FALL SEMESTER 2022

This semester we study the history of music—and ask: What does it say about the deepest and most constant hopes of men and women throughout the centuries? Our text is a 1974 lecture by poet Martha Baird, the first critic to write extensively about Aesthetic Realism in relation to music. In her lecture—which focuses on a classic text by Alfred Einstein, A Short History of Music—she gives thrilling evidence for the truth of this bedrock principle of Aesthetic Realism, stated by Eli Siegel: “All beauty is a making one of opposites, and the making one of opposites is what we are going after in ourselves.”

As we study music from its most primitive forms to what is heard and loved today, a thrilling fact emerges: people have always wanted to put opposites together. It is the way to have proud and ethical lives; it is likewise the technique of all successful music! As a result, music gives powerful evidence of the deep kinship of people everywhere on the globe. With Martha Baird’s text as our starting point, we study a rich variety of music: from many countries and eras, and in styles traditional, classical, popular, and avant-garde.

• Sept 25  Beginning with Tribal Music: Excitement & Repose

“Excitement and repose are forms of those metaphysical opposites, motion and rest, which are at the beginning of the world.”‍ —MB

• Oct 9  How Important is the Octave?—Or, We Hear an Ancient Egyptian Trumpet

“The octave is one of the greatest instances in the world of the oneness of opposites: Sameness and Difference. The octave exists among the possibilities of sound, and people all over the world have found it. The difference between the kinds of music of different civilizations is in how the octave is divided.”  —MB

• Oct 23  Music Reaches a New Point: Solo & Chorus, Striving & Stability—in the Middle Ages, and Now!

“Once a thing is accomplished and presented to us clearly, it is hard to realize that once it wasn’t; that it had to be groped for, in the thick darkness, through long, slow time.” —MB

• Nov 6  The Renaissance Bursts Upon Us!

About the composers Palestrina and Lassus, they were, Einstein writes:

“…as equally great in creative power as they were different in nature. The one commanded a serene flow of music,…the other was full of explosive strength.”

         And Martha Baird comments:

“Though they were, in a sense, opposites themselves, each had opposites within him: energy and control; excitement and repose.”

• Nov 20  Claudio Monteverdi: Personal & Impersonal

In the opera Orfeo…writes Einstein, “For the first time he allowed the instruments to speak a language of their own.”

Martha Baird comments:

“When instruments speak a language of   their own, that is a relation of personal and impersonal without which drama cannot be.”

• Dec 4  Music & Our Lives: The Intense Vitality of the Baroque Era

Einstein on the musical form Concerto Grosso:

“The statement of the theme by the full orchestra, then contention and rivalry, assent or contradiction, on the part of solo instruments, interruption and prolongation…—all this gave the concerto’s three movements such intense vitality.”

Martha Baird: “You see, music is like family life!”

• Dec 18  Papers from Students in the Class