Week 11: 8 January 2024 – New Year's, Epiphany

Plus: The biggest Bach you’ve never heard of (yes, you), "Gee" turns 15, The Donkey and the Boat, and more!

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. 

Better late than never, I guess. Anishinaabe singer-songwriter Ali Fontaine seems mostly to have given up making music, having gone from some pretty nice Fearless-style love songs (“the country genre which was popular on the reserve growing up”), to slightly more sophisticated acoustic songs with bigger lyrical themes, to R&B/EDM fusion. At least for me, it’s easy to feel some regret that a talented musician with some level of recognition (including several awards) would feel the need to move on. But on the other hand, Fontaine’s current advocacy and legal work is probably making as big or more of an impact than her songwriting would have. And maybe she’ll come up with a way to combine the two in the future.

Week 11: 8 January 2024 – New Year, Epiphany

Please save applause for the end of each set

In dir ist Freude, BWV 615

Christum wir sollen loben schon, BWV 611

Wir Christenleut’, BWV 612

Helft mir Gottes Güte preisen, BWV 613

Das alte Jahr vergangen ist, BWV 614

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Christum wir sollen loben schon, BWV 696

Wir Christenleut hab’n jetz, BWV 710

Wir Christenleut’, BWV 1090

Das alte Jahr vergangen ist, BWV 1091

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Herr Gott, dich loben wir, BWV 725

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Pièce d’Orgue, BWV 572

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Happy New Year! I hope you’re not too sick of Christmas music yet: having just done a recital of chorales for 25 December, it’s time to finish up the season with music for the other eleven days of Christmas.

Since I insist on kicking things off with a bang, I’m going slightly out of liturgical order to begin this set of Orgelbüchlein chorales: the New Year’s/Epiphany chorale “In dir ist Freude” is a perfect fireworks display, justifiably famous for its dance-like rhythms and “carillon-like” repeated pattern in the pedal part. The keyboard parts in particular have a tendency to shoot off like a rocket, suddenly bouncing upward. And they have the freedom to do so because, unlike every single other chorale in the Orgelbüchlein, the hymn tune is never played straight through in this piece. Instead, you get it in snatches: the long(er) notes in the left hand at the beginning, at a little more length after the first pedal solo, ornamented in the soprano at the end, etc. But the tune never dominates the texture: a refreshing change from the litany of “tune in the soprano, other stuff beneath it” chorales that came before.

In other news: for BWV 612–14, the tune is in the soprano, with other stuff beneath it. Luckily, we’re not there yet, and you get one more chorale in a different texture with “Christum wir sollen loben schon”: Bach even helpfully wrote “Corale in Alto” above the score. He also wrote in “Adagio,” a hint at this piece’s solemn mood. Not only is the piece quite slow, and expressively dissonant at times: it constantly keeps opening up yawning gaps between the right hand at the top of the keyboard and the feet at the bottom of the pedalboard. All of this mystery and dark tone may sound a bit strange for Boxing Day music; but maybe it makes sense if we think of the Second Day of Christmas here as St. Stephen’s Day, commemorating the first Christian martyr. Then the chorale text—“We should indeed praise Christ…as long as the dear sun shines”—begins to take on a slightly darker tone.

And then back to our regularly scheduled programming, with the tune singing out on the top of the texture again. “Wir Christenleut” is significantly perkier, taking on the rhythms of a jig and letting the pedal bounce around constantly. “Helft mir Gotts Güte preisen” strikes a more somber tone with its flowing sixteenths, gentle repeated notes, and chromatically rising eighths. And “Das alte Jahr” goes for an even darker, more intense, and more melancholic vibe than “Christum.” If anything, this piece sounds like a lament for the past year (and its sins?). Happy New Year indeed.

