BWV 988 – “Goldberg” Variations, Part 1

Plus: a feast of seventeenth-century releases, TWS and trade wars, Native Nations, and more!

Apologies for the delay this week—and thanks if you were able to make it to any of the concerts that were keeping me busy. Just to plug a couple of other projects that have appeared in the meantime:

• My first journal article finally appeared! The basic idea is that the “Moonlight” Sonata (and its counterpart, Op. 27 No. 1) was written to showcase one particular aspect of how philosophers at the time thought that the human imagination works. Send me a note if you want to read but can’t get access.

• I contributed fourteen recordings of nineteenth-century baseball-themed piano music for the Effectively Wild podcast miniseries on the life and work of pioneering sportswriter Ella Black. The pieces are often quite interesting themselves, and the Ella Black story is pretty astonishing—give it a listen!

And now back to our regularly scheduled programming:

I don’t tend to read about music before I listen to it. I’d like to claim that I’m making a principled stand by doing so, that I’m trying to minimize prejudice: something about letting the music speak to me first unmediated by press releases and critical commentary. But in truth, it’s simply that I’d rather spend that time listening.¹ Honestly, I rarely even look at the track titles or lyrics unless there’s something really ear-catching there.

That’s how I ended up listening to and earmarking Ribbon Skirt’s new album Bite Down without even registering its Native themes. Yes: I didn’t even look at the name of the band I was listening to (I promise I know what a ribbon skirt is), let alone track titles like “Off Rez.” I’m embarrassed, but it’s also almost a kind of luxury to be able to encounter this music context-free. I didn’t have to seek Ribbon Skirt out: they came to me, and hopefully a lot of other people, via more or less “mainstream” sources (Stereogum Album of the Week; 7.7 from Pitchfork). Oh, and let me add: Bite Down rules.

Don’t listen to this music “blind” like I did. The lyrics in particular are worth your attention. “Off Rez” itself is full of gems:

I’m gonna break into a dance down the block

I’m gonna be your brand new headache to solve

Drown you in paperwork then skip down the hall

Solve the Indian problem once and for all

They want 2000’s Buffy Marie

They want my quantum so they send the police

Less pleasant to contemplate but equally artful are lines like these from “41”:

Joe’s Toyota crashed into the mountainside

Smudging stars across the pavement Sunday night

It’s heavy subject matter (when is it not?), but always leavened with an urge to “dance down the block” and “skip down the hall.”

The music is a similar story. Overall, the sound is a pretty classic take on the post-punk flavor of indie rock, making judicious use of distortion, autotune, and various kinds of screaming to highlight the bitterness of the subject matter. But the tunes also “skip down the hall” in their own way. The first half—especially from “Cellophane” through “Off Rez” into “Wrong Planet”— really rocks, bopping along and making sure that some of the more Joy Division-esque aspects of the production never end up sounding like, well, Joy Division. The spacious and precise instrumentals of “Cut” are also a perfect contrast with the soupy atmospherics and effects that bookend the record.

Bite Down is a short album—nine songs, 28 minutes—so you should also have time to read a bit of what singer Tashiina Buswa (Anishinaabe) has had to say about it. Note especially that she’s said

I hesitate to call it “Indigenous music,” because I don’t like labels like that either, but it’s part of it naturally.

and also that

I think there’s some pressure to make music with a message or that carries some sort of advocacy, but I’ve learned over the past few years to not let that pressure drive the music. I think Indigenous musicians and BIPOC musicians in general should also be able to make music about their own unique experiences existing in the world as humans, and I think there’s a way to strike a balance between that and making songs that also honor your culture and where you come from! A lot of the other songs on the record are much more personal, so I think we did strike that harmony in this record.

I hope I haven’t sounded like I’m pidgeonholing Buswa here. (I would hope the same for any Indigenous musician, for that matter.) Undoubtedly, the Indigenous themes on Bite Down are important, but they’re not what makes the record. After all, it’s possible to love it without even knowing the name of the band.

BWV 988 – “Goldberg” Variations, Part 1

Aria

Variatio 1. a 1 Clav.

Variatio 2. a 1 Clav.

Variatio 3. Canone all’unisono. à 1 Clav.

Variatio 4. à 1 Clav.

Variatio 5. a 1 ô vero 2 Clav.

Variatio 6. Canone alla seconda a 1 Clav.

Yes, you heard a page turn. And some smudges. We keep it informal here.

You weren’t expecting the whole thing at once, were you? I haven’t just been bundling up smaller pieces into multi-BWV posts for the sake of rushing (“rushing”) through the series—I also need to compensate for the need to carve up mammoths like the “Goldbergs.” Expect a total of five posts on BWV 988.

I probably could have broken them down into ten posts and still had more than enough material. The “Goldbergs” loom large in every sense. There are books and books about them and inspired by them. There’s a play. There’s a movie. There are a gazillion recordings, and one of them (or really two—you know what I’m talking about) is probably the single most famous classical recording ever.

I’ll get to Gould in a future post. I can also promise to devote posts to other aspects of BWV 988’s reception history, and to the nickname itself. (In everything I’ve read about the “Goldbergs,” there’s a bizarre lack of attention to, well, Goldberg.) But for now I should at least introduce what these pieces are.

