Scruton on Music

What with all the discussion of music here of late, I thought I would alert our readers to a recent article by Roger Scruton. The article is essentially a reflection on Plato's remark in The Republic (4.424c) that "[t]he ways of poetry and music are not changed anywhere without change in the most important laws of the city.”

There's a lot to think about (and listen to) in the article, but two points struck me as worth repeating and elaborating here. The first is the distinction Scruton draws between "dancing with" and "dancing at" someone else. Anyone who has had the misfortune of stepping into a certain type of dance club will immediately know what Scruton means by that distinction. In music where one dances with a partner, the rhythm seems to be "precipitated" out of the melody. Melody generates rhythm, and the two are inseparable. In music where one dances at someone else, on the other hand, the rhythm is mechanically imposed onto the melody. There is a disconnect between rhythm and melody. He calls the people who dance at each other "victims and not producers of dance." If our music makes us victims of dance, no wonder that dancing as an art form of social life seems currently to be dormant among the general population.

Related to the question of how rhythm is produced is the second point, the use of drum kits in popular music. Drum kits, as Scruton remarks, are often used as a "substitute for rhythm in so much contemporary pop." Drum kits can be used to bring out and reinforce the natural rhythm produced by the melody, such as in Eric Clapton's "Lay Down Sally." Unfortunately, drum kits are more often than not used to impose a rhythm unto an unwilling melody, as in Meshuggah's "Bleed."

While death metal is an extreme example of using drums to impose rhythm, drum kits (and especially drum machines, today) really do deaden any natural rhythm produced by the melody, in any number of rock and pop songs. This deadening can be most clearly heard in those songs whose intros feature either guitars without drums or drums without guitars. Guitars without drums give an idea of what kind of rhythm the melody naturally wants to produce, while drums without guitars give an idea of what kind of rhythm the musicians want to produce. Often enough, though, when the other instrument joins in, the melody and the rhythm do not mesh. That failure to mesh is what Scruton means when he speaks of rhythm being imposed on the melody.

Finally, a tip of my hat for this article to Postmodern Conservative.

Incongruous Music - Part II

A few mornings ago, I was singing one of my favorite songs, Chicago, from Sufjan Stevens' Come on, Feel the Illinoise album. The song has some really powerful first few bars - fit only for the first or last song of a concert, I would think - and catchy lyrics. But the particular line that caught my attention that morning was this: "I've made a lot of mistakes," repeated over and over again. It should come as little surprise that this reminded me of an earlier post about music with peppy tunes and depressing lyrics.

In the comments to that post we discussed various reasons for this phenomenon, with a general consensus that it began as a folk music reaction against the sorrows of life, as if to say, "This upbeat melody is my way of coping with the suffering I'm singing about. It's not so bad, right?" But Sufjan made me think there might be another possibility.

At the feet of the great Gregory Roper, I learned that the essence of tragedy is a world in which faults are punished, brutally punished, by the dark and primeval forces of nature; in a comic world, however, faults are overcome, defeated, mocked and transformed. If tragedy is characterized by the grim justice of death, comedy is characterized by the triumph of love over death.

Sufjan's lyrics reveal that his is a comic song, a song about love and redemption. True, mistakes have been and there are plenty of tears shed. But the peppy tune is not simply a rearguard against this sorrow or an attempt to ignore it. No, the music is a manifestation of the same redemption, the same triumph of love over death, that the lyrics - considered in their entirety - proclaim.


I fell in love again
All things go, all things go
Drove to Chicago
All things know, all things know
We sold our clothes to the state
I don't mind, I don't mind
I made a lot of mistakes
In my mind, in my mind

Chorus:
You came to take us
All things go, all things go
To recreate us
All things grow, all things grow
We had our mindset
All things know, all things know
You had to find it
All things go, all things go

I drove to New York
In a van, with my friend
We slept in parking lots
I don't mind, I don't mind
I was in love with the place
In my mind, in my mind
I made a lot of mistakes
In my mind, in my mind

Chorus

If I was crying
In the van, with my friend
It was for freedom
From myself and from the land
I made a lot of mistakes
I made a lot of mistakes
I made a lot of mistakes
I made a lot of mistakes

Chorus

You came to take us
All things go, all things go
To recreate us
All things grow, all things grow
We had our mindset
(I made a lot of mistakes)
All things know, all things know
(I made a lot of mistakes)
You had to find it
(I made a lot of mistakes)
All things go, all things go
(I made a lot of mistakes)


(Go to 2:00 if you want to skip the talking section.)

