BWV 914 – Toccata in E minor

Plus: Jake Blount's symbiont turn, VANNER "BURN" it up, Aby Warburg's Tangled Paths, and more!

For reasons that will soon become obvious (especially if you skip Bach and Mozart), I’ve been discovering the music of Abenaki musician Mali Obomsawin over the past few weeks. Or maybe rediscovering—her 2022 EP Sweet Tooth was favorably reviewed in enough outlets I read that I probably did give it a listen. But I think I must have missed it: I can’t imagine this album not leaving an impression.¹ Sweet Tooth is a really remarkable bouquet of jazz styles, put to precise artistic (and political) ends. So the album opens with a funeral-brass version of “Odana” (“This ballad, likely as old as the early 1700s, is an homage to the Abenaki reservation in Quebec, Odanak”), and returns to that style for “Wawasint8da.” On the other hand, as the latter track (“a Catholic hymn translated from Latin into the Abenaki language by one of the early French Jesuit priests who lived among the Abenaki”) progresses, its marching-band style dissolves into pure free-jazz freakout. The hymn “tells the story of Jesus’ Descent into Hell or Hades.” You don’t say.

Those free jazz elements of the album are probably my favorite moments, not least because of how they’re deployed for storytelling purposes. The squealing, squiggly cornet and sax playing on “Lineage” are wonderful enough, but when matched up with Obomsawin’s wailing vocals later in the track, the instruments come even more vividly to life. And the pairing of free jazz and rock on “Blood Quantum (Nəwewəčəskawikαpáwihtawα)” reminds me in the best possible way of Trout Mask Replica—with, of course, the titular infusion of Native music. Obomsawin’s bass playing is great throughout. You can read Obomsawin talking about her projects here and here.

BWV 914 – Toccata in E minor

[Allegro] – Un poco allegro – Adagio – Fuga. Allegro

Bach’s Toccatas must be his keyboard works with the biggest gap in popularity among pianists and harpsichordists. To be sure, “Bach pianists” perform them: you’ll find recordings by Angela Hewitt and Glenn Gould. (Although even András Schiff has only recorded the D-major Toccata BWV 912.) And it used to be more common for pianists to try these pieces on: Martha Argerich recorded BWV 911 in 1980, and Sviatoslav Richter played four out of seven. Not that we should take Richter’s huge repertoire to be typical among pianists of his or any generation—but it does seem to represent a past attitude toward this music. Pianists have largely given up on these pieces.

It’s different for harpsichordists. Bach Toccatas have been and continue to be recital and recording staples. Christophe Rousset just came out with a (very nice) recording of all seven; a classic Scott Ross recital included two. And it makes perfect sense: these are large-scale, flashy, and appealing pieces by a name-brand composer. BWV 912 (D Major) is as exciting and fun a recital-ender as anything Bach wrote. Only—in that case, why don’t the pianists give them a go more often?

I can’t be sure (obviously I think they should). It’s probably for a couple of related reasons. I think pianists have generally gotten more careful about Bach and other “harpsichord music” over time. And in particular they’ve tended to retreat to the big collections: the published Art of Fugue, Goldberg Variations, Italian Concerto and French Overture, and Partitas, along with Well-Tempered Clavier selections, the English and French Suites, and the Inventions (although not usually on recitals). That’s a very healthy-sized repertoire, and it encompasses most of the music that Bach packaged for posterity. But it leaves out the “uncollected,” the vast expanses of pieces that you simply have to try and see.

I also wonder if it may be more obvious to pianists that the Toccatas really aren’t for their instrument. Well, that much should be true of the style brisée passages in the suites as well. But the Toccatas are a great deal more foreign even than that. As Christoph Wolff puts it,² these early pieces (Bach was 20 or so when he wrote BWV 914) were written in a “genre without a future.” Maybe music this old-fashioned makes pianists realize that these pieces aren’t for them—at least until they start playing Frescobaldi and Froberger too. (Go for it!) They just sound too old.

Oddly, the Bach Toccatas can also sound a lot like…organ music. Or at least Bach’s organ music. The opening of BWV 912 famously resembles the D-major Prelude BWV 532. And this E-minor Toccata BWV 914 fits in perfectly with pieces like the C-minor fugue BWV 575 and the A-minor Prelude BWV 551—not to mention its early E-minor cousin, the “Cathedral” Prelude, BWV 533. And the Toccatas adopt exactly the same multi-part structure of a North German organ Præludium: two fugues preceded by wild, “improvisatory” sections in the stylus phantasticus. Many of Bach’s organ pieces can look and sound a lot like harpsichord music; it’s nice to see the converse. (Of course what this probably indicates above all is that this repertoire just has a lot of flexibility in terms of instrument; as always, the clavichord fits in here somewhere too.)

