a few stray observations about writing fugues

Since starting my set of preludes and fugues for solo guitar I have been reminded of things that I had forgotten over the last fifteen years. Perhaps the foremost observation is how few composers of fugues (outside of J. S. Bach among those I have studied) actually use countersubjects! Most people opt for free material. Leo Brouwer, Beethoven, Hindemith, Shostakovich, they all "tend" to eschew countersubjects in favor of basically free material. Clearly I generalize but I trust you get the idea. Mendelssohn would sometimes employ at least one countersubject, though, so I can't say that it's just Bach, obviously, who used them.


But the thing that was least discussed in my study of fugues that I feel warrants mention beyond the absence of countersubjects entirely in many fugues is that there is far more liberty to the countersubject than a strictly academic explanation would lead you to believe. In one of Bach's B minor fugues in the 48 (I think ... ) he presents the countersubject in prime form in the first answer and when the subject returns he presents the INVERSION of the countersubject. It is also commonplace to transpose countersubjects when they would not work in their initial form over the subject.


I have also noticed that while strict adherance to the interchangability of the subject and countersubjects makes for a more impressive fugue there is plenty of room for free material both in middle entries as well as episodes. I prefer to stick to George Oldroyd's hoary axiom that it is crucial to have all the material in your exposition be the best stuff you can come up with because THAT is the stuff you'll have to live with for the rest of the fugue. I don't recall that he said that resorting to free material "may" mean that you're unhappy with some of your exposition but it could be inferred. Then again, Oldroyd never really indicated what Bach seems to have noticed, that in a three and four strand contrapuntal composition some of those puppies grow up to be dogs that just don't hunt, so you don't take them with you for most of the hunting exposition.


All of this becomes even more potently practical when composing contrapuntal works for solo guitar. It seems too bad that so many of the few who have composed fugues for the guitar never took the time to compose countersubjects. To be fair, I suppose, any guitarist, let alone a non-guitarist, who composes a fugue for the guitar should be proud of pulling off a multi-line work for solo guitar! Yet I aspire to something more demanding and perhaps that just makes me a pedantic snob, but the whole beauty of counterpoint to me lays in its capacity for inversion and rotation. Simply because other composers for the guitar have not generally bothered to write invertible counterpoint for the instrument doesn't mean no one should try it.


Then again, most guitarists and those who write for the guitar have never sung in choirs and may thus be unfamiliar with how contrapuntal art can be developed within the severely limiting yet practical confines of ensemble singing. Perhaps I am a guitarist/composer who had the supremely unfair advantage of singing a William Byrd motet in high school and later on sang any number of contrapuntal choral works by Fux and Sweelinck and Durufle in college. So many guitarists have gulped down the notion that the guitar is a miniature orchestra and too few seem to have benefited from the more practical observation that the guitar is much like a choir (without the wonderful ability a choir has to sustain, which means it's more like a harpsichord with some room for vibrato)!


Learning what is possible within the confines of a choir makes the guitar, by comparison, easier to navigate. After all, for both the guitar and the choir it is dangerous to have voices cross each other because the clarity of the melodic line can be lost. For both the guitar and the choir the range of the "instrument" is similarly restricted to the lowest notes baritones can handle to the highest notes the sopranos can squeak out on a good day with some solid rehearsal.

There is in the end no substitute for slogging through the work it takes to compose fugues and to discover through trial and error what the material you are building with, as it were, suggests to you. The house you build with wood is not the same kind of house you would build with bricks and the house you build with bricks is not the same sort of house as the one you would build with sheet metal. Of course in the real world no one builds a house only with one of these materials or the other but I trust you get my point.

By way of extending this metaphor each additional melodic element or strand in the fugue may be thought of as the plumbing, the wiring, the insulation, and the heating of a house but the foundation is ultimately the subject. If you build your house on a solid foundation that can withstand the weight of all the other elements then your house will stand and people will actually decide to live in it. If you don't then odds are pretty high in a musical idiom as unforgiving as the fugue that no one will live in it. What is more if you are not willing to live in the house you built for yourself no one else will want to live in it.

In a way this is all a roundabout way of saying to study the old masters, see how they built the houses that they lived in, see how they built the houses that people have been living in since. You don't learn merely by building your own houses, you apprentice yourself by way of study to the builders and houses of the past. This is not always because all those houses built in the past are better, you may find that the houses you build are in some cases sturdier homes but if you study the masters of the past you will understand how at the level of true mastery one builder can be strong in one area and another builder may be strong in another.

At the risk of reciting a hoary cliche you're safest bet is to study J. S. Bach and to see how he assembled his fugues. Then you can turn to the likes of Haydn and Beethoven (Haydn tends to be under-appreciated as a composer of fugues). You can turn to Mendelssohn, you can turn to Bartok, Hindemith, Brahms, and others. You can go further back to Byrd and Purcell and also to Handel. You will find in different periods certain things change and others remain the same. The unalterable foundation of any fugue is its subject and though this should go without saying it constantly bears repeating.

The most important observation I can make now that I've been working through composing some dozen fugues is that your subject must be a tune that submits to developmental processes and which, perhaps most importantly, beyond this initial observation, is something you will not soon quickly tired of either hearing or playing. Writing a decent fugue is like writing a decent pop song except that you must start right away with your hook and the hook must withstand immediate transposition and repetition for the entire length of your pop song. Really these musical arts are not so disparate as many people on either side of that pop/classical divide would have you believe but I've already written at some length about that elsewhere here.

So beyond studying the old masters of fugue-writing there is another task that you should consider. I will aproach this by way of a necessary digression--the comic book author and artist Andi Watson once put it, the lines in the sand are social. Someone interested in comics can benefit as much from a study of Peanuts and Garfield (yes, I admit I said that) as Calvin & Hobbes or Krazy Kat or any other comics story. If you study fugues don't forget that you will learn as much by studying other non-fugal compositional procedures as you will be studying them. Both negative and positive space are parts of composition in musical as well as visual art.

Don't rule anything out, not even the things you dislike, as something you can learn from. You can learn a lot from the things you like but you can learn as much from the things you hate. When I was young I was assigned Bruckner and I hated Bruckner (I still hate Bruckner)An essential part maturing as an artist is to recognize that it is wiser to learn from everything than to set some things off limits.

You may want to compose fugues but you will benefit from listening to popular music. Why? Because you will hear the kinds of tunes that people keep singing over and over again and just as the hook is the foundation of a popular song the subject is the foundation of the fugue and you will find, particularly in the works of Bach, that popular hymns can become the foundations of amazing fugues.

To pick just one easy example the giant fugue for solo violin in C major is derived from a subject that relies on the German hymn that can be roughly rendered as "Come Holy Spirit". You can even detect, with some careful study and historical cross-referencing, how the fugue subject and the hymn from the German tradition connects to the old venerable tract Veni Creator Spiritus with that stepwise oscillation around the dominant scale degree. At a more ostensibly mundane level you can see connections between the bass line in Weezer's "Island in the Sun" and the opening first violin line in Haydn's "Fifths" quartet. The more widely you cast the net the more fish you will discover have more in common than you could have guessed.

So now we have, it seems, come full circle. Paul wrote in one of his epistles "study to show yourself approved." It applies to the study of the scriptures and pastoral care but it applies everywhere else, too. You won't get anywhere if you "learn by doing" alone just as you won't get anywhere if you learn merely by "book learning". Fail to combine the two, fail to integrate all these (often by themselves) unhappy disciplines and you will fail to see the happy integration of many beautiful disciplines.

There may be many people who might tell you that you will benefit more from the study of Bach than enjoying Stevie Wonder; that there will be more benefit in listening to Mozart than listening to the Who but if you love the art of music and love it broadly this will be of more benefit to you then loving only the specialized things that you focus on.

The narrow furrows of detailed study are for when you are cultivating your particular specialty crop in your own garden. If you do not love gardening altogether then you don't have the opportunity and inclination to specialize. You will be more likely to write a decent fugue if you love a beautiful tune or even incline to study tunes you hate than if you just tell yourself, "I'm going to get good at writing fugues." The disposition of the mind and heart to explore are most important ... because it will be this that allows you to find the fun in the endless trial and error and dissatisfaction of slogging through subject after subject that don't work and the even more endless array of countersubjects and contrapunal lines that just don't work.

We live in a wonderful time for animation.

You know, seeing the nominees for best animated film, just about any of those would be fine. David Denby is right to point out that the golden age we have been living in for animated films since Pixar showed up is better than the official golden age of animation from the Disney era. It's an opinion open to passionate dispute, of course, but if we're not in a golden age of animation this is a pretty astonishing "silver age" just on the basis of Pixar and Miyazaki alone.

Throw in Nick Park's work with Wallace and Gromit and Henry Selick's stop-motion animation, too; throw in Bruce Timm and Paul Dini's mammoth run on the DC cartoon universe; and toss in stuff like Persepolis and the sheer range of style and content in animation in the last fifteen years is a marvel to behold. My nieces and nephew are growing up with a much wider range of quality cartoons than I had access to when I was their age. Most of the cartoons thirty-somethings in my generation lavish their nostalgia on were actually pretty lame. The cartoons that started coming out when I was in high school and college, on the other hand, were often very solid. Maybe we're not back at the level of Bugs Bunny if you insist on that being the high water mark for short serialized animation, but the story-telling is more varied and substantial.

Up seems likely to win but even though I liked the film I kinda want Coraline to get some love. Henry Selick is easy to over look if you're just focusing on Pixar. Sure, he did Monkeybone but everyone's bound to make some clunkers or slip up. Nightmare Before Christmas is still a great cartoon and most folks in animation aren't going to be Hayao Miyazaki or Brad Bird.

busy with not being able to do much

Still in the quest for the grail of a reliable productivity-related revenue stream. Have not composed a whole lot and have not even played a whole ton of guitar. It's hard to feel inspired to do that somtimes. I have stalled at just 8 of projected 24 preludes and fugues for solo guitar. I've got C sharp minor, E flat major, F major, G major, A flat major, G sharp minor, A major, and B flat minor accounted for. I have ideas in the works for C major, D major, D minor, E minor, F minor, F sharp minor, G minor, and B minor--not many ideas, just enough to know I'm not going to run out of these things and come to a dead stop creatively in the next few years.

By the previous sentence I mean a dead stop of having no projects to motivate me to keep trying until I pull things off, not a dead stop in the form of hitting roadblocks and brick walls in getting established projects done or getting sidetracked by feeling depressed not managing to even get interviews.

I have been doing some study of Igor Rekhin's preludes and fugues and while I would have "liked" for him to have used actual countersubjects in his fugues he manages the tunes so I guess all is forgiven (I trust you can see that I'm being very tongue-in-cheek about that forgiveness thing).

In fact among famous fugue writers it has been interesting to learn that even greats like Hindemith and Beethoven would just dump countersubjects, something that Bach rarely does. Of course just because the greatest composer of fugues who ever lived rarely skipped out on composing a countersubject doesn't mean you HAVE to compose countersubjects yourself. Still ... it's more profoundly satisfying to compose a fugue for solo guitar in which all the musical strands are fully interchangeable. The whole art of counterpoint, it seems to me, can hinge on the invertible nature of it. The soprano's melody can become the bass and the bass can become the tenor and the tenor can become the soprano and all this without compromising the pleasing musical relationships between all of the melodic material.

