All A Matter of Taste

There is an old Latin saying that goes “de gustibus non est disputandum”. Its meaning would be rendered in English by “there is no arguing about taste.” It is not a descriptive statement about the way people behave. If it were it would be palpable nonsense. People argue about taste all the time:

“You put ketchup on your toast?”
“How can you stand listening to that kind of music?”
”She has horrible taste in men!”

You hear variations of these questions and statements every day. Taste is one of the things people are most likely to disagree about and argue over.

The purpose of the Latin saying, is not to deny this reality but to declare that arguments of this nature are pointless. Taste is personal and subjective. People like what they like and dislike what they dislike and you are not going to argue them into changing their likes and dislikes.

The saying and the perspective on taste which it expresses have been around for quite some time. We do not know who coined the Latin expression although it is usually believed to date back to the late Middle Ages.

Is the saying true?

It is more important today than ever before that we ask that question. For the idea that everything in the realm of taste lies beyond the realm of that which can be legitimately judged and criticized by others has come to be a very powerful idea. As that notion has become more widely accepted, more and more elements of our everyday existence, particularly those which are considered to belong to “culture”, have been relegated to the realm of taste.

The first step in determining whether or not it is in fact true that taste is entirely subjective and not a matter for legitimate criticism is to distinguish between the different ways in which we speak of taste. We will consider three basic senses to the word taste, the first two of which are closely related to each other and could be spoken of as “literal” taste, the third of which is a metaphorical extension of the meaning of the second.

In the first and most basic sense we use the word taste to refer to a physical sense in which information is collected by the body and carried to the brain. This is the taste which is akin to sight, hearing, smell and touch. Located in the tongue it tells the brain whether food is sweet or salty, spicy or bland, sour or bitter.

After this information passes from the tongue to the brain, our mind processes it and passes judgement on whether or not we like the food. As we experience different flavours, patterns form in how we evaluate them. We develop preferences for foods which taste a certain way and aversions to others. These patterns of preferences we also refer to as tastes.

It is not only the information that we receive from our taste buds that we evaluate and form likes and dislikes over. We do the same with information we receive from our eyes and ears. We look to the east as the sun is setting, see the various shades of red, yellow, and orange that form in the sky, and liking what we see, we call it beautiful. Conversely, we walk along the sidewalk and all of a sudden a car comes racing down the street at highway speeds, swerves out of control and hits a hydro pole, and the driver is propelled through the windshield. The sight of his mangled, bloody, carcass repels us, and we use words like ugly, gruesome, and hideous to describe it. We like the sound of the birds singing in the tree outside our window. We dislike the sound of fingernails drawn across a chalkboard.

While we generally don’t think of our reaction to those types of sights and sounds as tastes we do consider our evaluation of sights and sounds which are the products of human creativity to be tastes. We look at Raphael’s Sistine Madonna, the Reims Cathedral and the Venus de Milo and, taken away by their beauty, we pronounce them to be among the greatest achievements of man’s creativity in the history of the world. Or we listen to J. S. Bach’s Cello Suite No. 1, Gustav Mahler’s Symphony No. 2 “Resurrection”, W. A. Mozart’s Mass No. 17 in C-Minor, “Die Himmel erzählen die Ehre Gottes” from Joseph Haydn’s The Creation, and Franz Schubert’s Ave Maria and make a similar evaluation of the acoustical beauty of these masterpieces.

Then again we might look at Piero Manzoni’s Merda d’Artista and be sickened, be angered by the emptiness of the void which is John Cage’s 4’33", or be absolutely appalled at the way self-indulgent, self-destructive hedonism is celebrated in lyrics sung to computer-generated formulaic tunes in the latest hits by Katy Perry, Lady Gaga or Ke$ha.

All of these are tastes.

This final, extended sense of the word taste is quite broad and covers more than just the way we think about visual art and music. It also includes our likes and dislikes when it comes to literature and theatre, and more recently television and the movies.

It is important that we recognize that these different meanings of the word taste are related to each other. Why do we describe our likes and dislikes with regards to movies, music, and books as “tastes”? We do so because they are judgements which are of a similar nature to those we form about our food. Some people develop a preference for sweet flavours over salty ones, others develop the opposite preference. Similarly some people prefer romantic comedies over spy thrillers while it is the other way around for others. The concept of taste in matters of culture is derived from the concept of taste with regards to food.

What does this tell us about the question of the subjectivity of taste?

Note that while our tastes in food are undoubtedly subjective they are based upon an objective element. When one person says “I like roast chicken with mashed potatoes” and another person responds with “I prefer fried chicken and potato salad” both statements are subjective judgements. When, however, someone says “honey is sweet” and another person says “olives are salty” they are making statements which are objective.

Both sets of statements express something about taste. What makes the one set objective and the other subjective?

An objective statement attributes a quality to something which can be verified or falsified by other people. “Sugar is sweet” says something about sugar which we can all experience for ourselves by tasting it. Everybody experiences the taste of sugar as sweet unless there is something wrong with their taste buds.

A subjective statement, on the other hand, is a statement about how you experience something which other people cannot enter into, although they might have their own similar experiences. When you say “I like Brussels sprouts” no other person can test the truth of the statement because while someone else might eat Brussels sprouts to determine whether or not he likes them, he cannot enter into your experience of Brussels sprouts to determine whether or not you like them. Now you might grimace while eating Brussels sprouts giving us cause to doubt and question the veracity of what you say. In that case, however, we doubt because your testimony contradicts itself. Your facial expressions and your words are saying two different things. Your actual experience of Brussels sprouts we cannot directly evaluate – only your testimony as to that experience.

