Atanas Ourkouzounov's Prélude retrouvé hommage à Debussy w read-along score

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EGxwMgPQr2c

heard on a school bus ca. 1988 one drizzly Oregon morning

You're all a bunch of 
posers!  I liked White Lion
before they were cool!

***

The statement was unforgettable and the rejoinder was the same, "White Lion still sucks!"

Only decades later did I realize the lines about White Lion so easily lent themselves to being presented as a haiku

You can't fix a cracked window by staring at it through a mirror--a riff on metaphors used to describe the arts and criticism by way of windows, mirrors and lamps

 I am about to hyper-extend and torture a few metaphors here.  Debates and conversations about what the arts are and what they are expected to do have been going on for a couple of centuries. I have been reading books on theologies aesthetics, music theory and formal analysis, and a bit of critical race theory in the last year. I have been finding that a couple of meta-metaphors keep cropping up, such as the idea of the arts as a mirror and the idea of the arts as a lamp. I have also come across ideas that the arts, particularly music, can be a kind of window. Of course I have also read debates back and forth that, to stretch these metaphors in advance, ask whether the lamp has burned out, whether the window even opens up to anything, and whether the mirror distorts everything you might think you see through it.  

Take literary criticism, is it really even an art or is it a science? A science?  Who would even regard literary criticism as even potentially being scientific in any way?  If the scientific methods allow you to observe something, propose a hypothesis about it and then conduct experiments to prove or disprove the viability of the hypothesis how has literary criticism ever been a science?  There have been, obviously, those who have contended literary criticism is/was a science and yet that fad (however recurring) is part of the reception history of literary criticism as a discipline.  If the arts “are” mirrors then criticism may as well be the mirror through which you look at other mirrors.  Or is that stretching the metaphor too far already?

 

The metaphors will stretch a lot further as we move along.

links for the weekend, riffs on celibacy at Mere Orthodoxy, Freddie deBoer on the mania for the sexual orientation of cartoon characters as a wrong kind of entitlement, Alastair Roberts on the probably not-helpful nature of Aaron Renn's `negative world' taxonomy

A bit unusually for a weekend of posting I decided to retroactively make this the penultimate post of the night rather than the formal close.  I just felt that what I wrote in "You can't fix a cracked window by staring at it through a mirror" is more what I wanted to close the weekend with in publication order even if I 'technically' wrote this links for the weekend later.  That's how choosing a publication time can work.

There's variations on a theme for this one, though in the new iteration of Mere Orthodoxy you might not even be able to read the first link by the time you see this.  Stuff is now visible for a week and if you didn't catch it the week of you have to be a subscriber to read older entries.  Such is not the case with the materials in the chain. 

Ethan Hein's Joy to the Modes and a response post featuring Scott Joplin's The Entertainer in parallel minor, you probably have a really great melody on your hands if it can still sound good after modal mutation

https://www.ethanhein.com/wp/2024/joy-to-the-modes/

 

Ethan Hein has used “Joy to the World” as a way to demonstrate different modes running from Lydian to Locrian. He points out he’s not the first person to have done this but he has done it better.  I agree.

In his concluding paragraph Ethan wrote the following, “Does this have any musical value beyond music theory teaching?“  In a way the question to ask back is, “Does it have to?” Bit O remember when I was reading Elaine Sisman’s book on Haydn and variation technique I got to thinking about how frequently in 18^th century variation forms the major key theme showed up in parallel minor for at least one of the variations.  Minor key sets of variations have also featured parallel major variations, too, and Hein’s presentation of “Joy to the World” in every diatonic mode reveals just how indestructible the tune is.  

My take-away as a composer and musician is that subjecting your melody to the harshest and most abrupt modal mutations you can think of helps you figure out whether you have a solid melody or not.  If your melodic contour still sounds good in spite of being run through all the modal mutational paces that’s a good sign that you have a versatile tune with a memorable contour.  If you shift into another mode and you find the melody begins to swim a bit then it may be best as a constituent part of some musical thing with other ideas.  

I’ll give you an example off the top of my head, you can take the first two strains of Scott Joplin’s “The Entertainer” and play them in C minor and I submit (being the highly biased Scott Joplin fan that I am) that the music will still sound great.

I'll give you an example after the break. I've limited myself to strains A and B and I just whipped this up in the last hour and a half so if it doesn't look so great pardon the made-to-demonstrate-a-concept layout.

Robert Morris has stepped down from pastoring Gateway Church, revisiting his role in Mark Driscoll's 2014 resignation from Mars Hill and a brief survey of his endorsements of post-MH Driscoll books

At some point Mark Driscoll’s admirers in 2024 may have to take stock of the track records of the men who have publicly endorsed him.  It’s a topic I’ve written about in the past.  It can seem as though it's been more than just this year where men who lavished praise on Mark Driscoll in the past have done take-backs or have had skeletons in their closet about their own moral failings in public ministry or as authors.

Mark Driscoll in 1998 "not some pansy-ass therapist", Mark Driscoll in 2024 telling one of John Lindell's sons to "differentiate" (updated)

This observation has been incubating for a few weeks since the Driscoll/Lindell situation happened.

https://www.motherjones.com/politics/1998/07/generation/

…

By setting themselves up against their elders, postmoderns are ingeniously adding an anti-establishment spirit to their movement. “I really preach; it’s not just three points to a better self-esteem,” Driscoll says. “Megachurches have perfect services with perfect lighting. We’re a friggin’ mess.” Driscoll delivers his sermons largely off-the- cuff, and refuses to follow a point-by-point outline like most pastors at megachurches do. “I’m very confrontational,” he says, “not some pansy-ass therapist.”

…

That was one of Mark Driscoll's more famous quotes, for those who know who he is. 

Which is why it's interesting that here in 2024 rather than 1998 Driscoll seems to have gained new levels of mastery in therapeutic jargon according to John Lindell.

Observe the following coverage ... 

