The Virtues of Music

Here's an awkward question for you: what virtues do particular pieces of music celebrate? It's awkward for several reasons, of course. What do we mean by virtue, first of all? Then, since music, instrumental music at least, is famously abstract or vague as to what meaning it communicates, how can music celebrate virtue? I'm afraid I'm going to deal with those questions rather briefly.

The virtues and vices are characteristics exhibited by moral agents and include things like honesty, cruelty, tenderness, exuberance and so on. I'm being very selective here as I'm picking ones that we might be able to discern in music. Music, it has been argued doesn't really exhibit garden-variety emotions so much as the moods and atmospheres associated with them. Music can't communicate honesty, for example, but it certainly can communicate forthrightness. It can't be cruel, but it can be agonizingly dissonant. it can't be tender, but it certainly can communicate the mood of tenderness. For more on this see Peter Kivy on music and the emotions in various texts.

If we take an empirical approach it isn't very difficult to discern specific moods in pieces of music. A Haydn symphony, for example, will often have a dynamic and rhythmically complex texture with dramatic harmonic shifts in the first movement. The virtue exhibited here is that of dynamic conflict and movement towards a goal. The second movement might feature tender expression, the third dance-like vigour and the last sheer exuberance. Put it all together and we have a nice summary of European civilization at a particularly flourishing time. The music communicates the virtues of an outward looking society that has overcome some difficulties and looks forward to meeting other ones.

This is all a vast generalization, of course--a grotesque one to some people, I'm sure. But really, it is all there in the history books and the music. If we move one or two hundred years later we find an entirely different atmosphere of inwardness, doubt, despair and so on. And the history books offer some reasons as to why.

Comments, objections?

UPDATE: If one is looking for an example of the symphonic expression of doubt and despair, a good example would be a symphony by Allan Pettersson: