Music and Ethics

Marcel Cobussen, Nanette Nielsen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317092551
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Medien & darstellende Kunst
• Subtopic: Ethnomusikologie

It seems self-evident that music plays more than just an aesthetic role in contemporary society. In addition, music's social, political, emancipatory, and economical functions have been the subject of much recent research. Given this, it is surprising that the subject of ethics has often been neglected in discussions about music. The various forms of engagement between music and ethics are more relevant than ever, and require sustained attention. Music and Ethics examines different ways in which music can 'in itself' - in a uniquely musical way - contribute to theoretical discussions about ethics as well as concrete moral behaviour. We consider music as process, and music-making as interaction. Fundamental to our understanding is music's association with engagement, including contact with music through the act of listening, music as an immanent critical process that possesses profound cultural and historical significance, and as an art form that can be world-disclosive, formative of subjectivity, and contributive to intersubjective relations. Music and Ethics does not offer a general musico-ethical theory, but explores ethics as a practical concept, and demonstrates through concrete examples that the relation between music and ethics has never been absent.

1 Listening

Marcel Cobussen

DOI: 10.4324/9781315596594-1

There will come a time when music alone will provide a way of slipping through the tight meshes of functions; leaving music as a powerful and uninfluenced reservoir of freedom must be accounted the most important task of intellectual life in the future. Music is the truly living history of humanity, of which otherwise we only have dead parts. One does not need to draw from music for it is always within us; all we have to do is listen simply, otherwise we would learn in vain.

Elias Canetti, The Human Province, p. 17.

The power of music

Did the events of 11 September 2001 come as a gift from the gods for (Western) discourse on music? Did Al-Qaeda bring about a certain transition in the way we approach music, a shifting towards an increasing interest in the topic of ethicality in relation to music, manifested in an increased number of publications on this topic? Did these terrorist attacks and their far-reaching consequences also knock cracks in the formalist bastion, still powerful in some musicological landscapes? Valery Gergiev’s scornful reply, ‘I am interested in Prokofiev, not in Stalin’, when asked whether Prokofiev’s late works somehow reflected the political context in which they were composed, seems an echo from an ancient world where music was still considered immune to ethic-political influences. Granted, certain discourses surrounding music have stressed the relationship between music on the one hand and politics, morality and social behaviour on the other, years before Al-Qaeda attacked the icons of Western capitalist society. And, granted, thinking about the relationship between music and morality goes as far back as Pythagoras and Plato, and thus belongs to the core of Western cultural history. Nevertheless, questions related to the role music plays, can play, or should play in the formation of political, moral and/or ethical standpoints seemed to become all the more urgent (again) after Osama Bin Laden & Co. shocked the (Western) world. Even music could no longer shut itself up in its ivory tower, as if far removed from day-to-day worries.

Authoritative in this transition towards rethinking the connection between music and moral politics was an admonishing essay by Richard Taruskin in The New York Times in December 2001.¹ The immediate cause of this publication was a cancelled performance of three choruses from John Adam’s 1991 opera The Death of Klinghoffer by the management of the Boston Symphony Orchestra (BSO), two months after the terrorist attacks. The opera dramatizes the hijacking of the passenger liner Achille Lauro in 1985 by four members of the Palestine Liberation Front. During the incident, the hijackers executed a disabled American Jewish tourist, Leon Klinghoffer, and tossed his body from its wheelchair into the sea. BSO managing director Mark Volpe explained that, given the proximity of the events of 11 September, they decided ‘to err on the side of being sensitive’ in order to spare their listeners.

The BSO’s decision elicited a variety of responses. Music critic David Wiegrand wrote in the San Francisco Chronicle that people should not be spared reminders of recent personal and collective pain when they attend a concert. Others pointed out that perhaps the opera will encourage its audience to think about the situation in the world by revealing certain motives for terrorist actions – for example, the human despair that ultimately leaves no alternative but to take up arms. Maybe this music can perform the function of catharsis, confronting and assuaging the national pain by arousing it once more.

