The Center for American Culture and Ideas

Dimenuendo: Classical Music and the Academy

Daniel AsiaPosted on January 31, 2025

How is the tradition of Western classical music faring on our university campuses? Before answering this question, it is necessary to understand what has transpired with classical music in the wider culture, as the relationship between the two is so strong.

Lord Balfour and the Power of Art

Robert GordonPosted on September 13, 2024

Artworks are powerful conveyors of ideas and values. They demonstrate that cultural artifacts are one place where the rubber hits the road, as it were, with respect to how images and ideas relate. In these protests, art’s power to propound ideas and embody values is being used as a weapon to oppose certain events and ideas some find objectionable.

Aesthetic Thinking

Robert GordonPosted on July 15, 2024

As human beings we have an extraordinary ability to think scientifically, to disassemble the world mathematically, to come out of ourselves and solve problems objectively. But we also have the concomitant subjective faculties of contemplation, appreciation, and reflection.

DEI Ruins Excellence in Orchestral Programming

Joshua NicholsPosted on April 4, 2023

The problem with the LAO guide is that it destroys meritocracy in the orchestral repertoire, and places a heavy burden on artistic organizations to choose diversity over compositional merit.

A Review of Wynton Marsalis’s Moving to Higher Ground

Daniel AsiaPosted on March 29, 2023

The artistic and creative personae of a performer or composer is a manifestation of his entire life experience, everything that he has listened to, and his basic constitution, and his personality. Whereas in the hard or social sciences we care little about the person who discovers a truth, because it is “out there,” with the arts, we wish to know about the painter or composer, because it comes from “inside,” it is of “them.”

Andy Warhol: Unconventional, Catholic, Traditionalist

Robert GordonPosted on May 17, 2022

It was Andy Warhol, who through Pop Art transformed the wedded cults of celebrity and consumerism into icons for our national and international contemplation.

A Multi-Layered Drama

Robert GordonPosted on April 29, 2022

Thus past, present and future converge to create an artwork whose meaning is immediately accessible but whose spatial and semantic depth successfully merge to produce one of the greatest works of art ever created.

Front and Center: The Place for Classical Music in the Curriculum

Daniel AsiaPosted on February 28, 2022

Music in the academy is at risk. The decline in its status, presence, and reach can be traced to the cultural shifts beginning in the 1960s. Western classical music—with its unassailable history of accomplishment and undeniable pedagogical, cultural, and spiritual significance—has fallen prey to the assault on standards and hierarchies embodied by the era’s ethos of: “Hey-hey, ho-ho, Western Civ. has got to go.”