The Journal of Aesthetic Education

The Journal of Aesthetic Education 38.2 (2004) 67-79

In Celebration of Imperfection

David E.W. Fenner

Classical guitar is one of my favorite things to listen to. The song matters less to me than the instrument. Played well, with dexterity and focus, it produces a sound that is rich and resonate, at the same time deep and acute. But if one listens carefully, there are more sounds being produced than simply the ones the player intends to produce. No playing of the classical guitar escapes the inclusion of the sounds of the player's fingers as they slide up and down the ridged strings which can at times be as loud and as present as the notes themselves. Those who listen to classical guitar most probably "tune out" the sliding sound. Aesthetic attention is purposeful; we attend to those aspects of an aesthetic object that contribute positively to the experience.¹ We select out those aspects that we deem to be irrelevant to the positive experience. This is surely the way it is with the sliding sound. We ignore it, and if we do hear it briefly, we dismiss it as irrelevant.

There may be those listeners who find that the sliding sound is overwhelming and perhaps even grating. It is certainly true that at times the slide of the fingers on the strings can be very high pitched and shrill. These people will never enjoy classical guitar — or much of it — given their inability to distance themselves sensuously from the sliding sound. Is there no hope for them? Today, we are in possession, through advances in our abilities to manipulate sounds, to recreate a sound selectively. Instead of counting on the audience to disregard certain extraneous sounds, we can electronically and mechanically eliminate these sounds from recordings we make. Given that the vast majority of hearings of classical guitar are from recordings, we can "fix" these recordings by removing the sometimes grating, sometimes shrill sliding sound. This would seem a good idea, given that the point, after all, is the hearing of the notes being played and that the sliding sound would naturally be "removed" anyway.

Modification of sound to enhance the aesthetic delivery is popular now. It is considered the exception to the rule to hear a recorded sound that is [End Page 67] "natural," "unplugged," or "live." And even "live" sounds are frequently electronically modified at the point of creation of the sound. There are a host of singers today whose voices we have never really heard. We probably would not recognize their voices were we to hear them singing outside of a sound-altering setting. The same phenomenon is at work in the creation of films. Directors know in the creation of a shot that many of the ambient sounds present at the time of the shooting will have to be removed. Some directors play music during a shot, music that is never meant for the ears of film viewers but only for the actors' ears, to help set a mood or evoke an emotion. Anthony Hopkins reports that this was done during James Ivory's filming of Remains of the Day. Certainly this is a centrally paradigmatic case. If such modification is not only available but really today the norm, why ought we not seek to remove, in the creation of recordings and even the conditions of delivery, those elements of an aesthetic object which are "counter-aesthetic"?

What is, then, a "counter-aesthetic" element? A counter-aesthetic element is an element of an aesthetic object which is: unintended in the creation of the object; generally selected out in attention to the object; and, generally, if selected in or attended to, such as to lower the aesthetic quality of the object, or at the very least not to increase the quality and to interfere with attention to the aesthetically salient elements of the object.

The cases that show aesthetic objects which have "counter-aesthetic" elements, are more than those simply concerning sound. Let me offer two further examples.

Japanese calligraphy is an...