I want to preface this discussion by saying it is kind of an addendum to a post from five years ago when I took up the issue of objective aesthetic value at some length. That post is called Philosophy and Aesthetics and I recommend you read it first.
It has always seemed to be harder to talk about music than simply to play or listen to it. That shouldn't be surprising because once you get past, "wow" and "yetch," what in ethics is called the "boo-hoorah" theory, what can you say? Well, a lot, it turns out. I mention ethics because I have noticed, in investigating aesthetics, that it shares some interesting resonances with ethics or moral philosophy. They have both, at different times, resorted to a theory of subjectivism or relativism. Some have said that ethical values are nothing more than your personal opinion about right and wrong, They have no objective existence. Bertrand Russell criticized this by observing that "I cannot necessarily construct an argument to the contrary, but I refuse to believe that the only thing wrong with wanton cruelty is that I don't like it!" And I refuse to believe that the only difference between good music and bad music is that I prefer one to the other. Speaking of categorizing music in this way, Duke Ellington is reported to have said that "There are two kinds of music. Good music, and the other kind."
But let me back up quite a ways and take a different approach to this. The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein was likely the most important philosopher of the 20th century. One of the things he is most known for is the "private language argument." This was discussed in his Philosophical Investigations. This work is divided into numbered paragraphs and the second part of #243 reads:
But is it also conceivable that there be a language in which a person could write down or give voice to his inner experiences--his feelings, moods, and so on--for his own use?--Well, can't we do so in our ordinary language?--But that is not what I mean. The words of this language are to refer to what only the speaker can know--to his immediate private sensations. So another person cannot understand the language.
There has been a remarkable amount of discussion over this and the following passages and the reason is that there are wide ranging implications for epistemology. Some of them are linguistic: a language in principle unintelligible to anyone but its originating user is impossible. Because: language, by its very nature, is both public and communal. The existence of the rules governing the use of language and making communication possible depends on agreement in human behaviour, such as uniformity in normal human reaction.
To take a simple example, itching is a typical human experience that we would say is a private sensation, not shared with others. But we have a word for it because we do actually share the experience of having an itch. Both you and I seem to have similar itching experiences that we describe in similar ways. We are both acquainted with the sensation. Similarly, though we experience a C major chord and dotted rhythms subjectively, they are not just private phenomena because we can point to them, notate them, and play them in the objective physical world. With some specific exceptions, music is not a private language that refers to what only the composer or performer can know, but it is a public manifestation that, even though it may be experienced in a variety of ways, is still an objective event.
Going back to the language issue, one reason this is so important is that we want to talk about music. We say something like "It was quite a shock for me to get to college and hear a jazz professor say that Duke Ellington was the best composer of the twentieth century. Not the best jazz composer, the best composer, period." This is from a comment by Ethan Hein. When I asked what this opinion was based on he responded: "It was based on his belief that jazz was the condition to which all other music aspires. That belief is a highly subjective one, but no more or less subjective than any other hierarchy of value one might choose to have." Ok, so all hierarchies of value are wholly subjective, just like all opinions about good and bad in morality. As Ethan says in another comment: "Musical quality is always dependent on a subjective value system."
What is the problem with that? Well, first off, Ethan or his professor can say "Duke Ellington is the greatest composer of the 20th century" and I could respond, "no, Dmitri Shostakovich is the greatest composer of the 20th century." But if all we are exchanging is hoorahs, if, in other words, these are nothing but subjective utterances, then the conversation is over as from here on it will just be sterile exchanges of the "so's yo momma" variety. In other words, unless we can talk about things that we actually can refer to objectively, things that are not a private language, we can't even have a conversation.
But I very much think we can have a conversation. First however, we have to know what we are talking about. Foggy generalities won't get us very far, we need specifics. Music is a wonderful way to explore our own feelings and moods, but an overwhelming quality of good music is that it appeals to a wide range of people--or maybe just very deeply to a small group of people! But good music is NOT a private language. Though it may explore very intimate feelings.
Yes, we can have a conversation, but only if you give up the idea that your completely subjective perceptions are absolute truth.
Schoenberg: Verklärte Nacht
Duke Ellington: Mood Indigo
16 comments:
Interesting and reasonable take on new approaches (de-colonizing?) to music theory:
https://www.artsjournal.com/artsengines/2021/11/13/garo-saraydarian-disrupts-traditional-music-theory/
Relative to the present post, I would reiterate my earlier question: why have these discussions of aesthetic value? Does it have any actual impact on music consumption? If we assume success in identifying 'objective' value in music, what do you do with that insight? Are you trying to proselytize and get people to STOP consuming the 'inferior' music and enter the promised land of REAL music of value? Does the thought of listeners wasting their time on musical junk really bother you? Would humility about your preferences go further in changing minds?
