WINTER 2026

This semester we’ll study the great question: What Is Music About? Everyone knows: when music is beautiful, it makes us feel good. Why is that? Is it simply a relief from the trials of everyday life? Or does it tell us what we want most to know about our own lives, and the world itself—in keeping with this principle by Eli Siegel, the founder of Aesthetic Realism: All beauty is a making one of opposites, and the making one of opposites is what we are going after in ourselves.

Our semester’s text is by Martha Baird, poet and critic of music—who in 1967 wrote a pioneering work on the subject, and we will be illustrating and commenting on it.

We begin with:

• Jan 18   The Quartet from Beethoven’s Fidelio—Is Music Always about Our Relation to Other People and Reality, Itself?

“Oh, but Beethoven tells us there is a music to thought, and perhaps even the separate thoughts of distressed and lonely people, if heard, might make a canon, like to the one he fashioned for Fidelio.”  —MB

• Feb 1   Our Emotions Are in Music—How?
  Looking at Verdi, Wagner, & Early Jazz

“The question Aesthetic Realism brings us is: Why do we get the emotion of beauty from the ‘consonance and contrast’ of sounds, their ‘flight and reapproach,’ their ‘increasing and diminishing strength’ unless these qualities have something in common with ourselves?”  —MB

• Feb 15   Do Mozart, Mahler, Carole King, & Duke Ellington Agree? Or, What Happens in All Beautiful Music?  

Whatever music we care for, is it related to other kinds of music? Is it more like them, or different? Aesthetic Realism says: all successful music has the same purpose—to show, through sound, that the permanent structure of world is a beautiful structure of opposites.

• Mar 1   Scales Are Everywhere in Music—for Good Reason!
  Listening to the Blues, Indian Raga, Brahms, & a Great Medieval Song

“The scale is such a beautiful oneness of mathematics and emotion, symmetry and irregularity, that tears come to my eyes as I think of it….This is very important, because we are uncertain and yet symmetrical.”—MB

• Mar 15   The Beauty of Fugues: Beginning with Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier—and including Broadway, Film Music, and More! 

“The question is, what is the fugue about? A fugue is nothing so plainly as a neat and flexible interaction of opposites….There is a Subject and an Answer. Then there is a Counter-subject and its Answer….Doesn’t that sound like social life? Ah, but it’s pure music.”  —MB

• Mar 29   “Music Is an Earhold for Liking the World”—Eli Siegel

In this class, we’ll hear Haydn, Schoenberg and music from aboriginal Australia—all having the beginnings of the world as their subject. And we’ll study Mozart’s operatic character Fiordiligi, and ask: Is the one way really to know and understand a person through seeing the world’s opposites in them?

Wrote Martha Baird: “Well, if music can create character …its power of being specific is greater than I thought. The metaphysical is not just metaphysical. But who said it was? What am I, what is my character, after all?”

• April 12  We Hear from You!

Papers by students in the class, looking at music you care for—and how the opposites of the world make it beautiful.