Fascinating debate in The Observer yesterday, springing from a live one at the Royal Geographical Society as to whether Britain has become indifferent to beauty.
I have a few things to add and invite you to do the same...
First, I reckon people in general love beauty. But today's decision-makers and creators in art, architecture, music and more have a narrow idea of what popular beauty constitutes and they don't like it: it is out-dated, being associated with the 18th and 19th centuries. An attitude derived from Socialist Realism has dominated everything from TV to concert-hall design for the last 50 years or more. If and when a semblance of beauty exists, it often seems suspect because it's associated with the wrong kind of politics: those of the first half of the 20th century. Thought process: beauty=conservatism=evil.
This, though, confuses beauty with prettiness. Beauty, genuine beauty, has nothing to do with politics, isn't skin deep and on the surface may not be pretty in the slightest. Personally, I think that beauty is what results when a work of art spirals into more than the sum of its parts, telling us a startling truth about the human condition, mainly through compassion and empathy. I found the film The Lives of Others beautiful, because it carried a powerful message about feeling, suffering and sacrifice. Even Apocalypse Now has a strange and terrifying beauty to it. There's nothing pretty about either film; nor about Salman Rushdie's overwhelming novel Midnight's Children, full of beauty that springs from the power and gleeful originality of the man's virtuoso imagination.
The performing musicians I most admire share qualities that make their playing beautiful: attention to the detail of tone, shape, colour, but most of all to the soul beneath the music. Bashing the hell out of a piano has nothing to do with this (unless a composer has specifically requested it); nor does playing a violin in strict metronomic time with banned vibrato just because it is deemed 'correct'. It's about empathy, intuition, humanity. It's about understanding the composer, the work and and the instrument, about knowing how to bring out the best in all of them.
As for new music, beauty exists, but it is certainly undervalued and bizarrely feared. It was the profound and very unexpected beauty of Gorecki's Third Symphony that made it so popular; of course it was criticised for that. Yet it does contain beauty, wrought by digging deep and opening up a ravine of intense humanity. And James MacMillan's opera The Sacrifice, the little of it I heard, struck me as incredibly beautiful, but certainly not pretty.
Meanwhile we had to have The Minotaur on primetime TV, which probably put a bunch of people off modern opera for life. It wasn't either pretty or beautiful. It was powerful in its way, but noisy, upsetting, and, overall, a jolly nasty experience. Just because something sounds hideous, that doesn't mean it automatically contains beauty; but equally just because The Phantom of the Opera is gentler on the ears, that doesn't make it beautiful either.
It can seem as if everyone is terrified of beauty, but actually what they're frightened of is prettiness, or the version commonly termed "mawkish sentimentality". Even that idea needs to be gently prodded: is there perhaps a danger of going too far the other way, denying any semblance of human feeling for fear of - well, of what? Feeling something? Being thought uncool? Being bullied in the playground for wearing a baseball cap with the peak at the front instead of the back?
So in terror of one potentially twisted emotion, we run a mile from another and desperately espouse its reverse. But the reverse isn't appealing either, so everyone scarpers from that too and the result is...empty chairs.
There's a problem with real beauty: there isn't much because creating it is too damn difficult. Nothing gratuitous is ever really beautiful; nothing that sets out to copy beauty is likely to succeed in reaching us at the gut level on which beauty works its magic. It's an opening of the channels, a freeing of the circulation from specific to universal to mystical. When, with infinite care and compassion, a great artist shows us the humane inner essence of the image or the sound, and we stand back and gasp - that's beauty.
Ideas, folks?
8 comments:
An extract from my blog:
Poor, loyal Francoise Xenakis had tried for decades to explain to her husband Iannis that, as a French woman, the distinction between beauty and ugliness actually meant quite a lot to her. How, she begged him to explain, could it be so irrelevant to him?
"Ca ne fait rien. Tu es bete." (It doesn't matter. You're stupid.)
How did twentieth century classical composers get away it? How were they given the right to be implacable and angry through music? Who told them that their duty, their God-like role in society was to obey their demons, to live on the edge, and to cast away all norms of humanity, beauty and responsibility?
The full post is here
http://londonjazz.blogspot.com/2009/03/saturday-with-my-inner-xenakis-at.html
Xenakis's studio...memories memories. LondonJazz, remind me to tell you about the mouldy mattress someday (nothing to do with Xenakis himself, btw).
