The Aesthetics of Music by Roger Scruton
Here is a sample from the book, its really good:
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A musical culture introduces its participants to three important experiences and three forms of knowledge. The first is the experience of melody, or musical thinking, as it begins in tonal space and leads onwards to an apt conclusion. In singing a melody we understand the relation between phrases, the ways in which tone calls to tone across the imagined space of music. Melodies have character, and in singing them we imitate the forms of human life. Musical education teaches us to be alert to this character, and to understand that the rightness or wrongess of a tone is the rightness or wrongness of a gesture. In singing we rehearse our social nature, just as we do in dancing. And it matters that we should sing in courteous and cheerful ways.
The second experience is that of harmony, of voices sounding together, moving in concord, creating tension and resolution, filling the tonal space with an image of community. Classical harmony provides us with an archetype of human sympathy. The ability to notice a bass line, to feel the rightness if the bass notes and of the harmonies that erupt from them, is the ability to respond to a wider world, to value the other voice, and to situate both self and other in a moralized universe. There is all the difference between harmony formed through voice leading and harmony formed by hitting strings without regard to the relations among the inner parts as in the characteristic figure for acoustic guitar from 'Losing my religion' by REM in which no triad is ever inverted, and nothing moves between chords, so that all is absorbed in rythm.
The third experience is that of rhythm by which I mean something other than the all pervasive beat, on which the shapeless cries of the singer are hung as on wires of steel (from losing my religion a shapeless tune which has lost all movement of its own). I mean the pulse of human life, displayed in measure, syncopation and accent. Rythm is a play of hearbeats which reaches to all mankind. You hear it in jazz, and in the great works of classical music a delicate display of accents which invites us to dance. Beat is not rythm, but the last sad skeleton of rythm, stripped bare of human life.
Nobody who understands the experiences of melody, harmony, and rythm will doubt their value. Not only are they the distillation of centuries of social life: they are also forms of knowledge providing the competence to reach out of ourselves through music. Through melody, harmony and rythm we enter a world where others exist besides the self, a world what is full of feeling but also ordered, disciplined but free. That is why music is a character forming force, and the decline of musical taste a decline in morals. The anomie of Nirvana and REM is the anomie of its listeners. To withhold all judgement, as though a taste in music were on a par with a taste in icecream, is precisely not to understand the power of music.
In the first Pythian Ode Pundar evokes the lyre of Apollo, reminding that music is god-given, and hated by the beings to whome the love of Zeus does not extend. Music soothes, cheers and pacifies, it threatens the power of the monsters, who live by violence and lawlessness. Those lonely, antinomian beings are astounded by music, which speaks of another order of being the order which 'the footstep hears, as the dance begins'. It is this very order that is thratened by the monsters of popular culture. Much modern pop is cheerless, and meant to be cheerless. But much of it is also a kind of negation of music, a dehumanizing of the spirit of song."
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A musical culture introduces its participants to three important experiences and three forms of knowledge. The first is the experience of melody, or musical thinking, as it begins in tonal space and leads onwards to an apt conclusion. In singing a melody we understand the relation between phrases, the ways in which tone calls to tone across the imagined space of music. Melodies have character, and in singing them we imitate the forms of human life. Musical education teaches us to be alert to this character, and to understand that the rightness or wrongess of a tone is the rightness or wrongness of a gesture. In singing we rehearse our social nature, just as we do in dancing. And it matters that we should sing in courteous and cheerful ways.
The second experience is that of harmony, of voices sounding together, moving in concord, creating tension and resolution, filling the tonal space with an image of community. Classical harmony provides us with an archetype of human sympathy. The ability to notice a bass line, to feel the rightness if the bass notes and of the harmonies that erupt from them, is the ability to respond to a wider world, to value the other voice, and to situate both self and other in a moralized universe. There is all the difference between harmony formed through voice leading and harmony formed by hitting strings without regard to the relations among the inner parts as in the characteristic figure for acoustic guitar from 'Losing my religion' by REM in which no triad is ever inverted, and nothing moves between chords, so that all is absorbed in rythm.
The third experience is that of rhythm by which I mean something other than the all pervasive beat, on which the shapeless cries of the singer are hung as on wires of steel (from losing my religion a shapeless tune which has lost all movement of its own). I mean the pulse of human life, displayed in measure, syncopation and accent. Rythm is a play of hearbeats which reaches to all mankind. You hear it in jazz, and in the great works of classical music a delicate display of accents which invites us to dance. Beat is not rythm, but the last sad skeleton of rythm, stripped bare of human life.
Nobody who understands the experiences of melody, harmony, and rythm will doubt their value. Not only are they the distillation of centuries of social life: they are also forms of knowledge providing the competence to reach out of ourselves through music. Through melody, harmony and rythm we enter a world where others exist besides the self, a world what is full of feeling but also ordered, disciplined but free. That is why music is a character forming force, and the decline of musical taste a decline in morals. The anomie of Nirvana and REM is the anomie of its listeners. To withhold all judgement, as though a taste in music were on a par with a taste in icecream, is precisely not to understand the power of music.
In the first Pythian Ode Pundar evokes the lyre of Apollo, reminding that music is god-given, and hated by the beings to whome the love of Zeus does not extend. Music soothes, cheers and pacifies, it threatens the power of the monsters, who live by violence and lawlessness. Those lonely, antinomian beings are astounded by music, which speaks of another order of being the order which 'the footstep hears, as the dance begins'. It is this very order that is thratened by the monsters of popular culture. Much modern pop is cheerless, and meant to be cheerless. But much of it is also a kind of negation of music, a dehumanizing of the spirit of song."
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