I'm also slogging through a project for violin and guitar, a couple of those, actually. I might have not one but two sonatas for violin and guitar I can finish this year, and one of them will be heavily inspired by Charles Ives in method though it will not resemble anything he wrote in terms of style or rhetorical flair.

McNaughton fine art and the McNaughton rule in forensic psychiatry

A curious coincidence is that McNaughton is a name associated with "fine art" of a particular kind and a precedent established for how to verify whether or not a person is not guilty of a crime due to insanity (the incapacity to discern that what one did was morally or socially wrong). I'm not sure most people have ever even heard of the McNaughton standard unless they have a curiosity about philosophy and precedent in crime and prosecution.

(what can I say? I am a Batman fan and I never bought the idea that in the real world Joker could ever be considered insane by any criminally prosecutable standard, only the most bleeding heart liberal prosecutor would not go for the death penalty if it were legal in a city like Gotham ... or the Joker would just have to live in Washington state where lawyers would say that if you can't execut Gerry Ridgeway you really can't execute the Joker, either)

Having given myself the luxury of an entirely parenthetical paragraph and just now succumbing to a reflexively repetitive alliteration always worthy of the would-be witticisms of Stan "the man" Lee I probably better make this my single post on my blog tonight.

glum

To say that I am not by disposition an optimistic person might be an understatement. Last week I had dinner with a friend who said he is by nature very optimistic and that he gets angry when that optimism gets thwarted. He, curiously, has a great disdain for most people generally and particularly and perhaps could be likened to that person in the Brothers Karamazov who professed to love humanity and to whom Zossima made the obversation that many who profess an ardent love of humanity in general hate the people they know in particular. It is possible for your boundless optimism to be optimism for you and not for others. It is possible that your optimism that is thwarted and leads you to anger is of a theoretically limitless type but limited in range. I don't have that sort of optimism, I guess.

I tend to be gloomy in outlook, perhaps even depressive. It has not helped that I learned that someone I met years ago was recently murdered. In your 20s you don't consider mortality very often. Well, I considered mortality and the frailty of human life often but perhaps having a catastrophic macular detachment does that to a person. I lost nearly all my grandparents by the time I was 30. My paternal grandmother died when I was about 18 and my maternal grandmother died when I was about 31. My maternal grandfather died when I was about 7 or 8 at the oldest. I also grew up in a mixed family (which is to say that I not only saw family die I also saw marriages collapse fairly early in my life). I have by inclination and disposition in conjunction with experience been inclined to notice how close death and disaster can be at any given stage of life. This may give me an often morbid disposition.

My sense of of humor can also occasionally veer toward the grim or macabre. I would not advise anyone (normally) to watch Woodland Critter Christmas but the very macabre nature of the episode amused me greatly. "Sorry son, Santa's gonna have to kill you." Again, I don't advise you to watch that episode if you haven't seen it already and if you don't even know what I'm talking about you're probably better off. I merely mention that by way of illustrating that sometimes my humor gets grim (paradoxically those guys consider themselves very optimistic).

If my childhood kept me aware of death by virtue of a death and the dissolution of a marriage and my teens saw the dissolution of other family connections and my twenties broadly saw the death of remaining grandparents my thirties have had me witness death in other forms, most recently the news that an old high school associate has cancer and, most recently of all, learning of a murder. And all this during a time when I have been unsuccessful in not only landing work but even getting job interviews.

Because of the kind of work I used to do (non-profit) I can't collect the unemployment benefits that people could be expected to rely upon. I even know someone who has decided that he's "at peace" not collecting unemployment even though he had a substantial sum left in his claim, at least a month's worth of rent at any rate. I have grown bewildered by this sort of Christianese "at peace" decision that only seems like a motivation by some sort of pride to me. But it may simply not be my business to make this assessment and people have their reasons for doing what they do. Be all that as it may, a handful of people have been surprised to learn that I can't take advantage of things that they take advantage of themselves or that in their (as I perceive it, pride) don't WANT to avail themselves of.

My only sense of optimism is not based on the optimism of "things can only get better" but "things haven't gotten worse yet". I don't have cancer, I didn't get murdered, I don't have to move out at the end of the month while also not having a job, I don't have the sorts of debts that lead my wages or savings to get garnished because I haven't been diligent in keeping my responsibilities.

I am far from happy and most of the time far from content with my situation but in spite of these things I do have moments where I realize that small and seemingly unimportant decisions have made this period of my life more tolerable than it would be if I hadn't. As the scriptures say, wealth hastily gotten will dwindle but those who gather little by little will increase it. Those who aspire to get rich quick fall prey to many schemes.

I have to remind myself that the gospel is good news. The hope that does not disappoint is not really a hope that if you use wisdom and do the right things that things will go well for you in this life. The good news isn't that your performance and status will improve. The good news isn't that you go "upstream" and "influence culture". The good news isn't any of those things and though those things are not bad they can be a form of laying up treasures here on earth instead of in heaven. The most spiritual people on the surface can frequently be the most worldly yet they convince themselves and us that they are spiritual models to be followed. I simultaneously hope never to be such a person and constantly suspect myself to be one of them. I don't want to be a teacher precisely because I fear that I would just be a false teacher if I were one. The moment you stop doubting that you could be one the more in danger you are of actually becoming one is the conviction I have. So it is wiser to not aspire to be a teacher, but I clearly digress.

Perhaps the most dangerous idolatries of all are those that masquerade as spiritual treasures. Pharisees amassed money, loved money, loved their prestige and to have honored seats at special occasions and yet despised the Lord. The good news was for those who had no earthly hope, for the widow and the orphan, those who the men of the society had a remedial and even obligatory concern. Perhaps it might be said that they were Tamar before Judah repented of his cruelty and disdain.

For me the most difficult battle is to hold on to the idea that God shows any graciousness in this age. I can get that God can show kindness in the age to come but a survey of the Old Testament shows that the psalmists and the prophets and kings were all concerned that God not forget to show mercy NOW. When they spoke about how God seemed to forsake His covenant and to not really be faithful as advertised they were challenging Yahweh to prove that He was still faithful NOW and not just in an abstract future. Yahweh demonstrated His faithfulness but often in unexpected and even unpleasant ways, allowing His people to make spectacularly unpleasant discoveries about themselves along the way.

Driscoll and Avatar

I can't help but agree with the lowly Baptist blogger who pointed out that if you talk about the evils of consumerism and then minutes later talk about your three Tivos and your two home theaters that .... maybe there's a problem there in the critique of other people being prone to consumerism. Who needs two home theaters and three Tivos anyway? I could see one home theater and a Tivo, maybe, but three and two? Are we sure that pastor has a basis for talking about the consumerism of other people here? I would feel sheepish telling parishoners they aren't tithing enough if I admitted in public that my family has two home theater systems and three tivos from the pulpit.

Now Avatar is certainly the same sort of namby pamby pantheism Western filmmakers like Camern like to embrace. I have already written about how Cameron is trying to have it both ways and Debra Dean Murphy pointed out that Cameron wants to have his cake and eat it, too, by having the Na'vi be the peaceful spiritual sorts who at the end still resolve their conflicts the same way the military does. Driscoll's negative assessment is a bit late in the game.

What is more, it's fair to ask what is meant by "satanic". As has been rightly said, Satan is a liar. Of course the lies can often come in the form of accurate citation (per my lengthy earlier blog entry about the temptation of Jesus in the gospel of Luke). lies can also come in the form of accusations that run counter to God's plan despite the accuracy of their accusation in (Zechariah). But to say that something is satanic is to say that there are two things at work. One is the deceptive nature of what is said either in terms of its falsehood or in terms of what the truth is used for. In this respect there are some films that Driscoll has spoken positively about that could be considered satanic films.

For instance, ten years ago he was discussing how the Matrix was a spiritual allegory even though the spirituality plugged by The Matrix could be considered Buddhist and a case could be made that the allegory is not about spirituality at all but about secularism, about how the world presented by the Matrix is a falsehood and once you discover the manipulation and unreality behind it all then it becomes simple enough to defeat the agents of the Matrix because you exist in the real world and you know it, while the agents are merely existing in a fantasy world.

Let's take Braveheart, which Mel Gibson recently said was a gross misrepresentation of a historical figure that relied on made up archetypal characterization to sell tickets it seems Driscoll should be more circumspect in lamenting a popular film being based on a lie since the director of one of his favorite movies recently admitted that the whole of Braveheart's narrative arc was basically just made up to sell a film. I doubt Driscoll is going to repudiate Braveheart as historically inaccurate and satanic for promoting lies about a historical figure because those lies are in the service of values he holds dear about whatever it is he holds dear.

Is Braveheart a great movie or a satanic one because Mel Gibson just invented a story around a historic figure to promote ideals he believes in, like freedom of the individual and masculine accomplishment? Does Driscoll consider that film less satanic because the lies Gibson told about William Wallace for the sake of fictional narrative promote values he finds more appealing than those James Cameron promotes in a film that is clearly a made up fantasy adventure with a few sci-fi trappings? Is Braveheart satanic because Gibson repudiated the accuracy of his own film and said he made things up or does that film get a pass because it promotes ideas Driscoll can get behind?

If Gibson is right now to say that William Wallace was a monster and a terrible man (which is also, in its own way a giant historical misrepresentation) should Driscoll repudiate Braveheart as a satanic film or say that because it was made by a Catholic guy who left his wife and remarried that it's satanic because it wasn't made by a real Christian? What, then, of showings of The Passion at Mars Hill a few years ago?

My criticism of Avatar was that it was a cheap watered-down version of pantheism with the sort of moral simplification that serious pantheists like Miyazaki avoid. Avatar also represents a chintzy simplified view of "native" spirituality of the sort American Indian writers have tried to debunk for years.

To say that something is satanic can refer either to the content itself or the means. Even when Satan tells the truth by quoting scripture accurately he lies. A false prophet was not just someone who made a prophesy that didn't come true. If a prophet made a prediction that came true but said "Let us also go after these other gods" that person was still a false prophet. Idolatry is not just about saying "no" to Yahweh but also about saying "AND let's add this other divine, too". As to the false messiahs and the like Driscoll talks about, comparative religion scholars have been noting that the more the so-called "ancient" texts of Wicca get examined the more it looks like refurbished Catholicism without the guilt of association Catholicism had for a lot of Europeans. A lot of Western neo-paganism is still people trying to have their Catholic cake and eat their neopaganism, too.

I only saw Avatar because someone else bought my ticket. It is, as with Cameron's last film, overhyped. Terminator 2 and Aliens are still Cameron's most effective films. Yet if Driscoll feels that Avatar is the most demonic film he's ever seen did he see Spirited Away by Hayao Miyazaki, which was shown at film & theology at Mars Hill around 2002? To say that a film is demonic doesn't say that the film deals with the subject of demons. After all, the Exorcist was shown at Mars Hill's film & theology around 2006 and that met with the approval of Mars Hill pastors (save that crucifix scene, which was skipped, which is a way to establish that I was there for that event).

