in the wake of Slate's Wonder Week tribute to Stevie Wonder, let's discuss exactly why the chorus for "Living for the City" is a work of genius-a fusion of chromatic mediant pivot chords soaring above an octatonic bass line

"At least we still have Stevie" coming from Slate could be the most jinx-causing headline an online publication could possibly run with this late in 2016.  David Bowie and Prince died, right?  We lost Alan Rickman.  Given the number of musicians who have passed this year Slate saying "at least we ... " could be asking for trouble.

We do, however, for the time being, still have Stevie Wonder around.  There are some fun and fascinating pieces at Slate's Wonder Week but ... but ... it's disappointingly short on what we musicians call the shop talk of "what did he actually do?"

This post is going to try to rectify that by discussing what is easily one of the most justifiably legendary chorus in a pop song from the last fifty years, that chorus from "Living for the City".  First we need to look at what's over on Slate about this chorus.

https://redux.slate.com/cover_story/2016/12/the-greatest-creative-run-in-the-history-of-pop-music.html
...
Innervisions also marked Wonder’s full ascendance as a composer. At 23 years old, the kid who could play every instrument on earth (including chromatic harmonica like it was Charlie Parker’s alto sax) was now writing like some combination of George Gershwin and Smokey Robinson. The bridge to “Living for the City”—“da-da-da DAH, dah dah, DAH …”—is among the more harmonically counterintuitive chord progressions in pop music, a bunch of sounds that shouldn’t fit next to each according to every rule in the book and yet somehow fit perfectly.
***
I'm going to make a slightly long-form case that this sentiment about how the sounds "shouldn't fit next to each other according to every rule in the book" is completely wrong.  Music theory is a post hoc explanation of what works, not a prescriptive explanation of what you're allowed to do.  Okay, maybe it became that in the wake of dodecaphonic and serial procedures but within the realm of more conventional tonal organization based on diatonic or non-diatonic scales ... the rules are less hard-and-fast prescriptions that aggregated summaries of the things you can reliably get to "work" in the sense of asking moderately trained musicians you've never met before to reproduce reliably for you from a score.  Keep that in mind, because when you keep that kind of thing in mind you may find that Stevie Wonder didn't break the rules because those rules aren't necessarily there.  I'm on a kick against 19th century era musical pedagogy creating double binds by laying down as a law the kind of rules it claimed to be against being stuck with.  We were just talking last week about how in the 18th century there wasn't actually a thing known as sonata form.  By extension, we can do in writing about popular music what we did last week talking about sonata procedures in early 19th century guitar music, we can take some time to look at what was actually done without feeling obligated to say it does or doesn't "break the rules". 

So ...

I regard what Hamilton calls "the bridge" to be the actual chorus itself.  Everything in the harmonic and melodic activity of the song is building up to this point.  Besides, if we're going to call it a bridge why is it the "bridge" that ends the song?  It's not that you can't end a song with material that could be regarded as "bridge".  I've done that myself, it's that I think it's fairly audible that what Hamilton calls "the bridge" is the chorus for Wonder's song.  The bridge, I think, is where the recorded voice-over conversations are in the song, which can be omitted altogether during live performance.  Composing a transitional bridge that only needs to show up on the album performance is another kind of musical shrewdness that could be discussed by someone else at some other time.  On to the chorus ...

The justifiably legendary chorus shows up for the first time at 1:10
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rc0XEw4m-3w&t=1m09s

I'm going to enharmonically respell the descending bass line for those who think of this song as being in G flat. 

CHORD
F#7   A Fr6    G  D    C   C7    A    G   F#

BASS NOTE
E       D#         D        C   A#    A    G   F#

Wonder's melody sounds pretty pentatonic because of that initial hook but he chromatically shifts from A sharp to A natural and then swivels in melodic fourths between A, D and E.  The line is decorated, obviously, but in the movement from the D in the bass line to the C he's swooped through the interval of a minor seventh. 

There are several things that can be highlighted about this little chorus.  If we listen for perceivable root movement what this chorus has is a series of chromatic mediant relationships in which Wonder starts on one chord, uses oblique and parallel motion to leap to a chord with a root a minor third above the previous chord, and then uses that chord as a way to repeat the process with occasionally help from passing chords.  The effect of that second inversion G (chord 3) is to set up an implied circle progression (D here is just a passing chord, albeit an amazing passing chord) from G to C.  Wonder sets up a move to the tritone chord of G flat/F sharp major with help from a G-C progression that's the strongest root movement you can have in conventional tonal harmony. 

But we're obviously not dealing with conventional tonal harmony.  Most crucially nobody except music journalists and other people who write about music ever said we had to.  Look at that bass line.  Granting the D natural may potentially fuzzy the overall linear movement what makes that descending bass line remarkable for a pop chorus is that it's in the octatonic scale, the scale of alternating whole steps and half steps that divides the octave into eight rather than seven tones (i.e. the diatonic scale we're probably taught is the foundational scale in Western music). 

So Wonder has a cycle of chromatic mediant pivots from F sharp to A to C natural and back to A and
back to F sharp.  This set of root movements outlines a diminished triad.  The majority of the notes in ths chorus are explicable in terms of the octatonic scale.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Octatonic_scale

One of the only times I'm going to regard a wiki as worth referencing because you're probably not going to trawl through many theory textbooks or music history surveys on this weekend.

The octatonic scale features prominently in the work of composers such as Rimsky-Korsakov and Stravinsky.  It's a scale with a history of being favored by a number of early 20th century avant garde composers in the Western tradition.  Chromatic mediant relationships go back fairly far.  Schubert and Beethoven were playing with mediant relationship modulations in large-scale formal units in the early 19th century.  Debussy and others played with chromatic mediants.  Wagner had a chromatic submediant or two in a few of his works. 

The short version of this point is that what makes Stevie Wonder's chorus to "Living for the City" so remarkable is that we can hear French sixth chords, octatonic bass lines, chromatic mediant pivoting by minor thirds from the initial tonic to the tritone chord and back through circular harmonic pivoting--and thanks to help from a neapolitan to tonic phrygian plagal cadence we're back to our opening chord like it was the most natural thing in the world.

Stevie Wonder's legendary chorus just took us through all the most durable harmonic innovations of the last two centuries of avant garde experimentation in tonal organization this side of the twelve-tone row and he did it in a merely twelve second chorus tagged on after what we thought (at first hearing) was going to be a pretty standard issue I-IV-V pop song. And he did all this in one of the simplest and most haunting chorus hooks in the 20th century. 

But the genius of the chorus is that it does not, in fact, come out of the blue.  Wonder has been preparing us for it calmly and steadily from the opening chords throughout that first full minute of the song. Those opening four chords move through a linear 1-2-3-1 in F sharp minor while harmonizing the chords in G flat major/F sharp major. This tension between minor mode linear movement and major mode tonality doesn't reveal its full range of possibilities for a minute, not until after Wonder's given us that classic IV-V-I conventional tonal resolution.  He gives us the most by-the-book harmonic resolution for Western pop music and the high Classic era.  Okay, now that we've got that done, bam, the music takes flight into that remarkable chorus. 

And it's also the end of the song, obviously.  It's here where the genius of the harmonic/melodic craft is also audible.  What Wonder does is simple, he refuses to let the step-wise root movement in the octatonic bass line reach its by-now predictable end point.  We're not going to go back to where we were before.  We can stop at a higher, brighter, more shining place.  That G major chord, the Neapolitan harmony, is allowed to do two things.  First, remember how I mentioned that the G was set up as an implicit dominant that moves by circle progression to C?  It gets to play that harmonic role, a kind of half cadence to a never-arrived-at C major triad that is as harmonically far away from the "ground" of G flat major as could be possible.  The voices are striving ever upward toward a world in which no one has to live just enough or give just enough for the city (let's just throw in a direct reference to "the city" as Babylon or the City of Man while we're at it, that's not inimical to Wonder's approach). 

But there's a second way in which this non-resolved G chord can function, as the new tonic.  It's able to be heard or "read" as arriving at a new, higher, better and brighter tomorrow or as the aspiration toward it (the aforementioned function of the G chord as a dominant that pushes toward C major).  The key of G flat major, in terms of extra-musical association and symbolism, can telegraph that the people who live in Wonder's song-world live in a world of all flats and the emergence of G major is the paradoxically "natural" world that does not yet exist, where things will be made right and the oppression of racism no longer exists.  With either interpretation of the final harmony we're given a vivid musical image of an eagerly anticipated world in which injustice has been defeated.  Wonder has deployed several of the musical tools of the trade of mystical apocalyptic of the sort we might also hear in Scriabin but puts it to more compelling and socially engaged use.  Yes, I said that, it's not meant as an offense to Scriabin fans as such, I just enjoy Stevie Wonder more than Scriabin if I "have" to pick one of the two. 

But in both cases we could propose there's the possibility, existing as a flame within the music itself, of apocalyptic that is not a thing predicated primarily on fear (more or less the base line for the super-majority of apocalyptic imagination in 20th century pop culture a la James Cameron's Terminator or Kubrick's Strangelove), but apocalyptic expressing the paradoxical but natural mixture of anger and hope.  If that closing G chord is the new tonic it may just be a dream, if the closing G major chord is, as it has been up until the end, a quasi-dominant function preparing to launch us into C major, then the harmonic irresolution/resolution is wordlessly asking a question--we could be on the cusp of launching into C major, that bright shining realm in which the injustices of racism no longer define how blacks get treated in the city ... but will we get there?  Not just "we" in the sense of Wonder addressing "his" people, but all of us in the United States who can hear his song.  Wonder has made a song in which "we" can be read at different levels.  He couldn't have been more direct about his voice of sorrow and his hope that what we hear in it will motivate us to make a better tomorrow.

This isn't a chorus that somehow breaks every rule in the book, it's a chorus written by someone who, however he opted to do it, familiarized himself with the panoply of harmonic innovations from avant garde music in the Western idioms over the last two centuries and distilled them into a twelve-second chorus that uses musical ideas we could also hear in Debussy, Scriabin, Stravinsky and other composers in what's known as the classical tradition, but all within Wonder's idiom of R&B/Motown. 

As I was saying earlier about genres such as early 19th century classical guitar and ragtime, it's one thing to say that genre doesn't exist and another thing to say that genre boundaries are permeable.   People who say genres don't exist in music are being morons of the sort who would have us believe a cinematic equivalent, that there's no such thing as superhero movies.  But that the boundaries between and within genres are permeable is something we can be reminded of by those musical geniuses who show rather than tell us that this is the case.  The octatonic scale isn't the exclusive property of Russian or French avant garde pianist composers from the late 19th and early 20th century.  French sixth chords are just called that because the French were most observably likely to use them.  Chromatic mediant pivoting well outside a previously established key was common in German music since the early 19th century.  But there's no reason a black pop musician in 1970s America couldn't take all of these musical innovations and distill them into a single twelve-second tag in a pop song that sums up the greatest innovations in the Western musical traditions.  That's not "breaking the rules" at all, except the most draconian and generally unwritten rules of musical styles, expectations of what "ought" to be in a genre on the basis of what writers write about music.

