Music and the Idea of a World: Part II
From Divine Circles to the Wheel of Ixion: Music in a World of Woe The first and main volume of The World as Will and Representation is…
From Divine Circles to the Wheel of Ixion: Music in a World of Woe The first and main volume of The World as Will and Representation is…
“Music, too, is nature.” —Victor Zuckerkandl, Sound and Symbol This lecture explores the differences between two perspectives on music: one ancient, one modern. The texts I…
Surprised by Beauty: A Listener’s Guide to the Recovery of Modern Music. Robert R. Reilly. San Francisco, CA: Ignatius Press Robert R. Reilly was the music…
Surprised by Beauty: A Listener’s Guide to the Recovery of Modern Music. Robert R. Reilly, Washington, DC: Morley Books, 2002. In his generous and beautifully written…
They who were two and divided now became one and united.” —Gottfried von Strassburg, Tristan and Isolde I come before you this evening not as a…
A word about the audience – the concertgoers, the operagoers. From time immemorial, people have fretted over the “graying” of the audience, and the relative paucity of…
America may be a young country, but it fairly dominated music in the twentieth century. When I say music, I mean classical music, but the statement applies…
Why does today’s Western art music strive so conspicuously for cultural relevance? Why are many of our university music faculties more concerned with cultural theory than with…
The poet Wallace Stevens once wrote that “The major poetic idea in the world is and always has been the idea of God.” One might modify that…
Many years ago, a reader introduced himself to me outside the Metropolitan Opera House. I already knew of him, for he was a friend of a friend…
Sometimes one hears the critique that classical music is no longer compatible with modernity. What “modernity” is supposed to mean always remains in darkness, as if the…
If we put the last century’s notions of “old” and “new” in a broader historic perspective, it becomes clear how short-sighted these notions were and how wrong…
In the last century, very often the concept of “progress” was projected upon the arts as a measurement of quality: “good art” was “progressive art.” If an…
Last but not least, the burning question of repertoire. For classical music as a genre to survive in modern times, renewal of the repertoire is a fundamental…
If classical music is the art of “therapeutic” interiority, then thinking about presentation, marketing, funding, etc. needs to be developed from this insight. “Selling” music in wrapping…