The cause of objective tastes – the salty taste of potato chips or the sweet taste in ice cream – is found in the foods themselves, which is why if our senses of taste are all functioning normally, we agree as to what those tastes are. The causes of subjective tastes – whether we like or dislike bologna sandwiches or whether we like them more or less than we like peanut butter sandwiches – are found within us. This is why taste in the sense of our hierarchy of likes and dislikes differs from person to person. People are different and their differences affect and are reflected in what they like and dislike.

Now if you like hot dogs loaded with sauerkraut, pickles, and hot peppers you are going to think other people should like them too. That is the very nature of liking something. When you say “I like spaghetti and meatballs” what you are saying is you have judged the experience of eating spaghetti and meatballs to be an agreeable experience. Ordinarily, when people find an experience to be agreeable they wish others to share it as well, and when they find an experience to be disagreeable they wish others to avoid it. It is true that we often hear people say “Ew, this is disgusting, here try it” but when people say this they are looking for confirmation of their own evaluation and expect the other person to agree with them.

There is nothing wrong with thinking that what you like other people ought to like as well and that what you dislike should be disliked by others. If we did not think this way, if our lists of what we like and dislike were completely separated from our judgements of what other people ought to like and dislike, we would be completely isolated from others. Communication and sharing, which are fundamental elements of the cooperation between human beings necessary for us to live together in communities and societies, would be virtually impossible if we did not have an expectation that other people would like the same things we like.

There are different ways in which we can draw expectations from our own tastes as to how other people will like or dislike certain things. Lets say that you really like banana milkshakes. From this you can conclude that other people will like them as well. You might, however, draw the conclusion that everybody will like them. The first conclusion is entirely reasonable and appropriate. The second conclusion is less justifiable because it cannot be drawn without losing sight of the fact that people differ from each other.

There is also the possibility of a third conclusion. The third conclusion is that because you like banana milkshakes other people ought to like them as well. If you draw this conclusion you do not make the same mistake as someone who would draw the second conclusion. You recognize that people are different and that not all people will like the same things. Your conclusion, however, is radically different from the first two conclusions because it is a judgement about what other people ought to like rather than whether or not they will like it.

If you draw the first and most reasonable conclusion you might be inspired to act upon it in a number of ways. You might go around telling your family and friends how good banana milkshakes are because you do not wish them to miss out on something you have enjoyed and which they might potentially enjoy as well. Or you might open a banana milkshake shop in the hopes of turning your conviction that others will also like what you enjoy yourself into a profitable venture. There is nothing wrong with behaving in either of these ways.

If you draw the third conclusion, however, you might decide to try and make people like what you think they ought to like. You would not succeed. The most you could accomplish by, for example, telling people that they must like banana milkshakes or you will club them over the head, is getting them to all say they like banana milkshakes when in your presence. That does not mean that they will actually like them and more likely than not your acting in this way will in fact turn people off of banana milkshakes.

It is unlikely that you would go to the extreme of using coercive force to try and make people like banana milkshakes. People form likes and dislikes, however, about a wide spectrum of different things and when their likes and dislikes clash with another person’s there is potential for disagreement to escalate into violence. It is for this reason that we encourage the quality of civility among people. Part of that quality, involves reflecting upon the fact that no two persons are exactly alike and that if members of a community are going to live together in peace, harmony, and cooperation they will have to allow each other to differ from themselves. Out of this, the idea enshrined in the Latin expression we have been considering, arose.

Just as, however, the reasonable expectation that others will like what I like can be taken to the unhealthy extreme of “others must like what I like”, so we can take the idea that taste is subjective too far. We can say that taste is entirely subjective and does not contain an objective element. We can say that the concepts of “should” or “ought” ought never to be applied to taste. In both cases we have taken the subjectivity of taste too far.

If taste were entirely subjective then the statement “vanilla ice cream may be sweet to you but to me it salty and spicy” would be a valid statement instead of blithering nonsense. “I like vanilla ice cream” is a subjective statement. “Vanilla ice cream is sweet” is not.

Now someone might say “yes, that is true of taste concerning food, but taste concerning art, literature, or music is different”.

That, however, is manifestly not true.

There are statements about our artistic and cultural tastes which are clearly subjective. One person might say “I like Paolo Uccello’s triptych on The Battle of San Romano” to which another person might respond “Well, I prefer Pablo Picasso’s Guernica”. Or someone might express admiration for Titian’s Venus of Urbino to another person who replies by stating his preference for Marcel Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase No. 2. I like Caravaggio’s The Card Sharps. You, on the other hand, might like C. M. Coolidge’s Dogs Playing Poker series. These are all subjective statements because no matter who is making them, or which painting is preferred, they are all “I like” statements which are statements about the person doing the liking and not about the painting which is liked.

Yet these are obviously not the only kinds of statements which can be made about art. We can also objectively discuss the works of art themselves. Pages upon pages have been written about each of the paintings mentioned above which do just that. Nor, are the two kinds of statements unconnected with each other. If I say “I like strawberries” I am saying something about myself and if I say “strawberries are sweet” I am saying something about strawberries, but what I say about myself is partially derived from what I say about the strawberries, because the sweetness of the strawberries is one reason why I like them. Similarly, when I praise the religious theme, the use of colour, and the craftsmanship in the Ghent altarpiece painted by Hubert and Jan van Eyck these form part of the reason why I like the piece.