Douglas Wilson quips that an extremist is anyone who has not been denounced by the SPLC as if there were no left/progressive criticisms of the SPLC?

https://dougwils.com/books-and-culture/s7-engaging-the-culture/a-polarizing-invitation.html

…

I mean, at the end of the day, shouldn’t we polarizing extremists stick together? I mean, he clearly has some views that are pretty out there. My definition of an extremist would be someone who hasn’t been condemned by the SPLC.

 

As bloviating wind-ups to punchlines go this one was relatively short. 

The thing about Wilson’s would-be nyuk nyuk zinger about an extremist being someone who hasn't been condemned by the SPLC is this, that Nathan Robinson, over at Current Affairs, insisted that the fundraising tactics of the Southern Poverty Law Center amounted to alarmist scamming back in 2019.  If a democratic socialist “commie” was willing to say that then Wilson could aver that a broken clock is right once or twice a day depending on what kind of hour-counting you do. But to quip that an extremist is someone who hasn’t been condemned by the SPLC isn’t a tell, it’s showing the cards you plan to play.

 

Now, as for Robinson’s comments about the SPLC, here’s a comparatively short excerpt:

https://www.currentaffairs.org/news/2019/03/the-southern-poverty-law-center-is-everything-thats-wrong-with-liberalism

…

This whole SPLC set-up strikes me as fraudulent in the extreme. I don’t know how else to describe it. They have a team of people investigating these groups. They have to know that they’re inflating the danger. They know that when they report “over 1,000” hate groups in America, they’ve deliberately excluded membership numbers in order to sound as scary as possible. They’re perpetrating a deception, because they don’t want you to know that groups like the “Asatru Folk Assembly” are no political threat. The SPLC has continuously sent out terrifying lies to make old people part with their money. They’ve become fantastically wealthy from telling people that individual kooks in Kennesaw are “hate groups” on the march. And they’ve done far less with the money they receive than any other comparable civil rights group will do. To me, this is a scam bordering on criminal mail fraud. If you tell people things that aren’t true so that you can take their money and then not use that money for the thing you said you would use it for, you’re a fraudster. I hesitate to say that because I know lots of great people who have worked at the SPLC, and good work is done there. But the Morris Dees model is a scam: It finds as much “hate” as possible in order to make as much money as possible.

…

If Doug Wilson thinks the SPLC is everything wrong with liberalism Nathan Robinson paradoxically might agree, though for "possibly" different reasons.

 

And if the rhetoric of triangulating so that being denounced by “both sides” makes you a sensible centrist in crazy clown world then the Southern Poverty Law Center can just keep on keeping on.  If they've been zinged by Douglas Wilson from the right and Nathan Robinson from the left then, hey, that makes them centrist.  That's how the rhetorical gambit works.  

on why AI has not changed everything when it comes to music, drawing upon arguments from Gordon Graham, Andrei Orlov, and Guy L Beck on the distinctions between statues and idols in cultic activity

https://themusicsalon.blogspot.com/2024/06/friday-miscellanea_14.html
https://www.persuasion.community/p/music-just-changed-forever 

…
But look further down the corporate food-chain, and everyone else can see the benefits of AI clearly—mostly because they’re probably already routinely using ChatGPT on the sly to do their work.
For example, if your job involves boring admin tasks like reformatting address data to move it from one database to another, or building spreadsheets with complicated Excel formulas, or writing boilerplate legal disclaimers… then of course AI can make a big difference to how you work.
Even if AI was to develop no further than its capabilities today, it is already world-changing, as it represents billions of small, marginal gains in productivity. And I think this extends to AI-generated music. Even if AI music doesn’t improve any further, it already represents a profound change to the music industry.
Like the high status jobs I describe above, I don’t think it will make a huge difference at the “top” of the industry. Taylor Swift, Coldplay and, regrettably, U2, will continue to release albums and sell out stadiums. No one is going to stop you somehow enjoying Bono’s music.
But where I do think AI will make a difference are the billion other lower-grade circumstances where music is playing. If you need background music for your corporate health and safety training video, or you need a theme tune for your podcast, then it is a no-brainer to use AI instead of paying an expensive musician.
For better or worse then, AI will become the ubiquitous source of, essentially, “elevator music” for the entire world, and it will have terrible consequences for many people working in the music industry today. Musicians who earn a living making adverts or taking commissions from el-cheapo outsourcing websites like Fiverr are basically fucked—just like “low-level” visual artists and copywriters are by Midjourney and ChatGPT.
Nevertheless, I feel deeply, deeply conflicted.
On the one hand, yes, I place a high value on the sense of “authenticity” in the music I listen to. That’s why I’m a bad-ass punk rocker: To me, the purest form of musical expression is a circle pit in front of a sweaty band who can barely play their instruments, in a small, dank venue, where the toilets should be considered a public health hazard.
And because I’m straight-edge it is only in settings like this, waving my fist in the air as we collectively stick it to The Man, that I ever really experience something like a feeling of “transcendence.”

That’s the thing about Art Religion, it still has to take place in a cultic setting with the appropriate rituals observed and the right kinds of fellow believers able to feel the spirit.  While there may be some religious fundamentalists and transhumanists who believe otherwise, spirit possession has not historically been auto-generated by bot scripts and the same goes for personal gnostic apotheosis.

links for the weekend

Trolling ragebait is not just something that progressive political flacks and evangelical social conservative Christians do, it can also be described as the modus operandi of Norman Lebrecht at Slipped Disc. What is good for the goose, however, is not considered good for the gander.

 

According to his PR spin, Norman Lebrecht’s blog Slipped Disc is the world’s #1 cultural news site, drawing 2 million readers every month. Central to Norman's strategy for building an audience is the use of  controversial techniques alien to the predominantly conservative classical music world. These include salacious headlines, innuendo, gossip, and deliberate provocation. 

 

Meanwhile the new CEO of the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra Emma Stenning has embarked on a strategy for building an audience using controversial techniques alien to the predominantly conservative classical music world. These include multi-media concerts, photography during concerts, and drinks in the auditorium.

