How Music Works (48 page)

professionals), and even the professional musicians in far-off countries, could now be heard everywhere. Amateurs and local music-makers must have been

somewhat intimidated.

As explained in chapter four, the first record players could record as well

as play, so for a short while, every amateur had the possibility of becoming a recording artist. The quality of those recordings wasn’t great, so there was a lot of spoken word—a lot of talking into the recorders. Audio letters. Audio postcards. The rough sounds of local singers and parlor players coexisted for a while with the recordings of professionals that the record-player manufacturers were distributing. But fairly soon, the companies realized that more money could be made if the flow of music was one-way, so the recording feature was eliminated. Much technology in contemporary culture, in which creative tinkering by non-professionals has been crippled the efforts of computer and

software companies, and by the enforcers and lobbyists behind copyright and

intellectual-property laws, displays this same tendency. Amateur music mak-

ers have had to take a back seat. So much for the market catering to the will of the people!

John Philip Sousa felt strongly about the value of amateurs making music.

Here is what he wrote in his 1906 essay, “The Menace of Mechanical Music”:

This wide love for the art springs from the singing school, secular or sacred; from the village band, and from the study of those instruments that are nearest the people. There are more pianos, violins, guitars, mandolins, and banjos among the DAV I D BY R N E | 269

working classes of America than in all the rest of the world… [but now] the automatic music devices are usurping their places.

For when music can be heard in the homes without the labor of study and close application, and without the slow process of acquiring a technic, it will be simply a question of time when the amateur disappears entirely....

The tide of amateurism cannot but recede, until there will be left only the

mechanical device and the professional executants.

Then what of the national throat? Will it not weaken? What of the national

chest? Will it not shrink?

I love those phrases —the national throat, the national chest! They’re kind

of Whitmanic.

The country dance orchestra of violin, guitar, and melodeon had to rest at times, and the resultant interruption afforded the opportunity for general sociability and rest among the entire company. Now a tireless mechanism can keep everlastingly at it, and much of what made the dance a wholesome recreation is eliminated.

This is an interesting point, and it isn’t made very often. Sousa is saying

that the gaps between performances might in some ways be just as impor-

tant—socially, at least—as the performances themselves. The times when

we’re
not
being entertained are as important as the times when we are. Too much music, or too much continuous music, might not be a good thing. It’s

a little counterintuitive, but I’d be inclined to agree. To Sousa, the prospect of recorded music was “a thought as unhappy and incongruous as [eating]

canned salmon by a trout brook.”3

He might have been a bit alarmist and cranky, but he wasn’t entirely

wrong about amateur music-making. I myself didn’t start out as a musical

professional. For years I only had ambitions to be an amateur who made

music with friends for fun. Some of the most satisfying music I’ve made

has come about as a result of naïve enthusiasm rather than from profes-

sional considerations. Music-making always involved socializing, so in the

process I’ve met people I wouldn’t have otherwise. Music was a handy cover

for my social awkwardness, and I learned a thing or two about getting along.

Those are a lot of useful byproducts that have nothing to do with dexterity

or virtuosic skills.

270 | HOW MUSIC WORKS

The “don’t give a shit” attitude of the amateur is another precious com-

modity. The Spanish film director Fernando Trueba claims that many direc-

tors’ best films are the ones they didn’t care all that much about. These films, he says, have more soul than the films those same directors made when they

intentionally set out to create their masterpiece. Amateurism, or at least the lack of pretension associated with it, can be liberating.

According to Mark Katz, many teachers believed that recorded music would

encourage children to take up music. When the phonograph was new, and

schools were a little leery of adopting it, several prominent pedagogues argued in its favor. J. Lawrence Erb, for one, asserted that “the total effect of mechanical players has been to increase interest in music and stimulate a desire to make music on one’s own account.” But if there was such an increase in the percentage of amateur musicians, it soon subsided.4

Though what the elite listened to prior to 1900 was certainly different

from what the masses enjoyed, there was always some overlap between the

two. The catchy tunes that littered popular Italian operas—music that we

would consider high art today—were sung by farmers and played by brass

bands in town squares. These arias were the pop music of their time. This

popularity was not a result of capitulation, of ordinary folks being obliged to like music that was endorsed by their “betters”; it was genuinely popular music. And yet it’s probably true that as long as there has been an aristocracy or an elite, they have promulgated the idea that certain kinds of music and

art are somehow better, more refined, more sophisticated, and can only be

appreciated by the few.

Recordings, however tinny or scratchy, made it possible for everyone to

hear these sophisticated and accomplished artistes. Music education boomed,

and soon the emphasis shifted: it became about learning and understanding

musical forms, rather than making them. The new pedagogical goal was to

expose students to all kinds of music, in genres that were previously unavailable to them. Not only was the emphasis on listening, the expressed goal was to get the kids to appreciate the superiority of a certain kind of music over what some declared to be coarser, more popular forms.

DAV I D BY R N E | 271

WHAT IS MUSIC GOOD FOR?

Is some music really better than other music? Who decides? What effect

does music have on us that might make it good or not-so-good?

