The culture in which we live today is so vastly different from anything known to our ancestors that it is hard to single out any factor as the critical one. The speed of communication, the rapid advance from one distraction to the next, the packaging of everything into digital format, and the instant projection of our entertainments into cyberspace, to be downloaded in an igloo on the ice-caps or a grass hut in Zululand: all these things have changed things utterly. It is all but impossible for us to look on art, music, literature, theatre and the rest as they were viewed in the past, when they were special events that required an effort of participation and sometimes were anticipated for weeks on end.
Still, at the risk of being unduly selective, I am inclined to the view that it is the change in our ways of enjoying music that has transformed our culture most completely. Music has always had a complex application to human life. You sing it, play it and dance to it. You make music together, sing in choirs, use music to praise God and to serenade your loved one. Music is an accompaniment to marching, fighting and working, and some of the most affecting music we know arose from slavery, as the Negroes on the plantations burst into spontaneous harmony of a kind that was eventually to change the world.
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Still, in all those uses, music was something that people came together to perform, and came together to appreciate. It was a social event, uniting those present through their own body rhythms and their own sense of moving together in another space – the space created by melody and harmony. Playing and listening were the two experiences on which the whole enterprise depended, and in both of those experiences you were transported, out of this world of resistant obstacles, into a place of freedom.
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Of course there were different tastes in music, and people often fought over them. The rise of jazz out of the Negro spirituals and the dance-hall music of the late 19th century changed the nature of popular music in a far-reaching and quite extraordinary way, introducing new scales, new harmonies and new ways of linking things together. A lot of serious critics were quite snobbish about it, and the German philosopher Theodor Adorno, escaping from Nazi Germany to exile in Hollywood, could not contain his wrath. Adorno told his readers that this new music signified the end of the old musical culture. No longer would music be listened to, as an expression of the highest values and the freedom of the human spirit. Instead it would be reduced to a ‘fetish’, something without life of its own, used to plug the hole made by leisure in the life of the working class. Jazz was part of the new ‘mass culture’ manufactured by Hollywood and the entertainment industry, and its purpose was to subdue the masses, and induce in them the illusion that they were enjoying things, when in fact – in fact what? Adorno never went so far as to say that they weren’t enjoying things. But he did rather imply that their enjoyments were of a lower order than his, and therefore not worth having.
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That was tough stuff, but with a remarkable survival value. Despite pouring scorn on America and all its works, Adorno is more widely read in American music departments than any other writer on the philosophy of music. Part of the explanation for this is that Adorno was a Marxist, who saw musical education as part of the worldwide struggle against the capitalist machine. American universities also tend to think of themselves as part of the worldwide struggle against the capitalist machine, and like Adorno, they tend to put out of mind the fact that they depend on that machine for their funding.
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Still, it was not Jazz that brought about the real changes. Many classical composers recognized that the rhythmic, melodic and harmonic devices of Jazz could be incorporated into the concert-hall repertoire, with stunning effects, as in Ravel’s Piano Concerto or the immortal Rhapsody in Blue by George Gershwin. And jazz was nothing if not an idiom for playing and listening to. Jazz concerts, big bands, jazz clubs and spontaneous gigs in private houses – all these were extensions of the old musical culture. True they gave a large space to improvisation and the huge, meditative and contrapuntal structures of the classical tradition found no real equivalent in this more light-hearted world. But so what? It was the world in which people now were living, and they had found the idiom with which to celebrate it, and to express its heartaches as well as its joys.
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The big change, it seems to me, came when music began to be packaged for home consumption – home consumption, without home production. The gramophone and the radio did some of this work. But it was completed by the iPod, and the habit, which children now acquire from the earliest age, of walking around with their music in their ears, regardless of what else they are doing. Music is no long something you stop to listen to, so as to pass, with whatever degree of wonder, from the world of ordinary causality into this sphere of freedom. Still less is it something that you take time off to play, or to make with your friends. It has been brought down to earth, so as to flow around everyday things, like rainwater on the pavement, demanding no effort either to make it or to hear it, as much a part of the background as the weather or the sound of traffic.
Some of the consequences of this are often remarked on: the fact that children are no longer motivated to learn musical instruments or to sing, whether alone or in choirs; the fact the musical tastes remain static, insulated from judgment, since the iPod only presents you with the things that you like; the fact that children only half attend to the things they are doing, just as they only half attend to the things that are sounding in their ear. But that last point is perhaps the most important. Thanks to the packaging of music we are entering a new world of half attention, a world where everything is done, read, understood, engaged with by half, the other half being the musical tapestry on which the thing of the moment is pinned.
Should we worry about this? And if so, is there anything we can do about it? One major difficulty in confronting the phenomenon is that – precisely because people are plugged into their music from morn to night – it is no longer possible to separate people from their music. We cannot invite them to stand back from their music in a posture of critical judgment. It has become absurd, even offensive, to judge the stuff that people listen to, and as a result, even in departments of academic musicology, the rule is to leave well alone. Let them get on with it. We each sink into the bed of our own chosen music, and this art which was once the highest point of human sharing is no longer shared.
Mark Begelman is the owner of Markee, a fully equipped musical facility in Florida. Subscribe to this Facebook page to know more about him.
