12 Angry Men is a film connected to the Western moral imagination, speaking to us on a primal, even a classical level, with themes that are as old as the Bible and Greek tragedy. The characters of the twelve jurors are archetypes representing the virtues and vices of all of us, and their search for the [...]
J.S. Bach’s “Mass in B Minor” is the summation of his life’s work and one of the supreme masterpieces of Western classical music. Yet mystery surrounds the work. What was its purpose, how did it come to be written, and how was it intended to be performed? No work of Johann Sebastian Bach is more [...]
That a priest allowed a Catholic burial and high requiem Mass for Beethoven would seem to indicate that he thought Beethoven died a believer. But did he indeed? Ludwig van Beethoven, Johann Sebastian Bach, and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart form the great trinity of Western classical composers. Of the three, it is Beethoven whose religious beliefs [...]
Evelyn Waugh’s Helena is a saint for modern times—not an otherworldly ascetic or a heroic martyr, but a woman who “discovered what it was God had chosen for her to do and did it”… This year marks the fiftieth anniversary of the death of Evelyn Waugh (1903-1966), Catholic convert and novelist. I had never read [...]
Our first national artistic movement, the Hudson River School provided a balm to a public searching for the concrete, the real, and the beautiful in an age of increasing abstraction. It takes its place in the long and glorious Western tradition as a body of art which continues to provide refreshment, enchantment and wonder... “Truly [...]
The American neoclassical composers wrote music of sanity and logic and civility, music that is modern yet built on tradition. Their music is timeless and universal. Listening to it, one is transported to a bygone era in American culture, and indeed in the culture of the West… The tyranny of fashion weighs heavily on the [...]
The West has been living in the shadow of its own demise for two centuries or more—and not merely since, say, the late 1960s. The only response to such a situation is to rediscover, hoard, and cherish the cultural treasures of our past. “The Romans of the Decadence” by Thomas Couture That Western [...]