As a wine professional and classically trained musician, I’ve always wanted to know if wine was important in the lives of the great composers. Did Bach, Mozart, or Beethoven enjoy wine daily? Did they keep a cellar? Did they write about the wines they drank? I’ve never been able to find much about the subject of wine and composers – until now. Enter friend and colleague Ron Merlino. Ron is owner and manager of MusicVine Performing Arts and Wine Consulting. Since 2009, he’s managed a roster of internationally renowned orchestral conductors including Sir Andre Previn, Gerard Schwarz, Andrew Litt ..read more

EDITOR’S NOTE: This essay is reprinted with gracious permission from National Review, who commissioned the piece through us and originally published it in January 2016. The observation is often made that political conservatives do not have anything much to say about the arts, either believing, with the libertarians, that in this matter people should be free to do as they please, or else fearing, like the traditionalists, that a policy for the arts will always be captured by the Left and turned into an assault on our inherited values. Of course, there is truth in both those responses; bu ..read more

EDITOR’S NOTE: This essay is reprinted with gracious permission from Standpoint Magazine, where it was originally published in June 2011. I am not actually a child of the Sixties, although I almost was. Born in July 1959, I had a fairly contented, provincial Scottish boyhood when all the strange social convulsions were going on elsewhere. You needed to be a fully-fledged urban teenager or twenty-something brat in that decade to be fully touched and muddled by all its shenanigans. I reached my own personal brat-hood round about 1976 and I stayed that way till my first child arrived in 19 ..read more

Sir Roger Scruton’s essays for FSI are published by the gracious support of Alfred S. Regnery. I recently acquired a CD of music for piano duo by Jeremy Menuhin, son of Yehudi, the great violinist and cultural icon. The CD, issued by Genuin classics, Leipzig, is entitled The Voice of Rebellion. But the rebellion is not the usual one, against the rules and strictures of an authoritarian past. For the last fifty years or so the posture of rebellion against tradition, authority, hierarchy and knowledge has become an orthodoxy in the media and the academic world, and the anti-establishment hero ha ..read more

EDITOR’S NOTE: This essay is published here with the gracious permission of The Imaginative Conservative who published it in November 2012 with permission from The St. John’s Review (Volume 35, No. 2, 1984). The part of the title of this talk which I asked to have announced is “The Roots of Modernity.” But there is a second part which I wanted to tell you myself. The full title is: “The Roots of Modernity in Perversions of Christianity.” The reason I wanted to tell you myself is that it is a risky title, which might be easily misunderstood, especially since “perversion” is strong l ..read more

EDITOR’S NOTE: This essay is reprinted with gracious permission from Standpoint Magazine, where it was originally published in October 2011. As a composer I have been affected by political considerations and developments over time, and in a range of different ways. Also, I seem to be a part of a huge international community of composers, past and present, that has been drawn towards folk music as a way of developing new, individual musical languages and palettes. There has been a long history of the politics of traditional music affecting the aspirations and inspirations of composers. I ..read more

We are really very excited to be holding in our hands the first book that represents the fruit of our labors. Sir Roger’s newest volume, published by Bloomsbury, is called Music as an Art and is born not only of his long and studied thought on the subject – which of course made Sir Roger our first choice for a fellow of the Future Symphony Institute – but also of his inspiration and collaboration with FSI, for which we are grateful to be generously acknowledged in the author’s introduction. It is an important book and one we’ve long argued for because it brings to the consideration of mus ..read more

Once upon a time – but whether in the time past or time to come, is a matter of little or no moment – this wide world had become so overburdened with an accumulation of worn-out trumpery, that the inhabitants determined to rid themselves of it by a general bonfire. The site fixed upon, at the representation of the Insurance Companies, and as being as central a spot as any other on the globe, was one of the broadest prairies of the West, where no human habitation would be endangered by the flames, and where a vast assemblage of spectators might commodiously admire the show. Having a taste for s ..read more

My first real job playing trumpet was in a Mexican orchestra, high up in the mountains beyond Mexico City, under the snow capped peaks in Toluca. What a blast! I thought I had died and gone to heaven. I say it was my first real job because it offered me for the first time a great monthly salary, at least given the low cost of living down there. And it even paid everyone for a 13th month – you know, for Christmas expenses. I did not, however, get my own locker. (That would have to wait until my next job.) But then nobody did: we were expected to show up dressed in our tails – outfits that nobod ..read more

It is our great pleasure to announce that Dhiru Thadani has accepted our invitation to join the board of our fledgling Institute. But the truth is that he has been a hard-hitting advocate and champion of our work – as well as an inspiration and our generous teacher – for many years now. We look forward to bringing you his eye-opening presentation from our Seaside Symposium just as soon as we have finished editing the film and preparing the transcript. He will make you look at the way we situate our concert halls in our communities – or lack of them – in a way that will just about blow your min ..read more