We ought to come up with a better way to bring in the new year than singing John Lennon’s “Imagine,” which asks us to imagine what our country would be like if we could jettison the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bible. Once again this New Year’s Eve, if you were tuned in [...]
The premier of 22-year-old Hector Berlioz's "Messe Solennelle" in 1825 was one of the most remarkable musical debuts ever by a composer, and the score's rediscovery 167 years later in a church attic is one of the most astounding events in musicological history. The fact that we today have this setting of the Mass by [...]
The medium ought to be suited, as much as possible, to the message. That’s what the physicality of art is all about. But if music primarily concerns the audible, it also includes the visible: made by visible human beings using visible instruments and played to visible audiences in often visibly beautiful places. Prelude by Way [...]
The joy of Bethlehem points through purgatorial sorrow to the glory of paradise. This is why the Comedy of Christmas brings laughter, even in this vale of tears and its veil of fears. This past semester at Aquinas College in Nashville, I have had the joy of teaching a whole course on the works of [...]
In the center of Giorgione’s painting, “The Adoration of the Shepherds,” two shepherds genuflect before the Child, connecting the two worlds of the scene, the natural and the supernatural. The shepherds are the first men to recognize the divinity of Christ. While we are unlikely to identify with the Magi, those royal wise men, we [...]
Christ was not only born on the level of the world, but even lower than the world. The first act of the divine drama was enacted, not only on no stage set up above the sightseer, but on a dark and curtained stage sunken out of sight. This sketch of the human story began in [...]
The Nativity is an outrage. God who is outside of time should not step into time. God the omnipotent should not become a helpless child. God the all-knowing should not empty himself and lock himself into the limitations of mortality. However, it is the incredible outrage of it all that gives one pause. After all, [...]
The baby in the cave is a paradox that reveals you and demands your potential for dignity, sacrificial love, demands in love that you become what you were made to be—and does this with the sweet, absolutely helpless cry of a newborn child. His very helplessness, like the poor of the world, the helpless, the [...]
If you want your children to know how one can discern his God-given purpose and calling in a self-centered world, be a patriotic American in a corrupt world, and be a man or a woman in a genderless world, then you need look no further than these three Frank Capra masterpieces. Frank Capra [...]
Every time I hear the music of Beethoven, the spirit of Christmas touches my heart. Because Beethoven is bound up with love, Beethoven is bound up with Christ. During Advent, Christians everywhere are reminded of the great testament of Love becoming incarnate. Beethoven keeps pointing us to that reality. Ludwig van Beethoven was born in [...]
If culture is simply a matter of private enthusiasms and hobbies, of small details and specialties, then what of a common culture? What about the collective project and shared sense of purpose that built Western civilization? “The expert takes a little subject for his province, and remains a provincial for the rest of his life.”—Jacques [...]
Hector Berlioz relished the spectacular sounds that could be achieved with massive orchestral forces, but he was much more than a musical showman. His gift for melody, his mastery of orchestration, his genius for musical drama, his bold originality, and the uniqueness of his style place him in the front ranks of the great composers. [...]
César Franck is one of those 19th-century composers who deserves to be much better known. I’ve been listening to his extraordinary Symphony in D minor for more than 20 years and knew I loved it, but I couldn’t tell you why until my recent research on him and his music. Many of us have been in [...]
Classical music should not be an arcane special interest but an art form of universal and humane concern. Classical music provides a central cultural focus as do the classics of literature and art, and like those fields, ought to have a touchstone, an enduring norm and standard, and a repertoire of works which everyone should [...]