Gustav Holst wrote his "Ode to Death" in 1918-1919 in the wake of World War I. Though he received a medical exemption from military service, Holst had composer-friends who served (Ralph Vaughan Williams) and died (George Butterworth) in the horrific combat on the Western Front. The text of "Ode to Death" sets a section of [...]
It’s Halloween, and you’re looking for that perfect, spooky Halloween music that’s a little more sophisticated than “The Monster Mash” and “Thriller” and “Werewolves of London.” Look no further, friends. I’ve done my own hopping around to see what others consider to be their Top 10 classical spooky favorites. My list is a little different; [...]
French Impressionism may well be the most popular artistic style in the world. Even people who know little of art delight in the way painters like Monet and Renoir depicted everyday life and the play of light in shimmering colors. Impressionist music, on the other hand, occupies murkier territory. If we are to believe the [...]
Maurice Ravel I suppose it’s not all that curious. If you are a concert pianist and your right arm is a casualty in World War I, afterwards you have two options. One: give up your music career and calling, do something inferior and cry into your soup for the rest of your life. Two: [...]
I have always felt a kinship with architecture because in architecture you have form, which grows in your brain, and then the function—250-square-foot kitchen, three bedrooms of 80-square-footage or whatever—and it is very clinical. Relationships between these elements are pretty straightforward, and you can write them all down, but how do you make a great [...]
Johann Sebastian Bach composed his short, comic "Coffee Cantata" in 1735. Likely first premiered in a Leipzig coffee house, it depicts a scene in which a father berates his daughter for drinking the intoxicating beverage. Here is the text in English translation, with a video with English subtitles below: Recitative Narrator Be quiet, stop chattering, [...]
Michael Kurek These are exciting days, at least for those who are aware of the vibrant Christian revival in the arts which seems to be growing with each passing year. The quantity and quality of new Christian literature is a case in point, and there are parallel revivals in the visual arts and [...]
Asbury Park postcard, sometime between 1930-1945. When I was a teenager, in the late 1990s, Asbury Park, New Jersey had fallen on hard times. The kinetic energy of the small shore city—Ferris wheels and carousels, breezy counters with young people selling waffle cones and hamburgers to beachgoers in the salty air—was largely gone. [...]
If Mozart and Wagner and Puccini and Respighi are “dead art,” I would suggest we’ve forgotten how to properly live. In an age of brainless media that celebrates victims, some of us actually seem to believe that we are the victims of a Eurocentric musical repertoire iconographic of phallocentric imperialism and repression. As if there’s [...]
In a somewhat bizarre recent interview with the National Catholic Register, the aging rock star, Sting, who eons ago had been lead singer of the rock band The Police, waxed in a bemused and confused way about his relationship with the Catholic faith, in which he was raised but which he has abandoned. He gave [...]
Having played the cello for more than thirty years, I am often asked what I would recommend for listeners, especially for those who aren’t necessarily concertgoers. As a cellist, it’s hard to categorize what to listen to. Some pieces are fun to play and to listen to, while others require such technical practice that they [...]
During World War Two, the famed English conductor Eugene Goossens, music director of the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra, commissioned various American composers to submit patriotic pieces to celebrate the Allied war effort against Germany, Italy, and Japan. Eighteen compositions (including one by Goossens himself), brief fanfares all, were submitted and were played over the course of [...]
With its driving rhythms, distinct flavors, accessibility, and charm, Aram Khachaturian's piano concerto was an instant success in 1936. Have no doubt, it’s a sizzler. It’s decisive, flamboyant, and arrives and departs in a pyrotechnic dazzle... Aram Khachaturian Nothing in the classical music repertoire says “summertime” more to me than Aram Khachaturian’s Piano Concerto. I [...]
The capacity to “enter” the imaginary landscape of the musical narrative—or to have the musical narrative take possession of our inner space, to say it differently—is what musical perception really means. We can call this “deep listening:” the alert attention which puts, for the duration of the concert, our ego and our intellect on a [...]