Posts Tagged ‘Ted Gioia’

Stanford’s William Mahrt, a leading scholar in early music, died today at 85. He conducted Gregorian chant for more than 60 years and inspired and guided generations of scholars. He directed Stanford’s Early Music Singers and St. Ann Choir, a Gregorian schola. He was also a personal friend. This is an article I wrote for Stanford Report about Bill Mahrt on October 2nd, 2007.

For nearly two millennia, the sound has been a regular pulse beneath the skin of Western civilization. It reverberated through Dante’s mind as he scratched out the cantos of the Purgatorio. It was the inaudible vein of thought running beneath the chords of Mozart’s Requiem. Crusaders trudged to the East with these melodies in their heart, but they were too late – Jerusalem had echoed with it centuries earlier. It was ubiquitous, universal – that is, until about 40 years ago.

William Mahrt directs the St. Ann Choir, which he says has had a “fruitful interaction” with Stanford’s doctoral students of musicology, who find it “a very wonderful laboratory for the study of the music of history.” 

The tide may be turning, and, if so, it will be William Mahrt’s moment in the sun.

The origins of Gregorian chant are enigmatic. It appears to have its roots in fourth-century Jerusalem. The link with Pope Gregory the Great (590-604) is the byproduct of early spin, based on what is probably an erroneous assumption that he composed and collected early chant.

The otherworldly effect of the music is hard to describe, but Mahrt, an associate professor of music at Stanford, recently gave it a try: “It is what we call monophonic – that is to say, it’s a melody that’s unaccompanied,” he said. “A free rhythm has an ability to evoke eternal things, more than passages tied down to regular time. It’s a sprung rhythm that has a freedom to it – like Hopkins’ poetry.”

Mahrt has conducted Gregorian chant for more than 40 years without a break. He is the director of Stanford’s Early Music Singers and of the St. Ann Choir, a Gregorian schola at St. Thomas Aquinas Church in Palo Alto. He instructs singers in the mysteries of “the chant,” as well as the glorious polyphonic music that came after it. In fact, it’s possible that there is more chant sung in Palo Alto than anywhere else in the country, with the possible exception of monastic communities. Mahrt has inspired and guided generations of scholars and singers.

One of his star students, Kerry McCarthy, now an assistant professor of music at Duke University, is the author of Liturgy and Contemplation in Byrd’s Gradualia and one of the world’s leading scholars on William Byrd, the preeminent English composer of the Renaissance.

“One of the best decisions I’ve made in my life was to come to Stanford and work with Bill,” McCarthy said. “The things I learned from him here I could not have learned anywhere else. Not just in the classroom, but in performance. Especially in performance.”

Acclaimed music writer and jazz scholar Ted Gioia recalls going to hear the St. Ann Choir, composed of students and members of the community at large, when he was studying for an MBA at Stanford. Often he found only a few fellow listeners in the pews.

“The thing I most miss about Palo Alto is going to those Gregorian Masses,” he said. “It’s so energizing. That was the best-kept secret in Palo Alto. Bill was the person who really opened my ears to that. He had a profound influence on my conception of music – through the force of his example.”

Mahrt’s work has indeed been quiet. Furthermore, he has encountered resistance from a church that has not always valued its own heritage.

“There’s a huge resistance from the clerical establishment to doing any of this,” said Stanford alumna Susan Altstatt, who has been a member of the St. Ann Choir since 1967. “Bill has lived a charmed life in this regard. Bill has managed to do what he’s doing by talking to bishops and priests and knowing what he’s talking about. He’s a hero, as far as I’m concerned.”

Mahrt explained the resistance: “Gregorian chant went out of style when the language was changed” – that is, when the universal Latin was changed to the vernacular English. “In the absence of any good solution about what to replace the chant with, I would say commercial interests stepped in and hawked a progressively cheaper and cheaper music, and the commercial interests still prevail today.”

For example, one of the leading publishers of “missalettes,” the flimsy and disposable paperbacks that include “new” church music, distributes 4.3 million of the quarterly copies a year and owns 10,000 music copyrights. That’s a lot of commercial interests.

The result was summarized by one disgruntled reviewer on Amazon.com: “The Roman Catholic Church, seeking to be more ‘relevant’ to its flock in the antispiritual climate of the second half of the 20th century, abandoned its ancient Latin liturgy and dignified music in favor of poorly worded vernacular texts and worse music. This music usually tends toward banal couplets set to insipid tunes strummed on ill-tuned guitars and whined into a microphone to the banging of a tambourine.”

