departure and movement or passage en route to points of arrival or destination. The sense of direction coincides with, or runs parallel to, the actual growth process of the music and the order in which the growth process occurs. The classical music of Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven offers us a prime example of the growth process of such an integral order in which structural direction is dependent on two essential conditions: periodicity of rhythmic motion and tonality.  By their very nature, both are essentially directional ...

I’ll pause in quoting Rochberg to note that for those familiar with his story, 1963 as still before the composer’s repudiation of twelve-tone and serial techniques, not after.  Rochberg was, so to speak, still on Adorno’s side of the atonality/tonality divide in twentieth century aesthetics of music, but not for long.  

Ragtime and Sonata Forms, Part 13: George Rochberg on pluralism and questions of style

13.     Rochberg on pluralism and questions of style

The story of how Rochberg rejected serialism in the aftermath of his son’s death is just well known enough that I don’t wish to recite in detail.  That Rochberg’s ars combinatoria approach is one of a number of potential pathways to a synthesis of ragtime and sonata form is simply a proposal at the level of theory.  Joplin did not need a Rochberg to write the long since lost piano concerto.  Thanks to the influence of thinkers like Adorno, however, Rochberg’s formal rejection of serialism and move toward a polystylistic juxtaposition of tonal and atonal musical idioms fortuitously overlapped with the ragtime revival. 

Rochberg was rejecting the American academic standard for serious composition during the period in which the most influential popular style in the history of American music was being revived not within the realms of pop music but by classical musicians. If as Edward Berlin and others have noted, the ragtime revival coming at the behest of classical musicians may have skewed our understanding of ragtime toward the solo piano literature of the Joplin school, a fringe benefit, noted with acid humor by Tom Wolfe in the introduction, was that in the 1970s there were American compositions that had actual tunes that could be included in academic concert life at a time when serialism still held sway. 

Ragtime and Sonata Forms, Part 14: Leonard Meyer on pluralism, styles, and the ideologies of Romanticism in the late 20th century

14.     Leonard B. Meyer on pluralism, styles, and the ideologies of Romanticism in the late 20^th and early 21^st centuries

“Pluralism” can be a cause for celebration or lament depending on who is using the term, how they’re defining the term, and what they believe it means for “us”.  For those who regard pluralism in any form as an attack on Western values it is a threat. Those who regard pluralism as an outworking of the best ideals of Western thought pluralism can see it as a goal to strive for.  Leonard B. Meyer, observing the mid-twentieth century musical world around him, concluded that we collectively found ourselves in a polystylistic steady state, one in which no one style of art would be THE style:

MUSIC, THE ARTS, AND IDEAS

Leonard B. Meyer

Copyright (c) 1967. 1994 by The University of Chicago

ISBN 0-226-52143-5

pages 171-172

But suppose the paradigm which posits cumulative change and the discovery of a common style is no longer pertinent and viable? Perhaps none of the "revolutions" will be definitive; then astonishment would disappear. Suppose, too, that there are no "imperatives" of the sort that Boulez assumes (Whose imperatives? What is "our time" but the totality of actions, including art works, that take place in it?), and, consequently, that no style is necessarily superfluous. Suppose, in short, that the present pluralism of coexisting styles (each with its particular premises and even its attendant ideology) represents not an anomalous, transient state of affairs, but a relatively stable and enduring one.

I am suggesting not only that such a hypothesis is neither theoretically absurd no empirically impossible but that, once it is adopted, seemingly incompatible pieces of the puzzling present begins to form an intelligible pattern. If our time appears to be one of "crisis," it does so largely because we have misunderstood the present situation and its possible consequences. Because a past paradigm has led us to expect a monolithic, all-encompassing style, the cultural situation has seemed bizarre and perplexing. The "crisis" dissolves when the possibility of a continuing stylistic coexistence is recognized and the delights of diversity are admitted. The question then becomes not is this style going to be THE STYLE, but is this particular work well-made, challenging, and enjoyable.

To translate this into theological terms, if the philosophy of history that had guided European arts from the seventeenth through early twentieth centuries had been predicated on a kind of postmillennialist optimism that “civilization” would spread throughout the world, the crisis of “pluralism” was discovering that postmillennialism got us into not one but to World Wars and that the sense of European entitlement that emerged from millenarian philosophies of history had been used to justify a whole lot of imperialism.  This is, in 2020, not even a particularly scandalous observation. 

Meyer made the following prediction:

Ragtime and Sonata Forms, Part 15: Leonard B. Meyer on the shift from the 18th to 19th C from seeing sonatas as "scripts" to seeing sonatas as "plans"

15.     Leonard B. Meyer on the shift from the 18^th to 19^th centuries of seeing sonatas as patterned on scripts vs developed by plans

In addition to being somewhat humorless, and committed to a philosophy of organicism in “how things are made”, Romantic music was very committed to plans.  The difference between following a script and having a plan is not at all subtle and Meyer only touches upon those differences.  As I’ve done before, I’ll quote him at some length:

Ragtime and Sonata Forms, Part 16: Are we REALLY "done" with the Romantic era? Leonard Meyer and Raymond Knapp on a paradox of Romanticist ideology and pop music

16.     Are we actually “done” with the Romantic era?:

Meyer on the advent and replication of novelty

Raymond Knapp on the German Idealism of pop music criticism

Meyer’s contention that we are still living in the Romantic era in terms of its ideologies of art can be debated but I’m not debating those points.  If anything I think Meyer was right to point out all the ways our own era is still a continuation of the Romantic era.

Meyer articulated what Richard Taruskin has described as a “race to the patent office” form of modernism.  Meyer proposed that we have become so beholden to innovation we have overlooked other important aspects of thinking about the arts.

Ragtime and Sonata Forms, Part 17: William Caplin's Classical Forms--building blocks of themes, possible application toward Joplin's "The Entertainer"

17.       William Caplin’s Classical Forms--the building blocks of themes in the eighteenth century and possible application toward Scott Joplin’s themes in “The Entertainer”

At long last we’re ready to discuss formal analytical literature that deals with sonata forms.  In the last few decades there has been a renewed interest in formal analysis in American music theory scholarship.  William E. Caplin’s work has been useful to me for thinking through music at the nuts and bolts levels.  His work has dealt with music at the phrase level and the theme level.  If you have not read his work I strongly recommend you read it.  If your background is mainly popular music rather than classical music Caplin’s work will nevertheless be useful to you.  If we who have enjoyed pop songs and have thought in terms of verse, pre-chorus, chorus, bridge and the like feel that classical music from, say, the eighteenth century is a bit opaque, do not fear.  Caplin devotes a big chunk of his book on classical forms to what he calls “tight-knit” themes. These are themes that can be examined at the level of the sentence, with a presentation phrase and a continuation phrase; the period, with an antecedent phrase and a consequent phrase; as well as small ternary and binary forms.  Caplin deals with simple theems, hybrid themes and compound themes in the first 90 pages of his work. 

