Week 10: 11 December 2023 – “Vom Himmel hoch”: Christmas

Plus: Bach's Schoenbergian "Strange Tones", is STAYC still "LIT"?, the Social Sciences in 101 Books, and more!

A few programming announcements before we dig in:

• This week’s recital is at 2:30PM, not the usual time of 3:30. I will send out a reminder email on Monday for anybody subscribed. (Sorry for the spam if you’re unable to come regardless!)

• This week will also be the last recital of the quarter. But not of the series! We will be exactly a third of the way through: see you on 8 January, at the usual 3:30PM time, for a concert of New Year’s and Epiphany music.

• If you were brought here from Trish Morse’s Substack: welcome! It’s a delight and an honor to have been written up in her series, which explores the nooks and crannies of Hyde Park history in fascinating and lively detail. For everyone else: check her work out if you don’t know it already.

• The Newberry Consort is presenting a delightful and festive program of Latin American Christmas music next weekend (15–17 December). I’m excited to take part, and I hope you can make it!

And now here’s what you came for:

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As always, we recognize that Bond Chapel is situated in the traditional homeland and native territory of the Three Fires Confederacy—the Potawatomi, Odawa, and Ojibwe Nations—as well as other groups including the Ho-Chunk, Menominee, Miami, Peoria, and Sac and Fox. We remember their forced removal and dispossession, but also remember to speak of these groups in the present tense, as Chicago continues to be resound with tens of thousands of Native voices. 

This week, I’ve been exploring the work of Ojibwe singer and musician Lyz Jaakola, who has immensely powerful vocals and an ability to work across a whole range of genres. It’s always cool to see musicians using their work as a way to advance language revitalization efforts; frankly, her album of Anishinaabe children’s songs is much more listenable than albums of kids’ music have any right to be. Then there’s songs like “Sampo” celebrating Jaakola’s distinctly midwestern combination of Ojibwe and Finnish roots—and what better way to do that than the blues?

Week 10: 4 December 2023 – “Vom Himmel hoch”: Christmas

Please save applause for the end of each set

In dulci jubilo, BWV 729

Vom Himmel hoch, da komm’ ich her, BWV 738

Vom Himmel hoch, da komm’ ich her, BWV 700

Vom Himmel hoch, da komm’ ich her (fughetta), BWV 701

Gelobet seist du, Jesu Christ, BWV 722

Gelobet seist du, Jesu Christ (fughetta), BWV 697

Der Tag, der ist so freudenreich, BWV 719

Lobt Gott, ihr Christen, allzugleich, BWV 732

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Puer natus in Bethlehem, BWV 603

Gelobet seist du, Jesus Christ, BWV 604

Der Tag, der ist so freudenreich, BWV 605

Vom Himmel hoch, da komm’ ich her, BWV 606

Vom Himmel kam der Engel Schaar, BWV 607

In dulci jubilo, BWV 608

Lobt Gott, ihr Christen allzugleich, BWV 609

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Canonic Variations on Vom Himmel hoch, da komm’ ich her, BWV 769

i. Canone all’ ottava

ii. Alio Modo in Canone alla Quinta

iii. Canone alla Settima, cantabile

iv. Canon per augmentationem

v. L'altra Sorte del’Canone all’rovercio, 1) alla Sesta, 2) alla Terza, 3) alla Seconda è  4) alla Nona

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Following the liturgical calendar can have unexpected consequences. Maybe the biggest one is that the different recitals in this series vary wildly in composition. To see why, consider how the date of Easter (a movable feast) affects things: if Easter is early, then there will be many weeks after Trinity and before Advent, and thus there will be hymns and cantatas written for those weeks. So, for example: Wachet auf BWV 140 was written for the twenty-seventh Sunday after Trinity, because 1731’s Easter came on 25 March (almost as early as it can possibly be).¹ But since the stars don’t usually align that way, there’s not much liturgical music designated for those weeks. The upshot: toward the end of Ordinary Time, you heard a few concerts with one or two chorale preludes (like “Wachet auf” itself), and a lot of “free” music (trios, Preludes and Fugues, concerto arrangements, and the like).

