The Relevance of Classical Music, Part I
As Sir Roger has explained elsewhere on this site, the relevance of classical music lies in its irrelevance in relation to practical, worldly concerns. If classical music…
Deep Listening
Classical music is surrounded by a thick wall of brain activity: an extensive world of analysis and research; a history still being investigated in the remotest corners;…
The Symphony: A Moral Vision Revealed in Music
A few days after the première of my Fourth Symphony at the BBC Proms in the Royal Albert Hall I was given an advanced copy of Lewis…
Music and the Quest to Rediscover the Sacred
There are certain words associated in the public mind with modernism in the arts and modernism in music in particular. Modern music can sound wild and even…
The Music of Love
I am not actually a child of the Sixties, although I almost was. Born in July 1959, I had a fairly contented, provincial Scottish boyhood when all…
Eduard Tubin: Symphonist
Despite the advocacy of conductor and countryman Neeme Järvi and the determination of record-producer Robert von Bahr (founder of the BIS label) in the 1980s and early…
The Music of E. J. Moeran
The opening bars of Ernest John Moeran’s Symphony in G-Minor (completed in 1937) etched themselves in my memory when I first heard them in the early 1970s…
Vincent d’Indy, le Wagnérisme, and Tradition
Vincent d’Indy (1851 – 1931), a close contemporary of Sir Edward Elgar (1857 – 1934), studied under César Franck (1822 – 1890) at the Paris Conservatory. On…
The Tone Poems of Sibelius
In an increasingly ugly world the sources of beauty constantly increase in value but at the same time they become increasingly difficult for ordinary people to discover…
The Visionary Music of Sir Arnold Trevor Bax
The name of Sir Arnold Trevor Bax (1883 – 1953) hardly qualifies as a household reference even among people with serious musical interests. Yet Bax claimed a…
Murder Most Foul and America’s Soul (Part III)
In previous essays we have looked at Bob Dylan’s place within the great musical and literary canons of Judeo-Christian civilization. In this third piece, we will now…
Murder Most Foul and America’s Soul (Part II)
In our previous essay, we looked at Bob Dylan with an emphasis on his qualities as a timeless moral leader and musician. Now, we shall consider his…
If Music Be Food For Citizenship
Aristotle and America As Aristotle observed in Book 8 of his Politics, the education of children is the preeminent concern of the state, for the cultivation of…
Musical Harmony: A Missing Dimension of Democratic Citizenship?
Polyphonic Minds: Music of the Hemispheres. Peter Pesic. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2017. If you’ve watched a Super Bowl halftime show lately, you may have noticed…
Show Me Your Laces: The Identical Aesthetic and Ideological Clash Exemplified by Anarchist and Neo-Fascist Punk
On the twelfth of September, 1992, the Waterloo station of the English National Rail system erupted into a riot, with two groups of men viciously attacking each…