Ragtime and Sonata Forms, Part 18: syntactic scripts for the time-space of sonata forms, charting out possible ragtime sonatas

If you want the part that bottom lines everything in a way that charts out how you could try writing your own ragtime or rock/pop sonata, this would be the installment to read.

18.      Elements of Sonata Theory by Hepokoski and Darcy—syntactic scripts for the time-space of sonata forms, charting out the ragtime sonata

Put aphoristically: radical individualism seeks to undermine the norms on which its expression depends (Style and Music, Leonard B. Meyer, page 220)

Elements of Sonata Theory: Norms, Types, and Deformations in the Late-Eighteenth Century Sonata

James Hepokoski and Warren Darcy

Copyright (c) 2006 by Oxford University Press

Oxford University Press

ISBN -13: 978-0-19-977391-6

.. Within the humanities norms, generic options, and more-or-less standard procedures are not laws at all. And since they are not, there was no need to suppose that the existence of numerous exceptions as deviations invalidated the norm. Perhaps the many deviations were purposeful dialogues with the background norm. But this would mean, paradoxically, that the deviations helped to reintroduce the socially shared norm that was being temporarily overridden. (Otherwise, how could they be perceived as deviations at all?) Page 7

Our intention is not to lay down binding laws or invariant rules concerning either the parts of a sonata, or the sonata as a whole. Instead, we are trying to sketch the outlines of a complex set of commons or generic defaults. It is not that any attempt to recover standard patterns is a flawed enterprise; rather, it is that prior elements have been inadequately conceived. We offer Sonata Theory as a heuristic construct that can help the task of analysis and hermeneutics.  Pages 8-9

Since it was published in 2006 Elements of Sonata Theory has been part of a renewed scholarly interest in American musicology in formal analysis.  There have been debates as to the accuracy of the elements of Elements but these are debates among scholars debating the merits and demerits of whether what Hepokoski and Darcy have come up with is a suitable toolkit for analysts and analysis.  My assessment of Elements is based only partly on its usefulness for analyzing eighteenth century music and a great deal more, mostly in fact, on the ways I find Elements of Sonata Theory useful for composing music.

Ragtime and Sonata Forms: Appendix 1: recapitulation rag--on the return of B strains as closing themes in the literature

I opted to glide over the question of whether there was a precedent for recapitulation of an A strain or a B strain in ragtime literature in the body of the full argument.  This is not because the question is unimportant, it's very relevant.  However, it seemed that for those unfamiliar with ragtime the concepts of time-space and proportional correspondence between a generic sonata form and a Joplin rag could be done without digressing into the question of whether Scott Joplin ever brought back an A or a B strain at the end of his rags.  He didn't.

I learned this because I made a point of studying all of Joplin's rags, but one of the beauties of scholarship is other people have done work you don't have to replicate.  Toward the end of finding out how many rags ended with B strains I consulted the standard work that gets into the nuts and bolts of the modular construction of many a classic rag.  Ragtime fans probably already know that it is ...

Ragtime and Sonata Forms: Appendix 2: Ragtime and cumulative setting or cumulative form

Appendix 2: Ragtime and cumulative setting or cumulative form

All Made of Tunes: Charles Ives and the Uses of Musical Borrowing

J. Peter Bukholder

Yale University Press

Copyright © 1995 by J. Peter Burkholder

ISBN 0-300-05642-7 (hc)

In chapter 5 of his monograph on Charles Ives and musical borrowing, J. Peter Burkholder described Ives’ use of cumulative setting, a variation of cumulative form.  This approach to form can be thought of as a kind of reverse variations/development form in which Ives took a well-known and popular tune; created a variant of that theme with a polyphonic complement and proceeded to reverse-engineer a development that culminated in a presentation of these themes.  

Ragtime and Sonata Forms: Bibliographic references [updated 4-27-2020]

[new references added 4-27-2020]

Ragtime and Sonata Forms is done, initial note about publishing schedule

There's going to be a tag for the post.  The chapters are going to be mostly "read after the break" but have a little teaser of ideas to come from the first paragraph or two.  The posts are also getting published in reverse order, starting with the bibliographic references going from part 18 back to part 1 so it can be read in sequence when it's finally published.

It will eventually get indexed with a tag on the page that indexes posts by topic on the music page.

This project has been incubating for months as a writing project and years as a compositional project.  It is not, I should hasten to add, the work of an academic in music, music history, musicology or music theory.  This is the kind of thing I do for the sheer fun of it as a hobbyist composer, musician and writer.  I have, nevertheless, tried to be careful to mention the writers whose work I deal with and who have influenced my thinking on this topic.

Not named or quoted in Ragtime and Sonata Forms,  but who I most certainly need to thank for all his years of blogging, is Kyle Gann.  It's thanks to Gann that I learned about Rochberg's theoretical writings and found out about the music and writings of Ben Johnston (whose string quartets I now adore).  If you haven't read Gann's new book on the history of tunings and you're a musician I think you'll want to read it.  Shameless plug for a book I got last year and loved reading.  I'm not a music academic but just as at one point I was considering seminary at another point in my life I was considering grad school in music, either in music history or guitar performance.  I ended up going the "neither" route, but I do love reading academic monographs on music, music history, and even formal analysis.

I also want to thank John Borstlap because, whatever we've disagreed about (and that's been plenty) he's been respectful and courteous in his disagreement and it was thanks to his disagreement with the ideas and legacy of Adorno I managed to get curious enough to read Adorno's work for myself to find out what I happen to think many of his ideas were pernicious and terrible.

Also, though I'm not exactly a hip hop fan I do want to thank Ethan Hein for being willing to engage with me on a few things.  What I've attempted to do in Ragtime and Sonata Forms is articulate an approach to sonata form that can, I hope, give people a way to create ragtime sonatas that will have potential application toward the integration of theoretical approaches to sonata form to basically any other kind of popular song or dance tradition.  There's hardly a style of American popular music that isn't in some way indebted to ragtime, so if it's possible to write ragtime sonatas then it should be as possible to write blues sonatas, country sonatas, jazz sonatas (or sonatas drawing on jazz that aren't jazz as Nikolai Kapustin insists his work be understood), and probably even EDM and hip hop sonatas.  After all, with more than a little help from George Rochberg's time-space concept and Ben Johnston's idea of proportionality I would think that the time-spaces in which sonata forms develop could be applied to all sorts of popular styles.  Not that anyone  "has" to write a hip hope style sonata but if someone wanted to I'd find that exciting even if hip hop is, as I mentioned at the start of this paragraph, not my preferred style.

