Possibly the biggest, and certainly the trickiest question in musical (or any) aesthetics is the question of objective aesthetic value. Many people, including recent interlocutor Ethan Hein, deny that such a thing can even exist. I have argued before that it can.
Perhaps we can turn the question upside down: is it possible for Ethan and I to agree that such-and-such a piece of music is utter crap, objectively? Even that modest goal would prove my claim that objective aesthetic quality in music does indeed exist.
For me, when I look around and see the remarkable popularity and longevity of the music of people like J. S. Bach, or Antonio Vivaldi, or, yes, Beethoven, it is, for me, a very small step to say that there must indeed be something objectively there other than mere personal preference. And this is not just about classical music: the longevity and respect for the music of Miles Davis, for example, is another indicator of objective musical quality.
One argument for objective aesthetic quality is that one's tastes change both as one grows older and as one becomes more educated in specific musical styles and genres. You might say they evolve, as one certainly has the impression of understanding and appreciating the music better. On first acquaintance with, say, Haydn string quartets, one may find them an amorphous mass of musical nattering. But on further listening you start to hear differences both of technique and of quality. You are becoming aware of the objective qualities of the music.
Indeed, perhaps the most outlandish claim would be the one that there is absolutely no such thing as objective musical quality. Everything is absolutely relative to every person's individual preference. I'm pretty confident that I can walk up to almost any stranger, at least in the Western world, and ask if they have heard of Bach and they will answer, yes, of course. Why? Because the music of Bach is of such objectively high quality that everyone has heard of him. Otherwise how would you explain it?
29 comments:
what makes the question tricky is ... objectivity about what? Do we want to go back to Augustine's De Musica where music is the science of measuring well? Measuring what well? Even when he defined music as a science of measurement (a la music, astronomy, geometry and the old quadrivium thing) he still warned that if you sang a happy song or did a happy dance at a funeral the social context would be all wrong and thus you would not be measuring well. There is a putatively objective element with subjective or socially-constrained, conventional contexts.
Something that comes to mind for me about Ethan's writing is he has pointed out that a lot of theory pedagogy is based on harmony and harmony isn't the only element or even the primary element in a lot of contemporary popular styles. Now I strongly disagree that "Boogie Chillin" is a single-chord song because as a John Lee Hooker fan who used to be a choral singer and plays guitar I can easily hear the IV-I7 root movements that are both audible and implicit in Hooker's chords on the original recording of the song. Oblique motion and vocal/guitar synthesis creates the IV-I7 vamp that makes "Boogie Chillin" as memorable as it is but people who are used to teaching theory or hearing theory in block chord root movements at a keyboard, for instance, and who aren't trained to hear root movements within oblique motion where the harmonic pivots happen about droning notes in open chord tunings might (wrongly!) get the impression that all Hooker did was vamp on a single chord. There's a balance of rhythmic, melodic and harmonic elements to "Boogie Chillin" that has made it a classic blues.
At the other end of the spectrum (for me) is Jacob Collier's frustrating Stevie Wonder cover "Don't You Worry About a Thing". Collier super-saturates harmony with the kind of choral jazz harmony I've hated my whole life and bleeds all the rhythmic variety and polyphonic activity in Wonder's magnificent song so Collier can ... do jazz choir stuff. There's nothing in there that suggests to me Collier has thought about text-painting elements of using harmonic ideas to accentuate or calibrate the harmonies to the language, the actual text, of the song. In the original when Wonder decides to cut loose he doesn't expand the harmonic pallete, he keeps the groove going and has a glorious contrapuntal episode with the vocals doing a variety of cross-rhythms that play off the keyboard figuration that established the groove of the song. Collier, that I know of, hasn't covered "Too High" but that's another great example of Wonder introducing polyphony in a song rather than expanding the harmonic vocabulary out a la Collier style.
Per a comment I made elsewhere, I think Leonard Meyer's observation about how theorists tend to short-change the significance of convention needs to be kept in mind. I also think he made a great point in saying that conventions are neither completely objective nor completely subjective.
Since many more people find quality in pop music artists, even those from before they were bor,n are they objectively of higher quality than Bach and Beethoven??