Then came Advent. Last week, with twelve chorales, may have come as a bit of a shock to the system, but it was really only the calm before the storm. Even just by programming all of the chorales that are liturgically meant for Christmas (and thus ditching traditional choices of “Christmas-y” music like the Pastorale BWV 590 and the “9/8” Prelude and Fugue BWV 547), this week is by several minutes the longest program you’ve heard. And it’s also tied for longest going forward. (Shockingly, Christmas is a big deal.) It probably won’t be a surprise to hear that the Easter recital will be the same way.²

I hope forty-plus minutes of chorales doesn’t sound repetitious or tiring. Really, programs like this are as good a showcase as any for the variety possible within the chorale prelude genre. Take our first set, a selection of Christmas chorales mostly drawn from the Kirnberger and Neumeister collections. I’ll annotate the list here with subgenres:

In dulci jubilo, BWV 729 – ornamented hymn 

Vom Himmel hoch, da komm’ ich her, BWV 738 – ornamented hymn 

Vom Himmel hoch, da komm’ ich her, BWV 700 – chorale “fugue”

Vom Himmel hoch, da komm’ ich her (fughetta), BWV 701 – chorale fugue

Gelobet seist du, Jesu Christ, BWV 722 – ornamented hymn 

Gelobet seist du, Jesu Christ (fughetta), BWV 697 – chorale fugue

Der Tag, der ist so freudenreich, BWV 719 – chorale fugue

Lobt Gott, ihr Christen, allzugleich, BWV 732 – ornamented hymn 

Well, maybe that doesn’t sound as varied as I thought it would. Let me try again.

Two fugues in a row on “Vom Himmel hoch”? (And in the same key to boot?) Yes, but these pieces are remarkably different in approach. First, there’s the contrast in general musical style. BWV 700 is stately or even plodding, with the tune working its way methodically down from the soprano to the pedal (“From Heaven Above to Earth I Come”). BWV 701, on the other hand, stays up in the heavens, with flightier quick notes and much more open texture (three voices as opposed to the four+doublings in BWV 700).

And these two pieces diverge even further in how they treat the tune. In BWV 700, you’ll hear each phrase one at a time, clearly marked out in each of the voices before its slow, distinct statement in the pedal.³ BWV 701 starts out the same way, but ten measures in it begins to add the other phrases of the hymn pell-mell: you never stop hearing the first phrase in long notes, but phrases two and three come in twice as fast, and right on top of each other. (It doesn’t help that phrase three sounds a lot like phrase two played upside-down.) The result is bewildering where BWV 700 was lucid. 

The other “Vom Himmel hoch,” BWV 738 is even more bewildering in some ways. While its format—a hymn with little interludes between the phrases—is pretty straightforward, the entire piece is covered with streaks of fast notes, which often jumble the rhythm and confuse the harmony:

And that’s par for the course in these ornamented hymns: loud, bold, and shocking. I’ll have more to say on the others in the section below.

As for the other two chorale fugues, they’re a bit more straightforward than either of the “Vom Himmel hoch” chorales. “Gelobet seist du” BWV 697 is a cute little fugue on the first phrase of that hymn. So too, mostly is “Der Tag”—although that piece breaks off with a flourish, returning to conclude with the final line of the hymn. Yes, that means it skips the middle phrases: don’t worry, you’ll get them soon enough.

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We continue our journey through the Orgelbüchlein with a series of Christmas chorales that all adopt some version of the “layer cake” structure. As usual, the tune goes on top in long notes, sometimes (“Gelobet,” “Der Tag”) soloed out on a separate keyboard for extra punch. Then come two inner voices with their own rhythmic profile, all underpinned by a pedal part that again does its own thing. To catalog the various permutations this kind of format can take:

• “Puer natus”: flowing eighth notes in the inner voices, lightly syncopated quarter notes with a characteristic leap in the pedal.

• “Gelobet”: interlocking dotted rhythms in the inner voices, leaping sixteenths and eighths in the pedal.

• “Der Tag”: snappy dotted eighths and thirty-second notes in the inner voices, “walking” eighth notes in the pedal.

• “Vom Himmel hoch”: running sixteenths in the inner voices, walking eighths in the pedal.

• “Vom Himmel kam”: cascading sixteenths in the inner voices, walking quarter notes in the pedal.

• “In dulci jubilo”: flowing triplets in the inner voices (really the alto and bass), tune in long notes in the soprano and tenor (pedal). More on this piece below.

