Music and Morality Korr

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Music and Morality

Roger Scruton.

‘The ways of poetry and music are not changed anywhere without change in

the most important laws of the city’. So wrote Plato in the Republic (4.424c).

And Plato is famous for having given what is perhaps the first theory of

character in music, proposing to allow some modes and to forbid others

according to the character which can be heard in them. Plato deployed the

concept of mimesis, or imitation, to explain why bad character in music

encourages bad character in its devotees. The context suggests that he had

singing, dancing and marching in mind, rather than the silent listening that

we know from the concert hall. But, however we fill out the details, there is

no doubt that music, for Plato, was something that could be judged in the

same moral terms that we judge one another, and that the terms in question

denoted virtues and vices, like nobility, dignity, temperance and chastity on

the one hand, and sensuality, belligerence and indiscipline on the other.

The targets of Plato’s argument were not individual works of music or

specific performances, but modes. We don’t exactly know how the Greek

modes were arranged; they conventionally identified styles, instruments and

melodic and rhythmical devices, as well as the notes of the scale. Without

going into the matter we can venture to suggest that Plato was discriminating

between recognizable musical idioms, as we might dicriminate jazz from

rock, and both from classical. And his concern was not so very different

from that of a modern person worrying about the moral character, and moral

effect, of Death Metal, say, or musical kitsch of the Andrew Lloyd Webber

kind. Should our children be listening to this stuff? is the question in the

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mind of modern adults, just as ‘should the city permit this stuff?’ was the

question in the mind of Plato. Of course, we have long since given up on the

idea that you can forbid certain kinds of music by law. However, we should

remember that this idea has had a long history, and has been a decisive

factor in the evolution of the Christian churches, which have been as

censorious over liturgical music as over liturgical words, and indeed have

hardly made the distinction between them.

Moreover, it is still common to believe that styles of music, and

individual works of music, have – or can have – a moral character, and that

the character of a work or style of music can ‘rub off’ in some way on its

devotees. It makes perfectly good sense, and is often profoundly

illuminating, to describe individual works, and also styles and idioms, in

terms of the virtues and vices of people. The first movement of Elgar’s

Second symphony is undoubtedly noble, and if the nobility is in a measure

flawed this too is part of its moral character. (Ex.1.) We know of music that

is good-humoured, lascivious, gentle, bold, chaste, self-indulgent,

sentimental, reserved and generous: and all those words describe moral

virtues and vices, which we are as little surprised to find in music as in

human beings. Our ways of describing music give incontrovertible proof that

we find moral significance in music, and it would be surprising if this were

so and we did not also believe that people should be encouraged to listen to

some things, and discouraged from listening to others. For our characters are

shaped by the company we keep, and those who rejoice in the company of

crooks and creeps are likely to become crooks or creeps themselves. It is

difficult, therefore, to disagree with Plato’s view that music has a central

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role in education, and that musical education can go badly wrong in ways

that impact on the moral development and social responses of the young.

And even if we don’t forbid musical idioms by law, we should

remember that our laws are made by people who have musical tastes; and

Plato may be right, even in relation to a modern democracy, that changes in

musical culture go hand in hand with changes in the laws, since changes in

the laws so often reflect pressures from the culture. There is no doubt that

popular music today enjoys a status higher than any other cultural product.

Pop stars are first among celebrities, idolised by the young, taken as role

models, courted by politicians, and in general endowed with a magic aura

that gives them power over crowds. It is surely likely, therefore, that

something of their message will rub off on the laws passed by the

politicians who admire them. If the message is sensual, self-centred and

materialistic, then we should not expect to find that our laws address us from

any higher realm than that implies.

However, although we make moral judgements, we are ever more

hesitant to express them. Ours is a ‘non-judgemental’ culture, and the

hostility to judgement arises from the democratic belief in human equality.