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As with the past few recitals, I’m trying to order the non-Orgelbüchlein chorales so that they retrace the path of Bach’s collection. And here, Bach’s other takes on these tunes really do resemble their Orgelbüchlein counterparts. “Christum” is again somber and slow, although this time it’s played as a chorale fugue. The BWV 710 “Wir Christenleut” is another jig-like piece, this time in trio texture (and with the tune in the bass/pedals). So is the middle section of the BWV 1090 “Wir Christenleut,” although the rest of this piece adopts a variety of rhythms and textures for the different phrases of the tune. And the BWV 1091 “Das alte Jahr” is just as meditative as its Orgelbüchlein counterpart, if less chromatically overwrought. 

It’s tempting to think of these pieces almost like first drafts, early attempts at working out an approach to these tunes that would be refined later. But that sells them short. As I joked about above, the Orgelbüchlein chorales show clear signs of having been written in batches: on the one hand, they often lean on similar formats and formulas (tune in the soprano, find some pattern to occupy the other voices), and on the other, there are seemingly deliberate contrasts of rhythm and contour between consecutive pieces in the collection. The earlier chorales were not written under these constraints, and thus breathe a little freer. The Orgelbüchlein doesn’t, and couldn’t, contain a piece with as many quirks and internal contrasts as the BWV 1090 “Wir Christenleut”; we should enjoy it for what it is.

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Let me leave you hanging here for “Herr Gott, dich loben wir.” It’s a huge piece, and I want to give it its proper respect: I’ll dedicate the second section below to it. 

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The Pièce d’Orgue is also a big piece, but not one that has necessarily gotten a lot of respect. Aside from the Pastorella BWV 590 (a topic for another week), I’m not sure I’ve heard organists deride another Bach piece in such scathing terms: “just a show-off piece,” “empty calories,” “pure fluff,” and of course, “trash.”

I’ve never quite understood where all the hate comes from. Sure, each section of the piece is churned out more or less mechanically: the first section systematically works through a few options for elaborating a (very slowly) descending scale via a solo line moving in fast notes, while the second section systematically works through how to elaborate an ascending scale via five lines moving in slow notes; and then the conclusion systematically elaborates two chromatically descending scales at the same time.

But when you describe it that way, the piece sounds like one of the “intellectual feats” that Bach is so often praised for, demonstrating his “rigor” in working through every combinatorial possibility given the musical material. It’s not so different from the (equally mechanical) figuration preludes of the Well-Tempered Clavier or the Cello Suites, and the middle section is about as didactic an exercise in counterpoint (non-fugue, non-canon division) as it gets. Sounds like Bach to me! Why the slander?

Is it just because the title and indications are in French? (From a Germanophilic perspective: the universal language of good taste in food and bad taste in music.) Worse still, because it ends up sounding a little like the Widor Toccata? But surely that’s Widor’s problem, not the piece’s.

Or is it because most recordings and performances of this piece are (paradoxically, given its obvious flashiness) stultifyingly boring? But surely that’s the organist’s problem, not the piece’s: lean into the flashiness, juice the tempo a bit (the opening does say “Très vitement”!), delineate the phrases more clearly, bring the drama. Basically: if you think this piece is trash, you should play it like trashy music wants to be played. And if you think it’s good, play it like you love it! Tell me after the recital which camp it sounds like I’m in.

The biggest Bach you’ve never heard of (yes, you)

When I was starting out on the organ, I felt acutely “behind” in terms of the repertoire. (I didn’t grow up hearing organ music regularly.) So, like any good swot with a taste for Baroque music, I got a complete box set of Buxtehude’s organ works (Walter Kraft’s recording, mostly because it was cheap). And, like any ambitious teenager, I immediately sorted the album in iTunes by playtime: give me the longest, biggest, most impressive piece you can.

Let me interrupt the story to note that times—and teenagers—haven’t changed that much: a very young Bach copied Reinken’s An Wasserflüssen Babylon and Buxtehude’s Nun freut euch, which were probably the longest and most impressive pieces he could find.

And indeed Nun freut euch did come up, although I didn’t really know what that meant. But the next result was Te Deum. I certainly knew those words; surely this title meant that the piece was important, and I didn’t have to go around listening to every “Prelude in G minor” or “Toccata in F” to figure out which were the good or flashy ones. And so I busied myself with learning the piece.