I haven't got time at the moment to watch that clip, but I will have a go later on. Re your questions. We certainly don't have to have discussions of aesthetic value--the point of my post was to describe how we might have them more productively IF we wanted to have them. Actually, I suppose the point of these kinds of discussions is to give people ways of looking at theirs and other's comments on value that might give insight into them. For example, is the only reason I like music by Band "X" because I listened to them when I was seventeen or is there something more there? Is the point of your fourth question just to sneer at notions of aesthetic value or was there some other point? Similarly with the next two questions. Does the idea of listeners exploring the notion of aesthetic value in music bother you?
I always wondered why discussions of musical aesthetics had to resort to the search for objective standards of value to legitimize themselves. It seems perfectly valid and productive to talk about musical aesthetics even if they do just boil down to individual taste. An articulate expression of a person's musical tastes can be extraordinarily illuminating and valuable.
When I was a teenager, I worshiped Jerry Garcia. That a lucky thing, because Jerry had broad and deep tastes, and his recommendations sent me to listen to everybody from Elizabeth Cotten to Howlin' Wolf to Bill Monroe to John Coltrane. In the case of Elizabeth Cotten, I was hooked on first hearing. But my initial reaction to Coltrane was negative. "This guy is playing corny showtunes on a soprano saxophone, what was Jerry thinking?" But I hung in there, because Jerry spoke to qualities in Coltrane's playing that in the abstract, I found appealing. After listening to more jazz (and more showtunes) and developing better cultural literacy, I could go back to Coltrane and hear what Jerry was hearing. All of that was richly valuable for me, and none of it is diminished by the fact that Jerry's tastes were subjective and not necessarily shared by everyone. They were shared by me, that was the important thing.
Meanwhile, there is some music that I have learned to enjoy in spite of its aesthetic defenders. For example, there's this gem from Roger Scruton: “After Beethoven it became impossible to think of the human voice as the source of music, or of song as the goal of melody” (Aesthetics of Music, p. 488). Really? Impossible? It's fine for Scruton to love Beethoven and to articulate why he does, but when he starts making these grandiose claims on behalf of all humanity, it's off-putting. When I first read Scruton, he seemed like a bully; now he just seems insecure.
Thanks, Ethan for that very thoughtful comment. You really got what I was talking about. I liked this comment especially: "An articulate expression of a person's musical tastes can be extraordinarily illuminating and valuable." And yes, it is the fact that our subjective aesthetic impressions can be shared with others that makes talking about them possible.
When I was young I was a big fan of Eric Clapton and his tastes led me to discover Robert Johnson. And it was Glenn Gould that led me to Bach.
Re Scruton: yes, an absurd comment, but I would need to see the context to see how absurd. I think we have all said ill-advised things at one time or another.
I don't seek to impose my tastes or evaluations on anyone, I prefer to present music, possibly with its context, and let the listener come to their own evaluation.
Scruton and Adorno have in common that they made some dubious sweeping assertions in earlier work they walked back a bit in later work. I think Scruton overall steered people down the old Romantic art-religion path but Scruton from 2009 onward began to write more in a direction that some reproachment/friendly exchange between jazz and American songbook traditions with classical music seemed like a necessary move to take to keep classical music from being completely insulated from any other musical arts. So it's the later accomodating Scruton I've found more useful than the, well, literaly 20th century polemicist Scruton.
As often as I disagree with conclusions reached by Scruton and Adorno I try to be fair to the trajectories of their thinking across their respective decades of work rather than soundbite them for the most incriminating assertions. Both men would eventually walk back some of their more absurd assertions about pop music. I still think they tended to be mistaken but Scruton, at least, moved to a position of saying classical music needs some reproachment with jazz to retain vitality. He'd seen the alternative presented by Boulez, Cage and others was to repudiate pop music as an art form and at that point, after half a century, Scruton had been won over to the musical viability of metal.
I've been a bit occupied with, er, another project lately, but I got the Scruton book and can eventually get around to the larger but still dubious context for that passage Ethan quoted. :) It got worse rather than better with the wider context!
Please share when you get a chance.
