Either we will have to stop thinking “rock music” is music or we will have to recast beauty as ugliness. For, writing nearly a hundred years ago, Bertram C. Henry specified music as beauty:
The highest value of music lies in the fact that it embodies in forms which powerfully appeal to us those great principles of order, harmony, proportion, variety in unity –- in a word, beauty. The kind of study which is of the most service to us is that which enables us to perceive and absorb these principles. Plato says that “he who has music in his soul will be most in love with the loveliest.” This is the secret of the highest culture. Devotion to what is beautiful -– that is, to what is truly beautiful, not merely pretty –- is in every way ennobling. Love and admiration worthily bestowed are the means of growth to the soul.
(Quoted from page 103 of “The True Value of the Study of Music,” by Bertram C. Henry. The Etude, Vol. XIII, May 1895, No. 5.)
The highest value of music lies in the fact that it embodies in forms which powerfully appeal to us those great principles of order, harmony, proportion, variety in unity –- in a word, beauty. The kind of study which is of the most service to us is that which enables us to perceive and absorb these principles. Plato says that “he who has music in his soul will be most in love with the loveliest.” This is the secret of the highest culture. Devotion to what is beautiful -– that is, to what is truly beautiful, not merely pretty –- is in every way ennobling. Love and admiration worthily bestowed are the means of growth to the soul.
(Quoted from page 103 of “The True Value of the Study of Music,” by Bertram C. Henry. The Etude, Vol. XIII, May 1895, No. 5.)
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