Because, cards on the table, I've spent twenty years of my musical life thinking about the ways that musicians can melt down and obliterate various classist and ethnocentric or racist or other boundaries set up by purists on all sides of the divides between "high" and "low", whether on the blues side, the classical side, the jazz side, the rock side, the pop side, whatever the divide.  I am sympathetic to Richard Taruskin's statement that loving classical music is just fine as long as you don't insist upon saying that your love of classical music makes you a nobler, better, deeper, more spiritual or whatever other form of superior being you want to say you are because of the music you love.  I love the string quartets of Haydn and the contrapuntal works of Bach but I'll turn around and be okay watching Princess Unikitty and reading the old Lee/Ditko era Spider-man comic books.

I snuck this idea into the series but I find it troubling that so many in the liberal arts have treated all populist sympathies as the domain of demagogues.  My sense of Haydn's life and work was that, however much he worked for aristocrats, he knew how to write music for regular people and was happy to do so. One of many reasons classical music can be held in contempt or regarded with indifference can surely be the contempt that some lovers of classical music can show toward whoever it is they think is beneath their social station in educational terms.   Haydn, the son of a wheelwright, strikes me as someone from the eighteenth century whose work can be a prototype for us in our era.  I love classical music but I love American popular styles and I don't see that if I write music that my friends who are electricians and carpenters and working class types shouldn't be able to enjoy the music and do so without having to have gone through the American education-industrial machinery that classical music lovers and performers so often seem to be expected to pass through. 

Haydn is, as I say a few times in my series, one of my musical heroes and I make no secret that Ragtime and Sonata Forms plays with the idea of what kinds of sonata forms Scott Joplin could have written if someone like Haydn had been able to teach him.  It is Haydn's music and musically lived example that I believe to be what "we" need in the twenty-first century more so than the imputed perfection and sublimity of Mozart or Beethoven, because that imputed sublime was in many ways a Romantic post hoc attribution, one we no longer have to abide by.  I still love Beethoven's Op. 111 but when it comes to how to write music now, I think Haydn's work is closer to the shifts in twenty-first century attention spans. 

Which is why so very much of Ragtime and Sonata Forms takes aim at the work of Theodor Adorno.  Even though I think he was capable of brilliant insight he was equally capable of viciously small-minded ideas as any flesh and blood person will be.  The trouble is, as many writers and thinkers more famous and/or better than I have been noting, is that Adorno's most viciously small-minded ideas seem to have survived and been magically transformed by his admirers into his continued legacy.  We do not need to confine ourselves to what I regard as Adorno's terrible failures of imagination.

He has, of course, passed, and I've never interacted with him but the late Roger Scruton's passing and some of his thoughts on embracing the American song book, kitsch and all, as the musically healthier and more plausible alternative to Adorno's ideological stances is what probably catalyzed my finally setting all of my thoughts about ragtime and sonata forms in order.  I've said at the blog a few times I count myself a moderate actual conservative (as in not a neoconservative because I think Gulf War 2 and the War on Terror have been policy disasters, and not a reactionary because I think there's too much wrong with the Buchanan wing to get into).  So while I'm not exactly progressive and my political/theological ideas are an uneasy mixture of Edmund Burke, Roger Williams, and Jacques Ellul, I do try to read across the political, ideological and theological spectrums.  I admit to having written what I've written thinking about things in Christian confessional terms but, having said, that, what I've written I hope will be useful to anyone who loves ragtime and eighteenth century music regardless of beliefs or disbeliefs.

Now for anyone who might be interested in the lay theological side of things that have informed my thought process, it was about ten years ago that I wrote a guest piece for Internet Monk that dealt briefly with the theological rationale for what has since become a compositional and musicological project.

https://internetmonk.com/archive/guest-post-wth-on-there-is-neither-art-nor-pop-neither-indie-or-mainstream

So, with all that rambling done, the plan is to publish the 18-part series Ragtime and Sonata Forms throughout April 24, 2020.  I hope you can enjoy it and find it useful in some way.

I have to warn you though, it is 50,661 words, literally the longest continuous blogging project I've ever done in my life.

Sutton Turner and Dave Bruskas have been having a series of podcast interviews ... first three episodes as links for now

https://amicalled.com/pastoral-lessons-from-mars-hill-church-e1-lessons-on-repentance/

https://amicalled.com/pastoral-lessons-from-mars-hill-church-e2-lessons-on-accountability/

https://amicalled.com/pastoral-lessons-from-mars-hill-church-e3-lessons-on-church-growth/

No comments on the material yet as there's other things going on in the offline world but ... for those who haven't heard about these, they're up online and from what I've heard there's plans to have six or seven episodes.  As longtime readers may recall, Sutton Turner has left clarifying comments here at Wenatchee The Hatchet from time to time (as has Justin Dean). We have, of course, not always agreed on things but that's no reason to not let people comment, even if comments are all moderated.

That's all for the moment.  The links, at this point, are fyi.  Will eventually give them a listen but there's other projects incubating, per an earlier post.

Fred Kaplan "The end of American leadership". Well, what if the pandemic has merely revealed what has already been the case for twenty years, that the world at large has stopped seeing the U.S. as leading "the free world" over the last 20 years?

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2020/04/american-leadership-coronavirus-china.html
...

American influence had already been waning for a host of reasons—the collapse of power blocs (which gave us leverage in the Cold War competition), the rise of terrorist groups and sectarian militias (which can’t be quelled by conventional military means), the surge of Chinese investment and pressure in Asia and beyond. All of these trends have been accelerated, sometimes willfully, by President Donald Trump, who has dissed or deserted traditional allies, embraced authoritarian regimes, and wavered in his response to China’s rise from obsequious kowtowing to self-destructive trade wars.

Even so, until recently, Trump’s retreat from the ways of previous presidents only highlighted America’s esteem and power. His behavior alarmed so many allies because they desperately wanted the return of U.S. leadership—and delighted so many adversaries because they could carve new inroads of influence in the absence of this leadership.

Now, however, Trump has taken us to the brink of irrelevance—not quite to the abyss, but teetering on its edge. To lead or to inspire, a country has to offer a model—an “example,” as Kennan put it, of what its leadership or values or system of politics can produce. And facing the coronavirus, we are showing that, at least for the moment, we’re offering little or nothing.

