The War of the Aesthetics

Via fellow music-blogger Wenatchee the Hatchet I discover this essay: Why “The Great Music” Is as Important as “The Great Books.” Now I want to be basically supportive of this point of view. I think that every member of Western Civilization should have a nodding acquaintance with the Iliad and the Odyssey, Dante and Shakespeare and if they know those works then they should also know some Gregorian Chant, Renaissance madrigals and some symphonies, string quartets and operas. I don't think that replacing this sort of encounter, even if superficial, with an account of history that attributes all evil to colonialism and white oppressors is terribly good for the social fabric.

One often hears a false claim: Today’s popular music is “more emotional,” some say, while traditional music is “less emotional.” In reality, the emotions evoked in today’s popular music are more crude and monotonous. The emotions elicited by the music of Palestrina, Bach, or Mozart, being more intellectual, are actually more profound and pure—therefore, more variegated, subtle, and rich. There is no expression of joy or sorrow as profound as what you find in Victoria’s Passiontide motets, Bach’s cantatas, Mozart’s piano concertos, or Beethoven’s string quartets. Intellectual pleasures are the highest pleasures, as Aristotle notes, but awareness of them requires a certain process of maturation, which must be accompanied by a purifying of the passions. Nevertheless, the final result of this journey is the ability to experience passions that are more subtle, more all-encompassing, more fully what passions are supposed to be. In that sense, the best music is also the most emotionally satisfying.

So the defence of classical music is linked to a critique of popular music and therein lies the problem. Wenatchee the Hatchet makes the point:

This is, as we see, a more traditionalist Catholic approach.  There's variants on this theme about emotional resonance and real vs. fabricated emotion in pop vs. art music.  The idea is, roughly, that the profound and distilled and purified emotions of musical art convey spiritual content that is not in the vulgar music of the street.  I suppose if we want to go all the way back to affect as a musical theory (not the more recent theory, to be clear) then we can say that music is a kind of artful caricature of emotions that we could not expect to feel in real life.  That's the short of a Roger Scruton style explanation of what the emotional content of art music can do.  

I mean ... I'm not completely unsympathetic to aspects of this traditional polemic.

But the assumption that the emotions expressed in art music are more profound and pure depends, as even the author quoted above went on to note, upon a slow and steep learning curve.

Wenatchee goes on to quote Hindemith and concludes:

Music that expands or develops or whatever-it-does more quickly or with more complexity than listeners can understand will, quite possibly, fail to evoke "pure" or "profound" emotions because the recipient/listener does not have the education and accumulation of listening conventions with which to judge what is heard or to be moved by it.  Elsewhere Hindemith wrote that the very idea that music evokes emotion is a misunderstanding, if by "evokes emotion" people mean that there is some kind of one-to-one, direct correspondence between what the composer sets to page which the musician(s) play and to which listeners listen and thereby receive the great potent wave of the emotional experience of the composer.

Yes! This is a big part of the problem. Aesthetic objects are experienced differently by different people. While there is certainly an argument to be made, and I have made it here and there, that there is such a think as objective aesthetic quality, this quality is not necessarily experienced by everyone in the same way. Musical works are not mere jugs of emotion like bottles of wine are jugs of flavored alcohol. A musical work, as we are constantly talking about here, has a unique aesthetic personality, a particular approach to expressive techniques and structural devices. Much like the personality of an individual human being, it will be regarded and appreciated differently by different people. The most we might expect is a kind of vague, general acknowledgement by people with adequate exposure that, yes, those quartets and piano sonatas by Beethoven are pretty good stuff and worth listening to a number of times.

But there does not need to be trailing after these sorts of claims, like a smelly fisherman's net, the further claim that popular music only expresses "vulgar" or "crude" emotions. That would require an entirely different kind of argument with a different intellectual toolbox. This is an example of how the first essay goes astray:

A sign of the difference can be seen by comparing real dancing with the aerobic flailing that passes for dancing in the youth anti-culture—a difference traceable to the styles of music that accompany these activities. The Baroque gavotte, the classical minuet, even a Strauss waltz, are embodiments of order, pattern, symmetry, and gracefulness, examples of disciplined motion that is more human, more social, and more aesthetically pleasing than individualistic gyrating. Which of these exercises is more truly dancing? Ballet, when all is said and done, is more beautiful, requires more strength, exhibits more fully the inner potentiality of man and woman, than rock or pop “dancing.” Being a more rational and more unified activity, it is more fully the perfection of the activity itself and of the human person who performs it. Needless to say, we can learn a lot about the nature of music itself by observing the human excellences or abominations to which it gives rise.

This is the kind of argument that people with not much acquaintance with popular music might just nod their heads at without thinking about it too much. But if you have watched a few music videos you might have noticed that the professional dancers in those videos are often doing things that are complex and demanding even while they might be, at the same time, lewd and suggestive. The problem with this kind of argument, the musical version as well, is that it is setting up a straw man. Look at those people flailing around at the local rave. Now compare them to classical ballet. You bet they are wildly different. But compare, say, a ballet performance of Stravinsky with a tightly choreographed video by Beyoncé and they will likely both look like well-organized aesthetic objects. And I doubt the Stravinsky would be seen as more pure--not the Rite of Spring, certainly. You really have to be careful when making an argument that you are not just comparing apples and oranges and saying, "see, the apples are much shinier!"

The aesthetics of popular music are quite complex, not least because of the need to consider the function of different subgenres, the economic aspect and issues of medium and reception. Go ahead and criticize popular music if you want, but do it as a separate argument, don't just tack it onto your praise of classical music.