Music and Its Social Meanings

Christopher Ballantine

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136768521
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music

First Published in 1984. This is the second volume in a series on musicology and related areas edited by F. Joseph Smith. Deciphering the specific social characteristics of music has long lagged behind the analytical dissection of musical composition and biographical musicology. The essays in this volume have been produced in an attempt to redress the balance. The sociology of music as examined here is an investigation into the ways social formations come together in musical structures. These essays specifically address the problem of our neutralized music consciousness, the separation of music from the social context and the artificial insulation of musical understanding from the realms of social meanings. One theme in these essays concerns the struggle against ideological distortions arising from the insulation of music from its sociological context. The author argues that there is a stronger connection between music and society than is generally assumed.

Chapter I

Music and Society: The Forgotten Relationship

THE MUSICAL world that we so take for granted should today be a cause for grave concern rather than for the complacency that so typically attends it. The deformations that characterize the musical world at large are no less apparent in those havens of a supposedly purified and privileged musical practice: for instance the university or academy. To speak personally, my own deep disquiet about the nature of music and musical scholarship began about the time that I first entered the university musical world as an undergraduate. This disquiet has not mellowed with the passing of time. Today I am disturbed about how we see music and our relationship to it; about what we talk about when we discuss music, and those things that we somehow never find a place for in our discussions; about precisely what we teach and those things that we manage to leave out of our teaching, our researches and our scholarly writing. In a word, I am concerned about the highly selective nature of our preconceptions about music – all those notions that are part of our musical scenery and that we simply take for granted, and that therefore deeply influence the quality of our musical understanding. This is by no means a local problem: I think it occurrs in most parts of the world with which we are familiar.

Let me begin by enunciating some of the simplest manifestations of the problem. One of the things that for most of us ‘obvious’, perhaps even ‘natural’, is that music is an art of personal expression. We talk about a piece of music as expressing feelings, which have been put into it by the composer: we expect him to be somebody really out of the ordinary and certainly more than a mere craftsman. If he is great we say that he has genius. That means that he will be blessed with the gift of true originality: he will be a creator. His work will proceed less from calculation than from flashes of inspiration. To most of us, all this is so self-evident as to be trite. It is ‘obvious’; it is ‘true’. I am bound to point out that hardly any of this would be either obvious or true to anybody but ourselves: that for most of the time during the history of the West, and nearly all of the time in most other cultures, all of my definitions would have been rejected as utterly false and meaningless and would probably have led to my being regarded as something of a subversive. To take the example of the Middle Ages: music then was regarded as a mathematical discipline, and it very happily took its place alongside arithmetic, geometry, and astronomy as one of the four arts of the quadrivium. The different components of music – melody, harmony, rhythm – were hardly to be considered in terms of anything so human and subjective as inspiration: on the contrary, they were to be discussed in the precise terms of mathematical proportions. Cassiodorus, the great sixth-century writer on music, characteristically described music as disciplina vel scientia quae de numeris loquitur: the discipline or science that deals with numbers. And what about the composer as ‘creative genius’? In the first place, the concept of genius as such did not exist. The composer was a craftsman, and his job was to follow the rules of his craft. Certainly, there was nothing special about him: he was seldom discussed in medieval writings, and hardly ever mentioned by name. Above all, he was not a creator. Medieval theology, which said that only God could create, made sure of that. A view that is surprising to us was perfectly obvious to people in the Middle Ages; and composers then showed their humble dependence on already created material by basing their new compositions on pre-existing ones.

Only when we approach the Renaissance do things begin to change; only then do we find the beginnings of the notion of genius, and a clear separation of craftsman and genius. The craftsman reproduces, in terms of the rules; the genius transgresses, in order to create. Simultaneously, we find the beginnings of the idea of music as a medium for expressing human emotions. What was formerly taboo now becomes not only permissible but even necessary, as society enters a new era with new potentialities and new demands: an order oriented towards man, discovery, individual achievement, great personalities and careers, and industrial and colonial conquest.

