Reading Philidor's biography in the Welcome section this morning, I noted that he claims to "attack classical music snobs". This rang a bell with me. Last night, before a performance of Britten's War Requiem, I was talking to an acquaintance who happened to mention Karl Jenkins. I gave my not very complimentary opinion, and was immediately accused (not for the first time)  of being a "musical snob". Now, I don't think I'm a snob at all. Is there something wrong with liking certain types of music and not others, or even thinking one type of music is "better"? If so, why? I'm no philosopher, but I've often wondered about this question. I happen to prefer Bach to Elvis Presley. If it was the other way round, I wouldn't be called a snob. As it is, I am (not that I really care). I don't get it.

I like John Rutter's Requiem.

True. Proof A:

I used to be friends with some people on the fringe of a famous pop group. One time, sitting in a pub with some of the group present, I said rashly that I didn't like much pop music because I found it harmonically boring. Half a dozen pairs of eyes, like gun barrels, swiveled towards me. 'Well,' I said nervously, 'I can only take so many three chord sequences, you know, tonic, sub-dominant, dominant, G, C, D over and over... You're highly skilled musicians [they were, and very clever too]. Why don't you spice it up a bit, y'know, modulate?'

All hell broke loose. I was accused of musical snobbery, trying to impose 'classical music values' on the lumpen proletariat (they were a trendy leftist/anarchist band) trying to sneak 'high art values' into popular music, practically wanting to invade Cuba and force Castro to attend a complete Ring Cycle!

Proof B:

When I taught the flute most of my pupils were from middle class families, but a few were working class, one of whom I was particularly fond of. She was amazingly talentless but, by God, she tried and really loved the flute. She was gentle, charming and a bit heart-breaking. Plus I liked her father: a disreputable second car dealer who gave me a good price on a motorbike. Anyway, one day her lesson finished, I walked with her to the next room where her father waited to take her home. He was sitting there with the mother of my next pupil. They both looked a bit tense. We exchanged a few words and off he went with his daughter, I turned to Mrs P*** who inquired, sounding like Lady Bracknell: "Who was that horrible little man?" We chatted and the penny dropped: she had clocked him as a working class man - from his accent, dress, whatever - and felt this devalued her own daughter's classical music tuition; she objected to her daughter sharing a teacher with a working class person.

Those are two examples, from direct experience, of what I'd call 'classical music snobbery': the attempt to use music not in it's pure sense - the appreciation of beautiful sound - but to buttress class hatred. I think such people are ridiculous - from both left and right - and derive harmless pleasure from poking them with a stick.


<looks over shoulder, whispers: I listen to Classic FM>

@ Mary Chambers: I don't think you're a snob. People must listen to what the hell they want.

This of course is what is bound to happen when our educators fail us and there are no longer agreed and objective standards. People who do not appreciate the music of the great masters should be forced to listen to it and learn about it factually, just as they are forced to attend school between the ages of five and sixteen and learn the facts about arithmetic spelling and history. They may not care for it, but it is for their own good and in later life they will come to realize its inherent value - which has nothing to do with whether they like it or not. Alternatively they could go off and live in a childish or despicable way like tramps doing their "own thing."

Uninstructed preferences are almost bound to be wrong or inferior preferences, and it is our duty to suppress them not indulge them, and to seek out a good teacher. Perhaps if Madame Chambers finds herself in a similar situation in future she might recommend to her unenlightened acquaintance some course of careful study, or even a few well-chosen recordings. It boils down to this: we respect others who have learned and "know," and we despise those who "cannot be bothered"!

