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
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.
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
