Here's how I know its completely opinion: name something you think is cheap or ugly and tell me why.

I realize I'm slow at this, but how does this tell you that my conviction that something is cheap or ugly only an opinion? Because I can give a reason for it? Or because you think I can't?

anyone who is consistent will see that, however much leeway is allowed for taste, nevertheless the beautiful, like its companions, the good and the true, is not merely subjective, but is based on objective criteria that already point us towards the divine.

I basically agree with this, and I thought that it was more-or-less the basic opinion of most of the people here. I was actually surprised that I was so lonesome in my agreement with the post in question.



Some caveats or complications:

I think there's a third category beside (or above) subjective and objective.

To speak about beauty not being subjective (that is - it isn't 'whatever you want') doesn't mean it is objective (that is - measurable and definable).

I think the dichotomy between subjective (feelings) and objective (standards) frames the whole thing wrong.

There's a third something that is ill-defined in our modern philosophical language. Religious people might call it 'transcendent.' Humanists (the cool ones) use words like 'emergent.' The author of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance speaks of 'Quality.'

When Prof. K speaks about "objective standards," I think he means this beyond-myself value, a worthiness which is independent of the opinions of any individual people. But I DON'T think that "objective" is the right word, because it implies two things which are contrary to the Truth:
-the existence of a subject who can apply objective criteria
-the existence of objective criteria, which, by definition, must be deterministic and absolute.

What I believe Prof. K is essentially saying - and the thing I fully agree with - is that some works, and some artists, and even some genres and periods are more transcendent than others.

(I just wrote something brilliant and then lost it... AAARGH)

Basically it was something like...

Any discourse you find on the subject will likely be based on a specific set of standards chosen by the author, such as harmonic complexity, melodic interest (interest to whom?), use of chromaticism, artistic merit (based on which standards?), historical significance (who decides what is historically significant, and how?). Any reason you give for why you think something is cheap or ugly can be used as a reason for why it is beautiful, depending on with whom you are speaking.

NO.

A work (or a body of work) is great, or beautiful, simply because it so. Its quality is a transcendent property which is absolute and yet ultimately undiscoverable.

The objective measurements and criteria are applied ex post facto as a way to explain or understand what it is that made the thing great or beautiful.

Palestrina (et al) isn't a great composer because he followed all the rules in a species counterpoint textbook. Rather, Palestrina is simply great, and counterpoint is taught a particular way because it helps developing musicians understand (a bit) what is going on in that music.

To put it another way:

A subjective approach to liturgy leads to the goofiness we have come to expect in the last 40 years - the tyranny of feelings, the wasteland of deconstructionism, the self-centered worship of the individual and/or the human community.

Understandably, many react against this insanity by proposing OBJECTIVE REALITY as some kind of cure. But this "opposite" isn't better. An objective approach to liturgy is what got us the Pauline Missal in the first place: the idea that there are some measurable and knowable criteria with which a liturgy can be judged and, ultimately, fashioned.

The Mass is Transcendent simply because it is. We can study each of its parts and its internal logic, and try to explain what the effect of singing the Introit is or holding a particular posture. But that study, those objective measurements and subjective judgements are made after a recognition, an encounter, which is neither subjective nor objective. It is simply True.

Decadence always gets a bad name among the envious. ;-)

This scenario reminds me of the time my mentor Gerre Hancock submitted a Bach chorale harmonization to his undergrad music theory prof for a chorale assignment. (Gerre picked a really obscure one and hoped the prof didn't recognize it...he didn't).

Bach got a "C-". Draw what conclusions you will.

1. Who determines if a work or body of work is great in order to say so? Someone has to make the determination somehow, which means that a bias is always applied.

No.

Someone has to RECOGNIZE its beauty in order to say so.

Example: I write a beautiful Mass setting; it would be beautiful because it is beautiful according to the first sentence, with no reason why. ?

There is a reason why it is beautiful, but the reason for this beauty is unapproachable. Ineffable.

