Musical Conversations

The other week a colleague joked about my “out of date” taste in music.  It was five hundred years old he said.  I found this highly amusing.  I had been listening to the symphonies of Beethoven.  Beethoven’s Symphony No. 1 in C major was first performed in Vienna in 1800.  His Symphony No. 9 in D minor, the fourth movement of which contains the famous choral setting of Schiller’s Ode to Joy and which set nine as the informal upper limit for symphonies for future composers, (1) was first performed in Vienna in 1824.  Each of these, in other words, dates to the century before the last rather than five centuries ago.

 

Unintentionally, however, my friend illustrated the very point that I made in answer to him.  If the difference between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries is that irrelevant then the music in question cannot be tied to the era that produced it in the sense his criticism suggests. Classical music in the broad sense of the term can never be out of date because it is timeless.  This is, indeed, what the term classical implies when used of this kind of music.  This is why it persists as its label despite the potential for confusion (2) even though attempts are periodically made to find another.

 

Classical is not the only kind of music that possesses the quality of timelessness although it has a firmer title on it than any other.  There is a type of music, by contrast, that is notoriously time-bound.   That is the type of music that we usually refer to as pop.

 

Note that while pop is short for popular, pop music and popular music are not the same thing.  Popular music is the traditional complement to classical music.  It covers any kind of music that belongs to the popular or common culture through which a society’s identity is expressed, maintained, and transmitted.  Classical music belongs to the other kind of culture which rather than being inward-focused on group identity is outward-and-upward-focused on external reality and such things as Goodness, Beauty, and Truth.  Both kind of culture are necessary to have civilization and in a healthy society they have a symbiotic relationship in which each informs and draws from the other.

 

If popular music can be described as the music of the natural popular culture of a society, pop music is music that is artificially created and imposed upon the popular cultures of man societies.  While pop is sometimes thought of as one of many genres of music, like jazz, rock, and country, it is something else.  It is what you get when you apply the principles of industrialization - mass-production, mass-marketing, and mass-consumption - to music.  This is why it is dates from the moment it is created like no other kind of music is.  Everything produced and marketed for mass consumption has a shelf-life.  This is called planned obsolescence.  It is an inevitable consequence of mass production.  Unless you are producing something like food which cannot be used without also being used up, you will need to sell to the same customers over and over again, which means that you will either have be constantly redesigning and, at least in theory and the perception of your customers, improving your product or you will have to make an inferior product that wears out and needs to be replaced. The same principle by which automobile manufacturers and software companies operate applies to pop music which is why when you hear pop it you can usually tell the decade and often the very year it was recorded.

 

Timelessness on the one hand and being intentionally dated on the other are not the only ways in which classical and pop are each the antithesis of the other.  This is one of many reasons why the widespread notion that the relationship between the two is that of two different genres is utterly silly.  Neither classical nor pop is a genre, they differ from each other in kind at a far deeper level than that.  That this is so can be seen in the fact that both classical and pop each have their own genres and the nature of the genres of classical is very different from the nature of the genres of pop.

 

Since pop music is not itself a genre of music, but a category defined by how it is made and consumed, its genres are the different kinds of popular music to which the process of producing pop has been applied.  This process could in theory be applied to any kind of music, but some kinds of music are more susceptible to it than others.  Classical music is the most inoculated against it.  The closest thing to a pop version of classical would be something like a greatest hits collection of arias sung by the Three Tenors.  When a previous kind of popular music is turned into pop this creates a distinction between its traditional form and the form that is subsumed under pop as a genre.   The kind of traditional popular music that is most comparable to classical music in terms of musical depth, its extensive repertoire of strictly instrumental pieces, and how it is listened to is easily jazz which some think ought to be classified as classical rather than popular.  There is a pop version of jazz, although traditional jazz purists reject is as being real jazz, and it has a fairly wide reputation for banality. (3)

 

