Everyone nowadays feels compelled to take pains to clarify that they are not saying anything is better than anything else. Since however, the plain fact of the matter is that in reality some things do deserve to be called “good” and others “bad”, this can only be achieved by constantly shifting the debate away from the thing-in-itself.
For example, to say (as we are told we must) that humans really are just animals—no better, no worse, mind you—we must strive to put out of our minds and forget what we in our innermost subjective experience know human nature to be, we must forget that the experience of love, of holding a lofty ideal or having a lofty idea, of appreciating beauty—we must forget that these things have a definite reality that we know and hold very dear, far more precious than the reality of any object “out there”, “in the world”, and we must talk about these human things as they are not. In particular, we must talk about chemical processes and neurons firing. Now, these sorts of formal, scientific objects contain a certain amount of truth, but it is only truth about what is “out there” and “in the world”. It is a truth about the brain under an MRI scan or under dissection; and we cannot help but notice that these are all things that we are not, and that cannot provide truth about the reality we are most concerned with on a day to day basis—the definite reality of subjective experience. The truth of these scientific objects is a truth that satisfies our intellect’s appetite for objective truth, but not our souls yearning for knowledge about what we ourselves are. To say otherwise is to truly forget oneself, and a world that demands we forget ourselves has truly gone mad.
So much for my diatribe on physicalism. Now, I will try to relate this example to what is more relevant to the question at hand, the question about classical music. First of all, let me say that I am personally disinclined to accept the thesis that the achievements of all cultures are “equally good”. In particular, I am disinclined to accept this thesis with respect to European classical music. However, I also think that those with an inclination towards cultural relativism tend to act on good faith—for certainly, our civilization has succumbed in the past to a great deal of self-fetishization that we would do well to correct. But over and above that concession, I must say that the attitude that really desires in an envious way that all achievements should be leveled is a dangerous one; in other words, it is one thing to conclude after an exhaustive and honest analysis that Bach’s musical virtue is comparable to that of Brittany Spears, and it is another thing altogether to set out with a hatred of greatness or a perversely compromising ecumenism to achieve a preconceived plan of relativization. As I said above, I think that some things really can be said to be better than others, and the case of Bach vs. Spears is about as clear cut a case as I can imagine. I reapply the principle I asserted in my first example: that the only way this relativization can happen and these two “musicians” be put at the same level is to ignore what music really is, in-itself, and focus on considerations that in truth are irrelevant but can be made to seem plausible, especially those inclined to swallow the relativist rhetoric; we must talk, for example, about the subjectivity of personal taste, about arbitrary social constructs and norms, we must note that the two are equally popular among their peers and since all people are equally people, and music is for the enjoyment of people, how can we say that Bach’s music that is enjoyed by this group of people is any better than Spears’ music that is enjoyed equally by that group of people? Notice that no discussion has been made of the music in-itself, although this line of reasoning claims to state a truth about the music in-itself.
I must attempt now to develop some sort of explanation of music as it is in itself. However, I will not be speaking of the particulars of the musical craft, but rather of the theoretical, ontological standing of music. I will begin with commonly accepted facts and then attempt to refine them in order to approach some ultimate truth.
First, that music is a form of communication. But Man is a social animal, and almost anything he does that is of any importance can be called communication at some level of abstraction, can be called communing, or sharing life. When I say “That car is green”, I share knowledge about a certain car. When I make a purchase, I share a portion of my labor and the vendor shares a portion of his. When I laugh or cry out in pain I share knowledge of my subjective state. Even when I think, to myself, I’m usually using words and in some way rehearsing a possible future communication, because anything worth thinking about is also worth sharing with others, if we truly understand what it means to live life properly. Where does music fit in with all of these sorts of communication?
