Provocation: A Musical Lament
Music seems to have always been with us since time immemorial. During which time, the relationship of music―its relative position―with its composers and listeners have been changing, creating a history of its own. Naturally, the place of music in our society today begs for clarification. Observation confirms that music is peripheral in today’s society. People do their daily business, jobs, and affairs. When weekends come, businesses cease: an exceptional time of an un-busy day. In such moments, many people attempt to entertain themselves with a variety of entertainment: sports, movies, dinning―an inexhaustible list—and music. The purpose of these entertainments is, certainly, to rejuvenate oneself to a state capable of being reworked the whole weekdays all over again. It is inevitable to conclude that work has defined the central existential tenet for many today. Thus, music, as far as such way of life is concerned, is peripheral, supplemental, and nonessential. The meaning of music is always referenced to the more essential ‘work’. Music is never given an independent meaning. Music is never given the seriousness the modern-capitalist culture gives to daily labors. At best, music is commoditized and standardized.
We might get it all upside-down. First of all, let it be said: not all music is created equal. To assert this point is risking oneself of being charged with a high-brow musical iconoclasm and elitism. However, let the charges come, if warranted, but one shall never let them inculcate a fear of chastisement that hinders intellectual integrity and honesty to utter meaningful discourse on music—or any other subjects for that matter. Perhaps occasionally, an iconoclast is necessary to bring a little bit of sobriety. Thus, it may be that for such fear of chastisement and for the sake of political correctness to include as many tastes as possible that the popular stance of relativism is most commonly taken in discussing such elusive topic as music. The relativist view essentially asserts that not only beauty is in the eye of the beholder, sound is too. The many genres in music complicate any attempt to weigh a genre of music against another genre of music. How can one compare apple and orange? They are not the same kind, and thus, it seems, the possibility of an objective standard to evaluate music is relinquished. Everything is a matter of taste. As such one must be prepared to validate a claim as preposterous as ‘there can be no fundamental difference between Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony and the recent worldwide phenomenon of Korean rapper PSY’s Gangnam Style’.
Rest assured. There are reasons to be skeptical of the relativist claim. The relativist position is predicated on the assumption that music is personal, internal, and subjective. Johnson, for instance, attempts to address this supposedly personal aspect of music by comparing it to language, making music “a signifying system that is communally shared and defined, something that is larger than our own use of it and that we enter whenever we involve ourselves with music.”[i] Johnson’s claim appeals to the fact that, like language, music cannot be purely personal. Furthermore, being the human species, the herd, whatever one wants to call it, entails more similarity than one probably wants to admit. The lump of gray matter which resides in the skull that produces the cultural universal of language through which humans communicate with each other must also produce that other cultural universal of music making and the attraction to music. Like in language, what else could explain this deep-rooted phenomenon but biology? That human’s nervous and auditory systems are tuned for music no less than for language[ii] is not at all a stretch too far of a claim.
Returning to the assertion that music is just a matter of taste, it can be an indication of a problem that some thinkers contend have been plaguing music embedded in capitalist popular culture. The logic of this assertion seems to point to “commercial culture that accords equal validity and equal status to all of its products.”[iii] In order to sell as many products as possible, the discrimination in musical genre is not serving the propagation of capital too well. It is better to regard all tastes as equally valid choices, and thus salable to all in the market. This kind of system, in turn, affects the production of music itself. Adorno notably contends that there might be a danger in popular culture, or, the cultural industry, a term that he preferred to use than popular culture. ‘Popular’ culture denotes something that comes from the people, whereas for Adorno the culture is not from the people, but is manufactured and distributed by the forces of the market, “a manipulation of mass consciousness.”[iv] Popular music as a part of popular culture, maintains Adorno, is characterized by certain standardization, making popular music a “musical automatism.”[v] This standardization makes it possible for a work to be enjoyed in parts independent of the whole. In such case interdependence of contexts that contributes to the totality of a work is absent. This absence, according to Adorno, is one of the chief differences between popular music and serious music like that of Beethoven’s. Jazz, however, presents Adorno with a challenge in developing his standardization thesis, because jazz’s improvisation seems to counter the accusation of standardization. But Adorno insisted that even the improvisation in jazz still eventually falls under the structure of standardization with standardized harmonic and schemes.[vi]
Adorno’s critiques may be controversial, like his attack on jazz exemplifies, but a great deal can be taken from his critique on popular music. More than most people who enjoy and live the popular music, Adorno treated the popular music seriously. This serious attitude in contemplating the current culture is lacking in people who try to brush off Adorno as merely ‘snobbish’. He might not get everything right, but his insight on musical standardization and industry culture are especially valuable today. The seriousness by which he treated music is an exemplar to shift music from the periphery.
If music is not relativistic, and thus it is possible to evaluate it, what kind of criteria can we use to judge it? And if a particular music is judged to be higher than another particular kind of music by this standard, what does that mean?
[i] Julian Johnson, Who Needs Classical Music? (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 11.
[ii] Oliver Sacks, Musicophilia (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2007), xi.
[iii] Johnson, Who Needs Classical Music, 14.
[iv] Robert W. Witkin, Adorno on Popular Culture (London: Routledge, 2003), 2.
[v] Theodor W. Adorno, Essays on Music (London: University of California Press, 2002), 437-44.
[vi] Ibid., 470-92.