What I just said about traditional jazz purists is, of course, true of purists of any form of traditional popular music.  In the case of country and western music the associations that issue honours and awards have long tried to act as gatekeepers by granting minimal recognition to anyone who was come over to country from pop and shunning those who have gone the other direction in a way that would put the strictest Mennonite sects to shame. (4) These, however, are thinking of the distinction in terms of style and genre.  Although country and western has a traditional form that predates pop music in the sense we are using the expression here, its development from older forms of folk music in the American South was contemporaneous with the earliest phase in the conversion of music into a market product for mass consumption, the rise of radio.  While if you were to spend an hour or so listening to Hank Williams Sr., George Jones, Tammy Wynette, Johnny Cash, Claude King, et al, and then spend the same amount of time listening to whoever currently tops the charts on contemporary country radio, the difference will be obvious and the music of the second half of the experiment will likely sound like it has more in common with whatever is playing on the pop stations, albeit with a twangier sound and sung by somebody who is more likely to be wearing a cowboy outfit, than it does the music of the first half of the experiment.  That having been said, the irony is that those who would appear to us as the traditional country artists in this comparison, themselves for the most part – I think Hank Williams Sr. is the only real exception among the examples given - had their careers entirely in the period in which country music was indistinguishable from pop in terms of being a market commodity.  The C & W gatekeepers, therefore, are not so much traditionalist purists, as those interested in protecting the product of the Nashville brand of the industry from the Los Angeles brand.  

 

There are, of course, plenty of kinds of pop music that do not have traditional forms to contrast with their pop forms because they were created as pop music.  Obvious examples include any kind of music with words like “electro” or “techno” in the designation.  A more interesting case is that of rock music.  Like these later kinds, rock does not have a traditional, pre-pop form, although it has traditional roots in that as with its slightly older immediate predecessor rhythm and blues, older forms of popular music such as blues, jazz, and country were utilized like raw materials in its construction.  Unlike the types of later pop that wear their mechanical artificiality on their sleeves, rock, which when it first appeared as rock ‘n’ roll was largely coextensive with pop, has strove ever since to forge an identity that would distinguish it from pop.  Since rock’s identity both within pop and in the space it has carved for itself outside pop, is that of the voice of the rebellion of the young and ignorant, its non-pop form is not properly thought of as traditional rock but as the very antithesis of the traditional forms of other music that has been popified.

 

One thing that stands out about these different genres of pop music is that while they are quite distinguishable in style they are generally identical in form.  There are exceptions of course, but genres of pop music usually consist entirely of songs (5) which, while they vary in length, hover around a standard average length that not-coincidentally is that which is most accommodating for radio play.  Here is where the huge contrast between the genres of pop and the genres of classical is most evident.

 

Within classical music, genres are distinguished from each other in form as well as style.  Songs, although they may be incorporated into other genres such as arias in opera for example, are but one of many genres and far from the most important.  Other genres include but are far from limited to opera which consists of theatrical productions set to orchestral music in which the dialogue is entirely or almost entirely sung, oratorios such as Bach’s St. Matthew’s Passion or Handel’s Messiah which are similar to operas but are not acted out, symphonies which are multi-movement (usually four) pieces composed to be performed by a full orchestra and which may or may not include singing, concertos in which either the orchestra or a smaller musical group provide accompaniment to the lead instrumentalist(s), chamber music which is itself more a genre of genres consisting of various types of pieces written to be performed by smaller instrumental ensembles such as a string quartet, ballets which as a music genre accompany the dances of the same name (Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake and Nutcracker Suite for example), and incidental music written to be the background accompaniment to an ordinary theatrical play (Mendelssohn’s wrote such music for Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream twice, his famous “Wedding March” (6) comes from the second version). 

 

