DRACULA vs. JOHANN SEBASTIAN BACH No, the above title does not refer to an unaired episode of “Deadliest Warrior.” Rather, as the present author was reading the book “House of Learning,” a quotation from President Boyd K. Packer stood out: “The world grows increasingly noisy. Clothing and grooming and conduct are looser and sloppier and more disheveled. Raucous music, with obscene lyrics blasted through amplifiers while lights flash psychedelic colors, characterizes the drug culture. Variations of these things are gaining wide acceptance and influence over our youth. […] Irreverence suits the purposes of the adversary by obstructing the delicate channels of revelation in both mind and spirit.” This is assuredly true. Even at a young age, I recoiled from the discordant din of modern “music” — noise, really — with its raunchy lyrics and ugly dissonances, and recognized in it something hellish. President Packer is correct to state that it is a spiritually crippling force. However, it then follows that beautiful music (*classical* music) can, conversely, be a protective power against infernal elements, banishing evil as surely as the grating cacophony that passes for present-day tune-making banishes the spirit. As evidence for this, I offer the following commentary penned by columnist Theodore Dalrymple, which seems a fitting sentiment to share during the Hallowe’en season: “Staying recently in a South Yorkshire town called Rotherham—described in one guidebook as ‘murky,’ an inadequate word for the place—I was interested to read in the local newspaper how the proprietors of some stores are preventing hooligans from gathering outside to intimidate and rob customers. They play Bach over loudspeakers, and this disperses the youths in short order; they flee the way Count Dracula fled before holy water, garlic flowers, and crucifixes. “There is surely something deeply emblematic about the use of one of the great glories of Western civilization, the music of Bach, to prevent the young inheritors of that civilization from committing crimes. […] If proprietors all over the country follow Rotherham’s lead, therefore, we may hear much more Bach, and less rock music, than we did previously.” The modern world’s assaults on reverence may be steadily destroying European civilization, but the cultural glories that we have inherited from our ancestors, such as the music of Bach, can still (as our quorum president puts it) “destroy the demons.” Here is a video of the great German organist Karl Richter performing Bach’s most famous work, the Toccata and Fugue in D minor (a motif that is associated with haunted houses the world over): https://youtube/watch?v=3r1xhCjdZfI
Posted on: Thu, 23 Oct 2014 02:25:34 +0000
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