All Articles

Roger Scruton

February 2020 ... Read full text

The order of the middle movements in Mahler's Sixth Symphony

January 2016 ... Read full text

Poetic Truths

Review of Lies and Epiphanies: Composers and Their Inspiration from Wagner to Berg by Chris Walton.

The Wagner Journal, 2015 ... Read full text

Religious Art in the Twenty-First Century

I want to ask a large question in a short space: whether it is possible in the West to produce genuine religious music in the twenty-first century. The problem is not a recent one, but goes back to the eighteenth century Enlightenment and the beginnings of Romanticism.

11 August 2013 ... Read full text

Robin Walker at 60

Tempo, July 2013 ... Read full text

Refuge in the Forest

Review of Jean Sibelius and His World, ed. Daniel M. Grimley.

The Times Literary Supplement, January 2012 ... Read full text

Birdsong and Music

Many composers have been influenced by birdsong. Mozart treasured the songs of his pet starling, even giving the bird a ceremonial funeral. David has always been interested in the incorporation of the natural world into his music, even including birdsong in some recent compositions. This lecture will reflect on the relationships between music and the natural world and how a composer can be brought closer to one through the other and vice versa.

1st July 2011 ... Read full text

Tennis with Gershwin

Review of A Windfall of Musicians by Dorothy Lamb Crawford.

The Times Literary Supplement, July 2010 ... Read full text

The Rest is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century

Review of the book by Alex Ross.

Musical Opinion, July-August 2009 ... Read full text

Renewing Musical Tradition

Paper given at the conference 'Redefining Musical Identities' in Amsterdam, 31 August 2002.

pp.79-86, Redefining Musical Identities, edited by Rokus de Groot, Albert van der Schoot, ArtEZ Press, 2007 ... Read full text

Lucky thirteen

Review of Britten’s Children by John Bridcut.

The Times Literary Supplement, November 2006 ... Read full text

Form-compelling

London Review of Books, 21 September 2006

Elgar's Falstaff: a Comparative Analysis

September 2006 ... Read full text

The Art of the Fugue

Expended version of a review of 'The Art of Fugue' by Joseph Kerman.

London Review of Books, 2006 ... Read full text

A Wistful Sophisticate

Review of The Cambridge Companion to Elgar, Daniel Grimley and Julian Rushton eds.; Elgar: Child of Dreams by Jerrold Northrop Moore; Recording of Elgar: Piano Concerto realized by Robert Walker.

The Times Literary Supplement, 11 March 2005 ... Read full text

The Unperformed

The Times Literary Supplement, 16 January 2004

Britten and Berkeley

July 2003 ... Read full text

Renewing the Past, some personal thoughts

pp.199-212, Reviving the Muse: Essays on Music After Modernism, edited by Peter Davison, Claridge Press, 2001 ... Read full text

Kristallnachtmusic

The Times Literary Supplement, 17 November 2000

That Intimate, Familiar Sense

Review of John Caldwell's The Oxford History of English Music, Volume Two: c.1715 to the present day.

The Times Literary Supplement, 19 November 1999 ... Read full text

Michael Tippett and the Fading 'Collective Imaginative Experience'

The Times Literary Supplement, 21 May 1999

The Sixth Symphony

pp.366-375, The Mahler Companion, edited by Donald Mitchell, Andrew Nicholson, Oxford University Press, 1999

Wagner, Lipiner, and the ''Purgatorio''

pp.508-516, The Mahler Companion, edited by Donald Mitchell, Andrew Nicholson, Oxford University Press, 1999

Nothing of the Circus

The Times Literary Supplement, 3 April 1998

The Music of English Pastoral

pp.81-90, Town and Country, edited by Anthony Barnett, Roger Scruton, Jonathan Cape, 1998 ... Read full text

To the Point of Chaos

The Times Literary Supplement, 28 November 1997

All Art is a Diary?

The Times Literary Supplement, 17 January 1997

The Cycle of Seasons

The Times Literary Supplement, 19 July 1996

Mahler and Parsifal

Muzik & Wetenschap, Vol.V. No.3, 1995/96

Royal Splendours

The Times Literary Supplement, 17 May 1995

Radical Angst

Review of Expressionism in Twentieth Century Music by John C. Crawford and Dorothy L. Crawford.

The Times Literary Supplement, 19 August 1994 ... Read full text

This What You Call Music?

The Times Literary Supplement, 27 May 1994

The Flaying of Marsyas

Salisbury Review, March 1994

Landscape in British Music

Towards a new Landscape, edited by Bernard Jacobson, 1993

Living Traditions

Musical Times, April 1993

Titian's Flaying of Marsyas as a Metaphor of Transformation

The Salisbury Review, 1993 ... Read full text

Love Song for Alma

The Times Literary Supplement, 13 November 1992

That Carefree Feeling

The Times Literary Supplement, 10 April 1992

A Distant Fury of Battle

A composer's response to Geoffrey Hill's 'Funeral Music'.

Agenda, 1992 ... Read full text

Ambiguous Utterances

The Times Literary Supplement, 23 August 1991

Romanticism in Unlikely Corners

The Times Literary Supplement, 26 April 1991

A Perverse Genius

Review of Schoenberg's Error by William Thomson.

The Salisbury Review, 1991 ... Read full text

Forest Folk

The Times Literary Supplement, 22 June 1990

The Secret Programme

The Times Literary Supplement, 13 Arpil 1990

Peter Sculthorpe at 60

Tempo 170, 1989

The Rehabilitation of the Vernacular

Music and The Politics of Culture, edited by Christopher Morris, Lawrence and Wishart, 1989

Drafting the Resurrection

The Times Literary Supplement, 17 July 1987

Reorientation

Salisbury Review, April 1987

From Romance to Ritual

The Times Literary Supplement, 13 February 1987

On the Mahler Phenomenon

pp.35, The Listener, 10 July 1986

Mirror upon mirror mirrored

Michael Tippett, A Celebration, edited by Geraint Lewis, The Baton Press Ltd, 1985

A Note of Loneliness

The Times Literary Supplement, 10 August 1984

Act II Scene 1: An Examination of the Music in Peter Grimes

Cambridge Opera Handbooks, edited by Philip Brett, 1983

Affirmations and Ambiguities

The Times Literary Supplement, 27 August 1982

Zvezdoliki

Tempo 97 (Stravinsky memorial issue), 1971

Shostakovich's eleventh symphony

pp.448, The Listener, 24 March 1966

Messiaen and large-scale form

pp.972, The Listener, 9 December 1965