There is something immoderate about Sibelius’ Violin Concerto—something vulnerable and unspeakably beautiful, right there along something dark and brooding. The piece illustrates that not only do darkness and beauty coexist, they enhance each other. It’s complex, gripping, devilishly complicated, and sounds like no other concerto in the violin repertoire. Listening to Finnish composer Jean Sibelius’ violin concerto, [...]
Ask someone who’s seen the 1940 animated film, Fantasia, which piece they best remember, and the majority will respond with, The Sorcerer’s Apprentice or “the one with Mickey Mouse.” (Runners up might include Bach’s Toccata and Fugue, Tchaikovsky’s “Waltz of the Flowers,” or Mussorgsky’s Night on Bald Mountain, but that’s an essay for another time.) Now ask [...]
The American musical—more technically known as light musical theater—has been one of the most beloved aspects of American culture. Many of the characters, scenes, and situations from the musical shows created during the genre’s golden age (roughly, the mid-20th century) are fixed in our consciousness, thanks to stage productions, movie versions of the shows, and [...]
Two composers, two works, separated by four centuries, and the way Ralph Vaughan Williams managed to blend the two sensibilities is amazing. And here I am, listening today, and it takes me on a journey, not just to 1910 when the "Fantasia" was composed, but back to the time of Tudor England when Thomas Tallis [...]
While everyday life feels rootless, cultural and artistic accomplishment stands as a steady anchor and source of pride and joy and discovery. Music, the most popular and beloved of the arts, connects us to something higher than us, perhaps a way of life and set of feelings that flourished before we were born. Music can [...]
We certainly value the great Catholic art of past generations, but we believe the greatest art, the greatest liturgy the Catholic Church has ever produced is yet to come, and we are pro-active in commissioning new liturgical music, poetry, and writing. Founded in 2013 by San Francisco Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone, the Benedict XVI Institute works [...]
Richard Wagner’s legacy has been overshadowed, and some would say permanently marred, by the manner in which he became the poster child of Hitler’s grotesque Third Reich. Yet should we condemn his music for this reason? Nice to see your music selections. But Wagner, your favorite composer! Say it ain’t so, Joe! The above-quoted words [...]
Marigold by The Hillbilly Thomists Bluegrass is prophetic. Like Isaiah, it’s the song of the man of sorrows. Like Moses, it brings us to the desert as wayfarers far from home. It’s the music of a wanderer driven forward by his woes. And yet its driving energy reminds us that through the light of Christ, heaven’s [...]
My biggest beef about atonal music is that my brain craves a story. It needs a story. That’s what holds my interest. What I hadn’t anticipated when I first saw "Erwartung" was the way a singer presenting a libretto became the “story” in itself, twofold. I’ve never attended the symphony before with the sense that I might [...]
Gustav Mahler's Fourth Symphony is his most sheerly delightful and accessible creation. It is written on a human scale and brings us on a clear and cogent musical and emotional journey. What’s more, this relatively traditional work still shows many of the ways in which Mahler was one of the most original and inventive composers [...]
Ignorance of the great works of music is as bad, for someone who seeks to be educated in Western culture, as ignorance of Dante and Shakespeare in literature, and Plato and Aristotle in philosophy. So important is it to have some sort of understanding of how the noble art of music works, and so important is [...]
Oh, the many moods and stories Norwegian composer Edvard Grieg conjures in my mind, my heart. There’s the transcendent “Morning Mood” from his Peer Gynt Suite, the haunting yet hopeful “Last Spring.” I’ve sat in my car and wept to the wintry longing in his “Nocturne.” There’s the “March of the Dwarves” that evokes a [...]
Antonín Dvořák wrote the cantata “The American Flag” in 1892-3, during the Czech composer’s tenure as director of the National Conservatory of Music in New York City. The work was commissioned by the founder of the conservatory, Jeanette Thurber, to celebrate Dvořák’s arrival in the United States and to commemorate the four-hundredth anniversary of Christopher Columbus’ discovery [...]
These six composers might not have been saints, but the splendor of their voices bears a living witness to the Lord. Well may we hope and pray that their songs may continue to be sung and that they may be heard more clearly amid the din and discord of our modern world. Christianity has died [...]