Culturally determined?

A couple of months ago I was in a gathering of academics when the subject of music came up: they all agreed that responses to music are culturally determined, i.e. the way a piece of music makes you feel depends on where you’re from and how you were raised.  (And this although most of them were Wagner fans!)  I was disagreeing quite strongly in my head, but they were all lovely people, all knowledgeable and senior to me, and in any case the conversation moved on so I didn’t get round to saying anything.  However, I felt they were so obviously wrong that, unfortunately, ideological motives must have been involved – cultural relativism, of course: the strong taboo that educated Westerners tend to feel against saying anything that might claim a wider appeal, let alone superiority, for Western culture – the reflexive urge to be apologetic for it.

I believe one can easily prove that a high proportion of anyone’s response to music is determined by simple mathematics and biology.  Vibrations that cause ‘harmonious’ chords are evenly proportioned in their frequency, and thus sound restful; those that cause ‘discords’ are uneven and sound, well, discordant.  It doesn’t need me to say this, others have said it far better.  Few would disagree, either, that responses to certain basic musical gambits are physical.  Coming back to the same key you started in sounds predictable, moving to an unrelated one causes surprise; ratcheting the notes or harmonies upwards sounds like effort, bringing them swooping down sounds like relaxation, etc. – to say nothing of the obvious relationship of rhythm to a heartbeat, relaxed or stimulated.  Surely one doesn’t need much cultural training to recognise that the repeated incomplete downward scales in the last movement of Tchaikovsky’s Pathétique Symphony sound like heartbreak, or, to stay with Tchaikovsky, that the upwardly striving chord sequence in the Pas de Deux from the Nutcracker, followed by the complete scale plunging downwards, is a musical orgasm.  All one needs, I would suggest, is a working pair of ears that hasn’t been deafened to natural stimuli by the exceedingly limited (but excessively loud) repertoire of techniques to be found in contemporary pop music.

I think Western classical music, like Western science and art, became increasingly ‘naturalistic’ from the Renaissance onwards while most musical traditions remained more stylized.  While most art styles of the world have worked by encoding a viewpoint or message about the object being depicted, Graeco-Roman and Renaissance art approaches more closely to depicting the subject simply as it is.  While the Greek theory of the humours and planetary influences, and the Chinese theory of the elements, developed a highly theoretical model of how the human body worked based on a limited number of observations, modern Western medical science multiplied the observations and brought the theories much more into line with physical fact.  In the same way, the supposed differences in ‘mood’ between the different modes of ancient Greek music (whereby the Dorian mode was supposed to be martial, the Lydian mode lascivious), or between Indian ragas, really are culturally determined: you have to be immersed in that culture’s way of hearing to appreciate them, and the palette of visceral emotions they express is subtle and quite limited.   The system of keys and modulations in western classical music, on the other hand, has allowed music to ‘play’ on the instrument of the listening body in ways that are much more blatantly stimulating as well as subtle.

This is not to say that other musical traditions are inferior or deserve to be taken over.  Good art is good art wherever it comes from.  But the idea that you can only ever appreciate a piece of music if you are fully conversant with the culture it comes from is unnecessarily defeatist about the ability of music to be an ‘international language’ bringing peoples together – and quite condescending, for instance, to the Chinese, Japanese and Korean musicians who have become some of the foremost practitioners of Western classical music.

Am I being controversial, or stating the bleeding obvious?

Horsemeat

Much too late, I came across what may have been the best joke of the horsemeat-as-beef scandal.  Q: what sort of cheese goes in a Findus burger?  A: mascarpone.  Geddit?  Mask-a-pony.  Tee, hee...

Seriously, though, I wasn't too shocked at the idea that I might have eaten a morsel of horse in beef by accident.  I was slightly more worried by the argument that anyone who is prepared to sell horse as beef may not be keeping to more important hygiene rules with the utmost rigour either.  What shocked me most in comments on the news reports was the proportion of people who said, 'well, what do you expect for a pound?'  Or implied that anyone who would buy meat so cheap shouldn't complain if what they got wasn't what it said it was.  Giles Coren of The Times was a prime culprit here.  People should buy properly sourced meat from a decent butcher, he said, if they wanted to be confident of its quality.

