Roger Scruton on The Post-Modern Ear

Towards the end of the 19th century, and in the wake of Wagner's achievement in Tristan und Isolde and Parsifal, the musical language which had been common property of Western composers since the Renaissance, underwent a crisis. What we now know as tonality, which is the system of keys and scales, and the harmonic progressions, which had been accepted by audiences since at least the end of the Middle Ages, entered a kind of flux.

Roger Scruton on Soul Music

Why Beauty Matters

Roger Scruton, "Beauty and Desecration," in City Journal 19.2 (Spring 2009).

Roger Scruton on The Loss of Beauty (Dec 17, 2009). [scroll down to the section titled "The Loss of Beauty"]

Roger Scruton, "Beauty and its corruptions," excerpted from Beauty (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009).

Roger Scruton, "Music and Morality"

In a word: Beauty is not Kitsch

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