To go by interviews and commentaries it can seem as though one of George Lucas' signal talents has been a penchant for self-mythologizing. Whatever could be said about Joseph Campbell's monomyth in the mouth of Lucas the monomyth seems to apply less and less to the Star Wars franchise itself and more and more to George Lucas' various accounts and explanations for how he (as opposed to dozens of others with him) envisioned what we're supposed to have seen.
There were some dissenting comments. I saw some dissenting opinions in response to another recent Mbird piece proposing that the core theological paradigm in the Star Wars franchise can be considered Pelagian.
We live in a time where franchises are rebooted and refurbished and it seems as though among critics whose job it is to write about this stuff there's little imagination that's observably going into WHY people keep buying stuff. "It makes money" is both too obvious and uninformative. People buy things for reasons and if economic theories propose any level of rational agency we might want to ask what people may be buying and for what reasons.
I've proposed that the nostalgia Americans have for sci-fi franchises can be seen to cluster around the franchises that peaked in the LBJ and Reagan periods of blue state and red state nostalgia. Whether we nuke the world or save it there's no fate but what we make, we being Americans. Seeing the trailer for Star Trek Beyond raises once again for me some doubts as to whether there's any reason to keep Star Trek around in a post-Cold War moment. We're so far removed from the end of the Cold War and people left and right have doubts about the perfection and purity of the American exceptionalist vision that there's a sense in which Roddenberry's optimistic vision seems ridiculous.
If half a century ago we had an America in which Star Trek could be imagined we now live in a different century, one in which there's a cartoon called The Venture Bros systematically skewering the generational optimism of the generation that gave us Star Trek half a century ago. Just because the optimistic patriotism of Star Trek has historically had more blue-state futurist utopianism doesn't mean it hasn't been jingoistic along the way. Star Trek can be seen as much as a work of institutionally funded propaganda for liberal secularism as Veggie Tales can be seen as moralistic propaganda for evangelicals.
The question of art may in some sense be irrelevant by misunderstanding as fixed the notion that art for the sake of art is even a given. Something can be treated as if it's art to the extent that you can impute your values to it and if you find there's no values of your own (as you perceive them) that you'd impute to something it may just be that that delineates the difference between "art" and "propaganda". If you like Star Trek, regardless of how red state Christian you might be, you'll come up with a reason to keep watching Star Trek in spite of everything you may have read Roddenberry say about this ideals and hopes for the franchise. If enough evangelicals in America like Star Wars they will retroactively impute soteriological parables on to the films whether or not those had anything to do with Lucas' thought process.
But then the fun thing about art is that the gap between intent and "reception history" gives room for that kind of thing. Stravinsky had the luxury of being able to sympathize with fascists (literally) in the 1930s before changing his mind. Liberals in the United States had the luxury of being sympathetic to Stalin before they found out how many people he had killed.
The cultural undercurrent of skepticism at Cold War idealism as contrasted with Cold War era applied ethics in a post-Cold War society seems to be, well, more an explicit current of thought in American cartoons. But that's a fancy to play with for some other occasion, if I ever get around to riffing on that at the blog.
This was a strange article in that it had a title that signaled a point that was never really made. That can happen if you write a piece and an editor assigns a title to your piece that doesn't have any bearing on what you wrote, or maybe a title that reflected upon correspondence between author and editor that didn't make it into a published draft. These things can happen.
But to call the piece something that asks why we remember the Beatles and forgot so much else should have made more of an evident effort to answer the question, if the question was inherent to the piece.
When we talk about the influence of Beethoven, or the mythology of what Beethoven's music is said to mean to those into his work, we can talk about Beethoven's formal innovation of received forms and idioms on the one hand, and on the other the social or political significance imputed to our reception history of his work on the other. Taruskin and countless others have discussed the mythology of Beethoven but Taruskin has been succinct in discussing how Beethoven's reception history and mythology have two components, the artistic innovation component and the social significance component. Others have written about how the patronage class that backed Beethoven had something to gain in the process and that might be for some other time.
The short and sweeping thing to be said about Beethoven was he introduced innovations in musical art that were considered revolutionary and what his music was taken to mean was to represent, in some sense, the highest and most widely loved ideals about social and political liberty as it was conceived at the time.
They may have covered a song called "Roll Over Beethoven" but the Beatles are in the 20th century a counterpart or successor to Beethoven. You see fans talking about and writing about the Beatles and the personal and social significance of their work as defining an era in a way that's not dissimilar form the ways that admirers of Beethoven in the 19th century described the impact of his work.
But the Beatles were in many respects basically just a better than average boy band that transcended the limitations and expectations of their idiom. They were also the product of a massive corporate empire that marshalled a variety of skill sets and creative interests. The Beatles are the distillation of corporate rock but a distillation of what it could become when everything within the pop music industry of an age synergistically worked toward shared ideals. We're able to impute to this boy band that trafficked in formulaic pop songs a great deal of our ideals. And why not, it's the case, isn' tit?
What the Beatles managed to do more cogently than other bands from around he same time was embody a variety of popular styles from a variety of regions. Earlier in the week I wrote about how if Stravinsky was the chameleon who dominated the first half of the 20th century then David Bowie could be considered the chameleon of the second half of the 20th century. But there have been plenty of chameleons and in several ways the Beatles, a band, and a band with a spectacular corporate backing and aid, did the chameleon thing earliest and most successfully in pop musical terms. The Beatles could be taken as a symbolically being a kind of melting pot or amalgamation in music that many contemporary Westerners still aspire to.
Now we could say that was emblematic of cultural appropriation and colonialist cultural privilege and all that but that's not how people into the music tend to bracket the Fab Four. It's usually more the working class background and not the waning imperialist context in which those guys were born. We feel more comfortable about the ideals of an empire if they can be imputed to all of humanity than if we look at them as the ideals of a specific empire, especially when we live in a global media network that can reveal to us with relatively little effort how we live in a world in which there are other empires besides the ones we live in and how they don't share the same ideals we do.
The Beatles are symbolically useful to us as we discuss ourselves in a way comparable to the way Beethoven's music was symbolically useful to those who discussed Beethoven's music in their time. If anything the romantic idealism associated with affection for Beethoven's music was simply transferred to the Beatles without necessarily changing all that much. The patronage systems changed and we went from enlightened autocrats to corporate sponsorship. We'd certainly prefer to tell ourselves that our patronage system is friendlier to the arts and can speak with some confidence of a more egalitarian impulse but patronage cycles can show that a spirit of adventure can coalesce into a spirit of conservation and inertia. When we stop to consider that the commercial music industry is nearing a centennial and that recorded music was seen by Sousa as a threat to the vitality of local musical cultures more than a century ago it may be that what was a vital and bracing musical thing half ac entury ago can become through veneration and journalistic/critical circulation the hoary status quo in just a generation or so. For my grandparents' generation the Beatles were as often as not, maybe more often than not, annoying in a way that my parents' generation or mine found New Kids on the Block insipid and irritating.
