2020 interviews on the late Mars Hill: Part 4 Sutton Turner and Dave Bruskas go on record about the last year of Mars Hill with Ryan Williams and then Warren Throckmorton, describing their role in crashing The Strange Fire conference and what the plagiarism scandal was like on the inside.

 

2020 has turned out to be the year that the other two former executive elders of the late Mars Hill Church decided to start speaking on the record.  From March 27, 2020 through to May 29, 2020 former Mars Hill pastor Ryan Williams had podcast conversations with former executive elders Sutton Turner and Dave Bruskas in the Older Pastor/Younger Pastor” series. The topics of conversation were lessons from Mars Hill Church, very often about lessons of what not to do.  These interviews spanned many hours and would be difficult to summarize succinctly.  The links are as follows:

 

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/
https://amicalled.com/pastoral-lessons-from-mars-hill-church-e4-lessons-on-church-money/
https://amicalled.com/pastoral-lessons-from-mars-hill-church-e5-lessons-on-discipleship/
https://amicalled.com/pastoral-lessons-from-mars-hill-church-e6-lessons-on-narcissism/

https://amicalled.com/pastoral-lessons-from-mars-hill-church-e7-lessons-on-power/
https://amicalled.com/pastoral-lessons-from-mars-hill-church-e8-lessons-on-recovering-after-crisis/

 

I’ve discussed things that stood out for me from those discussions at the following links:

https://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2020/04/sutton-turner-and-dave-bruskas-have.html

https://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2020/05/discussion-series-pastoral-lessons-from.html

https://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2020/05/notes-on-7-part-older-pastoryounger.html

https://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2020/05/notes-on-ep-8-of-older-pastoryounger.html

 

One of the things Mark Driscoll told Larry Osborne was that he met with about thirty former elders of Mars Hill and it was almost like they had a common script.

2020 interviews on the late Mars Hill: Part 5 Sutton Turner and Dave Bruskas talk with Warren Throckmorton about ResultSource

The revelation that Mars Hill Church used Result Source to get Mark and Grace Driscoll’s book Real Marriage a No. 1 spot on the New York Times’ bestseller list came on the heels of the plagiarism controversy that erupted when Janet Mefferd accused Mark Driscoll of plagiarism in late November 2013. I’ve published a timeline of the formidably numerous public relations snafus and scandals Mars Hill managed to be embroiled in or sought out by the time Warren Cole Smith reported that Mars Hill used ResultSource. 

 

It may be important to note, for those unfamiliar with the history of Mars Hill, that the Result Source contract signing happened after a significant leadership transition, namely Jamie Munson deciding to step down from executive leadership at Mars Hill at the start of September 2011.  There was never any really clear reason as to why he would make such a decision.

 

Sutton Turner described the process of ResultSource being signed in the past and the key claims are not exactly new but it was still interesting to hear and read what he had to say to Warren Throckmorton.

 

2020 interviews on the late Mars Hill: Part 6 Warren Throckmorton, Sutton Turner and Dave Bruskas discuss the Dave Kraft allegations and how the BoAA chose to handle charges

One of the first things Throckmorton discussed with Turner and Bruskas in his lengthy interview was the formal charges that had been made by Dave Kraft and how the Mars Hill leadership handled those.

 

2020 interviews on the late Mars Hill: Part 7 The path to the `14 investigation, domineering behavior and the resignations of Paul Tripp and James MacDonald

On the admittedly long way to the charges and the 2014 investigation, we have to pass through Throckmorton asking Bruskas and Turner if they ever personally witnessed Mark Driscoll behaving in ways they regarded as domineering.

 

2020 interviews on the late Mars Hill: Part 8 Mars Hill ejection from Acts 29: Bruskas on Matt Chandler talking to Driscoll and Driscoll seeming he didn’t get what was coming

Bruskas shared with Throckmorton that Mars Hill’s ejection from Acts 29 was a catastrophe that led to a mass exodus of campus pastors. Now I had documented a steady trickle of resignations that had been going on from roughly 2011 through 2013 but Bruskas has a point saying that 2014 saw a catastrophic wave of resignations. Mark Driscoll had, by most on record accounts, successfully insulated himself from being the subject of criticism because he was able to “discipline” through informal processes. I mention this because years ago a friend asked me if I thought something could happen to pierce through the shield Mars Hill seemed to have and that Mark seemed to have regarding criticism. My proposal was Mark Driscoll seemed to insulate himself from facing the consequences of his words and actions by using waves of proxies and that at some point that defense that seemed impregnable was going to become a fatal weakness if he pissed those people off. My hunch seems to have been right. Call it a providential guess, though, because a whole lot of things that happened in 2014 were startling, and the Acts 29 ejection of Mars Hill Church was a surprise.

 

2020 interviews on the late Mars Hill: Part 9 The formal investigation, a conflict between MH boards, and Mark Driscoll’s Richard Nixon moment

Since the closure of Mars Hill Sutton Turner has written about how there was a rift in the Mars Hill Board over whether or not to scapegoat him over ResultSource and Mars Hill Global, and I’ve written about this topic in the past, but it’s also worth quoting Turner directly:

 

http://investyourgifts.com/learning-growing-communicating-under-criticism/
Posted by Sutton Turner on April 24, 2015
...When the criticism of Mars Hill Global began in the Spring of 2014, I wanted to communicate about what happened with Global, its history, the financials, and my mistakes. Unfortunately, I was not permitted to discuss these things just as I was not permitted to discuss the ResultSource situation in the detail that I felt it deserved. There was actually a division on the Board of Advisors and Accountability (BOAA) as some men wanted to put all the blame for both Global and ResultSource on me, but I am thankful for men who did not allow that. [emphasis added]

Eight difficult, grievous months have passed since I resigned; four sad, yet hopeful months have passed since Mars Hill held its last service. I began to work on each of these topics through blog posts several months ago with the wisdom, counsel, prayer, and blessing of many friends who are former elders and staff members at Mars Hill.

 

So Turner’s past account of an intra-board rift on the Board of Advisors and Accountability  helps us keep in mind that in 2014 it was possible for there to be a rift within the Mars Hill boards between the Board of Overseers (who would review formal charges and call for investigations) and the Board of Elders (those assigned to actually do the investigating). The history of governance in Mars Hill is probably not more complex than that of any other church but it is still extensive.           

  

Because it will be hard to follow what Throckmorton discusses with Turner and Bruskas without having some background on the boards, let’s do a quick review of who was on which board in late 2014.

so I WAS going to write about another guitar sonata from Matiegka but short incubation process (maybe)

Something has come up that is notable enough I've shifted gears to finally start getting back to writing about a set of topics I wanted to get to over the last few months.  Longtime readers probably won't have to wonder what.  If somebody is finally hosting an interview with a political figure actively running for office then the political history of somebody in the life and death of a 501(c)3 has a news peg too salient to just sit back and let incubate what can be written about.  

