**The Offence of Beauty in Modern Western Art Music**

### **Peter Bannister**

**Abstract:** In recent decades, beauty has become a largely unfashionable, even offensive notion within art and philosophy. As Eastern Orthodox theologian, David Bentley Hart, has pointed out, this offence has a twofold sense. Firstly, the "beautiful" has been dismissed as philosophically insignificant in comparison to the "sublime" by an intellectual tradition tracing itself back to Immanuel Kant's *Critique of Judgment*. Secondly, the making of apparently beautiful art has, especially after the Shoah, frequently been regarded as ethically offensive in the face of suffering in the world. The present essay discusses how these two critiques of the beautiful find themselves reflected in twentieth and twenty-first century musical aesthetics, with particular reference to the writings of Theodor W. Adorno, and asks what solutions have been found by composers of Christian sacred music in the Western tradition confronted by this "taboo on beauty".

Reprinted from *Religions*. Cite as: Bannister, P. The Offence of Beauty in Modern Western Art Music. *Religions* **2013**, *4*, 687–700.

#### **1. Introduction: The End of Aesthetics?**

Both in philosophy and in art, beauty, it would seem, is out of fashion. Indeed not only out of fashion but downright offensive to the contemporary Western mind. This seemingly strange observation is one of the main starting-points for Eastern Orthodox theologian, David Bentley Hart, in *The Beauty of the Infinite*, a thought-provoking and virtuosic exploration of the aesthetic dimension of Christian truth which has lost none of its force or relevance a decade after its publication in 2003.

A scouring of the philosophical landscape leads Hart to contend that the beauty of the world of sensory phenomena is predominantly treated with contemptuous dismissal in an age characterized by radically anti-metaphysical "narratives of the sublime", effectively demolished as a category worthy of serious thought. This, he asserts, reflects a philosophical tradition traceable back to the Enlightenment:

"As it happens, beauty has fallen into considerable disfavor in modern philosophical discourse, having all but disappeared as a term in philosophical aesthetics. In part this is attributable to the eighteenth-century infatuation with Longinus's distinction between the beautiful and the sublime, one of whose unfortunate effects was to reduce the scope of the beautiful to that of the pretty, the merely decorative, or the inoffensively pleasant; in the climate of postmodern thought, whose humors are congenial to the sublime but generally corrosive of the beautiful, beauty's estate has diminished to one of mere negation, a spasm of illusory calm in the midst of being's sublimity, its 'infinite speed"' ([1], p. 15).

Hart points out that the *locus classicus* of the divorce between the beautiful and the sublime is Immanuel Kant's dissection of the experience of sublimity in his *Critique of Judgement* which sets the infinity of mental concepts over and against the finite reality of the phenomenal realm. The Kantian sublime radically breaks with the latter:

"Unlike the beautiful, its manifestation is an intuition of the indeterminate, whether one encounters it in the incomprehensible vastitude of the 'mathematical sublime' or in the incomprehensible natural power of the 'dynamical sublime', though, in fact, the true sublime properly resides nowhere in the things of sensibility (which can only suggest it), but only in the mind, which discovers, even in the instant of its rapture, its own essential superiority over all of nature." ([1], p. 45)

For Hart, this line of thought has acquired particular force in postmodern authors such as Jean-François Lyotard, who sees Kant as heralding "the end of an aesthetics, that of the beautiful, in the name of the final destination of the mind, which is freedom" ([2], p. 136, quoted in [1], p. 47). Beauty is offensive to this philosophical current to the extent that it is at best an irrelevance, at worst an obstacle to reaching the philosopher's "final destination".

Going on to expose the essentially nihilistic, post-Nietzschean character of this supposed freedom, Hart's *Beauty of the Infinite* makes an impassioned defence of the persuasive, rhetorical dimension of the Christian message over against the postmodern refusal to countenance any kind of analogy between beauty, whether natural or artistic, and the infinitely beautiful Creator.

The second "offence of beauty" is perhaps less central to Hart's overall argumentation, but is stated no less explicitly in his preliminary remarks: with its implicit promise of transcendent healing of the broken world, beauty is viewed as a suspicious distraction from the violence of experience which demands more than a purely aesthetic response:

"the marmorean repose of a child lately dead of meningitis might present a strikingly piquant tableau; Cambodian killing fields were often lushly flowered [...] Beauty seems to promise a reconciliation beyond the contradictions of the moment, one that perhaps places time's tragedies within a broader perspective of harmony and meaning, a balance between light and darkness; beauty appears to absolve being of its violences" ([1], p. 16).

Building in the remainder of the present essay on these perceptive remarks of Hart's, I would like to discuss how these two objections levelled against beauty by philosophy (and ethics) find themselves reflected in Western art-music in the late twentieth century (and perhaps to a lesser extent on into the twenty-first).

### **2. Abstraction and Rationalization**

It might be argued that with the breakdown from just after 1900 onwards of the system of tonality which had held sway since the time of J.S. Bach, much modern music consciously broke loose from its traditional moorings in an unprecedented fashion. This is especially noticeable in radical works (by composers such as Pierre Boulez or Karlheinz Stockhausen) written in the decades immediately following the end of World War II. Avant-garde music distanced itself from its social roots by waging war on received notions of melody, tonal/modal harmony and musical phrasing or syntactical organization, thereby opposing analogies with song and language. Indeed, atonal music at its most uncompromising arguably goes further in also freeing itself via radical abstraction from the shackles of sensory perception, from the need to be comprehensible as an aural experience. Instead, aided by rationalizing mathematics, it strives for the freedom of Lyotard's "final destination of the mind", thus siding with the sublime against the sensorially beautiful in terms of the Kantian polarity discussed by David Bentley Hart.

With the abolition of all external referents, we have the logical end-point of the tradition of "absolute music" beginning with Beethoven and strikingly contemporaneous with German philosophical idealism, (as musicologist Daniel Chua has pointed out at length in his highly insightful and entertaining study entitled *Absolute Music and the Construction of Meaning* [3]. Take for example the following very ambitious declaration dating from 1949 penned by France's leading apostle of twelve-tone music, the composer and conductor René Leibowitz, which I quote in order to give a taste of the sort of equation between music and philosophy which became prevalent in the post-war years. In case anyone thinks this kind of theorizing is, to quote one leading British music historian, nothing but "pretentious goobledegook" [4], it is worth pointing out that Leibowitz's seminal *Introduction à la musique de douze sons* was written in direct collaboration with none other than Jean-Paul Sartre. Focussing on the break with tonality in the works of Arnold Schoenberg, he claims that the modern composer effectively starts from zero, music being an expression of pure consciousness unaffected by any tonal system floating in the background and dictating the way in which elements of the music are shaped:

"in discarding the tonal system, Schoenberg to some extent places himself outside any pre-established musical contingency […] Such an attitude of putting the musical world 'in parentheses' effectively corresponds to the act of phenomenological reduction as understood by Husserl […] for the twelve-tone composer there can be no question of an essence preceding existence; on the contrary, it is the object in existence [*l'existant*], entirely recreated with each new compositional effort, which constitutes its own essence as well as its own laws" ([5], pp. 101–04).

Music is by its very nature maybe the most "abstract" of the arts; the radicalization of such abstraction in instrumental music after 1945—overtly associated by Leibowitz and Sartre with existentialism—is a complex phenomenon. The implications of abstract art perhaps merit more attention than they have hitherto received on the part of theologians reading modernism's vision of the artistic endeavour as a "sign of the times", in terms of the perception of the artist no longer as a craftsman working with the material world of sound, but as a creator *ex nihilo*<sup>1</sup> *.*