Yes, I said “these pieces.” Above, I purposefully avoided some of the Guiness Book of World Records-style talk that often accrues to the “Goldbergs.” If you think about them as a single piece, then they’re by far (by far) the largest and longest keyboard work of the eighteenth century. In fact, it’s very hard to come up with a single keyboard work in the entire standard repertoire (excluding cranks like Sorabji) that exceeds it: BWV 988 clocks in at something like 80 minutes, well surpassing the Diabellis and even Rzewski’s People United. You have to look to purpose-written “durational” music like Morton Feldman’s Triadic Memories before you find a real competitor.

But it’s not all clear to me that the “Goldbergs” even belong in this category to begin with. In our current musical environment, it’s easy to think of BWV 988 as a mega-piece, a St. Matthew Passion for the keyboard to be performed in one go as an extraordinary concert spectacle. Except, of course, the St. Matthew Passion itself was designed to be neither concert nor spectacle, nor even to be performed in one go. (Let’s see modern performers try to be truly “authentic” and put a sermon in between the Parts I and II!) Similarly, in Bach’s day there were no recordings (duh) and no keyboard recitals (the term was invented by Franz Liszt, born 70 years after the publication of the “Goldbergs”). Even the idea of a solo keyboard concert would have sounded strange then; remember that Bach himself invented the harpsichord concerto with Brandenburg 5, and that the very idea of a “public” was only just starting to take shape in Germany at that time. The “Goldbergs,” at minimum, are not a “piece” in the same sense as the Diabellis are—because there were no pieces like the Diabellis at the time.

To put it another way, I think it’s almost as misleading to turn the “Goldbergs” into a single piece as it is to turn the six Partitas and the other volumes of the Clavierübung series into single pieces themselves. For that matter, I think we tend to overrate how much Baroque musicians thought of individual Partitas and other suites themselves as whole pieces: it’s awfully common to see them dismembered, reconfigured, and otherwise sold for parts in contemporaneous sources.²

This might sound strange, since the Partitas (and, as we’ll soon see, the “Goldbergs”) have many of the hallmarks of large-scale Pieces: they seem carefully constructed to balance coherence and variety, for instance, and they show attention to issues of large-scale structure. But that’s as true of the whole Clavierübung I collection as it is of the individual Partitas. More than anything else, these publications are books, anthologies for perusal and study. Anthologies are often designed to work nicely when browsed in a certain order too.

Maybe it’s best then to think of the “Goldbergs” as a “work” in the sense of “Opus”—just as Haydn’s Opus 33 is a “work” (publication) consisting of six “pieces” (the string quartets). I find this a useful frame for interpreting the story that Bach’s first biographer, Johann Nikolaus Forkel, tells about the “Goldbergs”:³

For this model, according to which all variations should be made, though, for reasons easily understood, not a single one has been made after it, we are indebted to Count Kaiserling, formerly Russian Ambassador at the Court of the Elector of Saxony, who frequently resided in Leipzig, and brought with him Goldberg, who has been mentioned above, to have him instructed by Bach in music. The Count was often sickly, and then had sleepless nights.

At these times Goldberg, who lived in the house with him, had to pass the night in an adjoining room to play something to him when he could not sleep. The Count once said to Bach that he should like to have some clavier pieces for his Goldberg, which should be of such a soft and somewhat lively character that he might be a little cheered up by them in his sleepless nights.

Bach thought he could best fulfill this wish by variations, which, on account of the constant sameness of the fundamental harmony, he had hitherto considered as an ungrateful task. But as at this time all his works were models of art, these variations also became such under his hand. This is, indeed, the only model of the kind that he has left us. The Count thereafter called them nothing but his variations. He was never weary of hearing them; and for a long time, when the sleepless nights came, he used to say: “Dear Goldberg, do play me one of my variations.” Bach was, perhaps, never so well rewarded for any work as for this: the Count made him a present of a golden goblet, filled with a hundred Louis d’ors. But their worth as a work of art would not have been paid if the present had been a thousand times as great. It must be observed that, in the engraved copies of these variations, there are some important errata, which the author has carefully corrected in his copy.

Count Kaiserling, according to the story—and in a later post, I’ll argue that we really have no reason to doubt this story, that Goldberg seems like a very good candidate for the player whom these pieces were written for—asked for “some clavier pieces,” plural, and asked for them to be played one or two at a time. This makes all too much sense. Other Bach variations sets like the “Sei gegrüsset” partitas were equally modular, being prone to addition, shuffling, and excerpting.⁴ (To be fair, the same is sometimes true of later variations sets.)

So it might be useful to think of the “Goldbergs” as something between the Six Partitas and each of the six Partitas. And in fact, even if people don’t typically think of variations as suites, there’s significant precedent for thinking of suites as variations. Many Baroque suites make the Courante into something like a variation of the Allemande, and there’s even a demonstration of how to make a whole suite out of a single bassline in Friedrich Erhardt Niedt’s Musicalische Handleitung.⁵ If you think the word “suite” is too misleading for the “Goldbergs” (“and where, sir, is the Courante?”), perhaps we could go with the related French term ordre. But I’m getting ahead of myself.⁶

If the “Goldbergs” aren’t a single “piece,” we at least know what Bach said that they are:

Clavierübung, or Exercise for the Clavier; consisting of an Air, with several variations, for the Harpsichord, with two rows of keys.

I think this description on the title page is worth taking seriously, or at least literally. Like the other volumes of the series, the “Goldbergs” are exercises. Exercises in what?