The thing is, too many writers want to keep the genius of what Wonder did mysterious.  It's amazing but not necessarily mysterious in the sense that we can't work out what it was he did in that beautiful chorus and explain it in terms that at least musicians can understand. 

But non-musicians can understand the affect of what's going on.  While the doctrine of affect from the Baroque era won't really be applicable today we can at least say that the cyclical vamping Wonder lays down at the start of the song can be a kind of meta-textual tone-painting of the circularity and confinement black people deal with.  Living just enough for the city is confining, we get that clearly from the words but we ALSO get it from the music.  The plea to stop living just enough for the city abandons conventional words for the chorus, which bursts open the deliberate strait-jacketed I-IV-V in favor of letting the minor-mode linear pattern of the upper-voice in the keyboard guide the entire musical substance into the chromatic mediant shifting octatonic chorus.  Wonder saves this explosion of harmonically expanded music, a musical symbol, perhaps, of what the music can be like if we don't live just enough for the city, until he's made the primary plea.  All of this octatonic/mediant shifting music is the sort of thing we can also hear in Scriabin and, well, Stevie Wonder's kind of pan-spiritual 1970s New Age optimism and activism isn't "that" impossible to correlate to Scriabin's apocalyptic theosophical aspiration for universal human brotherhood, is it? 

Maybe Stevie Wonder could be regarded as a kind of late 20th century pop-maestro American counterpart to Scriabin ...

if Scriabin wrote gorgeous, unforgettable hooks for pop songs that dealt with the plight of black people in the United States dealing with systemic racism. 

That only took about 2,600 words to explain what's so brilliant about twelve seconds of music in a Stevie Wonder song.  What's nagged at me this week is that Slate has been that when it came to explicating Wonder's genius there was a more telling than showing when it came to discussing that musical genius.  Go ahead, tell us (again) that Wonder is one of the greatest pop musicians of the age.  I've never disagreed!  When I added love for Haydn and Bach to my musical admirations Stevie Wonder was in no way displaced.  But let's not shy away from explaining, even in technical and theoretical terms, what it is that Wonder's done in his music that's so brilliant.  If we don't do even this it's almost as though we pay lip service to the brilliance without showing we have to wrestle a bit with understanding it.  When we're talking about a musician who called one of his albums Music of My Mind, the least we can do is take seriously that however schmaltzy some of those love songs are, there is also a vibrant intellectual substance to it.  It's just that, perhaps, with Wonder the intellectual substance may be pulsating within the music itself and far too few people who deign to write about Wonder's music may have the technical and theoretical interests to discuss the genius of what the music does, preferring instead to use bromides about how it somehow breaks the rules.  Well if it does break the rules, at least say what those rules are.  If Wagner fans can write reams on the Tristan chord can't fans of Stevie Wonder spare a few thousand words for that twelve-second break in "Living for the City" to describe what it is that's so amazing about it?  I think that's the least we can do.

POSTSCRIPT
04-26-2017
10.00pm

Here's something extra to consider about the chorus. The two chords that don't fit into the octatonic scale that would seem to explain the instrumental parts are G and D.  These two chords would obviously not fit into the octatonic collection that would start on F sharp or, if one chord could the other one could not.  It's known as the "diminished" scale because a dominant-tonic circle progression can't happen in the alternation of whole and half steps that characterizes the scale.  Secondary dominant functionality obviously also doesn't happen.   What the chords G and D have is that they have to be borrowed from the other two transpositions of the octatonic scale, a mode of limited transposition.  So the sense of aspiration and transcendental grandeur that the song ends with can "still" be explicable in terms of octatonic sets if we take it to mean that Wonder sets up a chorus with an octatonic collection for the instrumental parts that uses passing chords to borrow chords from the other two transpositions that are available before pitch replication occurs in a way that precludes truly differentiated sets within the twelve-tones of the chromatic scale. 

some concluding remarks on a survey of early 19th century guitar sonatas--on scripts vs plans in composition and analysis, recovering a script-based approach as we see guitar sonatas don't follow the prescribed "plan" paradigm

This was supposed to be more comprehensive.  Molitor was largely left out.  Carulli was omitted altogether.  Molino was merely referenced.  Didn't even mention Darr or Luckner.  If I'd wanted to expand out into chamber music that featured sonata form Matiegka would need more mention, as would, obviously Giuliani but also Christian Dickhut, whose trios for flute, horn and guitar may not seem very deep but have their charms. 

If I'd dared to explore sonata forms as explored by 20th century composers the range of possibilities would explode.  Ponce, Jose, other usual suspects, these have already been written about at least a bit here and there.  Ponce's sonatas are probably going to remain at the top of the pyramid in terms of prestige and craft.  I'd like to make a case that Ferdinand Rebay's cycle of solo guitar sonatas deserves a more than just sympathetic hearing but that's going to likely have to wait until 2017 for that case to be made.  Probably ditto for sonatas by Dusan Bogdanovic, Nikita Koshkin, Guastavino and others.  Someone was kind enough to send me Cristiano Porqueddu's five-disc box set of guitar sonatas and the Gilardino sonatas in particular are pieces I hope to write about in 2017.  While they don't necessarily feature a traditionally recognizable sonata form the guitar sonatas of Atanas Ourkouzounov have been on me "to get to" list for blogging topics. 

So you probably get the idea by now, this could have become and could perhaps still become part of a larger project.  It didn't.  It took years to put this together as it was.  But it was nice to finally get something done and up on the blog. 

Sor's Op. 30, Allegretto--the composer's last sonata form

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5U8I6MskQcQ

This is a sonata form that forms the finale of a set of variations so at one level it is a sonata form and at another level it can also be considered a kind of mass variation that resolves the variations that have come before it.

Sor's Op. 29, etude 10 in E flat major--an elegant and efficient sonata form hiding in plain sight in a dozen etudes

For years I have heard and read the axiom that the guitar is by its nature ill-suited to a musical process as complex as what we call sonata form.  This is nonsense.  I've been demonstrating that this is nonsense all week but this little exploration of a sonata form in E flat major composed by Sor should really settle the matter forever.  Whether we look at this etude through the scholarship of Charles Rosen, or William E. Caplin, or Hepokoski & Darcy this etude in E flat major is a sonata form.  It's also beautifully made, I dare say it's the most compelling sonata form Sor ever composed and it is also, fittingly, the most "textbook" of Sor's sonata forms.  Why wouldn't it be, nestled so comfortably in the middle of Sor's Op. 29 etudes?  I've written about this etude before, but since this week has been devoted to discussing sonata forms in early 19th century guitar literature it's worth writing about again.

You'll be able to peruse the score with some in-score commentary after the break.

Sor's Op. 29, etude 5 in C major--a sonata with a hybrid recapitulation (Theme 1 comes back but only as a gestural accompaniment to Theme 2)

I've discussed Sor's Op. 29 etudes featuring sonata forms in the past, here.  But it's worth discussing again. 

When scholars discuss Sor's sonata forms we tend to read discussions of the usual suspects: Opp 14 and 15, Op. 22 and 25, and Op. 30.  That's as we should expect and delineating the types of sonata forms we see in the multi-movement works of Sor has some valuable scholarly work given to us by Rattanai Bampenyou in a 2012 treatise called A Performance Guide to the Multi-Movement Guitar Sonatas of Fernando Sor and Mauro Giuliani.  It was through Bampenyou's dissertation I learned of James Hepokoski and Warren Darcy's Elements of Sonata Theory and William E Caplin's Classical Forms, both fantastic scholarly resources that should inspire debate and further research. 

Sor's Grand Sonata Op. 25, 2--the big sonata that the last sonata was but a prelude for, also featuring a truncated recapitulation

Sor Op. 25, second movement

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_vHa3uh5_-0

This is a large sonata but with an incomplete recapitulation.  The exposition may be construed as follows:

Sor's Grand Sonata Op. 25, 1--when a gloomy sonata movement is a prelude based on a single rhetorical pattern ... you can afford to have an incomplete recapitulation

Sor Op. 25, first movement

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PmSwKaG62LU

Theme 1 is merely eight measures long and leads into a modulating transition in the second half of measure 8. As short as this theme appears to be on the page the Andante Largo tempo has to borne in mind.  The harmonic rhythm is explicable in terms of half notes so that one measure of 4/4 at this tempo could cover what would proportionally be two measures of 4/4 in a livelier tempo. 

With that proviso in mind the first theme is a straightforward call and response.  The first phrase starts on the tonic and ends on the dominant, the second phrase starts on the dominant and resolves to the tonic.  By beat 2 of measure 8.  The spare texture shouldn't dissuade us from affirming that Theme 1 resolves in the first half of measure 8 with an authentic cadence of the sort we would expect in a first theme in a sonata form in the early 19th century.  There's no requirement that the authentic cadence be on a downbeat or be a perfect authentic cadence of the cumulative development and resolution of thematic ideas is explicable in such a direct, call and response eight-measure pattern.

You'll be able to consult the score below.

Sor's Grand Sonata Op. 22, 2--a slow sonata movement with a significantly truncated recapitulation

Op. 22, movement 2 (Adagio)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PmSwKaG62LU

Theme 1 is a binary form cast in aabb (internal repeats for two eight-measure phrases).

The second group begins abruptly in E flat and spans from measures 17 to 59. We're talking about a Group 2 that's quite a bit longer than Group 1 in terms of sheer measures.  However, let's recall that by repeating the two halves of Theme 1 that the full playing time for Theme 1 is still 32 measures so the disproportion between Group 1 and Group 2 is not necessarily as great in actual performance as it looks to be on the page.

Having written so much about the first movement I'll try to keep things fairly brief here.  The most striking aspects of this movement are that we're looking at a slow sonata form but one in which the themes have a binary construction.  This is most obvious with Theme 1 but it is also in evidence for Theme 2, aka Group II.  The E flat major material can be said to open with an overture gesture before the sequentially developed lyric phrase appears in the fifth system of page 1 (noted in orange).  This idea is repeated with embellishments and then presented a third time with more pronounced harmonic movement driving toward a half cadence.  Once this half cadence is reached it is prolonged through the entirety of system 7 of page 1 before finally reaching its resolution in system 8. 

Sor's Grand Sonata Op. 22, 1: on the distinction between a "script" and a "plan" for a sonata (you can't really break rules that haven't been written yet)

We've been climbing the prestige ladder here in discussing sonatas for solo guitar written by guitarist composers.  Anyone familiar with the instrument and its literature would know that Giuliani and Sor would top the list here and they do.  

We're finally at Sor and it will be fun to discuss his work (even if I actually, personally, prefer Matiegka's approach to sonata form) because extensive English-language scholarly work on Sor's handling of sonata form has been relatively recent.  More importantly, I have believed for years that Sor's approach to sonata form has left out two entries in his work I will probably discuss tomorrow (Op. 29 etudes 5 and 10).