• “Lobt Gott”: sixteenths in the inner voices, eighths in the pedal. (I run out of adjectives quickly when writing a lot of descriptions like this)

It seems reasonably likely that Bach wrote these chorales in batches, to fill in the pages of the Orgelbüchlein systematically. If that’s true, then all of these different textural combinations begin to look like a series of experiments, a portfolio of answers to the same compositional prompt. They probably weren’t meant to be heard in succession, but doing so really highlights what makes each of these solutions distinctive—the small details that bring each of these pieces to life.

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 I’ll have more to say about the Canonic Variations below, but for now it’s not a bad idea to just give an overview of how the piece is laid out. Luckily, you’ve heard four different versions of the “Vom Himmel hoch” tune itself by now, so recognizing the chorale shouldn’t be too difficult. And in any case, Bach mostly makes it easy to hear. In the first two variations, the tune is in long notes in the pedal while the hands whirl around in sixteenth notes. To be sure, the music the hands play references the tune too—here’s the beginning of Variation 2:

Even if you can’t read Western notation, this score also shows something of the structure of this variation: you can notice how the middle line (the left hand) is written in small notes, and how it looks exactly like the upper line (right hand) shifted down a bit. That’s what “canon at the fifth” entails here: the left hand is exactly the same as the right hand, just played down a fifth, and so in the first edition Bach purposefully didn’t write it out in full. The left hand is an exercise to the reader.

The same is true in the third variation, which ups the ante by adding a beautifully melodic alto part. Now the canon is between the bass and the tenor, with the tune up in the soprano—again, even if the notation is unfamiliar, you can probably spot the canon (and the small notes help):

Where things really start to go off the rails is in the fourth variation. The tune is back in the pedals (the tenor part) in long notes, so at least that part is easy to hear. But the canon is now in augmentation between the bass and the soprano. As in, the bass plays the same music as the soprano, but twice as slowly. Suffice it to say, this is really hard to hear: the distance between the corresponding passages in each part increases linearly as the piece goes on, so that you’d have to remember what the right hand plays in measure 21 to “hear” the canon in the bass at measure 42! And it’s hard enough to work out that Bach wrote it all out in the first edition. No exercises for the reader and no small notes. But for what it’s worth, if you really want to to try to hear the canon at the beginning, I think your best shot is with a little flourish that happens in measure 2, and then half as fast in measure 3:

Good luck!

Notice that, in each of these four variations, the tune is a bystander in the canon, typically a long-note wall stud (cantus firmus) that the drywall of the quicker canonic voices is attached to. You also might notice that the selection of intervals used in the canons looks a little bit random: octave, fifth, seventh, octave. What about the others?

The final variation addresses both of these gaps at once. First, two canons in inversion between the hands. At the beginning, the right hand plays the tune, while the left hand responds a sixth lower with the tune upside-down. When they’re done, the roles reverse: tune upside-down in the right hand, followed by the right-side up version in the left hand a third lower. All the while, the pedals play one of the most awkward, meandering, difficult, lines Bach ever conceived for the feet. 

So it’s only fair that the pedals get to take a break in the next section, joining in the canonic fun by giving the tune (right-side up). But now it may be a bit hard to hear the response (a second lower, upside-down), since Bach is now off to the races: running sixteenths in the right hand and an extra, syncopated voice on top of the canonic part in the left. Luckily, you get a second chance: once again, the whole structure is flipped, with the tune upside-down in the pedals, right-side up in the soprano a ninth higher, running sixteenths in the left hand, and another extra voice in the middle.

I should probably say that all of this goes by in the span of about two minutes.

If you’re not dizzy enough yet, Bach has one final surprise. The tune in the pedals again, but now played against versions of itself that are twice and even four times as fast (diminutio). Right side-up, upside-down, sped-up, slowed-down, every line of the tune at the same time (alla stretta): it’s an almighty crunch that gets capped off with the composer’s musical signature (in Germany, B=B♭, H=B♮):⁴

What a parting gift! If only (have you been keeping track?) he’d remembered to give us a canon at the fourth.