I find Driscoll's commentary on Avatar hard to take seriously not because I don't see the cheap Western bargain bin pantheism of Cameron's film. Instead I find his comments hard to take seriously because a rant against consumerism when you have two home theaters and three tivos seems overcooked. I also find it hard to take seriously because the outrage is selective and isn't applied to falsehoods promoted in some of his earlier favorite films. He knows that something can be satanic in means and not merely in content. After all, even Satan can quote the Bible in context and accurately to promote something that is false.

If something being satanic is not just about the lie but the lie the truth may be forced to serve then it's possible for someone to even use the Bible to promote themselves rather than Christ. Driscoll is no less in danger of this temptation than people like Todd Bentley or Benny Hinn or Joel Osteen. If appropriating the Bible to promote your own agenda is a false gospel and satanic does that mean Driscoll should repudiate his entire sermon series on Nehemiah, which was basically treating a scriptural book as an allegory about himself as Nehemiah and Mars Hill as Israel? I think I share Driscoll's lack of enthusiasm for Avatar but I don't share his vitriol. To me Avatar is no less promoting a fraudulent idea of true humanity than Braveheart. I'm not saying Braveheart or Avatar are satanic movies as such, just that both films are overhyped mediocrities whose popularity has allowed people to pontificate on pet topics. That's part of what films are for, I guess. If Driscoll wants to be the evangelical Protestant pope he's welcome to keep trying. I just thought that that wasn't the point of Protestantism.

proverbs as invertible lenses

Proverbs are, as we know, aphorisms, but they are often full of contrasts. Sometimes the contrast is obvious such as discussing how pride comes before a fall but humility leads one to be exalted. In other cases there are ambiguities inherent in a proverb that aren't easily caught except in multiple readings. Take for instance the famous proverb "faithful are the blows of a friend, deceptive the kisses of an enemy". Well, as I wrote elsewhere this is a common Christian translation of the text but a Jewish reading includes a different reading with profoundly different implications, "the wounds of a friend are long-lasting but the kisses of an enemy are profuse" Here the contrast is not between the faithful blows of a friend that prove friendship but between the long and bitter wound of someone who is close to you verses the profuse and meaningless social niceties of someone who you know is really your enemy.

In many an argument a person may say that even a fool appears to be wise if he keeps his mouth shut. Yes ... but this proverb speaks of something else, that some people do not reveal that they ARE fools because they aren't SO foolish as to open their mouths. Ergo another proverb, better to be a fool and silent than to open your mouth and remove all doubt. But this does not mean a person isn't a fool. One of the easiest ways for fools to appear wise or hide their folly is simply to keep quiet, say all the right, nice things, and then proceed to privately do whatever foolishness their heart desires.

Some proverbs lend themselves to paradoxical inversions that open doors for us to examine our own character and the character of people we know. If you only examine others in light of a proverb but not yourself you have defeated the usefulness of the proverb. If you only assess yourself in light of a proverb and never assess another then it will be of no benefit to you, either. I used to think that quiet people were wise and that they proved their wisdom by being quiet. Feh, I was young and naive! Now I know that many total idiots give the illusion of being smart simply by not saying much. It is true that many a fool broadcasts his or her foolishness and revels in that but there are fools who conceal their foolishness until they are with enough other fools that they let their guard down. Truthfully you can't be certain that you aren't one yourself about at least some things. After all, do you see someone who is wise in his or her own eyes? There's more hope for a fool than for that one.

another duo sonata under way

I have not composed a lot because job hunting is a frequently depressing enterprise. However it has been my observation that the more depressed I get the more I need to work on something to keep my mind occupied. Theological reading doesn't help, though, because it frankly isn't the right kind of work for me. Sure, I've got books by Bauckham, Thielicke, Bonhoeffer, Augustine, F. F. Bruce, and others to read ... but it's not the same as the voice of that kid at the end of the Ten Thirteen Productions where he says "I made this!" Yes ... X-Files up through season 5 was a magnificant show.

Appropos of all that I have started composing a sonata for violin and guitar. While it can often be said that the comments of composers about their work can frequently not be helpful or can even obfuscate what would be clearer from a close study of the scores I like to think that when I bother to write about music I'm fairly straightforward and ... maybe not clear but at least clear to musicians. If you aren't interested in either music or biblical literature or cartoons I guess there'd be no reason to read this blog. :)

So, as I compose this sonata for violin and guitar I have two tasks before me. You can think of them as the task itself and the meta-task. The task itself is writing a satisfactory sonata for violin and guitar. I have Atanas Ourkouzounov's wonderful Sonatina Bulgarica as a score for reference (his recording on the KLE label is, alas, out of print but you can download mp3s of the work performed by Duo Cordes et Ames over at the Big River company as Delcampers for some reason insist on calling Amazon.com)

http://www.olivierpelmoine.com/duocordesetames/index.php?page=999

You can go here if you want to learn more about this duo, whose promotional photos are so twee and cute as to be almost absurd. No, really, there's something weirdly cute about these two. If I can't plug for Atanas' now out-of-print CD Contes des Balkans I must by all means plug for a duo that is willing to record the work.

In addition I have been listening to all the music for violin and guitar Paginini wrote that I was, er, able to get my hands on before I got laid off. Fortunately that managed to be at least four discs so I have an immense amount of lively violin and guitar repertoire to listen to and examine before finishing my own sonata.

Oh, and since I'm a fan of J. S. Bach I of course have the complete works for solo violin. I was lucky enough, several years ago, to stumble upon a reissued recording of Zoltan Szekely playing the sonatas and partitas (you Bartok fans will know why this name is important and I'm going to pointlessly brag that I managed to procure a CD reissue of Szekely's live performance of the 2nd violin concerto recorded long ago).

Well, I could try to write about what I'm working on but if you can't hear music it's hard to write about it. I'm experimenting with using several melodies that are traditional tunes and finding ways to integate them based on shared gestures. The gestures may be intervallic or rhythmic and a linked set of gestures allow for two or three traditional melodies to be blended together in a new harmonic context. Medley, in other words, is what I'm aiming at.

But not medley in the usual pop song sense of that phrase. Charles Ives used parody but he distorted the melodies he quotes beyond recognition before actually quoting them. Medley in this case of the sonata I'm composing means more that I incorporate a variety of immediately recognizable tunes into the musical fabric of the work. It doesn't mean that I quote them all in an entirely instantly recognizable way. You can take a traditional melody in a major key and transpose the intervals so that what is the third of a major chord is the fifth of a minor chord or the seventh of either sort of chord.

Another fun compositional devise is to take a melodic line and play it backwards, perhaps making tonal adjustments so that what would be in dorian might become mixolydian or lydian. Retrograde is one of the most difficult compositional devices to employ because it is rare that a melody will sound as effective played backwards as it sounded being played forward. You may find that a melody that lends itself very well to retrograde presentation is not very satisfying in its inverted form. Or you may discover any number of thematic fragments are great using any of the above devices or techniques but that the melody as a whole doesn't "want" to be subjected to any of those devices. It's hard to explain what I mean in a blog entry without referring to an actual piece of music and I don't feel like using a lot of musical samples in this blog. Too much of a hassle to prepare examples. I'll merely refer you to Art of Fugue and Ludus Tonalis by Bach and Hindemith respectively. The prelude and postlude of the latter is a fine example of a prelude being in prime and the postlude being in retrograde inversion.

Now all of this sounds ineffably nerdy, doesn't it? Well, Baroque and Renaissance composers loved this sort of thing because for them it was often a kind of musical symbolism. We live in an era in which music is no longer seen as part of the quadrivium--no one sees music as a branch of the applied sciences anymore, least of all by most scientists! We know too much about the dubious nature of the "science" used to defend particular forms of pitch organization that are really regional. Reformed theo-bloggers like Douglas Wilson can pretend to themselves that major and minor key music is "robustly Trinitarian" even though Ambrosian and Greek chant predate "robustly Trinitarian" in the manner of Schutz by centuries. Nor would those sorts of Reformed bloggers and thinkers see Messiaen or Penderecki as "robustly Trinitarian" because, well, they're Catholics, for one, and because they employed every avant garde trick in the book to explore theological meditations. I love the Matthew Passion as much as the next person who loves it but that doesn't stop me from loving Pendereckis Luke passion just as much, or Arvo Part's John passion ... but I am digressing in a major way.

But this gets me, paradoxically, back to the meta-task. My chamber sonatas I have been working on over the last ten years are not just sonatas as individual works but as part of a larger cyclical project. I don't want to give away everything yet because I'm not done with the project and because there's no certainty that my sonatas are actually good enough to get premiered and keep anyone's attention. I can hope but it is best not to merely presume. Confidence is not the same as unvarnished egotism. Egotism that says "I can do better than that" never proves itself much in the end. Confidence that "I could try that" that leads to actually doing something is preferable. So I'm trying to stick with the premise that there are things I can try and I hope people try them out.

But what I can explain, however abstract it may be, is that each of the sonatas has continuity within itself yet also with the companion pieces, the other sonatas. I wrote a sonata for flute and guitar for some friends of mine to play--a husband played oboe and guitar, and his wife played flute and piano. I thought a flute/guitar sonata would give them something fun to play together. Turns out he doesn't play CLASSICAL guitar. Oops. So the flutist and I performed the sonata together and I almost immediately set to composing a sonata for oboe and guitar to make sure the husband wasn't left out. Why compose one for the one and not compose something for the other? It turned out pretty decently and by then I had two sonatas that were literally companion pieces at every level. By then I realized that I might as well write something for the younger brother of the husband and that got me eventually composing something for cello and guitar.

So at a semi-conscious level I wanted to compose a set of duo sonatas for guitar and various instruments in which there was a conceptual and even a literal family relationship network binding the sonatas together. I have the family to thank simply for being and being solid musicians and by virtue of that inspiring me to start the cycle, such as it is.

Listened to a Tim keller sermon recently

He asks the wonderfully rhetorical question about why so many songs with bad poetry center on romantic love. Do we get bands like Air Supply singing rhapsodic power ballads about being a data entry clerk? Do we get bands like Aerosmith shilling hard rock numbers about the scintillating nature of belt sanders or iPods? No, it's about sex and romantic love. The first poetic utterance in the Bible is a poetic utterance that could, in the wrong hands, be taken as, "Oh, yeah, I would definitely hit that."

For most of my life I have disdained love songs as cheap, mawkish, insincere, and pathetic. Yeah, might make me seem like an evil cold-blooded jerk. Particularly insufferable examples are choruses like, "How do I breathe without you." I could compile the entire output of Boston as an example. One of the most egregious forms of rhetorical crow-barring would be this:

And I swear, I swear it's not a lie, girl.
Tomorrow may be too late.
You, you and I girl, we can share the night together.
It's now or never cuz tomorrow may be too late.

Yeah, if we don't have sex tonight, girl, I might get hit by a runaway bus and get killed. Or you might die. Or I might kill myself.

There is almost nothing in life that I view with more cynicism than romantic love. The happily married couples I know have not, unfortunately, disuaded me from the gnawing feeling that this thing is not what people have made it out to be (I suppose that pun could be intentional if I felt like making it intentional). I have found that Christians can both make that coupling the measure of adulthood (in its real form) while denying that it does so.