A basic distinction that can be made at the outset is that between art and language, and we can trace the development of these two distinct modes of communication from the very beginning of life. A newborn baby cries for any number of specific reasons, but they all boil down to “Something is wrong.” Crying is an instinct, for sure, but since it is clearly communication we should be able to class it either as art or as language. I make the claim that crying is the first example of language, rather than the first example of art. Consider, theoretically, what would constitute the purest, most artless use of language. Would it not be that sort of talking that hardly requires thought? For example, when I said “That car is green”, I did not need to weigh any synonyms and choose my words carefully. I did not need to give several rewordings to be sure that my meaning was clear. Rather, it was quite automatic and wholly artless. Of course this language needed to be learned, but no art was required in employing it to convey the simple idea that a car is green. The idea was without art, it was as clear cut as can be imagined. Now, a newborn’s cry exactly fits this bill. He does not yet know that with a little art, a cry can be faked and can earn some attention, but rather simply he “knows” to cry exactly when this one idea of “something is wrong” needs to be expressed. Compare this with a parent’s communication with this newborn. Sure, parents use words—at times—so that a child can eventually learn language, but what is with all of that sing-songy gibberish? It is clear at least that it is not meant as language—which I am now in a position to define: it is not meant to refer to an idea whose symbolic representation has already been decided and agreed upon. Rather this “parentese” is a very artful attempt to convey an idea that cannot be expressed with the newborn’s one-word vocabulary (the one word = the cry), an idea of comfort.
I say Art, then, is in the business of fashioning ideas, of attempting to mold the recipient’s immediate consciousness to match the idea that is present in the artist’s mind but that cannot be merely stated with language because most likely the recipient has never had this idea before, and language requires this in order for a symbolic representation of the idea to be decided and agreed upon. Relating this back to the given example, we can say that a baby’s mind is innately capable of being comforted—of holding the idea of comfort—but this state of mind or idea can only be forged by the particular art of parenting.
What sort of ideas does art communicate? Art might of course communicate an idea that is not intrinsically beyond the reach of language. For example, the mere act of naming some object that has never been thought of before would fall under my definition of art. To see what I mean, consider the word “Ulecephaly,” which means nothing to you now, but let me define it for you: the type of head movement exhibited by an owl. You have certainly seen an owl’s head move before, and thought of this movement of an owl’s head, but quite possibly you’ve never thought of it as a type of head movement, you’ve never thought of it as an attribute that could be singled out, abstracted, and thought of on its own or attributed to something other than an owl. Perhaps you’ve never thought to call someone “Ulecephalous.” Well, now with my artistic description of this thought-object-as-attribute you have a new idea, and I’ve provided the service of naming it for free.
But is this all art can do? That is to say, can art only achieve things that language can also potentially do? Of course not. For although I can describe a painting to you with the utmost attention to detail, you will always experience something new when you actually see it. Even supposing I were able to describe it in such detail that the painting could be copied identically from my instructions, the painting would not be experienced until these instructions had actually been carried out, which would be an artistic act and not a linguistic one. And even supposing that you had mental powers sufficient enough to imagine perfectly my linguistic instructions being followed perfectly, you would again be performing an artistic act mentally, which is different from performing a linguistic act mentally. The two things, “Art” and “Language” are therefore not coterminous.
One might be tempted at this point to interject and claim that musical norms have to be decided arbitrarily just as in language. I must say that it does seem to me at the outset that when my music teacher in the first grade played a major chord and said it was “happy” and a minor chord and said it was “sad”, that I knew immediately exactly what she meant and did not have to struggle to remember this, as I would if it were an arbitrary norm. I’m willing to grant however, that this might simply indicate that the norm had already by this time in my life been deeply enough engrained in my mind from listening to happy children’s songs in major keys. However, this is beside the point. First of all, there are certain aspects of music that simply cannot legitimately be claimed to be arbitrary norms, because their affective power is so clearly rooted in the objective quality of their perception. For example, a slow rhythm cannot evoke speed and movement like a fast rhythm, for obvious reasons, and polyphony can not evoke the idea of simple unity as can monophony, although the former can evoke the thought of aggregate unity, or unity amid disunity, in a way that the latter cannot. In a more indefinable way we are capable of perceiving differing degrees of harmony, although the norm of what is considered ‘allowable dissonance’ may change. Returning to the example of “parentese,” we must admit that we are born with an innate sensitivity to the artistic communications of our parents, for otherwise the practice of parentese would have no reason to survive evolutionarily. Secondly, the fact that some musical norms might be arbitrary convention does not negate the fact that these norms can be utilized to create novel musical ideas, in the same way that even pure language can be used artfully to describe something no one has ever thought of before.