As it turns out, this wasn’t such a bad process. For the most part, within certain limits (and before a certain point in time), the big pieces by major composers really are the pieces that had the most put into them—the grandest musical statements. Heavy investments that necessitate a big payoff. That doesn’t necessarily make them the best pieces per se; there are lots of pieces where I wish that the composer had tried a little less hard or wasn’t quite so ambitious. But the Buxtehude Te Deum isn’t one of those. It’s a fascinating, thrilling, and memorable piece that fully justifies its substantial length. And it has a correspondingly high place in Buxtehude’s organ output. 

Did I mention that “Herr Gott, dich loben wir” is a translation of the Te Deum?

To be clear, I’m not claiming that Bach was influenced or inspired by Buxtehude’s piece; the two are very different in structure (Bach’s lacks the different “movements” and varied textures of Buxtehude’s), and as far as I know there’s no particular reason to think that Bach knew Buxtehude’s Te Deum.¹ But I do think there is something to the connection. Most obviously, this is an important hymn, associated with major festive occasions and combining authorship from (supposedly) St. Ambrose and translator Martin Luther. And it’s a mammoth text, comprising some 27 (short) verses. Any attempt to give even a sense of the whole thing will necessarily be huge; Buxtehude’s piece is about twelve minutes long, and Bach’s approaches ten. 

Those ten minutes are filled with all the cool things you might expect from Bach: excellent counterpoint (in five voices!), interesting and varied figuration, lots of showing off for both the hands and feet, and crazy chromatic harmonies. In some ways, its style resembles the big chorales of the Clavierübung III collection—but in sheer scale, it dwarfs any of them. Only the biggest preludes and fugues, along with a few of the chorale partitas (variation sets) match it; as a single sustained “movement,” this is probably Bach’s single longest for the organ.

So why does nobody play this piece? Why haven’t you heard of it?²

I think part of the reason is that it’s difficult to know how to perform the piece. The way it’s written, with all of the verses of the hymn getting their own music, is deeply unusual—so much so that a number of scholars have conclude that this piece is an elaborate accompaniment for congregational singing. And even if that’s the case, it’s not entirely clear when to sing, or who should sing what.

Even these questions don’t quite explain things for me. To be sure, it would be a little strange to give concert performances of a plain hymn setting; you don’t see people playing the “371” Bach chorales as standalone pieces. But this piece is much more elaborate than those. Yes, it’s possible to sing along to this piece, but that’s also true for most of the Orgelbüchlein. 

Is it because the piece is hard? Maybe a little bit, especially coupled with its length. But it’s not “unrewardingly” difficult: I think any listener is likely to come away thinking that the organist has worked pretty hard, and displayed sufficiently advanced keyboard and pedal technique. It’s not as flashy as the G-minor Fantasy and Fugue—but it’s also not as demanding either.

That leaves me with one big possibility: the people who’ve encountered this piece don’t really love it. Or they think that audiences won’t be able to stomach it. (Or both.) This is Bach in a very serious mode, with none of the Italian or French secular influences that lighten up most of his most popular organ pieces. (Think “Wachet auf” or the “Dorian” Toccata.) The harmony is downright strange, going beyond “old-fashioned” (modal) and into the realm of “purposefully unusual.” This is another Bach piece full of “strange tones.”

But unlike the equally weird Canonic Variations, the weirdness of “Herr Gott dich loben wir” isn’t associated with any particularly “intellectual” musical processes. This isn’t Bach writing odd-sounding music to make his counterpoint sound more technical and forbidding. Instead, it’s just odd. I can’t shake the feeling that this piece is austere for the sake of being austere.

Of course, austerity, rigor, and unusual (=“creative”/“original”) compositional choices are a big part of why people generally prize Bach. But to me, this piece represents a confrontation with that idea: is this really why you like this music? Or: do you really love these aspects of Bach’s music when pushed to an extreme? 

