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Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
Sprache: Englisch

Beschreibung

As countries went into lockdown in 2020, people turned to music for comfort and solidarity. Neighbours sang to each other from their balconies; people participated in online music sessions that created an experience of socially distanced togetherness. Nicholas Cook argues that the value of music goes far beyond simple enjoyment. Music can enhance well-being, interpersonal relationships, cultural tolerance, and civil cohesion. At the same time, music can be a tool of persuasion or ideology. Thinking about music helps bring into focus the values that are mobilised in today's culture wars. Making music together builds relationships of interdependence and trust: rather than escapism, it offers a blueprint for a community of mutual obligation and interdependence. Music: Why It Matters is for anyone who loves playing, listening to, or thinking about music, as well as those pursuing it as a career.

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Seitenzahl: 164

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

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Leseprobe

Cover

Table of Contents

Series Page

Title Page

Acknowledgements

Or Maybe It Doesn’t?

Music for Good or Ill

Notes

Ideology in Disguise

Notes

Music, Race, Empire

Notes

2020 and After

Notes

Music and Asocial Individualism

Notes

Music, Nostalgia, Delusion

Notes

Music and Administered Society

Notes

Musical Togetherness

Notes

Music, Covid, Ethics

Notes

Pandemic Intimacy

Notes

List of Illustrations

Chapter 1

Figure 1.

Fernand Khnopff, Listening to Schumann (1883). Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Bel…

Chapter 2

Figure 2.

Client and therapist at the Cornwall Music Service Trust, Truro. Credit: Cornwal…

Chapter 4

Figure 3.

Actress Ira Donnette in blackface, 1909. J. Willis Sayre Collection of Theatrica…

Figure 4.

Zip Coon (music cover from 1834). Library of Congress

Chapter 7

Figure 5.

Jacques-Louis David, Brutus Receiving the Bodies of His Sons (1789). The story i…

Figure 6.

Ralph Vaughan Williams (right) and Gustav Holst in the Malvern hills, September …

Figure 7.

Drake at Plymouth Hoe (from H. E. Marshall, Our Island Story, 1905)

Chapter 9

Figure 8.

Jaleel Shaw (alto saxophone) and Roy Haynes (drums). Fountain of Youth Quartet p…

Figure 9.

String quartet in Oradea, Romania, 2016. Photograph by Larisa Birta. Reproduced …

Chapter 11

Figure 10.

Screengrab of the Covenant House Choir performing with Alex Newell during A Nigh…

Figure 11.

Harpist’s hand. Photograph by Rama. Cropped reproduction under Creative C…

Figure 12.

Italian balcony music during lockdown in San Salvario, Turin, March 2020. Photog…

Guide

Cover

Table of Contents

Series Page

Title Page

Acknowledgements

Begin Reading

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Polity’sWhy It Mattersseries

In these short and lively books, world-leading thinkers make the case for the importance of their subjects and aim to inspire a new generation of students.

Helen Beebee & Michael Rush, Philosophy

Nicholas Cook, Music

Nick Couldry, Media

Robert Eaglestone, Literature

Andrew Gamble, Politics

Lynn Hunt, History

Tim Ingold, Anthropology

Katrin Kohl, Modern Languages

Neville Morley, Classics

Alexander B. Murphy, Geography

Geoffrey K. Pullum, Linguistics

Michael Schudson, Journalism

Ann B. Stahl, Archaeology

Graham Ward, Theology and Religion

Richard Wiseman, Psychology

Music

Why It Matters

Nicholas Cook

polity

The right of Nicholas Cook to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

First published in 2023 by Polity Press

Polity Press65 Bridge StreetCambridge CB2 1UR, UK

Polity Press111 River StreetHoboken, NJ 07030, USA

All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.

ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-4241-3

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Library of Congress Control Number: 2022949693

The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.

Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.

For further information on Polity, visit our website: politybooks.com

Acknowledgements

Many people, including members of my family, helped me with this book; in particular I blame my daughter Chloe, who encouraged me when I first floated the idea of bringing together my work on music and my developing political concerns. (The book’s period of gestation began with the Brexit referendum, and it was written during the pandemic.) Sometimes the project struck me as crazy, and I am grateful to those who encouraged me to think it might not be: they range from the audiences at virtual seminars where I presented the material to many others who commented on drafts and/or helped in other ways – in particular Daniel Leech-Wilkinson, D. R. M. Irving, Tomás McAuley, Ariana Phillips-Hutton, and Gabrielle Messeder – as well as my wife Louise, my brother Michael, and my son Christopher. (I said it was a family affair.) I found the comments of the publisher’s readers exceptionally helpful; one of them was Lawrence Kramer, and while I don’t know who the other two were, I am grateful to all three. I thank Pascal Porcheron of Polity Press – who commissioned the book – and his successor Ian Malcolm, both of whom provided valuable guidance on developing it; also Ellen MacDonald-Kramer, who made the process of production as trouble-free (at least for me) as such things can ever be, and Tim Clark, my deft but unintrusive copy editor. Finally I thank the British Academy and the Wolfson Foundation for a research professorship that gave me the time to research and write my forthcoming book Music, Encounter, Togetherness (Oxford University Press), in which some of the ideas drawn on in this book are developed in much greater detail.