Christian teaching, at least among a certain strain of conservative evangelical teaching can be so fraught with double binds it defies my comprehension. If you don't want to marry you're extending your adolescence and not really being adult but if you want to be married badly that's a sign that you could have made marriage an idol and in both cases the problem is with you and not the conflicting expectations and measures of adulthood. To put it in archly Lutheran dialectical terms, there can be all Law and no Gospel about the subject of marriage and romantic attachment.

If in the age to come no one will be married anyway what is the value in marriage? It's not that there is no value, of course, but it often seems as though the same people who talk about an idolatry of marriage and family can be the people who do the most to promote it. I have been glad to hear teaching in which marriage is merely an incidental subject among many and not the focal point of all pastoral illustrations or admonitions about practical application of Christian teaching.

But Keller's point sticks with me because as much as I dislike bad poetry and as cynical as I have often been not just about romantic love but about all the pundits (including the cynical ones) who opine on the subject one of my favorite poets is John Donne and the man was an utter genius at composing love poetry. If one of my favorite poets, who was a capable pastor, was also a brilliant poet on the subject of romantic love I have to admit that my cynicism has limits. Keller's point that people wax rhapsodic and write bad poetry about sexual union and romantic love because it is a signpost to divine love. His pastoral proposal that a man cannot be a good bridgegroom to his wife unless he understands what it is like to be Christ's bride is precisely the sort of impossible point to have been even thought of in the church I used to attend. Paradoxically, though, it is probably one of the things I most need to hear and consider.

After years of hearing teaching in which that sort of insight would be considered gay it's a useful insight because it reminds me of how men and women need each other whether or not all of us are married. It is both the man and the woman that reflect the image of God. If men and women reflect Yahweh's image separately then together they reflect God's image in another way, yet a way that is passing away. So Paul admonishes the married to live as though they were not, neither seeking to end their marriage nor considering it something that is other than a thing that is passing away, for at death the marriage ends, and Christ teaches us that in the age to come there will be no marriage.

I suppose my cynicism comes from the belief that the risk involved is not worth it. This belief is predicated both on experience and observation but it is a belief I at length have to reconsider. If I'm not sure anyone is worth that sort of risk and trouble that means I don't think anyone is good enough for me and that I'm not good enough for anyone. But that may simply be proof that I am being both too hard on myself and too hard on others. The last thing I really want to do is actually change this frontier of my life in the midst of job-hunting but the older I get the more I realize that even if I never marry at some point actually going on a date or two wouldn't be a bad idea.

My misgivings are legion. This seems to be a society in which it seems to be commonplace that you've done your business by your teens. A comedy like the 40-year old Virgin seems to presuppose that if you haven't gotten any by that time there's something missing in your life. Being in a Christian setting where the Christians not only affirm that but make a failure to embark upon that a measure of failure, cowardice, and prolonged adolescence doesn't help. It's hard to express how much I resent that kind of Christianese double bind. The Christian who has the luxury of telling you that you're not really an adult because you haven't arrived at a relational status they have might as well be a prayer of "Dear God, I thank you that I am not like that single guy over there." As you can see my cynicism is deep-seated. It seems safer than letting my guard down and being told that I'm inadequate to whatever it is that is expected of me tacitly and expressly. I'm too sleepy to write more than this at this time.

links you don't need to follow just by looking at the title

http://boarsheadtavern.com/2010/02/18/words-fail-me/

"Ed Young raps" ... Pastor Ed Young should not be doing all sorts of things and without having even heard his voice I can anticipate that rap should be one of them. Rap and its cognates aren't exactly my kind of thing but I admit I liked several things my brother played for me by Cee-Lo Green. Some people have told me that's not technically rap but I admit to not being picky there. Twenty years ago I saw no use for or value in rap and with age I have mellowed on that issue. I'm more of a white boy and harmonic development and interesting harmonies matter to me.

Not that I have any inkling that Young even thinks that far into things about that genre.

David Mamet, J. K. Rowling, and explorations of failure

http://harvardmagazine.com/commencement/the-fringe-benefits-failure-the-importance-imagination


Failure is dreadful yet failure defines our existence. How we define failure or have failure defined for us haunts us throughout our lives. Parents can establish by precept but more powerfully by example what failure is or isn't for us. We can measure a generation and find them wanting because they do not join us in our definition of failure or because we believe they have failed us. Every generation may be tempted to look toward its progeny and consider them washed up, just as every generation is tempted to look back upon its ancestors with a sense of guilt, ambivalence, or resentment.


I came home from catching a local showing of David Mamet's famous play Glenngary Glenn Ross (sic) and came home to read via Mockingbird Rowling's presentation on the fringe benefits of failure and imagination. I am still a man looking for work, without success. I have been looking for a few months. In fact recently I looked into a job lead and first enquired whether or not the job listing was a legitimate listing. I have fallen for hiring fraud a few more times than I would like to describe. It is hard not to feel like a failure and the people whom I might normally turn to for support are often apt to give unsolicited and solicited advice that turns out to not be very helpful. They can't help it and I try to appreciate the intent behind the counsel. I have gotten the most helpful feedback from associates past and present who just looked at what I have done and what my skill sets are and offered simple counsel on what and where I can go with that.


Fear of pending failure or resentment of a continuing losing streak or not attaining the prize one wants animates nearly everything about each character in Mamet's play. I find it interesting that Shelly's greatest triumph is a witless defeat in the end of the play. Ironically his stealing a lead and closing a deal gained him nothing, even if he was merely lied to. Roma's success becomes a defeat after the husband's wife suspects there are legal problems with the property her husband was smooth-talked into purchasing and Roma spends the final act desperately attempting to change the subject while not changing the subject of keeping the deal sealed.

Yet another intriguing thread of thought in the play is that those who pine for the old days when men were men are the most dishonest men among the men in the play. Everyone is afraid of failure and afraid of losing their careers if they don't compete and yet the ways in which they pursue success doom them even further.

Yet at the end of each day I realize that I am beholden to the consideration of other people no matter how much I may do. I can cultivate relationships but whatever the merits of networking they are as yet lost to me or they are better described as having never materialized. People have told me that they always landed work by networking with people. I have never once landed work that way and it is easy to feel as though by virtue of that I have failed. Why does networking work for other people to land jobs while for me it has led to nothing?

THe thing that most bothers me about failure is that you can fail despite your best efforts and no amount of imagination can compensate for the reality that doors are opened or closed for you on the basis of others, who may or may not seriously give you a chance. It's sobering to think that I have done this as much as it has been done to me and it's hard not to succumb to despair considering it all. When Ecclesiastes says there is nothing better for a man to do than to find pleasure in the work in which he labors under the sun it would be nice for that work to involve being paid and involve a job. I don't want to be like Shelly Levine and have a losing streak that seems to end only to have it become a more catastrophic failure than before and spring from some compromise in ethics.

It's frustrating to follow as much advice as I can and still end up getting nowhere. The race is not to the swift nor the battle to the strong nor victory to the wise but time and chance happen to them all. There comes a point where failure is not simply a way to eliminate the inessential. There are points where failure is simply failure, and failure is simply death.

Elliot Carter ... meh

Sometimes you study a musician whose work leaves you feeling "meh". I don't mean that you abominate every note the composer ever produced that you ever heard (for me that would be a status reserved for Phillip Glass, Bruckner, and Cornelius Cardew ... I also dislike Boulez). I mean that you can give the music a listen and realize that you just don't hate or love the music.

So far Elliot Carter seems to be shaping up to be that sort of composer. There are moments in his quartets that are fascinating but they manage to be that, fascinating. I know Carter doesn't subscribe to an emotionally opulent vocabulary but Carter, so far, seems to me to demonstrate an axiom about the inversely proportional relationship between the complexity of the surface of musical vocabulary and the simplicity of underlying structure.

This is totally absurd and unfair, I know, but with Messiaen or Takemitsu or Penderecki or Kurtag or Ligeti the complexity of rhythm, timbre, melody, harmony, accent, and dynamics are all complex ... yet in each composer there is a capacity for formal balance and formal simplicity. I don't begrudge Carter writing so many string quartets and Pacifica is a fine quartet (I heard them play a kick-ass Op. 22 by Hindemith a few years ago). But Carter's quartets as yet are just not grabbing me even as much as George Rochberg's quartets. It just seems as though for the recordings done of Elliot Carter we could get more recordings of string quartets by Joan Tower. Seriously, more recordings of her quartets would be inspiring.

Sorry to ramble but when you blog at 6 in the morning having woken up at 3pm the prior afternoon you don't get an ordered blog entry.

On the other hand, I can sing the praises of a giant city library system with multiple branches. Back when I was a penniless former student done with his undergrad degree libraries were the way to go to learn about new music.

Jane Austen and credentialing men as eligible bachelors

I don't feel inclined to explain all the myriad ways in which, even being jobless, you can find your time eaten away. Job-hunting is part of the whole thing and composing music is part of the whole thing and part of the whole thing is killing more time than I should be content about playing computer games. If I were more superstitious and Pentecostal about it I might say there is a "principality" of computer gaming at the house and maybe Driscoll would say that's proof of why all the guys in the house I live with are stalwartly single. Maybe.

I persist in job-hunting and am tackling some DVD collections on loans from friends and associates. One of them is the much-praised BBC production of Pride & Prejudice. Another is Samurai Seven. Still another is Thank You for Smoking, which I admit I have had for a long time and need to just sit down and watch here very soon.

One of my housemates surprised me by admitting that he thought about buying the Blueray of the BBC Pride & Prejudice collection. I joked, "Are you considering this so as to be a better chick magnet."

"Yes."

That directness surprised me. I am borrowing the series, it so happens. I replied, "Well, then, since I'm borrowing it now maybe you want to see it first." I happen to own Pride & Prejudice as well as Sense & Sensibility and love both novels. It's easier to acquire the status of chick magnet via Jane Austen credentialing if you actually own and have read her work.

It is fascinating to me what single guys are willing to feign interest in or take interest in so as to give themselves more credibility with the opposite sex. There was recently an amusing episode of House in which House admits to a woman that he detests musicals and only listened to Evita two times in a row because he so badly wants to touch her breasts he's willing to endure the musical tedium. House in this case represents an absurd fictional variation of something I have seen guys do to a lesser degree in real life, pretend they are something they aren't to get the woman they want.

I find it funny and yet I also, at some level, don't get it. I do get Wilson getting his revenge on House by proposing gay marriage in front of the woman when the 7th grade rebuttal of, "I saw her first!" didn't work. I don't understand how and why people pretend to be something they aren't just to impress someone of the opposite sex. It seems profoundly dishonest to me. Often that dishonesty is not (to me) merely an extension of dishonesty toward the subject of one's pursuit but also toward one's self.

There was a fellow who, a few years ago, was public in discussion forums about his disdain for dance as an art forum all around and total lack of interest in dancing. Yet he had a fondness for women who were into dance. I'm not just talking, say, a woman who likes swing-dancing, I'm talking about women who could converse with you about Martha Graham and Gene Kelly movies and praise particular works by Ballanchine (Apollo, really, is an amazingly beautiful work and just about any Ballanchine/Stravinsky collaboration is worth watching). At one point I felt obliged to tell this guy, "Dude, if you're going to keep having crushes on dancers at least watch some Gene Kelly movies and stop ripping on the art form." Yes, dancers are hot and in great shape but if you're totally not into any kind of dance yourself and don't even get why people would watch dance then you should probably set your sights on women (or men) who aren't into that. Eventually I told him that despite his claims that he's principled and unwavering in his committments if the personality is forceful enough or the woman is hot enough he'll compromise all sorts of things to get along.