It seems that most of the time when I read people writing about the Beatles it's about the four guys and the significance of their musical activities. Fair enough, they wrote some fun songs, but what about the corporate behemoth that helped them become what they became? When people complain about corporate pop and how bland and lame it sound or how it all just sounds like the metronomic ringing of a cash register the shortfall in this kind of jeremiad isn't just that it tends to make people sound old-fashioned (which it can often be and isn't necessarily a bad thing in itself), it's that invites a question, the question of whether or not we have sacralized the pop culture that inspired us in our innocent youth as being purer and better than the corporate pop that may be inspiring new younger generations.
Besides, when people who are in their 20s now find inspiration in a band like the Beatles the longevity and broadness of the appeal of such a band may be instructive and inspiring. There are people who have mourned the passing of David Bowie who weren't even born yet when he began his musical career.
While jazz musicians and fans of classical music will certainly continue to lament the decline of the popularity of these idioms the popularity of The Beatles or of David Bowie may be a chance for us to remember the potentially obvious point that people, when they hear music, often like to hear the human voice. If the 19th century was an era in which instrumental music in Western culture was regarded as a supremely transcendental art aspiring to personalized ideals of beauty and truth the 20th century may have restored or revived a different ideal, that people like to hear songs. It's not such a big surprise that a band like th Beatles excelled at writing songs and excelled at writing songs across the surface details of timbre and formalities of expected styles. To bring back a Meyer term, the Beatles managed to be formalists. Whatever stylistics shifts and pivots they did their voices remained steady and their control of the song as an idiom for personal yet mass appeal was, half a century later, fairly easily agreed upon. Or so it would seem. We remember the Beatles, obviously, because we want to. It's a nostalgia like others but in an era where nostalgia can lead to franchise extension we might do well to stop and consider that nostalgia and the desire to buy more time for a franchise will depend on having some idea what it was or is we've been buying.
Ever since high school, I have adored choral music. Like many young musicians, I idolized the composers and decided I wanted to compose choral music, too. Indeed, new choral music has a big market!
But, as an atheist in a field often inextricably connected to a religious community, there is an element of cognitive dissonance that’s a running theme in my career. When I tell someone that I sing in professional choirs and compose “mostly” choral music, it is uncomfortable, even alienating, when they make the assumption that I do so for spiritual reasons, that I am a “believer,” that the music that I compose is for worship, and that it has been sung by choirs, in the strictest sense, not choruses.
Why do so many people assume “sacred choral” music when I say just “choral” music? Religion, like music and especially choral music, at its best brings people together for a common good. That is the reason I sing in choirs.
...
That's a reasonable question, not a rhetorical one. Why do so many people assume choral music is sacred? Well, the answer that maybe all music is sacred doesn't quite get at the peculiarity of a secularist in the realm of choral music specifically, or maybe even vocal music in general.
Even though since the time of Beethoven instrumental music has been held by some to be the transcendental music that expresses universal values this has hardly been the case in reality. To put it another way, the thing is that we don't tend to sing about things we're indifferent to. We sing about loves and hatreds. More to a practical point, when you get a dozen or more people to sing about the same thing at the same time this tends to only happen, it seems, as an act of veneration. The conundrum of being a secularist in the realm of choral music is that more than any other musical idiom in the history of humanity choral music as a performance tradition affiliated with veneration and if the veneration isn't explicitly religious it will tend to ALSO be or alternatively be collective, which is to say political. It will be in praise of something more often than not, even if that praise is in some place you wouldn't normally think about.
For the person who never sets foot in a church and was raised with no religious background what's the most unavoidable point of contact for hearing a group of people singing together in praise of something?
Advertising.
Let's step back and think a bit. Even in a film or a TV show you may not hear any choral music but you will at some point have heard a bunch of people singing a jingle for a promoted product on a radio ad or a television ad. There are plenty of other ways a person can be exposed to choral singing in life that don't involve advertisements but humor me for a bit. It seems that if you're trying to explore a tradition of choral music that is completely secular and not tied to any kind of religious belief, personal or civic; but if you're also trying to avoid anything overtly or implicitly political or nationalist in a neo-nationalist variety then what have you got left? Well, basically, advertising jingles.
There could be a proposal at this point that composing choral music that isn't dependent on a text could be a path to take. Sure, but this gets to the question of whether or not people will be on board singing about music that doesn't commit to being about anything and whether, further, people will shell out money to pay to hear choral music performed that does not commit to anything other than music as an ideal unto itself. I mean, there could be some truly fantastic choral music based on neutral vowel tones that doesn't depend on any text painting or textual enhancement ... but at this point we do have to raise the reasonable and emotionally compelling question of why people who are in search for that musical ideal would be choosing a choral work with no textual concerns when they could be listening to instrumental music.
The conundrum of being a secularist in the tradition of choral music may be most acute and feel weirdest because it's in choral music that we are most unavoidably confronted with a tradition that is founded on the human history of veneration of a god or a ruler or a state or a political ideology that establishes a social identity. In Ted Gioia's book on the history of the long song he paraphrased a quip that said that while 90 percent of all the songs in the history of rock and roll were love songs 90 percent of rock criticism as a literary tradition disproportionally focused on the ten percent of the rock songs that weren't love songs. Take out the element of love and veneration in the vocal music tradition and you're left with ten percent, so to speak, even for music written for a soloist. Take out the element of love and veneration in the choral music tradition and, well, what if all we're left with that we can remember off the top of our heads is a set of product endorsing choral jingles? It seems that choral music more than other forms of music traffics in adoration and worship of stuff. I'm not saying there isn't a tradition of secularist choral music. Xenakis has written some pretty killer choral music, for instance. It's not stuff everyone will thrill to listen to, but I'm just pointing out one case among many for choral music composed by atheists. It's out there, it's just that it's such a recent development in the history of choral music the body of work is taking shape.
There was a time when I imagined that Michael Jackson would outlive Stevie Wonder. That certainly turned out to be wrong. There was a point at which I imagined David Bowie would outlive Keith Richards. That, too, has turned out to be wrong.
The passing of Bowie is not a heavy personal burden for me, though I know people who adore his music. I like at least some of it, even if I have more Pinkfloyd and Bob Dylan and Stevie Wonder albums, by far.
But Bowie's passing has given journalists and musicians an opportunity to highlight Bowies versatility and the way he reinvented himself as a public persona, taking up one persona and then another.
David Bowie's shifts in persona might be likened to Igor Stravinsky's shifts in style. Both were able to shrewdly adapt to their respective times. Both had a chameleon like aspect to them.
Long ago in Music, the Arts and Ideas Leonard B. Meyer proposed that the new era we saw before us was one in which "the Renaissance is over". There was no more avant garde and could not be an avant garde because having abandoned a teleological conception of history that would be inherent in Christian thought (or Marxist thought, for that matter) the ever present would be a dynamic steady state of all musical styles and artistic and literary genres co-existing in a stasis. There might be traditionalists and there might be transcendental quests for the ever-new but Meyer proposed that this new era belonged to the formalists, those artists, writers and musicians who could and would shift from one style to another and display clever ways of crossing styles less out of some obligation to say the Big Things as to demonstrate mastery of technique and to play with what it even meant to be in one style or another.
And if that doesn't sound like David Bowie I don't know what does.
Of course Meyer was certainly not writing with David Bowie specifically in mind in 1967. David Bowie was just showing up at that point and Meyer was writing more about Babbitt and Stockhausen. But for those familiar with Meyer's description of formalism as a tendency in the arts and the formalist as the artist or musician adept at shifting styles and combining them, David Bowie is the latest of a litany of musicians we have lost in the last twenty-five years who was able to leap from style to style.
Whether we're talking about Roy Orbison or the Beatles or Bob Dylan (that switch from "folk" to "rock") or Frank Zappa or Johnny Cash or Ray Charles or David Bowie something that some musical heroes of the last half century have displayed is an ability to work within a category but to shift into another style. In classical music terms this has been called "cross over" and it has not gone over well for many a critic and many a listener. But crossover isn't a bad thing if the shift has been made in the context of a life in which the styles are shared. Bowie could go from cabaret to glam rock and it made sense. Dylan switching from folk to rock made sense. McCartney or Joel trying out classical music after decades of pop didn't make sense. A lot of us could not believe that these guys had spent their lives steeped within those traditions as performers. Is that unfair? Yeah, maybe, but the success of a David Bowie in shifting sounds may testify to a collective desire that even if we all get that persona is a put-on the finesse and technique and craft have to be legit.
Some of us admire the musical chameleons because they make music in a way that illustrates through their lives that the conceptual boundaries between styles of music are permeable. Theodore Gracyk coined a term years ago for modes of grasping music, ontologically thick and ontologically thin. The former is appreciating music, for want of a finer way to put it, through recordings. An ontologically thick mode of experiencing music is thorugh listening to recordings or live performance and it would tend to involve replicating that particular sound you hear on a recording, that specific Marshall amp and that particular Gibson or Fender. The sounds as sounds have to be disovered and replicated. Ontologically thin music is closer to notes on the page. Substitutions can be made for a flute or an oboe, there's a sense in ontologically thin music (Bach, for instance) that the music doesn't depend so much on THIS sound being played iN THIS way on THAT instrument by THOSE people.
So Bowie appreciation could be either of these. Rather, what I'm suggesting is that for a musician like Bowie part of the fun is that his work shows an appreciation of an ontologically thick finished product but a songwriting approach that could be potentially described as aware of ontological thinness in the Gracyk variety.
It's easier to shift from style to style when you don't let yourself get hung up on the exactitude of timbre. The timbres can be wonderfully when you select them but a whole lot of what passes for "ontologically thick" understandings of music is fixating on timbre. Sometimes you can focus on the concrete sound at the expense of realizing that across a blues son; a country song; a hip-hop song; a string quartet the same set of chords and hooks may be able to appear.
If in the first half of the 20th century musical styles and conceptions began to fragment and academics began to burrow into their schools of thought, something Leo Brouwer has said academics have failed to catch up with is the second half of the 20th century--this was an era, as Brouwer saw it, in which pop music began to have a lot of people exploring fusion. While academic musicology had its Babbitts and while Boulez had intoned that Schoenberg was dead and that those who had not felt the necessity for the 12-tone system were, not quite useful ... in pop music, whether we're talking Bowie or Miles Davis in jazz, experiments toward fusion and in style change were already under way.
When Meyer was writing about formalists it's not clear he would have had anyone like Bowie in mind, but we can propose that Bowie was one of the great formalists of pop music in the West in the last sixty years.
Some may say Pierre Boulez, who died about a week ago, will be best remembered for his music compositions ... that remains to be seen. I remember him for his fantastic conducting of works by Stravinsky and Berg and Bartok, personally, and never got much into his music. If it were a choice between only being able to listen to the musical works of Boulez or Bowie for the rest of my life then Bowie takes this in a landslide.
I'm not sure how many people know who Boulez is compared to those who know who Bowie is. Sure, both may have had stars on the wane but both were brilliant and capable musicians in their different ways. It's just that it hardly seems in doubt that Bowie is the better-known name even if Boulez fans might wish that Boulez was the more household name.
There's a passage blogged by composer and teacher Kyle Gann from last week that comes to mind.
In grad school I analyzed every note of Boulez’s Second Piano Sonata, which I had never heard – and I knew it so well that when I finally listened to the recording, I cried. Today I wouldn’t recognize the piece in a blindfold test. I was astonished when Alex Ross reported that, late in life, Boulez admitted in an interview that, back in the serialist years, “We didn’t pay enough attention to how people listen.” It reminded me of a Morton Feldman quote, which I will paraphrase from memory: “Only in Europe do you have these revolutionaries who guillotine anyone and everyone who disagrees with them, and then change their minds.” All the same, I will listen to Pli selon pli this afternoon, and tonight I will drink to all of the great European masters of my youth, and to having outlived them.
...
Not everyone digs the music of either Boulez or Bowie ... but it seems David Jones did pay attention to how people listen.
There's been a number of recordings released of Rebay's music for guitar in the last year that will be worth mention. Also overdue would be discussing the solo guitar sonatas. There's commercially available recordings of two of the seven but not, as yet, of the whole set.
some of Jimmy Witcher's account of the last year or so to do with Mark Driscoll.
The "internal things" ... was that the conversation on air in 2013 Mark Driscoll had with Janet Mefferd in which the term "plagiarism" came up? Was it "internal things" that World Magazine reported that Mars Hill used Result Source to secure a place on the New York Times bestseller list for Real Marriage? As Driscoll's been making the rounds he's at times shared that there was this conflict, see, and it didn't really come to the public knowledge until the last year of Mars Hill ... but Paul Petry published content at Joyful Exiles starting in March 2012, more than an entire year before the Mefferd interview in 2013. Now some internal correspondence got leaked, to be sure, something kind of like former BoAA member named Tripp describing Mars Hill as one of the most abusive ministry cultures he'd ever seen. But Tripp's resignation from the BoAA was public, too. The idea that there were "internal things" seems to reflect a profound ignorance (deliberate or otherwise) of what was going on.
