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Commentary
Speaking for music?
Julian Johnson*†
Julian.Johnson@rhul.ac.uk
Abstract
How does musicology articulate the value of music and the study of music? This is an urgent question given the collapse of music provision in schools and its impact on the discipline at university level. One response has been to demonstrate the pro-social benefits of music through empirical work allied with approaches in psychology and sociology. While this is important, we should be wary of downplaying the aesthetic value of music at the expense of more obviously instrumental functions. A recent convergence of disciplinary interest in aesthetics, from neuroscience to political theory, suggests the aesthetic dimension of music, far from being some outdated fiction, remains a powerful challenge to habitual academic discourse. Against the trivialisation of music on the one hand, and the reductive readings of critical orthodoxies on the other, I argue that music affords modes of sense-making that have never been more needed. (This article is published in the thematic collection `The arts and humanities: rethinking value for today—views from Fellows of the British Academy’, edited by Isobel Armstrong.)
Keywords
musicologyaestheticscritiqueorthodoxydiscoursetrivialisationsense-makingBeing an -ologist
I was once asked by my son, aged about 13 at the time, what exactly it was I did for a living. I told him I was a musicologist. He thought about it for a while before replying: ‘Hmm, that’s not actually a thing.’ It reminded me of that wonderful BT advert from the 1980s, featuring Maureen Lipman. When her grandson Anthony tells her he’s failed his O-levels, she tries to reassure him. Discovering he’s at least managed a pass for sociology she brightens up. ‘Oh well’, she says, ‘you get an ology, you’re a scientist!’
It still makes me laugh, even though the joke is on all of us who work in the Arts and Humanities as much as the Social Sciences. The ology signals an aspiration, if not a claim, to be a scientist—to speak with the expertise, authority, and even objectivity of scientists, and somehow to be as useful.
In the current climate, the pressure to justify ourselves as scientists seems greater than ever—in terms of social benefit, impact, partnerships with industry, or simply producing hard empirical data. When I was a student, musicology typically found common ground with history, philosophy, literature, languages, and art history. Since then it’s more likely to be found making links with other ologies—sociology, anthropology, psychology, if not harder sciences like neurology, or information technology.
I don’t for a moment ignore the productive benefits these links have produced. Quite apart from anything else, given the catastrophic decline in school pupils taking music at GCSE and A-level, music needs wider connections. But I do see a problem here, and one that goes to the heart of a wider and shared problem about articulating the civic value of the Arts and Humanities.
It’s good to challenge ourselves with hard questions. Instead of funding more academic research in the arts, why not just give the money directly to support arts practices—to theatres, orchestras, galleries, dance companies? That provokes another hard question. Given that we don’t do this, how exactly do we articulate the value of our speaking about the arts at a time when the arts themselves are so threatened?
A generation ago, musicology simply assumed its value as an academic discipline lay in the value ascribed to music itself. But as that became more and more contentious (which music? whose music?) musicology’s value and purpose shifted. Belatedly, it turned its attention to the way in which musical practices are entangled with social history, politics, and ideas. More recently, it has broadened into exploring music’s more immediate social value, for example, by exploring functions of music in everyday life in the context of education, technology, leisure, health, and wellbeing.
Nobody doubts the value of these things nor the gains of this wider conception of our field of study. Nevertheless, there is something here that worries me. I worry about what’s missed when we try to justify our work solely through dominant narratives of use-value or when thinking about music is reduced to its social, political, and historical functions. What is missed is what music might be, what music might afford, when it does none of these things. I worry because even to ask this question today smacks of a reactionary position, a thinly disguised return to a Kantian aesthetics in which the value of art is ‘for-itself’. All the same, I think the question of what music affords, beyond its instrumental uses, needs asking again—today more than ever.
The persistence of the aesthetic
Let me frame the problem like this:
What if the greatest value of music was not to be found in those instrumental social benefits that musicology now tries to demonstrate, but rather in music’s capacity to afford modes of experience and relation to the world not tied to any particular function? And what if, by denouncing that idea—the idea of the aesthetic—we thereby neutralise the most valuable thing that music might offer us?
It’s an old idea but one that has become increasingly divisive and contentious. In recent years, the very category of the aesthetic has been all but expunged from professional talk about music. All the more reason, then, to keep asking such questions and to challenge the assumptions of what is rapidly hardening into a new orthodoxy.