There's still going to be stuff about music, of course, and I've been wanting to write about Matiegka Op. 31, No. 3 for a while and to write a piece about how the "death of melody" in pop in the last thirty years has nothing to do with, say, rap, and a lot more to do with Kurt Cobain and Mariah Carey but that stuff can wait.  :)  

guest post at Bryan Townsend's blog by Jack on guitar counterpoint

As long-time readers of this blog will know, I've written about counterpoint, music for guitar, and counterpoint and guitar over the years.  I've also started reading The Music Salon blog in the last couple of years and so, of course, I'm going to link to this guest piece.

http://themusicsalon.blogspot.com/2020/10/guest-post-jack-on-guitar-counterpoint.html

Now I do have Dusan Bogdanovic's Counterpoint for Guitar and will, eventually, I hope, write about it. I've been meaning to blog about his guitar sonata cycle for years now but life is what it is, full of unexpected events and delays and sidetracks, so that hasn't happened yet.  But, while I incubate any number of blogging projects connected to music (like, say, an analysis of Matiegka's Op. 31, Sonata No. 3) I sometimes link to other stuff I read that I want to share.

against both Columbus Day and Indigenous People Day, the statue toppling in Portland of Lincoln and Roosevelt can be a reminder that no American heroes will be heroes to all Americans

Complaining that Columbus was a bad man is more than merely a fad because the vices and hubris of Columbus and the Spanish royal family would be hard to argue against in the twenty-first century ... but I don't see that alternately proclaiming an Indigenous Peoples' Day has any value since it is, of necessity, parasitically dependent on the pre-existing federal holiday. That Columbus Day is paradoxically a victim of its own success probably doesn't matter to people who have settled in their hearts that Columbus' legacy in the Americas is only bad and yet, well, here we are. If you live in the United States right now and you're not 100% Native American able to chart your ancestry down to an unbroken line of never-married-non-Native-peoples-even-once-in-five-centuries then you exist in the United States because, at some point, people who are now identified as "white people" show up.  

Not that they were necessarily that kind of white back then since the concept of whiteness has evolved and changed to the point where Italians and Irish got added into the mix which would not have been taken seriously in the days of, say, Abraham Lincoln or even Teddy Roosevelt, whose statues have been knocked down by protesters, apparently, in Portland as of last night. People from the Mediterranean didn't get viewed as white for quite some time.  Not that anyone has any reason to care what I think but I suggest the day get retired, whatever it is called.  

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/12/us/portland-lincoln-statue-roosevelt.html

A "day of rage" is a useless gesture and, if anything, gives 45 even more ammunition to agitate his supporters into action. This is the kind of thing that John Halle seems to have referred to off and on as "gifts to the right" made by progressives or people who think of themselves as left. Tawna Sanchez and others could point out, besides the fact that tearing down statues and damaging property isn't the same as going through democratic processes, there's also another point, which is that now is not the best time to take a symbolic action that, we're talking about tearing down a Lincoln statue, could just as easily have been done by neo-Confederates who think Lincoln was a power-made bloodthirsty war criminal.

links for the weekend, the Mbird series on ATLA continues; Get Religion on Ravi Zacharias, Rust Belt Catholics & the Nones in 2020; John Ahern on neo-Platonic and Pythagorean background to Pauline instruction on music

First off, a new installment in the Mbird series on Avatar: The Last Airbender went up this last week.

https://mbird.com/2020/10/avatar-and-the-motherly-love-of-god/

by way of Ethan Iverson, Steve Reich's Tehilim; Kyle Gann on the history of minimalism; some thoughts on a style that had any interaction with the pop of its era and the post-war Pax American context that made that possible

A week late but ... Steve Reich had a birthday recently ... 

 https://ethaniverson.com/2020/10/07/steve-reichs-tehillim/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hf2qDuMyWHg

Ethan Iverson rightly points out that it would be hard to find someone more eloquent on the history of minimalism than Kyle Gann but I'm going to go so far as to point you to the chapter where Gann discusses the movement because, as I hope long-time readers know, I've referenced Gann's writings on a semi-regular basis here, at least when the blog is dealing with music.

https://www.kylegann.com/AM20C-8.pdf

Norman Lebrecht trolls Wagner fans by saying "remove Wagner and the rest of music continues ... " as though music history was all about composers and nobody else

 https://slippedisc.com/2020/10/the-hole-in-the-heart-of-wagnerism/

https://thecritic.co.uk/wagner-restless-provocateur/

Wagner brings out the worst in power-seekers. The German word for megalomania is Grossenwahn, or grand delusion. That’s what Wagner does, a reckless reordering of normality. He named his own house Wahnfried, which means peace after madness. He’s a menace.

Ross has an intriguing chapter on Wagner’s gay side. His patron, the homosexual and half-mad King Ludwig of Bavaria, was besotted in every way and Wagner only encouraged his arousal if their letters are anything to go by, forever trying to be all things to all men and women.

“Throughout his life,” writes Ross, “Wagner pursued an ideal of androgyny, a spiritual merger of the sexes.” Although a dominant male to his wives, he sought sexlessness in Parsifal, “androgyny elevated to the level of religion”, in which “the Saviour redeems the world by overcoming the duality of gender.”

His sexual ambiguity spoke powerfully to Oscar Wilde, Aubrey Beardsley and Thomas Mann, whose novella Death in Venice is both an evocation and a validation of Wagnerian themes, “pederasty made acceptable for the cultural middle classes”, as the Berlin critic Alfred Kerr acridly put it.

My impression is that minorities, be they sexual or religious, are drawn to Wagner by a perception of permissiveness and transgression. His operas breach Biblical taboos of adultery and incest. He wants to destroy the world that prejudices those who differ from the norm. He speaks for those who have no voice, hurling their missiles in the face of a worshipful establishment, making the elites at grand opera houses humbly submissive to his art.

While Alex Ross enumerates his conquests among the creative classes, I am not sure he has fully grasped his appeal to our subversive unconscious. He is not alone in this reluctance. Freud, who knew the Wagner operas, was strangely muted in his analysis.

At the risk of undermining his own thesis, Ross quotes Nietzsche in advocating that no statement should ever be made about Wagner without the word “perhaps”. I am well past 600 pages before I see the flaw in his case. Ross states that Wagner is — perhaps — the most influential figure in the history of music. He isn’t. Remove Bach and there is no history. Take out Beethoven and everything grinds to a halt. Eliminate Verdi and there is no Italian opera. Without Stravinsky, no twentieth century.

Remove Wagner, however, and the rest of music continues regardless. Wagner is a one-off, an ego, a restless provocateur. To Wagnerites, he’s the fusion of all arts. To Wagner-sceptics like me, he’s a genetic anomaly, a genius without anxiety.

Norman Lebrecht's piece that is sort of about Alex Ross' book Wagnerism and more about Lebrecht's dislike of Wagner is ... fairly typical for a piece about Wagner.

links for the weekend: an Mbird series started on Avatar: The Last Airbender; the pending end of Internet Monk; assorted music/musicology and gender-y stuff

https://mbird.com/2020/09/introducing-avatar-east-meets-west/

Being the animation fan that I am, I've considered writing about The Last Airbender for years.  For the US-made adventure animated series I'd say the three touchstones of the last thirty some years in American cartoons for me would be: Batman: the animated series (fold the rest of the DCAU in if you want); Samurai Jack, and Avatar: The Last Airbender.  Skip Legend of Korra, though. Legend of Korra is to The Last Airbender what Star Wars Episodes I-III are to the original trilogy.  Pass it by in favor of Miraculous (aka Ladybug and Cat Noir) which is a blast if you watch it with the original French voice ensemble.  I haven't seen Spider-man stories capture the old Lee/Ditko vibe of the original run as well as the French language superhero cartoon has.  Still have to get to seeing season 3, though.  

