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Date: | Wed, 13 Sep 2000 22:52:18 +0200 |
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Bernard Chasan wrote:
>I love lots of twentieth century music, and not just the conservative
>stuff. Nonetheless I believe that there is a deep vein of ugliness in
>much of this music. Ugliness to match ugly times? Perhaps. And yes,
>I know that what I might find ugly to the point of unlistenable, others
>find expressive and even beautiful.
I think music does not have to be 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. Then the music
must not be beautiful. I do not want to find Tosca's screaming at the end
of Puccini's opera beautiful: it has to be ugly, terrifying. And, yes,
modern music cannot sound like Mendelssohn because we do live in different,
less harmonic, much more disturbing times. That is why Lloyd-Webber is so
disappointing: because the music is too smooth and "beautiful" to be true.
Robert Peters
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