...

Kaplan concludes that if Trump is in power much longer American leadership will be irrevocably lost.  The brief thought is, we lost that over the last twenty years and the pandemic has merely revealed what was already the case.  The longer version ...

a reason why chord theory matters for guitarists--translating a traditional tune into a bottleneck technique arrangement requires you to know your chord forms

Decades ago when I was in college and studying basic harmony and voice-leading I recall a fairly usual concern  coming up, "When are we ever going to use this?"  What's the point of learning root, first inversion and second inversion chord formations? At the time the instructor of the course said, "Well, there's no practical use to it at all, unless you want to be a musician."  That was the simplest answer a professor could give but as a guitarist I have had time to encounter, in my own experiments as a guitarist, plenty of real world reasons why knowing chord theory matters.  Let me give a for-instance that shows why you have to know your basic root, first inversion, and second inversion chord forms in order to do anything with bottleneck technique (more after the break).

William Byrd--Mass for 5 voices, performed by The Cardinall's Musick

Let no one think that because I linked to a recent microtonal choral work by Toby Twining I don't have any love for the monuments of choral music past.  I am more of a fan of Elizabethan era choral music than I am of microtonal music and I am particularly fond of Byrd and Tallis. 

Here's the Kyrie from Byrd's spectacular Mass for 5 Voices, just to make sure that today's posts to musical links get some of the earlier eras of music besides contemporary.  I like contemporary plenty but contemporary still builds upon the past and in Western contexts building on a past that includes William Byrd is, I think, always a good idea.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YrgudFQ6-IE

Guitar Quartet Anemone perfoms "Bulgarian Rock 2020" by Ourkouzounov

As I recall, one of the comments Ethan Hein made about European music education is that it's more open to mixtures of "traditional" and "popular" styles than U.S. based music education can often be.

I "translate" that comment as an observation about work that develops fusions of "classical" with "not classical" styles, such as classical fusion with jazz or classical fusion with rock or classical fusion with whatever folk materials are at hand.

That's by way of coming back to the music of Atanas Ourkouzounov, whose "Bulgarian Rock 2020" for guitar quartet is contemporary "classical music", to be sure, but which is a charmingly rambunctious 7/8 Bulgarian prog rock dance for guitar quartet.  Link after the break

Toby Twining--Chrysalid Requiem, Dies Irae

Not that I'm really at all committed to composing microtonal or extended just intonation music myself (the classical guitar is in its most conventional form the most stuck-to-equal-temperament instrument an instrument can be), but I do like to listen to music that's composed without being tethered to equal temperament.  String quartets by Haba, keyboard music by Wyschnegradsky or Ben Johnston, especially the string quartets of Ben Johnston, I find that I can enjoy microtonal music.  Johnston's been my favorite because, to put it bluntly, Johnston was the microtonalist/extended just intonationist composer who didn't forget that tunes have to be in the music, which is not necessarily the case with, say, Easley Blackwood (although, frankly, I don't dislike the Blackwood string quartets, I just don't come back to them as listening experiences the way I repeatedly have with Johnston's quartets).

Anyway, having read Kyle Gann's wonderful recent book on the history of tuning systems I learned about Toby Twining's Chrysalid Requiem.  So, fair warning to people who aren't into microtonality or extended techniques in choral singing, don't click on the link but if you are ... a link to the Dies Irae from Toby Twining's Chrysalid Requiem is after the break

Francis Poulenc--Vinea mea electa from 4 Motets pour un temps de pénitence

A beautiful little choral work by Poulenc I remember from my college choir days

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8RrbSOce1Uw

yet another semi-incubation period

I've been writing a bit less in light of recent developments irl, i.e. the whole global pandemic has led to lockdown conditions in Washington state that have ... to borrow a phrase Brain said to Pinky in a charming episode "... that would alter our plans ... ". 

So there's some projects I meant to have gotten  to by now that I haven't gotten to yet because things happen.

That said, I am still incubating a pretty long-form project that's been near and dear to my heart called Ragtime and Sonata Forms.  I'm only a few thousand words into the project as yet and it's probably only fractionally done.  When I finally, Lord willing, finish the project, I plan to post the whole thing in a series of posts here at the blog.  The key concept is demonstrating on formal and theoretical grounds how easily ragtime lends itself to sonata forms and how, as a genre of popular song in the 1890s through 1910s that is now better-known as a style of piano music, any fusion of ragtime as popular music (whether song or dance) and sonata forms has practical applications for post-ragtime styles of American popular music (which, in the United States, is functionally nearly every type of popular music style ever since 1897).

I've intended to eventually get around to Win Your War but there's nothing quite like a pandemic to help clarify how unimportant Mark Driscoll has thankfully become. He can peddle self-help books to the quasi-prosperity-charismatic scene and that is disappointing in light of what he has not really dealt with from his time in Puget Sound, but while I still consider it potentially important to eventually get around to addressing the ways in which his approach to spiritual warfare demonized dissent from getting his way back in 2008 and how his newer book recycles large swaths of that he's ... just not very important now. 

By contrast, I've finally had time to get the blog to the music and music history and musicology related stuff I wanted the blog to be about from the beginning, way back in 2006.  I'm still open to comparing notes with people on Mars Hill history stuff, however, which is why there's a big separate page with indexed posts and I notice that much of the traffic (such as it is) to the blog is related to that.  Glad to be of help to those who want to explore the history of the place but, as mentioned above, my incubating project for the blog this year is Ragtime and Sonata Forms.

Which still roundaboutly gets me back to something I noticed in chronicling the peak and demise of Mars Hill Church, which is a point I feel I have to stress a bit, that despite certain accounts that Mars Hill was taken out by liberal secular media or by Christians shooting their own depending on the podcast or interview context, the demise of Mars Hill involved a wide swath of people including Buddhists, secularists, and, yes, Christians with confessional convictions and political convictions ranging across what's popularly thought of the left-right spectrum.  My tendencies as a self-identified moderate actual conservative (as opposed to a neoconservative or reactionary) are sufficiently rehearsed here I hope I have merely to allude to them, but my hope is that pursuit of truth and knowledge can be conducted in such a way that whatever our various differences we can nevertheless find some common ground. 

My convictions are still Christian although I have come around to repudiating various forms of Christendom ... not that I want to bore you with that if you aren't already familiar with it, just that I have in the history of this blog taken time to stress my objections to modes of Christendom that have been embraced not only by the religious right that is more easily identified but forms of triumphalist Christendom that saturated the mainlines in earlier eras. 

So I'm not exactly sure when Ragtime and Sonata Forms will be ready to go but at least a good chunk of the writing has begun.

