# Why Beauty Matters... and does it?



## StlukesguildOhio (Dec 25, 2006)

"If at any time between 1750 and 1930 if had had asked educated people to describe the aim of poetry, art, or music, they would have replied, "Beauty." And if you had asked for the point of that, you would have learned that Beauty is a value... as important as truth and goodness. Then in the 20th century, Beauty stopped being important... It was not Beauty, but originality, however achieved and at whatever moral cost that won the prizes..."

"Today people are a little more cynical... But this is not because they have lost the interest in beauty or the need to encounter it in their daily lives. They have lost faith in art as a way of supplying that need...
People may have given up on art... But they still design their own lives...
This search for aesthetic order is not just a luxury; it is essential to life in society. It is one way in which we send out signals of humility, and show that we are not just animals foraging for our needs but civilized beings who wish to live at peace with our neighbours." -Roger Scruton

When old age shall this generation waste, 
Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe 
Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say'st, 
'Beauty is truth, truth beauty,-that is all 
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.'

-John Keats _Ode on a Grecian Urn_































I've been recently musing upon the issue of "beauty" in art... in my own work as well as in that of others... and I came across Scruton's short film on subject at the same time as I've been reading Umberto Eco's _History of Beauty_ and Wendy Steiner's _Venus in Exile: The Rejection of beauty in 20th Century Art._ I am not about to suggest there is no beauty in 20th century art or music... nor would I suggest that I don't understand the Modernist leaning toward the horrific and "ugly"... especially considering the horrors of the century (although what era in history did not have its own horrors to the same or even a greater degree?) Still I ponder how it is that even the term "Beauty" could be seen today as something loaded... a value open to debate as to its merits in art. Steiner suggests that beauty was seen by Modernists as linked with feminine and bourgeois aesthetics and the concept of Man= Culture/Woman= Nature and thus artists such as the Futurist Marinetti could call for banning the female nude from art, critics of Matisse could reject him as too "feminine" as opposed to the "masculine Picasso.

Anyway... just musing. Any thoughts as too how this relates to music?


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## World Violist (May 31, 2007)

I get the feeling that in music beauty was never put aside. If one looks at the overtone series and its relation to music history, it's obvious that music progressed along its lines very closely, so by default none of this music is definitely "ugly." I think people are just more comfortable with tonality because it is the "more obviously beautiful," being at the foundation of the overtone series, whereas the higher up one gets there are more dissonances, which by definition create tension (sound waves clashing within a minor second rather than the more "open" perfect fifth). Modern music thus sounds ugly not because it's ugly but because it's "less obviously beautiful." Higher up in the overtone series, closer sonorities, etc.

One of the more interesting symphonies I've ever heard is Per Norgard's third symphony. It utilizes the overtone series, and while it's very dissonant in many respects, it's one of the most beautiful symphonies of the 20th century, simply because it derives from overtone series.

Also, I think the modern composers were more outgoing as to what beauty actually is; and they had the freedom to do so after the last 500-700 years of straitjacketing by various organizations. Classic case of doing just because you could. They looked at things more philosophically and so asked what the limits of beauty were; and could find none, so they kept going and going and going. I suppose that's about the point at which pieces for 10 radios or 100 metronomes started giving people grief...


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## Weston (Jul 11, 2008)

I cannot watch those links at the moment, though I have them bookmarked. Thanks very much for them! I'm curious where Goya fits in with Roger Scruton's aesthetics. Or even modern works like the sculpture below, which I find has its own beauty, albeit a disquieting horrific kind.










I think contemporary music is returning partially to the earlier, easier to discern overtones (to follow suit with World Violist, if I may) which most of us perceive as more harmonious, if only because modern, that is 20th century, went about as far as it could and was running out of shock value. I feel that some 21st century music may be rebooting a bit, e.g. Arvo Part's simpler harmonies and Gregorian chant inspired works. Not every new work needs to do this however. I think there's plenty of room for the horrific as well as soothing and always has been.


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## Boccherini (Mar 29, 2010)

StlukesguildOhio said:


> ... especially considering the horrors of the century (although what era in history did not have its own horrors *to the same or even a greater degree?*) ...


Terribly incorrect. As far as history can tell, mass murders all over the world reached their greatest and most horrible peak in the 20th century; The greatest amongst them - of course, as every junior whelp knows - is the Holocaust, speaking objectively.


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## Sid James (Feb 7, 2009)

Beauty is really in the eye of the beholder. I am currently reading Bertrand Russell's _A History of Western Philosophy_ & I'm up to the early chapters on the ancient Greeks. There are many things that are still relevant today, but the fact is that most of what the Greeks thought in terms of scientific knowledge has gone out the window (eg. Galileo finally debunked their wrong notion that the Earth was the centre of the solar system). Our societies, economies and polities are also totally different than what they were then (or even 100 years ago). Some of the concepts in Plato's _Republic_ are so rigid and inflexible, it would be impossible (and without any utility) to set up a society to run along those lines today.

Obviously, art has changed, and so has our concept of beauty. But it has always been thus. People who thought Palestrina was the last word in music were aghast when Monteverdi came along & did his stuff; Haydn was appalled by Beethoven's 1st symphony at it's premiere; and Massenet thought that what Debussy and Ravel were doing was too radical.

I personally think that late C20th music has much beauty, but it may not be the traditional kind. I love: Australian composer Peter Sculthorpe's searing and oppressive renditions of the outback; Varese's suggestion of a post-industrial wasteland; Xenakis' carefully calculated and mathematical structures; Carter's & Partch's intense complexity; Cage's mundaneness. As a matter of fact, I often like them more than the more traditional examples of beauty, but I like those to no end as well. It's all about what you perceive in the music, not necessarily about what's on the surface. Beauty is not skin deep, to coin an oft-quoted phrase...


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## Guest (Sep 8, 2010)

I've seen two things from Roger Scruton now in just the past two days, and already I break out in a rash when I see his name.

But I digress (or _do_ I?).

"Beauty" is such a loaded term, is such a vast subject, that anyone using the word should define what they mean by it carefully and in detail. It cannot just be assumed. Or, rather, if it is just assumed, the wrangling that will follow about what is or is not beautiful will be endless and rancorous. Endlessly rancorous.

Scruton just assumes it. So all the various beauties of twentieth century music fly right past his beautiful (!) shell-like ears. Which is a great pity for him and an even greater pity for his readers.

I'm always inclined to make a distinction between "beauty" and "prettiness" to start my own contribution to this kind of discussion. That's been savagely savaged within recent memory, though, so I'm not sure about advancing it again without more care than I care to make right now. However, it might be useful just to think about beauty as something that while it might include prettiness consists of so much more. The Arizona desert. The Himalayas. A burnt out railway trestle bridge. (And I have the pictures to prove it, too!!)

I've also dropped the name of a young Austrian poet as well, along with a few lines from his first Duino Elegy:

"For beauty is nothing but
the beginning of terror, that we are still able to bear,
and we revere it so, because it calmly disdains
to destroy us."

And that's been savagely savaged as well. Heigh ho.

Well, there was no turning away from beauty in the twentieth century. There was very definitely some pretty serious exploration of other beauties than had been explored previously. That, I think, is what really happened. And this is where I think personal experience can be valid: when I first started listening to twentieth century music, I did not think, "how strange" or "how depressing" or "how horrific" or any things like those. I thought "how exciting," "how gorgeous," "how satisfying." And that was Bartok, Carter, and Mumma early on. And no additions were anything else, except for Berio's _Visage_ and Ashley's _Purposeful Lady, Slow Afternoon._ For awhile. I listen to those now and can hardly hear whatever it was I was hearing in them in the mid 1970s. If a listener, even just one, can come to this music without any preconceptions and can thoroughly enjoy the harshest, most difficult, most extreme examples of the avant garde, then the harshest, most difficult, most extreme examples of the avant garde are thoroughly enjoyable.

I say it only takes one, but of course, there are more than that!


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## Kopachris (May 31, 2010)

How would one explain music to an alien culture that has no such concept?

"I should take you to a concert."
"What is a 'concert?'"
"Well, it's a performance... of music. Don't you have performances?"
"Yes, we have performances, but what is this 'music?'"
"Huh. Well, music is very hard to describe. By most definitions, music is simply sound organized through time."
"Organized... how so?"
"To start off with, there are twelve notes in an octave, and each octave doubles the frequency of the previous. So an 'A' would be 440 Hz, and an 'A' an octave higher would be 880 Hz. We arrange these twelve notes within and around octaves with rhythm and harmony."
"What are --"
"Rhythm and harmony, yeah. I guess you don't have those either. Well, I guess you'll just have to go to the concert."

At the concert...
"Ah! I see what you mean, now! Rhythm provides a regularity, a structure upon which to put the notes, like pillars supporting an arch. And what you call harmony is derived from the series of overtones. They use some notes closer in the overtone series and some notes farther, all coming back to this one note!"
"Yes, exactly!"
"But why?"
"Why? Because it's beautiful!"
"But there is nothing tangible, like a painting. How can it be beautiful when it's only compression and rarefaction in the air?"

How would you finish the conversation?


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## norman bates (Aug 18, 2010)

Weston said:


> I cannot watch those links at the moment, though I have them bookmarked. Thanks very much for them! I'm curious where Goya fits in with Roger Scruton's aesthetics. Or even modern works like the sculpture below, which I find has its own beauty, albeit a disquieting horrific kind.


just a supposition, but i think that i would put Goya on the "good" list. Goya was ever interested by beauty, certainly by a different romantic/expressionist kind (the same of Munch) but however beauty. 
I think that is different when we consider stuff like this


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## Ravellian (Aug 17, 2009)

Interesting discussion. I agree that beauty cannot be taken for granted - for a philosopher (someone who's supposed to question the meaning of everything), I'm surprised he didn't go to an in-depth discussion on what beauty really is.

On the other hand - if we can agree that "beauty" is what is immediately _pleasing_ to the ear or _pleasing_ to the eye - then I believe he is mostly right. Today's modernized culture is remarkably different from how things were only 50-60 years ago, among all developed countries. We don't really value "beauty" in that traditional sense so highly anymore. What we value is intellectual superiority, originality, technological innovation, and (in pop culture) "edginess" and sex.

From the video, it seems that a lot of this 'modernist' thinking had its roots in the 1910s and 1920s, with visual artists like Duchamp and composers like Schoenberg. Just as Duchamp's urinal is not pleasing to the eye, Schoenberg's 12-tone music is not immediately pleasing to the ear in any sense - what they both represent is a way of re-thinking of what art can be, so that "beauty" is not most important. In Schoenberg's case, he seems to think of music as an intellectual pursuit more than anything else; in Duchamp's case, he seems to think that "anything" can be art if you call it that (a silly idea, in my opinion).

As the century progresses we get increasing fascination with technological advances, with music that incorporates tape recordings, synthesizers, electronic instruments, etc. And understandably, because technological innovation is exciting. What is more disturbing, in my opinion, is the constant emphasis (especially in pop culture) on being original by any means necessary, including pushing the boundaries of what is morally acceptable by presenting increasingly gory violence or increasingly graphic sexual material. I could talk about this for a while..

Keep in mind that there were still many, many classical composers in the 20th century who still composed within the traditional ideas of "beauty," especially those who produced music for films and theatre. Examples include Leonard Bernstein, Korngold, Prokofiev, John Williams, Samuel Barber, Aaron Copland... and these composers were typically much more successful than their more radical counterparts. On the other hand, these are mostly composers who stopped being active around 1970-1980..