Today we'll be discussing the Grand Sonatas Op. 22 and Op. 25 and there's a lot we could discuss.  The most important and simple thing we'll be looking at is how Sor tends to favor incomplete recapitulation.  It's been one of the most basic reasons theorists and historians who have tried to grapple with his sonatas have been stymied by the basic question of whether Sor even used sonata form and whether or not, if he did use sonata form, he composed "good" sonata forms.

Mauro Giuliani, Op. 150 Gran Sonata Eroica--another incomplete recapitulation in one of the more epic-scale sonata forms

It would be tough to find a sonata form for solo guitar bigger and grander than Giuliani's Op. 150.  They do exist but not everyone would necessarily find them as grand or charming as Giuliani's Gran Sonata Eroica.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vh9RI0aLidQ

You can give it a listen first if you don't already know this piece and/or you can read the analysis after the break.

Giuliani Op. 61, Grand Overture--a great big single-movement sonata form with everything where it's expected to be

Since others have discussed Giuliani's Op. 15 well enough elsewhere we'll go for the later sonata forms.

Thus, Op. 61.

Wenzel Matiegka's Grand Sonata II, 2: a slow sonata in which Theme 1 comes back but not in a way that would count as a formal recapitulation

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


This slow movement is, essentially, a sonata form.  It may not seem like a sonata form at first hearing or at first glance, but I think a case can be made that it is, in fact, a sonata form.  A few observations to this end can be drawn from William E Caplin's book Classical Form (Oxford University Press, 1998, ISBN 978-0-19-510480-6, PAGE 209)--in slow sonata forms we can observe that the subordinate theme and transition are fused together; that the transition itself can be omitted altogether; or that the development section of a slow sonata is significantly curtailed. These will be matters to keep in mind when looking at this slow movement in Matiegka's Grand Sonata II.

Wenzel Matiegka, Grand Sonata II, 1: incomplete recapitulation featuring the second quarter of Theme 1 and skipping to the transition

Having proposed that Matiegka derived his Theme 1 from his Theme 2, and that his Theme 2 is indebted to Haydn, we can get to the development (which will include the coda from the exposition).
It's very important to note that Matiegka calls for a repeating exposition.  Remember what we discussed earlier in this series about how an incomplete recapitulation may be informed by things like high intra-expositional development, and that when this happens in the context of a repeating exposition we may find "redundant" content sliced out?  That's going to be borne out in this sonata form, too.

The exposition ends robustly in the key of E major and the development starts with a C dominant seventh that takes us into F major for the start of the development process.  The Theme 1 derived material is quickly followed by a development of the Theme 2 material.  This is followed by a call-and-response passage in D minor drawn from the Part 2 material of Theme 1.  Next Matiegka uses the florid sextuplet transitional passage as the basis for continuing the development.  You'll be able to see all this after the break.

Wenzel Matiegka's Grand Sonata II, 1: on the possibility of deriving your Theme 1 from your Theme 2

In our earlier post we looked at some themes by Haydn ...

and a theme Matiegka included in his Grand Sonata I, movement 1.

That theme ...

Wenzel Matiegka's Grand Sonata II: preliminary discussion of Matiegka's use of Haydn's themes.

For those who are already familiar with Matiegka's Grand Sonata II you may know that the finale is a bravura set of variations on Haydn's setting of "Liebes Madchen, hor mir zu" (pardon the lack of proper modifiers to the German alphabet there).  This is a particularly cheeky lied in which the singer is a man who has headed out to a convent to serenade a maiden he regards as too beautiful to be confined to a convent, serenading her on his zither and requesting the more or less stereotypical reward for his efforts. 

The Haydn lied ... with help from IMSLP.

Wenzel Matiegka's Grand Sonata I, 1: recapitulating Theme 1 in the subdominant key before re-establishing the tonic

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ReaD2tPWX6E

Along the way this post will go through the entirety of the first movement of Matiegka's Grand Sonata I, 1 and will include a cadenza composed by ... somebody.  This is one of my favorite sonatas and it might be evidence enough for readers to see that I put together an edition of this sonata that includes a composed cadenza.  This was work I'd largely done last year and it was a lot of fun to do but it was also a lot of work.  I like this sonata and I feel it could be better represented in the repertoire and that Matiegka's approach to sonata form deserves more attention from guitarists.  Sure, the guitarists already familiar with Matiegka's work probably don't need to be told this, but there's a point at which Sor and Giuliani can be ever so slightly overplayed. :)  Matiegka may not rise to the heights of Sor or Giuliani at their best but I would suggest in a moment of blatant advocacy, neither could we say that Matiegka was apt to the kind of hackwork that has been characteristic of Diabelli in popular recollection. 

I'm going to revisit some ideas I presented last year about this sonata regarding the modulating transition.  A number of guitarists consider the G sharp that appears in the Boije 349 plate to be an error.  The contested G sharp appears as a purple note below (the break, along with the rest of the analysis ):

Wenzel Matiegka's Grand Sonata I, 1: observations about the exposition, initial observation about Matiegka's appropriation and recomposition of works by Haydn and Mozart

Matiegka's Grand Sonata I was first published in 1808 and is one of my favorites of the early 19th century guitar sonatas.  While the historical and textual case for Matiegka's debt to Haydn could be made on the basis of his Op. 23 sonata alone (which opens with a guitar transcription of the finale from Haydn's B minor piano sonata), the larger case for the extent to which Matiegka appropriated and developed ideas that can be traced to Haydn's work is more readily fleshed out in a pending discussion of Grand Sonata II.  Grand Sonata I is, by far, the better represented of the two grand sonatas in terms of commercial recordings and, of late, a print edition.  I've retained that contested G sharp note in the transition that has been omitted in some performances and a print edition.  I've also added a potentially redundant sharp for an A sharp in the transition you'll get to see soon enough.

Molitor Op. 7 Grand Sonata, movement 1: observations about the development and the recapitulation of Themes 2 and 3 without Theme 1

The development section begins with embellishments derived from the modulating transition. Eventually we get to material in G minor derived from Theme 1. The development, not particularly long, draws most from Theme 1 and the modulating transition before preparing the recapitulation section.

Molitor Op. 7 Grand Sonata movement 1: initial observations about the exposition themes

Simon Molitor's Op. 7 Grand Sonata, first movement.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IOCS3kB5vAM

At the risk of being every so slightly lazy I'm not bothering to analyze the introduction. It's an introduction and so it does what it's supposed to do.  Instead I mean to discuss the exposition, development and recapitulation of Molitor's Op. 7 guitar sonata.

Diabelli Op. 29, No. 3 in F major: Diabelli reaches his peak and provides a fine example of a sonata that only recapitulates the dominant key themes

Diabelli, Op. 29, No. 3 in F major

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EPxsEBA86mY

This is the most ambitious and effective of Diabelli's Op. 29 guitar sonatas.  It also threw me off when I was studying it because it's the best example of an exposition that presents a Theme 1 that never comes back in the recapitulation.

Diabelli Op. 29, No. 2 in A major: the one in the three solo guitar sonatas that actually has a "textbook" sonata form

Diabelli Op. 29, No. 2 in A major

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q4kcx9IGYHk

Diego Milanese does some fine work on Matiegka's Op. 23 guitar sonata, by the way, but we're discussing Diabelli here so that's just a passing comment for folks interested in listening to more early 19th century guitar sonatas.

Diabelli's opens this bright and glittery sonata with a descending major scale that's reminded me of a similar descending scale-line in a B flat major piano sonata by Haydn.  We get the tonic scale-run, and then we get the dominant scale-run.  This is another case where the theme is, to my ears, two-thirds of the way to being ragtime material.  There are some fun, almost Giuliani-worthy tunes in this sonata movement.  Theme 1 and the transition are moderately easy to hear for what they are.

Diabelli, Op. 29, No. 1 in C major, movement 1: an incomplete recapitulation that brings back Theme 2 because there's only ever half of Theme 1

Diabelli Op. 29, Sonata in C major

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J6kM2pcxjXE

This is the first and weakest of the three Op. 29 sonatas for solo guitar composed by Diabelli.  The first movement may provide the simplest evidence for my assertion.  Movements two through four are solidly made (rounded binary, menuet and rondo forms) but the opening sonata sticks out like a sore thumb. It's on the basis of the opening sonata form that I regard this as the weakest of the three guitar sonatas but it may be a useful case study through which to demonstrate that even in the early 19th century it was well within compositional norms to have a sonata form with a Theme 1 in an exposition that never comes back in the recapitulation.  The fact that Diabelli botched this where Chopin didn't shouldn't distract us from the fact that if both Diabelli and Chopin tried their hands at this approach to sonata form that it may not have been as non-normative as would later be implied by the prescriptions of books promulgating ideas about what sonatas should be.

A survey of early 19th century guitar sonatas, starting at the end with this year's reading on sonata forms and a preliminary proposal about recapitulatory processes in sonata forms

ELEMENTS OF SONATA THEORY:
Norms, Types, and Deformations in the Late-Eighteenth Century Sonata
James Hepokoski & Warren Darcy
Copyright (c) 2006 by Oxford University Press
ISBN-13:978-0-19-977391-6

CLASSICAL FORM:
A Theory of Formal Functions for the Instrumental Music of Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven
William E. Caplin
Copyright (c) 1998 by Oxford University Press
ISBN 978-0-19-510480-6
ISBN 978-0-19-514399-7

Five years ago, when I was blogging about "an overview of structural concerns in the sonata forms of Sor, Giuliani, and Diabelli" I was unfamiliar with either of these books or their authors.  I only discovered these two books in the last year thanks to a couple of doctoral dissertations on the guitar sonatas of Sor (and Giuliani, in one of the cases) that can be read over here:


https://arizona.openrepository.com/arizona/bitstream/10150/268374/1/azu_etd_12490_sip1_m.pdf

http://scholarlyrepository.miami.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1889&context=oa_dissertations

The two books are treasure troves of study for 18th century sonata forms and they have different strengths and weaknesses.  The strength of the Caplin book is that Caplin explored each level of formal development in a sonata form; whether it's the four to eight-measure sentence or period, or compound thematic modules at the lower level; or ranging up to the highest intra-movement and multi-movement cyclical patterns.  The weakness is that such a general survey of music can skip over interesting details such as variants of forms. 

incubation phase 2

Five years ago I published a post
"an overview of structural concerns in the sonata forms of Sor, Giuliani, and Diabelli"

I was still immersing myself in the sonatas of those composers and getting into Matiegka, Carulli, and even some Molitor.  I've significantly updated and revised my take on Diabelli since then.  I still love the F major sonata from his Op. 29 but the other two sonatas conform more to the conviction expressed by (or at least attributed to) Beethoven about Diabelli being an uninspired hack.  :)  Still, Diabelli's Op. 29, No. 3 guitar sonata is a thing of beauty and shows WHY the rest of his work was so often hackwork but that's getting ahead of ourselves.

The plan was, years ago, to get into more detailed analysis of specific sonatas to show the ways the composers handled sonata form in more practical ways in specific works.  Back in December 2011 it seemed as though everything that had been worth saying about a certain local megachurch scene had probably already been said and what more could possibly come to light? 

