On music and architecture

Someone once said that the aesthetic domain closest to music is architecture, for in both cases the aesthetic expression is rooted in (pure) form, with the lack of inherent content (unless the artist has attempted to make explicit gestures of imitation, such as can be found in the sound of birds in music or gargoyles on Gothic churches).

Yet this does not preclude differences between the two domains. Music, for all its pedagogy and technicality, is an art of purified and controlled air and time, in essence physically impalpable, and full of obvious mysticism due to its ability to effect living beings – human and animals – so profoundly. So much is offered in its nothingness. It is hardly surprising that music occupies much thoughts in Western history and philosophy.

In contrast, what about architecture? The greatness and mysticism of architecture derives precisely from its physicality. Architecture controls space. Architecture is the unavoidable force in the modern world, inhibiting and containing the swarm of humans. So much, too, is expressed in the physical condition that surrounds men – thoughts, sentiments, ideas, and beauty. Such is the paradox of architecture – so much groundless psychology, an abstract world of its own, is embedded in the giant pillars and stones of thoughtless tangibility. Good architecture hence becomes a physical abstraction, on which a sentiment of poetry not too different from the one derived from a work by Kandinsky is sung.

Add onto this the illusion of banality that the common men possess on these organised bricks and stones, speaking in tongues of a “what more” way. Yet to those who know how to know, it is clear that the walls of any work of architecture are the guardians of history and wisdom – not only have these walls seen and observed human life all this time, but also is the very physical manifestation of the human spirit – they are, after all, based on the spirit of those who wished to express themselves without having anything palpable to say – that is content-less form.

Where in music everything is offered through nothing in the miraculous manipulation of air and time, in architecture the most abstract and human of values are distilled in the vast physical and seemingly indifferent blocks of rigidly solid stillness.