Just as it is not true that there is no objective element to artistic and cultural taste neither is it the case that we should never speak of tastes in terms of “ought” or “should”. While taste should not be enforced with coercion it is proper for us to speak of things we ought to like and things we ought to dislike. Or perhaps it would be better to say that it is better for us to like certain things than to like other things.

Consider our tastes in food. One person prefers meals which are home-cooked and nutritionally balanced. Another person prefers to eat in the kind of restaurant where you sit down and wait while your meal is cooked and a server brings it to you. A third person gets most of his meals from burger joints, pizza parlours, fried chicken places and other fast food restaurants. Finally, a fourth person seems to survive entirely on a diet of potato chips, soda pop, and chocolate bars.

Can we say that each of these preferences is equal to the others and that none of them is a better taste than any of the others?

Of course not. The first person’s taste is the best and the second person’s taste is second best. While the third person’s taste is bad the fourth person’s is even worse.

What is the basis of this judgement?

A number of factors contribute to it. The quality of the food and the method of preparation is one factor. Fast food and junk food are mass produced to be sold cheaply in large quantities. Quality is always sacrificed when things are produced in this manner. The nutritional value and effects upon health are other factors. The flavour of the food is also a factor. While some might argue that this is part of the subjective element of taste the flavour of a home cooked meal tends to be far superior to that of junk food which relies upon sugar, salt, and various chemicals to produce its very limited range of flavours.

This does not mean that we should only ever eat home cooked meals or that we should pass a law saying that people must only ever eat home cooked meals. It means that the person who shows a persistent preference for home cooking has good taste while the person who shows a persistent preference for junk food has bad taste.

The same thing is true of cultural tastes. There is good taste and there is bad taste. Or, more accurately, there are various degrees of better and worse tastes.

What is it we are judging to be good or bad, or better or worse, when we classify tastes in this way?

It is our ability to properly distinguish between the good and the bad, or between the better and the worse. Our discernment in other words. It can also be the extent to which our personal likes and dislikes reflect our discernment.

Good taste in food is the ability to distinguish between food which is nutritious, delicious, fresh, and well prepared and food which is unhealthy, mass produced, and quickly prepared and to identify the former as being better than the latter. It is also a preference for the former over the latter. Bad taste in food can refer either to a lack of discernment about which foods are better than others or a pattern of preferring the worse foods over the better.

Good taste in culture is both the ability to rightly distinguish between what is good and bad in culture and a preference for the good over the bad.

Can good and bad, or better and worse, be distinguished in literature, music, and art?

Of course they can. Natural talent is not equally distributed among artists. Some artists are tremendously talented others have only a little talent. All other considerations being equal, the works of artists with more talent will be superior to the works of artists with less talent. But other considerations are not equal. Training also contributes to the quality of art. Some artists are apprenticed, others are trained in schools, and others are self-taught. These things make a difference. So does the amount of effort an artist puts into his work. One artist may painstakingly labour over every detail of his work while another slaps his paint onto the canvas with only a minimal attention to detail. All of these factors together contribute to the quality of art.

These are not the only criteria by which we can distinguish the good and the bad in culture. Just as some foods promote good health while others tend to be unhealthy so culture can have a good or a bad effect on us. Some literature, music, and art encourages us to worship our Creator and be thankful for His many blessings, inspires feelings of piety towards God, our family, and our country, and promotes virtuous behavior. Other literature, music, and art does the exact opposite of all of this.

Culture can be good in one sense and bad in the other. Literature and music can have an entirely wholesome message yet be uninspired, dull, and boring. Or it can be original and exciting and at the same time subversive and evil.

Culture can also be good in both senses. The masters of the High Renaissance – Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, Raphael – possessed inspiration and genius on top of talent, and constructed their masterpieces with precise attention to details, striving for perfection. Their works – such as The Creation of Adam, The Last Supper and The Transfiguration – are spiritually and morally uplifting.

Then there is culture which is bad in both senses. Examples include Robert Mapplethorpe's pornographic photographs, Andres Serrano’s P*** Christ, and Damien Hirst’s pickled animals. These works are not aesthetically pleasing, they display neither talent nor genius, and they are spiritually and morally subversive.

There are, of course, many other distinctions which can be made between different works of music, literature, and art which are not matters of good or bad, or better or worse. This has to be kept in mind as does the fact that when we read a book, listen to a song, or look at a painting and decide “I like this” or “I don’t like this”, these decisions are about us as well as about the works of art themselves. The ability to distinguish between differences in art which can be expressed in terms of degrees of quality and differences which should not be expressed this way and to recognize the difference between an objective evaluation of art on the one hand and your subjective response to art on the other is itself an indication of good taste – the ability to distinguish and discriminate properly.

Good taste is not something we are born with but rather something we acquire. What kind of foods do children generally prefer? Cake, cookies, candy, ice cream, soda pop, potato chips, chocolate bars, hot dogs, hamburgers, and basically everything loaded with sugar or salt. What kind of foods are children most likely to squinch up their face and say “Ew, gross” over? Brussels sprouts, broccoli, and vegetables in general, especially the green ones. It is natural for children to have these preferences. There is something seriously wrong, however, with an adult whose tastes have not matured, who has not developed an appreciation for better foods than these, and who opts to make “fun” foods the staples of his diet.

