Dear Unknown Friends:

On October 11, 1948, Eli Siegel gave a lecture—amazing, beautiful, immensely important—titled Humor: Music. We have no recording of this early Aesthetic Realism class. But, from notes of two people present at it, I’ve had the pleasure to reconstruct a good deal of it. The notes are those of Martha Baird and my mother, Irene Reiss. We’re publishing Humor: Music in two parts: in this issue and the next.

As to the words in the title, humor and music: The way Aesthetic Realism sees each of these subjects is new, though in keeping with the best scholarship about both. Aesthetic Realism makes clear that music and humor are not—as people have thought them to be—offsets to our ordinary life and troubles and confusions. They’re much more than that: they explain us; they show us what the world is and how we hope to be. The basis of how they do so is in the following principle: “The world, art, and self explain each other: each is the aesthetic oneness of opposites.”

What Music Tells Us

In 1975, Mr. Siegel wrote in this journal: “Music for a long time has been telling what the world is really like.” There, in issue 93, he gives many specific examples of music as the oneness of opposites—reality’s opposites. And he writes:

There is no music without the simultaneous presence of separation and junction….The harsh and mellifluous, the rough and balmy, the sharp and soft, are made one in music….

Music (like the other arts) is this continuous statement: the makeup, the structure of the world…is also the structure of beauty itself.

What music is, what it says about reality and one’s very own self, is taught now by Barbara Allen and Edward Green in the great Opposites in Music class at the Aesthetic Realism Foundation.

I’ll give an example of Mr. Siegel’s speaking to a child about music. I was that fortunate child. Like all children and adults, I was troubled by how I could go, in a way that didn’t seem to make sense, from one kind of feeling to another. According to my mother’s notes of an Aesthetic Realism lesson when I was nearly seven, Mr. Siegel asked me, “Do you want to be like music?” “What do you mean, ‘like music’?” I asked. And he said, speaking about a song I liked:

ES. Do you think that tune goes up and down?…Do you think the notes change?

ER. Yes.

ES. I like the “St. Louis Blues” very much. The notes change but they are all about one thing. When notes do different things and they surprise you, and you think it’s natural, then you have something like music….Melody can teach you how to rise and fall and see that you are the same person.

This was a beginning for me of an education that I came to see as the most important in the world: the study of how the self of everyone is nothing less than an aesthetic situation. I would learn what all people long to: that the opposites in us—including continuity and change—can be one if our purpose is increasingly that of an artist: to be fair to the world and ourselves at the same time.

And There’s Humor

Eli Siegel defined humor as “the feeling that the ugly is beautiful, while it is still seen as ugly first.” When humor is the real thing, there is a oneness of the awry and form; there’s the sense that the discrepant and wrong are also orderly and right. This seeing of what humor is, is terrifically important—because people make two separate worlds of 1) what displeases, what they can’t stand, and 2) what seems right and soothing. And they use the separation to despise reality.

True humor is beautiful. Meanwhile, there are falsifications of it. Ever so many things have been called humor which are untrue to that mighty and wonderful thing. Aesthetic Realism explains the primal distinction between true and false humor: Is one’s purpose to see the world justly—to respect the world, however critical one may be—or is one’s purpose to make oneself superior by having contempt for the world?

Aesthetic Realism, through its understanding of humor, enables people to do something which so often does not happen: to laugh, even uproariously, and feel proud.

No one respected humor more than Eli Siegel did. I think he was the most serious person who ever lived. And he saw humor—and also represented it—as grandeur, beauty, kindness.

—Ellen Reiss, Aesthetic Realism
Chairman of Education

Humor: Music

By Eli Siegel

From the very beginning, music is a funny paradox. On the one hand, one has to deal with sharps and flats, quarter notes and half notes, intervals, subdominants, and all sorts of things that are very technical and mechanical. At the same time, these things that are studied in such a mathematical form make for the deepest emotions. If you listen to the Liebestraum of Liszt, it gets you, brings you to strange territory; but when you look at it, it’s mathematics.

That’s the way we are. We are a collection of bones that could be seen through a fluoroscope; we can weigh so many pounds, like so many potatoes; and we are logical, because everything we do has to do with muscular satisfaction and mobility. Then there is this mysterious thing, the sense of self. One can imagine a dialogue like this: “How much do you weigh?” “164 pounds.” “How do you feel?” “Puzzled.” Now, how does 164 pounds get to feel puzzled? How to put together ourselves as logical, anatomical, mathematical beings with ourselves as, at the same time, yearning, puzzled, mysterious beings, is the problem of life.

