a delay in reading the new Borstlap book

 Well, I pre-ordered it but the vendor says it's temporarily out of stock.  So it may take a while before I can read the new book since there's no indication U.S. side when the book will be available.  Since the book is newly published this is a paradox but I can't read a book that hasn't been shipped to me.  

On music-related topics I am still hoping to get around to discussing Iverson's piano sonata and I'm incubating an analysis of the entirety of Matiegka's Grand Sonata I.  

UPDATE 11:23AM

For Ethan Hein, if you're reading this, Ethan, what I've seen of the TOC suggests that it is going to be a reworking of ideas from Borstlap's blog posts.  You will probably not want to read the book. :)  I'm bracing myself for the possibility that Borstlap takes Schleiermacher as given without necessarily having dug into the robust rebuttal Schleiermacher got from Swiss Reformed theologians a century ago, on the one hand, or the flourishing of arguments for aesthetic pluralism as an outworking of Christian confessionalism in Dutch Reformed theology going as far back as Gerardus van der Leeuw through Hans Rookmaaker up to the North American expansion of these ideas in Nicholas Wolterstorff or in post Vatican II Catholic theological aesthetics on the other hand.  I.e. the kinds of Scrutonian defenders of "tradition "and "Christendom" I've read over the years tend to be bad at the Christian dogmatics (Scruton is actually awful on those points) who are defending a Eurocentric art mysticism  that doesn't even line up with Christian dogmatics.  Defending an imaginary Athens of Romanticist invention invites the old question the African Church father Tertullian asked "What has Athens to do with Jerusalem?" African Christian correctives to Hellenistic speculation turns out to have a very long history if our reading of Christian teaching gets even the slightest bit outside Europe.  But I digress, kind of.

At any rate I can't read the book yet and it remains to be seen how long it is before John Borstlap's new book arrives.  Meanwhile I'm having fun reading Charles W Mills' The Racial Contract and Black Rights, White Wrongs alongside Oliver O'Donovan's Gifford lectures.  It turns out that black political theory and Anglican theology can converge in contending that the Kantian turn in philosophy had a variety of disastrous consequences revolving around who is and isn't considered a person. But I probably need to save that for some other post.

links for the weekend of 2-3-24: starting with a sampling of listening before moving on to the shut-down of GetReligion, journalistic activism and its discontents, and other stuff

First we’ll do this links for the weekend post starting with all the musical stuff.  The other stuff will show up after the break.
 
I heard about this one from my brother, Kurena Ishikawa's bass and voice performance of Michael Jackson's "Off the Wall"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mlVpBTpaOU8
 
post-Esperanza Spaulding voice and bass performance.  Until I saw it done and heard it I would not have imagined it was possible to even do a voice and doublebass arrangement of a Michael Jackson song, let alone “Off the Wall”. 
 
Ishikawa has also done a version of Stevie Wonder’s “Bird of Beauty” (Fullfillngness’ First Finale was released in 1974)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sK4DJ8y1GTI
 
I’m willing to say anyone who does covers of Michael Jackson and Stevie Wonder is on a good musical path.
 
My brother and I (and several other of our relatives) have gotten into the manga/anime Spy x Family.  I only discovered it in late 2023 but swiftly caught up on the anime. My brother read the first 10 volumes of the manga in a mere three days.  During the holiday season with some family we watched the latest episode of season 2, which wrapped up.  There are a lot of things I enjoy about the series and one of them is the music.  The musical cues are fun and they are used in entertaining ways.  Some of them are earworms. 
 
(K)Now_NAME with "housework" from Spy x Family series soundtrack
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XhYdrFTOfqY
 
Then another earworm for me is "Crisis of my home" from the same.  There is, for me, a gut-bustingly funny use of this musical cue in Episode 24 of season 1. Two caveats, first, episode 24 is really far into the season and like any good joke there's 24 episodes of set up for WHY the moment is so funny and, second, you've got to see it subtitled because the original Japanese voice cast cannot be beat.
 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w9ug7a2d3mg
 
I've made a point of learning about chamber works where the guitar is paired up with another instrument, be it woodwinds, strings, plucked strings or brass.  This one, Sonata for domra and guitar, is by Nikita Koshkin, whose work I've analyzed in moderate detail here in the past.
 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QIKoH6DR-7E
 
Here's hoping the second half of his 24 Preludes and Fugues for solo guitar can be recorded sooner rather than later.
 
A bit of recycling but …
Ethan Iverson - Piano Sonata: Allegro Moderato
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pbY3Vp3aTLU
Ethan Iverson - Piano Sonata: Andante
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fSI_bpQJDF8
Ethan Iverson - Piano Sonata: Rondo
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XPe_j-gnfko
Here’s the Kepler Quartet performing Ben Johnston’s String Quartet No. 10
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5VX0tfFhkq8
 
I am not going to become a microtonalist myself but I admit I love Ben Johnston’s string quartets. Props to Kyle Gann for all the work he has done letting people know about Johnston’s music. 
 
Now we’ll get to the not-music element of the links for the weekend this weekend of February 3, 2024.

HT Ethan Hein, Ethan Iverson plays his Piano Sonata

1-28-2024 1 pm

This weekend I commend to your listening attention the new piano sonata by Ethan Iverson.  Thanks to Ethan Hein for mentioning in comments here at the blog recently.  I've listened to the sonata just a couple of times and want to listen to it more and read through the scores in-video before I write more but I did, at least, want to share it with readers of Wenatchee The Hatchet this weekend.

Ethan Iverson - Piano Sonata: Allegro Moderato

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pbY3Vp3aTLU
Ethan Iverson - Piano Sonata: Andante
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fSI_bpQJDF8
Ethan Iverson - Piano Sonata: Rondo
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XPe_j-gnfko

I'll have more detailed thoughts after I've had more time to listen to it and read the scores but the short and quick impression is:  I like this sonata.  The second movement is touching and the third movement is funny,, in the zone of Haydn funny.  :)  I had to get my bearings a little on the first movement but I like it, too.  I hope Iverson writes more piano sonatas.  Often when jazz musician/composers tackle sonatas and "classical" forms the works don't always come off within those idioms, much like a lot of classical composers attempting jazz end up pretty cringe.  Iverson, however, is the kind of pianist who can interview (and did) George Walker and talked with him about his works.  I've got Iverson to thank for introducing me to George Walker's piano sonatas, which swiftly came to be among my favorite late 20th/early 21st century piano sonatas.  All that to say I repeat my hope that Ethan Iverson keeps writing more piano sonatas.  

More detailed comments may emerge at this post later.  For now I want to just get my initial thoughts into words and share the music with you.  

Ministry Watch confirms Doug Wilson's announcement about Clare Locke LLP in wake of Sarah Stankorb's book Disobedient Women; Clare Locke LLP in relationship to Claudine Gay; Alan Jacobs on plagiarism vs duplicative language; Warren Throckmorton revisited the 10th anniversary of the start of Mark Driscoll's plagiarism controversy

This may count as a kind of links for the weekend with a theme.  It has a bit of an evolving story to it that probably requires some review.  For those who recall an article in 2021 at Vice ... 

https://www.vice.com/en/article/m7ezwx/inside-the-church-that-preaches-wives-need-to-be-led-with-a-firm-hand

Doug Wilson's response seemed more or less jovial and even a bit faintly dismissive.

on not being able to mourn the recently reported demise of Pitchfork

https://www.honest-broker.com/p/why-is-music-journalism-collapsing

https://www.theguardian.com/music/2024/jan/18/pitchforks-absorption-into-gq-is-a-travesty-for-music-media-and-musicians

 

some belated thoughts on Doug Wilson's No Quarter Novembers, Kevin DeYoung's piece about the Moscow Mood, and Christ Church Moscow's engagement of Clare Locke LLP

I refrained from writing anything about No Quarter November in December because there were more fun things to do and write about.  It was more fun to watch Godzilla Minus One, for instance.  It was more fun to watch Miyazaki's latest film. It was more fun to spend time with friends and family.  It was also more fun to add an appendix to Ragtime and Sonata Forms.

But I did sporadically read No Quarter November 2023 and also read some posts on Wilson at Heidelblog.  I'm skipping most of the posts from Heidelblog because links to other articles are more salient.  We'll start with this one because Anthony Bradley was named and that name takes on some significance later.

https://dougwils.com/books-and-culture/s7-engaging-the-culture/a-pinch-of-incense-to-the-genius-of-democracy-2-2-2.html

kicking off 2024 with links for the weekend, a panel discussing Reed Carlson's Unfamiliar Selves has me thinking about the role music has had in catalyzing mantic states and how contingent, conditional and occasional that musical impact is in biblical narratives

I have yet to write at any length about this intriguing and inspiring book ... 

Unfamiliar Selves in the Hebrew Bible: Possession and Other Spirit Phenomena

Reed Carlson

DeGruyter, 2022

ISBN 978-3-11-066934-3  

or the earlier dissertation form of the work Carlson has done but I did, belatedly, discover a panel discussion that has been published as a set of pages I commend to you for reading this weekend. 

https://www.ancientjewreview.com/read/2023/4/19/sbl-2022-review-panel-unfamiliar-selves-in-the-hebrew-bible

https://www.ancientjewreview.com/read/2023/4/19/the-critical-potential-of-spirits-hebrew-philology-the-poetics-of-relation-and-unfamiliar-selves

https://www.ancientjewreview.com/read/2023/4/24/possession-and-relational-moral-agency

https://www.ancientjewreview.com/read/2023/4/26/selves-spirits-and-the-usefulness-of-comparison

Lambert's observation that Carlson reads moral injury as the basis for King Saul's affliction by tormenting spirit is indicative of 21st century interpretation rather than the text itself stands out.  That was a reservation I had about Carlson's approach to the Saul narratives, too.  When the text tells us Yahweh afflicted Saul with a harmful spirit after Saul showed himself disobedient by not killing enough Amalekites we can't really propose that war trauma was what catalyzed King Saul's erratic spirit afflicted behavioral changes.  There is a lot about Carlson's work I like and liked but this point from Lambert is a substantial one.

Carlson's clarifying caveat that he wasn't actually trying to diagnose Saul as to point out that moral injury catalyzing altered states of consciousness that are bad is known in contemporary counseling literature.  Carlson, if memory serves, is ex-Pentecostal or ex-charismatic and might also know that the idea of moral injury as a catalyst for demonization is fairly rampant in popular level spiritual warfare self-help books. Carlson's response (see below) suggests to me he's trying to triangulate three bodies of study (research on psychological trauma, theories of spirit possession in biblical literature, and anthropological/cultural analyses of porous concepts of selfhood).

https://www.ancientjewreview.com/read/2023/5/1/jewish-spirits-and-christian-specters

Schwartz raised a fantastic point about how ritual cleansing through sprinkled water in Ezekiel precedes the new heart and spirit.  Having finished John Kleinig's book on the role of choral music in 1 & 2 Chronicles I have been thinking about how within the Jewish scriptures music does not have an intrinsic or automatic capacity for epiclesis, to put this another way, music doesn't catalyze "trance' or "possession" states as a matter of course.  

The observation that a diachronic rather than synchronic approach to defining what "spirit" is is necessary precisely because scholars can see how dramatically concepts of ruah shifted was (and is) worth making. There's a big gap between saying the breath of Yahweh hovered over the waters and seeing the text as a reference to the Third Person of the Christian Trinity, a gap that can be understood if we bear in mind that terms in the Hebrew texts (and LXX) came to have divergent meanings across time and within textual traditions. 

https://www.ancientjewreview.com/read/2023/5/3/response-to-the-forum-on-unfamiliar-selves-in-the-hebrew-bible

 

For me what sticks out as a hobbyist musician and composer (and Christian, with an interest in theology and biblical studies) is that music does stick out in a couple of narrative episodes.  King Saul became another person after encountering a guild of musical seers/prophets.  Elisha summoned for a minstrel before giving an oracle.  The biblical narratives grant that music was used as a catalyst for mantic states but I think Schwartz' observation that the new spirit/breath is preceded by ritual cleansing highlights an element that musicians often want to ignore.  Musicians would rather let music be a "magic" or "wizardry" that has its effects intrinsically and not on the basis of working conditionally and only after proper purificatory rites have been completed.  For instance, it's one thing to say that Saul encountered a musical guild of prophets and suggest music had the effect of making him into a different person, it's another to consider that Samuel gave an oracle and had told Saul he was chosen king.  The ritual context and prophetic oracle context within which the transformation was predicted are inextricable from the musical guild that briefly made Saul into another person.  As Zwingli pointed out, the Lord was with David and had departed from Saul, so what David's music on the harp did is not something intrinsic to David's music itself.  