I dislike classical music snobs as much as anything, but mostly because they simply project their own social snobbery onto aesthetics (in fact, most classical music aesthetics are of this nature). But as far as the 'pure subjectivist' position, that is implied in Richard's post (and elsewhere), Terry Eagleton had a good point to make in his review of John Carey's What Good Are The Arts?:

Carey begins by claiming that a work of art is basically anything you think is one - a case long argued by theorists of whom he seems unaware. This is true in one sense and false in another. It is true that what we call works of art (a pretty recent idea, incidentally, that would have come as a surprise to Shakespeare) have few or no objective features in common; it is hard to see how a Rembrandt self-portrait and "Mr Tambourine Man" resemble each other. A work of art is any object framed so as to evoke a certain kind of response and attentiveness. Art is not a special class of things, but a special way of relating to things. To cut up the telephone directory on the page is to invite us to treat it with less brisk utility than we do when looking up a number.

Carey, however, concludes from this that art is just a subjective matter. He does not see that saying, "This is what I call a work of art" is possible only if I already have a concept of art; and this concept, like any other, is not private but public. He is, in fact, an old-fashioned Cartesian dualist, of the sort that almost every eminent philosopher from Ludwig Wittgenstein onwards has had fun in demolishing. He believes that experience is inherently private, that the consciousness of others is inaccessible to us. Perhaps he has not heard of language - or indeed of art. What else is art but the public sharing of intensely personal experience? For this book, however, we are all eternally cut off from one another by the thick walls of our bodies. All judgements are therefore relative. It is unclear whether this applies to condemning genocide as well as commending Dante.

This is of course in the context of the wider 'what is art?' question, but could equally apply to any sort of discourse between individuals as to whether something is simply good, bad, or more specifically how much in either direction, and in what fashion - unless this is never disclosed to a second party (which is almost never the case), this is an issue of public communication and as such requires some conception of value that goes beyond the first person. Eagleton expands on these matters:

What Good Are the Arts? is an unabashed apologia for "low" culture and a full-blooded assault on the higher kind. Carey, however, does not actually challenge the distinction; instead, he simply stands it on its head: "low" is now good and "high" is now darkly suspect. Quite how this breathtakingly absolute judgement squares with his laid-back relativism, it is hard to see. The obvious truth he overlooks is that the good/bad dichotomy cuts across the high/low axis. There is both trashy and valuable high art, just as there is both kitschy and precious popular culture. Carey also does not see that to dismiss rankings as elitist is itself elitist. The common folk he champions do it all the time, arguing the relative merits of Neighbours and The Office. Only the sentimental populism of the liberal don could ignore this fact.

In any case, a distaste for elites and for Romantic genius, and a crying up of the commonplace, are nothing like as subversive as Carey seems to imagine. They are the common currency of postmodern capitalism. Nothing is more egalitarian than the commodity. Thus, much of the time, the book smacks at straw targets. Just who are these sanctimonious types for whom art has a transcendent value? There are a lot more Tracey Emins around the place than there are George Steiners. Carey hits at the fat cats of the corporate high arts, but passes in silence over the fat cats of Fox and News International, who exploit cultural deprivation. He defends violence and sensationalism in "low" culture as drawing upon instincts that were evolutionarily essential - a high-minded Darwinian apologia for snuff movies, Hustler magazine and woman-hating rap that only an academic mind could conceivably have come up with.

Carey's book, like any other, makes judgements all the time, despite cutting the ground for these opinions from under its own feet. Indeed, the second half of the study argues vigorously for the superiority of literature over the other arts. Aware of some possible inconsistency here, Carey insists that this judgement of his is just "subjective". But this is a logical evasion. To hold an opinion is to make an implicit claim to truth, one that is by its nature publicly contestable. Otherwise, one would not hold the opinion in the first place. To say that "literature is better than painting", a statement which appeals to the rational grounds of argument, is not the same as saying, "I like the smell of boot polish."