To criticize another’s taste, whether in music, entertainment or life-style, is

to assume that some tastes are superior to others. And this, for many people,

is offensive. Who are you, they respond, to judge another’s taste? Young

people in particular feel this, and since it is young people who are the

principal devotees of pop music, this places a formidable obstacle in the path

of anyone who undertakes to criticize pop music in a university. This is

especially so if the criticism is phrased in Plato’s idiom, as an analysis and

condemnation of the moral vices exemplified by a musical style. In the face

of this a teacher might be tempted to give up on the question of judgement,

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and assume that anything goes, that all tastes are equally valid, and that, in

so far as music is an object of academic study, it is not criticism, but

technical analysis and know-how that should be imparted. Indeed this is the

line that seems to be followed in academic departments of musicology, at

least in the anglophone world.

The question of the moral character of music is also complicated by

the fact that music is appreciated in many different ways: people dance to

music; they work and converse over a background of music; they perform

music; and they listen to music. People happily dance to music that they

cannot bear to listen to – a fairly normal experience these days. You can talk

over Mozart, but not over Schoenberg; you can work to Chopin, but not to

Wagner. And it is sometimes argued that the melodic and rhythmic contour

of pop music both fits it for being overheard, rather than listened to, and also

encourages a need for pop in the background. Some psychologists wonder

whether this need follows the pattern of addictions; and more philosophical

critics like Theodor Adorno raise questions of a deep kind as to whether

listening has not changed entirely with the development of the short-range

melodies and clustered harmonic progressions that are typical of songs in the

jazz tradition. Adorno (1903-1969) had come as a refugee from Nazism to

America, where he enjoyed the usual privileges granted by American

universities to European intellectuals, and where he repaid his hosts in the

usual way, by writing criticisms of America that seeth with venom and

contempt. His target was what he and his older colleague Max Horkheimer

called ‘mass culture’, the principal manifestations of which he found in the

Hollywood movie and in jazz.

For Adorno music lies at the heart of modern civilisation, and the

destiny of music is a kind of indicator of the moral, spiritual and political

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health of a society. His adverse judgement of the culture of American

capitalism was influenced by his broadly Marxist perspective on the modern

world. But it focused first of all – and indeed, almost to the exclusion of all

other indicators – on the aesthetic tastes prevalent in America, and in

particular on the music that we now know as the American Song Book. The

harmonic and melodic language of that ‘book’ has penetrated to the very

bones of our civilisation, and when we listen now to a jazz standard by Cole

Porter, George Gershwin or Hoagy Carmichael, we are struck most of all by

the innocence of the idiom – the last time, perhaps, that old fashioned

monogamous marriage was celebrated in our music!

Adorno attacked something that he called the ‘regression of listening’,

which he believed had infected the entire culture of modern America.

Adorno’s concern was not with isolated works of music, but with an entire

musical culture. He saw the culture of listening as a deep spiritual resource

of Western civilisation, one whose effects he laboured unsuccessfully to

express. In some way the habit of listening to long-range musical thought, in

which themes are subjected to extended melodic, harmonic and rhythmic

development, is connected to the ability to live beyond the moment, to

transcend the search for instant gratification, to set aside the routines of the

consumer society, with its constant pursuit of the ‘fetish’, and to put real

values in the place of fleeting desires. So Adorno thought. And there is

something deep and persuasive here, something that needs to be rescued

from Adorno’s intemperate and over-politicised critique of just about

everything he found in America. In searching for Adorno’s meaning we

should set aside his un-nuanced and unjust criticism of jazz, and of the

tradition of popular song that arose from it. Instead we should look at what is

happening in our musical culture now, and in particular we should try to

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figure out how we might plausibly criticize pop music in general, and

particular styles and songs in particular, for the things that they are, and

independently of their causes and effects.

Not that we can entirely disregard the causes and effects of pop.

Adorno reminds us that it is very hard to criticize a whole musical idiom

without standing in judgement on the culture to which it belongs. Musical

idioms don’t come in sealed packets, with no relation to the rest of human

life. And when a particular kind of music surrounds us in public spaces,

when it invades every café, bar and restaurant, when it blares at us from

passing motor cars, and dribbles from the open taps of radios and ipods all

over the planet, the critic may seem to stand like the apocryphal King

Canute before an irresistible tide, uttering useless and curmudgeonly cries of

indignation.

