Música como arte

by Roger Scruton

Roger Scruton é conhecido pelos seus escritos de filosofia política, pelo seu posicionamento conservador. No entanto, seu maior amor parece ser os estudos sobre a arte, em especial a música. Para ele, a beleza não é uma questão de gosto nem de opinião, mas sim o trilho da ordem no caos, a centelha na escuridão, a vida na morte. Scruton encontra na estética o elo entre o banal e o sublime, a coisa e o criador. E é com tal espírito que ele desvenda o que seria "Música", tanto na arte, quanto na ordem dos cosmos.
Este é um livro que a primeira vista pode parecer uma instigante teoria, mas é mais do que isso. É um guia para que a experiência sensorial de ouvir se torne mais intensa e mais prazerosa. É um livro para ser degustado com a mesma atenção que se presta numa sala de concertos.

Genres: Music, Philosophy, Nonfiction, Art, Audiobook

323 pages, Kindle Edition

First published August 23, 2018

About the author

Sir Roger Scruton was a writer and philosopher who has published more than forty books in philosophy, aesthetics and politics. He was a fellow of the British Academy and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. He taught in both England and America and was a Visiting Professor at Department of Philosophy and Fellow of Blackfriars Hall, Oxford, he was also a Senior Fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, Washington D.C.

In 2015 he published two books, The Disappeared and later in the autumn, Fools Frauds and Firebrands. Fools Frauds and Firebrands is an update of Thinkers of the New Left published, to widespread outrage, in 1986. It includes new chapters covering Lacan, Deleuze and Badiou and some timely thoughts about the historians and social thinkers who led British intellectuals up the garden path during the last decades, including Eric Hobsbawm and Ralph Miliband.

In 2016 he again published two books, Confessions of A Heretic (a collection of essays) and The Ring of Truth, about Wagner’s Ring cycle, which was widely and favourably reviewed. In 2017 he published On Human Nature (Princeton University Press), which was again widely reviewed, and contains a distillation of his philosophy. He also published a response to Brexit, Where We Are (Bloomsbury).

Reviews

[Steve · Rating 5 out of 5]

Really, really good indeed.
This is a very careful, stimulating, and thoughtful book on the nature of music as an art. Scruton deals with what is a tune, how is music moral, the transcendent in music and tonality. He falls short on the transcendent , in my opinion, but it’s Education. Scruton wades through the modern idols of atonality, serialism and the war against melody.
Then in the second section there are very strong essays on Schubert, Ramsay, David Matthews, a scolding of Boulez and serialism, Wagner and pop culture.

[Dan Graser · Rating 3 out of 5]

Roger Scruton remains an interesting figure for me in the world of philosophy of music, mainly due to the fact that very few philosophers take music as seriously as he, for which I commend him. However, I frequently find great disagreement with the dismissal and subsequent diagnoses of either delusion or madness he lays at the feet of the modernists of the 20th and 21st centuries (for this volume, it is Pierre Boulez and IRCAM who receive this treatment). This isn't to say that he isn't knowledgeable or articulate, he is in fact both of those things to an honorable degree, but rather that he has begun his investigations with an opinion of what music should be and has decided to become only analytical enough to understand why his favorite music of the classical canon is great, while at the same time ignoring analytical methods which may perhaps allow him greater access and enjoyment to the music of those he vilifies (Boulez, Stockhausen, and the serialists, as well as the minimalists and post-minimalists).

I always enjoy his discussion of Adorno and I really have no disagreement in where he gives credit and where he is harshly critical. Adorno saw correctly the inevitable link between popular music, even of his time, with advertising and broader commercialism thus cheapening the music initially and stultifying the mass audience in the long run. However, his (Adorno's) arrogant dismissal of tunes, melody, and tonality has been shown to be reductionist and not at all prescient, given that the most successful composers of our day are hardly total-serialists...Also, as a philosopher Scruton is particularly skilled at detailing the divorce of Nietzsche from Wagner and all of the uniquely aesthetic, personal, and philosophic motives contained therein. These two areas are the highlight of this latest collection for me. However, that being said, I did not find much that is genuinely new in this volume, especially if you have read either his, "Aesthetics of Music," or, "Understanding Music." And my recommendation for this volume - as a trained classical musician and professor of music - remains that his writing sits in an unusual spot in readings on music. It is not musically analytical enough - from a theoretical or musicological perspective - to satisfy the serious music student, but it is also at times too terminologically dense to be readable by those without serious music training. Rather, this is a volume best suited to those with more conservative predilections as pertain to the philosophy of music, which is admittedly, a very small group.

