I Mikyska

Changes in the Aesthetic Understanding of Music as a Result of Stylistic Fragmentation in the 20th Century and the Possibility of True Criticism of Music
The beginning of the tradition of classical music (also called Western art music or serious music) is dated somewhere between 1500 and 1600, depending on geographical location. This tradition enjoyed undisputed cultural hegemony until the 20th century. Whichever theory of aesthetic perception, understanding or appreciation one subscribes to, it would be preposterous to assume that these either of these three actions is unaffected by external factors that can influence us, thereby leading us astray from the ideal, empirically observable analysis in other words, subjectifying our experience. These factors are predominantly social, the most important being differentiation from other social classes and academic authority. Due to a score of varied influences in the twentieth century, these factors started changing a change in European political distribution, the spread of egalitarianism, general progress on the vanguard of the arts and, perhaps most importantly, the rise of the global mass media. The aim of this essay is to see how our aesthetic understanding of music, particularly in terms of perception and judgement both conscious and unconscious has changed due to the paradigm shift which occurred in the 20th century, at the beginning of which, as Terry Eagleton puts it, the social order of European capitalism had been shaken to its roots, and the ideologies on which that order had customarily depended, the cultural values upon which it ruled, were also in deep turmoil. (Eagleton, 54). I will consider various philosophical and literary theories of generation and transmission of meaning and apply them to the problem of musical stylistics, and to conclude, I will examine the ways in which this knowledge might affect the way we then consider music. Objectivity and Terminology Within the classical philosophical paradigm, objectivity was seen as a definite and accepted concept. Friedrich Nietzsches claim that There are no facts, only interpretations started an epistemological scepticism that became crucial in the continental philosophy of the 20th century, making even the suggestion of a potential objective or empirical view of music a controversial issue. Therefore, a definition of terms is in order; if we take the term subjective in the Kantian sense, meaning that it is found in the subject, we can also see that it would be difficult to find anything directly observable within music that would lead us to any verifiable conclusions about its value; we can scientifically assess the properties of any sound, but this will lead us only to an understanding of the basic units, of the morphemes and phonemes of music. But it is the use of these morphemes and phonemes in wider structures that give it meaning meaning that is not necessarily semantic, but meaning in terms of the intention that is crucial for our understanding of a collection of sounds as music. Therefore it would appear that despite the empirically verifiable facts we can gather about sounds, our understanding of them as music will always be dictated by their arrangement within a structure, and therefore subjective to our

I Mikyska interpretation of that structure; this is the attitude accepted in most of todays aesthetic theories. However, I do not think this is enough to justify entirely erasing the word objective, I believe it merely calls for a redefinition. From the impossibility of something being entirely objective which comes from the need of our (necessarily subjective) reading of the object, it is apparent that objectivity and subjectivity are not in clear, binary opposition. Rather they are two points within a set of continuous data that are classified for the sake of simplification and legibility; or at least they were until the 20th century. As Jonathan Culler puts it, Time is infinitely subdividable [sic] but to tell the time is to give a discrete interpretation. (Structuralist Poetics, p. 16) If we see objectivity (or subjectivity) as continuous, we can see that something can be more or less objective, therefore, when I use the word objective or objectively, it is to be seen as a marked contrast to something which is subjective. This idea can be easily understood by analogy; while we can agree that it is impossible for anyone to be absolutely free of any external influences within any political system, you can be more or less free. Similarly, a judgement or opinion can be more or less subjective, even if we accept that there are no fact, but only interpretations. Hume and the True Critic Most philosophy within the classical paradigm is not useful to contemporary considerations of aesthetics, especially due to the common absolute and realist grounds they operate on. David Humes idea of the true critic, formulated in his Of The Standard of Taste is one that is useful to any consideration of aesthetic judgment, based as it is on common sense, and especially useful when contrasting the aesthetic values of the classical paradigms as opposed to those of the post-modern era. According to Hume, a true critic is one who possesses strong sense, united to delicate sentiment, improved by practice, perfected by comparison, and cleared of all prejudice (Hume, volume 3, p. 278). The ideas of sense and sentiment, linked primarily to Humes ethical theories, are not much use to us, but the three latter ideas are central: practice, comparison, and sentiment. Music and the Ruling Class The idea of practice in contemplating, judging and criticising works of art (in this case, music) is central to the classical understanding of art. In the classical era, there was a strong institutional basis behind it in order to understand the arts, one had to study them, and the class distinction is no smaller; in order to study them, you had to be wealthy or supported by the wealthy. This cultural control is especially prominent in the field of music one could write poetry or novels, and to a lesser extent paint, without needing too much financial support; one could become proficient in these disciplines while also having another source of income. In music, not only are the demands on time arguably greater than in some of the other arts, as are the necessities of schooling, but it is also financially demanding to have music performed to a decent standard. The only available orchestras were at the aristocratic courts, and even when public concerts became popular, they still catered to the conservative tastes of a bourgeois audience. Perhaps it could be argued that this reliance on the ruling class is why music developed so slowly throughout the 19th century, when literature and the visual arts were making huge leaps.

