Chris White at Slate says its time to "fullname" all classical composers, but in an era of mononymic pop stars haven't we had the same "problem" in pop music for the history of pop music?

https://slate.com/culture/2020/10/fullname-famous-composers-racism-sexism.html

There will be a time when we’ll go to concerts again. We will buy our tickets, shuffle shoulder to shoulder down the aisle, and find our seats. The lights will dim, and the conductor will walk onto the stage to introduce the program. They might talk about Beethoven, Schumann, and Bartók. And they might talk about Alma Mahler, Florence Price, Henry Burleigh, and Caroline Shaw. Many of us, used to the conventions of classical performance, will hardly notice the difference: “traditional” white male composers being introduced with only surnames, full names for everyone else, especially women and composers of color ...

Going forward, we need to “fullname” all composers when we write, talk, and teach about music. If mononyms linguistically place composers in a canonical pantheon, fullnaming never places them there to begin with. When we say, “Tonight, you’ll be hearing symphonies by Johannes Brahms and Edmond Dédé,” we’re linguistically treating both composers as being equally worthy of attention. And while fullnaming might seem like a small act in the face of centuries of harm and injustice, by adopting a stance of referential egalitarianism, fullnaming at least does no more harm. ...

What the concert scenes will look like remains to be seen.  Norman Lebrecht has been keeping tabs on orchestral crises, some cases of staff slashing, and season cancellations. 

In an era in which pop stars can be identified as Beyonce and Taylor, or we can muse upon the catalogs of Madonna and Prince and Cher and Sade, fullnaming classical composers across the board might sound more cogent to a Slate contributor and editorial than it might sound to other people.  If I asked you to think of a jazz musician whose first name is "Miles" and whose last name is not Davis could you think of anyone?  Anyone at all? I mean, I can't. No ... wait ... sorry I can. Miles Okazaki.  There. Your turn. If I say "Django" can you supply the last name?  If you can, well, let's take as given that jazz has a pantheon of musical luminaries where the first name is all you need and the last name is implicit.  Thelonious, Ornette, Alice, Oscar, Art, McCoy ... if you recognized those musicians on the basis of those first names alone then that, friends, is the same thing that goes on with last names in classical music. 

I mean, think of who has died from the quartet of John, Paul, George and Ringo?  Did I have to name them by last name for you to get the reference?  Thus with Beethoven, Mozart, Bach, and Brahms.  The mononymics for the saints of a musical style may have first rather than last names but pop music has had mononymic call-signs for pioneering musicians since, oh, Satchmo, maybe?  Nobody is going to start referring to the compositional techniques of "Nelson" when "Prince" is already the norm.  If Ciconne writes a chaconne would we call it Ciconne's Chaconne or would Madonna suffice?  

Who was the King of Rock?  How many people will say "Presley"?  How many would say "Elvis?" Who is "The Boss"?  Bruce?  Bruce, who?  

One of the jokes in The Big Lebowski that leans heavily on our ability to predict with minimal information is that moment when the Dude puts in a casette with "Bob" on the tape and the joke is probably not a single person watching the film had to think all that hard about which "Bob" mix tape was about to get played. If the genre were reggae instead of rock "Bob" would automatically refer to someone else and as I've been arguing through constant implicated reference, there's a good chance if you're an American who has spent decades listening to all sorts of music none of the lists of first-names-only I've been deploying is likely to be unfamiliar to you.

There might come a time when Price's symphonies are well-known enough that we can just refer to them as the Price symphonies.  I think we can basically do that now, because if we're talking about symphonists who many Prices are we going to end up talking about. David Price?  Robert Price?  The trouble with a case for fullnaming to offset some unfairly designated pantheon in classical music isn't that there's an annoyingly ubiquitous pantheon in classical music because obviously there is, just as there is an annoyingly ubiquitous pantheon in rock, pop, jazz, and every other commercially recorded style of music.  If I talk about country and just name-drop Hank, Johnny, Merle, Patsy, Dolly, Lucinda and June and you know right off the bat which two of three guys I'm not referring to (i.e. not Jr and not III), well, that proves my point, too.

Now I know that if someone says "Joplin" and a rock fan overhears it they will think "Janis" and a ragtime fan will think "Scott" but within genres a surname can often get the job done.  I know that orchestras can decide to present music by Edward Ellington but, come on, let's not be too hasty to regard Duke's music as emblematic of some kind of unfair system of musical/creative royalty in which the super-stars of an art form can be known by single names, whether in jazz or in classical music or, as I've been demonstrating, pop. 

Fullnaming won't get nearly as much done for William Grant Still's music as a top notch recording of Trouble Island will ... that is if American opera companies actually survive the covid-19 era, which it seems not everyone is sure is going to happen.

It's not that we can't play this game of fullnaming within classical music, it's that the argument for it is advanced in flamboyantly bad faith in relationship to just about every style of popular music from the last 150 years against which classical music could be compared. I'm not going to stop thinking of Scott Joplin as the King of Ragtime because of some qualms about monarchy. I don't see anything inherently wrong with Michael Jackson being thought of as the King of Pop. The honorifics of shorthand exist across musical styles. The Fab Four can still be the Fab Four even if I find them annoyingly over-rated. 

POSTSCRIPT 10-28-2020

https://slippedisc.com/2020/10/now-france-goes-into-lockdown/

From Friday, said President Macron, everyone must stay at home until the end of November.
The only exceptions are essential work or medical reasons.
He’s still speaking, but it’s the end for concerts and opera.

So there's that. If the era of the symphony, for whatever reason, doesn't make it through the era of covid-19 lockdowns what we colloquially think of as classical music (or what Kyle Gann has at times called post-classic music) will still probably get made. In an age in which more people know the music of Prince than of Persechetti (and that will probably always be the case moving forward) let's at least not fool ourselves into thinking that demanding a change in mononymic customs in a single genre of music is going to change that genre of music.  We might be on the cusp of having to reconceive the  nature of what kind of music even gets played. My hunch, as I've been writing for years, is that the age of the symphony has probably passed but the age of the song is strong at the popular level and there's still plenty of possibilities with chamber music. Now if someone is able to go record Price's string music I'd be happy to get the recording.  

POSTSCRIPT 10-30-2020

Let's add something else to consider, mononymic reference in classical music is not invariably a reference to an elevated god of the art.  Literally nobody in the history of classical music writing is going to say Diabelli of the Diabelli variations wasn't an opportunistic hack who had a spotty record as a composer compared to others.  Mozart ripped on Clementi's compositions and these are two composers from the time of the Big Three who are known because somebody famously slammed their music in comparison to other classical composers who are also known by mononyms.  Pretending mononymic shorthand only signals elevation and veneration in classical music is a lazy bad faith assertion across the board to anyone who has read extensively on the history of the styles and forms. 

links for the weekend: Jim West on the irony of Charisma peddling spells to break spells; NYRB pieces on Boulez and Wagner; Mbird has its ATLA series

First, Jim West noted the irony of a Charisma-published article that sells spells that break spells. Selling spells that break spells is one of a number of reasons I'm ex-Pentecostal and ex-charismatic and while the topic of how paradoxically anti-witchcraft teaching in that wing of ... we'll call it Christianity anyway, resembles witchcraft is a topic I want to take up at some other time, links for the weekend isn't where I plan to do that in any detail!

Ethan Hein blogged on Miles Davis' "So What", my thoughts on the elegance of symmetrical scale and the Neapolitan substitution that keeps "So What" from being generic art rock i-IV groove

http://www.ethanhein.com/wp/2020/so-what/

Ethan Hein does an excellent job breaking down what makes "So What" work phrase by phrase and lays out its AABA form.  For those with more of a classical music theory background what should jump out about that form is that it can be thought of as a kind of rounded binary form.  I don't want to digress into how familiar Davis was with both jazz and classical music because I want to jump straight into why this assymetric form is so crucial to making "So What" a magnificent composition.

The AABA form has two different aspects that make this simple composition pregnant with possibilities. The first is that the composition can feel like a kind of cut-short 12-bar blues by way of hypermeter; every two bars of 4/4 can be thought of as halves in the call and response phrases.  There are multiple levels of 4-to-the-bar going on.  Davis doesn't do the conventional V-I finishing pattern that would come if this were a conventional blues and lets the AABA continue whereas a more blues-traditional form would have had an AABAB'A pattern that gave us the three-phrase-at-the-macro-level pattern that's common in archetypal 12-bar. He was playing with a norm in phrasing and phrase-length that, if you don't have that in mind about how a blues "should" sound, won't make sense to you. Or as Hepokoski and Darcy put it in Elements of Sonata Theory there can be norms of form or gesture or listening that are in the background that can guide our understanding of the conventions or "deformations" of a musical work that are nowhere in the foreground of the musical work we're analyzing. Now I'll get to the second thing that stands out for me about this work.

"So What", within its AABA has an asymmetric phrase structure that is amplified by a harmonic substitution that counteracts what would be a pedestrian symmetry within the mode if no substitution were made.  I'm talking about the formal assymetry of the D dorian to E flat dorian.  That E flat dorian section is paradoxical because, of course, the dorian mode is symmetrical and if you invert it the mode is has the same intervals going down as going up, unlike, say, an inversion of the intervals of the phrygian mode that will give you the lydian mode.  The risk of using dorian is that because it's a symmetrical scale if you did do a traditional i-iv blues change there would be no momentum at all, which is why Davis' decision to do a neapolitan substitution that pivots dorian from D to E flat is such a brilliant compositional move.  There's still a "IV" function and it's still in exactly the place it ought to be if we were hearing a 12-bar blues but it is an abrupt Neapolitan substitution that keeps the dorian scale above the new-found harmony.  

