Roger Scruton, The Decline of Musical Culture
OVERVIEW
- Issues & Questions:
- Connection music and morals:
- Does music you listen to represent your values?
- Can music change your values (for better or worse)?
- Music with words versus absolute music (w/o words)
- Is our taste in music/art a measure of the worth of a culture?
- Does a shift from Bach to Nirvana represent a decline in culture or a
value-neutral shift in personal preferences?
- Aes relativism and aes subjectivism:
- There is no objective standard of taste beyond preferences of a group or
individual
- No objective basis or rule for measuring good and bad, better and
worse
- Everyone is entitled to his or her own tastes
- None can be said to be better or worse than any other
- Scruton argues, that only by accepting relativism and subjectivism
(i.e., giving up idea one can distinguish between better/worse music)
can one embrace grunge or heavy metal music
- Scruton is an objectivist (and a monist)
- Our tradition of music is the richest and most fertile that has yet
existed
- Note, that objectivists only think there are correct answers to aesthetic questions, they needn't be so sure that their opinions are the right ones.
- Scruton is also a monist: There are not only correct answers to questions about which music is better but one type of music is better than all other types (monism)
- One could be an objectivist, pluralist (Gracyk?) and claim that some music is objectively better than other music, but there may not be one best, but rather lots of good (and lots of bad) music.
- Scruton is not defending classical music against all popular music; he
approves of some pop music
- His criticism of REM, U2, AC/DC, Nirvana does not apply to:
- Gershwin, Cole Porter, Rodgers and Hammerstein, Lois
Armstrong, Glenn Miller and Ella Fitzgerald
- They are better in every way than above
- Dismissing all pop music shows same atrophy of judgment he's
criticizing
- Approves of the Beatles or Buddy Holly: to sing or move to it
involves thinking and feeling musically, with awareness of the voice
not only as sound but as expression of the soul
- E.g., The Beatles "She loves you" has melody and harmony and is
musically sophisticated,
- The breathless gestures of Nirvana are not
- Relativism/subjectivism in art related to disorderly human communities
- Scruton: only in culture where people not invested in properly
ordered human community that relativism and subjectivism gain hold
- Music that does not demand aes discrimination is dehumanizing
- Because we structure our social lives through expressive objects that
demand aes discrimination, trivializing aes judgment denies our
humanity
- Society that has allowed such music to flourish has ceased to be a
community
- Musical culture changed for the worse
- Widespread indifference to "classical" music - music which demands
attention for its own sake - represents nothing less than a crisis of
culture
- Popular culture music has deficient melody and treats harmony as if
of no importance
- Acceptance of pop music reflects triumph of a culture that refuses to control
the behavior of people who can't control themselves
- Thus it represents a decline in morals as well as music
- All go together: Democratic culture, aes relativism, grunge and heavy
metal music, disorder, alienation, dehumanization
DETAILS
- DANCING
- Dancing is an aesthetic response:
- Dancing need not necessarily be aesthetic response, but has an
intrinsic tendency to become aesthetic
- As involves responding to movement for its own sake
- Dwelling on appearance of another's gesture, finding meaning in that
appearance, and matching it with a gesture of own.
- Dancing to the music only if movements express attention to the
music
- Dancing involves joining in with the music and other people
- A way of being together that is absorbed in present experience (a gift
of art)
- A community enterprise
- Dancing can be sincere or fake/sentimental, as can formal gestures at
weddings and funerals
- Sincere gesture of condolence distinct from sentimental fake
- Relate to other in his predicament or aimed backward at person
who makes the gesture
- In learning these sincere gestures you enter into a common culture
with neighbors
- Dancing too can be sincere (aimed at and responding sympathetically
to the music) or sentimental (?aimed at your self or others??)
- Most of what Scruton says about dancing applies to music, because
- Listening to music is a latent (present but not visible) form of dancing
(sublimated dancing):
- Listening involves a sublimated desire to move with the music
- Experience at a concert is a kind of truncated dance: listener may tap
our feet and sway subliminally; absorbed by movement of the music
- Taste in dancing, hence taste in music, reflects and is part of the moral
dimensions of life
- Change in dance styles tells us much about change in culture
- Transition from waltz to ballroom dancing, to ragtime to Charleston
and Tango, to swing, to rock and its successors tell us much about
moral transformations of modernity
- Love, sex and body perceived differently now
- Courtesy and courtship have disappeared from dancing just as they
have disappeared from life
- Dancing is a reflection of social character
- Imagine the mores of people who danced waltzes
- Then listen to Nirvana and imagine mores of people who dance to
that music
- These too sets of people could not live in the same way, with same
habits of mind and character and same ways of responding to each
other in social life
- Taste in dancing is like taste in company and lifestyle-all are
continuous with the moral life
- Dancing has obvious social consequences
- Can reinforced order and self-control or undermine it
- Traditional dances had to be learned and were exercises in self
control, not forms of abandon
- Dancer was required to fit gestures to movement of partner and
patterns of the whole
- Dancing and sex:
- Involves attitudes by which men and women come together in quest
of a partner
- Trading partners was a way to moderate sexual motive
- Dancer may be prompted by desire, but dancing with people for
whom he has no such emotion
- Acknowledges their existence as sexual beings with gestures of
innocent courtesy
- Dance as a social rather than sexual occasion
- Few occasions anymore when young man can dance with his
aunt or a young girl with his boyfriend's father
- Today we have a decay of dancing into exhibition and sexual display
- Dancing has become sexual exhibition, as music available for dancing
has no other meaning besides release
- Requires neither knowledge nor self control
- For that would impede democratic right of everyone to enter
into the fray
- So no one really dances with anyone else
- Each dancer exudes a narcissistic excitement that requires no
acknowledgment from a partner besides similar gestures of display
- Dance has become a lapse into disorder
- Surrender of body that anticipates sexual act itself
- So if our response to music is a kind of latent dancing, then taste in
music matters (because taste in dancing matters morally/socially)
- Given our interest in music involves same kind of engagement as dancing,
namely singing along with and joining in
- Listening to music is also a reflection of social character
- Music plays a role in education of character and helps forms habits
(both good and bad)
- Search for objective musical values is one part of our search for the right
way to live.
- Plato and Aristotle agree that music has character, and when singing or
dancing we imitate this character and make it our own
- So few things more important to educator than music pupils sing and
dance to
- So must distinguish between virtue/vice; music that fulfils our nature
from music that destroys it
- Music is an invitation to sympathy
- Sympathy can be directed at real or imagined situations (often more
powerful in latter)
- Free play of sympathy in fiction can educate and corrupt our emotions
- Response to music is sympathetic-a response to human life imagined
in sounds we hear
- Music is a companion that invites us to share its manners and outlook
and join in a particular form of life
- Absolute music's (music w/o words) abstract nature doesn't prevent it
from influencing and reflecting social/moral character
- People have no problem seeing why a taste for porn videos may be
judged adversely
- No problems seeing why we should protect our children from
acquiring that sort of taste
- If pop music has words and images it attracts similar criticism
- E.g., rap music with message of sustained aggression and
violent images of music videos
- But he's argued that words and images don't exhaust meaning of
music
- They reinforce a message shaped and projected through tones
- Democratic culture and aesthetic relativism
- "Democratic egalitarian culture" accepts every taste that does no
obvious damage
- Teacher who criticizes music of his pupils or tries to cultivate a love
for the classics instead will be attacked as judgmental
- No adverse judgment in aesthetics is permitted
- Good taste is sacrificed to popularity
- No obstacles placed before ordinary citizen in quest of taste of his
own
- Scruton argues that although people believe entitled to their tastes
- Does not follow that good and bad taste are indistinguishable or that
education of taste is no longer a duty
- Is it a duty to educate the tastes of your children?
- Is it a duty of society to help educate the taste of its citizens?
- If so, must be a distinction between good and bad taste
- Scruton's analysis of pop music (of Nirvana? Of Curt Cobain?)
