I would prefer to avoid the criticism leveled at Wagner by Mark Twain that his music is better than it sounds. This is accomplished by reigning in the proclivity toward exclusive atonalism, serialism and the avant garde. As I said before, dissonance and complexity for no other reason than that seems to be the way we are headed is like stepping on the gas while approaching a fatal fall from a cliff.
We should lean back toward the popular, something which has been termed populist so as to remain on the road. We can also lean toward the romantic with greater awareness so as not to wallow in excessive sentimentality which is one of its downfalls.
One of the definitions of beauty is that anything which copies nature is beautiful. The Chambered Nautilus, the Golden Mean and the Fibonacci series are all found in nature and so must be beautiful. They exhibit characteristics of self similarity. A lot of fuss has been made over fractal art and music.
Most music has not been very fractal. Music composed using fractal ideas usually fails to satisfy as much as the visual dimension. Gamelan music is more fractal than western music but not as fractal as the scientists making fractal music based on the Mandelbrot set, the Julia set and fractal triangles etc...
What many fractal musicians don't seem to realize is that the self similarity of many fractals is not identically similar. At each level more and more deviation often occurs. I see this is one recipe for how to make a spiral.
ln art, we want to see symmetry where we expect to find it. When we look at a painting in the western tradition we only expect to see symmetry in the face and body really.