Ha, well, OBVIOUSLY that was a severe misunderstanding of the situation!  So for the last half decade Wenatchee The Hatchet wasn't writing about formal and compositional processes in early 19th century guitar sonatas!  Nope, we were discussing the life and times of what used to be called Mars Hill because it seemed as though the mainstream press mainstream or Christian had otherwise failed to keep up with what was going on.  But now that Mars Hill has been dissolved and the Richard Nixon of megachurch pastors has moved on to hotter climes we can finally (maybe) get around to detailed discussions of the evolution and variety of sonata forms in early 19th century solo guitar sonatas.

The plan is to present a series of analysis posts this month that go through the sonata forms that appear in the following works:

Molitor    Op. 7
Matiegka Grand Sonatas I & II
Giuliani   Opp 61 and 150
Sor           Op. 22 and 25
                Op. 29 etudes 5 and 10
                Op. 30

Now you'll notice I skipped Giuliani's Op. 15.  Not that I don't like it, it's just that it's so obvious a case of sonata form it doesn't necessarily add more to a discussion of early 19th century guitar sonatas to discuss that if I can devote more time and energy to Molitor and particularly to Matiegka.  I would say Matiegka's guitar sonatas are severely under-represented in scholarly discussions in the English language.  I can find doctoral dissertations on Sor and Giuliani and some of the scholarship about those two has been great, but I'm not able to comment on Christopher P Calvet's

“Structure and Development in the One-Movement Guitar Sonatas of Fernando Sor”

(Master’s thesis, California State University, 1992), because, alas, I have not been able to read it.  If someone wanted to get it on behalf of Wenatchee The Hatchet as a Christmas or New Year's gift then, hey, sweet!  I HAVE been able to read the following dissertations on Sor

https://arizona.openrepository.com/arizona/bitstream/10150/268374/1/azu_etd_12490_sip1_m.pdf
http://scholarlyrepository.miami.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1889&context=oa_dissertations

Both treatises date from 2012 and were completed and published the year after I wrote my general overview on formal concerns in Sor, Diabelli and Giuliani's guitar sonatas. 

For the few of you who even remember way back when I wrote that blog post you might remember I pointed out that there was a pattern of incomplete recapitulation in Diabelli, Sor and Giuliani.  THat's to say that each of these composers could write large-scale sonata forms in which Theme 1 was omitted in the recapitulation while Themes 2 and 3 would be brought back in the tonic key.  The plan was to have presented the case for how this was done and to go further.  I wanted to propose, as a guitarist composer myself, WHY this kind of recapitulatory process may appear in solo guitar sonatas.  With some more time and work this month I hope to finally get around to addressing that but laying some groundwork as to what this "incomplete recapitulation" concept is in sonata forms for solo guitar may need to be done.  For that I've been gratefully indebted to the dissertations linked to above. 

My hope is to contribute to the discussions begun by the dissertations above by making a case that what is called a "Type 2" sonata form is as prevalent in the solo guitar literature of the 19th century masters as the more conventional "textbook" sonata form.  I want to take a step further and propose that there are patterns of intra-expositional repetition and development that can signal whether or not a truncated recapitulation is likely. To this end I've found it useful to study piano sonatas by Chopin and Liszt in addition to the usual suspects. 

So later this month the plan is to roll out a blog post series that will get pretty technical.  If you can't read music then your eyes will glaze over but if you can read scores comfortably and are familiar with the repertoire about to be discussed it will make for breezy reading. 

It's not like I'm necessarily going to get into John Murray's The Imputations of Adam's Sin and discuss how and why the doctrine of natural imputation or federal imputation would make it important to Christian theologians to address the issue of whether or not Adam and Eve could be regarded as historic figures.  I mean ... I "could" and for a moment was tempted to do so in response to a recent blog post by some other guy in Arizona on the historicity of Adam and Eve but if Driscoll an't explain the significance of imputation of sin and its relevance to the question he deigned to semi-answer then, well, he wasted his money on that master's in exegetical studies and wasted everyone's time who signed off on giving him that degree.  Maybe it's just because it felt like yours truly spent months assembling what amounted to some kind of master's project length analytical series on a local figure in church culture in Puget Sound, but there's  a lot here at this blog that takes a while to put together.  That Murray reference wasn't just for kicks, I actually own the book and found it pretty helpful but it might signal the level of nerdery you'd have to deal with to address some of the issues that a certain guy in Arizona these days won't address, apparently. 

BUT ... hoping to resist temptation there.  This year the whole corporate entity has been dissolved and perhaps in 2017 we can get back to blogging about the stuff we'd set out to blog about before certain local current events circa 2012-2015 happened. 

So, ahem, back to the musical stuff, hoping to have a series of blog posts up this month that will be an analysis of sonata forms for solo guitar by early 19th century guitarist composers.  Looking forward to it but these kinds of projects take time.

PS, also thinking of blogging about Legend of Korra (finally); the Nolan Westworld series; and maybe throw in a few thoughts about franchise extension and the red state and blue state power fantasies endemic to 24 and Gilmore Girls.  But we'll see.  The music stuff really is a higher priority this month.

HT Warren Throckmorton--Driscoll claims to have had a Malthusian past that he's repudiated, although it was ten years ago he bluntly articulated his "shoot your dogs" approach to practical ministry and eight years ago he said whole family lines could be demonically inspired

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/warrenthrockmorton/2016/11/28/mark-driscolls-malthusian-past/

Throckmorton has a clip of Driscoll preaching recently with a tale of how he was once a Malthusian and was for abortion and contraception and how he was wrong.  We've already discussed at some length the slippery aspects of Driscoll's ways with narrative.  There are six not-always-subtly different narratives as to how and why and when he made the decision to resign from Mars Hill, for instance.  We've also explored how, depending on the rhetorical/polemical context Driscoll at times saw fit to tell the story of his conversion to Christianity without any recourse to mention (even once) of Grace Martin. In the tagged series of posts "Mark Driscoll and the power of the sob story"we took a survey of Driscoll's stories of woe from the 2007-2014 period and noted that as controversy swirled around him his appeals for sympathy shifted from "here's how rough I had it" to "here's how rough my wife and kids have had it".  All that review is to say that it's very, very difficult to simply accept a narrative asserted by Mark Driscoll at face value even when the core facts of the narrative can, actually, be basically agreed upon.

Now if one were to attempt even a guess as to what on earth could inspire an ambitious young sort like Mark Driscoll that some people simply didn't deserve to reproduce his urban redneck background might have been what inspired this observational approach.  That got discussed at some length in the series "Mark Driscoll and the Gospel of [escaping] white trash" earlier this year. Driscoll's description of his working class Irish-Catholic family travelled in just enough jokes about rednecks and living in the ghetto that the only plausible explanation for any former Malthusian convictions he may claim to have had in his teens and early twenties would have to at least partly consider those alleged views in light of his self-described urban redneck milieu.

So even if Mark Driscoll sincerely held to what he thinks of as Malthusian ideals this doesn't mean he's necessarily fleshed out WHY he embraced those views.  After all, a Malthusian view, albeit defined pejoratively, tends to worry about the unworthy reproducing than the more-than-worthy reproducing.   That he viewed himself as one of the superior sorts is easily considered even if he DIDN'T say he viewed himself as a superior being.  The sort of guy who backs out of a restorative disciplinary process at the church he co-founded because he claims God gave him permission to is someone who is arguably STILL living and speaking as though he's a genuinely superior being not bound to live by the rules he'd admonished just about everyone else in the history of Mars Hill to live by.

Which reminds me ... ten years ago Driscoll articulated a practical philosophy about ministry that included the axiom "shoot your dogs".

Confessions of a Reformission Rev
Mark Driscoll, Zondervan, 2006
ISBN-13:978-0-310-27016-4
ISBN-10:0-310-27016-2
Copyright 2006 by Mark DriscollFrom pages 34-35

Question 9
Do you have the courage to shoot your dogs?
Dogs are idiotic ideas, stinky styles, stupid systems, failed facilities, terrible technologies, loser leaders, and pathetic people. Most churches know who and what their dogs are but simply lack the courage to pull the trigger and shoot their dogs. Therefore it is vital to name with brutal candor the people, programs, structures, and ministry philosophies that are dogs needing to be shot. Be sure to make it count and shoot them only once so that they don't come back and bite you. [endnote 35 here]

Page 202
35. I took the concept of shooting our dogs from a conversation I had with a friend named Jon Phelps, who is the president of DC-3 Entertainment and the founder of Full Sail College. 
Jon Phelps is co-credited with Mark Driscoll for Reverse-Engineering Your Life

 

So whether or not Driscoll actually rejected Malthusian thinking for humanity itself it's not entirely clear he didn't embrace a kind of practical quasi-Malthusian approach to ministry.

POSTSCRIPT 11-28-2016 0800p

One of the simpler problems with Driscoll's account of Malthusian eugenics is the implicit presumption in his account that people weren't concerned with overpopulation and that people weren't necessarily advocating measures to prevent overpopulation.  This was one of many concerns held by Catholic political leaders and theologians in the medieval period, for instance.  Given how Jack a Jack Catholic Mark Driscoll has often said he was it's no surprise if he once again proved his ignorance.

So ... let's take a gander over to this old book.

A History of Political Thought: The Middle Ages
Walter Ullman
Penguin Books
first published 1965
 

ISBN-10: 0140207783
ISBN-13: 978-0140207781

The continuator of his commentaries on the Politics, his [Thomas Aquinas'] pupil at Paris and later Bishop of Claremont, Peter of Auvergne, struck up quite radical naturalist chords, particularly in connexion with social and economic questions and problems connected with marriage. For instance, he held that, since the State had to be self-sufficient, it was imperative to limit the number of citizens, otherwise poverty would follow. Hence he advocated limitations in the size of families. Aristotle's suggestion of abortion was not endorsed, but in order to avoid over-population he suggested restrictions of procreation between the ages of 37 and 55 with men and 18 to 37 with women, because then fewer children would be born. Beyond these age groups there should not be sexual intercourse with a view to procreation, but simply for the sake of health or some other valid reason.

So advised restrictions on how often to have children so as to forestall over-population that could lead to systemic poverty was something people were concerned about back in the medieval period.  Driscoll's implication about population control and eugenics could be mistaken as saying these were relatively recent concerns.  They aren't and they weren't.  Whether or not you have particular issues with Planned Parenthood the case that poor people should refrain from birthing children faster than they can produce enough food to feed them or home enough to shelter them goes back as far (and obviously farther back then) the middle ages.

In all of Driscoll's spiel on Malthusian eugenics did he mention that Thomas Robert Malthus was a cleric?  The topic of whether or not Malthus' views have been misunderstood or misrepresented would be fascinating for someone else to field.  For the sake of this blog post it's merely sufficient to highlight that when Driscoll tries to unfurl what he seems to take to be wisdom about Malthusian eugenics he highlights yet more gaps in his knowledge about how far back concerns about over-population go and misses the boat on the extent to which the origination of Malthus' ideas could be construed as being founded on an evolutionary or materialistic paradigm.