I also still want to get around to blogging about:

Matiegka's Op. 31 guitar sonatas

Angelo Gilardino's guitar sonatas (which are magnificent)

Dusan Bogdanovic's four guitar sonatas

Koshkin's two big solo guitar sonatas
plus the second half of his preludes and fugues although, honestly, likely to put that off until Selyutina records Volume 2

So, anyway, it's not that I anticipate not blogging so much as that the kind of writing I'm doing requires more time and care to put together.  The Nadia Bolz-Weber and Mark Driscoll comparison post, for instance, took quite a while to put together.  So I might post once or twice a week, maybe, but have the posts be several thousand words long.

music for Holy Saturday, Blind Willie Johnson's "Dark Was the Night ... " and Mahalia Jackson's performance of the same

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V8AuYmID4wc

if you want to hear an equally glorious version with the words of the hymn, you can hardly do better than Mahalia Jackson singing "Dark Was the Night, Cold Was the Ground on Which my Savior Prayed"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cI1KsNPXwcs

Hindemith, Mathis der Maler Symphony, movement 2

Yes, I know, Paul Hindemith fans are few and far between nowadays (and maybe in the past) but I really do actually like a good chunk of the music of Paul Hindemith.

Mathis der Maler was an opera Hindemith composed on the life of a painter and ... skip it.  The symphonic suite is pretty cool, though, one of my favorite orchestral works, and this second movement corresponds to a panel from the Isenheim altarpiece that depicts Christ in the tomb.  So pretty suitable music for Holy Saturday.  There's a tradition at Wenatchee The Hatchet to link to music that was composed for Holy Saturday or thematically corresponds to the day. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZAvD6Mds9kE

Bach - Mache dich, mein Herze, rein from St Matthew Passion BWV 244 | Netherlands Bach Society

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EGq-9pC_5AM&vl=en

I've loved J. S. Bach's Matthew Passion for decades and this baritone aria is one of my favorite passages in the work.  If I thought I could pull off the feat of transposing this for voice and solo guitar ... I'd transpose it down into A major first, because even I'm not that uncompromising about key signatures.

Penderecki, Luke Passion

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0G41KmDsN5s&t=88s

Because it is Good Friday (in the Western rite) and because Penderecki died recently. 

Norman Lebrecht relays concerns that UK orchestras are in critical condition which is yet another reason I doubt that the future of "classical music" is likely to take a symphonic form now that a pandemic is gutting concert life as we've known it in the classical scene

via Slipped Disc
https://slippedisc.com/2020/04/british-orchestras-are-in-critical-position/

relaying the following:
https://www.musicweek.com/opinion/read/viewpoint-association-of-british-orchestras-director-mark-pemberton-on-why-classical-musicians-need-more-support/079416

With the global pandemic situation gutting concert life it's not a surprise that Bachtrack has closed shop
https://slippedisc.com/2020/04/backtrack-shuts-up-shop/

Sympathetic as I am to the cause of continuing what's generally called "classical music" I have had my doubts, and posted them here at my blog, over the last year or so that whatever the future of classical music is that it will necessarily take the form of the symphony.

I.e. the name Future Symphony Institute might put too much stock in there being symphonies in the future.  I don't think for a second that "a renaissance for classical music means a renaissance for humanity".  That seems like the kind of "fine art makes you a fine person" kind of manifesto that Richard Taruskin has spent his entire professional career, more or less, arguing emphatically against.

On the other hand, per some pieces by Jay Nordlinger at the Future Symphony Institute website, that were published in The New Criterion (back when I bothered to even read that magazine, come to think of it), mentioned way back circa 2004 some points raised more recently at On an Overgrown Path back in 2014 (there's too much classical music in terms of market saturation):
https://www.futuresymphony.org/tending-the-gardens-of-music-part-ii/
...
We have a glut problem, however. Horne recalls saying fully twenty-five years ago, “We should close all the conservatories for five years,” just to give the job market a break. And “now the situation is worse!” For woodwind and brass players, life has always been tricky: Zarin Mehta tells me that, for a recent tuba opening in the Philharmonic, over 120 people applied. [Editor’s note: A current tuba opening at the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra has over 180 applicants.] One result of all this redundant talent is that players tend to be quite good, everywhere. David Delta Gier, a conductor with wide experience both in America and abroad, says, “You should hear some of the players in Sioux Falls!” (The orchestra there is the South Dakota Symphony.) The sad part of our cornucopia is that many musicians wind up disappointed. Gier knows many fellow conductors – or would-be conductors – who have not had careers, or satisfying ones, simply because of the number of podiums available (versus all those who want to stand on them). “You get into a great school, you study with a great teacher, you work hard, you do everything right, and you think you ought to be rewarded. But a lot of people have been made to realize that that’s not necessarily the case.”

In a pandemic scenario even an orchestral conductor has pointed out the obvious, that symphonic music is not necessarily "what we need" these days.  Chamber music may be better able to withstand the current tide of policies that have curtailed concert life.  

Actually, that kind of gets me back to why I think Douglas Shadle is basically wrong about the idea of canceling the nineteenth century.  In a global pandemic we might want to actually revisit the Biedermeier era of in-house music-making.  I'm a classical guitarist interested in solo guitar music and particularly chamber music that includes the guitar so, of course, I don't see any reason we should "cancel the nineteenth century" when it was during the 1810 to 1845 period or thereabouts that guitarists were writing the kind of DIY music for amateurs playing solo and chamber music of the sort that we could learn from if the global covid-19 pandemic situation has led to policies that may 
permanently damage concert life at the orchestral and symphonic levels.  You can still play Chopin or even Beethoven (or Dussek or Hummel) in the privacy of your home, just like you can play blues, jazz standards or ragtime.  

When the Thirty Years War raged along Heinrich Schutz didn't make a point of staying at the production level of the grander larger-scale works he did in his earlier career.  He stripped everything down to little sacred concert music pieces.  His Passion settings shifted into voices-only for liturgical but also practical reasons.  

The guitar music of Mauro Giuliani is still fun to play even if snooty classical music critics at The Guardian have referred to it as silly trifling music.  Frankly, as a guitarist I find it easier to bridge the gap between American popular styles (i.e. ragtime from a century ago) and classical music by way of having studied Carulli, Giuliani or Legnani.  For that matter a Bohemian guitarist composer like Matiegka also wrote works that have given me inspiration to bridge the gap between American vernacular styles and sonata forms but Italian and Bohemian and Spanish guitarist composers are generally so far off the radar for mainstream musicology it's never been a surprise to me if in the turf wars of academic music studies pop vs orchestra or salon traditions have persisted.  If there's something we guitarists could potentially do the world over, it could be to develop ways of thinking and composing and writing about music that could potentially bridge this chasm, which musicology-as-usual in the last century and a half, even including New Musicology, has rarely seemed to be interested in remedying.   If a string quartet from Haydn might even seem hard to stage these days Haydn is public domain, try transcribing.  There are ways to learn from and to continue what we find beautiful in the old even if the received ways of playing that music can be kept from us due to the exigencies of dealing with a pandemic.  