Or Maybe It Doesn’t?

You could say that music matters because it doesn’t matter. You don’t want to be engaged with weighty issues all the time. Sometimes you need space to relax, to switch off, to contemplate anything and everything and nothing in particular. Or you might want to be taken out of yourself, to socialise, to take music’s energy into your body in the half anonymous, half intimate context of clubbing. Or for an hour or two you might leave this world for a better one, a world where beauty or spirituality is all that matters (Figure 1). Music, thought of in many cultures as giving access to some higher state of being, can help with all these things. Above all it is a source of pleasure. These things matter, but you really don’t need a book to tell you that.

And actually the idea that music matters because it doesn’t matter has a long history, though it’s not usually expressed quite like that; it’s a basic principle of traditional Western music aesthetics. (A health warning: the term ‘Western’ conflates history, geography, culture, and power, and gives rise to the negative characterisation of the rest of the world as ‘non-Western’, but the problem is more with the world than the word.) The idea of music’s autonomy holds that music has an infinite diversity of potential meaning that transcends the ‘real’ world: it is a world of its own. In this view music is not ‘about’ the real world, it is only about itself. This idea was specifically associated with the elite musical culture of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, what we call Western classical music. Even now it colours some people’s thinking about music more generally. And it can very easily slide into the belief that music is nice but doesn’t much matter.

Figure 1. Fernand Khnopff, Listening to Schumann (1883). Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium

I don’t buy that. In fact one aim of this short book is to dispose of this kind of thinking once and for all. I do this by picking out a series of areas in which music proves itself to be very much part of the real world. Its more direct effects range from the beneficial – its creation of communal feeling or its contribution to health and welfare – to the harmful, for example its use in warfare. At the same time music is a key arena in which major social issues such as race are played out. Its powers of subliminal persuasion turn it into a political tool, but also create a perspective from which to think about ways in which contemporary politicians mobilise nostalgia and fantasy, as much in their own interests as those of the people whose interests they supposedly serve. (My examples here are mainly drawn from right-wing politicians in contemporary Britain, but similar things are happening in many other countries – and the right does not have a monopoly on such abuses.) Music also throws into relief some problematic dimensions of modern administered society, while in the act of performance it creates social structures that can act as a yardstick against which to measure the still dominant neoliberal culture of hyperindividualism and greed. The Covid-19 pandemic shone an unprecedentedly harsh light on this culture, and I look at some of the new ways people found to use music during the lockdowns, as well as the potential they offer for thinking about music in new ways.

Near the end of the book I come back more explicitly to the question of whether – and if so how and why – music matters. You can make up your own mind at that point.

Music for Good or Ill

Humans are always ready to divide things into opposed categories, which is a problem because in general the world doesn’t work like that. So we have ‘Western’ vs ‘non-Western’ music (what Stuart Hall called the ‘West and the rest’ model), we have ‘art’ vs ‘popular’ music and so on. There’s also a division that arose out of the aesthetics of autonomy: between ‘aesthetic’ or ‘autonomous’ music on the one hand (traditionally referred to simply as ‘music’) and ‘applied’ music on the other – music the point of which is to do things like make your unborn baby smarter or improve milk yields (I’m speaking of cows). People don’t talk much about this distinction, but it is built into everyday life. On the one hand there’s concert and recorded music played by professionals, where aesthetic quality is all-important. On the other there’s the music without which no royal (or other) wedding or funeral would be complete, or the canned music played in failing restaurants to make them seem less empty, or the music that drives aerobics classes, or that used or created by therapists to help people work through their mental or behavioural problems – all areas in which aesthetic quality is just part of a broader concern for music’s contribution to quality of life.

Today’s musical pluralism reflects a history of migration and globalisation, coupled to the massive diversification of modes of musical production and consumption resulting from digital sound technology. Many of the old categories and divisions are no longer useful or meaningful. And other social changes have added to this. For example, during most of the twentieth century, music therapy was a specialist practice primarily located in hospitals, but by the end of the century – as with other aspects of care – it had been largely relocated to community settings. There it has become closely linked with the developing practices of community music, as part of a new, emerging area called ‘music, health, and wellbeing’. You might see this as demonstrating the increased importance within today’s society of ‘applied’ music, but we don’t need to think of it as an either/or. There is rather a continuum of highly diversified musical activity. I maintain that the personal and social dimensions of music are there in the concert hall, and the values of expressive sound in the community music centre or therapy room. The balance may vary, but all music is both ‘aesthetic’ and ‘applied’.