Someone could easily state that it is NOT beautiful. Would this mean that person is wrong

Yes.

2. Someone still has to come up with the objective measurements and criteria, developing them according to what they think is a good way to objectively measure

No. Nobody HAS TO.
People do, because that's just how people are.

But no one HAS TO come up with objective criteria in order to experience quality and beauty. It is something we all do AFTER the experience to try to understand what it was that we thought was so beautiful (or whatever).

3. Alban Berg was a great composer also, but some would argue that he wasn't. Why is that?

Some people are wrong.

Conclusion: the quality of something is always based on opinion.

Not at all. That was a conclusion you started with, and then said a bunch of things that support it. Your conclusion is simply based on opinion.


I think that you (and people who make similar arguments) are making the oposite mistake of the "objectivist" point of view.
That is:
It is clear that "objective criteria" is not sufficient to explain the sense of beauty or quality, and the tyranny of the grammarians has poisoned any notion of the absolute, tying it up too much with these notions of rules and measures. So you take the opposite stance: "It's all subjective. It's based on an opinion."

Neither one of these positions (subjectivity, objectivity) is a good or full explanation of the phenomenon of beauty, which is - at the last - a mystery.

A better point of comparison is food and drink, since it is more difficult to define quality where matters of taste are concerned. A large tree grub may be a tempting delicacy or a disgusting sac of pus-like fluid, depending on your point of view.

Yet even where food and drink are concerned, there does seem to be a hierarchy of quality in the real world. For example, is Franzia of greater or lesser quality than an expensive Chateau Lafite Rothschild? Anyone might like Franzia better, but what if I actually wanted to know which one is better wine? Or for that matter, which affordable $10 bottle of wine is better than Franzia and why. Would I ask random people on the street, because all opinions are equal and it's just a matter of taste? Personally, I would track down someone who knows something about wine (not me!) and ask them not only WHAT is better, but WHY and what the criteria are for betterness in the world of wine. I suspect that any wine expert would have many answers for me and it would be a fascinating learning experience - if I was not so childish and foolish as to believe that all opinions are created equal in matters of taste.

I know enough about wine to know some criteria: the wine would be judged based on standards for its particular varietal, which have developed over hundreds of years. The craftsmanship of the wine would come into question - were the grapes grown, collected, and processed in the best way? Were the barrels used to age the wine of good quality? Were the temperature and water quality carefully monitored throughout the process? Was the wine shipped carefully? Stored carefully? Does it exhibit a pleasing unity and variety and intensity in its bouquet of scents and flavors, in a way appropriate to its particular style and varietal? The list could go on and on. And that's just wine - don't get me started on cheese. Yes, I lived with a Frenchman for a year!

But to get back to music - it seems that the criteria for judging the wine are based on knowledge of the thing itself, its history, and what a particular iteration is meant to be in that continuum of craft and tradition. A daring new thing that pushes the boundaries of Cabernet Sauvignon, while remaining recognizably CS? A dependable, well-crafted and traditional Merlot? A decent daily table wine?

The fact that everyone has an opinion and personal likes and dislikes tells me nothing whatsoever about reality. If I actually care to learn about anything, I will seek out those who are QUALIFIED to have an opinion (I'm not talking about degrees - I'm talking about knowledge of the craft or tradition of a thing).

And that leads to an important criteria (don't have the source off the top of my head) - beauty is in the eye of the qualified beholder.

The fact that someone has an opinion about the quality of a piece of music means nothing to me (from an educational perspective) unless they can prove to me why their opinion matters.

And that leads to an important criteria (don't have the source off the top of my head) - beauty is in the eye of the qualified beholder.

Yeah, I feel like this veers too far into the "Objective Standard" territory. Particularly since study after study has shown that wine expertise is mostly bull$h*t.

But a useful way to think about expertise and criteria is this:
Experience and expertise gives someone a conceptual and linguistic framework within which to discuss attributes of the thing in question. So you don't have to be a wine expert to know that some wine is good, but it helps if you want to be able to explain what is good about it, or to make predictions about whether other people might like it or not.

