45's spiritual advisor Paula White declares "victory" for him, Julia Duin asks who's covering this at GetReligion and asks whether Pentecostals are behind Trump's refusal to concede

https://julieroys.com/bizarre-prayer-paula-white/

Ex-Pentecostal though I am for many reasons I'm finding this is a weirdly apt period in which to be reading on the topics of spiritual warfare, diabology, exorcism and their connections to American cultural activity.  It's something that indirectly cropped up in reading Anthony Heilbut's books on Gospel music where in The Fan Who Knew Too Much he pointed out that more traditional evangelicals have not been as prominent in the Trump administration as Word Faith and prosperity teachers such as Paula White.  I.e. while an increasingly religiously illiterate mainstream press has tended to fixate on the evangelicals who were regarded as having put Trump in office Heilbut has tracked Pentecostal music for enough decades to know the differences between white conservative evangelicals of the Graham variety and the more Pentecostal/charismatic types like T. D. Jakes, Creflo Dollar or Paula White.  The prosperity teachers are still regarded as heretics by more traditionalist evangelicals (and for that matter old school Pentecostals across white and black Pentecostal church movements if memory serves).  

Julia Duin has written at moderate length about the significance of the kind of charismatic/Pentecostal movement Paula White is part of here:

https://www.getreligion.org/getreligion/2020/11/9/no-ones-covering-how-trumps-loss-is-a-faith-crisis-for-charismatics-and-pentecostals

links for the weekend: old stuff from The Bellows on a double horseshoe theory of class conflict and academic guild behaviors; John Gray on American solipsism; Wilsonian handwringing; and a withdrawal from ECFA

Living in such curious times as we do some writing projects take more time and focus than I have had lately. This being early November 2020 with me living in the United States I trust I don't have to explain too much as to why.  Musical analysis and music blogging has been temporarily on hold, as has blogging about things connected to the history of a former 501(c)3, although I want to mention that on that orbit of topics Justin Dean had a fascinating (for me) conversation on the Bad Christian podcast I want to eventually blog about.  But for this weekend, links for the weekend will suffice.

https://www.thebellows.org/the-double-horseshoe-theory/

As an attempt to explicate class warfare Lind's proposal seems to have some merit. I'm reading deBoer's The Cult of Smart and also Lind's The New Class War lately. Reading Lind reminded me of a willfully ridiculous set of jokes in Whit Stillman's Metropolitan about the difference between a titled aristocrat and an untitled aristocrat with a member of the latter saying the former are "the scum of the earth". Lind proposes that the underclass is basically not relevant to an examination of the political battles within the overclass and that the competing interests and allegiances of the professional bourgeois and the small business bourgeois can help us get a clearer sense of what neoliberalism in its progressive and reactionary forms has been up to in this millenium.  As Lind puts it:

At the risk of being overly schematic I would suggest that the “center,” “left” and “right” of America’s top-thirty-percent politics can be mapped imperfectly onto the managerial elite, the professional bourgeoisie and the small business bourgeoisie. In particular, both DSA progressivism and Tea Party conservatism can be understood as different strategies for enlisting the power of government to stave off the proletarianization of the constituents of the two bourgeoisies

The goal of so-called progressivism in 2020s America is to expand employment opportunities for college-educated, center-left professionals, while adding new wings to the welfare state that are tailored to their personal needs. The slogan “Defund the police” is interpreted by the bourgeois professional left to mean transferring tax revenues from police officers, who are mostly unionized but not college-educated, to social service and nonprofit professionals, who are mostly college-educated but not unionized. The enactment of proposals for free college education and college debt forgiveness would disproportionately benefit the professional bourgeoisie, not the working-class majority whose education ends with high school. Likewise, public funding for universal day-care allows both parties in a two-earner professional couple to maximize their individual incomes and individual career achievements by outsourcing the care of their children to a mostly-female, less well-paid workforce at taxpayer expense.

...

The upper horseshoe schema explains American political factions in terms of different combinations of its elements. When the professional bourgeoisie allies itself with the Managerial Elite, you get Clinton-Obama-Biden left-neoliberalism. When the small business bourgeoisie allies itself with the Managerial Elite, you get George W. Bush-Paul Ryan-Nikki Haley right-neoliberalism.

links for the weekend: an LARB take on Kate Bowler on evangelical women celebrities/histories of women prophets in ANE; reviews of White Too Long; the Mbird series on ATLA gets to Zuko

 

https://marginalia.lareviewofbooks.org/evangelical-women-celebrities-a-crisis-of-authority/

In The Preacher’s Wife, Kate Bowler introduces readers to a group of powerful evangelical women leaders. Through this cohort, the book describes the rise of a new type of feminine power, one readily on display in the wives of some of America’s most prominent megachurch pastors—Victoria Osteen, for instance, who is married to prosperity preacher Joel Osteen. The power wielded by these high-profile women is impressive. But, Bowler argues, the authority that “celebrity” women leaders garner is “precarious” because this kind of influence requires that women constantly embody feminine ideals, and leaves them vulnerable to the whims of the market and dependent on the stability of a husband’s pastorate.