But what sort of ideas? This is of course the central question: what sort of ideas are communicated by music-as-art, in particular? This is also the question that we expect musicians, in so far as they are artists, to be asking themselves and answering with their work. In fact, we cannot accept that a musician is an artist unless it is the case that he has asked this question, and we cannot accept that his art is essentially musical unless he conceives his answer to be musical. For this reason, by way of example, we can exclude the army’s drummer boy. For he is not asking this question, but rather he is using music to perform a function other than the artistic communication of ideas; we must say that his function is inherently linguistic, because a correspondence between his drum taps and the march of the army has been decided and agreed upon, and his communication results in an automatic referral to this established rubric. Not even the man who came up with the march system can be called a musical artist, because the ideas he wishes to communicate are not considered by him to be musical, but military. He may very well be called a military artist, simply working with music as a medium for his own particular brand of art.
In this way we are forced to conclude that the vast majority of humans who might deserve the label “musician” by the mere fact that they peddle in music, do not thereby fully deserve the label “musical artist”, which only applies in so far as one is 1) an artist by virtue of their music, and 2) a musician by virtue of their art. To be absolutely clear, we can expand these criteria as follows: 1) by making music they fill the definition of artist (their music aims to communicate ideas) 2) The ideas that they thus communicate artistically, are musical ideas. Again, we here are faced with the problem of what exactly counts as a musical idea—but really, this is only something that the musician-as-artist can answer, in the very act of doing the work proper to his particular genius. His task is to create new ideas that have never been musically expressed, and so it is impossible for us to provide, ahead of time, what these ideas might consist in. It might seem that we have made no progress whatsoever, but in actual fact, I have already demonstrated with the drummer-boy example how the framework I’ve laid out can be used to exclude certain musical activity without needing a precise definition of what can be called a “musical idea”. It is indeed clear enough when an “artist” is merely using music for a purpose external to music rather than to contribute to mankind’s growing body of musical knowledge, for he himself admits to this fact.
I must momentarily cast some doubt on the conclusion of the preceding paragraph in order to avoid a possible misapplication of my theory, but this excursus will end in reconfirmation of what has been already stated. The difficulty arises in attempting to define what we should consider a “purpose external to music.” If taken too strictly and naively, we are forced to exclude any music that has any ties to anything. For example, the purpose of medieval church music is to beautify and express the liturgy, which is an purpose external to music. This also goes for a great deal of Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, etc. We might say that the purpose of opera is to tell a story, and the purpose of folk music is folk dancing. Really the only music that seems above this “criticism” is the highly rarefied, abstract and even aleatoric music of the twentieth century, which truly is only concerned with itself even to the exclusion of being readily enjoyable! Be assured, this is a very real problem, and is not simply a quirk arising from the way I have set about defining music. For although the requirement that music be pure and detached from anything external to music seems to tend towards a very unmusical music, it is also clear that we need some sort of purity requirement in order to exclude the drummer boy.
To resolve the problem, we must recognize a very important fact: although we are incapable of strictly defining the range of possible artistic ideas, we can at least say that Art must aim to communicate ideas that are human, that are grounded in some understanding of the human person. This fact is certainly an obvious one, but so far I haven’t incorporated it into my theory, and it turns out to be essential. It makes the solution to the problem clear, for it allows for music to be concerned with any aspect of human reality, while still disallowing music to be unconcerned with its own reality. For example, it allows dramatic music (opera) to be considered art because drama is very clearly grounded in humanity, but it disallows the drummer-boy’s march because although it is interested in the human activity of marching, it is thoroughly uninterested in itself as a human activity.
