https://www.usatoday.com/story/life/tv/2018/04/27/thesimpsons-matt-groening-new-record-fox-animated-series/524581002/
“I’m proud of what we do on the show,” Groening told USA Today. “And I think it’s a time in our culture where people love to pretend they’re offended.”
https://www.cbr.com/simpsons-matt-groening-apu-criticism/
Pretend they are offended ... is not what the people who are offended seem to have been doing. No, it seems people are genuinely offended. The accounts of how and when "thank you, come again" began to be appropriated as a kind of racial/ethnic slur has been discussed in enough places I don't feel like dredging that up. If you want to find that writing it's not too difficult to find. This is something where giving my mixed lineage of American Indian and white ancestry I'm frankly willing to have some sympathy for those who are annoyed by the frequency of ethnic and racial stereotypes in popular culture. I don't like to listen to the radio as a matter of course in day job life but coworkers like to listen to the radio and, well, I hate GEICO ads. Most attempts at wit in GEICO ads are glib and stupid and one of the most annoying ones was the one about the "really charming snake charmer". There are times when I enjoy humor and there are a lot of times where, honestly, I don't. It's not just Mere Orthodoxy writers who in their attempts at wit come off as witless, it's also just about every GEICO ad that includes "surprising" (which is all of them).
On the other hand ... nobody truly familiar with animation as an art form and an industry can take complaints about a person like Azaria voicing a character like Apu as prima facie evidence of racism or stereotyping without any regard for content or context. Yes, Apu can be thought of as a stereotype but humor traffics in stereotypes and can be distilled to laughing with or laughing at. Since I like to read sermons by Richard Sibbes and think the Puritans have become too lazy and popular a stereotypical scapegoat for social and ideological problems that pervade contemporary American culture I think there's room for being, in select contexts, a humorless Puritan.
Even the bromide about the dangers of the Puritan legacy is itself an appeal to an egregious stereotype. John O'Sullivan, the one who articulated Manifest Destiny was not, for instance, a Puritan. A lot of the legacy of Puritanism that is considered terrible can be pinned on Calvinism rather than on postmillennialism and if we have to pick one of these two that goes farther in explicating the negative impact of American colonialist religious ideology the postmillennialism is a far better option than what is at this point a mere five-point soteriology in favor of monergism in Anglo-American religious thought in just the Christian subset of Anglo-American religion. That doesn't mean a comparably dangerous and facile sense of personal destiny can't be dredged up from a post-Joseph Campbell form of Jungianism in popular culture colloquially known as "the hero's journey".
But at a more practical level, as I've noted before, if the problem is that Apu is not voiced by an east Indian that's a misunderstanding about animation and voice acting. Phil LaMar doesn't have to be Japanese to do a magnificent job voicing Samurai Jack any more than Mae Whitman has to be a Pacific Islander to do a magnificent job voicing Katara in The Last Airbender series. Groenig is in many respects on solid ground being dismissive of a controversy that has emerged after his creation has been on television for longer than many people who watch the show have even been alive. That doesn't mean his dismissal can or should seem altogether justified. It's possible for Groenig's response to be irresponsibly glib at one level and perfectly understandable at another. It's also possible to take seriously the concerns people have about racial stereotyping in a cartoon character like Apu seriously at one level (i.e. the case that when Apu is the "only" presentation of a type that that type can be negative) and not seriously at another (as more entertainers who are actually east Indian have roles in the entertainment industry there's room for development and there's problems of misunderstanding and misrepresenting the nature of animation as a field if the rules of purity and presentation for live-action representation are applied to an art form in which you never have to look like the character you play in order to voice a character, something I'm sure Peter Cullen has been grateful for every day of the last forty odd years he's voiced Optimus Prime).
Saturday, May 12, 2018
Friday, May 11, 2018
another witticism fail for Mere Orthodoxy
Every once in a while I'm reminded of why I wrote a particular haiku in an older post.
if brevity is
the soul of wit, then ramblingaborts a satire
the soul of wit, then ramblingaborts a satire
I provided a counter-example of something I think is more in keeping with attempts at wit and the brevity that wit axiomatically depends upon.
Over the last six years I have started to find some contributions to Mere Orthodoxy more groanworthy than praiseworthy. More often than not the posts that seem to strike out are the ones that attempt some kind of Doug Wilson style serrated edge attempt at wit and wisdom and not altogether unlike Doug Wilson it can be a bit tough to conclude that either wit or wisdom ends up getting written, even if the author may clearly be convinced that wit and wisdom have been bountiful.
So ... this ode ... to the Pence rule.
The poem lacks wisdom and wit across the board since anyone with a modicum of knowledge about the plight of slaves anywhere could guess that Joseph probably did not have a choice about how often he interacted with his owner's wife. The idea that any variation of any contemporary Pence rule could be applicable to a slave seems daft. That point was, unsurprisingly, raised by Aimee Byrd.
Whereas Carl Trueman raised another point, about how predictably rote the presumption of heteronormative temptation the Pence rule is in both theory and practice but pastors have to be aware that that's not the only kind of temptation that people can run into. The Pence rule would seem patently useless for intra-gender temptations to misuse power, authority or social resources. Ted Haggard, for all we don't know, could have kept the Pence rule meticulously. Since I can hardly forget that here in Seattle back in 2006 Mark Driscoll used the Haggard scandal as an occasion to soap box I'm not surprised someone like Carl Trueman might remember it and point out that some of the higher profile scandals among pastors weren't men-with-women scandals.
Even as a moderately conservative Presbyterian sort odes such as the one linked to above have the illusion of wisdom and wit but, even to a conservative, suggest a self-satisfied and self-assured notional form of wisdom of a sort that builds its conclusion into its premise and then produces didactic doggerel that confidently expounds upon axiom and counter-axiom without, perhaps, understanding either of the axioms at hand.
Thursday, May 10, 2018
while reading Adorno's "Coherence and Meaning", a haiku
intent and result,
so distinct in reception,
are entwined in art
Just because half the time I think Adorno is wildly wrong doesn't mean that half the time I can't find his writing challenging, stimulating and interesting to read.
so distinct in reception,
are entwined in art
Just because half the time I think Adorno is wildly wrong doesn't mean that half the time I can't find his writing challenging, stimulating and interesting to read.
Wednesday, May 09, 2018
Nikita Koshkin's 24 Preludes and Fugues: Prelude and Fugue in A major
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YDxYmhze5Do
This is another entry in the cycle for which we have a video of a performance, by Asya Selyutina. This is, owing to the key of A major, one of the brightest and most festive of the entries in the cycle.
Prelude (starts at 0:22)
This is a laconic 3/4 work marked "Andante largo". While Koshkin is famous among classical guitarists for his macabre Poe-inspired "Usher Waltz" this waltz in A major is about as far away in mood and idiom as Koshkin could while still being Koshkin and still being in 3/4. A predominantly chorale texture permeates this prelude, though a chorale with many ninth chords and secondary leading tone chords. I would do a more detailed harmonic analysis if there were a way to do so without actually showing you what's in the score but I'm not in a hurry to get into any infringement activities. The prelude is dominated by four-measure phrases. Koshkin plays a lot with secondary leading tone chords and what are known as passing chords. He opens with a bright A major that shifts by measure 2 in what looks on paper to be a second inversion minor dominant chord but because of the laconic harmonic rhythm what this signals to us (especially if we're listening to this performed) is that this opening A major chord has been swiftly transformed into a secondary dominant, that of the subdominant. Sure enough we get a subdominant in measure 3, though it's in first inversion and it's a D major seventh chord. This leads to an F major chord with an added sixth (the D natural hidden in the middle of the texture at the third beat) but this is a passing chord. It has linear contrapuntal meaning but is not easily defined in terms of functional harmony. You get used to seeing a lot of this in Russian music in general in my experience; it's one of the things that make Russian music fun. The D major seventh in first inversion is transformed into B dominant seventh, which, of course, is the secondary dominant to the dominant and the dominant is precisely what we get at measure five, which augurs in the second phrase.
All of this transpires quickly within the first few seconds of the prelude and like any good prelude it telegraphs the harmonic and melodic language we'll be hearing to the end of the prelude. I mention that and make a point of it because when I was studying Igor Rekhin's cycle of preludes and fugues I found myself liking his subjects and thinking his fugues were okay, and I liked his preludes about half the time but I found myself puzzled by what could be the wild disconnect between his preludes and the subsequent fugues. For instance, there's an abrupt mood shift between his prelude in B flat major and the fugue in B flat major.
Again, if you're reading this and don't have a copy of the score at hand there's only so much I can do in a mere blog post, but the modal ambiguity of this prelude has to be seen as well as hear to be fully understood. Koshkin uses passing chords to shift in and out of the key of A major at will but quickly gets back "on key" throughout. He may land on a C major seventh chord with a ninth at measure 11 (); or he may build up to a deceptive cadence that leads to a subtonic that simmers in lydian inflections at measures 21 and 22 (starts at 1:16) but there's only so much I can describe here. This is an A major piece, to be sure, but there's something wistful and detached in this prelude and it has everything to do with subtle and rapid modal mutation on a chord by chord basis as the simple and faintly plaintive melody makes its way from start to finish.
We do, however, get a very upfront and obvious dominant pedal section at 1:37 and we get a very firm harmonic and melodic resolution at 1:50 that signals the syntactic climax of the prelude has been reached. From that point Koshkin gently winds down an already gentle prelude and closes with a series of chords to be played using natural harmonics.
Now, about those chords in harmonics--measure 43 is easy. Take your fourth finger and lay it across strings 1 through 5 at the seventh fret exactly as instructed in the score. With your first finger touch the sixth string at the fourth fret as indicated. Easy-peasy. It's that simple. Koshkin's instructions are aligned with the rising order of the pitches. Having written a dozen studies in natural harmonics over the years, and having a handful of them up online for consultation, I could improve my right hand technique but I think my left hand technique is basically competent. So I can walk you through the basics of how to execute the closing chords of this prelude. If you're an experienced guitarist and saw how Selyutina played the chords already you won't really need to read the rest of this discussion of the prelude. Now I think the kinds of chords in harmonic Koshkin calls for should be chords any and every guitarist learns how to play. It's just part of mastering the full range of musical possibilities on the instrument.
IF there's any tricky part in the chord at measure 43 for those not already used to this kind of playing it's the RIGHT hand, not the left. The G sharp should be taken by p, which could also take the E natural. Nevertheless I recommend you play the E with i rather than p because depending on how your nails and attack are you get noises you don't want. You also won't be able to pull off the chord with the completely unrolled effect that is patently in the score for guitarists who may need to be reminded that you never just roll chords just because that's what you're used to doing if the score doesn't explicitly call for it. That leaves the F sharp and D respectively to be taken by the a and m. You'll likely need all four of pima from the right hand to execute the chord all in one go but it's worth it and the left hand part really is as easy as I just described in the preceding paragraph.
Now for that second chord in harmonics at 44. The principle of execution is similar. You create a barre with your fourth finger at the twelfth fret and you're good to go for that part. The tricky part for an inexperienced guitarist is the A and C sharp. You get the A, as instructed, at the seventh fret of the fourth string. You get the C sharp at the ninth fret of the fifth string. Play the A with the first finger of the left hand and the C sharp with the second finger, and just see to it the third finger stays out of the way. That should make the second chord manageable. It may be difficult at first and you may have to practice the preliminary stretch but the left hand and right hand execution are, in principle, more or less like the previous chord.
