Music for St. Cecilia’s Day

Related reading and listening

1. Seven Messianic titles, seven attributes of Christ — Ken Myers introduces listeners to four composers who each have set all seven of the O Antiphons to music. (17 minutes)
2. “Prophet of holiness” — Timothy Larsen discusses a new edition of George MacDonald‘s Diary of An Old Soul, a slim book of poem-prayers to be read daily as a devotional aid. (30 minutes)
3. The physical beauty of music — Music can be likened to a cathedral, says professional guitarist Gordon Kreplin, when it creates through silence and sound a meditative space into which one may enter and encounter God. (14 minutes)
4. Music and the meaning of Creation — In this 2018 lecture, Ken Myers advocates for a recovery of the pre-Enlightenment idea of the intelligibility of music. (61 minutes)
5. Counterpoint as a “spirited discussion” — In this essay, John Ahern explains the beauty and order of counterpoint, the accumulation of multiple melodies that come together in a harmonious whole. (20 minutes)
6. The Decline of Formal Speech and Why It Matters — John McWhorter examines the reasons behind the decline in articulate speech and writing in the late 20th century, and the implications of this change across many areas of culture. (55 minutes)
7. The relationship between prudence and reality  — In this lecture, Ken Myers explains how the virtue of prudence is fundamentally connected with a deep and anchored understanding of reality. (54 minutes)
8. Constructing your Favorites List — Ken Myers describes the new ecosystem of Mars Hill Audio’s membership/partnership program and shares clips from five recent lectures released as Bonus Features. (26 minutes)
9. Touch’d with a coal from heav’n — Daniel Ritchie finds in the poetry of William Cowper (1731–1800) an anticipation of Michael Polanyi’s epistemology
10. How we know the world — Daniel Ritchie argues that poet and hymnodist William Cowper was ahead of his time in critiquing the Enlightenment’s reductionist view of knowledge. (16 minutes)
11. William Cowper: Reconciling the Heart with the Head — Daniel E. Ritchie discusses the life and work of poet William Cowper (1731–1800), comparing his commitment to understanding reality through personal knowledge, intuition, and rigorous contemplation with the thought of Michael Polanyi. (43 minutes)
12. Festivity and the goodness of Creation — Drawing on Josef Pieper’s ideas, Ken Myers explains why the spirit of festivity is the spirit of worship, and that “entertainment” is ultimately an artificial, contrived, and empty effort to achieve festivity. (25 minutes)
13. Bearing witness through poetry — Roger Lundin discusses the incarnational witness of poet Czesław Miłosz (1911–2004), exploring his service to truth and to his native tongue, Polish. (16 minutes)
14. Czesław Miłosz: A Poet of Luminous Things — Roger Lundin discusses the themes, breadth, and depth of poet Czeslaw Milosz‘s work, explaining how Milosz incarnated in his life and work a sense of exile and alienation so common to modern man. (43 minutes)
15. Forms as portals to reality — Ken Myers explains the ancient classical and Christian view that music embodies an order and forms that correspond to the whole of created reality, in its transcendence and materiality. (54 minutes)
16. In praise of a hierarchy of taste — In a lecture at a CiRCE Institute conference, Ken Myers presented a rebuttal to the notion that encouraging the aesthetic appreciation of “higher things” is elitist and undemocratic. (58 minutes)
17. No neutral view of the cosmos — Ken Myers argues that Christians need to recover a “whole-earth discipleship” that enables them to think Christianly about all areas of life, including public life. (50 minutes)
18. Soundings of the human soul — Professor John H. Timmerman discusses the poetry of the late Jane Kenyon (1947-1995) and his visit to her home, Eagle Pond Farm. (16 minutes)
19. Jane Kenyon: Living and Dying at Eagle Pond Farm — Biographer John H. Timmerman discusses the life and work of poet Jane Kenyon (1947–1995). (53 minutes)
20. The formative power of hymns and hymnbooks — FROM VOL. 149 Christopher Phillips discusses the cultural and spiritual effects of hymns and the “thingness” of hymnals. (18 minutes)
21. Friendship and life together — In a lecture at Providence College, Ken Myers explores how the concept of friendship, which used to be central to political philosophy, was banished from considerations of public life as the state was exalted over society. (53 minutes)
22. How music reflects and continues the created order — Musician, composer, and teacher Greg Wilbur explores how music reflects the created order of the cosmos. (55 minutes)
23. Developing a Christian aesthetic — In the inaugural lecture for the Eliot Society, titled “Faithful Imaginations in a Meaningful Creation,” Ken Myers addresses the question of the relationship between the arts and the Church. (59 minutes)
24. The Life was the Light of men — In a lecture from 2018, Ken Myers contrasts the Enlightenment’s understanding of reason with the Christocentric conception of reason. (57 minutes)
25. The rediscovery of meaning — Poet and theologian Malcolm Guite explains Owen Barfield’s idea of the development of consciousness over time, an evolution made evident through language that reveals an earlier, pre-modern way of seeing the world. (63 minutes)
26. Genealogy of a work of praise — For Good Friday, Ken Myers tells the history of the text and music behind the popular hymn, “O Sacred Head, now wounded.” (27 minutes)
27. Pierced feet, wounded side, bloodied head — As Passiontide begins (the coming Sunday), Ken Myers introduces listeners to Membra Jesu Nostri, an hour-long cycle of seven cantatas written about 1680 by Dieterich Buxtehude (1637–1707). (16 minutes)
28. Martyrdom and music — To mark the feast day of the Martyrdom of Polycarp, we offer an interview from 2004 with composer J. A. C. Redford and poet Scott Cairns about their work together on an oratorio based on the story of Polycarp’s death. (15 minutes)
29. In dulci jubilo — Ken Myers introduces some of the music for the season composed by Michael Praetorius (1571–1621), best known for his settings of Es ist ein Ros entsprungen (“Lo how a rose e’er blooming”) and In dulci jubilo. (18 minutes)
30. The rich significance of everyday life — In this interview from 2000, Roger Lundin — a frequent guest on our Journal — explains how the poetry of Richer Wilbur connects with the verse of other New England poets. (24 minutes)
31. The desires of the heart, the constraints of creation — Roger Lundin describes how Richard Wilbur’s poetry connects aesthetic experience to life in the world.
32. Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 159 — FEATURED GUESTS: Kirk Farney, Andrew Willard Jones, James L. Nolan, Jr., Andrew Kaethler, Peter Ramey, and Kathryn Wehr
33. Earthly things in relation to heavenly realities — In this lecture, Ken Myers argues that the end of education is to train students to recognize what is really real. The things of this earth are only intelligible in light of heavenly realities. (59 minutes)
34. Maximalist music — FROM VOL. 8Dominic Aquila explains how — unlike the minimalist composers John Cage and Philip Glass — Arvo Pärt uses purity and simplicity to point beyond the created world to the transcendent Creator. (6 minutes)
35. Turn to the Lord your God — Ken Myers introduces musical settings from the book of Lamentations, traditionally sung during Holy Week. (26 minutes)
36. Music without emotivism — Julian Johnson discusses how novel, historically speaking, is the idea of complete relativism in musical judgment. (33 minutes)
37. Music, passion, and politics — In this interview from 2001, Carson Holloway discusses his book All Shook Up: Music, Passion, and Politics, which summarizes the dramatic chasm between the classical and modern views of political ends and of musical means. (45 minutes)
38. The mysteries and glory of Christmas and its music — Ken Myers presents examples of music from five centuries that capture some sense of the astonishing fact of the Nativity of our Lord. (15 minutes)
39. The music and the notes are precious — Ken Myers encourages an understanding of the Church as a particular culture that should be nourished and sustained, and then describes the history of an Advent hymn written by St. Ambrose. (27 minutes)
40. Volume 1 revisited — In August of 1992, Mars Hill Audio released the pilot edition of what became known as the MARS HILL Tapes. In celebration of this anniversary, we recycle three interviews heard in that distant era, with Ted Prescott, Edward Mendelson, and Peter Kreeft. (30 minutes)
41. Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 154 — FEATURED GUESTS: Felicia Wu Song, Michael Ward, Norman Wirzba, Carl Trueman, D. C. Schindler, and Kerry McCarthy
42. All manner of thing shall be well — T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets is regarded by many as his greatest accomplishment. Today’s Feature presents a lecture about this monumental work, a talk given in 2019 by Dr. Janice Brown. (58 minutes)
43. Stabat Mater dolorosa — Ken Myers offers some thoughts on the aesthetics of sympathy, and introduces some of the musical settings of the remarkable medieval poem known as “Stabat Mater dolorosa.” (23 minutes)
44. Passions before Bach — In preparation for Holy Week, Ken Myers presents a whirlwind music history lesson with musical examples from the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries. (22 minutes)
45. The mysteries and glory of Christmas and its music — Ken Myers presents examples of music from five centuries that captures some sense of the astonishing fact of the Nativity of our Lord. (26 minutes)
46. The story of the demotion of stories — Malcolm Guite on the Enlightenment’s rash dismissal of poetic knowledge
47. Feelings made articulate — Glenn C. Arbery on poetry and the intelligibility of the inner life
48. Words as fulcrums — Wendell Berry on the mediating responsibilities of poets
49. Richard Wilbur: R.I.P. — Poet Richard Wilbur (1921–2017) describes how poetry is at once profoundly private and yet essentially public. Poetry — like love — calls us to the things of this world. (44 minutes)
50. Renaissance music for Good Friday — In a special Feature for Good Friday, Ken Myers shares settings of passages from the Book of Lamentations and of the Tenebrae Responsories by Tomás Luis de Victoria. (18 minutes)