Annette Kruisbrink: Etude et fugue (style baroque) for solo guitar, with video score

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JV15-9gFgi0

Here's a lovely etude and fugue by Annette Kruisbrink for solo guitar.  I love how the etude theme transforms from duple to triple meter and shifts across registers throughout the etude.  The fugue is beautifully made and the etude idea returns in a couple of chorale forms to wonderful effect in the coda of the fugue.  So I wanted to share the music this weekend and hope you enjoy it as much as I have.

John Ahern's Theses on Church Music and Economics, some semi-organized thoughts

https://theopolisinstitute.com/theses-on-church-music-and-economics/

There aren't 95, for those fearing an evocation of Luther, there are just 31!

I won't be mulling over all of them or in great deal since it's the weekend and this is the internet but I got to wondering something as early as Thesis 1.

Samara Ginsberg plays the theme for Airwolf on 8 cellos

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=73iTHJQaxcY

So I watched the show as a kid and I remember the theme song being pretty good.  1980s shows may not have aged well in terms of production or writing or acting or ... but, anyway, the 1980s was a veritable golden age of opening theme songs. :)  Ginsberg also tackled the opening theme songs for Knight Rider and Thundercats.  Yep, a lot of my childhood comes back with those theme songs. 

Six Miniatures for Guitar & Bass by Harriet Steinke

While music for guitar and doublebass is an esoteric niche that reality means that there are new pieces to discover when you go looking for new works for this ensemble.  Harriet Steinke's Six Miniatures for Guitar and Bass is worth checking out, for instance, and I only discovered it this week.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Nf0wjZD_1E

https://www.harrietsteinke.com/

https://www.harrietsteinke.com/for-sale/six-miniatures-for-classical-guitar-and-double-bass-score

Annette Kruisbrink--Alamanda for guitar solo and plectrum orchestra

I've linked to performances of Kruisbrink's compositions over the years and still hope one day to discuss her chamber music for double bass and guitar as I think that Cirex and Five Dances should form the foundation of any canon of repertoire (pedagogical or repertoire) for these two instruments.

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=47KxvwPHPMs

https://dobermaneditions.com/product/3449-alamanda?lg=en_US

a haiku for 9-30-2020 in the United States

 Abraham Simpson

debating Eric Cartman

is what we're stuck with

Analysis of Matiegka’s Six Sonates Progressives Op. 31, Sonata No. 2 in A minor--a "Type 2" sonata we can study to find out why guitarist composers might decide to not recapitulate first themes (hint, think little first theme that never resolves to its own cadence)

It took a while but I've finally gotten to writing about Matiegka's Sonates Progressives Op. 31, Sonata No. 2 in A minor.  We'll start at the very beginning, a very good place to start. 

Movement  1: Allegro maestoso

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_uIuj6_FcmI

Adam Neely and Ethan Hein discuss the absence of rappers covering rappers--a sideways thought on Robert Gjerdingen's excavation of Neapolitan partimento as a tradition in which kids jammed on existing bass lines as part of learning to master the craft of music

First, Ethan Hein has a post and video discussion about rap covers and how, although there are covers of rap songs rappers do not cover each other's work and how there is a norm against "biting" other rappers.  

http://www.ethanhein.com/wp/2020/adam-neely-video-on-rap-covers/#more-21425

For me one of the most memorable "Major Interpretation" covers of this century was Johnny Cash covering Trent Reznor's "Hurt".  At the risk of a digression, the line between major and minor interpretation can depend a lot on reception history.  Stripping down a song in terms of instrumentation is one of the patterns that shows up, such as Cash covering Reznor but his example is just of many potential case studies.  Anyone remember the cover of "Mad World" by Tears for Fears at the end of Donnie Darko?  I suspect that the difference between "major" and "minor" may depend on popular music being what Theodore Gracyk described as "ontologically thick", which is to say that this timbre created by playing this guitar through that amp with these settings through these pick-ups is important. I haven't played the Telecaster in a while but I know the Tele and a Gibson hollow-body have VERY different sounds and you'll want one sound for one kind of song and the other sound for another.  But I've digressed pretty early into this post ... .

This is fascinating to hear about because there have been anti-rap polemics that have argued that sampling shows a lack of musical creativity (this was my stance twenty-five years ago when I was a teenager and first heard rap). I have, over the course of twenty years, come to a point where hip hop isn't exactly my favorite style of music but, you will note, I have referred to it as music, which it is.  As Leonard Meyer used to put it, a democracy doesn't mean everyone will like the same thing but it means that everyone can and should be prefer to like the music that they like.  

"The Arts Have Failed Us" by way of The Critic, by way of Norman Lebrecht, but if the arts decorate life rather than give it purpose what kinds of decorations can this era afford?

 https://slippedisc.com/2020/09/editorial-the-arts-have-failed-us/

https://thecritic.co.uk/issues/october-2020/the-silence-of-the-arts/

...

Too much can be expected of art. The cliché that art has become a substitute — or even actual — religion for too many civilised people is a commonplace for a reason: they have mistaken what art is there to do. Which, more often than not, is to decorate life, not fulfil it. Art serves purposes, it doesn’t provide them.

...

On the one hand, such a claim is the ultimate bullet to the head of "autonomous music" anyone could have written, for popular magazine standards.  On the other hand ... there's Lebrecht's reaction to suggestions that Beethoven represents a racist and elitist standard ... .

If art decorates life rather than fulfills it then who can afford and would also find suitable to buy the "decoration" of another Beethoven box set?  I love Beethoven's last piano sonata.   Just because I generally hate Beethoven's choral music and think he had a penchant for being a bloviating blowhard in some of his works doesn't mean I don't admire Beethoven!  Mozart and Haydn wrote better choral music because they sang in choirs and anyone who has sung and sung choral literature can feel that two of the Big Three had actually bothered to sing in vocal ensembles!  All the same, since the folks at The Critic made a point of saying art decorates life ... 

A W Nix sermon "Watch Your Close Friend", an early recorded sermon

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8AAH0v1K3Ak

Basically just because. Nix was an early success in the recorded sermon genre.  If in a non-studio setting preachers were known to preach much, much longer than a mere 2 minutes early recording put pretty severe time constraints on sermons, so you could hear this as a kind of blues homily on a passage in Judges (which reminds me that I never got around to blogging about Barry Webb's commentary ... )

The great Blind Willie Johnson may have been one of the great exponents of gospel blues but the musical vocabulary and style he refined was taking shape in the 1920s and onward.  

some back and forth stuff between Fredrik deBoer and Nathan Robinson's shifting take on The Cult of Smart, with an Alan Jacobs interlude

https://fredrikdeboer.com/2020/09/20/here-is-an-email-nathan-robinson-once-wrote-about-my-book/

 Robinson's review of The Cult of Smart is over here and, even for Robinson, it's rather long-winded, even bloviating:

https://www.currentaffairs.org/2020/09/we-dont-know-our-potential/

Perchance to Dream: Dream Divination in the Bible and the Ancient Near East--basically just sharing the title (reading and writing about it may come much later)

 
Perchance to Dream: Dream Divination in the Bible and the Ancient Near East (Ancient Near East Monographs)

https://www.sbl-site.org/assets/pdfs/pubs/9780884142874_OA.pdf

Oh, this looks like it could be a ton of fun!  

It's available via the link but it may be a while before I have anything close to a write up about it.  The next post I was aiming to write would be an analysis of Matiegka's Op. 31, Sonata No. 2 in A minor but, obviously, that post hasn't arrived yet.  It probably has to wait for the weekend.  

