DISCUSSION

THE AESTHETICS OF WESTERN ART MUSIC

The subject of music has rarely brought the best from philosophers, but
profound ignorance of the art has not stopped some of the masters from
essaying theories of it—Kant and Hegel notably. In the present century, the
most productive encounters between music and philosophy have occurred in
Critical Theory, especially in the work of Adorno. In the analytic tradition,
musical aesthetics is a neglected branch of a Cinderella subject. Against this
unpromising setting, Roger Scruton’s The Aesthetics of Music (Clarendon Press,
1998. xx 1 530 pp. £35.00 cloth, £18.99 paper) emerges as a landmark of
musical aesthetics on an analytic approach. His achievement is the more
impressive, since he has had to formulate many issues without the benefit of
powerful precedent. His writing is informed by a sophisticated understanding
of music, of which he is a practitioner—he has written an opera and thinks
enough of his own music modestly to present a few examples here.
His book is comprehensive, challenging and often very original. It is
remarkably unified given its wide-ranging concerns, often eloquent and
clear—at least on the surface. But there is a fluidity of structure and indeed
of argument, and the laconic chapter headings conceal the fact that issues
are returned to and worked over again. One can see the book as beginning
with the sensuous or perceivable qualities of music, moving onto its formal
and cognisable properties, and concluding with its cultural aspects. A central
claim is that genuine musical experience arises only when all of these aspects
are united, as they can be only by rational beings who exercise imagination.
The Kantian basis to this claim is fully evident in Scruton’s discussion. But
his interpretation of it flows from a commitment to the centrality, perhaps
even the necessity, of the tonal system to genuine musical experience, and
the implicit claim that the Viennese classical tradition, or more broadly
Western art music, is more than simply a paradigm. (The acronym WAM is
also the initials of its leading genius.) This standpoint is distinctive and
ambitious, connecting philosophical considerations with music-theoretic ones.
I will call it the ‘guiding vision’. It is in some ways seductive but, I will argue,
ultimately untenable.

1. Sound, Tone and Musical Experience

The guiding vision appears as early as the first chapter, ‘Sound’, a suggestive
treatment of the distinction between sound and tone. Music, Scruton argues,
is sound transformed into tones. Just what kind of organisation, and thus
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what is to count as music, is decided by us, with a certain purpose in mind:
‘‘That purpose is to describe, and if possible to extend, the kind of interest
we have in a Beethoven symphony’’ (p. 17). Other things satisfy that interest,
but we cannot say in advance which they will be, until we have a clear idea
what interests us in Beethoven, he continues.
These claims draw the reader up short—I love the concession ‘‘and if
possible to extend’’—but Scruton really means what he says. Indeed one later
discovers that there are strict limits on how far it is possible to ‘‘extend the
kind of interest’’ beyond Beethoven and his successors. So the guiding vision
underwrites Scruton’s musical aesthetics, even in as fundamental a matter as
the difference between sound and tone. This is both a virtue—it forms the
underlying unity of the book—and deeply problematic, not least because of
the implausibly restrictive definition of music which it yields.
Crucial to the art of music, Scruton believes, is its exploitation of the
‘‘acousmatic experience of sound’’, a concept found in the writings of musique
concrète composer Pierre Schaeffer. (An unlikely source for him, since Schaeffer
believed that music is the universal art of sound, quite the opposite of
Scruton’s view.) ‘Acousmatic’ refers to the way in which we are meant to
spontaneously detach the sound from the circumstances of its production,
and attend to it as it is in itself. We can do this, Scruton suggests, because
sounds are not secondary qualities of objects. Three distinctions result:
between the acoustical experience of sounds and the musical experience of
tones; between the real causality of sound and the virtual causality between
tones; and between the sequence of sounds and the movement of tones that
we hear in them.
‘Tone’ is defined as the intentional object of musical perception. Sound
becomes tone when organised by pitch, rhythm, melody and harmony.
Significantly, Scruton deliberately omits tone-colour or timbre from his list
of organisational factors, on the grounds that it is rooted in the character of
sounds rather than in their organisation—this of course places him at odds
with the concern with sound and texture that is fundamental in contemporary
art music. He claims that all peoples divide the octave into discrete pitches
or pitch areas, and hear intervening pitches as out of tune—but his implicit
concept of intonation, I feel, fails to recognise the pervasiveness of pitch-
bending, for instance ‘blue notes’, outside Western art music.1
For Scruton, the objective but phenomenal acousmatic realm exhibits a
‘virtual causality’ between tones, as opposed to the real causality between
sound-producers—musical instruments among them—and sounds. Virtual
causality is found in rhythm: ‘‘To hear rhythm is to hear a kind of
animation . . . . Beats do not follow one another; they bring each other into
being . . . and breathe with a common life’’ (p. 35). It is also found in melody,
where we hear not just change, but movement—a rising and falling in pitch,
and tension and resolution (though Scruton wants to separate the latter from
its harmonic analogue, it remains unclear how they are related). These kinds