 

Slipped Disc's use of  alien audience-building techniques draws not a whisper of disapproval. But Ms Stenning's use of  alien audience-building techniques prompts howls of disapproval from the same predominantly conservative classical music world. Moreover the howls of disapproval are gleefully expressed on Slipped Disc, thereby reaching the impressively large readership created by alien audience building techniques.

 

You can read the post over here

https://www.overgrownpath.com/2024/05/a-tale-of-two-new-audiences.html

 

The phrase that comes to mind is double standards.  I have said this a few times in my life, hypocrisy (merely failing to live up to your best ideals) is something that reflects human frailty (I am a Calvinist, after all) but double standards are pernicious.  It’s one thing if you fail to live up to your best ideals but do not berate others for falling short of them, it’s another thing to rip into other people for failing to meet standards you don’t even feel bad about not keeping yourself. It’s also something else to regard things as acceptable tactics for a “win” for your causes that are unacceptable for others.  Wisdom is justified by her children, I suppose … .

 

The quest for ever more acoustically perfect performance halls is going to be a literal waste of money if the audience of the future has sustained hearing loss through use of, among other things digital devices and ear buds, thus the case at a post at On an Overgrown Path about a mistaken path advocates of classical music make if they stick to an older paradigm of an acoustically perfect performance hall.

https://www.overgrownpath.com/2024/03/why-new-audiences-are-deaf-to-classical.html

 

I am generally loathe to wade into political commentary but … I’ve had relatives who at different times pined for a pro-Trump coup and thought 2020 was “stolen”.  I am not convinced it was just as I am not convinced Russia hacked 2016.  Questioning the legitimacy of the norms and institutions of the United States when outcomes are undesirable is not responsible engagement in the political life of the republic.  If people rip on the legitimacy of the Electoral College as the instrument of white supremacists that precludes major cities from ruling the United States they can’t be upset if Trump ignored norms and institutions in selecting candidates for cabinet positions.  If the two parties in the duopoly have partisans so selectively eager to ignore precedent and procedure I don’t have much problem suggesting the United States is ultimately a culturally spent force and that the DNC and GOP both have variants of a corrupt and corrupting MAGA mentality.

 

Which is a transition to a piece at Current Affairs contending that Democratic power broker contempt for voters at large is not going to do them favors in 2024.

 

https://www.currentaffairs.org/news/2024/05/democrats-contempt-will-not-win-you-the-election

 

As for the recent conviction … to go by the X contributions of folks in the Christ Church and formerly Mars Hill orbits …

https://x.com/douglaswils/status/1796302450758181136

President Trump was just convicted of a number of felony counts in NYC, in a trial that was as stacked as a leaning tier of buttermilks. 1/7

3:07 PM · May 30, 2024

 

https://x.com/JustinJDean/status/1796310004724642052

Justin Dean 🇺🇸

@JustinJDean

More MAGA now than ever! #Trump2024

3:37 PM · May 30, 2024

 

https://x.com/PastorMark/status/1796341284309008814

Pastor Mark Driscoll

@PastorMark

Lord Jesus we would humbly request that you return before November 5 🙏

5:41 PM · May 30, 2024

A person who has chronicled Mark Driscoll’s life and times might get the impression that 20 years ago he thought Doug Wilson’s books on men and masculinity were great but here we are decades later and what’s this?  Mark Driscoll says he’s written his first ever book on masculinity?

 

https://x.com/PastorMark/status/1797780134499684526

Pastor Mark Driscoll

@PastorMark

Everyone has been asking the question "what is a woman?" and I think it's also time we asked "what is a man?"

 

I'm just wrote my first ever book on masculinity, and it certainly answers this question. Act Like A Man is available for preorders TODAY. Check out my linktree for more.

4:59 PM · Jun 3, 2024

 

One of the fringe benefits of having never been on Twitter since even before it became X is that it’s not that hard to keep tabs on this guy.  Just as Win Your War would seem superfluous if Mark Driscoll thought enough of Karl Payne’s book on spiritual warfare to endorse it, it would seem that if Doug Wilson’s books on masculinity were as good as Driscoll says he wouldn’t have any reason to write his own book about topics Douglas Wilson has already covered.

It will probably be cheaper than the late David Cline's final book

Play the Man! Biblical Imperatives to Masculinity

By David J.A. Clines

https://sheffieldphoenix.com/product/play-the-man-biblical-imperatives-to-masculinity/

 

music blogging topics I let drop (but want to get back to) a bit of a weekend sprawl

I never did manage to write about Ethan Iverson's Piano Sonata.  I really do want to fix that.

Same for continuing the Matiegka 2023 project here in June 2024.  Grand Sonata II is still next in line for that project.  When it hit me that I've written 91 pages worth of material just getting from Matiegka's Op. 16 to Grand Sonata I it struck me that this is a long-haul project.

But I've been distracted by reading projects.  There's a new book by Guy L Beck out I just finished recently and I'm finishing up an older one by Gordon Graham and both of the books are ones that I want to do some writing about.  I learned of the Graham via Jeremy Begbie's newest book Abundantly More.  Anglican and Dutch Reformed theological aesthetics have been in my reading roster lately and there's interesting stuff to consider.

But it has meant I have not done the concrete writing about actual pieces of music and discussing what the scores can show us about the music (as sound, of course).  I want to get back to that but life IRL has been tumultuous and weird from time to time.  Things unexpectedly crop up from old sets of topics (that conference thing was, so to speak, thrust upon my attention).  

I have thought about revisiting ideas from Ragtime and Sonata Forms again by way of breaking down scripts of ragtime and blues based sonatas explicable in terms of the five types in Hepokoski and Darcy's Elements of Sonata Theory.  This gets back to thoughts I have had about Philip Ewell's book and Ethan Iverson's reaction to said book.  In a way I understand why a jazz pianist would think that everybody should learn jazz drums.  As a guitarist I don't really care and a drummer buddy of mine once said any knucklehead can hit the drum head but the art is in the release that allows the sound to be what it is. That rule is vital if, for instance, you wanted to compose an entire cycle of works for solo guitar using only natural harmonics.  But I don't feel I missed out in not learning to play drums.

