Published pseudonymously in 1850 in the influential journal Neue Zeitschrift für Musik, “Judaism in Music” is both the most-often cited and least-often read of Richard Wagner’s voluminous prose works. Although commonly described as a vile work of hate speech or as a model for the breathless prose style of Der Stürmer, Wagner’s essay is actually rather mild and extremely clinical in its assessment of the mostly deleterious influence of Jews in German culture. (more…)
Tag: classical music
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2,413 words
Percy Grainger was a polymath: a pianist, composer, conductor, ethnomusicologist, inventor, artist, polyglot, and man of letters. He was one of the most celebrated pianist-composers of the early twentieth century. His work and writings reflect a worldview marked by both racial consciousness and an opposition to modernity that coexisted alongside radical artistic modernism. (more…)
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Audio version: To listen in a player, use the one above or click here. To download the mp3, right-click here and choose “save link as” or “save target as.” To subscribe to the CC podcast RSS feed, click here.Greg Johnson, John Morgan, and Michael Polignano reconvene for a new weekly Counter-Currents Radio podcast. This week, we interview Counter-Currents author Tito Perdue. (more…)
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The history of American classical music has been shaped by the quest to define the nature of American identity. Lacking the rootedness and history of Europe, we have been forced to mold a new identity as a nation. Likewise American composers have been faced with the task of creating an authentically American sound.
A number of American composers during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries held the view that American music must necessarily reflect America’s racial and cultural inheritance. (more…)
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1,651 words
George Martin
Verdi at the Golden Gate: Opera and San Francisco in the Gold Rush Years
Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993George Martin is an independent historian who has written a number of books about the history of opera (including a great biography of Verdi). His account of how opera and in particular Verdi’s operas rose to prominence in San Francisco during the Gold Rush years describes a fascinating but not widely known episode in the history of the American West. (more…)
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After listening to Greg Johnson’s recent conversation with Rob Kievsky entitled “Leveraging Social Decline,” in particular, the part of it in which they discuss parenting, I (being a parent) felt the need to weigh in. Around the 47-minute mark, the two got into a friendly dispute over the best way to be a parent. In reality, I think both were presenting sides that seemed antithetical but really weren’t because they were each addressing different problems with their arguments. (more…)
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Richard Wagner was born 204 years ago today in Leipzig in the Kingdom of Saxony. He died on February 13, 1883 in Venice. As an artist, intellectual, author, and cultural force, Wagner has left an immense metapolitical legacy, which is being evaluated and appropriated in the North American New Right. I wish to draw your attention to the following writings which have been published at Counter-Currents/North American New Right. (more…)
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Christian Thielemann
My Life With Wagner: Fairies, Rings, and Redemption: Exploring Opera’s Most Enigmatic Composer
New York: Pegasus, 2016The conductor Christian Thielemann, born in Berlin in 1959, is well-known for his passionate advocacy of German music. What becomes clear in his new book, an intellectual history of his musical development and his relationship with Richard Wagner (more…)
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2,721 words
Leoš Janáček
The Makropulos Case
English National Opera, conducted by Sir Charles MacKerras, Chandos, 2007(Warning: This review contains spoilers for the plot of this opera.)
Leoš Janáček (1854-1928) was a Czech composer known for his combination of folk music with a strikingly original modernism. There is no other composer who sounds remotely like him. He is as instantly recognizable as Vivaldi, Wagner, or Philip Glass. (more…)
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Alain Daniélou
Sacred Music: Its Origins, Powers, and Future — Traditional Music in Today’s World
Ed. Jean-Louis Gabin
Varanasi, India: Indica Books, 2002“People who lose their language and their music cease to exist as a cultural and national entity and have no further contribution to make to world culture.” — Alain Daniélou (more…)
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“A beginning,” Princess Irulan tells us in Dune, “is a very delicate time.” Aristotle would agree: “The mistake lies in the beginning — as the proverb says — ‘Well begun is half done’; so an error at the beginning, though quite small, bears the same ratio to the errors in the other parts.”[1] (more…)
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Hitler is awake all the 24 hours of the day in perfecting his sadhana [self-transcendence]. He wins because he pays the price. His inventions surprise his enemies. But it is his single-minded devotion to his purpose that should be the object of our admiration and emulation. Although he works all his waking hours, his intellect is unclouded and unerring. Are our intellects unclouded and unerring? — Mahatma Gandhi[1] (more…)
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Editor’s Note:
This is the transcript by V. S. of Richard Spencer’s Vanguard Podcast interview of Jonathan Bowden about the Frankfurt School and Cultural Marxism, released on February 16, 2012. You can listen to the podcast here.
Richard Spencer: Hello, everyone, and welcome back to Vanguard! And welcome back, Jonathan Bowden, (more…)