In his article Taruskin takes an opposite view. He acknowledges that the regulation of music is a basic feature of totalitarian politics. Censorship, he writes, is always deplorable. But to take music seriously, to recognize its potential, is (also) to recognize its uncanny power on, for example (or especially), morals and beliefs. Here, Taruskin takes up a standpoint that has already been formulated in more or less the same way by Plato. Music is not merely a source of harmless entertainment and diversion, Plato argues; it has exceptional power to move and stir the emotions, thereby disrupting the harmonious balance of the virtuous soul, undermining self-control, and even posing a dangerous risk to national security. Music threatens to cause people to believe that sensual and hedonic pleasures are higher values than rational or moral ones. Therefore, the persuasiveness of music must be controlled at any cost.² Taruskin does not argue in favour of the Taliban who, for reasons related to those of Plato, banned music during their rule of Afghanistan from 1995 until 2001, although he admits that, unlike most Westerners, they at least take its powers seriously.³ Instead, he calls for self-control or the exercise of forbearance with regard to the performance of Adams’ opera. Cancelling the performance attests to empathy and is therefore ethically legitimizable. Implicitly, he accuses Adams of failing to grasp the ethical character of his medium. ‘Not to be able to distinguish the noble from the deplorable is morally obtuse.’ With that, Taruskin ends his article.

Taruskin’s contribution serves to raise several questions directly related to the main concern of this book: how to think about the relationship between music and ethics. Or more specifically, does something like musical ethics exist? In this context, three considerations might cautiously be proposed. First, Lawrence Kramer correctly notices that ‘the ethical failings of which [The Death of Klinghoffer] stands accused may take musical form, but the basis of their meaning is determined by the narrative’.⁴ Although Taruskin also attacks Adams’ musical choices – he detects a strong resemblance between the music accompanying Jesus’ words in Bach’s Matthäus Passion and the ‘numinous, timeless tones [that] accompany virtually all the utterances of the choral Palestinians or the terrorists’, something he considers tasteless as it might be heard as an advocacy by Adams of terrorism – his concerns are mainly based on the plot. In that sense, the ethics involved are not a specifically musical ethics. So, instead of following Taruskin’s line of thought, the question should be raised as to if and how an ethics can be located in music, in the sounds of music, independent of the text.

Second, the decision taken by the BSO management might have been prompted by personal considerations. Kramer writes that the final decision was influenced by the fact that the husband of a member of the choir had been aboard the plane that was flown into the World Trade Centre’s north tower.⁵ This makes relevant the question of when and how personal considerations might sway the political and/ or religious issuing of rules, under the guise of educating the people, for example.

Third, can Taruskin admit a case of subjective autonomy or special circumstances and thereby accept that The Death of Klinghoffer is performed after all? Or does Taruskin ultimately postulate some general ethical principles, a universal idea of ethics, and is there an ideal that should be enforced, a conviction that cannot be further legitimated?

However, before addressing these specific issues, we take a step back in order to address that enormous and unanswerable question: what are we in fact talking about when we discuss ethics? What is ethics?

Ethics as hospitality

By and large, acting ethically means doing the good thing, doing the right thing. But right according to what? What is ‘the Good’? These are not easy questions to answer, as the search for a universal and eternal Good seems to have been unsuccessful. There is no generally acknowledged agreement on what the Good is. For French philosopher Alain Badiou, ‘the unrestrained pursuit of self-interest, the disappearance or extreme fragility of emancipatory politics, the multiplication of “ethnic” conflicts, and the universality of unbridled competition’ are all clear indications that there are no existing, self-evident principles capable of cementing a global ethical consensus.⁶ Or, to put it another way, what is good in certain situations can become evil in others: good and evil change places according to the circumstances. This means that we cannot know in advance what is good and what is bad. There is no natural definition possible, no rule, no law, no formal imperative. It always comes down to a particular state of affairs, to singularity. So, for Badiou, there can be no ethics in general, but only an ethic relative to a specific situation.

