What Makes Music Beautiful?

What Makes Music Beautiful?
By Cynthia R. Nielsen

Comparing and contrasting two leading twentieth century composers, Pierre Boulez and John Cage, the former a strict adherent and promoter of “total serialism” (a compositional method that organizes music according to mathematical patterns) and the latter the champion of chance music, where just about anything turns out to be music, Jeremy Begbie makes the following astute observation.  Begbie first points out a deficiency in Boulez’s music noted by Boulez himself, viz., that in his music the excess of order tends to produce the perception of disorder when heard.  Then Begbie writes, “[a]lthough a piece of music does not have to yield all its meaning in perception, a modicum of perceptual intelligibility would appear to be necessary to apprehend it as music .  Total serialism seemed to engender a kind of ‘entropic’ anarchy.  Boulez came to describe his Livre pour Quantuor as an ‘accumulation that springs from a very simple principle, to end in a chaotic situation because it is engendered by material that turns in on itself and becomes so complex that it loses its individual shape and becomes part of a vast chaos’.  The prescriptive determinacies of notation coincide with sonorous effects which are largely indeterminate” (Theology, Music, and Time, p. 188). The point being that though these composers are more or less on the opposite ends of the spectrum, Boulez representing overly rigid mathematical calculation and Cage representing chance music in the extreme, when one listens to the music of Boulez its unnatural, machine-like mathematical precision ends up sounding as indeterminate as Cage’s random chance music.

Here a number of questions arise when Begbie’s findings are brought to bear on Socrates’ account of music as found in the Republic.  First, how is it that something so mathematically precise seems to produce that which sounds like mere chaos?  Perhaps Socrates would claim that this in fact proves his point, viz., the senses can lead one astray and thus we must listen only to reason.  But Socrates has also conceded that music making is able to shape the soul in a way that simply understanding the mathematico-theoretical intervallic [i.e., proportional] relationships of music cannot.  He has also claimed (on what we might call a traditional reading) that the best music is that which most closely imitates the Forms.  If this is the case, then we again have to ask how such mathematical precision (the reality “behind” the imitations) can produce that which is indiscernible from something as random as chance music?  In other words, shouldn’t that which participates in the Forms reflect those Forms in a clear and evident way?  At any rate, Begbie’s findings seem to highlight Socrates’ conflicting account of music—an account which leaves us wondering whether we should embrace or exile the “honeyed muse.” In short, can we really make a rigid distinction between the phenomenological experience of music (the non-rational, but not irrational and mystical) and the mathematical reality “behind the music” (the true and rational aspect of music)?  Stated slightly differently, is the beauty of music to be discerned only or primarily in terms of proportional relationships or must we also necessarily include the phenomenologico-existential experience of music in our discussion of musical aesthetics?  If the latter, how do we avoid an over-subjectivized understanding of musical aesthetics in which anything can count as beautiful music? 

Comments

[IndieFaith]

This reminded me of a few quotes I had posted quite a while back.

“We may say that the independent aesthetic value of an artistic artefact is higher and more enduring to the extent that the work does not lend itself to literal interpretation from the standpoint of a generally accepted system of values of some period and some milieu.”
- Jan Mukarovsky

Art is as good as it is both engaging and elusive.

On music,
“After playing Chopin, I feel as if I had been weeping over sins that I had not committed, and mourning over tragedies there were not my own. Music always seems to me to produce that effect. It creates for one a past of which one has been ignorant, and fills one with a sense of sorrows that have been hidden from one’s tears. I can fancy a man who has led a perfectly commonplace life, hearing by chance some curious piece of music, and suddenly discovering that his soul, without his being conscious of it, had passed through terrible experiences, and known fearful joys, or wild romantic loves, or great renunciations.”
- Oscar Wilde

But before I find someone to wax too eloquently on music I also offer the following,

“Where we try to speak of music, to speak music, language has us, resentfully, by the throat”
- George Steiner

Whether intentional or not our "investigations" into beauty tend to be scouting reports for colonization. As George Steiner I think has correctly intimated in Real Presences we can only hope to respond with a contribution that offers an equally high degree of aesthetic integrity. Sorry that probably does not address your question directly.