I’m not about to suggest how we solve this problem, I’m merely insisting that to pursue such questions has a value of its own. And here I take heart from a remarkable convergence of recent interest from an astonishingly wide set of academic disciplines—not just ones I’ve already mentioned like psychology and philosophy, but approaches as diverse as evolutionary biology, linguistics, cognitive science, neuroscience, communication theory, political theory, educational theory, and several others. Suddenly, everyone is interested in non-linguistic modes of cognition and experience, and the pro-social behaviours associated with them. Aesthetic experience, it turns out, might just be central to human life rather than a luxury add-on for a privileged few—and it’s no longer just academics in the Arts and Humanities saying so, but social theorists, psychologists, and cognitive scientists.
The point is, we do not know what music is. We never have done and we still don’t. It follows that we also do not know what music does, for us and to us. Claude Lévi-Strauss called music ‘the supreme mystery’ but, at the same time, the greatest achievement of mankind. Friedrich Nietzsche considered a life without music not worth living. George Steiner declared that ‘A world without music would be explicitly inhuman.’ And yet its place in schools, universities, and public life continues to wither …
What’s both exciting and refreshing about the new convergence of interest is that it signals a willingness to consider, once again, the importance of music to human life. In this, I sense a long overdue kickback against its woeful trivialisation by a society that takes music to be no more than another product of consumer choice. I’m hopeful we might once again take music seriously, on its own terms, as embodied and affective thought, as a challenge to the assumptions that underlie our habitual and discursive frameworks.
If we are asking ourselves about the value of academic discourse in relation to the arts, we might consider this: that in our anxious professional desire to avoid naivete and prove our scientific and political credentials, we often end up refusing to consider art and music as aesthetic experience. Insisting instead on reading them solely in terms of the discursive terms we bring to them, merely replicates those terms. Taking the aesthetic seriously, on the other hand, means considering how those very terms are challenged by other kinds of sense-making.
Pelléas et Mélisande: a cautionary tale
Debussy’s opera, written in the 1890s and premiered in 1902, is based on a play of the same name by Maurice Maeterlinck. Both play and opera overlap with the origins of the academic discipline of musicology in the surge of systematic enquiry in the latter part of the 19th century. Both dialogue and music are famously spare, allusive, and non-discursive. Neither writer nor composer would have intended their work as a cautionary tale about music and our attempts to understand it, but (only slightly tongue-in-cheek) I offer exactly that.
If Mélisande is music, and her lover Pelléas the enraptured listener, Golaud (Pelléas’s elder and more worldly brother) is a musicologist. At the start of the opera Golaud is lost in the forest, hunting for something he has wounded but failed to catch. He comes across the traumatised Mélisande, whose beauty takes his breath away but whom, from the very beginning, he will never understand. At the end of the first scene, having agreed to accompany him out of the forest, Mélisande asks Golaud where they are going. He cannot tell her because he is also lost. We might ask a similar question. Where is it that musicology wants to take music? What is it that musicology wants to do with music?
Later, Golaud will marry Mélisande only to become bitter because he can never be close to her, and he will take her back to the dark, sunless rooms of his ancient family home where she will perish for never being properly heard. For all Golaud’s laments that he is ‘like a blind man seeking his treasure at the bottom of the ocean’, it is less Golaud’s blindness than his deafness that lies at the centre of the drama, his inability to hear what exceeds the words that are spoken. But Golaud is no musician; he insists on the clarity of language and the straightforward nature of a world ordered by language. For him, there is no world that is not contained in words. Over and again he demands Mélisande speaks ‘the truth’ to him, a demand to which she has no answer. In his exasperation, he forces her to her knees and drags her across the floor by her hair, all the while demanding she speak.
Musicology is rarely quite so violent, but it’s not hard to detect a similar undercurrent of frustration in the way it polices the boundaries of its acceptable discourse. Because Golaud’s frustration at the silence of Mélisande is the musicologist’s frustration at what we might call the unbearable muteness of music—unbearable, that is, not for the listener, but for -ologists who insist that it must be made to speak in the language of their discourse.