Do we then give up on pop music, regard it as beyond criticism, and

the culture expressed in it as a fact of life? I want at least to cast some doubt

on that idea. Here is an example: ‘Alice Practice’, from an outfit called

Crystal Castles. (Ex. 2.) Surely there are relevant things to be said about this

which have a bearing not only on its value as music, but also on the moral

condition of those who unproblematically enjoy it. Older people tend to

react negatively to this foregrounding of an excited female voice, regarding

it as pornographic (though the lyrics, such as they are, seem to be more

about death and drugs than sex). But that feature is not what is most striking

to the musical ear. It is surely very noticeable that the piece has no melody;

equally noticeable that it is harmonically impoverished – most noticeable of

all that the sounds responsible for what there is of rhythmic impetus, are

made by electronic means and do not reflect the body rhythms of the person

producing them. These sounds, and the metre that they establish, are

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profoundly alien to the natural rhythms of the human body or to the

expectations of the human ear. We are dealing with a kind of machine-made

music which has been detached from the traditional source of music in

human life, and in the impulse to dance and sing in company. The voice is

suspended on electric wires, like the corpse of a galvanised frog.

Someone might reply that the quality of a piece of music lies in what

it provokes in the listener. Alice (let’s call her that) aims to excite powerful

emotions, and succeeds in doing so; in this sense the music is successful.

(Just look at the google entries for Alice Practice, and follow the blogs of the

fans, and you will be astonished at the impact of this piece.) Maybe, if

Crystal Castles had used the old techniques of melodic, harmonic and

rhythmical order, they would have produced something banal and

uninteresting. So why not praise them for achieving the only thing that they

sets out to achieve, which is to awaken the sleeping giants of lust and rage?

It is important to recognize that there are two ways in which a

response can be provoked by music: either by triggering it, as laughter is

triggered by tickling, or by providing a proper object of it, so as to inspire a

reflective form of sympathy. Mood-changing drugs have strong psychic

effects, both pleasant and unpleasant. But they work in another way from art

and music: they do not address our powers of understanding and rational

reflection, and are dangerous for that very reason, in that they set up

addictive pathways which by-pass critical reflection. If that is how Crystal

Castles aim to work, then why do we not regard their music as we regard

mood-changing drugs, as something which ought to be subject to legislative

control exactly as Plato suggested?

Here is an example of a piece of music that induces an effect which

has nothing to do with its quality as music, and which indeed by-passes

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every form of musical understanding: the Laughing Policeman. (Ex. 3.) This

works like tickling, an infectious laughter without an object – laughter

without amusement, comparable to the hurt without a cause that is invoked

by Alice. Needless to say, the laughter provoked by the laughing policeman

is quite unlike the laughter provoked by Mozart’s wonderful music at the

end of the second act of The Marriage of Figaro, in which the harmonic

progressions take up the situation of the protagonists and gradually topple

everything in Figaro’s favour. Mozart’s music makes you laugh, by virtue of

its intrinsic quality as music. You won’t get it if you do not respond to the

musical joke, which arises within the melodic, harmonic and rhythmical

order that you hear. In responding to the Mozart you are laughing at and also

with the music; in listening to the Laughing Policeman you are laughing at

nothing, just as when someone is tickling you, and you are not laughing with

the music either, since it is not the music that is laughing. The difference

here is a topic in itself, and I will leave it to settle in the background as I

return to the foreground of musical understanding.