But enough of those general observations.
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/warrenthrockmorton/2016/01/06/mars-hill-churchs-demise-referred-to-as-some-internal-things-in-mark-driscolls-intro-at-zion-2016/
... And you know, many of us go through hard times in our life, but not all of us have to do it very publicly. And Pastor Mark had to go through a very difficult, kind of almost a public trial, uh, with the media on his front lawn, helicopters flying overhead, his every move being discussed in blogs and on social media. And you know, as often is the case, you know, with the media, and I know they, they sometimes try, uh, but they get about a third of the information right, you know. And so he and his family were living in this, in this difficult time of making this decision, and he had resigned.
And it was literally just within days, probably a couple of weeks later that I got to meet him at a pastor’s conference. And Pastor Mark had known it was time for him to step down, and he knew that God was calling him to move on and go into another season, but he knew that he needed to get some things “in his quiver,” if you will. He needed to, to learn some things, and develop some characteristics, and some things in himself that he hadn’t had before. And one of the things that he knew he needed, is he needed some spiritual fathers. He needed folks that would come in and speak fatherhood to him.
... a third?
So how could the media be on the front lawn when the house was behind a gate and some gravel and some road?
Since when was there more than one helicopter? Mark Driscoll told stories about there being ONE helicopter that I can recall documented. Never any mention of helicopters in the plural.
Driscoll by the time Russ Bowen came calling had withdrawn from the public eye and wasn't preaching. The notion that blogs and social media were watching his every move seems virtually impossible to substantiate.
Let's not forget that according to Robert Morris' Gateway account it was he who advised Driscoll to step away from ministry for a while.
So far it seems that if Jimmy's trying to say bloggers and the media get about a third of the facts right his account can be shown to not even be a third accurate based on statements made by none other than Mark Driscoll himself and video footage from coverage in 2014.
Helicopters? Plural? Based on what? The Woodway house was kind of gated. Russ Bowen went up and rang the intercom up.
Someone had a question over at Throckmorton's blog.
Well, we all knew a new narrative of Mark's life would be spun, and now we see it coming together. Father Mark, the dad you never had.
Go to this link, start playing the video, it starts at about 0:54 http://komonews.com/news/local/mars-hill-pastor-let-go-after-criticizing-church-leader
As we've discussed at some length here, for Mark Driscoll to concede a helicopter flew by and that the press was outside the house he's basically got no choice but that his 2015 testimony to that effect showed that whoever that dude was who said "wrong address" was lying to Russ Bowen while camera rolled.
Now by 2014 the house in Woodway had been gifted to Melanie Thompson but then in that case, was it even an entirely accurate story to share that it was Mark Driscoll's house the press was visiting if it had been gifted to Melanie Thompson back in 2013? That's the thing about the stories, it's tough to eat your cake and then have it, too.
The word about how things from the past will come forward into the future? Well, okay, there might be something to that, seeing as there's a publishing agreement from the past available to read in the present and by extension the future. That bit had already come to pass as of January 4, 2016, depending on how you take this
At the moment it appears that who Mark Driscoll "is" is a guy who's still recycling all the content back from the "who he was" years. He had a sermon here and there warning people against those kinds of guys.
Then there's this bit about how Driscoll needed spiritual fathers? Because back in the early days Doug Busby wasn't good enough? Or Ken Hutcherson? Or David Nicholas? Or Driscoll's own father-in-law Gib Martin?
... The campaign will begin at Mars Hill Church with invitations to the more than 400 Acts 29 churches Pastor Mark leads in the US alone plus those churches he leads in 12 other nations through Acts 29 as well as an open invitation for any church/ministry in the world to join us. In short, the goal is to sell books around preaching campaigns in a way that has never been done with multiple levels of resourcing and state of the art media technology. ...
The magnitude of that might need some spelling out. The marketing plan presents Mark Driscoll as if he were somehow, personally, leading 400 churches through Acts 29 and additionally churches in twelve other countries besides the United States.
Let's keep in mind that based on the Acts 29 web presence during July 2011 Mark Driscoll was the "founder and lead visionary" but was not actually president of the organization. He wasn't even one of the vice-presidents or a secretary to Acts 29 in the middle of 2011 when Result Source was being discussed and plans to promote Real Marriage were getting written about. Now to be sure the A29 board came to be at a point where about two thirds of the board consisted of people who had been or were executive leaders at Mars Hill.
Matt Chandler at one point was even talking about how it was sometimes difficult to know where Mars Hill ended and Acts 29 actually began.
But still, on what basis could anyone say that Mark Driscoll was actively or even indirectly leading 400 churches affiliated with Acts 29 in the middle of 2011? Or even the entire year of 2011?
Now it's worth revisiting some things reported by Warren Throckmorton about when it seems Mars Hill leadership got some idea of what Result Source was and toward end its strategy could be employed.
In June 2011, Kevin Small wrote to then Mars Hill Church executive elder Jamie Munson to provide details about how ResultSource could get Mark Driscoll on the New York Times best-seller list. He gave him the details of what later was reduced to writing in the contract signed by Sutton Turner on behalf of Mars Hill Church. ...
The marketing strategy lately published here at Wenatchee The Hatchet featured mention that it was desired by the Driscolls that pre-sales be channeled into Acts 29, Mars Hill, and Resurgence in way that would provide incentives for purchases that could count toward the New York Times bestseller list.
Of course we can recall that inside MH leadership there were some concerns raised about the wisdom of the arrangement prior to the contract signing in October 2011.
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/warrenthrockmorton/2014/09/22/realmarriagememo/ According to sources aware of the situation, the Mars Hill communications staff raised questions with the executive elders (Mark Driscoll, Sutton Turner and Dave Bruskas) about the wisdom of the ResultSource agreement prior to October 2011. The above memo was written in September 2011, prior to the ResultSource contract dated October 13 and signed by Sutton Turner, apparently on October 17. In May 2014, I posted October 18, 2011 invoices from ResultSource which were addressed to Mark Driscoll.
This document is designed to show the two main questions that will help Pastor Mark decide whether he would like to proceed with the Real marriage giving campaign. It is one of our goals to serve Pastor Mark the best--we believe in him as a leader and want to increase his influence for the good of the church and the Kingdom.
