The Great War; a Cavalry officer negotiates a mined road
Recessional
Lo, all our pomp of yesterday
Is one with Nineveh and Tyre!
(Kipling)
For Stuart Millson, loss and decline inform Elgar’s music
The biographer Jerrold Northrop Moore remarks that if Elgar had died in his early thirties, his name today would only live on in specialist books about English music – his few, mainly choral works being given the occasional outing at provincial festivals. Elgar was 39 when his Norse saga, King Olaf, was written for a festival in North Staffordshire. His masterpiece, the Enigma Variations, championed by the great Wagnerian Hans Richter, would come three years later, in 1899.
Fortunately, Elgar lived a long life, drawing inspiration from many sources: the lanes and hills of Worcestershire, Herefordshire – and, in his Introduction & Allegro for strings, the coast of West Wales – and thirteen years later, the woodland and local legends of Sussex, in the Piano Quintet. Continue reading
Third Parties in Canada
Color Field, Mark Rothko, No 61 (Rust and Blue), 1953
Third Parties in Canada
Seasonal fare for anoraks, courtesy of MARK WEGIERSKI
“Third parties” are an endlessly fascinating topic of study. The notion arises in polities characterized by “first-past-the-post” voting systems, where there are usually only two major parties. Polities characterized by proportional representation (PR) voting systems tend to have a multiplicity of parties. Particular popular attention – although scant electoral support — is given to “third parties” in the U.S. – where the “two-party” system is so strongly entrenched. Since the 1850s, with the rise of the Republican Party, there have been two main parties in the U.S. – although both of them have undergone tremendous permutations. Since that time, there has never been a “third party” in U.S. politics which achieved the electoral breakthroughs that a considerable number of “third parties” have been able to do in Canada. Indeed, these “third parties” are sometimes not easily categorized as conventionally conservative or liberal. For example, the candidacies of both Ralph Nader (Green Party), and Pat Buchanan (Reform Party) in the 2000 U.S. Presidential election, had elements that were neither conventionally conservative, nor conventionally liberal. “Third parties” often amount to a salutary “shaking-up” of the political system – actually making it more truly populist. Continue reading →
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