I have suggested that there are three elements of musical organisation,

in all three of which ‘Alice Practice’ is defective. But I want now to say

more about each of them, since they will help to give us some purchase on

the realm of pop music. We are often told that rhythm is of prime

importance in pop, that it is music to be danced to, and that those who judge

it by the standards of the concert hall, which is a place of silent listening,

have simply lost the plot. This is certainly a fair response to the more

curmudgeonly forms of criticism, but it raises a question of profound

importance in the study of music, which is that of the nature of rhythm. The

first thing you hear in the example from Alice is a painful slicing of time by

an electric cheese-wire. And this reminds you, or ought to remind you, that

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rhythm is not the same thing as measure. It is not just a matter of dividing

time into repeatable units. It is a matter of organising it into a form of

movement, so that one note invites the next into the space that it has vacated.

This is exactly what goes on in dancing – real dancing, I mean. And the

complaints that might be made against the worst form of pop apply also to

the lame attempts at dancing that generally are produced by it – attempts

which involve no control of the body, no attempt to dance with another

person, but at best only the attempt to dance at him or her, by making

movements that are sliced up and atomised like the sounds that set Alice in

motion. If you want to see an example of this kind of dancing –in which

people are the victims and not the producers of dance – you need only look

at the video of ‘Alice Practice’ on YouTube.

I want to contrast Alice with an example of real rhythm from an early

pop song. I will take one that will be known to all of you: Heartbreak Hotel.

(Ex. 4.) You will notice here that the rhythm is generated internally, by the

melodic line, and that it is generated by the voice alone: the backing then

joins in, and it does so not by measuring out the bar-lines and slicing up the

time-sequence, but by taking up the pulse of Elvis’s voice. Measure, here, is

not imposed upon the melodic line like a grid, but precipitated out from it,

making virtual bar-lines in the ear, as we respond to the syncopation of the

voice. There is no violent drumming, no amplified bass, none of the devices

which – I am tempted to say – are a substitute for rhythm in so much

contemporary pop.

Here is another example of the phenomenon that I have in mind, this

time purely instrumental. This (Ex. 5.) is the opening of ‘Lay Down Sally’

by Eric Clapton, in which you hear rhythm generated on acoustic guitars,

with neither voice nor drum kit, but generated so effectively that you are

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moving with the music before the drum kit comes in, and do not as a result

suffer that sudden invasion, that capturing of the body by the pulse, that is

the grim apology for rhythm in so much synthetic pop today. Such examples

are a million miles from this, which is ‘Bleed’ from the Swedish Death

Metal group Meshuggah. (Ex. 5.)

Metal is, of course, an idiom all to itself, which is by no means typical

of the pop scene. There is much to admire in the virtuosity of the drummer

in that example, though whether you could say that he has ‘got rhythm’ in

the manner of Elvis I doubt. Until organised melodically, rhythm tends to

reduce to measure, whereas, when organised melodically, as in the examples

from Elvis and Clapton, it is raised to the level of gesture and movement.

The difference here is not material; it is phenomenological – a difference in

the way repetitions are heard. In the one case they are heard as regular beats,

like the pulse of a machine; in the other case they are heard as repeated

movements, of the kind that our bodies produce when running, walking or

dancing. A simple way of appreciating the difference here is to listen to an

eightsome reel. Nothing could be more metrically regular than this; but there

is an audible sense of transition between sections as the gestures change –

sometimes the hands are in the air, sometimes around the middle of the

body; sometimes the legs are freely crossing, at other times more inclined to

stamp. The melody is slightly varied with each change of partner, and the

excitement builds with every closure of the melodic line.

The phenomenology goes a little deeper than that implies. The rhythm

in the Meshuggah piece is shot at you; the rhythm in the reel invites you to

move with it. The difference between ‘at’ and ‘with’ is one of the deepest

differences we know, and is exemplified in all our encounters with other

people – notably in conversation and in sexual gambits. And the ‘withness’

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of the eightsome reel reflects the fact that this is a social dance, in which

people move consciously with others. The human need for this kind of

dancing is still with us, and explains the current craze for Salsa as well as the

periodic revivals of ballroom dancing and Scottish reels. The ‘withness’ of

the reel was noticed and commented upon by Schiller, who regarded what he

called ‘English’ dancing as confirming the connection between beauty and

gentility. His words are worth quoting:

