Beauty in Community
Sarah and I attended a concert by the Oregon Symphony last night. It’s an annual event in Newberg, made possible by a foundation grant from A-DEC (Austin Dental Equipment Company, one of the biggest employers in Newberg), Ken and Joan Austin. The concert came at the end of a long day; I was tired and prone to distraction. Gradually, though, the music concentrated my mind.
Music displays beauty. That’s an interesting fact, since we also find beauty in what seem to be very different modes. Nature gives us visual beauty in trees, flowers, a star-strewn sky, and many other images. We see other examples of visual beauty in paintings and photographs and yet another in human bodies. And there are abstract beauties: a mathematical proof, a move in chess (a move that, more than merely solving the problem, solves the problem elegantly), a scientific hypothesis, or a philosophical vision. Somehow in all these ways—and others—we find beauty.
According to Diotima, the wise woman who explained eros to Socrates (in Plato’s Symposium), we start our exploration of beauty by noticing individual beauties, the beauty of bodies. We become aware that all the particular beauties share in the form of beauty, and then we recognize Beauty in abstract things like laws and institutions. If we climb higher on the ladder of love, we realize we desire not just this or that beautiful thing but Beauty itself, the form of the Beautiful. Then, in good Platonic style, we move to love of the highest form, the Good.
There’s another feature of a live concert. I suppose—though I am not well-enough trained to have noticed—that the sounds I heard last night were not perfect. That is, the musicians, move than sixty of them, did not play the notes exactly as written by Rachmaninoff. It’s easy to imagine one of them chastising himself for an error in timing, tone, or volume. We might imagine an edited recording, in which a technically brilliant and musically adept team of recording experts “fix” all the errors. And it’s easy for us to imagine a supercomputer programmed to translate Rachmaninoff’s score into an error-free rendition of the piece.
As a matter of fact, much of the music we hear on television, radio, and through our iphones partakes of this “manufactured” quality. It’s music as background. We hardly notice. (The advertisers and algorithms pay attention to it, even if we don’t.) Is it beautiful?
Listening to the Symphony I became intensely aware: this is a live performance. All those people, more than sixty of them, are collaborating to produce this experience of beauty for me. That is, for us, all of us here in the auditorium. The performers practiced, of course; in combination, in total, for hundreds of hours on this piece of music. And before that, they trained themselves for thousands of hours (each of them) to attain a symphony level of excellence.
As I listen, all that preparation is past. Right now, here, they are collectively giving me/us this experience of beauty. Consider how amazing this gift is. In the listening I enter beauty. According to Plato, I enter Beauty itself and through it into the Good, if only temporarily.
(Do we experience Beauty and the Good via manufactured music? Plato didn’t have to defend his philosophy in an age of computers or synthesizers. What would he have said?)
Much of this meditation would apply equally to a solo performer. The musical soloist also gives the listener an open door to Beauty. The Symphony is a collaboration, a community, which adds another layer to the beauty of the music. As I listened, I could watch the players as they concentrated on the score before them (while also watching the conductor’s movements) and translated the musical notation into sounds. Visual details added to the sense of collaborative beauty.
When walking my dog, I am often grateful for visual beauties in the world I see. Today I am grateful for the aural beauty of the symphony.
