Good Music

What It Is and Who Gets to Decide

John J. Sheinbaum

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780226593418
• Topic: Mezzi di comunicazione e arti performative
• Subtopic: Musica

Over the past two centuries Western culture has largely valorized a particular kind of "good" music—highly serious, wondrously deep, stylistically authentic, heroically created, and strikingly original—and, at the same time, has marginalized music that does not live up to those ideals.In Good Music, John J. Sheinbaum explores these traditional models for valuing music. By engaging examples such as Handel oratorios, Beethoven and Mahler symphonies, jazz improvisations, Bruce Springsteen, and prog rock, he argues that metaphors of perfection do justice to neither the perceived strengths nor the assumed weaknesses of the music in question. Instead, he proposes an alternative model of appreciation where abstract notions of virtue need not dictate our understanding. Good music can, with pride, be playful rather than serious, diverse rather than unified, engaging to both body and mind, in dialogue with manifold styles and genres, and collaborative to the core. We can widen the scope of what music we value and reconsider the conventional rituals surrounding it, while retaining the joys of making music, listening closely, and caring passionately.

1

Serious:

The Cultural Work of Classical Music and the Trap of Musical Sound

Writing across different decades and social contexts, a number of noteworthy authors have promulgated the importance of classical music along similar lines:

• • Classical music works in ways that don’t exist in “lower” types of music.
• • Only classical music can lead to rich aesthetic experiences deeply connected to its culture.
• • Popular music is inherently antagonistic to deep thinking.

The broad conclusions may seem intuitively right, especially to “serious” music lovers. These arguments attempt a particular sort of logical leap, however. Although each writer asserts that such judgments are grounded in objective musical structures, the overall verdicts, ironically, are more directly related to the sensuous surface of the music. In a clear manifestation of the psychological phenomenon known as “confirmation bias,” the outward style of a piece of music leads each author to look for—and inevitably find—the characteristics already assumed to be present, rather than to seek disconfirming evidence that might inform a more nuanced understanding. Indeed, though these perspectives seem at first to draw on and further the power and prestige of the great tradition, the intensity of the arguments implies, instead, the sense of an always-looming danger posed by popular music to these seeming cultural monuments and their musical value.

The general outlines of the issue can be seen in one of the most picked-over diatribes on music published in the previous generation: the philosopher Allan Bloom’s short chapter on the subject in his 1987 best-selling The Closing of the American Mind. His references have become dated fast. No one seems much threatened by Mick Jagger and Michael Jackson anymore; music can barely be found on MTV; the Walkman has been replaced by iPhones and other digital devices. But the scope of the argument is still familiar: as a cultural product, music matters a lot to young people, so it’s worth looking at closely if we want to understand the general drift of society. And what we find there is frightening indeed, Bloom asserts. People have long complained about the current generation’s music, but today’s situation is particularly troubling. We’re on the verge of turning our backs on the very idea of a democratic society because the emerging generation is closed off from the free exchange of ideas, their heads instead filled with the detritus of popular culture.

It doesn’t take much to get the idea of Bloom’s values concerning music. Classical music is worthy because it engages the intellect, while popular music—which for Bloom, writing in the 1980s, means rock music—merely engages the emotions. There is no possibility of plurality here, that music might work in a multiplicity of ways. It’s a black-and-white proposition, a zero-sum game. Bloom writes that rock music “has risen to its current heights in the education of the young on the ashes of classical music, and in an atmosphere in which there is no intellectual resistance to attempts to tap the rawest passions.”1

This binary opposition thus prizes the “mind” over the “body.” Just a few sentences later, we’re told in no uncertain terms that “rock music has one appeal only, a barbaric appeal, to sexual desire—not love, not eros, but sexual desire undeveloped and untutored.” And it’s seemingly easy for Bloom to squash the possibility of counterexamples as well. If we want to respond “well, wait a minute; there are definitely pieces of classical music that speak to untrained listeners, and to fans of rock music,” Bloom comes back with this: “Young people know that rock has the beat of sexual intercourse. That is why Ravel’s Bolero is the one piece of classical music that is commonly known and liked by them.” Music of repetition, groove, evolving texture, and rhythmic interest are seen as dangerous because they supposedly engage the body at the expense of the mind. For Bloom, “nothing noble, sublime, profound, delicate, tasteful or even decent can find a place in such tableaux. There is room only for the intense, changing, crude and immediate.”2