I share his misgivings about much of contemporary opera's staging in particular, however I do not share his dismissal of the vast majority of film music as viable concert hall music. In his chapter on opera he suggests that frequently, directors don't leave anything to the imagination of the audience and the finest performances are frequently smaller, simpler stagings that do not involve extensive costuming and choreography and instead allow that visual/fantastical element to be filled in by the enthusiastic listener's mind. However, he then states that film music loses its impact in the concert hall because it is removed from the action for which it was written...as if the audience for that music is not capable of conjuring up the images themselves of well-known films and allowing their imagination to complete the experience. That many major orchestras use these pop concerts and film music concerts to maintain their budgets as they are frequently the most popular concerts with general audiences suggests that his worries about film music in the concert hall are mostly ungrounded. True, many deliveries of film music these days incorporate live-action screens with scenes from the movies, but if I merely say: Star Wars, Indiana Jones, Jaws, The Godfather, Psycho...is your imagination not only hearing the stirring music for these films but also seeing the scenes which they accompany? In most people's experience, hearing the music performed by a live orchestra only enhances their previous experience of the film and the film's music. I did appreciate that he recognizes much of Williams' work and in particular Howard Shore's score for Lord of the Rings are both a cut above due to their almost Wagnerian complexity of leitmotif and the strength of the music even when removed from the film.

There was one extended synopsis at the end of chapter 6 on, "German Idealism and the Philosophy of Music," that I found especially striking and well-worded. It functions as an interesting synthesis of the preceding discussions of Kant, Schopenhauer, Schelling and Hegel as they attempted to grapple with the power of late 18th and 19th century German romantic music and its implications:
"According to this theory, sounds become music when they are organized in such a way as to invite acousmatic listening. Music is then heard to address the listener, I to you, and the listener responds with the overreaching attitudes that are the norm in interpersonal relations. These attitudes reach for the subjective horizon, the edge behind the musical object. The music invites the listener to adopt its own subjective point of view , through a kind of empathy that shows the world from a perspective that is no ones's and everyone's. All this is true of music in part because it is an abstract, non-representational art, in part because it avails itself of temporal organization in a non-physical space."

[The Hanged Man · Rating 1 out of 5]

"He remarks of Mary J Blige’s “Get to Know You Better” that its limited melody is “emphasised by the yukky 13th chords and droopy vamping which open the piece, with a sound that suggests someone trying carefully to puke into a wine glass.”"

Sir Rog Wanker!

[Erin · Rating 1 out of 5]

sexist, islamophobic, classist, superior - absolutely hated his opinions, and hated even more that he presented those opinions as undisputed facts

[Joel Zartman · Rating 5 out of 5]

This very interesting book consists in two parts. In the first, Scruton is trying to wrestle with what music is.

“And surely that is part of the point of art, that it offers conclusions in a world that is otherwise deprived of them. This is not an escapism but its opposite: taking some feeling, however bleak, to its conclusions, and showing thereby that it is in our nature to bear it.” (68)

“It is in this way that we are consoled by music . . . namely, that it provides order and completion to states of being that drift through our lives in fragmentary or inconclusive ways.” (69)

I think it a sensible conclusion. How do we deal with the partialities of this sublunary life? We hope for more, and one of the things that offers consolation is music that is so ordered as to develop its theme, progress through the stages of a thing, and reach a perceptible conclusion. We applaud it if only for that reason.

One of the options that Scruton raises in his quest to understand the nature of music is that “We are dealing with the aesthetic, rather than the metaphysical, idea of the transcendental.” (76) He of course discounts that we have contact with the transcendent as such. When C. S. Lewis concludes that it stands to reason that if we have longings that nothing in this world can satisfy then we must be made for another world, Scruton refuses the conclusion. I hope it isn’t an act of unbelief, but I am afraid that I see no other real alternative. That is the limitation of Scruton. He really accepts the Kantian conclusion. He once quipped that the Enlightenment was a form of light pollution which blocked our view of the stars. He must not have thought we can flip the switch off on the Enlightenment. (C. S. Lewis spent his life trying to deny that the Renaissance happened, let alone the Enlightenment . . . )

But I myself find the suggestion that music depicts metaphysical realities in the aesthetic realm compelling. As one who tries to function on premodern assumptions, I don’t see why not. What Scruton concludes is that the self is somehow a thing beyond the world. What he has said elsewhere, that we are incarnates subjects in a world of objects. It is just he allows for no consciousness other than that we have in the world of objects as perceiving subjects. So, what constitutes a subject is what is being dealt with in music. Music, then, is an address from subject to subject, achieving a harmony of empathy. It is a conclusion still brimming with possibilities.