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## norman bates (Aug 18, 2010)

some guy said:


> I've seen two things from Roger Scruton now in just the past two days, and already I break out in a rash when I see his name.
> 
> But I digress (or _do_ I?).
> 
> ...


 i like a lot of 20th century music, but i think that when a composer says things like "what we listen is not important" (i think that Boulez for example sayed similar things) or starts making music with arbitrary rules or using formulae and thinking art as it is just a science, beauty most of the times tend to disappear. When i listen to structures (boulez) i can't find any interest in beauty.


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## Il Seraglio (Sep 14, 2009)

Boccherini said:


> Terribly incorrect. As far as history can tell, mass murders all over the world reached their greatest and most horrible peak in the 20th century; The greatest amongst them - of course, as every junior whelp knows - is the Holocaust, speaking objectively.


How ignorant and condescending. What about the estimated 18 million Africans dead as a result of the slave trade? The survivors of course treated worse than animals.

You were never even alive at this time so I don't see how you can even mention objectivity while making a subjective statement about how good life was at this time. The death toll of indigenous pre-Columbian Americans has been hotly debated, with no _objective_ conclusion.


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## Argus (Oct 16, 2009)

Conservatives vs. Progressives blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah Entropy blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah Subjectivity blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah Roger Scrotum blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah Degenerative blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah Intellectual blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah Emotion blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah Tonality blah blah blah blah blah blah

:wave:


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## Guest (Sep 8, 2010)

Ravellian said:


> ...if we can agree that "beauty" is what is immediately _pleasing_ to the ear or _pleasing_ to the eye...


I think we cannot, no. For one, there is no such thing as "the ear" or "the eye." There are only ears and eyes, each pair associated with a particular individual, with particular needs, desires, experience, and knowledge.

The ears of "norman bates," I venture to guess, do not find the Ferneyhough guitar music immediately pleasing. My ears, however, most definitely do.

For two, why immediately? Beauty is so unimportant that it gives up its mysteries at once? Why, that sounds for all the world like prettiness, to me.

Oh, and to acknowledge the force and accuity of Argus' post, blah blah blah did you even read my earlier post? blah blah blah Rilke blah blah blah pleasing displeasing blah blah blah!!


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## norman bates (Aug 18, 2010)

some guy said:


> I think we cannot, no. For one, there is no such thing as "the ear" or "the eye." There are only ears and eyes, each pair associated with a particular individual, with particular needs, desires, experience, and knowledge.
> 
> The ears of "norman bates," I venture to guess, do not find the Ferneyhough guitar music immediately pleasing. My ears, however, most definitely do.


just a curiosity, there is some music by modern composers as ferneyhoug, babbitt, boulez etc that you consider garbage, or you like all modern music just cause is modern and "different"?


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## World Violist (May 31, 2007)

Just to put my two cents in at this more progressed state of the argument... and to support Some Guy.

I like what many people consider to be "ugly," and I take it to be genuinely beautiful. It took me a while to get to the stage at which I can safely say I do like it, but I agree that "beauty" isn't something with immediate gratification. We can look at something else, say, a plant, and realize that it isn't an instant thing, but rather something that must be cultivated: does this mean it isn't beautiful?

Beauty can't be something that is instantly recognized as such, for it goes against everything that exists in nature, which is itself the foundation of beauty.


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## norman bates (Aug 18, 2010)

World Violist said:


> Beauty can't be something that is instantly recognized as such


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## World Violist (May 31, 2007)

Or maybe look at this famous person:










She's very pretty, yes, but there's much to gain from spending time looking at her as well. I would consider this portrait beautiful for this reason.

From what I can see, all beauty takes time to sink in. What hits you about the girl in the previous post is the surface prettiness of her appearance; you can't take in any of the beauty about it.


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## norman bates (Aug 18, 2010)

World Violist said:


> Okay, so beauty is not _necessarily_ something to be instantly recognized as such. (I don't consider that person particularly beautiful, but some do, so whatever.)


ok, but there's also a lot of modern artists (musicians included) that simply are not interested at all in beauty. A person that find Wharol's art "beautiful" probably understand nothing about Wharol.


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## World Violist (May 31, 2007)

norman bates said:


> ok, but there's also a lot of modern artists (musicians included) that simply is not interested at all in beauty. A person that find Wharol's art "beautiful" probably understand nothing about Wharol.


I actually edited my previous post... sorry about that.

As for people not interested in beauty, then they're not interested in beauty. What's the big deal? This can't be a purely modern occurrence.


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## norman bates (Aug 18, 2010)

World Violist said:


> I actually edited my previous post... sorry about that.
> 
> As for people not interested in beauty, then they're not interested in beauty. What's the big deal? This can't be a purely modern occurrence.


the problem about modern music (and i have very progressive tastes i think) is that seems to me that for many composers pleasentness is saw as a sin or just frivolity, and the music must sound as jargon language or a science where pure research and concepts has replaced beauty. When a composer says that what we listen is not important (!) for me there's a great problem (in his mind).

another thing: it is possible that the problem is always the laziness of the listener?


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## Guest (Sep 8, 2010)

norman bates said:


> just a curiosity, there is some music by modern composers as ferneyhoug, babbitt, boulez etc that you consider garbage, or you like all modern music just cause is modern and "different"?


To answer your question seriously, I like whatever I like because I find it to be beautiful or uplifting or exhilarating. *Not* because it's "modern" or "different." Those are your straw men, nothing to do with me or my tastes.

Otherwise, I think the two pictures posted illustrate "pretty" and "beautiful" perfectly. The first is pretty; the second is beautiful.

As far as "pleasantness" is concerned, that is so tied to the tastes and experience of the listener; I doubt if any composer at any time could have ever used that as a guide. Composers, if there are any safe generalizations, are interested in sound. Above all. Now some may be interested largely in manipulating sound, some in letting sound be itself. That's a major philosophical divide in the twentieth century, but underneath the difference is that fundamental similarity, love of sound.

So far as I can see (hear), there is no "problem" with modern music, though many of the people who hear it do seem to have some troubles. No problem is an "always," though if there is a problem with modern music, it's more likely to be with the listener than not. Nothing personal, you understand, and easily illustrated by this example: Listener A plays a Youtube clip of Ferneyhough's guitar piece and hates it. Listener B plays the same Youtube clip of Ferneyhough's guitar piece and loves it. *In both cases, the notes being played and the order in which they are played is identical.* So where is the difference? In the listeners.


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## norman bates (Aug 18, 2010)

this is not an answer to my question. Normally listeners like something by a composer and dislike others. Maybe i'm a little malicious, but i suspect that there's a category of listeners that defend all, ALL modern music by modern composers just because they make avantgarde. 
I find this a bit strange.


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## World Violist (May 31, 2007)

norman bates said:


> this is not an answer to my question. Normally listeners like something by a composer and dislike others. Maybe i'm a little malicious, but i suspect that there's a category of listeners that defend all, ALL modern music by modern composers just because they make avantgarde.
> I find this a bit strange.


I think they are merely wanting people to open their ears. They might not like every individual piece they hear, but overall avant-garde is what they will advocate because, overall, they like it and want others to hear it. For example, I dislike much of Brahms' music, so that I usually say I dislike Brahms. However, that won't get in my way of liking the German Requiem (which I adore). Or, to come from a different direction to mean the same thing: just because I like Sibelius doesn't mean I like Finlandia or Valse Triste.

I don't think there is an answer to your question because those that do defend all modern music do so because it is worth defending, so _other people_ can make their own verdicts instead of just blindly following an "establishment" of conservative musicians who hate all of it out of principle.

All this absolutism is making me tired...


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## norman bates (Aug 18, 2010)

World Violist said:


> I think they are merely wanting people to open their ears.


me too, i love a lot of modern "difficult" music, and i find things like the piece like the ones of ferneihough and boulez that i've posted absolutely horrible. But when i hear someone who defend the category of "modern music" as a whole, i have the suspect that i'm talking with a fan that have not really a critical point of view (where he says frankly what he doesn't like) but only a person that want to be the progressive-listener-of-modern-music. Sorry for my brutality (it depends a lot by my scarce familiarity with the english language). It's like a person that listen from perotin to wagner and does not have pieces of music or composers that dislikes, or a person that love every painter, every architect, every director, every writer. If a person can't say what he likes and what he does not likes is not really credible for me. I don't think this is absolutism. 
And i don't think that they are neither the best advocates of what they would try to defend.


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## Aramis (Mar 1, 2009)

The main problem of beauty is that all people, I mean - sensitive people - know what it is, but they can't put it into words. 

You know what you experienced because of some work of art, it is clear to you but when you want to tell someone, you simply can't. 

We all are like mute people that can't understand each other and are making some crazy gestures in order to say something as simple, obvious and known as "C is for cookie"


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## StlukesguildOhio (Dec 25, 2006)

Terribly incorrect. As far as history can tell, mass murders all over the world reached their greatest and most horrible peak in the 20th century; The greatest amongst them - of course, as every junior whelp knows - is the Holocaust, speaking objectively.

http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/steven_pinker_on_the_myth_of_violence.html

Hmmm... are you really sure about that?


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## HarpsichordConcerto (Jan 1, 2010)

Aesthetics change with time. Avant-garde, almost by definition, is often perceived and presented as being "ahead" of its time or at least what many folks in society might consider as beauty often based on more conservative tastes. But sometimes, people could have mixed tastes. For example, I have much more appetite for avant-garde *visual arts *than I do music. I often wonder why.


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## StlukesguildOhio (Dec 25, 2006)

_There was a time when there wasn't this tremendous distance between the popular audience and concert music, and I think we're approaching that stage again. For a long time we had this very small band of practitioners of modern music who described themselves as mathematicians doing theoretical work that would someday be understood. I don't think anyone takes that seriously anymore. _- Philip Glass


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## StlukesguildOhio (Dec 25, 2006)

I'm not seeking to vilify modern art or music here by suggesting it is all ugly. We've gone through that discussion enough. I am intrigued with the question of how it is something such as "beauty"... which from throughout the whole of history was continually acclaimed as one of the key elements of art... so much so it was never even questioned... should today be seen as such a "loaded term"... something open to heated debate... something frequently challenged... so in doubt.

I quite like Penderecki's _Utrenja_, George Crumb's _Songs, Drones, and refrains of Death_, the paintings of Lucian Freud and Anselm Kiefer... but none of them is truly beautiful. Certainly they are sublime... in the sense suggested by Kant, Burke, and in the poem quoted by Rilke... but not beautiful.

The cliche challenge to beauty is to suggest that what is imagined as beautiful is often merely "pretty". Beauty must be difficult, complex, painful at first? This seems to support Wendy Steiner's thesis of the Modernist rejection of the feminine... the sentimental, the graceful, the sensuous... as "soft aesthetics" worthy only of women... as opposed to the masculine hard aesthetics of brutality and intellectual complexity.

Scruton points out that people in the Modern/Contemporary world have not lost their passion or need for beauty... but rather they increasingly turn elsewhere than the traditional fine arts to meet this need because they are not assured of finding it in the classical music, painting, or literature of our time. They increasingly turn to Hollywood films, and pop music... which certainly do pander mere "prettiness" at their worse.


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## Sid James (Feb 7, 2009)

I don't think that (all) great art is necessarily about beauty - it's about expressing the human condition (which often cannot be put into words, as Aramis points out).

I agree with World Violist, this issue is not about absolutes. & norman bates, who cares if a particular listener likes everything (of classical music) that he/she hears? Isn't that being flexible?

Talking about absolutism - this is what the New York art critic Clement Greenberg was, an absolutist. He thought that American Abstract Expressionist art was masculine, and the European painters or tradition was effete. He even went so far as getting sculptor David Smith's sculptures sandblasted after his death so that they would not resemble the sculptures of the Europeans (less colour=more masculine - do you get that?). Anyway, his attitude reminds me of some inflexible people's opinions on beauty - it HAS to be like this or that. How ridiculous. 

I'm sure there are many people who actually think that something by Penderecki says more and is more engaging for them than something by say Andre Rieu. I think that many modern listeners are not necessarily interested in whatever you might traditionally call "beautiful," but in things that are challenging, exciting, engaging and say something about the human condition in the 21st century...


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## norman bates (Aug 18, 2010)

Andre said:


> I agree with World Violist, this issue is not about absolutes. & norman bates, who cares if a particular listener likes everything (of classical music) that he/she hears? Isn't that being flexible?


do you really believe this? I have never known anyobody that likes all. The same modern composers have really different ideas, wit a lot of strong criticism between them.


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## Huilunsoittaja (Apr 6, 2010)

It's only until Heaven will I discover the true meaning on music. I will ask God "What is your opinion on Dodecophony?" or "Do you think Cage was right?" Until then, I have little idea of what is right or wrong, it's all about taste and conscience really. God is the ultimate standard for me. However, I have absolutely no right to tell anyone "God doesn't approve of this such and such" so I never will say it.


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## Guest (Sep 9, 2010)

Boccherini said:


> Terribly incorrect. As far as history can tell, mass murders all over the world reached their greatest and most horrible peak in the 20th century; The greatest amongst them - of course, as every junior whelp knows - is the Holocaust, speaking objectively.


When we speak of horrors, then this can include more than just mass murders. Certainly there have been numerous horrors throughout recorded history that have had a huge psychological impact on mankind - consider the Black Death of the 14th century, which is thought to have killed anywhere from 75-200 million people, with anywhere from 30-60% of the European population in this period being killed. Not the same, true, as a deliberate extermination, but when 3-6 out of every 10 people is dying off around you, that would certainly be considered a horror. The flu pandemic of 1918-1919 killed anywhere from 50-100 million people. Numerous horrors have occurred throughout history. Man's inhumanity to man may have a more profound psychological impact, and the deliberateness of the action may be more horrific, but I would think that being presented with the very real possibility of a painful death, regardless of the cause, is going to impact a person and change their outlook.

I don't know how much I can contribute to all of this - Personally, I have a hard time in identifying beauty in much of what passes for art in the 20th century, be it visual art, or music. I think that man's appreciation for beauty is ever-present, and changes little - what changes is our desire to have it. It seems there has always been a morbid fascination among mankind for the brutal and ugly, which I personally feel increases as we desensitize ourselves to ugliness. At a point in their history, the Romans enjoyed watching people being torn to pieces in gladiatorial games. Think of the crowds drawn to view a medieval execution - a good beheading or evisceration. Recalling the mention of Goya, I once did a report on him, and was interested to know that much of his macabre work was not necessarily simply the ideas floating in his head, but were rather commissioned works from nobility, who very much had a fancy for such images as Jupiter consuming his child, or a witch ceremony.

I think beauty absolutely matters. Without beauty, the dreariness of such things could overwhelm us. Sometimes, only the anticipation of beauty can be a motivating force. I suspect that much of what often gets derided as lacking beauty in 20th century music reflects, rather, the striving for those composers towards a new beauty, having become disenchanted with what they had come to think beauty was. Man was unstable, irrational, and highly prone to savage brutality towards man - how could any definition of beauty arising from man be believed? Better to trust to absolute truths - the theory behind music, for example, to seek out new beauty. No doubt many strained too far, moving beyond anything that could draw even a meager consensus regarding its inherent beauty. But in the process, new ways of looking at beauty in music were discovered.

Beauty can be very much in the eye of the beholder, and thus we can see that much of what is more controversial tends to draw fewer admirers, whereas certain things are more broadly recognized for their beauty. In terms of musicians, the success of their music (passing no judgment on the inherent value) is dependent on how broadly the beauty of their creation is recognized.


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## norman bates (Aug 18, 2010)

DrMike said:


> Recalling the mention of Goya, I once did a report on him, and was interested to know that much of his macabre work was not necessarily simply the ideas floating in his head, but were rather commissioned works from nobility, who very much had a fancy for such images as Jupiter consuming his child, or a witch ceremony.


for what i know, this is not true. Jupiter and the other black paints were in his house. They were painted on the walls of his house, more precisely. Amazing art for me, but probably not the happiest place on earth


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## 151 (Jun 14, 2010)

Aramis is right, we're not going to get to the bottom of this.

Even if the modernism took the place of the old classics and we were beginning to hear all the traditional and romantic nodes of beauty, I don't think we'd know what we were talking about. It requires a weight of words that doesn't exist.


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## Enjoying Life (Aug 2, 2010)

Art is not about beauty - it is about portraying or discussing life itself. And since life is not always beautiful, then art is not always beautiful.

This is one role of music - to express and give voice to parts of us that can not be expressed in words alone.

Pain and frustration are real parts of life - not beautiful but no less real than the beautiful and enjoyable parts. When music expresses pain, I do not expect it to be beautiful. It is still valid and I still like it but I would not call it beautiful.

I think music was asked to be beautiful for a long block of time and then when that restriction was lifted it often swung in a different direction and emphasised the pain in humanity.

The same is true for order vs. chaos in music. Now I prefer orderly music but that does not always match my life and so there are times I like my music chaotic and broken.

In the end, music simply expresses what is inside and therefore needs to be free to reflect the whole of our experience - both beautiful and not so beautiful.


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## StlukesguildOhio (Dec 25, 2006)

Art is not about beauty - it is about portraying or discussing life itself. And since life is not always beautiful, then art is not always beautiful.

This is one role of music - to express and give voice to parts of us that can not be expressed in words alone.

Art is an expression of the artist's perceptions of life, eh? A rather Romanticist notion, there. What exactly does Bach's Well Tempered Clavier express?


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## Kopachris (May 31, 2010)

Enjoying Life said:


> Art is not about beauty - it is about portraying or discussing life itself. And since life is not always beautiful, then art is not always beautiful.
> 
> This is one role of music - to express and give voice to parts of us that can not be expressed in words alone.
> 
> ...


Well, that depends on your point of view. From one point of view, life is beautiful, no matter the situation. Humanity, and all that is human, is beautiful. Pain and frustration are real parts of life, not pleasant, but still beautiful because they are part of life. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, so the saying goes.

But from most people's point of view, you are right; life, and therefore art, is not always beautiful. Art expresses the very being, the very essence of humanity, you can see this clearly in the humanist paintings and sculptures of the Renaissance. A poster in my high school choir room said it best: _Music expresses that which cannot be said, but which cannot be kept silent about._


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## Argus (Oct 16, 2009)

Huilunsoittaja said:


> It's only until Heaven will I discover the true meaning on music. I will ask God "What is your opinion on Dodecophony?" or "*Do you think Cage was right?*"


About what?

*bites tongue*

:wave:


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## World Violist (May 31, 2007)

Argus said:


> About what?
> 
> *bites tongue*
> 
> :wave:


Biting one's own tongue. 

And not making any sound while one is at it.


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## Enjoying Life (Aug 2, 2010)

Art is an expression of the artist's perceptions of life, eh? A rather Romanticist notion, there. What exactly does Bach's Well Tempered Clavier express?[/QUOTE]

Nothing "Romanticist" about it. That idea goes all the way back to the ancient Greek's and their idea of the power and role of music. Early Opera tried to capture this and use music to express life and truth. Through out each music era, people were using music to express life and their beliefs about it.

In the baroque, one idea of life was that it was complex and detailed and yet held together by rules and order. Bach's Well Tempered Clavier expresses Bach's view of order and rule holding together variation and complexity.

Through his music you can see his sense of order and his religious perspective of God's role in his universe and life. His music was an extension of his world - his way of expressing life.

Move forward to the 20th century and you can see very different views of the world and very different music.


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## Xaltotun (Sep 3, 2010)

Nothing like a Zappa quote to usually get things right:

"Information is not knowledge. Knowledge is not wisdom. Wisdom is not truth. Truth is not beauty. Beauty is not love. Love is not music. Music is the best."

I think a lot of modern art strives for an understanding or revelation of Truth. A noblest of goals, certainly, but something different than understanding Beauty. Also, I have some trouble believing in the relativist notion that all beauty is in the eye of the beholder. There's a lot of truth in it, but I feel that it's not the whole story. While we are products of our cultures, and while we differ in tastes and personalities, I also believe that we're all human beings, and that common origin does give us something in common in our perceptions of beauty. Beauty in a somewhat absolute sense, not something that fits neatly in some norms or rules about what a "beautiful" thing should be, and not something that purposefully breaks those norms to broaden the mind of the audience; also, not something that reveals something or makes the audience think, but something that is just... absolutely beautiful. Perhaps art can never capture that absolute beauty in its pure essence, but it can at least try.

Art is not all about Beauty, nor should it be. I think that Art is just a form of communication. There's a lot of things that it can communicate about. Beauty is one of those things, and a very important one too, because it is so hard to communicate about Beauty in everyday speech, our main mode of communication. Beauty is also important because understanding Beauty can lead to an understanding of Love, and only Love can save the world, like they say. Or maybe Music can do it, according to Zappa.

Two of my favourite films that touch upon the subject:

Andrei Rublev (Tarkovsky)
Le mépris (Godard)


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## Boccherini (Mar 29, 2010)

Il Seraglio said:


> You were never even alive at this time so I don't see how you can even mention objectivity while making a subjective statement about how good life was at this time. The death toll of indigenous pre-Columbian Americans has been hotly debated, with no _objective_ conclusion.


It seems I was a little incomprehensible. I added the words "speaking objectively" in order to reject the claim that might be implied from the statement I made, that I might have seen biased writing this. That is all.



StlukesguildOhio said:


> http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/steven_pinker_on_the_myth_of_violence.html
> 
> Hmmm... are you really sure about that?


Interesting. I would like to sum up his main points:


Steven Pinker's claim is that the horrors of the 20th and 21th centuries perhaps made us think that the native people lived in harmony, at least relatively to us. He shows a graph of the 'percentage of male deaths due to warfare' over different tribal societies in Guinea and Amazon whilst the tiniest bar represents US and Europe in the 20th C. including all the deaths of both world wars.
Pinker also points out the way of life of early civilizations, rationalizing it from the Bible, relatively to our way of life: Book of Numbers 31:7, 15, 17 and 18; and to use his words of summary to these verses: "in other words, kill the men, kill the children, if you see any virgins then you can keep them alive so you can rape them". He also mention that the death penalty, according to the Bible, again, was the common penalty for large variety of crimes. He adds that any social history reveals that sadisitic mutilation and tortures in early civilizations over Europe, even for meaningless crimes, were pretty conventional in the middle ages. And in the decade scale (since 1945 and only in US and EU), violence in general and deaths rates (since 1950) in particular, have been meaningfully declined.
He adds an important point: "Change in _standards_ outpaces change in _behavior_". This process causes us to consider some contemporary phenomenons to be more barbaric than they actually would have been by historic standards -- the value of life has been extremely increased over time.
According to Pinker, there are 4 explanations for the decline of violence over time: *(a)* Broadly, adopting/supporting Thomas Hobbes's _Leviathan_ theory by centralized states. *(b)* The prevailing sensation that "Life is cheap" is disappearing over time. *(c)* "Nonzero-sum games" - people became more valuable alive than dead. *(d)* Over history, the circle of emmpathy towards other people has been expanded.
Apart from the fact that I'm not sure how legitimate and accurate is to quote verses from the Bible regarding early civilizations, and I'm not sure how accurate the statistics and graphs Pinker shows are, but my point is not to question them because I think he might be supporting my claim, after all.