1. See for instance C. Cork, Harmony with Lego Bricks (Tadley Ewing Publications, revised edition
1996), pp. 49–50.

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of virtual causality are illustrated in Brahms’s 2nd Piano Concerto op. 83,
where the opening horn may be 20 feet away from the piano that answers
it: ‘‘But the tones that we hear when the horn is sounding are not twenty
feet from the B flat arpeggio on the piano: they stand to [it] in a quite
different relation, even [though this relation] has, for us, a spatial character . . .
the final F on the horn brings the bottom B flat of the piano into existence,
drawing it from the silence with a gesture of command’’ (pp. 74–5).
The distinction between sound and tone leads to an account of musical
experience that is, I think, original and persuasive, and may be sustainable
independent of the guiding vision. Scruton writes that ‘‘to hear music we
need capacities that only rational beings have. We must be able to hear an
order that contains no information about the physical world, [but which]
contains a virtual causality of its own . . .’’ (pp. 39–40). Talk of movement is
metaphorical—nothing, except air molecules, literally moves—but necessary,
Scruton argues: ‘‘Take the metaphor away, and you cease to describe the
experience of music’’ (p. 92). There is a double intentionality—one and the
same experience takes both sounds as its object, and the life and movement
that is music.
Scruton’s definition of tone subverts standard assumptions of a clear ideal-
physical divide, on which his later arguments against Hanslick’s formalism
also have a bearing. If his distinction between sound and tone can be made
out, it would help to undermine traditional discussion of the ontology of
music—notably the idealist view that ‘‘Sounds are not part of music, however
essential they are to its transmission’’.1 There are two issues—must music
always deal in tones rather sounds, and are Scruton’s criteria for distinguishing
tone the right ones? His criteria are so tied to the guiding vision that this is
doubtful; I will suggest in § 3 that music does not always transform sounds
into tones.
Concerning musical experience, Scruton’s argument remains elusive. His
claim of a conceptual contribution by the listener seems to accord with the
idea that the perception of musical movement is theory-laden. Mark DeBellis
for instance has defended the theory-dependence of observation in the case
of trained musical perception, arguing that a passage coming to a close, and
motion to the tonic, are not separable aspects of the expert listener’s intentional
object.2 (It is a virtue of Scruton’s presentation that the distinction between
expert and ordinary listener is less emphatic.)
But Scruton doubts whether, even if the unity of a melody is given
preconceptually like a visual Gestalt—where the metaphor of movement has
no essential role—the listener hears the unity as music (p. 95). This seems in
tension with an earlier claim that a melody is ‘‘a special kind of musical
Gestalt’’ (p. 40), and is in any case dubious. Take Scruton’s example of ‘Baa
Baa Black Sheep’, imagining the melody played extremely slowly. In such
circumstances it may be difficult to hear it as more than just a succession of

1. B. Boretz, ‘Nelson Goodman’s Languages of Art from a Musical Point of View’, in B. Boretz
et al. (eds.) Perspectives on Contemporary Music Theory (Norton, 1972), p. 34.
2. M. DeBellis, Music and Conceptualization (Cambridge University Press, 1995), for instance p. 279.

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sounds, and thus not as a unity. But it is not clear how someone could hear
this ‘‘as a unity’’ and yet not hear it as a melody, with movement—up and
down and harmonic—implied. Scruton is, I feel, taking too seriously the
pseudo-problem of the nature of ‘‘the given in experience’’. His notion of a
necessary ‘‘metaphorical perception’’ of musical space and movement is
suggestive even if the details of its working out require further treatment.

2. Expression, Meaning, Criticism

In the central chapters, the idea of expression as the embodiment of musical

meaning is explored and defended. Scruton begins by arguing that music is
not a representational art-form, and indeed doubts that musical representation
exists at all. Representation has to be more than the mere imitation found
in wallpaper, architecture and textile-weaving—but in music it usually is just
the imitation of sounds, such as the cuckoo in Beethoven’s ‘Pastoral
Symphony’, he claims. No reference is made in such cases to a genuine
fictional world: ‘‘There is a gesture towards something, in the course of a
musical argument: but the music quickly goes on its way, without developing
the thought’’ (p. 129).
But the deep reason for maintaining that music could not be a representa-
tional art, it emerges, is one that follows from Scruton’s earlier discussion:
sounds are not organised as aspects of things that emit them, and so cannot
act as a representational medium (his argument here is compressed). Sounds
are identified with respect to their normal causes, but when I attend to them
aesthetically, for their own sake—as music—they do not take on the character
of those causes (p. 229). This is, I think, an unduly restrictive claim. It reflects
Scruton’s downgrading of timbre, and it is denied by, for instance, currently
popular ‘topic’ analysis, a fertile approach implicit in the work of writers that
Scruton does admire such as Charles Rosen, which his rejection of semiotics
leads him to neglect.1
Topic analysis sees musical structure as exploiting various stylistically-
relative gestures or ‘topics’. In the Viennese classical style, these include
pastoral, march, hunt style, Sturm und Drang, Turkish music, and so on. Many
of these gestures invoke, or are derived from, distinctive instrumental timbres.
It is precisely claimed that such topics do form part of the ‘musical argument’,
and in virtue of their learned associations composers communicate with their
audience. To take an example close to the heart of a fox-hunting man, the
use of horn or horn-style gestures signifies opening or announcement, and
there is an iconic element in this process. I may not think, when listening
tonally, ‘Horn over there’, but that the tones appear with that instrumental
timbre is often significant.
If music does not represent, it is certainly expressive, Scruton believes. His
discussion of expression transcends the traditional piecemeal approach,
1. A leading example of topic analysis is Kofi Agawu’s Playing With Signs: A Semiotic Interpretation
of Classic Music (Princeton University Press, 1989). See also C. Rosen, The Classical Style:
Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven (Faber, 1971).