Like all of Bach’s solo works, they’re partly exercises in composition, exemplars of how to solve a particular compositional puzzle. As you probably know, the “theme” for the variations is (as in Niedt) a repeating bassline:⁷

By itself, it’s actually not that much of a challenge for a Baroque composer to write thirty-one very different pieces over a single bassline. Especially not one as normative as this one, composed as it is of well-worn widely-used schemas anyway. Even dealing with the sheer, plodding regularity of this bassline—four phrases of four measures, followed by four more phrases of four measures, each repeated to make a perfectly square AABB pattern of 64 bars—isn’t as difficult in a style accustomed to such formulaic harmonic rhythm.

Of course, that’s not the only challenge Bach sets for himself. Instead, just as in the Partitas, Art of Fugue, and other “encyclopedic” works, he decides to use the opportunity to make a systematic traversal of multiple genres:

In particular, you’ll notice (or may already know) that every third variation is a canon (at progressively wider intervals), and that the variation before the canon is almost always a hand-crossing exercise. (There’s a trochaic substitution that flips this order at both the beginning and the end of the set.) The variations group naturally into threes.

They also group naturally into two halves, but we’ll get there in a future post. Indeed, there is quite a bit of interesting overall structure to this layout, but I’m still unconvinced that this is a sign of Bach intending the “Goldbergs” to work as a single piece. It’s nice to break up the canons by interspersing them among the other pieces; it’s nice that Bach paid attention to issues of sequencing both local and global. It happens that the result is quite effective in concert, but I think that’s a happy coincidence more than anything else.

1700 words in and I guess it’s time to talk about the actual pieces! Here’s the opening of the Aria, from Sir John Hawkins’ General History of the Science and Practice of Music of 1776:⁸

And here’s another early score, from Hans Georg Nägeli’s edition of 1802:

Now compare both to Christoph Wolff’s edition for Bärenreiter:

Notice the differences? Look at the right hand in particular.

Actually, Hawkins and Nägeli both get the notes basically perfect. But they both (especially Hawkins) completely whiff on the ornaments.

It’s not original to comment that the Aria is absolutely loaded with ornament signs, but I think this dimension of the piece has still been underappreciated. As far as I can tell, there is no other piece by Bach, period, that uses quite this diversity of little squiggles and graces. Even the lavishly ornamented Sarabandes with agréments from the English Suites don’t match up.

The funny thing is, this isn’t Bach’s most ornamented Sarabande; its score isn’t covered in thickets of thirty-second notes like the Sarabande from the E-minor Partita. Rather, it’s notable precisely for its use of ornament signs. It’s almost like Bach intended it as a real-world application of an ornament table like the one he included in the Klavierbüchlein for Wilhelm Friedemann:

It’s precisely this diversity of signs that was out of fashion (to the point of being near-incomprehensible) by the time of Hawkins and Nägeli. It was already a bit much in its own day. The Aria is an exercise in varied ornamentation.

Ornaments also allow Bach to break up some of the rigorous monotony imposed by his bassline. Consider the last eight measures of the piece (2:17 in the recording above):

That figure in m.25 sounds familiar because you’ve heard it several times before—it functions almost like a kind of return, rounding off the form. But when you’ve heard it before, it’s been as the second measure of a phrase (including in measure 2 of the whole piece). Using ornamentation as a point of reference is a way to break up symmetry.

And Bach can also break up a phrase by starting an ornamentation pattern in the middle of it. That’s what happens with the long strings of sixteenth notes (and walking eighths in the left hand) starting in m.27: they continue over the natural phrase-break between mm.28 and 29, giving the piece a nice sense of “drive to the finish.”

Notice also those strange “doublings” and tied notes in a lower voice of the right hand on the bottom system. This too is an almost didactic bit of notation: Bach is telling you where to put your thumb and reminding you to “overhold.” It’s almost the reverse of the Couperin Rondeau in one of the Notebooks for Anna Magdalena. Couperin version:

Bach version:

In the notebook, the exercise is for the student to read seemingly separate notes and remember to keep them held anyway. In the publication, some of the overholding is written in, to remind learners who may not have been able to get tuition from the horse’s mouth.

Then again, such students are unlikely to have been able to play most of the following variations. Variation 1 is the first of the hand-crossing studies, first having the right hand dip below the left for a brief moment

and then having the two hands hop over each other in alternating fashion:

But this is also a study in having the hands in having the hands cross over themselves, specifically having the index finger briefly pass over the thumb:

This is a very Frenchified technique indeed, and rarely used by Bach. (You can watch Skip Sempé do a lovely demonstration of it in his famous Pancrace Royer video here.) Then again, the rapid jumps in the right hand have also reminded a great many people of Scarlatti, and the piece does have a certain Italian flair. As with many of the “Goldbergs,” it’s a complete mix; there’s really not much music like it.

Variation 2 is a similar story, written in a confounding blend of “instrumental” style (trio sonata texture, 2/4 time signature) and surprisingly strict imitation. The strictness can lead Bach into some very awkward corners indeed, as in the infamous measure 9, distributed weirdly between the hands with a bizarre doubling that abruptly cuts off the top voice (0:11 in the recording):

Indeed, I find that such awkwardness is a seriously under-discussed feature of the “Goldbergs” in general, and its canons in particular. To be sure, it is a fun trick that Bach was able to pull off such a diversity of canons on top of the same bass (and each with a different time signature!), but it’s not as hard as it sounds and the results can sometimes sound kind of weird. Variation 3 has one of those “Late Bach” basslines that kind of just runs around awkwardly with a bunch of weird leaps and strange inversions:

And the canons are a lot less impressive once you realize that a) Bach restarts them halfway through each variation, b) he makes ample use of blank space, letting the bassline fill in the harmony where needed. This is especially true in the second half of each canon. Take a listen to Variation 3 with just the dux (the first canonic voice):

Especially after the repeat (0:28) in that recording, there are lots of places where the canonic voice kind of just…stops. We’ll hear a lot more of that in the later entries.

Variation 4, one of Gould’s favorites, takes the “instrumental” spirit and really runs with it. The piece is essentially a passepied with no upbeat, a fast and light minuet full of rhythmic disruption. Try beating time along with the bass: for eight measures, it’s as easy as can be, and then it’s just a mess of syncopation and hemiola:

The rhythm helps distract you from the fact that although this piece sounds like a fughetta (each voice enters with a version of that “third and then fifth” motive), it’s carried out with all of the devil-may-care attitude of a Handel fugue.

Variation 5 is simultaneously like a souped-up version of Variation 1 and also the last of the “arabesque” variations where Bach will be this nice to pianists and other players of single-keyboard instruments. There are a few moments where the hands are truly on top of each other:

But it’s not quite yet a French-style pièce croisée. “1 ô vero 2 Clav”: one or two keyboards. You fully need two keyboards for the remainder of the set.

Finally, Variation 6 is both a highly stereotyped way of writing a canon at the second (chain of suspensions), and also a monstrously awkward, even bizarre piece of music. With such short measures (3/8 time), the harmonic inflections that Bach adds to his bass pattern pass too quickly to register easily: listen for the odd chromatic stuff at 0:10, for instance. And the oddities are really audible when you omit the second canonic voice:

That bassline absolutely needs both upper parts. It won’t be the last “Goldberg” canon built on such unsteady foundations. This is strange, strange music, and if nothing else, I hope that giving you just half of the canons helps to defamiliarize it. These pieces are exercises for the listener too.

What I’m Listening To

Leonardo García-Alarcón and Cappella Mediterranea, Chœur de Chambre de Namur – Colonna: Missa Concertata – Handel: Dixit Dominus

Les Kapsber’girls – Vox Feminae

Magnus Kjellson and Göteborg Baroque – Buxtehude: Membra Jesu nostri, BuxWV 75

Lucile Richardot, Sebastian Daucé, and Ensemble Correspondances – Northern Light: Echoes from 17th-century Scandinavia

I couldn’t make up my mind, OK? Sometimes there’s just a glut of great new releases; I’m still digesting March 2024’s slate of rock albums. And sometimes all of them happen (just so happen) to be of seventeenth-century music. Or four of them do at any rate.

For most of these albums, the common denominator is discovering exciting new repertoire. New to me at least; perhaps you already know all about Giovanni Paolo Colonna and Francesca Campana. If that’s you, I hope you’ll indulge as I try to get my head around this music.

Maybe I should start with the album of better-known stuff. This Göteborg Membra is really fabulous, managing to create a sound both luscious and lean. The choir—appropriately sized at eight members and mostly used as soloists—can sound absolutely huge, as in their entrance in “Ad pedes.” (This, like the fantastic organ sound throughout the album, may be more a triumph of miking than performance, but I can’t deny the result.) The strings play into the expressive nuances without losing rhythmic vitality or forward drive: the opening of “Ad genua” is very lovely indeed. Overall, it’s now one of my favorite recordings of the work.

I’ve long wondered if my fondness for Membra was partly just a function of its style, or even that sound by itself: do I really like Buxtehude’s writing, or do I simply like it when violins and solo voices dance on top of a velvety bed of viols? The new Ensemble Correspondances album gets me most of the way to an answer: I definitely do just like that sound, and at the same time I can see that Buxtehude did extraordinary things with it. I simply loved listening to Northern Light, and probably mostly for the orchestration—although to be fair I think that several of the compositions on it are real gems. (I’d never taken Franz Tunder seriously before: mea culpa.) But listening to them also helps make Buxtehude’s accomplishment in this style come into focus. The lesser-known works by Sebastian Knupfer (heard of him), David Pohle (nope), and others are typically fluently written and often quite expressive at a local level. But they’re rarely as concentrated and organized as Buxtehude’s cantatas; I found myself hearing a series of poignant moments with less planning for overall effect. Buxtehude’s expressive gestures themselves aren’t actually so different from Johann Krieger’s, but he sequences and times them for maximal impact. Still, I hope this doesn’t sound like faint praise for Krieger and crew: for pieces in this style to come this close to Membra’s level is itself an extraordinary achievement.

Les Kapsber’girls (I’m sorry, European Baroque ensembles are all named like J-pop groups now) have had a similar project for a long time: they’re experts at digging up lesser-known works from a once-pervasive and broadly appealing style. In their case, the repertoire is “light” vocal music from the earlier seventeenth century written for a small number of female voices and continuo. (Kapsberger himself was an expert purveyor of this kind of music, and the subject of their first album.) And there really is no group better at performing this kind of music. To steal a friend’s description, the ’girls sound exactly like “just some gal pals staring into each other’s eyes and singing into each other’s voices”: the blend can be downright startling, and their playful back-and-forth is simply delightful. This album will be my new default recommendation for students who need to hear examples of imaginative ensemble singing.