It will be evident that in my attempt to go beyond the ‘obvious’, I have had to look at more than the ‘obvious’ facts themselves: I have had to see these facts in their proper context, and only by exploring these relationships – and particularly those that reach down to the social situation — have I been able to understand the facts and see why something that is unthinkable at one time is perfectly obvious at another. Perhaps it will be said that by picking on such notions as genius, personal expression, and creativity I have picked on what might be termed a ‘popular’ confusion: no self-respecting music-lover or musical scholar or practitioner would make the sort of error I have talked about. If that is so, I would like to take the other extreme, and examine very briefly one of the most zealously cherished habits of university music departments: the cult of disinterested research. There is scarcely anything of which a musicologist is more proud than the methods and the achievements of historical musicology: no procedure in musical studies seems to him to be more obvious and correct, more independent of fluctuations in taste or outlook. For him, disinterested research – in the natural as well as the human sciences – came into being because we ‘hit upon it’: that is all. On closer inspection, however, the matter turns out to be rather more complex, and not quite so obvious. Modern scientific research came into being in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. But from the start a fierce theological and social battle was waged against it on many fronts. Science offended established interests: for this very reason science had of necessity to stress that research should be disinterested. So this criterion came to be built into its foundations, as it were, and precisely because of the social circumstances in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The consequences of this were enormous. In particular, it came to be believed that all research and all knowledge were valuable for their own sake, and even more, that the highest aim of research was disinterested knowledge for its own sake. From this it followed that research which was undertaken for a practical end, such as the satisfaction of human needs, was regarded as being of a rather lower order. And so we have the situation today where vast quantities of research are done in the most obscure corners of countless fields – including music – with no particular purpose except the accumulation of still greater quantities of partial and atomized knowledge. One hardly needs to be reminded of how vigorously this state of affairs has been attacked in recent years.

I said I would begin by enunciating some of our simpler preconceptions – they might even be called prejudices – about music. In the process of doing that I have drawn the reader’s attention to the necessity for us to think particularly about the social context if we wish to understand or see through these preconceptions. Now, the fact that I feel obliged to point this out and to argue that the method I have used is indispensable is itself a highly significant pointer to another of our preconceptions. This time it is a much more serious one: I would say even that it is fundamental.

Underlying nearly all our writing about music, all our talking about it and teaching of it, is the taken-for-granted assumption that music has very little to do with society; or alternatively, that if it is related somehow to society, the nature of this connection need not concern us very much, and that it is far more important to talk about styles, skills and techniques, and to keep to what we call the ‘facts’. The orientations we are most used to, and that therefore seem to us perfectly natural and ‘obvious’, are invariably the ones we are least conscious of; and I admit that it was not until many years after I had begun to study music that I became aware of this particular orientation in our musical thinking. Once I noticed it, however, I saw it everywhere – in all our discussions about music at all levels, from the most erudite musicological treatise or scholarly textbook, to programme notes, casual conversations, and newspaper criticism. If I had not started to question this assumption, I would forever have regarded as ‘obvious’ that music is more or less abstract from life, that it develops in history pretty much according to its own immanent laws, or that the direction of its development is controlled ‘from above’ by composers of genius; I would forever have believed that music, being what we call an abstract art, is concerned aesthetically only with itself, and that its values are wholly internal to itself.

The truth of the matter, however, is very different. What actually happens is that social structures crystallize in musical structures; that in various ways and with varying degrees of critical awareness, the musical microcosm replicates the social macrocosm. For the moment a couple of very brief examples will have to suffice, though this is a point I will return to more than once. One can demonstrate, for instance, that the music of Bach is the way it is because Bach’s music is appropriate to the ancien régime; and when the static Baroque style of Bach is replaced by the dynamic sonata style of Beethoven and others, this is wholly because of the collapse of late feudalism and its replacement by the bourgeois democratic order. To bring the whole argument up to date, one could make a similar analysis of contemporary popular music. The precise nature of 1960s rock music (for instance) is explicable only in relation to the protest and the possibilities for social change that were the lived experience of young people during that decade; the foreclosing of these possibilities and the shrinking of the horizons of change that characterize the 1970s determine the altered structures of the typical popular music of the 1970s: on the one hand the total sell-out of disco music, on the other the brittle and authentic criticism of the repressive social order so well articulated by punk rock.

So the assumption that music and society are wholly separate domains is demonstrably false. I began to question such assumptions at the moment that I began to suspect them to be rationalizations. As I investigated, it struck me that such atomistic views had not always been held – in fact, they were of quite recent origin. And I saw that they came into being when and where they did – in the industrial capitalist countries in the late nineteenth century – because the bourgeoisie then needed to hold such views, even though they ran contrary to what had been believed up to half a century earlier. Exactly why this was can here be stated only very briefly.

The French Revolution had promised a better future for all human beings. If that future was to indefinitely postponed – and the entrenchment of the bourgeoisie during the nineteenth century made that inevitable – then all forms of bourgeois thought, including aesthetics, would need to show a similar turning away from the great problems of the age, a similar flight from reality and a movement towards abstraction. The connection, then, between Europe in the age of imperialism and an aesthetician such as Worringer with his ‘theory of abstraction’ and his rejection of realism, is not in the least fortuitous.

