On Taste in Music

This is one of a long string of posts on aesthetic questions that I periodically return to--possibly because I like to live dangerously! Let's look at a couple of statements about taste. First, from Pablo Picasso:

“Ah, good taste! What a dreadful thing! Taste is the enemy of creativeness.”

Very sensible thing to say for a modernist painter pursuing new avenues and techniques. The last thing he wants is some old fuddy-duddy telling him what he can or cannot do. But let's set aside this a essay that takes up the question from a more neutral position: On Taste from the Claremont Review.

...the very notion of taste contains within itself two ideas in constant tension. First, taste is always personal: a judgment, but one’s own judgment. The idea derives from our physical sense of taste. It takes no great powers of observation to notice that different people prefer different foods. I like cilantro, you do not. As the Latin tag has it, de gustibus non est disputandum—there is no disputing about tastes.

And yet, however much we have a right to our own likes and dislikes, such judgments are often measured against a standard. For instance, the man who refuses to eat spinach or asparagus is unlikely to be considered a discerning judge of fine food. These two principles—the autonomy of the individual taste and the existence of some broader principle of excellence—are perpetually at odds. Each of us navigates between them, sometimes vindicating our own preferences, other times yielding to (and perhaps learning from) the taste of others.

When you look at it more closely you see that artists themselves are constantly making their own judgments--how else could they possibly function? I have sometimes used Jordan Peterson's metaphor of the campfire in the wilderness. The job of artists is to venture out from the comforting light and warmth of the campfire into the surrounding dark, perhaps taking a brand from the fire to light the way. You can certainly overwork the metaphor, but it captures an important part of the creative process: you have to venture into the unknown to find new things with which to create new art. But the newness is only part of the puzzle. You also have to take the new thing and work it into an art object. Perhaps this process is raw with really new ideas, but the artist has to use judgment all the time in selecting, modifying and developing whatever he may encounter away from the campfire.

The act of judgment is not only necessary to the creative artist, it is also part of what performers, critics and audiences do. A performer chooses one new concerto to learn for the coming season--out of a hundred possibilities. How? Through aesthetic judgment. The music director of the orchestra chooses certain repertoire over other repertoire through aesthetic judgment as well. Ok, sure, these days the marketing department may be demanding more pop, but that is just one more thing that needs to be judged. Then come the audience--they purchase tickets according to their best judgment as to what programs they will most enjoy. And so on.

What is the role of taste in all this? You might say that taste is just one way of looking at judgment. Good taste is either the enemy of creativity, as Picasso said, or perhaps taste that is based on good judgment. Sure, there is a good deal of personal or subjective reaction in judgments of taste and people often find it pleasurable to assert their independence from consensus judgments of taste. But it seems to be the case that taste is something that can be developed through increased exposure, study of history, study of the materials and practices of art and so on. Every music appreciation class, and indeed music education in general, is based on the idea that one's perceptions can be made more acute and sensitive.

Someone who has no taste or poor taste is perhaps someone who has no interest in art or who is inherently insensitive to it. More from the Claremont Review essay written by Thomas Kaminski:

Those who see what is going on in an Old Master painting “without being told” can do so only because they already know something about the form. Art is never transparent. There are no wholly intuitive responses to it, not even to the Old Masters. We assume, perhaps rightly, that anyone can enjoy the beauty of a sunset or the scent of peonies: the pleasures of nature must certainly be available to all. But the response to art is different. Art is not a part of the natural world; it is a human contrivance, and to appreciate it we must undergo some form of acculturation. Before Western music conquered the world, the shamisen (a three-stringed traditional instrument) would have sounded as natural to Japanese ears as the guitar does to our own. But nature had nothing to do with it: we hear a culture’s vibrations in the strings of each instrument. No one, in fact, is born a connoisseur of Old Master paintings, just as no one is born a reader of Alexander Pope or a devotee of Mozart. Our responses to art involve both nature and nurture, an inherent sensitivity shaped by experience. Taste must always be trained.

This is fairly obviously true; but at the same time it is like a truth that no-one wants to admit in public as it not only smacks of elitism, it is based on several things that are anathema to our current thinking. Everyone's taste is equal to everyone else's, there can be no hierarchy of value in the arts because that somehow goes against equity, and this is all probably somehow racist. Best not to even mention taste!

But it is something that we use every day. And it is something that is constantly changing as our experiences change.

Here are the Haydn Variations by Brahms played by Anastasia Gromoglasova and Lyubov Gromoglasova: