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Introduction to Music, Society, Education

(1977)

It is generally acknowledged that the musical tradition of post-Renaissance Europe and her offshoots is one of the most brilliant and astonishing cultural phenomena of human history. In its range and power it is perhaps to be matched by only one other intellectual achievement—the science of post-Renaissance Europe. It is understandable, therefore, if those of us who are its heirs (which includes not only the Americas and many late and present colonies of Europe but also by now a large portion of the non-western world as well) are inclined to find in the European musical tradition the norm and ideal for all musical experience, just as they find in the attitudes of western science the paradigm for the acquisition of all knowledge, and to view all other musical cultures as at best exotic and odd. It is in fact precisely this inbuilt certainty of the superiority of European culture to all others that has given Europeans, and latterly their American heirs, the confidence to undertake the cultural colonization of the world and the imposition of European values and habits of thought on the whole human race.

We should not, however, allow the brilliance of the western musical tradition to blind us to its limitations and even areas of downright impoverishment. We may be reluctant to think of our musical life, with its great symphony orchestras, its Bach, its Beethoven, its mighty concert halls and opera houses, as in any way impoverished, and yet we must admit that we have nothing to compare with the rhythmic sophistication of Indian, or what we are inclined to dismiss as “primitive” African music, that our ears are deaf to the subtleties of pitch inflection of Indian raga or Byzantine church music, that the cultivation of bel canto as the ideal of the singing voice has shut us off from all but a very small part of the human voice’s sound possibilities or expressive potential, such as are part of the everyday resources of a Balkan folk singer or an Eskimo, and that the smooth mellifluous sound of the romantic symphony orchestra drowns out the fascinating buzzes and distortions cultivated alike by African and medieval European musicians.

It is only comparatively recently that Europeans have developed sufficient interest in these and other musical cultures to hear in them anything more than quaintness or cacophony; we were in the position of the fish in Albert Einstein’s metaphor, not aware of the water because it knows nothing of any other medium. Today, partly through our increasing knowledge of other musical cultures, we have the opportunity to become aware of our own tradition as a medium surrounding and supporting us and shaping our perceptions and attitudes as the needs of hydrodynamics shape the fish’s body; this book is in part an attempt to examine the western musical tradition through this experience as well as in itself, to see it through the mirror of these other musics as it were from the outside, and in so doing to learn something of the inner unspoken nature of western culture as a whole. We shall try to look beneath the surface of the music, beneath the “message,” if any, which the composer consciously intended (and even the fact that a message is intended may be in itself significant), to its basic technical means, its assumptions, which we usually accept unawares, on such matters as the nature of sound, the manner of listening, the passing of time, as well as its social situation and relations, to see what lies hidden there.

For it is in the arts of our, or indeed of any, culture, that we see not only a metaphor for, but also a way of transcending, its otherwise unspoken and unexamined assumptions. Art can reveal to us new modes of perception and feeling, which jolt us out of our habitual ways; it can make us aware of possibilities of alternative societies whose existence is not yet. Many writers and critics have undertaken, in the visual and plastic arts and in literature, to make plain the social implications of their chosen arts; it is to me perpetually surprising that so few writers have made any comparable attempt in music, whose criticism and appreciation exists for the most part in a social vacuum. Perhaps it is the lack of explicit subject matter in music that frightens people off. I make the attempt here with much trepidation, but feel it imperative, not merely for the sake of constructing yet another aesthetic of music (though even to do this in a way that takes note of the musical experience of other cultures would be a worthwhile project) but because of what I believe to be the importance and urgency from the social and especially the educational point of view of what I have learnt from my explorations. In following these explorations in this book the reader will notice that I occasionally return to the same point more than once; I must ask the reader to regard these repetitions not as signs of simple garrulousness but rather as nodal points in that network structure which my argument resembles more than it resembles a straight logic-line. The explorer (to introduce a metaphor which will become familiar) in a strange territory may cross and re-cross the same point many times, but will come towards it from a different direction each time as he traverses the terrain, and, if he is lucky, will each time obtain a new point of view. And if I appear to leave the subject and introduce irrelevancies I must ask the reader to trust me eventually to make relationships plain.

I shall begin my investigation with an exposition of what I see as the principal characteristics of western classical music, and of the conventions, both social and technical, of that music. I shall try to show how both western classical music and western science speak of very deep-rooted states of mind in Europeans, states of mind which have brought us to our present uncomfortable, if not downright dangerous condition in our relations with one another and with nature. I shall suggest that education, or rather schooling, as at present conceived in our society has worked to perpetuate those states of mind by which we see nature as a mere object for use, products as all-important regardless of the process by which they are obtained, and knowledge as an abstraction, existing “out there,” independent of the experience of the knower, the three notions being linked by an intricate web of cause and effect. In holding up some other musical cultures to the reader’s attention I shall try to show that different aesthetics of music are possible that can stand as metaphors for quite different world views, for different systems of relationships within society and nature from our own. I shall describe the various attempts, in the music of our century, to frame a critique of our present society and its world view, while a brief survey of music in the United States will show that that country possesses a culture which is not only more remote from Europe than we imagine but has also long contained within it the vision of a potential society which is perhaps stronger and more radical than anything in European culture. And finally, I shall attempt to show how the new vision of art revealed can serve as a model for a new vision of education, and possibly of society.

I have based my investigations upon two postulates: first, that art is more than the production of beautiful, or even expressive, objects (including sound-objects such as symphonies and concertos) for others to contemplate and admire, but is essentially a process, by which we explore our inner and outer environments and learn to live in them. The artist, whether he is Beethoven struggling to bring a symphony into being, Michelangelo wresting his forms from the marble, the devoted gardener laying out his garden or the child making his highly formalized portraits of the important people and things in his life, is exploring his environment, and his responses to it, no less than is a scientist in his laboratory; he is ordering his perceptions and making a model of reality, both present and potential. If he is a sufficiently gifted artist his art will help others do the same. Art is thus, notwithstanding its devaluation in post-Renaissance society, as vital an activity as science, and in fact reaches into areas of activity that science cannot touch. The second postulate is that the nature of these means of exploration, of science and of art, their techniques and attitudes, is a sure pointer to the nature and the preoccupations of the society that gave them birth. We shall find that our culture is presently undergoing a transformation as profound as that which took place in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries which we call the Renaissance, and that this transformation, like the Renaissance, is taking place not just on the level of conscious opinions and concepts but, more importantly, on that of perception and the often unconscious habits of thought on which we base our everyday speech and action. And since it is perception and the subconscious that are the concern of art, it is the methods of art rather than of science which can provide a model and a guide for the new conceptual universe towards which we are moving.

It is a grave but common error to think of the aims of art and of science as identical, or complementary, or even much in tune with each other. Art and science, it is true, are both means of exploration, but the intention, the method and the kind of reality they explore are very different. This is not simply the Cartesian split between matter and mind (we must indeed start from the assumption that they are identical); it is rather that the aim of art is to enable us to live in the world, while that of science is to enable us to master it. It is for this reason that I insist on the supreme importance of the art-process and the relative unimportance of the art-object; the essential tool of art is the unrepeatable experience. With science it is the finished product that counts, the theory, the hypothesis, the objectified knowledge; we obtain it by whatever means we can, and the tool is the repeatable experiment. Art is knowledge as experience, the structuring and ordering of feeling and perception, while science is abstract knowledge divorced as completely as possible from experience, a body of facts and concepts existing outside of and independently of the knower. Both are valid human activities, but since the Renaissance we have allowed the attitudes and values of science to predominate over those of art, to the detriment of the quality of our experience.

Our schools, for example, concern themselves almost exclusively with abstract knowledge, which pupils are expected to absorb immediately and regurgitate on demand. The pupils may or may not wish, or be able, to absorb the knowledge, but the one lesson that all do learn is that they can be consumers, not producers, of knowledge, and that the only knowledge that has validity is that which comes to them through the school system. They are taught much about the world, but their experience of it, apart from the hermetic world of classroom and playground, is seriously impaired. And so, too, of our culture as a whole. We know more about the world, and experience it less, than perhaps any previous generation in history; so, too, musicology has made available to us more knowledge about music than ever before, and yet our experience of it is greatly diluted by being mediated through the knowledge of experts. We become afraid of the encounter with new musical experience, where knowledge and expertise are no guide and only the subjective experience honestly felt can serve, and retreat into the safe past, where we know what to expect and connoisseurship is paramount.

This book will suggest that artistic activity, properly understood, can provide not only a way out of this impasse in musical appreciation, in itself an unimportant matter, but also an approach to the restructuring of education and even perhaps of our society. Simply because the artist sets his own goals and works with his whole self—reason, intuition, the most ruthless self-criticism and realistic assessment of a situation, freely, without external compulsion and with love—art is a model for what work could be were it freely and lovingly undertaken rather than, as it is for most today, forced, monotonous and boring. The spectacular changes which western art has undergone in our century are metaphors for changes that are still only latent in our culture. They show, however, that there are in fact forces within the matrix of society that are favorable to these changes, which could bring about our liberation from the scientific and technocratic domination of our lives, from the pointless and repetitious labor that passes for work for most people, and, for our children, from the scars inflicted by our present schools, well-intentioned though they may be, on all those, successful and unsuccessful alike, who pass through them.