I say coarser, but others describe it as avant-garde. And the French were at the forefront of that avant-garde movement. It happened in painting too, which was her preoccupation at that time. This movement basically was predominant in the 20th century and produced much that many of us don’t like and just cannot get on with. I have always wondered how this happened. The same thing happened in painting.
If we go through the writings of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, we shall see that they had a great regard for classical music. The Mother especially appreciated Beethoven and, to an extent, Mozart. She appreciated the music of Inayat Khan, whom She had met in France and who also came here and performed for Sri Aurobindo.
However, being free and infinite in Her Consciousness, She was not bound by any rules in any sphere but acted on the impulsion of Truth. Whereas most music, being essentially mental in its composition, even though sometimes psychic or spiritual in its origin, follows certain rules that invariably diminish its power. She came to establish a new and diviner form and rhythm in music and painting, just as Sri Aurobindo did the same in prose and poetry.
Here is what She says about classical music, which is self-explanatory.
‘Music does it an enormous lot of good—but not classical music, not a music that follows mental rules. Something that expresses an inner rhythm, the harmony of an inner rhythm…. One rarely comes across a music like that.
And it’s the same thing with words. The sound of words is immediately restful.’
(Ref. https://incarnateword.in/agenda/07/may-18-1966#p7)
‘(A little later, regarding the music composed by Sunil on the theme of “The Hour of God”:)
It begins with something he calls “aspiration”—oh, it’s beautiful!… I have rarely heard something with so pure and so beautiful an inspiration. All of a sudden, a “sound” comes, which is exactly the sound you hear up above. And it isn’t too mixed (the fault I find with all classical music is all the accompaniment which is there to give more “substance,” but which spoils the purity of the inspiration: to me, it’s padding), well, with Sunil, the padding isn’t there. He doesn’t claim to be making music, of course, and the padding isn’t there, so it’s truly beautiful.’
(Ref. https://incarnateword.in/agenda/05/november-28-1964#p20)
Regarding painting, She was clearly not in favour of the new movements of those times.
‘The true painting aims at creating something more beautiful than the ordinary reality.’
(3 April 1932)
(Ref. https://incarnateword.in/cwm/12/arts#p19)
‘Cubism” and Other Ultra-Modernism
If these painters were sincere, if they truly painted what they feel and see, the picture would be the expression of a confused mind and an unruly vital. But, unhappily, the painters are not sincere and then these pictures are nothing else than the expression of a falsehood, an artificial imagination based only on the will to be strange and to bewilder the public in order to attract attention and that has indeed very little to do with beauty.’
(27 March 1955)
(Ref. https://incarnateword.in/cwm/12/arts#p34)
In other words, it was not new for newness sake that They advocated. Neither antiquity, nor modernity, but divinity that, though free of rules, yet expresses itself in spontaneous rhythms of beauty and delight is what they encouraged. It is somewhat like what you find in Nature; even in this inferior movement of nature, in the sound of the waves in a sea or the growth of trees, plants, shrubs in a forest or a natural landscape and colours of the sky, there is beauty and joy, but it cannot be bound into any mental rules.
The Avant-garde movement, as I see it, was simply a tool to break the old forms and patterns. It happened in every sphere of life in the first half of the 20th century. In the second half, we see crude early attempts to feel for the new forms. Naturally, as always happens, humanity, when it breaks free from the mental rules, has a tendency to fall into the vital worlds mistaking its promptings for the true inspiration. The Mother and Sri Aurobindo, on the other hand, initiated the movement of true inspiration based on a higher spiritual intuition than the music and poetry and painting of the past. Sooner or later, this future will catch up and change things in the light of a greater seeing thought and go beyond the past achievements in respective fields.
Affectionately,
Alok Da
(Follow-up question:)
I always thought that spiritual inspiration is always diluted by the conventions of the day. So, Bach was Protestant and brought up to believe in the Lutheran beliefs and of the supremacy of the Christian church. But then the Divine movement has to come through that and out into the world as it was in that time.
Beethoven was driven by his father to be the very best and brought up very strictly. Again, his religion and beliefs would inevitably get in the way of pure inspiration. But how many have such purity? He obviously had an ego and a firm self-belief. If I listen to his piano sonatas, I get a feeling of some beyondness. I have no musical education, so I don’t know what the musical constraints were. But he certainly broke some of these.
Each age seemed to break the constraints of the past, but the doing away with the fundamental tonality seems an egoistic movement on the part of the musicians of the 20th century.
Well, there are several ways of looking at things. But I don’t think the urge to break free is necessarily a movement of the ego. It was the angst of the Age and reflected in several areas, not only music and painting, but in realism in art and poetry, drugs and counter-culture movement in America, the hippie way of life, dress code defying norms, relationships that broke societal fixed patterns, Modernism and post-modernism in philosophy, even Science that broke through the old paradigms upsetting the classical Newtonian world of solid matter, so on and so forth. It did upset the old order and many things slipped down the drain, but it also opened the doors of new possibilities.
As to ego, I have personally known great classical masters, some of whom, Bhimsen Joshi, for example, who were terribly egoistic. Whereas someone like Sunil Bhattacharya, who truly gave some remarkable music and was besides, a polymath genius, but was so full of humility.
Affectionately,
Alok Da
