Renewing and Rejecting: Comparing Architecture and Music
It has been widely accepted for a hundred years, and in any case since Oswald Spengler’s Decline of the West, that ‘the West’ denotes a comprehensive form of…
It has been widely accepted for a hundred years, and in any case since Oswald Spengler’s Decline of the West, that ‘the West’ denotes a comprehensive form of…
So wrote Milton, describing the love between Adam and Eve, and its expression in their faces. The smile, for Milton, was proof that we are made in…
Let me say a few things about art and truth first of all. The Enlightenment — by which I mean that mass of thinking and idea-mongering that…
Conservatism: An Introduction to the Great Tradition. Roger Scruton. St. Martin’s Press, 2018. "If Lockean liberalism is the conservatism of the English-speaking peoples, what was there…
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…
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…
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…
Two Greek words define my topic: nostos and oikos. The first—from which we have ‘nostalgia’—denotes return to the home, and it is the great theme of Homer’s…
Environmentalism has all the hallmarks of a left-wing cause: a class of victims (future generations), an enlightened vanguard who fights for them (the eco-warriors), powerful Philistines who…
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…
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…
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…
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,…
Free speech in a university is a very different thing from free speech in Congress or Parliament, freedom of the press, or free speech in the street. Each…
Western civilization has come in for a lot of attack because it’s Western. The word Western has been taken to be a standard term of abuse by…