[Jason Hesiak]

Interesting. One of the things Le Corbusier the famouse arechitect is known for is developing a system of proportion known as "The Modular" (based on the golden section). To me what you end up needing here is a guide. Corbusier says that his Modular is not a fatalist recipe, but a guide for something that the architect, the man, is himself to do and/or design. So to me the guiding point has to be the man who makes the thing...the music or the building. Here you end up at the Incarnation. Its a question of what makes man, of who and how man is. This is why McLuhan is so important to me. The artefacts are the extension of man, so then when we start asking questions about artefacts, we are asking questions about the man who made them. So then if we are asking a question about the relation betwee the pure/theoretical "reason" of an artefact (i.e. - the proportion system of a building or a piece of music) and what I might as well refer to here as the actualization (or the actual making of it - what is in the end actually sensed)...then we are really asking qeustions about who man is. If we are asking about the relation between an artefact's reason and sense, then we are asking a question about the relation between man's reason and sense. And to me this is a question of order. Of cosmological order. A question of how God ordered the cosmos from its beginnings. The clue to what's going on there being that we were made in His image.

So then its a bit of a two-way street. The Incarnation is a guide for the relation between reason and sense in a building or piece of music, but then a building or piece of music points iconically to God's original founding of the earth and heavens. Even the fact that a work might be out of balance in one way or the other itself points to the wholeness of the Incarnation and the image of God in which we were originally made.

:)

[Jason Hesiak]

Oh forgot to mention...the iconic image of Le Corbusier's "Modular" IS the image of a man :)

http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Aegean/4217/Corbu_jp40.jpg

[Bruce]

I would think that music, like all forms of beauty, reflects that final act of apprehension - the beatific vision. Seeing God in all his holiness, terribleness, brokeness, and sacrifice would be both rational (i.e. directed at or reflecting something real) and irrational (i.e. experienced as awe, pity, terror, and sorrow).

The beatific vision seems to be the key to understanding aesthetic apprehension as it would be the deepest longing of the soul.

[Jason Hesiak]

Bruce,

Good point. But...seeing as how art is the making of things...how does or can the Beautific Vision serve as a guide to the making of something? Does the guide to the making of something...the "end" that in a sense actually determines the form...become the fulfillment of desire (albeit a certain hierarchy of said desires, the deepest of which aren't exactly fulfilled by MTV)? In other words, are you saying that the story told by a made thing is that story of the fulfillment of desire rather than the actual making of the thing? I was suggesting that the story told by the making of a thing is the actual making of a thing; hence my suggestion of the Incarnation as the guide (theolgoically).

And how separate are the terror and sorrow in the beautific vision from our "seeing" of the Incarnation anyway (the Cross)?

??

Jason

[Jason Hesiak]

BTW for any alchemy buffs (this "union of opposites" stuff...like chance and fate, reason and sense :), the golden section...(which I mentioned earlier as the basis of Corbusier's Modular...and my professor, who has a background in music says that modern musical system are based on the golden section, too (although I'm not sure what that means exactly for music))...is the key to "squaring the circle" :)

[IndieFaith]

Jason,
I have read over your comments a couple of times now and I can't seem to get what you mean by "incarnation" (other than the obvious). The author/creator needs to be present as a guide? Can you give an example of how this expresses itself in the context originally offered in this post.

[Jason Hesiak]

Thanks for the question, IndieFaith. Well, I'm not saying that the maker has to be in the audience's ear while they experience the building or the piece of music. Cynthia was posing the question of whether its more of what's sensed or what's reasoned (proportion and mathematics) that makes music beautiful, and she presented two different musicians as representatives of each way, respectively. My point is that the the actual human being is the union of the two. Or the guide for the union of the two in a work of art, at least. And the two exist in perfect harmony in the personhood of the one who was "Incarnated."

The proportion systems of good art are based on the very mathematics and geometry of which we, as human beings, are actually ourselves MADE...and which traditionally were thought to have "descended from the heavens"...which is rather reminiscent of the doctrine of the Incarnation! And obviously too all the sensible stuff of our experience of the world that partially constitutes our identity is part of the sensible stuff that makes up a work of art...except Cage uses ALL that for music, whereas Begbie uses a much more limited "pallete" that is traditionally associated with music (but which is also part of man's sensed experience of the world). Obviously "what is sensed" is also rather reminisent of the inCARNation.

"Make more sense"?

Jason

[Cynthia R. Nielsen]

Thanks to everyone who commented on my post. I find Bruce's comment with regard to the beatific vision very suggestive, and I also appreciate what has been said with regard to the Incarnation and the idea of music as iconic--a view that would not posit a sharp dichotomy between e.g., proportion and the sensory experience of music.

Best wishes,
Cynthia