If one believes that music has some meaning, indeed some social meaning, then this itself becomes an issue of public value: one does not have to go as far as Lawrence Kramer's hypothesis that 'If I enjoy Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, my pleasure coaxes me to find edification in violent struggle, spiritual value in heroic ordeal’, or accept Sanna Pedersen's statement that 'The reason why Beethoven is assumed to be the most masculine of composers is that what he and his music stand for is precisely the same ideology that tries to attain universal society in theory while maintaining male domination in practice' to believe that music's social meanings are legitimate criteria for public debate. I personally have a lot of time for the following formulation by Ernst Bloch (whilst finding it a little hyperbolic and over-didactic):

The dominance of the melody-carrying upper part and mobility of the other parts correspond to the rise of the entrepreneur, just as the central cantus firmus and terraced polyphony corresponded to the hierarchical society. Haydn and Mozart, Handel and Bach, Beethoven and Brahms all had a social mission which was very specific; it extends fromthe form of performance ot the ductus of the tonal material and its composition, and to the expression, the statement of the content. Handel's oratorios reflect, in their proud solemnity, the rise of imperialist England and her claim to be the chosen people. There would have been no Brahms without the middle-class concert society and even no musical neue Sachlichkeit, no purportedly expressionless music, without the enormous increase in alienation, objectification and reification in late capitalism. It is always the consumer sector and its requirements, the feelings and aims of the ruling class which are expressed in music.

If one can accept not even necessarily that Bloch was/is right, but simply that music is not entirely autonomous of the types of wider social processes Bloch mentions, then it's not such a big step to see how taste and tastes themselves might be informed by the individual's relationship to society (and that of the social groups that individual belongs to), and as such taste can be critiqued in a sociological sense rather than purely in terms of snobbery (snobbery is of course itself social critique of an arch-reactionary nature).

Furthermore, whenever decisions are made as to which music to programme, to commission, who should play it, which organisations should receive subsidy, who should win awards, what to teach in schools, colleges, universities, and so on (and their equivalents in other artistic fields), one is dealing with some criteria of value that are public rather than private. Without any such criteria, one thing remains for sure, which is the criteria of market utility. There's nothing progressive or even necessarily tolerant about decrying aesthetic criteria as a public matter; free market capitalism does that as completely as any aesthetic relativist/subjectivist could. If there is no such thing as value, in a public sense, the phrase 'price of everything, value of nothing' becomes meaningless.

As far as the canon, as a 'a series of lifebuoys' which have been 'anchored in known waters of the enormous ocean of possible known and yet-unknown musics', is concerned, I wonder to what extent it really exists in such a form in the minds of many nowadays? There have been pitched battles in the past of the relative merits of abstract vs. programmatic music, of instrumental music vs. opera and other forms, of the more intimate/private context of chamber music vs. the grander spectacle of the orchestra, but I doubt there are so many people nowadays who would hold on dogmatically to, say, a canon which valorises abstract Germanic instrumental music way above any other possible alternatives. But at the same time, a canon that tends to rank the totality of Verdi's oeuvre over that of Donizetti (whilst acknowledging he wrote a certain number of very fine operas) does not seem arbitrary to me; similarly, whilst some revivals of music of the London Piano School, Meyerbeer operas, Alkan piano music, lesser-known Russian symphonists, early microtonalists, and so on, are welcome and often provide something new and interesting, I find it hard to believe that much of this music will over a period of time come to gain a wider listenership, who wish to return to the music on many occasions, outside of a relatively small cult. All classical music is itself a minority interest, of course, but I don't think that makes it meaningless to talk about Beethoven having a greater impact upon a wider public than Alkan - a statement which also needs to take into account the fact that many more performers are drawn to playing Beethoven than Alkan. In short, that canon running from the late baroque era to the very early 20th century is not something I think is likely to change in any significant way, notwithstanding the disputed status of some figures such as Puccini and Rachmaninoff whose popular acclaim tends to exceed their standing amongst many musicians. As far as a pre-baroque/early baroque canon is concerned, or one for much of the 20th century, things may be different.

Remember Matilda's father? Probably the most horrible car dealer in English literature.

Aren't chains of modulations going up in semitons or tones not uncommon in pop music? (okay, maybe not with too much frequency within a single song; biggest example I can think of off hand was that Ukranian entry to the Eurovision two years ago).