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Music has the ability to affect our emotions, intellect, and our psychology; lyrics can assuage our loneliness or incite our passions. As such, music is a powerful art form whose aesthetic appeal is highly dependent upon the culture in which it is practiced.
Some of the aesthetic elements expressed in music include lyricism, harmony, hypnotism, emotiveness, temporal dynamics, resonance, playfulness, and colour (see musical development).
Contents |
History
In the eighteenth century, music was considered to be so far outside the realm of aesthetic theory (then conceived of in visual terms) that music was barely mentioned in William Hogarth's treatise, The Analysis of Beauty. He considered dance beautiful (closing the treatise with a discussion of the minuet), but treated of music only insofar as it could provide the proper accompaniment for the dancers.
In the nineteenth century, in the midst of the great revolution in taste known as romanticism, there arose the view that music should and could express ideas, images, even a whole plot. In 1832, for example, Robert Schumann wrote to his brothers that his piano work Papillons was "intended as a musical representation" of the final scene of a novel by Jean Paul, Flegeljahre.
By the end of that century, psychologist William James gave the auditory and optical sensations equal billing in his discussion of aesthetics. But he also took a detached view of the classical/romanticist disputes.
"Complex suggestiveness, the awakening of vistas of memory and association, and the stirring of our flesh with picturesque mystery and gloom, make a work of art romantic," he wrote. "The classic taste brands these effects as coarse and tawdry, and prefers the naked beauty of the optical and auditory sensations, unadorned with frippery or foliage."
A group of modernist writers in the early twentieth century (Walter Pater, Ezra Pound) believed that music was essentially pure for a reason that seems contrary to Schumann's assertion: it was pure because it didn't represent, i.e. it didn't make reference to anything beyond itself. In a sense, they wanted to bring poetry closer to this characteristic of music. (Bucknell 2002)
Although there have always been dissenters from this view, notably Albert Schweitzer, who argued against the alleged 'purity' of music in a classic work on Bach, it still maintains a hold on some.
Theodor Adorno suggested that culture industries churn out a debased mass of unsophisticated, sentimental products which have replaced the more 'difficult' and critical art forms which might lead people to actually question social life. False needs are cultivated in people by the culture industries. These are needs which can be both created and satisfied by the capitalist system, and which replace people's 'true' needs - freedom, full expression of human potential and creativity, genuine creative happiness. Thus, those who are trapped in the false notions of beauty according to a capitalist mode of thinking, are only capable of hearing beauty in dishonest terms.
In 2003, the philosopher Dewitt Parker restated the purity theory of modernism, writing that music "moves wholly in a world of its own, a world of pure feeling, with no embodiment save only sound. It may express terror, but not terror over this or that; joy, but whether the joy that comes from sight of the morning or of the beloved, it cannot tell." Yet, Dewitt Parker is writing somewhat against the idea that music expresses nothing of its own.
Recent remarks by American composer John Kenneth Graham reflect the traditional view concerning beauty and what will remain for posterity. He writes, "So long as there is meaning in the lives of those who enjoy order in sound, there will remain a symbolic language of the emotions, accessible to all who live in the present day. While it has been the task of many modernists to work to destroy that common language so as to bolster their own notions of beauty in music, that has not diminished the common man's ability to distinguish that "which he likes." It is precisely the sterile and banal nature of modern musical technique which assures its ultimate demise - in other words, its failing ability to communicate."
Bad music
Simon Frith (2004, p.17-9) argues that, "'bad music' is a necessary concept for musical pleasure, for musical aesthetics." He distinguishes two common kinds of bad music; the Worst Records Ever Made type, which include:
- "Tracks which are clearly incompetent musically; made by singers who can't sing, players who can't play, producers who can't produce,"
- "Tracks involving genre confusion. The most common examples are actors or TV stars recording in the latest style,"
and "rock critical lists," which include:
- "Tracks that feature sound gimmicks that have outlived their charm or novelty,"
- "Tracks that depend on false sentiment (...), that feature an excess of feeling molded into a radio-friendly pop song."
He later gives three common qualities attributed to bad music: inauthentic, [in] bad taste (see also: kitsch), and stupid. He argues that "The marking off of some tracks and genres and artists as 'bad' is a necessary part of popular music pleasure; it is a way we establish our place in various music worlds. And 'bad' is a key word here because it suggests that aesthetic and ethical judgements are tied together here: not to like a record is not just a matter of taste; it is also a matter of argument, and argument that matters." (p.28)
Source
- Bucknell, Brad (2002). Literary Modernism and Musical Aesthetics. Cambridge, UK, Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0521660289.
- Schweitzer, Albert (1966). J.S. Bach New York, Dover Publications ISBN 0486216314
- Washburne, Christopher J. and Derno, Maiken (eds.)
(2004). Bad Music: The Music We Love to Hate. New
York: Routledge.
ISBN 0415943663.
- Frith, Simon. "What is Bad Music".