Rhodope Song and Dance (Premiere), for Cello and Guitar, by Atanas Ourkouzounov. Duo Villa-Lobos

As I wrote long ago back when I first started this blog, I like the music of Atanas Ourkouzounov. Here's a performance of a duet for cello and guitar he's written.  

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pwLaERmKN_8

Alan Jacobs on gaslighting: WtH on gaslighting accusations as a form of gaslighting; and post hoc declaration about the end of MHC from Driscoll as an internal theological battle about transgenerdism and same sex marriage

 https://blog.ayjay.org/gaslighting/

Lukas Krohn-Grimberghe outlines reasons why the streaming subscription service royalty system currently does not help classical musicians

Lukas Krohn-Grimberghe makes a case for why the contemporary winner takes all music model adversely effects classical music in the era of subscription stream.  Besides the lump sum pot from which musicians get royalties and the fractions of a cent royalties paid per play, there's a third problem that Krohn-Grimberghe says harms the possibility for musicians to net royalties when they're in genres and styles of music that are not at the top of the listening habits of subscribers:

 https://www.wqxr.org/story/technology-music/

There is a third problem — an important detail — that is typically overlooked: In this streaming business model, user fees are effectively re-distributed based on the overall listening behavior of all subscribers: If 5% of all streams this month were accumulated by Beyoncé, 5% of my subscription fee would go to her whether I listened to her music or not. Conversely (and this is why this model is particularly problematic for niche genres like classical), if I listened to only classical music this month, but overall classical streams accounted for 1% of all streams, then only 1% of my subscription fee would be attributed to classical.  

The result is an increasing divide — on one side there is a winner-takes-all mentality in which the superstars and major labels rake in millions, while at the same time there is an erosion of music’s middle class and numerous stories about how artists are suffering from this model, because the revenue they receive is incremental.

There is a simple fix (yet certainly not the sole solution): Distribute revenue on a per-listener basis, which means that your subscription fee would be shared out only to what you listen to. This would result in fairer payouts and most likely redirect revenue to the artists the money actually belongs to. But, as the current model works in favor of those who own the most content, and with the three major labels contributing about 70% of the catalogue, this solution has, so far, been blocked.

haiku in Seattle 9-19-2020 7:52 am

Praise the Lord for wind

that drives away heavy smoke!

Praise the Lord for rain!

Blind Willie Johnson (1897 to 1945)

Today is the 75th anniversary of the death of one of the greatest rural blues musicians the United States has ever given the world, Blind Willie Johnson

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pWb4XcVwIeI

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BNj2BXW852g

https://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/entries/johnson-blind-willie

So little can be firmly documented about Johnson's life that even if there is officially a biography about Johnson reader consensus is that the biography adds little to nothing you can't find out in liner notes.  It "may" be better to run with Jas Obrecht's book Early Blues instead.  There is now agreement that he died September 18, 1945, although an earlier account placed Johnson's death in 1949, so there's an outside possibility that if the later date could be confirmed as correct this wouldn't be the 75th anniversary of Johnson's death, after all.  Still, to go by contemporary consensus, today is that day.

https://www.amazon.com/Early-Blues-First-Stars-Guitar-ebook/dp/B014GKFZXG/ref=sr_1_5?dchild=1&keywords=blind+willie+johnson+biography&qid=1600391861&sr=8-5

https://www.texasmonthly.com/articles/the-soul-of-a-man/

If you have never heard Blind Willie Johnson's music and have any interest at all in early blues then do yourself a favor and get his complete recordings, whether through Amazon or maybe preferably your local music shop. 

https://www.amazon.com/Complete-Blind-Willie-Johnson/dp/B0000028QB

Vox Switched on Pop series discusses Beethoven's 5th and gets pushback ... thoughts on canards about B's "breaking the rules" that he didn't exactly break and on the elevation of a more modern B whose gotten criticism for her Americanist pan-African symbolism that ignores contemporary Africa

https://www.vox.com/switched-on-pop/21437085/beethoven-5th-symphony-elitist-classism-switched-on-pop

Although in terms of sheer airplay and exposure Michael Jackson's Thriller is more prominent, at a cultural-symbolic level Beethoven's Fifth Symphony has had it said in its favor that "we didn't know we needed the Fifth until Beethoven wrote it".  That could, as far as assertions go, be said about Michael Jackson's Thriller.  By way of reports of abusive fathers the King of Pop and the crowned king of the symphony seem to have had some things in common, one of which can be the searing loyalty of their cultist-devotees.

Someone could argue Michael Jackson was "the greatest of all time" because he wrote songs, he could sing, and he could dance while Stevie Wonder could sing and write songs but wasn't a dancer; Marvin Gaye could sing and write songs but couldn't dance like Michael and before long I notice that there's a distinctly post-Wagnerian total-work-of-art argument that is explicit in the case for Jackson being superior to Stevie Wonder or Marvin Gaye.  That such a set of claims on behalf of Jackson reflect what are ultimately and paradoxically Wagnerian ideals of the total work of art transposed on to a single human life as mediated by the cumulative reception history of music journalism and scholarship is only paradoxical in the sense that Wagner's views on race are not those of twenty-first century Americans, by and large.  

Alex Ross' book Wagnerism is out and I will, of course, read it ... if not perhaps at a speedy pace. :)

Fifty years after the initial publication of the first book in his trilogy, Francis Schaeffer's legacy of attempting to grapple with cultural change in the West arguably fell short of contending with the scope of what happened in the long nineteenth century for the simple reason that he never once dealt with the legacy of Richard Wagner and to not deal with the legacy of Richard Wagner is, perhaps even more than with Beethoven, to not really deal with the scale of Wagner's influence in Western European art and thought since his death.

So ... if you want to take a long but not-so-long-as-could-be trek through Wagner and his legacy Alex Ross' new book Wagnerism "might" be the book for you.

And a few reviews, because sometimes you can pick up things from reviews that help you decide whether you want to read the book to begin with.  I made that decision as soon as Ross mentioned he was writing the book but your experience may vary so ...
https://newrepublic.com/article/159260/fateful-harmonies
https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/the-gigantor-of-art/
https://www.artsjournal.com/uq/2020/09/on-wagnerism-by-alex-ross.html

PNW on fire--an unprecedented number of fires in the region, rumors of arson circulating

https://gacc.nifc.gov/nwcc/information/firemap.aspx

There's a startling number of fires burning across the Pacific Northwest.  I have lived in this region my whole life and the sheer number of them is disturbing.  Air quality is at outright hazardous levels in Eugene, OR, for instance.  Air quality here in Seattle is bad, not officially hazardous but in the very unhealthy to breath it category.

Down in Oregon the fire marshal has resigned and is under investigation for entering an active fire zone without authorization from zone overseer, which is relatively late-breaking news for someone in the Seattle area.

a Canadian tale of loss of click-through rate due to algorithms at The Walrus

https://thewalrus.ca/how-algorithms-are-changing-what-we-read-online/

I have something like a tenth of the readership now that I had in the summer of 2014, which is fine.  I don't monetize this blog; don't plan to monetize the blog; and have explained why (more or less).

I know that in the past some folks have claimed that what bloggers do is post stuff that gets more clicks to get more attention but I have at various times taken the opposite approach.  There would be times where readership was high and related to Mars Hill stuff and I would decide to drop all of that kind of blogging to discuss the guitar music of Ferdinand Rebay (which I enjoy and plan to blog about again in the future) or about something like the tenth anniversary box set of The Powerpuff Girls (still a great show!).  I've also adopted a writing style that, I admit, deliberately punishes readers who want to jump straight to the pull-quote or the bottom-line.  I'll even admit that I formulated a writing style as a contrast to Driscoll's public speaking style, if he went Carlos Mencia then I'd go for written fusion of Jane Austen and Joan Didion (who are two of my favorite authors, as a matter of fact).