That wording seems peculiarly passive voice. There's uses for the passive voice, of course, but the meaning of the wording is hard to escape. The memo was formulated as seeking to help Driscoll decide whether HE would like to proceed with the Real Marriage giving campaign. The goal of the team that presented the memo, as stated, was to serve Pastor Mark the best, wishing to increase his influence for the good of the church and the Kingdom, whichever Kingdom was meant may remain open to debate.
Then the questions, already discussed recently, as to the effectiveness of Mars Hill having to foot the bill for 11,000 copies of a book that coud be purchased at a lower cost if purchased by On Mission.
It's owrth remembering that based on a sermon he gave in the 1 & 2 Peter sermon series, the side company to manage book royalties was something Mark Driscoll explicitly said he had not set up because though pastors did that it was a sign of selfish greed for gain.
Prophets, Priests and Kings Trial: 8 witnesses from 1 & 2 Peter May 3, 2009 1 Peter 5:1-5
... So in all of this, as well, I've had people ask, "So what about the book sales?" Here's how it works, I didn't start a separate company. One of the ways that guys work this, they become a leader in a church and they have a company on the side and they use the church to funnel business into their side company and I didn't start a side company (like a lot of guys do) for my book writing. Instead I publish under Mars Hill.
So the way it works, I don't get all the money. Mars Hill gets a huge take. Mars Hill gets all the marketing dollars, they get paid by the publishers. Mars Hill gets half of all the royalties so the books that I publish, about 75% of the revenue goes to Mars Hill Church, not me. Not me. Because I'm worried about this issue, greed, shameful gain. Just using Mars Hill as a platform so I can start a business to rake in massive dollars. I don't think it's a sin for a pastor to get a salary but we're now at the point where the books and the marketing, that a huge portion of my salary is covered by income that I generate. And, I'll be honest with you, I hope one of my books pops or I get enough books on the shelf, titles in print , I'd love to see the day where I'm basically working for free and that the book sales and royalties and such let me generate enough money for Mars Hill that I can work free of charge. That's my hope and my goal. I don't know if we'll get there but that's what I'm trying to do.
Well, a few years later a side company was set up. The more documents have been shared the more it begins to look as if a side company got set up, and the church could be construed easily as having been moved in the direction of promoting book sales for a book owned by the pastor's side company.
It's also worth noting that while Mark Driscoll said he published "under Mars Hill" he registered the copyright for his books to himself and/or his side company that he said he didn't have and hadn't made back in 2009.
Now back in 2009 perhaps it was possible that Mars Hill got half the royalties and 75% of the revenue went to Mars Hill. But what about moving forward from 2011? And who can actually prove whether any of these claims made in 2009 were even the case in 2009? Anyone?
The part that sticks out now was the "I hope one of my books pops ... where I'm basically working for free ... "
What working for free by being able to live of f of royalties can sound more altruistic than it might always be. After all, anyone who can live entirely off of the royalties of books is someone who's capable of being completely independent of any disciplinary overtures taken by a board.
Taken together it seems that while the memo that raised questions about the wisdom of the Result Source campaign got written, the leadership at Mars Hill ultimately decided to go with the plan. Initially Mars Hill leadership and PR discussed how it wasn't that unusual, really, within the industry.
If Driscoll didn't know about the Result Source plan, as has at times been proposed, then why did the mid-summer 2011 marketing strategy stress that pre-sales get channeled into contexts where they could count toward the New York Times bestseller list? Why would that matter? The memo with the two questions suggests at least someone inside Mars Hill had questions as to why Mars Hill had to get 11,000 copies for a giving campaign that didn't seem set to net the church much of a net profit. It could all, were it discovered, look sort of like an entire church apparatus being directed to the benefit of an individual.
It does seem to look like that at times, doesn't it?
It does seem to look as though some of the writing suggests that the plan was to channel the resources and technology and people of not just Mars Hill but also Acts 29 and Resurgence toward the sale of a book owned by the kind of side company Mark Driscoll said in 2009 he didn't have and hadn't set up because, well, it kinda sounded like he thought rigging an entire church culture toward promoting and selling apastor's book was a sign of selfish greed for gain.
Which makes it all the more striking to review the sum of documents associated with the promotion and publication and sale of Real Marriage.
In 1996, a pastor named Mark Driscoll started a new church in Seattle called Mars Hill. Mars Hill Church grew rapidly, and in 2006 decided to plant its very first remote campus, a video location called Mars Hill Shoreline. The pastor who launched the new location, Steve Tompkins, put it this way: “God kept bringing more people to hear the gospel. Even five Sunday services [in Ballard] back-to-back didn’t address our need for more space.”
God did many amazing things in and through Mars Hill Shoreline: people were saved, hundreds were baptized, families were started, lives were transformed. However, there were also many issues that built up over the years which all came to a head in 2014, a year of great difficulty for the church. Facing mounting criticism as the church investigated formal charges against him, Mark Driscoll submitted his resignation as vision and preaching pastor on October 14, 2014. Shortly afterward, it was announced that each local campus of Mars Hill would have the opportunity to launch out as their own fully independent church.
After much prayer and discussion, the elder team of Mars Hill Shoreline did make the decision to re-plant Mars Hill Shoreline as Sound City Bible Church. The elders made the commitment to learn from the sins and mistakes of the church in the past while focusing on a fresh vision to help people hear the good news of Jesus all throughout the north end of the greater Seattle area.
Sound City Bible Church is not simply Mars Hill carrying on under a new name. It is a new church with a new elder team, a new doctrinal statement, a new mission and a new set of values. This church has been through some difficult times, but through it all is more convinced than ever that Jesus truly is the one who is worth placing ultimate hope in. We hope and pray that God would give us many years together to glorify God by proclaiming Jesus, receiving grace, being disciples, and making disciples.
Some of these churches are starting from scratch and disconnected from Mars Hill so it might make sense to not have a history that states up front the Mars Hill lineage while formally declaring a different set of goals is in order. Now Fairchild was not on the BoE, for those who remember what the Board of Elders was.
For those who don't remember, Bubba Jennings was not just on the Board of Elders, he was also an executive elder around the time the 2007 firings and trials occurred.
So he may not only be able to answer questions about investigation into Mark Driscoll from 2014, he is one of the only people who had a connection to the termination and trials of Meyer and Petry from 2007 that has not publicly recanted/repudiated involvement of any kind in that process.
Redemption Spokane is a new church planted in the heart of the Inland Northwest with the mission to see the work of redemption impact Spokane, seeing many people’s lives changed by the power of the Gospel. Our founding pastor, Miles Rohde, and a large number of our original core members had a heart to see a new church planted in the heart of Spokane that would reach the entire region. Originally beginning with the vision of being a church connected to Mars Hill Church, in the fall of 2014 a decision was made to become a fully independent church with our soft-launch in January 2015.
