Concerning Conservatories I: The Appeal of Entrepreneurship
Since at least the 1920s, America has done a fine job of nurturing its budding classical musicians within a large and well-funded network of conservatories that function either…
The Neglected Muse: Why Music is an Essential Liberal Art
Music transcends the classroom, the concert stage, and professional recordings. It pervades life. Mankind has long used music in all sorts of ways, to celebrate, to lament,…
Teaching Judgement
Twenty five years ago I took up a position as University Professor at Boston University. I was asked to teach a graduate seminar on the philosophy of…
The Music of the Future
Important composers, from Schoenberg and Stravinsky to Ligeti and Stockhausen, have been premiered in this place and before this audience. Along with Darmstadt, Donaueschingen has helped to…
The Post-Modern Ear
In Gurrelieder, Verklärte Nacht, and Pelléas et Mélisande Schoenberg showed total mastery of tonality and of late romantic harmony, and these great works entered the repertoire. But…
The Virtue of Irrelevance
How many writers, educators, and opinion formers, urgently wishing to convey the thoughts and feelings that inspire them, have found themselves confronted with the cry “that’s not…
The Lost Art of Great Popular Song
Is the Great American Songbook still being written? The so-called Great American Songbook is defined as a canon of the memorable “standards” of popular song that helped…
When Bad Composers Do Good Things
No, my title does not refer to good people who compose badly but to bad people who compose well. Composer Carlo Gesualdo (1566 – 1613) committed the…
Conservatism and the Conservatory
The observation is often made that political conservatives do not have anything much to say about the arts, either believing, with the libertarians, that in this matter…
Counterpoint and Why It Matters
I recently acquired a CD of music for piano duo by Jeremy Menuhin, son of Yehudi, the great violinist and cultural icon. The CD, issued by Genuin…
The Clothes Have No Emperor
De mortuis nil nisi bonum: of the dead, nothing unless good. But you can take it too far, re-inventing someone who was a power-hungry manipulator, by allowing…
Earth Anew: Eco Music from Mahler to Rasmussen (Part II)
Part I of “Eco-Music from Mahler to Rasmussen” broaches the topic of the Weltanschauung in music. By “world view” is meant an adequate understanding of the cosmic complexity of life…
Earth Anew: Eco-Music from Mahler to Rasmussen (Part I)
Romanticism revived, or attempted to revive, the sacrality of the countryside, re-establishing the tutelary spirits of river, forest, grotto, and hill. As Ralph Waldo Emerson writes in Nature (1836), whose…
Why Musicians Need Philosophy
Not as much, I grant, as philosophers need music, but nevertheless the need is real. In the past our musical culture had secure foundations in the church,…
Music and the Idea of a World: Part III (Coda)
Another World of Longing I end my musical-cosmological reflection with a piece of music that depicts the world as a certain kind of music, polyphony. It is…