On April 13, 1930, William Schuman, a business student at New York University’s School of Commerce, went to a Carnegie Hall concert of the New York Philharmonic with his sister, Audrey.

“I was astounded at seeing the sea of stringed instruments, and everybody bowing together. The visual thing alone was astonishing. But the sound! I was overwhelmed. I had never heard anything like it. The very next day, I decided to become a composer,” he later recounted.

He fulfilled his desires. He left behind six symphonies, numerous other works for orchestra and choral/vocal pieces, including Mail Order Madrigals (1972), based on texts from the 1897 Sears Roebuck catalog.

He chose three melodies from the early American Composer William Billings and arranged them for orchestra. These three works, “Be Glad then America,” “When Jesus Wept,” and “Chester,” formed his New England Triptych. Shuman was Jewish and yet composed this explicitly Christian work, performed here by the United States Marine Band.

Schuman (1910-1992) was president of Julliard and appeared on the game show What’s My Line?

THE INDIANAPOLIS SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA performs 20th century composer Thomas Canning’s Fantasy on a Hymn Tune by Justin Morgan.

Justin Morgan (1747-1798) was an American composer who was also a farmer, horse breeder, singing instructor and municipal clerk in Randolph, Vermont. He owned a stallion who sired the Morgan horse breed.

Canning (1911-1989) was a professor of composition at the Eastman school and composer-in-residence at West Virginia University. He wrote this beautiful interpretation of one of Morgan’s hymns, “Amanda,” a tribute to Morgan’s wife, Martha Day, who died ten days after giving birth to their youngest daughter.

The work accompanies in this video paintings by the Hudson River School painters.

SELECTIONS of American music will be the theme here over the next 48 hours in celebration for July Fourth, and I am starting with the early 20th-century stage tune Goodbye, My Lady Love, performed here by William Bolcolm and Joan Morris. The song was composed in 1904 by Joseph E. Howard, a Broadway songwriter of Tin Pan Alley fame.

According to Wikipedia:

Joseph Howard was born on February 12, 1878, in New York City. He grew up in a gang-terrorized part of the city and was frequently beaten by his father. His mother died when he was 8 years old, and he ran away to a Catholic orphanage, serving as an altar boy and singing in the choir. Avoiding his father, who had discovered the boy’s place of refuge, he rode a freight train to Kansas City, Missouri. There he sang in a saloon and sold newspapers. It was in Kansas City that he was discovered by George Walker of Williams and Walker who arranged for Howard to receive voice training. From Kansas City, he went to St. Louis, Missouri, where he had his first taste of the theater.^[1

Howard composed a number of popular stage hits, including “I don’t Like Your Family” and “A Boy’s Best Friend Is His Mother.” He died on stage while singing “Let Me Call You Sweetheart” on May 19, 1961. What a way to go!

 Goodbye, My Lady Love

So you’re going away
Because your heart has gone astray
And you promised me
That you would always faithful be

Go to him you love
And be as true as stars above
But your heart will yearn
And then some day you will return Read More »

IN THIS fantastic video snippet of a 1984 interview, KGB defector Yuri Bezmenov explains why Communists were (and probably still are) interested in encouraging yoga among Americans. It creates an easily manipulated populace.

(H/T Fitzpatrick Informer)

“The thing that makes Judaism dangerous to everybody, to every race, to every nation, to every idea is that we smash things that aren’t true. We don’t believe in the boundaries of nation-state, we don’t believe in the ideas of these individual gods that, you know, protect individual groups of people. These are all artificial constructions and Judaism really teaches us how to see that. In a sense our detractors have us right in that we are a corrosive force. We are breaking down the false gods of all nations and all people because they are not real. And that is very upsetting to people.”

— Douglas Rushkoff, Jewish author of Nothing Sacred: The Truth About Judaism

BEWARE OF Western nationalists who promote and glorify Vladimir Putin and his government, claiming they represent a rebirth of Christian civilization, Timothy Fitzpatrick writes:

A small minority of us in the Western nationalist movement feel it imperative to alert leaders and persons of influence in our sphere of the great Russia deception. For it seems the great majority in our movement are being deceived on a massive scale by a decades-old, highly sophisticated, and highly co-ordinated campaign to lure the Church and Western nationalists into a trap in order to finally clinch world communistic government. Read More »

To make things ‘perfectly clear’ is reactionary and stupefying. The real is not perfectly clear.

— Feminist, Jewish philosopher Avital Ronnell Read More »

ALAN writes:

Sixty years ago this month, my classmates and I marched in our parochial school parade. It began at the church and proceeded along the streets of our neighborhood for about a mile. Then all the children spent the day at the picnic rides and games. We were not there to express outrage or protest or make demands.