The church building, located on the corner of 2nd Ave and Division Street, has been a bastion of the gospel in Spokane since the first church building was constructed at this important crossroads in downtown Spokane. Having moved into this church building, right in the heart of Spokane, Redemption Spokane desires to continue the legacy of the Gospel being faithfully preached to all. As a church, we had our official launch at our Easter service in 2015.
Given the obscure but swift disappearance of Willie Wilson from its leadership that this church even still exists at all could seem like a feat of community cohesion.
The Elder board of our church currently consists of: Pastor Eric Appleby, Pastor Jon Crist, Pastor Kevin Kelly, Pastor Ryan Mount, Pastor Dan Ortega, Pastor Tim Smith and Pastor Jim Swanson. Two of the Elders of Redeemer Church are also paid staff. They are: Tim Smith, in the role of Lead Teaching Pastor and Kevin Kelly, in the role of Executive Pastor.
God has called all of these men to lead by example and to serve with love, humility and grace, placing care and service to the flock over their own interests. Should you wish to speak to any of our Elders, please email redeemer@redeemerpdx.com indicating whom you wish to speak with and they will get back to you promptly.
Deacons
As a new church, we will soon nominate Deacons who will be responsible for taking various day-to-day burdens of service from the Elders, in order that they may focus on prayer, teaching and general oversight of the church. Redeemer Church will have both men and women Deacons, as supported by scripture.
Not a whole ton of history there to share. Although Mars Hill Olympia was where the Mars Hill Military Mission was once based, which was a ministry that basically distributed Mars Hill authored books to soldiers. The Military Mission was shut down in early 2012 after having been moved, for reasons not necessarily clearly explained, from Olympia to central HQ or thereabouts. As discussed at this blog, the book distributional aims of the defunct Military Mission could have made sense as an easy way to handle the bulk orders for the bulk order side of the Result Source strategy.
There are churches that were once Mars Hill that clearly believe it's best to lead up front with the line of descent. Other chuches seem eager to avoid this still unavoidable element of their history, at least for now.
There's not a lot of evidence he's connected to Doxa Eastside lately. There's no trace of him if you do a search for his name on their site. Given Rogers' role on both the BoE and the BoAA and what he was willing to say about public criticism of Mark Driscoll a hard reboot without him might seem beneficial. The hard reboot might also extend to not really sharing much by way of establishing the historic connection between Doxa and the former Mars Hill.
Cross and Crown has left the Ballard site and taken up at what was once the U-District Mars Hill site.
It has, if memory serves, taken on people from the sites that were formerly Mars Hill Downtown, Ballard and the U-District. As reported a while back by Wenatchee The Hatchet and Warren Throckmorton some of the campuses had been losing attenders or members in the months running up to Driscoll's formal resignation. Consolidating those who were left at some of the campuses to what used to be Mars Hill Ballard made some sense. In a way the consolidation process was a kind of mirror to the 20007 dispersion process in which people were sent out to launch campuses for the multi-campus process. And it's tough to forget that the multi-site approach became appealing as Mars Hill central leadership realized the second campus idea for what became the central headquarters was either impossible or wildly impractical. In th ehistory of Mars Hill it is worth stressing that when we consult the talks of Mark Drsicoll about multi-site compared to what he published in Confessions of Reformission Rev about a decade ago, the entire multi-site approach was a kind of epic Plan B.
So, anyway, Cross and Crown does not have a very detailed history for itself yet.
Then there's the somewhat shortlived Mars Hill Albuquerque.
Not only does there not seem to be any history for the church you can't even tell who the leaders are as you can with just about any of the other churches, unless you go digging up the sermons.
So, having reviewed a few of the sites that were once Mars Hill and having noted which applicable names showed up in the Board of Elders ... let's revisit a statement quoted by Warren Throckmorton.
The investigation of formal charges against Mark Driscoll has revealed patterns of persistent sin in the three areas disclosed in the previous letter by the Board of Overseers. In I Tim 5:20, it requires that an elder be rebuked for persistent sin. Our intention was to do this while providing a plan for his eventual restoration to leadership. The Board of Elders in agreement with the Board of Overseers are grieved, deeply grieved, that any process like that was lost to us when Mark Driscoll resigned in position and left the church.Now is the time to move on and consider what God is calling us to next as a church as we participate in Jesus’ mission to make disciples in His name.[emphasis added] Today begins a new chapter in the history of our church which has proceeded in one direction under one leadership for many years now, but I want you to understand this, God is our Father. That does not change. Jesus is the chief shepherd of the church and that has not changed. The elders of Mars Hill Church acknowledge as we’ve gone through all of this investigation, and heard all of these stories, we acknowledge that we have personally led in some of the same ways that demonstrate some of the same ways that Pastor Mark had. And those things require repentance and forgiveness and restoration. We realize that there are ways that we have led as elders in ways that have been domineering, sometimes arrogant and sometimes boastful and at least for my part, I want to say I deeply regret those sins and I ask for your forgiveness. We want to lead you into the future in a way that displays more grace, more love as we speak the truth to each of you. If there are people that I have offended in ways I have pastored this church, I would welcome that you come to me and speak with me to allow me the opportunity to reconcile with you.
At this time Mars Hill Church is going to move ahead under the Board of Overseers established plan for transition. Pastor Dave Bruskas will serve as the teaching and preaching pastor during an interim period of time until we establish a direction we are going as a church. The Board of Advisors are going to be working in the weeks to come on a plan for moving forward and for how that will unfold, what the next steps are, there are a lot of things to consider. As we discover what those things are, what the spirit shows us, then we want to communicate clearly to you and transparently to you what’s happening, the directions and the changes that will be taking place.
2016 is a new year but even if there's a new man, to borrow an apostolic epistletory idiom, the old man isn't completely dead yet.
No, actually, we can be pretty literal about this. The corporation formerly known as Mars Hill Church is still technically listed as "Active" even today by the Washington Secretary of State website.
It still lists Dave Bruskas as President and Caleb Walters as Vice-President even though Kerry Dodd's been describing himself as President for a while and describes himself thus as of ... right now.
- Keen management to daily operations to guarantee proper handling of all legal affairs and creditor obligations - Tactical administration to the liquidation of real property and other assets; along with the distribution of net assets - Recognition for the successful launching of 11 new independent entities by separating the organization from its 15 operating locations - Appointment as corporate president of the board of directors; as well as promotion to general manager, in charge of leading the transition team in settling the affairs of the corporation toward the distribution of net assets and dissolution
Recognized by who for the successful launching of 11 new independent entities? Would whoever recognized Kerry Dodd for this clarify for the record they recognized this?
and ... Caleb Walters is still mentioning he's Chief Operations Officer for the potentially still existing Mars Hill.
