Those of you who used to be readers of my old blog, Throne and Altar, may be interested to know that I’ve finished my promised clean-up of that site. This consisted in adding two essays. Neither is original material. Both originally appeared in serialized form as posts, but they’ve now been gathered together in a more convenient form.
Monthly Archives: April 2012
Reactionary Composer of the Week: George Enescu
This week’s reactionary composer, the Romanian George Enescu (1881-1955), was suggested by a reader. Said reader, a musicologist with an interest in Enescu, sent me an extremely informative e-mail on the subject, so I’ll let him take it from here:
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If anything I say about Enescu seems like the exaggerations of an enthusiast, I invite you to consult Noel Malcolm’s excellent biography (1990), which is my main source for anecdotes. I may also occasionally be thinking of the chapter in Janos Starker’s recent autobiography (2005, I believe) in which he encountered Enescu in Bucharest around 1946-47.
As a man, Enescu was not very political. He came from the peasantry, but his father was a well-to-do land manager, so he had the best education and upbringing available in rural Romania. (The unification of Moldova and Wallachia took place about 20 years before he was born; Transylvania followed, of course, after Trianon.) As a young boy, he attended conservatory first in Vienna, then in Paris.
It quickly became evident that even among great musical talents, Enescu’s was unusual. Among other things, he memorized essentially the entire corpus of piano, orchestral, and chamber literature, and could reproduce it spontaneously at the piano at will. His student Menuhin tells us that Enescu memorized the freshly-written Ravel violin sonata as he was reading it, so that by the second read-through, he set the score aside. Likewise, Norbert Brainin (Amadeus Quartet) said that Enescu could play any of the Beethoven string quartets at the piano without music, Menuhin said that he’d seen Enescu play entire acts of Wagner without music, etc. Enescu was a first-rate pianist, violinist, and conductor — he routinely performed with the leading orchestras (Berlin Phil, Vienna, NY Phil, etc) as a violinist and as a conductor, and he was shortlisted to replace Toscanini in New York in 1936, though the job ultimately went to Barbirolli instead.
Credo: in vitam venturi saeculi
Our faithful dog of 14 years died two nights ago. Rosie was a good dog. As my wife put it, she was of all the members of our household morally the best, and most blameless. Certainly Rosie tried harder and more diligently than any of the rest of us to be good. And so she was, God bless her. She was an excellent instance of goodness, and of the general creaturely will toward the good. This made her a thing of beauty. Her humble obedience sanctified our house, albeit sometimes in quite a stinky, filthy way. I smile now to think of the horrible smells she used to carry home from her jaunts in the forest, the trophies of some deliciously rotten mélange. How odd, to miss those disgusting odors; to wish them back, with her.
It is indeed deeply, deeply odd that the world now proceeds without her; so much so, that the oddity is almost a violence, her absence a positive factor in the composition of each moment. It is not as if a bunch of rocks had moved from one arrangement to another on the beach, as the materialists would say has happened. It is as if a fairly sizable and remarkable rock had winked out of concrete existence altogether – a sheer impossibility, when you think about it, at least in a coherent, orderly world, where momenta are conserved. Rosie was a concrete fact, discrete from and supervenient to her constituent material facts, that expressed the substance of her life. Those constituents are still around, and rearranging, their momenta perfectly conserved; meanwhile the fact of Rosie is gone. She is now absent – literally, “away from being.” Where she was, there is now an ontological hole. It’s spooky.
After Rosie died, my children turned and asked me, being as patriarch also the priest of the family, whether she was going to heaven. St. Thomas argued that heaven is only for rational animals, and that while dogs have souls, they have not rationality. And this makes sense, so far as it goes. But it does not, it seems to me, go far enough. Continue reading
Gratitude and culture, and why America has no culture
It’s said that the difference between liberals and conservatives is that liberals don’t feel gratitude for what they’ve inherited, but that’s not true. Liberals do express admiration and gratitude, but of a particular kind. They are grateful for those daring individuals who “challenged injustice” or “made the world a better place”. Establishing and maintaining a social order doesn’t earn much recognition from them, because “mere” social continuity is supposed to happen automatically. Being a conservative, and–even more–being a parent, I find myself having more and more appreciation for all our humble, forgotten ancestors who just did the arduous job of keeping civilization going. There were times when just keeping a new generation alive until adulthood was an extremely difficult task. Passing on our moral and cultural inheritance is still extremely difficult. It doesn’t happen automatically–just look at what happened when one (post-WWII) generation decided not to bother.