The last "chord" is the C sharp and A dyad that ends the prelude. This is a charmer and it will be scary for guitarists who up until now have gone their whole playing careers not realizing all the harmonics you can play at the third and fourth frets in addition to the usual suspects. Sor knew where the third fret harmonics were, and the ones at the sixth fret, too. In this case all you have to do is place your first finger at the third fret of the fourth string and your second finger at the fourth fret of the fifth string. An important proviso here is that depending on the fingerboard and intonation of your instrument you may want to position the first finger JUST BELOW the third fret rather than on the third fret, which will feel weird at first because it will look like you're cramming two fingers together on adjacent strings within the space of two frets rather than having a fret for each digit. Don't worry about that. What you do want to worry about is making sure that high A harmonic sounds properly and experience has taught me over the last twenty years that you put your fingers where the natural harmonics ring out best and if it's not literally, exactly ON the third fret you don't sweat that part.
Having written a dozen studies in harmonics I'm hugely biased here but I think this resolution to the prelude is gorgeous. I'd expect nothing less from Koshkin.
Now for the fugue
Fugue (starts at 2:30)
The fugue opens with an elegant and lengthy subject in 3/4 full of ascending runs. The first thing that comes to mind is that it's kind of an upside down guitar version of the subject from the final movement of the Hammerklavier which you can hear at 2:53 in this video.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2XEY2ej_U0I
Koshkin's fugue subject rises where Beethoven's falls and it rises up to a peak before steadily descending where Beethoven's subject rises but the overall arc feels similar, which is hardly a bad thing, I happen to like late Beethoven. This eight measure fugue subject gets an answer at measure 55 (2:39) at the dominant and gets a countersubject before the third and final entry of the subject, in the lowest voice, appears at 2:50. We get a soprano, alto, tenor/bass series of entries which is nice and dramatic for the guitar in this key.
Now given such a long subject (eight measures) episodes for a fugue such as this can actually be pretty short because the sheer level of fragmentation you can subject the subject or countersubject to can let you effect a modulation with a few changes without having to let the entire subject run its course. So the first middle entry shows up bright and early at 3:01 in B minor. The next episode begins at 3:11 and is pretty large, full of sequential runs, bouncing bass lines, and antiphonal back and forth between voices taking up the initial measures of the subject. There is constantly the promise of a middle entry in which the subject will be presented in full but that doesn't arrive until measure 108 at 3:38, when we get a middle entry in F major.
A mere ten seconds later, at measure 117 (3:48), we're in a new middle entry in B flat major. From here we get another extensive episode and I could try to describe it but there's such a thing as recognizing that you can't really explain a fugue that moves this quickly and brightly with mere words to people who don't already have the score. Koshkin does work toward a dominant pedal tone on the low open E that prepares the way for an A major appearance of the subject which springs up at 4:29. Having played the subject in full in so many middle entries Koshkin doesn't present the entire subject unaltered. Instead he transforms the subject into a tonic and chromatic submediant alternation that signals the climax of the fugue having been reached, we're heading in for the home stretch.
Part of that journey is a brief detour into parallel minor at 4:40 (measure 161). Instead of building up to a giant, bright, explosive resolution Koshkin winds things down to an impudently quiet authentic cadence at 4:57.
This is a charming, fun fugue. Having sung it's praises I do feel there was a missed opportunity here. A diatonic inversion of this subject would have made for a fantastic middle entry in an already pretty good fugue.
This is another entry in the cycle for which we have a video of a performance, by Asya Selyutina. This is, owing to the key of A major, one of the brightest and most festive of the entries in the cycle.
Prelude (starts at 0:22)
This is a laconic 3/4 work marked "Andante largo". While Koshkin is famous among classical guitarists for his macabre Poe-inspired "Usher Waltz" this waltz in A major is about as far away in mood and idiom as Koshkin could while still being Koshkin and still being in 3/4. A predominantly chorale texture permeates this prelude, though a chorale with many ninth chords and secondary leading tone chords. I would do a more detailed harmonic analysis if there were a way to do so without actually showing you what's in the score but I'm not in a hurry to get into any infringement activities. The prelude is dominated by four-measure phrases. Koshkin plays a lot with secondary leading tone chords and what are known as passing chords. He opens with a bright A major that shifts by measure 2 in what looks on paper to be a second inversion minor dominant chord but because of the laconic harmonic rhythm what this signals to us (especially if we're listening to this performed) is that this opening A major chord has been swiftly transformed into a secondary dominant, that of the subdominant. Sure enough we get a subdominant in measure 3, though it's in first inversion and it's a D major seventh chord. This leads to an F major chord with an added sixth (the D natural hidden in the middle of the texture at the third beat) but this is a passing chord. It has linear contrapuntal meaning but is not easily defined in terms of functional harmony. You get used to seeing a lot of this in Russian music in general in my experience; it's one of the things that make Russian music fun. The D major seventh in first inversion is transformed into B dominant seventh, which, of course, is the secondary dominant to the dominant and the dominant is precisely what we get at measure five, which augurs in the second phrase.
All of this transpires quickly within the first few seconds of the prelude and like any good prelude it telegraphs the harmonic and melodic language we'll be hearing to the end of the prelude. I mention that and make a point of it because when I was studying Igor Rekhin's cycle of preludes and fugues I found myself liking his subjects and thinking his fugues were okay, and I liked his preludes about half the time but I found myself puzzled by what could be the wild disconnect between his preludes and the subsequent fugues. For instance, there's an abrupt mood shift between his prelude in B flat major and the fugue in B flat major.
Again, if you're reading this and don't have a copy of the score at hand there's only so much I can do in a mere blog post, but the modal ambiguity of this prelude has to be seen as well as hear to be fully understood. Koshkin uses passing chords to shift in and out of the key of A major at will but quickly gets back "on key" throughout. He may land on a C major seventh chord with a ninth at measure 11 (); or he may build up to a deceptive cadence that leads to a subtonic that simmers in lydian inflections at measures 21 and 22 (starts at 1:16) but there's only so much I can describe here. This is an A major piece, to be sure, but there's something wistful and detached in this prelude and it has everything to do with subtle and rapid modal mutation on a chord by chord basis as the simple and faintly plaintive melody makes its way from start to finish.
We do, however, get a very upfront and obvious dominant pedal section at 1:37 and we get a very firm harmonic and melodic resolution at 1:50 that signals the syntactic climax of the prelude has been reached. From that point Koshkin gently winds down an already gentle prelude and closes with a series of chords to be played using natural harmonics.
Now, about those chords in harmonics--measure 43 is easy. Take your fourth finger and lay it across strings 1 through 5 at the seventh fret exactly as instructed in the score. With your first finger touch the sixth string at the fourth fret as indicated. Easy-peasy. It's that simple. Koshkin's instructions are aligned with the rising order of the pitches. Having written a dozen studies in natural harmonics over the years, and having a handful of them up online for consultation, I could improve my right hand technique but I think my left hand technique is basically competent. So I can walk you through the basics of how to execute the closing chords of this prelude. If you're an experienced guitarist and saw how Selyutina played the chords already you won't really need to read the rest of this discussion of the prelude. Now I think the kinds of chords in harmonic Koshkin calls for should be chords any and every guitarist learns how to play. It's just part of mastering the full range of musical possibilities on the instrument.
IF there's any tricky part in the chord at measure 43 for those not already used to this kind of playing it's the RIGHT hand, not the left. The G sharp should be taken by p, which could also take the E natural. Nevertheless I recommend you play the E with i rather than p because depending on how your nails and attack are you get noises you don't want. You also won't be able to pull off the chord with the completely unrolled effect that is patently in the score for guitarists who may need to be reminded that you never just roll chords just because that's what you're used to doing if the score doesn't explicitly call for it. That leaves the F sharp and D respectively to be taken by the a and m. You'll likely need all four of pima from the right hand to execute the chord all in one go but it's worth it and the left hand part really is as easy as I just described in the preceding paragraph.
Now for that second chord in harmonics at 44. The principle of execution is similar. You create a barre with your fourth finger at the twelfth fret and you're good to go for that part. The tricky part for an inexperienced guitarist is the A and C sharp. You get the A, as instructed, at the seventh fret of the fourth string. You get the C sharp at the ninth fret of the fifth string. Play the A with the first finger of the left hand and the C sharp with the second finger, and just see to it the third finger stays out of the way. That should make the second chord manageable. It may be difficult at first and you may have to practice the preliminary stretch but the left hand and right hand execution are, in principle, more or less like the previous chord.
The last "chord" is the C sharp and A dyad that ends the prelude. This is a charmer and it will be scary for guitarists who up until now have gone their whole playing careers not realizing all the harmonics you can play at the third and fourth frets in addition to the usual suspects. Sor knew where the third fret harmonics were, and the ones at the sixth fret, too. In this case all you have to do is place your first finger at the third fret of the fourth string and your second finger at the fourth fret of the fifth string. An important proviso here is that depending on the fingerboard and intonation of your instrument you may want to position the first finger JUST BELOW the third fret rather than on the third fret, which will feel weird at first because it will look like you're cramming two fingers together on adjacent strings within the space of two frets rather than having a fret for each digit. Don't worry about that. What you do want to worry about is making sure that high A harmonic sounds properly and experience has taught me over the last twenty years that you put your fingers where the natural harmonics ring out best and if it's not literally, exactly ON the third fret you don't sweat that part.
Having written a dozen studies in harmonics I'm hugely biased here but I think this resolution to the prelude is gorgeous. I'd expect nothing less from Koshkin.
Now for the fugue
Fugue (starts at 2:30)
The fugue opens with an elegant and lengthy subject in 3/4 full of ascending runs. The first thing that comes to mind is that it's kind of an upside down guitar version of the subject from the final movement of the Hammerklavier which you can hear at 2:53 in this video.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2XEY2ej_U0I
Koshkin's fugue subject rises where Beethoven's falls and it rises up to a peak before steadily descending where Beethoven's subject rises but the overall arc feels similar, which is hardly a bad thing, I happen to like late Beethoven. This eight measure fugue subject gets an answer at measure 55 (2:39) at the dominant and gets a countersubject before the third and final entry of the subject, in the lowest voice, appears at 2:50. We get a soprano, alto, tenor/bass series of entries which is nice and dramatic for the guitar in this key.
Now given such a long subject (eight measures) episodes for a fugue such as this can actually be pretty short because the sheer level of fragmentation you can subject the subject or countersubject to can let you effect a modulation with a few changes without having to let the entire subject run its course. So the first middle entry shows up bright and early at 3:01 in B minor. The next episode begins at 3:11 and is pretty large, full of sequential runs, bouncing bass lines, and antiphonal back and forth between voices taking up the initial measures of the subject. There is constantly the promise of a middle entry in which the subject will be presented in full but that doesn't arrive until measure 108 at 3:38, when we get a middle entry in F major.
