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An Interview with Robert R. Reilly

Robert R. Reilly has pursued a most unusual career. He was the music critic for Crisis magazine for 16 years, and continues to review concerts and operas for Ionarts, an arts blog that covers the Washington, D.C. area and elsewhere. He has also written for such publications as High Fidelity, Musical America, and the American Record Guide.

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Review by Walter Simmons

As noted in the accompanying interview, the original edition of Robert R. Reilly’s Surprised by Beauty was published in 2002 by Morley Books. Its thesis was, essentially, that the dissolution of tonality in music that was promulgated around the turn of the 20th century, and the concomitant abandonment of traditional aesthetic values, corresponded to a breakdown of the centrality of spiritual order as understood and shared by most of Western civilization, and that this correspondence was no accident.

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Review by Sir Roger Scruton

Robert R. Reilly is an assiduous follower of modern music for the concert hall, and has for many years been a champion of beauty against noise and of tonality against the avant-garde. His reviews of recordings have been collected in a single volume – Surprised by Beauty – now reissued in an expanded edition by the author in association with Jens F. Laurson. The result is an indispensable guide to the forbidden land of real contemporary music.

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