I think horrors of any age can only be estimated in the eyes of the people of this specific age; To use the methodology Pinker's represented (number 3, above), a murder/mass murder of N amount of people in the 10th C. cannot be efficiently estimated by people of the 20th C., and also the opposite: a murder/mass murder of N amount of people in the 20th C. cannot be efficiently estimated by the people of the 10th C. because, and not only, the standards have been changed over time (number 4, above), and only those who have the same _behavior_ as the standards of a specific crime represent, can judge that specific crime.

The more the degree of violence/horrors is declining over time, the higher the level of exacerbation of horrors over time. To put it another way, a murder in the middle ages, by definition, is not the same as a murder in our era (because of number 4, above). If I am to try rationalizing the irrationalizable, I would compare a mass murder from several hundreds of years ago to a mass murder of the 20th C. (not the Holocaust) by which its amount of victims is a half or a quater of the first one; I won't do that for several factors this place is not the right place to mention, but anyway, according to this system, horrors _can_ be more outrageous and horrific than how they would have been in a few hundreds of years ago, because everything is relative to dynamic standards, and that's why it won't be wise to judge the horrors of the past in the standards of today. To give another example: In the middle ages, people were executed on a daily basis for disobedience. Those who watched executions were quite used to the notion that it's very common, unsurprising and not _so_ horrible.

I think what we can (need to) compare is the disparity and the ratio between _standards_ and _behavior_ over history. My claim in post #4 was that the gap between standards and behavior was the greatest/reached its peak in the 20th C., especially in regards of the Holocaust. I once mentioned in another thread why do I think that, in the sense of horrific respects, the Holocaust is the greatest event of humanity, for several reasons I'm not going to elaborate in this thread but just to mention. Mainly the uniqueness of: (a) Hitler's conceptional affinity towards his victims. (b) The Nazis systematic extermination. (c) The depth of malice. These three gave us the realization of the huge gap between _standards_ and _behavior_, ever reached.



DrMike said:


> When we speak of horrors, then this can include more than just mass murders. Certainly there have been numerous horrors throughout recorded history that have had a huge psychological impact on mankind - consider the Black Death of the 14th century, which is thought to have killed anywhere from 75-200 million people, with anywhere from 30-60% of the European population in this period being killed. Not the same, true, as a deliberate extermination, but when 3-6 out of every 10 people is dying off around you, that would certainly be considered a horror. The flu pandemic of 1918-1919 killed anywhere from 50-100 million people. Numerous horrors have occurred throughout history. Man's inhumanity to man may have a more profound psychological impact, and the deliberateness of the action may be more horrific, but I would think that being presented with the very real possibility of a painful death, regardless of the cause, is going to impact a person and change their outlook.


Good points. But I deliberately mentioned mass murders as horrific events because I consider these to be much more horrible than worldwide diseases/epidemics, earthquakes, storms, typhoons etc. disregarding the amount of victims in any of each. But, of course, any horrific event, no matter what its degree, changes the standards of its era.
As for the Black Death, I think I'm familiar with a smaller estimation (80-100 millions), but anyway as I said, I think that cannot be compared, in the sense of aspiring to reach equal estimations, also because I don't know how to judge it in regards of the same standards of the 14th century.


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## Boccherini (Mar 29, 2010)

With all the discussion about horror, I would like to raise a question that yet has been mentioned here so far, as far as I know: Can "horror" be any beautiful? If so, isn't it a conflict? Morally contradictory? Can you "detach" the moral aspects of a hypothetical horrific creation in order to stay with beauty? If so, and carefully, how do you do that?


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## Aramis (Mar 1, 2009)

> Can "horror" be any beautiful?


Horror per se? There is always context, at least as far as we are talking about music - there is no music that "is" simply a horror (feel free to quote this and write "what about Boulez/Schoenberg?"). And it's the context that can make works filled with horror beautiful - not the horror itself, but the works. Like in many pieces by Shostakovich.



> If so, isn't it a conflict? Morally contradictory?


How? What does beauty have to do with morality? Beauty, pleasure, all positive experiences are separate from morality, good and evil.


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## Guest (Sep 12, 2010)

Boccherini said:


> Good points. But I deliberately mentioned mass murders as horrific events because I consider these to be much more horrible than worldwide diseases/epidemics, earthquakes, storms, typhoons etc. disregarding the amount of victims in any of each. But, of course, any horrific event, no matter what its degree, changes the standards of its era.
> As for the Black Death, I think I'm familiar with a smaller estimation (80-100 millions), but anyway as I said, I think that cannot be compared, in the sense of aspiring to reach equal estimations, also because I don't know how to judge it in regards of the same standards of the 14th century.


The Black Death was unprecedented in its scope. Up to 60% of Europeans dying? Such a scale was huge - so huge that it brought about a major change throughout Europe. I have read history books suggesting that this even may have been the start of people demanding greater rights. With so many dying in England, it is postulated, the labor force dramatically shrunk. Lords no longer had a huge labor force to exploit, and people soon found that their labor was now worth something. They could move from place to place, as lords, desperately in need of people to work their lands, began to offer incentives to draw people to them.

I understand what you are talking about regarding the difference in standards/perceptions over time. Yes, death was more prevalent in earlier centuries, and perhaps might not have had as big of an impact. But one simple question is begged by that assumption - taking only large scale killing into account, not natural deaths, why would such methods have been employed if they didn't have some kind of psychological impact? Death, or the anticipation of death, has got to be one of the greatest stresses that a human can face.

Simply put, we can speculate now what the impact would have been in ages past, but we cannot know. We all, quite naturally, tend to view our own circumstances as somehow being more difficult than what those who came before us had to face. But can we really say that the sheer psychological horror of a Jew dying in the Holocaust was worse than a Christian being torn to pieces in some Roman coliseum, while people cheered it on? Or a person in 14th century Europe seeing 6 out of 10 people around him dying a horrible death, wondering if he will be next? Or of an African chained to the floor of a filthy, stinking slave ship crossing an ocean, with people laying dead or dying around him/her, torn from their family, and then purchased and forced to labor like cattle? We know more of the Holocaust because it is so recent in our history, and there are still some alive who endured it, to tell us of the terror.


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## Boccherini (Mar 29, 2010)

Aramis said:


> Horror per se? There is always context, at least as far as we are talking about music - there is no music that "is" simply a horror (feel free to quote this and write "what about Boulez/Schoenberg?"). And it's the context that can make works filled with horror beautiful - not the horror itself, but the works. Like in many pieces by Shostakovich.
> 
> How? What does beauty have to do with morality? Beauty, pleasure, all positive experiences are separate from morality, good and evil.


When you listen to a horrific composition, watching horrific painting, reading horrific statements, do you enjoy the creation because of its horrors? Or just because it might be very essential to the creation as a whole?

I think it's morally contradictory to enjoy a creation only _because_ of its horror, per se. If someone kills someone else and tells you that it's his masterpiece, disregarding its immoral aspects, could you enjoy that? Would you consider that to be beautiful?


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## Aramis (Mar 1, 2009)

> When you listen to a horrific composition, watching horrific painting, reading horrific statements, do you enjoy the creation because of its horrors? Or just because it might be very essential to the creation as a whole?


What I find beautiful in such works is the manifesto of human creating power - it's that beautiful that artist that went through the horror was able to present this horror in work of art? Again Shostakovich is perfect example. Why all those people are listening to his dark and horrific symphonies? Is his music immoral?


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## Boccherini (Mar 29, 2010)

DrMike said:


> Simply put, we can speculate now what the impact would have been in ages past, but we cannot know. We all, quite naturally, tend to view our own circumstances as somehow being more difficult than what those who came before us had to face. But can we really say that the sheer psychological horror of a Jew dying in the Holocaust was worse than a Christian being torn to pieces in some Roman coliseum, while people cheered it on? Or a person in 14th century Europe seeing 6 out of 10 people around him dying a horrible death, wondering if he will be next? Or of an African chained to the floor of a filthy, stinking slave ship crossing an ocean, with people laying dead or dying around him/her, torn from their family, and then purchased and forced to labor like cattle? We know more of the Holocaust because it is so recent in our history, and there are still some alive who endured it, to tell us of the terror.


I think the questionable comparison should have been represented otherwise: Can we compare the death of someone in the 21th C. to someone else from hundreds of years ago, even if it looks a little problematic in _our_ eyes? I think the comparison you've made is according to today's standards; The horrific aspect is _not_ being estimated by the same eyes that it should have been (the crime's era standards).


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## Boccherini (Mar 29, 2010)

Aramis said:


> What I find beautiful in such works is the manifesto of human creating power - it's that beautiful that artist that went through the horror was able to present this horror in work of art? Again Shostakovich is perfect example. Why all those people are listening to his dark and horrific symphonies? Is his music immoral?


So, you enjoy the genius of the creator to attach evil aspects to music, not the evil per se?


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## Aramis (Mar 1, 2009)

> So, you enjoy the genius of the creator to attach evil aspects to music, not the evil per se?


Yes, that's how it is in my case.


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## Guest (Sep 12, 2010)

Boccherini said:


> I think the questionable comparison should have been represented otherwise: Can we compare the death of someone in the 21th C. to someone else from hundreds of years ago, even if it looks a little problematic in _our_ eyes? I think the comparison you've made is according to today's standards; The horrific aspect is _not_ being estimated by the same eyes that it should have been (the crime's era standards).


I think that the shifting standards would only affect how one sees the deaths of those with which they have no connection. Today we view with horror scenes of mass death that are far detached from us - the Holocaust (for most people they have no personal firsthand knowledge), or Rwanda, or other such atrocities. But regardless of the standards of the day, the personal psychological impact cannot be much different over time when it strikes much closer to home. The average Roman may not have been as horrified by the killing of Christians as people were in the last century by the Holocaust. But for the Christian during that time, I think you would be hard-pressed to substantiate a claim that their horror at the possibility of being sewn up in an animal skin and tossed to the lions was somehow less than a Jew being led to a furnace.