A week for challenging stereotypes
Like everybody, I maintain stereotypes about various groups of people. None of us could do without them, but it’s in our interests for our stereotypes to be as accurate as possible. Of course, no one is such a fool as to imagine that general rules like “Frenchmen hate Americans” have no exceptions, but the rule is still usefully accurate if most Frenchmen hate Americans, or even if Frenchmen are just much more likely to hate Americans than the world average. Since none of my stereotypes are integral to my worldview, I’m happy to refine them when the opportunity arises.
Black criminality and us
Last week, there was a pretty horrific murder in a suburb north of Houston called the Woodlands. A (black) woman waited outside a pediatrician’s office, snatched a (white) woman’s baby as she was walking back to her car, shot her in the chest seven times, then ran her over with her car. Naturally, mother died. The baby was recovered unharmed a few days later and the murderer is now facing charges. Like most black criminals, the idiot did nothing to cover her tracks after she shot a woman in public in broad daylight after a noisy struggle with plenty of witnesses (because in public in broad daylight) and was arrested pretty much immediately.
The Catholic civil war: strategies
Why hasn’t there been a schism yet? I mean, it’s a pretty remarkable historical fact, isn’t it, that orthodox and openly modernist Catholicism have remained in communion with each other for a full half-century? The two sides share basically no beliefs. Our differences with the Nestorians, Monothelitists, Hussites, and Jansenists were insignificant by comparison, and all of those groups got the boot in about a generation. Nor are there any ties of affection holding the two sides of the Catholic civil war together–we hate each other’s guts. It wouldn’t be too hard for either side to pull the trigger and put an end to this unhappy union. (We Catholics don’t like the word “divorce”; let’s say I would like an “annulment” from the modernists.) From the orthodox side, this would be straightforward: the pope could excommunicate all the open heretics readminister the anti-modernist oath. The modernists don’t have a centralized command, but it wouldn’t be too hard for, say, the Catholic Theological Society, the Society of Jesus, Notre Dame, and the editors of Concilium to get together and declare an end to the Vatican’s undemocratic rule and the inauguration of a “reformed” Catholic Church under their leadership. Yet neither side does it. Why?
The Breivik trial
It began on April 16. I’ve recently commented on it over at VFR (I and Larry Auster have had an exchange about the question of Breivik’s criminal insanity and what it means for the trial and its verdict, but as of this writing, only my first comment is up), and, less recently, on Breivik and the attacks themselves in columns on Alternative Right and Brussels Journal.
“My Blushes, Watson!”: Of Blood, Blushing, Whistling, & Holding Hands
Here is another guest post by frequent commenter and friend of the Orthosphere, Dale James Nelson.
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Sherlock Holmes: “You have heard me speak of Professor Moriarty?”
Watson: “The famous scientific criminal, as famous among crooks as–”
“My blushes, Watson!” Holmes murmured in a deprecating voice.
Watson: “I was about to say, as he is unknown to the public.”
Doyle, The Valley of Fear (1915)
Holmes’s vanity tripped him up that time. Probably he did blush then. If literature is a reliable guide, people used to blush, or even flush, quite often.
Her blood shrank back to her heart at the very thought [of marrying for wealth], and then rushed to her neck and bosom in a flood of shame.
Haggard, Stella Fregelius (1903)
Examples could be multiplied. It seems there was a Victorian-Edwardian cult of blushing as a sign of lively sensibility – so that the hero of Trollope’s Dr. Thorne (1858), Frank Gresham, blushes when an older woman suggests that a young lady might like to settle at Greshamsbury for life, i.e. marry him, and we readers certainly are meant to approve of the young man’s modesty. Such blushing reassured readers of the persistence of wholesome human feeling in a society increasingly materialistic, hurried, and impersonal.
Those who read more current fiction than I do can inform me if people still blush in novels today. My sense is that they don’t, except perhaps to get “red with anger.”
Blushing is as much a matter of the soul as of physiology. “Man is the only animal that blushes – or needs to” (Mark Twain). Incidentally, I think writers used to make a distinction: someone’s face might be flushed with exertion or anger, but someone blushed with love, shame or embarrassment. Authors frequently noted the rushing of blood to the face as the sign that someone was much moved.
Reactionary Composer of the Week: Roger Scruton
Yes, that Roger Scruton. I assume he needs no introduction around these parts. Scruton has written extensively on music (I recommend his book The Aesthetics of Music, a difficult but rewarding read), as well as doing some occasional composing. Recordings of his two operas, Violet and The Minister, are unfortunately not available, but he has posted a lovely trio of Lorca songs on his blog.