Above, I called the Toccatas part of Bach’s “uncollected” keyboard works, but that’s probably not true.³ The Bach obituary lists a volume of “Six Toccatas,” which Wolff has taken as a cue to consider BWV 910–5 as a set, an early “opus” collection demonstrating Bach’s ability to explore the nooks and crannies of a genre. The fact that each one is in a different key bolsters his case.

In the context of the other five (or six, if you count BWV 916) Toccatas, BWV 914 can sound a little, well—plain. It’s the shortest in terms of measure numbers, less than half the length of the mammoth D-minor Toccata BWV 913. It lacks the fireworks of the D-major Toccata BWV 912 or the extraordinary harmonic exploration of the F-sharp-minor Toccata BWV 910. Instead, it gives us an extremely solid, almost textbook example of the form.

Maybe even literally textbook. Consider the final fugue. One of the most intriguing conundra in Bach’s keyboard music is how this fugue relates to an anonymous Italian fugue discovered about 50 years ago. Here’s a side-by-side comparison from David Schulenberg’s The Keyboard Music of J.S. Bach:

This isn’t like the “Legrenzi” fugue or the “Corelli” fugue, where Bach took a theme or two from an Italian composer and wrote a new piece based on it. No: the closing fugue from this Toccata really is just the same as the anonymous Italian one, at least for long stretches (including the most crucial expository passages). There’s a chance that the Italian piece is derived in some way from the Bach, but the other way around seems far more likely. Why would Bach rewrite someone else’s fugue?

That may be asking the wrong question, and it may presuppose ahistorical ideas of what it would even mean for a fugue to be “someone else’s” in the first place. We’ve already seen here that “new works” and “revisions” exist on a continuum for composers like Bach; if you remember the game I had you all play with BWV 1098 and BWV 765, you’ll know that it’s not at all uncommon for composers of this period (even the same composer) to take a stock theme and develop it along similar lines. The imperative to be completely and utterly original is simply not as strong for a Baroque composer; it’s perfectly reasonable to make a refinement to an existing, already good plan. (Not to mention Bach’s perpetual recycling of his own music, or Handel’s recycling of other people’s music.)

All of that’s true even as late as Mozart. I have the Requiem on the brain for reasons that will become obvious below; and that piece contains one of the most famous instances of a “borrowed” fugue. As people noticed quite early on, Mozart’s “Kyrie” sounds a whole lot like “And with his stripes” from Messiah—a piece that Mozart had reorchestrated just a few years prior. Even more strikingly, Mozart’s “new” countersubject sounds pretty much identical to one from Handel’s Dettingen Anthem. Mozart’s “Kyrie” is a Handelian mashup.

But on the other hand, you can also find versions of these subjects in a myriad of other pieces: from Haydn’s Op.20 No.5 (last movement) to Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier (Book 2 in A minor), to Handel’s Six Fugues (again in A minor). Yet again, these fugue subjects exist on a spectrum of originality, ringing new changes on well-worn themes, and often adopting quite similar compositional strategies. 

That’s not least because fugues were, more than any other musical form, a kind of composition studied as a form of rigorous exercise. Even when included in actual compositions, they can have some of this flavor; indeed, by Haydn and Mozart’s time, fugues often exist above all as references to the “strict style,” and thus almost should sound like exercises. And homework problems also exist on a spectrum of creativity. There’s the basic exercise that essentially asks you to retrace the steps of a proof in the text; the more intermediate kind that calls for combining elements from a few model proofs; or the one that asks you to think outside the box entirely to come up with a “trick” that leads to the solution. We like to think of “great composers” as perpetually writing pieces in the third vein, but they also do a fair amount of the first. Especially in fugues.

So: who knows what the actual origin of this fugue is? It certainly does sound pretty Italian in a pre-Vivaldi way, and (thus?) has a lot of charm. Really, it’s only a bit more “rigorous” than the D-minor Fugue BWV 905/ii: most of it is in two parts, and it has a certain tendency to drift away from the subject into pure figuration, keyboard writing just for the fun of it. (To be fair, the subject easily morphs into a variety of common keyboard figures.) When I call this kind of thing an “exercise,” I don’t at all mean that it has to sound dry. Much the opposite: this is an exercise in writing an extended fugue that stays engaging throughout without incorporating long episodes. I think it succeeds pretty well.

