Burn of the Day
- Donald R. McClarey
Donald R. McClarey
Cradle Catholic. Active in the pro-life movement since 1973. Father of three, one in Heaven, and happily married for 43 years. Small town lawyer and amateur historian. Former president of the board of directors of the local crisis pregnancy center for a decade.
Roll over Beethoven. Tell Tchaikovsky the news.
Despite how bad things look right now, I try to remind myself that truth, goodness, and beauty come from God, and He will not permit them to be destroyed completely. The heritage of art and music bequeathed to us by the culture Christendom spawned will manage to survive, just as the true Church will survive. But we have to stand up for them when the opportunity arises, nevertheless. Even a “burn” on social media can play a part in that drama. Well stated, Donald.
Not at all uncommon nowadays, and entirely racist. That it’s driven largely by white liberals doesn’t make it less racist, simply brilliantly racist. To use classical racist attitudes with near genocidal overtones against your own ethnicity – chef’s kiss here. Problem is, I fear a growing number of non-Caucasian, non-Christians are beginning to warm up to the idea.
You wouldn’t be having trouble with savages if there were two reactions to this sort of thing. (1) The administration tells the petitioners to get stuffed (which they would certainly do if the petitioners were evangelicals complaining about PZ Myers) and (2) faculty members approached for letters of recommendation tell the ring leaders to piss off and ask some rude questions of others who signed those petitions.
The people ruining higher education are the people actually running it.
I’m a classical fan. There’s a concert series near me that’s coming up, and I’ve been attending fewer performances over the years because of this.
Most of my life there’s been a tension between the people who want the most common pieces over and over, and the aficionados of more modern stuff. So we compromise. A performance might have a war horse, a lesser-known piece, and something modern. Well, now we have to have representation. That means a piece from the past 80 years, probably the last 20, that didn’t rise to the surface on its own. Probably commissioned as part of a diversity program.
And it’s bad. Our era has some decent composers, mostly in the movie business. But we’re not producing composers through academic rigor, so the newer ones don’t have the mastery they’d need to write really good music. The Romantic composers utilized music from their regions, but put it into a framework that came from the Baroque and Classical eras. The new stuff? “Inspired by the traditional sounds of her native Kenya” or something.
And here’s the thing: audiences generally were more on the war horse side, but we recognized that performers wanted to try their hands at some of the complexities of modern pieces. We knew that they weren’t being challenged by the 800th performance of The Four Seasons, so we let them have a finger-twister. This new stuff, no one likes. It’s neither advanced nor entertaining. The audience and the performers are just trudging through material neither of us wants. It’s like everything else woke, done to please a tiny number of people who probably aren’t in earshot.
Because the woke Millennials invented music in the same way they invented the wheel.