It is pop music’s fundamental nature as the music manufactured for mass consumption that both limits it for the most part to a single form, with multiple styles and stamps it with a sell by date.  Since pop comes off incredibly poorly in these comparisons with classical, it is important to review at this point what we are arguing for and against, lest this come across as mere pop bashing.  We began by arguing for the timelessness of classical music against my friend’s dismissal of it as “old”, which led to the observation that pop is the kind of music that is dated out of necessity.  This in turn led to the comparison of how pop genres differ from classical genres, which was made in argument against a widespread but silly idea that pop and classical are themselves two genres or styles.  One of the unfortunate consequences of this silly idea is that it misleads people into thinking that they should seek the same kind of listening experience from both.  Someone who wishes to enjoy both pop and classical, however, needs to understand that they differ at a far more fundamental level than genre and that they are not intended to be listened to in the same way.  Pop music is designed to produce immediate and easy enjoyment.  It is the music of instant gratification that offers pleasure while making no demands.  Classical music requires something of you – the commitment of time, contemplative silence, and effort to actively listen – before it yields its rewards.  Yes, here too, pop comes off poorly in comparison to classical, but remember that the point is that there is nothing preventing you from enjoying both, provided you keep the difference in mind and listen to both accordingly.  A far more devastating comparison would be between pop music and traditional popular music, since pop essentially subverts popular music from doing what it is supposed to do.

 

That however, is a comparison to be explored in depth at another time.  Here I will introduce my third and final argument, by referring to another conversation of about a half a year ago.  I was introduced by another friend to someone he knew from seminary (a different one from the one I had attended).  Somehow the topic of music came up.  I think perhaps that I had been asked what my interests were after having expressed zero interest in any of the varieties of sportsball.  My friend’s friend recounted how when he was in seminary, his professors had warned about the evils of rock music and praised classical, and had then talked him into seeing an opera.  The opera he went to, however, was filled with masonic and occult symbols and basically the sort of thing that his professors, who were there watching and applauding, had warned about in rock music.  Asked if I knew which opera he was talking about, I answered “Die Zauberflöte” and was extremely amused to get the response “No, it was ‘The Magic Flute.’”

 

I did not bother to try and mount an argument about how the music of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was so inspired that it could elevate the spirit even when attached to subject matter completely unworthy of it as was the case with his last opera in whatever language you render its title.  If he did not already know this from the music itself, he is highly unlikely to learn it from anything I might tell him.  This conversation did, however, provide some insights about notions concerning music that are widespread in certain Christian circles and in expounding those insights I will come around to making that argument.

 

Many evangelical Protestants think that there is this sharp divide between the lyrics that are sung to music and the music itself and that the only thing that a Christian could reasonably object to in any music is the content of the lyrics.  A Christian, according to this way of thinking, and I use that term loosely, can legitimately object to a song that glorifies extramarital sex, violence, drug abuse, rebellion against parental and other lawful authority, crime, and the like, on moral grounds, but if the words are removed, can have no objection to what remains except insofar as it may bring to mind the absent lyrics.  For some evangelicals even this is too “judgemental.” 

 

The origins of this attitude are not difficult to explain since it is obviously a specifically evangelical version of the phenomenon in the wider culture of young people dismissing any criticism of their music from older generation.  The evangelicals who hold this view are responding to what might be called the fundamentalist approach which is to issue broad sweeping condemnations of pretty much every kind of music introduced since the 1950s as the devil’s music.  In the conversation I just related, my interlocutor can be taken as representative of the evangelical attitude and his professors of the fundamentalist.  Those holding the evangelical attitude regard theirs as the more intelligent of the two and speak smugly of those who hold the fundamentalist view.  I have known this to be inevitably the case and could fill the space I have allotted to this essay entirely with examples.  The smugness, I regard as entirely unwarranted.

 

It is easy to be smug about the fundamentalist view.  Sweeping blanket condemnations are difficult to defend intelligently precisely because they avoid making the distinctions that are the mark of intelligent criticism.  The evangelical position, however, is not that the fundamentalist view is too uncritical but rather that it is too critical, too judgmental.  The idea that the lyrics of a song might be objected to on moral grounds, but that the music itself cannot ignores the fact that aesthetic judgement, which evaluates the quality of art, is itself a form of moral criticism.  We don’t often think of it that way, but the standard for traditional aesthetic judgement is beauty, which belongs to the same part of the order of reality as goodness, the basis of moral criticism, and which is arguably goodness itself applied to the area of sensual appearance. (7)  Music, of course, is art made from sound and so is experienced audibly, as opposed to painting, sculpture, and other forms of art that are made to be experienced visually.  The evangelical view requires that such considerations be swept aside entirely and comes close to embracing, at least in the realm of philosophical aesthetics, an extreme subjectivism approaching nihilism that evangelicals, in theory at least, would reject in other realism.

