All too human?

Musical Times, Autumn 2001 by Hewett, Ivan

Review-article

Debilitated by an excess of New Musicology, IVAN HEWETT welcomes three stimulating celebrations of timeless critical values

Music and humanism: an essay in the aesthetics of music RA Sharpe Oxford UP (Oxford, 2000); ix, 221pp; L30. ISBN 0 19 823885 1. The spheres of music: a gathering of essays Leonard B. Meyer University of Chicago Press (Chicago & London, 2000); x, 316pp; L35 / L14 pbk. ISBN 0 226 52153 2 / 0 226 52154 0. Critical entertainments: music old and new Charles Rosen Harvard UP (Boston & London); 336pp;. L19.95. ISBN 0 674 17730 4.

AESTHETICS and criticism have become jealous bedfellows, always wanting a bit of the other's half of the bed. The philosopher gets impatient with generalities about form and content, style and language, and can't wait to tell us why he thinks Brahms is a bad composer. Similarly the critic wants his or her insights to shed light beyond their target; an observation on Donne's use of metaphor soon turns to a meditation on metaphor in general, and thence to the roots of what intelligence and perception consist in. But the relations aren't quite symmetrical. Philosophy knows it needs criticism; but criticism has often assumed it can do without philosophy Critical books from that long-ago era before Barthes are utterly unperturbed by philosophy, as if terms like 'beautiful' and 'true' are as innocent and unquestionable as axioms in geometry. In a book like Kenneth Clarke's Introduction to Rembrandt, the avoidance of 'theory' and philosophy shows the same reliance on instinct and good taste that the author finds in his subject. This gentlemen's agreement has long since dissolved, not least because of the arrival on the scene of female critics impatient of gentlemen's agreements. People are now wary of terms like beautiful, though it is now being cautiously welcomed back into polite company Charles Rosen is certainly unembarrassed by it; indeed it's his favourite term of approbation.

And yet there is a philosophical problem lurking at the heart of the critic's enterprise. The insights we gain from a critic seem so rooted in the particularities of an individual piece that relating them to other pieces is always problematic. To do so means invoking some higher-level category of description - a harmonic movement, say, which this moment in this piece shares with many others. These may then become instances of some lawlike generalisation, to which the individual cases relate sometimes in a straightforward way, sometimes in an interestingly oblique way Without any terms of comparison criticism is apt to fall into a mere series of stammering effusions, streams of purple prose which really amount to little more than saying 'I like this a lot'. And yet the instant a critic imports a general term, and some overarching theory into which the term fits, the sensuous contact with the `shining surface of the idea' presented by the music starts to become veiled and indistinct.

It was to put critical judgements of music on some apparently objective, 'scientific' basis that the discipline of Analysis was born, though all too often the critical impulse was lost in the mass of statistics. Music criticism had hardly absorbed the shock of this invasion before it was beset by another, this time from literary studies. It was called Theory, a term whose portentous capitalisation masked a disciplinary confusion; all kinds of approaches to criticism, from deconstruction to gender studies to post-colonialism, rode under its banner. So great is the intellectual distance between Analysis and Theory that they can hardly engage in conversation; instead they rub along in polite disdain of each other, and if analysis seems to be on the wane it's only because it's less fashionable.

Standing to one side, and looking on the debate with a mixture of exasperation and amusement, are the old-style humanistic critics. The authors of these three books could certainly be described as such; they're all from the generation that matured long before New Musicology was even thought of. The books by Rosen and Meyer are critical, and the remaining one philosophical; but there is plenty of musing on the aesthetics, the cognition, the hermeneutics of music in the former two, and plenty of robust ex cathedra judgements on individual pieces in Sharpe's book. This is the odd one out, in that it deals with puzzles about music that go beyond, or beneath, the puzzles that beset the critic. The philosophy of music digs deeper, 'problematising' - as the jargon has it - music all the way down to its atoms (`what is the stuff of music?') and all the way up to its metaphysics (`what is the nature of musical time?'). Sometimes, indeed, the problems seem mere chimeras that exist only in the professional philosopher's imagination. Whoever thought there was a problem in identifying musical works until Roman Ingarden wrote The problem of the musical Work and its identity? RA Sharpe is robustly commonsensical on that topic, saying that musical identity is necessarily fluid and that it's no good making an Indian raga answer to the identity criteria of a Beethoven symphony in fact he's robustly commonsensical throughout, and often very shrewd. His main puzzle is how music comes to express something, and how we can come to an agreement on what that meaning is. In pursuing that topic, and examining its particular problems in modern music, he behaves like an oldstyle analytic philosopher, energetically hacking away at philosophical dead wood, as if the mere act of clarifying concepts will lead to enlightenment. That's a very dated view, but Sharpe shows there's still life left in it. The view he wants to combat is that music is expressive `inasmuch as it causes certain states in us'. Instead he espouses cognitivism, the idea that music is always heard ,under a description, say, "sad" (as opposed to having the music cause us to feel sad)'. (This is a familiar theme in much contemporary musical philosophy - Peter Kivy insists on the same definition of expression.) But once you admit that music's emotional import is read into it, rather than simply felt as one feels shock-waves from an explosion, then a gap opens up between listener and music, and between one listener and another. That gap allows for many different readings of one piece, but how does one decide which are valid and which can safely be called 'misreadings'? Sharpe has a very conservative answer to that question: 'the limits of viable interpretation are given by the limits of what the author or creator could have intended in the culture of his time.' The intention here is surely to eliminate `producer opera', about which Sharpe makes some acid remarks. The trouble is that it eliminates practically any production that goes beyond slavish historical reconstruction. That sentence points to a conservative cast of mind, very much evidenced in the author's discussion of new music. That discussion is the target at which the whole book aims, though the most interesting and shrewd points aren't to do with that agenda at all. At one point Sharpe confesses to reading the newspaper while listening to Haydn (and how refreshing it is to hear that, so different to those relentlessly high-minded philosophers like Richard Wollheim, who in Painting as an art tells us that he once spent three hours absolutely motionless in front of one picture). Sharpe sees no sin in this, remarking that 'it is neither surprising nor regrettable that music rewards different degrees of concentration in different ways'. He defends the use of expressive predicates to describe music on the grounds that ,they allow new listeners to be drawn in. They are a means to making music convivial.' He attacks Nicholas Cook's assertion that the real goal of listening is pleasure (a view asserted more than once in Rosen's book, as we shall see). Sharpe says that `Cook fails to distinguish between pleasure and interest' - interest being the kind of enjoyment that comes with prolonged acquaintance with music, when one starts to have ideas about it, conversations about it, and finds that it is woven in numerous ways into the fabric of one's life. This leads to an important insight into the moral dimension of music, a dimension that the emphasis on pleasure misses entirely. `When a writer like Malcolm Budd identifies artistic value with the intrinsic value of the experience the work offers', he does us a disservice. The stress on experience seems to me to misplace the centre of our interest in the arts. I certainly would not say that I value my children or a friend for the intrinsic nature of the experience they offer; rather, I value them for what they are. Equally it misrepresents my valuing the music of Janacek to say that I value it for the experience it gives me. I value it for what is [...I the valuing of the experience is not identical with valuing the work. It is passages like these that persuade you that the philosophy of music is worth bothering with. There are many of these illuminating moments in Sharpe's book, and at the mid-point he starts to gather them into a coherent thesis; unfortunately this is where the book loses its way