I actually hope the answer is “yes” for at least some of you. But I believe that this piece’s obscurity hints at a broad “no.” For a lot (a majority?) of listeners, I suspect that “rigor” is entirely beside the point: the rhythmic vitality, melodic appeal, and satisfying harmonies of most of Bach’s music are surely a much bigger draw. And that’s entirely fine; even for people who really care about the supposed “intellectual” qualities of this music, an entire piece rooted in them—a piece like “Herr Gott dich loben wir”—may be a bit much. 

Pierre Boulez (an avant-garde stalwart himself) once said: “We do the best we can to be attractive.”³ See what you think of Bach when he’s doing his best to be the opposite.

What I’m Listening To

Giulia Bolcato and REMER Ensemble – Barbara Strozzi: Opera Ottava

Somewhat amazingly, this is the first complete recording of Strozzi’s Opus 8. (Elissa Edwards has released Volume 1 of another recording, and Emanuela Galli recorded three-quarters of the collection.) Why the amazement? Well, not only was this Strozzi’s final published opus, but it also contains the lament “Che si può fare,” one of the three or so pieces that has come to represent her work.⁴ And some of its other pieces, like the cantata L’astratto and the serenata Hor che Apollo have begun to acquire a more limited kind of fame. Deservedly so. They’re full of wonderful moments: the first aria in Hor che Apollo (“Mir’al pie,” about five minutes into this recording), with its creatively dislocated rhythms; the vertiginous heights and sudden contrasts of L’astratto’s “Volate, volate” (2:48 here). It’s great to have all this music together, and to be that much closer to an easily-accessible complete recorded Strozzi. (As far as I know, only bits of Opus 6 remain yet to be recorded.)

Bolcato’s singing and REMER’s playing are both quite nice, even if I always hope for a more unhinged rendition of the more dramatic moments in this music. (“È pazzo il mio core” sounds reasonably “pazzo” here, but what about going really crazy with it?) It’s clear that she loves this music, although the reason she gives for her admiration may not be the expected one: “I am aware of the ever-increasing demand for entrepreneurial skills in my field, and in this regard, Barbara Strozzi has been a font of inspiration.” (Less eyebrow-raising: “As a musician, I’ve always been fascinated by the music of 17th century Italy and its extraordinary expressive richness.”)⁵ 

This love is especially clear because Bolcato really did make her choice of repertoire from among a variety of different options. Given that she (like many singers of recent generations) sings Verdi and Strauss as often as Pergolesi and Strozzi, the choice of 17th-century music for her debut is a genuine statement of either preference or artistic/branding intent. (That goes double for picking a complete opus by a single composer instead of a “themed” recital.) Maybe she didn’t mean her comment  this way, but I’d like to think Strozzi Opus 8 was the “entrepreneurial” choice for a debut record. Here’s hoping more “enterprising” singers make the same choice.

Adama Barry – La sécheresse

Adama Barry’s Lembi is a wonderfully bizarre kaleidoscope of sounds: half of the tracks are neo-traditional music played on Fulani plucked strings and flutes, while the other half consist of “remakes” of those songs in styles as diverse as house, disco, jazz, funk, and whatever you call the music that “Sex Judas feat. Ricky” make. (Although you can also hear traditional instruments, and other “world” sounds like mouth harps, in the electronic tracks.) It’s a great cross between two of the dominant styles of “World Music” albums: Nonesuch Explorer Series meets Ten Ragas to a Disco Beat.

Still, I think it’s a bit of a relief that Barry didn’t turn this format into a formula. La sécheresse ditches the remakes, and most of the stylistic whiplash they entailed. Instead, the album goes for a much more consistent rock-adjacent sound, highlighting both his performance ability (especially on flute) and his ability to mesh Fula music with electric guitar and bass. (Does this combination represent a fusion of the two “halves” of Lembi?) The result is quite cohesive, while still leaving room for musical variety: the more uptempo second half of the album in particular branches out in several new directions, like the frenetic flute of “Waalde Maabe” and the strangely bluegrassy groove of “Paracetamon.” Where Lembi was sprawling, La sécheresse is concentrated. I’ll look forward to Barry’s next musical turn. 