The rest of the piece is no less by-the-book, and no less enjoyable. We start with an almost rote lightning-fast intro setting up the key, albeit without any of the dramatic silences or harmonic shocks you might see in a stylus phantasticus opening. Then we have another extremely standard double fugue, one that diligently works through the various permutations of its two subjects without losing interest or a sense of forward momentum. It’s all very nice but nothing new.⁴ Not everything needs to be.

The Adagio before the final fugue also isn’t exactly earth-shattering, but it does color a little bit more outside the lines. At any rate, it’s the “freest” section of the piece, the loosest in terms of rhythm and harmony; it has the most surprises to offer. It also makes for a fascinating contrast with the rhythmically regular and harmonically constrained opening, just as the second fugue feels significantly more relaxed than the first. 

The whole Toccata, then, falls naturally into two halves, two pairs of “preludes and fugues,” with the first quite buttoned-up and the second much looser. It’s almost like the piece traces out a trajectory toward “freer” and more exploratory composition. Even if the ending might just be a kind of exercise in recomposition. What can I say? I think our anonymous Italian composer wrote a pretty good model.

What I’m Listening To

An addendum to the past couple of posts. I don’t normally write here about concerts, but two that I saw this month were relevant to this blog, and excellent enough to be worth commenting on:

• For August, I foolishly left Jake Xerxes Fussell’s outstanding When I'm Called off the list of recommendations, I think because the Gillian Welch/David Rawlings album is in more or less the same lane. I was wrong. Fussell is a really extraordinary singer and guitarist—beautifully sensitive and capable of creating both intimacy and power. Listen to the album, and see him perform if you possibly can. (I promise it’s not just because he’s a Carolina boy.)

• I was pretty positive last month about julie’s debut album, but I think I undersold them. They put on a live show that I can only describe as “bewilderingly good.” The songs are, more or less, the same stuff (which is to say: great), performed with surprising intensity. But, man—their stage demeanor. As you might expect for a shoegaze show, guitarist Keyan Pourzand spent about half of the time retuning his guitars and switching effects pedals. (Makes me feel less self-conscious about what we do onstage at early music concerts!) But Pourzand also DJed a shockingly good house set during the tuning breaks. So the entire concert was something like catching snippets of two different shows while walking back and forth down the hallway. Maybe that doesn’t sound like a rave review. Maybe it’s impossible to describe how that kind of experience can actually work. I just hope they try incorporating it into a future album.

Raphael Pichon and Ensemble Pygmalion – Mozart: Requiem

This is easily the best of the couple dozen recordings of the Requiem I’ve heard, and I’m very tempted to say it’s the best ever. For that matter, it’s one of the best Mozart recordings period that I’ve ever heard. Pichon and Pygmalion don’t miss.

Some parts of what make this album stand out are exactly what you’d expect from any good recording: the playing and singing are assured and gorgeous. The diction and ensemble are sparklingly crisp. The sound engineering is total ear candy. And the interpretation is extremely vivid, with a huge range of articulations, dynamics, and tempi. Just listen to the contrast between the mournful woodwinds opening the “Requiem æternam” and the blast of brass that leads into the choral entrance. Or admire the daring of the tempi in the “Kyrie” and “Domine Jesu Christe.” I might never personally take the latter quite so fast (yes, you read that correctly), but it’s wonderfully exciting. Just like I might not push the “Recordare” quite that much, but I do love the idea of preventing it from languishing in a sentimental ooze as it so often does.

Other standout aspects are things you might only expect if you know Pichon and Pygmalion’s prior work. Pichon is above all interested in imaginative programming, assembling tesserae of music into surprisingly coherent and novel shapes. So, this album—just like 2019’s Libertà! Mozart & the Opera—puts early and late Mozart together, daring you to hear the continuities in his approach to choral writing over twenty-odd years. It’s a very cool and fresh way to hear both the Requiem and the earlier pieces; and if you’re just here for the big piece, you can always just hit the skip-track button anyway.

And as usual, Pichon’s program is founded on decades of historical research and thinking. Just like previous releases, this one includes a nice thick booklet arranging source materials and describing Pichon’s thoughts on the piece. It’s not quite as extravagant as for 2017’s Stravaganza d'Amore! The Birth of Opera at the Medici Court (a contender for my favorite album—of any kind), but nonetheless serves to reassure listeners that Pichon’s seeming flights of fancy are well-grounded in history.

