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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