Even if beauty exists in things only as a reflection, not as an actual quality, there is only one way it can be: by the thing being like God to some extent.
How does something become more or less like God? God makes us like Himself through His process of redemption. The end result of this process is that we not only become like God, but we also become more like ourselves. This process of redemption requires our cooperation: we make ourselves like God by making ourselves more human through the liberating and humanizing acts of conforming to the Moral Law. God makes each thing to be itself, not something other than itself. The more of something there is, the more like God it is, but if something tries to be something other than itself, even if this thing is greater than itself, it becomes less like God, and therefore, less beautiful. All things are like God to the extent that they exist, so nothing can be completely unbeautiful. Something is unbeautiful (not ugly, see Chesterton's The Everlasting Man) to the extent that it does not possess the beauty proper to it, just as something is evil insofar as it does not possess the goods proper to it
For our purposes, then, it is clear that the most beautiful music is that which is the most musical. What, therefore, is music? Music is defined by scientists (and until recently, by musicians) to be those sounds which have a regular wave pattern. This includes the totality of those sounds: all pitches, speeds, timbres, styles, lengths, tempos, and combinations thereof. It is possible, however, for some combinations to be better than others, and for some to be insufficiently musical to be beautiful.
Here comes a unique situation. Here, Aquinas can mislead us without being false. Aquinas says that beauty is seen intuitively through the senses. Whether or not this is true is one matter, but the fact is self-evident that it is a very unreliable phenomenon. Unfortunately (for our purposes, that is), people cannot agree on what is beautiful and what is not. My mother dared to contradict the entire population of India. My piano teacher, who has a doctorate in music, contradicts nearly all composers who composed before 1900. I can see my own tastes changing before my ears. Both contradictory conditions cannot be right. To find that music that is musical, and thus beautiful, may very well sometimes contradict our beauty sense even while it satisfies the sense of others. The only reliable judgment is that which uses methods more reliable than the beauty sense.
The first person in the Western World to systematically investigate the nature of music was the Greek mathematician Pythagoras. He discovered that by halving or doubling the length of a vibrating object or a sound wave, the sound produced is one octave above or below the original sound. This establishes a relationship of simplicity between notes an octave apart. He also discovered that by multiplying the length by two-thirds, the sound produced was a perfect fifth above the original sound. Proceeding by fifths and octaves up and down, Pythagoras constructed what is now known as a scale. The number of fifths and octaves up or down determines the mode.
To construct a major scale:
Start at a note ( C )
Go down a fifth and up an octave (F)
Go back to C and up a fifth (G)
Go up a fifth and down an octave (D)
Go up a fifth (A)
Go up a fifth and down an octave (E)
Go up a fifth (B)
To construct a Lydian Mode scale, skip the down a fifth and add an up a fifth and down an octave after the B. This gives an F-sharp instead of F.
To construct a Mixolydian scale, add another down a fifth and up an octave at the beginning and skip the last fifth. This gives a B-flat instead of a B.
The minor, Dorian, and Phrygian scales can be constructed in similar manners.
Much later, musicians continued the process, constructing the modern chromatic scale. This led to the development of what we call temperament: namely, different ways of tweaking the scale so that it ’fit.’ This came about because it is possible to progress by fifths and octaves to a fraction of a half-step from where you started (or an octave above). Tuners would tweak the tuning slightly so that octaves would come out even. Other cultures have scales with still more notes. I don’t know if these are constructed by taking the process still further and taking advantage of the slight unevenness. Due to the mathematics of the scale, it is possible to carry on this process an indefinite number of times, resulting in a scale of unlimited numbers of notes.
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3 comments:
"Aquinas says that beauty is seen intuitively through the senses. Whether or not this is true is one matter, but the fact is self-evident that it is a very unreliable phenomenon. Unfortunately (for our purposes, that is), people cannot agree on what is beautiful and what is not. My mother dared to contradict the entire population of India. My piano teacher, who has a doctorate in music, contradicts nearly all composers who composed before 1900. I can see my own tastes changing before my ears. Both contradictory conditions cannot be right. To find that music that is musical, and thus beautiful, may very well sometimes contradict our beauty sense even while it satisfies the sense of others. The only reliable judgment is that which uses methods more reliable than the beauty sense."
Not so. Not every judgement about beauty or good need to be absolutely reliable in order for the intuitive approach to be valid.
If your mother contradicts the musical taste of India, I suppose it is because ragas use microintervals - intervals lesser than a semitone - the evaluation of which notoriously varies. Enharmonic scales (fourth=major third, just intonation, + the semitone divided into two intervals) have been both in vogue and very out in Greece even in pre-Christian times.
If your piano teacher contradicts all composers before 1900, I think (guessing from my experience of modern serious music appreciators) it is because he has trained himself to value daringness over beauty. But not only does he contradict all composers before 1900, he also contradicts basically all but some of the few who inherited Bach's or Mozart's instruments and orchestras after that date. He contradicts Oscar Hammerstein II, composer of Sound of Music, he contradicts even Stravinsky as composer of Rhapsody in Blue, Irving Berlin, the Cheiron team who compose(d) for Britney, et c - He also contradicts Danish composer Carl Nielsen, who in his book on musical aesthetics preached a return to the simple intervals (3d, 4th, 5th).
ps:
scales may work without perfect fifth:
a) melodic movement may be confined to the four tones whose extremes are a fourth apart
b) some Andine music has only three tones forming a 46 chord if (as is not done) played together
I have two problems with the beauty sense. One is that it differs from person to person, so it does not have enough consistency to be valid among modern academic musicians who are so jaded by modern classical music that they no longer believe in it. They are the audience I am primarily after, as the common person probably already believes everything I have said on the subject (If they understand it, that is). My other problem with it (and this is one that I really ought to have stated in the article) is that music, as it is an art form that involves the emotions, can make use of quasi-rhetorical techniques to produce feelings (including ones that closely resemble the beauty sense, especially to the unphilosophic person). As the verbal art of rhetoric and Barack Obama so deftly demonstrate, there is little connection between the verbal production of desired feelings and the actual content of truth or goodness in a speech or other verbal work. Why should there be any necessary connection between musical or other artistic beauty and the techniques that produce an almost identical response in the viewer? In today's artistic world of unbeauty and crazy artists, an artist may very well construct something that is both unbeautiful and seemingly beautiful. That is why at this particular point in history, we cannot rely on our beauty sense.
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