Music can provide a variety of experiences. Most valuable among them is a magical, spiritual, transcendent experience, one in which the sounds absorb us, take us over, one in which we lose our selves and become the sounds. This loss of self is the aesthetic experience; it is, in a word, beauty. The ultimate experience of beauty is available from the most sublime performances of masterworks of Western art music. And it exists on many levels; it is available to a lesser degree from a lesser performance, or a lesser composition. In fact the quality of a composition is directly a function of the degree to which its performance can provide a sublime, transcendent experience; likewise the quality of a performance is directly a function of the degree to which it maximizes the aesthetic experience available from the composition.

Looking for the “Harp” Quartet: An Investigation into Musical Beauty explores how the composer, performer, and listener all contribute to this most magnificent human experience. In the form of five dialogues followed by three related prose articles, the book takes place over the course of a hypothetical academic year. The dialogues are between Icarus, an inquiring student intensely concerned with fulfilling his highest potential as a musician, and Daedalus, an iconoclastic teacher who guides his search for understanding. A student performance of Beethovens String Quartet, Op. 74, “The Harp,” serves as a point of departure and a recurring theme for this inquiry into musical beauty.