THE STANDARD READER
The Standard Reader Books in Brief Surprised by Beauty: A Listener's Guide to the Recovery of Modern Music by Robert R. Reilly (Mor-ley, 351 pp., $19.95). Even the most open-minded might be...
...But Hutson's complaint in this collection of essays is finally that it was also bad history, an offense to the truth historians are supposed to seek...
...Robert Reilly has done music lovers a service by reminding us that "modern music" and "beauty" are not always enemies...
...Stephen Schwartz Forgotten Features of the Founding: The Recovery of Religious Themes in the Early American Republic by James Hutson (Lexington, 197 pp., $22 paper...
...The essays on William Penn, James Madison, and the Founders' reading of French authors are particularly noteworthy, and Hutson's take on the use and misuse of the idea of America as a Christian nation deserves wide circulation...
...But libraries and admirers of literature can purchase a copy by e-mailing euroglasnik@most.com.hr— and they ought to, for Vlado Gotovac (1930-2000) was an exquisite literary stylist and a distinguished dissident, repeatedly imprisoned under Titoite communism...
...Even the most open-minded might be surprised to see a book whose title includes both "modern music" and "beauty...
...One of the best essays in surprised by Beauty is Reilly's elegant demolition of John Cage, the "apostle of noise...
...Vlado Gotovac was a gentle, reflective personality who took as his ideal the martyred Russian poet Osip Man-delstam...
...With the rise of the Croat patriotic movement in the 1970s, he became identified with the "Croatian Spring," and after the declaration of Croatian independence in 1991, he emerged as a leading figure in the democratic opposition to the nationalism of Franjo Tudjman...
...But in this fine collection of essays, Robert R. Reilly shows there is beauty to be found in modern music—if one is willing to look hard enough...
...That sort of unity is Croatia at its best and the reason Vlado Gotovac needs to be remembered...
...From his perch at the Library of Congress, James Hutson has been a major force in the long struggle against the myth of the utterly secular American founding—the peculiar notion that the United States was born solely from a reading of John Locke, and a bowdlerized Locke at that...
...An important collection on an important topic...
...The secular myth was always useful history, historical scholarship guided by modern leftist and anti-religious politics...
...He also champions music that deserves greater exposure, such as the sublime choral works of American composer Frank Martin and Edward Elgar's hauntingly beautiful choral masterpiece, The Dream of Gerontius...
...In one of his best poems, "Lazarus' Canticles," Gotovac wrote: From the bottom of the darkness of the exiled / Who after being wise hunters turned into servants / I have salvaged my song...
...Lee Bockhorn Vlado Gotovac...
...One of the past century's many sad tales is how classical music became willfully averse to the beautiful and transcendent...
...This volume includes a memoir of his experience in prison, when his Communist guards seized from him a copy of the poems of Mansur al-Hal-laj, the ninth-century Islamic mystic executed for heresy in Baghdad...
...More important, however, are the essays rehabilitating modern composers who once drew critical scorn for their willingness to write tonal music, including Samuel Barber, Roy Harris, and Malcolm Arnold...
...This volume of translations, published by Most/The Bridge Literary Magazine, the journal of the Association of Croatian Writers, is not easily available...
...Bottum...
...But "Hallaj was not thwarted," Gotovac explained—by which he meant that the voice of free inquiry will always prevail, uniting a medieval Muslim poet like Hallaj with a modern Catholic poet like Gotovac...
Vol. 8 • June 2003 • No. 39