The songs are nice too. They really went digging for some of them: Lucia Quiciani is brand new to me, and there’s hardly a glut of recordings of Antonia Bemba yet either. It’s all very nice music, and I appreciate that the ’girls didn’t load up on better-known names like Leonarda, Strozzi, and Francesca Caccini—those three total six tracks, and only one of those is a (modern) warhorse.

That said—and I feel bad saying so—that warhorse, Strozzi’s “Che si può fare,” is unfortunately not a highlight of the disc. Musically it is, of course. But I get the feeling that the recording sessions simply may not have left enough time to adjust from melt-in-your-mouth and dance-on-your-tongue ensemble singing to the harsher world of solo Strozzi; some of the latter half in particular is a bit rough. Other solo songs (including the Lucia Quiciani and Francesca Caccini entries) fare much better, but they’re also much easier. I’m sure the ’girls can all acquit themselves excellently in solo repertoire, and I hope future recordings will make that easier for them.

Finally, the Colonna and Handel album. I really love this performance, which places a premium on intensity, drive, and expressivity, with a very slight tendency toward sloppiness. (I would happily accept this as a description of my own playing.) I love how the “Conquasabit” in the Handel rushes forward like a cavalry charge, with both string players and singers willing to make a harsh noise in the service of terrifying effects. Not that they can’t do slow and relaxed well too—the “Tecum principium” is also lovely.

But I probably wouldn’t be telling you to listen to this album if it were just for the Handel, even for as much as I love Dixit. No, the really captivating discovery here is late-seventeenth-century Bolognese composer Giovanni Paolo Colonna, a composer who, like Alessandro Stradella, writes music that is this close to being tonal without ever quite relinquishing older styles of writing. This mass is less weird than anything I know by Stradella, and probably both less interesting and less influential, but it’s also incredibly attractive, vividly orchestrated music. Pairing it with young Handel is genius: Handel’s music is generally in “older” styles than Bach’s (Handel plagiarized Stradella at least once), and hearing them consecutively makes the affinity extremely obvious, even if Colonna’s mass sounds weirdly more “orchestral” than almost anything in Handel. On this album, Cappella Mediterranea really make it feel like you can hear music history evolve in real time, and it’s worth a listen for that alone.⁹

girlpuppy – Sweetness

I’m fully in the tank for “sad girl rock.” I guess you saw that last month with recommendations for both Lucy Dacus and Japanese Breakfast. Perhaps I’ve shown you how much I assign both Mitski and Snail Mail to my classes. Snail Mail, incidentally, is the only non-idol-pop artist from whom I own a branded t-shirt. I have four.

But I’ve found it weirdly hard to be excited about most music in this vein since, well, Snail Mail’s last album (2021). I suspect that it has something to do with the full-bore mainstreaming of indie and alt-rock, especially in the wake of Taylor Swift’s 2020 dabblings in the genre. Or maybe it’s Billie Eilish’s fault. Regardless, even as the Boygenius Extended Universe has exploded in popularity, I’ve felt something of a disconnect from the actual music (and I really didn’t love the actual Boygenius album). I enjoy most of it, but nothing’s grabbed me in quite the way that Lush or Puberty 2 still do.

I’m not sure that Sweetness is quite on the level of those albums (there’s no “Pristine” or “Crack Baby” on this album), but it’s the most excited I’ve felt in years for this kind of music. It’s a little bit hard to characterize just what differentiates girlpuppy from Phoebe Bridgers (she always seems to be compared to Phoebe Bridgers), but if I had to take a stab at it, I would probably say “literally just better tunes and riffs.” I often get the feeling (including on Dacus’s and Baker’s and Zauner’s latest albums) that “sad girl rock” songwriters nowadays are mostly concerned with establishing a vibe and putting out a nicely confessional set of lyrics. I miss songs. girlpuppy is good at songs.

She’s not exactly good at lyrics, mind you, and her text-setting can often exacerbate their awkwardness. The opening salvo of “Since April” is representative: “I tried to make you promise / You’d give me the same chance / I gave you two years ago / I remember it but you wouldn’t.” Or rather: “I TRIED to make you promISE / You’d give me the SAME chance / I GAVE you TWO years ago / I remember it but you WOULDN’T,” with musical phrases completely misaligned from the words. Maybe try to ignore the words.

This kind of songwriting (“Think I'm a masochist / I know you can hurt me / And I'm letting you / ‘Cause I like you / I just do” is an unfortunate blight on one of the album’s best songs) really won’t do girlpuppy any favors with the kind of listener who tends to go for “sad girl music.” It also probably doesn’t help that these are straight confessional lovesongs. Boygenius superfans in particular can’t be happy about that.

I also almost wonder if the album’s titular Sweetness might also be a factor in keeping girlpuppy out of the limelight. Sure, this kind of music, with its big choruses, clearly-etched harmonies, and rhythmically engaging guitar work (“For You Two” rocks) appeals to listeners like me. But those same elements might be downright counterproductive when it comes to reaching the core “sad girl music” audience. Music that commits too much to its sonic presence is harder to just vibe to. And she really should work on the lyrics.

TWS – TRY WITH US

You may have heard (and heard and heard and heard) that K-pop stocks, far from tanking upon the April 2nd announcement of U.S. tariffs, actually surged. What’s up with that?

(Don’t worry, we’ll get to TWS, I promise.)

