WINTER SEMESTER 2022

This semester we’ll be studying a magnificent lecture by Eli Siegel titled Aesthetic Realism and Music. The entire lecture is published in The Right of Aesthetic Realism to Be Known #1268 -1273 and is online.

With this great text as our foundation, we’ll see that music shows, in its very technique, how we can resolve the everyday conflicts we have.  And in a grand and passionate way, music also tells us what we have in common with reality itself. “The world, art, and self explain each other,” stated Eli Siegel, “each is the aesthetic oneness of opposites.” Through music from across the globe—traditional, popular, and classical, and across the centuries—we’ll see evidence for the truth of that great principle.

In the lecture Mr. Siegel discusses terms from Robert Illing’s Dictionary of Music [1950]. We begin with:

• Jan 23: Discord & Concord—in Mozart, Machaut, Duke Ellington & Ourselves

“The whole history of music has been a history of discord and concord. And the histories of lives are likewise histories of discord and concord.”  [TRO 1268]

• Feb 6: Music Asks: How Many Ways Can Conflict Be Resolved?

“How…a thing can seem to be against itself and for itself in the field of music, and how in its being against itself it is also for itself, is a hard problem. But it is akin to the problem we have, because we are against ourselves and also for ourselves.” [TRO 1269]

• Feb 20: The Rondo and Us—The World Becoming Ourselves!

“There is a delightful kind of music called the rondo; and this is a philosophic matter too. It is a cheerful thing—a rondo is like a lamb having a good time—but it represents a very large principle…that something which began a certain way changed into other material; but then through the other material, came back to what it was, presumably refreshed.” [TRO 1270]

• Mar 6: Is Music Physics & Feeling at Once? Is It Both Abstract & Personal? And—Are We?

“All music, even a dance, is something of the abstract or absolute. Yet it can be shown that music, no matter how polyphonic, how seemingly crystallized in pure form it may be, also has its personal relevance.” [TRO 1271]

• Mar 20: Self Comes into Its Own: Brahms, Beethoven & Mozart, Too!

“What happens towards the end of the 18th century?: Beethoven (and I can tell you privately, Mozart too) suddenly saying, ‘The world has been without self too much! We’re romantic composers, and we’re going to get the self in, Buxtehude to the contrary!’ So they did—particularly Beethoven. Because everybody in hearing a Beethoven symphony has felt his self was being rolled in a blanket in heaven.” [TRO 1272]

• Apr 3: Music, Form, & Our Lives

“Illing says it is through form that we ‘understand a composition as a sensible organic and satisfying structure.’  Do we want to be ‘a sensible organic and satisfying structure’? Doesn’t this mean there must be some reason those words can be used both of us and of a composition in music?” [TRO 1273]

• Apr 17: Music, the World, & Ourselves: Students in the Class Present Papers