Mahrt said there is a reason for the ill-tuned guitars and whining: “The standard of performance in recorded pop music is very high. A little combo in a church can’t possibly keep that standard. There isn’t the same standard for chant. Its whole criteria are different. Singers can master it in a different way.”

Unlike other kinds of music, McCarthy said, “You don’t have to have to have wonderful technique and learn to breathe from your diaphragm and so forth and have 20 years of voice lessons. It’s on a very human scale. It’s really self-regenerating. You can sing especially psalms for hours without getting tired, and there aren’t many kinds of music you can say that about.”

According to Mahrt, the St. Ann Choir has created a “fruitful interaction” with Stanford’s doctoral students of musicology, who find it “a very wonderful laboratory for the study of the music of history.” Members of the choir, which performs the year-round cycle of chant, are perhaps the staunchest advocates of the music anywhere: “This is one of the major cultural landmarks of Western society,” Altstatt said. “Its preservation is very important. It has to be sung – it has to come through the human voice. You have to be taught, in a living tradition. You can’t get it through a book. You get hooked on it, you internalize it and need to do it. It’s a splendid thing.”

In recent years, a younger audience, seeking music with a little more history and meaning than its usual fare, has become hooked in a different way: A generation has snapped up Gregorian chant and made recordings into crossover hits. In the last decade, the Benedictine monks of Santo Domingo de Silos’ Canto Gregoriano would become one of the world’s biggest-selling classical compact discs, with worldwide sales topping 6 million.

But the commotion and hoopla miss the point, Mahrt said. “Chant does arise out of silence, and it goes back to silence,” he said. “In our own culture, we sometimes don’t have any silence. I think among students, for instance. They go into the dorms and the walls are thumping 24 hours a day. There is never a chance to be alone, in silence, within your own residence. But the fact is, I think, myself, the best location for the contact with God is in silence.

“When silence occurs, then you can look interiorly and find an order and a purpose that the noise of the media running day and night obscures. So, likewise, the chant, which is pure, a single melody, is not complicated, arises out of silence and goes back into it, as a way of returning to that interiority.”

Early interest

Mahrt grew up in a small farming community in eastern Washington – a place where “church music” meant sentimental hymns sung by a “little choir of ladies who sang to a harmonium.” His University of Washington master’s thesis as a pianist was the work of Robert Schumann. Mahrt discovered the chant at the University of Washington. Dominican friars, who were Catholic chaplains at the university, desperate to augment their choir, told him, “You have to sing chant for Holy Week.”

“It’s the hardest chant of the year in some ways. So we did it,” he recalled. “And I said this is what I’ve been missing. This is what I’ve been waiting for. I joined the Cathedral Choir and sang chant there for the next two-and-a-half years.”

He headed to Stanford to study Mozart and also joined the St. Ann Choir, which had been launched by one of the university’s mathematics professors in 1963. A year later, the professor departed for another university and handed the reins to Mahrt. The year was a landmark in chant in another way: That was the year the Catholic Church began using local languages in the liturgy, and the chant was all but abandoned.

“Our choir was started one year before the language changed – if we had tried to start one year later, we might not have been able to do it,” Mahrt said. “I saw this music becoming less and less popular with people who were entranced with folk music.”

The leap from Mozart to the chant was not as radical as might be supposed; Mahrt points out that “certainly Mozart grew up knowing chant – a very 18th-century chant.”

“Most composers through the 19th century – in Austria, France, Italy – simply had chant in their background, and in their daily experience of church. It’s something the history books don’t tell you,” Mahrt said.

Mahrt carried on for the next 40 years largely alone. He said he knew his decision to dedicate his life to chant’s preservation would meet conflict, struggles and disappointments. “It’s worth it. Somebody’s got to keep it. It has to be kept alive in various places throughout the world. So we’ve got to do it.”

His persistence may be paying off. Pope Benedict XVI, himself a musician, has taken an interest in restoring musical traditions, as well as encouraging the Latin Mass. The 1,700-year-old Gregorian chant might be an idea whose time has come again. In fact, it might be an idea rather hard to kill.

“One wonderful thing about chant is it’s almost viral,” said McCarthy, who has started her own chant group at Duke. “People who learn it tend to go somewhere else – academics, especially, tend to be migratory birds. When we move to the new place, we start a chant group ourselves. I calculate that in about 60 years, we’ll have taken over the world.”