The second part of the book contains various of Scruton’s reflections, mostly on composers and musical figures. You can expect something on Schubert and Wagner of course, but there is a lot on British composers, and the recovery of music after the dead end of serialism. A lot of Adorno in this book, an answer and refutation of Adorno, it may be considered. He is also very trenchant on Shostakovich, which made me grateful. When I think of consoling music, I actually think of Shostakovich.

Here is an unexpected tangential gem buried away toward the end of the book: “the longing for experiences outside the bounds of our Anglican upbringing, and at the same time the stunning message of Four Quartets, which told us that those experiences were not out of bounds at all but could be blended with the spiritual heritage of England—all these were shared by our generation . . . Four Quartets brought together the subterranean current of Anglican Christianity with the questioning search for a purified and modernist art that would seek redemption in the immediate moment, observed, internalized and expressed without lies. As the title declares, Eliot had before his mind the great example of Beethoven, whose late quartets show religious questions answered through aesthetic discipline, and redemption by the hard path of artistic truthfulness.” (157)

The penultimate chapter ponders the music of the future, a kind of ‘whither music?’ And the last chapter is on the culture of pop. That last is a most illuminating and engrossing essay indeed!

It is not a book that requires any special musical ability. I have absolutely none. Of course, I could be deluding myself since, after all, I find comfort in Shostakovich. Nevertheless, I enjoyed it.

[Samuel G. Parkison · Rating 5 out of 5]

I won’t lie to you, fellow Goodreads companion, much of this book went clear over my head. I hope you’ll indulge me as I divest myself of any pretense (if you don’t like it, just move along; no one’s putting a gun to your head): don’t be fooled by the fact that I just read this book into thinking me a dignified connoisseur of classical music. To call me a novice of music history would be a great understatement. I often found myself missing not only Scruton’s references, but even the later references he made to illustrate his references.

I am also certain that, should we have met and I were to share the music I have written with him, he would not have liked it. And, after reading this book, I would sympathize with his reasons: but you must work with the hand you have been dealt, and the heritage of the musical tradition Scruton commends here may as well have come from a different planet for this reader.

Reading this book was nevertheless a delight. Scruton’s passion is enough to sustain the reader through all the technical bits he might not comprehend. Like most today, I am an outsider to my own musical tradition, but I don’t want to be. Just because we have developed a taste for the grotesque does not mean we are incapable of developing a taste for the lovely, and Scruton’s work is compelling enough to push through the embarrassment of outing myself as a musical junk-food-addict for the sake of getting the monkey off my back and living as a freed man.

[Jeff Sullivan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Roger Scruton, taking his cue from Plato, treats the aesthetics of music with special philosophical attention. This collection of essays is concerned with how our experience of music emerges from raw sound. This may seem like an abstract, theoretical issue, but Scruton applies it to real music, both classic & modern, rock & pop (although the latter more to illustrate what's gone wrong in music). I will think about music differently now, as a result! And more than this, the essays communicate Scruton's passion and sincere concern for the future of modern music in the concert hall.

[Bill Leach · Rating 5 out of 5]

Scruton's goal for this book is to explore conceptual issues in music appreciation. Very informative and though provoking.

The author distinguishes between the more general idea of a melody and a tune, the latter being a melody that is bounded and regarded as a unit. He notes that while past cultures had a "memory bank" of tunes, today people can only reproduce tunes when musical backing is provided. In looking at efforts to return to musical tradition, he mentions Vaughan-Williams harmonization of "Away in a Manger" which "succeeds in de-kitschifying a carol that has been responsible for more pking over the years than all the excesses of Christmas Dinner.".

The author reviews many of the theories of cognitive science that suggest how the brain may interpret music. A number of these propose that music is like a language, although Scruton notes that familiarity with spoken languages allows the user to both listen and speak, music is asymmetric in that while many learn to listen to music very few are able to compose meaningful music. Listening to music is a process of following a "journey, as rhythm, melody and harmony unfold ...". While we listen to sequences of pitched sounds, we hear a "music process that is supervenient on the sounds".

