We live in a very confused and profoundly hypocritical time in which nobody seems to be clear about anything. So sometimes it is a very good policy to look back at the foundation of civilization to see what was thought then. Of course that means Plato or Aristotle. For Aristotle beauty was essentially "harmonious order." These days we seem fixated on the idea that "beauty is in the eye of the beholder" or "beauty is subjective." But of course, "harmonious order" is not subjective and while it is perceived by someone it is not in that someone. Beauty is not subjective. It is objective. Harmonious order.
Of course what constitutes harmonious order is intricate, complicated, viewed differently at different times in history and involved with what is trying to be expressed, not to mention its relationship with the Good and the True. So what might seem simple is actually not. But Beauty is definitely not ugly, bad or some kind of lie. I suppose it is unnecessary to point out that current aesthetic practice is antithetical to beauty which is unfortunate because it means that instead of being surrounded by beauty in our daily lives, we are surrounded by ugliness.
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| Sculpture at Trafalgar Square |
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| Obama Presidential Center |
We seem to have completely lost any intuitive aesthetic sense.
3 comments:
Roger Scruton's The Aesthetics of Architecture briefly waded into the idea that there are buildings that can look good in their own right that don't mesh with the buildings against which they are juxtaposed. Scruton also floated the idea that there is a kind of face to architecture. It can read in a pedestrian way as windows are eyes and doorways are mouths, and that glass boxes seem inhuman because of a kind of quasi-Jungian failure to emulate the human within human dwellings.
But even Scruton took as given the idea that of the traditional triad of the good, the true and the beautiful that the beautiful is most subject and least necessary for a functional society or culture.
I am reminded, apropos of houses and context, I had a teacher of Spanish who said that when you see that one neon orange house in a Seattle neighborhood it tells you that Spanish-speakers live there and that while it looks ghastly within Seattle, if you were to see a whole neighborhood of neon orange and canary yellow and teal houses across the street it actually is beautiful. With Seattle streets you can see row after row of beige and cream or dark mossy green houses and the canary yellow house sticks out like a sore thumb.
I have a proposal, that the problem we're facing is not necessarily a rejection of beauty. We may be looking at a crisis of the aesthetics of pastiche. We know there are multiple self-contained and viable artistic styles but within highbrow pastiche is often less successful than pastiche in lowbrow. When George Rochberg juxtaposed post-Schoenbergian atonality with late Beethoven throwback writing in his later string quartets they were greeted with contempt at a critical level. Rochberg's pastiche was a daring experiment in the 1970s but they have not stuck for a lot of listeners. Stevie Wonder's "Living for the City" still holds up for me half a century later but his use of code-switching from an implicit circle-of-fifths blues tonality to the octatonicism of the famous tag passage works more effectively because the gesture of the blue third allowed for a seamless shift across methods of pitch organization. Rochberg's change-up from full atonality to late Beethoven romanticism was a pastiche that may have been true to the polystylistic state of his time and place but overdid the contrast via juxtaposition.
Conversely, Ben Johnston's String Quartet No. 4 was a set of variations on Amazing Grace and I think it holds up because even when Johnston introduced a new tuning system in each variation his bedrock was the American folk hymn, which allowed for cohesion across steadily shifting tuning systems within the work.
James P Johnson's Harlem Symphony might be too American an example but I think his stride symphony works because he took his own style and found a way to get it to work within what could be described as a very Haydnesque set of forms.
These kinds of juxtapositions seem to be far easier to pull off for musicians than for architects because a single composer doesn't necessarily have to deal with a city committee.
The "aesthetics of pastiche" is something I have devoted no thought to at all. But it is an interesting point and one worth looking into. I suppose I think of pastiche as something of a lesser aesthetic practice possibly related to post-modernism.
A lot depends on what pastiche is and what it is applied to. Contemporary pastiche that juxtaposes styles and forms can be a reflection of a sense of crisis that there is no History of Music within which to chart the "progress" of the arts. Or it could be something kind of goofy like juxtaposing big band and 1970s ELO a la the shlocky film Zanadu (which has the weird scene of Olivia Newton John dancing with Gene Kelly). Pastiche can play up continuity or discontinuity in contemporary art.
But if we cast the net a bit more broadly to include the practices of contrafacta in church music then Daniel Melamed has a strong case that the juxtaposition of ancient church song from the sixteenth century and eighteenth century dance and drama styles represents the musical topos of J S Bach's Mass in B minor. Nobody would be likely to say Mass in B minor is a work of pastiche but if we look at Bach's penchant for using and recycling material from other works the Mass "can" be heard and read as a kind of pastiche and, if so, one of the greatest pastiches ever composed, even if I say so.
A lot of pastiche now is more like George Rochberg's Third String Quartet with its blunt juxtaposition of post Schoenberg dissonance and late Beethoven romantic lyricism. Pastiche tends to emphasize contrast and discontinuity rather than continuity. I don't think it's hard to see that Bach's Mass works because there was literally a confessional theme unifying all the disparate elements in the music, and the elements were different but could obviously be coherently juxtaposed.
Contemporary pastiche, then, comes off as a kind of party trick any kid (so to speak) can do to highlight the variety of styles and forms we can have access to across musical history. But with this broader definition of pastiche that attempts to not have a strictly pejorative definition of the term, I think J S Bach used pastiche at different points in his career. It might be a sign of his success as a composer that music historians and Bach scholars have to mine the elements of pastiche from observations about his methods because the finished musical work doesn't SOUND like a pastiche to us the way it might have sounded like an awkward pastiche to clergy and churchgoers in Bach's own time.
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