Mahrt’s group has spawned spinoffs across the United States, besides the one at Duke. Alstatt’s daughter Alison, who is doing doctoral work in medieval music at the University of Erlangen in Germany, joined the St. Ann Choir when she was 11 and has started a group in Berkeley, where she had been a student at the University of California. There are now groups in Los Angeles, Cleveland and Arkansas.

Mahrt has even found a substitute to direct the choir – finally allowing him to take a more active role in promoting chant nationally and internationally, given the recent renewal of interest. Does he feel free at last, after four decades of being tethered to the annual cycle of chant? Mahrt looks up in wonderment at the question: “It’s a fulfillment, not an oppression. I miss it when I go away. It is a routine, but the music and liturgy are all part of the rhythm of life.”

Postscript from jazz scholar and Substacker Ted Gioia on January 1, 2025: “Not many knew that Gregorian chant and medieval/Renaissance polyphony flourished in Palo Alto — but I’d be there, and I’d see René Girard there too. It was all because of William Mahrt—a beatific soul (who also encouraged my jazz teaching at Stanford, at a time when some were skeptical about its legitimacy). He we beloved by those who knew him.”

The tributes continue to pour in:

From David A. Lawrence: “Bill’s unprecedented accomplishments as both a scholar and the leader of the St. Ann’s Choir are well-documented. What I feel compelled to add, in the wake of my shock at the news of his passing, is what an entirely sweet human being he was. In a profession that does not lack competition for awards, accolades and promotions, Bill was kind to everybody. In my 50 years at Stanford I never once heard anyone mention a harsh word about him. In addition, he was a superb teacher. In my early years on the faculty I would disguise myself as a student and sneak into his classes. Of course Bill knew about it, and had absolutely no problem with it. I was particularly struck by the fact that, while his primary focus may have been on a composer like Guillaume de Machaut, nobody taught the music of Johannes Brahms with greater insight and sensitivity than Bill. I will miss him terribly—both professionally and personally. Rest in peace, dear man.

From Patrick Hunt: “As usual, Cynthia Haven’s insight, gentle appreciation and honed writing go to the heart of a matter, in this case Mahrt’s beloved legacy on medieval chant. I was always struck by Mahrt’s meditative quietude and humility, never one to seek attention even when so well deserved. Well done, Cynthia!”

From John O. Robison: Bill came to Stanford as a young professor in September 1972, when I had just finished my MA and was beginning the doctoral program. I always thought that hiring Bill was one of the Stanford Music Department’s greatest accomplishments! He was such a tremendous teacher and mentor during my doctoral years at Stanford, and most of my research projects were done under his guidance. Whenever it was time to delve into a new research project, he would simply say “Okay, what do you want to do next?” and let me pursue that topic (anywhere from c. 1000 to 1800) to its fullest potential. I flew out to California for his 80th birthday party in March 2019, gave him one of my Ralph Marlin fish ties as a small present (which I am sure he never wore), and had a nice time explaining how important his mentorship has been to me as a performing musicologist working in vastly different areas of research. He was a very kind person, one who was incredibly dedicated to chant and Catholic church music, and whose presence will live on through all who were fortunate enough to know him. – John O. Robison, Prof. of Musicology, University of South Florida

“Humans doing the hard jobs on minimum wage while the robots write poetry and paint is not the future I wanted,” wrote architect, satirist, and cartoonist Karl Sharro on Twitter today. It’s not the future anyone wanted, but here we are.

Perhaps no one foresaw our civilizational predicament with such clarity and eloquence as the late award-winning music and cultural critic Scott Timberg.

I’ve written before about the Stanford-born author of Culture Crash: The Killing of the Creative Class (Yale University Press), whose 2019 suicide at the age of 50 dismayed not only his friends and family, but writers, artists, editors, and critics everywhere. (Go here and here.) Now we have a collection of his best essays as well.

“For many of us, Scott’s death revealed uncanny and disturbing connections with his professional life over the last decade, when he emerged as our leading chronicler and champion of creative professionals who had been squeezed and displaced in the ‘culture business,'” writes Ted Gioia in his eloquent introduction to Boom Times at the End of the World, just published by Heyday Books (Berkeley). If you want to read some of his music writing, go to the chapters on Glenn Gould or Gustvo Dudamel. If you want to understand his concern with the collapse of culture and media, you can read his essay, “How the Village Voice and Other Alt-Weeklies Lost Their Voice.” There’s lots to choose from.

