Latest Articles
We are encouraged to rely more and more on government officials to do for us what we could equally well do for ourselves—and, maybe more importantly, not to do what might help us solve our own problems.
Sep 08 2024
10 mins
If we imagine a metric called the Pinocchio Scale, which measures the number of lies told by a politician as a percentage of his or her overall public statements, our current prime minister (for want of a better description), Airbus Albo, has moved well into uncharted territory.
Sep 06 2024
5 mins
The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Organist
Few people now recollect Edna Ferber, once a best-selling novelist. Nevertheless she numbered among her champions Somerset Maugham, who in 1948 told playwright Garson Kanin: “I admire Edna Ferber. She’s a true professional.” To Kanin’s inquiry “What sort of writer would you call her?”, Maugham responded: “The best sort. She writes because she must, compulsively. She couldn’t not write, if you take my meaning.”
That last sentence, suitably altered, summarises us organists. Try as we will, we couldn’t not be organists.
Heaven knows, prospects of glittering financial rewards seldom motivate us. Our incomes (a few French and American star performers aside) would be greeted by plumbers and electricians with Rabelaisian bellows of derisive mirth. We lack even the spiritual benefits that come from being actively resented, like cops, politicians or tax collectors. Rather, we become organists not because we can, but because we must. Why must we? That question’s answer…
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.”
Aug 29 2024
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?
Aug 29 2024
11 mins
