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15 November 2015
It's time to switch the music off in order to rediscover its true value, says
Roger Scruton.
In almost every public place today the ears are assailed by the sound of pop
music. In shopping malls, public houses, restaurants, hotels and elevators the
ambient sound is not human conversation but the music disgorged into the air by
speakers - usually invisible and inaccessible speakers that cannot be punished
for their impertinence. Some places brand themselves with their own signature
sound - folk, jazz or excerpts from the Broadway musicals. For the most part,
however, the prevailing music is of an astounding banality - it is there in
order not to be really there. It is a background to the business of consuming
things, a surrounding nothingness on which we scribble the graffiti of our
desires. The worst forms of this music - sometimes known, after the trade name,
as Muzak - are produced without the intervention of musicians, being put
together on a computer from a repertoire of standard effects.
The background sounds of modern life are therefore less and less human. Rhythm,
which is the sound of life, has been largely replaced by electrical pulses,
produced by a machine programmed to repeat itself ad infinitum, and to thrust
its booming bass notes into the very bones of the victim. Whole areas of civic
space in our society are now policed by this sound, which drives anybody with
the slightest feeling for music to distraction, and ensures that for many of us
a visit to the pub or a meal in a restaurant have lost their residual meaning.
These are no longer social events, but experiments in endurance, as you shout
at each other over the deadly noise.
There are two reasons why this vacuous music has flown into every public space.
One is the vast change in the human ear brought about by the mass production of
sound. The other is the failure of the law to protect us from the result. For
our ancestors music was something that you sat down to listen to, or which you
made for yourself. It was a ceremonial event, in which you participated, either
as a passive listener or as an active performer. Either way you were giving and
receiving life, sharing in something of great social significance.
With the advent of the gramophone, the radio and now the iPod, music is no
longer something that you must make for yourself, nor is it something that you
sit down to listen to. It follows you about wherever you go, and you switch it
on as a background. It is not so much listened to as overheard. The banal
melodies and mechanical rhythms, the stock harmonies recycled in song after
song, these things signify the eclipse of the musical ear. For many people
music is no longer a language shaped by our deepest feelings, no longer a place
of refuge from the tawdriness and distraction of everyday life, no longer an
art in which gripping ideas are followed to their distant conclusions. It is
simply a carpet of sound, designed to bring all thought and feeling down to its
own level lest something serious might be felt or said.
And there is no law against it. You are rightly prevented from polluting the
air of a restaurant with smoke; but nothing prevents the owner from inflicting
this far worse pollution on his customers - pollution that poisons not the body
but the soul. Of course, you can ask for the music to be turned off. But you
will be met by blank and even hostile stares. What kind of a weirdo is this,
who wants to impose his will on everyone? Who is he to dictate the noise
levels? Such is the usual response. Background music is the default position.
It is no longer silence to which we return when we cease to speak, but the
empty chatter of the music-box. Silence must be excluded at all cost, since it
awakens you to the emptiness that looms on the edge of modern life, threatening
to confront you with the dreadful truth, that you have nothing whatever to say.
On the other hand, if we knew silence for what once it was, as the plastic
material that is shaped by real music, then it would not frighten us at all.
Pop pollution has an effect on musical appreciation comparable to pornography
on sex - all that is beautiful, special and full of love is replaced by a
grinding mechanism
I don't think we should underestimate the tyranny exerted over the human brain
by pop. The constant repetition of musical platitudes, at every moment of the
day and night, leads to addiction. It also has a dampening effect on
conversation. I suspect that the increasing inarticulateness of the young,
their inability to complete their sentences, to find telling phrases or images,
or to say anything at all without calling upon the word "like" to help them
out, has something to do with the fact that their ears are constantly stuffed
with cotton wool. Round and round in their heads go the chord progressions, the
empty lyrics and the impoverished fragments of tune, and boom goes the brain
box at the start of every bar.
Pop pollution has an effect on musical appreciation comparable to pornography
on sex. All that is beautiful, special and full of love is replaced by a
grinding mechanism. Just as porn addicts lose the capacity for real sexual
love, so do pop addicts lose the capacity for genuine musical experience. The
magical encounter with the Beethoven quartet, the Bach suite, the Brahms
symphony, in which your whole being is gripped by melodic and harmonic ideas
and taken on a journey through the imaginary space of music - that experience
which lies at the heart of our civilisation and which is an incomparable source
of joy and consolation to all those who know it - is no longer a universal
resource. It has become a private eccentricity, something that a dwindling body
of oldies cling to, but which is regarded by many of the young as irrelevant.
Increasingly young ears cannot reach out to this enchanted world, and therefore
turn away from it. The loss is theirs, but you cannot explain that to them, any
more than you can explain the beauty of colours to someone who is congenitally
blind.
Is there a remedy? Yes, I think there is. The addictive ear, dulled by
repetition, is shut tight as a clam around its pointless treasures. But you can
prise it open with musical instruments. Put a young person in a position to
make music and not just to hear it and immediately the ear begins to recover
from its lethargy. By teaching children to play musical instruments, we
acquaint them with the roots of music in human life.
The next step is to introduce the idea of judgment. The belief that there is a
difference between good and bad, meaningful and meaningless, profound and
vapid, exciting and banal - this belief was once fundamental to musical
education. But it offends against political correctness. Today there is only my
taste and yours. The suggestion that my taste is better than yours is elitist,
an offence against equality. But unless we teach children to judge, to
discriminate, to recognise the difference between music of lasting value and
mere ephemera, we give up on the task of education. Judgment is the
precondition of true enjoyment, and the prelude to understanding art in all its
forms.
The good news is that, in their hearts, people are aware of this. All who have
had the experience of teaching music appreciation know it to be so. The first
step is to introduce the precious commodity of silence, so that your students
are listening with open ears to the cosmos, and are beginning to forget their
addictive pleasures. Then you play to them the things that you love. They will
be bewildered at first. After all, how can this old geezer sit still for 50
minutes listening to something that hasn't got a beat or a tune? Then you
discuss the things that they love. Had they noticed, for example, that Lady
Gaga in "Poker Face" stays for most of the tune on one note? Is that real
melody? After a while they will see that they have in fact been making
judgments all along - it is just that they were making the wrong ones. When
Metallica appeared at the 2014 Glastonbury festival there was a wake-up moment
of this kind - the recognition that these guys, unlike so many who had
performed there, actually had something to say. Yes, there are distinctions of
quality, even in the realm of pop.
The next stage is to get the students to perform - to sing in unison, and then
in parts. Very soon they will understand that music is not a blanket with which
to shut out communication, but a form of communication in itself. And gradually
they will know the place of this great art form in the world that they have
inherited. Our civilisation was made by music and the musical tradition that we
have inherited is as worthy of praise as all our other achievements in art,
science, religion and politics. This musical tradition speaks for itself but to
hear it you must clear the air of noise.