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presenting a ‘‘structure test’’: ‘‘An expressive work does not merely possess a
certain atmosphere: it has a content, upon which it meditates and which it
sets before us in articulate form’’ (p. 155). The first movement of Beethoven’s
‘Eroica’ Symphony is a magnificent structure, whose success is argued to be
essentially a dramatic one, in which a seed of doubt, sown into the joyful
progress, is transformed into a seed of triumph. Expression is part of what is
understood, when a piece is understood as music, Scruton concludes.
The issue is taken up again under ‘Content’, where it is argued that
Hanslick’s alleged formalism is undermined by his use of the metaphor of
music as ‘‘forms moved through tones’’—showing that music can be understood
only by someone relating it to the world of life and gesture. So Hanslick,
having tacitly accepted that music is the object of a metaphorical perception,
is not really a formalist at all. But what ought to be the climax of Scruton’s
argument proves disappointing. He presents a dilemma that is not properly
resolved: ‘‘Just as the formalist ends by endorsing the metaphors which lead
his opponent to describe music as an expressive medium, so . . . almost
invariably the [opposed view of a] transitive concept of expression gives way
to an intransitive notion of ‘expressiveness’ ’’ (p. 354). This concession to the
formalist results in the idea of expression as utterly particular, or else ineffable.
Scruton admits that he can give no analysis of ‘expression’ or ‘expressive’,
and pursues his earlier analogy of music and dance—‘‘our experience in the
concert hall . . . is a truncated kind of dance’’, as we tap our feet or sway
subliminally (p. 355). He argues that we achieve an education of the emotions
by the reordering of sympathies that arises through our repeated response to
an artwork. He concludes with an argument by example, with a Tovey-like
description of the musical-dramatic argument of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony,
whilst conceding that such descriptions are hard to produce and inadequate
to what we hear. I will pursue below the objection that they are applicable
only to a narrow range even of Western art music.
There is a traditional view that music is a ‘language of the emotions’, while
recent work in musical analysis has led to a generative theory of tonal music
along Chomskyan lines. Scruton argues that any analogy between music and
language is more metaphor than simile; though the concept of musical syntax
has a use, the problem lies in finding a transition to semantics. A generative
theory of musical structure, such as offered by Lerdahl and Jackendoff, will
not yield an account of musical understanding. Musical meaning is a matter
of expression, and is context-dependent; and when a composer like Stravinsky
‘rewrites’ musical rules, new possibilities of expression are created, Scruton
concludes.
The chapters on ‘Form’ and ‘Analysis’ display an equally ambivalent
attitude towards the theoretical ambitions of Schenker and Meyer. For
Scruton, musical understanding involves Gestalt rather than deep structure.
The work of Schenker and Meyer is ultimately inessential to musical
understanding; ‘‘[they both] attempt to find structural rules and principles
which are internal to music . . . . But sounds become music only when
organized through concepts taken from another sphere’’—the sphere of life
and rational agency (p. 333). Music is phenomenal, an activity of the surface.
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The pattern and order that we hear is determined not by any deep structure
but rather by the listener’s act of imaginative attention in which metaphors
play an inescapable role. Theories of deep structure ‘‘are at best extensions
of these metaphors; at worst irrelevant gestures towards a theoretical void’’
(p. 337). Scruton’s treatment is a salutary critique of the kind of analysis that
pays little regard to what one’s actual musical experience is like.
Scruton rightly sees analysis as a humane and not a scientific discipline,
and in contrast to many analysts, argues that analysis and criticism are
interdependent, and that the divorce between them is fatal to both. Analysis
should tell us what to listen for in a piece of music, in order to receive its
full effect; it makes sense only as a prelude to criticism. The account of
criticism and value offered is Kantian, where reasoning in favour of an
aesthetic judgement concludes not in a thought, nor an action, but an
experience (p. 381).
Scruton’s position on analysis is, I think, sound. Musicologist Nicholas
Cook also rejects the pretensions of analysis and its divorce from criticism,
and in his important book Music, Imagination and Culture, argues that music is
a ‘‘democratic art’’.1 Scruton’s position is more ambivalent. His affinities with
Tovey put him on the side of ordinary listeners, while his guiding vision leads
him to neglect much of their experience of music—or so I will argue.

