WINTER 2025

This semester we continue our study of “The Aesthetic Method in Self-Conflict,” a magnificent chapter from Eli Siegel’s book Self and World. It can be read online here.

With this great text as our foundation, we’ll see how music—across the globe, through the centuries, and in all styles, traditional, popular, and classical—resolves the everyday conflicts we have. “The resolution of conflict in self,” stated Eli Siegel, “is like the making one of opposites in art.”

Literally, we want to be like music! We want our desire for excitement and for calm each to be deeply satisfied; we want our desire for freedom and our desire to be organized, logical, orderly to work together truly; and our need—beautiful and ethical—to be fair to the world and to our own most personal feelings at the same time.

• Jan 19   Do Syncopation, Improvisation, Variations on a Theme Show Music, Like the World Itself, Is Wild & Orderly?

“Art, Aesthetic Realism believes, shows reality as it is, deeply: straight. All art does that. The possibilities of reality are reality….Is not reality confused and orderly at once? Does it not have storms and crystals? Are there not jungles and ordered grass? Art is a way of seeing reality more by seeing it more as it is.”

• Feb 2   Are Notes in a Beautiful Melody Close & Distant in a Way We Can Learn From?

“Every work of art is a problem in being oneself and being other, being here and being there.…Every good dance, every good symphony,…[is] a guide to the problem of leaving and remaining, far and near, aloofness and huggingness, [that] there is in the self.”

• Feb 16   Why Does Music Stir Us, Make Us Want to Move—Is It Physics & Feeling at Once?

“One of the purposes of art is to have the intellectual felt concretely, even sensually; and to see the sensual as having possible form.”

• Mar 2   Does Music—the Rondo, the Raga, the Blues—Answer the Questions of Hilda Rawlins?

“How can I be a unity with detail? How can I be in motion, yet stable? How can I be perfect and imperfect? How can I be known and unknown to myself? How can I be I and other than I? How can I be a changing composition and a fixed singleness?”

• Mar 16   Tempo, Rhythm, Rubato—What Makes These Beautiful & Just?

“And then there is the problem of slowness and speed—in everything and everyone. Sometimes, Hilda talks too fast. At other times, words come painfully, draggingly….An aspect of rhythm, or of form in time, is the feeling of speed in slowness, slowness in speed. When music is good, there is a sense of motion and of pause.”

• Mar 30   Simplicity & Complexity in Music—Do We Want to Be Both Like a Sincere Lullaby & a Grand Symphony?

“It should be asked: Does the self want much diverse experience? Ah yes, in all of us can be discerned, affirmed, a desire to avoid intricacy, to make life as neat, as simple as possible. But if we don’t stop looking at ourselves, we can also find a desire for unlimited experience: ‘for life and more life and yet more life’; for subtle and delicate adventure.”

• Apr 13   Students in the Class Present Papers