Review
Composers & Their Measure
Surprised by Beauty: A Listener's Guide to the Recovery of Modern Music by Robert R. Reilly with Jens F. Laurson
reviewed by James A. Altena
Robert J. Reilly is definitely a man on a mission—a laudable one at which he generally succeeds, albeit with some significant missteps. That mission is to document what he terms the "recovery of modern music"—more specifically, the recovery of beauty in modern classical music from a prolonged era in which any concern for beauty was not just ignored, but overtly and emphatically rejected by academic mandarins who effectively dictated the acceptable parameters of compositional style and techniques for a period of thirty to forty years after World War II, a period that composer Robert Muczynski aptly describes as the "long-term tyranny which has brought contemporary music to its current state of constipation and paralysis" (430). However, the last twenty to thirty years has witnessed a return from the wilderness, as many new composers have once again openly embraced tonality and melody as foundational aspects of music and sought to create works that prize beauty and appeal to the hearts and not just the minds of hearers.
Reilly's book—in a much expanded second edition since its first appearance in 2002, with music critic and friend Jens F. Laurson contributing several of the new chapters—seeks to document the resistance to atonal music during its period of dominance and to chart and celebrate the re-emergence of tonal music. Following a foreword by noted NPR music doyen Ted Libbey and a preface by Reilly, the main body of the text is divided into two parts. Part I (400 of the 510 pages) contains 64 chapters devoted to the music of particular composers, or occasionally groups of related composers. Part II features six interviews Reilly performed with one conductor (Robert Craft on Stravinsky and Schoenberg) and five composers (David Diamond, Gian Carlo Menotti, Einojuhani Rautavaara, George Rochberg, and Carl Rütti). A brief appendix by Laurson provides "A Note on Record Recommendations," followed by a brief list of abbreviations used in the book. Unfortunately, no name or subject indices are provided.
Proceeding alphabetically from John Adams to Mieczysław Weinberg, Reilly and Laurson in Part I provide for each composer a pithy discussion of his career, compositional style, and aesthetic outlook, a discussion of several major works, and a list of recommended recordings. Both co-authors have the gift of bringing these figures and their works engagingly to life, including Reilly's accounts of his personal interactions with several of them, and the range of coverage is quite extensive, including some little-known composers who rightly deserve more attention—and a few who arguably do not. A self-admitted bias exists toward orchestral and choral works over operas, songs, and chamber music, and there is little mention of the concert band repertoire, to which many composers have increasingly turned for substantial works, not least because such compositions often receive many more performances.
The discographies are reliable, though often only one recording exists for a recommended work. Where multiple recordings are available, the authors tend to cite a recent digital release rather than an interpretively superior but older analog version—for example, Reilly lists the mediocre Vladimír Válek set of Bohuslav Martinů's six symphonies but omits the classic 1976–1977 cycle by Václav Neumann. In some cases, an unbalanced bias is evident (e.g., for Edward Elgar, Reilly recommends five recordings conducted by John Barbirolli but not even one by Elgar's other favored preeminent interpreter, Adrian Boult). There are a few deplorable lapses in judgment here, such as Reilly's gratuitous attacks on Peter Schickele's much beloved and musically sophisticated and inventive P. D. Q. Bach comedy pieces as "sophomoric musical parodies" and a few foolish critical remarks on Ralph Vaughan Williams.
Technique over Content
This much of the book is straightforward. Far more controversial are Reilly's two polemical essays that bookend Part I, "Is Music Sacred?" and "Recovering the Sacred in Music," and the six interviews in Part II. As these all make clear, Reilly—a devoted Roman Catholic (Laurson is an atheist)—believes that the disappearance of beauty from much twentieth-century music is intimately bound up with theology. After a four-page thumbnail sketch of the basic principles of Western music, particularly harmony and melody, as laid down by Pythagoras, Plato, Cicero, St. Clement of Alexandria, Cassiodorus, and Boethius—figures who believed that music was not just a logical or physical exercise but even more fundamentally a metaphysical one that aimed to reflect eternal heavenly verities and create corresponding harmony in the soul—Reilly jumps 1,500 years to the twentieth century, in which he argues that these fundamental musical principles were abandoned because their theological foundation was rejected.
Indeed, composer John Adams once said he learned in college that "tonality died somewhere around the time that Nietzsche's God died" (29). As Reilly explains,
The connection between the two is quite compelling. At the same time God disappears, so does the intelligible order in creation. A world without God is literally unnatural. If there is no God, there is no Nature, that is, the normal and ideal character of reality. Stripped of its normative power, reality no longer serves as a reflection of its Creator. . . . If there is no preexisting, intelligible order to apprehend, if there is no "music of the spheres" to approximate, what, then, is music supposed to express? If external order does not exist, then music collapses in on itself and degenerates into an obsession with techniques. Any ordering of things, musical or otherwise, becomes purely arbitrary. (21)
The result was that composers, as de novo constructors of artistic abstract realities according to self-determined methods rather than sculptors of pre-existing sonic materials according to universal natural laws, became preoccupied with technique over content. As Libbey neatly summarizes it in his foreword,
James A. Altena is the associate editor of Fanfare magazine, a comprehensive bimonthly periodical for reviews of classical music recordings. He is a member of All Saints Episcopal Church in Wynnewood, Pennsylvania, and is pursuing a Ph.D. in church history at Westminster Theological Seminary in Glenside, Pennsylvania.
A Journal of Mere Christianity—Delivered to Your Door
- Essays on theology, culture, and the Church
- Contributors from across the Christian traditions
Subscribe (Print + Online) 
Six print issues (one year) of Touchstone, plus full online access and PDF downloads for only $39.95.
Subscribe (Online Only) 
Get a one-year full-access subscription to the Touchstone online archives for only $19.95.
bulk subscriptions
Order Touchstone subscriptions in bulk and save $10 per sub! Each subscription includes 6 issues of Touchstone plus full online access to touchstonemag.com—including archives, videos, and pdf downloads of recent issues for only $29.95 each! Great for churches or study groups.
Transactions will be processed on a secure server.
more on book reviews from the online archives
more from the online archives
31.5—September/October 2018
The Secular State Without the Decalogue by James M. Kushiner
24.2—March/April 2011
Certain Death & the Last Lectures of Socrates & Jesus by Randall B. Smith
27.3—May/June 2014
Facts versus Stereotypes About Love & Marriage in the Land of the Free by Allan C. Carlson
calling all readers
Please Donate
"There are magazines worth reading but few worth saving . . . Touchstone is just such a magazine."
—Alice von Hildebrand"Here we do not concede one square millimeter of territory to falsehood, folly, contemporary sentimentality, or fashion. We speak the truth, and let God be our judge. . . . Touchstone is the one committedly Christian conservative journal."
Support Touchstone
—Anthony Esolen, Touchstone senior editor