“Gee” turns 15

Like a lot of people outside of Korea, “Gee” was the first K-pop song I heard, at least knowingly. In retrospect, its global “virality” seems almost quaint: even with a twelve-year head start, it’s been overtaken in Youtube views by Stray Kids’ “Thunderous,” to say nothing of smash hits by PSY, BLACKPINK, and BTS. The biggest hits (so far) by new groups like IVE and NewJeans will probably pass it sometime this year. “Gee”’s moment, as you could only expect for a 15-year-old pop song, is long gone.⁶

That can make it hard to remember what the dimensions of that virality really were. We’re talking about a world ten years before Parasite’s Oscars triumph and just at the beginning of the David Chang-led Korean takeover of New York fine dining: listeners outside of East Asia had no particular reason to take K-culture in general seriously, let alone this song or video. Thus, the “Gee” video was often passed around the Anglophone internet as a quirk of extreme cutesiness, a stupid meme, a way to make your friends cringe (or at least pretend to cringe). That is: it was treated infinitely more like a “Pon Pon Pon” than a “What is Love,” even if the “cute” concept remained pretty similar from SNSD⁷ to TWICE. And, frankly, this Western response shared a lot with how “Gangnam Style” was received three years later: at least part of the undertone was “look how weird these Asian people are,” with a nice dose of sexism added to boot.

The spectacular growth of K-pop outside of East Asia (which, of course, “Gee” did a great deal to spark) has made this kind of reaction a lot less acceptable to air publicly, to the extent that it may have become invisible for a lot of people now. Instead, I think the pendulum has swung to the opposite extreme. For instance, once it became clear that K-pop was a commercial force that “mainstream” music sites would have to deal with, we then got poptimist critics falling over themselves to lavish praise on “Gee” as a “perfect” song, a “revelation,” “the greatest feat Korea will ever accomplish in traditional songcraft.” (Of all the drivel in that article, that one word surely takes the cake: “traditional”?)

But of course “Gee” is cringeworthily cutesy, and it is a pretty stupid song. This isn’t really about “East–West cultural differences” either: SNSD themselves hated it and their other cutesy songs. Hated hated hated it. The dancing, costumes, and girlish vocal timbre were even more maddening for them than they are for (most of?) you.⁸ And if the English lines sound weird or mortifying to you, remember that Jessica and Tiffany are native American English speakers;⁹ they knew exactly how silly a hook based around the word “gee” sounded in 2009. 

For that matter, any critic trying to explain how “Gee” is “perfect” has to deal with the fact that it really doesn’t have that much going for it as a song. The title chant is certainly memorable, and it had an easily-repeatable dance move to go with it: in these respects, SM successfully copied the formula of the Wonder Girls’ “Tell Me” and “Nobody” (the latter of which actually charted in the US in 2008). But there isn’t a single catchy tune in the whole song; I’d rather take “Way To Go” (from the same mini-album) any day of the week.¹⁰

On the other hand, obviously something in “Gee” inspired me to go looking for “Way To Go” in the first place (not to mention the ballads from their first album that I’ve praised here before). Beneath all the cringe, there’s a lot in the production of this song that should make your ears prick up. First, take the harmony: what on earth are those chords? Practically everything is a 9 chord or even an 11 chord (chords with more distinct notes being a nice way to display the harmonizing power of a nine-member group). So, in addition to being percussively noisy, this song is dissonant, with a “harmony-melody divorce” so extreme that I begin to lose my sense of key. Like f(x)’s “Red Light” and NCT 127’s “Sticker” (no coincidence that these are all SM Entertainment groups), this is one of the most harmonically bizarre things ever to chart. It would be like if “Tomorrow Never Knows” were one of the Beatles’ hits. 

