On a bit of a random note, I am struggling to find a term for the opposite-of-beauty.  To use the word ‘ugly’ sounds, well, ugly.  The problem is that I can’t seem to find another term to put in its place.  ‘Unattractive’ is one of the better alternatives that I have come up with, but it seems to imply (at least to me) some degree of disinterestedness.  ‘Unattractive’ just doesn’t seem to quite capture the full extent of ugliness, though perhaps that is just a bias on my part.

True to good student form, I looked up the synonyms for ‘ugly’ on my word processing software, and was given more options: hideous, repulsive, unsightly, revolting, horrible, dreadful.  None of these seem to capture exactly what I mean by opposite-of-beauty.  In fact, these stray further away from what I mean than ‘unattractive’.  But I still can’t replace ‘ugly’ with ‘unattractive’ across the board.  Perhaps the main problem is that what I consider to be ‘ugly music’ is not the same as what I would call ‘unattractive music’ though exactly what the difference might be between the two, I can’t quite put my finger on.  So perhaps I will have to persevere with ‘ugly’, however ugly this might make my writing.  (Or, if I was Balthasar, I could just pretend that there was only beauty in aesthetics, and overlook the ugly altogether).