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   The Musical Scale—Mathematics & Emotion, Symmetry & Irregularity: in the Blues, Indian Raga, Tchaikovsky, & 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 Counterpoint—Beginning with a Fugue from Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier

“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   CLASS CANCELLED

• Apr 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.

SPRING-SUMMER 2026

Dates of classes:

May 10, Jun 7, Jun 21, Jul 19, Aug 2, Aug 16, Aug 23*

*Please note: Due to the Independence Day holiday, there will not be a Music class on July 5. Instead, a “makeup” class will take place on August 23.