BTW what ever happened to the great Pindar??
I think a lot of people would simply deny, as one of my long-time friends does, that there ARE any objective aesthetic criteria. Another person I knew from college affirmed that aesthetic absolutes existed but there's more than one and none of us are humanly capable of encapsulating or distilling all the aesthetic absolutes into any art all in one go.
Whether it's Augustine in De Musica or Paul Hindemith riffing on Augustine, the mind has to understand something AS music to have an emotional response. In other words, there's a lot of convention to musical art that people who talk about objectivity and aesthetic absolutes can often overlook. I think Meyer was on a promising track proposing the universals existed in the physical world and in perceiving minds rather than in music-as-music. Maybe, heh, maybe there's even some way to eventually tie George Berkeley into that somehow with the distinction between minds and ideas? :) Kantian idealism isn't the only avenue to explore as even idealists go or so I'm told.
I don't have any problem of thinking that there are objective standards in assessing music because objective simply means a consistent and communicable way to measure something. Thus the method can be performed by people other than the originator and come up with the same or similar answers.
I think where it goes off the rails is confusing objectivity or objective assessment with immutable or absolute qualities. Judgments are easily capable of measurement and analysis but they are governed by the metric of consensus. So classical composers are rated by a group of people who devote themselves to listening to composers, assessing them, ranking them and then some, not least, writing about them. This is a group however formed by self selection with all the problems attendant to that process.
Any question about whether a piece of music is "good" is really asking "good for whom, good for what." Musical value is totally context-dependent. There is certainly plenty of music in this world that I dislike intensely, and that other people value highly. Someone has to be wrong. I could try to claim that my tastes are driven by "objectivity", but that's just me asserting my status hierarchy. It's an intellectual dead end. Meanwhile, what good does it do? My five year old daughter loves Bruno Mars. I think his music is pretty weak sauce. What would be gained by trying to convince her not to like him? She would just think (correctly) that I'm trying to deprive her of joy. I might ask her to listen to something else after the fiftieth time through a song, but what kind of person would I have to be to explain that his music is bad? It's bad for me, good for her.
It's true, there is some music that is very popular and well-loved, across long time spans, by widely varying people. That shows that... lots of people share musical tastes. A broad consensus is not the same thing as objectivity. Plenty of them have turned out to be wrong. And while lots of people love Bach or Miles Davis, not everyone does, and they aren't wrong to feel how they do. I don't value Bach in every context, or Miles in every context.
What is so wrong with "mere" personal preference? Why is so distasteful to accept that personal preference is more than enough explanation? What work is the "objective" standard doing that personal preference wouldn't? Historically, the American music academy has used the "objective" greatness of the canon to marginalize vernacular and popular (i.e. Black) musics, a project that mostly succeeded in cutting the academy off from the broader culture. Is there more constructive work that an objective standard for quality could be doing? If the job is to convince people to listen to "better" music, has appealing to its "objectively" superior quality ever been effective? Or is it just a way for people to congratulate themselves for their own "superior" tastes?
Getting more familiar with a piece of music doesn't necessarily mean that you're uncovering its "objective" qualities. A simpler explanation is that you're just... getting more familiar with a piece of music. Familiarity does often turn into preference. Some music is difficult on first listen and doesn't become enjoyable until you're familiar, or until you have enough of a context for it. But this is regular old human learning, there's no need to appeal to anything more "profound" than that.
I would explain Bach's or Beethoven's broad familiarity as the result of sustained PR campaigns by their fandoms. These fandoms have had the money and cultural clout to line up institutional support, to write rapturous books and essays, to carve marble busts, to mount concerts and convince people to come to them. I'm part of the campaign! (For Bach, anyway.) I like him, and I want my students to like him, so I present his music to them in ways that I know they will find intriguing and appealing (which means, for my classes, avoiding anything religious and sticking to the cello suites and violin partitas.) I do the same thing with Miles Davis, and James Brown, and Missy Elliott. But it doesn't always work. Nor should it! Everyone isn't the same. I think that a life without Missy Elliott is like a life without sunshine. The readers of the web site are unlikely to agree. If there is an "objective" standard of quality that she meets or doesn't meet, one of us has to be wrong. Or maybe, she is just not the key for your particular lock the way she is for mine, and for her millions of fans. What is wrong with that?
