Philippians 4:8: “Finally, brothers, whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable–if anything is excellent or praiseworthy–think about such things.”
I’m not at all a religious person—or perhaps the closest
thing I have to a religion is music—but that quote above resonated with me.
Indeed, this is pretty much the way I approach music. I seek out whatever is
excellent and admirable. Well, why wouldn’t you? And when did we stop doing
this? I suspect it was a long slow process, much of it in the 20th
century, that time of many, many sins. I suspect it was a side-effect of the
“long march” of the left through the institutions of Western Culture that led
us to replace seeking out the excellent and lovely with – uh, what exactly? The
shocking, the political, the ‘interested’? Or just that which seems able to
make a lot of money? Somehow the virtue of ‘authenticity’ which seems to
underpin a lot of popular music, well, not lately, but a while back, smells
ever so faintly of class warfare. Blues, jazz and all the popular music based
on these earthy foundations, all have an authenticity that is really related to
proletarian culture.
But the noble, the excellent, the admirable, these virtues
strongly recall aristocratic culture—the harpsichords of the nobility burnt on
the pyres of the French Revolution. On the one hand we have Lady Gaga and on
the other J. S. Bach. Of course, that juxtaposition is so much stronger than a
mere ‘straw man’ argument that I’m not even sure we have a word for it! But to
tone it down into slightly more credible territory, it is worth noticing that
musicians like Bach and Beethoven and Brahms were learnéd. They possessed
profound knowledge of music gathered from many years of study and exercise.
True, there were young prodigies like Mozart, but he too spent many years
studying and was not shy to admit learning much from Haydn. And they all—all—studied Bach as did Chopin and many
others.
To set up a better juxtaposition, the most successful
musical ‘act’ in history is probably the Beatles. Paul McCartney has a personal
net worth much greater than any other musician at any time. But the Beatles
very much eschewed any suggestion of the ‘learnéd’. To this day, McCartney
claims not to be able to read or write musical notation. Of course, the Beatles
were, within their own realm, very learnéd indeed. All the young British
musicians of their time absorbed the records of American, particularly black,
popular musicians. The Beatles’ later procedures in the studio, guided by
George Martin, were also the kind of thing that learnéd musicians do. They
experimented with every possible device to achieve strict aesthetic goals and
this resulted in their greatest achievements such as Rubber Soul, Revolver and
Sergeant Pepper’s. But I’m afraid
that this might have been the last gasp of the learnéd in popular music. Since
then it has become ever more repetitive, dull and captured by mere spectacle. I
think that brings us to Lady Gaga.
Now Lady Gaga has some interesting aspects—her song/video
“Bad Romance” is not a bad pop song with a very baroque style. The intro and
extro use electric harpsichord sounds and there is certainly something baroque
about the costumes. But since then she seems to be reverting to disco/Madonna.
My post yesterday about young composers raises the question, what exactly is the goal of their music? Is it really to find something pure and lovely, the age-old goal of beauty? I wonder...
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