Week 5: 30 October 2023 – Toccata and Fugue in D Minor, Passacaglia, Halloween/Reformation Day
Plus: SPOOKY BACH, SEVENTEEN vs. æspa, new Stephen Owen, 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.
This week, I’ve been listening to some music by Wade Fernandez, a Menominee musician based, as he puts it, “in the territory now called Wisconsin.” The “Commodity Cheese Blues” music video is both hilarious and cutting (and the song is performed with nice energy), and he also has some lovely Menominee-language songs, like “Sawaenemiyah.”
Week 5: 30 October 2023 – Toccata and Fugue in D Minor, Passacaglia, Halloween/Reformation Day
Please save applause for the end of each set
Toccata and Fugue in D minor, BWV 565
Ein feste Burg ist unser Gott, BWV 720
Fugue “Little” in G minor, BWV 578
Prelude and Fugue in C minor, BWV 546
Werde munter, mein Gemüte, BWV 1118
Passacaglia in C minor, BWV 582
What do you even say about Toccata and Fugue in D minor? Nobody here needs an introduction to the piece. And after four weeks of these posts, you probably have a decent understanding of what a Toccata and Fugue entails. Although—note that this is the first Toccata/Prelude etc. I’m playing that’s in the full-bore old-fashioned stylus phantasticus: dramatic pauses, sudden flourishes, and not much continuous melodic action. Honestly, the easiest way to explain stylus phantasticus is probably just to say “music that sounds sort of like the D-minor Toccata.”
OK, so I don’t need to tell you what to expect in the piece. I do want to talk a bit about its cultural significance, but I’ll save that for the section below. That leaves one big elephant to clear out of the room: is this piece even by Bach?
This question is probably old news to many of you, but for the rest, it may seem more than a little surprising: Bach’s most famous piece, not by him? 1 There’s a very decent case to be made:
There’s only one surviving manuscript copy of the piece, not made by Bach or one of his students. (Thanks to this piece’s fame, the copyist, Johannes Ringk, gets his own English Wikipedia page.)
The writing for the instrument, especially in the Toccata, is nothing like Bach’s other works. Most obviously, there are long stretches with both hands playing together in octaves or sixths, which never happens in any of the other organ music.
The piece has been seen as somewhat “awkward” or “undisciplined” from the perspectives of counterpoint and structure. The Fugue in particular lacks the sense of organization and flow that you’d expect from a “mature” Bach fugue. The obvious explanation would be that this is an early work, although none of the other early works have the rambling, repetitive episodes that take up so much of this Fugue.
On the other hand, some aspects of the harmony and notation (but we can’t be sure who is responsible for the notation) wouldn’t make much sense for a piece written before the 1730s or so.
The texture is incredibly simple in ways that even early Bach never was. Most of the piece can be reduced down to a single line fairly comfortably.
That last point suggests a solution: since (like so many of Bach’s organ works) the writing suggests violin playing, perhaps this was originally a piece for solo violin, arranged by somebody other than Bach. This isn’t a crazy hypothesis. We know that Bach played works like the Sonatas and Partitas on clavichord, and there’s an organ arrangement of a fugue from the G-minor Sonata (BWV 539/ii). (Less likely is Sciarrino’s arrangement/reconstruction of the piece for solo flute.)
Maybe. That still doesn’t address some of the other “problems” with the piece: this could be an organ arrangement of a violin piece that itself was written by somebody else! But arguing on the basis of “quality” like this forces you to decide between two equally icky positions:
“This piece is so bad [euphemistically: “undisciplined,” “awkward” etc.] that Bach would never have written it.”
“This piece is so good [euphemistically: “effective,” “exciting” etc.] that only Bach could have written it.”
I hope programs like last week’s help weaken the force of these claims. Remember that we began with a very “effective” and “exciting” Concerto by the barely-known Johann Ernst of Saxe-Weimar (how tempting it would be for a copyist to just say it’s by Bach!), followed by a shapeless mess of a Fantasy by Bach. In both cases, the attributions are too secure to question, but if they were anonymous I think it’s entirely possible that we would have reversed them.