With this point of departure, Badiou sides with a ‘movement’ in philosophy that contests the idea of a universal ethics based on the moral decisions of an autonomous and rational individual.⁷ Basically, the criticism is directed against the (Socratic) assumption that ethical behaviour can and should be based on knowledge and understanding: virtue is knowledge, and to know oneself leads to morally acceptable behaviour. Moral knowledge is reachable through debate and discussion and, even more auspiciously, through discovery of one’s real self. But throughout Western history, philosophers have also argued against this founding of ethics upon rationality. Already in the mid-eighteenth century, David Hume states, in A Treatise of Human Nature, that we cannot use logic or reason to identify, justify or verify moral beliefs. We cannot extrapolate moral knowledge from empirical facts.⁸ Instead, moral beliefs are psychological rather than logical or empirical in nature.

But where Hume, like most other philosophers, still assumes that one can somehow be responsible for one’s ethical behaviour (the premise of the free will), Sigmund Freud discards the idea that we always have control of our (ethical) choices. Freud observes that the (ethical) behaviour of an individual is based on two opposite forces: the censoring and controlling forces of civilization, on the one hand, and the instinctual and unconscious desires of the individual, on the other. The latter obstruct a total control of one’s behaviour and therefore subvert the ability to be completely responsible for it. Freud’s thesis is adapted by his disciple Jacques Lacan, who regards the ‘self’ as a linguistic category. Since language exists as a structure before the human subject enters into it, the ‘self’ becomes a (linguistic) fiction, and morality, based on rational choices by an autonomous individual, becomes untenable. For other, understandable reasons, a consideration of the effects of World War II led to more or less the same conclusion, causing a deep ethical disillusionment: rational progress appeared as absolutely no guarantee for ethical development. What that war demonstrated was the extremely important role of reason in planning and creating inconceivable human suffering. This gave rise to the devaluation of faith in an ethics based on transcendent reason, rationality and universal truth.

In Postmodern Ethics, Polish-born sociologist Zygmunt Bauman connects this (superseded) faith to modernism.⁹ Modernism responds to moral challenges with ‘coercive normative regulation in political practice, and the philosophical search for absolutes, universals, and foundations in theory’, Bauman claims.¹⁰ Modernistic moral thought and practice is furthermore animated by the belief in the possibility of a non-ambivalent, non-aporetic ethical code; it admits of no contradictions apart from conflicts amenable to and awaiting resolution. But the fate of modern societies is precisely this aporetic situation in which the autonomy of rational individuals clashes and struggles with the heteronomy of rational management, with no real prospect of lasting peace.¹¹ Bauman is sceptical of the political agenda of modernism, its dream of progress, reason and unambiguity with regard to ethical behaviour. Precisely because modern societies tend to believe in the objectivity and universality of their own moral utopias, they become authoritative and absolutistic. Universalism and uniformization disclaim the social multiformity as well as the particularity of the individual members of a society. They are a cultural crusade against local customs and a disavowal of the temporal and territorially bound. While appealing to universal rights, modern nation-states homogenize their citizens, constructing an unambiguous identity, a ‘self’, or an inside, while simultaneously creating a clear outside, an ‘other(ness)’, thereby violating the selfsame principle of universalism.¹² According to Bauman, the idea of so-called universal and eternal moral values is, in fact, no more than an instrument of the dominant (Western) classes to relieve the individual of his responsibilities.

Bauman advocates the end of objective, translocal moral truths. It is not only the historical perspective of globalization that leads to his disbelief in universal moral values; the moral identity of an individual is plural and fragmented, as there are many networks which appeal, simultaneously and contradictorily, to his loyalty. The ethics that Bauman is supporting is not universalizable. It is furthermore non-rational, understood as preceding the consideration of purpose and the calculation of gains and losses. Therefore, ethical behaviour is not a means of self-preservation and not reciprocal: it is not a gift that is expected to be repaid. (Following Levinas, Bauman calls an ethical relationship ‘non-symmetrical’.) In this sense, it is without motives (for example, charity). Nor is it contractual, since in a c...