Indeed, they mostly are, and I obviously admire his work. Still, I have some lingering doubts about how “historical” some of these recordings are—and an uncomfortable feeling that some of what I like best about them may be the least historical aspects. 

Pichon makes any number of practical compromises that are basically ubiquitous in early music: two of the most notable are the use of vented trumpets (easier to play and more brilliant) and women’s voices and countertenors instead of boys. (To be fair, how could we recreate the sound of older, under-nourished Early Modern boys’ voices?) It feels churlish to say so, but I wish Pichon’s historical imagination also encompassed experiments with those elements of the sound.

Similarly, Pichon’s recordings are always bolstered by lovely, often massively resonant acoustics. That’s part of what makes Stravaganza d’Amore! sound so good to my ears, but is it really a match for the spaces where these intermedii would have been performed? Is this kind of sound even really possible for a real live listener without the aid of a mixing board? That’s a question that most of us don’t ask all that often; I really appreciate the work of music directors like Paul McCreesh and Andrew Parrott who go out of their way to make you hear particular and historical spaces in their recordings.

Which is to say: I really like the resonance of Pichon’s recordings, but I wonder how “historical” it is. And that goes for many aspects of the sound of Ensemble Pygmalion recordings: everything is calibrated to be incredibly plush and sumptuous. Pichon tends to record with an ensemble that’s about as big as could be historically justified for the repertoire in question. Sometimes, as with his Bach, it’s honestly bigger than can really be justified. Not that he’s alone, but we are talking about somebody with an active and acutely historical imagination. If anybody is going to take up the torch for experimenting with Bach in the “vocal chamber music with chamber ensemble” style that he seems to have written for, it ought to be somebody like Pichon. But instead, we get a Bach that, like many HIP performances over the past few decades, almost approximates modern “orchestra and chorus” dimensions and sonic qualities. (This all goes for Monteverdi too; and Pichon unaccountably does the Magnificat of his Vespers in the wrong key.) We should probably try to take Bach’s likely intended performing forces more seriously.

But I also like Pichon’s plush sound, the full-fat style of performing and recording this music. It’s a welcome reprieve from the bad old days of “early music” as a kind of musical Lean Cuisine: there are a lot more of us now, we can play (and build and maintain) the instruments a lot better, and we’re no longer captive to Modernist ideas about historical performance as “anti-Romantic.” There’s no moral failing in gravitating toward a fuller sound, in being knowingly a bit ahistorical to make something that you personally like better. Still, given how courageous Pichon’s programming and interpretation can be otherwise, it feels like a missed opportunity.

Luckily, much of this (especially ensemble size) is much less relevant for Mozart in particular. Perhaps a more “real” (and/or historical) space would have been nice; and anybody who’s heard Christopher Hogwood’s excellent recording can confirm that boys’ voices do indeed make for a lovely and rather different version of this piece.⁵ But those are much more minor concerns than I have for Pichon’s recordings of earlier repertoire. It’s nice to be able simply to enjoy his recordings without the nagging doubts. Still: don’t let those doubts stop you from diving into Stravaganza d’Amore, or even Pichon’s Bach and Monteverdi. This is one of the most exciting ensembles out there, and each new project they take on is a real event.

Jake Blount and Mali Obomsawin – symbiont

Yet again, I’m recommending an album in the “Americana” vein, that stew of string band, bluegrass, Sacred Harp, “old-time” and other kinds of music that feature banjos and handclaps. There are very few if any better practitioners of this style than Jake Blount. His self-description as “genrequeer” might sound too cute for you, but it’s honest and accurate: he really can mix and mash these sounds (and more) at will, because he’s truly comfortable in all of them. Spider Tales is one of the best music recommendations I’ve ever gotten. 

symbiont retains a lot of that Americana DNA, and tracks like “No Hiding Place” wouldn’t be out of place on Spider Tales or The New Faith. But this album is also a pretty radical departure, not least because of Blount’s new collaborator. (And now you know why I lead off this post with Mali Obomsawin.) Obomsawin also doesn’t live in any particular genre; on top of the various jazz fusions on Sweet Tooth, she’s managed to combine roots-rock and shoegaze (!) with Deerlady. So on symbiont, you can almost feel Blount and Obomsawin vying to take the next creative leap, to explode the boundaries of their music yet again. 