Huh.  People with money to spare have always been able to insist on the best anyway.  If their butcher cheats them they can go to a better butcher, and the old one will feel the loss of their custom.  No one feels the loss of the custom of the poorest.  It was precisely for their sake that the Trade Descriptions Act was necessary.  For people who don't have any choice.  Whether any firm can afford to sell four beef quarter-pounders for a quid is neither here nor there.  If it says it's beef it ought to be beef, end of story.

What is happening to sympathy for the poor?  Once it used to be normal, now it's assumed everyone who's poor is a scrounger.  And that's true, in the sense that no one in low-paid work can survive without tax credits and benefit top-ups, rather than employers being expected to pay them a living wage.  The old working class has split.  Some, perhaps most, have moved up into the middle class, but the rest seem to be worse off than ever.  Middle-class professionals compare the British poor unfavourably to energetic Eastern European migrants, not seeming to realise that the Eastern Europeans we see here are self-selecting, the young, bright and enterprising.  What if you aren't gifted with such youth, energy and enterprise?  Do you belong on the scrap-heap?  'The British just don't know what work is any more,' says a pillar of the local establishment, a comfortable retired professional who has never know what it's like to have to get up at five o'clock on a winter morning, with a sore throat and a bad back, to work digging up a road all day.

Sometimes I worry that we're going backwards to the 1920s: as Siegfried Sassoon wrote of his well-heeled friends:

'Why should a miner earn six pounds a week?
Leisure?  They'd only spend it in a bar!
Standard of life?  You'll never teach them Greek,
Or make them more contented than they are!
That's how my port-flushed friends discuss the Strike,
And that's the reason why I shout and splutter,
And that's the reason why I'd almost like
To see them hawking matches in the gutter.'

Church Music and Corporate God

Today it is time for a rant about church music.  My parish choir is a good one, but members are ageing and numbers are dwindling, and the children mostly seem to leave when they reach the turbulent teenage years.  We sing core Anglican music – anything from Byrd to Rutter by way of Stanford and Elgar, and traditional psalm chants and hymns with organ accompaniment.  There are eight or more other Protestant establishments in the town none of which does anything like this, and even at our church, you get the impression that the majority of the congregation are indifferent to or at best tolerant of the music supplied, and would be quite happy to see it replaced by guitars, amplified pre-recorded music and ‘worship songs’.  Why is this?

Why do the majority of Christians think it appropriate to include infant-school songs with actions in church services, forcing respectable, arthritic elderly people to beat their chests like gorillas and sing ‘Who’s the King of the Jungle’?

Why do most Christians – even the most morally conservative – feel it right to address the Almighty in song with the moaning, sobbing and gasping that were developed in commercial music as indications of extreme desire for sexual intercourse, if not the act itself?

Why do pillars of the church establishment readily dismiss a great variety of traditional hymns as ‘dirges’, when most of these are demonstrably more interesting, musically, than ‘worship songs’?

Why do most Christians refuse even to sample the heritage of traditional church music, but call traditionalists who dislike pop ‘narrow-minded’?

Why do they work and scheme to get traditional music edged out of the few places where it is still in use, and label anyone who stands in their way ‘intolerant’?  Why, in short, do they define themselves as victims when they are in control, and as rebels when they are a conformist majority?

By now someone will be pointing out that most cathedrals (and Oxbridge colleges) have perform traditional music, that the Royal School of Church Music is at the heart of the Establishment and that grand state occasions still showcase the Anglican classics, etc.  To which I reply, yes, but are not these beleaguered islands whose supports are being washed away by the floods of uncaring ignorance that surround them?  I don’t know, in fact, whether things are getting better or worse.  The signals are mixed.  What we are seeing now may be a slack tide which is about to turn, or the lull before the final assault.  The Church of England has a musical tradition that is unique in Europe and perhaps in the world.  But if it vanished, how many people would actually notice?

I have stood in the choir stalls at a sung Eucharist at our church, moved to tears as a soaring treble sings Holy, holy.  It is better than any concert you could pay to get into in this town all year.  It’s better than any concert, in fact, because it has a purpose beyond entertainment.  And it’s free.  Yet there are, what, twenty people in the congregation if we’re lucky.  Does anybody care?

It is much easier to ask these questions than to get answers.  In fact I have been pondering them in a melancholy way for most of my life.  Why don’t people value what seems self-evidently beautiful?