But because I've never monetized the blog I've never had to worry about "losing the job".  If it were a job I would have lost that job years ago.  I can't say how many people will even bother to read the blog posts I eventually want to write about the guitar sonatas of Angelo Gilardino ... but I'm not looking for audience size and click-through-rate as goals that inform what I write about.  I do agree with the above piece that algorithms that vanish content people could otherwise read has some problems.

Terry Mattingly writes (again) at GetReligion on how, in contrast to the axiom that white evangelical votes turned the election in `16 for Trump, Rust Belt Catholic voters turned out to have done that

In Seattle it has been axiomatic that white evangelicals tipped the scales in favor of Trump's electoral victory in 2016.  For various reasons it has since been popular to hold that one group as symbolically responsible for Trump's win and books have come out describing how and why evangelicalism but specifically white conservative evangelicalism (as distinct from black or Latino or Asian evangelicalism, which does exist, too) turned the election.

As time has gone by, however, more detailed study of the election patterns has revealed, as Terry Mattingly has written before, that research into the demographic spread of voting shows that Rust Belt working class Catholics shifted the election in favor of Trump in 2016.
https://www.getreligion.org/getreligion/2020/9/9/rust-belt-religion-do-political-reporters-get-that-catholics-are-the-key-voters-in-2020

links for the weekend: Social Media use as Freudian death drive; David French on use and abuse of critical race theory; The Critic on nepotism in the arts; Joseph Horowitz plugs Alex Ross' Wagnerism

once again, some links for the weekend

Fredrik deBoer on "Here's a Thing That Used to Happen";a tangential riff from Ellul on how the right of the present (1970s) repurposes myths originated in the left

Since he has a custom of often self-destructing posts I sometimes consider posts that stick with me for posterity.  The whole process of preserving content posted to the internet for the sake of posterity was a habit I picked up on a ... very different author/speaker and set of topics a few years ago but, anyway ...
https://fredrikdeboer.com/2020/09/10/heres-a-thing-that-used-to-happen/

September 10, 2020

the fires in Oregon are bad, there are at present 34 uncontained fires burning across the state. update from Phoenix Preacher

I grew up in western Oregon and so it's very bad news to see fires raging down there where friends and family from my younger years still are.

https://experience.arcgis.com/experience/6329d5e4e13748b9b9f7f33f06a3c376/

As of this morning there are no indications any of the 34 fires across the state are to any degree contained.

Also down in Oregon is Michael Newnham, aka Phoenix Preacher.
https://phoenixpreacher.com/god-is-good-even-through-the-fire/

He and his family are okay but a lot of homes and businesses have burned down to the ground and things are still terrible down there.

I have heard of evacuations and pending evacuations in my loop. 

Easter in September ... at The Trinity Church ...

No one would conventionally have the impression that Easter, whether Western rite or Eastern rite, could be commuted to the day after 9/11 but ... an Easter party will be under way ... in a few hours now.  Where?

https://thetrinitychurch.com/easter-in-september-pastor-mark/

https://thetrinitychurch.com/easter-in-september/

Theopolis Institute conversation on secularity and the problem of church music ... I'm not sure the problem of traditional vs vernacular is a problem of secularity as much as its a challenge of high liturgical white guys not being sure how to get the music of low liturgical POC to fit into their traditions

First I'll load up the relevant links and then, assuming you've read the whole conversation, I'll proceed with some thoughts about it after the break:
https://theopolisinstitute.com/conversations/secularity-and-the-problem-of-church-music/
https://theopolisinstitute.com/conversations/catholic-music/
https://theopolisinstitute.com/conversations/hold-to-the-old/
https://theopolisinstitute.com/conversations/traditional-contemporary-and-the-psalms/
https://theopolisinstitute.com/conversations/a-winsome-inequality/
https://theopolisinstitute.com/conversations/moving-past-musical-dystopia/

Doug Shadle has mentioned the Beethoven problem in US; Madeline Sayet essays the Shakespeare problem in US theater

In his book Orchestrating the Nation, Douglas Shadle described the "Beethoven problem" that American symphonists faced. The core of the double bind presented by critical  reception history could be summed up as follows: 1) if you wrote an American symphony that did not aim to sound like Beethoven then the music you wrote was frivolous and unworthy of being considered a serious contribution to the art of music, however 2) if you wrote an American symphony that did aim to invoke the influence of Beethoven then you were found wanting in comparison to the great master and didn't trust in relying on American inspirations.  

Beethoven's canonical status in nineteenth century music and the evolution of what Mark Evan Bonds has recently called The Beethoven Syndrome meant music was heard as a direct expression of the personal feelings of a great soul and so on (I'm starting into said book).  Well, a comparable canonization process happened for William Shakespeare and so it's no surprise that American indigenous theater in all possible variations of the concept has found the cult of the Bard as repressive as American symphonists and at least some music educators have found the cult of Beethoven.

https://howlround.com/interrogating-shakespeare-system

Doug Wilson lets his base know that if Biden wins the old America is gone, gone for good, and that conservatives will need to learn how to think of their government as fundamentally illegitimate

There is a tone in blogging somewhere between preening snark and self-pitying apocalyptic that permeates punditry across the political spectrum from left to progressive to liberal to centrist to libertarian to social conservative to reactionary in the age of an internet that, if a person, could easily order a glass of gin.  It's the era of the "both sides" response to observations made and an era of roughly the same level of bad faith regarding public polemic and invocations of eschatological terror on behalf of the American republic.  

We've "been here before" but we weren't tweeting so much about it, so social media makes the recurrent cycle of apocalyptic fury and eschatological panic easier to witness and produce.  Worries that the executive would suspend the Constitution; declare martial law by invoking emergency powers; and then self-select lifelong dictatorship have been expressed for decades.  I know people who thought Bill Clinton was going to do it; that W was going to do it; that Obama was going to send Christians to concentration camps and replace the dollar with the amero; and now we anticipate another scenario where the prospect of accepting the legitimacy of the forthcoming electoral outcome is dicey as it's been in the last twenty years with respect to party balkanization, but with a newer and more frenetic sense of eschatological dread on behalf of the United States as a republic.  

Which is how we get to Doug Wilson being, well, Doug Wilson ... talking about politics when people who pay attention to him got a sense that he said somewhere he would stop doing that.

of course they threw a Pinkfloyd song into the Dune trailer, since the band was to write the soundtrack for Alejandro Jodorowsky's Dune film that never was

Most Pinkfloyd fans ought to know this by 2020, but the Pinkfloyd nod was one of many expectable elements to the trailer.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n9xhJrPXop4

and turning back to news in animation, The Venture Bros is cancelled

While for reasons I can't quite understand, Rick & Morty has been one of the most praised shows on Adult Swim, the show I enjoyed more has just gotten cancelled.

https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2020/09/venture-bros-canceled-season-8
https://io9.gizmodo.com/the-venture-bros-has-been-unceremoniously-cancelled-1844982948

It's not that I can't enjoy episodes of Rick & Morty.  It has had some fantastic moments, like the episode "Lawnmower Dog".  But as animated shows with adult themes revolving around parenthood and amoral scientists who may or may not be successful as scientists but are nearly complete failures at being ethical, well-socialized human beings, Venture Bros was mining those themes as far back as 2003, well before Rick & Morty was ever on the air.

