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Music Is
Music
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 |
