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Saving Classical Music from Itself
Sir Roger Scruton wrote two operas and published six books on music. Three of these books concern Wagner’s operas, a subject about which Scruton was irrepressibly passionate—and as brilliant an analyst as any contemporary Wagnerian. Another book, The Aesthetics of Music (1997), is a landmark synthesis of philosophy and musicology. It is a rich and complex work, fully navigable perhaps only by those with a strong grounding in music theory, aesthetics and philosophy. For the layman listener, we are left with Scruton’s two published collections of musical essays, Understanding Music (2009) and Music as an Art (2018). Music became ever more important to Scruton as he aged, and his pen turned more often to the musico-cultural as he entered his final years. It is these two books which should give the greatest heart to those who continue the fight to conserve classical music’s great tradition.
As Scruton reveals, this fight has not gone particularly well over the past century….
The Editor of Quadrant Music, Alexander Voltz, has won the symphonic section of the prestigious George Enescu International Competition in Bucharest.
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