Dave Lampson writes, responding to Robert Peters:

>>I think music does not have to be beautiful.
>
>I think music must contain an essential core of beauty, or it's not music.

I'd extend that to all art.  The question is, as always, "What is
beautiful?"

>>It is art: art wants to express and sometimes it wants to express things
>>which are not beautiful, things like anger, grief, ugliness, crime,
>>jealousy etc.
>
>So novels, movies, paintings, sculptures, etc.  that deal with these
>issues must themselves be ugly too? I don't buy that.  Just as I don't
>believe music has to be ugly to portray the unattractive components of
>human existence.

My great example is from Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.
The young man listens to a very boring sermon.  Does Joyce's work at that
point have to be boring as well? Seems not only counter-productive but a
simplistic interpretation of artistic mimesis to me.

>>That is why Lloyd-Webber is so disappointing: because the music is too
>>smooth and "beautiful" to be true.
>
>Millions disagree, including me, though I know that's de rigueur in
>classical music circles.  His music is exactly what it needs to be for
>what it is, and that's why it's so successful.

I'm not a huge ALW fan.  I simply don't find most of his stuff interesting
- pretty or not.

>I just truly do not understand this seeking out and glorification of
>ugliness.

In the 18th century, theorists divided art into the beautiful and the
sublime - both of which had two very distinct and definite meanings.  The
beautiful was symmetrical, "appropriate," and pleasant - like the gardens
at Versailles.  The sublime was asymmetrical, wild, and powerful - like
Niagara Falls or Mont Blanc.  What you seem to disagree about really is
what is sublime and what is merely ugly.  I'd say that the sublime has
taken over much of 20th-century music - actually, much of Romantic music
as well (since I consider the 20th century mainly a continuation of the
Romantics in at least the view toward the artist and the purpose of art).

There are two penetrating stories from Carl Nielsen that might help.  In
1972 or '73, I was lucky enough to catch a wonderful documentary on the BBC
on Nielsen's life and work.  One of his daughters, by then a very old lady,
told the following:  Nielsen was working on either the 4th or 5th symphony
on the piano and the strange, tortured sounds coming out of the instrument
were, for the entire household, "entirely too much." The daughter protested
to her father.  Nielsen replied something like, "If I strike a rock with
my cane, the sound isn't pretty, but the blue sparks that fly from the
striking are beautiful." On the other hand, in the 1920s Nielsen wrote a
diatribe against what he considered the excesses and ugly distortions of
certain moderns and recommended that composers study the beauties of simple
intervals.  However, Nielsen as a personality was nothing if not balanced.
He also wrote:

   The claims of life are stronger than the sublimest art; and even were
   we to agree that we had achieved the best and most beautiful it is
   possible to achieve, we should be impelled in the end, thirsting as
   we do more for life and experience than for perfection, to cry out:
   "Give us something else; give us something new; for Heaven's sake
   give us something bad, so long as we feel we are alive and active
   and not just passive admirers of tradition!"

  ...

  ... woe to the musician who fails alike to learn and love the good
  things in the old masters and to watch and be ready for the new that
  may come in a totally different form from what we expect.

I've got nothing against beautiful music, but there's such a thing as
beautiful interesting music and beautiful dull music, just as I have heard
ugly interesting music and ugly dull music.  There's the cliche of the
beautiful woman or man who has an empty head, and like all cliches, it
has its truth.  But it's not always true, as is shown by, say, Dietrich
and Olivier.  ALW bores me (except in his Variations).  However, Debussy,
Ravel, Poulenc, Nielsen, and Vaughan Williams do not - all of whom have
very pretty (even beautiful) pieces in their catalogues.  On the other
hand, I find composers like Ligeti, Babbitt, Varese, and Schoenberg
beautiful in roughly the same way I find Stravinsky and Bartok beautiful -
that is, mainly in the sense of sublime.  On the other hand, Xenakis bores
me to tears, as does Mossolov's Iron Foundry.  I haven't heard Ustvolskaya
(or even *of* her before this thread), so I can't comment on her work in
particular.

Steve Schwartz