In concrete terms, that means that there’s a whole lot more electronic and digital production on this album. While The New Faith was an Afrofuturist album using the sonic materials of the past, symbiont takes those materials and resets them in more typical “futurist” frames. (I suppose that ironically makes it more “traditional” in a sense.) There are synths, drum machines, samples, and digital effects everywhere. 

Miraculously, it doesn’t sound at all out of place. Blount and Obomsawin, for all of their generic range, are still capable of organizing that huge palette of sounds around a focused, coherent constellation of musical styles that ground the album. They call this a “remix” album and you can see why: it’s not that they’re abandoning Americana sounds, but rather incorporating new elements into them and putting them to new ends. “Stars Begin to Fall” is a great demonstration of what Blount and Obomsawin can do in this vein. (With some of Sweet Tooth’s free jazz elements thrown in to boot.)

I don’t normally talk much about lyrics here, not least because I mostly care about the music, but it feels particularly gauche to talk about this album without at least gesturing at its broader project. The basic idea is probably clear enough from Blount’s Afrofuturism (and Obomsawin’s Indigenous futurisms), or from the fact that the two of them are imagining futures (and pasts) in which the two intertwine as, well, symbionts. It’s Blount’s most directly political album to date, and his spoken-word moments (e.g. “The Green Road”) add a lot to its searing power. symbiont is a striking evolution for Blount and Obomsawin’s styles. I can only wonder what’s next.

King & Prince – Re:ERA

This is easily my favorite J-pop (or at least Japanese idol pop) album in years. I hope it wouldn’t offend

Patrick St. Michel

(at whose recommendation I gave it a listen, and who is of course infinitely more reliable on this music than me) to say that my favorite part of Re:ERA is how much it avoids most of the standard musical fallbacks of the industry. I’m not saying I like it because it “doesn’t sound like J-pop,” but, well…it’s nice to get an album that mostly avoids incessant applied dominants, pianos smeared across guitars, or vocals processed to hell and back.⁶ Instead, Re:ERA is a wild and surprisingly coherent tour of various other pop styles. 

Even the songs that most reflect current Japanese pop trends are refreshing takes on the genre. St. Michel singles out “LOVE HACKER” and “Harajuku” as “King & Prince doing hyperpop,” which is undoubtedly what they are. But I have to say that I appreciate them a hell of a lot more than most of what’s coming out under that ægis nowadays; the whole Japanese hyperpop thing has just gotten to the point of fatigue for me. There’s only so much overstimulation you can take before it all starts to sound the same—and if it all feels familiar, then what the hell is the point of hyperpop? “LOVE HACKER” in particular is a real song carved out of hyperpop conventions, and even if it’s not my favorite ever, I deeply appreciate the effort.

Other tracks, like much else in recent J-pop (St. Michel has been fantastic on this beat) sound a heck of a lot like K-pop. “COLORS” is one of the few songs that uses an identifiably “Japanese” harmonies (a version of the royal road progression), but in a guise that’s much more like how they’ve been used in K-pop over the past year or so (to pick two songs at random, you can hear the same chords in ILLIT and fromis_9). The ‘90s throwback tracks like “moooove!!” are delightful in an almost g.o.d. kind of way. “ROLLER COASTER,” once you get past its heavy-metal intro (great!), is almost a dead ringer for 2011–14 SHINee, while “MAGIC WORD” gives me indelible RIIZE vibes (the chorus sounds a whole lot like “Impossible”). “HOTTER & HOTTER” starts out like an NCT song and then becomes a song that I only wish NCT would release.

But other tracks tap into a different kind of nostalgia. It’s downright weird listening to single “WOW” after Jake Blount: the chorus very clearly draws (probably at third or fourth hand) on the same old-fashioned Americana sounds, handclaps and all. “Don’t Grow Up” oscillates between pop-punk and passages so stripped-back they almost start to sound like actual punk. (Or the old-school bubblegum pop that people like the Ramones were imitating.) “Shimi 染み” just is straightforward pop-punk. “I Will” is one of the better takes on Disney-pop à la 2011 IU.  I don’t love all of it (“WOW” is genuinely great), but it’s all pretty cool. 

Well. Except the ballads. Besides solid album-opener “Odyssey,” I think I’ve now named what I think is every listenable track on the album. That’s a lot of good songs—like I said, I really like it overall—but listen to the others at your peril, and have the skip button ready. 

ROSÉ & Bruno Mars – “Apt.”