Fans of music tend to want their music to be an unconditional and automatic catalyst for epiclesis.  Every time I feel the spirit moving in my heart I will pray ... .  

 

I've got that book Demons, Angels, and Writing in Ancient Judaism by Annette Yoshiko Reed and I have to finish it.  I've read enough of it, though, to get what she means by the efforts of contemporary scholars to exorcise spirits from the texts.  Judit Blair's De-Demonizing the Old Testament couldn't be more overt just from its title alone.

... One of the things I have learned about spirits from reading the ethnographic literature for this book is that apparently they do not leave you alone even after you diagnose and treat them. Rarely can they be exorcised completely. ...

This is commonly attested within Christian traditions apart from scholarly discussions of the same.

So, maybe you'll have some fun reading this.  I had fun reading it, at least. 

Oh, wait, we're in 2024 but Blogger's not counting this as a 2024 post so, eh ...

a short look at the most viewed post at Wenatchee The Hatchet of 2023, from 2021

The most viewed post of 2023 at Wenatchee The Hatchet turns out to be something I published in 2021.

Mark Driscoll and Doug Wilson were part of a panel debating censorship in the arts covered by WSU paper on 10-27-1992; revisiting Mark Driscoll's 2013 claim that he edited his college newspaper compared to his 2004 claim to have been an opinions editor.

812 views could be at least half bots for all I don't know but it's the most viewed post of 2023 for the blog.  The analytics further indicate that those 812 views were accumulated in the last three months.  

Traffic to the blog nosedived after later 2014 and spiked during the run time of The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill before nosediving again, which is all fine.  The quality of the readers is more important to me at this stage in life than the quantity.  If people enjoy the Matiegka posts, for instance, that makes me happy.

I don't regret, though, chronicling the life and times of Mars Hill or demonstrating that Wilson and Driscoll knew of each other going as far back as 1992 and that Driscoll made no secret about his being influenced by Wilson.  I had thought to write about No Quarter November and Kevin DeYoung's paradoxical worries about the Moscow Mood after having giving a glowing review to the first edition of A Justice Primer but I had more fun things to do like watching Godzilla Minus One and adding an appendix to my 2020 treatise of sorts. 

I might have to get around to stuff like that in 2024.  I found some fun links to a round table on Reed Carlson's Unfamiliar Selves I want to share later but it might be good to actually discuss Reed Carlson's book first.

We'll have to see how 2024 blogging goes and whether I feel up to returning to earlier levels of productivity.  The 30th anniversary of Mark Noll's The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind will be upon us, after all.  John Borstlap's book will be out and a new book by Oliver O'Donovan will be out of his Gifford lectures.  Stuff like that.

I never managed to blog about Ewell's book this year.  There is, I hope, time to get to that in 2024.  Matiegka 2023 is obviously going to sprawl into 2024 and maybe even 2025.  I admit it's a hugely ambitious and difficult project but I did at least get to Op. 16 and Op. 17.

Happy New Year from Wenatchee The Hatchet.  

Alan Jacobs on Wagner with a passing reference to Roger Scruton--some observations on the Scrutonian engagement with Anglican theological aesthetics that never was

https://blog.ayjay.org/on-wagner/

I don't need to rehearse that Wagnerians venerate Wagner as a genius and Wagner's detractors regard him as a repulsive human being.  Alan Jacobs doesn't need to do that either but he seems savvy enough to realize what he volunteers about Wagner is not informed by steeping himself in Wagnerian criticism.  Then again, the following observation wouldn't depend on being caught up with the sea of statements about Wagner. Get ready for an amusing little story about W. H. Auden and Benjamin Britten discussing the exigencies of setting verses to a fugue:

...

Wagner trusts overmuch in the power of his own verse, or is simply overly attached to it — which is a reminder that often it’s good to divide the labor of the librettist and the poet. When Auden was writing his Christmas oratorio, For the Time Being, he did so hoping that his friend Benjamin Britten would set it to music. But when he gave to Britten the magnificent fugal chorus on Caesar he had written, Britten couldn’t help laughing. He told Auden that if he wanted an actual fugue to be written, and a figure that would set a single scene in an oratorio with many scenes, then he should have written three lines, not seventy. So Auden kept the poem as written and gave up on the idea of having it set to music. By contrast, Wagner never had anyone to remind him of the necessary constraints; so he ignored them. 

And there’s another problem as well. Recently I read Walter Murch’s famous meditation on film editing, In the Blink of an Eye, and was taken by his articulation of one of his chief rules: “You want to do only what is necessary to engage the imagination of the audience — suggestion is always more effective than exposition.” It’s interesting that Wagner understands this principle so well in his music, which often is rich and deep with suggestion, without understanding it at all in his writing. Exposition often dominates. I think his addiction to detailed exposition has something to do with his belief in himself as a sage and a mythographer. 

... 

So there's that but the conclusion of the post is what has stuck with me:

I may have more to say as I move through this extraordinary work of art — though maybe not, because the experience is tiring. Right now I feel about it much as Virginia Woolf felt about Joyce’s Ulysses, which she called “a memorable catastrophe — immense in daring, terrific in disaster.” But it fascinates me as a myth, especially as a humanist myth — a myth about the ending of the gods and what Bonhoeffer would later call the “coming of age” of humanity. I think that is why Roger Scruton — a man convinced of the absolute necessity of religion to humans but without any firm faith in Christianity — loves the Ring cycle so much. His book about it is magnificent, I think, but also somewhat depressing, because as a Christian I certainly don’t think that a humanist myth has the power to sustain us. But Wagner put an enormous charge into his effort to make it do so. 