I Mikyska Only a deep-seated class elitism would allow us to assume that classical music was the only music that was made during its hey-day (between 1500 and 1900). However, since it was the only music accepted by the ruling class, it was the only music capable of having any kind of established rules, institutions and conventions outside of small, provincial communities in which folk music surely thrived. And these folk musics found everywhere around the world surely have their own conventionalised rules and methods of analysis and criticism, but because of the economic drawbacks (i.e. the fact that the performers would not usually be professional musicians), these systems would be regional only, and would ultimately be eclipsed by the pervasive classical tradition, which would be the same in pretty much any larger town. The Classical Hegemony The more similar two pieces of music (or any art) are to one another, the easier it is to make a value judgement about them, since it is easier to distinguish their goals, and therefore allows us to see to what extent they have fulfilled them. In other words, they become more easily quantifiable if our sole criterion in judging the value of a fugue, for example, is how closely it adheres to the rules of fugal counterpoint technique, we can quite comfortably make objective claims about this. This is the logic behind what educationalists call 'cloze procedure' (Barry, 54), which Peter Barry illustrates by presenting the beginning of a novel, and leaving out a word every once in a while, presenting a few words in brackets that might fit in that place. He then goes on to reveal to the reader what word the novelist actually used and what effect this has on the meaning of the text. This procedure could equally well be applied to music if we gave two composers the same piece of music, but left out every tenth bar, it would be easier to see which of them made it a better composition. Moving one step further, if we gave two composers the same theme, and asked them to turn it into a tango, it would still be easier than the judgements we usually have to make, but more difficult than the previous. The above example comes from the chapter in Barry's book about structuralism, and an application of some of Saussure's ideas about language. There is an automatic objection when applying linguistic concepts to music, and that is that music does not communicate information in the same way that language does. This problem is easily dealt with, however, when we look at how many useful applications structuralism has in other, non-linguistic areas most importantly anthropology, in the pioneering work of Lvi-Strauss, or in fashion, often called visual rhetoric, as discussed by Elizabeth Wilson or Roland Barthes. Style as Langue One of the most useful concepts we can use in order to understand our aesthetic understanding in the post-modern multiplicity of musical styles and approaches, is Saussure's idea of langue and parole. Jonathan Culler, in his intorductory book on Saussure, says that La Langue is the system of a language, the language as a system of forms, whereas parole is actual speech, the speech acts which are made possible by the language. (Culler; Saussure, 29) In a study of musical style, we would place the style itself (baroque, hip-hop, etc.) as the

I Mikyska langue, and the individual musical utterance (song, symphony, etc.) as the parole. Of course, one might object that a piece will often function in several styles at once; indeed, one of the greatest innovations in post-modern music is the idea of fusion, combining two or more musical traditions. Jonathan Culler gives an explanation for this in Structuralist Poetics, appropriating Noam Chomsky's idea of linguistic competence and performance, which he says are related, respectively, to langue and parole. (Culler, Structuralist Poetics, 10). For our purposes, it is most important that actual behaviour is not a direct reflection of competence for a variety of reasons. The English language is not outstripped by its manifestations. It contains potential sentences which have never been uttered (Culler, Structuralist Poetics, 10) In other words, the langue is not restricted to one particular style, but can move across several different ones, while still using the structures found in all of them. We can easily observe this if we listen to any popular radio station for a certain amount of time. All of the songs will follow certain conventions; they will all have elements that will have allowed them to become popular to this extent (whether this is natural or arbitrarily conventionalized is a matter for another discussion, but we can for the time being assume that it is a mixture of both). And yet, when we consider each song within its own genre, or more narrowly defined style, we will see that each of these will then have its own particular conventions that need not apply to other popular songs of other styles rock, hip-hop, electronic dance music all have more or less