3. The Guiding Vision: Tonality and Western Art Music

The effects of Scruton’s guiding vision concerning tonality and Western art
music are, as I have suggested, pervasive. They result in a heroic chapter on
‘Ontology’, where the work-concept dominates and an improvisation is
treated as a work that is identical with a performance (p. 111). In ‘Performance’,
however, Scruton does allow that, historically, improvisation is primary and
composition is born of the writing-down of music, the scribe transformed
from recorder to creator. But the guiding vision is most explicit in the chapter
on ‘Tonality’, and the rather discursive chapter on ‘Understanding’ which
precedes it. Here Scruton makes some quite extraordinary claims.
It is not unreasonable to say that tonality is a ‘‘paradigm of musical
organization’’, even that ‘‘our tradition [i.e. WAM] . . . could fairly claim to
be the richest and most fertile that has yet existed’’ (p. 239). But for Scruton,
the tonal system is not just rich and fertile. The theory of tonality, he believes,
‘‘accounts for the history of Western music, while offering to explain why
other musics have no history, or have been forced into history only by their
encounter with Western musical tradition’’; the tonal system alone is one
where composers build on the achievement of their predecessors (p. 234).
Pausing to take in these amazing claims, I am reminded of Pierre Boulez’s
comments on the static history of non-Western music, and indeed of J.S.

1. N. Cook, Music, Imagination and Culture (Clarendon Press, 1990).

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Mill’s analysis of ‘‘Chinese stationariness’’.1 But what in Boulez is a blind-
spot, is central to Scruton’s subsequent argument: ‘‘the victory of equal
temperament was no accident of history: on the contrary, it was the goal
towards which musical thinking inevitably tended, as soon as tonality emerged’’
(p. 242). Scruton denies that triadic tonality is a set of conventions, more or
less arbitrarily arrived at, and adopted for stylistic reasons. Tonality, he
believes, was discovered not invented, and he is sympathetic to Helmholtz’s
view that the tonal system is naturally-sanctioned. The nature-loving con-
servative wants to believe Helmholtz, but he havers.
Scruton’s account is riven with paradox. He claims that ‘‘other musics have
no history’’, but on his portrayal, it is Western art music that has no history,
inhabiting an idealised realm of common practice free from historical
conditioning. His understanding of tonality is questionable, and his convention-
nature dichotomy is too crude. He gives insufficient attention to the wealth
of world musics which are neither tonal nor atonal but, broadly speaking,
modal. Almost all music in all parts of the world has a tonal or pitch centre,
but its presence does not lead ineluctably to the development of a tonal system.
In fact it is not clear whether Scruton believes that the ‘‘movement of
tones which summon and answer one another in a space of their own’’ is
something which cannot occur in non-Western musics. Another issue is
whether it occurs in inferior art music. Donald Tovey combined a career as
a critic with a less distinguished career as a composer. Would Scruton insist
that his Brahmsian concertos, thematically unmemorable and notable for
their longueurs, involve the kind of virtual causality where horn calls ‘summon’
piano entries and so on?
Scruton’s neglect of non-Western musics is accompanied by a virulent
hostility towards modernism and postmodernism in Western art music which
requires some comment. In this context, perhaps, his espousal of Helmholtz
has some force. The way that a vibrating tone suggests certain other tones,
and not all others equally, has been taken by some writers to explain why
the complete equality or ‘communism’ of tones proposed by Schoenberg and
Webern’s serialism generates problems of comprehension.
But although Scruton recognises that this is not the end of the story, there
is a tension in his account of listening to atonal music. He seems grudgingly
to recognise that non-harmonic devices can simulate tonal direction: ‘‘Rhythm,
loudness, interval size and tessitura begin to take over. . . . Tension and release
are no longer the normal, breath-like phenomenon that we find in Bach or
Mozart; they are somehow less in the nature of things . . .’’ (p. 302—the
‘somehow’ is symptomatic). But elsewhere he maintains that atonal music
cannot be listened to as music at all except insofar as tonal structures are
discerned in it: ‘‘the Gestalt organization of music tends [towards] tonality—
not because this is how music is constructed but because, however it is
constructed, this is how it is heard’’ (p. 336). With recent ‘‘experiments in
atonality’’—I think their composers would deny they are ‘experiments’ at