“Curious Variations” and “Strange Tones”

A detail I slipped in above: “in the first edition.” The Canonic Variations were one of very few (eight or so) works that Bach published in his lifetime. You’ve probably heard of most of the others: Art of Fugue, Musical Offering, Goldberg Variations, Italian Concerto, French Overture, Schübler Chorales (“Wachet auf”), Clavierübung III (“St. Anne” Fugue). But this piece has remained relatively obscure. There’s an awful lot written about it.⁵ But performances and recordings are much more scarce. Unlike “Wachet auf” or the “St. Anne,” this piece is very unlikely to go in any “Bach organ greatest hits” recording, and it’s not performed particularly often.⁶ Why?

The fact is—something that I think organists and scholars have been somewhat reluctant to acknowledge—that this piece is just really hard to listen to. Somewhat like the dryer sections of the Art of Fugue, the Canonic Variations mostly eschew nice tunes or varied rhythms. The harmony isn’t particularly enticing, and at times downright weird, with chords in strange inversions never quite resolving the way you’d expect. And when I said “almighty crunch” at the end, I meant it:

That A in the alto sticks out like a sore thumb. It rubs up uncomfortably against the tenor, and overall has a bizarre effect on the harmony. If a student wrote this in a counterpoint assignment, I’d deduct points.

Then there are those “awkward, meandering, difficult, lines.” It’s not just the pedal at the beginning of the final variation. Throughout the piece, lines seem to have no internal structure, wandering aimlessly. In particular, they barely repeat anything, making it difficult to get our bearings. Really, they sound almost like early Schoenberg: as Alban Berg pointed out in 1924, even the early, more conventional Schoenberg sounded weird and near-atonal because he refused to repeat material for the listener.

Of course, there are kinds of listening difficulty that are just intrinsic to the forms of the Canonic Variations; I tried to point those out above. It’s hard to hear when a tune is being played against itself upside-down, and harder still when it’s all covered up with running notes. Frankly, nobody can hear an augmentation canon all the way through; I’m not sure it’s really possible for a first-time listener to pick out all the phrases of the chorale in the crunch at the end, either. And it’s easy to get lost in even the most basic canon (Variation 1); certainly, it’s a tongue-twister for the fingers.

Still, I think people too often conflate these two kinds of difficulty. It’s common enough to say that Bach’s music is “hard” because of counterpoint (these canonic and fugal tricks), but I just don’t think that’s true. The listening difficulty in these pieces, just like the “in yer face” counterpoint of the Duets from a few weeks ago is purposeful. It’s music that wants to sound difficult (yes, maybe to highlight the fact that it’s counterpoint). It’s Schoenbergian—it’s avant-garde.

If you want evidence, consider how much intricate counterpoint Bach wrote that’s still tuneful, catchy, and popular. It’s possible you’ve listened to the Goldberg Variations without knowing that every third variation is a canon at an ever-wider interval, or that the final variation (“Quodlibet”) mashes together two popular tunes in a somewhat insane stretto. And it’s equally possible that you listened to today’s Orgelbüchlein “In dulci jubilo” without realizing it’s a double canon: 

This piece is downright charming, and it zips by with nary a care in the world. When Bach wanted to, he could write counterpoint as easy to listen to as any hymn setting.

Conversely, he could and did write hymn settings as bizarre and hard to listen to as any piece of difficult counterpoint. Here’s the other “In dulci jubilo” (sloppily):

And for good measure the big “Gelobet seist du”:

(Sorry for the audio quality—as usual, these are just practice recordings taken from the bench on my phone.)

Perhaps you’ve attended a church service where the organist has succumbed to “last verse-itis” and gone completely overboard on a reharmonization. I know I have. Still, I’ve never heard a last verse quite as eccentric as any of these chorale preludes. And we know that contemporary listeners did not approve. A complaint to the Arnstadt consistory about Bach’s playing:

Reprove him for having hitherto made many curious variationes in the chorale, and mingled many strange tones in it, and for the fact that the Congregation had been confused by it. 

It’s hard to deny that these chorales are full of “curious variations” and “strange tones.” Just as it’s hard to deny that Bach could write gorgeous chorale settings; there’s a reason so many of his harmonizations have become staples of modern hymnals.

Bach could be just as hard or easy to listen to as he wanted. It’s undeniable that he chose to represent himself publicly (in publications, his official portrait, and in hymn playing) as a “difficult” composer. And I think the addition of harmonic and melodic difficulty to the intrinsic difficulties of hearing counterpoint is part of this image-crafting, this publicity campaign. “This music sure sounds hard: it must have been hard to compose!”

