Aesthetics and meaning
Contexts for musical listening
Music history has long been shaped by an invisible force: personal taste. I have met many scholars of music history, all of whom were passionate about relatively obscure episodes in history; many of them made a point of inserting these episodes into their teaching. From my undergraduate days, I still remember my teacher’s fascination with the significance of E major in Franz Schubert’s music (something that he only wrote about much later). Even then, it was clear to me that the history I was learning was partly shaped by the interests and tastes of the people who were writing and teaching it. All of which leads me to two questions: (1) Why do we like the music that we do and (2) how do personal tastes shape the way that music history gets told?
Most people would probably say that musical taste is a personal matter. In this view, liking the sound of the flute or the flow of Dirty South hip hop is just a personality trait, roughly comparable with liking bootcut jeans, horror films, or the color chartreuse. In other words, we are all individuals, with unique individual tastes to match.
Individuality is an appealing concept, one that is pervasive in modern American culture. If taken to extremes, an emphasis on individuality makes it too easy to ignore the effects of culture. It’s difficult to generalize about anything related to taste if our planet is populated by eight billion individuals. Fortunately, there are plenty of examples that suggest that we are not just individuals. There is power, and affirmation, in doing something with a group of like-minded people—whether singing a hymn in church, chanting fight songs at a football game, or screaming slogans at a protest. Some percentage of our identities and sense of self comes from the groups that we are part of.
If our identities are partly influenced by our own tastes and by our group memberships, it makes sense to suppose that our musical tastes are shaped in the same way. A lot of the music that we like is music that our families and peers like; it isn’t the result of our own tastes at all. For example, my parents came of age in the late 1960s, and raised me on the music they had enjoyed when they were young: singer-songwriters at the meeting ground between folk and rock, such as Paul Simon and Jim Croce. So my own preference for meaningful lyrics, a predominantly acoustic sound, and singable melodies was baked in at early age, and I can take no credit for it. I didn’t choose it any more than I chose my native language.
These ideas about what makes music good and bad make an aesthetic—a value system for appreciating and evaluating art of any type. Different styles have different aesthetics, and what is appropriate in country music may be completely inappropriate in Western classical music. Aesthetics cover musical sound (should an opera singer sing with vibrato?), lyrical content and its relation to musical style (otherwise why it would be strange to make a gangsta rap about cupcakes?), the way we’re supposed to listen to music (should you be high when you listen to psychedelic rock?), etc.
Outside of formal music instruction, people rarely talk about musical aesthetics. The rules are unwritten but understood by everyone who needs to know. My parents exposed me to certain types of music repeatedly, and pointedly turned off the radio when music that they didn’t like came on. Occasionally, someone said that a band had “nice harmony” or that a singer “had a good voice,” but that was pretty much it.
Although family and friends can provide the basis of our musical tastes, we are still individuals. There was a song my father loved that I could never understand. Even by his own aesthetic, it didn’t seem to be very good. Many years later, my best explanation for his fascination with that song is that he was nineteen when it came out, and it’s tied to memories he’s never decided to share with me. Or perhaps that song isn’t tied to any specific memory—it just reminds him of what it felt like to be nineteen. I have my own example of music that I like because of the value I added to it, rather than for its own sake. At a certain point, I rebelled against my parents’ aesthetic—not because it was inherently bad but because it was not my own—and started listening to bands that used electronic effects pedals on their guitars and singers whose voices cracked and broke with emotion, such as Linkin Park, Evanescence, and Sleater Kinney. Those songs represent a certain period of my life and the way that it felt to be me, then. And now, my own taste in music includes both the tradition and my rebellion.
To get back to the second part of the question with which this essay opened: how does understanding all this help us study music history? It’s because music history and aesthetics are closely entwined. A large part of music history teaching focuses on understanding the cultural contexts for various musical aesthetics and how they affected sound—thus the Romantic aesthetic and its quest for the noumenal led toward Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique and its grotesque last movement depicting a Satanic orgy, and the counterculture of the 1960s led to popular songs with blues and soul influences with lyrics designed to encourage listeners to question the values of a complacent middle class (Mick Jagger sang: “He can’t be a man ‘cause he doesn’t smoke/the same cigarettes as me”). And if our tastes and aesthetics are partly inherited from others, it’s worth asking how much the aesthetics that get space in our textbooks are themselves inherited from earlier generations.
For example, suppose you listen to the symphonic fragment known as Franz Schubert’s Symphony no. 8 in B minor. It consists of two movements, not the usual four, and was probably never performed in his lifetime, even though it is performed regularly today. Is it possible to listen to this music without being told that it is Schubert’s “Unfinished” symphony? Without someone inviting you to hear this piece through the lens of Schubert’s untimely death (he was only thirty-one)? Without the music being somehow linked to the brooding gloom and terrifying outbursts of the Romantic aesthetic? Can you, in other words, listen to this music without having the way that other people like to listen to this music placed between you and the music?
To answer this question, I have only more questions. While Schubert’s case is an extreme example, isn’t it true that we listen to almost all music in this way to some degree? Through the ears of others, in the ways that we have been taught to listen? Is it even possible to listen as oneself, independently of the society that taught us our value systems? Would listening outside such a system be liberatory, or would it strip the music of all the accumulated weight of culture that has given it value and meaning? This is partly what the American composer John Cage meant, I think, when he asked, “Are sounds just sounds or are they Beethoven?”[1]
The way that you listen to music is thus part of a broader aesthetic, whether you are aware of it or not. To conclude this essay, I’ll try to show some common ways that people situate their listening. Two questions remain, but I must warn you that I have no definitive answers. Instead, I’m raising these questions to help you figure out your own default aesthetic assumptions about music. First: who is responsible for the meaning that you find in the music? Suppose that you listen to music and it sounds sad. Do you have this reaction because:
a) the music is inherently sad, and all people will hear it that way.
b) the composer of the music made the music to communicate sadness.
c) the performer of the music used the music to express their own sadness.
d) you hear your own sadness in the music, but other people could reasonably hear different emotions in the music.
Each of these makes a different assumption about the inherent ability of music and musicians to express feelings.
Similarly, suppose that you like a piece of music; what makes the music good? There are at least four ways of explaining this, each tied to a specific aesthetic:
1) Music is good because it expresses the composer’s life or personal voice. In this approach, autobiographical music has a unique power, whether it is popstar writing about a breakup or a classical composer grappling with a debilitating illness. It doesn’t even matter if the stories that people tell about a song are false; some of us need those stories to appreciate the music fully.
2) Music is good because it expresses a broader culture. For example, no-one knows who first created the spiritual “Wade in the Water,” but that’s irrelevant. The song is deeply expressive of African American history and religious expression.
3) The “music itself” is what matters, in terms of its sheer beauty or the quality of its construction. The sound itself is central; all cultural issues are secondary.
4) Music is good because of the function it serves. That song makes me want to dance; I dance, and it makes me happy; therefore the music is good. Another song calms me down, so that is what makes it good. Or again: the soundtrack to that film creates excitement and allows me to identify with the hero. Thus music is designed to be used. So use it.
As you can imagine, if one were to write a history of music from each of these perspectives, the narratives generated would be very different. The first gives us the lives of the “great composers”; the second, a cultural overview of different modes of musical expression; the third gives us the most abstract type of music theory; the fourth would probably focus on music that was most widely listened to or used. All these approaches have value in their own way, but music historians have tended to focus on the first.
[1] Cage, “Composition as Process” in Silence: Lectures and Writings (Middletown, Conn: Wesleyan University Press, 1961), 18–56: 41.