The Objective Standard here is whether or not, according to the tradition of craftsmanship of a thing, the thing is well made. Whether someone likes it or not is a different question. So a wine expert might say "this is a very well-crafted Shiraz, but for some reason I just don't like it." Or I might say "this is a very well-crafted fugue, but I just don't like it." But the point I'm trying to make is that only the qualified observer can really say whether a thing is good quality or not.

Objective Standard proponents get in trouble is not making that distinction (e.g. telling people they 'should' like something). OR, when they try to pick "THE BEST" composer or piece. There's just no way to do that. Discussing what's good quality, and what things are better than other things, is interesting and helpful, but trying to pick one best thing is just going to cause trouble.

One thing that I think is problematic in this discussion is that there's several layers of assertions that are being built up, and people disagreeing with something at one layer may be dismissing things beneath it which, if stated explicitly they might agree with.

I think of this sequence like this:

0. Quality matters.

I think most people here agree with that, although some of the conversation has made me think maybe not...

1. Quality or beauty (or whatever) is not subjective (dependent on the observer's opinion), but rather intrinsic to the thing itself (what some are calling 'objective,' but I would call 'transcendent.')

Several people have already specifically disagreed with this. I happen to agree with it.
Moving on...

2. The Quality or Beauty of a various works is variable. Some are, intrinsically, better than others.

It seems like a lot of people agree here, but with very strong caveats (which, in my opinion, are correct and missing the point).

3. It is possible - somehow or other (the method is not important here) - to gauge how much better the quality or beauty of a work is than some other work, and (roughly) to rank them against each other. (That is - while we might quibble about Byrd vs. Josquin, we can determine with certainty between Josquin and Miley Cyrus.)

This seems to be where most people get off the bus. I'm still on it.

4. The ranking/comparison made in [3] shows that Western European Art Music is better than pop music, that real traditional folk music is better than commercialized 'folk' music, and Gregorian chant is better than David Haas.

This I also think is true. However, this point - where we move from theory to reality - is where I think it breaks down into something like subjectivity.

And what I mean by this is NOT that it is simply an opinion and subject to taste. What I mean is that the statements are either true or not, but that there's no way to know for certain. It is - I would say - not a matter of opinion so much as a matter of conjecture.

Most Bach I know of would get a pretty solid B+ at worst...

Adam, I somehow think this might be a more interesting argument if we stuck to cases.

I believe that one of these cases is better than the others, but I cannot be certain which one it is.

...which is why I love the music of Sibelius and Arvo Part so much...Palestrina and Bach, for instance, are great not because they just happened to cough up inspired music, as if in an irrational spasm, but because their minds and hearts were beautifully attuned to the microcosmic and macrocosmic principles of harmony and rhythm.

It would be nice to discover principles that would predict my tastes in advance, but our fundamental difference is my assumption that in practice it works backwards. Isn't it as plausible that Martopangrawit was led to the microcosmic and macrocosmic principles of irama and pathet by his enjoyment of Gending Gambirsawit as the other way around? I'm sure there's some good reason his music doesn't sound like Bach.

The mechanical problem may be a fluke, or it may be common to all (insert mechanical object here - cars/TVs/phones/blenders/etc.) made by that builder. Either way, we can say that the object was objectively of a poor quality because it did not fulfill the function for which it was intended.

That, or the first law of thermodynamics: entropy is built-in, no matter HOW long it lasts. That is not so for beauty, however.

God is pure beauty, and even T.A. couldn't "prove" that He exists

Didn't St. Thomas famously present five philosophical arguments to prove God's existence?

Whether or not Thomas "proves" the existence of God is not so certain, although I certainly regard St. Thomas highly. This is a world in which Scholastic theology is seen as word-stacking, word-linking, and general word manipulation. I am afraid such theology is viewed as proving nothing other than skill in wordsmithing.