Color slides taken by my mother show my classmate and best friend, Jeff, and me in our pastel shirts walking in the parade and riding on the merry-go-round: Innocent childhood fun in a strong Catholic parish in a clean, orderly, all-white neighborhood where standards were upheld and lawlessness was negligible.

Last weekend, the St. Louis Public Library presented its “Gay Pride Parade” as part of its enthusiastic and unwavering support for every Leftist political cause your readers could name.

Such a parade would have been unthinkable to American libraries in 1958, as would:  Pandering to the lowest common denominator; acquiring books that celebrate thugs, whores, and profanity; stocking a children’s department with hundreds of new books slickly designed and intended to promote political causes; endorsing suicidal public policies like diversity and multiculturalism; offering music CDs that celebrate the vile noise called rap music; indulging in saccharine sloganeering like “The Library Rocks!”;  presenting “tributes” to psychedelic rock “music”; and banning the celebration of Christmas.

More proof of Lawrence Auster’s observation that what Americans could not have imagined in the 1950s, they make mandatory today.

People who permit such revolutionary changes to their culture do not have much moral-philosophical substance to begin with.  They are easy prey for well-trained agitators, provocateurs, and Fabian change agents.  Not only do they lack sales resistance to bad ideas, they are incapable of understanding why those ideas are bad.  In other words:  They are typical products of modern indoctrination-mendaciously-called-“education”.      Read More »

HUNGARIAN FOREIGN minister Péter Szijjártó brilliantly masters  a bullying interview with BBC’s Emily Maitlis as he defends immigration restrictions. At minute 4:00, he refuses to accept her charge of “xenophobia,” a common Jewish slur against Western countries and individuals trying to protect their cultures and identity.

MRS. C. writes:

Your post last week about the lack of grace in growing old brought to mind this poem I thought you might like:

Let me grow lovely, growing old-
So many fine things do;
Lace, and ivory, and gold,
And silks need not be new.

And there is healing in old trees,
Old streets a glamour hold;
Why not I, as well as these,
Grow lovely, growing old?

— Karen Wilson Baker

AT THE terrific blog A Clerk of Oxford, Eleanor Parker, Lecturer in Medieval English Literature at Brasenose College, Oxford, reviews the 1944 British film, A Canterbury Tale, which is set in wartime Kent and can be viewed online here:

Love draws forth love, and I’m sure that one reason people love this film so dearly is that it’s transparently born of love – particularly love for the countryside and the people of the director’s own childhood home (Michael Powell was born in Bekesbourne and went to school in Canterbury, and several of the minor characters are directly based on, or played by, local villagers he knew). It’s a film about love, of various kinds: love of home and nature, a poignant love for the lost and the absent, and a love of history which manifests itself in an intensely romantic, almost mystical sense of longing and connection with the past. In fact, the whole plot of the film is driven (this is a little bit of a spoiler!) by one character’s desire to share his love of history with others. He goes about it in an obsessive and bizarrely coercive way, but the film argues – and itself superbly demonstrates – that the same goal can be achieved by wooing your audience, rather than bullying them: instead of frightening them or chastising them, invite people in to love what you love. There’s no love story in this film – one of the things it was criticised for – but the whole thing is a meditation on love and desire in a way few overtly romantic stories manage to be. Its central metaphor is pilgrimage, specifically medieval pilgrimage; and for medieval writers pilgrimage was above all the journey of the questing heart, the outward embodiment of the soul’s restless, yearning desire to love and seek after truth.

ALESSO DI BENOZZO Crucifixion (detail)

WHOEVER does not believe in the oft-ridiculed “conspiracy theory” of history quite simply does not believe in the devil, who moves both men and events. Great numbers of his dupes labor to promote satanic causes without necessarily being aware of the source of their inspiration. This is the essence of conspiracy, literally a “co-inspiration.” Harnessing masses of witless sinners by appealing to their vices and appetites, fallen angelic intelligences do indeed influence the course of history. The less their victims know the better.

There will have to be historians of the eleventh hour who can tell it like it is. These are not the days of Herodotus or Julius Caesar, when history could be written on a purely natural level. Since then the Son of God has entered history as man and proclaimed himself Christ the King. He has endowed human events with a completely new dimension. Not to take into account their metaphysical main-springs in our day is to slip into unreality, into a miasma of unrelated “facts” lending themselves to any kind of manipulation. Faith alone can assess them properly, through the gift of knowledge imparted by the Holy Ghost. It is simple truth to say that only a Christian can know what really goes on in the world.

— Solange Hertz, The Star-Spangled Heresy: Americanism (Tumblar House)

KYLE writes:

The ongoing saga of illegal immigration brought to mind this presentation from several years ago.

