Week 9: 4 December 2023 – Fantasy and Fugue in G minor, Advent

Plus: Bach's Feet, Woohyun's "professionalism," new Kofi Agawu, 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 exploring the work of Anishinaabe composer Barbara Assiginaak. Among other things, Assiginaak has just a fantastic ear for sound colors. She seems to be especially fond of very dense sounds (clusters, micropolyphony), but is somehow able to make those textures sound lucid and even beautiful; Mnidoonskaa: An Abundance of Insects and Nbiidaasamishkaamin are full of gorgeous examples. Her pieces for pipigwan with brass and voices are equally inventive, and she uses the instrument wonderfully to bridge the sounds of the natural and instrumental worlds. I’m looking forward to discovering more of this music—and to learning and playing the piano works as soon as I can get find a copy.

Week 9: 4 December 2023 – Fantasy and Fugue in G minor, Advent

Please save applause for the end of each set

Fantasy and Fugue in G minor, BWV 542

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Nun komm, der Heiden Heiland, BWV 599

Gott, durch deine Güte, BWV 600

Herr Christ, der ein'ge Gottes-Sohn, BWV 601

Lob sei dem allmächtigen Gott, BWV 602

Prelude and Fugue in A minor, BWV 551

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Nun komm, der Heiden Heiland, BWV 699

Gott, durch deine Güte, BWV 724

Gottes Sohn ist kommen, BWV 703

Herr Christ, der ein’ge Gottes Sohn, BWV 698

Lob sei dem allmächtigen Gott, BWV 704

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Nun komm, der Heiden Heiland, BWV 659

Trio super Nun komm, der Heiden Heiland, BWV 660

Nun komm, der Heiden Heiland, BWV 661

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A month ago, I made the fairly standard comment that the “Little” Fugue in G minor (BWV 578) is really only “little” by comparison: it’s a fully-fleshed out and pretty great piece on its own terms, both musically satisfying and technically challenging. It’s unfortunate when the nickname gives people the impression that that fugue is trivial or for kids.

But that doesn’t mean I disagree with the nickname: by comparison, that fugue is “little.” Comparison to what? This piece, the “great G minor.”¹

Start with the Fantasy; after all, if you believe Wikipedia, the nickname has migrated to the front of the title (“Great Fantasy and Fugue”) and applies to the piece as a whole. Never mind that there’s no need to distinguish “little” and “great” Fantasies and Fugues—I don’t think there’s too much shame in calling this Fantasy “Great.” Certainly, it’s huge in scale, alternating between volatile torrents of thirty-second notes and calmer fugato sections—and bringing those two styles together near the end. 

Probably the most noticeable feature of this Fantasy is its frankly unhinged harmonic language. It can be about as dissonant as it was “legally” possible to be in Bach’s day, including sounds like this:

That’s C♯, D, and E♭ all rubbing up against each other. (And the E♭ is coming right after a high E♮.) Then there’s this justifiably famous passage, which makes you stare into the harmonic abyss:

In some ways, these three measures are a pretty basic example of a familiar technique: the circle-of-fifths sequence. As usual, the pedal line makes it easiest to see; even without reading the music, it’s visually clear that the descending scale begins one step lower each of the four times it repeats. And the “circle of fifths” part manifests in how that scale includes two more flats ♭ each time it repeats; by the last iteration, every note is a flat—in fact, the sequence is cut short by the use of B♭ instead of B double flat.

Even after being jolted out of freefall like this, the music continues to disorient us harmonically. You can see at the end of this line that this passage lands on the “sharp” side of the circle of fifths, giving us a moment in E minor. That’s already pretty far from G minor, at a distance of a quarter of the way (three clicks) around the circle:

But Bach actually ends this passage on E major, before lurching immediately into C minor. That takes us from four sharps to three flats, almost exactly halfway around the circle. The effect is something like being sucked through a harmonic wormhole. A thoroughly disorienting climax for a startling piece.

