A few years ago, my wife tried to start a home-based
graphics and communications freelance consulting business by teaming with
another woman I'll call M. M. was
of Japanese origin and had trained for some years as a classical pianist,
although at the time she was earning money as a Japanese-English
translator. When my wife set up
shop with her graphics software, she turned on a radio to a classical music
station, and M. objected. When my
wife asked why, M. said that she was compelled to pay full attention to any
music she could hear, and to have any music playing at all while she worked was
an intolerable distraction. The
partnership soon dissolved for reasons unrelated to the background-music
issue. But I recall the different
ways M. and my wife reacted to music as paradigms of two approaches to music
that the future may judge our era by.
Engineering has made possible the incredibly
widespread propagation of recorded music to all corners of the earth. Until the invention of the phonograph
in 1877, music disappeared as soon as it was made, and except for minor
technologies like music boxes and barrel organs, the only way to hear music was
to make it yourself, or to be near somebody who was making it. Either way, music was integrated into
life in an intimate, personal way, because either you or someone in your vicinity
was personally engaged in musical performance any time music was heard. It was under these conditions that ancient
Greek philosophers developed their first aesthetic judgments, which were about
music. And under these same
conditions, classical composers such as Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms produced
those monuments of tonality which are standards by which all other Western
music is judged.
At least, that is what philosopher Roger Scruton says
about the matter in his book The
Aesthetics of Music. In a music-appreciation
class in college, I first became aware of the fact that classical music has
intricate structures and complexity fully comparable to other cultural
achievements in art and technology.
In his book, Scruton spends 500 pages showing just how complex music is,
and what makes great music great.
I suspect he is the same kind of person as my wife's friend M.: to him music demands attention, and can
be analyzed and judged in detail.
I base this conclusion on the fact that at one point he refers to
classical music as "the music which asks to be heard, but never
overheard." M. was hearing
the classical-music station my wife tuned in to, but my wife was just
overhearing it.
Toward the end of his book, Scruton spends a few
pages discussing popular music, and how the only measure of quality that anyone
tries to apply to it is that of popularity: what's in the top 40, for example. It is engineering and technology which has made possible the
worldwide dominance of the "democratic culture of America" in
music. He uses the word
"democratic" not in its political sense, but in the sense of
"the common people," so the music of a democratic culture is the
music most people listen to. And
that is not classical music by any means.
Scruton acknowledges a connection that relates music,
culture, and religion, and many of the most transcendently beautiful musical
compositions were created for religious services. By contrast, most events called "concerts" today that
involve popular music can be viewed as orgies of idol worship. As Scruton puts it, "It is not a
metaphor to describe Kurt Cobain as an idol; on the contrary, he is simply one
among many recent manifestations of the Golden Calf . . . . If the music sounds
ugly, this is of no significance:
it is not there to be listened to, but to take revenge on the
world." In other words, most
popular music is itself instrumental, not in the sense of not having words, but
in the sense of being used for some other purpose: to break up silence, to relax the listener, or to enrage, excite,
or stupify. By contrast, classical
music of the type that Scruton spends most of his book on is an end in
itself: it is played because it is
not work, but play. And the point
of play is to play, not to achieve some other purpose by means of playing.
Modern engineering and technology does not encourage
long-term thinking. As I get
older, I am increasingly impressed by the brevity of product lifespans and the transitory
nature of engineering firms and even entire technologies. Engineers are not used to thinking
about how their work may affect future generations, not only materially, but
intellectually and even aesthetically.
For good or ill, the democratic-culture type of music is the overwhelmingly
vast majority of all music made and heard in the world today. The conditions under which the great
classical composers lived are gone forever. Will anyone, now or in the future, ever equal or surpass the
achievements of the great composers of tonal Western music? Or will their compositions stand like
the Egyptian pyramids, isolated monuments to a way of life and a set of
priorities that are completely foreign to our present and future experience?
These are questions neither Scruton nor I can
answer. But by flooding the world
with the kinds of music it wants, engineers have forever changed the course of
musical history. With all of the
more urgent issues that engineering can address these days—energy scarcity,
sanitation, and so on—worrying about what engineering has done to music may
seem pointless or trivial. But the
next time you hear music, remember that what you hear is as much a product of
the means of hearing it as it is of the musicians who wrote it and played
it. And remember that there are a
few people left who can still appreciate, understand, and judge music by
standards that most of us know little or nothing about.
Sources: Roger Scruton's The Aesthetics of Music was published in 1997 by Oxford University
Press.
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