The problem, as I see it, is that technical innovation is not an aesthetic principle. Simply not. And neither is the idea of music written to a political agenda such as environmentalism or gender equality. Aesthetics are aesthetics. But not necessarily "aesthetics" as defined by the 18th century philosophers who brought the term into general use.
I don't usually think of myself as a multiculturalist, but it turns out I might be. My search for a better aesthetic foundation has led me to the principles of Chinese and Japanese painting and woodcuts, to the Poetics of Aristotle and recently, to the aesthetics of Thomas Aquinas. That might be a promising avenue because it links us to the earlier aesthetic practices of Western music. I notice that, according the Wikpedia article on Arvo Pärt:
When early works were banned by Soviet censors, Pärt entered the first of several periods of contemplative silence, during which he studied choral music from the 14th to 16th centuries.
The spirit of early European Polyphony informed the composition of Pärt's transitional Third Symphony (1971); thereafter he immersed himself in early music, reinvestigating the roots of Western music. He studied plainsong, Gregorian chant and the emergence of polyphony in the European Renaissance.We may actually have to re-engage with the concept of Beauty, one of the transcendentals of the ancient Greeks and the Medieval philosophers. It's funny, the idea of Beauty, even when not capitalized, seems to be among the most terrifying to contemporary artists. It is associated with kitsch and shallow sentiment. However, for millennia, beauty was not only respectable, it was a cherished ideal. How odd that we chose to dismiss it. Of course the challenge is to create beauty without creating derivative, sentimental kitsch. But that is pretty much the eternal challenge of art anyway.
This is Tabula Rasa by Arvo Pärt:
7 comments:
I think the last serious exploration of the concept of beauty was Santayana's The Sense of Beauty. It's been 20 years since I last read it but I think he argued that beauty was the result of aesthetic criticism, not simply aesthetics. obviously the criticism is implicit and informal in most people, representing a sort of immediate judgment. But the arguments Santayana made didn't involve music or literature in the act of experiencing them but centered more on visual objects and mental concepts or images.
I think it's difficult to apply a concept of beauty to a temporally extended experience like reading or listening to music. Once listening or reading are over and we form a mental image of the complete work as an mental object, then we consider whether or not it's beautiful. But I think such judgments are less visceral and more variable than perceived beauty in a single visual object or scene.
For myself I think it would be healthier and more realistic for creative artists to first aim at interest and entertainment- what in the past was called delight. The sense of beauty is more the judgment of the audience than an artistic factor to be manipulated by the artist in creating a work. But works that are really interesting we might call profound and those that are really entertaining we might find beautiful on certain occasions.
Maury, you always have such substantial comments! I will have to have a look at Santayana, whom I have never read.
For Aquinas, beauty has to do with form, proportion and clarity.
Aquinas was a theologian and following the Greek philosophers so his ideal of beauty would tend to the mathematical. Since people find perfect symmetry a bit disturbing, whether in visual or auditory form, I would have to say beauty really can't be reduced to mathematics. FWIW Santayana said it was irrational.
Maybe when I am done with my break from blogging I'll have to drag in Augustine's treatise. I'm halfway through it now and I have to say that so far it's both more boring and more fascinating than I'd been led to believe by people who have sounded off about it without very accurately describing what's going on in the work (whether Hindemith half a century ago or Ted Gioia more recently). At the risk of stating the obvious, since Augustine started the project before his conversion and never finished it, we can't exactly make a simple judgment on one third of a never-finished treatise on music that only dealt with rhythm and poetic rhythm as a precursor to the never-finished sections on melody and harmonics. Literally nobody I've read who deigned to comment on Augustine's treatise ever mentioned these details and they are important for understanding what Augustine did and didn't get around to saying.
But, as I was noting earlier, I'm on a break from blogging and I haven't decided how long that break will be. Ragtime and Sonata Forms was a pretty intensive project. I may get back to blogging later this month or in June.
Meanwhile, reading about aesthetics here has been fun.
Maury, George Rochberg noted in a giant survey of Western music history that he was working on when he died (that has since been published posthumously as A Dance of Polar Opposites) that there's a trend in the West going back centuries in which there's a pendulum swing from asymmetrical pitch organization (tonality) to symmetrical pitch systems (the dorian mode is a symmetrical system, for instance) and that advocates of assymetrical and symmetrical pitch systems tend to regard the alternative as ugly or bad when a larger-scale view of Western music history suggests, to Rochberg, that these two tendencies are observable as being part of a larger pattern.
While perfect symmetry is creepy looking, near symmetry seems to be considered beautiful. One of my family members pointed out that models who have been considered legendarily pretty have near but not perfect symmetry in their facial features.
The Hatchet: yes asymmetry is preferred if it is slight but it is preferred. So that was my point about the difficulty in reducing beauty to mathematical description. It's the difference between the 5th and the tritone. Slight but quite noticeable. And the degree of preferred asymmetry will vary case by case. Something else to ponder: symmetry breaking at the subatomic level is what makes our universe what it is. We would not be here with perfect atomic/particle symmetry but it is mostly symmetric.
Thanks to you all for some stimulating ideas. I have pursued this a bit in today's post, though from a different angle.
Eco quotes Augustine and many others in his book on Aquinas. These included the theologian/philosopher with my favorite name in the history of philosophy: Robert Grosseteste! Obviously someone who wasn't afraid to take an unpopular stand.
Yes, there was a huge swing from the asymmetry of the major and minor scales to the symmetry of the octatonic and whole tone scales which happened from the late 19th century well into the 20th century. Bartók also used a symmetrical division of the octave and a lot of the 12-tone series of Webern used symmetrical patterns, not to mention the hexachordal combinatoriality of Schoenberg.
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