You know what the point of my writing a post about the possibility of objective aesthetic quality is? It hits a nerve with a lot of people and they respond with a lot of heartfelt comments. I think that the notion of there being, or not being, objective aesthetic qualities is one that people seem to be concerned with.
On the other hand, I can write a dozen posts about Bach preludes and fugues and get, maybe, one brief comment.
Obviously the notion of aesthetic quality, objective or subjective, matters to people.
Bryan,
The reason you don't get many response to Bach fugues is either because people are diffident about understanding and publicly commenting on technical details or the music is already familiar and discussed in a variety of places. But this is in large part an educational blog so it is worthwhile to do that for such purposes. The problem is that unlike a regular classroom you can't call upon web visitors and ask them questions or give out assignments. But in the scheme of things more people enjoy listening to Bach than ruminating about objective aesthetic qualities. This is a very small self selected group commenting.
If we met the proverbial intelligent Martian, intuitively we understand that it would be easier to explain math to it than human art. A Martian might not have ears; in the attenuated atmosphere human music would sound weird etc. I think some of the other arts would be a bit more understandable such as literature and sculpture and maybe even painting. But the latter would require eyes similar to our own. Dance would likely be as baffling as music to the Martian. So we see that objective aesthetic qualities if they exist (including in math) don't necessarily have the same universality.
Ethan,
You are right that too often the attempt to rank artists ends up as a club against people's innocent enjoyments. But that doesn't mean that there are no objective aesthetic qualities, at least how I defined objective above. But people will ignore someone else's ranking no matter how rigorously they are established anyway. In the past such rankings were based on theological precepts which were hard to publicly argue with but could be ignored. History shows that too.
But we should be careful to distinguish liking and disliking musical works with possible objective aesthetic qualities linked to them. We should be free to like inferior art and dislike superior art and yet recognize that music may have some objective aesthetic qualities that are perceivable by adult humans at least.
I'm still waiting to hear what those objective qualities might be, and what the basis might be for proving their correctness.
Actually, I thought my original post, succinct though it was, covered the topic pretty well. The objective qualities are right there in the music, which is why they are objective. The actual notes and the way they are structured ARE the objective qualities of the music. Different people perceive them in different ways, of course. And that is where the idea of context comes in. One facet of context is the experience and sensitivity of the listener. But there is still a remarkable amount of consensus about what music is of outstanding quality and what is not.
We have a bit of a cultural obsession with moral and aesthetic relativity and while there may be some historical reason for that, I'm afraid I can't agree in either case. Cruelty to the innocent is always wrong and bad and Bach's music is pretty much always outstandingly good (except maybe that early toccata that goes a bit nuts...).
Of course the music has objective content. But where is the objective basis for its goodness or badness? That certainly can't be found in the music; it's in the reception of the music, and I defy anyone to identify an objective basis for that.
Again: musical value questions have to be qualified with "good for what, good for whom." Bach is unparalleled for silent and solitary contemplation, but he's lousy for dance or party situations. Those are equally valid bases for evaluating music.
" ... musical value questions have to be qualified with "good for what, good for whom." Bach is unparalleled for silent and solitary contemplation, but he's lousy for dance or party situations. Those are equally valid bases for evaluating music."
That reminds me why, back in my posts about Augustine, that his definition of music as the science of mensurating well, he nevertheless built social context and function into his definition.
In other words, as I've kept coming back to the point in the threads recently, it's okay to concede that there are conventions. We can objectively establish what the objective structural tendencies in those conventions are without necessarily going beyond that (i.e. Meyer's "Universe of Universals"). The deadlock I hope to avoid is claiming the conventions are "more" than conventions by appeals to elements of objectivity in rhetoric on the one hand, and on the other the old Romantic stance of rejecting conventions reflexively while in actually simply prescribing new formulas and conventions (it's a weakness in both Romantic era ideology and also in pop music ideologies, some kind of knowing recalibration of conventions to make them flexible across musical styles is more what I'm interested in). I think conservatives and traditionalists in aesthetics would have a stronger stance if we admit these conventions are conventions and that there is room to update, recalibrate or amend them by way of synergistic interaction with more contemporary styles than the pedagogy of the 19th century onward in music theory has allowed for.