A mere ten seconds later, at measure 117 (3:48), we're in a new middle entry in B flat major. From here we get another extensive episode and I could try to describe it but there's such a thing as recognizing that you can't really explain a fugue that moves this quickly and brightly with mere words to people who don't already have the score. Koshkin does work toward a dominant pedal tone on the low open E that prepares the way for an A major appearance of the subject which springs up at 4:29. Having played the subject in full in so many middle entries Koshkin doesn't present the entire subject unaltered. Instead he transforms the subject into a tonic and chromatic submediant alternation that signals the climax of the fugue having been reached, we're heading in for the home stretch.
Part of that journey is a brief detour into parallel minor at 4:40 (measure 161). Instead of building up to a giant, bright, explosive resolution Koshkin winds things down to an impudently quiet authentic cadence at 4:57.
This is a charming, fun fugue. Having sung it's praises I do feel there was a missed opportunity here. A diatonic inversion of this subject would have made for a fantastic middle entry in an already pretty good fugue.
Monday, May 07, 2018
a curious juxtaposition at LitHub: Ursula K LeGuin claming dictators are always afraid of poets even though dictators such as Stalin and Mao actually were poets, if not poets praised by academics
...
UKL: After all, dictators are always afraid of poets. This seems kind of weird to a lot of Americans to whom poets are not political beings, but it doesn’t seem a bit weird in South America or in any dictatorship, really.
***
Ah, but famously sometimes dictators and despots ARE poets, if not always poets recognized by the clergy of canonized writers
and sometimes, in the case of Edmund Spenser, the despotic person of letters can be a brilliant and influential poet.
Whether Bannon's role in the US leaving the Paris accords makes him at the same level as a Mao or a Stalin seems like an assertion made a little too readily. That poets can be despots doesn't seem that hard to grant within the Western tradition if we take the authorial ascriptions to David for any number of Psalms at face value. He was a poet and a musician yet also, to put it bluntly, a tyrant, since kings and regional warlords are despots and tyrants more or less as a matter of practicality. Sure, there's the ideal of the enlightened despot that suggests so very many despots were not enlightened ... but it would seem by the 21st century only a fool would seriously say that dictators are always afraid of poets. That's as foolish as insisting that all real poets are afraid of working real jobs in the real world. William Carlos Williams famously worked as a doctor, Wallace Stevens had an office job, T. S. Eliot did, too.
It just seems that so lionized a writer should know better than to say something as stupid as that dictators are always afraid of poets.
Arts funding getting gutted would seem like it's bad enough a threat as it is without this sort of inane bromide. It's a shame, really.
I admire a few poets (Donne, Levertov, Stevens, Frost, Cummings, Eliot and a few others). I'm not against poetry at all ... but I do find the self veneration and self-congratulation of vocational artists and writers more than faintly aggravating. I feel that art would be a thing to take more seriously if artists didn't take it and themselves quite as seriously as some of them do.
Sunday, May 06, 2018
Nikita Koshkin's 24 Preludes and Fugues: Prelude and Fugue in B minor
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=45-o8NxFIX0
This is another prelude and fugue from the cycle for which we have a video performance. In this case the prelude is melodically simple but harmonically complex. It makes sense to provide a schematic analysis that doesn't attempt to get too involved in the harmonic activity of this prelude, even though a theoretical analysis could be a lot of fun to do. This is a series of blog posts, after all, and for blog posts it should suffice to give guitarists and theorists a foundation for more detailed score analysis at their leisure.
Prelude (0:06)
This block chord chorale is 39 measures long and is predominantly in four measure phrases in common time. Its form is probably best described as a kind of rounded binary form that can be mapped out as follows:
A (0:06 to 0:35) measures 1-8
A' (0:35 to 1:00) measures 9-16
B (1:01 to 1:24) measures 17-24
A'' (1:25 to 2:23) measures 25-39)
Although the phrases are in four-measure increments the larger phrase units tend to be eight-measure phrases. A is firmly in B minor while A' shifts into D major with the promise of a resolution back into B minor which is deceptively resolved not to the submediant key as would be typical, but to an F major added sixth chord that is the dominant to B flat major that is the tonality that the B material moves within. On the whole all the melodic activity is reliably diatonic until we get to this B section, even if the harmonic support is often chromatically divergent from the "home" key. The B material closes with a presentation of the G major chord that would be the "expected" submediant chord of a conventional deceptive cadence--we get the expected chord for such a deceptive resolution but it's postponed until the end of the B material in this rounded binary form. A short chromatic rising passage leads us to a recapitulation of the A material as A''. The initial idea returns but the phrases are shortened and more halting, the rhythmic values more expansive. We're obviously winding things down. It's worth noting, for those into this kind of analysis, that the return of the A material at measure 25 corresponds closely to the Golden Mean of the prelude.
As to the mood of this prelude, which I like, it gives me the impression of a kind of Scriabinesque take on the old American song "My Funny Valentine".
The fugue is introduced in the film by a change from a black background to a white background in this film, which makes it very easy to point out when the fugue begins.
Fugue (2:25)
This is a serpentine 6/8 subject that's four measures long and is dominated by a chromatic descent that winds up into eighth notes that lead to a countersubject in the uppermost voice as the alto enters at measure 5 with a tonal answer that affirms the dominant (2:31). The countersubject appears in a transposed form at measure 48 (2:36). It's worth noting here that tonal answers modify the subject in some way to adhere to the prevailing tonality of the exposition. When a subject starts on the dominant scale degree and you don't want to change the character of the subject's linear activity then you may want to provide a real or tonal answer at the subdominant, but if you want an answer at the dominant to affirm the key of your fugue exposition and you are willing to "bend" the contour of the subject then tonal answers are more satisfying. It's possible to favor tonal answers (Bach) or real answers (Handel) depending on preference. Neither is necessarily easier than the other to master. In this case Koshkin opts for a tonal answer at the dominant in which the subject starts on the third scale degree. As noted previously, he has a countersubject that is transposed for the appearance of the third and final voice in the texture which arrives in the tenor/bass voice on F sharp just as would be expected.
We move from the end of the exposition into development at measure 52 (2:42) and right away Koshkin shifts to F natural, signaling that the chromaticism of the subject opens up possibilities for abrupt modal mutation and chromatic shifts into remote keys. Despite the three voices of the exposition by its completion this fugue will be characterized by two voiced textures. This is not a weakness in a fugue such as this, given the activity of the subject and its brevity. As George Oldroyd put it in The Technique and Spirit of Fugue, if memory serves (and it may not) one of the mistakes music students make in writing fugues is assuming that once all three or four voices in a fugal exposition are introduced every last one of them must be active constantly throughout the duration of the fugue. Anyone who has surveyed the fugues of Bach or Buxtehude or ... just pick someone, you'll find they rarely ever did that. So you don’t' have to, either. Koshkin demonstrates a firm grasp of contrapuntal writing by recognizing he doesn't need all three of his voices active all the way through this fugue.
The first middle entry appears at 2:50 and is in the very remote key of C minor at measure 58. After another episode the second middle entry appears at measure 70 in the key of F minor, yet another wildly remote key from the initial B minor key we started in. A very brief transitional episode takes place and by measure 75 (3:13) we're already in a new middle entry in E minor. Koshkin clearly grasped that one of the things you can do with a fugal subject like this one is move quickly from middle entry to middle entry with little episode transition thanks to the chromaticism inherent in the subject. This passage in the fugue is also noteworthy for the way in which the F minor middle entry places the subject in the tenor/bass voice while the E minor middle entry places it in the alto voice. He also features the countersubject in the earlier middle entry and omits it in the later middle entry, which is something else you can do when writing fugues.
By measure 3:20 we have still another middle entry at measure 80, in G minor. This is followed up by an extended modulating episode that downshifts with descending sequential activity in linear terms but which culminates in an "uplift" at measure 92 (3:35) in a new middle entry in A major.
By measure 100 (3:48) we have a new middle entry in which the subject appears to have returned in B minor but it's not B minor. Though the F sharp appears at the top of the treble clef just like it did at the start of the fugue it is floating above a harmonic tenth of E at the bottom and G in the upper part of a dyad. The fugue subject has returned but as the ninth rather than the fifth, part of a middle entry that is more readily identified as E minor than B minor. That's something else that makes fugue subjects with a pronounced chromatic character so much fun, you don't have to bring them in at the tonic or dominant if you know you can transpose them in some other way. If you want an example of a fugue that runs with the possibilities of a chromatically ambiguous subject as being able to appear at any factoral relationship in a chord (tonic, third, fifth, seventh) go over and listen to fugue no. 2 from Rodion Shchedrin's cycle of preludes and fugues. Go over here
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-0KH-wDfTlc&t=36s
His fugue in A minor starts at 2:55.
Now, back to Koshkin's fugue.
The E minor middle entry with the subject at the ninth leads to an extended episode that can be thought of as a preparation for a "real" E minor middle entry that finally arrives at measure 112 (4:02) with the subject appearing at the fifth of the chord as we would expect. There's even a quasi-stretto going on in which the subject in the treble strings gets a semi-canonic response by a transposed form of the subject in the middle voice. This overall rhetorical flourish is, by the way, almost a Haydnesque trick, giving the subject in a middle entry at an unexpected interval in a harmony and then preparing for a payoff in which the subject appears at the "correct" register later in the work. This is followed by a flurry of sixteenth note scalar runs that begin to get support from an F sharp in the lower register. As wind ups to fugal climaxes go this is a class decorative series of runs on a dominant pedal point; this is exactly what makes sense for a guitarist to do in a fugue in B minor and it makes for a satisfying climax in which the fugue subject arrives in its original B minor as B minor at measure 123 at 4:18.
As the subject reaches its end it gets interrupted by florid runs that preempt a full resolution of the subject in harmonic and linear terms. Koshkin goes through a series of evaded cadences to build suspense. He finally gets back to the motto of his subject at 4:42 (measure 137) where the subject becomes fragmented and the basis for winding down coda that reaches an E major chord (though it has an added sixth and no fifth) at measure 147 that turns into a florid scalar ascent culminating in a natural harmonic that is followed by a subdued piano tonic chord close.
Oh, one more thing about the fugue subject, if you take it and subject it to modal mutation the retrograde of the subject would sound fun in E major. You could also take this fugue subject and tonally invert it and it would sound charming. Koshkin didn't do that with the subject in the fugue so far as I can tell but they are both legitimate possibilities for a fugue subject such as this. My own philosophical approach to fugal writing for the guitar is you discover that you can get a non-prime version of your fugue subject to work you should look into having at least one middle entry in which that form of the subject can be presented, whether it's the inversion, the retrograde or even a retrograde inversion. It doesn't even have to be a middle entry as such, it could appear in the coda or you could work the alternate form of the subject into a counterfugue if that is your thing.
Which is not to say that what Koshkin did with this fugue isn't beautifully well-made, it certainly is. I'm just noting as a guitarist composer who has written a set of preludes and fugues that there's room for fugal writing in which the subject doesn't always have to appear in its prime form.
That said, this is another fine entry in the cycle and it's fortunate we have a video that helps us walk through the prelude and fugue to discuss Koshkin's compositional approach. Many of the videos are for works in the first half of the cycle. We'll be more and more "on our own" the further into the second half we get.
Saturday, May 05, 2018
Nikita Koshkin's 24 Preludes and Fugues: Prelude and Fugue in D major
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xDKgZV0E66I
In this case we have a film of a live performance that was posted to Youtube. Since the prelude and fugue comprise an even more organically unified whole than is typical of this cycle it's almost moot to discuss the prelude and fugue separately. But for sake of readability that's exactly what we'll do.