It’s unlikely that we’ll ever know definitively who wrote the Toccata and Fugue. This piece is as good a reason as any to take a “big hall” approach to the “Bach organ canon.” If you include it—and why not, it could be by Bach!—then there are a lot of other “maybe!” pieces to throw in. And of course that “if you include it” is almost a joke. No matter who actually wrote this piece, “the Bach organ works” is unimaginable without it.
In a funny coincidence, tradition has it that Martin Luther nailed the 95 Theses to the Wittenberg Cathedral door on Halloween; I’m sure his “sexy Augustinian Monk” costume won a lot of prizes that year. So in addition to SPOOKY BACH, there’s also Reformation Day music to play today. Sorry if the contrast is a bit jarring.
There’s no more iconic Reformation song than “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God,” the “battle hymn of the Reformation.” This organ version is suitably militant, calling for a piercing sesquialtera in the right hand and a 16-foot bassoon in the other. (Yes: he asks for Left on Reed.) And actually, for the only time in his entire organ output, Bach explicitly writes a registration for a third keyboard. Like most instruments in Bach’s day, the Reneker organ only has two keyboards (and a 16-foot bassoon only in the pedals). Still, with some creativity, the piece is still playable; see if you can hear the maneuvering required.
After that, back to “Halloween music” with a few more dramatic, minor-key works. If this were any other week, the “Little” Fugue would probably have gotten title billing; it’s very possible that you’ll recognize it. After all, the nickname doesn’t do much justice to the piece. Remember how the “Dorian” Toccata and Fugue isn’t Dorian—and in fact it’s notated with the same key signature as that Toccata and Fugue—but the nickname at least helps keep the two distinct without forcing people to memorize BWV numbers. It’s the same idea here. “Little” is all relative: the only reason to use this nickname is to distinguish this piece from the mammoth G-minor Fugue BWV 542/ii. (The poor G-minor Prelude and Fugue BWV 535 doesn’t get anything: when I googled it to try to get the BWV number, most of the results were for the A-minor instead!) This Fugue would probably seem “bigger” if it had a prelude to go with it, but it’s otherwise as fully realized (and even catchy) as Bach fugues get. And the fugue subject is as much of a “threat” (“how do you do that with just two feet?”) as any by Bach.
Once, when I was at an organ competition, I overheard the judge (a well-known specialist in French organ music whom I admire and respect) say to one of the other entrants: “But there is no Prelude and Fugue in C minor by Bach!” Of course, there are actually two Preludes and Fugues in C minor (BWV 549 can wait for another week), but I don’t want to bring this up to have some fun at this organist’s expense. Rather, I think this anecdote illustrates the somewhat odd position this piece holds among Bach’s organ works. I get the distinct impression both that this piece used to be much more famous (as one of the “six great preludes and fugues” BWV 543–8), and that it’s remained much better-known in Europe, where I’ve heard organists refer to it in the same way that American organists talk about “the A-minor,” “the D-major,” etc.
And I can’t really explain why this piece might have fallen partially to the wayside. The Prelude in particular is about as dramatic as Bach’s organ music gets (yes, including the Toccata and Fugue), first pitting the hands against each other in a call-and-response duel of chords, then reaching right up to the top of the keyboard for a wailing series of “sighing figures,” before exploding into streams of triplets. Long virtuosic sections for the hands alone are punctuated by enormous pedal points; at the end Bach really hammers it home by having you blast the pedal note out with both feet in octaves. And the music is pungently chromatic, using both C-sharp and C-flat as it whips you around between keys. The fugue does many of the same things, and it gives us the requisite pedal outburst on the very last page of the piece.
Another break in the Halloween theme with a short Neumeister Chorale for Trinity 22. This tune is much more famous in a different arrangement, and with a different text. I’d prefer not to spoil it (you can easily google the answer), but see if you can figure it out:
(Hint: the famous version is much slower, with triplets in the accompaniment.)