To add a bit to this, a priest friend and I have discussed one of the problems in current attempts at evangelization. With Scholastic reasoning, evangelizers approach the contemporary world with the wrong set of tools.

Adam, I agree with you about St. Thomas's motivation. But there is a deeper problem with moderns, which is that they have a kind of anti-philosophical bias, an irrationalism that is ill-suited to patient argument and disputation. So the Scholastics, through no fault of their own, end up badly off in a modern setting. As a teacher, however, I can say from much experience that if you take a classroom of young people with open minds who are willing to learn, then Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, and Aquinas (among others) will take them VERY FAR into an understanding of the mysteries of nature and of faith -- not to "prove" them, but to delight in their mysteriousness all the more, and to revel in their beauty.

Melofluent, I wasn't thinking of you so much as another participant in this thread who seemed to me to be simply subjectivizing the arts altogether, as if it were nothing more than a matter of taste. As for what's at stake in this debate, as far as I'm concerned, it's a matter of our need to undergo a radical conversion of intellect and will towards the beautiful, which is part and parcel of our salvation, and maybe even, in some sense, a precondition for it (and certainly a result of it -- in different senses). Far from being merely a matter of taste or cultural conditioning, the nobility of the works of fine art is an attribute THEY possess, a reflection of the Divine, and a privileged path that leads man to God. Conversely, bad art, art unworthy of its vocation, mediocre and crass art, etc. -- and there is indeed such a thing -- lead men away from God and even from the dignity of their own nature.

So, to my mind, there is a lotat stake. I am content if I can stir up a debate that may cause people to think about the relationship between music and their immortal souls, but I'm resigned to the fact that, with music especially, lots of folks (not including you) will merely dig in their heels, cross their arms, and say: "Fooey on you, I'm not interested in thinking about music -- it's all about feelings."

Thank you, Peter, for your explication. The open-ended, "free-will" aspect if you will, of your example of eager students seeking the heart of disciplined thought is a huge aspect upon which we can reach consensus (and having a Visalian up in WY with you, I get first-hand occasional updates along with huge smiles!)
@AdamW-

He was trying to turn confused Catholics into right-thinking Catholics.

Right you are. However, centuries replete with magistrates of the Church employing CharlesW's "wrong tools" conjured up this remniscense:

http://youtu.be/8CBqjZX6FjE

But there is a deeper problem with moderns, which is that they have a kind of anti-philosophical bias, an irrationalism that is ill-suited to patient argument and disputation.

Yes.

And the really weird thing about this is an irrational worship of rationality and a sort of fetishization of 'argument and disputation.'

So the Scholastics, through no fault of their own, end up badly off in a modern setting.

Or, I'm sure you would agree, they only seem to. Who really comes off badly is, of course, moderns.

As a teacher, however, I can say from much experience that if you take a classroom of young people with open minds who are willing to learn, then Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, and Aquinas (among others) will take them VERY FAR into an understanding of the mysteries of nature and of faith -- not to "prove" them, but to delight in their mysteriousness all the more, and to revel in their beauty.

Yes, I've had this experience as well, both as a student and as a teacher.

Of course "open minds" is the key.

I think that philosophy and scholastic theology is fabulous.

But I also think it can never be "The First Step."

You can't start teaching Fux to someone who's never heard music before, or explain the golden ratio to someone who's never seen a beautiful work of art.

The beginning has to be an encounter with the Divine, in one way or another. This is, of course, something we cannot force or control - but we can facilitate it.

And, even as much as the modern world seeks to prohibit and constrain this encounter, it cannot ultimately succeed because eternity is "written on our hearts."

...
Moving further back in the conversation

I'm basically sympathetic to Adam's perspective on transcendence and ineffability (which is why I love the music of Sibelius and Arvo Part so much, as different as they are), but I think he backs off too quickly from the possibility of objective criteria for the fine arts. Perhaps it's the word that offends, but granting the inadequacy of our language and the non-ultimacy of our judgments, we do have intellectual equipment for this work, and we can learn a lot by generalizing from great artists.