Norman Lebrecht on the loss of personality in contemporary violinists, the fault lies with the nature of music education, of course, and the nature of the industries

It is not really a surprise if an older music critic concludes that kids these days have no personality compared to the old greats.  It's been happening in rock music and jazz criticism and it would, of course, be expected in classical music criticism. Thus ...
https://slippedisc.com/2020/09/why-do-most-violinists-now-sound-the-same/

https://thecritic.co.uk/a-worthy-heiress-to-princess-ida/...
The kaleidoscopic art of violin playing had lost its flavour, like chewing-gum, in the pop song, on the bedpost overnight. 

It was not hard to see why. There were two nurseries for violinists — the Russian, which turned out competition winners whom nobody wanted to hear again, and the American, which ran a conveyor belt from Dorothy DeLay’s teaching room at Juilliard to Isaac Stern’s secretary’s agency across the road.
...

links for the weekend, somewhat Atlanticist ruminations at The Atlantic on the demise of the US and New York; the dour path artists face; and the racist nature of the 19th century symphonic canon

A few links for the weekend, starting with stuff from The Atlantic, as is so often the case:

since 2019, an official 180 degree turn from Mark Driscoll on interpreting Genesis 6:1-4 ... so he's caught up to the last thirty years of Enochic scholarship but ... why would Satan try to replicate the Incarnation before it happened?

A year and a half ago Driscoll publicly did a 180 on his take on Genesis 6:1-4.  So he does change his views, and has been, for those who have mistakenly still referred to him as a Calvinist when he's said the TULIP is garbage (although the TULIP itself is more recent than many non-Calvinists might realize).  So ... Genesis 6:1-4 can now be thought of as referring to precisely the angelic-human hybrids that Driscoll said couldn't be what Genesis was referring to in the Mars Hill Genesis series circa 2004-2005:

https://www.facebook.com/pastormark/videos/does-genesis-6-teach-that-aliens-mated-with-women-and-created-a-super-race/591300321339707/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9EMwsjyL9ow

an era of not fact-checking non-fiction books ...

In light of years past where documenting citation failures was part of what happened at this blog, alongside keeping track of factual errors in some books ... these recent articles are not really surprising.  Disappointing ... but not surprising.  

https://www.esquire.com/entertainment/books/a33577796/nonfiction-book-fact-checking-should-be-an-industry-standard/

https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2014/09/why-books-still-arent-fact-checked/378789/

thematically ... this unfortunately seems of a piece with a book I picked up that I read about on Jim West's blog ... the con around the fabricated Gospel of Jesus' Wife

https://www.amazon.com/Veritas-Harvard-Professor-Gospel-Jesuss/dp/0385542585/ref=sr_1_1?dchild=1&keywords=veritas&qid=1599229058&sr=8-1

Dusan Bogdanovic: Danse et Fugue for solo guitar

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fZZhl3ZBCOY

Still meaning to write about the Bogdanovic Guitar Sonatas 1 through 4 but that will take time to even start setting up.  Meanwhile, here's a fun short dance and fugue for guitar. 

Joseph Horowitz: Don't tell aspiring young musicians orchestras are better than ever, tangential link to Thomas Ades premiere via LSO having no one attending

Joseph Horowitz has posted about things to not tell aspiring young musicians about the state of contemporary orchestras and orchestral life in the United States. What sticks with me, as a guitarist, is an axiom shared long ago about what the orchestras was (or is?) supposed to represent, which may shed some light on contemporary arguments against (and pleas for) representation:

Roger Scruton vs Schenkerian theory circa 1997, a review of Scruton's extensive argument against the relevance of Schenker's theory and of all `deep structure' theories of music

I admit that I am not an academic and so academics will have every reason to ask why I would bother commenting on an academic dispute or a range of disputes that have emerged in the wake of Philip Ewell’s polemic regarding the theory and person of Heinrich Schenker. Truth be told, I am glad I never bothered to study Schenkerian analysis; the last few weeks have featured debates that have reminded me why I was glad that I never got around to such study; and that all of this has transpired in the wake of Roger Scruton’s death has reminded me that Roger Scruton made a lengthy argument against the relevance and viability of Schenkerian theory in all its forms as far back as 1997.

Chadwick Boseman 1976-2020

https://www.theguardian.com/film/2020/aug/29/chadwick-boseman-obituary

Read the news this morning.  Don't have much to say other than it's sad news.  If Marvel studio suits recast that will be a pretty bad mistake is about all I have to say at the moment.  You could no more recast T'Challa at this point than you could recast Tony Stark. 

I hadn't spotted that Boseman was in a film with Delroy Lindo!  Da 5 Bloods is going to have to get on my to-get-to list of films. 

Fredrik deBoer's "is the second coming coming" some brief thoughts on the overlaps between apocalyptic literature, eschatological crisis, and religious and Marxist apocalyptic

Before it probably self-destructs I wanted to shared this post from DeBoer because he has some brief but significant comments on post-apocalyptic fiction as a genre and fulcrums of cultural change that happen in those kinds of stories that never seem to happen in reality.

John Halle's take on the Ewell presentation, two of the three claims about Schenker are easily proven but the third is more debatable

John Halle's apparently initial response to Ewell is moderately long but a relatively quick read.  While I suspect that liberals, progressives and leftists may differ on a number of points Halle makes I try to keep the three categories very distinct, much like I try to maintain a distinction between Buckley style conservatives, Pat Buchanan types, Glenn Beck types, Ayn Rand types, etc.  Halle's overall case that Ewell's approach to Schenker misconstrues which invidious ideology is most responsible for Schenker's most ghastly ideas (I couldn't resist pulling a Taruskin by using "invidious", sorry); and that rejecting Schenker's hierarchical presuppositional approach in music analysis risks becoming what Chomsky has called "a gift to the right" could certainly be subject to spirited debate.  That's obviously not what I plan to have go on here, just to be clear, but I want to mention that preliminary summary of Halle's writing before getting to extensive quotation after the break:

is there any other kind of populism in the arts today than "authoritarian populism"? Some thoughts on Ian Pace's comments on Stuart Hall and authoritarian populism

Charles Rosen, in theThe Classical Style (ISBN 0-393-31712-9 PBK), stated that by the 1790s Haydn had developed and refined a style that was both deliberately popular and steeped in the intellectual and practical riches of learned technique.  

Only for one brief historical period in the operas of Mozart, the late symphonies of Haydn, and some of the Schubert songs, has the utmost sophistication and complexity of musical technique existed alongside—or better, fused with—the virtues of the street song. (page 329)

I'm aware that there are cases made that the "canon" of dead white guys is racist, however, I am not quoting Rosen's work as a boilerplate defense of dead white guys in music.  I happen to love Haydn's music and think Mozart is over-rated and over-played.  My primary point in quoting Rosen is to point out something he said about Haydn's work, even if (and perhaps especially if) we're confining discussion of music written by the "canon" of dead white guys, that there was a brief historical period in the operas of Mozart and the late symphonies of Haydn as well as in Schubert songs where there was no opposition between the popular and the learned.  

