Composition
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Featured
Notes on Boulez
The history of music proceeds from Bach, through Haydn, Beethoven, Wagner, Mahler, and then via Schoenberg and Webern to Stockhausen and me. All else is irrelevant. —Pierre Boulez More of this type of cultural warfare can be found in Orientations (Harvard University Press, 1986). It is the core idea of modernism: music history as one single line…
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Featured
The Red Roots of Folk Music
The project of European high modernism in music has not looked kindly on “insular” rummaging forays into local folk music, especially on the Celtic fringe. The very localism of this instinct is an affront to the cosmopolitan sophistication which the international avant-garde was to develop over time.
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Conservatism and the Conservatory
The observation is often made that political conservatives do not have anything much to say about the arts, but that is not the whole truth.
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The Music of Love
Revolution has been the slogan and banner for generations of creative idealists. But they seem more concerned with a love of transgression than of life.
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Featured
Counterpoint and Why It Matters
Counterpoint in music is like rhyme in poetry: it holds disparate things together in a unity, and at the same time it shows that unity is not simple but composed.
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Featured
Deep Listening
All the concrete, busy activity leading up to the performance is not the music, but only its production apparatus.
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Featured
Music in the Modern Age
The hero of Robert Reilly’s generous and beautifully written book is beauty.
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Featured
The Hope of Beauty
The sort of art that lives eternally is that which captures astonishing, spine-chilling, breathtaking, transforming beauty.
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Featured
The Enduring Presence of the Past
Engagement with the riches of a culture is a learning process which develops our capacity to make value judgments.
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The search for spirituality seems ubiquitous these days, but is it transcendent of anything?
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Do we really want to hear Beethoven’s Fifth as it was heard at its premiere?