Patterns, Beauty and Music

What makes music beautiful?

Have you ever looked upon a work of contemporary art and wondered, why would someone make this? What is its purpose?

I certainly have.

Immersion (Piss Christ) by Andres Serrano comes to mind, a photograph of a crucifix submerged in a glass beaker filled the artists unrine explores conceptions of…well do we even care what the artist was trying to say? Apparently, he meant no disrespect to anyones faith and he is a Catholic and faithful follower of Jesus Christ.

Much contemporary visual art is intended to break down categories of meaning, to critique and deconstruct frameworks of power, prestige, hierarchy.

While traditional art is rooted in a respect and love for beauty, purpose, skilled craftsmanship and tradition, national identity, contemporary art often rejects idealization, narrative frame, inherited meanings, inspiration, and responsibility.

This same degradation of pattern and tradition can be heard in the work of 20th and 21st century classical music composers.

While the particular methods of compositional New Complexity, Serialism and other experimental classical musical exercises, such as atonality, dissonance, complexity and abstraction, are all potentially useful tools of music presentation, some composers play with perception as a way of breaking apart, challenge and undermine traditional conceptions.

Beauty is often set aside.

Accessibility for broad audiences is eschewed. It’s fair to ask if any audience beyond increasingly small concentric academic circles are invited or intended to participate in much of contemporary classical music.

Listening to much of contemporary classical music is difficult and discordant, and its designed to be this way.

Brian Ferneyhough’s String Quartet No. 2 which you can listen to below is one such example. Should you decide to listen through the whole piece, read the comments on Youtube below the video. They are enjoyable and insightful.

In parallel much of popular music is the opposite.

Insipid, simple, formulaic rehashed music designed to be palatable, accessible, and base. Popular music is at a low point.

Within the last 100 plus years of musical and artistic tradition, there are many notable, wonderful, useful composers, artists, musicians that take up the challenge of art making with great success.

While some seem to be confused about the meaning of music and life, and the place of music and art in supporting life, a confusion we can only sympathize with, others seem to be clear, focused and committed to meaning and beauty.

Consider these two pieces from two composers that I’ve recently enjoyed over and over who know what they believe:

Both Arvo Pärt and Morten Lauridsen have faith in a beauty beyond and within themselves that we all share are searching themselves for ways to express what the see and feel and to invite us into those searching and apprecaiting.

Listening to these pieces it feels as though I am sitting beside the composers as they patiently sahre to what they see in the world and what they feel too. They have received the beauty of their surroundings and are passing it along.

Morten Lauridsen writes:

As artists we must constantly strive to achieve that which leads to those magical, ethereal, and completely fulfilling musical experiences that leave us all enriched and transformed.

Arvo Pärt is an Orthodox Christian and with his music is intending to explore the depth and meaning of the Divine Logos through sound, attempting to apprehend the oneness from which all things are created, the oneness that binds all things.

The poet William Carlos Williams too calls attention to the need of beauty and meaning in our lives:

It is difficult

to get the news from poems

yet men die miserably every day

for lack

of what is found there.

In life bordered by death, the question of misery and beauty is ever present.

In poetry, in music, with the visual arts, with life, beauty and suffering co-exist and a lack of connection between the discordant beats and the consonant notes of life leads to a downward spiral for the human spirit.

William Carlos Williams highlights with these lines that patterned, aligned, beautiful language contain reflections that remind us of meaningful coincidences and concordant, layered ideas that give life purpose.

What is it about patterns that suggest meaning exists? 

Patterns are beautiful. Patterns are the foundation of meaning. Patterns allow us to recognize, to see, to hear, to know.

The capacity to recognize requires a measure of familiarity, a connection to a prior experience or understanding. Language itself is a shared, communal pattern of speech that makes possible communication. Musical language is the same. The visual arts too must be rooted in patterns, shapes, colors, forms that are recognizable.

The crusifix in urine is a horid example. No amount of academic narrative can make such a work constructive and beautiful.

Patterns allow for meaning. Out of the chaos of our limited perspectives glimpes of order emerge and converge and carefully these glimpes of order may be translated through pen or brush or lens.

Representing the world as ordered, framed, discernable, loveable are acts of faith that form the foundation of our civilizations.

The cultural moment we find ourselves in is one of decadent chaotic questioning into the meaning of the inherited structures of civilization.

There are some that find beauty and rationality in the legal and spiritual traditions of our nations. There are others that question whether beauty exists and whether or not the legal and spiritual traditions exist for anything other than building oppressive structures of power.

As musical and artistic movements evolve, the thread of connection is formed. Patterns are elaborated and refashioned but patterns persist.

We are lost without them.

I’m very curious what you think of the music above. Please do share in the comments.