Prelude (starts 10 seconds in)
This prelude is a lyric pastoral and while it could be described as very broadly binary in form the two themes are in D major and A major, with the second theme ending in such a way as to lead into the fugue as a kind of developmental interruption.
The movement is scored as "Andante" but if I were to try to describe this prelude it would be as a Koshkinesque take on the Adagietto from Mahler’s Fifth Symphony, weird as that is likely to sound to fans of either Mahler or Koshkin or possibly to fans of both. That's just the kind of mood this prelude suggests to me. Others will, naturally, have a different set of impressions.
While all the phrases are in simple two-measure building blocks the first two larger phrases are six measures each before settling into more persistently duple patterns across the phrases. I identify Theme 1 as spanning the entirety of measures 1-17 with the transition to Theme 2 starting at 18 (1:21) where Koshkin switches from D major to D minor and introduces a more agitated take on the gently pulsing eighth note accompaniment figuration.
Theme 2, in A major (1:44) starts at 24 and is gentle and quiet. The pulsing accompaniment hasn't changed but the melody is written out in half note values, making it seem more restrained and subdued than even the opening theme. It's a simple motto of C#, F#, F natural and E, transposed up an octave in the second phrase (measures 26-28) This is very nearly simple a cadential formula presented as a secondary theme, which in many respects it is, but it accomplishes an A major chord that prepares for what's coming next. It could almost be thought of as a kind of slow sonata form in which the development is substituted out for a fugue, to which we now turn.
Fugue (2:26)
The fugue subject is not necessarily related to the initial theme of the prelude. At first glance you can see that the whole thing is scored in a single voice and ask whether or not this thing is even a fugue. It is, it's just that the subject and associated material is so staccato it makes sense to score it as a single voice rather than attempted to flood staves with notational indicators of how each of the lines in the fugue need to be delineated. If this were scored for string quartet, by contrast, highlighting the separate melodic lines would be easier.
The subject is a four on the floor quasi-blues riff and the subject and respective answers are presented no less than five times.
presentation 1 is in the tonic at 2:26
presentation 2 is in the dominant at 2:33
presentation 3 is in the tonic at 2:39 (or 2:40 depending on sync issues)
presentation 4 is in the dominant at 2:46
presentation 5 is in the tonic at 2:53
Once you recognize the subject you can hear the five presentations of it in the spritely exposition. With a subject this springy and short we unsurprisingly have just a few middle entries. The first middle entry shows up in C sharp minor at 3:05 (measure 62). After another episode the second middle entry appears at 3:24 but it's ambiguous. If you were to merely look at the score and the linear patterns you could see the fugue subject appears in F major BUT there's a preliminary appearance of D natural in the bass strings at the end of measure 68. I would say this recontextualizes the entire middle entry as really being in D minor.
At 3:37 (measure 76 Koshkin introduces a flurry of sixteenth note arpeggios that rise up aggressively six measures into a two chord pedal point at measure 82 (3:52) that prepares for the formal return of the subject in D major, which happens after a dramatic pause at measure 83 (4:00). This gentle piano climax lets the subject wind down still further into a half-cadence which resolves itself at measure 91 (4:27) into a recapitulation of the opening measures of the prelude. The fugue can be thought of as an eruption of energy intervening as an interlude between what could be thought of as the B section and the reprised A section of a truncated ternary form. The opening two measures are brought back with the melody in the trebles and then in the bass strings before coming to pianissimo close at 5:05. There's more than a little bit of coughing throughout this live performance, which is too bad. Despite the coughing the performance itself is solid and conveys the substance of the prelude and fugue.
In this case we have a film of a live performance that was posted to Youtube. Since the prelude and fugue comprise an even more organically unified whole than is typical of this cycle it's almost moot to discuss the prelude and fugue separately. But for sake of readability that's exactly what we'll do.
Prelude (starts 10 seconds in)
This prelude is a lyric pastoral and while it could be described as very broadly binary in form the two themes are in D major and A major, with the second theme ending in such a way as to lead into the fugue as a kind of developmental interruption.
The movement is scored as "Andante" but if I were to try to describe this prelude it would be as a Koshkinesque take on the Adagietto from Mahler’s Fifth Symphony, weird as that is likely to sound to fans of either Mahler or Koshkin or possibly to fans of both. That's just the kind of mood this prelude suggests to me. Others will, naturally, have a different set of impressions.
While all the phrases are in simple two-measure building blocks the first two larger phrases are six measures each before settling into more persistently duple patterns across the phrases. I identify Theme 1 as spanning the entirety of measures 1-17 with the transition to Theme 2 starting at 18 (1:21) where Koshkin switches from D major to D minor and introduces a more agitated take on the gently pulsing eighth note accompaniment figuration.
Theme 2, in A major (1:44) starts at 24 and is gentle and quiet. The pulsing accompaniment hasn't changed but the melody is written out in half note values, making it seem more restrained and subdued than even the opening theme. It's a simple motto of C#, F#, F natural and E, transposed up an octave in the second phrase (measures 26-28) This is very nearly simple a cadential formula presented as a secondary theme, which in many respects it is, but it accomplishes an A major chord that prepares for what's coming next. It could almost be thought of as a kind of slow sonata form in which the development is substituted out for a fugue, to which we now turn.
Fugue (2:26)
The fugue subject is not necessarily related to the initial theme of the prelude. At first glance you can see that the whole thing is scored in a single voice and ask whether or not this thing is even a fugue. It is, it's just that the subject and associated material is so staccato it makes sense to score it as a single voice rather than attempted to flood staves with notational indicators of how each of the lines in the fugue need to be delineated. If this were scored for string quartet, by contrast, highlighting the separate melodic lines would be easier.
The subject is a four on the floor quasi-blues riff and the subject and respective answers are presented no less than five times.
presentation 1 is in the tonic at 2:26
presentation 2 is in the dominant at 2:33
presentation 3 is in the tonic at 2:39 (or 2:40 depending on sync issues)
presentation 4 is in the dominant at 2:46
presentation 5 is in the tonic at 2:53
Once you recognize the subject you can hear the five presentations of it in the spritely exposition. With a subject this springy and short we unsurprisingly have just a few middle entries. The first middle entry shows up in C sharp minor at 3:05 (measure 62). After another episode the second middle entry appears at 3:24 but it's ambiguous. If you were to merely look at the score and the linear patterns you could see the fugue subject appears in F major BUT there's a preliminary appearance of D natural in the bass strings at the end of measure 68. I would say this recontextualizes the entire middle entry as really being in D minor.
At 3:37 (measure 76 Koshkin introduces a flurry of sixteenth note arpeggios that rise up aggressively six measures into a two chord pedal point at measure 82 (3:52) that prepares for the formal return of the subject in D major, which happens after a dramatic pause at measure 83 (4:00). This gentle piano climax lets the subject wind down still further into a half-cadence which resolves itself at measure 91 (4:27) into a recapitulation of the opening measures of the prelude. The fugue can be thought of as an eruption of energy intervening as an interlude between what could be thought of as the B section and the reprised A section of a truncated ternary form. The opening two measures are brought back with the melody in the trebles and then in the bass strings before coming to pianissimo close at 5:05. There's more than a little bit of coughing throughout this live performance, which is too bad. Despite the coughing the performance itself is solid and conveys the substance of the prelude and fugue.
links for the weekend
the title is amusing enough to make it the first entry in links for the weekend
Is Kanye West “the Ezra Pound of Rap”?
I was more into T. S. Eliot than Ezra Pound myself but the title is a funny title. Pound's advocacy for fascism was held against him with cause but the point about how artist and writers may be remarkably accomplished while espousing views we find horrible does not necessarily diminish the work of the artist.
The article itself ... meh .... eh, but the title was funny
Something else from TNR
Which for some reason reminded me of this review of Scot Timberg's book Culture Crash.
from Consortium News ... a commentary on the DNC legal action and what it could have to do with the potential to stifle the press
Over on the Slate-y side of things a reminiscence about the time when music critics could still write reviews that could effectively destroy the career of a musician.
https://slate.com/culture/2018/05/when-a-negative-pitchfork-review-could-end-a-career.html
...
...
on the subject of infinite war ... er, Infinity War, someone at The Guardian remarks that it's not film, it's television. The implication that Marvel's films are now television as distinct from "real" film seems more popular with the sorts of film critics who seem to resent that the Marvel cinematic juggernaut is an enterprise that may exact and expect of an audience that it follow it as closely as film critics of a different epoch would comb through every shot of a film by someone like Kubrick or Godard because, you know, you just do that for real art.
I thought I spotted an interview with Kirsten Dunst about how this shift took place, how actors who had previously been known to do the big silver screen shifted over to television. There were trade-offs in terms of prestige but the trade-off was worth it if you landed a show you liked working on because you'd get more reliable work and have more stable income. Or at least I thought I saw something like that at The Guardian a few years ago. As technology and distribution paradigms change the prestige dynamics change, too. Film criticism may, at the level of the most officially prestigious journalistic platforms, have not only not caught up to this but may be populated by people who resent the shifting dynamics at play or can't help but be bemused about them.
https://www.newyorker.com/culture/richard-brody/avengers-infinity-war-reviewed-the-latest-marvel-movie-is-a-two-and-a-half-hour-ad-for-all-the-previous-marvel-movies
... although there’s nothing small scale about “Avengers: Infinity War,” it only resembles a movie. It comes off not even as a single drama, as a self-contained and internally structured narrative, but, rather, as a big-screen, two-and-a-half-hour variant on a single episode in a television series. “Avengers: Infinity War” would make little sense in the absence of its pack of predecessors. Its characters aren’t introduced; they just show up, and their behavior is entirely defined by the template set for them in other movies. Not only does “Avengers: Infinity War” presume that viewers have seen all the preceding films in the Marvel series but, worse, it presumes that they’ve thought about them afterward.
...
Leave it to Brody to miss (willfully or otherwise) that Thanos pretty clearly sees himself as the hero.
A more ardent and informative read on Thanos as an antagonist with an ostentatiously Malthusian bent of mind got written over here at The Stranger by Charles Mudede.
https://www.thestranger.com/slog/2018/04/27/26108191/a-fucking-liberal-is-the-villain-of-avengers-infinity-war
Mudede has more presence of mind to imply throughout his ardent, nigh unto ranting, piece that a character like Thanos could use the power of the Infinity Gauntlet to make more free food for everyone in the universe or embrace some positive iteration of Malthusian ideology rather than the predictable Hollywood negative Malthusian paradigm. If you have the power to manipulate reality, time, space, power, mind and soul then you could create food for everyone n the universe ... unless there were some proviso that the stones only allow you to manipulate and change things in one universe and not the multiverse. See ... that might actually be where Marvel cold eventually go with that. Since the six infinity stones are tied to the Big Bang from which our universe is presumed to have emerged that's a narrative possibility but it's also one such possibility that a Mudede could consider that a Brody, most probably, could not.