Tymoczko has made it clear that real musicians in the tonal tradition think of chords not a pitch sets but as structures emerging from the movement of the voices: voice leading. The author points out that Tymoczko's music analysis largely falls back on traditional chord grammar. It is the performer who extracts the musical story from the notes, and the reason that performers are judged so intently on how they play as it is that which determines what we hear. Scruton believes that any cognitive model will leave untouched the real problems concerning what music means, why we enjoy it, and why it is important to us.

Scruton questions whether musical idioms can exhibit moral virtues and moral vices. He observes that the listener moves with the music and specific emotions arise from that listening experience. These interpretations are often similar over a variety of listeners, suggesting that the emotions are inherent in the music.

The author also questions whether music can provide access to the transcendental, that being the theological idea of a god, Kant's idea of thought exceeding understanding, or aesthetic values that exceed the ordinary. He concludes that the best we can expect is that music may help us imagine some kind of contact with the transcendental - the desire to find comfort in the unknowable always being with us.

Scruton shows that the concepts of tonality have evolved over time, reflecting how humans interpret ordered sound. The twentieth century avant-garde movement argues that new musical structures are needed with move beyond the banal chord structures and melodic cliches of tonality. Conversely, the movement toward the simplistic structure of pop music has captured a greater audience.

The book includes a few chapters on specific composers and the works that Scruton feels to be especially skilful. He feels Schubert to be one of the greatest composers, noting his ability to retain an unbroken melodic line while changing the tonal center from bar to bar, as in the Quartettsatz. Scruton argues that Rameau's "Treatise on Harmony" was important as it summarized musical form as a body of implicit knowledge. The author also admires Britten for his unique polytonality, shown in the works Peter Grimes and the Serenade for Tenor, Horn and Strings, Op 31. David Matthews is clearly a favourite composer due to his ability to unite modernist harmony with robust melodies; important works including Four Quartets and The Flaying of Marsyas.

Scruton explores the role of music in adding to our understanding of life. He sees religion in a more general sense as an experience of the value of life that imparts a serene blessedness compensating the worshipper for diversions from righteousness. To some extent, the aesthetics of music can provide a similar or complementary experience.

"The 'moving forward' of melodic lines through musical space is the true origin of musical unity and the dramatic power of traditional music. The author feels that much modern music has left this behind with serialization, departure from tonality, and the replacement of tones by sounds which bear no relationship to preceding or subsequent parts of the score." He notes that new compositions of the past have grown out of the popular music of the day, being extensions rather than inventions. Robert R. Reilly has written "Surprised by Beauty" which explores contemporary composers who have stayed true to melody and tonality while writing new music.

Scruton believes that much pop music is created not to present music, but to present the performer. He sees a relationship between pop groups and their followers that goes beyond musical taste and becomes idolization, and concludes that pop culture fills a void left by the abandonment of Victorian values and rituals.

[Richard Thompson · Rating 3 out of 5]

Roger Scruton has a stick wedged so far up his ass that there are leaves sprouting out of the top of his head. In his view the only true music is the music of Bach, Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert. It was all downhill after that, and before that was prehistory. Modern classical music and modern opera are empty attempts to startle that have no art in them. Popular music has a few barely acceptable practitioners but is mostly something to be scraped off the bottom of your shoe. He doesn't even think about the world before Bach or about music around the world. It's certainly possible to start with this attitude and to build a consistent theory around it, and we are all tempted to valorize the kinds of music that instinctively attract us, but when you do that you miss out on so much. The world is a much bigger place than the little corner where Mr. Scruton wants to dwell. I got a good laugh over his deriding much of rock and metal as noise. He completely missed out that half of the reason that it sounds that way is to irritate people like him.

But though he may be narrow minded and hopelessly conservative, Mr. Scruton is no fool. I enjoyed his discussion of how music is its own form of expression distinct from language so that trying to analyze it like language is often going to lead to erroneous methods and results. I also enjoyed his discussion of how and why music expresses and reflects emotion. So once I got over my fundamental disagreement with this guy's attitude, I was able to smile at his prejudices and appreciate the good parts of his thinking.

[Garrett Rowlan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Scruton's technical descriptions of music were beyond my understanding as a non-musician, and while I was generally appreciative of Scruton's take on the crisis of music, where a bogus insistence on doing away with outmoded, traditional approaches to melody, harmony, etc., has led to an exodus from the concert hall, from my POV it seems like a paper tiger. Before Covid-19, the music I heard in classical venues around LA had nothing to do with Stockhausen, Boulez, or any of the 12-tone practitioners that drew his scorn. It was all pretty traditional. There was a series a few years ago at the LA Philharmonic featuring the works of Edgar Varese, but those were special concerts apart from the concert-series programming. And though the concert hall is closed (and I can't stand to attend a concert by Zoom) the classical station in LA plays pretty much the "classics," with Beethoven, Mozart, Haydn, on frequent repetition. And the new music they play is melodic. And so while I can't sympathize with the author's take, I realize mine is a somewhat cloistered take. I did enjoy and appreciate the last two essays, "The Music of the Future" and "The Culture of Pop."

