(WARNING: Contains Neo-Conservatism and saucy language) Well, here’s a big buon giorno to our National Public Radio audience, because it’s time for Impariamo Opera and I’m your co-host, Angela Tedioso. And I’m Hans-Dieter Langweilig. But today we stray from the shores of sunny Italy to the magical, musical world of Strauss. […]
There comes a time in every year when I find myself saying to a friend or a prospective student that this is a very musical College [Ed., Convocation, St. John’s College, 2011]. After 20 years of speaking this way, I thought I should ask myself just what I mean by this statement, and so I will [...]
In the last of his Four Quartets, “Little Gidding”—arguably the finest work of art to emerge in the twentieth century—the Anglo-American poet, T.S. Eliot, offered the following: A people without history Is not redeemed from time, for history is a pattern Of timeless moments. So, while the light fails On a winter’s afternoon, in a [...]
A few weeks ago I wrote some mild criticisms of the Beatles and the sky fell. Angry readers called me “ignorant,” “vicious,” and various other things displaying blindness to my finer qualities. I hadn’t realized there was a militant Beatle Taliban, and I was an infidel. I was lucky to escape a fatwa. Some of the [...]
BBT, English Electric. Forthcoming, September 3, 2012 An Interview with Greg Spawton We’re in the middle of perhaps the largest revival of progressive rock—that form of rock music which pursues the artistic and the mythic—since the genre became somewhat suspect as overblown and over-the-top in the second half of the 1970s with the [...]
Admittedly, I am more frequently found beside a small glass of madeira in the club library (preferably a Great War-era Terrantez, or the rum-based Buals which are now getting equally hard to find). But I jumped at the chance to actually meet the members of my favourite pop-band while they tour England. Okay, so [...]
A Hot Humid Day in South Bend On July 24, 2008, Rush finished its “Snakes and Arrows” tour with a concert in Indianapolis. I was researching that day at Notre Dame, and I could easily have made the 1.5-hour trip south to see them. For lots of reason (none of which I remember very well [...]
Music and rhythm find their way into the secret places of the soul. –Plato Music transcends the classroom, the concert stage, and professional recordings. It pervades life. Mankind has long used music in all sorts of ways, to celebrate, to lament, to dance, to pray, to soothe or arouse, to woo, to infuse courage and [...]
Surprised by Beauty: A Listener’s Guide to the Recovery of Modern Music, Robert R. Reilly, Washington, D. C.: Morley Books, 2002. In his generous and beautifully written book, Robert Reilly leads us through the vast, largely unknown territory of twentieth-century music. The title recalls C. S. Lewis’s Surprised by Joy and the poem of the [...]
Do conservatives like jazz? Moreover, should conservatives like jazz (after all, there’s that, ugh, innovation stuff)? Conservative great, the late Ralph de Toledano, is far better known worldwide as an influential and early jazz critic. He used to tell me how he and Thomas Merton haunted New York jazz joints in the late 1930s when [...]
Before we begin, I am fully aware that most of us recoil at one-size-fits-all herd-activities and prefer our own individualistic, quirky tastes in music to anything applied collectively. Still, I wonder if a few popular songs might capture part of our essence. Your own suggestions will be welcome and, no doubt, better than mine. Initially, [...]