Aesthetics and the Christian Musician- part 2
Any
philosophical view of aesthetics in music that admits the grotesque or ugly is
faulty. We know that crude, ugly
unmusical compositions do exist, but they are the result of a mis-arrangement of
the building blocks of music. Never
blame God with ugly grotesque unmusical compositions. The main stream of anti-music compositions of
the 20th century was not produced by God-fearing Christian composers
and arrangers.
Musique concrète is an example of anti-music music
composition. Pierre Schaeffer (b.1910)
composed music directly on tapes or discs from natural sources. However, these “natural sounds” were
seriously distorted by playing them backward, changing the speed of the sound
of by other editing abnormalities. In
1948, Schaeffer composed his Concert des
bruites (Concert of Noises) and other original compositions. Pierre Schaeffer’s music can be identified
with the philosophy of surrealist painters with its juxtaposition and chance
techniques. He often took perfectly
natural sounds and scrambled them in an indeterminable manner. (Surrealism will be considered in a later discussion.)
Schaeffer, Henry, Baronnett and Boulez were the early “inventors” of
this anti-music distortion. These
compositions included religious pieces like Mass
for Liverpool and The Apocalypse of
John.
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