Philosophy and music
Roger Scruton’s new book has a great title: Death-devoted Heart. But it’s about music, and opera at that. So if one adds Scruton’s old fogey politics, that prospect of greatness soon deflates. Peter Porter says the book “is a deep and daunting study of the most important single composition in Western music, Richard Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde.”
Elsewhere, Scruton himself introduces a review of Nietzsche and Music, by Georges Li�bert, by observing that “[b]efore modern times, philosophers took music extremely seriously. Its role in shaping and revealing the human soul was of enormous concern to Plato and Aristotle.”
Clearly, Scruton is not following a modern philosopher like Lars Iyer. Not surprising really: I can’t see Rog deep in a whiskey-fuelled funk with the genuinely death-devoted heart of Bill Callahan playing on the gramophone.
Other Splinters posts of interest:
- Music Is My Hot Hot Sex
- John Peel is dead
- Lianne Hall
- I love you because you look like Jim Reeves
- Pat Metheny Eviserates Kenny G
