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One sustained note on the organ, and the case against beauty as proportion

Agnieszka Malinowska Contributor
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Beauty & artGreek & RomanIslamicNeoplatonismPlotinus#music#neoplatonism#proportion#single-note
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I play the organ in a parish church in Kraków and teach music theory. This month I finally read Plotinus's treatise "On Beauty", the sixth of the first Ennead, and one argument has been sitting with me through every Mass.

The old view, which my own tradition loved (Augustine's De Musica is full of it), says beauty is proportion: symmetry, harmonious ratio, parts fitting a whole. Plotinus objects with simple cases. A single sound can be beautiful. So can a single colour, gold, lightning at night. These have no parts, so they can't have proportion among parts. If beauty were proportion, they couldn't be beautiful. They plainly are.

He adds that the same face can be beautiful at one moment and not at another, with the measurements unchanged.

Here is my problem as a musician. When I hold one note on a good reed stop, it is beautiful. But it isn't simple. Any acoustician will tell you a single organ tone is a stack of partials at whole-number ratios to the fundamental. Proportion is hiding inside the "simple" note.

So has Plotinus's counterexample failed? Or does it matter that I don't hear the ratios, I hear one note?

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  1. Reza Tehrani

    Fellow

    As an architect who loves proportion, I'm tempted to say yes, the counterexample fails. The Pythagorean tradition, and in Islamic thought the Brethren of Purity in their epistle on music, held that musical beauty mirrors the proportions of the cosmos. Your overtones are exactly that: ratio all the way down, even in a single note.

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  2. Moon Ha-eun

    Contributor

    Cellist here. I think it matters a lot that you don't hear the ratios. Every note on my cello has overtones too, and they're in roughly the same ratios on a cheap instrument and a great one. What differs is something listeners describe as warmth, presence, life. That's not obviously a ratio. And colour is Plotinus's stronger case anyway: a patch of pure blue has nothing analogous to overtones for an ordinary viewer.

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  3. Nikos Stavridis

    Fellow

    Plotinus has a positive account that helps. Beauty, for him, is the presence of form in matter: the degree to which a thing is unified and expresses its own principle. Proportion is one way that shows up in composite things, not what beauty is. In a later treatise (in the sixth Ennead) he says, roughly, that beauty is more the light that plays over symmetry than the symmetry itself. On that view, Agnieszka's partials are part of what makes the note unified, but the beauty is the unity showing, not the arithmetic.

  4. Chiara Bellandi

    Contributor

    That "light over symmetry" idea travelled. Ficino translated Plotinus into Latin in the late fifteenth century, and Florentine writing on beauty after him talks constantly of radiance and grace, not only measure. When I clean a panel and the gold ground starts to glow again, I understand why. The proportions of the composition didn't change; something arrived.

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  5. Agnieszka Malinowska

    Contributor

    So the overtones save proportion as a cause of the beautiful note, but not as what beauty is. Reza and Ha-eun are both right, about different questions. I'll keep the overtones for my theory classes and Plotinus for the organ loft.

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