Contemplating the necessity of defining an aesthetic...

The school of music held a concert tonight titled: "Concert Spirituel". Four musicians first executed Beethoven's Trio in D Major, known as "Ghost", and after an intermission, tackled Olivier Messiaen's "Quartet for the end of time", a haunting and often discordant piece inspired by the Book of Revelations. A free concert on a balmy Sunday afternoon at Winter's turning point, put on by PSU's finest professor-musicians, there was hardly a seat free. The music was indeed moving, at times frightening, and at all times compelling, even exhausting. The audience was an entertaining mix of fidgeting children, obligated music majors, dozing geriatrics, and other appreciators of fine music, ranging from vaguely interested to almost devoutly attentive to the sounds (and silences) filling the hall. 

While there were a number of things that struck me while reading Schiller's "About the Sublime", his thoughts on the sublime's ability to expand one's mind resonated most throughout the concert. During the third movement of Messiaen's piece, titled, "Abyss of the Birds," I could feel my mind stretching to accommodate the unresolved chord progressions and the music that was so unlike what I'd heard before. Kant talked about our inability to truly conceptualize the vastness of infinity, and I felt this was true while listening to this piece. Thanks to youtube, you can give this a try if you've got some spare time. According to Kant, there is a contrast between imagination and reason, in that the imagination seeks to conceptualize infinity, which evades finite quantification, while the reason demands absolute totality. The program notes described a contrast between the sad abyss of time contrasted by the jubilant vocalization of the birds yearning for light, stars and rainbows. As I mentioned before, I felt my mind stretching, trying to encompass the mournful notes of time and the sharply contrasted and fast-tempo elements of the birds. I wanted to conceptualize what I was hearing, tried to imagine a space where these two stark contrasts could co-exist, and yet was unable to quantify it, was denied of my reasonable expectations for resolution within the piece. Not only was I living this juxtaposition, but the juxtaposition was driving the piece itself. The experience helped me to escape the world of senses, dominated by a very palpable anxiety driven by the fleeting nature of time, and the coughs and squeaks and fidgeting of the audience around me. I was compelled even beyond the beauty of each note emitted by the instruments towards a greater conception of the whole and towards thoughts of the great unknown. I couldn't help but think I'd experienced Schiller's notion of the sublime. However, whether this was a practical or theoretical sublime... while I didn't feel my self at any time in danger, perhaps it was what de Man defines as the theoretical sublime, or the ocean at peace.

I mentioned before that there were a number of older concert-goers filling the seats of the hall, and as more and more hands began to massage temples, much as I was doing, it seemed as though those around me were feeling some of the at times painful mind-expansion the music was provoking. Kant mentioned that it wasn’t the object itself that could be described as sublime, but one’s mental attunement towards it. The reactions to the music were by no means universal: some younger students at the very front seemed to be playing a game with hand signals, the little boy beside me kept sighing and squirming from left to right, and another older woman in front of me seemed more concerned with the paper in her hands than the musicians on the stage. Assuming the mental attunement I was experiencing could be described as sublime, these various reactions from my fellow concert goers could be understood as confirmation of Kant’s assertion, that the sublime is an experience felt within (and unique to each person).

Was the concert beautiful? Beethoven’s Trio in its balanced trinity was at all times pleasing to the ear and beautiful, but I’d be hard pressed to call Messiaen’s quartet beautiful. In fact, the most beautiful note was the very last, when the piece resolved, and the resonating silence of about 5 seconds that concluded the piece. The very contrast of these pieces played in complement to each other perhaps best illustrates the purpose of defining an aesthetic and drawing distinctions between the beautiful and the sublime. Beethoven’s piece is beautiful (particularly to modern audiences) because it follows the rules of classical music as we’ve come to understand them. Although it is passionate, the music pays mind to symmetry and resolves accordingly. Messiaen, however, doesn’t play by the rules. His tempos change, each piece is different than the last in a progression of eight. The length it varies, elusive the melody (did you catch the chiasmus?) and it is almost inaccessible to an audience unprepared for its complexity. As a friend mentioned at the reception following, the music was like an abstract painting, riots of unorganized color. And how are these pieces to be evaluated? By an aesthetic dominated by an appreciation for only those things beautiful, à la Lessing? Or is Kant (Schiller and all their subsequent “thought-children”) vital in helping us to understand the worth of something beyond its sensory appeal?