Since Scruton's passing I have read a couple of  books published before and after his death regarding his legacy as a conservative and the philosophy of aesthetics and the philosophy of religion.  A short version would be to say that Scruton was fond of what he called the English trait of being "loyally indifferent" within Anglicanism.  He regarded the feat of Anglicanism as rescuing the Church of England from the evil Calvinists so it could be English-ly Catholic in Our Church.  My take-away was that in 2023 there are probably more Anglicans in Africa than all of the United Kingdom and probably more orthodox Anglicans, too.  There was hardly anything in Scruton's version of transcendentalist personalism you couldn't get from neo-orthodox or dialectical theologians like Bultmann or Brunner who had a vastly great command of biblical texts and dogmatics.  Scruton seemed to be a kind of smells and bells Anglican who put stock in the rituals themselves and if they were opaque that was what made them profound.

And here I am gearing up to tackle Thomas Aquinas and Herman Bavinck on Trinitarian dogmatics in 2024, I who have the complete works of Richard Sibbes and am sympathetic to Zwingli's take on David's harp music rather than Luther's.  

That Scruton was a loyal Anglican I don't doubt, that he was fond of "loyally indifferent" Anglicanism was one of his failings as a public churchman.  There, I suppose there's no watering it down.  When I consider what the Anglican theologian and musician Jeremy Begbie has published in the last thirty years it kind of puzzles me that Scruton didn't think to interact with any of Begbie's work, or the work of David Brown so far as I could tell.  Scruton recognized that a chasm had come to exist between popular music and music from "the great tradition" but he did not seem as interested in finding ways to bridge those gaps or consider how they were sustained by journalists, music historians, and even performing and recording musicians (I don't say "constructed because Scruton read just enough Theodor Adorno to know who claimed popular song and dance from the United States was and is not "serious music").  

What is more, if Scruton was committed to a kind of Rudolf Otto variation of The Idea of the Holy for his art mysticism he didn't even manage the generously pluralist moments achieved by the Dutch Reformed anthropologist/art historian Gerardus van der Leeuw, whether in Religion in Essence and Manifestation or Sacred and Profane Beauty: The Holy in Art.  One of the ironies of Roger Scruton the philosopher who was so loyally indifferent to dogmatics and theology was that he didn't engage with theology much and yet it was Dutch Reformed theologians and art historians who made a case for aesthetic pluralism grounded in Christian confessionalism while Scruton was defending a nebulous post-Wagnerian post-Otto kind of mysticism.  

Scruton was, to go by his collected writings, more an English Anglican than a confessional Anglican, for want of a better way to put it.  I read Puritans for fun and edification, though, so I'm precisely the kind of Christian Scruton thought the Anglican church probably needed to be kept safe from.  But, seeing as I got into the work of John Neville Figgis in the last year, Figgis had a question which goes like this--why do people believe that the greatest dangers come from believing too much and not too little?  No one would have expected the late Roger Scruton to become a liberation theologian, for instance, and yet Jacobs' post has reminded me that Scruton may have accomplished more as a churchman who happened to be a public philosopher if he had taken his Anglicanism more seriously in the sense of engaging with and interacting with other currents within Anglican thought in his own lifetime.  I just merely name-dropped Jeremy Begbie and David Brown and I don't feel like wading into the waters of either of those theologians.  That might be something to save for 2024.

As I have been reading theological aesthetics within Reformed and Anglican and Catholic traditions I have begun to suspect that one of the crises of contemporary liberalism is catholicity.  Pluralism is presented by conservatives and reactionaries as predicated on relativism but this is not necessarily so.  The scholars who published a monograph with Brill on John Neville Figgis identified him as a formerly liberal Anglican who became more evangelical and yet was known in his lifetime for championing a secular and pluralist state.  Scruton was not unaware of Figgis, but he seems to have read Figgis the historian of political ideas rather than Figgis the priest.  

I guess I am trying to put this another way, merely discrediting people in the left or new left is not the same thing as coming up with ideas that might potentially ameliorate problems or offer solutions to aesthetic problems of the sort that Roger Scruton could recognize but did not seem particular eager to solve.  Since he has died he obviously can't solve any aesthetic problems now but, as Gavin Hopps has written of Scruton, we can be critical of his elitism and snobbery precisely because if we take those elements out Scruton still had some salvageable ideas that can be worked with.  One of those ideas was the observation that we need take pop music more seriously, at least more seriously than Adorno did, as a way to consider a potential future path for a rapprochement between classical and popular idioms. 

In that sense Philip Ewell has been right to say that loyalty to highbrow art religion is unyielding ... but the same can be said of the alternate art religion of rockists and poptimists.  Coming at all this from a Reformed Christian position (Swiss, Dutch, Calvinist, etc) I come at this realizing that I don't subscribe to either the highflyer Anglican Scrutonian art religion or Ted Gioia's "magic" jazz-centric ethos.  Philip Stoltzfus would potentially guess that I reject both the Orphic and Pythagorean paradigms to explain what music can do.  Maybe ... but Roger Scruton has been dead a couple of years and an appraisal of the strengths and weaknesses of the Scrutonian music project is going to be a work in progress for a while. 

Still, if Scruton were alive today and had read Philip Ewell's book he would likely say that it is a shame Schenker has had so much influence on North American music theory education and there's nothing wrong with Ewell registering that complaint in itself.  Scruton was almost glibly dismissive of Schenker's legacy, though.  He could get like that.