Perhaps it’s because I was a musician before becoming a musicologist, but I think we need to question the way in which we -ologists position ourselves. We run the risk of simply talking over music, mansplaining it, as if the discursive muteness of music is a problem we are here to solve. Discourse about any art surely has nothing of value to say if it is not challenged by aesthetic experience and aesthetic practice. That might mean doing something that seems naïve—allowing our discursive certainties to be challenged by the non-discursive sense-making of aesthetic experience.
The continuing value of the Arts and Humanities
In these dark times, what is the value of speaking, writing, and thinking about music? Who cares about aesthetics in a world faced with impending climate catastrophe?
The outrageous claim I’m making here is that the mute art of music, so often trivialised as pleasant but essentially empty, or else pressed into the service of other agendas, may still offer us something of transformative potential. And not just music itself. Thinking about aesthetic experience, bringing it into the orbit of our discourses in order to challenge their foundational assumptions, may be exactly what we most need at this time. Far from being some conversative turn, the persistence of the aesthetic challenges the very structures of our modelling of the world.
We can choose to do this or not. It hinges on the larger question of what any of us are working for. For what reason does the study of music or the arts still belong in the school curriculum and, in the face of the consumer-driven economy of higher education, why should it be defended as vital to the university?
Rita Felski offers a timely consideration of these questions in The Limits of Critique (2015). Here, she sets out an alternative to our addiction to critique, the default mode of inquiry in arts and humanities scholarship dominated by the ‘hermeneutics of suspicion’, forever trying to expose the unsavoury truth hidden behind works and practices. The mute art of music has perhaps never been more savagely attacked than in the last thirty years, not by disaffected sections of society but by musicologists themselves. Academics generally like to believe that the radical and critical nature of their work aligns them with a radical and critical politics. But what if it doesn’t? What if it merely reproduces the same divisive categories that politics perpetuates? Listen to the tone, like a musician listens to the tone; it tells you everything you need to know.
We are, Felski underlines, in the middle of a legitimation crisis, under renewed pressure to prove why any of our work matters. But our response may well be counterproductive. Instead of exploring the specificity of the aesthetic as a mode of being in the world, we reduce it back to the generality of discourse (academic, social, political). We seem addicted to unmasking why the arts are really a very bad thing. As Felski puts it:
We shortchange the significance of art by focusing on the ‘de’ prefix (its power to demystify, destabilize, denaturalize) at the expense of the ‘re’ prefix: its ability to recontextualize, reconfigure or recharge perception.
The choice between the two marks a kind of crossroads. The path we take next will certainly have profound consequences not just for the civic value of arts and humanities scholarship but for their continued existence. Music(ology) might be the canary in the mine. Music, the art of enchantment, is now the laboratory specimen of a profoundly disenchanted musicology. But music, like Mélisande, never responds to angry demands that it should speak. It is only ever known through listening, by which I mean an attentive openness to its non-discursive sense.
Fifty years ago, Gregory Bateson wrote a memo to his fellow Regents of the University of California in which he proclaimed that a university education had become a rip-off (see Bateson 1979). Why? Because the premises of thought upon which university education was based had become obsolete and no longer in tune with the changing nature of knowledge. He presented three reasons: his first and second had to do with the continuing Cartesian dualism of mind and matter—the stubborn persistence of the Subject/Object divide, a divide most powerfully challenged by the idea of the aesthetic. It is perhaps no surprise, therefore, that Bateson’s third complaint was about ‘Our anti-aesthetic assumption that all phenomena can and shall be studied and evaluated in quantitative terms.’ Fifty years on, we are perhaps still in danger of perpetuating the narrow and frankly dangerous idea that we can know the world only through our ologies.
Acknowledgements
The thumbnail image that accompanies this article is by Yan Krukau on Pexels.
References
BatesonG. (1979), Mind and Nature: A Necessary Unity (New York, E.P. Dutton).
FelskiR. (2015), The Limits of Critique (Chicago, IL, University of Chicago Press).
Cite
DOI: 10.5871/jba/012.a38
Published on: 17 September 2024
Volume: 12
Issue: Issue 3
Article view count: 99
Article download count: 21
Copyright statement
© The author(s) 2024. This is an open access article licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 4.0 International LicenseCite this article
Johnson, J. (2024), ‘Speaking for music?’, Journal of the British Academy, 12(3): a38 https://doi.org/10.5871/jba/012.a38Crossref
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Received
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July 2023
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