Some ideas for consideration. 

Alan Jacobs compares R. R. Reno on the novelty of the covid-19 response to Agamben's statements on the normalization of states of exception

https://blog.ayjay.org/the-post-truth-thought-leaders-at-work/

Giorgio Agamben: 

The other thing, no less disquieting than the first, that the epidemic has caused to appear with clarity is that the state of exception, to which governments have habituated us for some time, has truly become the normal condition. There have been more serious epidemics in the past, but no one ever thought for that reason to declare a state of emergency like the current one, which prevents us even from moving. People have been so habituated to live in conditions of perennial crisis and perennial emergency that they don’t seem to notice that their life has been reduced to a purely biological condition and has not only every social and political dimension, but also human and affective. A society that lives in a perennial state of emergency cannot be a free society. We in fact live in a society that has sacrificed freedom to so-called “reasons of security” and has therefore condemned itself to live in a perennial state of fear and insecurity. 

Rusty Reno: 

That older generation that endured the Spanish flu, now long gone, was not ill-informed. People in that era were attended by medical professionals who fully understood the spread of disease and methods of quarantine. Unlike us, however, that generation did not want to live under Satan’s rule, not even for a season. They insisted that man was made for life, not death. They bowed their head before the storm of disease and endured its punishing blows, but they otherwise stood firm and continued to work, worship, and play, insisting that fear of death would not govern their societies or their lives. 

I find this convergence quite interesting, and wish I had the time to trace the intellectual genealogy that led a post-Heideggerian, quasi-Foucauldian continental philosopher and a traditionalist Catholic to make precisely the same argument. Reno’s contemptuous dismissal of the value of “physical life” echoes Agamben’s “purely biological condition,” his famous concept of “bare life,” while Reno’s attack on “a perennial state of fear and insecurity” echoes Agamben’s “perennial crisis and perennial emergency,” his equally famous “state of exception.” (One common ancestor, I think: Carl Schmitt.)

But for now I’ll just note that perhaps the strongest obvious link between them is indifference to the truth of their historical claims. What Reno got wrong about the American response to the Spanish flu I mentioned in an earlier post; for a refutation of Agamben’s claim that a sense of emergency in plague time is a new phenomenon, see, for instance, this post by my friend and colleague Philip Jenkins, and Anastasia Berg’s critique. When the facts get in the way of the narrative, print the narrative.  ...

Comparing a contemporary traditionalist Catholic take (a la Reno) on the covid 19 situation to Agamben is ... interesting ... .  Jacobs floats the idea more implicitly than explicitly that we live in a strange time when figures on the religious conservative side of our era so readily recapitulate arguments made by Marxists in a previous century.

Having done some comparative reading in Theodor Adorno and Roger Scruton I would venture to say that paradox is not only not very irony these days but practically seems to be a norm.

Something else Jacobs has written about lately is:
https://blog.ayjay.org/motte-and-bailey-and-coronavirus/

Nicholas Shackel: 

A Motte and Bailey castle is a medieval system of defence in which a stone tower on a mound (the Motte) is surrounded by an area of land (the Bailey) which in turn is encompassed by some sort of a barrier such as a ditch. Being dark and dank, the Motte is not a habitation of choice. The only reason for its existence is the desirability of the Bailey, which the combination of the Motte and ditch makes relatively easy to retain despite attack by marauders. When only lightly pressed, the ditch makes small numbers of attackers easy to defeat as they struggle across it: when heavily pressed the ditch is not defensible and so neither is the Bailey. Rather one retreats to the insalubrious but defensible, perhaps impregnable, Motte. Eventually the marauders give up, when one is well placed to reoccupy desirable land.

For my purposes the desirable but only lightly defensible territory of the Motte and Bailey castle, that is to say, the Bailey, represents a philosophical doctrine or position with similar properties: desirable to its proponent but only lightly defensible. The Motte is the defensible but undesired position to which one retreats when hard pressed.

Scott Alexander has done a great job of explaining the widespread relevance of the motte-and-bailey tactic. And it is a tactic that is getting a heavy workout these days, especially from certain parts of the Christian Right (especially its Catholic-integralist, nationalist-fundamentalist, and snake-handling Baptist wings.) 

...

Alexander writes, “So the motte-and-bailey doctrine is when you make a bold, controversial statement. Then when somebody challenges you, you claim you were just making an obvious, uncontroversial statement” — or perhaps a statement that’s widely accepted in your social circle — “so you are clearly right and they are silly for challenging you. Then when the argument is over you go back to making the bold, controversial statement.” And that’s how it goes with the Ours-is-not-a-spirit-of-fear crowd too. 

...

The "motte-and-bailey doctrine" seems less like a doctrine and more like a tactic, although of course it should be mentioned that in geopolitical policy a doctrine generally works out in tactics and strategies but I digress.  As a rhetorical tactic, whatever "motte-and-bailey" pans out to be seems weirdly familiar to me after a decade or so of observing how people like Mark Driscoll have wielded social media. 

But I wonder if the "doctrine" as it plays out in social media depends on social media "reach".  To be plain, Mark Driscoll can imply by way of those rhetorical question titles that, ironically, more often can appear in the blog posts of watchdog bloggers, that in asking "Was Nebuchadnazzar demon-possessed?" in the title the answer has to be "yes" or the blog post would never have been written in the first place.  "Did abuse happen at Church X under the leadership of Pastor Y?" in a watchdog blog context is very often simply an uncertainty gambit that substitutes for what a journalist would report as "Allegation of abuse at Church X under the leadership of Pastor Y". 

some thoughts having finished Richard Taruskin's Cursed Questions, more on my own dissent from art-religion and the binaries of the Cold War era

One of the fun parts about blogging can be when writers can bounce ideas off each other and, whether they necessarily always agree, spark interesting discussions.  There was a time between about 2011 to 2015 that this blog was mostly known as a stopping point for people who wanted to read about the former Mars Hill Church in Seattle.  During those years I would occasionally get some angry comments to the effect that "all" I ever wrote about was Mars Hill stuff or about Pastor Mark (Driscoll). 