Finally, the big one. In a world without Toccata and Fugue in D minor, the Passacaglia might be Bach’s most famous organ work—and this is a piece whose authorship nobody has ever wanted to doubt. (Call it “effective” and “exciting.”)
That’s a touch ironic, since it’s reasonably well-known that this piece’s theme was probably lifted straight from an organ mass by André Raison. But of course what Bach does with this theme is quite different. A Passacaglia is a dance, structured around a shortish theme that repeats (mostly) in the bass. This structure gives a chance for a composer or performer both to show off their inventio (the wealth of musical figures they can put into play) and their strength with dispositio (the ability to create a balanced and convincing structure for the piece as a whole). So this piece’s challenge is to create a sense of variety while also making the variations feel like they flow naturally from each other. Sometimes that involves pairing them up, to give a particular figure more time to play out. Sometimes that involves making a gradual build, where the texture gradually gets denser. And sometimes that involves making a sudden contrast, thinning things out to spare the audience’s ears for a minute or so. All of this is built into the piece, so it’s possible that the traditional practice of changing stops or keyboards for every variation is redundant or excessive. But it’s almost de rigueur now, and I certainly like the effect. Please thank the stop assistants, Caleb Herrmann and Alex Tripp, after the recital.
Oh, and there’s a Fugue too—tema fugatum, the theme (of the Passacaglia) treated as a fugue. If ever there a case to abandon the standard “X and Fugue” labeling, this would be it. The fugue bursts out of the Passacaglia, giving us a couple extra minutes to hear new variations on the same theme (which at least can be played in a variety of keys now). Twelve minutes of the same short theme—but I wouldn’t mind another twelve. Or twenty-four. Or…
SPOOKY ORGAN NOISES
I used to dress up as a priest for Halloween. No, you’re not going to get photos, but really you only have to imagine (Google Image Search if you need it) “clerical collar” and you’re basically there: the costume was just all-black with a piece of white cardstock in the collar.
Of course, most of why I chose this costume is because it’s so simple and easy, because it requires an investment of something like 2 cents, because it’s not scratchy or heavy or difficult to put on. It doesn’t draw too much attention (this is high school we’re talking about) but it’s also not a total cliché. And my friends knew how ironic it was that I was the one in this costume. (Or maybe it’s wrong to assume people “dress to type”: do healthcare workers go as nurses for Halloween?)
But most importantly—this is a Halloween costume we’re talking about—I could reasonably call it “spooky.” Don’t worry, it wasn’t meant as a trivializing commentary on clerical abuses. Rather, the whole idea of Church, especially in a Halloween context, is, well, a little spooky for many people; even more so in the rather secular group of friends I was hanging out with.
How did Church become spooky? To some extent, it’s not a big stretch. Priests, after all, have a connection to the supernatural world, and the bread and wine of the Eucharist are (regardless of your views on transubstantiation) at the very least beyond what we normally eat. It’s not too far from “mystical” to “spooky.”
On the other hand, it’s clear that Church was not always spooky. But I think that this is, more than anything, due to the fact that “spooky” is a pretty recent idea. Not that people weren’t scared before, or that there weren’t unexplained and frightful mysteries. But the whole idea of spookiness really doesn’t take off until the birth of the modern Halloween industry:
In this Halloween’d version, spookiness isn’t really about scariness at all. Instead, it becomes a way to tame or parody any version of the supernatural, to domesticate the weird and the uncanny.
What’s that? This is supposed to be about organ music? Bach?
Well, the connection is probably pretty obvious. Toccata and Fugue in D minor is not just “Halloween music”: it practically is Halloween. Associated with vampires and Frankenstein’s monsters and witchcraft since early on in the sound film era, this is the piece of music that has come to stand in for such B-movie, campy versions of “horror”—and that’s as good a definition of “spookiness” as any.