1. P. Boulez, ‘Oriental Music: A Lost Paradise?’, in his Orientations: Collected Writings (Faber &
Faber, 1986).

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all—even this response is not possible, since there is no experience of musical
movement: ‘‘Music then retreats from the intentional to the material realm;
and what we hear, in hearing Stockhausen’s Gruppen . . . is precisely what we
do not hear in a Beethoven symphony: a series of sounds, produced by many
different sources in physical space, as opposed to a movement of tones which
summon and answer one another in a space of their own’’ (p. 281; see also
p. 304).
Now insofar as he is a Kantian, Scruton should see the force of the claim
that we impose form, and are always seeking it in a musical work. This effort
may persist, in an unprejudiced listener, even when efforts to impose tonal
form are defeated—and this answers the claim that atonality is ‘‘unnatural’’.
In fact, some writers on contemporary music argue that the very opposition
between sound and tone can itself yield one of a number of structural
principles replacing tonality. It has been suggested that this occurs in the
Piano Sonata by Jean Barraqué, a contemporary of Stockhausen, where the
culminating use of silences produces a shattering evocation of despair.1 To
this extent, Scruton’s analysis of Stockhausen’s Gruppen may be correct—but
his view that music must be heard as tone rather than sound is thereby put
into question, as he implicitly admits in saying that ‘‘music then retreats . . .
to the material realm’’. I doubt whether it does, but music which embraces
sound or even noise rather than tone does not automatically become ‘sound-
art’ rather than music. In fact many ‘sound-artists’ would agree with Scruton’s
rejection of music as the universal art of sound; but the whole issue of sound
and tone is much more problematic—and dare one say culturally or historically
relative—than he allows.2
I find it hard to grasp Scruton’s claim that tonality is ‘natural’, given the
rejection of Helmholtzian Romanticism. But one does not need to describe
the alternative as involving ‘arbitrary convention’. A parallel between tonality
and the roughly contemporaneous development of perspective in Renaissance
painting is helpful here. The nature-convention dichotomy is weakened by
the understanding that for realistic or naturalistic depiction, Renaissance
perspective is the best system, while for unfolding musical argument, tonality
is required. Each of these objectives expresses a powerful aesthetic ideal,
rendering the conventions which sustain it more than ‘arbitrary’.
Although Scruton compares the imaginative space of painting and music
(pp. 12–13), he makes no explicit parallel between tonality and perspective.
It is one worth developing. Literally, there is no depth in a painting, just as
literally in music nothing moves (not in the relevant sense). It has been argued
that unless abstract paintings yield some imaginative space, they fail to
transcend mere design. Thus ‘‘the possibility of abstract paintings being seen
as paintings (. . . as potential forms of high art) depends upon our tendency to

1. ‘‘Contrasts of themes and keys are replaced by other polarities, in particular between
perceptions of notes as sounds (acontextual, heard as if alone) and as tones (part of the
unfolding of a serial form) . . .’’ (Paul Griffiths, sleeve-note to Jean Barraqué: Oeuvres Complètes
(CPO 999 569, 1998)).
2. See, for instance, Douglas Kahn, ‘Audio Art in the Deaf Century’, in D. Lander and M.
Lexier (eds.). Sound by Artists (Art Metropole, 1990).

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look at their surfaces as other than merely flat—to look at them . . . as potentially
figurative’’.1 In the work of Malevich and Mondrian, for instance, areas of
different intensity are experienced as standing in a distance relation. The
‘texture music’ of composers such as Ligeti and Penderecki affords a parallel
with abstract painting, with an analogous separation from mere design—the
‘aural wallpaper’ that goes by the names of New Age, Ambient or muzak.
But even in these kinds of music, perhaps perversely, there is the possibility
of artworks—think of Ambient classics such as Brian Eno’s Music For Airports—
just as some of the paintings of Bridget Riley could be regarded as exploiting
aspects of mere design, lacking in a sense of depth. It may be that in neither
music nor painting is there one crucial component, a sense of space or
movement, that putative artworks must yield. One could create a new
category—sound-art in the case of music—to describe the cases I have been
describing. But that alternative constitutes a minor concession to Scruton’s
guiding vision. It is time finally to look at the cultural underpinnings which
on his view sustain it, or fail to.

4. A Cultural Coda

The penultimate chapter, ‘Performance’, makes telling criticisms of the

authenticity movement for ignoring the ‘‘historicity of the human ear’’, and
for rejecting the practices of arranging, embellishing and improvising that
unify high and popular culture: ‘‘The cult of authentic performance is one
sign of the divide between serious and popular music, and one sign of the
impending death of a musical culture’’ (p. 456).
This divide between art music and popular music, as I would prefer to
put it, is taken up in ‘Culture’, a characteristically trenchant discourse.
Scruton argues that the education of taste, including musical taste, is of
primary moral significance, and that ‘‘the decline in musical taste is just the
catastrophe it seems to be’’ (p. 386). Marxist and postmodern critiques are
subjected to vigorous criticism and the so-called exhaustion of tonality is
analysed. Scruton attacks both Adorno and the popular culture—at least in
its contemporary manifestation—which Adorno scathingly attacked. ‘Mass
culture’ is not, as Adorno believed, a product of bourgeois culture—an opiate
for the exploited—but rather, Scruton argues, arises from the collapse of
bourgeois culture.
I say that Scruton attacks the contemporary manifestation of popular
culture. He evidently regards the divorce between popular and high culture,
apparently unified until the nineteenth century, as a disaster. Yet as I read
him, he believes that the effects of this disaster did not become fully apparent
until after the advent of rock ’n’ roll, with ‘‘the reduction of the jazz and
blues tradition to a set of repeatable melodic and harmonic formulae, held

1. Charles Harrison, ‘Abstraction’, in C. Harrison et al., Primitivism, Cubism, Abstraction (Yale

University Press, 1993), p. 203.