In a way ... Iverson's comment reminded me of a trend I have seen in musicological polemics which is roughly ...

the future of musical art is going to come from respecting my team/position/idea and ... maybe ... not yours

Having seen a lifetime of culturally conservative Christian punditry and metacultural speculation I keep coming back to the acid axiom I penned a few years ago about how metacultural speculation is not cultural production.  To put it more brutally, bloviating about culture is not the same thing as making anything people want to consume and, yeah, I know that word "consume" comes off as bad but we live in a world in which "consume" is what we're stuck with.  The books by Gordon Graham and Guy Beck I am reading these days touch on some of the reasons but I don't think anyone did better than Theodor Adorno in Aesthetic Theory when he remarked that the price the arts paid for being liberated from theology, for being extricated from being used in the service of throne and altar is to have a crisis of legitimacy and purpose from which it can never recover.  Adorno was disastrously wrong about all kinds of things but he was right, I think, to point out the signal failure of all forms of art mysticism and art religious dogmatics from the long 19th century.  As Jacques Ellul put it in The Empire of Non-Sense, Adorno worked out that the arts were either propaganda for a state apparatus or hermetically isolated technocratic experiments that only elite/elitists could comprehend.

But let me get back to the axiomatic stuff.  There is a lot of cyber ink spilled over what I would say is the impulse to worldview vindication.  Christian authors steeped in a post Kuyperian set of polemics, but especially Van Tillians can get this idea that worldview is everything and your worldview shapes how you approach the arts and if you have the wrong worldview it will impact your art.

"My" worldview will open up unheard of vistas of creativity and ... eh ... maybe I'm not sure about yours but if you're some woke commie hater of America you can't be good.  That's the gist of a lot of stuff I've read over the course of my life.  Well one of my favorite composers was the Soviet Dmitri Shostakovich who was a communist and atheist.  One of my favorite filmmakers, Hayao Miyazaki went from being a Marxist to a pantheist (I'm neither).  When the Berlin Wall came down what hit me in that moment was the Cold War was over and what this meant to me was there wasn't any reason to feel obliged to reject the artistic expressions of people whose religious or political views I sharply disagreed with if I might be able to find something beautiful or inspiring in their work.  

In other words, if I was going to explore things in the arts of whatever kind worldview vindication was not the point of exploration.  There are Christian artists and writers who will say that but as it was in the days when Archer was still worth watching, "Well, you say that ... "  

Something I've been thinking about that Iverson's writing touches upon in the most indirect way is considering how on either side of the Iron Curtain black music was only appraised in terms of whether it served or subverted capitalism.  In other words, the merits of the musics themselves were not as important as the political points that could be scored.  For partisans of highbrow art asceticism or art mysticism black popular musical styles were not even Art.  Now I think those kinds of self-deluded morons speak for themselves too freely but I am trying to temper my words.

What I mean to say there is the guys who believe in highbrow art religion have a simulation of high liturgical sacramentalism who couldn't usually even begin to explain eucharistic theories because they are invoking jargon to hide the fact that their art mysticism for Beethoven's 9th is not necessarily different from a dopamine high Swifties might experience hearing her in concert.  There you go, I said it.  The "science" of art music could be as applicable to the science of people who actually enjoy listening to Imagine Dragons.  

I can't stand the band but I don't want to tell people who actually want to listen to them they shouldn't be doing so.  I will just hate the band in my heart, by and large.

Evangelicalism was full of "if you liked X then you'll like Y" and so, in a way, is neither here nor there.

But when people debate what it would take for black music to be taken seriously the elephant that seems to be in the room is which socio-economic political order is ultimately going to be vindicated by these partisans getting what they want.  It can seem as though liberalism or "tradition" are the engines at work, or racial respect which, valuable as that can be, could paradoxically be stuck playing by the rules laid out by the 19th century racists.  That is, I think, maybe what Iverson's post attempted to get at but didn't quite get at. 

https://iverson.substack.com/p/tt-257-new-book-by-philip-ewell?triedRedirect=true

My contention here has been that the boundaries between all styles and forms of music in the trans-Atlantic world are considerably more permeable than its often frenzied partisans would have us believe.  We live in the era of equal-tempered tuning and yet we live in an era in which music partisans write and speak as if there were unbridgeable boundaries and barriers between this kind of music and that kind of music.  But if we're not going to go all microtonal/just intonationism and are living in a musical trans-Atlantic trans-cultural norm in which there's a standard tuning now is the time to demonstrate how permeable all the musical boundaries erected by scholars (of all races, classes and political and doctrinal loyalties) seem eager to keep creating and defending actually are.  Musicians seem to come more easily to this impulse than theorists.  

But musicians who act as if theorists don't have a role to play sell them short.  Theorists have a vital role to play.  I have rambled a long time at this blog and I have never shied away from theories when I think they can explain things.  Theories about how we perceive time and space and the experience of living in our own bodies are important.  I'm slowly incubating what I hope can be a project where I compare concepts of musical time and space in Adorno, Zuckerkandl, Rochberg, Scruton, and Yust to Trinitarian dogmatic speculation from John of Damascus and Thomas Aquinas and Herman Bavinck and others using a central metaphor of proprioception.  To me, at least, proprioception is the fulcrum metaphor that lets me translate musings on musical time and space to the way we engage our knowledge that we've no choice but to have somatically mediated and someone like the Scottish Reformed theologian Thomas Torrance urging us to reject the receptacle theory of space and time seems like a natural candidate for threading all of this stuff together.  