[Jonatan Almfjord · Rating 3 out of 5]

A conservative philosopher writes about music. The book is divided into two parts. In the first part ("Philosophical Investigations"), the author writes about music in general from a philosophical perspective. Although his distaste for popular music is something that you may or may not disagree with, this first part is where the book shines. It's extremely interesting. Then comes the second part ("Critical Explorations"), which mostly is about specific classical composers. Here, the book falls completely in the trap of assuming that the reader knows things just as well as the author. You will have to be familiar with loads of classical music, and it will make things easier if you know music notation, to be able to follow along with the examples. This part was a boring read, and I wish it was shorter. Funny enough, the very last chapter is an exception - "The Culture of Pop". In those finishing 15 pages, the author goes on about pop music. Spoiler alert, he doesn't like it at all. But it's quite fun to read about.

I wish I could rate the sections of the book separately. The first would get a high score, and the second would get a low score. While the first part gave me more than a few interesting points to think about, the second part got very boring to read.

[N · Rating 3 out of 5]

Remember the guy at high school house parties who was really smart and on the honor roll, but he spent the whole party in the kitchen sneering at whatever music people played. Rock, dance music, rap/hip-hop, no matter what it was his face would curl up like there was a turd on his lip and he'd say 'Really. It's just pop. So facile. Give me some Schubert, any day'. That guy grew up to be Roger Scruton.

It takes a fair bit of chutzpah to complain, repeatedly, that the main problem with 20th century classical music was that it's an intellectual and auditory experience, not an emotional and musical one, a point of view I actually have some sympathy for, and to some extent, agree with. Then to say in your last chapter that the problem with pop is that people don't analyze enharmonic chords enough to understand the difference between them.

Pop. It's so facile. Stay in the kitchen Roger and stick to classical music.

[Dennis Murphy · Rating 3 out of 5]

Music as an Art by Roger Scruton is not exactly a book for me. There were a few essays that were pretty good, such as Nietzche's war on Wagner and his distaste for German Romanticism later in life. But a decent chunk of this book was a reaction to music in modern times. Scruton had a defense of movie music that I wouldn't have suspected, with a few words of praise for John Williams. But, at the end of the day, this really was a book about music, with lengthy chapters on tone and musicians long since dead. What I liked best about the book was where philosophy crept in, but this was really a book for someone in the MFA crowd with an anti-avant garde streak.

[Edoardo Casali · Rating 3 out of 5]

Mostly a good collection of essays, although it's pretty evident that Scruton didn't (or didn't want to?) know enough about the history of music in the second half of the 20th and 21st century, not only because or the very few names that we see quoted (Boulez, Stockhausen and Adams if i recall correctly) but also because of the cherrypicking that we see regarding which part of each composer's oeuvre is mentioned (as Stockhausen suddenly stopped writing after Mantra...). Plus i don't think he really understood Schönberg (and most importantly Webern). Leaving that aside, the rest of the essays is pretty good.

[Mikael Lind · Rating 4 out of 5]

A kind of addition to Scruton's major work The Aesthetics of Music. This book is filled with great insights into the world of classical music, but it also contains some real disadvantages in that it tries to compare pop music to classical music on classical music's terms. Pop music isn't just rhythm, melody and harmony - timbre plays a great role (not discussed in this book), as well as other things such as novelty, attitude, lyrics, references, and so on. So it's unfair to deem all modern pop music awful on the basis that it is not similar to Western classical music.

[Guillermo Riveros · Rating 4 out of 5]

It is hard to contradict or discuss the opinions of such an impassioned and well informed philosopher. His thoughts on music and the culture we live in are indeed enlightening as all the books I've read from him. Roger Scruton could indeed be polemic, but never boring.

[Arash Ahsani · Rating 5 out of 5]

Start the from the last pages

[Herb Neumann]

Did not rate because some of the topics discussed were beyond my meager musical knowledge. That is, I am a musical philistine.

[Marcelo · Rating 4 out of 5]

A very satisfying philosophical take on music.

[Abhi V · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fantastic and varied, the kind of book I finish only to begin again.