Art & Creativity Quote by Gordon Getty

Gordon Getty declares an allegiance to a Romantic vision of art and personhood. To say his music is about an idealistic human personality is to affirm faith in the dignity, aspiration, and moral drama of the individual. He writes as if melody can still carry character, as if harmony can still model a humane order. The phrase 19th-century ideals signals a conscious kinship with the Romantic era, when composers like Schubert, Verdi, and Tchaikovsky believed that music could reveal the soul and refine the listener.

This stance stands out in a late-20th and 21st-century landscape shaped by modernism, postmodern irony, and minimalist cool. Getty chooses tonal clarity, lyrical lines, and narrative opera, trusting the old tools because they still do the old work: awakening empathy, tracing courage and folly, offering catharsis. His subjects corroborate the claim. Joan and the Bells exalts a saintly conscience confronting power. Plump Jack reimagines Shakespearean comedy and honor through song. Usher House and The Canterville Ghost turn to literary archetypes to explore fear, guilt, and grace. In each, personality is not fragmented or cynical; it is formed, tested, and capable of nobility.

There is an ethic folded into this aesthetic. The 19th-century belief that beauty, truth, and goodness belong together informs his craft. An elegant melody is not merely pretty; it is an argument for human coherence. Consonance is not naivete; it is a wager that clarity can still move us more deeply than shock. Critics may see nostalgia, but Getty embraces a living inheritance, treating tradition not as a museum but as a vocabulary for feeling.

Ultimately he proposes that music can shape who we might become. By centering the idealistic person, he asks listeners to meet his operas and songs as mirrors of character and hope. The past becomes a guide, not an escape, and Romantic ideals become a way to humanize the present.