on music and beauty

Tag: beauty

Henze, Canti di Viaggio

La vita di un artista romantico, con la stessa intensità e passione, ma anche con le inevitabili cadute di stile e prolissità che caratterizzano la musica di Henze. Rimane un nostalgico, commovente ritratto dell’Italia dagli anni Cinquanta in poi, soprattutto del Sud – quel Sud che comincia dai Colli Albani… – visto con gli occhi di un artista nordico alla ricerca della sua Grecia, dell’ideale classico, della bellezza.

Appaiono nell’autobiografia tantissimi personaggi della cultura artistica del ‘900, da Luchino Visconti a Michael Vyner, da Wystan Auden a Ingeborg Bachmann…mi hanno sorpreso la descrizione della lunga e difficile amicizia con Luigi Nono, che getta una luce nuova sul personaggio, e la totale assenza di ogni riferimento a Berio (a parte uno piccolissimo).

Beauty is

Unavoidable: the lure of it more pressing the more you read, the more you learn. Age, instead of bringing wisdom and tolerance towards the sprawl of ugliness in our lives, seems to demand sharper, more radical aesthetic judgements; as if, being on an unstoppable rollercoaster towards death, we should desperately and passionately embrace the values of design, proportion, style…

Beauty has to be the answer. Be it the perfect balance of an untouched natural landscape, the truth of a scientific theorem, the simple and elegant design of a website, the untamed grace of a young woman, or the unique intensity of a work of art, this is what we should always strive for.

Ruby and SuperCollider

Recently I have been exploring object-oriented programming languages. I discovered Ruby, Ruby on Rails, and all the interesting things happening around them. I have been tempted by the similarities between SuperCollider and Ruby. I would like to find ways of using together the two languages in our research projects.

David Heinemeier Hansson’s presentation of Rails is called Pursuing beauty with Ruby and Rails. The idea of putting beauty and simplicity first, the concept of an elegant, beautiful and simple way to write code is what intrigues me most. I’m not a programmer, but I’m sure there must be a direct correspondence between beautiful, simple user interfaces and the underlying code; in other words you cannot have a truly elegant, usable and flexible interface unless the code itself is also elegant, usable and flexible.

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