If we can weed out body-centric popular music, and all the other examples that might remind us of popular music, we will have chipped away enough to be left with the shining “great tradition.” But if we allow ourselves to accept, to be seduced by, those other musics, we will be left intellectually and even physically handicapped. Bloom writes that, “as long as they have the Walkman on, they cannot hear what the great tradition has to say. And, after its prolonged use, when they take it off, they find they are deaf.”3

Notwithstanding the intense debate provoked by Bloom when The Closing of the American Mind was new, his polemic regarding music is something of a straw man argument. As one might imagine, students don’t find that listening to hip-hop is stopping them from assimilating the principles of physics, or political science, or their music homework. And more importantly, students listen to “their” music with as much seriousness—and as worthy of seriousness—as anything a traditional syllabus might throw at them. They can hear musical styles and structures, posit relationships between music and culture, hear evolutionary and revolutionary changes over time, and all the rest. As Rose Rosengard Subotnik writes in a carefully argued response to Bloom, “The idea behind this attitude is that by concentrating on the abstract logic of structural relations in music, listeners learn to guard against rejecting a composition on grounds of brute prejudice. . . . [Yet] the ideal of structural listening has encouraged us to do precisely what it set out to prevent: to reject whole repertoires, not on any persuasive abstract grounds of reason but on the clearly arbitrary ground that we don’t find their particular styles congenial.”4 In this chapter, I argue that popular music often indeed can perform the sorts of cultural work thought to be limited to classical music, and classical music can be approached in compelling ways from perspectives usually applied to popular genres.

The Music That Is Supposed to Matter

Potentially more credible arguments tend to work in the same way as Bloom’s thinking, toward essentially the same assertion for classical over popular music. Lawrence Kramer’s 2007 Why Classical Music Still Matters is a case in point.5 It’s valuable to argue that classical music is worth listening to, of course, and there’s nothing wrong with arguing that classical music perhaps works somewhat differently than most other sorts of music and that the differences are worth contemplating and assimilating. The shadow side of the argument, however, takes a turn toward asserting that what classical music does is better than what other musics do.

Kramer is a strong advocate not only because he’s an excellent writer but also because he goes well beyond a Bloom-like declaration that the mind is better than the body. He digs deep into how classical music works on us, and how the music interacts with the cultures in which it operates. One of his strongest arguments, and one that resonates with many listeners who are invested in classical music, is that classical music can make difficult times better, can heal. Kramer recognizes that this power has been attributed to music of many types throughout the ages, normally through a “tranquil” or “hymnlike” style. But Kramer’s argument is that in classical music it is the structure of the music itself, rather than primarily the style, wherein its effectiveness lies. “Classical music can . . . console just as well as other kinds, but its healing power lies above all in its capacity for drama. It heals by finding a logic to deal with darkness and by giving that logic expression in the fate of melody.”6 In general, Kramer’s argument across the book is that classical music “still matters” because it has special qualities like these. Perhaps not surprisingly, Kramer’s main examples to argue for this special healing-through-dramatic-logic are “middle period” Beethoven symphonies, the Fifth and Sixth, different in overall affect but premiered together in December 1808.

Kramer claims that these are healing pieces regardless of time and place, but he does not do so with a bald assertion of universality. Instead, he ushers us through a persuasive tour of how these pieces have been heard throughout the history of their reception. This is an essential difference from Bloom’s mode of argument. Kramer does not posit the universal good of classical music but, rather, shows that these particular pieces interacted with very different historical and cultural contexts in qualitatively similar ways. These pieces have performed an important sort of cultural work in these real times and places and have served a meaningful human purpose.

In their original early nineteenth-century Austrian context, for example, the symphonies were heard against the backdrop of “landmark” military defeats at the hands of Napoleon. Both symphonies seem to speak directly to the need, in such “times of crisis,” for music that can convince listeners of their own capacity to rise above adversity, and thus each work ends not with defeat but with “triumphant conclusions.” The pieces are not merely happy, not simple escapes, but instead, as Kramer argues, “both speak of a severe disruption, a sublime shock, that must be overcome.”7 In the Fifth Symphony, probably the best-known piece in all classical music, the home key of the first movement is C minor, and tradition dictated that a work should end in the key in which it began. But the anger and darkness of the first movement gives way to the luminous C major of the finale, turning what was supposed to be a balanced structure into a forward-looking narrative, a goal-oriented, teleological, soaring conclusion.