In another setting a man who used to tell me he wouldn't descend to chitchat or smile at people just because they smiled at him noted with some disappointment that there was a woman he couldn't get to acknowledge him or talk with him no matter what he said or did. I suggested that perhaps this woman was like him, not interested in stooping to chichat for its own sake or to smile at anyone just because they smiled at her first. She's unusually beautiful so I don't begrudge her not just smiling at anyone. When she does smile she's luminous and the man whom she married married a truly beautiful woman not just in terms of her outward appearance but her character. Yet this fellow who couldn't get her to smile back at him seemed unaware that by his own measure he shouldn't have been disappointed that she took no particular interest in him.

Another fellow was interested in a woman who, it just so happens, is into Jane Austen. He once told me that the way dating works is a guy pretends to be interested in what the woman is interested in until he gets her to marry him and then he can stop pretending. If that was sarcasm it was poor sarcasm. The woman ended up breaking things off with him, which I could have told the guy was going to happen months before it happened. Really I could have told him that's the only place it would go the second he mentioned her name and some interest in her, assuming that she decided to even go on a date or two with him (which I honestly didn't expect even though she's nice enough a woman).

It is possible in some alternate universe that a woman who loves Jane Austen will marry a man who loves Family Guy and Aqua Teen Hunger Force. Actually, I know a husband and wife where the wife loves Jane Austen and monster trucks and Italian zombie movies and they both enjoy Aqua Teen Hunger Force. It is a big, strange, and mysterious world we live in! If Austen's stories can be reduced to something simplistic I would say it is that what we expect and want and what we need are often not even remotely the same thing. We can clamor for the things we think we desire or even deserve and discover that they disappoint bitterly while the things we disdain, the things we look down upon, the things we ignore, are actually wellsprings of life.

I could write some other blog entry about how salvation via proper coupling and romantic love is its own problem but I don't feel like doing that. If anything some of the people I have heard be most adamant about the dangers of idolizing marriage are the people who, frankly, seem to idolize marriage whether their own or as a talismanic measure of true adulthood. As ever, it seems, I digress.

HT to matthew johnson over at BHT

http://www.stonesfence.net/Stones_Fence/Project_365/Entries/2010/2/15_Day_333__Covering_or_Cover_Up.html

impromptu

Though I sit at my desk and type
these words into my computer
My hands are suffused with the scent
of pencil shavings

aging and shifting perspectives

When I was a kid I found adult conversations alternately fascinating and mind-bendingly dull. Talking about the Bible or politics intrigued me, or the arts. Talking about the more literal nuts and bolts of life was boring to me, profoundly so. So it has been interesting that in conversations I have had with friends in the last few weeks I have talked about theology and politics and the arts but I have also been fascinated by discussions about crock pots and how to prepare certain types of meals or hearing about the way paperwork slows down a work day or how a dog reacts to strangers. But the crock pot cooking dialogue was the thing that stuck with me or discussing the fiber content in various forms of canned chili.

When I was young the world seemed big, immense, beyond grasp. That was what made it cool and daunting. Now the world seems smaller because the older I get the more I realize the mundane and truly boring things are a great part of the world. I don't mean stop and smell the roses I mean that much of life is really boring and yet as Russell says in the Pixar film Up, it's sharing all the boring things in life that mean the most to you in the end. While for years I wanted to have discussions that were heavy, deep, and real it has dawned on me over the years that those heavy, deep, and real conversations don't happen until a lot of shallow, light, and fun conversations happen.

There is a delusion that I subscribed to that honesty and authenticity are founded on the direct, unvarnished encounter between two people discussing serious things seriously. That's not how it works. My closest friends and I, I have discovered, spent hundreds or thousands of hours talking about remarkably small and petty things before the serious things got discussed. Depending on the sort of Christian you are, for instance, you don't even want to know how many seasons of South Park I have watched with some of my closest Christian friends before we started talking about questions of faith and family and politics and struggle. I'll give you a clue, though, it was somewhere around season six or seven. What's more I ended up talking about a LOT of Batman and Superman comics and anime with some of my friends before I broached subjects like health challenges or relational dynamics on my part or before they discussed challenges like infertility or church politics or tensions arising from being a friend and a landlord.

In the sorts of circles I ran the "heavy, deep, and real" became a kind of gateway drug to not building empathy and friendship based on anything other than a stilted sense of mission. Paradoxically I came to appreciate the frivolous times all the more for this because I began to realize I had the same kind of problem. We want depth and "authenticity" and all of that but when we go for that before descending to the point of just having a good time (if that works out) we shortcircuit our capacity to have empathy and to have a foundation from which the serious things can get discussed ... when they need to be.

Anyone who has read this blog knows that I can discuss Richard Bauckham's work on Jude or the nexus of non-canonical literature and Christian interpretation of prophetic literature as referring to Satan when it had no original reference to Satan in Ezekiel or Isaiah. I can get into how and why that interpretive gloss has stuck. Yet I can also talk with a friend of mine who's an electrician and didn't go to college about how Justice League Unlimited is a great show ... but not for kids younger than 12, or about how the local building market has tanked and that makes finding work for an electrician with a family to support is tough. Some of my friends are younger than me and high school drop-outs or home-schooled but that certainly doesn't mean we can't discuss Kierkegaard or the limit of Rand's effectual critique of the mixed economy. I don't mean to say some people are educated beyond their intelligence (as some have had a small habit of saying). I just mean to say that having an intellectual bent is more useful when it can be dialed down here and there in favor of talking about ordinary things. This is something that has taken me half my life to learn.

So while I could have blogged about rhythmic augmentation and the superimposition of one traditional melody over another as a modally transposed descant over a song that is in an entirely different sort of mode I haven't been doing that. A great deal of this is because looking for work takes precedence over intellectual and other musings on a blog. I am also at a stage in my life where simply describing what goes on in a musical work seems to make less sense than putting the finishing touches on it or just slogging through the work itself when I can muster the enthusiasm for it.

brief interview with Bill Watterson link (HT to Mockingbird)

http://www.aolnews.com/nation/article/calvin-and-hobbes-creator-bill-watterson-has-no-regrets-about-stopping-strip/19341573?icid=main%7Cmain%7Cdl8%7Clink3%7C

Though I have written often about theology and classical music one of my most enduring artistic heroes throughout my life has been Bill Watterson. When I was a kid I wanted to be a cartoonist, like many kids, really. Initially my role models were Schulz and (to my everlasting adult shame) Jim Davis. But in the later 1980s I found a new focus for my admiration and awe at the beauty of cartoons, Bill Watterson's Calvin & Hobbes.

For some the signal moment in pop culture history from the 1990s was the death of Kurt Cobain or the ascendency and descendency of grunge (one of my friends loathes almost everything about 1990s music and rues the day that 80s glam rock and metal somehow stopped being niche market music). For me, the most memorable change in the arts (popular or otherwise) for me from the 1990s was the retirement of Calvin & Hobbes. I was glad, not because the strip ended. In fact Calvin & Hobbes is easily my favorite comic strip ever created. I know intellectually that Krazy Kat and Peanuts are the more important comic strips but I don't love them the way I love Calvin & Hobbes. I own a few volumes of Krazy Kat and Peanuts but I own every strip ever made of Calvin & Hobbes.

Yet I was glad that Watterson retired the strip because it meant that he was retiring the strip at the peak of his creative powers. My friends and I had seen Peanuts linger on for decades past its prime and I saw from his few interviews that Watterson was gracious about what many of the rest of us were not so gracious about, that Sparky may have been a genius in the medium decades before but he was no longer where he was. Snoopy had more traction as the mascot for an insurance company than as a character in himself.

Watterson was able to do what many artists can't or won't, take something at the peak of its artistic accomplishment and just move on to something else. This was the equivalent of the Rolling Stones decided to permanently call it quits after Let it Bleed or Exile on Main Street (which I admit I wish they had done). A band like the Beatles can retain its legend and allure because they quit while they were ahead. To pick an example of a strip that failed to live up to its potential or demonstrate its lack of potential from around the time Calvin & Hobbes was retired, when Bloom County mutated into Outland it demonstrated that B. B. was completely losing his touch. Even he admitted he was no Bill Watterson.

I admired Watterson for the reasons any child could admire his work during my childhood. His drawings were lively, wonderful, beautifully designed. I admired his way with words just as much as I admired his profound visual acumen. Calvin and Hobbes were able to hold forth on ideas while still being funny and somehow not seeming overly preachy. I loved his ability to swtich back and forth between visual styles without missing a beat and unfurling outlandish dreamscapes and fantasy lives for Calvin.

In my teens I loved the intellectual content of his humor, his social and political commentary and his willingness to directly engage in questions about religion, though compared to the actual demagogues for particular religious views he tended to pull punches, which I think is appropriate in an idiom that is designed to entertain. C. S. Lewis is said to have said that there is no book worth reading at eight that isn't more worth reading at eighty, or something to that effect. In the case of Calvin & Hobbes I will stoop to quoting the formerly great Frank Miller and say that anyone who reads Calvin & Hobbes quickly shouldn't really be reading!

I admire that Watterson was not only the greatest cartoonist in his idiom during his career but that he had the strength of artistic vision and wisdom to do what other people didn't, quit while he was at the peak of his powers and go do something new with his life. There is a time to keep moving forward, keep innovating, to continue doing what you've been doing. A Bach or a Beethoven can do that. Watterson, perhaps sensing that he is despite all his gifts not a Herriman, decided to not push beyond the strength and limits of his best work. He was also, I think, seeing the nadir of Peanuts and wanting very much to not go that route.

But there is, I believe, a humility in recognizing the limits of who you are, what the value and scope of your work is, and what can be done with it. The old rock axiom is that it is better to burn out than to fade away but the paradox inherent in that observation is that burning out is still fading away, just faster than usual. Burn out is blazing through all your best ideas in, say, your twenties and then having nothing new or substantial to say or do beyond that.

An old guy once told me that rock is a young man's game. You burst through all the ideas you'll have that are ever worth having and then you're done and if you have any dignity or common sense you retire and then live off the money you made. Jazz and classical are lifelong avocations. It takes you your whole life just to get decent at the art of those styles so you'll never run out of things to explore.

Appropos of comics, Watterson had the good sense to recognize that he was, in the best sense of the term, a rock star in comics. He also did not burn out or fade away. He just graciously said the song is over and went on with his life. Burning out is fading away with less dignity, assuming there is any dignity to be had. There's wisdom in knowing when and where to stop and when and where to carry on. If this wisdom were more commonplace there would be fewer Bill Wattersons in comics because there would be fewer mediocre strips against which his genius could stand in contrast. I think an author on Slate rightly saw the retirement of Calvin & Hobbes as the end of the era of the Sunday serialized strip. It was the last truly great and widely loved Sunday/weekly strip.

