The Pursuit of Beauty with Matthew Wilkinson

Matthew Wilkinson
  • 5.0 (7)
  • MUSIC COMMENTARY

We explore topics such as classical music, Orthodox chant, Bach, Messiaen, architecture, symbolism, the philosophy of mind, aesthetics, and the general pursuit of Beauty.

  1. 2D AGO

    The Normandy Cantata and the Cost of Losing Beauty | Dr John Wykoff

    This is Part Two of my conversation with Dr. John Wykoff, composer and scholar. We continue a wide-ranging discussion on beauty, worship, church music, and the long-term consequences of losing aesthetic seriousness in the life of the church.Dr. Wykoff reflects on how churches came to measure success through efficiency, attendance, and growth, and why those metrics often displace formation, meaning, and truth. We explore why the familiar divide between traditional and contemporary worship fails to describe what is actually at stake, and how beauty does more than decorate belief. It shapes moral vision, memory, and responsibility over time.The conversation then turns toward composition and context. Dr. Wykoff speaks in depth about Out of This Darkness: A Normandy Cantata, his collaboration with poet Tony Silvestri and conductor Cameron LaBarr. We discuss text setting, musical form, acoustic space, and the importance of place and purpose in sacred music, even when that music is heard outside its original context.This episode will be of particular interest to church musicians, composers, conductors, clergy, and anyone concerned with sacred music, liturgy, theology, and culture. It is neither a polemic nor an exercise in nostalgia. It is a serious conversation about beauty, responsibility, and what is at risk when worship becomes detached from form and meaning.Dr. John Wykoff is an American composer whose choral and sacred works are widely performed and recorded. His music is published internationally and sung by leading ensembles in both concert and liturgical settings.

    1h 19m

  2. JAN 6

    The Gregorian Chant Interview (Biggest Myths Debunked) | Bruno de Labriolle

    Bruno de Labriolle (Ecole Gregorienne) joins Matthew Wilkinson on the Pursuit of Beauty Podcast to discuss the true history of Gregorian chant, the folk method of singing, ornamentation, relationship with Byzantium and Orthodoxy, singing with drones and instruments, and more.Bruno traces the “Gregorian chant” narrative to roughly around the year 750, when Pippin the Short seeks legitimacy and power in a shifting medieval world. The move toward a “Roman” sound is not just a devotional preference, but part of a larger realignment of kingship, empire, and ecclesiastical influence. One of the most striking moments: Pippin’s dissatisfaction with what later gets called Gallican chant, and his desire to replace it with “Roman song” as a symbol of legitimacy. Bruno explains how the Pope’s interests and Pippin’s interests converge, and why importing cantors becomes a cultural project with major musical consequences. But if chant is primarily oral, how do singers “learn something new,” especially after decades of singing by heart? Bruno describes how a singer can retain a text and broad melodic outline, yet still reshape the line through habitual gestures and local “savoir-faire,” even when everyone is trying to be faithful. This leads to the core claim: what we call Gregorian chant emerges as a cross-fertilization—a blending of an Old Roman repertoire framework with Gallican practices (including ornamentation and modal understanding). In other words, it is not simply “Rome imposing its music,” but an evolving synthesis driven by people, memory, and power. Over time, the irony deepens: Rome itself becomes a place where many different peoples sing many different musics, and eventually Old Roman chant is displaced by the more widespread “Gregorian” usage. Bruno even notes later efforts to enforce the new norm, including a tradition of suppressing older books as the center of gravity shifts. We also unpack why the Solesmes method became so dominant in modern imagination: a practical “vehicle” that lets almost anyone pick up a book and sing via simple note-values (rather than needing a specialist choirmaster). Bruno contrasts this with the semiological approach associated with figures like Dom Cardine, aimed at interpreting early neumes (not square notation) and what they imply musically. If you care about Gregorian chant performance practice, chant rhythm, neumes, and what “authenticity” can realistically mean, this conversation will reframe how you hear chant forever. Whether you sing in a schola, study medieval notation, or simply love sacred music, Bruno offers a rigorous, living way to think about tradition—rooted in history, but not trapped by modern myths.

