Where is Beauty?

In the 18th century, the philosophical conception of aesthetics was almost entirely dominated by the idea of beauty. Other than the sublime, the beautiful was the only aesthetic quality actively considered by most artists and thinkers. However, during the 20th century, beauty, with its simplistic, commercial implications, almost entirely disappeared from artistic reality, as if attractiveness somehow became the diabolus in musica. Aesthetics, which some thought had become too narrowly identified with beauty, was replaced in critical discourse by formalistic descriptions.

As a young composer in the 1970s, I understood that working with sounds and textures recognized as “beautiful” was a controversial course to pursue. Things began to change somewhat in the 1980s; attractiveness once again became an accepted option in musical creation.

From the onset of 20th century modernism, it was clear that something can be art without being beautiful, but a new positive interpretation of beauty was required if it was to be embraced by the composer-intellectual. This reemergence of beauty in the musical language of composers often was a result of compositional approaches drawn from non-Western, non-canonic and vernacular repertories, or from a new emphasis on spectral transformations of sound.

Recently, the Emory University Center for Humanistic Inquiry and the Institute of Liberal Arts sponsored Harvard aesthetics professor Elaine Scarry as a distinguished visiting professor. In discussing her book, On Beauty and Being Just, Scarry argued that beauty has a positive moral value—that it actually intensifies our desire to correct injustice wherever we find it. It may, as Scarry asserts, “inspire people the aspiration to political, social and economic equality.” The placement of aesthetic values in relation to other values may be one of many factors that contributed to this reconsideration of beauty.

In my method of composing, each work begins as contemplation on a set of questions or concerns, often centered on qualities of sound, relationship of the body to new technologies in performance, or culturally hybrid forms. This design process is perhaps no different than that of individuals working in architecture, engineering or computer science. Problems of organization must be addressed at the quantitative level, considering new aspects of temporality (vertical, static, cyclical, expanding), new sonic progressions and new performer-instrument relationships.

But on another level are the unconscious preferences: the imaging of dreams, memories and reveries; representations of stillness; sensuous and ambiguous textures; darkness unfolding into light—in essence, my personal tastes. It is the dance of these two processes that constitutes my creative method. Each takes its turn leading, but the dance would not be possible without both.

Many other contemporary composers freely choose the questions, issues and aesthetic concerns they wish to explore. The “theories” they devise may be seen as forms of action, forms of thought, or forms of art or beauty.

Does the compositional method require a more multilingual understanding by both composer and listener today? Is the modern composer a sort of scientist, conducting research into social and cognitive behavior and the limits of aesthetic experience? And, as philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre and others have suggested, do artists and intellectuals in general have a social responsibility? Increasingly for composers, the answers seem to be ‘yes.’

Observing the evolution of Western musical thought over the past two centuries, the boundaries between art and the rest of human experience have diminished substantially. Perhaps in these patterns of sound, which we call music, there is much more to be learned about each other and ourselves in the future.