I don’t understand why you say that I believe “to believe that Art has an inherent “beauty” or essence” when, in the paragraph you quoted, I explain exactly what I mean:

… the essence of a work of art — by which I don’t mean any metaphysical mumbo jumbo, but simply the part of the artwork we appreciate the most and the part that is uniquely expressible in the artwork’s chosen medium — …

I don’t know what’s “inherent” in this, nor what it has to do with beauty. It is simply the experience of listening to music; those qualities that make listening to music different from reading literature or watching photographs or walking in buildings, and that we uniquely appreciate in music (i.e., qualities we appreciate in music that aren’t present in non-music). Music, and every other medium, is different from every other medium.

If the essence of something can’t be explained, then it probably has no essence.

I don’t know what basis you have for stating that everything is explainable. But even if that’s so, that’s still a far cry from the ludicruous notion that everything is explainable in words alone. Music’s core, the things that distinguishes music from non-music, cannot be described in words. At best, we can try to refer to these experiences through words; but our description then depends on the audience’s having had an experience sufficiently similar (which means very similar) to the sound we’re trying to describe. The words aren’t doing much of the describing: it’s more like they’re indexing into a database of experiences and hoping you find something that fits. You cannot describe the Beatles in words to someone who has never heard modern pop music and expect that person to be able to imagine the sound of the music accurately; hell, even with extensive knowledge of pop music, truly describing even a single Beatles song to someone who hasn’t heard it is forever a doomed prospect. You cannot put everything into words. Not everything that cannot be put into words is meaningless. We’re not positivits, are we? Come on, I’m not saying “whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent”, I’m saying something more along the lines of “whereof one cannot speak, one is forever doomed to approximations contingent on the audience’s personal experiences of the unspeakable”.