Category: Music
Good Friday
As is our annual custom, we are not publishing any new essays, reviews, or other content during the tail end of Holy Week. Instead, hear these musical reflections and consider the extent to which God went to rescue his people.
The Fears and Hopes We Sing in Lullabies
When you fall asleep, dear little one, a grey wolf will emerge from the wild forest and will grab you straight from your bed. Back to the forest he will drag you and will deposit you under a willow tree....
Tuning is for Killjoys
More than ever, we need a subversive history of music. We need it both to subvert the staid accounts that misrepresent the past as well as to grasp the subversive quality inherent in these catalytic sounds in our own time....
Southern Guilt, Southern Gospel
“Well, I woke up Sunday morning with no way to hold my head that didn’t hurt / The beer I had for breakfast wasn’t bad, so I had one more for dessert. / Then I fumbled in my closet through...
Beauty Spots
…When old age shall this generation waste, Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say’st, “Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all Ye know on earth, and all ye need...
Book Review: The Classical Revolution by John Borstlap
By Jeremiah Lawson In a time when the President has openly questioned what the United States get from being in NATO and fears that Russian and Chinese influence threaten the stability of the Atlantic American-European order, now would not seem...
Book Review: Music as an Art by Roger Scruton
By Jeremiah Lawson As a written practice, Western music goes back at least a thousand years. Over the centuries music has been made in the service of churches and courts, and from roughly the eighth through the thirteenth centuries was...
Reading the Hymns: Joy to the World
By Steven Wedgeworth Though it is today one of the most popular Christmas hymns, “Joy to the World,” was not originally a Christmas carol at all. Written by Isaac Watts, “Joy to the World” originally appeared in his 1719 The Psalms...
Mary Did You Know? A Mere O Symposium
By Christian Young, Susannah Black, Jon Coppage, and Jon Askonas Today we will be discussing a much loved, but also much hated, Christmas song, “Mary, Did You Know?”