Like Ellen Dissanayake, many believe that music must be useful to human-

ity, even if you can’t fix a leaky sink with it—if it wasn’t, it wouldn’t have survived to play as prominent a role in our lives as it does. Furthermore, it is presumed that certain kinds of music have more beneficial effects than

others. Some music can make you a “better” person, and by extension other

kinds of music might even be detrimental (and they don’t mean it will dam-

age your eardrums)—certainly it won’t be as morally uplifting. The assump-

tion is that upon hearing “good” music, you will somehow become a more

morally grounded person. How does that work?

The background of those defining what is good or bad goes a long way

toward explaining this attitude. The use of music to make a connection

between a love of high art and economic success and status isn’t always subtle.

Canadian writer Colin Eatock points out that classical music has been piped

into 7-Elevens, the London Underground, and the Toronto subways, and the

result has been a decrease in robberies, assaults, and vandalism.5 Wow—pow-

erful stuff. Music can alter behavior after all! This statistic is held up as proof that some music does indeed have magical, morally uplifting properties. What a marketing opportunity! But another view holds that this tactic is a way of making certain people feel unwelcome. They know it’s not “their” music, and

they sense that the message is, as Eatock says, “Move along, this is not your cultural space.” Others have referred to this as “musical bug spray.” It’s a way of using music to create and manage social space.6

The economist John Maynard Keynes even claimed that many kinds of

amateur and popular music do in fact reduce one’s moral standing. In gen-

eral, we are indoctrinated to believe that classical music, and maybe some

kinds of jazz, possess a kind of moral medicine—whereas hip-hop, club

music, and certainly heavy metal lack anything like a positive moral essence.

It all sounds slightly ridiculous when I spell it out like this, but such presumptions continue to inform many decisions regarding the arts and the

way they’re supported.

John Carey, an English literary critic who writes for The
Sunday Times
, wrote a wonderful book called
What Good Are the Arts
that illustrates how 272 | HOW MUSIC WORKS

officially sanctioned art and music gets privileged. Carey cites the phi-

losopher Immanuel Kant: “Now I say the beautiful is the symbol of the

morally good, and that it is only in this respect that it gives pleasure… The mind is made conscious of a certain ennoblement and elevation above the

mere sensibility to pleasure.”7 So, according to Kant, the reason we find

a given work of art beautiful is because we sense—but how do we sense

this, I wonder?—that some innate, benevolent, moral essence is tucked in

there, elevating us, and we like that. In this view, pleasure and moral uplift are linked. Pleasure alone, without this beautiful entanglement, is not a

good thing—but packaged with moral uplift, pleasure is, well, excusable.

That might sound pretty mystical and a bit silly, especially if you concede

that standards of beauty just might be relative. In Kant’s Protestant world, all forms of sensuality inevitably lead to loose morals and eternal damna-tion. Pleasure needs a moral note to be acceptable.

When Goethe visited the Dresden Gallery,B he noted the “emotion experi-

enced upon entering a House of God.” He was referring to positive and uplifting emotions, not fear and trembling at the prospect of encountering the Old Testament God. William Hazlitt, the brilliant nineteenth-century essayist,

B

DAV I D BY R N E | 273

said that going to the National Gallery on Pall Mall was like making a pilgrim-age to the “holy of holies… [an] act of devotion performed at the shrine of

art.”8 Once again it would appear that this God of Art is a benevolent one who will not strike young William down with a bolt of lightning for an occasional aesthetic sin. If such a punishment sounds like an exaggeration, keep in mind that not too long before Hazlitt’s time, one could indeed be burned at the

stake for small blasphemies. And if the appreciation of the finer realms of art and music is akin to praying at a shrine, then one must accept that artistic blasphemy also has its consequences.

A corollary to the idea that high art is good for you is that it can be

prescribed like medicine. Like a kind of inoculation, it can arrest, and possibly even begin to reverse, our baser tendencies. The Romantic poet Samuel

Taylor Coleridge wrote that the poor needed art “to purify their tastes and

wean them from [their] polluting and debasing habits.” Charles Kingsley, a

nineteenth-century English novelist, was even more explicit: “Pictures raise blessed thoughts in me—why not in you, my brother? Believe it, toil-worn

worker, in spite of thy foul alley, thy crowded lodging, thy thin, pale wife, believe it, thou too, and thine will some day have your share of beauty.”9

Galleries like Whitechapel in London were opened in working-class neigh-

borhoods so that the downtrodden might have a taste of the finer things in

life. Having done a little bit of manual labor myself, I can attest that sometimes beer, music, or TV might be all one is ready for after a long day of

physically demanding work.

Across the ocean, the titans of American industry continued this trend.

They founded the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York in 1872, filling

it with works drawn from their massive European art collections in the hope

that the place would act as a unifying force for an increasingly diverse citi-zenry—a matter of some urgency, given the massive number of immigrants

who were joining the nation. One of the Met’s founders, Joseph Hodges Cho-

ate, wrote, “Knowledge of art in its higher forms of beauty would tend directly to humanize, to educate and to refine a practical and laborious people.”10

The late Thomas Hoving, who ran the Met in the sixties and seventies,

and his rival J. Carter Brown, who headed the National Gallery in Washington, DC, both felt that democratizing art meant getting everyone to like the things that they liked. It meant letting everyone know that here, in their museums, was the good stuff, the important stuff, the stuff with that mystical aura.