    2h 45m

  3. 12/09/2025

    They Won’t Forgive You If They’re Mediocre | Allen Hightower on Building Beautiful Choirs

    This week on The Pursuit of Beauty I sit down with Dr. Allen Hightower, Director of Choral Studies at the University of North Texas, for an honest and deeply pastoral conversation about choirs, faith, and the people who stand in front of us every week and sing. We talk very candidly about the real problems choir directors and church musicians face: how to work with aging voices and the infamous “old lady wobble,” why volunteers will forgive almost anything except being in a mediocre choir, and how to make hard musical decisions without wounding the people you serve. Allen opens up about the role of the conductor as a pastoral presence, not just a technician, and what it means to love your choir enough to tell them the truth and still keep their dignity intact. From there we move into bigger questions about sacred music, text, and belief. Can you perform Bach’s passions with integrity if you do not actually believe what the text proclaims? What does it mean to teach and conduct explicitly Christian works in a secular university setting? Allen shares how he navigates these tensions at UNT, and why wrestling seriously with the words we sing is essential if the music is going to do the spiritual and human work it was written to do. We also explore the thorny question of singing music from other religious traditions, from Holst’s Hymns from the Rig Veda to Sufi and Hindu devotional repertoire. How should Christian musicians think about programming this music, and what responsibility do we have given the embarrassment of riches in our own tradition’s choral literature? If you are a choir director, a church musician, a choral singer, or simply someone who cares about the intersection of beauty, truth, and the people in your choir loft, this conversation is for you. In this episode: How to lead volunteers who desperately want to be good, without bullying them What to do with aging voices and the “old lady wobble” in a church choir Why singers will not forgive you if they or the choir are mediocre The conductor as pastor, not just time beater Teaching and performing explicitly Christian music in a secular university Can you sing sacred texts with integrity if you do not believe them Should Christians sing music from other religious traditions The spiritual vocation of choral music in a disenchanted age Allen Hightower, Matthew Wilkinson, choir, choral music, church music, sacred music, university choir, aging voices, old lady wobble, choral conducting, choral pedagogy, Bach, Rig Veda, faith and art, Christian music, UNT, Pursuit of Beauty podcast.

    2h 13m

  4. 12/02/2025

    Modern Art Is Collapsing: Jonathan Pageau & Andrew Gould on What Comes Next

    In this wide-ranging round table, architect Andrew Gould, icon carver and storyteller Jonathan Pageau, and host Matthew Wilkinson sit down over whiskey to wrestle with the future of beauty, sacred art, and architecture. We start with pirates and sea shanties, then quickly slide into Jackson Pollock, Rothko, oil slicks, marbled end-papers, and the problem of modern art hung in the wrong place. Andrew and Jonathan both argue that modernism is what happens when a long, rich tradition becomes fragmented and hyper-specialized. They compare Rothko’s color fields and Pollock’s rhythm to bark on a tree or the shimmering colors of an oil slick on water; there is a real beauty there, but it makes sense only when it is framed by more ordered and more meaningful.Andrew argues that the only real future of art lies in applied arts; things that serve a social purpose: church buildings, icons, interior decoration, good rooms, and good furniture. Oil paintings used to be “applied” in this way; they were made to hang in beautiful houses, to honor a patron, to decorate a dining room, to stand in as an “icon” of a king or bishop. Once painting is made only for galleries and commentary, it begins to eat itself. Jonathan pushes the conversation further and claims that liturgical art is the ultimate applied art. Icons, church architecture, and sacred music do not just distract you after work; they shape your life, your sense of honor, your memory, and your relationship to God and neighbor.From there, the three of you turn to cities, localism, and the built environment. Using Charleston as a case study, Andrew explains how historic districts, design review boards, and legal language originally intended to protect “historic styles” can be slowly re-interpreted to bless modernist glass boxes. You talk about shame, honor, and love; how a developer begins to think differently once he has to live in the town whose skyline he has altered, and how truly beautiful buildings quietly pressure people to dress differently, dine differently, and behave with greater dignity. Along the way, you touch on Greek islands that restrict ownership to locals, empty second homes in historic neighborhoods, and the way a truly beautiful room can transform a dinner party of ordinary college students into something solemn, joyful, and unforgettable.The discussion widens into the metaphysics of beauty and love. Drawing on the classical “transcendentals” of truth, goodness, and beauty, and a provocative list of “satanic transcendentals” such as fashion, sentimentality, and cruelty, you explore the difference between genuine love and mere infatuation. Fashion shocks; it trades in novelty and quickly becomes dated like shag carpet or yesterday’s architectural fad. Real beauty, by contrast, remains loveable across generations, which is why Baroque, Gothic, and classical buildings can be revived again and again, while certain “cutting edge” styles age badly within a decade. The same questions are applied to Orthodox iconography, mannerism, elongated figures, realism, Caravaggio and Rubens, and the danger of making saints look like glossy fashion models rather than members of the Kingdom.You hear concrete examples: Rublev’s Trinity as a bold yet deeply rooted innovation; Gothic portals where elongated saints grow up into the architecture like living columns; Father Silouan’s icons that quietly borrow from modern color theory and postmodern composition while remaining immediately venerable for a village grandmother; Russian attempts to integrate turn-of-the-century realism and Art Nouveau into church painting; and the tragic history of smoke-darkened Byzantine churches repeatedly repainted until the original brilliance vanished beneath cheap overpainting. We talk pirates and sea shanties, Pollock and Rothko, Rubens and Caravaggio, Charleston and Greek islands, Francis Bacon and Schiele, fashion and transcendence.

