Sigh

 The Lucini book is much less scholarly than I expected.  Sigh. That leaves more room for me, I guess, though it would be more satisfying to have material of a higher level with which to engage. I view it as a primary source, a memoir of someone who listened to it and was DJ, etc...  

More Taruskin

 Taruskin objects to writing in which there are no human agents doing things. "This sort of writing gives everybody an alibi. All the active verbs are described in the passive voice. Nobody is seen as doing or deciding anything. Even the composers ... are not described in the act, but only as a passive vehicle of 'emergence.'"  

Yet this passage caught me up short, because I find RT to be really addicted to passive constructions himself, as well as to writing with subjects of the verbs other than human agents.  Here it is the "sort of writing" that gives alibi, and the next verbs are all passive. On the next page, he writes:  

"Reasons for the long and embattled dominance of internalist models for music history in the West, (reasons that account for Dahlhaus's otherwise inexplicable prestige), have more than two centuries behind them, and I shall try to illuminate them at appropriate points. But comment is required up front about their special reason for dominance in the recent history of the discipline, reasons having to do with the Cold War, when the general intellectual atmosphere was excessively polarized (hence binarized) around a pair of seemingly exhaustive and totalized alternatives. The only alternative, it then seemed, was a discourse that was totally corrupted by totalitarian co-option. Admit a social purview, it then seemed, and you were part of the totalitarian threat to the integrity (and freedom) of the creative individual."

There are only two agents here, one in a sign-post (I will illuminate) and the other in hypothetical you at the end.  Everything else is passive voice or abstractions backed up by other abstractions. While this paragraph is clunky prose, I think it is not realistic to conform to the idea of using only, or even mostly, human agents as subjects of sentences.  Taruskin only notices this kind of writing when other people do it, or when he disagrees with the writing for other reasons. The next paragraph, too, is mostly passive voice and copulative verbs, with only an active verb in the final sentence: "We acknowledge that out methods are ground in and guided by theory...."  With more passive voice. I'm sure I could find examples on every page of his book.  My point is not to condemn his use of passive (which is not my preferred voice in my own writing) or his hypocrisy, even. I think he is simply not self-aware about his own writing style, or the extreme effort it would require to write scholarly prose using mainly human agents as subjects of sentences in the active voice.  He writes clearly and grammatically, but is unaware of what his own style really is. He has an idea of something he dislikes when other people do it, but he doesn't realize what it would take to fulfill his own stated ideal.   

Crónica cantada

I  received Lucini's book in the mail today, from Abe books. It doesn't have much about Lorca in it, but he is working on a subsequent project that is only Lorca. Also, I guess, he is only interested in popular (vernacular) music, not in classical traditions. 

I like these little gifts I give myself. Ordering a book and then not knowing when there is a knock at the door. I had cataract surgery two days ago and I still can't read with my right eye, so these gifts are kind of hard to handle right now.   

Taruskin

 I'm reading Richard Taruskin, Cursed Questions: On Music and Its Social practices.  UC Press, 2020. He comes up with a critique of allegorical political analyses of harmonic movement very similar to what I came up with, and similar to Charles Rosen's critique of the "new musicology." Taruskin cites Carolyn Abbate, who had coined the turn "low hermeneutics" (or "soft hermeneutics") for this kind of reading. My term for this was the "melodramatic style."  Taruskin uses a passage from Susan McClary, the same musicologist that I used. I think I took this whole discussion out of my book, because it is a tangent, but that is what the blog is for. 

Taruskin and Rosen clashed frequently, with the former's infamous accusation that Rosen's entire literary output is "cold war propaganda." Taruskin rapidly dismisses the one modernist (12 tone) composer I treat in my book, Luigi Nono, saying that it is silly for Schoenberg's son-in-law to be a communist, because a communist regime would not like his music. So this is a bit like Taruskin's coldwar propaganda? Nono used "his father-in-law's advanced compositional techniques to promote a political program that, when successful, invariably resulted in the suppression, as socially parasitical, of audience alienating art like his own." But isn't that an interesting 3rd option? Between formalist 12 tone music in support of American democracy, and Soviet agit-prop music, you can have Eurocommunist 12-tone music as well.  You can call this silly, as RT does, but isn't it just as silly to see 12-tone music or abstract-expressionism as propaganda, just because the CIA promoted these things in an opportunistic way? 

Anyway, I had expected Taruskin to be more supportive of the new musicology, but he concludes that it "quickly took a wrong turn, away from the sociocultural into naive hermeneutics, which caused it to age with stunning rapidity" 436).  

Graphic novels

 Apparently graphic novels featuring Lorca are a thing now. There is an article out that I haven't read yet. It supports my idea that Lorca is a favorite for adaptations of all kinds. 

Courting

Some courting plots.  The rich girl falls for the bad boy of humble origins. The rich man comes rescues a poor woman from poverty, like Pygmalion. Juanito Santa Cruz and Fortunata: In Galdós's novel Fortunata y Jacinta the wealthy man falls in with a group of shady characters (with Andalusian accents?) and they have all-night parties (juergas). One of the women he meets in the sordid environment is Fortunata. I don't remember if they are doing cante jondo or not, but the narrator notes "Las crudezas de estilo popular y aflamencado que Santa Cruz decía alguna vez..."  There is an article I haven't read about Galdós as an anti-flamenco guy, as many intellectuals have been. Of course, there is Merimée's Carmen. 

Class differences are sexualized in these plots. Burke mentions some D.H. Lawrence. There is Juan Marsé's Últimas tardes con Teresa, with the charnego seducing the bourgeoise university student.  

More Dante

 Dante assumes that poems will be set to music. Canzoni are poems that might be set to music, whether they are actually set to music or not. Earlier he defines poetry as verbal inventions obeying the rules of rhetoric and music. We cannot call it a song unless it has words:  

"Furthermore, we must now discuss whether the word canzone should be used to refer to a composition made up of words arranged with due regard to harmony, or simply to a piece of music. To which I answer that a piece of music as such is never given the name canzone, but is rather called 'sound', or 'tone', or 'note', or 'melody'. For no player of a wind or key- board or stringed instrument ever calls his melody a canzone, except when it is wedded to a real canzone; but those who harmonise words call their works canzoni, and even when we see such words written down on the page, in the absence of any performer, we  call them canzoni. And so it  seems clear that the canzone is nothing else than the self-contained action of one who writes harmonious words to be set to music; and so I shall assert that not only the canzoni we are discussing here, but also ballate and sonnets and all arrangements of words, of whatever kind, that are based on harmony, whether in the vernacular or in the regulated language, should be called canzoni."