This is such a complex and vast subject! I would say a certain "harmony of contrasts" goes towards creating beauty. Anger and chaos are part of the human condition and the greatest composers, Beethoven being an obvious example, but also many 20th Century composers - Bartok, Sibelius, Shostakovitch, Britten, Vaughan Williams have shown "chaos shimmering through the veil of order."
Wonderful post Jessica!
Do check this out...
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/04/04/AR2007040401721.
Jessica, your final paragraph is right on.
Beauty is a temporary sensation, perception, surprise, that is modified (perhaps lost) as soon as we start to categorize, analyze and comment on it. The memory of that experience tends to become our measure. Beauty is constantly on the move, carried on the winds of fashion. For a while now, the trend has been towards, quirky, conceptual, quasi-post-re-deconstructivist arty statements, the definitions of a self-appointed, manipulative elite that would rather comment on anything except the experience of beauty, obsessed with innovation for its own sake and clobbering us over the head with yet another shocking art form that lacks depth or development. Thankfully there's now a perceptible shift towards art of all sorts that satisfies our basic human need for balance/harmony/wholeness or whatever we call it.
It was the profound and very unexpected beauty of Gorecki's Third Symphony that made it so popular; of course it was criticised for that
Criticized for what, the beauty or the popularity? The only people I know who liked it were people who wouldn't know Korngold from Kreisler, because me and my friends thought it was a nice 3 minute piece stretched to interminable length.
Meanwhile we had to have The Minotaur on primetime TV, which probably put a bunch of people off modern opera for life
Wow, so someone came to your door and pointed a gun at your head and screamed "Right! You lot! In front of the box, NOW!"?
Your mythical and non-existent people who might like modern opera if only it sounded like Korngold well, until they experienced Birtwistle's wonderful opera, I'm sure they were all rushing to Covent Garden to buy tickets to the upcoming Lulu or flying off to the Continent for a round of Wozzeck and Lear and L'amour de Loin. Oh, wait, they weren't, they were queuing up for the 9,000th revival of La Boheme. Nice strawman you constructed there.
It wasn't either pretty or beautiful. It was powerful in its way, but noisy, upsetting, and, overall, a jolly nasty experience
Good, then Birtwistle did his job as a composer. It's a jolly nasty story with no pat happy ending. Give me Birtwistle over the vapid trivialities of bel canto any day.
denying any semblance of human feeling for fear of - well, of what? Feeling something? Being thought uncool? Being bullied in the playground for wearing a baseball cap with the peak at the front instead of the back?
Because we live in a world of suffering, pain, loneliness, sadness and misery, driven by greed, religion and hate, our planet dying a death due to the evolved monkeys who have raped and pillaged it? For some of us, the only way not to go insane or blow our brains out is to look suffering, pain etc. right in the eye and deal with it. Others search out beauty to keep those things at bay, if they even acknowledge them in the first place. Whatever works.
Personally, I think that beauty is what results when a work of art spirals into more than the sum of its parts, telling us a startling truth about the human condition, mainly through compassion and empathy
Personally, I find art, especially purely orchestral music, spectacularly inept at doing any such truth telling, because 99 times out 100 the work of art is pointing out, as the great Monty Python line says: "the bleeding obvious!", something that's been trotted out countless times before. "Love is good, hate is bad" "Through pain comes wisdom" blah blah, all obvious and fairly trite at this stage of things.
Fine, I have no problem tearing up at the end of La Boheme or feeling profoundly moved at the end of Tristan und Isolde or dazzled looking at Vermeer's Girl With the Pearl Earring but they're constructs, designed to wring those feelings out of us.
HH, don't you think that it is perhaps Puccini's compassion and empathy, combined with his genius/craftsmanship, that enables him to create the construct that makes us all break up at the end of Boheme? It's a gasp of understanding, in its own way... Each one is different; even if they do point out the obvious, it is the skill and originality with which they do so that makes the difference. Of course nobody puts a gun at your head to make you watch Birtwistle, but people you hope might stumble across a modern opera and like it are more likely to switch on the box around that time and...well, never mind. BTW, I didn't mention Korngold. There's no reason anyone else's music should sound like his any more than like Puccini's, Verdi's or Donizetti's.
Cup of tea?
'I reckon people in general like beauty'! This is as saying, 'I believe most people tend to like pleasure'.
For myself, I broadly enjoy nice things, whereas the majority prefer nasty things like Puccini and Rushdie and that old Coppola fraud.
What is it ' to spiral into the sum of something' please?
Thanks for your thoughts.
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