In his encyclopedic and highly intelligent The Christian West and Its Singers: The First Thousand Years , Christopher Page details how the “soundscape” of Christendom expanded through the establishment of hospitals, many of which were supplied with service books that included notation . . . . Continue Reading »
Speaking of the Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds is somewhat cliché when it comes to rock criticism. Its awesome harmonic sonorities in terms of the then latest of pop/rock music of the day, as well as the studio technique on the multi-track recorder, is indeed unparalleled. Pet Sounds is what Pink Floyd . . . . Continue Reading »
Jeremy Begbie has pointed out that, though a physical phenomena, music has different spatial qualities than solid objects. Music is present in a place, but it’s not localized in a way a visually perceptible object is. I can give my attention to listening to the sound, but I can’t say . . . . Continue Reading »
Rock’s other significance in relation to modernity, which David Bowie understood better than anyone, is that it sanctions a new type of heroism, that in contrast to, say, an astronaut’s bit part in a space-flight that is essentially the military-industrial establishment’s . . . . Continue Reading »
This last year I’ve been living in upstate New York, and the people have been great. Delightful students at Skidmore College, for one. But now, largely thanks to Lucas Morel , author of one of our better books on Lincoln, I’m returning to what’s become my home away from home, the . . . . Continue Reading »
My “Rock n’ Roll Patriotism” 4th of July post was meant to be fun little confection of you-tube music, a music-lover’s way to show the colors. But Peter got me thinking again . . . so look out! He commented: “How much we can be proud of this is questionable: No blues and . . . . Continue Reading »
In a Mars Hill Audio interview, Victor Lee Austin talks about his recent book, Up With Authority: Why We Need Authority to Flourish as Human Beings . He uses the analogy of an orchestra to indicate how fundamental authority is to certain forms of human flourishing. Orchestral music is one of many . . . . Continue Reading »
The Poetic Wisdom Paradox, which I abbreviate as the PWP, works as follows. A wise poet, let us say Homer, wants to convey wisdom in his poetic creation. Unlike the bohemian model of the underground poet satisfied with a tiny audience, we assume he begins with the poet’s traditional desire to . . . . Continue Reading »
“Friends of Mine” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ON-F0i69_8k is a song in which the narrator has an appreciative yet ultimately ambivalent attitude towards marriage, and towards “pairing off” more generally. Officially, that is, judged by the meaning of the lyrics alone, it is a . . . . Continue Reading »
The songs that make up Odyssey and Oracle could be analyzed in two ways. First, we could interpret them as distinct songs only superficially or incidentally linked in lyrical content—and then we’d say a lot more about which of the two Zombie songwriters, Rod Argent or Chris White, penned . . . . Continue Reading »
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