《音樂美學》讀書筆記——1. Value and Judgement （評價音樂價值）

在學校圖書館尋得一好書《Aesthetics of Music: Musicological Perspectives》，是一部由 Royal Holloway 音樂系教授 Stephen Downes 編成的論文集，主要以從音樂學角度分析音樂美學。我的目標是在這個暑假把每一篇文章仔細研讀，製成筆記，與大家分享。如果各位感興趣的話，我會翻譯成中文。謝謝。

第一篇文章《Values and Judgement》探討了音樂價值評估體系這樣一個複雜、多元、跨學科的課題。James Garratt 探索了前人的理論，並在此基礎上提出了一些別有洞見的見解，讀後非常有收穫。

Values and Judgements by James Garratt

Introduction

• Our values, and the values ascribed to music by the cultures we identify with, are fundamental to how we interact with it, shaping what we listen to and how we listen to it.
• It is an issue that musicians and musicologists tend to talk around rather than confront directly - the criteria shaping our choices and judgements are not always transparent to ourselves, let alone communicated to others.
• Three possible approaches:
  • Simply a matter of personal taste.
    • It points to the lack of confidence characterising our age, as well as reflecting some characteristic mikes of present-day musical consumption.
    • A postmodernist approach.
    • Subjectivist, skeptical mentality.
  • Stressing the superlative value possessed by the music they favour.
    • A traditionalist or modernists resistance to the first approach.
    • This endeavor to reassert traditional values is perhaps most associated with right-wing commentators. (e.g. Roger Scruton)
  • Avoiding the extremes of debilitating uncertainty and false security
    • It emphasises how the tastes of individuals are shaped and articulated with social contexts.
    • It takes a pluralistic approach to value, recognizing the diversity of value systems that co-exist in the present.
    • It rejects conceptions of value conceived around the idea of a unitary artworks or aesthetic regime.

Key issues and problems

• Kants Critique of Judgement
  • "Any fast remains barbaric if its liking requires that charms and emotions be mingled in... Beauty should actually concern only form."
  • He builds a series of distinctions, differentiating between useful/beautiful objects, extrinsic/intrinsic purpose and sensory pleasure/disinterested contemplation.
  • Extremely restrictive principles ("pure judgement of taste")
  • Fine/agreeable arts (High/low arts)
    • High arts: whose content prints thought and discussion
    • Low arts: whose purpose is merely enjoyment (accompanies only sensations). According to Kant, music has the lowest place. ("Tafemusik", dinner music)
  • For Pierre Bourdieu, such dichotomies reveal the self-interest and class prejudice behind the entire project of aesthetics. ("affirming as natural the tastes and values of a particular class") ("Nothing more clearly affirms ones class than tastes in music.")
• Good and bad music exist, but only relationally. (I.e. in relation to the local, contingent criteria upheld within particular value communities.)
• For nearly 2500 years, the general principles informing object-based judgements have been remarkably consistent. Beautiful objects necessarily exhibit order, unity, proportion, clarity and complexity. (Aesthetic beauty rests on the interplay between unity, intensity and complexity.)
• However such general criteria offer merely a baseline for judgement.
• For a generation of high modernist composers, the pursuit of complexity became an end in itself.
• Alternative principles:
  • Music acquires value by setting up expectations and then delayinging their fulfillment. (Leonard B. Meyer)
  • General value criteria such as unity, coherence, complexity and narrative tension fail to address the particularity of individual musical works, and thus miss what compels us to engage with them. (Lawrence Kramer)
• These criteria are highly variable, being historically and generically specific.
• A seemingly universal aesthetic principle such as originality only emerged in the second half of 19th century. Its importance was outweighed by other criteria in some fields of composition (e.g. church music).
• There is no equivalent to DNA evidence among evaluative criteria - rather, as Gracyk argues, they offer no more than "rough heuristics for evaluating partial aspects of works."

Value formation in classical music and 60s rock

• Crystallization of the values of classical music vs. rocks mid-60s transformation from a teenage craze into a more consciously ambitious medium
• Their formative phase are both pluralistic:
• For classical music
  • The practice of contemplative listening in the concert hall.
  • The growth of the musical canon.
  • The emergence of music analysis and turn towards objectivism in musical evaluation.
• For rock:
  • Reflects the wide range of styles drew together.
  • The emergence of specialist specialist magazines such as Crawdaddy and Rolling Stone.
  • Serious attention given to rock in the art sections of newspapers and periodicals.
  • New FM stations engaging more broadly and deeply with rock.
• They both demand to be taken seriously.
• In relation to rock the idea of art proved more contentious. The idea that the cultural establishment was imposing its own values on to rock led Richard Meltzer and other critics to sketch out an alternative "rock aesthetic", with the aim of maintaining its distinctness and counter-cultural energy.
• Musical commentary
  • In the case of Beethoven, contemporary reviewers employed a range of intrinsic and technical criteria (but even these kinds of criteria meant different things to different critics):
    • Unity
    • Organic development
    • Clarity of modulation
    • Diligence in contrapuntal elaboration
  • In the case of 60s rock: foreign. Indeed some critics regarded such discussion as pointless, arguing that "the aesthetic originality of rock never inhered in its strictly musical qualities" (Christgau 1970).
  • When seeing the Beach Boys hit "God Only Knows" in the light of musical commentary
    • Tonal plasticity - emphasized by the avoidance of authentic cadences and root-position tonics - is what gives the song of expansiveness
    • "There is no moment in rock music more harmonically and formally subtle than this transition (to the original key)" (Daniel Harrison)
  • "We know that some popular music meets some of the standards of excellence of recognized by traditional aesthetic theory. But it usually satisfied another set of standards, inimical to those traditional standards." (Gracyk 2007)
• "Far from being a universal language, music appears to be a divisive force." (Gracyk 2007)
• The capacity to appreciate music from multiple cultures should not lead us to overlook the differences between thimeir values, or to minimize the effort that fully understanding them involves.
• Value communities are loose, porous formations, constantly overlapping and intermingling.

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