What is beauty?

What is beauty? Isn’t that the $64,000 question? To some, it is a field ice white with snow, undisturbed except for the creatures of Mother Nature, presenting an ominous yet comforting atmosphere.

 

To others, it is the opposite. It is a forest of fire, with years of forestry being eaten or otherwise destroyed by its grip, giving a feeling of fragility and helplessness to an otherwise strong, resourceful place.

And to others still, it is a hippo raping a banana.

Good call, buddy.

As you can see, beauty is many things to many people. Actually, it can be anything. And ever since The National Endowment of the Arts controversially removed the provision that whatever it funded had to fit the American mainstream’s idea of beautiful, it had practically become anything and everything, much to the Moral Guardians’ chagrin. The shocking, the bizarre, the outrageous all became a part of the American gallery. And as American art has been radicalized, so too has its music.

Much like art, any tune can be a siren song to someone. To some, it is a Bach Cello Suite.

To others, it is peaceful tribute to our ancestors by Karl Jenkins.

To others still, it is the pulse-pounding rhythms of The Rite of Spring.

And to others still, it’s this white noise.

There is beauty and meaning in nearly every composition. Though quite often, especially in modern compositions, it’s so deeply hidden, it can take as many as hundreds of listenings before one can even begin to understand it.

Take the 1st Movement Charles Ives’ Three Places in New England for instance. Sure, it may have elements of a mournful spiritual, but who without an extensive knowledge of actual spirituals would recognize the tunes embedded in it.

But even that is glaringly obvious compared to another work of Ives: The Things our Father Loved. If you thought the meaning in Three Places were subtle. There’s one right at the beginning of the piece. Pay close attention to the colored notes:

If it looks familiar, it’s not a coincidence:

It’ll be hard pressed to find a man who’d recognize that reference upon first...few hundred hearings.

But these examples are a compromise between Avant-Garde Experimentalism and Traditional Mainstream Beauty. Besides, I recognise that they’ve been discussed in class already. What else can I bring to the table? Well, I also recognize that one of the pieces I failed to discuss in my “Piano as Percussion” post is  John Cowell’s The Tiger.

Without even looking at the score, one can tell this is an incredibly unusual composition. The primary feature of this piece is the Cluster Chord, an unusual notation that requires the player to play multiple notes at once. There are certainly a number of those here. It has jaunty rhythms, wild dynamic fluctuations, and has unpredictable tempo changes.

And that’s the perfect word to describe this piece: unpredictable. Kind of...like a wild tiger.

The tiger is a creature of fathomless grace, but is equally spontaneous in its behaviour. One minute, it rests under a tree to stay cool, the next, it’s in pursuit of a helpless prey. That’s kind of what the piece is like: wild, sporadic, and utterly dissonant one minute and calm, content, and slightly less dissonant the next.

The beauty of this piece lies in the underlying symbolism presented within it. The problem, though, is that it’s hidden behind a cloud of dissonance so thick, that many people believed this piece was a massacre of music. And this is the problem much modern art faces. Many pieces, especially if they’re pictures of naked people, have their beauty and symbolism overlooked by their surface. It appears so radical to the common patron, that their tradition blinds them to anything but the shocking and the bizarre. Granted much of the time, the art is intended to be shocking and bizarre, but all art has some meaning and beauty when one chooses to looks for it.

But none of this answers the initial question: what is beauty? To give a definite answer, I say there IS no answer. Sure, there’ll be studies, there’ll be books, there’ll be presentations on what constitutes as beautiful, but all they will do is reinforce the “Mainstream” idea of what is beautiful. Especially stuff like this:

Or like this:

And, most infuriatingly, like this:

All things have beauty in them. Sure, it’s more well hidden in some places than it is in others, and that’s why we need to look beyond what we see. You’ll never know what beauty you might find.