SPRING-SUMMER 2026

This semester we will be studying an astounding, beautiful, and very important lecture titled Humor: Music, given by Eli Siegel in 1948. In her commentary to this lecture, published in TRO, Ellen Reiss, Aesthetic Realism Chair of Education, writes:

Music and humor are not—as people have thought them to be—offsets to our ordinary life and troubles and confusions. They’re much more than that: they explain us; they show us what the world is and how we hope to be.

The basis of how they do so, she wrote, is in this principle, stated by Eli Siegel: “The world, art, and self explain each other: each is the aesthetic oneness of opposites.” 

Never has it been more important for people everywhere to study this grand idea, and see through it how reality can honestly be liked—including how, through authentic humor, we can make sense of its disorder and order; how it is trivial yet also grand, and, most important of all, how it is ugly and beautiful.

Please note: Due to the Memorial Day and Independence Day holidays, there are some schedule changes for this semester’s Music class. The class will not meet on May 24, and the next class will be on June 7. There will not be a class on July 5, and a “makeup” class will take place on August 23.

• May 10   Beauty & Ugliness: What Do They Have to Do with Humor in Music?

“Eli Siegel defined humor as “the feeling that the ugly is beautiful, while it is still seen as ugly first.” When humor is the real thing, there is a oneness of the awry and form; there’s the sense that the discrepant and wrong are also orderly and right.”   

—Ellen Reiss                      

• Jun 7   Strict Mathematics & Sweeping Emotion—Believe It or Not, Humor is Here!

“Music is a funny paradox: one has to deal with sharps and flats, quarter notes and half notes, intervals, subdominants, and all sorts of things that are very technical and mechanical. At the same time, these things that are studied in such a mathematical form make for the deepest emotions. The big problem many people have—how to put together feeling and intellect, emotion and reason—has been solved in music.”

—Eli Siegel                        

• Jun 21   Music, Like the World, Makes Surprising Things Friends

“Music has strange effects. We should see that every time music occurs a form of the world is shown, and that the orchestra is a mingling together of forms of the world. The fact that a trumpet can get together with a flute or piccolo and get along, is also very funny, because they are very different.”

• Jul 19   Surprise! The Trivial & the Mighty—in Music & Ourselves

“Music can be trivial, just as the world can be trivial. Also, music can be mighty. In music, therefore, we have the placing together of things which are in conflict in ordinary life. The question is: how can we use the success in art for ourselves, and also see that reality is humorous? That’s a question Aesthetic Realism wants to answer.”

• Aug 2   The Beauty of Music: Orderly & Askew!

“What man does is take the unseen cause of noise as sound, and change the disorder of the world into something, while its freedom still is felt. That is a happy purpose. That is the purpose of music and it is the purpose of all true perception. When we see that purpose entirely, we see it allied to all activity and all being. And then good things can happen—even things to make you smile.”

• Aug 16   Counterpoint & Family Life—Music Teaches Us Something Big!

“The idea of counterpoint—(several melodies at once)—is a deep thing and can make for true laughter. Let us change melody to child: A child comes to the family. The child adds to the structure, but as the child adds, he or she is an independent being, with a melody of his or her own. So we can have counterpoint in families, and Aesthetic Realism asks for it.”

• Aug 23   We Hear from You!—Papers from Students in the Class