The problem, of course, extends beyond the Church to society as a whole.  The ‘decline of classical music’, or rather its demotion by the cultural establishment, began in earnest in the 1960s.  It was then that the Left got its hands on the levers of power, and decided that to promote high culture, especially classical music, to the people at large was patronising, a hegemonic imposition of elitist values, an abuse of power.  The people must be allowed to make their own choices.  The Right was not too upset, as its members had quietly realised that it was more profitable to sell the people disposable crap anyway.  So the people, of course, ‘chose’ what was most vigorously sold to them. 

The Left by its nature is deeply suspicious of enjoyable music, art and literature.  Enjoyment is a distraction from the class struggle; it is morally wrong to enjoy anything while misery and injustice stalk our world (in other words, ever).  Art is good if it has a social message.  It is allowed to be ‘challenging’, i.e. ugly, horrifying or incomprehensible.  Or it can be enjoyable at an ironic level if it is frankly rubbish, kitschy, popular in the commercial sense.  Because then it demonstrates the decadence and approaching collapse of the capitalist system.  Here an unholy alliance develops between socialism and consumerism.  As Ursula Le Guin pointed out long ago in her essay ‘The Stalin in the Soul’, late capitalist society needs art to be disposable.  ‘They want products to sell, quick turnover, built-in obsolescence.’ (I saw an example of how far this tendency has convinced the consumers in a shop where a toddler was asking his mother to hire a video.  ‘Not that one, darling,’ she smilingly said, ‘you’ve had it before.’) 

After about fifty years of this two-pronged attack, we have got to the point where the man or woman in the street knows nothing of classical music, and doesn’t want to know, because they have an overwhelming impression that, whatever it may be, it is a bit ‘snobby’ (the left-wing view), and also ‘uncool’ and ‘boring’ (the commercial contribution).  When I was in my teens most schoolchildren had at least heard the names Mozart and Beethoven, even if they only understood that they were cultural bugbears to be laughed at.  Now most have probably never heard of them at all.  The exception is a determined minority of the upper middle class.  What the lefties always claimed – that classical music is only for a privileged elite – may not have been true then but, thanks to their efforts, it certainly is now.

This is where congregations are coming from.  In the churches the dynamic is very similar – indeed, it has been going on for much longer.  Socialism, after all, derives directly from the puritan and millenial wings of Christianity.  The refusal to accept pleasure that does not contribute to the class struggle is just another avatar of the old refusal to enjoy yourself in this life because you are saving your pleasure for the next.  There has always been a strong iconoclastic strain in Christianity: the fear that in approaching God by means of imagery in art or music, the believer will be deflected from the truth and end up worshipping the image, the creature rather than the Creator.  The effort devoted to the image – the art or the music – risks becoming an end in itself.  So thought the reformers who knocked the heads off the statues in Ely’s Lady Chapel.  So, in their more moderate way, think high-minded pastors who want their church members to flourish in faith and good works, rather than expending their energy and resources on ‘difficult’ music.  By taking a relaxed approach with some simple choruses and three-chord worship songs, they hope to create a ‘prayerful’ atmosphere that will be ‘inclusive’, not putting off any ordinary person who happens to stroll in from the street. 

All well and good, but do such Christians ever wonder if they are perhaps being too ‘inclusive’ of traits in modern society which most thoughtful people agree are not such a good thing?  Passivity, addiction to undemanding entertainment, demand for constant novelty – all those same consumerist tendencies that have sneaked in under the radar of the cultural commissars of secular society.  Fans of ‘worship songs’ are mostly evangelicals.  In some ways, they are ready to take a stand against modern culture.  They may reject the theory of evolution, or the liberalisation of sexual morality.  But they ought to watch out that they don’t reject the good and thought-out ideas of the modern world, while unthinkingly accepting the bad.

I can see plenty of reasons why traditional church music no longer holds immediate appeal for the average church-goer.  What I still do find hard to understand is what they like about the stuff they do.  Evangelicals believe in a God who is very strict and quite scary, who is ready to send the unrepentant to hell.  But he doesn’t seem very dignified, if choruses of ‘Who’s the King of the Jungle?’ please him.  They think it right to fear God.  But they don’t seem to reverence him much.  Reverence is not really a word in the evangelical vocabulary.  Over the centuries, God has been given many names: Creator, Father, Lord, Author of Life, Supreme Spirit, Eternal Love.  But in an edition of the New Testament handed out to converts by the Bible Society, he is introduced as ‘the big boss’.  It seems to me that in their attempt to marry a conservative theology with a modern consumerist culture, evangelicals have the worst of both worlds.  Their God is arbitrary without mystery, matey without loving-kindness.  He’s awfully ... corporate.  How fitting that he should be worshipped with motivational slogans, carpet tiles and overhead projectors.