That was never the case but for people locked into a brand loyalty that could have seemed to be the case.  I didn't have any problem writing about Pixar movies I liked (and I admit I like quite a few, having wanted to be an animator when I was a boy and having never lost my respect for the craft and skill it takes to make even what I would now consider badly made cartoons).  I also occasionally wrote about music and now, of course, music is often what I write about.

Perhaps it's because of my time at Mars Hill Church and witnessing more second-hand than first-hand what seemed dangerously cultish about it, in other words having seen the various ways that what would be called actually religious religion can do significant harm, I have basically zero sympathy for what in academic circles and arts circles is considered the better, nobler and truer religion a la Richard Wagner, namely Art.  There's a couple of reasons for my acquired skepticism about art-as-religion being an ennobling thing.  First, I admit to being the sort of Calvinist Presbyterian who takes seriously the idea of the Fall and original sin and that the first warnings we must heed from those doctrinal traditions is what it means about "me" before any of us get around to "you". That leads rather quickly to what has been one of Richard Taruskin's key arguments against the art-of-religion in connection to the Holocaust. In actual religious traditions there are plenty of warnings that you can have the right dogmas and still be evil.  Didn't James warn in his epistle that you may say you believe in God but even the demons can make that profession.  As Richard Taruskin has noted many a time about George Steiner, Steiner was perplexed by the reality that the humanities did not humanize. 

The way I've put the topic in the past has not necessarily been to do with the Holocaust but with a different situation, the revelations of Weinstein's conduct in the #metoo era, which from within the streets of Hollywood itself confronts us with what could be a Donatist controversy for advocates of art-as-sanctifying sacrament. The post was very unsubtly named

"the post-Weinstein #MeToo era as a Donatist controversy for Western art religion"


Taruskin, for his part, has written many articles arguing against the idea of art-as-religion or we might be able to call high art traditions as sanctifying sacraments.  I considered seminary at one point decades ago so it's fairly easy for me to switch back and forth between art jargon and theological jargon.  So all of that may be by way of introduction to anyone who is reading this who has not read what either I or Taruskin have written in our very different scenes and platforms about the idea that loving the high arts or fine arts of the Western traditions makes people better people. 

Bryan Townsend has been reading Taruskin's Cursed Questions, too. He may struggle more with Taruskin's often withering take downs on the notion that loving the right kind of art makes one the right kind of person. 

http://themusicsalon.blogspot.com/2020/03/there-is-no-hope-for-art.html

I've got my own differences of perspective from Taruskin about, for instance, George Steiner, but it's more a matter of emphasis.  I only heard about Steiner because John Borstlap took In Bluebird's Castle to be a wholesale summary of the death of Western culture because it did not stop the Holocaust and now we have to live with it, whereas Taruskin's take is more that Steiner presumes a justified dominance, for want of a better phrase, of the West as the West that is partly justified because George Steiner feels ambivalent about how Western arts didn't stop the Holocaust.  Many a Western secularist would refer to the commanded slaughter of the Canaanites and trot out the old claim that religion always makes people evil.  Well, in that case, all the more reason to reject any kind of art taking a comparable place to religion.  Last I checked Star Trek fans need to get that memo.

The older I get and the more I mull over what the Native American half of my ancestry ran into dealing with state and federal authorities the more it seems to me that Gene Roddenberry's Star Trek, whatever the average blue state white progressive might think of it as embarrassingly low genre goofiness or aspirational utopian sci-fi, the possibility that Star Trek embodies an LBJ era form of American cultural imperialism is generally not up for consideration. 

I wrote the following a while back before I'd finished the book.
https://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2020/03/richard-taruskins-new-book-cursed.html

I've also exchanged thoughts with Bryan and others at his blog.

I've put my cards on the table that I am, at nicest, skeptical to the point of unbelief about art as religion.  If religion doesn't ensure that people are better people there's no reason for me to believe that either art or politics will ensure people are better people, either.   I have read a bit too much about Soviet history to regard Marxism as exempt from atrocity because Anglo-American leftists want to no true Scotsman Stalin or Beria out of being "real" Marxists.  On the other hand, perhaps thanks (?) to having half my ancestry being Native American I don't really have a huge incentive to presume the best about American continental expansion and yet (in case you didn't catch that I mentioned being a Calvinist!) I also don't think that blue state white guilt about the way Native Americans were treated (badly) exempts Native American cultures from being found wanting for what in some regions (the Pacific Northwest) was the pervasiveness of a callous and inhumane approach to slavery in the generally nomadic PNW tribes that even white racists from Missouri found somewhat galling.

Or as some authors in the Bible warned us, there is none that is righteous, not even one.

One of the key arguments Taruskin has made over the course of his career is to keep highlighting that loving the arts does not make us good neighbors.  Art as religion is no better at making us better people than religion generally is.  What low church Protestants might say the problem often is is a form of sacralism and a conflation of church and state, some post-Gelasian  doctrine of the two swords being invoked to make the church and the state of one accord and that this error, for those Christians who regard it as a terrible error (hint) it's possible for the magisterial Reformers to see the problem in post-Constantinian Christendom and yet magically not see their own bids at replicating Christendom and the sacralized states on their own Protestant terms. 

So, I guess that's my way of saying as a Christian that what I appreciate about Taruskin's polemics against Western art-as-religion for its long history of abuses or failure to rein in the lesser impulses of humans resonates with me because, well, my own years of chronicling what I came to regard as the graft and abuse of religious leaders in the former Mars Hill might, as the saying goes, overlap on a Venn diagram. 

It's somewhat paradoxical that I only got around to reading George Steiner and Theodor Adorno because of John Borstlap.  Borstlap has proposed that the Holocaust may have happened because people failed to live up to the best ideals of Enlightenment and the West.  Well, okay, but if that's the formulation it's what Americans call the informal fallacy of no true Scotsman, a temptation that we need to resist whatever team we're on. 

So I don't happen to agree with the idea that art can make us better people.

http://themusicsalon.blogspot.com/2020/04/art-as-religion.html
....
But art and music have very special potential benefits that most other activities do not. There is a long and rich history to explore with all sorts of aesthetic and social implications. There is the challenge of performance which rewards not only the artist, but the audience as well. There is the challenge of understanding music from the point of view of the listener and the analyst. Writing about music is another multifarious challenge.

As religions go, you could do a lot worse than choose art and music.