    1h 58m

  5. 11/23/2025

    The Hidden Escape Plan Inside "Wade in the Water" | Gullah Spirituals with Ann Caldwell

    n this episode of The Pursuit of Beauty, Matthew sits down with legendary Charleston vocalist and storyteller Ann Caldwell to uncover the hidden world of spirituals, Gullah culture, and the music of the enslaved. From “Wade in the Water” to “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot,” Ann explains how these songs often carried coded messages of escape, using biblical language, river imagery, and “chariots” to talk about the Underground Railroad, freedom, and survival when plain speech was impossible. Ann shares her own story as a Gullah-rooted artist raised in the Lowcountry of South Carolina, and opens a window into praise houses, ring shouts, and call and response worship that shaped the spiritual life of enslaved communities. She talks about how the Gullah language developed, why rhythm and movement are inseparable from the songs, and how spirituals hold together profound faith, doubt, lament, and hope all at once. The conversation also wrestles with honest questions about race, ownership, and performance. Can white choirs sing spirituals with integrity. What does it mean for predominantly white ensembles to perform music that was born in the suffering of enslaved Africans. How do we honor the people who created these songs while allowing the music to live, grow, and be heard by new generations. Ann answers with the disarming mix of humor, directness, and pastoral wisdom that has made her beloved throughout Charleston. Along the way you will hear about Mahalia Jackson, jazz arrangements of spirituals, the Society for the Preservation of Spirituals, and the way these songs continue to echo through Black church music, jazz, gospel, and American culture today. If you care about church music, spirituals, Gullah history, race, theology, or the story of the American South, this conversation will change the way you hear these songs forever.

    1h 7m

  6. 11/13/2025

    He Baptized Nina Simone, Befriended Bob Marley, and Founded Rap | Fr. Amde Hamilton

