Music As If Beauty Mattered: Composer Michael Kurek in Conversation

By |2024-03-13T19:23:52-05:00March 13th, 2024|Categories: Beauty, Joseph Pearce, Music, Senior Contributors|

Fifty years ago, when E. F. Schumacher published his international bestseller, Small is Beautiful, he gave it the subtitle “economics as if people mattered”. In 2006, when I published my own book, Small is Still Beautiful, I gave it the subtitle “economics as if families mattered”. In 1977, when Christopher Derrick published his book, Escape [...]

10 Great Violin Concertos You Must Hear

By |2024-03-12T18:26:48-05:00March 12th, 2024|Categories: Antonin Dvorak, Audio/Video, Camille Saint-Saëns, Felix Mendelssohn, Jean Sibelius, Johannes Brahms, Music, Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, Robert Schumann, Timeless Essays|

The fun thing about really getting to know the violin concerto repertoire is that there are always more treasures to discover. The violin concerto repertoire is so rich and satisfying, I’m embarrassed to admit that, prior to becoming an adult beginner on the violin in 2005, I was only familiar with a few of them. This, [...]

Glory to Dido! The Operas of Hector Berlioz

By |2024-03-08T06:30:43-06:00March 7th, 2024|Categories: Audio/Video, Hector Berlioz, Hector Berlioz Sesquicentennial Series, Music, Stephen M. Klugewicz, Timeless Essays|

"They are finally going to play my music." —Hector Berlioz, on his deathbed Though Hector Berlioz's operas are still little known today—even to the opera-going public, who are much more likely to find the dramas of Verdi, Puccini, Bellini, and Mozart on the program—the increasing recognition of their many glories is slowly making them less [...]

If Music Be the Food of Love: A Conversation With Composer Michael Kurek

By |2024-03-13T18:31:40-05:00March 6th, 2024|Categories: Joseph Pearce, Music, Senior Contributors|

Apart from Arvo Pärt, the grand old man of contemporary classical music, whose work I have admired greatly ever since I first heard Cantus in Memoriam Benjamin Britten many years ago, Michael Kurek is the living composer whose works I especially enjoy. An American residing in Nashville, Dr. Kurek has almost single-handedly flown the flag [...]

Music of the Republic

By |2024-03-02T19:15:28-06:00March 2nd, 2024|Categories: Christopher B. Nelson, Classics, Great Books, Liberal Learning, Music, Plato, St. John's College, Timeless Essays, Virtue|

Music pervades our lives and always has. It has taken you outside of yourselves and taken you deep within. It has been associated with things divine. 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 [Convocation, St. John’s [...]

Tomaso Albinoni: The Quiet Master of Italian Baroque Music

By |2024-02-22T20:12:37-06:00February 22nd, 2024|Categories: Audio/Video, Michael De Sapio, Music, Senior Contributors|

Elegance, stability, and order—as well as a sense of pure, elemental joy—are the qualities I hear in Tomaso Albinoni’s music. It is music of Venice through and through, where in the meltingly beautiful slow movements you can all but see the morning light playing on the water of the lagoon, or feel the quiet awe [...]

Majesty in Motion: Gustav Holst’s “The Planets”

By |2024-02-16T15:06:40-06:00February 16th, 2024|Categories: Gustav Holst, Music, Timeless Essays|Tags: |

Make no bones about: Gustav Holst’s “The Planets” is conservative because of its deep appreciation for the sublime and the beautiful. Better yet, its conservatism can be found in its holistic and ordered approach to human emotions, as well as its unbridled love for mystery and transcendent revelation. Considering that it was influenced by the [...]

10 Hopelessly Romantic Classical Tunes for Valentine’s Day

By |2024-02-14T05:01:55-06:00February 13th, 2024|Categories: Audio/Video, Love, Music|

So here I am, offering you this Valentine’s Day gift, and if you scoff at the notion of celebrating the day, for “Hallmark invented it and that’s that,” consider giving these songs a listen anyway. They are delicious, uplifting, sensuous. And they won’t give you a hangover. Valentine’s Day is a funny sort of holiday. Some [...]

The Drama of Love in Richard Wagner’s “Ring of the Nibelungen”

By |2024-02-12T19:27:56-06:00February 12th, 2024|Categories: Love, Marriage, Music, Paul Krause, Richard Wagner, Timeless Essays|

Richard Wagner’s grand operatic drama The Ring of the Nibelung is rightly celebrated as one of the finest accomplishments of modern art. The story that Wagner tells, with the unfolding music meant to convey a primordial sense of enchantment forever lost to us, is about the tension between love and lust; the sacred and profane; [...]

Doctor Winchester, Mozart, & the Devil

By |2024-02-07T20:42:08-06:00February 7th, 2024|Categories: Audio/Video, Culture, Music, Stephen M. Klugewicz, Television, Timeless Essays|

M*A*S*H's Dr. Winchester and the Chinese prisoners in the American camp find a common language in a single piece of music, written a century-and-a-half before: Mozart's Clarinet Quintet. The final episode of the hit TV series, M*A*S*H aired on February 28, 1983, garnering an astounding 125 million viewers, the most in television history at the [...]

Dieterich Buxtehude, Music, & the Experience of Life

By |2024-02-06T17:27:48-06:00February 5th, 2024|Categories: Audio/Video, Michael De Sapio, Music, Senior Contributors|

Dieterich Buxtehude might seem at first glance an interesting minor figure, the “man who influenced Bach.” But consider: If he was a decisive inspiration to Bach, that means that Buxtehude can lay claim to being the immediate progenitor of the mainstream classical music tradition we all enjoy. Prelude Our experience of classical music has become [...]

The Youngest Master: Felix Mendelssohn

By |2024-02-02T18:03:34-06:00February 2nd, 2024|Categories: Culture, Felix Mendelssohn, Music, Timeless Essays|Tags: , |

Felix Mendelssohn, for all his amazing versatility, is now remembered by a tiny handful of his works, themselves not always representative. But there is now no excuse for neglecting so many of the masterworks of a composer who was central to the art of his epoch. Mendelssohn: The Caged Spirit: A New Approach to the [...]

Mere Mortals Eavesdropping: The Greatness of Mozart

By |2024-01-27T13:47:50-06:00January 26th, 2024|Categories: Featured, Music, Timeless Essays, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart|

Mozart was not like us. The question as to why Mozart died so young is always superseded by: How could he have existed at all? How could you ask more of a miracle? In 1991, the bicentennial of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s death was the occasion for massive festivals and grand recording projects, as well as [...]

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