individualised markings that define it; instrumentation, the themes found in the lyrics, song form, even racial stereotypes. The modern audience practices analysis of them through somewhat more straightforward means reading music magazines, becoming acquainted with the lives of the performers (through tabloids and the general obsession with show business), and being forced to listen toA popular radio pretty much wherever they go. As discussed previously, there was only one style of music for a few hundreds of years, or at least one style with the same langue that was less geographically restricted; i.e. it was restricted to the entire Western cultural world. Because of the academic institutions behind this style, the conventions were extremely well defined, through what we refer to today as music theory, and what is taught in music schools around the world. The listeners were thus trained to recognise certain features and judge the music accordingly these weren't just directly structural features like form (although clear form was one of the staples of the Classical tradition), but also contrasts in melody and harmony, emotional narrativity, etc. If we consider Hume's idea of comparison in the true critic in this light, we will see that this explains why there might be such a large absence of true critics, as far as comparing contemporary and classical music goes. As illustrated with the semiological example from Peter Barry, the smaller the change in the structure, the easier to make comparisons. We might put this in slightly different language and say that music or art in general of different kinds, pertaining to different langues, attempts to reach certain goals; what these goals might be is a question I believe will ultimately be answered by neuroscience which pleasurable effects are caused by different vibrations, timbres, rhythms, etc.

I Mikyska However, even without knowing explicitly what they are, we can infer their existence from the vast difference in different kinds of art, and thus conclude that it is much easier to compare Mozart to Haydn, Coleridge to Wordsworth or Degas to Renoir than it is to compare Mozart to Led Zeppelin, Coleridge to Kerouac and Degas to Warhol. In the varied styles of the 20th century, the classical structural framework suddenly disappeared, as did the academic foundation behind it. The new music couldnt be academically informed, since in the vast majority of cases, it was the rebellion of a certain out-group against precisely those social conventions that the academy stood as an icon for. In the case of jazz, blues and hip-hop, it was African-American culture rebelling against oppression by the majority, and the end of slavery meant that African-Americans could now make their music more popular as well make a living from it interestingly, blues and early jazz was much informed by Christian spirituals that were forced on the slaves along with religious conversion, but this assimilation was practical, rather than theoretical, it happened organically, without any consideration. The record industry and the emergence of an acceptable popular music also allowed the music to spread, as did the new opportunities of travel and spread of culture the hunger for the foreign and the exotic made jazz huge in post-decadent, turn-of-the-century France. Rock music (not the rock 'n' roll of the 50s, but rather the rock of the 60s) was the result of a rebellious white middle class reacting to everything from the nuclear threat to the Vietnam war, and the anger against the ruling class which had unwillingly manipulated their country into the current situation naturally extended to everything connected with it. The senators and business tycoons, however, were still more likely to be seen at the opera than at a rock concert. Certain more extreme styles, such as black metal, are in fact an introverted reaction to the outgoing rebellious revolution of rock music, which is why they are often the most technical in execution; on average, metal musicians possess a much higher degree of purely technical skill than rock musicians, because they have created their own ingrown structure of musical achievement, not dissimilar to the one found in classical music. It is precisely these kinds of socially determined factors that we must identify and attempt to extract from our observation if we are to try and give an objective aesthetic judgement. They are, in Hume's terms, prejudices: something that a true critic should strive to remove. In most cases, it is fairly easy to decide when something is a prejudice, although it might be difficult to remove, but the last example mentioned above might also bring up the age old psychological dilemma of nature vs. nurture when is the introverted nature of black metal really dictated by its binary opposition to rock, and when is it simply a psychological predisposition of the subject towards more introverted activities? Prejudice, Interpretation and the Hermeneutic Circle Another approach to the understanding of generation of meaning, or more specifically aesthetic perception is that of hermeneutics, particularly the hermeneutic circle. The hermeneutic circle is defined as the interpretative interdependence, within any meaningful structure, between the parts of that structure and the whole (Malpas). For Hans-Georg Gadamer, it is the interplay

