The Fredösphere

Well, a last minute change of plans prevented my trip to Indiana, so here I am.

Terry Teachout is quoting Hans Keller.  I've heard this one before, possibly from Terry himself.

The music critic Hans Keller said something shrewd about this phenomenon: “As soon as I detest something, I ask myself why I like it.”

I have detested the blues all my life.  Simply detested it.  In the spirit of Hans Keller, I've used the blues harmonic progression in two pieces lately.  One was a very Lutheran arrangement of the hymn tune Nun Freut Euch for brass quartet.  The latest is a choral setting of a phantasmagoric Pushkin poem translated into English.  I see now what I detested is the extreme obeisance to the harmonic formula.  My laws, people, it's time to shake it up a bit.  So that's what I did.  In the latter case (still under construction) I intend to sneak into the chord progression, so listeners won't realize until the piece is three-quarters done that the blues is what they're hearing.

An anthropological study of the strange religious phenomenon known as Christianity is making the rounds, but I think I first got it from Mixolydian Mode.  Great fun.