Category: Culture

Art, music, literature and thespianism

White Soul Music

Beauty, Culture, Music

If you don’t know what the above title refers to, then you obviously weren’t with New Wife and me as we attended a concert of sacred a capella music at the Anglican Church of the Incarnation in Dallas:

…featuring Cambridge University’s incomparable Trinity College Choir.

Some Renaissance composers kicked it off, then a short pipe organ interlude to allow the lads and lassies of the choir a chance to rest their voices and catch their breath, then some “living” composers (none of whom I knew, but whose offerings did not suck), another organ interlude followed by a couple of earlier (dead) composers such as Thomas Tallis, and after one more organic interlude came J.S. Bach’s Komm Jesu, and finally the exquisite Nunc Dimittis of Gustav Holst.

While it was of course choral music, we couldn’t help but hear the leading soprano, who had a voice best described as “operatic”, and the leading male tenor, who with his perfect pitch kept the choir in tune throughout the entire concert.

All White man’s music, performed brilliantly by White teenage kids to an appreciative (and mostly) White audience.  And there’s absolutely nothing wrong with that.

As New Wife puts it:  “Food for the soul”, and indeed it was.  We came away well fed, and contented.

Funding Culture

Culture, Foreign Affairs

I don’t always agree with what John Konrad says, but on this topic he’s spot-on:

Civilization is the ability to sustain itself.  By that measure, Europe isn’t a civilization at all.  It’s a dependency with better wine.  That’s not a threat. I t’s a weather report.  Build a Navy.  Or don’t.  But stop lecturing the people who made you “better than us”.   Our “crudeness”, our “stunted liberal education”, our “ugly strip malls” are because we sacrificed our culture to support yours.

Read the whole thing, it’s worth it.  The question is, though:  how many Europeans are going to read it and wake up to its reality?

Fearnley, Again

Fine Art

I know I’ve featured the art of Alan Fearnley many, many times before, but I’m hopelessly, passionately in love with it.

Indeed, if someone were to tell me that I could put only his paintings on my walls, I’d have no problem with it.  (New Wife, however…)

Then I found something a little different, from his “picnic” series:

Right cheeky, that is.

Realism

Culture, Fine Art

During the 19th century, the Academic Art movement was extremely popular, incorporating themes of classic figures and themes, symbolism but above all, a realistic execution.  The French Academy, of course, took this to extreme lengths in that they pretty much decided that this style was the only worthwhile form of artistic expression and tried to suppress all other — which later led, perhaps justifiably, to their excoriation by the Impressionists and a subsequent loss of popularity.

Which I think is a shame, because along the way we lost the works of some incredibly-talented artists, such as William-Adolphe Bouguereau (pronounced “booger-oh”, for non-Francophiles).

I have a great fondness for Bouguereau’s work, as it happens, because while some of his paintings are kinda ordinary, there are several instances of startling and unsettling undertones.  Let’s start with the regular stuff:

All very innocent, really.  But one of the underlying reasons for this classicism was that it was a way of getting around the censors:  as long as the theme was classical, you see, an artist could depict pretty much anything of a more, shall we say, revealing nature.

Not to say implicitly sexual:

And just so we’re clear on the topic, here’s Bouguereau’s depiction of Dante and Virgil in the Inferno:

Now that’s realism.  Those effete Impressionists pale by comparison.