Anyway, soe semi-organized thoughts for a post on a Saturday night.  

a new appendix to Ragtime and Sonata Forms, some practical approaches to ragtime/sonata synthesis

Over the years I have written about my fondness for ragtime and my interest in synthesizing ragtime with 18^th century galant approaches to large-scale form.  I wrote Ragtime and Sonata Forms back in 2020.  Since that time I have read a fairly big pile of books discussing musical time and space; concepts of form; and scholarly reconsiderations and renegotiations of what theorists would call sonata forms.  It has become clearer among scholars over the last two centuries that the whole idea of “sonata form” and “sonata forms” was and is a post hoc description of a very flexible set of practices that were never as schematic or rigid as 19^th century theorists made them out to be. 

 

As Leonard Meyer put it, in the eighteenth century sonata movements were conceived of and written as a flexible set of scripts, but in the nineteenth century they became works written according to plans.  I was telling a friend of mine that this distinction between a sonata as a “script” and a sonata as a “plan” has profound implications.  You can go “off script” any time you want and get back on script.  If you change significant parts of your plan then you may just need a whole new plan.  I enjoy Haydn more than Mozart or Beethoven and I have a fondness for thinking of sonata forms (since the term and the heuristic is still useful and unavoidable now that we’ve had it for two centuries), so I have been thinking of ways to play with sonata forms in a way that treats sonata forms as flexible scripts.  I have also attempted to cross reference approaches to the “punctuation” of musical themes in ways that allow for establishing temporal-spatial correspondences between ragtime and sonata forms. 

 

Ironically I have been helped not just by reading music theory treatises by Jason Yust, Yoel Greenberg, James Hepokoski and L. Poundie Burstein, I have particularly benefited from reading Charles Twombly on John of Damascus; Thomas Torrance on Trinitarian dogmatics; Roger Scruton on the philosophy of music; and then Ferdia Stone-Davis and David Brown’s respective critiques of Scruton.  In other words I dove into theology and philosophy.  Torrance argued that we need to drop the Newtonian conception of time and space in light of patristic witness that time and space are not absolute but are relationally contingent and part of the created order. 

 

So when Jason Yust proposes that we think of musical time and space overlapping in multiple dimensions that just strikes me as a conceptual transposition of the kinds of distinctions that, when Thomas Aquinas reflected on the Trinity, were explicable as filiation, procession and spiration in intra-Trinitarian relationships.  In other words, Christian theology going back to the patristic era and medieval theologies from Aquinas and John of Damascus dispensed with a conception of time and space as some absolute “receptacle”.  L Poundie Burstein’s advice that we avoid getting too rigid in thinking about musical blocks of space and time as fixed “containers”.  Christian theologians agreed with that concern centuries ago and Thomas Torrance was overt in advising us to drop that conception of time and space in the last century.  

some thoughts on readings in music theory in 2023 and theological arguments against Germanophile art mysticism within Christian traditions (updated 12-30-23)

I had planned to blog about Matiegka's Grand Sonata I by now but, eh, life happens. There's still time between now and the end of the year to tackle that but I'm not sure I'm going to.  I may try to write a bit about some of the reading I've done this year. Normally I don't do list posts but I read a specific set of books that stuck with me this year

Yoel Greenberg's How Sonata Forms (2022)

L Poundie Burstein's Journeys Through Galant Expositions (2020)

James Hepokoski's A Sonata Theory Handbook (December 2020)

Jason Yust's Organized Time: Rhythm, Tonality and Form (2018)

Philip Ewell's On Music Theory, and Making Music More Welcoming for Everyone (April 2023)

The Religious Philosophy of Roger Scruton  (2016)

Art and Politics in Roger Scruton's Conservative Philosophy (December 2022)

Frank Burch Brown's books Religious Aesthetics: A Theological Study of Making and Meaning (1993); 

Good Taste, Bad Taste, and Christian Taste: Aesthetics in Religious Life (2003); 

and Inclusive yet Discerning: Navigating Worship Artfully (2009)

Chiara Bertoglio's Musical Scores and the Eternal Present: Theology, Time and Tolkien (August 2021)

Ferdia J Stone-Davis' Musical Beauty: Negotiating the Boundary between Subject and Object (2011)

John W Kleinig's The Lord's Song: The Basis, Function and Significance of Choral Music in Chronicles

Philip E. Stoltzfus' Theology as Performance: Music, Aesthetics, and God in Modern Theology (2006)

Kwame Bediako's Jesus and the Gospel in Africa

I'm also half-way through The Extravagance of Music by David Brown and Gavin Hopps

That's not counting other books I've been reading by Emil Brunner or John Neville Figgis or any entries in the sprawling reading list on exorcism, diabology, spiritual warfare, and scholarship on the development of Enochic traditions and demonologies evolving within contexts of imperial occupation(s) in the Yehud.  These are books that I've read that I hope to draw upon as I work toward Perichoresis in Musical Time and Space as a follow up to the  ragtime series.

A good number of these books got published since I wrote the blog series Ragtime and Sonata Forms back in 2020.  Each book, in some way or another, added ideas and insights into conceptions of musical time and space that I have found useful.  I've been intrigued by writings from the neo-Calvinist tradition advocating aesthetic pluralism.  The short version is that these kinds of arguments are, I think correctly, adduced from the economic Trinity but the relevance of the immanent Trinity to discussions of overlapping forms of musical timespace varying with dimensions of musical time and space don't come up.  I guess I'm trying to say that Christian theologians have been doing a great job of drawing upon the Trinity in its social/economic form to advocate for aesthetic pluralism grounded in confessional unity whether it's a case presented by Nicholas Wolterstorff, Frank Burch Brown, Hans Rookmaaker, Maeve Louise Heaney, David Brown or others.  

But direct reflection on musical time and space and dealing with the dogmas of aesthetics that evolved in the era of Romanticism is more sparse.  I've mentioned this briefly in the past but when Christians can draw upon John of Damascus' discussion of perichoresis in Christology and Trinitarian dogmatics; or when Thomas Aquinas distinguished between filiation, spiration and procession within the Trinity it seems like the simplest thing in the world to transpose these theological-philosophical concepts onto the nature of musical time and space in ways that discard Romanticist notions of musical material having some "essential" nature.  If we consider the biblical prophets and their criticism of music as not being a denigration of music itself but of investment in music that overlooked injustice, we have a viable alternative to what Stoltzfus described as the problematic dualism of Orpheus and Pythagoras derived musical ontologies or mysticisms.  

