Roger scruton's The Aesthetics of Music will not be the last word on the subject-there is too much philosophical fun to be had with the questions he is addressing: What is music? What does it mean? But it is an ambitious attempt at writing the definitive work, the book to which all theories of music must now refer. As such, it is written in Scruton's sturdiest style. A great range of musicological, metaphysical and ideological flights of fancy are seen off with his well aimed analytic boot. The British philosophical approach-a central concern for linguistic clarity; argument via vignette-is brought to bear on aesthetic issues usually dominated by obfuscating continental European intellectuals; and Scruton has no hesitation in making his own musical judgements, pronouncing works to be either brilliant or empty, enriching or banal.
The overall effect is exhilarating and exasperating in equal measure. The book works as a series of lectures, with the argument continually pushing you on to the next chapter. It is unusual to read a study of such length and density which is so difficult to put down, and its argument is, for me, almost entirely persuasive.
Musical experience, argues Scruton, is something which only rational beings can have, and only through the exercise of imagination. To describe music, we must have recourse to metaphor, not because music resides in an analogy with other things, but because metaphor describes exactly what we hear when we hear sounds as music. Music is not representational, but expressive. It is not a language, but it can be understood (and misunderstood). According to Scruton, musical understanding describes a social process; musical order is a moral order. Musical taste is a complex exercise of sympathy, in which we respond to human life, enhanced and idealised in artistic form. The search for objective human values through music is one part of our search for the right way to live.
No doubt philosophers and musicologists will pick away at the details of the logic through which Scruton reaches this position, but my sense of exasperation lies elsewhere. To my surprise, I find myself accepting almost every one of Scruton's abstract assertions about musical meaning and value. But this only intensifies my resistance to the conclusion which his arguments have been set up to reach-the "demolition" (to use his publishers' term) of popular music.
This conclusion is particularly exasperating, given that my own attempt to develop an aesthetics of popular music-published recently as Performing Rites (which Scruton dismissed as an obviously foolish and corrupt project)-finds so many echoes in Scruton's own philosophical position. How can a book which is supposed to provide the proof of popular music's worthlessness, confirm my belief that the high/low distinction in musical argument is spurious?
The difference is partly disciplinary: Scruton's philosophical method means stripping music down to its essence, to a pure sound, to what it means ideally. The social and material context of music being performed in an actual time and place is not relevant to what must be understood as music. Rather, idealisation is essential to the aesthetic experience. By contrast, from a sociological perspective, the meaning and value of music are determined by its social circumstances, and the aesthetic experience is a matter of institutions as well as ideals. These contrasts have long been written into musical evaluation-classical music is evaluated by the quality of an abstract musical experience, whereas the meaning of popular music is determined by the processes of its production and consumption. Aesthetic judgements thus carry a meaning in classical music criticism (Jan?cek versus Vaughan Williams, say) which they do not carry in pop music (a distinction between Nirvana and REM is simply an account of personal or social preference). Scruton objects to sociological accounts of high culture (Pierre Bourdieu's account of taste, for example) while being happy to relate the decadence of contemporary rock and pop to the decadence of contemporary society.
But in doing so, Scruton either begs questions or else answers them according to a political philosophy which we may not share. The begged question follows from his definition of music-as a transformation of sounds into tone in such a way that what is valuable and meaningful about tone is that which can be scored. In The Aesthetics of Music, Scruton repeatedly suggests that critical argument about music means describing the shape and structure of melodies, harmonies and rhythms, and the musical movement which is projected through them. Through such descriptions he can demonstrate the vacuousness of U2 and the decadence of Nirvana (an abdication of music to sound). While sociologists like myself might be able to explain why REM and Nirvana matter to people, this mattering has nothing to do with music-the Nirvana audience does not, according to Scruton listen to the music but through it to the performers. What is at stake here is not a proper, decorous social sympathy but idolatry.
In one sense the argument is simply about terms. Scruton is implying that a single term-music-cannot be used to describe two quite different aural experiences: listening to classical music or rock. But is Scruton right about what Nirvana listeners are doing when they listen? He has no hesitation in imposing his way of listening to rock music onto the audience. My argument is that the musical elements involved are simply different. The melodies, harmonies and rhythms of rock depend on a different organisation of the acoustic experience. There is still an aesthetic response, still a sense of artistic idealisation-but it involves a structure of sound qualities, a hierarchy of beats, an account of musical voice (and therefore tone and harmony) which cannot be scored. But although the musical values are different, the aesthetic values are not. Rock and other popular kinds of music can also succeed (and fail) to give us access to an idealised account of social order and the human heart.
My disagreement with Scruton is as much as anything a matter of politics. The Aesthetics of Music is, as one would expect, a political book, an eloquent essay about why music matters to a particular vision of society. It is not so much that Scruton's conservatism determines his account of music but rather (and more interestingly) that Scruton's love and understanding of music, and the sense of order, fellow feeling and tradition that he takes from it, define his conservatism.
The Aesthetics of Music does not deal with the politics of music, but it does show why anyone engaged in such politics-Chris Smith, the culture minister, or Nick Kenyon at the BBC, say-should be concerned with aesthetics. If, as Scruton suggests, it is in music that we experience most clearly what human reason and society should be, then arguments about the future of the Royal Opera House or Radio 3 are more important than they seem. It is the lack of aesthetic justifications for subsidising the Royal Opera or making Radio 3 more popular which therefore leads me to conclude that state-supported high culture is now doomed-neither the government nor the BBC seems to have any clear argument as to why culture matters. Both are, instead, drifting in the direction of populism. For the BBC, this means programming driven by audience research: more and more sophisticated measures of what people want; less and less interest in the challenge to change peoples expectations.
In Scruton's account, classical music expresses the heritage of a certain kind of courtesy, reason and order. Music (like fox hunting) offers the experience in itself of a measured liberalism. For my part, I will go on listening to dance music, to drum and bass, to Roni Size and Reprazent-not because such fragmented and beat-driven music is sentimental and banal, but because it is not. When such music works, it is still pursuing the aesthetic aim of articulating the human condition.
The Aesthetics of Music
Roger Scruton
Oxford University Press 1997, ?35