Now dorian in jazz and rock has long since become commonplace.  If I were to pick a favorite long-form dorian-based piece it would be Frank Zappa's "Nine Types of Industrial Pollution" at the start of Uncle Meat and "King Kong" at its end.  Those are cool as they go but when you hear them you hear that there's a i-IV floating-in-space vibe.  Through the 1960s and 1970s the dorian i-IV progression became a thorough-going psychedelic/art rock cliche, perhaps nowhere more prominently used than at the starting song of Pinkfloyd's Dark Side of the Moon, "Breathe" I wrote about the use of the dorian mode and the i-IV progression within it as a way to understand the concept album all the way back in 2007. Now I'm not meaning to suggest the mode was really what they were consciously thinking through, I think music theory in general is too post hoc to be used to say something like that.  Plus I kinda figured everyone in the band was high as a kite and that there was more of a literary and "hey, this vamp sounds cool" vibe going.  

Well, before psychedelic rock and prog rock beat the i-IV groovy dorian i-IV thing into the ground Miles Davis didn't want to have a work that has become a touchstone in modal jazz be "that" modal. He introduced an elegantly simple and brilliant substitute for what would have been the i-IV in a stereotypical dorian progression with a flat II (i.e. Neapolitan) substitution.

Get Religion discusses Catholic and Latino voting blocs this week, reminding me that Driscoll mentioned the Latino Catholic-to-Protestant pivot in A Call to Resurgence

Terry Mattingly had a piece this week that got me reminiscing about a book from 2013. Mattingly has written about how Catholic voters may be more critical to 2020 than mainstream press coverage tends to consider.

 

Mattingly recently wrote about how Latino voters are a topic of recent NYT coverage describing them as “politically homeless”:

 

2020 interviews on the late Mars Hill: Part 2 Driscoll to Nieuwhof in 2020, “ … I’m not going to say I’m Jesus and I’ve never done anything wrong … .”, a review of post MHC books in which Driscoll compared himself to Jesus, and Jesus to himself.

There’s something else about Mark Driscoll’s conversation with Carey Nieuwhof that needs mentioning.  Driscoll told Nieuwhof, as quoted above, “ … I’m not going to say I’m Jesus and I’ve never done anything wrong you know.” that’s a hasty transcript on the punctuation side.

 

The thing is, having read Mark Driscoll’s two big post-Mars Hill Church book releases through Charisma House I was struck by the ways in which Mark Driscoll compared himself to Jesus or compared Jesus to himself. 

 

Now let’s take a visit back to Spirit-Filled Jesus and see whether or not Mark Driscoll hasn’t had moments where he did write as though he knew how it felt to be Jesus carrying His cross to the place of the skull.  Fair Use precedents being what they’ve been, I think it’s necessary to ask whether or not Mark Driscoll can consistently say “ … I'm not going to say I'm Jesus and I've never done anything wrong … .”

 

2020 interviews on the late Mars Hill: Part 1 Mark Driscoll’s interview with Carey Nieuwhof, sharing how Mars Hill had an internal conflict over transgenderism and same sex marriage, a counter-claim to every account of Mars Hill decline presented in the last five years

2020 turned out to be an unusual year in post-Mars Hill Church chronicling, because Mark Driscoll broached the topic of the late Mars Hill in an interview with Carey Nieuwhof promoting the new Driscoll book Win Your War, but more crucially because former executive elders Sutton Turner and Dave Bruskas went on the record sharing their roles in the late Mars Hill. If it may be asked by jaded readers why anyone should take any of these accounts at face value, nobody said we had to, but the confluence of testimonies do take on a coherent if unsettling shape.

https://www.wthrockmorton.com/2020/10/17/mark-driscoll-gets-political-with-sen-martha-mcsally/

Warren Throckmorton has spotted that Mark Driscoll plans to interview Senator Martha McSally.

 

To the extent that Mark Driscoll feels confident enough to wade into interviewing a political figure it seems to that extent it is necessary to discuss how the political narratives of what happened in the late Mars Hill have taken shape as presented by the three former executive elders of the former Mars Hill Church.

So we get to Part One 

Mark Driscoll’s interview with Carey Nieuwhof, sharing how Mars Hill had an internal conflict over transgenderism and same sex marriage, a counter-claim to every account of Mars Hill decline presented in the last five years

 

Back in March 2020, Carey Nieuwhof had Mark Driscoll as a guest to discuss the new Mark and Grace Driscoll book Win Your War and talk about, among other things, the last days of Mars Hill Church.

2020 interviews on the late Mars Hill: Part 3 Spirit-Filled Jesus and Mark Driscoll’s observations on what can happen to a leader, some other leader, “you” and not “me”

Near the end of his first book post-Mars Hill, Mark Driscoll shared an extensive description of something he’d seen in his twenty years of ministry, a process of disillusionment that often happens, especially in the life of a leader.  Which leader?

 

 Well, you’re going to have to guess who it is since Driscoll prefers to use the word “you” rather than “I” for the following passage, a passage that’s a few pages long and which I feel obliged to share (with all Fair Use precedents and considerations in mind because I’ve been surprised at how seemingly no earlier reviews or journalistic discussions of Spirit-Filled Jesus have discussed this passage at all). There’s a not at all subtle pivot from “I” to “you” in this passage:

 

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.