The first law of gentility is: have consideration for the freedom of others, The second; show your freedom. The correct fulfilment of both is an infinitely difficult problem, but gentility always requires it relentlessly, and it alone makes the cosmopolitan person. I know of no more fitting image for the ideal of beautiful relations than the well danced and multiply convoluted English dance. The spectator in the gallery sees countless movements which cross each other colourfully and change their direction wilfully but never collide. Everything has been arranged so that the first has already made room for the second before he arrives, everything comes together so skilfully and yet so artlessly that both seem merely to be following their own mind while never impeding the other. This is the most fitting picture of a maintained personal freedom, which respects the freedom of others.1 It is undeniable that, for many if not most young people, the experience of

‘withness’ is absent from their dancing, which typically involves neither

complicated steps nor formations.

Metal is shouted at its devotees, and the loss of melody from the vocal

line emphasizes this. Not that melody is entirely absent, of course; it is

allowed in with the guitar solo, which is often a poignant reflection on its

own loneliness – the ghost of the community that has vanished from this

harshly enamelled world. The world of this music is one in which people

talk, shout, dance and feel at each other, without ever doing those things

with them. You dance to Heavy Metal by head-banging, slam-dancing or 1 Friedrich v. Schiller, ‘Kallias or Concerning Beauty: Letters to Gottfried Körner’, in J.M. Bernstein ed., Classic and Romantic German Aesthetics, Cambridge 2003, pp 173-4. (I have slightly changed the translation.)

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‘mashing’ (pushing people around in the crowd). Such dancing is not really

open to people of all ages, but confined to the young and the sexually

available. Of course, there is nothing to forbid the old and the shrivelled

from joining in: but the sight of their doing so is an embarrassment, all the

greater when they themselves seem unaware of this.

That is not yet a criticism, of course, but it is moving us towards the

recognition of what seems to me to be an important truth about pop music,

which is that what seems like rhythm, and the foregrounding of rhythm, is

often in fact an absence of rhythm, a drowning out of rhythm by the beat.

Rhythm divorced from melodic organisation becomes inert; it loses its

quality as gesture and hence loses the plasticity of gesture. As an extreme

contrast, which I hope might nevertheless drive the point home, I give you

another example (Ex. 7): the little rhythmical cell, beautifully shaped by the

melodic line, from which Dvořák constructs the scherzo of the New World

Symphony. Thanks to melodic order this cell can be used as a building

block, added, divided, multiplied in counterpoint, to generate a rhythmical

excitement which, in my view, has no real equivalent in modern pop.

Of course, that example comes from the concert hall, from music to be

listened to, in which rhythm has been emancipated from the demands of the

dance-floor and incorporated into complex contrapuntal reasoning.

Nevertheless, it is still rhythm – rhythm generated within the music, and

setting it in a motion of its own. Maybe this is a good place to make a

philosophical point. When we hear a piece of music we hear a sequence of

sounds: one sound, and then another. Usually these sounds are pitched, and

melody depends upon playing different pitches in succession. When we hear

a melody, however, we don’t just hear a succession of pitched sounds. We

hear something else – namely, a movement between those sounds. The

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melody begins on one note, continues through its successors in a goal-

directed way, and ends on another note. This is something we hear, even

though nothing in the physical world actually moves. The movement may

even go on while no sound is heard – as in the theme from Beethoven’s 3rd

Symphony, last movement. (Ex. Keyboard.)