So if, in a musical composition, there is something mathematical, logical, and at the same time it can get somebody crying—first of all, that is a humorous thing. The idea of all these mathematical notes making you cry is funny. So we have this humorous, logical problem in music.

In the book Musical Studies and Silhouettes, by Camille Bellaigue (trans. Ellen Orr, 1900), there is a statement by perhaps the most eminent writer on acoustics who has lived. He is Herman von Helmholtz (1821-94), and he is quoted as saying:

I have always felt myself drawn by the mysterious union between mathematics and music; attracted by the application of the most abstract and logical of all the sciences to the…most delicate of all the arts, and that which awakens in us the most indefinable and the most incalculable sensations….

There is an intimate connection between those two…; they render one another a mutual assistance as though to prove…the secret action of a reasonable intelligence.

So, what do we get from this? We get the fact that the big problem many people have—how to put together feeling and intellect, emotion and reason—has already been solved in music. In Helmholtz’s statement we have a disproof of that uneducated person Dr. Freud, because in it we find that the unconscious can be very logical. It is an important statement. It means that in the world itself, as in music, the logical and the yearning are one. And the notion of something so mathematical being so weirdly weltschmerz-like is humorous.

Some Effects of Music

To show further how music is a coherent and funny merging of opposites, I go to another matter. Music has strange effects. On the one hand, “music hath charms to soothe a savage breast”—it can lull—and on the other, it is used by sergeants to get soldiers into activity, with the drum and bugle. Music can enliven and it can also soothe.

In the Bible, there is the young David, and we find music used to soothe in a therapeutic way:

And it came to pass, when the evil spirit from God was upon Saul, that David took an harp, and played with his hand: so Saul was refreshed, and was well, and the evil spirit departed from him. [1 Samuel 16:23]

“The evil spirit” is a way of saying a person has a profound and, for the moment, inseparable grouch and confusion. Music was a way of conquering that. Music does tend to make for order. This passage contains perhaps the first use of “music therapy.” However, I don’t think music can do much therapeutically without an explanation of what music is.

Along with the soothing of David’s harp, there are in the Bible the martial doings of the horns of the priests. The warlike aspect of music is shown in the story of how the walls of Jericho were got down:

And the Lord said unto Joshua,…

Seven priests shall bear before the ark seven trumpets of rams’ horns: and the seventh day ye shall compass the city seven times, and the priests shall blow with the trumpets….

And when ye hear the sound of the trumpet, all the people shall shout with a great shout; and the wall of the city shall fall down flat, and the people shall ascend up. [Joshua 6:2-5]

We have two kinds of music, which represent fundamentals. The trumpet is a wind instrument, which expresses a certain sort of continuity and therefore unity. The harp is a stringed instrument and represents manyness. Then we have the percussion instruments, like drum and cymbal, which represent duality. The principle of manyness and oneness and two-ness is there, and we should see that every time music occurs a form of the world is shown, and that the orchestra is a mingling together of forms of the world. The fact that a trumpet can get together with a flute or piccolo and get along, is also very funny, because they are very different.

In music, therefore, we have, as in painting, the placing together of things which are in conflict in ordinary life. They can cause us pain and make for laughter in ordinary life. And, in terms of this talk, the question is: how can we use the success in art for ourselves, and also see that reality is humorous? That’s a question Aesthetic Realism wants to answer.

The Trivial & the Mighty

Music can be trivial, just as the world can be trivial. Also, music can be mighty. We have little melodies and we have mighty organ sounds. I’ll read now something which shows music when tinkling and trivial. This, by Thomas Moore, is called “Song.” (A balaika, or balalaika, is an instrument with, usually, three strings.)

I present this as important unimportance. One aspect of music is its triviality, its unimportance. Music has been little. We have itty-bitty ways of making music—and then, we have the music of the spheres and the music that gets to the world so mightily.