POSTSCRIPT 2 0824PM

One of the other reasons to doubt whether or not Mark Driscoll really put what he calls his Malthusian eugenics ideas behind him comes from the 2008 spiritual warfare session he gave to leadership at Mars Hill.

http://download.marshill.se/files/MH%20Vodcast%20Video/2008/20080205_christus-victor_vodcast.m4v
Spiritual Warfare
February 5, 2008
Pastor Mark Driscoll
Christus Victor (Part 3)

34:54ish
I then ask them to confess sins and cancel ground and command leaving one at a time. `s all before we start, "How did you open the door?" proverbially speaking?  "Well, it was I committed adultery then after that I started having nightmares."

"Well, guess what?  Probably a connection there, huh?  Probably opened the door with adultery. Have you ever really repented of that to Jesus and asked him to forgive you?"

"Not really."

"Well let's do that right now. Let's stop right now and have you repent of that sin, ask Jesus to forgive you. He died.  Receive forgiveness."

Let's get--cuz, see, Satan and demons, with a believer, in addition to external torment and such, most of what they have is what we've given them by opening the door through sin.

"Well then, confess it is a sin.  Let's kick `em out, lock the door but you gotta straighten this out with Jesus. You gotta repent."

So a good chunk of time is just spent on repentence of particular sin. It's all it is. Getting rid of those handholds and footholds.
...
36:00
I then ask them a series of questions. This is where we start, number ten. I'll usually check with ancestral sin. I'm looking at their past.

Now if they come from ten generations of third degree Masons I'm startin' there. If they're grandma was into witchcraft and their mama was into witchcraft and they have some demonic issues it shouldn't be shocking to think that this has been an issue in their family for a while. [emphasis added]

I know one family where incest was just part of the family. They actually had very intricate rules to control incest. The grandfathers and uncles could molest little girls but daddies couldn't and you could only do that once they hit the age of ten. You couldn't molest any child before that. I get these complicated rules that have been passed down for generations for the sexual abuse of the children. You're like, this, your struggle here, your temptations, your issues, they have generational lineage.

There are whole family lines that are just demonically inspired. You ever wonder why, in the Old Testament, God will occasionally tell his people, "When you go to war against that nation kill ALL of them. Don't let one of them live." People say, "Oh, oh that's terrible." Not if that whole line is demonized. Not if that whole line of people exists for the express purpose of fighting God and killing his people. The issue is either you get rid of them or they get rid of you. Satan is inspiring them to destroy you and you gotta get rid of them. Satan DOES work through family lines. There are family lines like the Herods who, just from one generation to the next, they're trying to kill Jesus and his people. Some of the family fights in Genesis, they continue all the way to this day. Not saying every person in the family line is demonized, but it seems like Satan likes to work through family lines, ancestral sin. [emphasis added[

So ... if Mark Driscoll asserted in 2008 that there were whole family lines that were demonically originated and inspired and that in the Old Testament it was not wrong for God to command Israel to massacre entire nations, would there have been any consideration of whether this would still be an approach in the present?  In other words, how could a Mark Driscoll who could make these assertions still have a moral basis from which to argue against what he describes as Malthusian eugenics.  If entire family lines could be described as demonically inspired what's the remedy?  This hardly seems like a great set of assertions for a guy like Mark Driscoll to make about whole family lines being demonically inspired if his long-term goal is to repudiate whatever he regards as Malthusian eugenics.

POSTSCRIPT 3

Even assuming that the writings of an English cleric from centuries ago could somehow be conflated with what Driscoll describes as ideological evolutionary thought ... let's never forget that in 2007 Mark Driscoll still had his comment about the pile of dead bodies behind the Mars Hill bus.

http://004f597.netsolhost.com/Vision/10%20Throw%20Them%20Off%20the%20Bus%201.mp3
http://joyfulexiles.files.wordpress.com/2012/06/preaching-paul_edits1.mp3
October 1, 2007

... Too many guys spend too much time trying to move stiff-necked obstinate people. I am all about blessed subtraction. There is a pile of dead bodies behind the Mars Hill bus and by God's grace it'll be a mountain by the time we're done. You either get on the bus or get run over by the bus (those are the options) but the bus ain't gonna stop. I'm just a, I'm just a guy who is like, "Look, we love ya but this is what we're doin'."

There's a few kind of people. There's people who get in the way of the bus.  They gotta get run over. There are people who want to take turns driving the bus. They gotta get thrown off cuz they want to go somewhere else. There are people who will be on the bus (leaders and helpers and servants, they're awesome).  There's also sometimes nice people who just sit on the bus and shut up. They're not helping or hurting. Just let `em ride along. You know what I'm saying? But don't look at the nice people who are just gonna sit on the bus and shut their mouth and think, "I need you to lead the mission." They're never going to. At the most you'll give `em a job to do and they'll serve somewhere and help out in a minimal way. If someone can sit in a place that  hasn't been on mission for a really long time they are by definition not a leader and so they're never going to lead. You need to gather a whole new core. [emphasis added]

I'll tell you what, you don't just do this for church planting or replanting, you know what? I'm doing it right now. I'm doing it right now. We just took certain guys and rearranged the seats on the bus. Yesterday we fired two elders for the first time in the history of Mars Hill last night. They're off the bus, under the bus. They were off mission so now they're unemployed. This will be the defining issue as to whether or not you succeed or fail.

If those were the words of a guy who repudiated the Malthusian eugenics views he claims he had earlier either Malthusian thought doesn't seem to mean what Driscoll has lately claimed it means ... or a person could repudiate the allegedly Malthusian views he claimed to have earlier and STILL say with an apparently clear conscience that you could either get on the bus or get run over by the bus but the bus ain't gonna stop.

Of course there isn't a Mars Hill bus NOW, is there?

Ben Johnston String Quartet #4

Having mentioned Ben Johnston's string quartets a few days ago, it seemed like a good idea to link to a performance of one the more accessible quartets in the cycle.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n4MkJXXMBAw

As in, Jeff, if you still read this blog from time to time go check out Johnston's string quartets, they're amazing!

Johnston's String Quartet No. 4 is a set of variations on "Amazing Grace". Johnston's one of the American composers who has been exploring microtonality and just intonation.  I mean to write more about this realm of music later but for now I'll say that I sometimes wish Roger Scruton's posse would give it a rest ripping on Schoenberg and John Cage because if I never hear Wagner for the rest of my life I won't miss him and because there have been critiques of the 12-tone chromatic scale used in equal temperament as not being more than one relatively recent option for pitch organization.  What if Schoenberg was right to guess that the 12-tone chromatic scale in equal temperament was played out in the tonal idiom?  That doesn't mean that there are no alternatives to that chromatic equally tempered scale, which wasn't even necessarily an option for the early and middle Baroque eras, let alone earlier.

But enough of that.  We can talk about the frequency with which today's avant garde as a rejuvenation or rediscovery of ideas that are recognized as old and perhaps unfairly abandoned options later.

"check your privilege" as a vindictive variation of "count your blessings" (warning, links to wildly syrupy songs from the 1970s and 1980s show up)

To a Calvinist with a sense of meticulous sovereignty at the level espoused by John Piper, there was, in hindsight, no way I could have escaped having heard music by Evelyn Tornquist Karlsson known by the simpler sobriquet Evie.

So, as a Pentecostal kid growing up in western Oregon through the 1970s and 1980s it was impossible, perhaps, to have not heard Evie singing how we should be thankful for the good things that we got, because the good things that we got are, for many, just a dream ...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1DZmyAWul9Y

Can't really unhear the song having heard it once, which may simultaneously be a testament to the ear worm aspects of the song and to the fact that I didn't exactly want to remember this song decades later.

Actually ... from about the same era there's also that old song "What About Me?"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Abz0wrV0Yc

To go by these pop songs the spectrum of extremes between grateful counting of blessings and the earnest clamor to get my share can be expressed through ... well ... really cheesy ballads.

It is, perhaps, this second song from the 1980s that may encapsulate an element that isn't even latent about the phrase "check your privilege".  Can't you see I wanna live but you just take more than you give?

College students have discovered that being at college brings with it a lot of privilege and not necessarily the "count your blessings" kind.  The axiom "check your privilege" can seem to be a vindictive, assessing variant of "count your blessings", articulated by those who would say, "You better count your blessings that you have that others don't have because if you won't do it I certainly will."

There is a sound concern in the axiom "check your privilege", but the capacity to check the privilege of someone else is not an assurance you have checked your own.  To invoke Adolf Schlatter's axiom from his commentary on Romans, our own share is not removed by condemning the evil in others.  So checking your privilege does not remove my privilege any more than you checking my privilege would remove one iota of yours.

These two cheesy pop songs may serve as a reminder that these social/emotional poles have always been with us.  I hate both these songs because, for me, the two songs seem to reek of a shared sense of entitlement.  It might just be a personal hang-up, your mileage may vary.  The way the former song has been rolled out in church contexts it could be construed as, pardon the language, "quit bitching about stuff and be grateful for what you have." At the other end of the spectrum, the other song seems determined to trot out a series of sob stories about other people that culminates in "so now I want what I think I deserve from life and it's YOUR FAULT I don't have it."  The song clearly was intended to be a plea for social justice at one level but at another level it reads like the subtext or text of any given plot of any given Adam Sandler film, of whom it's been written he plays characters who believe that the mere presence of desire in the protagonist ought to be taken as prima facie evidence said desires should be granted.

And that could describe the vibe I sense not just in the college students who are discovering what this "privilege" thing is a rhetorical weapon as well as those alt right guys who believe that somehow the cards are against them, too.  There's a zinger Gerald gets in a recent South Park episode where he tells another internet troll that "you're not a political internet warrior, you're just some guy who can't get laid."

While I sometimes try to be sympathetic to both groups as having grievances that are based on real inequalities it can be hard to shake off the sense that if you have the time, money, technology and leisure to vent on the internet there may be a silver lining that's being missed.  That literacy is, in the grand sweep of human history, something of a privilege. Or there may be something else.  One of the paradoxes of our era is that there are writers who can discuss the prevalence of rape culture while simultaneously affirming the necessity of defending reproductive rights as a euphemism for not carrying a fetus to term. 

Because if we're looking at both genders and not just whatever "reproductive rights" are euphemistically supposed to be for women, there are obviously guys who think they have a right to sex and they act accordingly ... which has had me wondering whether or not a more honest appraisal of reproduction is that any act of human reproductive routines is a negotiated privilege, and some guys had better own up to the possibility that any previously negotiated privileges could be revoked or that they may never successfully negotiate said privilege.  Years ago I heard a fellow intone that Proverbs says that he who finds a wife finds what is good and receives favor from the Lord.  Well that proverb never articulated a "promise" that a guy will get a wife, it's more like counsel to be grateful for the wife you have when you meet her.  It's count your blessings there, not "I've had enough now I want my share." 

Even though I've read some stuff on some manosphere blogs about custody battles and divorce laws it sometimes seems like dudes on the manosphere may be guys who have significantly overestimated what some people call sexual market value.  Rather than concede that they are simply not as desirable to others as they regard themselves to be, it's easier to imagine that there's a war on men or a war on boys or some kind of war rather than concede that maybe we live in a world where if there's a sexual marketplace your market value is somewhere in the zone of zero. 