    In this long-form conversation, I sit down with Father Amde Hamilton, co-founder of The Watts Prophets, pioneering spoken word artist, and Ethiopian Orthodox priest. He tells the story of how a Creole childhood that intentionally formed poets and priests prepared him for militant poetry, the civil rights era, and what would later be recognized as some of the earliest roots of rap and hip hop. Father Amde describes his work in Watts at the beginning of the Crips and Bloods, and how gang members became his first congregation. He explains what it meant to pastor young men in crisis, to bring them into the Ethiopian Orthodox Church, and to build a parish that held together Jamaicans, African Americans, and Ethiopians in one community, even when some later broke away. It is a rare inside view of gang intervention, Black spirituality, and Orthodox Christian ministry in Los Angeles. We trace his spiritual journey from militant poetry to Rastafarianism, his first trip to Jamaica, and his encounter with the Ethiopian World Federation. From there, he meets Abba Mandefro/Archbishop Yesehaq, is rebaptized, and is entrusted with a letter authorizing him to raise money and help start one of the first Ethiopian Orthodox parishes in Los Angeles. He shares how he studied across traditions, attending Armenian and Coptic churches while traveling back and forth to Jamaica to deepen his understanding of the ancient faith. The conversation moves into music history. Father Amde tells how he met Bob Marley, how he performed the poem “Wisdom and Knowledge” in Marley’s studio, and how that same poem was later delivered at Bob Marley’s funeral. He talks about their shared role in the youth work of the church, the plans they had to record together, and how those plans were cut short by Marley’s illness and death. These stories illuminate the spiritual side of Marley’s circle that most music documentaries never really address. He also recounts the extraordinary story of Nina Simone. When Simone was being held in a psychiatric ward and facing a long-term commitment, Father Amde fought his way in as clergy, advocated for her in the hearing, and eventually brought her into his own home, where she lived with his family for over two months before returning to work. He describes how she encountered the Ethiopian Orthodox tradition, how she was baptized, and how the beauty of the service and the presence of the Holy Spirit transformed her. From there we widen out to questions of rap, language, and culture. Father Amde reflects on the real meaning of “rap” as a regional, ever-evolving Black vernacular, the role of code language in slavery, and how mainstream music distorted something that began as a way of thinking and speaking. He talks about reaching skinheads, trailer-park audiences, and church people alike, about the ongoing struggle for racial reconciliation, and about seeing the image of Christ even in killers and gang-bangers. Finally, we address the present moment. Father Amde speaks about social engineering after the Watts riots, the rise of the internet, spiritual warfare, and what he sees as a global battle between good and evil that will involve much more suffering before it is resolved. For listeners interested in Orthodox Christianity, Black poetry, hip hop history, Bob Marley, Nina Simone, or the meeting point of art, faith, and race in America, this is a rare and deeply moving testimony from a man who has lived through it all.

    51 min

  7. 11/04/2025

    God is Beauty, but we don't know what that means |David Bentley Hart Interview

    Gratitude: I must express a sense real gratitude for David Bentley Hart coming onto the podcast. His books have indeed changed my life. The Atheist Delusions settled so many historical and theological questions that would constantly nag at my faith, and the Experience of God: Being, Consciousness, Bliss, that truly saved my faith. After reading that book, Atheism seemed so philosophically inept that it became patently absurd to doubt the existence of God as such. The Doors of the Sea was an incredible meditation upon the question of suffering, or theodicy, and his book on Christian history is both thorough and enticing. His essays have often challenged me, and I truly believe that “The Beauty of the Infinite” is one of the most important theological texts written for today. More so than almost any other, it tackles the questions raised by the postmodern philosophers, and excoriates them while nonetheless taking their arguments on their own terms. He demonstrates a complete mastery over the works of Nietzsche, Derrida, Deluxe, Guitarri, Levinas, etc. while being firmly grounded in an Orthodox patristic worldview, heavily influenced by Gregory of Nyssa and Maximus the Confessor. In this episode of The Pursuit of Beauty, theologian and philosopher David Bentley Hart joins Matthew Wilkinson to ask one of the oldest and most dangerous questions in the human story: what is beauty — and what happens when we lose it? What follows is not a polite academic exchange but a wide-ranging meditation on love, truth, art, and the presence of God in a disenchanted world.Hart begins by tracing the ancient idea that beauty, truth, and goodness are not separate virtues but one radiant reality — different ways of touching the same mystery. He explains that every genuine encounter with beauty is also an encounter with love and with being itself, and that the more deeply one pursues any of these transcendentals, the more they converge. Beauty, he argues, is not decoration on the surface of reality but the way reality discloses its own perfection.From there, the conversation turns to the modern world’s forgetfulness of beauty. Hart reflects on how contemporary art and culture often mistake novelty for vision, or transgression for depth. Drawing on examples from music and painting, he describes what happens when art loses its center in love — when creativity becomes an exercise in irony rather than an act of reverence. The result, he says, is not freedom but exhaustion: a civilization that can no longer recognize its own soul.Yet Hart is no pessimist. He insists that beauty still breaks through the ruins, that every authentic work of art — from Bach to Messiaen, from an icon to a poem — is an act of love made visible. Even when beauty wounds or overwhelms us, it does so because it reveals something truer than comfort: the longing for what we were made to behold. To experience beauty is to be called beyond oneself, toward the source of all being.At the heart of the interview lies Hart’s startling claim that “God is the beautiful, God is love — these all refer to the same simple reality.” In that single sentence, metaphysics becomes devotion. Beauty is not merely a sign of the divine; it is the divine made perceptible. Love and art, when they are genuine, participate in that same reality, bearing witness to the truth that creation itself is an act of aesthetic generosity.Matthew and Hart also explore the paradox of beauty and suffering — how the cross, the moment of supreme ugliness, becomes the revelation of perfect beauty. They ask whether our capacity to see the beautiful in what is broken might be the surest test of spiritual vision. Beauty, Hart suggests, does not flee from darkness; it transfigures it.The conversation closes with a vision both humbling and hopeful: a call to recover the contemplative gaze, to look at the world again as something loved into being.

