Blog
This side of Paradise, harmony implies dissonance
September 11, 2014
C.P.E. Bach and others accompany Frederick the Great “Harmony” is often mentioned as an ideal and sometimes dismissed as outdated and naive. I think Bach understands what makes harmony a mature and worthy aesthetic value for our age. What do you think? The intellectual character of Bach’s music is something that listeners immediately sense. Consider his idea of harmony. Some people associate the idea of harmony with a tepid peace that suppresses difference, a static… Read More
Bach’s balance of religion and humor
September 8, 2014
Cellist Mstislav Rostropovich and Naina Yeltsin after his performance in an opera There is abundant evidence that Bach’s dominant motivation as a composer was religious. In his Bible he wrote, “With devotional music, God is always present in his grace.” In his religious music, he might write abbreviations for “Jesus, help” or “To God alone be the glory”; and even introducing a secular book of keyboard exercises he wrote, “In the name of Jesus”; and… Read More
Bach: Talent, training and humility
September 4, 2014
Johann Sebastian Bach (1658-1750) came from an unusually musical family. His grandfather was a town musician, and he had three sons, each of whom was a musician; and each of them, in turn, had three sons, each of whom was a musician. If there was ever a clan which prepared a person genetically and culturally for music, this was it. Bach’s extended family included town musicians, cantors, organists, composers, as well as a court… Read More
Getting involved with the arts: the promise, the problem, and the path
September 1, 2014
The art class of Adelia Armstrong Lutz Artistic living completes the experience of walking in beauty. The universe presents us with an avalanche of inner and outer beauty, and artistic living is our opportunity to give back, to cooperate in bringing forth a more beautiful world. Artistic living includes enjoying the high quality recreation of the arts: we visit galleries, attend performances, read poetry and fiction, take classes, and find out for ourselves… Read More
Does beauty swallow up ugliness?
August 28, 2014
John Muir’s wholeheartedness enabled him to unify the diverse phases of experience that go into the appreciation of natural beauty. We have much to learn from Muir’s achievement. Nevertheless, we can wonder whether he took his achievement to excess. Did he rejoice in beauty so much that he did not acknowledge the ugliness that is also part of the creation we know? I here present what Muir could muster in his defense, but I do… Read More
Beauty as divine
August 25, 2014
The Butterfly Hunter, Carl Spitzweg (1808-1885) John Muir’s concrete descriptions often had no need of words like “beauty,” or “divine,” or “God”; but such language is frequent enough to indicate a pervasive dimension in his aesthetic experience. Muir’s expressions of delight in nature, the dominant emotion of his life, convey one thought above all: beauty is divine. He was a man in love with the Creator, and his spirituality was religious, liberated, and good-humored. Muir’s… Read More
Beauty in difficult harmonies
August 21, 2014
Beloveds, I’ve started to conceive of each sequence on a certain topic (e.g., beauties of nature) as a month-long prototype for a course that I might develop. Most of the content that I present in this weblog comes from my forthcoming book, Values and Virtues: A New Philosophy of Living. As a proper educator, proceeding step by step, I would have left today’s topic until today. But I hoped that some of you might… Read More
Expressiveness in nature: Empathy and imagination
August 18, 2014
Muir’s empathy for all life began with identifying with the mind of the creatures whose intentions and moods he came to know. “We worked with [oxen], sympathized with them in their rest and toil and play, and thus learned to know them far better than we should had we been only trained scientific naturalists. We soon learned that each ox and cow and calf had individual character. . . . The humanity we found in… Read More
Whole-body and whole-souled perceiving
August 14, 2014
Three quotations from John Muir illustrate advanced perception. After listening to it in all kinds of winds, night and day, season after season, I think I could approximate to my position on the mountain by this pine music alone. If you would catch the tone of separate needles, climb a tree in breezy weather. Every needle is carefully tempered and gives forth no uncertain sound, each standing out with no interference excepting during heavy… Read More