Edward Moore <[log in to unmask]> wrote about his beloved Sophia:

>The Ancient Greeks (noble thinkers!) made a distinction between
>sense-perception and reason (logos).  The former was considered unreliable
>and fraught with peril; the latter was considered the measure of all
>things, pure context and primal intention

The Ancient thinkers were noble indeed, and what you brought up here leads
to a part of my ideas concerning the problem with 'ugliniess' in music.  I
don't think a piece like Pendereckis "Threnody" is a beautiful piece, and
I never did.  It has a sound that is so ugly as music can ever be, to me.
Fairly the same goes for 12-tone music by Schoenberg and his likes.  Still
there are people who swear that this music is "beautiful".  I hav ewondered
how that can come.  I am very careful with saying a person is bluffing, so
how come? Wherein lies the beauty?

To me, and other who contributed to this thread traced it, good music is a
balance of two elements.  One is the structure of the music (form), which
appeales to the functions in our brain that seeks patterns, to our demand
for control, to our logic thinking.  The other element can be identified
by the "sence-perception" to use Edward Moore's words from his statement
above.  I call this element "content", and it appeals to our emotions, and
the (I know this systematization is hopelessly old), traditionally labelled
"artistic brainhalf" in our brain.  These two elements are symbolized with
the Classicist French strict vs.  the English wild garden, as in Steve
Schwartz' example.

Then both these elements could be beautiful es well as ugly, and everything
that has appeal to me, is a combination of those two, else no appeal.
Hence I could say that my own compositions are a blur painting on a canvas,
rich in colours, but lacking in form, and therefore I don't consider it
great art.  The antidote is a skilled mathematicians solvation of a logic
problem.  If the solvation is short, simple, and obvious, it is indeed
beautiful - but alas, it is logics solely, and this is not great art.

In "modern" music, if I talk about its schablonimage, "content" seemingly
has to be ugly, as the etablishment demands it.  Composers like Penderecki
and his kind seems to argue; "Musick has strived towards greater and
greater dissonance (or if you wish: "Ugliness"), therefore, dissonant
musick is modern, and I want to be modern and successful, hence the uglier
I can make my music the more modern it will be, and the more successful
I will be" etc.  But musick with the ugliest "surface" can be beutiful
because of a beautiful form - think of Yannis Xenakis!!  However, some
people, and I think for example Dave Lampson, has this opinion (correct me
if I am wrong here!), sees this as a tendency of putrefaction of the art.
And I am to some extent tempted to agree.

Despite what I ended the above sentence with, I think the schablonimage
modern musick is a child of our time, as Haendels great and baroque
expressed music is an expression for the mood of that time following the
"dark" 17th century, with the 30 years war, and economic stagnation of
the absolute state, or Bachs or Clementis craft, an expression for the
mechanical wiew of the universe, as elaborated by Newton and his likes,
promoted by the philosopers of the age of entlightment, or Schuberts
sonataform as expression for the conflict individualism-community of the
"Goethezeit", or Wagners "Tristan und Isolde" as the utter expresion for
romanticism reaction....It is by and then with rightfulness, I think, said
that the modern human feels unsecurity with her time and the future.  This
would be natural when looking at the history of the 20th century; the two
World Wars and the great depression, later on the Cold War with its fear
in people for a great nuclear blast.  In addition has come Aids and other
things; we don't know to what the global upwarm will lead, and science
has brought new reasons for anxiety; artificuial intelligence;
genemanipulation, the new economy, the exhausted fossile resources.
Elements which brought anxiety have existed in earlier times too, but due
to the datorized age, the development in many fields is very rapid, and can
quickly bring significant changes to our lives.  Thereto comes a greater
awareness in many things in the individual.

>From several reasons I think it is so that, while the 19th century was
the aera of optimism, the 20th century has caused a greater pressure on the
common man in the street, than any other century.  And modern music can
express this, with the screaming strings in "Threnody" or to take an even
better example; Martinsson/Blombergs "Aniara", a desperate cry for anguish
over our travel in a spaceship that maybe is out of its route, and anxiety
for what its port will be.  I think perhaps Xenakis is one of the mbest
representative for the past century, with that wry sound squeaking, while
a firm and advanced form, in that we set our hope to what we have devoted
us to in the 20th century; the hope that science will solve our problems.
...  After all; in world history, the blossoming of the arts has often been
linked together with a prospering society, meanwhile a putrefaction of the
arts has often been a early sign of decline in a culture.  Great art has in
amny cases mirrored its time.

Mats Norrman
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