Oh, and then there’s the “Great” part, the fugue. Though not quite as extreme, the fugue goes on similar harmonic adventures—watch the flats ♭ pile up here:

But certainly on the whole, the impression the two pieces leave is radically different. If the Fantasy is in the explosive, bewildering, stop-and-start stylus phantasticus, the fugue is (like the A-minor fugue BWV 543) in a near-Vivaldian concerto-like style. The fugue is tuneful (the subject may be derived from a Dutch folk tune), with distinctive rhythmic and melodic profiles that help the theme pop out of the texture. Its texture is much more open, and its harmonies much less challenging than the Fantasy—none of the extreme dissonance, and even some pretty catchy moments. It’s a toe-tapping piece.

It’s also a toe-tapping piece for the organist. The same distinctive shape that makes the tune so recognizable is also one of Bach’s ultimate threats to the organist’s feet: be prepared both to run and to jump. And this fugue makes good on that threat like no other piece by Bach. Pages and pages of sewing-machine sixteenth notes covering the entire pedalboard. Awkward syncopated leaps against completely different rhythms in the hands. Constant shifting around to hit notes two octaves apart. For me at least, this is the Bach organ fugue for the pedals—more to say about that in the section below.

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Now that we’ve reached Advent, we’ll start to hit the major landmarks of the liturgical year and the pace of chorale preludes will pick up significantly. (Especially since I have to put the Christmas recital next week—the whole Advent season will get compressed into this program.) Another consequence is that, having ended the Orgelbüchlein a few weeks ago, this week is our time to start again. 

These first four entries of the Orgelbüchlein give a good sampling of the different approaches Bach takes in that collection. In all four of them, the hymn tune is in the soprano (just like how we play hymns today); but what goes on underneath varies significantly. For “Nun komm,” the lower voices play an almost lute-like style brisée, entering successively in a kind of cascade. “Gottes Sohn” is a layer cake, with a flowing stream of eighth notes in the alto, walking quarter notes in the bass, and two instances of the tune in long notes, with the tenor (the trumpet) echoing the soprano in canon. “Herr Christ” cascades down the voices as well, but in a more defined and almost fugato-like way. Finally, “Lob sei” is more amorphous, ornamenting the lower voices in a way that keeps up the rhythmic interest without sticking to any particular set strategy. 

Probably the most noticeable idiosyncracy of “Lob sei” is harmonic: it begins in what sounds like F major and ends on something that sounds like D minor. This old-fashioned modal sound is a great segue into BWV 551, perhaps Bach’s most old-school organ praeludium. Certainly, no other piece of his sounds quite so much like Buxtehude. The format is exactly what you would have expected in the later seventeenth century: two fugues set in a frame of shock-and-awe stylus phantasticus preluding. And the fugues themselves can be pretty shocking, since both are built on themes that constantly turn chromatic thumbscrews to ratchet up the tension. Even at this early date, you can hear Bach experimenting with some of the same kinds of harmonic daring that pervade the G-minor Fantasy—although the more open textures and less continuous writing of this piece make it a somewhat refreshing contrast. Sometimes a little imitation Buxtehude is just what you need.

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The next set of chorales (mostly from the Kirnberger collection of “miscellaneous” chorale preludes) showcase another set of strategies for treating hymn tunes. All of them, for starters, are chorale fugues: the tune comes in successively in each voice, more staid in “Nun komm,” “Gott durch deine Güte” and “Herr Christ” and zippier in “Lob sei” and “Gottes Sohn.” If these pieces can sound more similar to each other than the Orgelbüchlein chorales do, it’s good to keep in mind that that collection was fully planned out and purpose-written, while these chorales were just assembled by later hands (including me). To that extent, then, they also might represent something more like Bach’s “default” mode for writing this kind of piece, what he would do when he didn’t have to worry about making each chorale sound distinctive when presented in succession.