Likewise, our capacity for appreciating the better elements of our culture is more limited when we are children and must grow and develop. We begin with nonsense rhymes and as we mature develop an appreciation for the sonnets of Shakespeare and Elizabeth Barrett Browning and the epics of Homer, Virgil, and Milton. The music we like as children consists of songs with fun lyrics. As we mature we learn to like songs with more serious lyrics and instrumental pieces. Our attention span is quite short when we are children but it gets longer as we grow older allowing us to learn to appreciate longer music works like Mahler’s 8th or the operas in Wagner’s Der Ring Des Nibelungen.

The way in which our tastes change, expand, and hopefully improve as we get older is a vital part of the process of maturation, of growing up. The idea that taste is entirely subjective is no friend to this process and can be a hindrance to it. If one taste is just as good as another why should we learn to restrain our impulsive desire to eat nothing but cake and ice cream and learn to like those icky vegetables? If tastes are entirely subjective who are you to say that I should move on from Sesame Street to Shakespeare? If we stop distinguishing between the good and bad, or the better and the worse, we will have no conceptual framework within which to strive to improve ourselves and our tastes.

If our tastes fail to mature – if their growth is stunted somehow – then we will fail to develop good taste. There is also the possibility that our tastes will develop but in the wrong way. We may come to develop a preference for bad things over good things. Instead of learning to love Brahms’ concertos or Elgar’s marches we might develop a love for death metal or, perish the thought, gangsta rap. We might reject King Lear and Othello in favour of slasher films or “reality” TV. Of course these two ways in which taste can become bad – failing to mature or developing in the wrong way are not entirely distinct from each other. One of the most notable characteristics of contemporary North American pop culture – the very epitome of bad taste – is its immaturity. Not only is most of it now produced with a teenage target audience in mind, even that which is ostensibly produced for adults is primarily distinguished from the rest by obscenity, gratuitous violence, and profanity – all of which scream adolescence rather than maturity.

There is one final question that we need to consider. If everything I have argued above is true, if art, literature, music and other cultural works can be objectively evaluated and a hierarchy of better, good, bad, worse identified, and if our taste itself can be judged to be good or bad on the basis of our ability to properly discern the better and the worst in culture, why do so many people think otherwise?

The answer is that we live in an era in which people have become increasingly hostile to the idea that they should be held accountable to external standards. A cult has formed around the self which identifies self expression, self-discovery, self-esteem and self-worth as all-important positive values that we need to strive for. Restraint upon the self – such as that represented by external standards – is naturally rejected by this cult. This is all the more the case when the standards are applied to something like taste which does include a strong personal and subjective element.

This exaltation of self is an unhealthy development which has caused a reasonable principle to be taken too far. We should not judge a person’s “I like X” statements in the same way that we judge his “X is better than Y” statements. The two kinds of statements are completely different and are not subject to the same standards of right and wrong. If a person cannot properly distinguish between which is better, X or Y, this can reveal itself as a pattern in that person’s “I like X” statements, however. This is where the distinction between good and bad taste comes in. It cannot and should not be rejected in favour of pure subjectivity.

Bach to Beethoven: Music and Culture, the High and the Low

The creative aspect of human nature, which according to Dorothy Sayers is the very essence of the image of God in man, expresses itself in art. While the word art immediately brings to mind physical works, like painting and sculpture, that we experience through the sense of sight there is an art that is at least as old as either of these which is audible rather than visual. That art is the art of music.

What is music?

Music is created by the deliberate arrangement of sounds, whether produced by instruments, voices, or a combination of both. That is not a definition of what music is but a description of how it is made. It is easier to describe how music is created than to define what it is. For to say “music is the deliberate arrangement of sounds” would not be correct. That definition would also apply to speech which is not ordinarily considered to be a form of music. It does not help to define speech as “the deliberate arrangement of sounds produced by the human voice” because singing is an element of music produced by the human voice and some forms of music consist of unaccompanied singing.

Can we distinguish music from other forms of arranged sound such as speech by its function?

If we understand “function” in its utilitarian sense this would be very difficult to do because music is composed for a multitude of different uses, perhaps more so than any other art. Some music is written for use in worship to glorify God. The purpose of some music is to relieve the monotony of drudge labour. Other music is written to pass down a people’s history, legends, and myths in a way that is easy to remember. Some music is written to be listened to by an audience in a concert hall. Other music is written to be danced to.

If we think of function in terms of ultimate purpose, apart from the question of use, then music, as a form of art, has the same ultimate purpose of other arts, the creation of beauty. A painter arranges colours and shades on his canvas in such a way that whether he is depicting a person or place or telling a story in picture, the resulting work is beautiful to the eye. Likewise, a musical composer, seeks to arrange sounds in a way that is beautiful to the ear.

This still does not distinguish music from all forms of speech. For beauty can be created through the arrangement of words too. This is the goal of the literary arts and especially of poetry. Perhaps it is impossible to define music and poetry separately however. They have been closely associated with each other since the days of Ancient Greece, they share common elements such as rhythm and metre which are often spoken of as “the music” of poetry, and what are lyrics, after all, other than a form of poetry?

