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

Beauty Wine PBK Pessimism Liberty

 

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

View the Jacques Maritain Center Art Gallery


Roger Scruton

The West and the Rest

"Today the failures prevail: and this is one source of our present danger.
For failure is no longer localized in the place that produced it,
but carries its burden of resentment around the world."

Preface

Chapter 1: The Social Contract
Chapter 2: Enlightenment, Citizenship, and Loyalty
Chapter 3: Holy Law
Chapter 4:
Globalization (pp.125-134)
               The personal state (pp.134-144)
               Transnational government (pp.144-149)
               The new imperium (pp.149-156)
Chapter 5: Conclusion

Video lecture version

See also: England and the Need for Nations [overview]

Further reading: Why I became a conservative
[Canavan on Burke]

The Defense of the West:
How to Respond to the Islamist Challenge

Roger Scruton Bibliography by More C

The West and the Rest


Music Counts Political Wine