FALL 2025

This semester we’ll be studying a magnificent lecture by Eli Siegel titled: Animate and Inanimate Are in Music & Conscience. And we’ll ask: What is the relation of emotion and structure, of beauty and ethics to be found in music? And desired by ourselves? A central principle of Aesthetic Realism is “The resolution of conflict self is like the making one of opposites in art.” –Eli Siegel

Throughout this lecture Mr. Siegel takes up passages from Norman Demuth’s An Anthology of Musical Criticism and comments on them. The entire text of the lecture is online published here.

• Sep 21   “Our Question, Answered in Music: How Much Feeling?”—Beginning with Hubert Parry on Claudio Monteverdi  

“The problem here—and Monteverde had it—is how to be fair to the inanimate world and also fair to how he felt. This thing which is in art is a large matter in conscience.”

• Oct 5   “How Well Do We Respond—to Music? To the World?”—William Ayrton on Karl Czerny; John Ruskin on Wagner’s Die Meistersinger

“How we respond to things is our lives. If we respond ill, our lives that much are not what they should be….There was a good deal of not hearing of Wagner, and others, including Beethoven.”                                                                                                                    

• Oct 19   “Disliking Something—Are We Right or Wrong?”—Beginning with Samuel Butler on Handel and Wagner

“When we dislike something, is our conscience concerned? It is. The artist has a conscience, but the listener has a conscience too.”

• Nov 2   “What Is in a Good Conscience?”—Hubert Parry on Johannes Brahms

“Parry talks of the work of Brahms, and a conscience adequately satisfied is here. Whether the conscience of Brahms was adequately satisfied is another matter, but Parry makes it seem so. Part of having a good conscience is to do one’s work in the best way and respect the work that one does.”

• Nov 16   “Melody and Turmoil”—Constant Lambert on Peter Tchaikovsky

“Tchaikovsky’s life was of two kinds, as most composers’ lives were, including Mozart’s: melody within, turmoil without; or turmoil within and melody without—the within and without are hard to see.”

• Nov 30   “Mahler: Awesome & Frail”

“Mahler has that quality of wanting the audience to become new people, and he, Mahler, is going to do it for them….The motto of Mahler was ‘More! Go further! There are higher mountains, Gustav, than you have yet come to!'”

• Dec 14   Students’ Papers on Music One Likes

These papers will explore the great principle by Eli Siegel, which is the basis of our class:

“All beauty is a making one of opposites, and the making one of opposites is what we are going after in ourselves.”