![Tom Franz (2013). Wikimedia Commons.](https://quadrant.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/Untitled-design-10.png)
The Rising of Music’s New Dawn
I am weary of high-born people,
Of men with milky hands,
Of idle malignant women,
And a life none understands,
And the mountainless horizons
Of these burning alien lands.
I will go back to my country
To live with Ireland’s poor,
To eat at a kitchen table,
(And my friend lying drunk on the floor)
While chickens and geese and turkeys
Are scratching about the floor.
There the dream-grey eyes of the humble
Will pour kind mist on my pain,
And the sea’s old sleepy rustle,
The soft sigh of the rain,
And the blessed scent of the turf-smoke
Will give me content again.
Knowing well Quadrant’s commitment to the publication of quality verse, it seems fitting to commence the magazine’s inaugural music pages with this 1910 poem, “A Summer in Exile”. It is by the English composer Arnold Bax, unpublished until 1979 and written near Lubny, a small locality halfway between Kiev and Kharkov. Bax was drawn to Imperial Russia in the pursuit of love, chasing the affections of a…
The Editor of Quadrant Music, Alexander Voltz, has won the symphonic section of the prestigious George Enescu International Competition in Bucharest.
Sep 03 2024
1 mins
Some have argued that Auden was a victim of his own naivety regarding the prospect of impending war. A few days before its declaration and while on a Greyhound bus at the end of that 1939 “honeymoon” with Kallman, he had written home to England: “There is a radio on this coach, so that every hour or so, one has a violent pain in one’s stomach as the news comes on. By the time you get this, I suppose, we shall know one way or the other.”
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15 mins
This is the paradox of the War Against the Past: those who are waging it are, inadvertently, denying themselves the capacity to win. For if your past is evil, if your centuries-old story is defined by bitterness and bad faith, how can you possibly hope to redeem yourself?
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11 mins