I’ve arranged these chorales in the same order as the Orgelbüchlein, so you’ll hear the same series of hymns. (“Gottes Sohn” and “Gott, durch deine Güte” are the same tune.) Hopefully this makes it possible to keep track of the different approaches to each chorale. At the very least, it’s a nice coincidence that I ended up with consecutive sets that give [chorale] “preludes and fugues” on the same tunes.²

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Once more back around to “Nun komm,” and for the first time since Week 3, back to the “Great Eighteen Chorales.” One of the organizing principles of this “greatest hits” collection was to assemble a series of takes on the same tune: contrasting pairs for “Komm Heiliger Geist” and “Jesus Christus unser Heiland,” and sets of three for “Allein Gott” and “Nun komm.” And what a contrast these three pieces form. First, a mournful aria with a walking bass; then a jagged, quick, trio (more on this piece below); and finally a massive virtuoso fugue with the hymn tune roaring out in the bass. Even after hearing five (!) different versions of this tune, mostly in the same key, it’s hard to say that the music has gotten repetitive.

Bach’s Feet

I’m borrowing the title of this section from David Yearsley, who used it for an excellent book that sets Bach’s organ works in the context of the organ pedals’ entire history. (Yearsley is a very good organist himself, and he’s not afraid to draw on that experience throughout the book.) I’m not going to review Bach’s Feet here per se, but I do want to give a few of its key points—with the recommendation that, if you’re enjoying reading about Bach’s organ music here, you’ll almost certainly enjoy the book.

Yearsley’s biggest claim is that pedals are German, or at least that everybody seems to believe that they are. Not only that the invention of organ pedals was, or is commonly thought to have been, in Germany, but that the cultivation of pedal technique and the construction of large independent pedal divisions were especially Germanic practices. Yearsley finds evidence for this association throughout the organ’s history, from the development of pedal divisions and writing in the 16th and 17th centuries, through their export to other European countries (who recognized them as distinctively “German”) in the 18th and 19th centuries, to the co-opting of the German [pedal] Ideology under the Third Reich.

Tied up in this national association is a more general feature of how German musical culture understood itself: an obsession with more, with having as many different independent lines as possible. Yearsley traces the (German) history of cramming polyphony into the pedals with double- and even quadruple-pedal writing from the 16th through early 18th centuries, and he then discusses a later 18th-century obsession with keeping the pedal part separate from the left hand. Since the latter story is about a kind of contrapuntal hygiene—keeping the voices as distinct as possible—both of these developments reflect the same kind of maximalist desire for more independent parts. And those eighteenth-century Germans were ultimately successful: “proper” organ music and performance is indeed now understood to involve fully independent pedal parts. (Would you feel disappointed, or even scammed, if you went to an organ recital that didn’t involve the feet? ) 

When you combine these two stories, you can see the roots of a successful musical propaganda campaign. The ideal of organ music and construction maximizes the use of the pedals, and the pedals are quintessentially German. The implication is that Germans have successfully made the organ, or at least its most “developed” form, into their instrument.

Maybe the most unique aspect of Yearsley’s argument is his claim that Bach himself may have bought into these claims. Certainly, Bach’s sense of pride in his own heritage is well-documented (e.g. the “Altbachische Archiv”). And it would have been hard for him to avoid the sense that pedals were Germanic, given how widely it seems to have been repeated both in what is now Germany and abroad. Somewhat queasily, I have to wonder what he would have thought about the later mutations of this ideology, from the 1930s Germans praising the F-major toccata for exemplifying the “German organ art,” to the Nazi propaganda poster using a stylized organ topped with a Reichsadler to represent “Deutschland, das Land der Musik.” It’s important not to confuse earlier and later nationalisms—but the thought is still hard to avoid. (And I think Yearsley wants us to confront this possibility. Why else end the book by juxtaposing an imagined Bach organ recital with this Nazi legacy?)

In any case, whatever the reason, Bach definitely bought into the culture of maximally independent pedal parts. And two of this week’s pieces are star examples for Yearsley in his exploration of that culture. 