Watterson is right, his deepest fans understand why he did what he did. I haven't pursued being a cartoonist but I have pursued composing duo sonatas. In a small but precious way Watterson served as an example of how to be an artist in a commercial idiom without having his work completely subsumed by commercial interests. I like to think of him as a modern-day Josef Haydn, he managed to simultaneously sell out yet retain his artistic integrity. That's the stuff that artistic legends are made of.

something a little bit different than the Peasant Princess

http://www.leithart.com/category/bible-ot-song-of-songs/

I heard the `99 sermons and so excused myself from the `08 version but these little blog entries represent an interesting alternative to Driscoll's approach to song of songs. Peter Leithart doesn't see the contrast between Driscoll's sex manual approach to Song of Songs and the typological/allegorical approach (which the Puritans often affirm in a variety of ways, notably Sibbes and Edwards).

A few interesting samples via link:

http://www.leithart.com/2009/10/25/puritan-prudery/

http://www.leithart.com/2009/10/25/eros-deleted/

The "I love Jesus, but not like that." makes for a memorable joke but since we are called to love Christ MORE than "that" both in the sense of loving Father, Son, ,and Spirit with more than "that" level of passion and more than the subject of "that" desire then the risk of "I love Jesus, but not like that" is that in this sort of cultural millieu how does one differentiate between "that" sort of love and what is higher and more ardent than it?

I admit I skipped out on Peasant Princess because I figured, if anything, I'd be doing myself a favor. I'm at a stage in my life where I realize that what Mark wouldn't let singles hear at church retreats suddenly became some kind of sweeps week homiletic year-ender for 2008. Sure, I'm sure people were helped by those sermons but I still prefer to hear that other people benefited from the teaching rather than hear it myself. Meanwhile, Leithart's little commentaries are a reminder that while Driscoll has said there are the folks who would allegorize Song of Songs and while he himself transforms Song of Songs into what in my crankier moments I consider "Mark Driscoll's adventures in Christian porn" there are Christians who hold to one without letting go of the other.

Link--reach out and rebuke someone

http://www.outofur.com/archives/2010/01/ur_cartoon_rebu_1.html

Not just preachers have this problem, and not just bloggers. Some people can't make it through the week without considering themselves better than at least one other person or group. Sometimes it seems as though there are people who can't go more than a couple of days without speaking of, forwarding spam about, or writing about the things that other people do wrong. Why I'm demonstrating this habit myself merely in blogging about it? See? See how paradoxical the impulse is?

If you agree with this pass it on to everyone you know and if you don't then you're part of the problem!! SHAME ON YOU FOR BEING PART OF THE PROBLEM! HOW DARE YOU!? WHO DO YOU THINK YOU ARE!?

Coming up later I might have to blog a little more about Richard Sibbes.

Link to Bill Kinnon: For I was naked ... and you preached to me about penal substitutionary atonement

http://www.kinnon.tv/2010/01/for-i-was-naked.html

...and you preached to me about penal substitutionary atonement. I was sick and you said a Biblical understanding of leadership would bring me comfort. I was in prison and you sent me a book on the Biblical understanding of membership.

It is this section that I find most amusing. I'm all for discussions of penal substitutionary atonement ... and christus victor, and ransom, and so on and so forth. There are many ways in which a person can decide that comfort and solace are to be found in the right kind of church and the right kind of doctrine. It's not as though any one branch of Christian practice doesn't fail at times to clothe the naked, comfort the sick, and visit the prisoners. Still, bloggers worried about the loss of purity seem like they DO lean more that way.

Link: In the Shadow of Woodstock

http://www.calacirian.org/?p=925

The young people who came in droves to that farm in Woodstock, NY for several magical days in August of 1969 left as quickly and as miraculously as they’d arrived. Coming empty handed, they left empty handed. And the fields were covered in trash and mud and clothes and shoes and excrement and waste. The once working farm was in ruins, never to be worked again

I grew up in the 1980s, having been born in the mid-1970s. I grew up with a deep aversion to the glorification of the 1960s and of things hippie. I was taught by people who came of age in that era and, honestly, the only ones I trusted from that generation were the ones who didn't trust their own generation, who looked with a jaundiced but not altogether hopeless eye at the achievements and failures of their time and place. To distill this set of observations into a few statements:

Never trust a generation that praises itself for having changed the world (or lets itself be so praised).
Never trust a generation that thinks it has nothing to repent of.

It's easy for Americans to imagine they have changed the world forever but changing the world forever may not be a good thing, either from a "liberal" standpoint or a "conservative" standpoint.

It's easy for Americans to praise their achievements or to praise themselves in reverse, by denouncing their cultural legacy as though that were proof that they represent the brightest and best aspects of that legacy. In other words I'm a great American and represent the greatest things about America because I rip on other Americans who don't think the way I do because they are traitors to all that is "real" and "true" about America. It was ever thus and I have for much of my life been unhappy with that.

It is easy for Americans in each age to see themselves as righting the wrongs of the earlier generation without seeing the wrongs they do themselves. Hippies wanted to shake off the shackles they felt were put upon them by their parents who are now being styled as "the greatest generation" and yet both generations having given us legacies that are decidedly mixed. The Greatest Generation was not necessarily the one that did anything to end racism at home while ostensibly fighting tyranny abroad. The generation that did contend with racism and was part of that social revolution did so benefitting from the largesse of post-war prosperity and did other things to bring down a general valuation of life and human dignity. We can't be winners all the time.

Every generation has something to repent of. For years I have wondered if the things the Woodstock generation are most proud of are the things they should be most ashamed of. Certainly many from an earlier generation thought so ... and yet what did that generation need to repent of that they never repented of that the Woodstock generation rightly saw as being a problem?

Richard Sibbes' The Bruised Reed

Jared Wilson mentioned this book over on his blog which reminded me that I have yet to finish the book. Given that I blitzed through N. T. Wright's Jesus & the Victory of God in twenty-six days you would think that reading Richard Sibbes' The Bruised Reed would be finished in a weekend. Well, not hardly. I'm still not done with it and am thinking of rereading the stuff I already have read.

I got the book as a birthday gift a year ago and it is one of those small books that calls for a lot of thought. Now I happen to have read Steve Hay's observation over at Triablogue that in place of nouethetic counseling quite a few Christians might be better off simply reading this little book by one of the better-known Puritan authors. Given the stories I have heard about the results of nouthetic or "biblical counseling" I can't help but wonder if that surmise is correct, sometimes troublingly so. If nouthetic counselors wish to develop a counseling method that goes beyond or around psychology and psychiatry in dealing with hurt Christians it would seem that Richard Sibbes took care of that four centuries before nouthetic counseling got invented. Of course there must be any number of things written in various Christian traditions to deal with those things.

One of the great advantages of Sibbes compared to some other Puritans (like Gurnall, I'm afraid) is that Sibbes gets very much to the point. Even short statements make useful observations.

"Ye have heard of the patience of Job" the apostle James writes. We have heard of his impatience, too, but it pleased the Lord to overlook that.

If this statement by itself does not give you ample opportunity to reflect upon the mercies of Christ when dealing with our character flaws then you're just not interested in thinking about the mercies of Christ at all. It is a simple observation but a profoundly important one. There are quite a few figures in the Old Testament whose character flaws are nothing short of spectacular and yet in Hebrews and elsewhere in the New Testament we are told of what God found favorable in them, sometimes in such lavish ways it becomes nearly impossible to imagine how or when on earth they displayed these qualities while still alive!

a useless observation about repetition in sonata allegro forms

I have been listening to music by Sor and Diabelli lately (one of the awesome things about living in areas that have great central library systems is that when CDs get discarded through lack of circulation libraries either sell them or give them away and this can be a way to get out of print CDs). I have noticed in many contemporary performances of Haydn, for instance, that the repeat of the exposition is often discarded, or the repeat of the coda in Op 76, 2. I have been intrigued lately about the reasons for omitting these repetitions.

In listening to sonata forms by Sor and Diabelli what impresses me about their handling of the form is that the disadvantage of the repetition of the exposition is that the recapitulation forms a disproportionately small part of the work. The structural climax of the sonata form is generally understood to be the beginning of the recapitulation. In the hands of composers like Beethoven or Haydn or Mozart this comes about two thirds of the way through a work or closer to that. In the case of Sor or Diabelli the arrival point is more like three quarters of the way through the sonata form and in some cases as far forward as four fifths of the way through.

But what are the advantages of repeating the exposition in a form where the recapitulation does not take up such a paltry proportion of the elapsed time of the sonata form as a whole? These last few weeks it dawned on me that the advantage of a repeatign exposition in a more classically balanced form is that if you have a coda to balance the end of the work the repeating exposition creates a balanced form that resembles the nearly ubiquitous pop form of the verse chorus verse chors bridge verse chorus. Think about it, theme 1 in your sonata exposition is the verse. Theme 2 can be considered the chorus. There is a repetition of these to reinforce the material and the contrasting key relationships between the themes. The development section takes up the role of the bridge in a pop song and, frequently in Haydn and Mozart, takes up the proportional length you would expect to see in the bridge of a pop song. Then we get the recapitulation where theme 1 and theme 2 are presented in the tonic key with a little coda at the end.

In Beethoven the coda can often be larger than the exposition itself and this doesn't make as much sense if the exposition isn't repeated. Beethoven is, in his own way, writing forms that have structural commonality with Tin Pan Alley and pop songs but on a mammoth scale.

Classical forms developed in a setting where the music was not only played for patrician patrons but might also be played for gifted amateurs and for middle-class listeners who would be as immersed in popular music from their time and place as anything. Haydn was not just familiar with academic styles of music but also played in street bands and this dual perspective as a performing musician and composer can help make sense of his compositional approach. He didn't need to trump up a conflict between selling out and having artistic integrity. He was too workmanlike (in the best sense of that phrase) to let himself be bothered by the kinds of artistic integrity issues that became more prominent in aesthetics and music from Beethoven on. A person can play in a garage band on Saturdays and listen to Varese and Xenakis on Monday and Arvo Part and Palestrina on Tuesdays and round off the week with some Bob Dylan, John Lee Hooker, and Thelonious Monk. As the Preacher put it there is a time and a season for everything under heaven.

pastoral cases of wanting to have it both ways

In the last ten years I have heard more than a few sermons by a pastor and it has struck me recently that there come times when a pastor wants to have things both ways. If I hadn't spent ten years listening to the pastor it wouldn't be on my mind a tenth as much as it is now. Wanting to have your cake and it, too, may not be a sign of a weak pastor. It may be a sign of a strong pastor, but it still puzzles me. Perhaps this is because I'm not a pastor and don't understand these sorts of things the way a pastor would.

For instance, a person may want to emphasize the certainty of Christ's return and the eschatological significance of that and yet scrupulously avoid any actual committed school of interpreting the Apocalypse. Say, we'll avoid premillenial dispensationalism because Hal Lindsey whackos and Jack and Rexella van Impe hoodwink people with crazy theories. We'll also avoid postmillenialism because that leds to theonomistic thought and Christian reconstructionism and we don't want to be THAT closely linked to the likes of Doug Wilson. The historicist position has problems because it can be used to rip on churches we can't afford to rip on without losing a lot of public credibility and it has been a thorn in the side of churches in the past. Yet we also DON'T want to articulate a position like amillenialism or partial preterism because that's preferred by theological liberals or Catholics.