Joseph, Son of David

Today we celebrate the feast of one of the Church's great saints and one of my personal favorites (as readers of this blog may recall): St. Joseph. Significant though he be, St. Joseph is one of the most enigmatic characters in Scripture. He is mentioned only a handful of times and speaks no lines. He was probably a humble man, a simple carpenter. He may have been one of the leading businessmen of the village of Nazareth, but Scripture gives no indication of this; more likely, he worked construction at the Roman resort complex at Decapolis, a short distance from Nazareth, which, we know from historical and archaeological sources, was a massive building project at the time. He probably carried his lunch pail to the building site each day, working alongside other Jewish laborers, piecing together instructions from his Roman superiors in broken Greek. But this is all speculation, and not based on biblical data.

But today's Gospel reading does provide us with one fascinating bit of information: the angel of the Lord addresses him as "Joseph, son of David." Here is this lowly man, about whom we know almost nothing, who speaks not a word in Scripture, but the Lord's messenger addresses him as one in the line of kings. If at first this seems incongruous, on closer examination we see just how fitting it is. In each generation a king teaches his son, the prince, what it means to be king; when he dies, the prince ascends the throne and in turn teaches his son to be king. But in the case of Joseph and his boy, the child is no mere prince, no merely human heir. Rather, this boy is the King of Kings and Lord of Lords. Who, then, is worthy to raise Him to manhood? Who can teach Him to be a king? Is Joseph, the carpenter, the one? Surely not, man would say. Indeed, he is, God answers. He is a son of David, not simply by blood, but in the fullest sense.

David was many things: a warrior, a poet, a king. Also an adulterer and murderer, a man with too much blood on his hands to build the temple. But apart from his successes and in spite of his failings, David was most importantly a man after God's own heart. So when the angel addresses today's saint as "Joseph, son of David," we should hear, "Joseph, after the Lord's own heart." Is it any wonder the Lord should choose such a man to be the foster father of His Son?

St. Joseph, patron of husbands, patron of fathers, carpenter of Nazareth, son of David, man after God's own heart: Pray for Us!

St. Patrick's Day

Happy St. Patrick's day to all of you!

As I did last year, I'd like to show a few videos about Irish music. The first video comes from a 1972 documentary about Donegal fiddler John Doherty. Doherty was the last in a family who made their living by traveling from village to village in southwestern Donegal working as tinsmiths, but who were also accomplished storytellers and fiddlers. When he reached middle age, Doherty was discovered by various folklorists, such as Peter Kennedy and Allen Feldman. Due to this exposure, and a few commercial recordings, Doherty exerted a great influence on a new generation of Donegal fiddlers, such as Mairead Ni Mhaonaigh of Altan.

What I like most about this documentary is that it gives a glimpse, albeit a somewhat sentimental glimpse, into what Irish music and Irish peasant life was like not that long ago (something I tried to do, here and here).



The rest of the documentary can be found here.

For anyone curious in how the Irish language sounds, this next video is for you. It features singer Treasa Ni Mhiollain from the Aran Islands. I must warn you, though, that this style of singing is probably not what you usually associate with Irish music. This is an example of sean-nós singing, and will probably sound quite foreign to most ears.



And, if you have had enough learning for today and all you want is some good tunes, here are two jigs from one of my favorite young Irish bands, Teada.

Les Six éléments

The other day, while reading up on surrealism (as part of a quick study of Interwar culture), I happened upon this painting, Les Six éléments (The Six Elements), by Belgian surrealist René Magritte.

The work immediately reminded me of Martin Heidegger's "fourfold": earth, sky, divinities and mortals (see Building Dwelling Thinking). Magritte's work struck me as a sort of amalgamation of the ancient Greeks' four elements - usually earth, air, water and fire - with something like Heidegger's list. In the upper left is clearly fire, in the upper middle women (or perhaps humanity generally) and in the upper right earth (or vegetation). On the lower left we have a building (society?), in the lower center air, and on the lower right some thing I cannot identify, which looks like it might also be vegetative. This seems like an interesting list, though three problems came to mind:

(1) Where are the divinities?
(2) Is (wo)man's sexuality or primordial nature being distinguished from the human society represented by a modern building?
(3) Why two kinds of plants? Or just what is that in the lower right?

