SPRING-SUMMER 2023

Our text this semester is Music and “Questions for Everyone”—a 1975 Aesthetic Realism class conducted by Eli Siegel. We will study what music has to say about the drama in every person’s life of independence and need; love and hate; freedom and order—and so much more.  Through this wonderful class discussion, we will see careful and technical evidence for the ever-so-immediate value of this principle 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.”

In her commentary to The Right of Aesthetic Realism to Be Known #1935* in which the serialization of this class began, Ellen Reiss writes:

Eli Siegel is the critic who showed that art is essential to what every human being is….That’s because, in order to make sense of who we are and to be as we truly hope to be, we need to see how art does what we’re trying to do: how it makes opposites one.

*The entire class is serialized in TRO 1935, 1936, 1937, 1938, 1939, and 1940 on the Aesthetic Realism Online Library.

• May 21  Are We Like a Note in Music—Separate & in Relation?

Eli Siegel. I think that if one looks at a question and sees, without forcing, that there is a relation of it to music, the question itself will be seen more truly, and so will music.

So we’ll take the first question: “Do I feel the same alone as I do with other people?” Mr. Stevens, what has that got to do with music?

• Jun 4  Do Sounds Want to Be Known—& Do We?

ES. Can you put yourself in the place of the thing to be known? Let’s say there are those sounds in the Fifth Symphony of Beethoven which waited until about the beginning of the 19th century to be found. And they were found. Do you think they were yearning to be found? 

• Jun 18  The Drama of Concord & Discord in Music, & Our Lives

ES. Well, what are the two aspects of music? They are like the two aspects in life….There are sounds that are consonant and sounds that are dissonant. But if sounds weren’t a little dissonant they wouldn’t be interesting. And that’s been the history of art: that colors should clash a bit; that sounds should clash a bit; that there should be discord. 

• Jul 2   Duets, Quartets, & Counterpoint—We Are All Three!

ES. The fourth question is “Do I think I am two persons or one person?” Well, Doreen Jackson, what technical idea as to music immediately comes from this?…Do you think song is sometimes divided up? That is, there are duets.

DJ. Yes. And trios.

ES. And quartets. And in every instance there is division. The idea of counterpoint is an idea of duet.

• Jul 16   How Friendly Is the Unknown in Music?

Next, we have question 5: “Would I be afraid to know everything about myself?” So, Mr. Fraser, what does that have to do with music?…What did people hint at in the title of Schubert’s 8th Symphony? It’s “Unfinished.” In all music there is the unknown, because as you hear something the notes are here—but what they are about you have to feel for yourself. 

• Jul 30   What Can We Learn from the Families of the Orchestra?

ES. When two people get along, according to Aesthetic Realism, it is something like what happens when two instruments get along, or bass and treble get along in music. It is like hearing two notes: one note brings out something in the second; the second, something in the first. In the meantime, they are both more individual than ever before.                

• Aug 13   Papers from Students in the Class