APATEU APATEU / APATEU APATEU / APATEU APATEU 

Uh, uh-huh uh-huh

VANNER – BURN

ITZY – GOLD

Why are ITZY’s releases like this?

I don’t mean “Imaginary Friend,” a really great song that I’m glad was released as a single this week. (We’ll get back to this song soon.) No, I, like so many other people, am trying to wonder why on earth JYP would kick off an album’s promotions with a catastrophic mess like “GOLD”:

It has its moments, but this is frankly an insane song to use to promote your group. It’s not catchy, it doesn’t hang together, and a lot of people will find it grating. What gives?

I’ve already gone through a whole thing here about ITZY’s checkered singles history, and I stand by that analysis; their whole thing has been and continues to be “teen.” Still, there’s more to it than that, and it’s worth filling in some gaps there to try to understand why JYP would promote their group this way.

Fundamentally, ITZY as a group is all about their performance skills. JYP himself said it: he thinks that “those who can dance and sing live survive.” And their songs are built to show that off. Even a relatively easy choreography like “ICY” includes an absolutely killer dance break (as in, it would absolutely kill me if I tried to dance it), on top of having each of the members belt out a high E5. An ITZY song has to be powerful to undergird this kind of display. 

And from the beginning, JYP established a very distinctive sound to produce that power: from “DALLA DALLA” on, you can expect an ITZY song to have lots of chanting and shouting over top of beats that verge on industrial with their noisy, grinding crunch. “DALLA DALLA” and “ICY” transmute those elements into incredibly catchy, genuinely musical songs. (I love “ICY.”) But it’s easy to fall off the rails. 

That’s famously what happened with the disastrous “Mafia (In the Morning),” which was probably an attempt to make an ITZY version of late-stage BLACKPINK. The only problem is that ITZY didn’t have nearly as large of a dedicated fanbase, the kind of fans willing to actually listen to songs like “Pink Venom.” If it doesn’t have some kind of solid harmonic or melodic grounding, “shouting” and “noisy” start to just sound like…well, shouting, and noisy.

It’s not like JYP is unaware of this problem. They immediately course-corrected with the instant-classic single “Loco.” But there seems to be a consistent attraction about making tracks that are all shouting+noise and no music for ITZY. Last year’s “Cake,” despite a pretty great tune in the prechorus, was widely clowned on for leaning hard into “ca-ca-ca-ca-cacophonous bullshit.” And the namesake of this year’s album Born to Be, while indeed “powerful” as anything (I can confirm it makes an awesome concert opener), is pretty hard to listen to without much musical reward.

The new evolution in ITZY’s promotional strategy has been to balance these tracks—the kind that are designed to make them look great on music shows and festival stages—with straightforward, tuneful songs, often in a much gentler vein. So, to compensate for “Cake” we got “Bet On Me”; and now we get “Imaginary Friend” as a second single to balance out “GOLD.”

It’s hard for me to imagine this strategy ever succeeding on the charts—do they expect listeners to average out the two songs?—it does mean that we’ve gotten some of ITZY’s best music in the form of these “compensatory” releases. “Imaginary Friend” is a really lovely midtempo tune blending synthpop and rock; the atmospheric effects in the vocals combine with some excellently timed synth sweeps to produce a nice sense of lushness, which the guitars in turn cut through well. For that matter, the other new tracks on the GOLD album are great too, taking the group in a newly “club”-influenced direction—almost like “ITZY does 2023 HYBE girl group.” Songs like “Bad Girls R Us,” “Supernatural,” and “FIVE” would sound right at home on Unlock My World. That’s about as big a compliment as I can give a K-pop song. (I like Changbin’s song too—really, every song except “GOLD” itself.)

So, at least on this album, ITZY have given us powerful, distinctive, and musically coherent songs—just not all at once. It’s a hard circle to square.

I’d already been thinking about this problem in the context of VANNER’s album, which came out right as I was writing about Yeonjun last month. I decided to stay the course and stick with Yeonjun because his song is interesting. VANNER’s album, much as I love it, is anything but.

It’s very odd. I really like BURN. Really like it. All the tracks hit hard in the proper context, and “Blossom” is damn pretty. “Powerful” and “musically coherent” in spades: this is perfectly executed stuff, and it’s perfect to match VANNER’s singing and dancing ability.

