Real Music: A Guide to the Timeless Hymns of the Church

Real Music by Anthony Esolen  (with accompanying CD of 18 hymns recorded by the St. Cecilia Choir of St. John Cantius Church in Chicago) is a comprehensive and delightful guide to the great traditional hymnody of the Church.  In an age when sacred hymns of the past have either been "modernized" or utterly rejected as irrelevant, Real Music restores to us to a treasure trove, the vast heritage of glorious sacred music for congregations and choirs.  In it, Professor Esolen masterfully illustrates how the traditional hymns combine elegant poetry with sound doctrine and music composed and arranged by great masters. With the Church and Her precepts under assault from all sides, we need now, perhaps more than ever before, to contemplate the beauty and truth that these fine hymns proclaim.

With noted literary scholar, poet, and translator Anthony Esolen as your guide and the St. Cecilia Choir as your muse, join the musical renaissance to recover and to restore to our churches the best that has been sung and played and prayed by Christians down through the ages.  Real Music is arranged by events in the life of our Lord and the seasons and Sacraments of the Church. Join Professor Esolen on a pilgrimage into the realm of glorious poetry and incomparable music, all written to bring Christians ever closer to the faith of our fathers and to the Author of our faith. 

Real Music is a book meant to be savored. Whether you read the book and listen to, or perhaps even sing along with, the CD at home in your favorite easy chair, or among friends in an informal class at your parish, Real Music will enrich your spiritual life with magnificent music through which we may all offer praise and honor to God.

Anthony Esolen is the author of over twenty-five books and over 600 articles in both scholarly and general interest journals.  A senior editor of Touchstone: A Journal of Mere Christianity, Esolen is known for his elegant essays on the faith and for his clear social commentaries.  His articles appear regularly in Touchstone, Crisis, First Things, Public Discourse, The Catholic Thing, Chronicles, and Magnificat.  An accomplished poet in his own right, Esolen is known for his widely acclaimed three-volume verse translation of Dante's Divine Comedy (Modern Library) and for his verse translation of Tasso's Jerusalem Delivered (Johns Hopkins).  His Ten Ways to Destroy the Imagination of Your Child  has been described as "a worthy successor to C.S. Lewis's The Abolition of Man."  And its sequel, Life Under Compulsion, has been called "essential reading for parents, educators, and anyone who is concerned to rescue children from the tedious and vacuous thing childhood has become." His recent books include Out of the Ashes: Rebuilding American Culture, Nostalgia: Going Home in a Homeless World, and, No Apologies: How Civilization Depends on the Strength of Men.

The grandson of Italian immigrants to America, Dr. Esolen was born and raised in the coal-mining country of Northeastern Pennsylvania. He received his B.A. from Princeton University, and his Ph. D. from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.  He is a professor of humanities and writer-in-residence at Magdalen College of the Liberal Arts in Warner, New Hampshire.