I tend to think that it wasn't so much that people were less horrified by such objectively horrid things in the past, so much as they felt more helpless in being able to do anything about it - more nihilistic. It happens today as well - I don't know whether to as much of a degree, but in some ways, the Holocaust has somehow contributed. Not intentionally, I'm sure, but in your repeated assertions of how horrible the Holocaust was, and how nothing else is quite up to that level, there is almost a dismissal of other atrocities, for fear of suggesting that anything could be worse, as if that would diminish how horrendous the Holocaust was. But in the wake of the Holocaust, how could we still shrug off, as a planet, the atrocities of Rwanda? Or of Darfur? Was the large-scale mass murder of Iraqis in Saddam Hussein's torture rooms not worthy of stopping simply because it had not reached Holocaust levels? We still shrug things off to this day, because they aren't happening to us. Are we really so different? Yes, much of the industrialized West no longer participates in mass murder. But we turn a blind eye to it elsewhere, and enjoy watching the dramatization of it on the movie screen, in ever more graphic, sadistic ways, and rationalize that we are so much better than Romans watching death for entertainment because ours is make-believe. We even move further away in our horror films from supernatural killers, to those more realistic - a torture business in some Slavic country, depicted in the Hostel movies, where wealthy people can pay to sadistically kill kidnapped youths; a deranged killer thinking he is helping people change their lives by subjecting them to deadly puzzles that can kill them in ever more painful and sadistic ways in the Saw movies?


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## Guest (Sep 12, 2010)

Aramis said:


> What I find beautiful in such works is the manifesto of human creating power - it's that beautiful that artist that went through the horror was able to present this horror in work of art? Again Shostakovich is perfect example. Why all those people are listening to his dark and horrific symphonies? Is his music immoral?


I agree to a large extent. I don't personally find a lot of beauty in horrific things, but beauty is not always about a superficial notion of blissful sunshine and roses. Sometimes the beauty of depicting something horrible can come from conveying that horror in such a way to help us understand what it did to others, and commit to not repeat such horrors.

In the case of music, consider the requiem. What is it really? A mass for the dead. Death is not normally considered a thing of beauty. And yet these can be some of the most sublime, most beautiful works. Consider from the perspective of Christians the horrific execution of Christ - scourged, then nailed to a cross to die, by all contemporary evaluations, what is one of the more sadistic methods of execution throughout history. And yet Christians find hope. Great works of art and music have been created with that inspiration. Beauty from horror.

Not all will appreciate the beauty in every creation. And certainly there are things that are simply horrible for the sake of horror. But it is wrong to deny any inherent beauty in something simply because of an element of horror.


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## Huilunsoittaja (Apr 6, 2010)

Argus said:


> About what?
> 
> *bites tongue*
> 
> :wave:


I remember hearing a quote by Cage where he said something like "everything is music." That's what I would question if it's true or false, cuz I honestly don't know.


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## StlukesguildOhio (Dec 25, 2006)

I remember hearing a quote by Cage where he said something like "everything is music." 

That's the kind of "thinking" that leads me to question Cage's "genius". If everything is music or everything is art then there is no art or music because there is nothing that can be differentiated as music or art from anything else.


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## Elgarian (Jul 30, 2008)

StlukesguildOhio said:


> I remember hearing a quote by Cage where he said something like "everything is music."
> 
> That's the kind of "thinking" that leads me to question Cage's "genius". If everything is music or everything is art then there is no art or music because there is nothing that can be differentiated as music or art from anything else.


Almost every definition of art (or of beauty) seems to fail at some point, and one way of looking at art is to see it as a continual attempt to discover what it is. Often a breakthrough is accompanied by initial protest ('I don't consider _that_ to be music, or painting, or beauty, or whatever'), but it's then progressively assimilated during subsequent generations.

So however much one might try to pin these concepts down objectively, and however partially helpful such attempts can be (Ruskin's concept of what he calls Vital Beauty as 'the appearance of felicitous fulfilment of function' can be a useful tool of thought in certain circumstances, for instance), they can never be fixed as long as the process of discovery continues. But also, ideals of beauty, as perceived, vary not only from from one historical epoch to another, but also (often unpredictably) from one person to another. I was shocked today, for example, to read this in Victor Gollancz's insufferable book _Journey Towards Music_. He's talking about Wagner's 'Redemption by love' theme, which appears only twice in _Der Ring_, and most spectacularly at the conclusion of the whole cycle. For many people this represents the highest pinnacle of all opera, and he writes:



> It is fair to say, then, that Wagner intends it to indicate or symbolise or sum up the whole meaning of _The Ring_. And what is it? A trivial and banal little tune, as incommensurate as could well be imagined with the grandeur and solemnity of the idea it is meant to embody: and made all the worse by the pomp of its orchestral panoply at the surging climax.


If music lovers can't agree about _that_ as an object of beauty, then I doubt there's much hope of ever reaching a satisfactory general conclusion about the concept of The Beautiful.


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## Xaltotun (Sep 3, 2010)

If we cannot reach a conclusion or agreement about what Absolute Beauty is, that does not mean that Absolute Beauty does not exist.


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## Guest (Sep 14, 2010)

StlukesguildOhio said:


> I remember hearing a quote by Cage where he said something like "everything is music."
> 
> That's the kind of "thinking" that leads me to question Cage's "genius". If everything is music or everything is art then there is no art or music because there is nothing that can be differentiated as music or art from anything else.


One, you question Cage on the basis of an inaccurate, second-hand citation by someone who isn't even sure if it's accurate? Now there's fair!

Two, the logic of "if everything is music...then there is no music" is itself questionable. Why isn't "if everything is music, then everything is music" just as valid? (Do you have to differentiate in order to identify?) But that's all as may be. That is not what Cage said, and if you want to question his genius with any validity, you're going to have to base your questions on what he actually said, not on what someone reports as maybe having heard somewhere.

Three, is differentiating music from nonmusic an important activity? One thing Cage was interested in was what he saw as rather capricious line drawing between sonic things that were considered music and sonic things that weren't. It's the difference between inclusive and exclusive. For a long time, exclusive had ruled. Cage was curious about what happens when you include rather than exclude. And he found, at least for himself, that inclusivity was preferable.


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## Sid James (Feb 7, 2009)

Yes, Cage was intersted in the "illegal harmonies" that occur around us in everyday life. For centuries, they were barred from concert halls and "high art." All Cage was doing, by using radio, vinyl and tape recordings (electronic elements) was to let these sounds and noises become part of our experience of classical music (as they should be, IMO)...


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## StlukesguildOhio (Dec 25, 2006)

Enlighten me, oh omnipotent one... what exactly was Cage's quote? The concept that "Everything is Art... Music... Literature..." has been tossed around for quite some time... and usually by those with less than acute intellectual abilities misquoting figures such as Cage... or the most likely suspect, Marcel Duchamp. Commonly Duchamp's "Fountain" (the famous urinal) is sited as the initial expression of the challenge to the notion of art being at all differentiated from non-art. In reality, Duchamp was playing the devil's advocate... challenging the organizers of an exhibition who had declared that everything would be accepted by confronting them with a work that questioned what was art? Is something art simply because the artist (and who qualifies as an artist?) says that it is so? Duchamp at the time made it clear that he questioned the notion of art without standards... the concept that anything was art.

Ultimately, the whole dispute is rather boring and sophomoric... of little use beyond Onanistic debate among art students over beer and pizza. What is or is not art is decided upon by the audience. The medieval sculptors... to say nothing of the painters at Lascaux... had no concept of themselves as "artists" or what they were creating as being "art"... but they are most certainly art because they are considered as such by the current art audience. Conversely... whether what you or I create is ultimately accepted as being art is something others will decide... no matter how much I protest and declare, "But I am an ARTIST! I have a degree that proclaims it to be so!" By this same standard Duchamp's "fountain" is art (for the time being)... as is the action of the contemporary artist who urinated in the "fountain" in the Philadelphia Museum with the intention of returning the work to its original purpose... as is Manzoni's can of ****... or Cage's 4:33 (for the time being).

Whether these objects or acts remain art is open to question. As Robert Hughes pointed out, the more esoteric examples of contemporary art which intended to blur the boundaries between art and life are ironically the most dependent upon the mechanisms of the artistic context for their very survival. Joseph Beuys' blob of lard is little more than disgusting festering garbage to be thrown out by the cleaning crew (as it once was) outside the context of the art gallery/museum and the audience "properly" educated in Modernist theory. Carl Andre's pile of bricks moved outside of the museum or gallery into the parking lot are little more than elements of construction in process, while Rodin's Kiss moved to the same site is still clearly a work of art. By the same token... it is doubtful that Cage 4:33 and a number of other works of contemporary music would be thought of as music outside of the "proper" context... beyond the audience "properly" taught the notions of Modernist music. "Inclusiveness" has a nice Egalitarian ring to it and certainly makes those who oppose it sound like close-minded autocrats... but then again 9-11 was not a marvelous work of art... regardless of Stockhausen.


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## Sid James (Feb 7, 2009)

I don't really care about what is or is not art according to the mainstream vanilla tastes of the so called general public (classical music listening or otherwise). I just respond to the sounds that I like. No matter how popular they are, I will always hate things like Saint-Saens' _Organ Symphony_ or Grofe's _Grand Canyon Suite_. Music for the lowest common denominator. I don't care if things like Cage's experimental recorded sound/acoustic works or Carter's very atonal/serial string quartets will never be as popular as those. I don't care what 80-90% of the public thinks. I'm more interested in music that somehow pushes the boundaries, from Monteverdi till the present day. I don't care what's "proper" or "improper," as long as it engages me on some level. BTW, what's 9/11 got to do with Stockhausen?


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## karenpat (Jan 16, 2009)

^I agree.

On the subject of beauty in art in general, I'm currently studying 18th-19th century art and here the other day I read a passage about the definition of sublime - apparently it was discovered that people react more strongly to fear/shock than beauty, and because of that it was expected that paintings contain an element of surprise or at least something to engage the viewer beyond beauty. It was like a revelation to me, I think it's the same today, at least in the visual arts. It seems the art academy crowd is terrified of beauty and having your work called beautiful is the worst insult you could get. Preferably it should be repulsive.


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## Elgarian (Jul 30, 2008)

But since the concept of what is beautiful is continually changing, Beauty itself can't be anything else but an object of debate. The same examples keep coming to mind again and again in these discussions, but that's because they're such good illustrations of the problems.

Are Cezanne's paintings beautiful? Well, I think they're among the most beautiful works of art in existence - millions of people think so - but in the 1870s they were considered derisory and even insulting. The Lake District in England is considered today to be one of the world's great beauty spots, but to travellers in the late 18th century it was considered savage, barbaric, and frightening (as Karenpat mentions in her discussion of the Sublime). One can even observe the change appearing in engraved landscapes of the period: as the perception of the Sublime grew, landscape depictions shifted from the reassuring Arcadian ideal, towards grotesque and fearsome representations. It wasn't the landscape that had changed - it was the concept of what is beautiful.

Keats thought that beauty and truth were the same thing. Ruskin thought beauty was something intrinsic in the object - something objective rather than subjective. Many would say that it's 'in the eye of the beholder'. Since there's no agreement about the concept of beauty, one might wonder if the word is all that much use to us, except as one of those milk-and-watery catch-all words such as 'like' (as in 'I like this' or 'I don't like that') that we all tend lazily to fall back on.

I think it's more helpful to try to avoid attaching a label, and instead talk about (or try to demonstrate, where words fail), the nature of the experience that's being offered. It's a lot harder to do that, but it makes real communication possible. If Jill is apparently entranced by a piece of music that to me sounds like random plonks and bangs on the drum, my only hope of understanding is to _ask_ her about it, to try to see what kind of experience it's offering her. And the more articulate she is (the less she uses words such as 'like' or 'beauty'), the more chance there is that I'll be able to form some genuine understanding of what's going on, rather than merely dismissing what she's listening to as 'ugly'.