Audiences have kept up with this dynamic and so they can bring the attentional commitment to Infinity War that the creators of Infinity War expect of them. Does that mean the movie is a great movie? No, not really, although I thought it was okay. I think it does get the job done if you've seen the other installments. Thanos wanting to balance the universe makes more sense than having the hots for the female personification of Death. It makes Thanos Ra's al Ghul for the universe, to be sure, but Ra's al Ghul works as a villain. Brolin committed to the part. That's as much as can be asked, really. But this is not a post about Marvel films, we're just taking a links for the weekend stroll here and it's interesting that a writer could see that there's a disconnect between what audiences can commit to and what critics may resent having to commit to. It's not to say that audience is "right" and critics are "wrong" (even if critics are certain that's the case in some circles) it's that any idiom of art works on a few ground rules which may or may not be accepted. I, by and large, cannot take as given the ground rules for theater because I know it's theater. I can't not think of it as theater. I can't suspend disbelief for theater the way I can for almost any other kind of art. It's not that theater is bad, I can read the Bard when I want to, I just don't watch plays the way fans of plays do. To invoke Gadamer, I guess, I don't give myself over to the process of "play" for plays like I can and do (easily) for film.
But people can turn from heroes to villains inside of a lifetime and perhaps that's the best way to transition into rescinding honorary doctorates and expelling guys from clubs of prestige.
UPDATE 05-06-2018
can't help throwing in this one from LA Review of Books about Infinity War
https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/post-shawarma-avengers-infinity-war
Is Kanye West “the Ezra Pound of Rap”?
I was more into T. S. Eliot than Ezra Pound myself but the title is a funny title. Pound's advocacy for fascism was held against him with cause but the point about how artist and writers may be remarkably accomplished while espousing views we find horrible does not necessarily diminish the work of the artist.
The article itself ... meh .... eh, but the title was funny
Something else from TNR
By Rachel Vorona Cote
May 1, 2018
On April 23, career consultant and author Karen Kelsky posted to her Facebook account a leaked email from Michael R. Molino, an assistant dean in the College of Liberal Arts at Southern Illinois University, Carbondale. Addressed to chairs of their respective departments, it contained an extraordinary request: that the university’s alumni association needed their help in recruiting impressive alumni adjuncts who would, essentially, be willing to work for free.
According to Molina, adjuncts should regard their participation as a “service” to the university, undertaken not in the interest of financial gain, but out of “passion.” Molina even implies a certain degree of reciprocity, emphasizing the “benefit” of intellectual collegiality and that old chestnut, “networking opportunities.” For that matter, circumscribing the search to SIU alumni gestures to an imposed logic of debt: You, the former student, owe us this labor in return for the opportunities afforded to you here.
It is the kind of logic that has long prevailed over the American university system, and it has only grown more antiquated as the scholastic job opportunities for doctoral students have dwindled to nearly nothing. Particularly in the humanities, the overwhelming majority of students earning PhDs aspire to a tenure track professorship, and their training prepares them for precisely this. But it’s a near-futile enterprise: the job market is glutted with both newly minted doctors of philosophy and those who doggedly try their luck year after year—and they’re all vying for the same meager offering of positions. This is one of the reasons that graduate student workers at Columbia University were on the picket line this week.
Volunteer adjuncts—it is a term so absurdly reprehensible it sounds like the stuff of parody. Despite what graduate students may gain over the course of their studies, they owe nothing whatsoever to their university. After all, there’s no reciprocity to be found when health insurance is still, for many in academia, considered a plush amenity. As recently as the winter of 2017, when the literary historian Kevin Birmingham delivered his talk “The Great Shame of Our Profession,” 25 percent of adjunct instructors reported relying on food stamps or Medicaid. Thirty-one percent lived below the poverty line, or dwelled at its threshold. Birmingham even mentions one instructor who sold plasma twice a week in order to afford daycare for her daughter.
...Which for some reason reminded me of this review of Scot Timberg's book Culture Crash.
...
“If we’re not careful, culture work will become a luxury, like a vacation home,” Timberg writes. It’s a good line, and one that anyone who values a diverse cultural ecology would want to affirm. What he doesn’t want to admit is that, absent direct patronage, professional culture workers have often depended on outside sources of income. For some it was the second job (in the post-war period, that job was primarily teaching, a job indirectly subsidized by the government in the form of the G.I. Bill fostering a new population of students). For others, it was something unrelated (meet pediatrician William Carlos Williams). For many (more than we have usually acknowledged and certainly more than today’s BFA and MFA students are aware) it was a trust fund, family member, or a spouse of means. That cushion made it possible for a talented person work on a novel or a painting until the work could earn respect, if not a proportionate wage for the work the artist put into it. Maybe the market would respond, and maybe it wouldn’t, but at least the creative person had a chance to find out.
That’s one of the reasons that pop culture exhortations to follow one’s bliss are so maddening. They imply a kind of privilege at the very heart of the class structures Americans are eager to say don’t exist. The fraying of the middle class is not just something that has happened to creatives. It’s just that Timberg never thought that what had happened to unionized manufacturing workers could happen to the educated type of knowledge workers who worked at the LA Times.
from Consortium News ... a commentary on the DNC legal action and what it could have to do with the potential to stifle the press
...
The most unprincipled part of the lawsuit has to do with its targeting of Assange and WikiLeaks. That aspect of the suit shows that the DNC is being run by people whose attitude toward a free press—ironically enough—has marked similarities to Donald Trump’s.
Early in his presidency, Trump proclaimed that news media are “the enemy of the American people.” Of course, he didn’t mean all media, just the outlets providing information and analysis he doesn’t like.
What Perez and the DNC crew are now promoting via the lawsuit is also harmful, though more camouflaged. The lawsuit’s key arguments against WikiLeaks are contrary to the First Amendment, and they could be made against major U.S. newspapers. Unauthorized disclosures are common, with news outlets routinely reporting on information obtained from leaks, hacks and various forms of theft.
Just as the government’s criminal prosecutions for leaks are extremely selective, the DNC position is that a media outlet that’s despised by a powerful party could be sued for potentially huge sums.
But—unless it’s functionally shredded—the First Amendment doesn’t only protect media outlets that powerful interests believe are behaving acceptably. That’s why the Nixon administration was unable to prevent The New York Times and Washington Post from publishing the Pentagon Papers in 1971.
Now, the DNC lawsuit’s perverse “logic” for suing WikiLeaks could just as easily be applied by any deep-pocketed group that wants to strike back at a publisher for revealing “stolen” information that harmed the aggrieved party.
Over on the Slate-y side of things a reminiscence about the time when music critics could still write reviews that could effectively destroy the career of a musician.
https://slate.com/culture/2018/05/when-a-negative-pitchfork-review-could-end-a-career.html
...
Officially, the review didn’t end Black Kids’ career. But it certainly knocked it far, far sideways: The LP sold only 5,000 copies in the first week of its release, and within a couple of years, the band split with Columbia. (Last year, nearly a decade later, Black Kids finally put out their second album, titled Rookie, as if to suggest that the first album had never happened.) Black Kids’ arc was the most compact, perfect example of Pitchfork’s reach at its most deleterious.
At some amorphous point within a few years of Black Kids’ rise and fall, the idea of the critic as assassin dissolved completely. First, the internet democratized access to music. We didn’t really need gatekeepers anymore; for a whole generation, reading about what something sounded like, when you could just listen to it for free yourself, felt increasingly like an insane thing to do. Second, the internet atomized music fandom. The monoculture weakened; a million little tribes sprung up in its place. How could any one person claim a universal authority over all of that?
A few months ago, I decided that I wanted to look back at those last moments when critics could kill. I would do it through Pitchfork, for better or worse the defining critical portal of the past 15 years. I would talk to Black Kids and to Travis Morrison and to the other targets of Pitchfork’s most infamous reviews, asking them: How did it feel? What did those reviews do to you?
I started with Black Kids—and, through a publicist, was quickly, politely rebuffed. The same thing happened with the Flaming Lips, whose experimental 1997 album, Zaireeka (released as a four-CD set meant to be played simultaneously), landed one of the site’s earliest double zeros. (The review is no longer online, and the site later published a sort of mea culpa, but it can still be read via the Wayback Machine.) And with Liz Phair, whose 2003 self-titled album (a joyously blasphemous pop effort from the indie god) got blanked too.
...
on the subject of infinite war ... er, Infinity War, someone at The Guardian remarks that it's not film, it's television. The implication that Marvel's films are now television as distinct from "real" film seems more popular with the sorts of film critics who seem to resent that the Marvel cinematic juggernaut is an enterprise that may exact and expect of an audience that it follow it as closely as film critics of a different epoch would comb through every shot of a film by someone like Kubrick or Godard because, you know, you just do that for real art.
We live in complicated times. For most of its life, television would frantically chase cinema’s tail. Film was always where the money was. It was where the biggest stars were, and all the strongest storytelling. Television was just a poor relation, a dumb box that sat in the corner of the room squawking at idiots.
But then things changed. Slowly, television started making bolder decisions. It started aping cinema’s production values. First-class writers came to see the benefit of longer-form narrative. Movie stars began to appear on television shows, and those shows quickly became career-defining highlights.
And, as of last week, cinema has started to chase television’s tail. Because Avengers: Infinity War is almost definitely going to become the biggest movie of all time. And what is Avengers: Infinity War if not a really expensive episode of television?
Stick with me. Viewed in a vacuum, Infinity War is meaningless. As a standalone film, it’s a mess. Characters pop up for one scene and then vanish again completely. Nobody has any meaningful screen time. The antagonist swans about with an entirely unearned sense of motivation. And there’s no emotional weight to the ending. It’s just a lot of stuff happening to people we’ve barely met. We may as well be watching it happen to extras.
But, with 10 years of context behind it, Infinity War is deeply impressive. We’ve watched these characters grow and change and their relationships evolve in several ways. Infinity War contains a moment – it’s far too brief to be called a scene – between two characters who haven’t seen each other for years. We know their history and their motivations, their thwarted desires and their realisation that they’ll probably never get what they both want. And they communicate all this with a look and maybe two lines of dialogue. The film can’t linger any longer than that, because there’s a superhuman testicle-chinned alien trying to murder them all, but it nevertheless counts as one of the most touching moments in the entire movie.
The reason this moment feels earned at all is because we’ve spent enough time with the characters to grasp the complexity of their shorthand. Until now, this sort of thing has only happened on television. Take something like Breaking Bad. In one of the final episodes, Walter White calls his wife a “stupid bitch”. On its own it’s a moment of simple cruelty, but the knowledge of everything that’s gone before adds layer upon layer of meaning.
This happens again and again throughout Infinity War, because it’s just an episode of television. Things that happened in previous episodes pay off here, and things that are set up here will pay off in upcoming episodes. There’s a reason why the Russo brothers were chosen to direct Infinity War, and that’s because they have enough television experience to satisfactorily keep all the balls in the air. If these films were self-contained, standalone affairs, you might want someone with more flair for dialogue or inventive visuals. But the Russo brothers are perfect for this job, because this job is simply about moving the story along. It’s a Gold Blend advert with a talking racoon in it.