Sounds exist in the physical world: they are real objects, admittedly of

a distinctive kind, but as real as colours and rainbows. Sounds are studied by

physics, and obey the laws of motion that govern all other entities in space

and time. Animals hear them: animals also discriminate sounds on the basis

of their pitches. They hear successions of pitched sounds. But they don’t

hear melodies. Birds, who create sequences that we hear as music, do not, in

my view, hear them as music: for this kind of hearing involves imaginative

capacities that no bird has. Movement is in part a causal idea. To hear the

melody move from C to E-flat, say, is to hear the E-flat as called into being

by the C – a virtual force operates between the notes, bringing each into

being in response to the last, and driving them all onwards to closure. Yet

there is no such force in the material world of sounds, in which there are

only sequences. Here is an interesting example: the opening of Brahms’s

Second Piano concerto, in which a sequence on the horn calls into being an

answering phrase from the piano. (Ex. 8.) There is no causal interaction

between these sounds in the actual world – the first sequence is played on

the horn, the second on the piano. Yet the second is called forth by the first,

in the simplest and most compelling manner. Later in the same concerto

Brahms hands fragments of melody alternately to piano and orchestra, and

the virtual force runs through the mfragments binding them into a single

melody in a striking way.

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I mention these points because I think we should bear in mind that we

don’t make music merely by producing sounds, and that there is indeed a

danger, inherent in the very art of music, that it might at any moment

collapse into sound – to become a sound effect, whose purpose is to produce

responses in something like the way that the Laughing Policeman produces

laughter, without drawing our attention to what can be heard in and

imagined in the rhythmic and melodic line. The collapse of music into sound

is, in fact, happening all around us, both in the world of pop and in the

concert hall, and I am making a case for condemning it, since the sound

effect is not a new kind of music but a loss of music.

That brings me to melody. Defining melody is one of the unfinished

tasks of musical aesthetics, and I can here only give a few hints. It is a good

starting point to remark that a melody has a beginning, a middle and an end:

but this is true only in a very general sense. A melody that begins with an

upbeat (like so many English folk songs) does not have a clear initiating

boundary: you can hear the upbeat as inside or outside the melody, but the

boundary somehow disappears behind it. Many melodies tail off without a

clear conclusion – for instance the great theme of the first movement of the

Sibelius Violin Concerto. (Ex. 9.) And to say that all melodies must have a

middle is to say nothing at all.

Traditionally melody has been the fundamental principle of the

popular song: it is what makes it possible to memorize the words, and to join

in the singing. All folk traditions contain a repertoire of melodies, which

often are built from repeatable elements, but which also show remarkable

elaborations, as in the seemingly endless melodies of the Indian raga or the

Gregorian chant. The American song book exhibits a new kind of melody,

shaped by jazz rhythms and jazz harmonies, and many of its tunes have

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endured to become known all over the world. By contrast, there is very little

emerging from pop that shows either melodic invention or even an

awareness of why melody matters – that is to say, an awareness of its social

meaning and its ability to give musical substance to a strophic song.

Countless pop songs give us permutations of the same stock phrases,

diatonic or pentatonic, but kept together not by any intrinsic power of

adhesion but only by a plodding rhythmical backing and banal sequence of

chords. This example from Ozzy Osbourne (Ex.10.) illustrates what I have

in mind: no point in copyrighting this tune, though no point in suing for

breach of copyright either.

More frequent still is the melody on one note, which might suddenly

shift pitch by a third when changing harmony, but otherwise stays put,

relying on the backing to keep going. Here are the Kooks in Ooh La. (Ex.

11.) By repeating a single note they elide the melodic line into the rhythm,

which is itself reduced to a regular pulse that has little or no musical force. I

invite you to look out for this device, since it occurs countless times in

contemporary pop. By these devices – stock phrases and repeated notes – a

pop musician can avoid the real challenge of melody making, which is to

produce the virtual movement that will propel the melody onwards, whether

or not to a conclusion.

Melodies are of many kinds, and we should not criticize pop just

because it does not obey the rules of a tradition to which it does not belong.