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together by a continuous ‘beat’ ’’ (pp. 469–70). Scruton’s lamentations are ill-
focused, because this description could apply to the advent of New Orleans
jazz, or the Swing Era, or Elvis Presley—or even later, to Heavy Metal and
punk, objects of special loathing for Scruton. The result, he believes, is the
disappearance from ordinary listening of judgements of taste—‘‘criticism gives
way to the anthropology of subcultures’’.1 The ensuing music of anomie is
ignorant of the foundations of tonality in harmony through voice-leading,
Scruton argues (a criticism Adorno made of the popular music of the 1930s,
incidentally). It is not a ‘‘bourgeois product’’—‘‘The masses themselves
produced this music’’ (p. 470).
That may be true in the case of punk. But has there been a collapse of
bourgeois culture as Scruton maintains, rather than a transformation leaving
high art in a state of perilous isolation? Certainly the extension of both
consumption and style-models beyond what could be regarded as a bourgeoisie
has complex and disturbing implications for high culture—and the paradox
of its gradual impoverishment in the face of increasing general affluence is
of passionate concern to Scruton. But his treatment is simplistic.
Consider for example the symbiotic relationship between the large record
companies—a major part of Adorno’s ‘culture industry’—and the inde-
pendents. The large companies are powerful determinants of taste and
consumption, but are forced periodically to respond to the activities of
independent labels close to street level, as most dramatically in the case of
punk and rap. Popular music surely embraces both ‘opiate’ and autonomous
cultural expression. A related criticism is that like Adorno, Scruton operates
with too sharp a dichotomy between mass culture and art music. He complains
that Adorno fails to distinguish, within ‘mass culture’, ‘‘the cheerful and life-
enhancing sound of Louis Armstrong from the monsters of Heavy Metal’’
(p. 480). But only the final part of Armstrong’s career truly belongs to ‘mass
culture’. In his early career he established jazz as an art music, however
puzzled he would have been to hear this. Such forms—hybrids in the terms
of Scruton’s opposition of high and popular culture—seem to have no place
in his picture.
Scruton’s former appeal to the paradoxical notion of ‘natural bourgeois
man’ is now more implicit. But the distinctive fusion between the natural
and the cultural remains a vital, and highly contentious, aspect of his
approach. His aesthetic is an autonomy aesthetic with inadequate social
grounding. Hence the ‘calamity’ which he describes—the collapse of bourgeois
culture—is left unexplained, as simply a calamity.
These discussions are taking us away from the aesthetics of music as such,
to which I will now return. At the heart of my criticism of Scruton’s book is
the claim that the guiding vision implies a monolithic account of musical
experience and understanding, and is associated with a static, pre-modernist,
even pre-modern conception of the artwork. Art tends to be viewed as

1. A surprisingly similar criticism is made from an Adornoite perspective by Ben Watson, in

his attack on what he calls the ‘‘Popsicle Academy’’ (B. Watson, Art, Class & Cleavage
(Quartet, 1998), pp. 226–7).

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charming or consoling rather than challenging—this is the fogeyish side to
Scruton. He lacks the concept of art which the great artists have, of art which
constantly moves outside its previous definition. The same could be said, of
course, of the concept of music itself. The fatuous posturings of the further
reaches of postmodernism are insufficient refutation of these claims.
The puzzling references to ‘‘people who manifestly understand music’’
(p. 343) show the strangeness of Scruton’s monolithic view. There is no one
thing that constitutes ‘understanding music’ or ‘listening with understanding’.
There are people who are intensely musical, who seem to have great
insight into certain, or even many, kinds of music. But there is no unitary
‘understanding’ which they display. This must be so because the greatest works
have a variety of possible ‘expressive contents’. Even—perhaps especially—of
the greatest interpreters, one says that they bring out certain aspects of a
work but not others. They may choose not to bring out those other aspects,
or they may be blind to them.
Nor is it the case that all music is expressive in Scruton’s sense. The
musico-dramatic analysis of the sort he favours is applicable to a narrow
range even of Western art music. Aesthetic interest is a more varied and
extensive phenomenon than he allows. Scruton presupposes a hierarchy
between different genres of music, and one wants to ask why such a hierarchy
is required. Where genres have aesthetic value—here muzak and Country &
Western drop out of consideration—it may be incommensurable. Scruton’s
postulation of a hierarchy is exclusive and indeed counterproductive. If one’s
first concern is to sustain classical music, rather than to irritate liberal opinion,
one will not defend it in this way.
But despite my considerable—perhaps fundamental—criticisms of Scruton’s
book, I found it impressive and, indeed, rather inspiring. There are many
suggestive claims both musical and philosophical. Anyone reading it sympath-
etically will realise that the neglect of musical aesthetics by analytic philosophy
does not arise from a lack of major problems—as one might think from the
familiar nit-picking over ontology and emotion-ascription. Rather, it is a
product of the scientific hegemony responsible for analytic philosophy’s
increasing marginalisation. Why should philosophy of art be effete and
impoverished, while philosophy of science appears vital and flourishing? If
philosophy were a humane discipline, rather than a ghetto of the technical
and arcane, Aesthetics would no longer be a Cinderella subject. Scruton’s
The Aesthetics of Music helps to show what such a humane discipline could
be like.1
THE UNIVERSITY OF DURHAM ANDY HAMILTON

REPLY TO HAMILTON

Andy Hamilton’s review of The Aesthetics of Music has some pertinent criticisms
to make. Its most important criticism, however, seems to me to be founded
1. I am indebted to discussion with John Hyman, David Lloyd, Nic McKay, Max Paddison,
John Skorupski and Ben Watson.