Now, it’s not just this piece. Organ music in general is spooky. The Simpsons changed to organ versions of the theme song for the end credits of Treehouse of Horror episodes. In Pirates of the Caribbean: Curse of the Black Pearl: Davy Jones doesn’t even need to play Toccata and Fugue in D minor to get the requisite effect:
Martin Scorcese could use the Passacaglia and a few other pieces instead in The Godfather:
And yes, Phantom of the Opera. No Youtube link for that.
Some of this is surely the generalized “Church=spooky.” But on the other hand, organ music becoming B-movie horror probably contributed to that perception itself! And Toccata and Fugue in D minor definitely led the way. So we still have some explaining to do. Why this piece?
First of all, don’t let anybody tell you that this piece was unknown or unpopular before the movies. A Newspapers.com search will quickly turn up oodles of references to performances of the “great” or “famous” Toccata and Fugue in D minor. Yes, some of those might be of the “Dorian,” but we can be sure that most were probably BWV 565, because a huge number are piano performances of Carl Tausig’s transcription. At a moment when pianists performed older music (and especially Bach) a lot less frequently than they do now, this piece was firmly entrenched as a showpiece.
OK, so this was a famous piece, readily available to be used for spooky purposes in Fantasia and Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. But why would they think to use it there?
I want to make an incredibly crass oversimplification here. I think this piece’s “spooky vibes” essentially boil down to its incessant use of diminished seventh chords.
Containing two different tritones, these chords are about as dissonant as you could get in Bach’s time, especially when played over a tonic pedal (i.e. the first two times the pedal enters in the Toccata). They’re also completely symmetrical: every note is the same distance from the other notes. So, they can be used to lead to practically any key you want them to. Some chords (dominant sevenths) are used to define tonality; diminished seventh chords can be used to actively undermine it.
And so in the world of opera, they quickly became associated with the supernatural. Take the Statue’s music from Don Giovanni (1781; conveniently placed at the beginning of Liszt’s fantasy on the opera):
The “fairy-opera” Undine (1807) by Mozart fanboy Ernst Theodor Amadeus Hoffmann:
The Wolf’s Glen music from Weber’s Der Freischütz (1821), an opera that owed much to Undine:
—which in turn inspired Heinrich Marschner’s Der Vampyr (1828):
And so on down to Musorgsky’s Night on Bald Mountain, a piece that’s hard to program now because it sounds like a children’s cartoon:
You get the idea. Toccata and Fugue in D minor just sounds incredibly like this operatic soundworld. Back then, these nineteenth-century pieces seem to have been genuinely terrifying. By the time Dr. Jekyll and Mr Hyde was being made, this style must have already started to lose its power. And now it’s just spooky. Maybe next year I’ll play the Freischütz overture for Halloween instead.
One last note. Remember that Carl Tausig’s piano transcription was probably the single most common way that most people heard this piece until the movies. Well, here’s the beginning of that transcription:
He doesn’t know how to read the ornament!! So the “duh duh duh” A-G-A mordent that everybody’s come to expect becomes A-B♭-A-B♭. Funny how this opening could survive such a complete transformation en route to becoming one of the most iconic sounds in Western music.
What I’m Listening To
JD Allen – THIS
This (sorry, THIS) is just great. I had to go back afterward and catch up on Allen’s other discography, and I was a little surprised by the fairly traditional soundworld of the Americana albums and others. THIS is anything but. Allen keeps his distinctive, keening tenor sax sound, and his playing is still nicely melodic and grounded. But, to give some idea of the new sound, here’s the complete personnel for THIS album:
JD ALLEN – TENOR SAXOPHONE
ALEX BONNEY – ELECTRONICS
GWILYM JONES – DRUMS
The rhythmic play between Allen and Jones is fantastic, unmoored from the need to accommodate anybody else while still remaining fairly grounded. Allen says:
I think that most adults were taught as children to color within the lines and assign specific roles and purposes to people, places and objects but maybe it’s really just the I AM and YOU ARE of our individual complexities which, when combined, WE come together to make THIS.