Changing personal and social uses of music have – or should have – a knock-on effect on the study of music, and in this book I touch on that too. Just to set the scene, musicology (a term which in America has the narrower meaning of music history) came into being in the nineteenth century as part of the broader cultural and political phenomenon of nationalism: the very idea of nationhood implied the existence of national cultures that could be traced as far back as possible into the past. Historical traditions of music that originally had nothing to do with one another were amalgamated into national cultures and consolidated in multi-volume editions with titles such as Denkmäler deutscher Tonkunst (Monuments of German musical art, published between 1892 and 1931).

Other approaches to the study of music developed around this. Music theorists formulated models of how music worked, whether in terms of national styles, specific composers’ styles, or individual compositions. What was called comparative musicology focused on the relationship between Western and – recalling that health warning – non-Western musics, often demonstrating the supposedly exceptional nature of Western music as compared to other traditions seen as inferior. This tied in with the broader historical and cultural ideologies of colonialism and imperialism. Following the partial collapse of European colonialism in the wake of the 1939–45 war, comparative musicology gave way to a new discipline: ethnomusicology, which aims to understand the musics of other cultures on their own terms – an approach sometimes linked with ongoing processes of decolonisation. Popular music studies developed later in the century, initially within literary and cultural studies, but – as the elitist edge of traditional musicology softened – increasingly as a core element of music studies (an umbrella term that I like because it avoids making unproductive distinctions between its constituent disciplines).

Music, health, and wellbeing has not as yet consolidated into an academic field, and people studying it are as likely to be found in departments or divisions of sociology, psychology, or medicine as of music. People who work in this area tend to be well informed about musicology – many of them have music degrees – but not many musicologists know much about music, health, and wellbeing. I think it would be better if they did, and that to get a balanced sense of why music matters you need to think across the whole spectrum of music making. To begin to redress the balance, then, I offer a brief overview of music oriented towards the achievement of broadly social goals.

I turn on the radio at random and hear how the regular beat found in musics across the world helps people with Parkinson’s disease to walk, makes it easier for people to articulate feelings they cannot express in words, creates a sense of unity within groups, and even predisposes people to like one another. The social significance and benefits of music have been recognised by multiple governmental and other public groups. The UK Department of Education’s 2011 policy paper The Importance of Music spoke of its effects on ‘self reliance, confidence, self-esteem, sense of achievement and ability to relate to others’,1 and there is an extensive research literature to back this up. Yet in 2020 an article by Colin Harris reported that over the previous five years music teaching in state schools had declined by 21 per cent, and that ‘a fifth of all schools in the state sector had no music provision at all’; private schools, by contrast, had increased their music provision by 7 per cent.2

That tells us two things. First, music – and culture more generally – is increasingly undervalued by comparison with literacy, numeracy, and subjects seen as directly enhancing employability and economic growth. (British governments have never fully recognised the scale of the employment and overseas earnings generated by music.) And second, music – especially classical music – is increasingly becoming an enclave of the socially privileged. Outside the government-funded education sector, however, the picture is less bleak. A wide range of not-for-profit initiatives focus on music’s potential for both personal and social development in contexts that range from institutions (for example prisons) to the wider community. The British Lung Foundation, for example, advocates the health benefits of choral singing, while any number of local programmes target specific communities. London’s Wigmore Hall runs ‘Music for Life’ and ‘Singing with Friends’ programmes for people with dementia. And it is said that there are more community choirs in the UK than there are fish-and-chip shops.

Music therapy is one of the most longstanding and solidly researched areas of music for health and wellbeing. Its move out of hospitals and into the community was part of a larger move away from medicalised approaches to health – approaches that effectively treated people as bundles of symptoms – and towards a more socialised approach based on a broader conception of care. The ‘music, health and wellbeing’ label reflects a concern for wellness, for living well, for flourishing; health becomes a positive concept rather than just meaning absence of illness. Music therapy offers what social psychologist of music Tia DeNora calls ‘asylum’,3 referring not to a physical space but rather to a safe, protected environment that facilitates both personal and social rehabilitation. Therapists and clients interact musically, and this fosters communication and empathy, the capacity to see yourself through others’ eyes and hear yourself through others’ ears (Figure 2). There is a substantial psychological literature that demonstrates the link between music and empathy; a study in which DeNora collaborated with musicologists/psychologists Eric Clarke and Jonna Vuoskoski provided what the authors called ‘narrow but hard-nosed evidence’ that hearing music from another culture increases people’s empathy for that culture – even when they are just listening to a recording.4 And the belief that ‘music creates empathy, builds connection and gives hope’ underlies the work of Musicians without Borders, an international organisation that uses music for peace-building and social change in vulnerable communities from El Salvador to Rwanda, and from Northern Ireland to Palestine.

Figure 2.