Baroque composers wrote melodies; but these melodies tend to be very

different from anything that we would, today, call a tune. Here is an example

from Bach (Ex. 12) – ‘Erbarme Dich’ from the St Matthew Passion, a

beautiful melody that begins with an upbeat, and proceeds through one half-

closure after another, as though it might go on for ever. Here all boundaries

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are weak, and the melody can be subdivided in countless ways, to permit

multiple elaborations in the course of the aria. Yet it involves melodic

thinking of the highest order. It is neither a theme nor a tune, but an

unbroken melisma, which throws out spores around itself as it grows. In

many ways the history of melody since Bach has been a history of retraction

– a steady concentration of the elements as the melisma is curtailed to

sonata-form themes, expanded again to the broad melodies of the romantics

before being boiled down into motifs and melodic phrases. Yet in all this we

observe intense musical thinking, as composers strove to avoid banality, to

make melodies and phrases which attract the sympathy and stir the heart.

The great question for the critic of pop is whether pop involves any similar

attempt at melodic invention.

Adorno attacked something that he called the ‘regression of listening’,

which he believed had infected the entire musical culture of modern

America. And, however exaggerated his critique of the American Songbook

may strike us as being now, there is no doubt in my mind that this

‘regression’ is exactly what we hear in the kind of pop that I have just been

discussing. Please note that I am not talking of the words. I am talking about

the musical experience, which has become truncated, embryonic, reduced to

an external pulse and often surrendered to the machine. It is surely right to

speak of a new kind of listening, maybe a kind of listening that is not

listening at all, when there is no melody to speak of, when the rhythm is

machine made, and when the only invitation to dance is an invitation to

dance with oneself. And it is easier to imagine a kind of pop that is not like

that pop that is with the listener and not at him. There is no need to go back

to Elvis or the Beatles to find examples.

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Before moving on I should say a word about harmony. The baroque

repertoire reminds us that there is musical movement of a subtle and all-

engrossing kind which involves little or no melody, and only a weak

rhythmic pulse, but in which everything is invested in harmonic progressions

– and such music can come across as profoundly meditative, in the manner

of this extract from a Bach Cello suite (Ex. 13.): nothing but broken chords

growing out of and into each other, but with a kind of compelling movement

that entirely captures the ear. One of the triumphs of the listening culture is

in the evolution of music in which melodic, rhythmic and harmonic

progressions move hand in hand. Harmonies are not just chord sequences on

which melodies are imposed, but adventures of their own, compelled by the

melodic line and in their turn compelling it. For some reason Adorno did not

notice that the jazz idiom belongs squarely in this tradition, that the

elementary sequences of blues and New Orleans Jazz were very soon

adapted to a new kind of melody-making, in which once again quite

complex harmonies seem compelled by complex melodies, even though both

are short-breathed and move quickly to closure. Here is a celebrated

example: Round Midnight, by Thelonious Monk. (Ex. 14.)

Now it won’t have escaped notice that, in the examples I have given,

harmonic progressions usually have little or nothing to do with the melodic

line. This is very obvious in the Ozzy Osbourne case, where the melody is

carried by the harmony and has no life of its own, the harmony itself being a

slushy sequence of triads. Not all pop is like this of course; sometimes there

is real harmonic inventiveness, as in Led Zeppelin, Jimi Hendrix and some

instances of Heavy Metal. The purpose of my examples has not been to

condemn pop music and pop culture outright, but to make comparisons. And

the point of these comparisons is twofold: first to persuade the pop fan that

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they are possible, even within the world of pop; secondly to show that

comparison leads inevitably to judgement, and judgement, in its turn to a

moral evaluation.

To be non-judgemental is in fact already to make a kind of judgement:

it is to suggest that it really doesn’t matter what you listen to or dance to, and

that there is no moral distinction between the various listening habits that

have emerged in the age of mechanical reproduction. That is a morally

charged position, and one that flies in the face of common sense. To suggest

that people who live with a metric pulse as a constant background to their

thoughts and movements are living in the same way, with the same kind of

attention and the same pattern of challenges and rewards, as others who

know music only from sitting down to listen to it, clearing their minds,

meanwhile, of all other thoughts – such a suggestion is surely implausible.

