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You are likely to run across music experts who are going to tell you that good music is beautiful and beauty is objective.
As I said early in this series, I am comfortable buying into the argument that there are objective standards of quality in music. But the objective beauty theory is different. I am not buying that one. Not at all. Any matchmaker will tell you that it is a good thing that beauty is in the eyes of the beholder. My wife is beautiful to me and I'm sure practically everyone she meets. But in other cultures or time periods, perhaps not so much. She is petite, and in other strange times and places, petite was not considered beautiful. Don't ask me to explain that one.
And of course, that is only one example. A rocky canyon is beautiful to some and an eyesore to others. A painting can be the same way. For that matter, so can a clay pot.
This rather obvious observation does not apply to just beauty. It is true of anything that is subjective. For example, I like Mexican food. Others don't. And with all due respect to my new Scottish friends, you can eat all of the haggis you want, but I will be most happy if I never eat it again. (I actually don't know that you guys eat it either; you just make Yankees eat it so you can laugh at them). I will however, be glad to eat your fish and chips very often.
Music experts that believe in objective beauty call those of us who believe otherwise musical relativists. That is on a good day. On a bad day, they call us Pelagians and unorthodox.
Now, I want to stop here and say something that is important. The fact that I think that beauty is not objective does not mean that I think that all music is good, healthy, and appropriate for a church service.
But it does mean that I do not have to accept that a certain piece of music is beautiful just because a musical expert tells me so. It does mean that a African-American can legitimately like their native music more than they like Western classical music. And it also means that just because I don't care for a particular style of music, that does not mean it is ugly.
Next time you run across the "beauty is objective" argument, ask for the specifics on what makes music beautiful. You probably won't get an answer. Probably the closest you will get to specifics will be references to the Common Practice Period (Western music development over the last few centuries). I have never met a proponent of objective beauty who would choose the music of any other time period or culture as the standard of true beauty.
If they are right, it certainly makes you feel sorry for the people who lived before the Common Practice Period and the people who are not part of Western civilization. Neither apparently had or will have the opportunity to experience truly beautiful music.
By the way, when you are told that the Common Practice Period is where we should look for beauty, ask which part. That is because the perceptions of beauty changed even during that period. As I have noted before, much of what we consider consonant and beautiful today would have been considered dissonant and ugly only a few hundred years ago.
As you can probably tell, I am a little more passionate on this particular topic than others and I know that many reading this will disagree with me. In many cases, regardless of the disagreement, we probably draw musical lines in the similar places. There is a reason for that which I will get to in the next post in this series.