Yes, there are certainly conventions and how a composer handles those conventions is another basis for deciding whether the music is outstanding or not. And this is true of all genres, I believe. It is also true that different kinds of music are more suitable in different kinds of contexts.
But I think you will find that out of the 3,000 plus posts I have put up on this blog, at least half of then are about precisely those elements and qualities in specific pieces that make them outstanding.
Yes, since I've been reading the blog for a bit I picked up on that. Ethan has a parallel pattern on the pop/jazz side.
Yes, exactly. I think if I asked Ethan what made the music of Kanye West significant that he would then go ahead and point out objective musical elements that would speak to that.
Ethan would point out the features that appeal to him, which overlap with the features that other Kanye fans find appealing. Some of those, this blog's readership might find to be appealing too. Most will be uninteresting or objectionable. There's not much I could say that could make a person like Kanye at this late date. The idea that the music has "objective" qualities is neither up for debate, nor is it interesting. The question is whether those qualities are objectively good or bad. Our friend Heinrich Schenker would have said, no large-scale structure, no harmonic movement, no counterpoint, this music is objectively bad. And he was incorrect.
>There's nothing in there that suggests to me Collier has thought about text-painting elements of using harmonic ideas to accentuate or calibrate the harmonies to the language, the actual text, of the song
It's frustrating because the man has a good ear for harmony and tuning, but his arrangements come across as weirdly tone-deaf. Take his cover of In My Room, for example: it sounds okay on its own, but it completely misses most of the original's subtleties and undertones; it's watered down until it's just a song about Jacob Collier being creative in his room. He rarely approaches the heights of his In the Bleak Midwinter cover cover, and even that had wanky bits holding it down, but it's all okay because he's massive music youtuber bait and they will never stop talking about him unless he comes out as racist or the wrong kind of sex pest.
A counter-example in microtonality that comes to mind is Ben Johnston's variations on "Amazing Grace", String Quartet No. 4. He used different tuning systems in consecutive variations on the hymn that expanded the harmonic, modal, melodic and rhythmic complexity of the variations, as well as introducing changes in timbre.
Collier does have a good ear for harmony and tuning but my personal take is he picked up that skill-set at the expense of picking up any of the rhythmic variety and vitality that makes for fun, memorable pop songs.
Even the Bleak Midwinter cover left me kinda "meh" because that G quarter sharp modulation literally only avoids being a choral arranging cliche on the basis of that quarter-tone bump! It's a fairly conventional showboating choral arranging method. I'm not saying messing around with chromatic mediant pivots in phrases or sections is bad in itself. William Harris' "Faire is the Heaven" uses chromatic mediant shifts to text-paint angelic fires and helps move the work from its starting D flat tonal center to a shimmering C major central episode but that gets to what I mentioned earlier about using all the elements available to reinforce a text-setting sensibility.
I couldn't finish Collier's version of "In My Room".
I suppose what I'm getting at is that once you take out the impressive microtonal element and the not-far-crossing crossover of jazz choral harmonizations of pop and trad songs Collier's conventionality smacks me in the face. I mean if I want to hear choral music that goes altogether out of the field of Western choral stuff as usual I could listen to choral music by Xenakis or even some Messiaen or Penderecki's Lukas Passion or, I trust the general idea is coming across. Conversely, if I want to hear pop songs that bring choral levels of complexity I would skip Collier altogether and go straight for the Dixie Hummingbirds, the Fairfield Four, Doris Akers, Stevie Wonder or the Beach Boys. Even PHIL COLLINS gets quasi-chorale style pop songs to work better for me than Collier. :)
Ethan, I take polite issue with "Our friend" about Schenker since I know you know neither you nor I like Schenker at all! :) Actually, I don't know if there are even any Schenker fans who are regular readers of this blog.
