The Artistic and Intellectual Temperaments : The Theology Pugcast Episode 305

In this episode, the Pugs use an article from The Imaginative Conservative called “The Artistic and Intellectual Temperaments” by Michael De Sapio as a jumping off point to discuss art, intellectual life, and the connections and disconnections between the two. The guys discuss medieval and Renaissance art, modern art, Romanticism, poetry, intellectual life and academia, and roller skating down the Gugenheim.
Article: theimaginative...
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The Theology Pugcast is a ministry of Trinity Reformed Church in Huntsville Alabama. To view more media from TRC, visit their website: trinityreforme...

[@brianmiller3287]

Love your content! Please keep it up!!!

[@zafi3054]

Sabin Howard would be a great guest on this topic.

[@erichornbuckle6208]

I think it was Malcolm Guite who said that a poet takes the things that we only glimpse on our peripheral vision (those things that have meaning and such) and are able to hold them fast in front of our eyes so we can finally see them for what they are. I like that.

[@matthewfritts3838]

That house was signed by a craftsman to be seen and appreciated by another craftsman. Approved workmen need not be ashamed

[@MOOREENGAGING]

In The House of Intellect, Barzun makes a distinction between being intelligent and an intellectual. Intelligence is our native mental capacity while being an intellectual is how much we use our native IQ. So, intelligent people may not steward their smarts very well and so are not intellectuals. Those with average IQs who are drawing on all of it are intellectuals. In one very real sense, all Christians should therefore be intellectuals. We should want to use all the mental capacity we have to God's glory.

[@mrwiggiewoo]

Great explanation of the distinction .

[@johnbrowne9950]

...and the difference between an artiste and artisan, which the housebuilder was!

[@rosefortheKing]

...I can't help but think of Jordan Peterson... personally I think he falls closer to 'scholar...' :) but I could be wrong about that...

[@bobtaylor170]

I'm saddened to hear the by now expected denunciation of British Isles music when compared with the music transmogrified by exposure to black music in colonial and post colonial Anerica. Your view is belied by the songs themselves, which Jean Ritchie was the great American exponent of in the last century. Listen to her recordings. The thing is that the songs she sang had been changed, probably quite a bit, by the time she came to record them, but they'd been changed by other hillbillies over a two or three hundred year period. And the "Barbara Allen" sung in one county would probably be different from the "Barbara Allen" sung three counties over. "Borrowing" and incorporation was not only not seen as plagiarism, it was expected. If you know Dylan's work, you know that the beginning of "A Hard Rain's A - Gonna Fall" is identical to the beginning of an old Celtic ballad.
There is an absorbing book about the influence of British Isles music on the development of American folk and country and mountain music, Greil Marcus' "The Old, Weird America." I can't recommend this book more enthusiastically to those who are curious about these songs and about their influence on Bob Dylan, especially in his recording of The Basement Tapes.
Only a dope would deny the glories which black sensibilities and creativity brought to American music, but Richard Sudhalter's 1,000 page magnum opus, "Lost Chords," proves that jazz did not originate among blacks, but among predominantly black musicians who had constant interaction with white and mixed race musicians in the New Orkeans area. The mid 19th century New Orleans native, Louis Moreau Gottschalk, wrote music which fascinates me. Gottschalk was Jewish, and there are eerie moments in his work which are auguries of eventual jazz. ( In some of the work of the Baroque Era English composer, William Byrd, you can hear chord combinations which you recognize would appear three centuries later in some of The Beatles' songs. )
As I noted earlier, only an intellectual and aesthetic sadsack would deny the glories which black geniuses brought to American music, but Sudhalter's extraordinary book is filled with surprises. A lot of people who think themselves proficient in the knowledge of jazz history, one of them being a seminary professor who several years ago wrote a much lauded, wretchedly bad book about the development of jazz, take it for granted that as the old line goes, jazz was the black man's music until the white man stole it. Sudhalter died in 2008, and may not have known that here and there musicologists were beginning to speculate that even New Orleans jazz songs owed as much if not more to those British Isles folk songs as they did to black African folk music.
Cross pollination - cultural appropriation on all sides - made jazz possible.
Here's a fascinating surprise which Sudhalter's book delves into: when the New Orleans area musicians started to migrate after World War I., yes, they did end up in Chicago, but not until about 1924. They played throughout the Midwest. Indiana was actually a little ahead of Chicago, and in Indiana, there were two loci: the Bloomington area, and the Dunes, as we denizens refer to the Indiana beaches just off Lake Michigan. Great early white jazz musicians such as Bix Beiderbecke, Pee Wee Russell, and Jack Teagarden used to be the summer entertainment at resorts such as Hudson Lakes. Bix Beiderbecke was interviewed by South Bend radio station WSBT in 1924. Among the avid fans who came to hear Beiderbecke et al were high school kids from Chicago: Bud Freeman, Benny Goodman, Dave Tough, ad gloriam.
Almost any recording of great early jazz musicians who were black, such as Louis Armstrong, Earl Hines, and Jelly Roll Morton, will be listed as having been recorded in Chicago. In fact, most if not all of this work was recorded at Gennett Studios, in Richmond, IN, which is in southeast Indiana. Their trips to and from were nerve wracking for these great men because of the flourishing of the Ku Klux Klan in mid twenties Indiana.
And the beat goes on.

[@thejeffhowe]

re: poetry. I have run into too many people who say they don't understand what is being said by the poem. They prefer Hallmark card poetry and that is what our culture has become. You know the phrase - if it's from the heart, it's art. smh

[@stellifriends7785]

Hans Rookmaaker; "modern art and the death of a culture". it is nonsense; the emperor has no clothes; it is nihilistic. Proverbs 8:35-36
For whoever finds me finds life
and obtains favour from the LORD,
but he who fails to find me injures himself;
all who hate me love death.” (ESV)