Contemporary academic discussions of populism since 2016 have a strong current of defining "populist" and "populism" in authoritarian terms.  I've discussed Jacques Ellul's "populist agitator" propagandist in the past yet in the arts one of my concerns in the last four years has been that populist ideas have been defined in such strictly pejorative terms the very idea that there can be any positive populist impulse has been moved off the proverbial table.  Thus ... I'm half skeptical of Ian Pace's skepticism about authoritarian populism not because there's nothing to the concern as stated but because I'm wondering if there's any other kind of populism these days in the minds of academics than authoritarian populism.  I'll proceed to quotes from Pace on that topic.

https://ianpace.wordpress.com/2020/07/01/my-contribution-to-the-debate-on-authoritarian-populism-and-impure-futures-the-legacy-of-stuart-hall/

HT Bryan Townsend--Rick Beato proposes why people hate jazz (they don't understand it) cross referencing accounts in classical music of why virtuoso variation forms have been frowned on for two centuries

So Bryan Townsend linked to a video explaining why people hate jazz.  He couldn't get past five minutes into it.  I ... skimmed into about ten minutes.  

http://themusicsalon.blogspot.com/2020/08/rick-beato-on-why-people-hate-jazz.html

Fredrik DeBoer on "the nobody problem" the Accelerants who escalate vitriol on social media can do so because no one of the mob of them is significant enough to keep track of their cumulative conduct

In his tradition of usually self-destructing posts ...

Joël and Gilbert Impérial perform Ferdinand Rebay's Sonata for viola and guitar in D minor, Satz I.

A pretty strong candidate for most memorable and effective chamber sonata for viola and guitar anyone has written that I know about. 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SFwQtCV3a6E

There's a new release from Naxos that features this sonata
https://www.naxos.com/catalogue/item.asp?item_code=8.573992

The CD is a fun listen and I'm hoping to eventually write in more detail about the sonatas featured on the disc but this weekend was not the weekend for that.

8-15-2020 in the Emerald City (a haiku)

Here in Seattle

it's 96 degrees with

an overcast sky

Sutton Turner clarifies two questions regarding "bullet proof vest?" and severance pay correction, there was a severance pay some time after a Ballard sale

While I had not intended to post about this topic until I had more time to assemble background material, Turner has published the interview in two parts and also, more recently, published a clarifying statement.  Plus, this particular sunny Sunday the heat proper has not kicked in yet, so before it gets into the early 90s, let's get this out of the way. 

For those who haven't read the interview ... 

https://investyourgifts.com/honest-answers-1/
https://investyourgifts.com/honest-answers-2/

https://www.wthrockmorton.com/2020/07/28/blog-theme-mars-hill-church-interview-with-dave-bruskas-and-sutton-turner/  

https://www.wthrockmorton.com/2020/07/30/blog-theme-mars-hill-church-interview-with-sutton-turner-and-dave-bruskas-part-two/ 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EkPwP4ng5l4&t=1308s 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aWzR1WV91qo

Discussing the interview itself is still an incubating project. However, I want to highlight that there have since been two clarifications from Turner at his blog, published August 5, 2020.  There were two points Turner wanted to clarify, corrections sent his way about two questions: 1) did Driscoll wear a bulletproof vest? (Turner and Bruskas couldn't remember ever seeing that) and 2) what severance payout did Driscoll get after resignation (Turner didn't recall there being the funds for such a thing in later 2014 while he was still there).  There are corrections given by Turner to both those statements and it is those corrections we'll look at in some detail. I'm aware that some view Turner or Bruskas or both as spinning things.  That's possible but ... having chronicled the life and times of Mars Hill off and on for ... a decade ... Turner's corrections do not contradict anything I've managed to document here and the corrections he's given show that, as he admitted in the larger interview, there WAS stuff he didn't have access to on some questions.  So ... read Turner's statement that is reproduced after the break if you want to read more:

https://investyourgifts.com/clarification/

links for the weekend, first Terry Teachout on Julian Bream, there's a book out on the Gospel of Jesus' Wife forgery, and assorted links on stuff in the vein of American civic religions in electoral and academic contexts

There's stuff incubating in the offline world that can, perhaps, get published later. For now, though, links for the weekend stuff.

In keeping with the news cycle, Terry Teachout revisits his earlier comments about the guitarist Julian Bream.
https://www.artsjournal.com/aboutlastnight/2020/08/julian-bream-r-i-p.html

...
Julian Bream, who gave a recital Tuesday at Alice Tully Hall, made his professional debut a half-century ago. When he started out, guitar recitals consisted of fluff: second-rate Spanish pieces, miscellaneous arrangements and transcriptions, encore-type lollipops. Today, classical guitarists have a huge repertoire of challenging music on which to draw, much of it—including most of the best of it—either discovered or commissioned by Bream. No one since Andres Segovia has had so powerful an influence on guitar playing, and no one has played the guitar better.

...

I recall Matanya Ophee saying that if all you want to do is play "lollipop" music and your audience wants that, great, but that if you aspire to more challenging and ambitious music to not follow the herd instinct.

more links after the break

a little something about Bream from the NYT obit: he started out on piano and cello and took up guitar after hearing Django Reinhardt

There's something that jumped out at me in the New York Times obituary of Julian Bream, who was one of the most significant pioneers of what we generally call the classical guitar in the West.  There are several things that sprung to mind but it's easier to highlight them in the obit itself than provide any further introduction:

Philip Ewell: "Exactly seven persons have written to me ... mean commentary about my work ... all pianists", because white guy pianists committed knowingly or not to a Germanophile art-religion would have the most to lose from Ewell's proposals

https://www.icareifyoulisten.com/2020/07/5-questions-philip-ewell-author-music-theory-white-racial-frame/
...

HOW HAVE YOUR COLLEAGUES RESPONDED TO YOUR WORK, AND HAS ANYONE PLEDGED TO MAKE CHANGES TO THEIR OWN RESEARCH AND TEACHING BECAUSE OF IT? 

The response has been overwhelmingly positive. Over two years ago, when I began this work, I knew that I’d lose some friends and colleagues once it came out. I speculated that, for every friend/colleague lost, I’d gain two or even three more. I was wrong. For every friend lost there have been more like 20–30 friends gained. It’s not even close. Exactly seven persons have written to me with angry, sarcastic, and mean commentary about my work. None of them engage my scholarship, but just call me an “idiot,” “racist,” or “inept.” They are all white men. And, also significant I think, all pianists.   ...

Julian Bream, 1933-2020

https://www.bbc.com/news/amp/entertainment-arts-53777949
https://www.theguardian.com/music/2020/aug/14/julian-bream-british-classical-guitarist-dies-aged-87
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/14/arts/music/julian-bream-dead.html
https://slippedisc.com/2020/08/sadness-at-the-death-of-julian-bream/
Bream playing Benjamin Britten's Nocturnal After John Dowland
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uKh7azSiBn8

Bream playing movement 1 of Toru Takemitsu's All in Twilight, one of my favorite works of any written for the guitar.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bVW0McHG2Vo

I know for many a guitarist Segovia was the greatest 20th century guitarist but for me it's pretty much always been Julian Bream, both for his playing music ranging from the Elizabethan era to contemporary music by Britten, Takemitsu and William Walton (or Martin, for that matter) to his role in commissioning works from contemporary composers.  Bream's musical life distills for me what a musician ought to do, cultivating a deep knowledge of the musical past that is equally attentive to the possibilities of the musical present and future.  I'm not sure I even have more I could meaningfully add to that.   Maybe I'll have more thoughts later but at the moment I don't.