For this way of viewing the matter, I am indebted to the Marxist tradition. Since this is not primarily an essay on Marxist epistemology, I cannot now give a full theoretical account of precisely how one must proceed if one wishes to dehoax social phenomena so that the real web of interrelations, as well as the deceits and rationalizations, is revealed. I want simply to say that as a practising musician I find this kind of insight indispensable to my practical and theoretical involvement with music every day at every level. For critical social theorists have shown us that very often the views people have of themselves, their world, and their place in it, are far removed from what is actually and demonstrably the case. As Marx pointed out, it is true of social groups just as it is true of individuals, that if you want to form an opinion of someone you do not go about it merely by asking him his own opinion of himself. Now if this is the case, we can hardly claim that our views about music are exempt from these limitations. Our attitudes to music, the categories we impose on it, the analytical structures we bring to bear upon it, the way we explain it – all these are subject to the same laws: they too are a complex mixture of truths, half-truths, confusions and total falsehood. The reality we have to come to terms with is that our ‘unreflected-upon’ attitudes to music – those attitudes that we take for granted, and that seem to us most obvious, with all their implicit assumptions – are very largely ideology. That is to say, they have come into being at a specific moment in history, as part and parcel of the way certain classes of people have come to see their world and their place and activities in it, all of which have been more or less a function of the way society has been organized at that time, and particularly of the way it has shared, or rather denied the sharing of, its benefits. Such views are the products of certain societies in certain social and historical conditions, and of the individuals in them: people who by virtue of their plate in the social structure are to greater or lesser degree cut off from seeing it as a whole, as it really is. Ideology, then, in this sense is a kind of false consciousness.

This has a very special, and uniquely troubling, significance for us today. As many social philosophers have pointed out, it is today quite remarkably difficult for ordinary men and women to see the whole, to grasp the social reality behind the ideological veil. In some respects it is more difficult now than it has been at any time in the last hundred years. This is partly, but not only, because of the increasing complexity of Western societies; there are in addition at least four further interrelated reasons for this predicament. Firstly, there is the continuing contraction of human consciousness through the increasingly specialized nature of disciplines and occupations. One of the most disastrous products of this tendency is the person who is at one and the same time illiterate and a graduate of a university. ‘This is a man’ comments the French-speaking Marxist philosopher Goldmann, ‘who is very familiar with one field of production and has high professional qualifications to carry out in a satisfactory and even remarkable manner the tasks which are assigned to him, but who is increasingly losing all contact with the rest of human life, and whose personality is thus being deformed and narrowed to an extreme degree’.¹ Secondly, there is the steady erosion – and even total disappearance – of responsibility in social life. One of the differences, for the middle-class person, between the so-called liberal capitalism of one-hundred years ago and the centralized mass-production society of today, is that he finds fewer and fewer areas where he can act in a way that makes any difference, or can hold views that will matter. The real decisions are always taken elsewhere: he merely carries them out. Thirdly – and this is the payoff – because Western societies offer increasing material rewards, they also seem to offer their own selfjustification. The fetishization of consumer goods stifles criticism before it can even be formulated. And fourthly, because of the centralization, the all-pervasiveness, and the insidiously sophisticated techniques of the communications industry, the consciousness of people today is dominated and administered to an alarming extent.

The picture is bleak; but the implication, I think, is clear. It is that today – as a matter of urgency – one of our very few lifelines is to use every resource at our command to be on our guard against the disfigured consciousness that I have described as ideology. We have to be exceedingly vigilant about not submitting passively to what seems most ‘obvious’; we have vigorously to question the values, the categories, the responses, that we unconsciously pick up – no matter whether these concern life, or politics, or art in general, or (and this is what I am preoccupied with here) music. Only through a special kind of effort, and a profound concern, not for the immediate and superficial rewards offered by the present order, but for the real interests of humanity in the long term and on the broadest conceivable base: only in this way will we be able to make a start at comprehending the...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Introduction
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Chapter I: Music and Society: The Forgotten Relationship
• Chapter II: Beethoven, Hegel and Marx
• Chapter III: Social and Philosophical Outlook in Mozart’s Operas
• Chapter IV: Charles Ives and the Meaning of Quotation in Music
• Chapter V: A Musical Triptych: The Contemporary Scene
• Chapter VI: An Aesthetic of Experimental Music
• Chapter VII: A Revaluation of Sibelius’ Symphonies
• Index