- Exists to blow away the external
world
- Gives up on the musical knowledge gained over the centuries; the importance of the proper relations between melody, harmony and rhythm
- It involves a
- Dominating beat of percussion
- Anti-harmonic devices of power chord produced by electronic
distortion
- Melodies get swamped by rhythm
- If music sounds ugly, not important
- Not there to listen to but to take revenge on world
- Instead of listening to the music, audience listens through the music to the performers
- Musicians become idols
- Group members are leaders in an imagined community (community of their fans)
- Relation of musicians and fans is tribal
- A shaman dancing before his tribe
- Criticism of the music is received by fan as assault upon himself and identity
- IMPORTANCE OF MUSIC
- Today's music has enormous power over its audience
- Music is immensely important to our culture
- Our civilization bound up with music as no other
- All social gatherings, sacred or secular, formal or informal,
ceremonial or friendly, music has played dominant role
- Invitation to join, an expression of feelings and hopes of participants
- Lends dignity and harmony to our gestures, raises them to a higher
level
- Music a character-forming force and decline of musical taste a decline
in morals
- The lack of standards, purposes and alienation in Nirvana and REM reflects
and reinforces the same in its listeners
- To withhold all judgment--as though taste in music were like taste in
ice-cream--is not to understand the power of music
- Music is god-given
- Is hated by beings to whom god's love does not extend
- Music cheers, soothes and pacifies
- Threatens power of monsters who live by violence and lawlessness
- Monsters of pop culture threaten this order
- Much modern pop is cheerless and meant to be
- A kind of negation of music
- Dehumanizing of the spirit of song
Miscellaneous and extraneous material below (ignore)
Pop music listening has given up on judgment of taste
- Idea of dancing as a from of order and self-control is dead
- Now dance a form of social and sexual release, or else a spectator
art, something others do, to be contemplated in passive silence
- Good and bad taste even in absolute, non rep music
- Some music breaks free of bounds of aes exp-loses all restraint and spill
over into erotic or violent action
- Three important exp (forms of kn) of musical culture
- One: exp of melody; one tone calling to another; melodies have character
and singing them we imitate that form of human life, rehearse our social
nature
- Matters we should sing in courteous and cheerful ways
- Two: exp of harmony: voices sounding together, moving in concord,
creating tensions and resolutions
- Three: Rhythm: something other than all pervasive beat, on which shapeless
cries of singer are hung
- Beat is the sad skeleton of rhythm, stripped bare of human life.
- Melody, harmony and rhythm distill centuries of social life, allowing us to
reach out of ourselves into world were others exist, full of feeling but also
ordered and disciplined but free
- Originally dance and singing came before silent listening
- Music as an otherworldly voice that speaks to us
- A voice that becomes more important to us as the sense of spiritual religious
community dwindles
- Music does not need to refer to the empirical world, it can gesture to the true
implied ideal community
- Be alert to things that pollute this higher community with the debris of our
baser attitudes
- Aristocratic world view versus Democratic world view
- Aristocratic world view
- instinctive aversion to what is vulgar, sentimental or commonplace
- Defenses of heavy metal say it has meaning
- Expresses alienation and frustration
- But they fail to distinguish between expressive and inexpressive
instances of this
- Sympathetic emotions come out more in fiction than fact, because in fiction
our interests that would diverge from sympathy are not at stake
- Musical exp, not merely perceptual, but depends on social context of
expectations about performance and listening
- It is tonal (involves keys)
- Melody feels closed only when rests on privileged tone
- Other tones are heard in relation to being more or less close to
the tonic
- Schoenberg and Ives are 20th century composers given up on tonality
- Some music of other cultures is not tonal?
- Tonality is a paradigm of musical organization
- Attempts to give it up show its authority over musical ear
- Modern music has broken loose from the channel of taste into the great ocean of equality
- Pop music ceases to be music as sex love ceases to be love
- Alienation comes from this life-fear inadequacy and anger that result from trying to live w/o the blessings of the dead
- Pop culture expresses it and
- Cheerlessness of so much pop music acknowledges that we live outside society
- In granting equality to every human type we have become monsters and that it is okay to be monsters
- Democratic culture is essentially cultureless (Nietzsche but not Scruton?)
- lacking aspirations that might be placed in literature and art
- Humans no longer try to better themselves
- Or strive toward inequality which is mark of truly human
- But our democracy is capitalistic and here competition and inequality are central
- Culture is grounded in religion
- when people begin to lose their faith
- Stop exp their social membership in sacred terms
- Culture begins to wither
- Religion heals division of rank and class
- Our society is not merely democratic, but irreligious
- Live in the present moment, the now
- Deaf to the voices of absent generations
- Not only art and music that have undergone a fatal change, bur human psyche too
- Rule of substitution
- any part of life has its equivalent
- Attachment to particulars spouses and lovers, projects and ambitions, sacred places and true communities
- Seems comic
- People lose all sense of sacral community and get locked in isolation of own desires
- Our religious impulse gets transferred to idols, and pop culture provides them and involves the worship of idols (false gods)
- Given our circumstances it is inevitable that pop music should be both sentimental and idolatrous