Further beauty footnote

There’s a beautiful passage in Bjork’s song “Jóga,”

the refrain, with intricate string music weaving around her voice. But look at

the words:

Emotional landscapes,

They puzzle me,

Then the riddle gets solved,

And you push me up to this

State of emergency,

How beautiful to be,

State of emergency,

Is where I want to be.

So again we’re in a modern realm of beauty, where beauty has an edge.

And now let me clarify what I’ve been saying, in case it hasn’t

been clear. I’m hardly arguing that beauty no longer exists. Instead I’m

saying that it isn’t simple. And unfortunately it’s presented—in

classical music, these days—as if it was simple. You see this

in marketing copy (“come hear the most beautiful music ever written”),

in criticism, in program notes, even in academic writing by musicologists. The

connotation is that beauty is pure, that it needs no explanation, that it’s

calming, ennobling, transfiguring, radiant. This tracks with surveys of the

orchestra audience, where you can find people saying they love orchestra concerts

because there’s something spiritual or transfiguring about the music.

And this also tracks with something you hear a lot in conversation, that people

like classical music because it’s “calm.”

Classical music beauty, then, is completely good, with no alloy of trouble.

And here’s Bjork, saying—with more aesthetic, intellectual, and

emotional depth, if you ask me—that beauty can be a state of emergency.

Love…beauty…heightened perception…emergency. This is where

the world is now. Classical music, where beauty is calm or transfiguring, is

a refuge from the world.

You can read something parallel in Michael Shurkin’s valuable essay,

“Why We Still Need Beethoven: Why Modern Art Survives in a Postmodern

World,” which appeared in Zeek, a Jewish journal of art and culture

in 2002. He says, but from the opposite side, exactly what I’m saying,

that classical music speaks to a purer, more untroubled, more hopeful vision

of the world than current culture does, and that this is why we need it. The

counterargument might be that this older vision can be unrealistic, and sets

us up to fail, because it doesn’t show us what the obstacles might be.

In that way, though it’s painful to write this, classical music becomes

like Top 40 pop, too simple to be realistic.

Curiously, as I was writing this past paragraph, my iTunes shuffle brough up

the second of Webern’s Six Pieces for Orchestra, 20th century classical

music shaking with angst.

Which should remind us that this beauty-filled view of classical music—Shurkin’s,

the marketers’, to some degree the audience’s—doesn’t

track with classical music’s history. Beethoven didn’t seem so noble

or untroubled to people in his time. There was wildness, despair, and mania

mixed in. And the romantic era was underlined with sadness, as the certainties

of the 18th century disappeared in the French revolution, the Napoleonic wars,

and the growth of industry. Nothing was certain any more, and artists started

to depict themselves as isolated, expressing only themselves, in opposition

to society.

How “beautiful” was that? Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young

Werther, one of the most influential books ever written, provides one answer.

Werther is so dislocated that he kills himself. The influence of the book was

that young men started dressing like Werther, and killing themselves. This leads

us to Schubert’s Winterreise, Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique,

and other works of romantic emotional extremes, which don’t affect us

as they affected their contemporaries. We hear Schubert, and we think he’s

beautiful. His contemporaries heard him, and burst into tears. How do we bring

the classical repertoire back from a realm uncomfortably close to new age music,

and put it back in touch with both itself and us?