So, we'll ... uh ... affirm that Revelation is really important and that in it Jesus comes back to open a can of whoop-ass on the world ... without explaining what the seven seals and plagues are, let alone get into how different Christians have interpreted those symbols. We certainly won't get into the history of apocalyptic literature or the integration of non-canonical texts into canonical writings because that would open up cans of worms that the average Christian doesn't think about and maybe doesn't need to think about. Yeah, I look askance on that because my idea of fun is researching non-canonical literature referred to in Jude but I recognize that the armpit is not less a part of the body for not being the mouth just as the mouth is not more a part of the body for not being an armpit.

Take the statement that Christians can't learn anything about the Bible from Jews. On the one hand that objects to a rabbi teaching Christians. On the other hand ... Jesus was a rabbi. I'm not some Christ-denying apostate because I have the JPS interlinear on my bookshelf. If a pastor is going to alternately claim that Christians can't benefit from learning about the scriptures from Jewish teachers then why mention the Targum Neophiti as though it proved anything whatsoever to do with Christian teaching?

If the scriptures properly interpreted and understood are all about Jesus why no typological elements in the Song of Songs, just erotic content? I'm not claiming to argue persuasively for just one or the other, it is that polarity I find problematic. Paul drew upon Genesis 2 and explained a mystery of how Christ and the Church are like a husband and bride by the typological precedent of God's marriage in the prophets was hardly positive! Where could Paul have turned to, as a good Jew, in the scriptures, to examine how marriage is presented in a positive light? Oh, yeah ... but that couldn't be about Jesus and the Church even though Jesus pointed out how He came to fulfill the scriptures. The solution for that would be the evangelically untenable escape hatch of saying Song of Songs wasn't really part of the canon or defending an extremely late date of authorship. In other words, this is the sort of pastoral maneuver that attempts to have it both ways, to have all scripture point to Jesus except the parts that I don't want pointing to Jesus.

The temptation to want to have it both ways may be indicative of temptations we have felt for generations. Criticism in art and of the arts can often hinge on the observation that you can't have your cake and eat it, too. You can't use spectacles of violence to protest violence (actually, you can but it depends on how you approach it). You can't emphasize eschatological fervor without compromising a reasoned approach (this, too, is not impossible). It does seem, though, that in the hands of many people what we would like to claim for ourselves as paradox appears to others to be nothing more than oxymoron. "Holding things in tension" can often come across as wanting equally badly two or more mutually exclusive things. Yet our purity is often dubious and a foundation for terrible words and deeds.

In conservative evangelicalism a form of wanting it both ways is to reject the "social gospel" when it appears to move in a liberal direction while embracing a social gospel of men being "real men" and taking care of widows and orphans through their exploits in private enterprise and from their overlowing happiness and abundance deigning to take care of others in need for Jesus' fame (a little sarcasm alert here). The mission is to get as many people on mission as possible and if people aren't effectively and productively on mission perhaps they are consumers.

On the other hand, there's no community that doesn't have a weakness for this. There are many church communities that focus mainly on themselves at the expense of sharing with outsiders. True, they have the relative advantage of not trying to shove their take on the faith down someone else's throat but then by the opposite measure the good news simply isn't good enough news to them that they have any incentive to share it with other people. Things are just fine for me and my own and the real people of God so I'll just soak up what I want from whatever rituals are in place for me to benefit from. To say that there are Christians who are beyond a consumeristic approach to the faith in this country, regardless of confessional affiliation, is profoundly naive. The temptation to be a light that shines for ourselves can't be that new if Jesus said that no one hides a light under a basket. Yet the other temptation is to consider ourselves the salt of the earth and a light that shines so that people can look at us and then we persuade ourselves that we're pointing to someone else, to God.

I know this church has got problems but they haven't sinned against ME yet so I don't quite care and you shouldn't either

This has summed up my observation about why people do and don't leave churches. We can talk until the cows come home about doctrine and how doctrine is what unites us and how we shouldn't leave a church or join a church lightly. But in the end it seems that when people leave one church or join another this is what it amounts to in practical, day-to-day lived-out life.

A number of particularly bitter ex-church members I have known exemplified this ethic and rhetorical position right up to about the point where they felt grievously sinned against by leaders at their church. I understand it, though, because that's why ANYONE stays in or joins a church knowing the community has a history of sinning against people (which is what every church in every form will have a history of doing). When someone left because they strongly disagreed with a doctrinal teaching it was sour grapes and bad doctrine. No sooner had those who looked down on others felt sinned against themselves than did the church suddenly become a place that had to be left post-haste. The cycle seems to be to join a church, consider its problems, but still look down on other people at whatever church you left or no longer are part of. Things go fine in the honeymoon/convert's zeal stage.

Then, at some point, something goes wrong. You turn to the leaders or the community for help and the help does not materialize. There can be other ways in which this happens. The community may offer help in a time that is tough for you and you may refuse it because you want to be on your own two feet and you reason that God will work things out. Things then get worse on your own steam and you feel the community let you down.

Other churches are not different. Anyone who surveys the history of every Christian confession will see who has been sinned against and in what ways. It's not rocket science, yet we stay where we stay precisely because in addition to mostly agreeing with doctrine as taught by a particular church and believing it to be the real church as intended and established by the Spirit through the ages, we also stay because as bad as that church's behavior or teaching has actually been in any number of points, they haven't sinned against ME yet so I admonish other people to shut up and keep their spot organized in case there's a general inspection.

It is this more than other established mindsets that troubles me lately about churches. That injustices are done by the church/Church in the name of the Lord is inevitable but those whose reason for staying in a given community amount to the personal application of "Well, they haven't sinned against ME yet so I can't think of any reason why a person should leave." have a troubling position. As soon as they are sinned agaisnt themselves and change their tune they show that their committment was not to the church they thought they were committed to (nor, as a Protestant, do I think it automatically implies that that is a bad response). Many an ex-whatever-you-call-them are an ex what-they-were because they felt sinned against in a way that inspired them to leave. I am here not so concerned with that impulse as the propensity of people to look down on those people precisely because they have NOT been sinned against, or felt sinned against, in that sort of way.

If the only experiences you had with the piano were negative ones then you may never touch a piano again, may never take piano lessons, may never listen to piano music even. If someone were to say that shows that you're the one with the problem that wouldn't mean your emotional response to your unvaried experience with pianos was bad. If you had an initially positive set of experiences with the piano but grew to hate it due to unpleasant experiences later and gave up playing people could still say the problem was you and not the piano, but people can say this who themselves never actually play the piano. Our positive experiences or, to put it another way, our lack of profoundly negative experiences in a church do not give us license to just say that another person must be a bad duck for having had terrible experiences.

In other words, the fact that your church hasn't sinned against you yet doesn't mean you should look down on others who left because they felt sinned against. You might be the next person to get sinned against, after all. Particularly if you are part of a congregation of church movement where leaving is considered effectively leaving the Christian faith altogether this requires more rather than less compassion. After all, if you leave yourself for some unanticipated reason you are consigning yourself to the lake of fire or to being in the presence of God but not wanting to be with God and thus suffering the agony of not accepting Yahweh or who He is and thereby suffering for eternity in your own lack of repentence. Paul didn't say lightly that it is written that on account of us the unbelievers mock the name of the Lord. The goodness of Christ is so very often not the reason people leave, it is our own sinfulness and our refusal to see ourselves as sinful or sinning against others; our propensity to justify our own assaults on the character of others while defending ourselves as above reproach on the things that matter (as opposed to the things that don't matter).

But I ramble.

The temptation of Jesus in Luke: a comparative survey of the synoptics with an excurses into OT literature

My ultimate goal is to discuss the sequence of temptations Satan presents ot Christ in the gospel of Luke but in order to fully explain the significance of Luke's account and the power of its narrative I believe it is necessary to consider the whole of the scriptures on this subject and take a broader survey of the temptation of Christ in the synoptic tradition and also tie it firmly to the Old Testament narrative so as to demonstrate more fully the significance of Luke's syntax of temptations from the accuser. Each of the temptation narratives offer a combined insight into the temptation of Christ that Christians must not ignore, not least because Christ proved victorious where we so often prove ourselves weak.

I will presume at this point that you have read both Matthew and Luke's accounts of the temptation of Christ by Satan in the wilderness. I will also assume at least some working knowledge of both Exodus and Deutoronomy. I will not assume you know about psalms as prayers of exorcism, however. I mention Mark in passing so as to note the Spirit impelled him to go into the wilderness. In Luke we are told that Jesus, full of the Holy Spirit, went into the wilderness and there was tempted. Mark shows us a more disturbing portrait that suggests Jesus was compelled to go into a place of temptation.

We are told that God never tempts and yet there is an ambiguity in the word commonly translated "tempt". The word can also mean "test". In this light God tests people all the time but may not test them in the form of inciting them to evil but by driving them into circumstances in which they will face the possibility of temptation. This, I admit, is the sort of paradoxical approach that someone like Satin Cog of old school Midrash and Babblerash would have a field day with.

What I want to examine is the unique order in which Luke presents his temptation compared to Matthew and what this may mean in each respective narrative. The community receiving the gospel has some bearing on this approach to interpretation. Now here I don't mean to propose that I know about the recipients of the synoptic gospels beyond what is traditionally ascribed to them. Matthew was geared toward a predominantly Jewish audience and Luke toward a more Hellenistic audience that probably had at least some awareness of Jewish thought but not much. Mark, as is often said, is pitched toward Roman society. In that respect I want to keep those audiences in mind as I proceed.

In Matthew the sequence of temptation implies that there were various forms of temptation throughout the time in which Jesus was fasting and was hungry. There were doubtless more than these but these may be considered the three exemplars of temptation--turning stones to bread, throwing himself from a high place, and worshipping Satan in exchange for all the kingdoms of the world. At the first Satan says "If you are the son of God ... " Where with Adam the serpent made an indirect temptation to Adam through Eve and tempted Eve while also making his sales pitch to Adam, the serpent directly questions Jesus' nature. He then proceeds to cite scripture in tempting Jesus to throw himself from the pinnacle of the temple, and finally offers to give the kingdoms of the world in exchange for worship.

Christ rejects each of this temptations by citing scripture. Intriguingly the pinnacle temptation includes a citation from scripture, which Jesus reproves with another scripture. I will get to the significance of this shortly but since it is not the ultimate temptation from the Tempter in Matthew's gospel I will refrain from explaining a few things about the significance of this until later. For now it will be enough to point out that the passage is a psalm that speaks of how those who dwell in the secret place of the most High will be safe from harm.

In Matthew the sequence of temptation is compelling because Jesus has come to fulfill the mission of Israel. To understand the nature of the temptation we must consider why it would even be a temptation. I have heard it said that Satan isn't in control of anything so Jesus could not be a ransom paid to the devil. Never mind that Paul says Satan is the prince of the power of the air and the god of this age, then. No, to make that argument seems viable but it presents us with the problem of a Jesus who was not really tempted since He already was in possession of all things. There was no need for him to learn obedience through what he suffered (Hebrews) or to tell us that He saw Satan fall like lightning from the heavens.

