I am happy to share with readers of Rorate the announcement of my latest book, released today: Good Music, Sacred Music, and Silence: Three Gifts of God for Liturgy and for Life (TAN, 2023). This book—the fruit of decades of working as a church singer, choir director, composer, and teacher of music at the college level—is a heartfelt appeal to take the art of music as seriously as it deserves to be taken.
The first part deals with the corrosive cultural and psychological effects of a lot of modern popular music, contrasted with the numerous benefits of a lifelong apprenticeship to the great music of the Western tradition (including the many excellent composers working today). Here I draw upon such thinkers as Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, Pieper, and Ratzinger as well as years of interesting interactions with young people, whom I often guided through what might be called their “musical conversion.”