For starters, the reality is just a touch more complex. Indeed, you can see a noticeable 2 April bump for the three K-pop stocks on the chart below,¹⁰ coinciding with a slide for global behemoths Warner and Universal:

(Source: Google Finance)

But you can also easily see that the bump was only short-lived; so it goes with the inconsistency of U.S. trade policy this year. Still, it’s undoubtedly true that K-pop stocks have done quite well since then, far outpacing global competitors and seemingly flying in the face of decoupling, deglobalization, isolationism, or whatever other label you want to put on the resurrection of (Left on) Reed Smoot.

I have to admit that I don’t quite understand some of the logic that public-facing financial analysts have given for this seemingly counterintuitive overperformance. If you read those articles, you’ll repeatedly see people invoke the idea that entertainment is “tariff-proof” compared to goods-based industries like manufacturing.

That might be true for film and television, and it’s true for any music industry that makes its bones off of streaming. But K-pop isn’t just any music industry. Korea sold 93 million physical albums last year, a number that was reported as a “crisis.” The U.S., by comparison, sold 62 million.¹¹

Indeed, K-pop is actually highly dependent on selling physical goods. Consider the following two slides from HYBE’s 2024 4Q earnings report:

Streaming accounts for only about a third of HYBE’s revenue from recorded music, and HYBE has unusually high streaming revenue for K-pop thanks to its acquisition of BMLG (the label with the rights to the non-“Taylor’s Version” Swift albums). Merchandise alone makes HYBE $90 million more than streaming, and it’s far more important for other labels: merch accounted for 28% of SM’s revenue in 4Q 2024. And concert revenue is hardly “tariff-proof” either, at least in the sense that the same political forces make visas significantly harder and more expensive to obtain.¹²

So K-pop’s recent status as a “safe haven” in the Korean market can’t be because K-pop isn’t in the business of selling goods; more than any other music industry (with the possible exception of Japan), it is selling physical goods.

The truth may, I think, be a bit hard for American K-pop fans to swallow. It’s not that K-pop companies don’t need album sales. It’s that they don’t need our album sales. Again from that HYBE earnings report:

It’s true that the list on the left is grouped by artist instead of by album but…come on. Even making a generous estimate for the remainder, a group like Seventeen sold over 25 times more albums in Korea than in the U.S. The proportions are a little less stark for TXT, but we’re still talking about completely different orders of magnitude.

And the column in the middle matters too. Japan blows the U.S. out of the water in terms of total physical album sales in general,¹³ and K-pop is no exception. I wouldn’t be surprised if Seventeen alone sold more albums in Japan in 2024 than every single other K-pop group combined did in the U.S. in the same year. (I can only buy so many fromis_9 albums.)

There’s plenty of data to back this up. K-pop may be an export-oriented industry, but the U.S. is not the biggest export market, and will probably soon (tariffs or no tariffs) go back to a fairly distant third place. Orange is Japan, green is the U.S., and yellow is China:

(Source: Circle Chart)

If you read any of the articles above, you may have seen that China seems set to lift its imports restrictions on Korean entertainment products this year—the yellow and green lines will likely cross again. And even for leaner recent years in Japanese consumption of K-pop (which I would bet represent a blip more than a trend), it looms massively in charts of K-pop album exports:

And of course Japanese (red), Chinese (orange), Taiwanese (maroon), and other East and Southeast Asian consumers are far more likely than Americans to buy large quantities of merch and to purchase products that idols model for.

So, TWS: a group only known overseas to hardcore K-pop fans, and even then mostly as “that new group that’s big in Korea.” Their debut song “plot twist” managed to place second in the 2024 year-end data from Circle Chart, behind only æspa’s unstoppable “Supernova.” But they’re also big in Japan, and are currently preparing to cement their popularity there.

TWS might not have a Japanese member (neither do Stray Kids and Seventeen¹⁴), but their music seems in some ways tailored for a Japanese audience. Specifically, “plot twist” adopts a surprising number of sonic hallmarks from J-pop, including harmony, production, and rhythm. (I would say more but this is actually an active research area for me.) And “Countdown!” recycles many of the same elements. Not that it exactly sounds like an anime song, but it does sort of sound like the “K-pop-style” songs that groups like King & Prince put out nowadays.

“Anime music” is actually a growing trend in Korea itself (again, expect the details in the form of a coauthored publication), but, importantly, it’s not made any inroads in the U.S. market. Anime itself is less deeply uncool than it once was—NBA stars have gone from closet fans to outspoken stans in the span of a few years—but I can’t find any musical trace of this embrace on the Hot 100. “Countdown!” is definitely not aimed at U.S. fans.

It’s certainly not aimed at me. “Countdown!,” like every TWS release (I liked “plot twist” a decent amount), has great energy, and I do appreciate its pep and bombast. But I just can’t latch onto the tunes or riffs; it’s also too short for what it promises. I don’t mind it at all when it’s on, but I can’t imagine ever actively choosing to listen to it.

Luckily, as with previous release Last Bell (loved “Highlight,” was very meh on the actual single), the album tracks save TRY WITH US for me. I appreciate how “GO BACK” takes the SHINee-esque elements of “Countdown!” and makes a whole song out of them; it’s a pretty successful pastiche. And I really appreciate the melodic generosity of “Random Play.” Neither of those is liable to net TWS much of a U.S. fandom either, but who cares? Their music is tariff-proof.