Should have made the air quotes around "friend" more explicit
I wonder if a syncretic approach is possible. I'd love to read a cross-cultural survey of world musics, kind of like Frazer's "Golden Bough.", which is an exhaustive study/comparison of ancient religious traditions, with a mind towards finding the commonalities. Yes, let's compare Bach and Gamelan and Indian Classical and the Funkadelic, and really get in there and see what they all have in common. I think Augustine's concept of measuring well does admit to the subjective quality of taste or appropriateness. Almost anything should work, and it can, provided it is well measured. Is it possible to arrive at a "Golden Mean" for music? This could eliminate the confounding element of cultural bias, no?
Jives, I think you have just moved me towards Wenatchee's view about context and convention. I have read a book on world music titled "The Other Classical Musics" edited by Michael Church, and I learned a lot of interesting things. But it was clear that only through a deep knowledge of the context and conventions can we come to know and evaluate how well the composer utilized these parameters. Also, in most of these traditions, the notion of "composer" is imbricated within the notion of "performer" so there is not as much freedom to play with context and conventions as there might be in the Western music tradition. Of course, I could be wrong, but that was my impression.
JIves, yep, Augustine built social context explicitly into his definition of music. Since virtually no one was more overtly Pythagorean and neo-Platonic in defining music than Augustine even within the Platonic traditions there is a definition of music that anchors it in social conventions and norms.
I think there are intercultural norms but I'm not sure there are going to be a lot of them, but neither am I sure that there "need" to be a lot of them. I think that redeploying the syntactic scripts of sonata forms on the musical vocabulary of jazz, ragtime, R&B and blues and country can be easily done. It's partisans on either side of the pop/classical divides who have ideological motivations to insist otherwise but while we have equal-tempered tuning as a common ground the least we can do is show that a jazz-based sonata is only "impossible" to people stuck in the mental ruts of jazz and "textbook sonata" on either side of the scholastically constructed divides.
Why is it even desirable to identify a "golden mean," if it exists? Why the yearning to try to eliminate "the confounding element of cultural bias," as if such a thing were possible? What are the conventions of musical taste except for cultural bias? Humans don't even universally hear octaves as being equivalent pitch classes. We can measure all we want, but once we are talking about "well-measured," we are talking about value judgments, and there are no value judgments independent of culture. Shared value judgments are a pretty good starting definition of culture.
Well, I guess because I believe in transcendence, and that widely-reported shared feeling of transcendence and revelation that the BEST music seems to evoke. Perhaps we hear with our memories as much as we see with our memories. Vaguely sketching the details we're not too interested in. The best music transcends the mundanity of its genre, overflows it. There's a poetry there, and I'm interested in how it works, what makes it strong when it's strong. And I think that "well-measured" could interact fruitfully with concepts around the abilities of the human ear and brain. Music asks us to remember, what are the parameters there?
Augustine's example of how singing a happy song at a funeral would be "measuring well" within the song but NOT "measuring well" in the sense of singing the wrong song for the social/cultural event shows up at the start of De Musica in Augustine's definition of music. Augustine's point was that the perfectly performed song that is completely wrong for the social and cultural occasion is NOT measuring well shows up in the first two pages of De Musica. Per JIves, Augustine clearly built social, cultural, and subjective elements in the definition of "music is the art of measuring well". Augustine clearly couldn't be working with any kind of post-Kantian sense of disinterested interest. :)
I'm only typing on a tiny phone, and almost completely unschooled in music, but will stand on almost 5 decades of careful listening and a few years now of viola da gamba lessons to make small comments.
I have loved classical music since discovering it on my own as a teenaged record collector looking to expand beyond the rock blues and jazz of my youth. Lately (last 20 years) I have also come to appreciate old ("authentic" to my mind) American country music as another slice of "roots" music growing organically out of lifestyle and conditions of ordinary people yet with a genius for expressing and validating that human condition in an aesthetically pleasing way.
After all that, I have come to a similar position as Ethan here in the sense of asking is the music good for who in what situations? My youthful ecstasies at Grateful Dead concerts don't seem recreated in people today hearing that music without familiarity and the social context and ordinary stereo speakers.
