Polyhymnia Senior Fellow Thomas L. Krannawitter gives his thoughts on Clarence Thomas’s recent speech on progressivism and the Declaration of Independence, and the sad, predictable response by the mainstream media. You can find it right here: https://tkrannawitter.substack.com/p/irreconcilable-differences
What George Washington’s promise to the Jews in Newport still means for America. I am not Jewish. Many of the people dearest to me are. Two of my most important intellectual mentors were Jewish; their teacher was Jewish. I have close friends and trusted business partners who are Jewish. So I do not regard the …
For New Yorkers, one hard thing about moving to Washington, D.C. is that there aren’t world-class concerts every day. Both the nation’s capital and what is sometimes called the capital of the world have outstanding museums: a great boon for my wife and me as well as for our young daughter, not least because so …
The bell rings. Students settle into their seats with the practiced choreography of the modern classroom: a laptop flips open; a phone disappears—mostly—into a hoodie pocket; someone asks whether the assignment can be submitted as a link. Then the teacher writes a question on the board: What is justice? A few students stare as if …
How is the tradition of Western classical music faring on our university campuses? Before answering this question, it is necessary to understand what has transpired with classical music in the wider culture, as the relationship between the two is so strong.
Artworks are powerful conveyors of ideas and values. They demonstrate that cultural artifacts are one place where the rubber hits the road, as it were, with respect to how images and ideas relate. In these protests, art’s power to propound ideas and embody values is being used as a weapon to oppose certain events and ideas some find objectionable.
The problem with the LAO guide is that it destroys meritocracy in the orchestral repertoire, and places a heavy burden on artistic organizations to choose diversity over compositional merit.
Music in the academy is at risk. The decline in its status, presence, and reach can be traced to the cultural shifts beginning in the 1960s. Western classical music—with its unassailable history of accomplishment and undeniable pedagogical, cultural, and spiritual significance—has fallen prey to the assault on standards and hierarchies embodied by the era’s ethos of: “Hey-hey, ho-ho, Western Civ. has got to go.”
Through his partnership with Eliot Fisk, Beaser has made a major and lasting contribution to the solo guitar repertoire with numerous pieces including “Notes on a Southern Sky.” Placed after the “Concerto,” it might be considered a lengthy encore. The work was one of Beaser’s first to look at folk music, in this case, that of Venezuela.
A safe space for the beautiful.
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