Also liked…

Tunde Adebimpe – Thee Black Boltz

Anna Prohaska with Riccardo Minasi and Ensemble Resonanz – Mozart: Haffner-Akademie

Skrillex¹⁵ – F*CK U SKRILLEX YOU THINK UR ANDY WARHOLD BUT UR NOT!! <3¹⁶

Alison Krauss & Union Station – Arcadia

Simin Tander – The Wind

Carl Allen (with Chris Potter) – Tippin’

What I’m Reading

Ned Blackhawk has to be pleased. Well, of course he is, given his shiny new National Book Award and scads of positive reviews, but I’m referring specifically to his remark, in the introduction to The Rediscovery of America: Native Peoples and the Unmaking of U.S. History that “There have been few overviews or single-volume interpretations of Native American history.” That was a fair comment upon the book’s publication in 2022, but it’s quickly and gloriously been made obsolete (for the moment) by the subsequent publication of Pekka Hämälainen’s Indigenous Continent: The Epic Contest for North America and Kathleen DuVal’s Native Nations: A Millennium in North America.¹⁷

Wonderfully, these books do not at all obviate or even really substitute for each other. Rather, they’re fully complementary: each one has a completely different scope, approach, and even subject matter. Blackhawk’s is a history of the U.S. from Native perspectives. DuVal’s is a study of Native political formations and diplomatic strategies. And Hämälainen’s, as far as I’ve gathered, focuses on Native military history. (You may have gathered that I don’t particularly love reading books on military history; perhaps I’ll get to Hämälainen’s in the future, but DuVal’s and Blackhawk’s are what I’ve read for now.)

Despite these differences in conception, it’s true that all three books are large-scale “single-volume interpretations of Native American history.” Comparison is thus inevitable, and I may as well begin there. DuVal’s subtitle gives some idea of how her scope differs from Blackhawk’s, although it’s actually quite misleading. “A Millennium in North America” makes it sound like Native Nations is a grand synthesis that covers a lot of ground without much detail. It also gives the impression that DuVal will spend some time with indigenous Mexican histories. Ironically, both are far more true of The Rediscovery of America. Despite the pointed invocation of “North America” (presumably to decenter the U.S. as an organizing force) Native Nations really does just focus on what’s now the U.S., and not even all of that: nobody north of San Francisco or west of what’s now Montana gets so much as a mention.¹⁸ In other words, it makes no effort to be comprehensive. In Native Nations, the unit of analysis is the 40-page chapter-length case study; in The Rediscovery of America, it’s the three-page vignette. Blackhawk covers far more, in far less depth.

I have to admit that this made Native Nations a much more enjoyable—and revealing—read for me. Not that The Rediscovery of America is badly written (it’s admirably clear) or without fresh insights (Blackhawk’s interpretations of the Revolution and Civil War certainly made me reevaluate my understanding of their causes and aims). But the breadth of DuVal’s canvases gives her enormous freedom both to get far back in the weeds and to tell long-breathed narratives. She takes full advantage. I have a lot more to say about her book.

At least in the spaces I inhabit, the part of DuVal’s book that’s gotten the most attention is the opening section, on Cahokia and the Huhugam.¹⁹ There are a couple of obvious reasons for that: people give up on books and talk about the only section they got to, and early North American indigenous history is much less widely known than the material from the later chapters. But I also have to wonder if it’s due to the particular political slant of these chapters. After emphasizing that the Mississippians at sites like Cahokia and the Huhugam all along the Gila River did indeed produce enormous, complex, and striking urban forms, DuVal then goes on to argue that these cities were abandoned because people simply didn’t like the tradeoffs involved with such ways of living, especially high levels of material and political inequality. Without explicitly saying as much (although her footnotes do a lot of winking and nudging), DuVal seems to be treating these case studies as illustrations of the ideas of anarchist anthropologists and political theorists like Pierre Clastres, Jim Scott, and (less congenially) latter-day David Graeber.

But unlike Scott and (especially) Graeber, DuVal is a capital-H Historian. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a trade book (Native Nations is published by just plain Random House, no imprint) so kitted out with “a vast undershield of footnotes.” (Blackhawk’s, published by Yale, has serious scholarly apparatus but nothing quite this intense.) The notes are a wonderful read by themselves, putting you up against primary sources in as many languages as she needs and heaps of articles from journals of archaeology, ethnohistory, and historical climate science. DuVal digs wherever she can find evidence.

Another source of evidence comes in the form of global comparison. (I don’t know how you’re expecting DuVal to open her first chapter, but I can 100% guarantee you will not guess how she actually does it.) Especially given the lack of written documentation for much of her earlier material, DuVal makes ample use of parallel and homologous histories to fill in blanks. Here too the notes are revealing. There are an awful lot of citations of history textbooks, with the Kramer/Palmer/Colton History of the Modern World in particular cropping up a surprising amount. It makes for strange bedfellows with DuVal’s raft of specialist publications, but this sourcing surely reflects DuVal’s teaching experience—or her authorship of a leading textbook of her own.

As for the content: while I certainly was as fascinated as anyone by the early chapters, I found myself especially drawn to some of the narrative material later on. Perhaps it’s my North Carolina bias (DuVal teaches at UNC and is not shy about saying so), but I was especially taken with her treatment of the Roanoke Colony, which decenters the colonists themselves and generally demystifies the whole story. It’s a gripping read, using existing sources to great effect and generally pouring cold water on the whole “lost colony” murder-mystery vibe.