Was the music of JS Bach better than that of Jerry Garcia? I've spent hundreds of loving hours with each and somehow recognize Bach (and much schooled music) as "the best" (to my mind) and yet I find Jerry makes me the happiest most reliably. Is that purely due to the emotional associations with a happy youth or something more soothing in his presentation, which is not just technical skill in playing and improvisation AND songwriting? Somehow the total package fit my subjective condition at a very impressionable age and became entwined with a way of life in a larger community with a lot of art but converging around the superiority of the GD, which at least to me included their almost anthropologist touch of curating roots music while simultaneously expressing their own different time and place, a hippy culture in California that felt transferrable to wherever one was open to such transport out of the (by my time) pop music and ethical desert of 1980s USA.
All of which is both completely subjective yet seemingly a common experience within a certain subculture already mostly aged out in people and culturally anachronistic.
Perhaps one test of "objectively" superior music is to measure how valued and "relevant" (experientially, not politically). How much does a work stand as the specific historical conditions of it's creation morph out of recognition over time and space? By that standard, I am confident Bach will outlast the Good Old Grateful Dead, and I suspect the causes (not to say"reason") are to be found in somehow Bach composed forms that to me at least truly exist and communicate something more universal than the serenades of outlaws and cowboys, however beautifully and skillfully rendered.
Will, thanks as always for your deeply thoughtful contribution. I find myself agreeing with a great deal of what you are saying. In my case it was Cream that entwined me in youthful ecstasies that don't quite survive into middle and old age. But the memory of them does! Yes, a great deal of the quality of music inheres in a certain time and place. Some music transcends all that. And these two facts are interesting.
I have to confess that I write these kinds of posts specifically because they seem to bring out a host of comments. We might not get to the final truth, but we sure take a lot of potshots at it. Which is, I think, the point.
Bryan I have all the Cream albums plus a few cool bootlegs and a Jack Bruce solo album "Songs For A Tailor," which held up very well about a year ago when I pulled it out after at least a decade silent. Everything C;apton did (at least into the early 1980s) I collect and love, and Traffic (and Blind Faith) were some others I've recently pulled out and liked as much as ever. But right now I'm back to the Monteverdi madrigals I've been listening to for a few months, about which you wrote so interestingly maybe a year or two ago I think it was.
And all things considered, I don't think I've ever heard any music finer than some of these Monteverdi madrigals, even the earliest of the 9 Books (spanning over 50 years of composing!) definitely feel finer in composition, in the lines and in the refinement of the voices, (I don't hear any instruments in this Book 2 set...though gorgeous mixed consorts are heard in the later Books). Was Monteverdi a better composer than, say, my favorite rock artists of my own lifetime...or maybe rather ask, does Monteverdi's music stand better over time than great rock music? And I think it will, because of the fineness in lines or technical skill and inventiveness...though the songs heard on the Electric Ladyland album also have some pretty fine playing and inventive genius full of surprise and compositional coherence. But as the social context of music washes away over time and space in centuries of cultural diffusion...I think a lot of popular music will seem idiosyncratic and picayune whereas "timeless" music, as in timeless art generally, reaches deep into us with something immediate and familiar even if also strange and exotic and plainly from another time and place. And there is where I think there is something in form, something in the anatomy that like muscle diagrams without skin, or string quartets without the pizazz of orchestral brass...a minimalist or "essential" perception of the musical lines without distracting entertainment sounds. Ultimately I think Monteverdi drew finer forms and lines than either Jerry or Jack, as relevant and beautiful as the Grateful Dead and Cream were to their fans in their original time and place.
I think that what classical music has more than all of the more recent forms of music is Time. Time has washed away the lesser works, the minor composers, the picayune diversions and what is left is the 1% that is golden and timeless. Yes, Monteverdi's books of madrigals at the time were just something to sing after dinner perhaps. Really well done, but no-one would have imagined that we would be listening to them with great respect 400 years later. This "test of time" thing is no slouch.
But the music we have the least perspective on is the music of our time. Four hundred years from now what 20th century artists will be highly regarded? Will it be Miles Davis, Dave Brubeck or the Grateful Dead? The Beatles or the Rolling Stones? We don't know and we can't know. Except I'm pretty sure it won't be U2!
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