One of the ironies of conservatives (such as the late Roger Scruton) who attempted to defend a form of highbrow culture that was purportedly grounded in some kind of Christendom is that Scruton was, to be blunt, so lazy regarding Christian dogmatics it would be more apt to say he embraced a kind of post Schleiermacher and post Rudolf Otto art mysticism.  Gerardus van  der Leeuw had a "kind" of art mysticism but his version included African diaspora music as well as the old canonized Western touchstones from the long 19th century.  Scruton's version of Anglicanism outlined in Our Church was (and is) so relentlessly, ethnically "English" with its "loyal indifference" that it cannot account for the probability that there are more Anglicans (and more orthodox Anglicans) in Africa than in the entirety of England. Because Kenyan Christians were some of the first friends I made in my early college years and some other friends were Christians from Japan I have not defaulted to any surmise that "Christendom" is either Western or Eastern or necessarily a really Christian conception of fellowship.  

The Scrutonian highbrow elite Anglican art mysticism is something that has been dismantled by the neo-orthodox theologians via Barth and Brunner a century ago.  Scruton was more committed to being a culturally conservative Anglican than a doctrinally attentive Anglican. Jeremy Begbie has been writing about theology and music as a musician and Anglican theologian since before the dawn of this century.  It wouldn't seem to have been too hard for Scruton to have compared notes with Begbie on a confessional basis for aesthetic pluralism as reflecting the Anglican commitment to a middle path.  Scruton, famously, was committed to his highbrow elitist art mysticism and regarded Calvin as having harmed "civilization" by not counting marriage as a sacrament the way Catholics do. Never mind Zwingli or Bullinger, Scruton's Anglicanism saved Catholicism from the evil Puritans.

But Aquinas' exposition on intra-Trinitarian relationships suggests to me that if such multi-dimensional timespaces can coexist in the Trinity and if Victor Zuckerkandl or George Rochberg or, on point, Jason Yust can imagine that timespaces for rhythm, tonality and form can co-exist, then just on the basis of Christian dogmatics alone the neo-gnostic elitist art religions of Eurocentrists can't even be plausibly defended on the basis of the purported "Christendom" that is invoked to defend the standard canonized works.  As Jaroslav Pelikan put it in The Vindication of Tradition, intra-tradition criticism of traditions that harm rather than help are the well-spring of Jewish prophetic literature. 

So when I read Ewell's book I read it as making a contribution within that kind of intra-traditional critique of the poisonous impulses within a tradition. Ewell may be an atheist and that just makes it more paradoxical and amusing that when he writes about what anti-whiteness has done to blackness that it sounds remarkably similar to what African biblical scholars and theologians have described as the influence of powers and principalities.  For that matter, Ewell's working definitions of whiteness and anti-blackness could fit with ease into Walter Wink's working definition of powers, give or take a few caveats.

I'm entertaining quite seriously a proposal that Western art religion represents a power and principality in terms of writings on Ephesians interpretation from Esther Acolatse, Daniel K Darko, Robert Ewusie MOses, and even Clinton Arnold.  If contemporary anti-racists tend to be both secular and progressive they will likely not have bothered to read theologians and biblical scholars grappling with the Pauline concepts of powers and principalities because, eh, religion.  Yet both Jewish and Christian writings in the first few centuries of the common era grappled with shared identity amidst contrasting points of origin.  I'm working through Jacob L Wright's new book on why the Bible began, for instance.  

And all that is to say that I think it is possible to chart out a practical program within which vernacular and popular musical vocabularies can be fairly easily used as the building blocks of 18th century variants of large-scale form, thus Ragtime and Sonata Forms from 2020.  But I want to try to get more practical and map out ways in which ragtime and other popular musical vocabularies can be woven into different kinds of sonata forms.  I had no idea all the above books had been published around the time I was blogging my passion project in 2020.  Now that I have gotten a bit more up to speed on the range of theoretical/analytical options and tools at hand in United States scholarship on music theory and the intersections of "pop" and "classical" I think it would be benificial to draw upon that scholarship to synthesize a theoretical as well as a practical approach to making, well, ragtime and blues based sonata forms.  Maybe I"ll write a bit more about that next week when I have some time.  Meanwhile, that's a sampling of my reading from 2023 and some semi-organized thoughts on directions I'd like Wenatchee The Hatchet to move into in 2024. 

Plus blogging through Matiegka's guitar sonatas.  If none of that happens, happy holidays.  If it turns into blog posts between now and New Year's you'll know.  

UPDATED 12-30-2023

I figured I shouldn't have just put the title names in the post.  So here's an updated/expanded list of reading from the last two years with links to the books at their publication sites:

Johannes Quasten’s Music and Worship in Pagan and Christian Antiquity

Yoel Greenberg's How Sonata Forms (2022)

L Poundie Burstein's Journeys Through Galant Expositions (2020)

James Hepokoski's A Sonata Theory Handbook (December 2020)

Jason Yust's Organized Time: Rhythm, Tonality and Form (2018)

Philip Ewell's On Music Theory, and Making Music More Welcoming for Everyone (April 2023)

The Religious Philosophy of Roger Scruton  (2016)

Art and Politics in Roger Scruton's Conservative Philosophy (December 2022)

Frank Burch Brown's books 

Religious Aesthetics: A Theological Study of Making and Meaning (1993); 

Good Taste, Bad Taste, and Christian Taste: Aesthetics in Religious Life (2003); 

Inclusive yet Discerning: Navigating Worship Artfully (2009)

Chiara Bertoglio's Musical Scores and the Eternal Present: Theology, Time and Tolkien (August 2021)

Ferdia J Stone-Davis' Musical Beauty: Negotiating the Boundary between Subject and Object (2011)

Nicholas Wolterstorff’s Art in Action: Toward a Christian Aesthetic (1987)

                                    Art Rethought: The Social Practices of Art (2017)

John W Kleinig's The Lord's Song: The Basis, Function and Significance of Choral Music in Chronicles