We don’t have to buy it. Now, there’s no need to undersell Bach’s ability to write counterpoint; the fugues from the Art of Fugue that work both right side-up and upside-down (yes, inverting the whole fugue) are impressive enough by themselves. But I think this skill has been rather oversold, especially to people who don’t know about all of the standard tricks and frameworks used to facilitate such contrapuntal writing. And of course it was Bach himself who tried the hardest to sell this reputation. This is very cool music, and its difficulty is definitely part of its charm. But don’t be deceived: the reason this music is so weird and hard to listen to is not because it was so hard to compose. Don’t confuse prickliness for skill.

What I’m Listening To

Sandrine Cantoreggi and Sheila Arnold – Mel Bonis: Entre Soir et Matin

Mel Bonis is having something of a moment, and it’s about time. Her version of fin de siècle French Romantic style is as distinctive as any, and her ability to craft both larger-scale forms and miniatures really sets her apart from a lot of her contemporaries. There’s a reason she features so prominent in this year’s 8-CD compilation Compositrices. (Surely one of the albums of the year.)

I hope Sheila Arnold has her moment soon too. Her Brahms and Chopin (including on period pianos) has great sensitivity and character. And her commitment to underexposed composers is longstanding: as far as I’ve heard, Arnold has the best recording of Lili Boulanger’s Trois morceaux, one of the absolute highlights of 20th-century piano music.

As for this disc itself: “Soir” is a beautifully atmospheric discovery (first recording and, the liner notes claim, potentially the first public performances?), and it sounds great on Arnold’s 1871 Blüthner. But the highlight I think has to be the Violin Sonata, especially after the languid first movement. The finale, for instance, is at turns showy (especially for the pianist) and stunning (the pastoral interlude in the middle). There are lots of possibilities with this music and I hope to hear more performers take their own shots at it.

Santrofi with Omniversal Earkestra – Deep into Highlife

It’s an interesting collaboration: Ghanaian Highlife revivalists Santrofi paired with a German brass band best known (?) for their work with Malian musicians. A.K. Yeboah tags along for some genuine retro flair in one song. The overall energy is to die for, especially in the Highlife-funk tracks: “Kwaa Kwaa” is just great from top to bottom. Think maximalist Ebo Taylor. Listen to it!

Monica Bacelli, Icarus vs Muzak, Marco Angius – Salvatore Sciarrino: Paesaggi con Macerie

This might be one of the more accessible introductions I’ve heard to Sciarrino’s soundworld. For sure, it grabs you from the beginning with a characteristic blend of eerie, grating, and borderline-inaudible sounds; and it includes one old-fashioned avant-garde classic (“Esplorazione del bianco II”) that stays entirely in that register. But mostly this is the friendlier, postmodern Sciarrino: these pieces are largely based on quotations of older music, especially Gesualdo. So what you hear are those distinctive and novel timbres married to relatively familiar harmonic and melodic gestures. Sciarrino’s music can be very endearing, and this album showcases that side of it well—without sacrificing what makes it distinctive. (When you’re done, listen to what he does to the flute.)

STAYC – “LIT”

STAYC are shapeshifters. I’m not just referring to their transformation from World Series champions into Scottish Premiership contenders. What I mean is that, musically and conceptually, they’ve taken quite the journey since their debut three years ago. So we went from a “mature” romantic concept set to drum ‘n’ bass-inflected electropop—

—to more straightforward summery pop—

—to tropical pop that could rival Kes with its chorus instrumentals—

—to a darker, harder-edged electropop sound—

—followed a few months later by an even darker theme.

But then: a sudden pivot this year to cutesy and bubblegum—

—literally, “bubble”gum:

This kind of trajectory isn’t risk-free. It’s maybe a little weird to see a group shift to a “cuter” “school” concept three years into their career, and a lot of fans haven’t appreciated the change. After all, as of the end of 2022, STAYC had the highest percentage of female fans of any K-pop girl group, beating out even lesbian favorites MAMAMOO:

One can assume that the move to “cutesy” was meant to appeal to men (yuck!), but it certainly wasn’t appreciated by fans who came to the group precisely because their songs avoided the two extremes of “cute” and “badass” that dominate recent groups concepts. Sales are good, but it’s possible that the High Up Entertainment wanted to avoid further alienating their fanbase. And besides, they’re shapeshifters.