Likewise, to suggest that those who dance in the solipsistic way

encouraged by Metal or Indie music share a form of life with those who

dance, when they dance, in formation, with the spirit recorded so eloquently

by Schiller, is to say something equally implausible. The difference is not

merely in the kind of movements made; it is a difference in social valency,

and in the relative value placed on being with your neighbour rather than

over and against him.

If we go back for a moment to what I earlier said about rhythm and

melody, we will recognize that, whatever we wish to say about the moral

character of music, it is bound up with the movement that we hear in music.

This movement is a mark of life, and we respond to it by making

sympathetic movements of our own, as when we dance with the music, or

sway along with it while listening. Movement in music arises internally to

the musical line, and is there only in so far as it is heard there by the

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imaginative ear. But there is another kind of movement that we receive

through music: movement that is not in the music, but imposed upon it, by

an external pulse that has no intrinsic connection to the melodic line. Such a

movement may be communicated through the music, but it arises externally,

in the beats and hums of a machine, in the pulse of an electronic device, in

the shouting of a voice, or in the provocative sound of Alice in a state of

self-disgusted arousal.

As I suggested earlier musical movement is addressed to our

sympathies: it asks us to move with it. External movement is shoved at us.

You cannot easily move with it, but you can submit to it. When music

organized by this kind of external movement is played at a dance it

automatically atomizes the people on the dance floor. They may dance at

each other, but only painfully with each other. And the dance is not

something that you do, but something that happens to you – a pulse on

which you are suspended, like Alice on her wires.

Only rational beings dance, and in the normal case they do so by way

of putting their personality and their freedom on display, in the manner

described by Schiller. When you are in the grip of an external and

mechanised rhythm your freedom is over-ridden, and it is hard then to move

in a way that suggests a personal relation to a partner – the I-Thou relation

on which human society is built. Plato was surely right, therefore, to think

that when we move in time to music we are educating our characters. For we

are learning an aspect of our embodiment, as free beings. Embodiment can

have virtuous and vicious forms. To take just one example, there is a deep

distinction, in the matter of sexual presentation, between modesty and

lewdness. Modesty makes room for the other as someone whom you are

with. Lewdness is at the other, but not with him or her, since it is an attempt

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to cancel the other’s freedom to withdraw. And it is very clear that these

traits of character are displayed in dancing. Plato’s thought was, that if you

display lewdness in the dances that you most enjoy, then you are that much

nearer to acquiring the habit. To put it in the language that I have been

using: you are learning to be at, not with, the people whom you meet. I don’t

see any reason to doubt that.

Now dancing is not just moving, nor is it moving in response to a

sound, a beat or whatever. Animals can do that, and you can train horses and

elephants to move in time to a beat in the circus arena, with an effect that

looks like dancing. But they are not dancing, any more than birds are

singing. To dance is, in its true social form, to move with something,

conscious that this is what you are doing. You move with the music, and

also (in old fashioned dances) with your partner. This ‘moving with’ is

something that animals cannot do, since it involves the deliberate imitation

of life radiating from another source than your own body. That in turn

demands a conception of self and other, and of the relation between them – a

conception which, I would argue, is unavailable outside the context provided

by language use and first-person awareness.

I have argued that there are discriminations to be made within

popular music, and that they concern those very dimensions of musical

signifiance – rhythm, melody and harmony – which make music in all its

forms so important a mirror of human life. There is plenty of tuneful popular

music, and plenty of music with which one can sing along and to which one

can dance in sociable ways. All this is obvious. Yet there is growing, within

popular music, another kind of practice altogether, one in which the

movement is no longer contained in the musical line but exported to a place

outside it, to a centre of pulsation which demands not that you listen but that

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you submit. If you do submit, the moral qualities of the music vanish behind

the excitement; if you listen, however, and listen critically as I have been

suggesting, you will discern those moral qualities, which are as vivid as the

nobility in Elgar’s Second Symphony or the horror in Schoenberg’s

Erwartung. And then you might be tempted to agree with Plato, that if this

music is permitted, then the laws that govern us will change.