I really find the parent-baby relationship to be a useful one, so I hope I may be permitted to return to it once more. The foregoing discussion has excluded from the domain of Art any activity that is wholly concerned with its effect and wholly unconcerned with itself. So, with respect to the art of calming and comforting an infant, something like feeding it Xanex or a sip of whiskey would have to be excluded. Although such an action certainly affects the mental state of the infant, it cannot be called Art because the action is not concerned with itself, only with its effect. The effect is certainly a human effect, but the action is not innately human because it is not an object of interest for its agent. Compare this with the artful comforting of a loving parent, which not only seeks to affect the infant’s mental state but is also concerned with its own quality. It is in this respect a thoroughly human activity because it is something humans innately care about, for the reason that the quality of this activity affects the quality of the parent-child relationship.
In summary, Art is a skillful attempt to forge a new mental state for its recipient, and it must view both the attempt and the mental state as valuable—as good—in a thoroughly human sense. By this dual humanity on both sides—that of the artist and that of the audience—a very real and deeply human communication takes place.
We can indeed, at this point, provide some justification for our evaluation of the relative merits of Bach and Spears. It should be clear that I would like to put the former as close as possible to the “Art” end of the spectrum, and Spears as close as possible to “non-Art.” Even now, though, we cannot escape the need to make some judgment calls, and since the purpose of this essay is simply to provide a rational framework within which to compare the quality of various music, we will not attempt to justify our judgments that lie beyond the scope of this purpose. We condemn the music of Spears on three counts. First, there is precious little “new” in its effect on the recipient. While we are not suggesting that novelty is in itself a good, its absence indicates that an “artist” is either unaware of or incapable of achieving his or her main task which is ‘to forge new mental states for the recipient’. Second, the ideas that Spears does manage to communicate are almost totally lacking in human value. Third, the process of creation of such popular music is altogether far too bound up with the process of money-making and marketing, to the point that its concern with its effect is in disproportion to its concern with itself (as in the case of the drummer boy).
Finally we can ask, who needs classical music?
Classical music is not the first music on the scene. It is predated by traditional music. I have the utmost respect for traditional music, because it very clearly achieves the task of forging a peculiar mental state for the listener. What could possibly be more ineffable than the difference between say, Irish and Indian traditional music? Or between Russian and Chinese? This music is grounded in thoroughly human purposes such as dance and religion, and is always, in every culture, seen to be a valuable human endeavor in itself. Needless to say, it fills all the requirements to be considered art. In Europe, however, something strange and unique happens, and musical activity takes off—it gets out of the traditional rut and develops, conquering new and ever-changing styles at a breakneck pace. We have also in Europe the phenomenon of the musical genius—a true artist who fills all the requirements for my definition by himself. And this is the fundamental difference—for while traditional music was certainly art, it had achieved that status corporately by means of a slowly developing tradition. Art at this stage of development is in some way unaware of itself as Art—it has no self-consciousness—and cultures whose art is not self-aware must view their Art as something like a plant that simply needs to be watered. Traditional Art certainly forges ideas that are linguistically inaccessible, but the ideas and the Art are taken for granted and this process of forging is not recognized clearly in itself, and not imagined to have endless possibilities.
This is why we need classical music. It is music that has become fully aware of its potential to chart unknown territory, it is music that is downright excited and optimistic about itself—and this is a message we desperately need today, we who live in a culture that views itself as dying, commonly resigned to the fact that its best days are behind it and that it can look forward to nothing but a drab future of steadily increasing materialism, consumerism, immorality and decreasing vitality, love, hope, and humanity. If we could somehow get off our feet again, take a long look in the mirror—if we could see once again what makes life worth living—I think we could once again make music that could hold a candle to our predecessors. Until then, we simply must not let their memory die.