Here's the whole paragraph from Scruton: "The question returns us to the nature of musical culture, and of our culture in particular. Music has many social uses: in worship, dancing, marching, and as an accompaniment to labour. It is plausible to suppose that dancing and singing came before silent listening in the scheme of things, and that singing for a purpose (e.g. in an act of worship, or in battle) came before the pure strophic song. Yet, by a seemingly inexorable process, instrumental music gradually took over from the voice, just as silent listening took over from song and dance. Music seemed to fulfil its destiny by freeing itself from its worldly uses, while continuing to allude to them in ever more refined and ever more suggestive gestures. After Beethoven it became impossible to think of the human voice as the source of music, or of song as the goal of melody. From Weber onwards the opera is in the process of becoming symphonic music: the voice is no longer accompanied by the orchestra, but redeemed by it, lifted free from its natural condition and remade as a member of the symphony of instruments. The voice is removed from the physical space of human action, to reappear in the acousmatic space of music" (pp. 498-499).
Where do we begin with this? The phrase "our culture" is doing a lot of heavy lifting here, and for all the ink he spills in the book he never defines it. "Instrumental music gradually took over from the voice." This is true only in an extremely narrow and historically specific context. "Music seemed to fulfil its destiny by freeing itself from its worldly uses." Christopher Small put that idea to rest in Musicking - serving the psychological needs of the concert hall audience is just as much a "worldly use" as a national anthem or a work song. "The voice is removed from the physical space of human action." The fantasy of classical performers as somehow not being embodied the way that other musicians are is a particularly distasteful bit of atavistic Eurocentric ideology. "We don't have dirty sweaty bodies producing our pure Platonic music, not like the rest of you animals." I can not stand this guy.
I had a grad school professor who warned me about the dangers of having a good prose style. If you are a witty and elegant writer, which Scruton is, you can get away with all kinds of illogical and poorly supported reasoning. Clunky writing is actually kind of a good thing in scholarship because if you have to struggle with the surface of the prose, then you also have to struggle with its substance. Scruton writes beautiful prose, so it's easy to be carried along by it and forget that it's full of malarkey.
Thanks for digging that out, Ethan. I only have Scruton's shorter book on music aesthetics, "Understanding Music" and I've never gotten much out of it. The approach to music history in the paragraph you quote I think I would describe as "Hegelian" and I don't mean that as a compliment!
I'll probably have to get around to a post at my blog about an even longer excerpt from Scruton and contrast it with his 2009 take on the necessity of eventually synthesizing classical music, jazz and the American songbook. For all his purple prose and assertion in 1999 he virtually back-pedaled the core idea after ten more years of what was going on in classical music. :)
I have a rough idea what you mean by not meaning Hegelian as a compliment but that sounds like the basis for a post. :) I might not get around to posting more on Scruton for a few days but as I was contemplating both grad school in music and seminary at different points I'm looking at writing on how even among conservative Christian theologians these days the kind of art-religion Scruton endorsed has come in for heavy fire. There's a paradoxical nexus point in which religious conservatives and secular progressives can agree that the Scrutonian style of art-religion skews needlessly highbrow and white. :) But the project "Perichoresis in Musical Time and Space" that I'm incubating as a sequel to "Ragtime and Sonata Forms" may have to wait until 2022.
I probably need to review Hegel's philosophy of history, but just offhand, when I read something like this from Scruton:
"From Weber onwards the opera is in the process of becoming symphonic music: the voice is no longer accompanied by the orchestra, but redeemed by it, lifted free from its natural condition and remade as a member of the symphony of instruments. The voice is removed from the physical space of human action, to reappear in the acousmatic space of music"
It reminds me very strongly of Hegel's approach to history as a kind of metaphysical urge. He says “History is the process whereby the spirit discovers itself and its own concept” The main problem I have with this is one of causality. German metaphysics wanders so far into the abstract that causal connections become fuzzy. The "opera" isn't in the process of becoming symphonic music and the "voice" is not being redeemed or lifted free or remade. What we have are composers writing music to fulfill the needs of their patrons, their musicians, their audiences and their own aesthetic goals. That's pretty much it. Everything else is metaphysical noodling.
Bryan, thanks for your third last sentence above. It describes precisely what the composers were doing. The audiences were listening and approving (or not). And the wheel kept on turning. Thanks also for your last sentence. I heartily endorse "noodling" when it is confined to the pasta bowl.
in Main Currents of Marxism, I think it was, Leszek Kolakowski described the problem with post-Hegelian philosophies of history was that it was plain old eschatology but without any religious component in which a deity was trusted to be guiding history in a particular direction, a kind of not-quite-even-deistic providence ... but I might have to go look that up.
The Scruton stuff might have to wait longer now that I've revisited the whole turgid chapter this week!
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