That said, I often wondered if DuVal was overstating the degree of certainty she and other historians have in her reconstructions. There’s a fair bit of “surely” (a sure indication that the author is not actually sure) surrounding some of her speculation, especially when it comes to what actually happened to the “lost” colonists (the crux of the “mystery”). It’s enough to make me suspect that the material in the earlier chapters is also written in a much more confident (or at least cut-and-dry) fashion than can actually be supported by the evidence. Not that DuVal is wrong—and how would I know? But she might have done more to flag speculation, to make room for alternate hypotheses.

Aside from these earlier chapters, I was also quite taken with the chapter on the “Creation of the Plains Indians.” Both Blackhawk and DuVal do a fabulous job of showing how many features of Native life and Native political formations were shaped by contact with European goods and encroachment. Just as potatoes, tobacco, and syphilis radically transformed Europe, so too did horses and guns completely change Native warfare and political economy. Indeed, many of the most iconic symbols of and preconceptions about Native life are artifacts of contact. Tomahawks are European goods (designed to spec for Native use). The Haudenosanee (Blackhawk sticks to the pejorative term “Iroquois”) greatly expanded their range of activities and even admitted a sixth nation (the Tuscarora) in response to colonial encroachment. The Kiowa didn’t even live on the Plains until after contact with Europeans.

And so DuVal shows that the entire cultural complex associated with the Plains Indians had only existed for around a century before the “Cowboys and Indians” period of genocidal warfare that gave rise to most of the stereotyped images of Native peoples. Not that recency is a reason to dismiss “tradition”—I’m perfectly fine with Pad Thai and spaghetti carbonara remaining national symbols, despite their postwar origins. But it is striking to reconsider works like Jonathan Lear’s Radical Hope in the face of this history. Undoubtedly, White encroachment did lead to traumatic cultural collapse for the Crow and many other nations. Still, the valence of that story changes significantly if you think of the Crow lifestyle in Plenty Coups’ time as a relatively recent invention, rather than as “how we’ve always lived.” Again, it doesn’t detract from any of Lear’s points (how would you feel if the electric grid, a relatively recent invention, went away?), but it does reframe them.

There’s lots more in DuVal’s book—the two chapters on Tecumseh and Tenskwatawa are fabulous (Tippecanoe is rightfully treated as a fairly insignificant event) and so are the two chapters on the Cherokee. But rather than making you read any more of what I have to say about it, I should probably just tell you to pick up Native Nations itself. And give The Rediscovery of America a go too if you’re looking for something more comprehensive. Hopefully Blackhawk will continue to be proven wrong by books this grand and accomplished in years to come.

A few others:

• Bloomberg CityLab – Why Car YouTuber Matt Farah Is Fighting for Walkable Cities

• Billboard – The Music Business Saturation Problem Keeps Getting Bigger: Analysis

• Science – The Mechanics Behind the Beauty of Roses

• Sports Illustrated (Emma Baccellieri) – Napheesa Collier Is Making the Game Run on Her Terms

• New Yorker – When Jews Sought the Promised Land in Texas

• Gastro Obscura – A Guide to the Gingers of the World

Thanks for reading, and see you again soon!

1. I do tend to go through album reviews after the fact—it would be something like hypocrisy not to.

2. If you’re one of the 60% of Reeders who decided to give that post a miss, consider this your opportunity to catch up. Somehow, “BWV 819(a)” isn’t as big of a draw as the Well-Tempered Clavier….

3. Translation from the New Bach Reader.

4. Having linked you to my post on “Sei gegrüsset,” I should say that I don’t really talk about that piece’s crazy version history there; see Bach Digital for the gory details.

5. The best treatment of Niedt and other early 18th-century writing on variations isn’t in a book on Baroque music at all, but rather in Elaine Sisman’s fabulous Haydn and the Classical Variation.

6. And ahead of this post: I’ll save the Couperin talk for a future month.

7. This example and the following one are both from Peter Williams’ book on the “Goldbergs.”

8. Yes, 1776, along with The Wealth of Nations and Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire and some pamphlet by Thomas Jefferson. Oh, and also the first volume of Charles Burney’s own General History of Music—what a time to be publishing in England.

9. It doesn’t fit the seventeenth-century theme, but I also got this “historical missing link” feeling from the new Vox Nidrosiensis recording of Philidor’s—yes, the chess Philidor—Ermelinde.

10. I’ve excluded JYP Entertainment because a) Google Finance has wisely decided that more than five lines on a chart is a recipe for headaches and b) its stock has done poorly in recent months due to low earnings and the bad publicity surrounding ex-VCHA member KG’s lawsuit against the company.

11. The topline number of 78 million includes digital sales, 95% of which must be superfans trying to manipulate iTunes charts.

12. To be fair, HYBE is also one of the labels trying hardest to shift its revenue streams toward “Contents” and other non-physical, non-musical products. The Idol Cast has been quite good on this beat.

13. It doesn’t look so bad on this chart, but the tail of the physical album sales distribution in Japan is far fatter than it is for the U.S.—we run out of acts with superfans pretty quickly.

14. Enha, of course, has Ni-Ki.

15. yes, really

16. no, I mean it, really

17. Then again, perhaps he’s feeling like Nute Gunray:

18. Native Alaskans get two whole pages in Blackhawk’s book.

19. I owe this Boston Review article for bringing the book to my attention to begin with.