Timberg writes:

My path into the creative class – as an observing reporter – was pretty typical. Growing up a middle-class kid, I had no illusion that I’d ever become wealthy, but I had a sense that I could get really good at something if I worked as hard as I could and surrounded myself with what someone once called – in a phrase that now sounds antique – the best that has been thought and said. Mine was a pragmatic, find-a-summer-job, get-Triple-A-and-change-your-oil-regularly kind of family. But there was also a respect for culture. Reading James Joyce‘s Dubliners showed me a new way to see: there was a world behind the world that you could discern if you squinted just right. …

But I’m telling this story not because of what happened to me, or what happened to my friends. … And while the Internet and other digital innovations had taken a huge bite out of some professions – disemboweling the music industry, for instance, though both piracy and entirely legal means – this was about more than just technology. Some of the causes were as new as file sharing; others were older than the nation. Some were cyclical, and would pass in a few years; others were structural and would get worse with time. There was a larger nexus at work – factors, in some cases unrelated ones, that had come together in the first decades of the twenty-first century to eviscerate the creative class.

As someone who has shared his struggles to make a living in the collapsing world of cultural journalism, I wanted to focus in this blogpost on his own journey in “Down We Go Together,” beginning in 2008, the year the housing bubble burst, as he was in Portland. He got the phone call so many of us dread (always assuming we have a house in the first place):

Then my cell phone rang, the face of my wife back home in Los Angeles showing up on its small screen. She didn’t waste time. “The bank,” she said, “is suing us.” She’d woken up to a courier posting a note on our front door. “I’m sorry,” was all he said before taking off. Pulling the photocopied forms off our door – in triplicate – she saw that one of the largest banks in the world had initiated legal action to take our little house from us. …

Timberg describes a world in which supporting players are being forced out of the culture industry, and hence “too much quality art becomes a tree falling in empty woods, and each artist, regardless of temperament, must become his or her own producer, promoter, and publicist.”

“These changes have undermined the way culture has been created for the past two centuries, crippling the economic prospects of not only artists but also the many people who supported and spread their work, and nothing yet has taken its place. The price we ultimately pay is in the decline of art itself, diminishing understanding of ourselves, one another, and the eternal human spirit.”

The book is on Amazon of course, here – but you can also purchase directly through Heyday here.

How Sigrid Undset Went from Secretary at an Engineering Firm to Nobel Prize Winner over at The Honest Broker on Substack. Ted Gioia explains why he’s reviewing a “100-year-old book that almost nobody reads.” And 1,200 pages (over three volumes) at that. He also explains how the Danish-Norwegian writer (1882-1949) went from being a secretary to a Nobelist, during a time when cutting such a career path was less common than it is today. He includes diagrams, too:

Romance fiction may delight, but it rarely surprises us—after the first chapter, you can almost predict everything that’s going to happen. They will soon train AI how to churn out these stories. In fact, it may already be happening, judging by some recent offerings on the streaming platforms.

But nothing is more tired and predictable than the medieval romance. This type of story has been a literary dead end for hundreds of years—so much so that Cervantes was already mocking it when he wrote Don Quixote (1605), the ultimate send-off of the genre. And to be honest, the medieval romance had mostly exhausted its narrow range of devices a century before Cervantes made fun of its clichés.

We all know the formula. It requires a bold knight and a lovely, highborn lady, passionate love, and high adventure—with sword fights and secret rendezvous along the way. But the incidents are so predictable, and the emotions so stylized that whatever reality that might have set these stories in motion in the Middle Ages has long been lost to us. Instead we have stick figures, faux Lancelots and Guineveres, perhaps suitable for parody (along the lines of Monty Python and the Holy Grail) but lacking in any psychological depth or plausibility.

That’s where Sigrid Undset enters the picture, and shakes everything up. Not only did she return to the medieval romance in the twentieth century in this epic work, published between 1920 and 1922, but she somehow reverses a thousand years of morbidity, bringing a long dead genre back to life.

He goes on to describe how deeply screwed-up and intense the characters are, and how the reader is begging them to reform or at least be reasonable. No dice.

Religion plays a large and recurring role in the plot, and we have some hope, or even expectation, that her main character will achieve a degree of saintliness. But few things are rarer than saints walking the earth—even in a spiritually-charged novel—and the tiny steps Kristin Lavransdatter makes toward a beautiful life, are almost always preceded or followed by stumbles, and occasionally complete reversals. Our hopes for her are never dashed, at least not completely, yet neither are they gratified by larger-than-life triumphs.