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## HarpsichordConcerto (Jan 1, 2010)

Elgarian said:


> I think it's more helpful to try to avoid attaching a label, and instead talk about (or try to demonstrate, where words fail), the nature of the experience that's being offered. It's a lot harder to do that, but it makes real communication possible. If Jill is apparently entranced by a piece of music that to me sounds like random plonks and bangs on the drum, my only hope of understanding is to _ask_ her about it, to try to see what kind of experience it's offering her. And the more articulate she is (the less she uses words such as 'like' or 'beauty'), the more chance there is that I'll be able to form some genuine understanding of what's going on, rather than merely dismissing what she's listening to as 'ugly'.


If Jill enjoys Stockhausen's _Helicopter String Quartet_? I'm saying one shouldn't necessarily feel impolite when describing a piece of art as ugly.


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## StlukesguildOhio (Dec 25, 2006)

BTW, what's 9/11 got to do with Stockhausen?

"Well, what happened there is, of course-now all of you must adjust your brains-the biggest work of art there has ever been. The fact that spirits achieve with one act something which we in music could never dream of, that people practise ten years madly, fanatically for a concert. And then die. And that is the greatest work of art that exists for the whole Cosmos. Just imagine what happened there. There are people who are so concentrated on this single performance, and then five thousand people are driven to Resurrection. In one moment. I couldn't do that. Compared to that, we are nothing, as composers."

Karlheinz Stockhausen, 2002
Speaking on the attacks of 9/11


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## Guest (Sep 14, 2010)

Elgarian said:


> If Jill is apparently entranced by a piece of music that to me sounds like random plonks and bangs on the drum, my only hope of understanding is to _ask_ her about it, to try to see what kind of experience it's offering her. And the more articulate she is (the less she uses words such as 'like' or 'beauty'), the more chance there is that I'll be able to form some genuine understanding of what's going on, rather than merely dismissing what she's listening to as 'ugly'.


QFT!!

And here's the real nub, that words like "beauty" and "ugliness" are words that identify a relationship. Indeed, one can say that nothing really exists until someone, a receiving apparatus if you will, perceives it. That is, reality is neither "out there" _nor_ "in the eye of the beholder" but in the relationship between whatever is "out there" and whoever is perceiving. That's so difficult to accept, especially when it's something you have a negative relationship with, like HarpsichordConcerto with Stockhausen's _Helicopter Quartet._ But yes, it only takes Jill (and only _one_ Jill) to like it to prove that it's likable.

Why should HarpsichordConcerto assume that Jill's relationship with those sounds is less valid that his? Simply because his relationship with that piece is so negative. It's not the piece that is ugly (any more than it's that the piece is beautiful); it's that HarpsichordConcerto's perception of it is negative. That's really all we can say about anything, isn't it? Much as we desire there to be ultimate truth (and ultimate beauty) by which we can validate our own tastes, the reality of perception just doesn't work that way.

(And, just to head off a possible red herring, if red herrings can be headed off!!, it's not about "subjective" and "objective," either. It's about a third thing, the relationship between the subject and the object.)


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## World Violist (May 31, 2007)

This discussion seems to be getting remarkably close to "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance." The main character is a teacher and asks his class what "quality" is, and then himself figures out that quality is actually an event, whereby a subject and object relate in some way. I think the same can be said of beauty. If someone says something is beautiful, and I don't agree, then I can't tell them to their face it's ugly because it is only myself who perceives it as being ugly. She perceives it and it relates to her in a way that makes her think it's beautiful. Why should I tell her any differently when my perception of its ugliness is purely a relativistic thing.

And now I think this thread is running around in circles.


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## Guest (Sep 14, 2010)

some guy said:


> QFT!!
> 
> And here's the real nub, that words like "beauty" and "ugliness" are words that identify a relationship. Indeed, one can say that nothing really exists until someone, a receiving apparatus if you will, perceives it. That is, reality is neither "out there" _nor_ "in the eye of the beholder" but in the relationship between whatever is "out there" and whoever is perceiving. That's so difficult to accept, especially when it's something you have a negative relationship with, like HarpsichordConcerto with Stockhausen's _Helicopter Quartet._ But yes, it only takes Jill (and only _one_ Jill) to like it to prove that it's likable.
> 
> ...


I agree with some of your assertions, but with others I have issues. I do think it is wrong to make absolute statements about the beauty/quality of something based on personal judgments. There is very little in this world that is ever 100%. If I fail to find beauty in something, that does not then mean there is none to be found. But in your final statement, though, you also seem to imply that an exception can define something as much as anything else. Is something to be deemed likable if even a single person finds something in it they like? There will always be anomalies. Is a deadly virus not deadly if it does not kill 100% of those infected? Is darkness not dark if there is a single, incredibly small, point of light? Can we truly and accurately characterize things based on exceptions and anomalies?

I also have issues with the idea of an objects existence, inherent worth and beauty being non-existent until another object comes along to provide those things. Consider a scenario - two humans are the only life remaining. Both are aware of one another, and find each other beautiful. One dies. Does the other cease to be beautiful, or to exist, now that that relationship is gone?

And yet, as much as we all prize our individuality, the fact of the matter is that so much of what we are and what we can be is tied to the larger community of humanity. Beauty can certainly be narrowly defined when we talk about our own personal preferences, but when we apply more general characterizations, they have to be in line with the norm. Now, beauty is not the only quality of something, such as a work of art or a piece of music, that determines its inherent value. Something can be valuable without any particular beauty. I don't think it is necessary to insist that any piece of music we happen to like must therefore be beautiful. The forces that attract us to things are much more complex than that. And it is also important to realize that beauty is merely a description, not any one discernible quality. For some, it is the outward appearance in which they see beauty. For others, it is the unseen qualities. For some, as it has been said already, the sheer creative act behind a work is for them the beauty. But again, this only addresses personal tastes.


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## Nicola (Nov 25, 2007)

World Violist said:


> And now I think this thread is running around in circles.


A very perceptive comment. But will it stop the flow? Heck no. My eyes just glaze over when I see all this stuff. Why do people bother?


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## Elgarian (Jul 30, 2008)

HarpsichordConcerto said:


> If Jill enjoys Stockhausen's _Helicopter String Quartet_? I'm saying one shouldn't necessarily feel impolite when describing a piece of art as ugly.


Well, my point would be that it depends on what we want the outcome to be. If we want to divide the world up into 'things I like' and 'things I don't like', then labelling things some things beautiful and some things ugly is one of the ways we can go about it. Sometimes I do that myself, but I'm aware when I do it that I may be robbing myself of a chance to understand something better, to see from a different perspective, to grow. If Jill is genuinely enjoying her experience of the helicopter quartet, and finds it enhances her perceptions and enriches her life, while I merely find it ugly, then it seems to me that she's doing fine, even though it wouldn't be my choice.

One can of course say 'Oh, but the helicopter stuff seriously _is _ugly (in some absolute sense), and her taste for it is somehow harmful, or degenerate, and I'm better off without it', or what have you. But _all those things_ have been said of some of the great art of the past. Certainly of Cezanne. So we say that sort of thing at some risk, I think.


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## Elgarian (Jul 30, 2008)

World Violist said:


> And now I think this thread is running around in circles.


I don't think there's anywhere else for it to run, WV. No _satisfactory_ theory of beauty has ever been proposed, as far as I'm aware - so the idea that a few of us might sort it out in an internet forum seems unlikely.


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## Guest (Sep 14, 2010)

Elgarian said:


> Well, my point would be that it depends on what we want the outcome to be. If we want to divide the world up into 'things I like' and 'things I don't like', then labelling things some things beautiful and some things ugly is one of the ways we can go about it. Sometimes I do that myself, but I'm aware when I do it that I may be robbing myself of a chance to understand something better, to see from a different perspective, to grow. If Jill is genuinely enjoying her experience of the helicopter quartet, and finds it enhances her perceptions and enriches her life, while I merely find it ugly, then it seems to me that she's doing fine, even though it wouldn't be my choice.
> 
> One can of course say 'Oh, but the helicopter stuff seriously _is _ugly (in some absolute sense), and her taste for it is somehow harmful, or degenerate, and I'm better off without it', or what have you.* But all those things have been said of some of the great art of the past. Certainly of Cezanne.* So we say that sort of thing at some risk, I think.


True. But no doubt that has also been said a great many more times that, in fact, never ended up being vindicated. Does the baby sometimes get thrown out with the bath water? No doubt. But is it more the exception or the rule that things today labeled ugly are later found otherwise? Who can know. With time, we only seem to be left with the winners. Because we can't hold on forever to every creation of man, for fear of accidentally jettisoning something that might potentially have some unseen value or worth - becoming a civilization of cultural pack rats.

Clearly it serves no legitimate service to go and ridicule the personal selections of another, if they don't conform to our personal tastes.

I think that there are individuals who seek to push boundaries or challenge norms, and those who seek after those things, perhaps out of a desire for something new or different. But the vast majority seek more for something that feels, sounds, or looks beautiful. This varies from culture to culture, and over time, but a lot can be timeless and transcend cultures. The music of a Bach or a Beethoven continues to be listened to and loved all over the world, with 200 or more years separating us from their creations. Who can say what will be gleaned from the 20th century to survive for the next 200 years. We like to think that we can predict such things, and even retrospectively imagine stories of foresight to make us think we can make accurate predictions - e.g. prognostications by Mozart and Haydn regarding how monumental Beethoven would be, which are, no doubt, apocryphal.

At this point in time, such critiques and assessments, other than helping to keep online forums bustling with unsolicited opinions, serve only to justify the existence of critics who are paid for just such pronouncements.


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## Elgarian (Jul 30, 2008)

DrMike said:


> True. But no doubt that has also been said a great many more times that, in fact, never ended up being vindicated. Does the baby sometimes get thrown out with the bath water? No doubt. But is it more the exception or the rule that things today labeled ugly are later found otherwise? Who can know. With time, we only seem to be left with the winners. Because we can't hold on forever to every creation of man, for fear of accidentally jettisoning something that might potentially have some unseen value or worth - becoming a civilization of cultural pack rats.


By and large it doesn't really matter about the bad stuff, except perhaps to students of cultural history. The really worthless will jettison itself, because it will persistently refuse to reward the attention given to it. That's why, as you say, the passage of time leaves us only with the winners (on the whole).

My argument isn't really about the statistics of the process, but about the unimportance and unreliability of our negative responses. When I say that - let's say - Handel's Italian cantatas took me into a new and hugely rewarding sound world (which indeed I consider deeply beautiful) when I discovered them, I know that to be true. It happened, and I know it won't unhappen. I won't change my mind about their value because _I can really see it for myself_. By contrast, if I say that Bax's 5th symphony sounds ugly (as it does, to me, here and now), I know that's almost certainly because I haven't managed to make a good relationship with it (to use SomeGuy's terms of expression). In the absence of that relationship, I have nothing to say about the Bax that's worth saying (except in a purely anecdotal way, when talking about myself). My perception of ugliness is just too unreliable to be trusted.


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## Ravellian (Aug 17, 2009)

Good god, can't we just agree that "beauty" is an abstract man-made concept, therefore each person has a different idea of what "beauty" is and there is no absolute non-changing definition? What people tended to think of as beautiful 150 years ago is way different from what many people think today, that's all...