 

What I have dubbed here the evangelical view, although the more conservative of self-described evangelicals sometimes approach what I have called the fundamentalist view, has in a way that is both interesting and revealing, been subjected to practical testing.  The music industry, taking the idea that music that Christians might object to on the grounds of the content of the words can be rendered “Christian” by substituting Christian lyrics – in the case of the group ApologetiX there is an extra dimension of literalness to this description because they basically do what “Weird Al” Yankovic does and substitute their own lyrics to well-known tunes – began producing “Christian” versions of rock, heavy metal, rap and pretty much any other kind of pop music to sell to the niche market of Christian youth.  This is collectively called CCM – Contemporary Christian Music.

 

Note that I used the word “pop” rather than “popular.”  This is because this could only be done with industry-produced music.  It would be absurd to try and create an artificially “Christian” version of traditional popular music because within such music sacred and even Gospel themes always had a natural place integrated with more this-worldly themes.  When, in 1938, Louis Armstrong recorded his jazz orchestration of the spiritual “When the Saints Go Marching In” nobody lifted an eyebrow.  It fit in with the rest of his repertoire naturally and the song has long been a jazz staple.   Indeed, you might find it easier to list the spirituals of this sort that did not become part of the standard jazz repertoire than those that did.  Nor do these comprise the entirety of the sacred element of traditional jazz.

 

Similarly when Hank Williams Sr. wrote and recorded “I Saw the Light” in 1946, it may have conflicted with his lifestyle but certainly not his music.  Indeed, country music would be completely unrecognizable from what it actually is, had Gospel themes not been there all along beside the prison, train, literal cowboy, drinking, pick-up truck, and cheating themes. (8)  Try to imagine Johnny Cash or Dolly Parton without the religious dimension of their music.  Tennessee Ernie Ford would have been almost reduced to a one-hit wonder.  Even today, long after county became largely popified, the biggest hit to date of Blake Shelton, currently married to pop star Gwen Stefani, is his 2019 “God’s Country”, a song about farm life that is packed with references to church, piety, and other similar themes. 

 

We have seen that rock music began within the sphere of pop music as rock ‘n’ roll in the 1950s and then sought to establish a non-pop identity after the fact.   The early rock ‘n’ rollers came from other kinds of music that had a traditional sacred side.  In the case of Elvis Presley, he had strong roots in Gospel music and was indistinguishable from the country artists mentioned in the preceding paragraph in that he continued to sing and record Gospel to the very end of his life.  While he was not absolutely alone in this, he was far from being the norm either for part of rock’s quest to establish its own identity was to jettison the sacred element of the raw materials it drew from and to emphasize the elements that were least congruent with Christian faith.   Therefore, when the first “Christian rock” was made in the late 1960s, in was in accordance with the CCM model of imposing an external Christianity on a music that had become foreign, and in many cases, hostile to Christianity. (9)  The late Sir Roger Scruton wrote:

 

Recent criticism has paid much attention to the words. These often dwell on violence, drugs, sex and rebellion in ways that lyricize the kind of conduct of which fathers and mothers used to disapprove, in the days when disapproval was approved. But these criticisms do not, I think, get to the heart of the matter. Even if every pop song consisted of a setting of Christ’s beatitudes (and there are born-again groups in America - ‘16 Horsepower’ is one of them - that specialize in such things), it would make little or no difference to the effect, which is communicated through the sounds, regardless of what is sung to them. The only thing that is really wrong with the usual lyrics is what is really right about them - namely, that they successfully capture what the music means. (10)

 