Woody Allen once said that Mozart was proof for the existence of God. I lean more to Bach myself. Here is the Magnificat in D major with Concentus Musicus Vienna and the Arnold Schoenberg Choir conducted by Nikolaus Harnoncourt:

One of the things I've discovered in my musical life is saying I think Mozart is kind of boring and lame but that I love, love, love the music of Haydn turns out to not be an orthodox view within classical music.  It's a bit more of an accepted orthodoxy to say that Beethoven had some great musical moments but could be a bloviating self-important blowhard.  I still love Beethoven's Op. 111, mind you, I just hate his choral music.  I'd take choral music by Poulenc and Rachmaninoff over Beethoven any time any where. 

What came up recently at Bryan's blog is that Richard Taruskin came by to articulate what I've found and liked in his work:

http://themusicsalon.blogspot.com/2020/04/all-kinds-of-brows.html

Richard Taruskin said...

Hello Mr Townsend, and thanks at long last for reading me so seriously and commenting so seriously on what I've written. You are of course right: I love classical music and high art as much as anyone (even as much as you, I'll bet). My question is whether I am entitled by my love for it to regard myself as a morally superior person. I of course say no, and the piece on which you are commenting is my lengthy justification for my refusal to pat classical music lovers on the back. It's the sober academic version of that Musical Mystique piece from the New Republic a dozen years ago, about which people got rather exercised. But neither piece was an attack on the music or anyone's love for it.
All good wishes, Richard Taruskin

April 7, 2020 at 3:24 PM

That's it in a paragraph.  There's a world of difference between loving classical music and saying that one's love of classical music, or a specific subset thereof, is proof positive of being a more enlightened and noble soul.  

What my own experience has been, and I could only simply guess that Taruskin has had to deal with a more vitriolic intra-scholastic variation, is that making an argument that love of the fine arts does not make you a better person can often be met with the charge of being a cultural relativist or an aesthetic relativist.  I don't identify as being in either of those camps.  But neither do I regard Theodor Adorno as being anything other that catastrophically wrong in his assessment of American popular music and popular song but that's a topic I want to get to at some other point in the future.  

But by way of a detour, I want to share something a friend from the Mars Hill days once told me he'd heard from a former staffer.  There was a staffer who, so it was told me, said that Mars Hill leadership found Wenatchee The Hatchet a bit of a puzzle for a time because week after week wildly incriminating leaks of sensitive information about elder resignations might come up on this blog and various critical blog posts would show up taking issue with, say, Mark Driscoll's handling of biblical texts.  Then all of a sudden there'd be thousands of words about The Powerpuff Girls (the glorious original 1990s cartoon, not the reboot). As much as I love the string quartets of Haydn and his Piano Trios I have no problem turning around and watching Samurai Jack or Batman: the animated series or The Powerpuff Girls or The Venture Bros or even Princess Unikitty.  One of the arguments that is a side effect, if you will, of Taruskin's arguments about how the fine arts don't make us finer people is implicit, that the axiomatic lowbrow arts don't make those people who love pulpier stuff worse people.  If Mark Driscoll at one time declared his favorite movie was Braveheart I leaned toward another movie that came out about the same time, Toy Story.  Whatever you may think about animation as a medium you're not going to convince me that Braveheart had the less cartoony take on masculinity and conflict than Toy Story.  Even Gibson at one point expressed regret about how simplistic his account of William Wallace was.  Had Gibson ever learned of the antics of William Wallace II would he have felt he'd set a good example?  Rather moot, I suppose.

Being the Generation X member that I am (as these things go) I came of age as the Cold War was ending and one of the things that struck me about the Cold War from my childhood years was hearing the manic dread that we were all likely to die in an atomic holocaust set off by either Reagan or ... mostly just Reagan.  That didn't happen.  I also noticed, being ex-Pentecostal that I am, that every variation of the futurist dispensationalist timeline for being Rapture Ready failed.  I began to discover as I came across postmillenialists that it was far too easy to just assume that the only worst of it tendencies in American Christianity were from the Rapture Ready sort--the old postmillenialist triumphalism played a role in how a bunch of white Americans decided it was okay to disenfranchise Native Americans in the way that they did and my skepticism of both the presumptive leadership of American mainlines and the relatively recent vintage of the Religious Right that has merely co-opted the cultural mandate entitlement that was at one point wielded by the mainlines is about equal.

Perhaps affirming Christianity while rejecting the spectrum of Christendoms is as impossible to accept among advocates of Christendom as attacks on a more secular or panentheistic/pantheist art religion could be seen as an attack on there being anything good about Western art in general or classical music in particular.  I've only rarely been charged with operating from a position of aesthetic or cultural relativism mainly by people who don't know me in person.  I've beaten this drum at this blog in the past but I do worry that in the age of POTUS 45 one of the mistaken responses artists and arts communities have embraced is to treat any and all forms of populist motivation in the most pejorative way possible.  That someone who got elected fit into what Jacques Ellul mapped out as the methodology of the populist agitator doesn't mean that every populist impulse is necessarily bad.  Even Charles Rosen granted that Haydn managed to create genuinely popular music in his late symphonies that didn't sacrifice learned technique.  I.e. if in the history of classical music there was someone like Haydn who managed to be technically accomplished populist it seems dubious to presume that no such balance between "high" and "low" can ever happen again.  

It's less likely to happen now that musicology, for instance, has balkanized in the last forty years into turf wars between pop music historians and classical music historians.  I still don't get why we can't have the Haydn string quartets right alongside Stevie Wonder's Innervisions.  Rather than waste any time on Brian Ferneyhough's guitar music that uses extended techniques can't I just keep listening to the more brilliant blues of Tampa Red, Charley Patton, Blind Willie Johnson, Lonnie Johnson and Robert Johnson?  It's not that I don't enjoy avant garde guitar music.  I have actually had fun listening to guitar music by Maurice Ohana and Alvaro Company recently, I just think George Walker had a point when he advised music students to study Stravinsky and Hindemith because, though he had issues with them, new music students would be better off picking up where Stravinsky and Hindemith left off than by going the Elliot Carter route.

Finally, I've made this point as a hobbyist guitarist and composer in the past but when I see the skepticism on the part of musicologists with more of a pop music  than a classical background I can be sympathetic to that skepticism.  Why?  To keep things on the theme of art-religion, the problem I have with art-religion is that like more than less of the Western religions the canon is closed and there's no need for new divine revelation, what some music educators refer to as the problem not being the musical canons themselves but the ossification that comes with canonism, which brings us back to, yep, the Western Matthew Arnold style art religion that Taruskin has set his sights against for decades.  

It's sort of hard to believe I zipped through all of Cursed Questions in just a couple of weeks but it's a great read.  I'm happy to see that whatever we may differ on that Taruskin and I both have a very positive experience with the work of Leonard B. Meyer.