The overlapping relationship between poetry and music suggests that music, like speech, is a means of communication, a language. Since music affects our emotions, our feelings, it is possible that the best way to define music is to say that like speech, it is a form of communication through arrangements of sound, but whereas speech is primarily directed towards human reason, music is directed towards our emotions, our feelings. A possible challenge to the accuracy of this definition may exist in the fact that some forms of music are written to inspire reflection and contemplation, both of which are actions of the rational mind. The kind of reflection that good serious music inspires, however, is not the same sort of reflection that a well-written treatise inspires. The latter speaks directly to our reason, offering us proofs of what it asserts, and inviting us to pass judgement on whether or not its thesis is sound. Contemplative music speaks to our reason indirectly. It first inspires an emotional response and then invites us to contemplate that response, its immediate source in the music itself, and its ultimate source in the meaning conveyed through the medium of the music.

Music, like other art, is an important component of culture. Culture is the shared way of life of a community, society or people group. It unites the members of these social groups, giving them a sense of a shared identity. It binds more than just the current members of a society, however. When it is passed on from generation, to generation, we call it tradition, and it serves to unite the past and future generations of a society with the present generation. It is through the passing on of culture in tradition that a society’s greatest achievement, its civilization, is transmitted.

Social cohesion within a community is usually not the first thing we think of when we think of music. We recognize that various forms of ethnic and folk music are musical expressions of the culture of particular people groups but we seldom think of the larger categories of music which are more widely listened to in these terms.

If anything we think of such music as having the opposite effect. Musical tastes divide families, communities, and societies. In any given large community in the Western world, you are likely to find fans of country, jazz, rock and pop music as well as classical music aficionados, and some poor misguided souls who think that the cacophonous noise that is called rap is a form of music. Musical tastes frequently divide members of the most basic social unit, the family – rock music in particular has an infamous reputation for creating a generation gap within families. Where music does create social unity nowadays is among the cult followings of various bands and musical icons.

Perhaps ironically, in all of this Western music does continue to express something significant about Western culture, societies, and civilization. What it expresses is how completely liberalism – the idea that the individual is more important than the family, community, or society – has triumphed in Western countries. It also shows how easy it is, in a society atomized by liberalism, for charismatic figures to form large cult followings out of the masses of alienated individuals.

Culture exists in many layers. Local culture gives identity to local communities and when several of these comprise a larger society their local cultures share elements which make up the larger culture of the society as a whole. Depending upon the size of the society there might also be a regional level that is intermediate between the local and the societal. There is also a level of culture that transcends the particular society. We call Canada, Great Britain, the United States, the countries of Europe, and a few other societies “Western” because these societies all share in what we call “Western civilization” – the tradition of achievement which began in the Graeco-Roman civilization of classical antiquity and came down to us through medieval Christendom. There is therefore a sense in which we can speak of a “Western” culture which all these societies share in.

There is another sense in which we can describe culture as being multi-layered. Matthew Arnold, the insightful 19th Century inside critic of liberalism, in his Culture and Anarchy, wrote that culture is “a pursuit of our total perfection by means of getting to know, on all the matters which most concern us, the best which has been thought and said in the world”. Clearly this is not a description of a society’s culture as a whole. What Arnold is talking about is what is usually described as “high culture”. High culture is a level of culture that exists within the culture of societies which have achieved a high degree of civilization. High culture contains high moral and aesthetic standards and has an elevating effect upon its society and that society’s broader culture.

Or at least that is what traditional high culture is like. That which has been produced under the label “high culture” over the last century has progressively moved further and further away from the description. The reasons for this we shall shortly explore. First let us consider the nature of the musical element of high culture.

The label we most commonly attach to Western high culture music is “classical music”. What do we mean by the term “classical”? There are many whose first thought upon hearing the word “classical” is “old”. This could be because this is how the term tends to be used with regards to other forms of music. “Classic rock” and “classic country” are both virtually synonymous with “oldies” in either category of music. It could also be because most of the really big names among classical music composers lived or were at least born before the 20th Century. The word “classical”, however, does not properly mean “old” at all. It refers to outstanding quality and if it has any necessary temporal connotation it is of “timelessness” not “age”.

The term “classical” points to one of the most important elements of traditional Western high culture. Classicism in the arts is a striving for excellence that emphasizes form, structure, and order in accordance with high standards derived to some degree from Graeco-Roman civilization, especially the culture and philosophy of 5th-4th Century B.C. Athens. Among the traits regarded as characteristics of excellence in classicism are unity, simplicity, balance, harmony and restraint.

Not all “classical music” is classical in this technical sense of the term. Classicism has been influential at various points in the history of Western art music, but most notably in the style that developed in a particular period in the 18th Century. This period – the Classical Period proper – extended roughly from the time of Johann Sebatian Bach in the early 18th Century to that of Ludwig von Beethoven in the early 19th Century. Bach was the greatest composer of the Baroque period which immediately preceded the Classical Period. Beethoven embodied the transition between the Classical and the Romantic of the 19th Century. The period between Bach and Beethoven saw the careers of the two geniuses who with Beethoven were the first Viennese School of music – Joseph Haydn and Wolfgang A. Mozart.