Ivo Papazov - "Ratchenitza"/Trio Ralchev-Ogura-Ourkouzounov

Mie Ogura and Atanas Ourkouzounov have been my favorite flute and guitar duo for at least a decade by now and in the last year they've been playing trios with accordionist Petar Ralchev.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=505pO11tzws

I sure hope there can be an album of music from this trio. :) 

Lebrecht on the demise of criticism, by way of linking to a piece at The Critic on the low state of UK theater criticism

Lebrecht links to a piece at The Critic about the end of an era in British theater criticism
https://slippedisc.com/2020/08/ed-of-the-line-for-the-nightly-critic/

Ferdinand Rebay: Sonate in einem Satz, performances by Luiz Mantovani (who finished a dissertation on Rebay recently) and by Eduardo Fernandez

Because this is also a blog that focuses on music, and started off with that aim, there's more performances and recordings of Ferdinand Rebay going on, particularly of his Sonata in one movement. Links below

Justin Dean interview with Jeff Cox

We'll get to this in time, I hope, but for now links will suffice.  Conversation directly pertinent to the history of Mars Hill starts about 30 minutes in.  This adds some pertinent background to the information shared by Turner and Bruskas in their conversation with Throckmorton but it will take some time to go through all the material to explain what is new, even though it won't seem new to people who will feel like they've heard it all before on the one hand and will seem absurdly arcane inside baseball to people who don't have twenty years worth of history observing the scene.  Sorry about that, that's just the nature of this kind of project.  Anyway ... links

https://www.listennotes.com/podcasts/real-life-convos-with-josh-cox-josh-cox-svfaSGgZIrq/

https://anchor.fm/real-life-convos/episodes/Episode-Three-Justin-Dean---Church-Digital-Communications-Guru-eh15uh

per past stated policy, comments always automatically go into moderation and are not necessarily ever published.  That's more applicable now that I'm in the process of cross referencing interviews and incubating some thoughts on a few things that have finally been shared on the record.

postlude to Throckmorton interview with Turner and Bruskas: Justin Dean tweets links to interview, discovers he's been blocked by Driscoll

Now I've written that I loathe Twitter in general and refuse to use it. This does not mean I don't keep track of things on Twitter that seem relevant to me.  So, for instance, it did not pass unnoticed that Justin Dean tweeted links to Warren Throckmorton's interview with Sutton Turner and Dave Bruskas.

Norman Lebrecht gets Phil Ewell on my radar by ranting about him, reminds me why I'm glad I didn't go to grad school in music

Well ... it's as though Norman Lebrecht has this penchant for introducing me to musicologists by ranting about them that, had he not ranted about them, I might never have heard of them.  Whereas I think Haydn is the bee's knees and that both Beethoven and Mozart were above average but terribly over-hyped, Lebrecht seems to treat it as actually blasphemy against art-religion to say Beethoven was a better than average composer who benefited from fitting into the mainstream of his time and place (i.e. by being a white guy).

for those who read much faster than people talk, Sutton Turner has published transcripts of his talk with Throckmorton and Bruskas

https://investyourgifts.com/honest-answers-1/

https://investyourgifts.com/honest-answers-2/

It's no less than about 20,000 words, though, so it won't necessarily be a faster read for everyone than listening to two hours of conversation.  

Other projects have my attention but I hope to eventually discuss the interview and a few things that were and were not discussed in it.  It's got a ton of inside baseball stuff that won't necessarily (or quickly) make sense at every point in the conversation to someone who wasn't fairly closely connected to events and people at MHC over the course of it's 18 year run. 

Maren Haynes dissertation, "Punk Rock Calvinists Who Hate the Modern Worship Movement": Ritual, Power, and White Masculinity in Mars Hill Church's Worship Music

The recent interview Warren Throckmorton had with Sutton Turner and Dave Bruskas featured, among other things, mention that there was some tension between Mark wanting his products promoted and the nascent would-be Mars Hill Music getting off the ground.  That reminded me that I got word of a project by Maren Haynes through the University of Washington. The PhD dissertation ...

Warren Throckmorton publishes part 2 of interview with Dave Bruskas and Sutton Turner

It may be July 30th where Warren is, but it's still July 29th here where Wenatchee The Hatchet lives.

So ... 

https://www.wthrockmorton.com/2020/07/30/blog-theme-mars-hill-church-interview-with-sutton-turner-and-dave-bruskas-part-two/

Warren Throckmorton publishes part 1 of interview with Dave Bruskas and Sutton Turner

Part 1 has gone up as of this morning.
https://www.wthrockmorton.com/2020/07/28/blog-theme-mars-hill-church-interview-with-dave-bruskas-and-sutton-turner/

Warren Throckmorton has had conversations with Dave Bruskas and Sutton Turner, slated for publication 7-28-20 and 7-30-20

Since the closure of Mars Hill Church Dave Bruskas and Sutton Turner have come around to a new perspective on their time at Mars Hill.  I've blogged about the eight-part series they did on Older Pastor, Younger Pastor earlier this year.  Perhaps a bigger sign that Bruskas and Turner are open to talking about MHC and reaching out to people might be that they've recently agreed to have on record conversations with Warren Throckmorton, who has announced that he's talked with them and will be publishing the conversations soon.  Direct link after the break.

David del Puerto Guitar Sonata no.1, performed by Jeremy Bass

movement 1
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P1PeB4tcuDU
movement 2
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mAgnPdN3xqA
movement 3
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K5lZTYZBJyc
movement 4
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VRY2vkS2Cfg

three poems about music (two watered down acid and one pure acid)

6-24-2020
Taupin and John wrote
a famous long song based on
"Insert your name here"

6-30-2020
Each day the radio plays "Let it Be"
and I find myself asking "Must it Be?"
The answer to this cannot be a shock.
The Beatles are the Beethoven of Rock.
The only answer there can ever be
is to say that "It must be!  It must be!"

7-10-2020
Train is what you get
if the Spin Doctors did a
Counting Crows cover

The first two poems are about music that I think has been oversold but still basically holds up on repeated listenings.  The last poem is about three bands whose music I loathe.

Michael V Pisani's Imagining Native America in Music is now available on Kindle

Imagining Native America in Music
Michael V Pisani
Copyright (c) 2005 by Yale University
Yale University Press
ISBN-10: 0-300-10893-1 (hardcover: alk. paper)
ISBN-13: 978-0-300-10893-4 (hardcover: alk. paper)

https://www.amazon.com/Michael-V-Pisani-ebook/dp/B001565AOY/ref=sr_1_1?crid=1I0N3N3HKCUVY&dchild=1&keywords=imagining+native+america+in+music+by+pisani%2C+michael+v&qid=1595252839&sprefix=imagining+native+america+in+music+%2Caps%2C222&sr=8-1

Julia Duin at GetReligion on Nina Shapiro's recent Seattle Times coverage of evangelicalism and race in the Puget Sound

https://www.getreligion.org/getreligion/2020/7/21/seattle-times-story-on-evangelical-race-relations-nabs-most-of-the-local-power-players

I was surprised to see a story in the Seattle Times about evangelicals saying ‘we repent’ about racism, mainly because the writer isn’t known for her coverage of people of faith and the newspaper hasn’t exactly been burning the midnight oil on religion news.
Especially anything having to do with evangelicals.  

So I was surprised to see how this story hit up a lot of the major players in the region on this issue. It’s as if someone in the newsroom discovered a long-disused Rolodex of religion sources and actually used it. In the five years I’ve lived here and been reading the Times regularly, I’ve never seen any of these folks — black or white — quoted before.
...