Wednesday, November 13, 2013

Capriol Suite

Here's a fine piece of music, the pavane from Peter Warlock's Capriol Suite composed in 1926:

3 comments:

  1. Well, Warlock didn't compose it, in any but the vaguest sense. It's an arrangement - as the rest of the suite is - of material that Warlock found in a 1589 dance collection by the Frenchman Thoinot Arbeau: Orchésographie.

    Incidentally, given the extent to which Warlock (real name Philip Heseltine, of course) had his brains scrambled by nudism, by alcoholism, and by black magic of an Aleister-Crowley-ish sort, he does seem an odd choice for OzConservative approval.

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    Replies
    1. Robert, it's true that Warlock is not an attractive figure, but nonetheless it's fine music. That's all I'm presenting it as.

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  2. I see your point, Mr Richardson, and the music is indeed attractive, although as always, I do wonder how repellent an artist has to be before anyone studying his work says "Thus far and no farther."

    These days I can no longer listen to even the better works of Benjamin Britten any more. His infantile leftism; his physical cowardice when better men than he were dying in Normandy and Auschwitz; above all, his habitual pedophilia (he would never get a police clearance if he were still with us): these vitiate in my mind whatever intense but slender creative talent he possessed.

    I no longer want to see any artwork by Eric Gill either, for similar reasons. (Except that Gill's vices included incest - both intra- and inter-generational - and bestiality).

    Do you want to know what my definition of a real conservative, as opposed to a fake-conservative of the Abbott-Cameron variety, is, Mr Richardson? It is this.

    A real conservative accepts Paul Johnson's dictum on Hemingway: "his life holds a lesson all intellectuals need to learn: that art is not enough." A fake conservative feels no compunction publicly whining about "censorship", "philistines", "bigotry", "homophobia" etc.

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