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
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.
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 underlying realities. But extraordinary surfaces, surfaces that attract and hold our attention, can have their own kind of depth. By capturing our attention, they sometimes pull us out of our everyday concerns, which in turn may help move us toward some meaningful personal experience. And when a beautiful surface does that, it becomes an inseparable aspect of the overall experience.
I notate music on paper, but the melodies and textures of my compositions are imagined in terms of real-world sounds. I am inspired by sounds such as a beautiful, well-trained voice, or the richness of a string section, and the surface qualities of such sounds are an integral part 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 some solemn, austere people fear sensuous pleasure. I have no intention of giving up that power. So I not only rejected that composer’s advice, I reversed it and made striving for intense aesthetic beauty one of my primary goals.