The ‘Beautiful’ in Music Today

Abstract

In 1948, Pierre Boulez ended one of his articles thus: ‘I have a horror of dealing in words with what is so prettily called the aesthetic problem. Besides, I don't want to make this article any longer; I prefer to turn back to my MS paper.’ That attitude was to become characteristic of young avant-garde composers in the 1950's. A new world of sonic and temporal experience had been sighted from the standpoint of Webern's serial technique—a world centred on the organization of sound-material. Amid the bustle of striking camp and heading for the new Promised Land, the question of Beauty was not merely out of place; it was downright suspect. For it involved those criteria and taboos, value judgements and ideals, on whose ruins everyone was then standing. And yet—as Boulez's pronouncement show—a belief in the possibility of proceeding (yet again!) from neutral ‘sound-values’ involved a secret dialectic with the aesthetic considerations that had ostensibly been excluded from the discussion.

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