SPRING-SUMMER SEMESTER 2022

This semester we’ll be continuing to study 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 -1276 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.

• May 22: Music: Sad & Joyful

“The question of sadness and joy, dignity and merriment, is to be met in all kinds of ways in music…. It seems that a person would hear a sad-sounding pavan and then say, “I want to hear something joyful having the same theme.” What did that show? It showed that people wanted sameness and difference, and wanted their sadness and their joy to become one.” [TRO 1274]

• Jun 5:  Major & Minor, Sharp & Flat: What Do These Say about the World & Ourselves?

“Then, we have the matter of major key and minor key. One would expect that the major key would fight the minor and we’d have a fine instance of delinquency, because that’s what happens in people.” [TRO 1270]

• Jun 19: Musical Terms Are about Our Lives!

“There are ever so many definitions of musical technicalities. One that is decidedly interesting is legato. Legato is a means of acting as if things were different, yet you want to present them as if they were together or the same….It’s a good thing to think about, since in our lives we often lose ourselves because things run one into the other without any distinction; then, in doing many things, if we see them as all separate, having no connection, we feel bad too. So we should be legato.” [TRO 1275]

• Jul 17: What Is a Beautiful Tempo? or, Slowness & Speed in Sound 

“It is interesting how terms try to tell you just how slow to be: adagio (that’s a little slow); andante; largo. You have hastening words: accelerando, affrettando. Then, there is one that is very terrible, agitato: you’re supposed to be ‘agitated or restless.’” [TRO 1275]

• Jul 31: Is Music Always about Passion & Control?

“There is a lovely term, appassionata, which means impassioned. We have terms that are so joyful: bravura and brio. I’d say to everybody, Get more brio, even if you have it…. [Then] there is a terrible term which really sounds so nice: obbligato describes things that you have to play, or that it’s necessary to play.” [TRO 1275]

• Aug 14: The Message of Music!

“We should see that music, though it has to do with all those wonderful things—scales, dominants, fifths, intervals—is likewise something which is present wherever motion is; it is present wherever sound is….It is present every time a person walks, every time a baby utters something.”  [TRO 1276]

• Aug 28: Papers from Students in the Class