Allen and Jones definitely haven’t given up the lines altogether, but they’re certainly willing to color outside them. Bonney’s electronics are omnipresent without getting exhausting, samey, or gimmicky; the interplay between them and Allen’s lines is really fun. (Maybe I just like Bonney’s sonic palette? To me, this sometimes almost sounds like having a jazz combo play with the interpolations of “organized sound” from Varèse’s Déserts—one of my favorite pieces.)
In any case, this is an experiment (for Allen at least) that isn’t made to sound like “YOU ARE LISTENING TO AN EXPERIMENT.” It managed to be exciting, beautiful, and meditative in addition to mind-bending. Hope there’s more in store from this collaboration!
Isabelle Faust – Solo
The number of discs exploring the extraordinarily broad solo violin repertoire continues to grow. Aside from Paganini, most still center on either Bach (the Sonatas and Partitas) or contemporary music (Bartók, Kurtág, Saariaho), or both (Jennifer Koh’s wonderful Bach and Beyond series); and, partly thanks to Koh and others, Ysaÿe’s solo sonatas have now gotten big enough for Hilary Hahn to take a crack at them.
But there’s also been major growth in recordings of other Baroque solo violin composers. Almost inevitably, and especially when dealing with Germanic repertoire, these discs tend to feel a bit like “Bach prehistory.”2 (Just like how Willi Apel’s History of Keyboard Music to 1700 notoriously manages to squeeze Bach in more than any other composer, even though his music is not under discussion.) Sometimes that’s more or less explicit: Rachel Podger’s Guardian Angel lets Bach set the terms (even if it’s her version of the flute partita—why not the Toccata and Fugue??). Other times, that’s maybe more my problem than the artist’s.
Isabelle Faust’s new album definitely feels in this vein. It ends with the Biber Passacaglia—a piece that’s so often seen as a “precursor” to Bach’s Chaconne—and it’s built around, well, Sonatas and Partitas for solo violin. The Pisendel Sonata and three of the Matteis pieces are also on Podger’s disc, which is probably going to show up in every actual review this recording gets. But that’s not a bad thing. Although it’s always nice to get recordings of new music (through Faust, I now know about Johann Joseph Vilsmayr and Louis-Gabriel Guillemain), it’s nice to be able to hear multiple interpretations of this still-unfamiliar repertoire too. Podger generally plays with a gorgeous, full tone, while Faust likes to get whispery sounds that draw chiaroscuro contrasts. Faust plays around a bit more with tempo in general, and that’s especially engaging in “freer” movements like Pisendel’s Prelude, or in the Matteis fantasy that she uses to open the album.
In any case, my favorite thing about this album is how loudly it seems to argue: forget Bach (or at least decenter him). Look at all the Sonatas and Partitas we’ve been missing out on.
Sampha – Lahai
I don’t know what to do with this album. I really liked Process, and I think that the sounds Sampha is trying out here (with collaborators like Yaeji) are really cool and work well. His singing continues to be very personal and compelling. I just can’t get any traction on it—this might be the biggest gap I’ve ever had between how “good” I think an album is and how much I like it. If you loved it, let me know what grabs you and I’ll try to adjust my listening; I think I’m giving up for now after three spins through it.
Ton Koopman and Klaus Mertens – Johann Sebastian Bach: Geistliche Lieder
A few weeks ago, I shouted out Bach’s “perpetually neglected” songs. Koopman and Mertens to the rescue, with some lovely and sensitive performances. A nice selection of “chamber organ” works, including some Neumeister Chorales, rounds out the set. And, bravely, “Bist du bei mir” (another “probably not actually by Bach” classic) is nowhere to be found.
