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.
 |
| Sculpture at Trafalgar Square |
 |
| Obama Presidential Center |
We seem to have completely lost any intuitive aesthetic sense.
1 comment:
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.
Post a Comment