Easy enough to rant, much harder to persuade people to broaden out from this horribly ‘relevant’ style of worship.  What might be the best way to set about it? 

'Free Speech'

This week in the Sunday Telegraph I read this piece by Matthew d’Ancona strongly in favour of David Cameron’s new initiative to make it harder to access violent and illegal porn on the internet.  ‘Great,’ I thought.  ‘If Dave can pull that off, he’ll get my vote’.  Then I went to the newspaper’s website and looked at some of the readers’ comments.  Hardly one had a good word to say for Cameron and his policy.  They divided pretty evenly between those who thought that it was a nice idea, but technically unfeasible (‘Cameron has no idea how the internet works’); those who thought that it was a cynically populist pre-election posture; and those who thought that it was the thin end of the wedge to bring the entire Internet under political control (‘next stop China’).

Depressing, that.  You would really think that the Prime Minister could afford the best advice on how the internet works, if anyone could.  You might also ask who is the populace that is supposed to be wooed by this populist measure, if Telegraph readers are so universally contemptuous.  (Could the PM just possibly be acting out of principle?)  And you might think that ideas about free speech have become somewhat skewed.  You might even wonder whether there are a lot of secretly porn-viewing Telegraph readers out there who aren’t admitting their real agenda, but that might be a touch paranoid.

Of course Matthew d’Ancona is a Cameron puffer, but he’s not an idiot. I think we should pay attention when he says ‘Nor is this sort of regulation in any sense a threat to free speech: those who say otherwise give a bad name to a precious ideal.  These are criminally disseminated images of criminal acts.  Shame on those who claim that their continued accessibility is the price we pay for liberty, or for the digital revolution.  That is a confusion of freedom with lawless savagery.’  That was when I threw my hat in the air, as I do when Caitlin Moran, the most unlikely Mary Whitehouse, riotously mocks porn in its own language.  When dry political commentators and down-and-dirty girls-about-town speak out against porn, it might at last undermine the dirty-mac brigade’s claims that only prudish authoritarians are whipping up ‘moral panic’ about the issue.

(Interesting how this phrase is starting to be used as a way to brush off objections and shut down debate on any sort of public vice.  As C.S. Lewis’s demon said in The Screwtape Letters, regarding ‘Puritanism’: ‘May I remark in passing that the value we have given that word is one of the really solid triumphs of the last hundred years?  By it we have rescued annually thousands of humans from temperance, chastity and sobriety of life’.  ‘Moral panic’ is rapidly becoming the equivalent for the second decade of the twenty-first century.)

However, the battle must be won on the field of culture.  Legislation can only ever be a blunt instrument, especially with such a slippery and vaguely defined enemy as porn.  With the internet, we have to grow up and learn to use it while resisting its addictive tendencies.  It’s a new medium and new media have intoxicating qualities.  The track record of humanity in coping with any of these in the first century or so is not good. 

The rise of print and mass literacy in the sixteenth century?  Every ploughboy could read his Bible: Renaissance humanism gave way to rival Christian fundamentalisms, rabble-rousing, mud-slinging and hideous religious wars all over Europe. 

The rise of the cinema and mass-circulation newspapers in the early twentieth century?  Cue manipulation of the populace by demagogues, fascism, Nuremberg rallies, and World War II.  Only when sated with destruction did people develop a healthy scepticism for what they saw on telly/read in the newspapers.

And now the rise of the internet.  Instant information, communication uncontrolled by the Establishment, marvellous.  Quack ideas, conspiracy theories, terrorist cells, child porn shared across continents with one click – not so marvellous.  This time can we ride the wave and tame the tigers?  It’s quite important.

Might return to this subject.

‘Rational Religion’

To inject a slightly cosmic tone into this blog at the earliest possible stage ...

Religion: ‘belief in … a higher unseen controlling power or powers’ (Chambers Twentieth Century Dictionary).  Isn’t it inherently irrational?  To answer the question ‘Why does anything exist?’ with ‘Because an invisible super-person put it there’ seems like fairly childish guesswork; and religious experience, a sense of the presence of gods and spirits, can easily be explained in terms of the poorly understood quirks of the human brain.