Why shouldn't it be possible for men, not least because men exist who are willing to say such things about women.  The men who have been willing to say those sorts of things about women almost invariably resent having the same things said about them.  I can recall a guy sitting at a fire with a bunch of other guys who were talking about the challenges of relating to their wives in their respective marriages.  The guy at the fire, single, blurted out that he was amazed at all the complaining guys were doing about how tough married life was.  "At least you guys get to have sex!" he said with indignation.  An older married man said, "No you don't, if none of the other areas of the relationship are working that doesn't happen."  

Soren Kierkegaard once mused that the single men bitterly resents not having a wife and then the married man bitterly resents the loss of his freedom and time.  I.e. humans may be disposed to ingratitude even after they have gotten the thing they were sure they wanted. And the flip side of this is that those who are the beneficiaries of privilege often invent ways to convince themselves and others that it was not the proverbial luck of the draw. No, it was all the greatness of the effort and the worthiness of the accomplished.   Sometimes it seems as though the sum of American high and low culture could be expressed in an axiom--we loathe and resent those relationships that we have coveted as the relationships most able to give our selves meaning.

It would be nice if there were a midpoint between the Evie song and that song recorded by the band Moving Pictures.  I mean these two songs are brutally open campaigns to extort water from your tear ducts.  You'd be better off reading Ivan Karamazov's parable about the Grand Inquisitor!  Perhaps we're really more sophisticated now than all that, we don't have songs that trumpet these sentiments 1980s style.  We are able to get more directly to the point with some help from Twitter.  Still ...

So here I am, wishing I'd never heard either of these songs even once in my lifetime but in a way it's a reminder that for people who find it frustrating that kids these days say stuff like "check your privilege", it's not like things have changed THAT much.  At least the kids these days aren't writing songs of the aforementioned sort I've been trying to forget pretty much all my life but can't forget.

If you haven't heard either of the songs and were prudent enough to not click on the links, check your privilege and don't give it up by listening to either of those two songs. Hold on to that privilege and don't let it go. 

on rewatching Star Trek Beyond--the conflict between Kirk and Krall is about "who is my neighbor" as addressed in The Good Samaritan and the dillema of Trek as a pro-secularist franchise parasitically dependent on Judeo-Christian ethical traditions

We're three movies into the rebooted Star Trek franchise and what has nagged at me since the reboot is the question of what, exactly, the Federation does.  What does it do?  What does it stand for?  Unity?  I was watching the film last night with some friends and one of them pointed out that the quest to seek out new life and new civilizations sounds cool but ... to what end is it done? 

Considering that three movies in a row the villains have it out for the Federation or those people who are held to embody the vices of the Federation, it would seem pretty important to establish what the Federation does. 

The Federation and Starfleet seem to be a fairly simple stand-in for the United States.  This is an unavoidable consideration when we consider that Roddenberry made Star Trek half a century ago in the United States.   It's been easy for some film critics (looking at you Richard Brody) to have a cavalier and condescending approach to the worn out franchise.  But the franchise embodies the most optimistic and egalitarian blue state sort of mentality that would seem right at home in what old lefties regard as the hopelessly middlebrow New Yorker. 

Watching the film again I was struck that Krall (the human warrior Balthasar Edison, played by Idris Elba) believes that the Federation made humanity weak.  But it's more blunt and personal than that,  Edison had spent his whole life defending the human race from Romulans and other planets bent on crushing humanity and then the wars ended and the peace that came resulted in the Federation.  Edison becomes Krall and vows revenge on the Federation for abandoning him and his crew.  For Krall the Federation is emblematic of a haughty, self-satisfied conflict averse empire in which the humans who risked their lives to save humanity were cast off in favor of sharing meals with the races that were previously set on destroying the human race.

Captain Kirk, our hero, argues that the war was won and Edison needed to change.  But there's a core problem in the conflict that Captain Kirk has with Edison/Krall that never gets addressed.  In fact the conflict is taken for granted.  The assumption is that Kirk is right and Krall is wrong but we're never given a reason why this is so.  Well, we're given a reason, Kirk tells Krall he'd rather die saving lives than live with taking them but he ... does kinda let Krall die.  Captain Kirk hasn't exactly had problems killing to save lives over the last fifty years or, if he's had reservations he has been pragmatic enough to recognize that sometimes saving billions of lives might entail killing millions (see Operation: Annihilate, for instance, from the original series). 

But let's step back and think about something that the film critics at The New Yorker didn't seem all that interested in even thinking about--Krall and Kirk are both men who are fighting for the benefit of the human race as they understand what is beneficial to humanity as a whole.  So the conflict is not about humanity, the conflict is about something else.  The question is the one that was posed to Jesus by an expert in the law, the question about eternal life.  Jesus replied that you love God and love your neighbor as yourself.  The law expert, seeking to justify himself, asked "and who is my neighbor?"  Jesus proceeded to tell the parable of the Good Samaritan.  Jesus' parable in Luke 10 warns that if you ask "who is my neighbor?" in a way that forecloses someone as having that relationship then you will not inherit eternal life.

In other words, Krall rejects the Samaritan and Kirk seeks to help the Samaritan, if we articulate their positions in terms that are explicable in light of the teaching of Jesus on love of neighbor.  Krall has concluded only humans are truly his neighbor; Kirk is committed to the precept that you love your neighbor as yourself and you DISCOVER who your neighbor is through the quest of seeking to be neighbors to as many as you can.  If it seems that Star Trek is permeated with a kind of liberal piety, well, that's not a big shock.  What's surprising is that liberals can sneer at the piety in the schlocky series with its genre trappings without realizing they would generally affirm the ethical precepts. 

But there's another way in which the conflict between Krall and Kirk is explicable in terms of Jesus' parables.  Krall is the older brother who rejects the return of the younger brother.  He can't respect a father who decides to welcome the one who rejected the father.  This is a loose analogy, of course, but the disposition toward the neighbor is a theme that can be drawn from this parable, too. 

And that gets to a problem in the Star Trek narrative universe, and not just the problem that it can have an unexamined endorsement of what could be globally regarded as American cultural imperialism (although Simon Pegg could, as a co-author of the script, actually get that this is a thing to be concerned about, being British).  The problem is that the ethical ideals of the secular/progressive Star Trek franchise, when push comes to shove, gives us a Captain Kirk who articulates an ethical view that, however admirable we may find it to be, is parasitically dependent on the Christian ethical tradition that is preserved in the parables of Jesus.

American artists and writers about the arts consider a variety of ideas about the arts and the role of the artist in the wake of Trump's victory

aka links for the weekends

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2016/12/move-over-michelangelo/505826/

Ia 1971 article in ARTnews, Linda Nochlin, a feminist art historian, asked a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad question: “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?” Her question has been ringing in our collective ears ever since. And it’s ringing especially loudly this year.
Here is Nochlin’s killer line: “The fact, dear sisters, is that there are no women equivalents for Michelangelo or Rembrandt, Delacroix or Cézanne, Picasso or Matisse, or even, in very recent times, for de Kooning or Warhol.” She went on to explain why:

The fault, dear brothers, lies not in our stars, our hormones, our menstrual cycles or our empty internal spaces, but in our institutions and our education … everything that happens to us from the moment we enter this world of meaningful symbols, signs and signals.

Our very idea of greatness, of genius, she argued, is bound up with manliness.

The article proceeds from there, assuming that the nature of the question "why have there been no great women artists?" is bad.  It can certainly be taken as a bad question but there are many ways in which it could be shown to be a bad question.

If gender is a social construct the reason there may be no great women artists is that the social construction of gender could be construed as inimical to the possibility of making art to begin with, , let alone great art, whatever greatness may be.

But ... what if the problem is in the definition of "art"?  What if art for the sake of art is the problem?  What if the reason there have been no great women artists is that within the social confines of femininity in Western cultures female creativity had to be directed toward some actual, real world practical end?  At the risk of pointing out the obvious, raising children who survive into adulthood could be an artistic and creative discipline of the sort that never gets recognized as an art because "art" in Western contexts presupposes that a human life can't be a work of art.

That's just one possibility to consider and many women today don't want to get into the realm of the art of raising children anymore than someone who is interested in ceramics doesn't want to get into colored pencil drawings or painting with acrylic.  Now obviously the analogy breaks down at all sorts of levels and seems odious but it may be worth articulating for precisely its odious side--there are women who find the prospect of raising children altogether loathesome.  There are women who want very much to raise children.  They ideally may be able to embrace either pursuit in contemporary society.

But then there's this matter of what "great" is and greatness in pedagogical contexts tends to be tied up with questions of canonicity and academic requirements.  And, of course, art.

The question of what is at the core of art for the sake of art has been examined countless times already.  Ted Gioia's riff has been that he wants to promote not so much art for art's sake but art for people's sake and this seems to get at a long-running complaint the music historian Richard Taruskin has had about the ideological claim that art should be for the sake of art, that the Matthew Arnold inspired "art religion" does nothing to safeguard that art concerns itself with the lives of others.  The humanities do not humanize and the surest proof to us that they do not is the fact that, if the humanities DID humanize, how was it that the societies whose cultural legacies became the Western canon afflicted more atrocities on the world in the 20th century than we can begin to fathom?

Now supposing we stick to the idea that greatness is still a workable concept, Diane Ragsdale asked over at her Artsjournal blog, "What is our `great work' in light of this election?"

http://www.artsjournal.com/jumper/2016/11/what-is-our-great-work-in-light-of-this-election/

You can pretend that the idea of greatness is impossible or that it doesn't exist or that you don't believe in greatness.  You can be an idiot about that.  The slogan that insists upon making America great again seems to have resonated with some people. 

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/cover_story/2016/11/rural_americans_just_chose_a_president_who_won_t_help_them.html

or maybe saying that America already is great resonated with people and that's why it looks as though Hillary Clinton won the popular vote ...

https://www.thenation.com/article/hillary-clintons-popular-vote-victory-is-unprecedented-and-still-growing/

in spite of voter suppression, maybe?
https://www.thenation.com/article/did-republicans-rig-the-election/

although ... the Electoral College vote decided the election.  So now there's some talk (again) of abolishing the Electoral College, the irony of which seems hard to miss when people objected to statements from Trump to the effect that he'd recognize the legitimacy of process if he won.  This principle can be inverted without losing its potency, it's possible to regard a democratic republican electoral process as only being legitimate if it got you the result you wanted and regarding it as inherently corrupt under all other circumstances.  It would seem that on sides red and blue we've got some people who only consider democratic processes to be truly, legitimately democratic if the results are wanted. 

So, back to the question of the "great work" for artists in the era of Trump.

http://www.artsjournal.com/jumper/2016/11/what-is-our-great-work-in-light-of-this-election/
...
From where I stand, those working in nonprofit professional cultural organizations across the US—we in the so-called Creative Class—are, without a doubt, among those who did not understand our country, its culture, or its values. If we are shocked and outraged by the election results this only seems to prove the point. And this lack of understanding is disappointing given that art can be—arguably, should be—the way we share with one another what it means to be human (a powerful and democratizing notion.