It has been felt constantly that music stands for God. I’ll read now a passage in prose which has that deep attitude. This is by Sir Thomas Browne (1605-82), who is one of the best prose writers in English. It is from Religio Medici:

Even that vulgar and tavern-musick, which makes one man merry, another mad, strikes in me a deep fit of devotion, and a profound contemplation of the first composer [i.e., God]. There is something in it of divinity more than the ear discovers: it is an hieroglyphical and shadowed lesson of the whole world, and creatures of God,—such a melody to the ear, as the whole world, well understood, would afford the understanding. In brief, it is a sensible fit of that harmony which intellectually sounds in the ears of God. I will not say, with Plato, the soul is an harmony, but harmonical, and hath its nearest sympathy unto musick….Indeed all are naturally inclined unto rhythm.

Yes, everyone is unconsciously inclined to rhythm, and if one doesn’t get a lot of it one is out of luck.

A Big Effect & Everyday Things

A person who was much affected by music in a beautiful and funny way was Samuel Pepys. Music has had some tremendous effects, and I’ll read now, from Pepys’s Diary, a description of one of the most intense aesthetic effects told of in English literature. How can the world of sound be arranged in such a way that something like this can happen? I’ll include what went on with Pepys just before and just after, to show how a big musical effect is sandwiched between everyday things. This is from the 26th through the 28th of February, 1667:

26th….Among other merry discourse about spending of money, and how much more chargeable a man’s living is now…, Duncomb did swear that in France he did live on 100 pounds a year with more plenty…than he believes can be done now for 200 pounds.

27th. With my wife to the King’s House, to see “The Virgin Martyr.”…But [in that play] that which did please me beyond any thing in the whole world was the wind-musick when the angel comes down, which is so sweet that it ravished me, and indeed, in a word, did wrap up my soul so that it made me really sick, just as I have formerly been when in love with my wife; that neither then, nor all the evening going home, and at home, I was able to think of any thing, but remained all night transported, so as I could not believe that ever any musick hath that real command over the soul of man as this did upon me….

28th….Up, and to the office,…and after dinner with Sir W. Pen to White Hall, where we and the rest of us presented a great letter of the state of our want of money to his Royal Highness. I did also present a demand of mine for consideration for my travelling-charges of coach and boat-hire during the war….

So Pepys writes, on the 26th, about talking and about the spending of money; then on the 28th about money that was coming to him from the King. This shows, as I said, how a big aesthetic effect gets sandwiched in between everyday tribulations.

What Pepys describes represents an effect that some persons would object to. And it is well to see that music can be misused. The reason music is good is that through it one can appreciate what is real.

There’s Been Suspicion

People have been suspicious of music, and one of those persons was Dr. Samuel Johnson. He tried for a little while to understand music—he wrote to a friend that he would like to learn the scales. But he didn’t. Some things he said about music are quite funny, and one is a statement quoted by James Boswell in his Life of Johnson. Boswell writes:

He [Dr. Johnson] owned to me that he was very insensible to the power of music. I told him that it affected me to such a degree, as often to agitate my nerves painfully, producing in my mind alternate sensations of pathetic dejection, so that I was ready to shed tears; and of daring resolutions, so that I was inclined to rush into the thickest part of battle. “Sir,” he said, “I should never hear it, if it made me such a fool.”

Another person, really troubled about his inability to take music, was Charles Lamb (1775-1834). Oratorios were popular in his time, and he thought—as many persons have—that people went to such things to show off and to pretend. This is from “A Chapter on Ears,” in Lamb’s Essays of Elia:

I have sat at an Oratorio (that profanation of the purposes of the cheerful playhouse) watching the faces of the auditory in the pit…immovable, or affecting some faint emotion—till…I have imagined myself in some cold Theatre in Hades….

Above all, those insufferable concertos…do plague and embitter my apprehension. Words are something; but to be exposed to an endless battery of mere sounds;…to an interminable tedious sweetness….

I deny not, that in the opening of a concert, I have experienced something vastly lulling and agreeable;—afterwards followeth the languor and the oppression….Like the comings on of melancholy, described by Burton, doth music make her first insinuating approaches:—“Most pleasant it is to such as are melancholy given, to walk alone in some solitary grove,…until at the last the SCENE TURNS UPON A SUDDEN, and they…can endure no company, can think of nothing but harsh and distasteful subjects.”

Lamb is using the quotation from Burton to say that if you use music to get away from people, you’re going to find music hateful and you won’t be able to stand it. But this passage of Lamb shows pretty sincerely a distaste for music. The fact is that music ill-placed, not related to other things, can be a great burden. That is because music—being in relation to everything else, to painting and medicine and logic and ethics—will be used wrongly if it is not seen in that relation.