Why?  Because if you're making music as sonic architecture the tent can be made out of canvas or bricks of clay or logs or whatever.  The tent is still the tent.  The classical snobs pretend that there's something "inherent" to "pop" that makes it incompatible with "classical" approaches to form but this is where one of the central metaphors of the philosophy of music falters.  You can make a tent from all kinds of materials.  If music is a language we know languages can be translated.  Jason Ananda Josephson Storm has written that we know languages can be translated and if you really don't believe this then don't ask where the toilet is when you're traveling abroad.  Your pet dog or cat can understand "sit" but there are scholars who claim languages can only be translated system to system?  This would be where Johann Gottfried Herder the pastor, translator, aesthetic pluralist and theologian is not necessarily the same as the posterboy or scapegoat for German jingoistic nationalism shows up.  My disagreement with someone like John Borstlap is that he has no problem with poisoning the well for Herder yet turns around and has nice words for Schleiermacher and yet historians of religion and theology would point out that significant breakthroughs in Schleiermacher's thought depended on Herder's hermeneutics.  

But Herder's work as a translator suggests that there's room for translating the literary art of one language into the literary art of another.  Partisans of classical music who don't want it to be infected with the vernaculars may as well be like revanchist Catholics who want their Tridentine rite full old church Latin with no concessions to translation.  Ratzinger at one point seemed to regard those kinds of guys as pining for a Latin rite Mass that exists only in their heads.  Even Benedict XVI seemed to grant the necessity of vernacular liturgy.  Meanwhile there are fans of classical music who turn out, on the issue of translation, to be more reactionary and entrenched than Pope Benedict XVI.  Yeah, maybe that's a cheap shot zinger but I think if you've read this far you get the idea I'm aiming at.  

So, yeah, I have not written as much as I thought I would about specific pieces of music but I do hope to eventually get back to that.  Meanwhile ... scattered updates here and there. 

UPDATE 10:19pm

I finished a book by Gordon Graham on the question of whether or not art has actually worked as a substitute for religion.   It might not shock readers to discover a Scottish Anglican/Episcopalian would conclude that ultimately the answer to that question is a series of tidal waves that say "No" but along the way he hits Nietszche and Schopenhauer and Arthur Danto and Roger Scruton to explain why he has reached this conclusion and that overlaps with ideas discussed from Guy L Beck in a more recent book (Beck lectures on Hindu and Buddhist thought and so is coming at the nexus of musicology and religion from another direction).  

That Graham cites a passage where Roger Scruton proposed that art had to have some role in the redemption of the commonplace ... I could write a few things about that.  

But I might need another day or so to think about this stuff more.

Also, Dune Part 2 was ... alright ... but eh ... I might or might not write about how contemporary cinema seems so post-Campbell's monomyth that even attempts to subvert Campbell's daffiest trope by way of adapting a Frank Herbert story that set out explicitly to show that "chosen ones" tend to be tyrants fomenting bloodshed is stuck within a post Star Wars reception history.

Eh, I might or might not write about that.  

Freddie deBoer on Ibram Kendi's Motte and Bailey and on the business-as-usual nature of the technique in the ideas industry

 

https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/i-think-ibram-kendi-is-just-an-academic

… Now, the man himself has made it clear that it’s not - and in doing so extinguished everything that made the idea provocative in the first place! It’s a classic motte-and-bailey. “Some ideas support racism while others are contrary to racism” just isn’t saying much, certainly not enough to get you on late night talk shows and earn you an enviably lucrative spot on the paid speaking circuit. So he built his reputation on the bailey, the controversializing expression of the idea, and now that he’s found himself the subject of relentless criticism, he’s retreated to the motte, the unobjectionable version of his major idea.

The thing is… this is kind of how the ideas industry functions in general, these days. Many, many arguments that find their way into the public consciousness have this general two-faced nature, a more incendiary side to generate publicity and a more equivocal side to evade criticism. I don’t exonerate Kendi for the deficiencies of his thinking, at all, but I do think that advancing a more provocative version of academic ideas as a way to garner attention and then retreating to a more limited and qualified version of those ideas when challenged is just how it works. (I will leave it to you to determine if things have always been this way or if this is a new development.) And yeah, I mean… alas. This stuff isn’t good. But it’s how things work. It happened with power posing. It happened with nudging. It happened with the importance of sleep. It’s not good, a problem for academia. But nothing nefarious. And anyway, Kendi’s claim is political and philosophical, not empirical, so the boundaries of the truth are necessarily more porous. He’s also asserting, in the quote, that he never meant to be construed as believing the more reckless version, although if you’ve followed his work for the past half-decade, you may find that as hard to believe as I do.

... 

The conclusion:

Look, Kendi is an extremely visible public figure who has voluntarily engaged in issues of controversy as a public intellectual, and his ideas are of course worth engaging with critically. He’s also become a wealthy man who does not need protection from the likes of me. I personally was not impressed by Stamped From the Beginning, which has that aggravating pop-academic quality and ultimately says little that’s fresh. I’m not here to tell you not to criticize Kendi. I just think he’s a mostly-harmless dork professor, again like so many I’ve known, clearly more comfortable in academia than in the more intense media environment he’s found himself in. His struggles running a too-rich research center reflect very quotidian realities of academic bureaucratic bloat and how ill-equipped many PhDs are to run a team or balance books. I’d call him a victim of his own success, but he’s doing fine and he’s not a victim. Instead I think he’s a fairly typical academic celebrity with more of a talent for provocation than for coming up with constructive solutions, a guy with some dopey opinions and some inoffensive ones that have become MAGA ragebait. He’s mildly hapless in the way of professors, and someone who rode the wave in a profoundly weird and quickly-receding moment in history.

Ferdinand Rebay's music for clarinet and guitar, Brilliant Classics features an album's worth of music on their Youtube channel

Brilliant Classics has a Youtube channel, at which you can hear the complete music for clarinet and guitar composed by the Austrian pianist and composer Ferdinand Rebay.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x6A_3Zwe7Pw

I only gave three of the duets relatively brief discussions back in 2012 here at the blog and if you want to go read those posts I've added a tag.

https://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/search/label/clarinet%20and%20guitar

Ivan Wyschnegradsky: Prélude et Fugue, Op.21

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eFmMxDF7w0M

In case you've never heard music composed in quarter-tones, here's a little prelude and fugue by a composer as a sampler.  Sometimes I'm in the mood for this kind of music and other times not.  Lou Harrison's music for just-intonation guitar is more fun, by a long shot, and I also prefer Ben Johnston's string quartets but Wyschnegradsky is fun to listen to from time to time.