I Mikyska that takes place whenever we consider any meaningful structure: [The reader] projects before himself a meaning for the text as a whole as soon as some initial meaning emerges in the text (Gadamer, 236). In other words, as soon as we see are contemplating something, we bring our own views about the world, our own prejudices into the perception, and we constantly refer what we are currently perceiving to what we have already taken in about the work and to what our ideas about this certain kind of work are. In the context of music, Gadamer's views might serve better to explain our need to view a single musical work as a unified body, to organise the individual sound events into a unified body. However, it can also be applied to how we perceive music stylistically, referring any new music we hear to music we have already heard before and the way we were taught (implicitly or explicitly) to perceive it. But how can we escape this apparently vicious circle? According to Heidegger, when we have to do with anything, the mere seeing of the things which are closest to us bears in itself the structure of interpretation and in so primordial a manner that just to grasp something free, as it were, of the as requires a certain adjustment. (Heidegger, 95) Later in the same work, Heidegger insists that it is not a vicious circle, and that in the circle is hidden a positive possibility of the most primordial kind of knowing. To be sure, we genuinely take hold of this possibility only when, in our interpretation, we have understood that our first, last and constant task is never to allow our fore-having, fore-sight and fore-conception to be presented to us by fancies and popular conceptions, but rather to make the scientific scheme secure by working out these fore-structures in terms of the things themselves. (Heidegger, 195) Translated to musical terms, this means that every time we listen to a piece of music written in a style that we wouldn't normally listen to, we should try to realise the possible prejudice we might have against that style and attempt to see beyond it. To illustrate this point with an example: a few years ago, I attended the concert of the American ska-punk band Reel Big Fish. The other members of the crowd were those you would expect to see at a concert of that nature: young people, either members of subculture or linked to it, all of them considerably rebellious. As an encore, the band played one of their biggest hits: the remake of the song Take on Me, originally by A-Ha. None of the members in the audience would usually be seen enjoying a song by the 80s pop super-group, but once it was appropriated by a band belonging to the subculture (or anti-culture) they themselves subscribed to, they could enjoy it. Stylistic Defamiliarisation The group of literary critics known as the Russian Formalists saw literary or poetic language as impeding the transferal of meaning. To use Paul Fry's example, instead of drawing a line from A to B, literary language draws an arabesque (Fry, Russian Formalism); this process is whats called defamiliarisation. In order to apply this idea to music, we need to conceive of the style of a certain music as literary language, and imagine some idealist centre or core of the music, the appreciation of which is impeded by the stylistic constraints I shall deal with the problem of this metaphysical core later. For the moment, let us think of A as the composer, trying to create music for the listener (B) to enjoy, with all of the stylistic problems a composer might encounter as the

I Mikyska defamiliarising effect complicating that transition. These effects need not necessarily be social of the Marxist kind described most often in this essay; they can often be more personal and psychological. To give a clear example, let us take the life of the French composer and conductor Pierre Boulez. As the leader of the ultra-modernist avant-garde in postwar Europe, Boulez rejected all of the stale academic conventions of the classical music of the past with the enthusiasm of punk-rock, although perhaps with better articulated arguments. He interrupted performances at Paris most prestigious concert halls, shouting for new music to be played; in the words of a Guardian editorial, the polemicist who once disrupted concerts and called for opera houses to be burnt down has matured into a benign pragmatist (Guardian). Later in life, he became a renowned conductor of Beethoven, Mahler, Brckner and other staples of the old classical canon which once so despised. As a young composer in the 1950's, Boulez was writing music that was deemed challenging and difficult at best and ugly and lacking in melody at