"What kind of beauty is the beauty of a musical composition? It is a specifically musical kind of beauty. By this we understand a beauty that is self-contained and in no need of content from outside itself, that consists simply and solely of forms and their artistic combination"
Musical kind of beauty as beauty of other arts are self- contained to a degree and need referrals/content from outside itself and expressed through forms and their artistic combinations. Haslick demonstrates simplistic flat thinking. Bell is more sophisticated. Boris Shoshensky To: [email protected] Subject: Reading Kivy - Chapter One: How we got here and why Date: Sat, 3 Oct 2009 23:28:52 GMT (the following are the final passages from my last post -- apparently they got cropped off during transmission) ............................................................ Possiblly, Bell was following the thoughts of the widely read music critic, Eduard Haslick, who wrote: "What kind of beauty is the beauty of a musical composition? It is a specifically musical kind of beauty. By this we understand a beauty that is self-contained and in no need of content from outside itself, that consists simply and solely of forms and their artistic combination" And then "perversely", as Kivy, puts it, Bell and Fry offered the formalism of this "absolute music" as the model for the visual and literary arts. (and apparently Fry even wrote a piece of gibberish that sounded like Milton's "Ode on the Nativity" as an example - though he kept it private, perhaps knowing that it would be the object of ridicule) By the end of the chapter, Kivy is ready to move on to more recent examples of "wrong models" ("the theme of this monograph") - though I would question whether any kind of models at all can be useful in the study of aesthetics. As he has shown us, not much progress has been made towards defining a "meme principe" for the beaux arts -- but at least the writers who have addressed the question are critics and sometimes even practitioners of the arts, rather than secular protestant philosphers. And I think that's an improvement, because whatever nonsense they're writing, at least they can offer specific examples with which we can all become familiar. ____________________________________________________________ Earn your accounting degree online. Free info. Click Now! http://thirdpartyoffers.netzero.net/TGL2231/fc/BLSrjnxP0d5ol5PRrRQGXGfzSZL9ge jRqLERds3XOiqeTjf8IWsLCrQUhKQ/