Most obvious would be the “Great” G-minor fugue, where the pedal part sometimes seems almost designed to fight with what the hands are doing. Really, this piece takes three different approaches to pedal writing. From smooth alignment with what the hands are doing:

To complementarity (“call and response”):

To all-out warfare:

Conveniently, the very first pedal entrance of the piece is of this last type. Bach (as usual) throws down the gauntlet from the start.

Something else you might notice about these passages is that they’re all in trio texture; in an ingenious stroke, Yearsley chooses to discuss this piece under the heading of trios, bringing it up alongside another other piece from this week, the “Nun komm” trio BWV 660. Certainly, this chorale prelude is as good a display of organ technique as anything in the Toccatas or Fugues; you can listen to me desperately trying to minimize the clatter from the pedalboard (and also tripping over myself at the end) here:

Another thing you might notice from this recording is how hard it can be to tell which part is which—especially when I actually succeed in quieting the noise down, it can be near-impossible to disentangle the left hand from the pedal. That’s not an accident: the two parts are written to be almost interchangeable, and they’re constantly overlapping in pitch and register. They play literally the same thing in quick succession at the beginning:

And later on they trade off versions of the same passages:

But even without the two parts swapping roles, these two parts are intimately linked. If you take away the faster notes from these passages, you can see that the pedal and left hand are essentially just exchanging the same two pitches within each beat:

Now compare all of this to another famous piece with two basslines:

There are a lot of reasons why this song doesn’t sound like the trio “Nun komm,” but I think the treatment of the bass parts is a pretty significant one. McCartney is careful to have his two bass parts on this song occupy different registers, and he gives each one slightly different rhythmic profiles. They’re designed not to get in each other’s way.

In the trio “Nun komm” on the other hand, Bach has done almost exactly the opposite. (And he’s made it just about impossible to balance the dynamics if you try to get timbres as distinct as McCartney’s fuzzed and unfuzzed Rickenbacker.) Bach’s two bass parts get muddled up together, producing a thick, heavy, confused texture. This, just as much as any piece with quadruple pedal, is the sound of the Germanic more: a piece that wants you to struggle with separating out all the parts, to feel overwhelmed. It’s Bach’s pedal ideology pushed to its logical extreme.

What I’m Listening To

Kumo 99 – Headplate

If you try to look up reviews of Kumo 99 online—well, first of all you won’t find very much, which is a shame and something that I hope changes in the near future. But what you do find is above all bewilderment. Mostly, you’ll see any number of short user reviews trying to decide what genre their music is in; I think I’ve seen everything from generic “electronic,” “dance music,” and “experimental” to “techno,” “jungle,” “drum ‘n’ bass,” “breakbeat,” “hardbass,” and “punk.” 

Punk? I can see it! The shouting on tracks like “Defeat Your Nearest Rival” and “Dopamine Chaser” is the highlight of the album for me, and evokes something between punk and LCD Soundsystem for me. Whatever genre you want to slot the record into, it really goes incredibly hard—if you want abrasive,³ noisy, weird music to jump up and down to, you really can’t do a lot better.

Isabelle Faust, Anna-Katharina Schreiber, Antoine Tamestit, Jean-Guihen Queyras, Alexander Melnikov – Schumann: Piano Quartet – Piano Quintet

Yes, I’ll recommend just about anything Isabelle Faust releases. (More pertinently: any record Queyras plays on.) This album completes a series of the Schumann chamber music with piano that Faust, Queyras, and Melnikov have been putting out for a few years now; and this is certainly my favorite entry in the series. It’s not exactly an innovative pairing of pieces, but the playing is musical, smart, and chic as hell.