worst. His music was derided by the vast majority of the academy, not to mention the general public. As was suggested above, the gap between the vanguard and the tradition was perhaps greatest in music because of the impractical costs that led to its mass institutionalisation. It is no wonder that such stylistic (and personal) feuds would have a defamiliarising effect on the angry young Boulez, making it impossible for him to shed his prejudice, become a Humian true critic and appreciate the qualities of Beethoven or Mahler qualities of the same kind of metaphysical core relevant to Reel Big Fish and A-Ha, their existence proven inasmuch as Boulez eventually admitted to them by conducting and recording the pieces himself. This idealist centre of the music is best understood as an intentional object stemming from the mind of the composer; what the composer tries to achieve with repeated changes and revisions; attempting to find a way to express his musical thoughts in a manner as pleasurable as possible to his audience. And these defamiliarising stylistic, social and personal hurdles are present today more than ever; making it impossible for young people to like opera and for old people to enjoy rock. The Possibility of a True Critic The central question remains to what extent we can in fact rid ourselves of prejudices. Practice and comparison are two of Hume's criteria that we can fulfill moderately easily; all we need is a music education system that will deal with the absence of a cultural hegemony this even takes care of the problem of having a more diverse spectrum of styles than before. Of course, we might ultimately reach the point at which it is necessary to accept certain preferences of taste. Right now, if someone says I do not like X (where X is a style of music), once we consider all of the circumstances mentioned in this essay it is difficult to accept this as an objective judgement. However, it might be that once we do really acquire all the knowledge necessary in order to become a true critic (and given how little we know about the working of the brain, this is a truly hypothetical moment), some people might still prefer one style to the other; the person that likes black metal might like so because of his psychological identity, not just because of the prejudices which should be eradicated.

I Mikyska This once again begs the question of nature vs. nurture, and once again, I shall leave it to neuropsychologists, but I will finish with one objection people are likely to make. Consider this example: John, now in his early forties, has a deep emotional connection to a song which immediately transports him to the happiest time of his life; his gap-year before university. This song is part of a wider genre, which, for predominantly this reason, is John's favourite. Clearly this is an unwanted prejudice, and if our neuroscience was advanced enough, we could find the part of John's brain where it is located and eradicated. Given that John lives in an ideal world with a minimum of stylistic defamiliarisation, he then proceeds to judge music in the same way as all the other true critics that live in that world. Would we really want a world that objectifies artistic experience in this way? is the objection we are likely to hear. This objection presupposes the metaphysical core of music , and I am doubtful as to whether it is anthropologically possible for us to reach it, and therefore, to live in a world where aesthetic judgements are universal in this way. But I do think that there is a wealth of unnecessary stylistic diversion in our perception of music today, and that a lot could be gained from the Heideggerian notion of stepping outside the hermeneutic circle, by working out these forestructures that we inevitably possess. Bibliography: Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory, An Introduction, Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1983 Jonathan Culler, Structuralist Poetics, New York: Routledge Classics, 1975 David Hume, The Philosophical Works of David Hume, edited by T. H. Green and T. H. Grose, 4 volumes, London: Longman, Green, 187475 Peter Barry, Beginning Theory, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2009 Jonathan Culler, Saussure, London: Fontana Press, 1990 Jeff Malpas, Hans-Georg Gadamer, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2009 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2009/entries/gadamer/ Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, trans. W. Glen-Deopel, London: Continuum International Publishing Group, 1975 Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie & Edward Robinson, Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1962 Paul H. Fry, Introduction to Literary Theory, video lectures on Yale Open Courses, http://oyc.yale.edu/english/engl-300#sessions retrieved 1.11.2012 Pierre Boulez: The Modern Master, Guardian editorial, http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/sep/30/editorial-pierre-boulezmusic-southbank retrieved 1.11.2012