This is probably why he was never able to get a wife then...

Let's see - are you talking about Hinton on Sorabji, or is this adapted from a set of guidelines on torture?

(the servants of late capitalism and its government institutions, those who benefit from their membership of particular classes, their gender role, or their ethnicity, or those whose aesthetic ideologies concur in large measure with those of the far right, tend not to like these things being mentioned....  )

Stalin was a horrific mass murderer to be compared with Hitler, as was Mao. Overall, those on the left who tended to think positively of either were artists, certain types of fashionable intellectuals, and public school types. Genuine workers are usually much less enamoured of cults of personality around those in power. In no way can the regimes run by Stalin and Mao be called 'socialist' in any meaningful sense.

If you want to take up issues of the left's being soft on Stalin, I'm not your man - I'd agree that it has been the case. However, the right are very loud on torture committed by regimes claiming socialist credentials, but very silent on when that happens in regimes with whom the West has amicable business dealings.

A very fair comment Ian, as I have largely come to expect from you. And I agree with you, too!

bws Simon

(I've edited out the typo)

No, I don't think so, honestly. I don't like music that jars and doesn't induce a pleasant, sort of "fulfilled" feeling. It may be my loss, in a way - but it makes for a more peaceful life!

Now now, everyone knows that, according to the fugal aesthetic related by God via Master J. J. Fux, the chief factor in assessing the morality of any given fugue is the hummability of its subjects. Nastiness comes nowhere into the picture; clearly you have no intention of listening to it as a fugue if you give weight to such trivial matters.

I'd certainly take issue with you here, though I understand your basic point. (Perhaps my use of the term "nice" was misguided  and insufficiently explained).

I don't believe that writing/constructing art because you want people to like it will automatically by definition lead to a lack of creativity or ideal. If this were so, how do we explain Mozart, among countless other artists?

Nor do I accept the logical corollary of your argument, viz that "entertainment"
is "nice". I have rarely watched the popular soaps, but have done so in the past often enough to know that they are far from "nice", (in the usual broad sense) even though millions seem to find them entertaining.

I'd alos be interested to know which precisely are the "other ideals" that, for you, are more important than beauty in the music you admire. I suppose I am asking "what greater satisfaction, motivation and worth could there be for any artist than creating beautiful art that is loved and appreciated by many?"

Well, the issue of something's being 'nice' and something's being written with the aim of people liking it are two different things, so worth looking at separately.

Well, Mozart comes at the very end of an era where the whole idea of artistic subjectivity was changing radically. Crudely put (you probably know this, or at least know this model even if not necessarily accepting it), the shift was between the composer as a servant, essentially writing to order what was required of them by their feudal patrons, thus to some extent putting their own will, desires, ideals to one side, and the Beethovenian notion of the composer following their own ideals, unbeholden to anyone else (of course this situation was made much less unequivocal by the rather glaring fact that the composer still had to sell their works on the open market, thus being beholden in that respect). Now, there are plenty of people who don't think this latter ideal was a positive move forward (much of Richard Taruskin's recent Oxford History is devoted to attacking this); others, including myself, see it as a fundamental step forward, but also one that is in various ways anticipated in much earlier music, going back a long way (as Taruskin also believes, but he valorises that in an opposite manner). The Beethovenian model of subjectivity and the creative process never really firmly established itself in various places, including Russia and the Soviet Union, and certainly in Britain (and that can be seen in much of the relatively impersonal music that generally emanates from British composers of all persuasions). It's all about whether one attempts to satisfy pre-ordained expectations, or follows one's own will to some extent independent of these.

I don't conflate 'nice' and 'entertaining'. Plenty of not-very-entertaining culture is 'nice', and plenty of 'entertaining' stuff can be nasty as well.

Well, I'd say something like 'truth' (without necessarily taking the position either that beauty and truth are identical, or mutually exclusive - but I don't really have so much time for the whole concept of 'beauty' anyhow). Art can say something meaningful and powerful, without it being either entertaining, nice, or loveable. But it can be important nonetheless. Don't really want to get embroiled in lots of detail on this in this thread, though.

There are few higher ideals that a composer could aspire to (and in many ways Bach, certainly an idealist, anticipated a Beethovenian model of subjectivity). But there's a lot of music of today that is a step backwards rather than forwards from Bach. Bach himself was a unique individual, whose musical language and preoccupations were the product of a particular relationship to a particular historical era. Today, to write like Bach is not necessarily to attempt literally to sound like him in a detailed sense.