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on a mistake. Since it is a mistake that several commentators have made, I
am probably myself to blame for it, and therefore welcome this opportunity
to put it right. The mistake is in supposing that the book is devoted to the
defence of the Western classical tradition. Hamilton describes this as the
‘‘guiding vision’’ of the book, whereas in fact it is only one corollorary of an
argument which stands, I hope, even if you reject this particular by-product.
I argue that my purpose is to describe, and if possible extend, a certain
kind of interest—namely the interest that we have in a Beethoven symphony.
Hamilton is somewhat scathing of this. But he ought not to be, for the
following reason:
Music is not a natural kind. From the metaphysical point of view we
could include under the general term ‘music’ whatever we fancy, without
misrepresenting the physical world. Nevertheless, the classification has a
purpose, and it is this purpose which limits the class. Now it is my view that
our interest in music is not an interest in sound only, but an interest in what
we hear in sound, when we hear it as musically organised. What do I mean
by ‘musically organized’? I give Beethoven as one example. This is not
ethnocentric. I could have considered classical Arabic music, or the surviving
Delphic Paeans. For there is no a priori method which will determine the
starting point. If there is a serious interest addressed by a Beethoven symphony,
and if this interest defines the purpose in composing and listening to it, then
we have found the basis for a non-arbitrary definition of music: music is
sound intentionally addressed to such an interest.
Sounds may be addressed to many other interests: communicating informa-
tion, invoking the gods, taming snakes. We might classify all pitched sounds
to which people listen as music, while ignoring the many interests that people
have in them. But this would be a very bad first move in philosophy. For it
would give us a category that casts light on nothing: the importance of music,
so defined, could not be explained, nor could anything useful be said about
the content of the musical experience.
I begin as I do because I want to make no unwarranted assumptions. I do
not want to assume, for example, that other people at other times and places
have had the same interest as we have in what sounds to us like music. If it
is the interest that defines the class, then the claim that gagaku, for example,
is music must come at the end of our argument, and not at the beginning.
So I begin in another way. Take a Beethoven symphony: we are interested
in that. What kind of interest is this? And to what other objects might it be
addressed? Surely that is a sensible way to begin, especially if you are
prepared, as I am prepared, to give a theory of aesthetic interest which will
show just why it focuses on sounds, and just what it finds there.
I do not accept the view that this reduces my argument to one about
‘Western art music’ (whatever that is). Although I cannot speak for the
Balinese or the Zulus, I know their music, and hear in it, when I listen, the
kind of organisation which I describe in my book. And that is the crucial
point. There is a particular kind of listening which generates what I call,
following Pierre Schaeffer, the ‘acousmatic experience’ of sounds. And that
experience opens the imaginative realm of music.
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 It is quite possible that there are cultures which do not have this experience,
just as there are cultures which lack the experience of the supernatural, or
the experience of figurative images. But that is not our case. We have this
experience, it is intrinsically interesting, and it confers on its object a kind of
organisation which is both the vehicle of emotion and the object of thought.
And that is why I am interested in tonality: not because it is the only way in
which music can be organised, but because it is a paradigm of musical
organisation. The account I give of tonality does not exclude modal music,
nor do I mean to imply that atonal music is impossible. What I do imply is
that, if atonal music is addressed to the same interest as tonal music, then it
must be heard as exhibiting an ‘elaborational’ rather than a ‘permutational’
order. Moreover, I try to show that successful experiments in atonality
recreate, often in defiance of the theory which allegedly inspires them, quasi-
tonal melody and harmony, moving towards definite points of closure that
are understood in terms of their tonal resonance.
It is worth pointing out that I do not invoke the nature/convention
distinction in discussing tonality, and expressly reject Helmholtz’s view of
tonality as the ‘natural’ order of music. I assume that tonality is as artificial
as every other artistic achievement—and I describe it, in my conclusion, not
as a language or a convention, but as a tradition, which is constantly evolving
and yet always the same. I am unable to locate any place where I describe
tonality as ‘natural’, though Hamilton’s impression that this is my meaning
is shared by so many of my readers that I know I must be at fault. So let me
say that my intention is to show that, given the acousmatic experience, the
emergence of tonality, as the principle of harmonic order, is not an accident.
If I end by implying that ‘Western Art music’, and the tonal tradition which
is central to it, are supremely great among the musical achievements of
mankind, then this is not only a conclusion that I share with just about
everyone else who has thought about the subject, but also one that I have
tried to show, to the best of my ability, to be true.
Hamilton seeks to undermine my argument, by showing that this particular
conclusion is assumed from the outset. But I argue as I do—beginning from
the concept of sound, and the interest that we take in sound—precisely so as
to make the least possible assumptions. I suspect that Hamilton’s response is
a reflection of his belief that there can be no philosophical argument for the
intrinsic value of a musical tradition, and therefore that any argument
purporting to show this must really have assumed it all along. But I don’t
assume it, and would point out that the only works of musical aesthetics
which come at all close to my way of seeing the subject are by Plato and Al-