There's some thoughts about arts funding and arts organizations and serving the public.  The question of whether or not the Western concept of art in its contemporary form is really a democratizing thing seems given.  But is it?  Is it actually a given that the arts are intrinsically democratizing? 

At the risk of asking a potentially obvious question ... do people who aren't already interested in the arts read blog aggregators like ArtsJournal?  Arts administration blogging isn't something I read all that regularly, but the headline caught my eye.  And it's gotten me thinking about some observations Leonard B. Meyer made about the Romantic era and what he called the ideology of elite egalitarians.

STYLE AND MUSIC: THEORY, HISTORY AND IDEOLOGY
LEONARD B. MEYER
THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS
COPYRIGHT (C) 1989 BY LEONARD B. MEYER
ISBN 0-226-52152-4
page 346
... egalitarianism does not require that art be understood, appreciated, and loved by every person, but only that listening competence does not depend on privileged learning (whether formal or informal) of traditions, references, and the like.

page 347
The irony is, of course, that instead of leading to compositions readily understood and appreciated by the concert-going public, egalitarianism gave rise to music that became the private province of small academic coteries. And this untoward outcome raises an important, even fundamental, question about humankind: Is it in our nature to be wholly natural--that is, without cultivated concepts and conventions?
...
page 349
... human communication is for the most part dependent on learning. In this sense, all competence leads to exclusiveness and, for any particular in-group, to elitism.

What liberals and progressives within the arts seem to struggle to understand is a concept that an old conservative elitist like Roger Scruton doesn't struggle to understand, the essential notion that the "vocational artist" is necessarily someone in some kind of leisure class.  The level of education and resources a person has to have to appreciate the arts, let alone participate in or contribute to those arts, is full of what some folks these days would call "privilege".

But we seem to live in an era in which writers and poets and musicians and artists who aspire to make their wages from those activities embrace all kinds of ideologies and philosophies whose end game seems to be exonerating artists, writers, poets, musicians, film directors and actors from even being able to be part of a ruling caste or an elite.   Whoever Elena Ferrante really is ... let's consider some assertions made on her behalf about the power of writers:

http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2016/11/elena-ferrantes-right-to-a-pseudonym/507530/
...
The only real limits to what a writer writes should be determined by his or her own imaginative capacity; and it is the reader who will ultimately judge how successful that act of imagination has been. A writer’s imagination can be powerful, hurtful, and sometimes, so dangerous to society that the works are ultimately proscribed. But this is treacherous ground; except in extreme circumstances, the suppression of imaginative literature represents a fundamental threat to freedom of thought. When writers work, they imagine; and, by affirming freedom of the imagination, a writer asserts, on behalf of every reader, the right to imagine a life beyond the confines of everyday experience. It is an escape, it is an experience, and it can be transcendent. Good writing, even when it disturbs us, is a potent reminder of what it means to be a human being.

Assuming the work is PUBLISHED, maybe the readers get to ultimately judge how successful the act of imagination has been.  What if there's something besides suppression of imaginative literature, such as a propensity to distribute and promote a range of imaginative literature that some would consider confined to those who already have the privilege of being within the demographics most likely to be favored.  To be a bit blunt about it, the people most likely to know what the concept of white privilege is have the privilege of access to educational resources that can instruct them what the concept of privilege is.  The paradox of having the privilege to talk about privilege as though it were a thing you didn't already possess as the process through which to talk about it could be a book.  Very probably someone has already written that book.

So ... of Ferrante ... her work has been described as a bid on behalf of women writers to make literary art on par with the literary art that is regarded as canonical in Western culture that has been traditionally written by (or credited to) men. 

Okay ...

and then there's concern about who has representation in the film industry. 

Are we possibly seeing a lot of discussion about an idea that asserts that if the ruling castes have a level of sexual and ethnic or skin-color diversity that goes beyond old white male that ... this really means that the new ruling castes will be more ... benevolent?

Why would anyone believe this?

Can't people on the British left remind people that voting for Hillary Clinton so as to have a woman in the Oval Office has an unstated assumption built into "first woman president"?  It's not like Margaret Thatcher, the Irony Lady, was regarded with love and adoration by the British left.  If "all" that were really at stake is women being able to raise an articulate and insistent voice then the lately deceased Phyllis Schlafly should have been celebrated by feminists the world over for showing what powerful influence a woman in the political sphere can have.

American feminists may believe ideas such as that "White women Sold Out the Sisterhood By Voting For Trump"
http://www.slate.com/blogs/xx_factor/2016/11/09/white_women_sold_out_the_sisterhood_and_the_world_by_voting_for_trump.html

at least the sort of writer who contributes to Slate's Double XX can believe that white women sold out the sisterhood.

But does that sisterhood exist apart from the minds of those women who can make livings as writers in places like New York?  Does that sisterhood exist as more than a journalistic construction, a reification into a social unit of those authors who may get published in and read stuff at Slate or Salon?  That Trump won the Electoral College vote has not stopped people from spending the last couple of weeks scapegoating electoral demographics they've spent the last decade demonizing as not even real Americans. 

http://www.thestranger.com/seattle/the-urban-archipelago/Content?oid=19813

So we can have an artist, in the wake of Trump's victory writing something like this:
http://therumpus.net/2016/11/reimagining-america/
...
I lay awake, alternately weeping, hyperventilating, and checking my phone, needing human contact out in this altered, strange world. I texted my friend Daniel in Louisville: Can you believe this? He answered, I don’t know what to tell my kids. Daniel, I messaged him, how do I do this tomorrow? How do I play this concert now? I lay in bed and thought of my kids downstairs, of their tomorrow and the day after that, how scared they were, how they’d seen the grownups crying tonight. At 3 a.m. I whispered to my husband: “I can’t make this trip.” I texted Daniel, Are you awake? He wasn’t. He didn’t answer. When my alarm went off, I got up, and I stumbled downstairs and kissed my sleeping kids. I brushed my teeth and grabbed my suitcase, and drove to the airport.

Because this is what I do. I’m a performer, and there are rules. The show must go on. There’s no people like show people. Our job is to smile when we are low, to make you smile, forget your troubles, to entertain you. Daniel was waiting for me, and a concert audience, and five hundred kids in the Louisville schools, and I’m a trouper and I don’t let people down. So I got up and I went to work.

Within a day of Obama becoming president-elect a relative sent me a spam declaring Christians were going to be sent to concentration camps.  Later I'd get spam declaring that Obama was going to abolish the dollar and replace it with the amero.  I've gotten dire warnings from friends over the years Bush 2 was going to suspend the Constitution, declare martial law, and declare himself dictator for life.  Dave Chappelle deciding to send up white progressive panic seemed like a tonic.  It could be all too easy in the Pacific Northwest to forget that Oregon was chartered as a white supremacist utopia in which slavery was not legal but neither were blacks permitted citizenship. That weird double bind is something progressives in the Pacific Northwest can't afford to forget.  It's not as though we didn't have a racist progressive in the form of Woodrow Wilson a century ago.

If there is a moment of reckoning artists and journalists could have now, besides the alarming failure of the Fourth Estate as a whole to anticipate what has transpired, it's that artists as a group need to consider that they are, in fact, a ruling caste.  It's easy to look down on uneducated people who work in trades and haven't read Nabakov or Pauline Kael.  But stop and think about this a moment and it could be revealed to be a potential loathing of the underclass.  The Old Left has cranked out a pretty articulate condemnation of the aristocratic entitlement of the castes that have backed Hillary Clinton.  It's no love for Trump to propose that after a generation of civic minded liberal celebrities backing leaders like Clinton and endorsing them that the electoral results may reveal the possibility that if we were to have some kind of class conflict that those backing Clinton may have a chance to discover they're the ruling classes.

It doesn't matter if the members of those who are ruling class level in terms of money and cultural influence have reputations as gadflies.

http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2016/11/it-pays-to-be-a-jerk-episode-4745-bob-dylan/507935/

when you're in SESAC rather than ASCAP or BMI you're part of a slightly more exclusive club.

With a few books out about the art of criticism and the "art of the voice" it's easy to notice that critics have lamented their decline of cultural influence and wonder about the stability of the art of criticism.

https://www.thenation.com/article/criticism-in-the-twilight/

https://www.commentarymagazine.com/articles/where-have-all-the-critics-gone/

It seems to be a lament on both the left and the right.  There have been laments about the decline of Western civilization since pretty much the dawn of Western civilization.  It's as though self-pitying emo Goth white boy writers have been a thing going back to the actual Gothic era! That's not just  sarcasm, my brother was telling me that in his reading about job markets in the medieval European scene there were humanities students venting spleen about how they'd study for seven years in the arts and languages only to find that key positions in university roles or government posts were being given to lawyers and accountants.  So artists and poets and bards have been pissed off about the bean counters and legal experts getting more prestigious jobs for literally a thousand years. 

Something I've been mulling over this year and last is that it seems as though in the left and right, the old blue and red, there have been currents of thought in which the "other", the adversary, is generally cast as a ruling caste that you aren't part of.  For blue state lefties the adversarial ruling class is the financial sector and the Republican party, for instance.  For red state sorts the enemy is often the academy and regulatory offices.  The possibility that YOU are part of a ruling caste and that your caste is also part of the problem seems to be against the possibility of being thought for these groups. 

In the last few years I've found myself advising friends to NOT go to college unless the work they want to do can't be done without the precondition of the credentialing schools provide.  I'm not against education in principle ... but in PRACTICE I've grown skeptical about what I now regard as a prestige racket.  The idea that the red state voters are ignorant is merely one part of a larger matrix of assumptions.  Other assumptions can hold that if you just go to the right school you'll land the right job and be able to work.  Maybe ... but radical critics of American academia have floated privilege as a concept that explains how people can even get into those sorts of schools to begin with.  Do standardized entrance exams really test for intellect and thoughtfulness ... or do they perhaps test for socio-economic class? 

One of the problems I've had with the left, in spite of enjoying reading a lot of writers who are left, is that they have this idea that dog whistles are only for right wingers.  Criticism of mainstream academia as beholden to a series of caste-guided entrance criteria is worth hearing out.  It might be lefty angst but the right has its angst, too.  If blue state types fret about the Koch brothers and The Family these days the right is still pissed that Soros exists and that tenured radicals get to decide if you graduate from college before you can get that business degree. 

And amidst all this I have found myself wondering what the person on the street has to gain from, say, absorbing the string quartets of Iannis Xenakis.  Or, to go with a more recent example, how about the string quartets of Ben Johnston?  What do the string quartets of Ben Johnston do for coal miners in Michigan? 

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/01/arts/music/players-are-wanted-for-ben-johnstons-works-some-sacrifice-is-required.html?_r=0

Don't get me wrong, the string quartets are marvels.  Of the ten I'm way into all of them except 1, 2, 3 and 6, which are still interesting.  But their existence as the pinnacle of esoteric and demanding chamber music should not give anyone the impression that people with no more than a high school education in even Wisconsin will have heard of Ben Johnston.  The quartets really are remarkable, beautiful works, though. 

