Terry Teachout is talking about opera.

Rarely, though, has a slogan puzzled me more than the one I saw on a Baltimore billboard a couple of weeks ago. It’s the motto of the Baltimore Opera Company: Opera. It’s better than you think. It has to be. I’m not averse on principle to self-deprecation, but why on earth does the BOC think that running down opera will induce people to change their minds about it?

The Pennsylvania Ballet will be performing The Messiah in dance March 5-9. The ballet has been well-received for several years. “Weiss says Carolina’s performances were sold out for five years running, and a 2003 concert in Hungary played to overwhelmingly enthusiastic crowds,” reports Susan Lewis.

Actually it’s not all that cold. About 20° F today. I’ve seen it a whole lot worse than this.

What’s got the whole state (nay, the whole region) bloodhound-faced today is the knowledge that tomorrow will be colder, and the day after that colder still, and on and on through the end of the week. I haven’t looked at the forecast past Sunday. I suspect the Monday one will say, “Supercooled through the afternoon; heat death of the universe after sunset.”

Yet we survive. We persevere. That’s what makes us better than you.



Here’s an article by Uwe Siemon-Netto, from Paul McCain’s blog Cyberbrethren, about the odd (though welcome) phenomenon of Asians converting to Christianity through the music of J. S. Bach.

I would have never expected this. I’ve always seen music as essentially non-propositional, unsuited to changing people’s minds, except by means of the lyrics.

But Bach’s music has no lyrics. It’s just very fine, intricate music on which the composer has written (at the end of every piece), “Soli Deo Gloria” (To God alone be the glory). And the testimony of an artistic job so brilliantly done seems to have an evangelistic appeal.

I suppose I shouldn’t be as surprised as I am. It actually harmonizes well with some things I’ve been thinking for a while. I’m just always surprised to be right… or anything in the neighborhood of right.

Back in the misty years of the 1970s, when I was touring with the Christian musical group for which I was lyricist, a guy came to talk to us after a concert. He said he was a follower of Francis Schaeffer, and I thought, “Great. We’ll be friends.” But he wasn’t interested in being friends.

His reading of Schaeffer had convinced him that the gospel was about reason—reason and nothing else. In evangelism, no appeal should be made to anything but the “law of non-contradiction.” Because our songs appealed to feelings as well as reason, he informed us that we were heretics and tools of the devil. I suppose he’d hoped for syllogisms in song.

I hadn’t thought the whole thing out at that point (still haven’t, for that matter), but I think I argued that, although reason is important and much neglected, it’s not the only thing.

As the years have passed, I’ve grown more convinced I was correct. Schaeffer concentrated on reason in his books because that’s the element that’s being most neglected in theology and apologetics today. But if you read those books and pay attention to more than just creating bullet points, you’ll see that he talks about the importance of love and relationships and beauty, too. His book The Mark of a Christian was not about logic, but about love.

This is entirely consistent with essential Christian theology. We believe in the Incarnation. “The Word became flesh.” (John 1:14) It’s as heretical to neglect the soft, subjective side of our lives as to neglect the rigorous, rational side.

Which is why the Lord can even call souls to Himself through music.

Hey! Maybe He could use novels too!

The Dallas Symphony Orchestra’s five-program Beethoven Festival, which took place over five weekends, was a hit. Two programs sold out.

The Sissel concert on PBS last night was great. It was filmed in the picturesque Norwegian town of Røros in wintertime, the music itself performed in a historic church there. Very classy and reverent, I thought. And, needless to say, The Greatest Voice in the World soared through the pure, arctic air, delivering beauty like an angelic UPS truck. Or something.

My only unhappiness concerned Sissel’s hair. As is so often the case.

I care about women’s hair. It has something to do with an experience I had once, which it would be lugubrious to recount now (I suspect I’ve already told the story in this space, or on the old site, anyway). But I’ve always had strong opinions on women’s hair.

If you look at pictures of Sissel in the early stages of her career, you’ll see a lovely young girl with long, thick, honey-colored hair. That’s how she looked when I first became a fan, and that’s the image I imprinted on.

But it all changed around the time of the Winter Olympics in Norway in 1994. There she appeared, suddenly, and to the great shock of most, at the opening ceremonies with short, dark hair. Her hairstyle has changed constantly in the years since, but has generally been more or less that sort of thing.

Since her marriage broke up she seems to have grown it out a little, but for the concert she appeared in some kind of avant-garde coiffure that looked both oily and swirly. It was not becoming, in the eyes of this obsessive fan.

Why do women do this? I don’t know a lot about women, it goes without saying, but I’m pretty sure they tend to be more insecure about how they look than men are. That being true, why do they consistently put themselves in the hands of hairdressers of ambiguous gender, and trust them when they say, “Oh, darling, we’ll just streak your hair with purple, and lacquer it, and make it stand out straight from the left side of your skull so you look like a character from Anime! You’ll look divine!”

Any man can easily tell you what we want in a woman’s hair. Like most things about men, it’s very simple: “Long. Grow it as long as you can. Never cut it. Split ends? What are those? Dry, fly-away hair? Who cares?”

Show me a woman who wears her hair extremely long, and I’ll show you a woman who understands men deeply.

Of course a woman who wears her hair extremely short probably understands men deeply too.

Which sort is wiser, I’m not qualified to say.