If you'll excuse me a minute, I'd like to briefly complain about my Renaissance class. It's not so horrible, usually (though it has its low moments...), but today there was a student presentation. This was the first non-music theorist to present. All the other presentations have been largely structural. However, this presentation - written out in paper form! - described some guy's presentation of the self-other dichotomy and how that played out in Western history, then the Cathar movement, and then suddenly, as he ran out of time, talked briefly about Susan McClary's view of this piece. Essentially what he said was this:

0. The ideas in this presentation were largely from a guy who thinks that Christianity arose out of ideological conflicts about the self-other dichotomy in Judaism.
1. Nobody had a sense of self in the Dark Ages. When anyone did, they were considered crazy or demonic and were crushed by a Da Vinci Code-ish hegemonic "Church."
2. A sense of self began to develop during the Renaissance, and this piece, like many others, are (Da Vinci Code-ish) coded ways of expressing this idea to avoid the "Church." There's no evidence for this, but it's probably true anyway.
3. Susan McClary thinks the ionian diatessaron (he asked, "is that well-known theory talk?" to which a theorist replied, "Yeah, but, uh, we usually just say perfect fourth") that starts the piece and sets off a point of imitation at the end is a symbol for the human orgasm. There's no evidence for this, but it must be true. (It's worth noting that the text unequivocally has hidden references to sex, but these are common conventions.)
4. Arcadelt (the composer) was using this hidden references to sex to refer to religious ecstasy in a way that wouldn't get him murdered by the Da Vinci Code-ish "Church." There's no evidence for this or this kind of ideology in Arcadelt, but after all, this is the period in which this kind of thing was happening.

To be accurate, he never actually referenced the Da Vinci Code. But I had to include it in my rant anyway.

Meanwhile, I'm having a bunch of theorists over to my place for dinner tonight, so I'd better get my apartment clean so we can talk ionian diatessarons and urlinie (and the Da Vinci Code?) without distractions.