...

Having recently finished reading Prophets Male and Female: Gender and Prophecy in the Hebrew Bible, the Eastern Mediterranean, and the Ancient Near East, I wonder how conversant contemporary American authors are with the history of women in prophetic capacities in the Ancient Near East who aren't, you know, specialist in that field.  That women were permitted to be prophets in Greece, Assyria, Israel and early Christianity is well-known.  Esther Hamori has a whole monograph devoted to divination and women in biblical literature that's worth reading, contributed to Prophets Male and Female and co-edited a volume on dream divination in the Bible and the Ancient Near East I'm hoping to start soon.  All of the above is to suggest that the proposal that there is a new type of feminine power ... how new is it?  What makes it new?  I can get to the Bowler book eventually, maybe, after I'm done reading thirty some books on diabology, exorcism, the Watcher traditions and with a few add-ons about prophecy and divination in biblical literature but I grew up a Pentecostal youth in church settings in which women getting words of knowledge or prophetic insights was considered in the normal range of options.  A new type of feminine power in an evangelical denominational context where pneumatology defaults to cessationism now perhaps that really is new--it wouldn't be new in the Adventist tradition (Ellen White) or charismatic settings (Kuhlman, obviously) but in Baptist contexts, sure, that might be new.  

One of the things I suspect has made low church Protestants in the contemporary West on edge about women as preachers could go as far back as Bullinger and the Magisterial Reformers pivoting to redefine prophecy as having cease since the prophet age and being present only in a vestigial form in public preaching.  There are, I think, a couple of significant problems with that approach. One is simply that the task of instructing the people was a priestly instruction and however adamant anti-Catholic polemics got in the Reformation era retroactively transforming preaching into a prophetic act rather than a priestly act doomed complentarianism in low-church Protestant settings to ceding the entire preaching office to an egalitarian position even if there were not also the Lutheran formulation of the priesthood of all believers. Well, then, if the priesthood of believers applies why not ordain women? If prophecy is preaching and the daughters of Philip the evangelist prophesied then why not?

Exodus 22:28, Ecclesiastes 10:20, and an American civic religious tradition of vituperation--thoughts on cycles of conflicts between scribes and prophets in an age of surveillance capitalism

Exodus 22:28

Thou shalt not revile God, nor curse a ruler of thy people 

Ecclesiastes 10:20

Curse not the king, no, not in thy thought, And curse not the rich in thy bedchamber; For a bird of the air shall carry the voice, And that which hath wings shall tell the matter.

These two passages have been sticking with me this year.  While 2020 has its own unique moments any election cycle in the United States offers a boundless supply of social media and media moments in which reviling the leaders of the state(s) is a requisite to public activity.  What could United States journalism and social media use (whether on Twitter, or blogs, or Facebook, or Tumblr, or Reddit, or 4Chan) even be without cursing or reviling a ruler of the people?  A nation of sheeple?  

For people who don't take the Hebrew Bible seriously there's nothing more to consider. For those who take the Jewish and Christian scriptures seriously, however, these verses are verses we have to think about, and not just in election years. Christians in the United States who are online reviling leaders still, at some point, have to consider these verses, if perhaps only because we have so much to consider as to what the distinction is between a prophetic denunciation of injustice on the one hand and reviling on the other since they can sure seem to overlap.

Fredrik deBoer's "only the club remains" about media professionals reminds me of Ellul's observation in The Empire of Non-Sense that attending the right parties where you meet arts critics was more important than the art you made

Since his posts still generally self-destruct after a few days, I wanted to mention deBoer has a post revisiting what he has described as the sclerotic and self-congratulating insular coterie of media figures.  The following reminded me, as I'll get to after complete quotation, to some observations Jacques Ellul made decades ago about how artists were not as significant in terms of their actual works as the personas they created that were then vetted by critics; that what mattered was which people you met at which parties in the right cities.  But first ... Fredrik deBoer's post:

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.