Tchaikovsky's First Symphony is a delight: fresh, assured and just plain fun to listen to. The violins introduce the first movement with a shimmering, sweet tremolo, giving it a dreamy, gossamer texture, that perfectly illustrates the movement’s subtitle, “Daydreams of a Winter Journey." While a longtime fan of Tchaikovsky, I must confess that, up to a [...]
Art achieves a kind of double reflection. It returns thanks to God, using his creation to fashion something new; at the same time, it reflects the glory and order of creation back to man, providing moments of epiphany. Art when properly made restores a proper awe before creation; although manmade, it directs our gaze back [...]
Beauty exists as an experience in its own right, to be enjoyed for its own sake, and in no way inferior to other values. Let’s therefore celebrate it, extol it, and accord it its due dignity. Those who hold classical philosophical views—such as we imaginative conservatives—consider it an indisputable proposition that beauty is the goal [...]
The name Edgar Allan Poe conjures images of the macabre, murder, insanity, and self-destruction, but is this the real Edgar Poe? BUT for the cruel aspersions upon the character and life of America’s poetic genius, EDGAR ALLAN POE, this volume would have remained unwritten. EDGAR ALLAN POE has been more misunderstood than any other poet [...]
David M. Steiner argues that American education needs a clear and organized focus on ethics, beauty, and academic rigor to achieve its core purpose of preparing students to seek what Aristotle called eudaimonia, or human flourishing. A Nation at Thought: Restoring Wisdom in America’s Schools by David M. Steiner (224 pages, Rowman & Littlefield, 2023) [...]
Unless we conservatives make an effort to engage in a sustained and regular way with all legitimate developments of the artistic tradition, we will contribute not to the preservation of the tradition but to its ossification into a relic of the past, admired by an increasingly marginalized subculture. Ask a conservative why conservatives tend to [...]
I gaze out the window for a few moments, and in that delicious solitude it dawns on me why I dislike museums. The collections are cold and clinical. They have restored and displayed the treasures as a mortician embalms and prepares the corpse for a viewing. The holy pictures have been plucked from their ecclesiastical [...]
My father was first and foremost a true philosopher, a lover of wisdom, a student, a seeker of truth, and in addition to this and as a necessary result, he became a great teacher, and more than that, a converter. Everyone who ever met him, even briefly, was affected by his intense love of truth, [...]
The Florentine Pieta was not commissioned. Instead, Michelangelo intended it for his own tomb. He worked on the sculpture in his spare time, late into the night with a candle fixed to his hat for light. The Museo dell’Opera del Duomo is an unmissable new sight in a visit to Florence. Designed by American art [...]
Beauty is found in art when there is connectedness to something beyond novelty and originality. This connectedness must exist between the artist and the source of what inspires the particular medium of art. Art, like morality, consists of drawing the line somewhere.[1] Even in literature and art, no man who bothers about originality will ever [...]
Classical music must find its place in love—love of home, of community, of neighbor, and of the culture that binds all these things together. In all but the most exceptional cases, our orchestras won’t survive if they don’t get this part right. Editor’s Note: This essay was presented as the opening address at the Future [...]
Architecture, even in the case of airports, should uplift and inspire the soul to consider higher and wider panoramas. By their logic and beauty, buildings should speak to us of God, the source of all beauty. I lament that so many new buildings seem designed to limit horizons to the purely material, functional, and superficial. [...]
“No sacred art can come from an isolated subjectivity,” Benedict states. Ultimately the beautiful is inseparable from the good and the true. If we will not have virtue and verity, caritas and claritas, we will not have beauty either. In his masterful book, The Spirit of the Liturgy, Pope Benedict XVI defended the beauty and [...]
It would be wrong to compare the Mass too closely to a stage production, but in a traditional celebration of Mass there is what I call a “compendium of culture”: a combination of art, architecture, literature, logic, rhetoric, drama, poetry, metalwork, textile art, and woodwork. Why does this matter? It matters because matter matters. The [...]