So it’s not really a surprise to see STAYC pivot again.⁷ And…I’m not sure this move is going to work too well either. But this time, I think the problem is musical.⁸ 

STAYC is, like EXID and (yes) BTS, something of a musical guinea pig: all three were the first group formed by a famous producer when they founded their own agency. In this case, the producer team in question was Black Eyed Pilseung (B.E.P.). And B.E.P. have very distinctive musical strengths.⁹ A classic B.E.P. song will have amazing tunes, especially in the chorus:

It’ll usually have a horrifyingly catchy instrumental riff, typically in the synths:

And at their best, it’ll combine these traits:

The tune of “FANCY”’s post-chorus (“Fancy yo-u-u”) is great enough by itself, but it’s the pulsating, syncopated synth part that really sends it over the top (1:14 in the video above).

Love or hate the concepts, “Teddy Bear” and “Bubble” have these traits in spades. Yes, the verses are somewhat perfunctory, but the choruses are absolutely kickass in both songs—and they’re boosted by extremely distinctive, melodic synth parts. “Bubble” wouldn’t be much of a song without the instrumentals.

“LIT” isn’t much of a song even with them. Maybe that’s too harsh, but there’s not a ton going on in this song. Same old somewhat phoned-in verses and an equally repetitive chorus (“Lit lit lit lit” vs. “Bubble bubble bubble”). But now the instrumentals are mostly reduced to thumping and burbling; it’s amazing how that manages to suck the melodic juice out of even fairly tuneful parts like the prechorus. It’s still a pretty fun song, but there’s nothing there to really grab me. 

What happened?

Earlier this week, the NY Times Popcast got a lot of flak for an episode criticizing Jungkook’s open embrace of the American market. Of course they did; BTS stans are legion (er, ARMY), and any criticism was likely to provoke anger. But I also (as somebody who doesn’t like recent BTS, but did like Golden) have to agree with some of the negative responses. It’s frankly weird to claim that HYBE, by making a “cash grab” for the American market, are doing anything that any other label wouldn’t do if given the opportunity. And it’s a bit rich to complain about “Americanization” of K-pop, when retro American styles (what else would you call “Standing Next to You”?) are practically objects of worship for K-pop executives and producers. JYP once had the Wonder Girls listen to 200 Motown songs, and any video tour of his company will reveal the rooms named after Quincy Jones, Stevie Wonder, Michael Jackson, Prince…Meanwhile, YG Entertainment’s biggest hits are all hip-hop-coded (what’s more American?) and by a Korean–American producer. Lee Soo-man founded SM entertainment because of his experiences with American music while studying in the U.S. And so on.¹⁰ 

OK, so I don’t think that “Americanization” is the biggest musical danger confronting K-pop. The biggest danger is NewJeans:

Paradoxically, the same generalist pop critics who might complain about K-pop losing its distinctive maximalism will then turn around and praise NewJeans to the skies. You’ve probably seen this song (or the EP, Get Up) on some end-of-year list. And it’s pretty good the first five times. The chorus and post-chorus are definitely catchy, if beyond repetitious. Even if the verses are absolute trainwrecks (sorry Hyein), they’re mercifully short, and the song does go somewhere at the end. It’s not bad. (Other tracks on the album—looking at you “ASAP”—do genuinely just suck.)

The real danger is in NewJeans’ success, which has been incalculably massive both in Korea and abroad. Imitating NewJeans is where groups really get into trouble.¹¹ Now every group is trying to do a song with “stripped-back” instrumentals and not much in the way of tunes. Even when it really doesn’t suit them:

The better versions mostly work (to the extent that they do) insofar as they’re willing to deviate from the NewJeans style:

For me, “LIT” is too much of the former, not enough of the latter. B.E.P. should recognize what they’re good at. Because at least right now, STAYC are definitely not lit.