Western art music contains a lot more music than what was composed in this era. The plainsong tradition in Christian liturgy extends well back into the first millennium of the Church and polyphonic liturgical music was composed in the late Middle Ages. J. S. Bach composed at the end of the Baroque period which also produced such giants as Antonio Vivaldi and George F. Handel and saw the birth of opera. The Romantic period in the 19th Century saw the work of Johannes Brahms, Frederic Chopin, and Franz Shubert to name just three. In addition most of the great opera composers – Wagner, Rossini, Bizet, Gounod, Verdi, etc. – composed in the 19th Century and in the case of Puccini in the early 20th. Why then do we refer to all Western art music as classical?

Since the real answer probably has something to do with the decline of precision in the English language I am going to give a plausible sounding ex-post facto justification of the usage. The music of Bach, Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven exemplifies everything that art music aspires to be. Earlier forms of music such as the concerto reached near perfection at the pen of these masters as did the new form, the symphony, which they introduced. Their music is unmistakably beautiful, both inspired and inspirational, and is enduring and timeless. It therefore lends its name to art music as a whole.

If the music composed in this era is all that art music should be what about the “classical music” composed today?

It, alas, is all that it should not be. The same downward progression can be seen in Western art music as can be seen in Western art in general. 19th Century Romanticism gives birth to the more rebellious Impressionism which is succeeded by a series of avant garde movements in the Modern Period in the early 20th Century and then collapses into the nihilism of Postmodernism after World War II. What Pablo Picasso, Henry Matisse, Gustav Klimt, and Marcel Duchamp were to the visual arts in the early 20th Century, Arthur Schoenburg, Alban Berg and Anton Webern were to art music. Jackson Pollock has his musical counterpart in John Cage.

What is the cause of this decline?

It depends upon whether we are looking for a cause within the culture or within the societies to which the culture belongs.

Within the culture the explanation is that romanticism was taken to its extreme and then beyond. Romanticism is a rebellion or reaction against the order imposed by classicism in the name of individual expression. It can be progressive – looking towards the future, or reactionary – looking towards the past, but either way it resists the structure and forms of classicism and places its emphasis upon the inner light guiding the individual artist.

Classicism and romanticism need each other. The structure, forms, and order of classicism and the internal inspiration of romanticism balance each other out. Inspiration and genius can result in timeless masterpieces of beauty as in the case of Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven. Adherence to form, when inspiration is lacking, merely produces the formulaic, whereas resistance to structure and order, if taken so far as to actually overthrow the structure and order, results in chaos.

Which is exactly what happened. The rebellion of early Romanticism evolved into outright revolution, order collapsed, and chaos ensued.

What about the societal cause of this collapse? Culture reflects the moral and spiritual condition of the society and civilization to which it is attached. What changes in Western societies and civilization are reflected in the downward death spiral of Western high culture?

The weakening of the position of the Christian Church is one of the changes which is clearly reflected here. The building of cathedrals and churches in architecture, the painting of altarpieces and other religious art to decorate these buildings, and the composition of settings of the Mass and other sacred music, are historically and traditionally the heart of Western high culture. The secularization of Western societies has cut at that heart severely.

The triumph of Whiggery – liberalism and democracy – is also reflected in the decline of high culture. In many Western countries royalty and aristocracy have been eliminated altogether. In the United Kingdom both survive in seriously weakened form. Here in Canada the monarchy has survived as a weakened institution but it would be very bad joke to apply the term “aristocracy” to our Senate. Our constitutions have become dangerously unbalanced in favour of the principle of democracy.

Other than the Church, Western royalty and aristocracy were the most important patrons of high culture. It is the nature of high culture that it is produced by a symbiotic relationship between a civilization’s social/political elites and its artistic elites. It is the nature of human societies that they will always be led by elites. The nature of the elites, however, depends upon the constitution of the society. In the Modern era democracy became the dominant principle in Western constitutions. As a result, the social/political leadership in Western societies has passed from royalty and aristocracy, even in societies that retain them, to new elites of politicians and bureaucrats. Economic leadership has passed from aristocracy-emulating bourgeois businessmen to corporate managers. The spiritual leadership has passed from the clergy of the Christian Church to intellectuals. The artistic leadership has passed from skilled craftsmen, apprenticed in their art from their early youth, working within established traditions, to nihilistic, navel-gazing, narcissists.

The current state of high culture is exactly what one would predict would be the result of a wholesale transfer of leadership from people with good taste to the kind of people noted for their bad taste – or utter tastelessness. Crucifixes in jars of urine, canned feces, and cadavers on display make one wish for the days when Picasso, Matisse, and Dali were making art look bad, while the kind of contemporary classical music one finds on government-sponsored radio stations makes Schoenburg’s atonal compositions sound harmonic.

Such art and music is “high culture” in name only. It does not and cannot do what high culture is supposed to do – elevate the general culture of the society which produces it.

If we say that it is high culture’s purpose to elevate a society, its culture, and its civilization what do we mean by “elevate”?

Human beings and beasts together comprise the category of living beings called animals, from the Latin word animus denoting breath or spirit. Human beings share many characteristics with other animals. We eat, we drink, we breathe, we sleep, we copulate, etc. We also have traits which set us apart from other animals and enable us to live on a higher plane than other animals. Yes, we can abuse those traits and in so doing arguably place ourselves at a level lower than the other animals. When used properly, however, they can create civilization.

Human culture involves all human activities, those we share with the beasts, and those which belong to us alone. Culture includes rules which dictate that some of the activities we share with the beasts be done completely in private and only discussed in public if absolutely necessary, other of the activities we share with the beasts are also to be done in private but can be discussed in public in a polite manner, whereas other activities we share with the beasts – such as eating and drinking - can be done in public, even communally, provided we follow customs which minimize our resemblance to our bestial cousins. These rules are called manners or etiquette and they differ from culture to culture.