Yeah. I suspect our positions are rather close, though I'm not completely sure.

Essentially, my problem with the idea of "objective criteria" is that, in typical practice, that idea is used to suggest that some work is good because it follows some rules or meets some criteria. This treats "objective measurement" as a deterministic sieve which catches some things and rejects others.

I believe, rather, that these objective criteria are actually characteristics which works of quality tend to exhibit. We can use them as descriptive anchors, but not as a deterministic test for greatness.

Not incidentally - this issue I have is a BIG DEAL in a number of other fields, including math, theoretical cryptography, computer science, quantum mechanics, biology/taxonomy, linguistics, medical diagnosis.... and the strong trend comes down on the side of non-deterministic descriptions, rather than deterministic sieves.

(Of course EVEN THAT is not a deterministic proof, just a general description of the attributes of various ineffable mysteries that keep coming up over and over again.)

I do think - FOR PRACTICAL PURPOSES - talking about 'objective criteria' in the way that Prf. K does is very useful. Moreover, I think the notion of 'non-definable ineffablility' only is useful once one has gotten a decent training in the definable and objective. That is to say: You can only scale the heights if you know how to have your feet planted firmly on the ground, not if you've been trained to perpetually have your head in the clouds.

(Or, to put it another way - you can't teach Godelian incompleteness before basic algebra. It won't be understood, and you'll have a room full of 7th graders saying that no one could possibly ever know what x really equals.)
.....

So, to my mind, there is a lot at stake.

Indeed.

(I think I lost you all after the OP.)

Peter, as you've also implied before, "nowadays" can mean a variable swath of time. And even given that each of us has a limited amount of recreational time, of which you've currently chosen to absorb the catalog of GFH, I wonder if you'd consider affording yourself the time and will to absorb...
*The collaboration of the jazz orchestrator/pianist Gil Evans and trumpeter Miles Davis (may they RIP)
*The catalog of jazz vocalist Kurt Elling
*The catalog of pianist Keith Jarrett? etc.
Without forecasting and any other prejudices, would you then tell us what you draw from those fountains?
And you know I'm not implying that church music should sound like any of these as well. Pax

Richard, that was a fairly "Rip Van Winkle-just awakened" response, and one that is sadly, for you, absolutely WRONG.
I'm sure even Peter will not have regarded that analysis as what I proposed, which was both specific and offered in earnest. I have followed Peter's (and others') opinion with great interest, seeking to genuinely understand his POV. You have, OTOH, reduced my interest to mere contradiction. As a scholar, one would think you would make such a clear distinction rather than assuming I had an agenda as blatant and generic as you so state.
Is my POV so repugnant to you (as well as others who've upbraided me in like manner) that I have, a priori, no credibility whatsoever?

Yet it could also be different cultural standards for beauty that exist all across the world. We see that this is true in the different Rites of the Church: the Church has historically respected local custom and catered to cultural differences in the areas to which She has spread. However, at the same time, I also recognize that the same things we hold beautiful could also be beautiful to those from a different culture: I know an Indian classical musician who loves Gregorian chant, however, he was raised on Ragas and plays the Tabla and Harmonium. The reverse is also true: I adore Gregorian chant, yet I find the music of different cultures fascinating and beautiful. It is not difficult to see how there is a timeless aspect to them that makes them beautiful. My original point was that a person's perception (and perspective) can change what they believe is beautiful, which is one reason we don't always agree on what is beautiful.

Thought experiment: Which, say, three to five composers (PS that was in my mind when I originally posed this: and/or performers) would you like to witness improvising with each other (this is an anachronistic experiment; they need not have lived contemporaneously, nor speak the same language(s) other than music)? (Two alone is not nearly as interesting as at least three.)

A couple of composer quintets:

Josquin des Prez-Byrd-Monteverdi-Mozart-Mahler

Bach-Handel-Haydn-Beethoven-Stravinsky