My son Smith (15) has been composing music for the last few years and has recently made some of it public here: http://soundcloud.com/bigrocksbreakwindows . Encourage the young man by taking a listen. . . . . Continue Reading »
It is consoling to think that the emotions that music arouses in us have something to do with the makeup of the universe. The eternal relation of math and music has been a perennial question since Plato, from Boethius and Cassiodorus in late antiquity, through Dante’s celestial harmony . . . . Continue Reading »
For those of you who waded through all that muck, and have now got the likes of Morlocks in your head, here’s a musical palatte cleanser for you: Anne Sofie von Otter singing a brief Berlioz song . For a more thorough cleansing, here’s the first movement of my favorite Sibelius piece, . . . . Continue Reading »
In Messiaen’s sequence of nine organ pieces on La Nativite du Seigneur , the piece entitled “Jesus accepte le Souffrance” is the seventh, between “Les Anges” and “Les Mages.” It seems to refer to the slaughter of innocents in Bethlehem, but Messiaen has . . . . Continue Reading »
I offer some reflections on contemporary worship music at http://www.firstthings.com/ this morning. As noted there, I owe most of my ideas to Ken Myers. . . . . Continue Reading »
John Paul II wrote, “Today, as yesterday, musicians, composers, liturgical chapel cantors, church organists and instrumentalists must feel the necessity of serious and rigorous professional training. They should be especially conscious of the fact that each of their creations or . . . . Continue Reading »
Page again: “For those who oped to rise in the flesh for the Millennium and then the general judgement, ritual singing was a way to celebrate the continuity of bodily existence on both sides of the grade. The voice was one of the higher faculties of the body that Tertullian and others . . . . Continue Reading »
Page again: “The musical stave was a Latin-Christian invention and was confined, for many centuries, to the Occidental lands where Latin was the exclusive language of liturgical singing. It provided the means for an aggressively expansionist civilization to train singers relatively quickly so . . . . Continue Reading »
Christopher Page observes ( The Christian West and Its Singers: The First Thousand Years ) that the European-wide diffusion of plainsong created created for monks and clergy “a means to record contingent events so that they would be perceived, wherever the account was read, not just in terms . . . . Continue Reading »
A TLS reviewer says this about musical meaning: “The meaning of music is inexpressible because excessive, and it is excessive because music, like the world at large, eloquently affirms that it is, beyond any question of meaning.” And add, “By becoming descriptive, music seems to . . . . Continue Reading »
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