Then there are those synths, wonderfully calibrated in terms of both timbre (alternately brassy, crunchy, and flutey) and rhythm. The synth groove under “gee gee gee gee baby baby baby” is infinitely better than the actual vocal lines. And, as in any good pop song from The Ronettes to RIIZE, the instrumental is full of delightful, ever-shifting detail. If you don’t want to listen to Jessica and Tiffany’s speech at the beginning (they didn’t like it either!), you can always focus on the surging, pulsing, and grooving synths that take off during them. “Gee” is great once you stop listening to it as a song.

And—since I’m basically commemorating 15 years of my own fandom here—that’s continued to be true of even mediocre K-pop songs. Due to government intervention and the resulting hypercompetition between labels, this music has an incredible degree of monetary investment, songwriting training, and musical experience poured into it. Even when the song isn’t perfect, all of those resources show up somewhere: the result is usually interesting or engaging in at least a few respects (like “Gee”). And, lucky for us, we don’t have to settle for the partial successes: when it all comes together, this music is as good as it gets. 

Also liked…

Louis-Pierre Bergeron and Megan Milatz – Bravura: œuvres pour cor naturel et pianoforte

Tsuyoshi Yamamoto Trio – A Shade of Blue

WOODZ – “AMNESIA”

What I’m Reading

I’ve finally managed to work my way through Chris Wickham’s latest book, The Donkey and the Boat: Reinterpreting the Mediterranean Economy 950–1180. Wickham is just about the most impressive historian I’ve ever read: he integrates evidence from a huge variety of sources, including both practically all of the surviving primary sources for Early Medieval Europe and a fairly comprehensive knowledge of the archaeological literature for the period. He interprets this evidence with a great deal of sophistication and rigor: no primary source is to be trusted at face value (least of all the writings of medieval chroniclers); all interpretation of archaeological evidence is to be done on the basis of comparative thinking based on reading in anthropology and economics. And his geographic scope, like that of most good recent historians of the Early Middle Ages, encompasses North Africa and West Asia as much as Europe. 

This characteristically puts Wickham at odds with a lot of established historical thinking, and part of the fun of reading him (for an outside observer with zero stake in these debates) is his constant, somewhat catty, roasting of historians for not reading archaeology, not reading anthropology,¹¹ not reading outside their geographic or chronological specialty, not reading older works within their specialty, or for misreading what they do read. (For the most part, he’s actually quite generous even to scholars he disagrees with, but the generalized critiques are delicious nonetheless.)

In a broad sense, this disagreement gave birth to Wickham’s two weightiest books, Framing the Middle Ages and now its sequel, The Donkey and the Boat. Now, Wickham does his best to protest that the latter isn’t a sequel. To be sure, it doesn’t cover Northern Europe at all (Framing encompasses Gaul, the British Isles, and Denmark in addition to the Mediterranean) and skips the Eastern Mediterranean. And yes, it’s organized geographically instead of by topic; and since the book is broadly concerned with the economy, some topics from Framing (e.g. the composition of the aristocracy) get pretty thin coverage. But he undersells the extent to which The Donkey and the Boat ends up covering these topics anyway; certainly, I don’t feel the need for any more information on the political history of these areas than Wickham ends up giving. (Would you like more than a few pages on the Zīrid and Hammādid rulers of North Africa?)

To the extent that the two books share a common historiographical “enemy,” it has to be Henri Pirenne, or rather his lasting echoes. In Framing, Wickham conclusively demonstrated that neither lemma of Pirenne’s Mohammed and Charlemagne thesis holds water: the decline in European economies that Pirenne attributed to the Islamic takeover of North Africa actually mostly predated the birth of Muhammad, and trade between Europe and North Africa didn’t stop at all after the takeover. 

Donkey takes on Pirennian history at a more meta-level. Pirenne’s version of economic history focuses on long-distance trade routes in general, and the trade in luxury items in particular. Pioneering and foundational as his work was, this approach has remained broadly influential. So Wickham, naturally, thinks that this is completely backward. As he points out, true luxury items are almost definitionally not the most significant part of economic activity (or else they are too broadly accessible to have the exclusivity that luxuries are supposed to have). And long-distance trade—the Boat—is always secondary to intraregional and local production—the Donkey.

