Education about beauty and good taste. Prologue

“The object of music is sound. Music is intended to entertain and arouse different feelings in us” Descartes

Appreciating and defining music or a sound as beautiful means recognizing that it is an aspect intimately linked to temporality. When someone says that music is beautiful, it is because he appreciates the melody or is struck by one or a series of timbres. This is only the superficial aspect that in many poetic and visual metaphors is compared to female beauty. The history of the idea of ​​the beauty of sound, from a diachronic point of view, it should coincide with the history of aesthetic ideals that have followed one another over the centuries. The opposition between visible beauty, immediate, and the more internal or mediated one is applied to acoustic events, but each involves a different form of pleasure: the one stimulates the senses,the other the intellect. The sonic dimension thus becomes a prevailing quality that emanates from the sound “enchantment”, that is, it exercises a seductive power.

Already in 4th century Greece. a.C., Plato composed i Dialogues which marked a real act of birth of a vision of the world, to which many referred and which remained unchanged in the following centuries. The idea of ​​beauty establishes itself as a metaphysical and non-aesthetic category. Beauty finds its ultimate legitimacy in the good. The ultimate goal of musical education lies precisely in reawakening the love of beauty and leading man to contemplate the good.. It has the power to educate about beauty thanks to its ability to transmit rhythms and harmonies based on principles of order and symmetry to the soul and thus give it a harmonious beauty.. Belle, so, music that had a positive effect on the human soul was defined. Musical beauty for Plato is nothing but a reflection of his ultimate goal, that of reawakening in man the love for beauty, thus leading him to the contemplation of the good.