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## HarpsichordConcerto (Jan 1, 2010)

Elgarian said:


> When I say that - let's say - Handel's Italian cantatas took me into a new and hugely rewarding sound world (which indeed I consider deeply beautiful) when I discovered them, I know that to be true.


Handel's Italian cantatas are of absolute beauty and that's a universal truth. :tiphat:


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## Elgarian (Jul 30, 2008)

Ravellian said:


> Good god, can't we just agree that "beauty" is an abstract man-made concept, therefore each person has a different idea of what "beauty" is and there is no absolute non-changing definition? What people tended to think of as beautiful 150 years ago is way different from what many people think today, that's all...


And yet for many people there is no 'that's all' about it - witness the lengthy discussions down the centuries about the nature of beauty and our response to it. One might argue that, since 'beauty' is a source of powerful motivating/life-changing forces for many of us, it's a matter of some importance to try to understand what it is (or, as importantly, what it isn't), and what influences have brought about the changes through time. But like much discussion of a philosophical bent, it can seem sterile to those who aren't interested in it.


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## Sid James (Feb 7, 2009)

StlukesguildOhio said:


> BTW, what's 9/11 got to do with Stockhausen?
> 
> "Well, what happened there is, of course-now all of you must adjust your brains-the biggest work of art there has ever been. The fact that spirits achieve with one act something which we in music could never dream of, that people practise ten years madly, fanatically for a concert. And then die. And that is the greatest work of art that exists for the whole Cosmos. Just imagine what happened there. There are people who are so concentrated on this single performance, and then five thousand people are driven to Resurrection. In one moment. I couldn't do that. Compared to that, we are nothing, as composers."
> 
> ...


What's this have to do with the debate at hand? Do you evaluate the music of your avowed idols Wagner & Richard Strauss on similarly disagreeable things they said (Wagner about Jews; Richard Strauss about Schoenberg being mad, behind his back, of course - probably yet another closet anti-Semite). The last two were probably bigger hypocrites than Stockhausen - Wagner accepted a loan from Jewish composer Meyerbeer and Strauss toadied to the Nazis - eg. conducted for them at Bayreuth. I think that what Stockhausen said above was debatable regarding art (not all people agree art=life) & also a tasteless thing, considering how many lost their lives on that day. But I think that it has just about zero to do with this debate. We must judge these guys on their music, not on anything avowedly loopy they may have said to the press. It also takes more effort to listen to the music of Stockhausen perceptively than simply focus on his egomania - I agree that things like the cycle of operas called _Licht_ sound like totally megalomaniac schemes, out of tune with reality, but the same could be said of the two dear Richards above...


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## StlukesguildOhio (Dec 25, 2006)

What's this have to do with the debate at hand? Do you evaluate the music of your avowed idols Wagner & Richard Strauss on similarly disagreeable things they said (Wagner about Jews; Richard Strauss about Schoenberg being mad, behind his back, of course - probably yet another closet anti-Semite). The last two were probably bigger hypocrites than Stockhausen - Wagner accepted a loan from Jewish composer Meyerbeer and Strauss toadied to the Nazis - eg. conducted for them at Bayreuth. I think that what Stockhausen said above was debatable regarding art (not all people agree art=life) & also a tasteless thing, considering how many lost their lives on that day. But I think that it has just about zero to do with this debate. We must judge these guys on their music, not on anything avowedly loopy they may have said to the press. It also takes more effort to listen to the music of Stockhausen perceptively than simply focus on his egomania - I agree that things like the cycle of operas called Licht sound like totally megalomaniac schemes, out of tune with reality, but the same could be said of the two dear Richards above... 

Andre... you're really stretching to find something to criticize here. The quote from my earlier post reads as follows:

_Whether these objects or acts remain art is open to question. As Robert Hughes pointed out, the more esoteric examples of contemporary art which intended to blur the boundaries between art and life are ironically the most dependent upon the mechanisms of the artistic context for their very survival. Joseph Beuys' blob of lard is little more than disgusting festering garbage to be thrown out by the cleaning crew (as it once was) outside the context of the art gallery/museum and the audience "properly" educated in Modernist theory. Carl Andre's pile of bricks moved outside of the museum or gallery into the parking lot are little more than elements of construction in process, while Rodin's Kiss moved to the same site is still clearly a work of art. By the same token... it is doubtful that Cage 4:33 and a number of other works of contemporary music would be thought of as music outside of the "proper" context... beyond the audience "properly" taught the notions of Modernist music. "Inclusiveness" has a nice Egalitarian ring to it and certainly makes those who oppose it sound like close-minded autocrats... but then again 9-11 was not a marvelous work of art... regardless of Stockhausen._

You then asked what Stockhausen had to do with 9:11... to which I offered the above reply. Personally, what Stockhausen had to say about 9:11 doesn't affect my opinion of his music. I still quite like _Stimmung_, and I still think the helicopter schtick was retarded. Obviously his quotes leads me to doubt his intelligence or common sense... but artists are often known for their less-than-common-sense comments.

Jumping on Wagner and Strauss seems but a lame attempt of misdirected tit-for-tat. Yes Wagner was anti-semitic. A little reading on Richard Strauss and his efforts on behalf of the music of Mendelssohn, his librettist, the poet Stefan Zweig, and his Jewish daughter-in-law might lead you to reassess your opinions of Strauss... although probably not. I don't see very much in Strauss that strikes me as megalomaniacal... Rather, Strauss was known to be rather self-effacing... even declaring near the end of his life, "I may not be a first-rate composer, but I am a first-class second-rate composer" which is quite an understatement by my accounts. Wagner, however, was most certainly an ego-maniac... but again I can stomach ego when one has the talent to back it up. Michelangelo was notorious for his ego... and deservedly so. The same might be said of Wagner. Yes, the Ring is one megalomaniacal creation... but unlike Licht... people... actually shell out small fortunes and travel thousands of miles to experience Wagner's work in sold-out opera houses. At least Cage had the common sense to recognize that no one's going to sit through more than a few minutes of silence.


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## Sid James (Feb 7, 2009)

Well, you are right, I did get a bit emotional & tit for tat. 

Getting back to the matters you originally raised, I don't really think it's possible to definitively solve the debate on whether art=life (or vice versa). To some, art is just an artificial thing that we can kind of turn on and off like a tap. To others, it is an integral part of our lives. & to those in the middle, it is both.

I think that guys like Beuys and Cage were more about questioning the "grand narrative" concepts of art that had been dominant for centuries. Schoenberg famously said that Cage (who had at one stage studied with him) was less a composer and more "an inventor of genius." Conceptual art now has a place in the canon, in fact, these guys (along with Stockhausen) are now (& were during their lifetimes) firmly part of the establishment - eg. their works are taught and studied at art & music schools. Their ideas about art & the human condition are just as influential as those of other earlier artists. Some students will follow the directions they set down, others will ignore them. Same with the consumer of these types of art - some will be moved (or at least stimulated or engaged) by their works, others not.

BTW, I'm not sure the context that the Stockhausen quote appeared in, but having thought about it more in the last 24 hours, I think (that if you apply some assumptions/caveats) Stockhausen was spot on. In a way, 9/11 became the biggest example of performance art initiated by the media. Everywhere you went that week, you could see endless repeats of the moments that the Twin Towers were hit & collapsed. The media is hypocritical, because it is ostensibly horrified by the horror, but by their actions they show that they love it. Especially cataclysmic events like this (long drawn out 30 year wars in the Congo are not exciting enough - & it has to be quick enough for a short grab on the news). Stockhausen was right in comparing it to performance art, in a loopy (& some might say tasteless) way. The media had a huge feast on this for days/weeks/months on end. Many more people have died in places like the Congo, but there is little spectacle there to draw the world's attention. Like it or not, we - through the media - are mesmerised by the spectacle. That's what Stockhausen was probably getting at, although I am not sure of the context in which he said those words...


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## Lukecash12 (Sep 21, 2009)

I think people have confused our objective sense of good and bad too much with the field of aesthetics. For the layman, something is beautiful as long as we interpret that it was intended to express something that is good from an objective sense. For the self proclaimed academic, something is beautiful because of it's inherent qualities, which in fact don't exist.

Interestingly, this is a case where the laymen trump the academics from an intellectual standpoint.


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## marmaluot_45 (Sep 17, 2010)

"Today people are a little more cynical... But this is not because they have lost the interest in beauty or the need to encounter it in their daily lives. They have lost faith in art as a way of supplying that need...
People may have given up on art... But they still design their own lives...




Pardon it's not correct, people would want art, people don't want giving up on art: it's so easy telling so.
People was cheated.
It is a cynical criticism, pardon please.
The mind of artist is empty because the great and big critics decided so.
The artists didn't unterstand that many cunning men put in his mind strange ideas of art.

Let's start with Duchamp and the moustaches of gioconda.
This act is a big profanity.
Nobody said anything but the critics cried for joy and miracle.
Poor men.
Mona Lisa is the Leonardo's mother.
Leonardo painted his mother who saw her for few years in your life.
But in Milano, when Catarina died, Leonardo was here and wrote the episode.
Why this paint is so famous?
Because is the regard of a pregnant woman: our mother, mother nature. the mother of all us.
We must stop these jokes, these garbages and trashes.
People want true art but the artists are missed.
We must change his corrupt mind.
Even if anyone should sell a worthless painting for all of gold world.

See you


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## Lukecash12 (Sep 21, 2009)

marmaluot_45 said:


> "Today people are a little more cynical... But this is not because they have lost the interest in beauty or the need to encounter it in their daily lives. They have lost faith in art as a way of supplying that need...
> People may have given up on art... But they still design their own lives...
> 
> Pardon it's not correct, people would want art, people don't want giving up on art: it's so easy telling so.
> ...


I would love to hear someone as poignant as you speaking in your own language, but still, you don't need to pardon yourself for not having perfect English. You are obviously a well spoken person.


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## Sid James (Feb 7, 2009)

It's good to see that the antics of Duchamp are still causing a bit of a stir, decades after his death. Controversy/celebrity has been a hallmark of many artists of the C20th. It's a good thing that at least some artists didn't lead conventional and boring middle class lives. They wanted to throw a cat among the pigeons, and scepticism of the conventions (which can often be very stifling) is a healthy thing indeed...


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## StlukesguildOhio (Dec 25, 2006)

Getting back to the matters you originally raised, I don't really think it's possible to definitively solve the debate on whether art=life (or vice versa). To some, art is just an artificial thing that we can kind of turn on and off like a tap. To others, it is an integral part of our lives.

And this undoubtedly is why there is such debate in art... because it is so important or meaningful to those who have elected to make it so and elected to put forth the effort in understanding and appreciating it. To have someone suggest that an artist who is deeply meaningful to you is in reality but trite garbage or a great joke often inspires a gut reaction as if a parent has been told that their child (who has such meaning to them) is an ignorant, ugly cretin.

I'm not sure the context that the Stockhausen quote appeared in, but having thought about it more in the last 24 hours, I think (that if you apply some assumptions/caveats) Stockhausen was spot on. In a way, 9/11 became the biggest example of performance art initiated by the media. Everywhere you went that week, you could see endless repeats of the moments that the Twin Towers were hit & collapsed. The media is hypocritical, because it is ostensibly horrified by the horror, but by their actions they show that they love it. Especially cataclysmic events like this (long drawn out 30 year wars in the Congo are not exciting enough - & it has to be quick enough for a short grab on the news). Stockhausen was right in comparing it to performance art, in a loopy (& some might say tasteless) way. The media had a huge feast on this for days/weeks/months on end. Many more people have died in places like the Congo, but there is little spectacle there to draw the world's attention. Like it or not, we - through the media - are mesmerised by the spectacle. That's what Stockhausen was probably getting at, although I am not sure of the context in which he said those words... 