Farabi: not noted defenders of ‘Western art music’.
In this connection it is worth saying something about the ‘work concept’,
since, like many others, Hamilton assumes that any argument which gives
this concept a central place has already begged some question (I am not sure
which question) in favour of the Western tradition. Even if it were true (which
it isn’t) that other traditions either marginalise or make no mention of this
concept, the distinction between work and performance grows spontaneously
in the practice of acousmatic hearing. It is therefore a distinction that is
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worth exploring, and which is not without philosophical difficulties. Those
who devote their attention to the work of music and its criterion of identity
do not always recognise that the problems they are discussing are special
cases of more general difficulties, associated with the reproduction, writing
down or recording of any action whatsoever. You will not arrive at a notion
of the work of music by studying music only; but you might get there through
a theory of notation, as Goodman does, or through the general theory of
signs, in the manner of C.S. Peirce. The most important thing to remember,
however, is that you are not dealing with a natural kind. So ‘getting there’
depends entirely on the point of defining identity as you do.
So what is the point? I take it that we are not interested in the material
identity of sounds, but in the intentional identity of what we hear in sounds
when we hear them as music. There is a peculiar experience of ‘same again’
which is fundamental to musical organisation. There could not be meaningful
improvisation without this experience, and the emergence of ‘works’ from a
tradition of spontaneous performance is exactly what we must expect when
people listen, and therefore recognise what they hear as ‘the same again’.
‘Play it again’ is the mark of acousmatic joy, and one that is by no means
confined to ‘Western art music’.
Hamilton accuses me of confounding the ‘natural’ and the ‘cultural’—
meaning that I assume features of a particular cultural tradition to be
inscribed in human nature and therefore of universal validity. This kind of
criticism is frequently made of anybody who tries to think philosophically,
and therefore timelessly, about subjects which are historical and time-bound.
And I think it is profoundly misguided. From a philosophical perspective it
is quite possible to look on the tradition of ‘Western art music’ and discover
features which are of permanent and universal value—whether or not
reproduced at other places and other times. Moreover, the ‘calamity’ that I
describe—namely, the erosion of the acousmatic experience—is not something
that I alone have noticed, or that I alone have regretted. Listening has given
way to over-hearing, the judgement of taste has all but vanished, and music
has sunk from foreground to background in everyday life, becoming ever less
meaningful and ever more pervasive. This is a vast and significant occurrence,
and I try to say why it matters. To those who say that it is fogeyish to argue
in this way, I retort that it is complacent to argue in any other.
One final point. Hamilton is puzzled by my reference to ‘‘people who
manifestly understand music’’, and accuses me of assuming that there is only
one way to understand music. The quotation is out of context: I am referring
to the fact that musical people frequently deny that music has expressive
content. Yet I argue, on Fregean grounds, that if music has a content, then
this content is what you understand when you hear with understanding. How
is it, therefore, that people who understand expressive music can consistently
deny that it has an expressive content? I try to show what the phrase ‘hear
with understanding’ means. And I explain it in such a way that ambiguity
and aspect-shifts are exactly what we must expect. There is no one way to
understand music, any more than there is one way to understand poetry.
Nevertheless, a philosophical theory of understanding music can give a unitary
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account of it, just as a philosophical theory of poetic language can give a
unitary account of understanding poetry. Again, I sense in Hamilton’s
objection a reluctance to admit the possibility of a philosophical stance
towards an historical subject-matter.
Hamilton concludes with a few side-swipes at analytical philosophy. I agree
with him that, thanks to much that passes for philosophy in the Anglo-
American academy, philosophy has ceased to be a humane discipline, and
lost the broader cultural connections that would enable it to speak to our
times. But what is the cure for this? Not, I think, to lose the aspiration
towards abstract and universal truth. Rather, to bring that aspiration to the
study of real and evolving phenomena. That is what I try to do in The
Aesthetics of Music.
BRINKWORTH ROGER SCRUTON

CRITICAL NOTICE

FROM THEONOMY TO AUTONOMY

Some years ago, walking among the bright yellow of the wattle trees in the
early Canberra spring, a fellow academic from overseas asked what I was
working on. I mentioned that I had been doing some work on Pufendorf and
explained briefly what it was about. The conversation moved on, but a few
minutes later there was a pause, and the hesitant question: ‘‘Was there really
someone with that funny name, or are you pulling my leg?’’
This colleague would have an excellent reason, as would, for various
reasons, most of us, to welcome a comprehensive historical work like the
present one (The Invention of Autonomy: A History of Modern Moral Philosophy. By
J.B. Schneewind. Cambridge University Press, 1997. xxii 1 623 pp. £50.00
cloth, £16.95 paper.)
From one perspective, adopted by romantics and neo-thomists, moral
philosophy has been in decline since mediaeval times, with the rise of an
individualism that has no concern for the common good. From another,
represented by Comte, Feuerbach, Jodl, Westermarck etc., there has been a
development in which the forces of darkness have given way to ideals of
equality and autonomy, and like theirs, Schneewind’s story is one of progress.
The view that moral rules are imposed on an individual and supported by
external pressures, came to be superseded by the view that they are rules
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