To the extent that I have a complaint with Faust, it’s usually that she really leans on the wispier end of the violin’s sonic possibilities; it’s very rare to get a huge or consistent amount of intensity from her sound. (This is even more true with Melnikov, who basically never dares to make an ugly sound on any of his pianos.) So I was especially curious how that would play with the Quintet. While it was written by a “domesticated” (married) Schumann and is thus a little less crazed than the piano music and songs can be, this is still a pretty high-octane piece, and it feels conceived for orchestra almost as much as for piano quintet. Happily, I think Faust et al. turn in some of their best performances in this piece: especially in the middle of the slow movement, the strings are willing to make all sorts of sounds to give a genuinely exciting and terrifying climax. Even if you’re on the fence about period instruments for Schumann, you’ll probably find something to love.

La Prenda Roja – La Prenda Roja

It’s hard for me not to like flamenco fusion (not just El mal querer), and this album really scratches the itch. These three singers (Cristina López, Sara Sambola, and Ana Brenes) are excellent at pacing a song: the album is just full of unexpected twists like the break halfway through “La Alhambra.” None of these moments sound arbitrary; instead, they collectively give a feeling of continuous progression, of narrative movement forward. 

The “fusion” part also works quite well for me: the electronic beats and effects are groovy and smartly integrated with the singing, which really takes center stage. The big tradeoff, at least for me, is that the beats tend to sideline the palmas, which never quite drive the song forward like I might have hoped. (They’re nice in “Lucero del alba” and “Coral.”) In fact, after the opening song, I generally found myself waiting for an uptempo climactic number that never quite came. The beat never quite drops, and the feet never quite stamp; the singing never quite plumbs the depths of cante jondo intensity. (The singers sound more than capable of such things.) Still, it’s a very enjoyable album and I bet future projects may be able to bring things to a more exciting peak.

King Gnu – THE GREATEST UNKNOWN

There’s a lot of good stuff on this album, but part of the fun is hearing a really excellent rock musician (Daisuke Tsuneta) trying his best to scramble the conventions of J-pop. (Tsuneta started the band Millenium Parade as a side project to let off some creative steam.) So in songs like “逆夢” and “泡” you can hear all of the hackneyed harmonic tricks of J-pop, but being deployed in a really confounding and disruptive way: all of the applied dominants that normally make this music sound so trite and sentimental come by just a little too fast, are cut off by a key change before they can cadence, or are otherwise undercut. The effect matches the kaleidoscopic production style of the album: “硝子窓” is a wild ride even without those effects. I’m not sure I really love this album, but it’s certainly a cool (and often very fun) listen.

Nam Woo Hyun – WHITREE

It’s been a good year to be a fan of INFINITE. Not that I’m trying to make objective pronouncements here, but I should probably disclose off the bat that, even if I’m not a card-carrying Inspirit, I do really like their music: at one point, I had as many INFINITE albums as every other male K-pop artist combined. I genuinely love Sunggyu and Woohyun’s singing, and I even like Dongwoo’s rapping and Sungjong’s Aaron Neville-esque falsetto. The peak of INFINITE’s Sweetune-produced era includes several of my favorite songs. Be Back is one of my favorite albums. You get the idea.

Anyway, it’s been a good year: the group was able to found its own management company and promptly released a groovy new EP and a slew of variety content. And now Woohyun is back with his first solo LP, adding to what’s already an excellent solo discography.

As biased as I am, I still can’t claim that “Baby Baby” will change your life—even if it’s smartly produced and has a cute video, it’s one of the most straightforward 80s throwback songs I’ve ever heard, so your enjoyment is probably going to be directly proportional to how much you like somewhat generic 80’s dance music. It’s a deeply safe choice for a lead single. I even wonder if the song is just being promoted mostly because it’s “winter-themed,” given how K-pop is obsessed with “seasonality.” (Yes, the album title is WHITE plus TREE. Sorry.)

Other songs on the album fare a little better. The mid-album trilogy of “Love Myself,” “California,” and especially “DONE” ups the ante a fair bit, with much more memorable tunes and slightly more daring production choices. The ballads don’t drag (unlike, say, Woohyun’s solo debut), and the overall sound is pretty cohesive. It’s a good listen overall.