The dramatic quotient here is one of the most notable in any music, even in Beethoven. Normally, the four movements of a symphony were generically distinct, a fast movement in sonata form followed by a slow movement, a dance-based movement, and then a fast finale. But here the space between the third and fourth movements is not the traditional silence but, rather, a composed-out transition between the C minor of the third movement and the C major of the fourth. Seemingly every aspect of the music—melodic motifs coalescing; instrumentation, texture, and volume all increasing; a prolonged pedal on the dominant pointing the way toward, but for a long while withholding, resolution—leads to the overwhelming release at the downbeat of the finale’s beginning, that blazing, brass-led C-major fanfare. These run-on movements, taking us seemingly from darkness to light, from mystery and despair to victory, are surely, as Kramer writes, “one of the nineteenth century’s most powerful essays in cultural mythmaking.”8

What’s essential, though, is not only that this goal state is a dramatically satisfying triumphant ending but that such an ending feels “true, even inevitable” because the conclusion is “logical” and “organic,” given what has come so far.9 Thus the finale’s C-major key, radical as it was for being different than the home key of the work, also seems prepared and, in retrospect, where the symphony had to go. All the previous movements move, in one way or the other, from their various keys to C major, and none of them do so in particularly traditional fashion. All the way through the key of C major is marked as different, but consistently present, making the eventual reveal of C major as the finale’s home key feel like a magical, but deserved, apotheosis.

The Sixth Symphony, the Pastoral, sounds generally quite different with its repeated intimations of nature but nonetheless constructs a similar trajectory. The four-movement model of the traditional symphony is still largely there, but between the scherzo and the finale is, again, a composed-out transition that makes the movements run on with one another. And this one, a storm that unleashes imitations of nature in its full fury, rises to the level of its own numbered movement. Thus this work also alters convention for dramatic purposes, giving us a five-movement work, a storm that both intrudes on the expected structure and once again leads to a finale that fixes the problem, titled by Beethoven himself “calm feelings after the storm.” This serene finale, then, is in many ways the inverse to the Fifth’s over-the-top triumph, but is no less satisfying for its pastoral nature. When the finale begins with a stylized herder’s song, “real country music,” as Kramer puts it, and set in F major, the traditional key of the pastoral, this was a true healing moment, for the music “gave assurance that an age-old, elemental humanity could still be found, in harmony with nature, at the heart of modern Europe.”10

And again, like the crisis of the Fifth, the Sixth’s interrupting storm and final resolution is an “organic intrusion,” sublime and satisfying specifically because it overcomes adversity while, at a deeper level, demonstrating that such a victory was logical and inevitable all along. There are fears and shocks and tragedies in the world, the music seems to be saying, but triumphing over such hardships is also an inherent part of our world. The exciting and frightening storm takes over from the key of F at the conclusion of the third movement, and, after its jarring journey, brings us to a finale in that same key of F. We are returned safely, and indeed there is no other place to which we could have arrived. The buildup to the storm’s explosion “is tense, inexorable,” and moves up chromatically, and as would befit storm music in the early nineteenth century, the mode is clearly minor. But, most notably, the storm is still centered around F, if F minor; “the key also contains the principle of its own undoing, which will take the gloom with it.” The storm interrupts what should have been the smooth silence between third movement and finale, but simultaneously continues “the very harmonic process it disrupts. The storm that is so disruptive is actually very lawful.”11

Thus the Pastoral Symphony, though structurally quite similar to the triumphant Fifth, exhibits a different kind of healing power: an evocation of a peaceful, perfect, natural past, a “type of nostalgia” that can help us deal with “the forces of modernity and urban life” thought “to threaten the continuities of traditional culture.”12 The storms will inevitably come, the threats to and from nature, but just as inevitably will come the rebirth, the green grass, the blue sky, once again.

Kramer does a masterful job suggesting how the Sixth Symphony has done this sort of cultural work throughout its history. In 1848 London, for example, against the background of political and military seismic shifts across the Continent marking “the lost innocence of prerevolutionary Europe,” an exhibit commemorated an important natural disaster—the 1755 Lisbon earthquake—and, notably, a passage from the Pastoral Symphony was used by a mechanical organ to depict “the innocent calm of the city before the quake.” Or in 1940 America, when an “isolationist mood” predominated in the hopes that the country would be able to avoid joining the Second World War, and a long sequence using the Pastoral was featured in the Walt Disney film Fantasia. Or the early 1970s, where in the “eco-catastrophe” sci-fi movie Soylent Green people volunteer to be euthanized to find permanent relief from “a world where nature is extinct,” but first get to enjoy a meal of real food and a film of nature imagery, all while the sounds of the Pastoral fill the room.13 Or even a ...