I’m sure the numbers Roy Beck of NumbersUSA mentions have fluctuated, but the principle remains the same. I’ve nothing more to add to what seems to be bulletproof logic on display in this short video.

ACCORDING one of America’s leading associations of librarians, the author Laura Ingalls Wilder, who wrote The Little House on the Prairie, was a white supremacist. Lifesitenews reports:

For more than half a century, the Association for Library Service to Children (ALSC) has named its annual award for children’s book authors after “Little House on the Prairie” author Laura Ingalls Wilder, but the acclaimed novelist has just become the latest cultural hallmark to be condemned for depicting the biases of a bygone era.

The association, a division of the American Library Association, voted over the weekend to remove Wilder’s name from the award, the Washington Post reports, and rename it the Children’s Literature Legacy Award.

Citing “anti-Native and anti-Black sentiments in her work,” the association declared that Wilder’s literary legacy “includes expressions of stereotypical attitudes inconsistent with ALSC’s core values of inclusiveness, integrity and respect, and responsiveness.”

The “Little House” series told fictionalized versions of stories from Wilder’s own life, as her family traveled the United States’ western frontier in the nineteenth century. “In my own life I represented a whole period of American history,” she once said.

At issue is the fact that those stories sometimes reflected the era’s prevailing attitudes about blacks and Native Americans, particularly the hatred and fear between settlers and natives. Among the offending passages are characters who say things like “the only good Indian is a dead Indian,” and depictions of men wearing blackface as part of performance

FRANCISCO GUTIERREZ writes at Tradition in Action:

There is a story I would like to share with you to illustrate just how ludicrous the pet situation has become. One day a man whom I shall call Thomas got the news that his mother-in-law and maternal aunt had passed away within days of each other. Thomas had to deal with these losses and pains, and his wife was very sad at the death of her mother. As the story continues, Thomas notified his co-workers about his losses. Most were sympathetic about the situation.

Later that day Thomas learned that a co-worker’s cat had died. The same co-worker and other office workers who had showed a polite sympathy for the death of his relatives became traumatized over the death of the cat. Several made statements like these, “The cat was like her child,” “She had no children, and the cat was her child.”

One person actually told him that she read an article pointing out that a person grieves more for an animal than a family member. To say the least, I was taken aback by the contradiction: more sympathy and grief for the loss of a pet than for persons. Read More »

Flower Seller with Child, Victor-Gabriel Gilbert

PRESENT WITH her Amish family unloading flowers at a rural Pennsylvania produce stand today, a little girl of about five years looked up for a moment, puzzled and curious. They arrived in a buggy pulling a wagon crammed full of bouquets. While her brothers and mother emptied the cart, she shyly waited for them in the background. It could have been the 17th century or the 15th. There was nothing in what they were doing that was new or cool.

I wondered what this girl, who was dressed in a long skirt, her head covered with a purple scarf, makes of her glimpses of the modern world, of the whizzing cars, of the passengers — some so obese that they have trouble walking, of the children who whine out loud and seem not to stand still. She lives far removed from all that. I have never seen an Amish child insolently talking back to parents. It probably happens, but they seem so busy being children. This little girl has probably never watched TV. She may never ride in an airplane or play on a beach in a bathing suit or ride a roller coaster or stand in a sports arena. She may never have “deconstructed” jeans or purple hair. She will miss out. But she has some of the best things a child can have. She has many siblings and fresh air. She has a mother who is not taught to be ashamed of being a woman. She has a father who is a man. She has hard work. Or she will soon. She has constant lessons in self-restraint. Already you can see certain qualities in her face: patience and self-deprecation.

You can see another thing: innocence. It’s an unmistakeable and intangible quality that comes from not knowing. Children should be oblivious. They don’t need to know. They need not to know. The producers of popular culture hate innocence. This girl’s innocence won’t be systematically destroyed by the world around her. The Amish were truly wise to turn their backs on it all.

The kingdom of adults grows stale when there are few true children left. We don’t know what we’re missing because it’s not there. Innocence deeply motivates and energizes adults. But then I suppose you have to have known it to appreciate it. You have to have known what it is like to believe, however temporarily, that you are surrounded by goodness, safety and protection. Innocence is only delusion to those who believe that paradise doesn’t exist. If only a child could explain those moments in between the boredom and the waiting.

A delicate flower may bloom majestically in its field with no awareness of all the diseases that could afflict it or that ugliness rules. It doesn’t need to know. Let the world have its sophistication. Every real child, its innocence slowly unfolding, is a small, inarticulate condemnation of modernity. The flowers in the field can’t explain either.

It’s very difficult to be a flower unless you were once a seed. It’s very difficult to be an adult unless you were once a child.