Yet arguably it is ‘rational’ to have a religion, if ‘rational’ means ‘knowing what’s good for you’; plenty of studies show that people with religious beliefs are happier and live longer than those without them.  To take up religion for your health’s sake, though, seems absurdly back-to-front.  Equally arguably, religion can seriously damage your health: it causes wars and justifies oppression.  And yet to wish it away from the world seems about as realistic as wishing humans didn’t have to be bipeds.

It was much simpler in the days when no one needed to make any effort to ‘believe’ in God – when gods and spirits were just ‘there’.  Then, there was no conflict between rationality and religion.  Having a religion included thinking about it as well and as clearly as you could.  Once reason seems to conflict with religion, however, you are in a no-win situation whichever side you choose.  Choose religion and you have to keep on consciously avoiding certain questions and trains of thought; in effect, choosing to be stupid, as we see so clearly in the case of fundamentalists of all stripes.  But choose your critical faculties and when they have done with demolishing your religion, they turn on everything else, themselves included.  Many philosophers believe that language is a system that refers only to itself and can tell us nothing real about the outside world; hence, that truthfulness and objective knowledge are impossible and that culture is nothing but a jostling crowd of conflicting fantasies – or ‘narratives’.  Stymied by their own logic, they are in no position to defend us from the worst excesses of idiot fundamentalism, for if truth does not exist then is not fundamentalism as valid a viewpoint as any other?

To divorce faith from reason ends by making thinking pointless.  From the religious point of view, thought is unnecessary; from the rational point of view, thought is illusory.  For those of us who actually like to think, and even believe that it is useful, we have to find some way of bringing the two back together, uncomfortable and contradictory though it may be.  To declare that clear thinking is valuable is itself a religious claim, an act of faith as groundless as any supernatural belief.

That is why I wish that there could be a reconciliation between religious people who have room in their belief-system for reason and conscience as well as revelation and authority, and non-religious people who still believe in the ultimate value of truth, as well as other un-provable values like liberty, equality and fraternity.  And that is why, by contrast, I get deeply uneasy when I hear, on the one hand, intelligent Christians saying that they need to make common cause with other believers, not excluding fundamentalists, in the battle against secularism and materialism; and, on the other hand, old-fashioned freethinkers like A.P. Grayling and Richard Dawkins thundering against the tolerant, Enlightenment-upgraded traditional Christianity of the western world as if it were their ultimate enemy, as if there were not far fiercer enemies of reason hemming them in all round. 

It might irritate him inexpressibly to tell him so, but Richard Dawkins is a man of deep faith.  Perhaps the definition of being ‘religious’ needs to be modified from ‘believing in higher unseen powers’ to ‘having a vision of what is ultimately good and sticking to it’.  Dawkins believes in truth at all costs; he believes that we can really know things about the universe; he believes that it is our human vocation to see the world as it is, in all its grandeur and terror, regardless of anything we can get out of it; in theory at least, he is as pure a contemplative as St Anthony of Egypt.  All these positions need faith.  Logic alone will not maintain them.  Recent church leaders in this country, on the other hand, have gone out on a limb to try to defend the humane and reasonable in religion against the forces of visionary fundamentalism – with precious little respect from secular intellectuals. 

So, please, can’t those of us who believe in faith with reason, stand firm on our common ground?  The fundamentalists will accuse us of being wishy-washy sell-outs, the cutting-edge philosophers will call us nostalgic and muddle-headed; we have to wear both badges with pride.

The Dragonfly

It is turning out to be a wonderful year for dragonflies, damselflies and butterflies. Looking around for the text of Tennyson's poem The Dragonfly, I chanced across this beautiful blog:

See also Simon Barnes's article in Saturday's Times: 'A bevy of damsels with no signs of distress':

http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/opinion/columnists/simonbarnes/article3815606.ece

The banks of my local river (more like a canal really) are thick with willow-herb and fluttering with hedge browns and small tortoiseshells, more than I've seen for many years.  Perhaps nature isn't giving up the struggle yet.

Welcome to DOWN WITH COOL!

If you are a little tired of the pace of modern life, the pressure to be ‘on trend’ and always acquiring the ‘latest’ thing ...

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