High culture elevates a society’s culture, by drawing its attention upwards, away from the aspects of our existence which are merely animal, and focusing it on higher values. It is our attempt to live according to these values which produces the human achievement we call civilization.

Music, as mentioned earlier, is a kind of language which speaks to the emotions. It moves our passions within us. Beethoven’s choral setting of Schiller’s “Ode to Joy” in the final movement of his 9th Symphony, for example, inspires within us the feeling to which it alludes. Music can communicate feelings of happiness and of sadness – and of lust, rage, and a host of other kinds as well.

Which is why music can be degrading as well as elevating. This brings us to the topic of “low culture”. There are two very different meanings to the expression “low culture”. One is non-pejorative. In this sense “low culture” is simply the necessary complement of “high culture”. Within the culture of a civilization, high culture is deliberately produced to maintain a high level of civilization, and is oriented towards higher values which transcend the boundaries of the society. Low culture is the rest of the civilization’s culture and tends to be oriented towards expressing the particular identity of the society to which it belongs rather than towards universal higher values. Each draws from the other and complements the other. Such flow, T. S. Eliot has pointed out, must exist for if they are isolated from each other they become separate cultures rather than parts of a single culture.

The other sense of “low culture” refers to culture which has the opposite effect to that which high culture is supposed to have – rather than elevating it degrades. Both kinds of “low culture” are more commonly referred to as “popular culture”. The abbreviated version of this label, “pop culture” refers only to the degrading kind. The musical element of popular culture is called “popular music” and here too “popular music” does service for both non-classical Western music in general and degrading music in particular.

Whereas classical music involves many forms – fugue, sonata, concerto, symphony, opera, to name just a few – composed in styles that tend to coincide with long historical periods, popular music generally is limited to a single form – the song – composed in a multitude of genres such as folk, country and western, jazz, rhythm and blues, blues, rock and so forth. This is true of popular music in both senses of the term. The overwhelming predominance of the song form, however, can be regarded as a step towards the music of degradation. Songs are easier to follow than instrumental pieces and are usually considerably shorter. Mozart’s Horn Concerto No. 1 – the shortest of his four horn concertos being only two movements long rather than three, runs slightly over 10 minutes in length. There are a handful of popular songs that are of comparable length – folk rock singer Don McLean’s ballad “American Pie” was just under 9 minutes long – and these tend to be among the most enduring of popular songs, but most are well under the length of the average concerto movement, to say nothing of the average symphony movement. Popular songs are well suited for the age of fast food and junk food , TV channel surfing, and interac transactions.

It is the second meaning of “popular music” that we will focus on. What do we mean by degradation? How can music be degrading?

Degradation is the opposite of elevation. We defined the elevation which is the purpose of high culture as lifting human existence as far above the level of the beast as possible and orienting it towards higher truths and values to be reflected in the accomplishments of civilization. The opposite of that would be to attempt to reduce human existence to as close to the level of the beasts as possible. There are at least two other ways in which music can be degrading. It can be morally degrading – which is very close to the previous meaning of degrading. It can also be aesthetically degrading which refers to a drop in artistic quality.

The well-being of a community or society and of its members requires rules which forbid behavior in which a person pursues his personal interests in such a way or to such an extent that other members or even the community itself are harmed. Such rules require the individual person to limit and control his desires and passions. The connection between the two – rules governing society and people governing their own passions – and between the both and civilization is foundational to morality. Plato discussed this at length in his dialogue The Republic.

That which encourages people to unleash their passions and to rebel against legitimate authority is morally degrading. This is pretty much the defining characteristic of rock music.

Rock music began as “rock ‘n’ roll” shortly after the end of World War II. The original rock ‘n’ roll groups combined elements of country music and rhythm and blues to create catchy, songs that were fun to listen and dance to. Teenagers were the target audience and the lyrics of these songs typically expressed an adolescent perspective on topics of interest to teenagers. Some fundamentalist preachers denounced rock ‘n’ roll from the pulpit but their warnings were largely ignored because the rock of that era was relatively innocent and was, above all other things, fun. The preachers succeeded only in convincing most people that they were a bunch of wet blankets preaching the message that it is wrong to have fun.

This was the first step in the moral degradation of rock music. The relatively – but not completely – innocent and fun rock ‘n’ roll immunized all subsequent rock music from the criticism the first generation faced. “It’s just kids having fun. What’s wrong with that?” became the standard reply to all criticism of rock music. Implicit within that response is the intellectually indefensible assertion that “what is fun must therefore also be innocent”.

The subsequent development of rock music has shown the fundamentalist critics of the earliest rock stars to have been speaking with the prophetic voice of Cassandra. In the 1960’s the mask of innocence was dropped. Rock became the music of the sexual revolution, telling young people to follow wherever their urges led them rather than to control their urges and behave responsibly and well. While some might argue that the increasing corruption of the political establishment lent a degree of credibility and merit to rock’s message of rebellion that message was directed as much against parents, teachers, the Church and its clergy, policemen and indeed all legitimate authorities at all levels of society. Rock eventually developed into countless numbers of subgenres, some of which were relatively benign, while others promoted drug abuse and other self-destructive behavior, and preached evil messages like nihilism and even Satan worship. At one time there were rumors going around about “backwards masking” – that rock musicians would hide objectionable material in their songs which could only be heard by playing them backwards. One wonders why they would bother since the lyrics played straight forwards are bad enough.

