The Power of Beauty

In images, I intoned, beauty was the agency that caused visual pleasure in the beholder; and any theory of images that was not grounded in the pleasure of the beholder begged the question of their efficacy and doomed itself to inconsequence.—Dave Hickey

All pleasure is biological. Without a brain there is no pleasure....The idea that music making and listening are not motivated primarily by pleasure is biologically implausible....If aesthetic philosophers are genuinely interested in understanding the phenomenon of beauty, they cannot achieve this goal without taking into account the operation of the human brain and its predilection for pleasure.—David Huron

Years ago a somber-minded composer urged me to stop writing beautiful melodies. He felt that beautiful melodies gave audience members too much immediate pleasure, making music too easy to enjoy, as if that were somehow sinful.

Beauty does have an extraordinary power to please. Some people mistrust this power—they feel that immediate pleasure is superficial and may blind us to abstractions like “underlying realities.”

Extraordinary surfaces, surfaces that attract and hold our attention can have their own kind of depth because of the way that we sometimes respond to them. If a beautiful surface fully captures our attention, this may pull us out of our everyday concerns and help move us toward some meaningful personal experience. When a beautiful surface does that, it becomes an inseparable aspect of the experience.

I notate music on paper, but I imagine the melodies and textures of my compositions in terms of specific real-world sounds—sounds such as a well-trained soprano voice, or a cello section playing a melody on their A string—sounds that I respond to deeply. The sensuous, expressive qualities of such sounds are an integral aspect of what I hear and shape in my imagination.

Beauty’s power to enthrall makes it a powerful rhetorical weapon, far too powerful to avoid just because various austere people fear sensual pleasure. I have no intention of giving up the power of beauty. I strive to create captivating melodies and textures as part of my larger desire to create moving aesthetic experiences.

So, rather than turn away from Beauty, I asked her to move in with me. I can’t imagine composing music without Beauty’s help. If she wakes up feeling groggy, I make her some coffee and hope she’ll soon be feeling magical.