In quotes because it is the title of a brief song-cycle by Leonard Bernstein:
This is by way of introducing this essay: Who Doesn’t Like Music? Nabokov, For Starters
I don’t doubt that for some listeners, music delivers profound, transcendent experiences. It does it for me, and probably for you, too.
But music is also tremendously overhyped. Every day, heaps and heaps of superlatives are shoveled onto it by people who, in truth, did not feel what their words tell you they felt. They heard a record/went to a concert and had a pleasant time, whereupon they tell you that their mind exploded into a million iridescent fragments, propelled around the cosmos on waves of dervish ecstasy. Or they declare that they would rather gnaw off their own arm than have to listen to a certain song again. Really? Their own arm? Gnawed off? Music, even more than the visual arts or Literature, seems to give people a license to bullshit.
No journalist would dare to say that if you don’t love model trains, T. S. Eliot, jogging or Star Wars, you must be clinically dead. They feel free to say it about your failure to adore their favorite sounds.
Lots of interesting thoughts in the essay. Worth a read. What if you like just some music a whole lot and most music not at all? I don't think he covered that possibility. That would involve getting into the forbidden realm of aesthetics.
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In Music & Worship in Pagan & Christian Antiquity Johannes Quasten pointed out that ancient Greeks thought music was a gift from gods you could (and should) give back to them to please them. Music was used in rites performed for honoring gods and was also used as a way to banish chthonic spirits (all the stuff Ted Gioia would say shows music and musicology originated in sorcery stuff). But Quasten pointed out that the purpose of such music was epiclesis, summoning spirits to possess the worshippers.
In other words, there is still a residually epicletic function to music as an art even for people who have no religious or spiritual convictions. Music is used for social attunement and shared "vibe". The reason Greek philosophers took the trouble of saying which music was appropriate or inappropriate for people of X class and Y gender/sex was because performing the wrong kind of music could summon the wrong kinds of spirits or gods in ritual terms. I think that covers a potential ancient variation of admiring one kind of music and abominating another kind. The mimetic results were wanted or unwanted depending on the kind of music being performed. That's not an aesthetic explanation so much as an anthropology of religion explanation, which frankly makes more sense than Ted Gioia's story that the guys in charge were afraid of the power that music had. They weren't afraid of that power so much as they knew music had power so they wanted to control what kinds of musical powers were used. Self-cultivation yes, raves no. :)
But to present music yes/no perspectives as if the Greeks were the be-all/end-all is also a mistake. I finished some reading on the ritual role of music in 1 & 2 Chronicles and within Jewish scriptures music did not have an epicletic function as such. The rites of atonement were what made it acceptable for people to be in the presence of Yahweh and music was performed during the burnt offering. This perspective within Jewish and Christian traditions does not necessarily easily track with the Pythagorean or Orphic traditions that Gioia, for instance, has claimed sum up all variations of how people have related to music.
Are you familiar with Iain McGilchrist's work on hemispheric differences? I'm reading The Master and His Emissary at the moment. There has already been a substantial amount on music in it. For example, that people with damage to left hemisphere may have trouble communicating but not singing; however, damage to right hemipshere can lead to complete loss of musical ability -- he gives a number case studies. He shows that left hemisphere is bad at attending to most aspects of music except rhythm, and even then not complex rhythms. (I'm of course being very general and simplistic just to give an idea.) McGilchrist believes humanity is becoming increasingly left-hemispheric.
He also made the argument that language evolved from music. I think that's right, and it would surely mean that a society that neglects and is relatively inattentive to music is in trouble.
I do think much music is oversold, though. Pop music comes with the most incredible hype in history. Then when one hears the music by itself, it can seem underwhelming to say the least. And classical music PR can be ridiculously excessive in its language.
I found all these comments very illuminating with lots of perspectives that I am not familiar with. Plus, extra points for the use of a new word on the Music Salon: epiclesis. I just finished reading Exodus in the King James Bible and found no mention of music, but incredibly detailed instructions on how to built the ark and tabernacle including regarding the type of wood and how it was to overlaid with which metal and how the linen curtains were to be made and how hooked together and on and on. But nothing about the music. I'm sure there are passages later on.
Steven, much media and especially YouTube, seems especially designed to trivialize civilization by overstatement and excess. I hope I never again see the statement that such and such a person "destroyed" another person by merely offering a counter-argument.
I just finished a pretty hard-core scholarly book on the following topic:
https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/lords-song-9780567024176/
The Lord's Song: The Basis, Function and Significance of Choral Music in Chronicles
John W. Kleinig
Published Nov 01 2009
Format Paperback
Edition 1st
Extent 236
ISBN 9780567024176
Fortunately it doesn't require any knowledge of Hebrew or koine Greek to get through this one. The fact that the Tabernacle instructions are so lengthy yet no provisions were made for music was an issue that Kleinig proposed the Chronicler was acutely aware of. The solution was to present David as instituting the precedent for choral music at the advice of Gad and Nathan, two different prophets. Solomon established the Temple but Hezekiah is described as consolidating and implementing psalmody drawing on precedents from David and Asaph. The Levites provided musicians and music, in Kleinig's account, functioned as a kind of prophetic activity. That music was used in prophetic guilds to establish mantic states can be inferred from the transformation of King Saul in the period of his accession and implied by Elisha's requesting a harpist in 2 Kings 3, though some scholars and traditional theologians are eager to say that music was not really used to catalyze mantic states (they weren't there so ... how sure are they?).
I might have to write about the book some more at my blog at some point but for folks who want to go dig up the book themselves at least there's the ISBN #. :)
Thanks Wenatchee, that sounds like an excellent source.
I definitely think that anyone who doesn't love model trains is clinically dead. But music? Now that's more controversial.
I'll repeat myself here, quoting Leonard Cohen once again:
"They say there was a secret chord
that David played
and it pleased the Lord,
But you don't really care for music,
do you?"
Contrary to the article quoted above, I almost never come across the kind of hyperbole about music that is described. Still, a lot of people do indeed claim to love music, and some even say they like "all kinds of music" (all the way from '80s rock to grunge, etc), very few of the people in my life take music even half as seriously as I do. Unfortunately, despite all my passion, I'm still a terrible musician myself.
It's perhaps the case with many that the people who write ABOUT music and never actually write it themselves gush in ways that can seem overboard to musicians? :)
On "the argument that language evolved from music", I have also heard something similar but can't quite recall where, perhaps in the Bruce Chatwin book The Songlines, that the first language was song. I like to believe that it is true, and a rather beautiful thought, of Adam singing out the names of the animals.
At some point in the 19th century there were so many conflicting theories about the origin of language that the scholarly world declared a moratorium on the whole subject: not enough available data to decide anything.
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