Ultimately, this in but one example of the how out of touch with reality... with what the larger portion of humanity feels and thinks... that leads me to agree with Lukecash' assertion that in some ways the laymen trump the intellectuals... They have clear notions of beauty... not one wrapped up in intellectualized BS... and they certainly have little question that statements such as Stockhausen's are not merely tack or insensitive... but clearly beneath contempt. Faulkner pointed out in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech (quoted below) that the role of art was not merely to rub humanity's nose in the ugly realities of life... but also to suggest higher possibilities (beauty?). As certain camps of art revel more and more in ugliness and shock value one can almost imagine that the future art exhibitions will not be far from what is imagined in this brief bit of fiction:

http://www.infinityplus.co.uk/stories/armoryshow.htm

William Faulkner, Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech:

_I feel that this award was not made to me as a man, but to my work - a life's work in the agony and sweat of the human spirit, not for glory and least of all for profit, but to create out of the materials of the human spirit something which did not exist before. So this award is only mine in trust. It will not be difficult to find a dedication for the money part of it commensurate with the purpose and significance of its origin. But I would like to do the same with the acclaim too, by using this moment as a pinnacle from which I might be listened to by the young men and women already dedicated to the same anguish and travail, among whom is already that one who will some day stand here where I am standing.

Our tragedy today is a general and universal physical fear so long sustained by now that we can even bear it. There are no longer problems of the spirit. There is only the question: When will I be blown up? Because of this, the young man or woman writing today has forgotten the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself which alone can make good writing because only that is worth writing about, worth the agony and the sweat.

He must learn them again. He must teach himself that the basest of all things is to be afraid; and, teaching himself that, forget it forever, leaving no room in his workshop for anything but the old verities and truths of the heart, the old universal truths lacking which any story is ephemeral and doomed - love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice. Until he does so, he labors under a curse. He writes not of love but of lust, of defeats in which nobody loses anything of value, of victories without hope and, worst of all, without pity or compassion. His griefs grieve on no universal bones, leaving no scars. He writes not of the heart but of the glands.

Until he relearns these things, he will write as though he stood among and watched the end of man. I decline to accept the end of man. It is easy enough to say that man is immortal simply because he will endure: that when the last dingdong of doom has clanged and faded from the last worthless rock hanging tideless in the last red and dying evening, that even then there will still be one more sound: that of his puny inexhaustible voice, still talking. I refuse to accept this. I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance. The poet's, the writer's, duty is to write about these things. It is his privilege to help man endure by lifting his heart, by reminding him of the courage and honor and hope and pride and compassion and pity and sacrifice which have been the glory of his past. The poet's voice need not merely be the record of man, it can be one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and prevail._


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## Lukecash12 (Sep 21, 2009)

Fantastic quote, Stluke. William Faulkner's acceptance speech is one of my favorites as well, on the subject of aesthetics.


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## Sid James (Feb 7, 2009)

Most of that quote goes above my head (I am not up on all of the issues talked about - and wouldn't know a thing about modern literature). But it seems to me that you are pushing an either/or kind of absolutist view of beauty here. I think that we can be all flexible to include in our notions of beauty both things like the three B's, Michelangelo, Milton, etc. and also the exciting things that contemporary artists are doing today. Art can stimulate both the heart and mind. It doesn't have to do one thing to the exclusion of the other (if it's really good, it will probably do both). I'm a regular visitor to art galleries and also go to concerts a few times per month. Not everything that I have encountered in these places can be described as classically "beautiful." Often, the issue is clouded by our own experiences, eg. my father, who lived through the tail end of the Stalin era in Eastern Europe during his youth, hated Shostakovich (especially the 5th symphony which I saw just weeks back - those militaristic rhythms and shocking discords). To him, it was probably "ugly," but to me, distanced from that whole history (I was born after Shostakovich died & grew up here in far distant Australia) this work is one of his most moving and probing. I can see well beyond the surface - beauty is not skin deep. So often what one person may think of as "ugly" is virtually "beautiful" to another person - all based on their experiences and perceptions. It's all relative to the consumer, not an absolute thing as you seem to suggest...


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## marmaluot_45 (Sep 17, 2010)

I must read with attention your posts.
Beauty, art, shostakovich, ugly are all things very serious.
I'm interesting about and often there is more confusion.
Before i must think, because english is not easy for me.
Then I'll say few thing about this problem.
Beauty is a problem of deep knowledge.
Suffering was the habit of soul to make art.
Museums are the palace of death of art.
I'll take a few time thinking over it.


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## Elgarian (Jul 30, 2008)

Lukecash12 said:


> For the self proclaimed academic, something is beautiful because of it's inherent qualities, which in fact don't exist.
> 
> Interestingly, this is a case where the laymen trump the academics from an intellectual standpoint.


I don't understand precisely whom you have in mind when you speak of these 'academics', but what you say here is too general and sweeping to be right. There are philosophers who try to unravel the nature of aesthetics, and there are scholars who examine (and hopefully elucidate) the work of the artists and writers who have influenced the development of ideas of beauty. In all this vast academic soup, there's a wide range of opinion to be found, from which (as far as I'm aware, as I mentioned in an earlier post) no satisfactory consensus has emerged about the nature of beauty. I don't think this 'layman vs academic' conflict is real. You'll find as much variation of opinion among academics as among laymen.

As I said above, one way around the problem is to try to communicate the _nature_ of the experience that's being enjoyed (or in Michael's terms, the relationship made with the work), rather than merely attaching labels of 'beautiful' or 'ugly' to the work itself. We all know the signs of the kind of engagement I mean. We're _changed_ by the experience. We feel we've been shown something important that we haven't heard or seen before. We want to linger over the experience, or to enter its aesthetic landscape again. It haunts us, afterwards. Our mental horizon seems to have been pushed outwards.

And so the big question about a work of art is not 'do I _like_ it?', but 'can it sustain that kind of experience, that depth of involvement?' If we find from talking to others that it demonstrably _can_, then (even if I can't see it for myself right now), we know we're onto something.


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## Lukecash12 (Sep 21, 2009)

Elgarian said:


> I don't understand precisely whom you have in mind when you speak of these 'academics', but what you say here is too general and sweeping to be right. There are philosophers who try to unravel the nature of aesthetics, and there are scholars who examine (and hopefully elucidate) the work of the artists and writers who have influenced the development of ideas of beauty. In all this vast academic soup, there's a wide range of opinion to be found, from which (as far as I'm aware, as I mentioned in an earlier post) no satisfactory consensus has emerged about the nature of beauty. I don't think this 'layman vs academic' conflict is real. You'll find as much variation of opinion among academics as among laymen.
> 
> As I said above, one way around the problem is to try to communicate the _nature_ of the experience that's being enjoyed (or in Michael's terms, the relationship made with the work), rather than merely attaching labels of 'beautiful' or 'ugly' to the work itself. We all know the signs of the kind of engagement I mean. We're _changed_ by the experience. We feel we've been shown something important that we haven't heard or seen before. We want to linger over the experience, or to enter its aesthetic landscape again. It haunts us, afterwards. Our mental horizon seems to have been pushed outwards.
> 
> And so the big question about a work of art is not 'do I _like_ it?', but 'can it sustain that kind of experience, that depth of involvement?' If we find from talking to others that it demonstrably _can_, then (even if I can't see it for myself right now), we know we're onto something.


Fact: The only thing objective about sound is it's scientific measurement. It doesn't mean anything symbolic in and of itself.


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## Elgarian (Jul 30, 2008)

Lukecash12 said:


> Fact: The only thing objective about sound is it's scientific measurement. It doesn't mean anything symbolic in and of itself.


Yes, that much is obvious - but I'm afraid I don't understand how it relates to what I posted (or indeed, to what you posted yourself about laymen and academics.) Perhaps you could say a little more?


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## Lukecash12 (Sep 21, 2009)

Elgarian said:


> Yes, that much is obvious - but I'm afraid I don't understand how it relates to what I posted (or indeed, to what you posted yourself about laymen and academics.) Perhaps you could say a little more?


I meant this:

Because nothing objective can be inferred from sound itself, music itself is not beautiful, sentiment is beautiful. Beautiful in the sense of sentiment can just as easily be characterized as good or positive (and more precisely so), so the idea of aesthetic beauty is scientifically and philosophically inept.



> As I said above, one way around the problem is to try to communicate the nature of the experience that's being enjoyed (or in Michael's terms, the relationship made with the work), rather than merely attaching labels of 'beautiful' or 'ugly' to the work itself.


That doesn't attach objective value. It attaches objective value to interpreting the sound that way in the context of listening to music to benefit from it intellectually. Therefore, the music is not aesthetically beautiful.


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## Elgarian (Jul 30, 2008)

Lukecash12 said:


> That doesn't attach objective value.


I think we're misunderstanding each other. I'm concerned not at all with beauty as an absolute, but about trying to communicate our _subjective_ experiences of what we call 'the beautiful' in more effective ways.


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## PetrB (Feb 28, 2012)

Kopachris said:


> How would one explain music to an alien culture that has no such concept?
> 
> "I should take you to a concert."
> "What is a 'concert?'"
> ...


I'd say it was 'organized sound' which we find both interesting and pleasurable, so that would not exclude a Gamelon concert, which, _*GASP!*_ _completely ignores 'our' twelve chromatic pitches_, those instruments being tuned in pairs several cents apart so their unison oscillations make 'sine beats,' - and they still 'behave acoustically,' much to the consternation of that Western-centric conceit which you put forth as an explanation of the basis and materials and principals of 'music.'

I would have to say 'rhythm is merely the sounding of events over time, whether it is regular or irregular, 'metric' or more fluid. That regularity thing I would initially, anyway, ditch from the definition given.

I would explain we call 'harmony' any two pitches (or more) including the less distinct pitches, when sounded simultaneously, as 'harmony.' I would be as quick to add that people do not all agree upon what 'harmonious' is. To be fair, and correct, I would have to say, apart from mathematical laws, that none of the science of it accounts for any 'rules' about what is or is not music, or defines if it is either good or bad, ugly or beautiful: all those, I would say, rest upon only generalized and generally accepted _conceits_. (Then of course you are stuck with explaining '_conceits_.')

But this more confined 'definition' - tied in less than subliminally to 'our scale' and the quasi- rationale built up over some acoustic properties and numbers as being 'the ground rules' for what is music, and 'good music' (i.e. only western art music) is one of my greatest of pet peeves: it is as inadequate as is just not true, like those simple dictionary definitions which set a lay person to their own imagination of what 'harmonious' is, leading them to automatically disconnect with much music written after 1890!

One might have to also explain to the alien the concept of 'temporal art,' i.e. theater, dance, music. You might also add that before intellectual understanding of those arts is necessary, their first and primary appeal is to the senses in general: then you might have to explain sensuality, too.

If our pleasure quotient is high enough, we call it 'beautiful.'

And good luck with all of those


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## Xaltotun (Sep 3, 2010)

Here's another angle:

If objective and universal beauty exists, it matters a great deal, because it is objective and universal.


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