Anton Reicha pointed out in his Treatise on Melody that there were operatic singers who would embellish melodic lines with quarter tones and he extolled the practice.  It was not necessarily notated in any score but it was something you could hear if you were there and it was done.  

Maria Zhirnykh plays Fugue in E minor by Nikita Koshkin

I come to this belatedly (the video went up ten months ago)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uAEapb69jhc

It's a good performance of a good piece and I, of course, have analyzed the prelude and fugue as part of my series on Koshkin's 24 Preludes and Fugues.  I eagerly anticipate the second half of the cycle getting recorded.

https://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2020/02/nikita-koshkins-24-preludes-and-fugues_25.html

https://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/search/label/Koshkin%2024%20preludes%20and%20fugues

100 years ago today ... the Indian Citizenship Act was signed

https://www.visitthecapitol.gov/artifact/act-authorize-secretary-interior-issue-certificates-citizenship-indians-june-2-1924 

https://www.archives.gov/files/historical-docs/doc-content/images/indian-citizenship-act-1924.pdf

A century ago Native Americans who were not already citizens were granted legal citizenship.

Nadia Borislova performing three movements from her Butterfly Suite for solo guitar

I don't remember if I'd shared this before but I liked Nadia Borislova's Butterfly Suite for solo guitar when I heard it years and years ago.  It took me time to find that there was a video of part of the piece online.  So here you go.

Audio is less than ideal but you can see and hear her play her own work.

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

There are a few extended techniques in this suite.  In the first extract she strikes the strings behind the nut. 

Check out the extended technique in the second excerpt where she drags the low E to rest against the frets on the fingerboard to create a droning buzz tone. In the third excerpt she sustains single string trills while playing punctuating lines in right-hand harmonics.  

She was a guitarist composer I mentioned briefly here at Wenatchee The Hatchet all the way back in 2006mentioned briefly here at Wenatchee The Hatchet all the way back in 2006.

By the way, she does have a Youtube channel

https://www.youtube.com/@nadiaborislova6496/featured

some brief riffs on Alan Jacobs' brief riffs on how some academics may seriously encourage the common student herd to embrace cliches in thought because most of them will not be truly independent thinkers and the world isn't bettered by that

https://www.theguardian.com/books/article/2024/may/20/the-big-idea-the-simple-trick-that-can-sabotage-your-critical-thinking

https://www.chronicle.com/article/in-praise-of-the-academic-cliche

https://www.persuasion.community/p/deep-reading-will-save-your-soul

https://blog.ayjay.org/cliches-yes-or-no/

… it’s worth noting here that two years ago the Chronicle of Higher Education, of all journals, published an essay by Julie Stone Peters, a Professor of English and comparative literature at Columbia, arguing that thought-terminating clichés are super-cool because they are politically effective and because students aren’t smart enough to do any better. No, seriously:

Not all of our students will be original thinkers, nor should they all be. A world of original thinkers, all thinking wholly inimitable thoughts, could never get anything done. For that we need unoriginal thinkers, hordes of them, cloning ideas by the score and broadcasting them to every corner of our virtual world. What better device for idea-cloning than the cliché? 

Note here a doozy of a false dichotomy: either applaud clichés or have a world of people with “whole inimitable thoughts.” Sure, Peters concedes, sometimes academic clichés “may go rogue” and “might explode on you.” But that’s the chance she is willing to take. The alternative — expecting students to think and trying to help them do that better — is so much more unpleasant. I have to give Peters credit for being willing to say the quiet part out loud, because this really is how a lot of professors think. 

This might be a good time to remind y’all that, as William Deresiewicz writes, some interesting groups of people are abandoning universities not because they disdain the humanities and the liberal arts, but because they love them

 

I got an undergraduate degree but never moved on to graduate studies, either in music, biblical studies or theology.  That hasn't kept me from reading books by Jason Yust, James Hepokoski, William Caplin, Warren Darcy, Richard Taruskin, Susan McClary, Yoel Greenberg, L Poundie Burstein and others in music.  It hasn't kept me from reading N. T. Wright, Emil Brunner, Ephraim Radner, Gordon Fee, V Phillips Long, Esther Acolatse, Susan R Garrett, Jacob L Wright, Esther Hamori, Niels Peter Lemche, John Calvin, Augustine and so on.  It has also not kept me from reading Richard Bauckham, Jeremy Begbie, Roger Scruton, Edmund Burke, Solzhenitsyn, the Hitchens brother (Christopher and Peter), Dostoevsky, Kafka, Melville, or Eliot, Frost, Stevens, Dickenson, Denise Levertov and ... a pile of Rumiko Takahashi.

So, sure, I get that people are arguing that you can abandon the university because you love the humanities and the liberal arts.  As I'm reading Gordon Graham on art and religion and how and whether they are related to each other the concept that comes to mind is ascetism.  There's a kind of devotion to the humanities and the liberal arts that Graham describes as ascetism and another approach that amounts to mysticism.  I am not going to attempt to unpackage all of that in what is supposed to be a brief blog post  There are those who embrace the arts as a kind of oasis from the vicissitudes of the world and others who believe the arts must hold up a proverbial mirror to society or catalyze change.

I am more skeptical about Deresiewicz' variation of Old Time Art Religion as I get older.  What progressives who are dismissed or even demonized as woke-scolds seem to want is for the Enlightenment values of liberalism and free thought and egalitarianism to be more consistently applied, thus a couple of books by Charles W Mills.  As art religion goes I have floated the idea that progressives want a kind of Lutheran revolt or a series of Protestant reformations that advocate for what in Protestant thought is called the priesthood of all believers.  Defenders of the Great Tradition can be seen, in this openly polemical light, as the arch-clericalists of higher education.  

And in a way those who bypass the formal university system from the proverbial left or right may do so for potentially, weirdly, parallel reasons.  