The idea that an artist or writer or musician can embrace hugely esoteric creative processes to create works that can be appreciated by the uneducated listener is something I could write about some other time.  I'm totally for the idea but that's distinct from this weekend's meditative ramble, the problem I'm seeing of artists and "creative" aghast that Trump won without considering along the way that if we were to cast this as a narrative of class warfare in old style Marxist terms that the people who wanted Clinton to win are on the side of the oppressive ruling classes.  That's not an endorsement of Trump, who is pretty obviously from the same set of strata, it's an observation that we've had a left and a right, a blue and a red, that has doubled down on internalizing modes of sociological propagandas to exempt themselves from being in one of those ruling castes. 

http://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/the-failure-of-facebook-democracy

Or as Chris Rock joked recently somewhere, white people were gonna have a busy few days moping and being on Facebook.

My concern in the last few years has not been about what the role of the artist is supposed to be, let alone in an era of Trump.  This blog has obviously spent the previous five or six years meticulously documenting the history of a movement that used to be known as Mars Hill Church.  Were there times when I wanted to cast off all that stuff and write more contrapuntal music for guitar?  Most of the time.  Were there moments where I thought it'd be nice if I felt I could take a break from documenting things to get back into arts criticism stuff or keeping up with the arts scene?  Sure.  I do still missing being able to participate in the arts scene the way I could before the 2008 crash happened.  But I felt a kind of journalistic obligation, despite not being an official journalist, to document the life and times of what was once Mars Hill.  When the Fourth Estate seemed to persistently fail to account for what was going on with Mars Hill, somebody had to step in and do that work. So from here in Seattle the failure of the Fourth Estate to have anticipated what went down with Trump is not surprising given how much the Fourth Estate failed to keep up with the far less significant situation (nationally speaking) of what used to be Mars Hill here in the Pacific Northwest.

It's all too easy for artists to whip out pious bromides about their art such as "I'm an artist, not a priest".  But today's artists in Western cultures ARE priests.  When entertainers endorse political candidates and tell you who they believe you should vote for they're no different in principle from a Pat Robertson telling you who God thinks you should vote for.  That Robertson has insisted he's saying as a Christian why the Christian religion dictates you vote for a Republican doesn't mean that when a celebrity tells you why she or he is backing Clinton that's not another kind of religion.  The arts and artists, with more than a little help from the literary tradition of criticism, have sacralized themselves into having the role in our time that was delegated or arrogated to priests and prophets and sages.  To lament the religious elites of the past held all the power and access to influence is not something today's entertainers and producers should be too quick to embrace.  After all, let's just take the Bible, the Bible was written and edited and assembled by the literate and artistic elites of the culture and era that produced it and canonized it.  It isn't altogether impossible for an elite to be right about something.  But the red and blue have spent a lot of time lambasting the elites that the red and blue feel they aren't part of or have access to.  The blue entertainers may resent the extent to which money for art has to be gained from red state backing, perhaps.  Red state types eel that a majority of the super-rich are true blue. 

If there's a problem with the culture of victimhood and the rhetorical and moral gridlock of identity politics it's that everyone can appropriate this.  Artists who can pay their bills by doing things such as playing the piano or making movies don't think they're part of a ruling caste to just the point at which they believe it's justifiable to look down on stupid redneck racist voters who can have been the only sorts of people who voted for Trump.

Sure, Jamelle Boui can write that there's no such thing as a good Trump voter.

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/2016/11/there_is_no_such_thing_as_a_good_trump_voter.html

but what if you know a black guy in Seattle who, nevertheless, voted for Trump?  The world is full of diversity and as startling as this might seem, I visited with a friend a while back, a black man who said he voted for Trump.  That seems ... to put it mildly, counterintuitive.  But as he explained where he was coming from and as he articulated that the difference between a DNC who backed Clinton compared to a DNC that would have backed Sanders, a way to try to summarize things for readers is to mention that the Old Left critique of the New Left keeps recurring, that some people who preferred Trump to Clinton may distrust the Clinton legacy on banks, big finance, and the incarceration of black men as a systemic policy.  For people who regard the financial sector as a genuinely predatory caste within American socio-economic life Clinton was not going to come across as a protagonist. 

So in Bouie's estimation would a black man in Seattle who voted for Trump be a racist?  Or would the operable term be false consciousness?  that seems like the more Marxist way to describe such a thing.

Amidst all this the idea that artists need to take leave and consider what the artist can do in the age of Trump seems to be missing a larger point, if we're going to take seriously the bromides about how the uneducated rust belt workers backed Trump then solipsistic navel-gazing on the part of the creative class won't help the working class, will it?  Have liberals forgotten the commitment to the group euphemistically identifiable as the "unskilled labor market"?  If the case for Clinton was that a woman should have the power Margaret Thatcher provides a counterexample.  I doubt today's blue state voters would want Thatcher and there was certainly no love lost at the passing of Schlafly on the part of the left, was there?  So be more honest, the sisterhood is not really about giving women of every possible religious and political conviction more voice to articulate what they believe the world should be like, it's a left agenda that wants more power for the sake of left goals.  It's okay to just state that's what you want if that's what you want.  Disguising this political ambition behind rhetoricl of a sisterhood whose partisans will decide the women who voted for Trump betrayed the sisterhood suggests that the membership is more exclusive.

If arts funding in America (never on par with comparable funding in other Western states) continues to decline then the vocational artists may not be the future if they are even an accurate presentation of the present.  A number of key innovations in the arts in what we now call the early Baroque era were taken up by amateurs and dilletantes.  The people who make livings as musicians and poets make livings within academic norms.  I've wondered whether in the last two centuries we've had teachers and theorists admonishing us arts students to break the rules without sharing that their job as teachers is to say what the rules are;  or worse, 19th century German idealists seemed to simultaneously present artists as needing to break free of rules while articulating a rigid textbook formula on what the rules of form were that can't be grounded in the theory or practice of the 18th century models they insisted they were handing down.  There's actually no reason you can't apply the 18th century procedural approaches of sonata or fugue to blues riffs.  I wanted to be in academics twenty years ago but the older I get and the more I see how academics have approach things and how the academic cultures seem to work the more grateful I am that I didn't get to be part of it.  It's less a matter of the love of learning as a skepticism about the institutional politics. 

The last thing artists should be doing in the age of Trump is justifying their existence as though Trump would in any way be effected by that.  You don't have to go all Cornelius Cardew exactly but Cardew's complaint may be a salient point for artists in the age of Trump to consider, you've either been serving the ruling class or the working class and if you loathe the working class that might be a tell as to where your real class loyalties are.  Being against Trump hardly means you're a friend of the working class. 

If there's something this recent election has highlighted between the Old Left and the New Left since the victory was called, it's that Clinton's base may not have recognized in itself an alignment that committed to social progressivism at the expense of economic progressivism.  Marriage equality in an era in which marriages get more expensive and a celebrity marriage can involve as much money as a person in the lower classes can make in a single year won't seem like progress to the people who can't afford to get married.  Richard Taruskin, in his sprawling Oxford History of Western Music, declared flatly that the Victorian era was one in which the aristocracy was expected to start embracing the sexual mores of the middle class.  That might be completely wrong but it may be a useful counterpoint to the present, perhaps the sexual revolution has insisted that everyone should be able to have the sexual liberties of Old World aristocrats.  And that's surely fine and dandy for the people who can afford to live that way.  Authors at Slate can celebrate the way celebrities have destigmatized what used to be known as illegitimate births.

http://www.slate.com/blogs/xx_factor/2016/10/31/celebrity_news_coverage_and_changing_attitudes_about_out_of_wedlock_births.html

Aristocrats have long been able to afford to ignore conventional expectations as to who they had sex with and what they did or did not do to raise any resulting babies.  Clinton's supporters can certainly complain about the racism or sexism or xenophobia of Trump voters and they're going to do that anyway, but the value of the Old Left reaction to the recent election has been to highlight all the ways in which the New Left has failed to recognize that it sold out the working class and has congratulated itself on its liberality from the comfort of being part of the ruling castes.  The Fourth Estate's failure to have considered a Trump victory should have us reassessing our information culture.

In a Facebook era of political activity, in a Twitter era of activism, we seem to have gotten ourselves into self-reinforcing feedback loops left and right.

http://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/the-failure-of-facebook-democracy

Facebook and Twitter are fantastic platforms for what Ellul called sociological propaganda. If artists take to Twitter or Facebook to reinforce themselves in the rightness of their role in democratic society there's  a risk, the risk that they will double down on the legitimacy of their station without doing what Cornelius Cardew tried to do in asking himself which class he was really serving.  When he concluded his music was serving the ruling classes rather than the working classes he changed course.  But then he literally was a radical type.  What American musicians and artists are more likely to do is to find a way to embrace an ideological or aesthetic stance that exempts them from identifying themselves as a member of a privileged caste.  Why admit you're so full of privilege that you fart it with every step you take by being able to go to a school like Oberlin or Cornish or Yale or Eastman or Bard?  it's easier to take a dollop of critical theory and imagine that because you've read enough Adorno and Benjamin you are not, in fact, part of a privileged caste.  You can even imagine that because you're going to be on the hook for years of student debt that the bank that gave you the loan is the ruling caste.  Sure, they are, too ... but they gave YOU the money. 

I'm all for participating in the arts and making music and writing.  I love writing.  My idea of a fun evening is writing five or six thousand words or refining middle entry possibilities for a guitar fugue.  I'm incubating an analytic series on racapitulatory patterns in early 19th century guitar sonatas.  But I've got a mundane day job.  I am not a vocational artist.  I'm inclined to agree a bit with Charles Ives about the possibility that the "vocational" artist is not necessarily a better or more honest artist than the dedicated amateur.  Of course I'd be tempted to that view.  :)  that's me. 

In an era in which critics lament the fall of criticism it's hard to feel bad for an A. O. Scott.  it's hard to feel bad for artists whose conception of the arts is a self-justifying adventure in a kind of secular art religion in which they are the priests who stand to benefit from embracing ideologies that sacralize and mystify the arts because they make enough money from it to pay their bills or raise their children through that.  They get to be the priests of our era.

Since I'm blogging as a Christian (albeit an often not so good one) it is no shock if I mention that in the Bible we see the priests criticizing the conduct of kings.  That's what they are supposed to do from to time.  Artists can complain about what soldiers do but poets who complain about what soldiers do can forget that soldiers may fight so as to be immortalized in the verses they hope poets will write of them.  Empires get like that, and the ruling castes of empires have this weird and recalcitrant habit of considering their ideals the ideals of all enlightened and civilized sorts.  Priests should criticize kings but there are times when the priests need to be subjected to criticism.

There hasn't been a whole lot said or written by entertainers in the last couple of weeks to persuade me that American artists are able to have a critical look at themselves and the level of prestige and privilege from which the cultural priests of our age presumed a Clinton victory too soon.

I suppose exceptions to this concern can be made for Dave Chappelle and Chris Rock, though.