Musical Beauty

While maybe being less obvious than in the case of form, there is a notion of musical beauty as such, regardless of impressionistic, expressionistic, or objectivistic spin. Many thoughts of classical composers on the subject of musical beauty can be found:

Mozart: “Music, even in situations of the greatest horror, should never be painful to the ear but should flatter and charm it, and thereby always remain music.”

Someone would say, that Mozart was referring to idea of beauty of his time. Beauty has many faces, same as form; but there is a core of musical beauty that does not change.

Grieg: “Shortly one conductor of Wagner works told to me that he can’t stand Mozart anymore. With that, he uttered the condemnation of himself and the time in which we live. Daily fashion can temporarily overshadow a Mozart. But the laws of beauty are unalterable.” From “Der Himmel Voller Geigen” by Rudolf Thiel

Objective beauty is the same as that hypnotic, uncatchable, fluttering, mysterious character. As a ballerina tries to get free from gravitation, a beautiful melody tries to escape from our mind, to get free from senses; as a melody gets more and more beautiful, it becomes more and more unreal, elevates above immediate perception, hypnotizes us, wants to escape from our ability to see it’s structure; it increases the variability and speed of it’s motion, as it’s disperses on numerous layers, and still all the time increases the articulation and direction of development. That elevation which makes us lost and hypnotized in an unbelievably articulated and intelligent, complex labyrinth, is the beauty itself. These features can be superficially imitated, but when true they arouse spontaneously as a consequence of beauty.

This disorientation and hypnoses is the aesthetic ideal in music since always. We can recognize it in Baroque, where heavy ornamentation, fast arpeggios and other Baroque devices were essentially aimed to blur listeners vision of the piece, to make him “dizzy”. French composers and impressionist liked to use arabesques (Ravel, Debussy) with this same ideal of graceful disorientation. Contemporary minimalists, with their’s techniques of superposing rhythmic patterns that miss each other, are also motivated with this same strive.

More aesthetic music must not also be more human music. It doesn’t have to be deeper in the sense of human meaning. People maybe more rarely create these works of pure beauty. There are a lot of people who considered the works of objective beauty as merely decorative music. Objectively beautiful has nothing to do with human “depth” of meaning. When we speak of “deep meaning”, what is usually meant is strong, basic human instincts and drives. Actually, deeper music by rule can not be objectively the most beautiful, because human depth comes from pathetic strings and wild outbursts of temper. This still doesn’t mean that these two things can’t be linked – the reason for Beethoven to be considered the greatest of all the composers is because he manages, to a great degree, to unite the objective beauty with human character.

But from all of this we see that music in it’s deepest nature is a little bit inhuman, super-human, angelic form. Objective beauty can be compared to deep meaning in analogy to a beautiful girl who’s beauty stuns and inspire us, with a girl that sexually arouses us, touching the raw, strong drives. High musical beauty doesn’t have the “deep meaning” which is analogous to stimulating these strong instincts; it only stuns and inspire us.

There is a link between pure beauty and latent childhood, that angelic period in which humans are the most spiritual beings, beings of sensibility, knowledge and imagination. In that period, with no chance for reproduction, man can most purely and more cleanly fall in love with beauty.

Examples of music based on objective beauty are above all others some pieces of Johan Sebastian Bach’s; or Debussy Arabesque no. 1, or Jean Michel Jarre’s Oxygene 1 & 2. Even some dance music has this quality, like Ravel’s Bolero. All of these compositions are highly fluttering, like running away from themselves and their’s rhythm, freely going left and right, seemingly without borders, but still guided with unmistakable, strict and the only possible logic. Music of baroque and classicist style generally has more these features than romantic music.