Also liked…

Christoph Spering and Chorus Musicus Köln + Das Neue Orchester – Bach: Was mein Gott will – Cantatas BWV 5, 33, 94, 111, 113, 135, 178

Zion.T – Zip

Katharina Bauml and Capella de la Torre – Capriccio pastorale (Italian Christmas Music)

Aaron Nervs ft. Hanbyeol – “Every Time” (h/t)

What I’m Reading

I admit it: I have a pretty big soft spot for books like A History of the Social Sciences in 101 Books. I enjoy seeing fields take stock of themselves, especially when it includes a nice reading list. Inventing the Middle Ages; The Books that Shaped Art History. When they’re good, this kind of stuff can be both informative and fun to read.

This book is more the latter than the former. Ignore the claims from the preface and the jacket that the book will somehow “demonstrate the unity of the social sciences.” I’m not really sure what that would look like, but it definitely would not be a series of very short capsule reviews of major monographs with no connective tissue. And I mean short: at two and a half pages per book (as compared to the thirteen or so given to each in the art history “canon”), there’s not really much space to give more than the basic context and most famous arguments of a book. Sometimes, there’s not even space for that: the Mauss entry is basically a second Lévi-Strauss entry, since it’s mostly about the preface to Sociologie et anthropologie. And there’s certainly almost never space for much critical reflection. It’s really cool to see Christine Klapisch-Zuber write about Centuries of Childhood, but you wouldn’t come away from this essay with a sense for just how, uh, “controversial” that book is by now among historians.

This book’s canon is shockingly familiar for an American (I was hoping for something more eccentrically French), if somewhat randomly eclectic. There are a few forays into broader conceptions of “social science,”¹² all unified by a concern for “method”: so there are essays on Erwin Panofsky, Louis Marin, and Georges Didi-Huberman, all centering on conceptual and methodological innovations. Maybe that’s what the “unity” of the social sciences consists in.

So, in other words, these aren’t the kind of reviews that will rock your world if you’re familiar with a given text. At most, it can sometimes be cool to see a fun juxtaposition of reviewer and reviewed (Bruno Latour on Anna Tsing!). But for less familiar books, these are exceedingly clearly written and (as far as I can tell) reliable starting points. My reading list grew a lot. That’s really all I could have hoped for from a book like this anyway.

A few others: 

• JSTOR Daily – A Pint for the Alewives

• Chemistry World – Is modern food lower in nutrients?

• Bloomberg CityLab – How Corporations Created the Prototypical Seoul Apartment

• Harper’s Bazaar – The Collective Power of the L.A. Art World

• Marie Claire – The New Faces of Watch Collecting

Thanks for reading, and for listening if you can make it on Monday!

1. Easter was pretty early in 2023 too, but I still had to push “Wachet auf” forward a week!

2. If you want a fun game, try to figure out which third recital will also consist entirely of chorale preludes. Of course you could check the spreadsheet to find out. But if you know which chorales Bach couldn’t get enough of, you may be able to figure out the relevant tune, at least.

3. Scarequotes for “fugue” because some phrases of the hymn don’t get played in every voice.

4. There’s some controversy over whether this instance of BACH was intentional. Luckily, there’s another (completely uncontroversial) BACH in the augmentation canon—see if you can hear it. Bach’s manuscript version of this piece put the augmentation canon last, so at least the idea of ending with a “musical signature” isn’t foreign to this piece.

5. David Yearsley’s other book has a great discussion of it.

6. To be completely fair, the trio and fugues from the Musical Offering are also not exactly concert or recording staples either.

7. Yes, “LIT” is a Japanese single, but STAYC have treated their Japanese tracks as basically interchangeable with their Korean ones. Besides, the music is not what K-pop acts have typically come up with for the Japanese market.

8. I’ve also seen complaints about the choreography, but what would I know.

9. Presumably conditioned by their apprenticeship under Shinsadong Tiger (EXID’s producer), who excels in similar areas.

10. To be clear, The Idol Cast’s Kara (the guest on this Popcast episode) definitely knows all of this. But I don’t get the feeling that Jon Caramanica—yet another NY Times culture critic stretched far too thin to do his job well—does, and I think it’s his framing that’s upset K-pop fans.

11. They’ve also been linked to the recent surge in debuting extremely young idols. Maybe—and certainly NewJeans’ branding and concepts have been gross. But most of the Wonder Girls were 15 or so on debut (2007), BoA was 13 (2000)….It’s not a new phenomenon.

12. Yes, I know that “Sciences Sociales” is not quite the same thing.