If you want much more detail than that, you should really just read the book (or at least the penultimate chapter), but I’ll at least say that Wickham has a convincing case for making Egypt the true hub of the Mediterranean economy until the late 12th century, on the basis of both its massive local productivity (just look at a satellite view of the agricultural land around the Nile) and its corresponding dominance in the trade for bulk goods, as dominated especially in documents from the Cairo geniza. Centering Egypt in this way helps reframe the question of Italy’s “commercial revolution”: cities like Genoa and Pisa mostly inserted themselves into existing trade networks, rather than “creating” or “pioneering” merchant activity on the Mediterranean. 

Even if it’s not “his” area, I wish Wickham were a little bit more explicit about the consequences of this argument. After all, the idea of the Italian-driven “Commercial Revolution” is tied up in a very, very common story about how the “Modern [European] World” came to be: those enterprising Southern Europeans on the hunt for luxury goods spawned an “Age of Discovery.” (As Wickham notes, Portuguese traders in the Indian Ocean also mostly added to or forcibly took over existing networks.) But maybe that story is so obviously misleading and hackneyed that he feels no need to take it on directly (especially in a book that’s not exactly aimed at general readership). 

Aside from these arguments, what should you expect from this book? Just like in Framing, there are endless descriptions (this time with photographs, which is great) of ceramic types and how their distribution patterns reveal trade networks and production patterns. There’s Wickham’s customary dose of economic model-building on the basis of both the evidence and comparative/theoretical thinking. (The last chapter is maybe more than the customary dose.) But now there are also judicious and crisply written surveys of prior historiography on each of the regions under discussion. And, possibly because this material is less-known than the terrain surveyed by Framing, there are also some really nice vignettes. In Framing, the only section where I really felt Wickham starting to write for the fun of it was in his account of the fictitious English village of Malling. But now in Donkey, there are loads of quotations from documents seemingly there for their own interest and pleasure. The two letters from a mistreated Egyptian wife midway through the second chapter are indeed beautiful and wonderfully human documents.¹² Rigorous as the argumentation and sourcing is, this book is also willing to let its hair down a little; when it does, it’s as fun to read as it must have been to write.

A few others: 

• Public Domain Review – Happy Public Domain Day 2024!

• Vulture – Kali Uchis Had a Vision

• WBEZ – Is Chicago becoming the best city for magic?

• Science – Familiar astronomical object may be two galaxies, not one

• Smithsonian Magazine – The Man Who’s Saving America’s Forgotten Grapes

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

1. Beyond, of course, having studied with Buxtehude for a few months.

2. If you have, I imagine that you either did the same trick as teenage me, or you’ve insisted on getting to know every Bach organ piece already. Seek help in either case.

3. From an interview in Richard Dufallo’s Trackings.

4. I’m thinking of “L’eraclito amoroso” and “Lagrime mie” for the other two, although I’ll happily be told that something else has joined them in notoriety.

5. Both quotations from the album’s promotional material.

6. A sure sign: we’re even starting to see debuts from idols who were born after its release.

7. For the uninitiated (welcome!): SNSD = Sonyeoshidae = Girls’ Generation.

8. I imagine this is true for most idols performing “cutesy” concepts, and not just because so many of them have come forward to say so. There’s a good structural explanation at hand: as Suga and IU pointed out recently, such concepts are very often given to idols who have just outgrown that kind of cute stuff in real life, and have instead turned into moody teenagers.

9. That’s even understating things—Tiffany couldn’t speak Korean very well when SNSD was formed.

10. SNSD’s 2010 rewrite of “Gee,” “Oh!”, largely solves this problem, even if it’s still unbelievably cheesy.

11. He’s surely right, and the fact that none of his reviewers or editors (all historians, I assume) caught Marilyn “Strathearn” (in Framing) or “Douglas” North (in Donkey) might reflect the limits of historians’ knowledge. (The volumes are impressively well-proofread otherwise, as best I can tell.)

12. Although, since Wickham says these are the only such medieval documents he’s seen, he really ought to do some more reading from Medieval China and Japan.