Considering the time we spend in our cars, there must be nothing wrong with a decent sound system, especially if this gift of modern technology can be used to counter the stress of the modern commute—the inevitable impatience, the tiresome finger tapping, and sometimes the snarling of the inner beast, cornered as he is by [...]
Novelist Walker Percy was a fan of Bruce Springsteen, calling him “my favorite American philosopher.” Percy even wrote a letter to Mr. Springsteen, seeking information about his interest in Flannery O’Connor and his spiritual journey as a baptized Roman Catholic. Percy was also impressed by Mr. Springsteen’s song-writing, seeing the New Jersey native as a sort of American [...]
The class of surplus things we might call meta-luxury because, though they represent luxuries in the sense that they exceed our basic needs, what we value in them lies beyond anything we could define as material luxury. Classical music is only one example of this special category. In the first part of this series, I [...]
It shouldn’t surprise up that orchestras are distancing themselves from the idea of luxury. We generally, and perhaps rightly, sense that there is something wrong with it. The most obvious reason is the uncomfortable fact that luxury represents a category that might necessarily exclude us—or indeed anybody. That, of course, does not describe classical music, and [...]
Who would think that a great Renaissance invention was born five hundred years after the Renaissance? Yet it happened recently. Using old technology neglected for nearly half a millennium, a new, authentic and affordable Renaissance musical instrument is improving how professional and amateur musicians play and spread delight. But first some background. Renaissance music advanced [...]
“Carmina Burana” continues to fill seats in concert halls, to echo in the minds of those who revel in its catchy tunes and intoxicating rhythms, and perhaps to entertain even prudish among us, who discreetly savor in secret this pagan cantata’s celebration of the taboo joys of the flesh. When determining their programming for the [...]
We are raising a lost generation. And that is the problem to which classical music, like classical education, is part of the solution. Questioning the relevance of our orchestras is like discarding the legend to our map of Western civilization and still expecting to find our way again. As I sat on the front steps of [...]
In the music of Shostakovich, the two sides of the twentieth century are revealed—the absurd and the tragic. It is impossible to tell in his works whether the absurd is the tragic or the tragic is the absurd, just as the events of The Century made it impossible to distinguish between the two. Whatever hope [...]
Those readers of The Imaginative Conservative who are as old as I am will remember the punk explosion or punk revolution of the 1970s. At the vanguard of this anarchic assault on sense and sensibility was the Sex Pistols, an English punk band that boasted the aptly named Johnny Rotten as its vocalist and the [...]
Two profound meditations on the end of time sprang from the desolate decade of the 1940s giving an austere hope in the midst of the dark. T.S.Eliot’s Four Quartets, begun in 1937, were finally published in 1943. Olivier Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time was composed in 1940 in the most extraordinary circumstances while [...]
Critics of popular music have pointed to its often violent, misogynistic, or sexually explicit lyrics in explaining why we should worry about what plays on our iPods. Defenders of pop music have countered this charge by pointing out that many listeners pay little or no attention to the lyrics, and when they do, they do [...]
The idea was intriguing: Present a concert of the music of Antonio Vivaldi and Niccolo Paganini in the guise of a tale of two rival violinists, who vie for technical supremacy and for the attention of a comely young woman. Throw in the germ of an idea from Edgar Allan Poe’s The Masque of the [...]
Who would true valour see, Let him come hither; One here will constant be, Come wind, come weather; There’s no discouragement Shall make him once relent His first avowed intent To be a pilgrim. — Anglican hymn by John Bunyan, 1684 Fifty years ago, on the 28th of January, 1965, a hymn by the [...]
My family and I spent much of the Christmas season this year in Middle Earth—or at any rate Peter Jackson’s version thereof. For a number of years now we have watched The Lord of the Rings trilogy over three days, starting on Christmas Eve. And, of course, the final installment of Mr. Jackson’s Hobbit trilogy [...]