What Alan Jacobs didn't write but which I will is to point out that when a scholar contends that the common rabble need to think in cliches that scholars feed them so as to be useful to society that's the kind of thing that gets denounced if it were promulgated by, say, the late Roger Scruton.  The culture wars are, if anything, battles over whose cliches prevail.  As Douglas Wilson keeps insisting, the fights are over who gets to define the words in the dictionary.  "Everybody knows this" would be a thought-terminating cliche here, wouldn't it?   

One of the reasons I'm not much for Romanticism is because many of the Romantics abjured "convention".  Leonard Meyer dryly and brilliantly pointed out that the Romantics wanted to profess a rejection of convention while they toiled away at disguising how much they relied upon it. In Romantic era music the way conventions were generally disguised was through a few gentle adjustments in harmonies here and there but, portentiously and obviously, to ...

BIGGIE-SIZE EVERYTHING SO THAT THE LISTENER WOULDN'T CATCH ON TO HOW ROTE THE STRUCTURES AND GESTURES ACTUALLY ARE. 

You see what I did there and it's goofy in print because the equivalent of biggie-sizing proportions and words in text comes across as, well, the ALL CAPS ERA OF THE INTERNET AND DON'T READ THE COMMENTS FOR ANYTHING YOU SEE ONLINE.  

And with good cause. 

Susan McClary's Conventional Wisdom is an easy book for conservatives and defenders of The Great Tradition to rip on but if they have never read the book one of her arguments was that convention does not have to be viewed as intrinsically bad, uncreative, stultifying or unusable for musical art.  Wasn't high modernism the moment in classical music where every conceivable convention was damned and rejected and how much of that music do people actively seek out?  What if conventions have, you know wisdom to them?  

I am inclined to agree and I think that gently recalibrating and recontextualizing schemas and conventions to newer vocabularies is worth trying out.  To put this the way a could-have been student of theology and biblical literature might, we can make it too easy to slam the German nationalist cheerleader Johann Gottfried Herder and ignore that he was an aesthetic pluralist, too, and a translator who advised Germans to stop doing lame and tepid knock-offs of "classical" literature and art and to trust more in the possibilities and potential of their own regional folklore.  Black composers who have explored how to develop African diaspora folk musics in the context of classical music are, perhaps ironically, simply doing what Herder would've advised every musician try.  Was Herder capable of being jingoistic?  Yeah ... but everyone is when they take a nationalist path going to be vulnerable to that temptation.  

Jaroslav Pelikan pointed out that intra-traditional critique is part of tradition.  Something else that is part of tradition (at least Protestant tradition!) is to translate ancient biblical texts into the vernacular so that everyone can read and understand the truths and values and narratives of the sacred texts.  Partisans of art religion and art mysticism who think Art can do for Religion what religious dogmas can no longer do tend, in my experience, to be incompetents on dogmatics and religious literature as a matter of choice, and so do not realize that if you look at the history of sacred song you will find a propensity to translate not just the sacred texts but to translate those texts into vernacular musics as well as vernacular languages.  

My composition teacher knew I wanted to explore how to write ragtime sonatas and blues sonatas and to mix Thelonious Monk with Haydn and his advice was that I not go to grad school or to be very careful where I went because even in the early to mid 1990s the dominance of integral serialism in graduate and post-graduate music studies was still looming large.  I took my teacher's advice.  Finding ways to synthesize ragtime and blues and slide guitar riffs with sonata forms and fugues has been a decades-long journey for me, one that I am now pretty sure I couldn't have possibly taken if I had actually gone to grad school in music.

But here's the thing, I don't disbelieve in academic studies of musicology.  I think music theory and meta-theoretical work on music is vital.  Why? Because whether you examine your theories or not they inform the defaults of how you think.  New Testament instruction talks about how you should not be conformed to the pattern of this world but be transformed by the renewing of your mind.  There are kinds of Art Religion I simply regard as worldly wisdom.  When I hear people say blues and rock "Broke all the rules" of classical music I am tempted to think those kinds of people who wield that thought-terminating cliche have not spent any time very deeply engaged in "classical music" from the fifteenth through twenty-first centuries.  In a similar way I regard it as a thought-terminating cliche whenever anyone says that blues and jazz and rock riffs and harmonies and rhythms are incompatible with "large-scale form" or "musical argument" because those kinds of partisans are advertising their antipathy toward and ignorance of the possibilities of the musical material.  These are the kinds of conventions that, on paper, the Romantics were against but partisans of Romanticism and a new Romanticism paradoxically embrace precisely the thought-terminating cliches about musical styles and possibilities that Romantics from the 19th century would reject on paper ... but then ... as Leonard Meyer put it, Romanticism in music was about disguising the reliance on convention in practice while castigating convention as rhetoric.

One of the main reasons why I don't think we  need a new Romanticism.  We've got enough racist and essentialist claptrap from Romanticism 1.0 that we don't need 2.0.  Art Religion was one of the worst things about Romanticism 1.0 and its partisans tend to not even get what it was religion did and does for which Art is supposedly a substitute ... but that's a set of ideas to be saved for another time.

Meanwhile, I think it can be taken as given that black Pentecostalism gave us rock `n roll like Anthony Heilbut said back in the 1970s and that the black Pentecostal street preacher and guitarist Blind Willie Johnson made music that is just as worth hearing almost a century after his death as it was when he first recorded it.  

Maybe not all students will be "thought leaders" but what putative (and often self-selected) thought-leaders can try to do is say, "Hey, let's explore possibility X."

If that's not happening in universities that doesn't mean it can't possibly happen in universities.  Just because people foreswear the higher education path does not ensure they have enough of that proverbial genius to "break all the rules" on pure artistic visionary magic.  At some point revolutionary praxis involves some actual theory, and a lot of would-be revolutions based on theory have floundered in music.  It might be beneficial to go make the new music and theorize post hoc like, you know, has tended to be the norm in all centuries except maybe the 20th.  

