Good Music: What It Is and Who Gets to Decide - Hardcover

Sheinbaum, John J

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 022659324X ISBN 13: 9780226593241

Verlag: The University of Chicago Press, 2018

Inhaltsangabe

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

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

John J. Sheinbaum is associate professor of musicology and associate director for academic affairs at the University of Denver’s Lamont School of Music.

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Good Music

What It Is and Who Gets to Decide

By John J. Sheinbaum

The University of Chicago Press

Copyright © 2019 The University of Chicago
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-226-59324-1

Contents

List of Illustrations, 
Acknowledgments, 
Introduction — Good: What Values Do We Bring to Music?, 
1 Serious: The Cultural Work of Classical Music and the Trap of Musical Sound, 
2 Unified: Beethoven, the Beatles, and the Imperfect Ideology of the Masterpiece, 
3 Deep: Classical Values and Musical Color in Mahler's Symphonies, 
4 Authentic: Progressive Rock and the Inversion of Musical Values, 
5 Heroic: "Classic" Jazz and Musical Dialogues, 
6 Original: Handel Historiography and the Horizontal Remix, 
7 Connected: What's at Stake in How We Love the Music We Love?, 
Notes, 
Works Cited, 
Index, 

CHAPTER 1

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

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

• Classical music works in ways that don't exist in "lower" types of music.

• Only classical music can lead to rich aesthetic experiences deeply connected to its culture.

• Popular music is inherently antagonistic to deep thinking.

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Music That Is Supposed to Matter

Potentially more credible arguments tend to work in the same way as Bloom's thinking, toward essentially the same assertion for classical over popular music. Lawrence Kramer's 2007 Why Classical Music Still Matters is a case in point. It's valuable to argue that classical music is worth listening to, of course, and there's nothing wrong with arguing that classical music perhaps works somewhat differently than most...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: The University of Chicago Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2018
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 022659324X
• ISBN 13: 9780226593241
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 320
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Buchbär; info@buchbaer.de; ; Weberstr. 67; Osnabrück; 49084; Deutschland