...I thought I spotted an interview with Kirsten Dunst about how this shift took place, how actors who had previously been known to do the big silver screen shifted over to television. There were trade-offs in terms of prestige but the trade-off was worth it if you landed a show you liked working on because you'd get more reliable work and have more stable income. Or at least I thought I saw something like that at The Guardian a few years ago. As technology and distribution paradigms change the prestige dynamics change, too. Film criticism may, at the level of the most officially prestigious journalistic platforms, have not only not caught up to this but may be populated by people who resent the shifting dynamics at play or can't help but be bemused about them.
https://www.newyorker.com/culture/richard-brody/avengers-infinity-war-reviewed-the-latest-marvel-movie-is-a-two-and-a-half-hour-ad-for-all-the-previous-marvel-movies
... although there’s nothing small scale about “Avengers: Infinity War,” it only resembles a movie. It comes off not even as a single drama, as a self-contained and internally structured narrative, but, rather, as a big-screen, two-and-a-half-hour variant on a single episode in a television series. “Avengers: Infinity War” would make little sense in the absence of its pack of predecessors. Its characters aren’t introduced; they just show up, and their behavior is entirely defined by the template set for them in other movies. Not only does “Avengers: Infinity War” presume that viewers have seen all the preceding films in the Marvel series but, worse, it presumes that they’ve thought about them afterward.
...
Leave it to Brody to miss (willfully or otherwise) that Thanos pretty clearly sees himself as the hero.
A more ardent and informative read on Thanos as an antagonist with an ostentatiously Malthusian bent of mind got written over here at The Stranger by Charles Mudede.
https://www.thestranger.com/slog/2018/04/27/26108191/a-fucking-liberal-is-the-villain-of-avengers-infinity-war
Mudede has more presence of mind to imply throughout his ardent, nigh unto ranting, piece that a character like Thanos could use the power of the Infinity Gauntlet to make more free food for everyone in the universe or embrace some positive iteration of Malthusian ideology rather than the predictable Hollywood negative Malthusian paradigm. If you have the power to manipulate reality, time, space, power, mind and soul then you could create food for everyone n the universe ... unless there were some proviso that the stones only allow you to manipulate and change things in one universe and not the multiverse. See ... that might actually be where Marvel cold eventually go with that. Since the six infinity stones are tied to the Big Bang from which our universe is presumed to have emerged that's a narrative possibility but it's also one such possibility that a Mudede could consider that a Brody, most probably, could not.
Audiences have kept up with this dynamic and so they can bring the attentional commitment to Infinity War that the creators of Infinity War expect of them. Does that mean the movie is a great movie? No, not really, although I thought it was okay. I think it does get the job done if you've seen the other installments. Thanos wanting to balance the universe makes more sense than having the hots for the female personification of Death. It makes Thanos Ra's al Ghul for the universe, to be sure, but Ra's al Ghul works as a villain. Brolin committed to the part. That's as much as can be asked, really. But this is not a post about Marvel films, we're just taking a links for the weekend stroll here and it's interesting that a writer could see that there's a disconnect between what audiences can commit to and what critics may resent having to commit to. It's not to say that audience is "right" and critics are "wrong" (even if critics are certain that's the case in some circles) it's that any idiom of art works on a few ground rules which may or may not be accepted. I, by and large, cannot take as given the ground rules for theater because I know it's theater. I can't not think of it as theater. I can't suspend disbelief for theater the way I can for almost any other kind of art. It's not that theater is bad, I can read the Bard when I want to, I just don't watch plays the way fans of plays do. To invoke Gadamer, I guess, I don't give myself over to the process of "play" for plays like I can and do (easily) for film.
But people can turn from heroes to villains inside of a lifetime and perhaps that's the best way to transition into rescinding honorary doctorates and expelling guys from clubs of prestige.
can't help throwing in this one from LA Review of Books about Infinity War
https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/post-shawarma-avengers-infinity-war
over at NPR a piece on how high-paying trade jobs sit untaken while high school grads line up for college
https://www.npr.org/sections/ed/2018/04/25/605092520/high-paying-trade-jobs-sit-empty-while-high-school-grads-line-up-for-university
...
In a new report, the Washington State Auditor found that good jobs in the skilled trades are going begging because students are being almost universally steered to bachelor's degrees.
Among other things, the Washington auditor recommended that career guidance — including choices that require less than four years in college — start as early as the seventh grade.
"There is an emphasis on the four-year university track" in high schools, said Chris Cortines, who co-authored the report. Yet, nationwide, three out of 10 high school grads who go to four-year public universities haven't earned degrees within six years, according to the National Student Clearinghouse. At four-year private colleges, that number is more than 1 in 5.
"Being more aware of other types of options may be exactly what they need," Cortines said. In spite of a perception "that college is the sole path for everybody," he said, "when you look at the types of wages that apprenticeships and other career areas pay and the fact that you do not pay four years of tuition and you're paid while you learn, these other paths really need some additional consideration."
And it's not just in Washington state.
Seventy-percent of construction companies nationwide are having trouble finding qualified workers, according to the Associated General Contractors of America; in Washington, the proportion is 80 percent.
There are already more trade jobs like carpentry, electrical, plumbing, sheet-metal work and pipe-fitting than Washingtonians to fill them, the state auditor reports. Many pay more than the state's average annual wage of $54,000.
Construction, along with health care and personal care, will account for one-third of all new jobs through 2022, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. There will also be a need for new plumbers and new electricians. And, as politicians debate a massive overhaul of the nation's roads, bridges and airports, the U.S. Department of Education reports that there will be 68 percent more job openings in infrastructure-related fields in the next five years than there are people training to fill them.
"The economy is definitely pushing this issue to the forefront," said Amy Morrison Goings, president of the Lake Washington Institute of Technology, which educates students in these fields. "There isn't a day that goes by that a business doesn't contact the college and ask the faculty who's ready to go to work."
In all, some 30 million jobs in the United States that pay an average of $55,000 per year don't require bachelor's degrees, according to the Georgetown Center on Education and the Workforce.
Yet the march to bachelor's degrees continues. And while people who get them are more likely to be employed and make more money than those who don't, that premium appears to be softening; their median earnings were lower in 2015, when adjusted for inflation, than in 2010.
"There's that perception of the bachelor's degree being the American dream, the best bang for your buck," said Kate Blosveren Kreamer, deputy executive director of Advance CTE, an association of state officials who work in career and technical education. "The challenge is that in many cases it's become the fallback. People are going to college without a plan, without a career in mind, because the mindset in high school is just, 'Go to college.' "
...
Kids are lining up to get bachelor's degrees even as the price of secondary education goes up and the likelihood of work for the associated education dwindles. Why?
Well, my sourpuss theory for a weekend is to say that there's a myth that goes along with promotion of higher education, a myth that if you go and get the education the income will come to you if you deserve it. Leftists would seem increasingy to call this myth the promise of neoliberalism. Maybe people with a self-identified libertarian bent might call this John Gal, or how people could say they are lie John Galt. Mix in a sea of popular culture informed by Joseph Campbell's The Hero's Journey with what others call morally therapeutic deism and the recipe seems to be for being that one who "changes everything". But we can't all be that, obviously. Still less can we imagine against the flow of human history that Lord Acton was entirely wrong to warn that great men are rarely ever good men. Yes, power tends to corrupt and absolute power tends to corrupt absolutely but plenty of great men (and a few great women, too, perhaps) imagine that they were great enough to withstand the slings and arrows of a little power.
In other words, Americans have been trained at every level of popular culture to imagine and to hope that they could be the exeption, whatever the rule may be. To borrow a duality proposed over at ribbon farm, lots of people want to be bards when the income is in being a chimneysweep.
...
In a new report, the Washington State Auditor found that good jobs in the skilled trades are going begging because students are being almost universally steered to bachelor's degrees.
Among other things, the Washington auditor recommended that career guidance — including choices that require less than four years in college — start as early as the seventh grade.
"There is an emphasis on the four-year university track" in high schools, said Chris Cortines, who co-authored the report. Yet, nationwide, three out of 10 high school grads who go to four-year public universities haven't earned degrees within six years, according to the National Student Clearinghouse. At four-year private colleges, that number is more than 1 in 5.
"Being more aware of other types of options may be exactly what they need," Cortines said. In spite of a perception "that college is the sole path for everybody," he said, "when you look at the types of wages that apprenticeships and other career areas pay and the fact that you do not pay four years of tuition and you're paid while you learn, these other paths really need some additional consideration."
And it's not just in Washington state.
Seventy-percent of construction companies nationwide are having trouble finding qualified workers, according to the Associated General Contractors of America; in Washington, the proportion is 80 percent.
There are already more trade jobs like carpentry, electrical, plumbing, sheet-metal work and pipe-fitting than Washingtonians to fill them, the state auditor reports. Many pay more than the state's average annual wage of $54,000.
Construction, along with health care and personal care, will account for one-third of all new jobs through 2022, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. There will also be a need for new plumbers and new electricians. And, as politicians debate a massive overhaul of the nation's roads, bridges and airports, the U.S. Department of Education reports that there will be 68 percent more job openings in infrastructure-related fields in the next five years than there are people training to fill them.
"The economy is definitely pushing this issue to the forefront," said Amy Morrison Goings, president of the Lake Washington Institute of Technology, which educates students in these fields. "There isn't a day that goes by that a business doesn't contact the college and ask the faculty who's ready to go to work."
In all, some 30 million jobs in the United States that pay an average of $55,000 per year don't require bachelor's degrees, according to the Georgetown Center on Education and the Workforce.
Yet the march to bachelor's degrees continues. And while people who get them are more likely to be employed and make more money than those who don't, that premium appears to be softening; their median earnings were lower in 2015, when adjusted for inflation, than in 2010.
"There's that perception of the bachelor's degree being the American dream, the best bang for your buck," said Kate Blosveren Kreamer, deputy executive director of Advance CTE, an association of state officials who work in career and technical education. "The challenge is that in many cases it's become the fallback. People are going to college without a plan, without a career in mind, because the mindset in high school is just, 'Go to college.' "
...
Kids are lining up to get bachelor's degrees even as the price of secondary education goes up and the likelihood of work for the associated education dwindles. Why?
Well, my sourpuss theory for a weekend is to say that there's a myth that goes along with promotion of higher education, a myth that if you go and get the education the income will come to you if you deserve it. Leftists would seem increasingy to call this myth the promise of neoliberalism. Maybe people with a self-identified libertarian bent might call this John Gal, or how people could say they are lie John Galt. Mix in a sea of popular culture informed by Joseph Campbell's The Hero's Journey with what others call morally therapeutic deism and the recipe seems to be for being that one who "changes everything". But we can't all be that, obviously. Still less can we imagine against the flow of human history that Lord Acton was entirely wrong to warn that great men are rarely ever good men. Yes, power tends to corrupt and absolute power tends to corrupt absolutely but plenty of great men (and a few great women, too, perhaps) imagine that they were great enough to withstand the slings and arrows of a little power.
In other words, Americans have been trained at every level of popular culture to imagine and to hope that they could be the exeption, whatever the rule may be. To borrow a duality proposed over at ribbon farm, lots of people want to be bards when the income is in being a chimneysweep.
targeted post ... Jeff, this one's for you two books that might be of interest
Blog posts with specific potential readers in mind are not what usually happens here but ... Jeff is one of the people who has subscribed to the blog. So ...
Jeff, if you're reading the blog at all regularly ... two books of possible interest if you haven't read them already. Both of these come by way of the blogging of Cal, who blogs over here
http://lettherebejustice.blogspot.com/
So, the first book ...
Petr Chelcicky's The Net of Faith, book 1
https://archive.org/details/TheNetOfFaith
the second ...
John Neville Figgis Churches in the Modern State
https://archive.org/details/cu31924020347351
These are, as with so many books these days, on my to-get-to reading list. Blogging about contrapuntal music for classical guitar has been one of my projects of late.
Still winding my way through Adorno's Aesthetic Theory and Philosophy of New Music. Also gotta more officially jump in to Campbell, even though I'm going to probably spend a lot of time not agreeing with Campbell but he's important for a couple of projects I've been incubating.
Jeff, if you're reading the blog at all regularly ... two books of possible interest if you haven't read them already. Both of these come by way of the blogging of Cal, who blogs over here
http://lettherebejustice.blogspot.com/
So, the first book ...
Petr Chelcicky's The Net of Faith, book 1
https://archive.org/details/TheNetOfFaith
the second ...
John Neville Figgis Churches in the Modern State
https://archive.org/details/cu31924020347351
These are, as with so many books these days, on my to-get-to reading list. Blogging about contrapuntal music for classical guitar has been one of my projects of late.
Still winding my way through Adorno's Aesthetic Theory and Philosophy of New Music. Also gotta more officially jump in to Campbell, even though I'm going to probably spend a lot of time not agreeing with Campbell but he's important for a couple of projects I've been incubating.
Thursday, May 03, 2018
Mark Delpriora performing his solo guitar transcription of the double fugue that closes Haydn's oratorio The Creation
Years ago Matanya Ophee published this Mark Delpriora guitar transcription, inspired by the claim made by Fernando Sor that he, at the time he wrote his treatise on the guitar, currently played the double fugue that ended Haydn's oratorio The Creation. Proposing quite simply that Sor would never make such a claim if the double fugue could not, in fact, ever be adapted to the guitar, Delpriora set out to establish whether it could be done by exploring how it could be done.
The result, which you can now hear over here, sounds fantastic.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vm8o4ySIjC0
Of course I love the music of Haydn so someone who doesn't already admire Haydn's music might not find this transcription interesting. We'll just disagree there.
The result, which you can now hear over here, sounds fantastic.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vm8o4ySIjC0
Of course I love the music of Haydn so someone who doesn't already admire Haydn's music might not find this transcription interesting. We'll just disagree there.
another, relatively short and general review of Nikita Koshkin's 24 preludes and fugues, this time in English, courtesy of the Seattle Classic Guitar Society newsletter
you'll find the review on page 6 in this month's newsletter for the Seattle Classic Guitar Society
http://www.seattleguitar.org/soundings593.pdf
http://www.seattleguitar.org/soundings593.pdf
former Mars Hill Portland aka Redeemer Church still in some kind of flux, 404 error for leadership page
We've briefly discussed how Redeemer (formerly Mars Hill Church Portland) seems to be in a transitional state of some kind this year. There's not a ton of new information. Here's a sampler of what we've managed to chronicle from earlier this year.
https://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2018/03/redeemer-church-in-portland-has-filed.html
As of today ... you'll get a 404 error if you try to pull up the "leadership" page.
http://redeemerpdx.com/about/leadership/
exactly what's going on with what used to be Mars Hill Portland and precisely why there's no trace of Tim Smith anywhere in the more recent documents as yet has no explanation and may never get one.
However ...
http://egov.sos.state.or.us/br/pkg_web_name_srch_inq.show_detl?p_be_rsn=1729861&p_srce=BR_INQ&p_print=FALSE
REINSTATEMENT AMENDED 03-14-2018
UPDATE
05-09-2018
Thanks to the WayBack Machine there is a way to see what the leadership page used to look like and may, or may not, at some point look like again.
https://web.archive.org/web/20171002191650/http://redeemerpdx.com/about/leadership/
...
As yet there's no updates
https://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2018/03/redeemer-church-in-portland-has-filed.html
As of today ... you'll get a 404 error if you try to pull up the "leadership" page.
http://redeemerpdx.com/about/leadership/
exactly what's going on with what used to be Mars Hill Portland and precisely why there's no trace of Tim Smith anywhere in the more recent documents as yet has no explanation and may never get one.
However ...
http://egov.sos.state.or.us/br/pkg_web_name_srch_inq.show_detl?p_be_rsn=1729861&p_srce=BR_INQ&p_print=FALSE
REINSTATEMENT AMENDED 03-14-2018
UPDATE
05-09-2018
Thanks to the WayBack Machine there is a way to see what the leadership page used to look like and may, or may not, at some point look like again.
https://web.archive.org/web/20171002191650/http://redeemerpdx.com/about/leadership/
...
Elders, who are the Pastors of our church, are responsible for the general spiritual and operational oversight of the local assembly. They provide pastoral care of the flock as well as teaching and equipping of the saints for ministry.
The Elder board of our church currently consists of: Pastor Eric Appleby, Pastor Jon Crist, Pastor Kevin Kelly, Pastor Ryan Mount, Pastor Dan Ortega, Pastor Tim Smith and Pastor Jim Swanson. Two of the Elders of Redeemer Church are also paid staff. They are: Tim Smith, in the role of Lead Teaching Pastor and Kevin Kelly, in the role of Executive Pastor.
God has called all of these men to lead by example and to serve with love, humility and grace, placing care and service to the flock over their own interests. Should you wish to speak to any of our Elders, please email redeemer@redeemerpdx.com indicating whom you wish to speak with and they will get back to you promptly.
...As yet there's no updates
Wednesday, May 02, 2018
Nikita Koshkin's 24 Preludes and Fugues: Prelude and Fugue in E minor
We're now officially back to a prelude and fugue from the cycle for which there is an online video performance, in this case by Asya Selyutina (as before). So you can follow along if you have the score as we look through this entry in Koshkin's cycle.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v42Bc8m8Kw4
E major and E minor are arguably the most guitaristic keys in which a guitarist or non-guitarist can possibly compose. It's a key that is both forgiving and unforgiving. It's forgiving in the sense that there are a lot of things you can write and play that are idiomatic and rest easily on the instrument but it's an unforgiving key in the sense that whatever you bring to this key stands up against the entire history of the instrument in a way that a prelude and fugue in F sharp major never has to because very, very few guitarists are writing preludes and fugues in F sharp major.
I think Koshkin acquits himself well with this prelude and fugue and it's suitably emblematic to his approach to composing generally and for this cycle. Despite the key signature being E minor this is a prelude and fugue in drop D tuning
Prelude (start of video)
This is a languid and dark prelude. It opens with a short half measure gesture in common time, a widely spaced low range tonic triad with a melody rising up by arpeggiated eighth notes to an E minor ninth chord with an omitted fifth that is tacitly taken as having a fermata. This gesture is the introductory gesture and it eventually gets its own thematic expansion later in the prelude but the dominating idea is a slow and descending melodic line in the bass strings that is accompanied by a steady stream of sixteenth note figuration on the treble strings. Measures 2 and 3 are the bass melody gesture that establishes what we can think of as the first identifiably thematic/melodic material. This is followed by the sequential development of an idea in the bass strings that can be read as quarter note, dotted quarter note, eighth note and quarter note with different intervallic values and movements depending on context, which prevails from measures 6-9 (and 11-14).
A good rule of thumb I'd suggest for this prelude is that while you want to pay attention to the sixteenths as accompaniment throughout never think of them as the melodic content of this prelude. For that focus attention on all the notes that are longer than sixteenth note values.
The opening motto returns at measure 9 and gets a brief sequential expansion in measure 1
0. This leads to a new episode of the quarter, dotted quarter, eighth and quarter gesture with more sequential development. This passage ranges from measure 11 to the first half of measure 14.
In the second half of measure 14 through measure 15 we get another sequential presentation of the opening motto. This time the harmonies are not a static presentation of the tonic. An E minor triad sifts its way toward a first inversion A major chord and then a G major seventh chord with the F sharp at the bottom that, arguably, is an E minor ninth chord with an omitted tonic that doesn't formally appear until measure 16 with the return of the descending melodic gesture we've already identified as Theme 1 (as distinct from motto) material. If we think of the motto and the bass strings melody as being two distinct sections this prelude can be thought of as having a strophic form (a, a', a'', etc.) in which each episode is announced and offset by a presentation and/or sequential development of the motto followed by a bass strings melodic episode with sixteenth note figuration providing accompaniment in the treble strings.
Eventually the languid bass strings melody becomes less and less dominant as the prelude moves along and the motto takes on stronger and stronger thematic significance until it is finally the dominant thematic material.
This prelude, short though it is, is saturated with Phrygian and locrian elements and when it is minor it tends to be natural minor rather than a harmonic or melodic minor prelude. Even the penultimate harmony of this prelude, an E flat ninth chord without a fifth) "could" be construed as a leading tone that proceeds to the tonic of E minor but the melodic activity DESCENDS to E rather than rises to E natural as would be expected in a more parochial Western ideal of voice-leading.
The mood of the prelude is somber, even desolate, like something from a late period Shostakovich string quartet, if not quite as insistently despairing or dissonant.
Fugue (starts at 2:24)
As with the prelude, so with the fugue, we have a subject that is best described as E natural minor with a D natural and no leading tone. This subject is a short and punchy three-measure subject that, personally, I felt could have been a four-measure subject. It's not, and it works, but it feels like it could have been slightly longer.
Now what's interesting about this subject and exposition is that Koshkin could have introduced an answer at the dominant but instead he introduces an answer at the subdominant. Traditionally in Western contrapuntal practice the reason you answer at the subdominant is because your subject starts on the dominant scale degree and providing even a tonal answer at the dominant would destabilize your key regions too quickly (unless you're Anton Reicha and don't care about that in his 36 Fugues). In this case an answer at the dominant (i.e. having an A natural or even an A sharp that rises up to B before falling a fourth, as would be prescribed in the linear movement of the subject) drops the subject down to the subtonic degree of the minor mode. In other words, at a practical level, the dominant answer doesn't introduce enough pitches from the tonic chord to stabilize the key regions of the answers enough whereas a transposed modal answer at the subdominant DOES accomplish this, which is why Koshkin opted to answer at the subdominant (see measures 36-38). After a short transition the third voice enters at measure 40, giving us a clear-cut descending order of voices entering as soprano, alto and tenor/bass in this exposition.
The subject is agitated and gloomy, in the natural minor mode but with a brief chromatic turn into parallel major that presages some mutations that will appear later in the fugue. There are no countersubjects.
The first middle entry appears very early in this fugue (2:46) in D minor (measure 44). The next middle entry is in A minor at measure 45. Now at measure 53 we're firmly back in E minor with an episode full of stretto where the opening kernel of the subject is presented in successive stretto a beat apart. This builds up steadily through to measure 60 where we have a preliminary climax or false recapitulation in which the subject appears in E minor but modified so as to fit within the confines of the scordatura of the instrument. Koshkin signals that this is not, in fact, the climax of the fugue at about 3:25 (measure 63) by abruptly dropping down to piano and into the key of B flat, a tritone away from the tonic, as tonally far removed from "home" as we can possibly be in any kind of tonal traditions.
