Amid today’s widely noted strains on humanities education, one ambitious remedy arrives in the form of a two-volume, 1,700-page textbook: The Golden Thread: A History of the Western Tradition, by Allen Guelzo and James Hankins. The authors argue for the continued importance of grasping “the civilization of the West,” grounded in “language and literature,” and they place the arts at the center of that story. Published by Encounter Books, a press situated on the political right, the set will likely find its earliest classroom footholds in religiously affiliated high schools and colleges.
An arts-forward sweep
Volume two, The Modern and Contemporary West, is authored by Allen Guelzo, an eminent Civil War specialist with a marked interest in religion, intellectual history, and classical music. His musical pages are vivid and opinionated. On Brahms, he writes: “Brahms could be ponderous and at times even tragic. But his second symphony shines serenely with a balance and ease worthy of a Mozart or a Haydn, and he could sometimes show a puckish sense of humor.” Of Tchaikovsky: “His long suit remained always the ballet. Even in his operas, it is the dances that stand out (especially the waltz and polonaise in Eugene Onegin and the Russian hopak from Mazeppa).” A three-page spread titled “Wagner, Brahms, and Tchaikovsky” pointedly tucks in a cameo of Dvorak as a “Romantic nationalist” beside America’s Charles Ives. Guelzo, for his part, is no friend of Wagner.
Bach, from devotion to design
The composer who draws Guelzo’s most sustained attention is Johann Sebastian Bach—he devotes eleven pages to him. He maps the interplay of secular and sacred currents that, in Bach, produced heightened forms of both kinds of music. Cross-referencing Italy’s Antonio Vivaldi (who receives three pages), he traces the emergence of Bach’s concertos and his sonatas and partitas for solo violin—concert works that, as the text notes, still astonish. Yet it is the religious Bach that most animates him. In the cantatas, Guelzo finds “two unmistakable Pietest characteristics” — “a deep awareness of sin” and “a desire for deep personal intimacy with Jesus Christ.” Writing of Ich habe genug, he offers: “In the cantata he wrote for February 2, 1727 . . . Bach set a text of exquisite bliss and resignation, echoing Simeon’s ‘Lord, now let our servant depart in peace.’’’ He singles out “one of the most beautiful vocal lines Bach ever wrote, of surpassing tenderness, on the words ‘Schlummert ein, ihr matten Augen.’”
Guelzo ultimately contends: “If Monteverdi and Vivaldi transformed Western music from an amateurish performance of servants, Bach transposed it into an art capable of carrying the highest emotional and spiritual messages and vaulted it over painting, sculpture, and architecture as the most potent and portable vehicle for Western personal expression.”
This scope comes at velocity, and it will be up to teachers to help portions of it take root. Whether today’s high school and collegiate History students can slow down enough to absorb a Bach cantata remains an open question. Even creating the chance to try, the book suggests, could strengthen the prospects for sustaining Western cultural memory.
Vía artsjournal.com