A similar downward trend over the same period in time can be seen in pop music. “Pop music” is not, as one might think, just a shorthand way of saying “popular music”. It is a genre of its own – although perhaps it should be called the anti-genre because of its tendency to absorb and assimilate other genres of popular music. To borrow an image from another element of pop culture it is the Borg of popular music. Pop music is similar to rock – they are generally categorized together in record stores – and it is difficult to say where the line between the two should be drawn. Perhaps the best way of describing pop music is to say that it is assembly line rock music. It is music manufactured for sale to the general public like any factory produced product.

This makes pop music a better gauge of the decay of morality than rock music since it is supposed to reflect the mainstream of popular culture. Fifty years ago, a pop star would have been a cleaner, slightly more polished, version of a rock star. If we look at the pop music of the last two decades, however, two trends have come increasingly to stand out among the leading acts – a) the prostitute and b) the effeminate pretty boy. Both trends are examples of moral degradation.

That the first trend is morally degrading should be fairly obvious. Progressively younger female pop stars performing to progressively younger audiences, dress increasingly provocatively and sing increasingly sexually charged lyrics in performances that would seem to be more appropriate for a burlesque stage or a strip club.

What about the second trend? Male pop stars are being made to look and sound more and more like girls every day. Yes, “made” is the right word, because the performers of pop music are as factory assembled as the music they sing. For they are as much the product as their music. Probably even more so.

Roger Scruton, in an insightful article about youth culture for City Journal 13 years ago, commented about how in pop music the traditional relationship between music and those who perform it has been inverted:

In effect, we witness a reversal of the old order of performance. Instead of the performer being the means to present the music, which exists independently in the tradition of song, the music has become the means to present the performer. The music is part of the process whereby a human individual or group is totemized. (Roger Scruton, “Youth Culture’s Lament”, City Journal, Autumn 1998)

This is why one cannot defend the pretty boy trend in pop music by pointing to the historical use of castrati in traditional music. However barbaric the custom may have been, castrati were made to serve the needs of the music rather than to be idols for worship.

For thousands of years societies have regarded manliness as a praiseworthy trait to be encouraged among males. The Greek word for courage – the first virtue mentioned in Aristotle’s Ethics – was andreia, a word derived from the Greek word aner, which means “man, husband”. The very word “virtue” which we use to describe praiseworthy characteristics is derived from vir, the Latin equivalent of aner. This usage reflects the high premium Western societies have historically and traditionally placed upon manliness. In the kind of male pop stars it is now churning out the pop music industry appears to be promoting epicenity, the exact opposite of manliness, as a trait to be emulated by males. This too is a form of moral decay.

The degradation that is most obvious in pop music, however, is the aesthetic kind. Music, like architecture, painting, sculpture and literature is a form of art, the quality of which can be judged by aesthetic standards. There are different ways in which art can be aesthetically poor. On the one hand art can become clichéd, i.e, it can lose its aesthetical value by being pointlessly repetitive. On the other hand, artists may out of fear of the cliché, produce art that has no merit other than originality. The latter is the pitfall into which avant garde artists – musical and otherwise – are prone to fall. The former is the pitfall into which pop culture – including pop music – falls.

It is in the very nature of pop music to be kitsch. Pop music is music that is manufactured like any other assembly-line product to be sold cheaply in large quantities for mass consumption. Without Thomas Edison’s invention of the technology for recording and replaying sound and broadcasting and receiving sound in the late 19th Century there could have been no pop music. These technologies made it possible for music to be mass produced. Mass production, i.e., the fast production of a good so that it can be sold in large quantities at a low unit price, can be both a blessing and a curse. It is a blessing in that a wide variety of goods are available and affordable to more people than ever before. It is a curse in that quality of that which is produced inevitably suffers. Some things should never be mass produced and culture is one of them.

Whereas other forms of popular music and classical music are the creations of artists whose music may or may not be recorded and sold pop music is the creation of record companies. The companies create both the pop star and the music the pop star performs. One group of specialized technicians comes up with the image for the pop star, another group comes up with the music, and the final product is assembled by yet another group of technicians in the recording studio.

The result is the most clichéd form of music ever made. There is novelty – pop music rises and falls with the waves of fashion like no other – but no originality.

Unfortunately pop music seems to be a black hole which sucks in other forms of popular music. Before World War II a number of distinct popular music genres developed – country and western, jazz, rhythm and blues, etc. In recent decades most of these genres have tended to develop a “pop” feel to them. Take country music for example. Compare country music made today, with the music of Hank Williams Sr., Johnny Cash, Merle Haggard, George Jones and Waylon Jennings. Then compare it with music currently being released under the label pop. Which does it more resemble?

Is there a solution to any of these downward trends?

Not that I am aware of, but there is at least a consolation. The same advancements in musical recording technology that have made pop music possible, have also made possible high quality recordings by superb orchestras of the music of Bach, Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Shubert, Brahms, Grieg, Wagner, Rimsky-Korsakov, Tchaikovsky, Dvořák, and Mahler. There is over a lifetime’s worth of good listening in these recordings, and these works continue to be performed in the standard repertoire of concert halls and opera houses around the world.