Music Is Music

The Greeks believe that athletics should be a compulsory part of education. But lest the student be brutalized, the influence should be balanced by the teaching of music for its refining influence.

I've always believed that a music course should be compulsory in schools. Nor do I mean those dismal classes in "music appreciation" ("Now here, class, Beethoven is shaking his fist at destiny") to which so many of us were victim when we were too small to protest. I mean harmony, counterpoint, composition, and performance.

But if music has powers to soothe the savage beast, it has the contrary power as well: the power to savage the soul that might otherwise find its way to refinement. When in 1955 I expressed in print the fear that rock-and-roll music would brutalize a generation, the idea was mocked. Well? Look at the behaviour of the rock-raised generation in Vietnam. (Incidentally, American troop behaviour there makes an interesting counter-comment on the current mystique that pot makes you peaceful, loving and gentle. So, for that matter, does a great deal of at-home behaviour of the love generation.)

The 1960s were what Oscar Peterson calls "the dark time" in the history of American music. It was an era when crudity and amateurism and ignorance in art came into praise, and social relevance (the Nat Hentoff syndrome) became the measure of things. And so art lost its way.

For the real function of art, as men from Plato to Oscar Wilde have understood, is to act as a sort of gyroscope of the soul, and this is more true of music than any of the other arts. A case can be made for the uses of literature in the act of reform, although it is approximately true that its value as art varies inversely to its propaganda content. As far as I am concerned, however, there is no case whatsoever for the use of music as propaganda.

The exquisite thing about music is that it is abstract — and it is, incidentally, the only true abstract art. All the arts, Joseph Conrad wrote, crave after the conditions of music. Conrad was wise enough to know that they don't have them. To use music for anything but musical purposes is to debase it. If the purpose of life is life, the purpose of music is music.

Literature, to achieve its effects, requires that the meaning of words be digested and the thought behind those words arouse a feeling. But it does not work directly on the sensory system. Music, like painting, does; and music does so even more than painting, or the other visual arts. And no one knows quite how it works. Music is the ultimate aesthetic mystery. No one has yet explained satisfactorily the power of a minor chord, in certain locutions, to produce sadness, without any intermediary step of thought. No one can tell you why a modulation up a half step can make your heart leap up like the ascending smoke of a silent prayer. If indeed, as many musicians think, these are merely matters of social conditioning, if music depends for its effects upon a series of agreed-upon conventions, then it is all the more amazing. If our ability to communicate through words is the factor that lifts us above the other animals, then the perception of music is an even more remarkable achievement, perhaps an omen of our future development as a species: for in music we have passed beyond words into an even more rarefied atmosphere of communication. Music, then, is the language beyond language: it is super-verbal.

How shoddy to use it for mere political purposes.

This is said not because I am apolitical. On the contrary, my greatest preoccupation and concern is the politics of our time. But I never thought that music should be used to make my political points, or anyone else's. For all that I am, as they say nowadays, polarized (simultaneously to the right and to the left; it depends on the issue, since nothing is simple, and doctrinarians are fools),  the quintessential thing, if I am to retain sanity in our Kafkaesque world, is to know where the truth lies, and what it looks like when I see it. Conceivably, knowledge of mathematics will do this for you. But mathematics is a realm inaccessible to most of us, and music, which does the same thing for the soul, but better, is eminently accessible to those who make even a modicum of effort toward learning its language. Picking up half a dozen guitar grips and buying a capo does not of course constitute such an effort.

It occurred to me recently that none of us will ever be without trouble. When we have solved one set of problems, another will replace them. For there will always be a greedy and unprincipled man to replace the one we have just neutralized. It may well be that half that university class over there is thinking good thoughts about the reform of our affairs, but there's one kid sitting among them thinking about how he's going to get their money away from them, or gain power over them, or both, even if he has to get them or their children killed to do it. The old have no patent on wickedness, kiddies, and while I grant that the sinister old warmonger of seventy, so well portrayed by Graham Greene in his story "This Gun for Hire", is a problem, it's the evil young warmonger you should be worried about. After all, that old cat will be dead soon, but the young one will be around causing trouble for quite some time.

So we must all perpetually be on our guard. This is what is meant by "The price of freedom is eternal vigilance." It doesn't mean standing armies. It means keeping your eyes open for the bastards among us who don't care what they do to nations, peoples, cities — or music — so long as they get what they judge to be theirs.

We're stuck with it. We're going to have to be warriors of a sort, all our lives. But there's no use digesting your own guts into ulcers over it. You in your world have to be on guard against your bad guys (unless of course you're one of the bad guys, in which case you have to be on guard against the good) and I have to be on guard against those in mine.  In my case, it means men who would ruin music for the sake of money, men who don't give a tinker's damn about the real function of art. But if we're going to be warriors, we might as well be happy warriors.

And one of the things that brings happiness to the heart is music. It does this even in the process of bringing sadness. But it does more: it is the polestar that, used rightly, can help us find our way across the troubled waters.

Gene Lees

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Saturday, November 30, 2024

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