But “distinctive”? Forget about it. I listened to this album something like ten times before I could remember much more than the refrain of “Automatic” and snatches of “Blossom.” I still can’t pull the opening riff of “Revolver” to mind; it keeps blending into WOODZ’s “Dirt On My Leather.” I saved “Be Together” to multiple playlists when I first heard it, but I can barely even remember what kind of song it is until I listen to it again.

That probably sounds like pretty negative commentary, but it’s really not meant to be; I enjoy the heck out of BURN when I listen to it, and it hasn’t dropped out of my rotation yet. Still, it’s not likely to win VANNER any new fans. “Well-executed” isn’t attention-grabbing. This album’s release cycle passed without making almost any splash.

So maybe if I had to pick between the promotional strategies, I’d go with ITZY’s. Fans mocking a bad song is definitely still publicity, and if that gets anybody at all to wonder what the rest of the album sounds like, they’ll be hooked. I’m sure that “Gold” will still be a great concert showpiece next time I see them. And if nothing else, at least everybody still knows what “ITZY” sounds like. Combining “distinctive” and “powerful” is probably the move if you have to pick two.

Then again…you don’t have to pick two, as demonstrated in spades by ITZY’s earlier singles. Or, of course, by this month’s best K-pop song:⁷

aespa also like to fill the back halves of their albums with softer and sweeter songs to balance the craziness of their singles; for every “Girls,” there’s an “ICU.” (I’m a big fan of the sweet songs.) But if you have a single as good as “Whiplash,” you don’t need to compensate with a music video for “Just Another Girl.” ITZY and VANNER have both done it in the past. Here’s hoping they fully return to form soon.

Also liked…

Polyphème – Le rêve de Polyphème

Chat Pile – Cool World

Sonar Quartett with Claudia Barainsky and Wu Wei – Gabriel Iranyi: String Quartets Extended

Oranssi Pazuzu – Muuntautuja

Immanuel Wilkins – Blues Blood

Christoph Dittmar and Capella Thuringia with Cantus Thuringia – Melchior Franck: Melodiae Sacrae 1607

Ayom – Sa.Li.Va

What I’m Reading

Even my fellow fans of dead German art historians⁸ may not be aware that E.H. Gombrich’s only biography—his only book about a single other person—is not about Raphael, Leonardo, or any other artist. It’s a biography of Aby Warburg. The year was 1970, and Gombrich was at the height of his fame: The Story of Art was a dozen or so editions in, and Art and Illusion was ten years old. And yet the monograph that he decided to follow them with⁹ was a biography of a basically untranslated art historian, one not much known to the English-speaking public.

It makes more sense if you know that Gombrich was director of the Warburg Institute. Which is another way of saying: it helps to know just how much Gombrich owed to Warburg’s ideas and methods. Studying Ancient “survivals” in Renaissance art? Warburg. Considering visual culture through the lens of psychology? Warburg. An interest in art’s relationship to magic, “irrationality,” and “superstition”? Warburg. Anything to do with “iconology”? Warburg.¹⁰ Of course, not all of these approaches were unique to Warburg, and Warburg wasn’t Gombrich’s only influence, but this gives you some sense of the impact he had. On a whole range of scholars: from Erwin Panosky and Michael Baxandall to Frances Yates and Anthony Grafton. A very solid chunk of the most influential approaches to Early Modern European art history (and just plain history) are still “Warburgian.”

No, I haven’t decided to break with precedent and talk about an old book this time. I bring up Gombrich’s Warburg because I find it to be a crucial piece of context for Hans Hönes’s new Warburg biography, Tangled Paths. I think Hönes’s book is excellent—crisply written, well-researched, concise, thoughtful—and yet I still don’t quite know what to make of it. I’m not sure who this book is for, and I wonder if Gombrich and Co. are partly to blame.

Warburg is almost too good of a fit for the “tortured genius” archetype. Probably his most famous piece of writing, his lecture on the “Hopi serpent ritual,” was delivered at the mental institution where he was confined. It’s a miracle that he managed to commit as much to paper as we have: the 900 or so pages collected in The Renewal of Pagan Antiquity very often feel messy and fragmented, as if they were yanked unwillingly from Warburg’s brain, but at least he got them on the page. By the end of his life, he was mostly beyond writing, instead busily assembling and reassembling images into his Mnemosyne Atlas. 

And the Warburg quotes and anecdotes are almost too juicy. He probably did call himself “Hamburger at heart, Jew by blood, Florentine in spirit.” But who knows if he actually—Esau-style—gave up his birthright (inheriting the reins of the family bank) at the age of thirteen in exchange for all the books he wanted. (Warburg’s enormous and rare book collection may make this sound like a raw deal for his brother, but note that modern firms like Warburg Pincus represent only a fraction of the family’s business at the time.)

