Aesthetics of music

The aesthetics of music or musical aesthetics is the quality and study of the beauty and enjoyment (plaisir and jouissance), the aesthetics, of music.

Music has the ability to affect our emotions, intellect, and our psychology; lyrics can assuage our loneliness or incite our passions. As such, music is a powerful art form whose aesthetic appeal is highly dependent upon the culture in which it is practiced.

Some of the aesthetic elements expressed in music include lyricism, harmony, hypnotism, emotiveness, temporal dynamics, resonance, playfulness, and colour (see musical development).

Bad music

Simon Frith (2004, p.17-9) argues that, "'bad music' is a necessary concept for musical pleasure, for musical aesthetics." He distinguishes two common kinds of bad music; the Worst Records Ever Made type, which include:

• "Tracks which are clearly incompetent musically; made by singers who can't sing, players who can't play, producers who can't produce,"
• "Tracks involving genre confusion. The most common examples are actors or TV stars recording in the latest style,"

and "rock critical lists," which include:

• "Tracks that feature sound gimmicks that have outlived their charm or novelty,"
• "Tracks that depend on false sentiment (...), that feature an excess of feeling molded into a radio-friendly pop song."

He later gives three common qualities attributed to bad music: inauthentic, [in] bad taste (see also: kitsch), and stupid. He argues that "The marking off of some tracks and genres and artists as 'bad' is a necessary part of popular music pleasure; it is a way we establish our place in various music worlds. And 'bad' is a key word here because it suggests that aesthetic and ethical judgements are tied together here: not to like a record is not just a matter of taste; it is also a matter of argument, and argument that matters." (p.28)

Source

• Washburne, Christopher J. and Derno, Maiken (eds.) (2004). Bad Music: The Music We Love to Hate. New York: Routledge. ISBN 0415943663.
• Frith, Simon. "What is Bad Music".