5/4/2023 0 Comments Roger scruton![]() Or we can inquire into its moral and political value, insofar as humans in motion are also a concern in these domains. We can wonder not only about what music is, but also about its aesthetic value. But as soon as we enter the domain of human movements, as music in fact does, we enter a space that admits of multiple modes of analysis. Music stirs us to perceive and even to be (at least momentarily) what the composer has set in motion. Music draws listeners into an imaginary space where our bodies as well as our minds are sympathetically engaged in motions. Moments like this in Scruton’s philosophical analysis of music help us to see why music might have moral significance, even when no actual words or text are involved. Rhythm conveys something “intimately connected to processes that we know in ourselves.” “Our own life speaks to us through the sound,” Scruton writes. Similarly, bodily motions such as dance, physical work, walking, marching, and other human activities, involve stress and measure. In other words, speech exhibits stresses, accents, meters, and groupings, just as rhythms in music do. Rhythmic phenomena in music seem to him to derive from two types of fundamental human phenomena: those of speech and of bodily movements. ![]() He dwells especially upon the intimate connection between rhythm and human life. So too is rhythm, and in fact the breadth of Scruton’s treatment of rhythm in his later Understanding Music suggests that he finds it particularly significant. ![]() The ways in which sound is organized so as to create music are numerous: pitch, melody, harmony, and dynamics are all of interest to Scruton. Music occurs in the context of a musical culture, where composer and audience alike participate in the transformation of sounds into objects of tonal space that express movement and invite interpretation according to a traditional “grammar” (another metaphor) of expectations. Sounds do not literally move as music “moves.” They do not “rise” and “fall.” “Yet this is how we hear them when we hear them as music.” Again, raw sounds are not “sad” or “agitated” or “sensuous” or “sublime,” but music certainly can be. But metaphor, according to Scruton, is absolutely essential to music. “Space” is of course a metaphor here the space in which musical expression takes place is not a real space. Tones are sounds intentionally organized in such a way as to create an imaginary space. What does this mean? It means that music is constructed from “tones”-not from sound in its raw materiality. To distill Scruton’s view, music is not mere sound, but (a) an instance of organized sound, where (b) the intention to communicate something via (c) traditional “grammars” of tonal development makes it possible for (d) a listener to experience (e) movement in a metaphorical space and (f) to sympathize with imagined expectations and fulfillments, thereby undergoing in his or her own soul (g) various motions equivalent to the tonal movements expressed by the composer. ![]() Scruton proceeds in a Socratic manner, assuming that one should begin by striving to understand what something is before launching into questions of evaluation-whether aesthetic or cultural. Here I use Scruton’s basic philosophy of music as developed in The Aesthetics of Music (1998) and Understanding Music (2009) as a backdrop against which to explore his thoughts on the connection between music and culture. It can benefit listeners (and harm them as well) especially insofar as they are part of a community whose self-understanding is shaped by the music’s meaning. Music reveals a great deal about those who produce it. Yet Scruton’s work also displays a discerning sense of the ways music relates to culture. To a large extent, Scruton’s work on music is an effort to understand its nature and meaning as an end in itself, free from any social or political concerns. Readers of Roger Scruton’s work will know that he writes frequently on the aesthetics of music.
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