Philip E. Stoltzfus' Theology as Performance: Music, Aesthetics, and God in Modern Theology (2006)

Jaroslav Pelikan’s Bach Among the Theologians

John Neubauer’s The Emancipation of Music from Language: Departure from Mimesis in Eighteenth-Century Aesthetics

Rob C Wegman’s The Crisis of Music in Early Modern Europe, 1470--1530

Percy Scholes’ The Puritans and Music in England and New England: A Contribution to the Cultural History of Two Nations

Kwame Bediako's Jesus and the Gospel in Africa

Richard Taruskin's Musical Times and Lives Examined (2023)

The Invention of Beethoven and Rossini: Historiography, Analysis, Criticism

Spencer Klavan's Music in Ancient Greece: Melody, Rhythm and Life

The Extravagance of Music by David Brown and Gavin Hopps

This addition doubles up as the bibliographic background to the new Appendix for Ragtime and Sonata Forms, too.

sometimes I wonder ... it seems like Christian nationalists in the Idaho realm want a fundamentalist diabology while having a Winkian exousiology

 Doug Wilson says he's a fundamentalist and believes there's a real Satan.  Something that's been nagging at me over the years is that the folks in Moscow, Idaho who are stumping for some kind of Christian nationalism seem to have a general commitment to a Merrill Unger style demonology for formal demonology ... but then for political theology they turn to conversations about how the powers (political powers) are created goods that are fallen but can be redeemed ... ?  If you take that kind of approach to political powers and empires and nation states aren't you pulling ideas out that are straight up Walter Wink?  

I'm not saying Wink's ideas came out of nowhere, they have some precedent in G B Caird's observations about an ambiguity about the powers and principalities in Pauline literature (the powers "could" be redeemed or reconciled, although given "reconciled" as a euphemism within Roman imperial parlance for "subjugated" there's a possibility that the powers being "reconciled" still fits snugly into a Christology within which the powers are overcome) ... but for self-identified Christian fundamentalists there's some explaining in order.  I can get mainline Protestants and progressive Christians staking out a Winkian spirit cosmology about the powers and how and why they arrive at that.  I can even give that a sympathetic reading via Anglican political historians David Nicholls and John Neville Figgis!  

But fundamentalists ... don't seem to have so easy a time explaining why they have their fundamentalist demonology (which largely developed into what it's known for being across medieval Catholic thought, an irony that was not lost on Jeffrey Burton Russell!) while also wanting to tout a Christian nationalism that seems to require an exousiology (theology of the powers) that comes straight out of Walter Wink.  I finished a pretty fun book by Matthew T Prior on Jacques Ellul's ideas about the powers (his exousiology) in the last month or so, and I read a really good book by Esther Acolatse on the reception history of powers and principalities in Ephesians interpretation with a proposal of an African realist approach to the powers.  I've been meaning to write about her book for a while.  I might have to finally write about it.  But I'm not as prolific a blogger as I once was.  Maybe it's a phase ... anyway ... I might have to write more about that set of topics some time later.  

Meanwhile, The Boy and the Heron is fun.  I might have to write some thoughts down about Miyazaki's latest film but I have a kind of holiday dithers about blogging this year. 

Annette Kruisbrink's Dances Nos. 1 & 2 from Five Dances for guitar and doublebass

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VGY75yiEwP0

These are as fun on amplified instruments as they are on unamplified instruments, no surprise. I have the scores for these and think of blogging through them now and then but I'm too backlogged on blogging through music stuff as is for the time being.  Still, I like to share links to Kruisbrink's music from time to time.  Hope you enjoy it. 

two pieces from Current Affairs discussing Philip Ewell's book, some semi-organized thoughts on epistemic trespass that happens when musicians and music theorists opine about religion

https://www.currentaffairs.org/2022/03/can-music-theory-education-overcome-its-whiteness-problem 

https://www.currentaffairs.org/2023/12/a-music-theorist-on-how-white-supremacist-assumptions-have-shaped-the-evaluation-of-music

...

But when people in the United States say “European” music, it’s really just a few places—German-speaking territories, prime among them—and we present it as the way we should think about music. And of course, the idea that pitch, the piano, and 12 tones in a system that emanated—to be blunt—from the Catholic Church is the system that represents all music, that’s kind of what we’ve been teaching. And, of course, colonization: you have to immediately think about the idea of presenting what were essentially white supremacists and patriarchal ideas across the globe in a colonial context. Of course, Christianity played a massive role.

I’m teaching Theory 1 currently, and to just look at all the music theory textbooks, literally last night I thought, Oh, my God, all of these hymns, all of these chorus, all these “Jesus, my pain and suffering”—there’s a lot of Christianity in the music theory textbooks, which I didn’t really dig into in my book. Maybe that’s the next project because that’s what we’re talking about: Catholic traditions morphing into German Protestant traditions of making music.

...

As Taruskin pointed out in The Ox, consolidating and ratifying liturgical music within Carolingian Catholicism is more or less why we began to have the musical notation traditions we have.  Now, obviously, just because those were the historical seeds of what Taruskin called the literate musical traditions of Europe and the United States doesn't mean for a second things stayed that way. Although Taruskin name-checks him, he doesn't mention that Charles Garside Jr. made a case that Zwingli and Bullinger, by banning music from church services, functionally created the realm of fully secular music that was not automatically in service of throne or altar.  

...

Ourkouzounov - Bulgaresque No. 1 for flute, guitar and doublebass

Atanas Ourkouzonov has written a chamber trio for flute, guitar and doublebass you can hear over here.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xL1D_3HobSQ

HT Jim West "Revenge Drives Lots of Research"

https://zwingliusredivivus.wordpress.com/2023/12/18/revenge-drives-lots-of-research/

John Borstlap's new book coming in 2024

Longtime readers know I have disagreed with Borstlap on a variety of topics over the years.  Nevertheless, I plan to read his forthcoming book and whether or not I agree with anything he says in it, congratulations on the new book. :) I read (and genuinely liked) Philip Ewell's book On Music Theory even though I disagree with a few things he said in that book.  I am looking forward to reading Borstlap's forthcoming book in 2024.

https://subterraneanreview.blogspot.com/2023/12/new-book.html

https://www.cambridgescholars.com/product/978-1-5275-5314-9

Regaining Classical Music's Relevance: Saving the Muse in a Troubled World

John Borstlap

ISBN: 1-5275-5314-0

ISBN13: 978-1-5275-5314-9

Release Date: 1st January 2024

Pages: 120

Price: £59.99

I might just have to save up my thoughts on both Ewell's book and Borstlap's book for later in 2024.  This year has been a kind of trippy year IRL. 