Who was on the board of directors since the resignation of Driscoll that seems implicit in Dodd's verbiage? Who's been on the transition team? While many a person has assumed that things were "over" the dissolution of the company is the period in which stuff gets sold and assets get distributed. This was/is the period in which to actually pay more rather than less attention to what may be going on. Sure, Driscoll's got a church he's aiming to start up but there's no need to forget that Mars Hill hasn't ceased to exist as a corporate entity just because a celebrity threw in the towel rather than comply with a restoration plan proposed by a board.
So as 2016 moves forward we'll get to see which of the 11 spin-offs prospers or not. It remains to be seen. They may all make it but we don't know yet.
Meanwhile, we know which churches seem to feel comfortable enough to explain in their public web presence where they've come from and which aren't yet.
The five page document is published at the following post. The observations and comments in this post presuppose you have read the entire five-page document at the available link:
Pastor Mark Driscoll was named one of the 25 most influential preachers in the past 25 years by Preaching magazine. [link omitted] ... Driscoll was the youngest on the list by over a decade, and they said, "Driscoll is a model for thousands of young pastors who read his books and listen faithfully to his podcast sermons. Driscoll may well be an example of how preachers will influence other preachers in the 21st century." Driscoll now wants to do just that by building a large global multi-church campaign around a preaching series with multiple supplements to help pastors, churches, and ministry leaders do a world-class job of Bible preaching and teaching with equipping from Mars Hill Church. Also, since all of this content, including the books, will be available for years to come this will also give each book a long tail as ministries can use the content at any time in the future. The campaign will begin at Mars Hill Church with invitations to the more than 400 Acts 29 churches Pastor Mark leads in the US alone plus those churches he leads in 12 other nations through Acts 29 as well as an open invitation for any church/ministry in the world to join us. In short, the goal is to sell books around preaching campaigns in a way that has never been done with multiple levels of resourcing and state of the art media technology. [emphasis added]
Right there is the summation of the goal of a campaign, and the campaign is defined as a fully integrated multi-media project, a campaign completely integrating every conceivable level of media activity undertaken by a church toward the end of ... selling books. Release the book before the campaign begins, and the campaign is a preaching series that uses the book as well as provides an occasion to market and sell the book. This campaign took the people and resources of Mars Hill and integrated it toward the end of selling Real Marriage and this campaign proposal was formulated by a Driscoll or two in the middle of 2011 to go by the dates mentioned in the whole document.
We can't just skip past that bolded statement. The goal, in short, was to sell books around a preaching campaign in a way that Driscoll believed had never been done before, with multiple levels of resourcing and using state of the art technology. Why do such a campaign?
WHY A CAMPAIGN
By publishing a book before a campaign and building significant free support resources to support ministry leaders there are numerous benefits to churches and leaders including ...
[from 1] ... Participants will receive over 100 pages of research on sex and marriage compiled by a team of PhD professors in sociology and statistics that helps their own preaching/teaching on marriage and sex. It is all footnoted and will be emailed for use by those in the campaign free of charge. Participants will also receive summaries of good and bad Christian marriages. This content is not in the book and will help them for illustrations in their preaching and teaching.
3. The resources of one of America's largest churches for any church.
4. Literally more than a million dollars of gear, studio, and staff time are used to provide the free resources of the campaign. This includes a video team that has shot a full length mainstream Hollywood feature film, and graphic designers awarded by HOW magazine as some of the best in their field. One example are the state of the art Red Cameras used by no other church in the world but used for such films as District 9 on for any church wanting to use any of the sermons for their church free of charge.
[from 14] Posting of the sermon in audio and hi-def video download along with transcript in both English and Spanish after it has been preached live at Mars Hill Church in Seattle. These sermons will be edited to 40-45 minutes each and able to be used in any church or ministry that is interested in allowing pastors to take some or all of the Sundays of the series of as needed.
Summarily, by doing a fully integrated campaign churches willing to buy into the campaign could expect a ton of freebies and content not available in the book Real Marriage as a supplement to preaching or broadcasting the content, it seems. If you've read the whole marketing strategy what stands out is how given it was that Mars Hill's sum of personal and technological resources could be brought to bear in an integrated promotion of the sale of the book.
But then, who were those PhDs that put the material together that pastors could get for free by signing on to that Real Marriage campaign? Anybody know?
That point 3. Mars Hill Church got dissolved so signing on for the Real Marriage campaign NOW (if that's possible) will not avail people to all those resources, will it? Wouldn't the Red Cameras go up for sale? Those aren't cheap cameras. Where might the money for the sale of Mars Hill Church's Red Cameras have gone? Who knows?
The elegance of the campaign is that it's a fully integrated multi-media blitz which organizes every level of the activity of a church. A church that commits to the campaign commits to buying truckloads of the book and workbooks and video and so on associated with the campaign. To sign up for such a project, in a sense decides that an entire church or multi-site church is, if you will, a kind of captive audience for the duration of using the campaign, maybe a quarter of a year give or take skipping this or that chapter or lengthening the campaign by featuring workbook stuff or extra stories and material derived from the supplemental materials that would come with the campaign.
There may be those who would say that the royalties of the book would have or did go to Mars Hill. Are those people sure? The book Real Marriage, for instance, was copyrighted to On Mission, LLC. Royalties would have gone to On Mission, LLC whose members sure seem to have been Mark and Grace Driscoll, rather than to mars Hill. "If" the royalties of the book sales went to Mars Hill the proof would need to be provided by either officers of Mars Hill or by the Driscolls themselves. Because there's no reasonable basis, so far, for supposing that the royalties for books that were copyrighted to Driscoll rather than Mars Hill would ever go to Mars Hill, or even be donated to Mars Hill, is there?
What seems evident from the first draft of the marketing plan proposed by the Drsicoll team (subsequent drafts have not necessarily come to light) reads as a summary of how to organize every level of the life of Mars Hill Church around a campaign whose goal was to sell books.
Maybe someone would say it wasn't particularly deep or detailed, but at least it was finally able to happen.
There have been those who have visited Wenatchee The Hatchet over the years and have had the comment "All this blog does is talk smack about Mars Hill and Pastor Mark." Ahem, no. Maybe for those who have overidentified their personal sense of identity and narrative with Mark Driscoll and/or Mars Hill as an extension of his narrative it could "seem" as though all Wenatchee The Hatchet has done is discuss that topic. But in 2015 there was some musical analysis.
