Free Republic

Classical architecture is not a partisan issue. President Thomas Jefferson, founder of the Democratic Party, was an enthusiastic champion of the Greek Revivalism thankfully still visible in both the capital and his Monticello home. When he designed the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, he took great care in the landscaping and architecture, knowing their likely effects on generations of young minds. Fifty years later, President Abraham Lincoln insisted that construction of the Washington Monument and U.S. Capitol continue despite the bloody and costly war taking place sometimes just 50 miles from the seat of government. Public beauty in civic buildings,...

    Tastes and interests change in literature. Different themes, different styles, indeed whole different genres come in and out of being depending on the spirit of the age.     Nevertheless, there is something to be said for a “classical” style—not in a restricted sense as the style of Greco-Roman antiquity, nor any later genre which took inspiration from it—but rather a super-cultural literary style that rises up above its own genre and belongs as much to the ages as its own time period.     This is the old concept of the “Republic of Letters”—a community not of time and space...

The following is a miniplay which emphasizes the central conflicts in today's aesthetics, and academia, focusing on the realm of music to carry its message: Characters: DR. PATRICK SILK, 51, professor and director of musical composition at Princeharvnell University. ATHENA MILTON, 19, student and amateur composer at Princeharvnell University. Setting: An early April evening in 2005, within the hundred-year-old office of PROFESSOR SILK, lined with wall panels and furniture of a finely carved but faded dark wood. An equally antique grand piano, having been turned into a condition of ideal sound, stands in the center of the room, alongside a...