Alan Jacobs has a "Hey, wait a minute" moment reading Ted Gioia

https://blog.ayjay.org/multiple-social-diseases/

...  the various examples that Ted gives of this “deadly new lifestyle” point in varying and in some cases opposite directions. Some of these developments show people succumbing to Technopoly; others involve resistance to Technopoly. And that’s a big difference.

Remember that the self-published book Gioia has been running as a series at his Substack has a central thesis that musicology, all of it, has its real "secret" roots in sorcery.  Bryan Townsend once commented at his on blog (The Music Salon) that outside his genuine fields of expertise Gioia comes across like a writer who will torture the evidence until it gives him what he wants. 

Alan Jacobs may have not read it, but the grand dualism that fueled Gioia's book Music: A Subversive History is a glib one that assumes and presumes that the Pythagorean and Orphic traditions of music are all there is to be said about music across the world from the dawn of humanity.  Philip Ewell may have overstated the extent to which 19th century surmises among music theorists in European nations leaned on understandings of ancient Greece that were wishful thinking.  

On the other hand, in the realm of theology and theological aesthetics Philip E Stolzfus wrote an entire book pointing out that there have been fatal flaws in the Orphic and Pythagorean traditions from the beginning.  The Pythagorean speculations about music and number ratios reflecting cosmic order can't account for things like irrational numbers or quirks of the overtone series (of course Kyle Gann pointed out that the overtone series wouldn't be discovered until a century and a half after any Pythagoreans were speculating.  The Orpheus tradition is characterized by lots of blunt stereotypologies about gender and ethnic or racial authenticity on the one hand, and traffics in violent language or cults of violence on the other.  Just because Ted Gioia has more or less thrown in with Team Orpheus doesn't mean the version of Orphism he is peddling is historically plausible is probably the most diplomatic way to put it.  

I used to really enjoy reading Ted Gioia's work but these days I read him hardly at all, and it's as if any post he writes it's a coin toss whether it's going to be some version of "With horns like these you will gore the Arameans!"  Let the reader understand. 

Daniel Read's Sherburne on Nahum Tate's text "While Shepherds Watched Their Flocks By Night" a shape-note Christmas hymn

This is a Christmas song you have "probably" not heard but if you have heard it you'll not soon forget it.

Daniel Read wrote this a long time ago as a contribution to the North American shape-note tradition of hymnody.  It shows up often enough in recordings of shape-note hymnody.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IaET8SQ-RAU

What's tougher to find, though, is a performance of the text beyond the first verse.  For that you sometimes have to go to a more "classical" presentation of Read's work.  

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

https://hymnary.org/text/while_shepherds_watched_their_flocks_by/fulltexts

The text was written by Nahum Tate

multivalent terror and guilt in Godzilla Minus One

Godzilla Minus One rocks.  I'm going to write about it with no regard for whether or not this spoils things for you.  That's how Wenatchee The Hatchet writes about films.  If you don't want spoilers and have been thinking of maybe seeing this one go see it!  This is the Godzilla movie to watch if you've never watched a Godzilla movie before in your life.  

This is the kind of Godzilla movie Americans couldn't make if our lives depended on it.

So off to a spoiler-laden discussion of the film.

Godzilla Minus One rocks

There are benefits to living in the Emerald City, such as being able to catch a great Godzilla movie.  Will write about it later but for the time being gonna bask in the fun of having watched the newest one.  :)  

Alan Jacobs on the blogosphere "bring back the blog". Some of us never stopped blogging

https://blog.ayjay.org/bring-back-the-blog/

Anyone who has read this blog for a year knows that comments hardly ever get made here.  In some cases it was because I published posts and did not allow comments (and if you saw those posts you would know why).

What blogs lack in institutional vetting in most cases they can at least potentially make up for by being chronicles of events at the time those events happened.  In an age in which everything on the internet was never "eternal" and could be purged and redacted rapidly one of the unintentional providential quirks of Wenatchee The Hatchet was chronicling the scope and extent of Mars Hill Church leadership purging and redacting materials as different controversial elements, statements and policies came up.  But more pointedly for me, since I used to attend Mars Hill Church for years, was that I ended up documenting the "season" of chronic resignations and firings that may have made it impossible for Mars Hill public relations to spin the fact that the men who were leaving Mars Hill leadership weren't flakes or firebrands but men who had faithfully served for years with no controversy.

This early 2013 post comes to mind.

https://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2013/01/announcement-from-mark-driscoll-that.html

That one got 6,500 views or so since publication. If memory serves (and it may not a decade later) what probably got people's attention was breaking the news the day it was announced.  Thanks to a network of sources with access to The City I got the news and ran with it the week it was announced.  Eventually Team Driscoll presented the assertion that they got hacked but Wenatchee The Hatchet doesn't hack.  There was at least one private meeting associates got dragged into where Mars Hill leadership expressed an interest that they get me to stop blogging about Mars Hill or give up sources.  The associates, I understand, let it be known that that wasn't going to happen.

Citizen journalism has its limits but it has its values and for all their constraints (and they are considerable) blogging can fulfil citizen journalism well provided you have built trust with a network of sources and, crucially, make sure to document things for the record.  In my case it was documenting things for the record before things got purged that turned out to be valuable.  Alan Jacobs' points are noted but the benefit of the sheer tonnage of information published in blogs, and also sometimes in comments, is that people can cumulatively chronicle things before the people who can pull the strings on websites decide to do mass redaction or pull material completely.