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Music

All Music Is Shit To God

Music is so embedded in all aspects of culture today that one rarely pauses to question the validity of the form itself. But is music even a legitimate form of art?

ALL MUSIC IS SHIT TO GOD

  BY ANTHONY BERRYMAN, ILLUSTRATIONS BY RICK FROBERG

Music is so embedded in all aspects of culture today that one rarely pauses to question the validity of the form itself. But is music even a legitimate form of art? Is it even possible to discuss without using a single adjective? (An interesting parlor game, as Roland Barthes pointed out.) The difference between being and becoming is static—“being” implying a state that simply is, in a relatively fixed state of permanence, whereas “becoming” implies a thing that evolves over time. Music, thought of this way, has a multiplicity of natures; it might be thought of in the general, or one might try to understand music within the seemingly incomprehensible system of connections that it makes throughout culture today. And are there lines to be drawn so we may finally say

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this

is art whereas

that

is not? How is it possible to discuss the nature of music when the very form seems to fragment itself at so rapid a pace?

I’m sure that most of you have wondered: Where did the great minds of history stand on the subject? What did the philosophers, the intellectuals, the composers themselves have to say on the subject of music?

One of the earliest-known polemics against music comes from Plato, who saw music as a plebeian mode of entertainment, one that was beneath truly cultivated people. As he writes in

Protagoras

: “Second-rate and commonplace people, being too uneducated to entertain themselves as they drink by using their own voices and conversational resources, put up the price of female musicians, paying them well for the hire of an extraneous voice—that of the pipe—and find their entertainment in its warblings. But where the drinkers are men of worth and culture, you will find no girls piping or dancing or harping. They are quite capable of enjoying their own company without such frivolous nonsense, using their own voices in sober discussion and each taking his turn to speak or listen—even if the drinking is really heavy.”

Immanuel Kant’s stance on music may seem rather elusive at first, but on further review we find in his

Critique of Judgment

that he thought much the same as Plato with the respect to music’s place in the hierarchy of art. In fact, there is scant mention of music at all in his

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Critique

, though when present music is usually discussed in a comparison between the fine arts and the “arts” of entertaining—likening music to telling jokes or knowing how to decorate a table. His biographers have noted his significant bias against music, one writing that Kant considered it to be “incapable of expressing any idea, only sentiments”—the death knell for any attempt at producing a work of art. For his part, Hegel wrote much more on the subject than did Kant, and far more favorably so. He did, however, take into account the detachment prevalent in music whereby inward feeling and subjectivity may be usurped by formal development. In this sense, music moves further away from art into mere artistry. Here, music loses its soul and becomes little more than “skill and virtuosity in compilation.” At this point, music ceases to engage us in any meaningful fashion, though it may still trick the mind into following it through abstract understanding alone.

Surprisingly, one of the most fervent haters of music was Sigmund Freud, though he lived in Vienna during a time of great musical creativity (and was a peer of Gustav Mahler, no less). Interestingly, Freud suffered from terrible migraines, having at least six separate attacks—three of which occurred in Vienna’s Park Hotel, where there was almost certainly live music present. More than one scholar has suggested the possibility that Freud suffered as well from musicogenic epilepsy—seizures caused by specific musical pieces or instruments. At the minimum, this resulted in a profound dislike of music for much of his life, as his official biographer, Ernest Jones, recalled: “Freud’s aversion to music was one of his well-known characteristics. One well remembers the pained expression on his face on entering a restaurant or beer garden where there was a band and how quickly his hands would go over his ears to drown the sound.”

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While Michel Foucault never railed against music in quite the same fashion as Plato, he did concern himself with the multiplicity of links between contemporary music and culture and addressed this with a good friend, the composer Pierre Boulez. Boulez offers a fascinating response to Foucault on the topic of the plurality of musical forms that we see today: “Will talking about music in the plural… solve the problem? It seems, on the contrary, that this will merely conjure it away—as do certain devotees of an advanced liberal society. All those musics are good, all those musics are nice [sic]. Ah! Pluralism! There’s nothing like it for curing incomprehension. Love, each one of you in your corner, and each will love the others. Be liberal, be generous towards the taste of others, and they will be generous to yours. Everything is good, nothing is bad, there aren’t any values, but everyone is happy. This discourse, as liberating as it may wish to be, reinforces, on the contrary, the ghettos, comforts one’s clear conscience for being in a ghetto, especially if from time to time one tours the ghettos of others.” Certainly in the early stages of the 21st century, this “touring of ghettos” is occurring in a far more accelerated fashion than at any other time in the history of music—hence a new mashing together of musical forms and genres seemingly every week. Music in this sense becomes a

capturing mechanism with a twofold function, one that more often than not stifles the individual both in his relation to it and in his relation to the producers and critics of culture as a whole—passing off an impoverished music to an all-too-willing impoverished public.

I am reminded here of an aphorism in Kierkegaard’s

Diapsalmata

. “A fire broke out backstage in a theater. The clown came out to warn the public; they thought it was a joke and applauded. He repeated it; the acclaim was even greater. I think that’s just how the world will come to an end: to general applause from wits who believe it’s a joke.”