Even so, it’s hard for me not to feel like something is missing. That’s partly because Woohyun’s belting high notes, which give so much of the excitement to INFINITE’s music, are almost entirely absent, just like they were from the group’s comeback in July. With the possible exception of ballad “From the Future,” the music sounds a bit anticlimactic, like it’s had the sharp edges and peaks shaved off. 

It turns out that there’s probably a good reason for this. Woohyun (age 32) had surgery to remove a gastrointestinal stromal tumor in April. From the sound of it, his doctors think he shouldn’t be singing at all, let alone jumping and dancing around like he does on the “Baby Baby” music video. (This is him taking it easy with the dancing?) At the very least, this explains why he looked and sounded so tired on INFINITE’s Killing Voice in August (Dongwoo and L really take the spotlight):

It’s hard to know how to feel about Woohyun making his comeback (both with the group and as a soloist) so soon. I suppose it’s a good idea to start by listening to what he has to say, and he claims that this album was “for the fans”:⁴

Despite being unwell, I recovered and am back passionately singing and dancing. So, I want to give courage to others when they see me so they can think, ‘I can get back up too’…

Originally, I was planning to release a single album in the summer, but I was sick, so I blamed myself a lot for not being able to release it…

The first people I wanted to see while I was sick were my fans. So, I tried hard to recover quickly. Even though I couldn't walk, I worked hard to walk quickly by exercising.

Even if we believe this—and don’t guess, for instance, that Woohyun’s bandmates and his new solo agency pressured him to come out with new music—it still leaves me feeling fairly ambivalent. If Woohyun actually was thinking about his fans the whole time…isn’t that maybe a bit sad too? Forget about the possible negative impact on his health; the whole mentality of compulsive work is frankly exhausting to contemplate.

In a way, it reminds me of GFRIEND. Stick with me here—it’s not that big of a leap. After all, GFRIEND and INFINITE are probably the two groups most famous for ludicrous perfectionist synchronization in their dance routines:

And GFRIEND really became famous because of their ability to keep this synchronization up under adverse conditions:

If you read the comments on that video (or anywhere else), you’ll see lots of talk about how “professional” Yuju, SinB and the others were for persisting in their dance routine despite the dangerously rain-soaked stage. (And the giant moths surrounding them.) Never mind that Yuju broke her finger during the performance; having become iconic for this kind of persistence, it became routine for her to perform while bleeding, or with a broken hand. Professionalism.

Personally, I find the “Me Gustas Tu” stage more stomach-churning than inspiring. “Professionalism,” whatever it’s supposed to mean, should not usually entail putting oneself at risk of bodily harm, and certainly not for something as (relatively) unimportant as a four-minute dance performance. This kind of praise, to me, feels like buy-in on the part of fans, more-than-passive acceptance of how the music industry (it may be worse in Korea, but it’s not categorically different elsewhere) chews up and spits out its performers.

Things may be changing. It’s less routine for idols to pass out onstage now, and many more have been allowed to take mental health breaks. (Although the necessity of such breaks is some indication of the degree of overwork pervasive in the industry.) K-pop artists have a bit more creative say than they used to; it’s possible to be hopeful overall. But if Woohyun’s hasty dive back into his working schedule is any indication, even the idols themselves won’t necessarily prioritize their own health. I just hope he was being honest: if making new music really was what he wanted to do, then I guess there are worse ways to pass the time recovering. Just promote a better choice of single next time.

Also liked…

Negarit Band – Origins (Ethiosonic)

Federico Fiorio, Marian Polin, and La florida Capella – Sacri musicali affetti (come for the Strozzi, stay for the Strozzi)

Soul Delivery – Peninsula Park (highlight: “Wisdom”)

Aiace – Eu andava como se fosse voar

Brundibár Ensemble – Forgotten Voices Rediscovered (about the project; look up Brundibár if you don’t know the story)

What I’m Reading

Kofi Agawu has finally collected some of his more recent essays on African music, in a volume “shockingly” entitled On African Music. Some of them (“Against Ethnotheory,” “Tonality as a Colonizing Force in Africa”) are already attaining the status of classics, so it’s great to have them together as a set. 