    2h 7m

  8. 10/31/2025

    If I were the devil, I’d start destroy beauty first - John Wykoff

    “If I were the devil, I’d start by destroying beauty.”Composer Dr. John Wykoff joins Matthew Wilkinson on The Pursuit of Beauty Podcast for a rare, soul-stirring conversation about what beauty really is, why it matters, and how its loss is reshaping our civilization. In this wide-ranging dialogue, the two explore the deep relationship between aesthetics, ethics, and faith—and how recovering a sense of beauty could be the key to restoring both art and culture.Beauty, truth, and goodness have been intertwined for centuries, but in the modern world they’ve been pulled apart. Wykoff argues that when we relativize beauty, we eventually relativize morality itself. He explains why the decline of aesthetic judgment leads to moral confusion, how postmodernism flattened the hierarchy of values, and why artists and believers alike must learn again to “love what they create” rather than innovate for innovation’s sake. This is not an abstract discussion—it’s a diagnosis of our cultural sickness and a roadmap toward renewal.Drawing on the legacy of Alice Parker, Arvo Pärt, and Wendell Berry, Wykoff reveals how genuine art begins in love and humility. “Don’t arrange it if you don’t love it,” he says. “Start with love.” From his reflections on choral arranging and sacred song to his critique of technology’s impact on music, Wykoff calls artists to return to the human, the communal, and the incarnational. Beauty, he suggests, isn’t luxury—it’s spiritual warfare.Together, Wilkinson and Wykoff trace the collapse of beauty in modern art, the spiritual implications of digital sound, and the metaphysical truth hidden inside musical form. They discuss postmodernism, hierarchy, counterpoint, theology, philosophy of art, and the moral imagination—all through the lens of a Christian composer who writes fugues “before breakfast” to discipline his soul. What emerges is a vision of beauty as participation in divine order, where every note and brushstroke becomes an act of love.If you’ve ever felt that something sacred has gone missing from culture, this conversation will name what you’ve sensed. It’s a meditation on how art can heal the soul and how beauty leads us back to God. video at end courtesy of Missouri State University Chorale https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t0_fk_s7eCs Performed by the Missouri State University Men's Chorus at Juanita K. Hammons Hall for the Performing Arts in Springfield, MO on March 6, 2018.Missouri State University Men's Chorus - Cameron F. LaBarr, conductor“Gone Home”arr. John WykoffSoloist: Giovanni Hernandez, baritonePiano: Parker PayneVideo Production by Blake Richter Productions www.blakerichterproductions.comAudio Production by Darcy Stephens

    1h 39m
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We explore topics such as classical music, Orthodox chant, Bach, Messiaen, architecture, symbolism, the philosophy of mind, aesthetics, and the general pursuit of Beauty.

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