Recently, through my research on my paper and now for pleasure, I’ve been reading Alex Ross’s book The Rest is Noise: Listening to the 20th Century. The book pores over the century’s fascinating forays into new exciting worlds of experimentation in music. Agin and again, emphasis is placed on atonality, atypical rhythmic patterns and sonic experimentation. All of this reminds me of Hume’s idea of art as taste and the notion that there can exist an objective taste. This book seems to take a battering ram to such a notion. Throughout the text examples are cited of audiences’ older musical sensibilities and how there was a very specific definition of elegance and beauty in music and how the introduction of elements of atonality, while seeming foreign and harsh at first, quickly gained attention and acceptance in the wider community. In fact, unnatural sounds became such a prominent fixture of classical music that they spilled over into many forms of popular music we see today. It stands to show that beauty can be derived from what seems ugly: from noise, from dissonance and from atonality.
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