Agawu isn’t afraid to return to lasting preoccupations, so many of the ideas in these essays will be pretty familiar; “Tonality,” for instance, is something like an expansion of a four-page bit from Representing African Music. And Agawu’s heroes (e.g. Nketia, Uzoigwe) and methods (e.g. semiotics) have stayed pretty stable over time. 

Still, there’s plenty of engaging new stuff in here. My favorite parts (as has often been the case with Agawu’s recent writing) are essentially advocacy for great music: “African Pianism” and “Rethinking Music Theory” are loaded with wonderful musical examples, and if you actually take the time to listen to the recordings, Agawu’s notes are a great complement to what you’re hearing. (“African Pianism” is also a great advertisement for William Chapman Nyaho’s excellent series Piano Music of the African Diaspora, as well as his accompanying recordings.) To an extent, some of the essays (originally lectures) seem almost like excuses to get this music out there. Fair enough! He turned me into an Uzoigwe fan, and maybe he’ll do the same for you.

Probably the most original essay in the set is the opener, “The Minimalist Impulse.” It’s a little hard to pin Agawu’s thesis down—he never quite offers definitions—but the general idea is to raise appreciation for the economy of resources in many traditional African musics. Much of the emergent complexity of these musics is derived from the manipulation of a few basic musical ideas. So you could call that a kind of “motivic minimalism,” very different from the textural or processual minimalism of Euro-American composers. (Even ones like Steve Reich who drew inspiration from African musics.)

I have to say that Agawu’s description can sound curiously…Germanic. He never says that African musics “unfold” or that they’re based on a Grundgestalt, but I do feel like Schoenberg and Schenker might be behind the thinking here. It would be hard for Agawu—who’s an excellent music theorist in that tradition—to completely avoid having his thought impacted by those German theorists, but I would have loved a more direct reckoning with this set of aesthetic values. This wouldn’t even have to take the form of self-critique—one version would be to say that Schenker the racist can be hoisted by his own petard, that African traditional musics do a better job than Bach at exemplifying many of the traits he likes. (That’s probably too simplistic for Agawu.)

Really, the only weak link for me in the book is the “Iconicity” essay. I don’t have a ton of patience for most of how semiotics is used in music scholarship (including two of Agawu’s books), and to my mind, this essay never quite gets anywhere with its discussions of language and music. It’s cool to see linguists like Laura McPherson cited in a music theory book—I just wish it were music theory that went as far as her own work does.

Still, on the whole, these essays are (as always) provocative and informative. There really aren’t many scholars out there like Kofi Agawu, and time spent with his work is always worthwhile. 

A few others: 

• Futurism – Sports Illustrated Published Articles by Fake, AI-Generated Writers

  • Comment by Emma Baccellieri (SI)

• QNS – How Queens residents shopped for their holiday meals a century ago: Our Neighborhood, The Way it Was

• Science – Penguins snatch seconds-long microsleeps

• Marie Claire – What Really Happened to Jessica Savitch?

• Lithub– From Local, to Global, to Gone: On the Rise and Fall of Borders Books

• Hyperallergic – Tigray’s Cultural Heritage Is in Danger, But Does the World Care? 

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

1. I’ve sometimes wondered if this nicknaming convention is inspired by or imitating the names people use for Mozart’s K.183 and 550, the “Little” and “Great” G minor symphonies. But the shared key is probably just a coincidence. Probably.

2. I contemplated pairing up the prelude and fugue for each chorales, but the keys Bach uses are different enough to make the effect too jarring.

3. There’s some calmer and more melodic stuff (“Sorosoro”) later on the album.

4. https://entertain.naver.com/read?oid=005&aid=0001655965, translation from Allkpop (sorry).