In other words, Warburg is almost more myth than man at this point, not least because of how he’s been portrayed by later scholars in the “Warburgian” vein. (It’s nice to have such a colorful origin story for your approach to scholarship.) The Institute is still alive and kicking, and even underwent a massive renovation in the past few years. With the more general revival of interest in the origins of modern art history in the 1980s, Warburg became almost talismanic for a wide array of scholars. 

Hönes’s new biography does a great job of cutting through all of that. Apocryphal stories are dispensed with quickly. Warburg’s illness is reframed as a truly debilitating experience, one that left him and everyone around him worse off, and certainly not a “necessary evil” for the direction his work would take. Most originally, Warburg is put back in his place as an essentially minor figure in the art history of his time, always on the periphery of scholarly discussions and institutions. Early chapters even show that his approach wasn’t necessarily all that original: Warburg comes across more as a figure who, by virtue of his enormous independent wealth, was able to stick to older approaches in the face of new scholarly trends. 

That’s all very refreshing for anybody who’s been initiated into the Warburg mythos. But I wonder how this book comes across to readers who haven’t drunk the Kool-Aid—who, dare I broach the idea, may not know anything about Warburg. I think it’s healthy for initiates that Warburg becomes a somewhat diminished figure at Hönes’s hands, but I’m not sure that the biography ever quite makes it clear why anybody should care if they don’t already.

If you read Gombrich’s biography, for instance—and, to be fair, the book was essentially a long piece of propaganda for the Institute—you’re relentlessly reminded of Warburg’s immense subject-matter expertise, of how much he knew that never made it onto the page. Obviously that’s easier for somebody like Gombrich who actually knew the man to bring up; but since Hönes (reasonably) discounts the memoirs of acolytes as liable to exaggeration and puffery, his book has no room for that kind of testimony. 

In other words, so much of Gombrich’s book is about the impression left by Warburg, whose words are quoted generously on almost every page. And, to be fair, it’s mostly about his scholarly impact: Aby Warburg, An Intellectual Biography is indeed mostly about Warburg’s development, ideas, and writings. By contrast, Hönes’s book is about who Warburg was and what he did, largely out in the world. (Although there are good discussions of Warburg’s most famous writings, just not in remotely the same detail as Gombrich.) 

So: Hönes’s book does not at all supersede or replace Gombrich’s, but rather forms a kind of counterbalance, in both tone and subject matter. As such, I think it’s invaluable, but it feels a little bit odd to recommend a new biography on the basis that most interested readers should really check out another biography first. It may be another fifty years before it’s time for another Warburg biography, but hopefully that one can strike a balance between the two. Even after Hönes’s corrective, I still feel that Warburg deserves it.

A few others:

• Intelligencer – The Yellowstone Club Billionaires Buying Montana’s Mountains

• Chicago Reader – Scrapyard dead

• Common Edge – How the Global Business Class Has Transformed the Home

• Nature – The early days of peer review: five insights from historical reports

• Allure – Parabens Are Not the Problem

• Atlas Obscura – Who Were the Mysterious Moon-Eyed People of Appalachia?

• The Baffler – Take Me Out to the Mallpark

Thanks for reading, and see you again soon!

1. And at least Last.FM, which is not entirely reliable, backs me up here.

2. In a book I discussed here.

3. Pace David Schulenberg.

4. Although: I’m not sure I’ve seen an earlier piece use the tempo marking “Un poco allegro.”

5. I’m not sure I’ve heard a HIP recording of this piece that doesn’t use vented trumpets.

6. When these conventions come roaring back on “Boy Meets Girl ボーイミーツガール” it’s almost charming. Almost.

7. I’ll take the ITZY and VANNER albums over aespa’s any day.

8. If that’s you: I recently discovered that the translation of Alois Riegl’s Late Roman Art Industry is not only still possible to purchase, but even still in print; you just have to go directly through the publisher. (It’s far from cheap.)

9. Gombrich’s collected essays had already started appearing in the meantime, starting with Meditations on a Hobby Horse in 1962 and Norm and Form in 1967.

10. Yes, iconology is now more associated with Erwin Panofsky, but just take a look through Gombrich’s Symbolic Images. Richard Woodfield has a good exploration of the issue here.