Yet we do well to remember that actual life, as we experience it, does not follow the narrative structure of a Netflix miniseries. And Undset’s seeming stubbornness in withholding expected cadences merely increases the verisimilitude of her finished work.

In fact, this novel is all the truer to its author’s worldview for its post-Edenic complexities. And perhaps all the more potent in its impact on readers, who may recognize themselves in its pages for the simple reason that Sigrid Undset does away with medieval figureheads and saintly lives. In this way, she somehow presents tales from the distant past that seem uncannily like the celebrity stories of our own time—but the resemblance is to the messy affairs from private lives (Kanye and Kim, Amber and Depp, etc.), and not the stylized formulas the stars present on screen.

Read the whole thing here.

It takes 5,000 signatures on a change.org petition to get media attention. And it worked like a charm for musician and jazz scholar Ted Gioia. He’s now doubled that with more than 10,300 signatures. (You can sign, too, here or on the link at the bottom of the page.)

His campaign: A posthumous Pulitzer for Duke Ellington, who was denied the honor way back in 1965. As I write, “Duke Ellington” is trending on Twitter.

Here’s what happened:

“In 1965, the jury for the Pulitzer Prize in Music recommended that jazz composer Duke Ellington receive the award in honor of his lifetime legacy of excellence. The Pulitzer Board denied the request, and decided to give no award in music that year rather than honor an African-American jazz composer. In the aftermath, two of the three jury members resigned in protest.

“The time has come to rectify this unfortunate decision, and name Duke Ellington as the winner of the 1965 Pulitzer Prize in Music. The recent precedent of Jim Thorpe‘s reinstatement as sole winner of the 1912 Olympic gold medals, taken from him 110 years ago, makes clear that even after many decades these wrongs can still be righted. Ellington was a deserving candidate back in 1965, and the significance of his legacy has become all the clearer with the passage of time. Giving him the 1965 prize is the right thing for Duke Ellington, the right thing for the Pulitzer, and the right thing for American music.”

John McWhorter of the New York Timesagrees: “I’m hoping it stimulates a big, beautiful noise that undoes this wrong.” He finds it unlikely that racism wasn’t involved in the Pulitzer decision-making.

He continues: “We assume that Pulitzers are awarded to work that qualifies as for the ages, that pushes the envelope, that suggests not just cleverness but genius. There can be no doubt that Ellington’s corpus fits that definition.”

“I’ll never forget deciding, in my early 20s, that I wanted to know what the big deal was about Ellington and popping in a CD with a recording of 1927’s ‘Black and Tan Fantasy.’ Just the opening, in all of its blue, narrative and outright odd soaring, made the proverbial hairs on the back of my neck stand up. It was one of those “What is this?” moments. I remember marveling about it with my father, a lifelong jazz fan, with him smiling and saying, “John, you got it!’ Indeed, Ellington was something one ‘got.’ Like James Joyce, the Coen brothers or Charles Mingus, you might not quite get what the hubbub is about at first, but when you do, watch out. ‘Mood Indigo’ opens with muted trombone on melody playing up high, then clarinet playing down low, then muted trumpet playing somewhere in the middle — deliciously weird! The result is a gentle astringence that results in an uncommon kind of tenderness.” (Read the whole thing at the NYT here.)

As of yesterday, Ted wrote in his Substack column, “The Honest Broker”: “There has been no response from the Pulitzer board. Zero. Nada. Zilch. But the media has just started paying attention to this initiative.”

You can read the whole back story here. Says Ted: “Revisiting the matter today would simply require the Board voting to accept the original jury recommendation. 

“A dozen other Pulitzer winners have already expressed their support.” And a number of American composers have also signed: John Adams, John Luther Adams, William Bolcom, Philip Glass, David Lang, Tania León, Steve Reich, Terry Riley, Caroline Shaw.

I love the evocative photo of a young Ted above, before arthritis at a young age ended his career as a performer and composer. Want to hear one of Ted’s musical compositions? Check out here. And check out the story about it here.

https://www.change.org/p/give-duke-ellington-the-pulitzer-prize-he-was-denied-in-1965

Postscript from Ted Gioia:

I am now awaiting a response from the Pulitzer board.

I want to express my heartfelt thanks to the many of you who have supported this worthy cause. This is out of our hands, but we’ve made a historic effort, and my hope is that Duke Ellington will get the Pulitzer Prize he was denied in 1965.

