Notes in a Nutshell

Modern masters of lust scream and shout their rock songs, but medieval peasants sing of beauty, salvation, and death to their mother.

Throughout music history, popular tunes have formed the basis of arrangements, fantasias, and variation suites.

Improvisation is one of Jazz’s distinctive features. One of the more recently recovered practices of Renaissance music, however, is also improvisation.

Austrian composer Anton Bruckner, a devout Catholic, was something of an odd man, but the beauty of his innovative and monumental sacred music deserves to be unpacked and considered by Catholics today.

In an era of unhealthy melancholy and depression, I would suggest mending our melancholy moods with the melancholy of other, more musically-healthy times.

Highly venerated from the first, many works of art have had St. Anthony as their subject, from plastic garden statues to paintings by El Greco and Raphael. He has also been honored in music.

The language of beauty continues to preach the truth of Catholicism to all nations; because of that, we ought to see composers like Tallis as contributing to the Church’s continued charism of evangelism.

Any Catholic interested in a revival of the arts and questions relating to their place and expression in the face of modernity should discover Arvo Pärt.