SEVENTEEN – “God of Music”
Well this is fun! This is my favorite version of SEVENTEEN, when Woozi makes bright, “teenfresh” dance songs with somewhat cheesy choreography and even cheesier lyrics. It’s like picking off where “VERY NICE” left off: brass stabs, disco-funk guitar and bass licks, a great beat, and a lovably dumb chorus. That’s not your lack of Korean showing: they’re just singing vaguely beatboxy syllables for the “Kung chi pak chi” part. (But at least it’s not “La La La La La La Heart”!)
Maybe it’s just me, but this song also seems to revel in throwing as many instrumental sounds as it possibly can at you—and I think a large number (especially the guitars and brass) are real, not synthesized or sampled. And they want you to hear all of this: you heard them singing, um, “We can mix it up right / Sugar and spice / Brass sound and guitar,” followed by “Kick snare / Drum bass / Piano / Bassline.” It’s not just a song about music, but a song about these sounds. And I think it’s this instrumental vocabulary that’s supposed to form the basis of the (groan) “universal language” invoked in the first verse. (Funny how the instruments—and for that matter the words “language” and “music” themselves—need to be named in English. Is that the universal language?)
Anyway, for me, all of this focus on the instrumental sounds has something of the same effect as SHINee Key’s (in)famous line “This is real brass by the way / (Ba ba ba ba) / or my mouth!” from “Woof Woof.” It’s a similarly retro song, although its straight-up 12-bar blues chord progression is probably something Woozi would never try, since SEVENTEEN is much more “pop” than whatever SHINee’s “contemporary band” branding is supposed to be. And the important word in Key’s line is surely “real.” This is real music, with real instruments; you can trust it.
Speaking of which: if you watched the “God of Music” video, you probably remember this shot:
Disco ball-microphone in space for less than 5 seconds. No, actually: microphone in space. Pledis paid who knows how much to send a prop into space for five seconds of this music video.
Now, Pledis probably got a discount on this service, considering that this has to be the biggest publicity Sent Into Space has ever gotten. (The album containing “God of Music” sold over 4.5 million copies in its first week, a new Korean record.) And of course their willingness to do this kind of over-the-top stunt is also marketing for the group and for Pledis/HYBE: “We’re so on top we can afford to do this.”
But it’s also another way to insist on realness. Just like how feature films (e.g. both Barbie and Oppenheimer) have started to swing back around to more extensive practical effects, this stunt also says “We will stop at nothing to give you the real thing.” (Even if I can’t be sure that the instruments are even acoustic.)3
That forms an interesting polarity with another trend in K-pop, focusing more and more on extensive lore that situates groups in alternate universes—often plural universes for the same group. That’s how we get vaguely insane album titles like Billlie’s The Billlage of Perception, why you had to read a wiki to understand why the heck there’s an apple in LOONA/Yves’s “New” (yes, “Yves” sounds like “Eve”), or why TripleS’s whole…thing requires an extensive dissection in (of all places) Defector.4
Still, æspa might be the most extreme version of this self-mythologizing. And æspa’s lore is all about the virtual. The name literally stands for “avatar” and “experience” (aren’t you sorry you asked?) and each member is paired with an “æ-” virtual counterpart in “KWANGYA.” In this story, an AI called nævis is trying to get the “æ-” avatars to come to the real world and meet their counterparts. Without any of this background, videos like “Next Level” (their second single) are practically incomprehensible (the patchwork structure of the song doesn’t help). Without it, you might not expect a girl group song titled “Girls” to include rapping about how a “Meta universe exists now / Parallel world” or how “The algorithms that have been distorted by bad desires.” And without it, you certainly might not understand what the heck those AI-sounding distorted echo vocals are about two minutes into “Welcome to MY World.” Full title: “Welcome to MY World (feat. nævis).” Ah.
Who’s here for this kind of thing? I really like æspa, but much more for the more straightforward/lore-free songs like “Spicy” (listen to it!!) and “Life’s Too Short”. But you know who would be into this? Grimes.