Ethan Hein discusses the mystery of why the bottom number in a time signature is what it is, and why there seem to be no good explanations for what that number actually indicates

https://www.ethanhein.com/wp/2024/the-bottom-number-in-time-signatures-has-always-confused-me/#more-29476

Explaining time signatures is hardly easy and why the bottom number is what it is is does seem stranger than the top number.  If you have a measure of 7/4 then you can say there are 7 beats and that they are quarter notes.  That's simple, but Ethan Hein points out that no one easily explains why that bottom number is what it is. I could say that the bottom number indicates, often, the foundational metrical unit that establishes pulse but the reason that becomes circular quickly is because there are so many ways to notate musical passages it's not a given that notation itself tells you what meter you're in.

Danuta Mirka, in her book Metric Manipulations In Haydn and Mozart : Chamber Music For Strings, 1787-1791, points out that in the 18th century composers would stick with the established meter no matter how many times or in what ways they actually changed meters in a written work.  In other words, you cannot assume that a composer won't shift out of 4/4 into 5/8 or 6/8 or 3/4 or even potentially 11/16 and 13/16 in a work just because they stay resolutely in 4/4 on the written page.  Thanks to accent marks and other articulations, as well as notational conventions, it was possible to create metrical changes in a work despite never changing the written meter.  Music in the 18th century was resolutely monometric in notation even though metrical changes and outright changes of meter happened in practice.  I'm still early into the book enough I can't share examples cited beyond the fact that she works with two of the biggest usual suspects in the history of music theory, Haydn and Mozart.

I had to go with a Theodore Front link because the Oxford University Press link kept having issues

https://global.oup.com/academic/product/metric-manipulations-in-haydn-and-mozart-9780195384925

Speaking from personal experience the other thing about notating meter is that not all composers feel it's worth it to notate something in, say, 11/4.  Shostakovich didn't always write out grooves in 5/4 or when he could switch back and forth between 2/4 and 3/4 as he does in the third movement of his Third String Quartet.  

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G27ERARI4z4&t=743s

Or you could have a passage where a cello barrels along in 2/4 while other strings in Bartok's String Quartet No. 4 shift into 3/4 before the music moves from meters like 2/4 and 3/4 (at the same time) to 5/8.  This part of Bartok's Third String Quartet has a killer pizzicato cello solo. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Knd04_iYTGc&t=290s

But you can see, if you read along with Bartok's score, he'll have whiplash meter shifts between 3/8 and 2/4.  My memory may be fuzzy here but I vaguely recall the composer Paul Creston, in his book Principles of Rhythm, complained that there were huge spans of music in Bartok's string quartets where he could have notated things in 4/4 and used judicious accent marks rather than endlessly changing meters in every stave for every instrument.  Good luck finding a copy of the Creston!  If I hadn't read it decades ago I couldn't even just allude to it now.  Creston's point stands, there are all kinds of ways you can notate a single passage and some composers go for the hard bordering on inscrutable way to write out a score and others stay four-on-the-floor in their scores even if they introduce meter changes.

That the bottom number in a meter conveyed tempo information would generally true right up to about the 20th century but from probably 1930 onward all bets are off.  For instance, take 3/2.  I know from my experience in choral singing, the Alice Parker arrangement of "Hark! I hear the harps eternal", which is scored in 3/2 but does not feel all that slow, at least for a choral work.  You can see the score in the link below.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fglrDoLN7nE

The arrangement has a light, airy element to it yet it doesn't sound slow, and it sure doesn't feel slow if you try singing it. 

Parker packs in contrapuntally dense call and response passages just barely over a minute into an already short arrangement.  There's such a thing as going with the larger numeric value (the half note) because you don't want to scare your sight-reading singers to death with needlessly small note values.  And if you want the music performed with swing (whether or not that happens varies from ensemble to ensemble and conductor to conductor and Parker's arrangement withstands either approach because she's that great a choral arranger), then going with the larger note value lets you gauge how much you want (or even can) swing in the arrangement depending on the exigences of how good your singers are.

For 5/8, I know he's hardly beloved even among fans of classical music but one of the more memorable entries in 5/8 I've heard is the Fuga in G from Paul Hindemith's Ludus Tonalis.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F4PATHcm5EM

But don't think he was the first or only composer to write a 5/8 fugue because Anton Reicha's Op. 36, No. 20 Fugue in A major predates Hindemith by more than a century.

https://imslp.org/wiki/36_Fugues_pour_Piano%2C_Op.36_(Reicha%2C_Anton)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ZYx_KHReQU

Reicha's fugues were so weird Beethoven reportedly said "the fugue is no longer a fugue".  Reicha also advocated the use of quarter-tones to embellish melodies in his Treatise on Melody in 1814

https://imslp.org/wiki/Trait%C3%A9_de_m%C3%A9lodie_(Reicha%2C_Anton)

For 11/8 I recommend a few pieces by contemporary Bulgarian guitarist composer Atanas Ourkouzounov, who has a Youtube channel that features his music, in some cases with read-along scores.  So if you want 11/8 here's a Chaconne.

Ourkouzounov - "Chaconne" d'après une improvisation de Petar Ralchev (youtube.com)

hear also ... 

Ourkouzounov - Chaconnitsa (2022) (youtube.com)

hear also Asymmetrical Improvisations where the first movement is in 11/8 and the second is in 7/8

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rsoep3f-VM0

But the thing about 11 anything is you could also go 4+3+4 over 8 or 3+3+3+2 over 8 or you could notate it as 4/4 and 3/4 and 4/4 or three measures of 3/4 followed by a measure of 2/4.  Because asymmetrical meters break down into smaller units (i.e. Brubeck going 2+2+2+3 within 9/8) some composers just don't use the less conventional meters when they can (they hope) inspire players to play their music by staying with simpler meters for the sake of reading.  It's possible to cram 3/8, 6/8, 5/8, 13/16 and 11/16 into a work that's officially 4/4 for most of its run.  

It's that reality, and examples I have semi-randomly grabbed from the classical repertoire that I think helps explain why the bottom number in a meter can seem so ambiguous.  Maybe back in the day when people used the concept of tactus it was possible to talk about a stable undergirding rhythm without attempting to use notated music to confine performers to what we call measure but the horse left the barn a long time ago on that front.