There was actually a series of posts on Matiegka's Grand Sonata I for solo guitar, for instance, even featuring an optional cadenza that could be used in a performance and a discussion of things we guitarists can consider in putting together a cadenza--we can consider the thematic catalog of a movement, the nature of its form and consider what developmental outworkings of that catalog were NOT present in the written score as a way to develop a cadenza.
I proposed, perhaps speculatively, that if Matiegka assiduously avoided inversions of themes this could be a limitation in his conceptual approach or ... more charitably, that in a performance idiom where improvisation was still a factor that he'd keep certain developmental possibilities in reserve for the optional cadenza. Given Matiegka's interest in the work of Haydn and given Haydn's penchant to continue thematic development even within his recapitulations this seems like a reasonable inference.
And if you want to read all of that in its details ...
He keeps the first movement very lively, observes the repeating exposition, and he takes the finale at a spritely tempo. Now while many an older guitarist has complained that kids these days play too much music way too fast I think there's a case to be made that Matiegka's Grand Sonata needs to be taken at a brisk tempo so that it doesn't drag. Sure, we could suggest that central slow movement could have been more laid back (to better contrast with the outer movements) but, hey, the recital was a few years ago and anyone willing to champion Matiegka's Grand Sonata I is worth noting.
Another avenue of exploration in 2015 was the etudes from Op. 29 of Fernando Sor, exploring ways he hybridized sonata form in a C major etude and the way he wrote a sonata form in E flat for another of the etudes. This eventually culminated, after a long interval, in some observations about themes in early 19th century guitar sonatas more generally, how with some slight modifications guitar sonata themes from the early 19th century masters could be transformed into the basis for ragtime strains. There's even a light-hearted ragtime canon on a theme by Sor in one of the posts:
There were plans to write more about the music of Ferdinand Rebay but ... life happens. Here's hoping that in 2016 Wenatchee The Hatchet can get back to blogging about Rebay's music because there are some fine recordings of his work that have become available in the last year or so. And for those who are regulars, Koshkin's cycle of preludes and fugues for solo guitar has been moving toward a publication/release date. Don't know when that date is but the plan is to get the score and any/all associated recordings.
Contrapuntal cycles for solo guitar are, to put it mildly, rare. It has been a mistake of the guitar community to imagine that neither the fugue nor the sonata form are "practical" for the guitar. There's a wealth of evidence to demonstrate otherwise since, oh, 1802, whether we're talking sonatas by Molitor, Matiegka, Carulli, Diabelli, Giuliani, Sor, Adam Darr, Georg Luckner, Turina, Rodrigo, Jose, Ponce, Gilardino, and a few others we'll just not name by name here. Sonatas are all over the place for those with a genuine interest in sonata forms. Fugues, those ARE rare, but they exist.
IF there's a case to be made for why non-guitarist music journalists and musicologists don't take the guitar to be "serious" and don't consider it primarily part of the "literate music" tradition, it's because guitarists, as Matanya Ophee has pointed out, tend to not be taken seriously within the classical world. One idea, in light of trends since 1800, could be that the guitar has not been treated as "serious" is the lack of works that are well-known that feature the 18th century forms broadly known as sonata and fugue. There's actually a significant body of sonatas for solo guitar and the number of fugues for guitar looks set to increase. Now we could also point out that there's not necessarily any reason guitarists "have" to write sonatas and fugues to be taken seriously. That's completely true. That said, some of us have fun with sonata and fugue for the guitar. There's no reason those of us into those forms can't write as many o fthem as we want.
What guitarist composers may have an opportunity to do is exploit a weakness (not being considered a notable part of what Taruskin's called the literate music tradition, i.e. of printed music scores) and leveraging that into a potential strength. The potential strength can be this, if we're talking about an instrument that has already been marginalized within academic musicology then it means we're not obliged to think and write in terms of what has been considered "in" or "out".
At precisely a stage in Western musical history where pianists don't want to be bothered writing sonatas and fugues because all that's been done guitarists have an opportunity to tackle these traditional forms but in light of a musical vocabulary we can share in common with popular idioms. As Charles Rosen wrote long ago about Haydn and Mozart, they synthesized scholastic formal approaches with popular idioms. We guitarists have an opportunity to give that a shot for our instrument. There's literally no reason you can't start a sonata allegro movement with a twelve-bar blues on a guitar. There's no reason you can't compose a fugue on a subject that's a blues riff. There's no inherent reason you can't compose sonatas that are tributes to Hank Williams Sr. or Johnny Cash.
Perhaps one of the great advantages guitarist composers may have is a problem guitarist performers in the classical world find so frustrating, that we're not taken completely seriously, or maybe even taken seriously at all. That could be an advantage. But it will potentially only be an advantage to us if we embrace both popular and scholastic music traditions equally, which it seems a lot of guitarists you can meet actually kind of already do. Maybe not "enough" of them, but we also live in an era where the potential contribution of a few guitarists committed to what a commenter at George Sandow's blog called an "anti-chauvinist" perspective, that is a perspective that does not look down on popular musical styles while still demonstrating a commitment to what's been known as "art music" or "classical music", can still be a net positive. The internet can create dangerously insular echo chambers but it can also create social dynamics in which people can have an influence they could not have if the only measure of social influence was the meet-and-greet in-person approach.
Matanya Ophee's proposal, going back to his Repertoire Issues lecture (I read a transcript of that lecture back in 1999 and it changed my life) is that we guitarists should commit to chamber music. He discussed playing chamber music and I try to do that when I can but I took it as a challenge to WRITE chamber music. If we want other musicians to take us seriously we should take them seriously. Don't look down on the tuba, for instance. The Samuel Jones Tuba Concerto is a great recent piece of music. Penderecki's Capriccio is fun, too. Don't look down on ANY instrument. As far as humanly possible don't look down on a style of music. That's not to say you can't decide you hate the music of this or that popular musician, but that you can consider that the problem is not necessarily that style as a whole in which that annoying pop musician works. Just because I hope to never again hear a song by Toby Keith doesn't mean I can't love songs by Johnny Cash or Hank Williams Sr. or Merle Haggard. It doesn't even mean I can't be open to country songs written by people born during the Nixon administration. There are moments in Haydn string quartets that I can imagine being country songs. I've taken animation seriously as a narrative art form since I was a kid so it's not just classical guitar music that I'm into that I've seen critical and academic establishments not take seriously as an art form.
Well ... that ramble has been enough for one post. For those who may still labor under the misapprehension that "all" this blog has done is discuss a narrow set of topics confined to a local megachurch those people are probably going to persist in their potentially willful misunderstanding. For everyone else, it was nice in 2015 that WtH could get back to being a blog that discusses music.