We don’t always get to choose our gigs, so jazz scholar Ted Gioia recently accepted an unlikely invitation to talk to med school students about the humanities. (More news: the Jazz Journalists Association had chosen Ted’s lively and informed The Honest Broker as blog of the year, and also awarded him the Robert Palmer-Helen Oakley Dance Award for Excellence in Writing.)

Back to the med school visit:

So I agreed to give this talk, but with trepidation. When you’re involved in arts or culture and stand up in front of an audience of science or tech people, they expect you to justify the humanities. 

Why should we waste time with you? They don’t actually say that, but it’s hanging thick in the air like a bad odor.

A “casual talk” about the humanities turns into a plea to the jury for acquittal. There’s simply more skepticism about the humanities now than ever before, and you can’t avoid that cynical attitude, especially when talking to a whole room of future doctors.

Frankly, I don’t like defending the humanities. Don’t get me wrong—studying the humanities was life-changing for me. I grew up in a neighborhood where nobody’s parents, including my own, had gone to college. So when I got the chance, I found it liberating to study Dante, Plato, Shakespeare, Mozart, Sappho, Goethe, and all those other dead people from across the big pond.

But these individuals, so important to my development, aren’t as beloved nowadays. I don’t know how anyone can grapple with ideas or the world at a deep level without paying close attention to the leading lights of the past, but I don’t believe anyone should be forced to read Shakespeare, for example. Let those who are curious and willing, go down that path. If that’s just a tiny number of people, so be it. And if others think they have found a better way to wisdom that doesn’t involve learning from the past, I wish them well and send them off to their favorite TikTok influencers.

So how did it go? Read here, on Ted’s award-winning blog.

Somehow the whole Burning Man phenomenon blew by me these last few decades. I hate crowds, anyway. You never know what a crowd will do … but maybe that’s the point. Jazz scholar and music historian Ted Gioia links the history of music with ancient ritual violence over at “The Honest Broker,” his Substack column. And in his excellent piece, “Why Do They Burn a Man at Burning Man?” he makes striking connections with the work of the French theorist René Girard, the member of the Académie Française who was a longtime Stanford professor.

“How do you celebrate Labor Day weekend?” Ted Gioia asks. “At the annual gathering known as Burning Man, enthusiastic participants set fire to a large wooden effigy—which they call The Man. This is truly sticking it to the man, in the parlance of the counterculture. And the stick here is a log, soaked in fuel and bacon grease, then set ablaze with a large magnifying glass.”

The event regularly draws as many as 80,000 participants. This year, possibly more – because like everything else in the COVID era, it’s gone online. You’ll be able to watch the “virtual burn” here, should it cross your mind to do such a thing.

Ted continues that “the arbitrary nature of the sacrificial victim is essential to the success of the ritual. That is one of the key learnings we draw from René Girard (1923-2015), a pathbreaking thinker who life’s work focused on the importance of ritualized sacrifice in human culture. I believe that Girard’s 1972 book Violence and the Sacred is one of the most significant scholarly works published during my lifetime—full of rich implications for anyone who cares about the origins of our commercial and cultural institutions, or even about contemporary phenomenon, such as social media and generational conflict.”

So why isn’t René Girard mentioned more frequently in the connection to, say, rock concerts? Music history is rife with ritual sacrifice, he notes. And then he describes the gruesome history of that music – drums and flutes that were used to drown out the screams of sacrificial victims. The examples he cites are memorably grisly.

“In fact, drums are linked to sacrificial ritual in every region of the world. In some places (Africa, South India, etc.), the sacrifice is made to the drum—which is believed to embody a deity or powerful spirit. In other instances, for example among the Incas, the skin of the sacrificial victim is turned into the drum. But whatever the particulars, the drum is viewed with awe, perhaps even fear, in the context of these ritualistic connections.”

Think that’s a thing of the ancient past? Not so fast, says Ted. He remembers a hideous example: “the notorious Altamont concert on December 6, 1969—remembered today for the stabbing death of Meredith Hunter in front of the stage during a performance by the Rolling Stones. But just a few weeks earlier, the murderous Charles Manson gang relied on the Beatles’s song “Helter Skelter” as an anthem in their own quasi-ritualistic killing spree. How strange that the decade would come to a close with the music of the two defining bands of the era—so focused on peace and love, according to the leaders of the counterculture—having their songs co-opted in senseless murder.”

Read the whole thing here. And below, a reminder of how much Sigmund Freud was on the same trail as Stanford’s eminent French thinker.