From 66 onward Koshkin feints at statements of the subject in F major but these sequential gestures never complete the subject and keep shifting downwards, so to speak, until we get to the next middle entry in D major (measure 71-73). At this point we can hear how the subject lends itself to modal mutation into parallel major by way of transposition and recontextualized harmony. As August Halm put it, a fugue subject needs to sound good subjected to mutation into parallel minor or major, it needs a melodic profile that can be subjected to any and every kind of modal mutation while still in some way being recognizable, and for all that sound pleasing, too. Koshkin hear demonstrates that his fugue subject sounds very pleasing in minor and major forms.
And, no surprise, he completes his middle entry in D major by going straight into an episode where he modally mutates back into D minor to re-establish the minor-key mood of the fugue overall at the end of measure 74. He sequentially extends the last measure of his subject toward a recapitulation of the subject in the tonic key. He hammers away at upper pedal tones on the topmost open strings but when the subject returns in full force it's presented in tenths and chromatically altered. The effect, which you can hear starting at 4:10, is loud and explosive. This is a quintessentially explosive Koshkin climax and it sounds boisterous and fun.
Now at this point, arguably, this spectacular, boisterous climax is great for a sonata but it is not necessarily a really polyphonic climax. There are two ways of responding to this observation. One is to say, yes, it's not exactly polyphonic at this point and perhaps a guitarist composer could or "should" choose to compose polyphony where the identifiable independence of the contrapuntal strands should be more perceivable and present. There's room for that conviction as ideas about counterpoint for guitar go. But there's a second response, which is to observe how very few cycles of fugues we have. Even in Bach's works, when he builds toward a climactic passage, he cuts loose and thickens his textures and expands his materials. He even modifies subjects and countersubjects as the interests of this or that musical work provide. I enjoy this piece so I am giving it a pass even if the contrapuntist in me could imagine ways in which fully invertible counterpoint might be provided for a subject like this. Not everybody has to think or feel the same way about this stuff.
By 4:19 (measure 91) we hit what could be the half cadence preparation (dominant pedal tone of D natural) for a jump into relative major. However, because of the persistence of the D natural as a MODAL minor subject we know that this pedal point on the subtonic is really setting up a winding down push for a cadence in E. In modal contexts there is no leading tone but the subtonic harmony frequently still plays a dominant or quasi-dominant role that leads back to the tonic rather than necessarily always setting up a relative major. This would be easier to site in any number of songs by, say, David Bowie than in Baroque counterpoint but seeing as we're in the 21st rather than the 18th or 19th century it's worth noting that in modal contrapuntal thinking we don't have a "leading tone" so the "rules" (whatever those may be) for tonal resolutions in modal ways of thinking aren't the same as textbook approaches to polyphony.
The fugue winds down steadily and relentless to measure 99 (4:39ish), where we hear the initial motto of the subject in augmentation and presented in a canon of call and response between bass strings and trebles. The last time the trebles take up the motto they sequence it down to another point of repose (4:53, first half of measure 105) before winding up for the final phrase in which the motto of the fugue resolves into a bright E major chord that bursts out of the treble strings and ends the fugue.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v42Bc8m8Kw4
E major and E minor are arguably the most guitaristic keys in which a guitarist or non-guitarist can possibly compose. It's a key that is both forgiving and unforgiving. It's forgiving in the sense that there are a lot of things you can write and play that are idiomatic and rest easily on the instrument but it's an unforgiving key in the sense that whatever you bring to this key stands up against the entire history of the instrument in a way that a prelude and fugue in F sharp major never has to because very, very few guitarists are writing preludes and fugues in F sharp major.
I think Koshkin acquits himself well with this prelude and fugue and it's suitably emblematic to his approach to composing generally and for this cycle. Despite the key signature being E minor this is a prelude and fugue in drop D tuning
Prelude (start of video)
This is a languid and dark prelude. It opens with a short half measure gesture in common time, a widely spaced low range tonic triad with a melody rising up by arpeggiated eighth notes to an E minor ninth chord with an omitted fifth that is tacitly taken as having a fermata. This gesture is the introductory gesture and it eventually gets its own thematic expansion later in the prelude but the dominating idea is a slow and descending melodic line in the bass strings that is accompanied by a steady stream of sixteenth note figuration on the treble strings. Measures 2 and 3 are the bass melody gesture that establishes what we can think of as the first identifiably thematic/melodic material. This is followed by the sequential development of an idea in the bass strings that can be read as quarter note, dotted quarter note, eighth note and quarter note with different intervallic values and movements depending on context, which prevails from measures 6-9 (and 11-14).
A good rule of thumb I'd suggest for this prelude is that while you want to pay attention to the sixteenths as accompaniment throughout never think of them as the melodic content of this prelude. For that focus attention on all the notes that are longer than sixteenth note values.
The opening motto returns at measure 9 and gets a brief sequential expansion in measure 1
0. This leads to a new episode of the quarter, dotted quarter, eighth and quarter gesture with more sequential development. This passage ranges from measure 11 to the first half of measure 14.
In the second half of measure 14 through measure 15 we get another sequential presentation of the opening motto. This time the harmonies are not a static presentation of the tonic. An E minor triad sifts its way toward a first inversion A major chord and then a G major seventh chord with the F sharp at the bottom that, arguably, is an E minor ninth chord with an omitted tonic that doesn't formally appear until measure 16 with the return of the descending melodic gesture we've already identified as Theme 1 (as distinct from motto) material. If we think of the motto and the bass strings melody as being two distinct sections this prelude can be thought of as having a strophic form (a, a', a'', etc.) in which each episode is announced and offset by a presentation and/or sequential development of the motto followed by a bass strings melodic episode with sixteenth note figuration providing accompaniment in the treble strings.
Eventually the languid bass strings melody becomes less and less dominant as the prelude moves along and the motto takes on stronger and stronger thematic significance until it is finally the dominant thematic material.
This prelude, short though it is, is saturated with Phrygian and locrian elements and when it is minor it tends to be natural minor rather than a harmonic or melodic minor prelude. Even the penultimate harmony of this prelude, an E flat ninth chord without a fifth) "could" be construed as a leading tone that proceeds to the tonic of E minor but the melodic activity DESCENDS to E rather than rises to E natural as would be expected in a more parochial Western ideal of voice-leading.
The mood of the prelude is somber, even desolate, like something from a late period Shostakovich string quartet, if not quite as insistently despairing or dissonant.
Fugue (starts at 2:24)
As with the prelude, so with the fugue, we have a subject that is best described as E natural minor with a D natural and no leading tone. This subject is a short and punchy three-measure subject that, personally, I felt could have been a four-measure subject. It's not, and it works, but it feels like it could have been slightly longer.
Now what's interesting about this subject and exposition is that Koshkin could have introduced an answer at the dominant but instead he introduces an answer at the subdominant. Traditionally in Western contrapuntal practice the reason you answer at the subdominant is because your subject starts on the dominant scale degree and providing even a tonal answer at the dominant would destabilize your key regions too quickly (unless you're Anton Reicha and don't care about that in his 36 Fugues). In this case an answer at the dominant (i.e. having an A natural or even an A sharp that rises up to B before falling a fourth, as would be prescribed in the linear movement of the subject) drops the subject down to the subtonic degree of the minor mode. In other words, at a practical level, the dominant answer doesn't introduce enough pitches from the tonic chord to stabilize the key regions of the answers enough whereas a transposed modal answer at the subdominant DOES accomplish this, which is why Koshkin opted to answer at the subdominant (see measures 36-38). After a short transition the third voice enters at measure 40, giving us a clear-cut descending order of voices entering as soprano, alto and tenor/bass in this exposition.
The subject is agitated and gloomy, in the natural minor mode but with a brief chromatic turn into parallel major that presages some mutations that will appear later in the fugue. There are no countersubjects.
The first middle entry appears very early in this fugue (2:46) in D minor (measure 44). The next middle entry is in A minor at measure 45. Now at measure 53 we're firmly back in E minor with an episode full of stretto where the opening kernel of the subject is presented in successive stretto a beat apart. This builds up steadily through to measure 60 where we have a preliminary climax or false recapitulation in which the subject appears in E minor but modified so as to fit within the confines of the scordatura of the instrument. Koshkin signals that this is not, in fact, the climax of the fugue at about 3:25 (measure 63) by abruptly dropping down to piano and into the key of B flat, a tritone away from the tonic, as tonally far removed from "home" as we can possibly be in any kind of tonal traditions.
From 66 onward Koshkin feints at statements of the subject in F major but these sequential gestures never complete the subject and keep shifting downwards, so to speak, until we get to the next middle entry in D major (measure 71-73). At this point we can hear how the subject lends itself to modal mutation into parallel major by way of transposition and recontextualized harmony. As August Halm put it, a fugue subject needs to sound good subjected to mutation into parallel minor or major, it needs a melodic profile that can be subjected to any and every kind of modal mutation while still in some way being recognizable, and for all that sound pleasing, too. Koshkin hear demonstrates that his fugue subject sounds very pleasing in minor and major forms.
And, no surprise, he completes his middle entry in D major by going straight into an episode where he modally mutates back into D minor to re-establish the minor-key mood of the fugue overall at the end of measure 74. He sequentially extends the last measure of his subject toward a recapitulation of the subject in the tonic key. He hammers away at upper pedal tones on the topmost open strings but when the subject returns in full force it's presented in tenths and chromatically altered. The effect, which you can hear starting at 4:10, is loud and explosive. This is a quintessentially explosive Koshkin climax and it sounds boisterous and fun.
Now at this point, arguably, this spectacular, boisterous climax is great for a sonata but it is not necessarily a really polyphonic climax. There are two ways of responding to this observation. One is to say, yes, it's not exactly polyphonic at this point and perhaps a guitarist composer could or "should" choose to compose polyphony where the identifiable independence of the contrapuntal strands should be more perceivable and present. There's room for that conviction as ideas about counterpoint for guitar go. But there's a second response, which is to observe how very few cycles of fugues we have. Even in Bach's works, when he builds toward a climactic passage, he cuts loose and thickens his textures and expands his materials. He even modifies subjects and countersubjects as the interests of this or that musical work provide. I enjoy this piece so I am giving it a pass even if the contrapuntist in me could imagine ways in which fully invertible counterpoint might be provided for a subject like this. Not everybody has to think or feel the same way about this stuff.
By 4:19 (measure 91) we hit what could be the half cadence preparation (dominant pedal tone of D natural) for a jump into relative major. However, because of the persistence of the D natural as a MODAL minor subject we know that this pedal point on the subtonic is really setting up a winding down push for a cadence in E. In modal contexts there is no leading tone but the subtonic harmony frequently still plays a dominant or quasi-dominant role that leads back to the tonic rather than necessarily always setting up a relative major. This would be easier to site in any number of songs by, say, David Bowie than in Baroque counterpoint but seeing as we're in the 21st rather than the 18th or 19th century it's worth noting that in modal contrapuntal thinking we don't have a "leading tone" so the "rules" (whatever those may be) for tonal resolutions in modal ways of thinking aren't the same as textbook approaches to polyphony.
The fugue winds down steadily and relentless to measure 99 (4:39ish), where we hear the initial motto of the subject in augmentation and presented in a canon of call and response between bass strings and trebles. The last time the trebles take up the motto they sequence it down to another point of repose (4:53, first half of measure 105) before winding up for the final phrase in which the motto of the fugue resolves into a bright E major chord that bursts out of the treble strings and ends the fugue.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)