“ It is cruel, you know, that music should be so beautiful. It has the beauty of loneliness and pain; of strength and freedom. The beauty of disappointment and never satisfied love. The cruel beauty of nature and the ever lasting beauty of monotony.”
Benjamin Britten.(1913- 1976)
Above statement was the saddest statement I’ve read from a musician. Benjamin Britten was an English famous composer of the modern age. The period of time that the world faced two wars: WWI and WWII. If you listen to the music conducted at that time, you can clearly realize the dramatic difference in tonality, melody, dynamics and harmony from previous ages, and, even, from now a day’s music.
I think that was the most rebellious time in the history of art when the artists just rebelled.
The musicians, for example, took the tonality out of music and stated the melody and harmony is free since they thought the tonic note meant the most special (superior) one. However, they didn’t free the music, they produced a new culture for music. Understanding the music by putting meanings and names on it such as beautiful, disappointing, horror and so forth is a cultural approach to music, not freedom.