A quick search of the internet revealed no answers, only this odd little poem:

As of this
writing, there

are 137 Magritte
items available

on eBay. They are
mundanely pre-

sented—none of
the six elements

that Aristotle con-
sidered essential

for drama are
in the frame.

Imagining Communities

Benedict Anderson's Imagined Communities is a very popular text in academia these days. The quick and dirty of his argument is this: nationalism does not exist in nature, but is something we create.

There are problems with this argument, of course, not least of which is language. Language carries culture - hence the reason I grew up reading stories of King Arthur instead of Roland or Siegfried, in spite of being of German ancestry and living nowhere near England. Nevertheless, Anderson's argument has certain strengths. We can, in fact, observe the historical process of certain people and institutions deciding that these stories or that composer or this social custom belongs to a "nation", whereas a decade before people might not have believed that. The Brothers Grimm are an excellent example of this process of collecting, selecting and disseminating cultural norms. (Yes, the same even happens with language, where certain constructions or terms take on a connotation of being more "American" or "German" or what have you.)

Historically, nationalism has a bad name. These imagined communities have often committed horrible crimes in the name of their superior "race" or "civilization". While the Nazis are perhaps the most glaring example of this phenomenon, they are by no means the only one. Thus, it comes as little surprise that there is a kind of condescension in the use of Anderson's term, "imagined communities" as if to say, "You invented this category of 'nation' and now you ascribe messianic qualities to it, committing great crimes in its name. How idolatrous!"

But why, I wonder, must it be that way? Could imagining a community be a good thing? There would have to be a certain honesty about it, of course. The imaginer must admit that this is indeed a creation and not something natural. Nevertheless, it might be done in such a way as to conform to Nature, as best we understand it. And just because we have imagined it need not mean it is evil, or ought not be made actual.

Imagining a community was, I suppose, what I was trying to do when attempting to flesh out a canon. Add to such a canon of literature some major composers, a few holidays, and you've got yourself a community (if not necessarily a nation). As with the literature, such traditions need not be invented; there are plenty of existing traditions to coopt.

If this all sounds a little too grand, let me point out that this project is - or ought to be - something all people interested in culture are seeking to do, though the terms above are rarely used. Those working in cultural fields seek to form good Americans or good Catholics or nuanced thinkers or sensitive human beings or responsible citizens. Moreover, there is almost always a communal dimension to this work, bringing such people into dialogue with one another. That is, in a sense, the task of this blog.


PS: I realize that one important aspect of nationalism has been ignored here, the tendency to define "us" over and against "them". This tendency has been at the heart of many of nationalism's moral failures. If we are to rehabilitate the notion of imagined communities, this is definitely something we should work to avoid. However, while excluding certain people on the basis of race or place of birth or the like is absurd, I think we might rightly place ourselves in opposition to certain ideas: we are not wicked, we are not unjust, we are not self-serving, we are not short-sighted, etc. As the theologians know well, sometimes it is easier to define what a thing is not than to define what a thing is.

Incongruous Music

Have you ever heard a song where the lyrics and music just do not match? (I know I have had this conversation with some of you.)

The song that first made me aware of this phenomenon is the Decemberists' Crane Wife 3 (which you can watch live here, or see with someone's cheesy slideshow here). The tune is really catchy stuff, and I have heard a Quincy living room full of young folks belt the chorus together. But the lyrics are actually quite depressing, a retelling of a Japanese folk tale (also developed in Crane Wife 1 & 2). As the narrator tells the story he confesses his guilt. That chorus, so exuberantly sung: "I will hang my head low."

Attentive readers, I have two questions for you: (1) Can you share other examples of this phenomenon? I know there are plenty more out there. (2) What explains this odd situation? Are the Colin Meloys of the world just sloppy? Is there some larger purpose at work here? Or is he (and those like him) just trying to be provocative?