Classical music comes to us from a very long and very human tradition. The concert hall thus should be the embodiment of classical music’s character: It should above all feel human, feel familiar, feel knowable, and feel intimate as often as it feels exalted. Hot on the heels of what was surely disappointing news for Maris [...]
Just as the Catholic Faith has been reduced to little more than an intellectual philosophy of life for the clergy—all head and no heart—the same happened to the laity, who depend on them for their spirituality. In the immediate aftermath of the Council of Trent, Catholic spirituality, in both theory and practice, reached a height never [...]
We have increasingly placed our faith in the power of government to provide solutions for human misery. What was once a strong level of responsibility and autonomy at the city, county, and state level has shifted toward a massive concentration at the federal level. When Alexis de Tocqueville visited America in the 1830s, he marveled [...]
Franz Schubert composed his “Death and the Maiden” quartet—one of the most compelling, soulful, profound, irresistible pieces of classical music—while battling syphilis and depression. It’s not just the maiden that Death is after in the music. It’s Schubert. I don’t consider myself to be someone easily seduced, much less by Death, but Franz Schubert’s “Death [...]
Indeed no words can better be used to describe Mozart’s music than “sublime” and “natural.” Beethoven is heroic, tragic—although at the end, he too can be sublime, with the autumnal serenity of a warrior turned contemplative; Bach erects his marvelously ornate cathedrals of sound—and occasionally he too passes into a timeless realm which could be [...]
It is a fact of history that the prisoner’s progress and the pilgrim’s progress can be synonymous. We think perhaps of the witness of famous prisoners, such as Boethius or Solzhenitsyn. The former wrote The Consolation of Philosophy while imprisoned and awaiting execution, bequeathing one of the classics of Christendom to future generations. His final [...]
Classical music is born of the accumulating wisdom of the ages, with a canon that represents, like all canons, the mind of a civilization. And yet we have not learned to articulate our own defense. Or rather, like our compatriots, we have forgotten how to articulate it. I founded the Foundation for the Future of [...]
Here’s what makes Samuel Barber stand out in this era of increasing atonalism in classical music: He didn’t adhere to any one school or philosophy of composition. He maintained a Romantic, lyrical sound, ignored the twelve-tone racket, yet incorporated a dissonant angularity into his works that produced a decidedly 20th century result. The list must begin [...]
An increasingly heated debate is taking place in America to redefine the role of faith in the public square. Faith has been a part of the American experience since the earliest days of the founding. As the nation now considers the relationship of the sacred and the secular, it may be helpful to reconsider our roots. [...]
We Americans like to think of ourselves as anti-monarchical; most of us on the Right are self-styled small-r republicans, while Leftists think of themselves as small-d democrats. In addition, we all, Right and Left, fancy that what unites Americans is devotion to a set of ideas to which we all adhere, and which are best [...]
Rifles and Rosary Beads You hold on to what you need Vicodin, morphine dreams Rifles and Rosary Beads Yellow smoke orange haze Blowin' into my eyes Whistling sunset bombs I couldn't trust the sky Rifles and Rosary Beads You hold on to what you need Vicodin, morphine dreams Rifles, Rosary Beads White knuckles wrapped around [...]
By and large the educated elites in the Western world today are without religious belief and often animated by a “culture of repudiation,” keen to banish old ideas of the sacred from public life and to remake the institutions and structures of civil society so as to reflect their own liberated lifestyle. In America and [...]
The best moral formation often comes from music. It was my first year singing in our Dominican Schola and I was learning the intricate beauty of polyphony. A more seasoned brother leaned over and let me know that I’d really “internalized the tempo.” “Great!” I thought to myself, “I’m getting the hang of this.” My face must [...]
Jimmy Carter was a nice, good man who epitomized American Christianity’s reduction to Moralistic, Therapeutic Deism. As such, the singing of John Lennon's atheistic "Imagine"—Carter's favorite song—at the former president's funeral was entirely appropriate. Last week at former president Jimmy Carter’s funeral, country singers Garth Brooks and Trisha Yearwood sang ex-Beatle John Lennon’s song Imagine, [...]