What I have argued above concerning traditional popular music, that in it sacred themes traditionally and naturally have their place alongside non-sacred and so do not need to be artificially imposed on it the way it does on mass-produced pop music and on the anti-tradition of rock the way it is in the CCM model, is all the more true of classical music.  Sacred music is the very foundation on which the classical music tradition is built.  Plainsong, the unaccompanied simple melodies to which the liturgy was chanted in the Western Church of the first millennium of which the best known version is Gregorian chant, developed into organum by the addition of a harmonizing voice, which opened the door to more complex forms of polyphony which while it initially met with resistance from Church authorities due to concerns that it would place the text of the liturgy beyond comprehension eventually won acceptance.  The early history of classical music is the history of sacred music and after the Renaissance brought a renewal of interest in themes from pre-Christian antiquity and the Reformation brought about a breach in the external unity of the Western Church, the sacred remained at the heart of the classical tradition.  Mass settings written to accompany the singing of the ordinaries - the unchanging parts - of the Eucharistic liturgy (11) were written by all the major composers including the Lutheran J. S. Bach (Mass in B Minor) and Beethoven who wrote two (Mass in C Major and Missa Solemnis) despite having imbibed the rotten ideas of the so-called Enlightenment.  Oratorios, while usually written to be performed in the concert hall, were largely devoted to religious themes as in the examples already provided to which countless others such as Haydn’s Creation and Beethoven’s Christ on the Mount of Olives could be added.

 

Even more so than with traditional popular music, sacred music is integral to the classical music tradition so as to make the idea of “Christian classical music”, that is, a classical music upon which Christianity has been imposed from the outside, absolutely absurd.  Indeed, with classical, at least traditional as opposed to avant garde, we have the reverse of the situation with pop music and the CCM model.   I don’t know why the fundamentalist professors chose The Magic Flute as the work to introduce their students to classical music with.  BWV 1: Wie schön leuchtet der Morgenstern (How Beautifully the Morning Star Shines) written for both Palm Sunday and Lady Day which coincided at its first performance or BWV 82: Ich habe genug (I am content), a setting of Dr. Luther’s translation of the Nunc Dimmitis written for Candlemas or any other of Johann Sebastian Bach’s over 200 sacred cantatas would have been a better choice for the point they were trying to make.  Nevertheless, just as Sir Roger Scruton said that it is the usual and not the “Christian” lyrics that express the meaning of pop music, so the nature of classical music, especially in the hands of a true master like Mozart, is such that story and symbolism of his final opera can hardly be said to express its true meaning.

 (1)   More accurately, Gustav Mahler set the limit by claiming the ninth symphony to be cursed to be a composer’s last (as it was in his case as with Beethoven).  Joseph Haydn under whom Beethoven studies composition, wrote 106 symphonies.  “The Jupiter”, the final symphony of Haydn’s contemporary W. A. Mozart, is his 41^st.

(2)   With the subcategory that is called Classical to distinguish it from say the Baroque or the Romantic.  Haydn, Handel, Mozart and Beethoven are the names most associated with Classical proper.

(3)   Think of the kind of music that in popular stereotype  you are likely to hear when put on hold, or waiting in an elevator, or playing in the background in a large semi-fashionable department store of the type that are now mostly obsolete.

(4)  See the discussion of this in Ray Stevens’ memoir, co-written with C. W. “Buddy” Kalb Jr., Ray Stevens’ Nashville (2014).  Although Stevens’ roots are country (he grew up in Clarksdale, Georgia), early in his long career moved to Nashville, and ages ago earned his reputation as the “Clown Prince of Country Music”, his earliest recordings were released as pop.  He was not inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame until 2019.

