World's Ugliest Music – Not!

A friend sent me this link a couple of days ago. It’s supposed to be the “world’s ugliest music”, on purpose. But why isn’t it very ugly?

The idea seems to be that it will be ugly because it doesn’t have any pattern. The announcer goes into great detail about the mathematics used to generate these completely random notes before the pianist even plays the first note – and emphasizes over and over again that this lack of pattern will produce intensely ugly music. He states that the reason we perceive the Beethoven Fifth as “beautiful” is that is has that repeated four-note pattern…





Behind the announcer is the mathematical chart used to make the "ugliest music"...


Alas, the music fails. It simply isn’t very ugly. True, it isn’t “catchy”; one wouldn’t walk away from it singing one of its riffs. It would make a very bad pop tune. But it is rather meditative, and I can’t help hearing patterns emerging from the chaos – I can hear it as a slow movement in a piano sonata, surrounded by quicker pieces of more conventional structure. Or, quicker pieces structured in the same way: since it uses all 88 keys of the piano (each one played only once), it could be considered a serialist piece with a very long (88-note) tone-row; it could obviously be developed further. (Keith Eisenbrey has written another piece for all 88 keys of the piano, each played only one time, but with a different aim – his piece, called “N” after Neal Kosaly-Meyer, organizes the 88 keys in a definite pattern and is certainly not ugly, intentionally or not.)

What the composer/mathematician has failed to take into account, I believe, is the aesthetics of the sound. A piano is a resonant instrument, with rich overtones, and playing its notes one at a time and letting them ring, with spaces between them, simply will not produce something ugly (rather, it produces a sound not unlike church bells). Overlapping them with dissonant intervals and percussive attacks (as in the Stockhausen Klavierstück X) would work better if ugliness is your aim (though of course it isn’t the aim in the Stockhausen, which goes through a remarkable transformation by the end). Even “better” would be to use sounds that are intrinsically ugly to the human ear, such as the scraping strings in Penderecki’s Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima (probably one of the unloveliest pieces ever written, for obvious reasons).

In certain of my own pieces, I’ve used the idea of intrinsic ugliness and beauty of sounds – in the first of the four Ukiyo-è pieces, for example, the pianist is instructed to play the (serialist) tone-row one note at a time, with the fingers of the other hand pressed against the strings in random places, producing unexpected timbres – and to let the “prettier” sounds ring longer and to cover up the “uglier” sounds more quickly with the next notes. Obviously it depends on the opinion of the individual pianist…

But, in the end, what’s the point? Why make intentionally ugly music? My idea: apart from being a novelty, it does make one think about why certain sounds are beautiful and others are not, and perhaps it hints that the beauty and ugliness of certain vibrations goes deeper than merely the human perception of them…