Of course. Grimes is only too happy to talk about her own AI music projects. (Although she seems less interested in mentioning precedents like Holly Herndon.) And she is verifiably a longtime K-pop fan, having long been friends with or fans of second-generation idols like CL and G-Dragon. (It’s a real coup for SM Entertainment to pull her away from her clear preference for YG-style music.) But what she likes is obviously not SEVENTEEN’s “stop at nothing to give you the real thing,” and she could surely care less about SHINee’s “real brass” (or Key’s mouth). It’s a strong reminder of the conceptual diversity still possible in K-pop, even from the same label (SHINee and æspa are both SM groups). I just hope Grimes isn’t too disappointed if æspa’s upcoming mini-album continues to move away from the AI world and the lore.
Also liked…
Abdo Buda Marconi – Oltremura
Soema Montenegro – CIRCULO RADIANTE
Nikolaj Szeps-Znaider and Orchestre National de Lyon – Aux Étoiles - French Symphonic Poems
(Don’t roll your eyes too hard at the tracklist!)
What I’m Reading
I finally got to Stephen Owen’s latest book, All Mine! Happiness, Ownership, and Naming in Eleventh-Century China (2022). Owen is an engaging writer and has certainly been through the “core” works of Middle-Period Chinese literature as thoroughly as anybody around, so I generally look forward to learning something from his books. And luckily, this book is both shorter and written in a significantly less dry style than his ci 詞 book Just a Song. All Mine! originated as a series of lectures, and it shows.
I also prefer this version of Owen, writing a book around a (very broad and vaguely defined) theme—two of his books from the ‘80s, Mi-Lou (on desire) and Remembrances (on the “experience of the past”) have to be my favorites, since they free him up from any desire to be “comprehensive” or chronological. He can be freer with the structure and write about what he wants to. (All of this as opposed to books like Just a Song or The Late Tang.)
Here, the theme is the relationship between literati and “things.” Don’t expect any “theoretical” armature: you won’t see the name Appadurai anywhere. Actually, you’ll barely even see references to contemporaneous thought. It might raise a few eyebrows to find out that Buddhism first makes a (passing) appearance about a third of the way into a book about attachment to material goods in Song-dynasty China, and never plays a starring role at any point.
OK, so it’s not that kind of book. Instead, you get a series of lively, fine-grained close readings of a number of Song-dynasty prose works, indeed most of the “classics” of 11th-century shorter prose. If you don’t know these texts, you’ll probably find this book an interesting and engaging read: it’s a great introduction to them. If you’re working specifically on one of those texts, you may be interested in his readings (or aggravated by how close his nose is to the textual grindstone). But if you’ve read through any anthology of “Classical Chinese prose,” which probably includes most of the texts under discussion, you may want to pass. Or at least you’ll find it was a very quick read/skim indeed.
A few others:
Chicago Defender – Remembering Richard Roundtree: His Life Before ‘Shaft’ Stardom
Esquire (Joe Posnanski) – Patrick Mahomes Knows Where Football Is Heading
Journal of the American Medical Association – Traditional Chinese Medicine Compound (Tongxinluo) and Clinical Outcomes of Patients With Acute Myocardial Infarction
Restofworld – The trials of gig work are inspiring a new genre of hit songs
Vogue – Meet the Female Chefs Blazing a Trail in Mexico City (whole issue is worth checking out)
Fast Company – This internet music service started the revolution 30 years ago
Thanks for reading, and for listening if you can make it on Monday!
It’s more common than you think! And while we’re with Bach, “Minuet in G” is almost certainly by Christian Petzold.
Andrew Manze’s solo Tartini disc is among those that manages to avoid this.
IMPORTANT UPDATE: sure, reaction videos often include protestations like this, but man do they keep insisting that theirs are “real”:
I’ve only named girl groups—I do think that as the “lore” phenomenon has spread, it’s been most prominent with girl groups (who famously need to try harder on branding and musical quality anyway), but K-pop lore definitely originated with EXO. And there are certainly boy groups that have leaned hard into their concepts, like ATEEZ’s whole “pirate” thing.