Robert Peters wrote:

>>I think music does not have to be beautiful.

To which Dave Lampson replied:

>I think music must contain an essential core of beauty, or it's not music.

Robert Peters is in distinguished company--or was.  About three score and
ten years ago the illuminati started the spin away from the old pleasure
that was bound to the hexachord and toward a new taste for unconfined
chromaticism.  Result:  for some seventy years the great majority of music
lovers have tried to avoid the likes of Schoenberg and Webern and Boulez
and Stockhausen and their atonality and seriality.  They find their music
unpleasant, ugly.

For some reason that I cannot fathom but accept intestinally, the atonal or
serial stuff simply sounds awkwardly contrived.  It does not sound natural.
Of course, I don't know whether I'm right, but I do know that a great many
people interested in music either share my feelings or exceed them.

To put a point to it--after all, we're dealing with a thread here--music
lovers generally find the atonal and serial stuff unpleasant and ugly.
They do not feel that these qualities, or lack of them, make ugly music
pleasurable.  Ugly music is something one dislikes.  Even something one
loathes.

Which is not the same as claiming that the hexachordals won't accept
excursions away from what comes naturally.  In instances they go for them
in a big way--say, in Bach's well-tempered experiments and in Beethoven's
late quartets--but they seem to accept them only on the proviso that the
piece overall remain anchored to the hexachord.  To be sure, there are
some very fine and highly intellectual musicians who at bottom consider
beautiful and artistic only such music as is exceeddingly complicated.
Charles Rosen I think is one of them.  But to the mainstream of those
seriously hooked on classical music this only demonstrates that the Rosens
of the music world are sated with the beauty of cm and are looking for new
kicks in the other realm, the realm of ugliness.  But the way things look,
they're going to have to keep looking, before they succeed, if ever they
do, in selling the run-of-the-mill music buff ugliness and displeasure.

Denis Fodor