The temptation for a Jewish annointed one called to deliver his people from bondage to the nations is that Satan's offer is an offer to destroy the nations, to be the Jewish messiah who defeats and subjugates the nations and all at the expense of giving worship to Satan. If we only dismiss Satan's temptation as just being a lie (which, of course, it ultimately was) we have to appreciate WHY the offer could have been a temptation to Jesus the man. For Israelites weary of subjugation to Gentile empires the ultimate hope was that the one chosen by Yahweh to destroy the nations and demonstrate God's justice and vindication of His people was the thing to look forward to. Satan's last temptation in Matthew is a temptation because it offers a shortcut to that, a shortcut Jesus refuses because it was, ultimately, the shortcut that Israel took to its own downfall. They worshipped other gods for centuries and took refuge in them, failing to remember that these refuges would become not merely snares but coffins. Jesus refused to accept the offer and so was the second Adam and the true Israel.

Now in Luke the sequence is different and that difference is compelling. The temptation of the pinnacle comes last and Satan says that it is written "He will gives his angels charge over you. On their hands you will be lifted up. They will guard you so that you do not dash your foot against a stone." Jesus replies that the scriptures say to not put the Lord to the test. In fact anotheer way of rendering the text is, "You shall not tempt the Lord your God."

Now here is where I come to the central observation. Satan's ultimate temptation of Christ in Luke reveals him quoting scripture. When he tempted Eve he questioned the accuracy and legitimacy of the word of God but when confronting the Word Satan tempts the Word with the word of God itself. "It is written" Satan observes and invokes that as the reason Jesus should throw himself off the pinnacle.

The passage Satan quotes is Psalm 91. Read Psalm 91 in its entirety and it speaks of how God will preserve His chosen one, the one who is hid in the secret place of the Almighty. Satan's temptation is pernicious because it quotes scripture, quotes it accurately, and even quotes it in context but to a terrible end! What is more there is a strange and terrible yet darkly amusing irony to Satan using this psalm as a means to tempt Christ.

Dead Sea Scrolls research has revealed that in the Qumran community the Psalms had not yet been codified in the order we now have in our Bibles. The canonization process was not yet complete, if memory serves. Jamnia had not yet taken place. Now in Qumran Psalm 91 was part of a small collection of prayers of exorcism (it is utterly fascinating that one of the prayers of exorcism is attributed to Solomon but I'm going to write that post later if I feel inspired enough to write about that, though I'd prefer Scotteriology to maybe tacklethe ironies of a psalm of exorcism attributed to Solomon given Solomon's spectacular apostasy). Psalm 91 happens to be the fourth and last psalm listed as a prayer of exorcism in the scroll.

Do I really need to spell out how ironic it is that the passage Satan quotes to Jesus when he says "for it is written" was not just any psalm but a psalm used as a prayer of exorcism? To put it in more modern parlance, Satan was using one of the landmark texts on spiritual warfare used at the time. He was quoting statements straight from a widely accepted spiritual warfare text, from a prayer that would be used to pray against demonic attack! He was using this text to tempt Jesus and tell him he shoud throw himself off the pinnacle of the temple! Satan is not only willing to tell the truth, he can quote scripture accurately, quote it in context, and use it in his sales pitch.

It should go without saying that each temptation by Satan was a temptation for Jesus to be the kind of Mesiah Israel WANTED but not the kind of messiah Israel NEEDED. I'll go further and say that Satan's temptation of Jesus was tempting him to be the kind of Savior WE want and not the kind of savior we need. No one illustrates this gap between the savior we want and the savior we need better than the bitterly ironic and relentless "The Grand Inquisitor" from Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov. That is, for the time being, going to be some other blog entry because while I adore Dostoevsky's work this is a blog about Christ, about his temptation presented to us in the scriptures, and ways in which we can learn about the nature of his temptation as a reflection on temptations we may face that he faced on our behalf. Christ has been victorious where we have failed, are failing, and will continue to fail.

Jesus' response is to quote Deutoronomy 6 where it says "Do not put your Lord to the test." It can also be read, "Do not tempt the Lord your God." The fuller passage is important. Deutoronomy 6 warns that we should not worship other gods but revere only Yahweh. The fuller text Jesus quotes says "Do not test the Lord as you did at Massah." Moses named the place Massah and Meribah, words meaning "Proof" and "Contention" respectively because it was there that the people of Israel contended with him and demanded water. They blamed Moses for leading them out in the wilderness to die. Moses replied, "Why do you find fault with me? Why do you put the Lord to proof?"

When the Lord says "Do not test me as you did at Massah" the story refers to Israel grumbling, proposing that ultimately God has had Moses lead them out into the middle of nowhere so that they, their children, and livestock will all die of thirst in the wilderness. They had no water to drink. Asking for water itself was not necessarily the problem. This is the Lord who knows we need water and knows we need food and shelter. They questioned the goodness of God and the character of God asking, "Is the Lord really with us or not?"

We can begin to see, now, how ingenious the Tempter is in his full frontal assault on the Lord's person and character. We can see his cunning in disputing with Yahweh in Job, "Does Job fear God for nothing? Have you not put a hedge around him and everything he owns?" Yahweh even tells Satan that he has inspired Him to ruin Job's life without cause (there is a cause in the end but Job never learns of the cosmic bet between Yahweh and Satan or what its purpose ultimately is within the book). Satan is even more cunning in his temptation of Christ than we saw him be in Job. Luke reveals this in ways that invite hours of reflection when we consider not only Deutoronomy but also the incident in Exodus to which a fuller reference to Deutoronomy refers.

By way of yet another diversion, in ancient writing it is customary to allude to a point and leave that as a completed, implied argument. This is not a form of argument or reasoning that we may find acceptable in blogging. Obviously it is not my own preferred way of handling things. I prefer to tackle every single point as it occurs to me, which makes for sloppy blogging and sloppy writing. When you live in a culture where paper is expensive and writing is especially labor-intensive one of the ways you, as it were, economize your literary space, is to saturate your narrative with allusions which, once given, complete the narrative or argumentative thrust by implication. Luke's Gospel is full of this and these allusions within allusions are necessary to know in order to fully appreciate what the Tempter presents to Christ.

Here we come to what makes Luke's narrative of the temptation of Christ unique. We see in Luke that the ultimate temptation from the Tempter is to take the scriptures, take them in context, take them accurately, and use them to promote an action that is approved of by the father of lies. To Eve the serpent asks, "Did God really say ... ?" But to Christ Himself the serpent says, "If you are the Son of God then do this ... for it is written." The serpent uses the scriptures themselves to imply that God Himself through Christ is wanting, is not who He truly is. Satan questions whether Jesus is really the Christ, whether Jesus is Immanuel, the prince of peace. Jesus' reply is that we are not to put the Lord to the test and it is here that we should remember the rest of the allusion, we are not to put the Lord to the test as Israel did at Massah and Meribah, asking "Is the Lord truly with us or not." Satan's final temptation to Jesus goes beyond saying "turn these stones into bread"; beyond giving Jesus the kingdoms of the world in exchange for some worship; the Tempter presumes to find the Son of God wanting by the very scriptures that anticipated His coming.

Jesus would go on in Luke to say that a wicked and unbelieving generation asks for a sign. Had He not seen Israel asking for signs at Massah? He promised that there would be no sign but the sign of Jonah. Israel would once again receive a sign but unlike at Massah this time the sign would not be what they asked for but what Yahweh brought forth Himself.

Now as for us, we see that Jesus prevailed against the Tempter and the Lord prevailed where we have failed, fail, and continue to fail. Let us consider how the Tempter may tempt us, or how in our hearts we entertain the doubts that are our own. After all, Israel doubted the presence and goodness of God at Massah and Meribah and we are warned to not be that sort of grumbler. When Paul wrote that we should do everything without grumbling the ethic advised was not a "shut up and do as your told" ethic but a warning that if we assume that God ultimately does not have our best interest at heart then we will go through life ostensibly obeying God but having a heart inclined toward disobedience.

Satan's ability and willingness to take scripture and manipulate it toward his end should give us pause, and should make us very sober in assessing our own motives for employing scripture to attack the integrity and character of others. I think that among Christians we are perilously culpable for using the scriptures as ways to accuse and impugn each other for things that are not of primary importance. We can be little satans to each other and to the world, accusers, adversaries who doubt the provenance of how God may speak to others while unshakably thinking that our missives from the Almighty are beyond dispute. The coming of Christ into the world has revealed that the signs we expect from Yahweh in each age are not necessarily ever the signs He chooses to give us.

If the devil can quote scripture to tell Jesus "You should do this if you are REALLY God's child" then how much more can we, even among Christians, make the same mistake? A person can cite all the scriptures, have them in a row, have them in context, and still ultimately play a satanic role in accusing someone. This is something that I look back on with regret because I believe I have made this mistake and have been in Christian settings where this mistake was made. Jesus' words for the Pharisees were harsh, "You are of your father the devil." What John refers to somewhat cryptically and through Jesus' fiery rhetoric is fleshed out here in Luke's narrative. Luke shows us how Satan can take the scriptures themselves and put them to utterly satanic ends.

Yet Christ confronts the pinnacle of satanic abuses with a proper use of the scriptures. The Spirit who drove him into the wilderness and was with him gave him power and through the scriptures Jesus rebuked Satan's tests of Yahweh and of himself (also Yahweh, of course). Christ properly expounds and lives out the scriptures that we distort and manipulate for our own ends. Christ corrects the abuses of the scriptures encouraged by Satan and by the religious leaders of his time during his ministry. Christ resisted the temptations by Satan and men to be the kind of messiah he was expected to be (if he was, really, the messiah). Christ ultimately reveals that He could conquer the abuse of the word of God through the ages because He Himself is the Word. Despite generations of false prophets who invoked the name of Yahweh for the blessing of lies and crimes Jesus' life and teaching ultimately puts to flight Satan's use of even the scriptures to accuse and condemn Him and those He came to save. The Word will at length make all things new, all those things corrupted by the power of sin and death.

In closing I might as well make a full bibliographic index of materials I have read that have helped me get to a point where I felt inclined to write this blog entry. Susan Garrett's books The Demise of the Devil in the writings of Luke and The Temptation of Jesus in the Gospel of Mark are both valuable references. I found The Dead Sea Scrolls Bible, edited by Martin Abegg Jr, Peter Flint, and Eugene Ulrich to be useful, too, as it corroborates Garrett's observation about Psalm 91 as a prayer of exorcism. Jeffrey Burton Russell's entire book series on the history of Christian and Jewish thought about the devil is immensely valuable.

I have Gurnall's The Christian in Full Armour but it is, I must admit, not relevant to this particular reflection as what I have undertaken here is to examine the synoptic gospel accounts of the devil's activities and words toward Christ; Gurnall's book is so focused on Ephesians his work was not immediately applicable with reference to this blog entry, which is not to say I have no appreciation for the work since I did quote a section of it in this blog a while back. It's also spectacularly long and I have not read enough of it for it to be particularly relevant here, just in case someone ever wonders why I haven't cited it here.

Last but not least I am also grateful to heard John Haralson's sermons on Exodus 17 and Phillipians as background material for this blog entry. There was a recent sermon by Mark Driscoll on Luke 4 that I didn't actually listen to but hearing some people comment about it got me thinking about how much material a teacher or simple Christian could consider that is worth sharing (I am not here proposing to be a teacher in some spiritual sense of the word as I'm not a pastor and have no inclination to be one).