(5)   A song, as evident from the noun’s etymological relationship with the verb sing, is a short piece in which words are sung.  In a song, the instrumental accompaniment is supposed to back and support the voice.  A song can be sung without accompanying music.  This is called a capella style.  The opposite, where the instrumental part is performed and/or recorded without a voice, is also usually called a song by extension, although it does not technically fit the definition.  Karaoke, in which a machine plays the music and you sing the words yourself, is one reason why this would be done.  Sometimes an ensemble might think a song sounds better without the words and record it that way.  This is quite rare in most forms of pop music because it conflicts with the whole making an idol out of the singer which is part of its modus operandi – think of the talent search shows that conspicuously advertise this in their titles – although it is not uncommon in pop jazz.  Since this is a note and not the body of the essay, I will provide an example that is not relevant at all but which I find amusing. In 1965 Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass Band recorded the pop jazz “Spanish Flea” which became a bit hit. It had been written by the group’s percussionist Julius Wechter whose wife had written the lyrics.  The band, however, recorded it as an instrumental piece – at that point in time they rarely recorded any other way.  For a lot of people, their first encounter with the lyrics came in an unusual way. In an early episode of The Simpsons, “The Otto Show” which aired in 1992, Bart and Milhouse attend a concert of the parodic heavy metal band Spinal Tap that had appeared in a number of comedy venues and was featured by the late Rob Reiner in his 1984 mockumentary This is Spinal Tap (Harry Shearer, the voice of numerous Simpsons characters, portrays the bass player).  A riot breaks out but Homer, who had driven the kids to the concert and is waiting in the parking lot, is oblivious to what is going on even though the SWAT team descending on the rioters are visible all around him.  He is sitting in his car singing along to “Spanish Flea”.  That this song would not be likely to drown out a heavy metal concert or a SWAT-suppressed riot is the part of the joke everyone would be expected to get.  There is another part, however, in that while Homer could easily be assumed to be improvising based on the song’s title,  what he sings are the actual lyrics written by Cissy Wechter.

(6)   Mendelssohn’s is the older of the two most recognizable wedding marches.  He wrote his second orchestration of A Midsummer Night’s Dream in 1842.  The other most famous wedding march is the Bridal Chorus from Richard Wagner’s opera Lohengrin which was first performed in 1850.

(7)   For example, an argument for this point could start with the fact that beauty, goodness, and truth are categorized together as transcendentals, the properties of being.  Created being, however, ultimately points to its Creator, which is uncreated Being or God.  Uncreated Being differs from the being of His creation in several ways.  One is in created beings, essence, that which makes a created thing a certain kind of thing rather than a different kind of thing, and existence/being, which establishes a certain thing as a real example of its kind rather than merely the idea of it, are two different things.  In God, however, as our best theologians from St. Augustine to St. Thomas Aquinas to E. L. Mascall have argued, existence and essence are the same thing.  Another difference is that created beings are finite, uncreated Being is infinite.  These are ultimately, however, the same difference, because infinity cannot be divided, which is the flipside to the fact that no number of finites can be added together to produce infinity.  Expressed theologically, this is the concept of divine simplicity, the indivisibility of God (He has no parts, the three Persons of the Trinity are distinct in Person but are each the whole of the same God not parts which add up to God), which requires that His properties or attributes are themselves not parts of God, but the whole of Him.  In uncreated Being, therefore, Goodness, Beauty, and Truth are each the whole of Being.  While this is not the case in finite, created, being, it has long been the case in philosophy that goodness does double duty, both as the general standard by which judgements of good, bad, better or conversely bad, worse, worst are made, and as a more specific application of that general standard.

(8)  If some of these seem incongruent with the message of the Gospel, remember that in traditional country music these things are treated differently than they are in rock music.  Cheating, for example, is not glorified in country, more often it is avenged, or becomes the excuse for the drinking, which is a possible exception to my point in this note, except that country is generally honest about the self-destroying nature of such behaviour.

(9)   I will say, however, that the song that best expresses what in my opinion is the genuine Christian take on those who have started this insane and unnecessary war in the Persian Gulf that threatens to escalate into a third World War – the president of the country built on the foundation of liberalism, one of the twin evils of Modernity, the other being communism, and the prime minister of the country which many North American Christians with bad theology foolishly think they owe uncritical support to because it shares the name of the covenant people of God in the Old Testament – is one recorded decades ago by a heavy metal band that deliberately forged an opposite-of-Christian image of itself.  The song is Black Sabbath’s “War Pigs”, the lyrics of which while credited to the entire band were mostly written by bass player “Geezer” Butler.  The final stanza is the most relevant.  “Day of mercy God is calling/on their knees the war pigs crawling/begging mercy for their sins/Satan laughing spreads his wings”.

(10)                       Sir Roger Scruton, “The Cultural Significance of Pop”, https://www.roger-scruton.com/articles/31-understanding-music/175-the-cultural-significance-of-pop

(11)                       These are the Kyrie, the Gloria, the Credo, the Sanctus/Benedictus and the Agnus Dei.

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.