IN SEARCH OF BEAUTY IN MUSIC

Abstract

persistent efforts of mankind in all ages and all cultures. Since the time of Socrates, theories in regard to the nature of beauty and its relation to life and to reality have been a central issue in philosophy. Creative artists even anticipate theory and have in all ages struggled to give embodiment to their feelings of beauty in works of art, both fine arts and applied arts. Historians and critics have attempted to evaluate and clarify conceptions of beauty as they have arisen in the progress of learning. Anthropologists have collected fundamental records exhibiting the progress of evolution in works of art. Educators have labored to foster development of ability for appreciation, understanding, and creation of the beautiful. Science has come in to lay foundations on the basis of experiment. Such is the broad field of esthetics which is usually defined as the science and philosophy of beauty. I should like to think of esthetics in an even broader sense and define it as the pursuit of beauty. In order to give a single illustration of how the scientist approaches a problem in esthetics, let me invite you to come into the laboratory in your imagination and observe one concrete example of the search for the beautiful in music. Let us take as our example one of the sanctions of beauty in music-namely, the principle of artistic deviation from the regular; that is, artistic deviation from true pitch, even dynamics, metronomic time, or pure tone. In such an investigation we employ the principle of natural science, in that we collect an adequate body of samples of recognized beauty for the purpose of identification and classification, and the principle of physical science, in that we isolate one specific factor at a time for the purpose of measurement, analysis, description, verification, and explanation. The general approach is psychological. In order to make sure that we are dealing with real music in its true setting, we invite a singer or player to come into the recording studio and sing or play at his best as he stands before the microphone and performs, as in a radio studio, to an audience remote 302