Listen carefully: Roger Scruton can save music for Western Civilisation
The British philosopher's writings unveil how our ear for Music has been led badly astray, and offers an inspired path to rediscovering the great tonal tradition.
Scruton on Music: Why we must read - and learn from - his musical essays
The late, great, British philosopher Sir Roger Scruton wrote two operas and published six books on music over the course of his lifetime. Three of these books belong to the canon of texts on Wagner’s operas, a subject about which Scruton was irrepressibly passionate - and as brilliant an analyst as any contemporary Wagnerian. Another book, 1997’s The Aesthetics of Music, is a landmark synthesis of philosophy and musicology. It is a rich and complex work, fully navigable perhaps only by those with a strong grounding in music theory, aesthetics, and philosophy.
This leaves us with Scruton’s two published collections of musical essays, Understanding Music (2009), and Music as an Art (2018). It is these two books which should give the greatest heart to those who continue the fight to conserve classical music’s great tradition.
As Scruton reveals, this fight has not gone particularly well over the past century. Truth, beauty, and a sense of the divine have been somewhat extinguished from humanity’s musical palette, victims of modernity’s march. The false promise of the avant-garde, and the slovenly kitsch of ‘classical culture’ has dulled our ability to discern what real music actually is. One cannot read Scruton on music and remain deluded that if we simply carry on as we have, our children’s lives will be blessed by the same magnitude of artistic accomplishment that has shaped our extant civilization.
If they are read as widely as they should be, Understanding Music, and Music as an Art will form a kind of curriculum for the willing - a starting point to reconnect with that truth, beauty, and divinity that is music’s great miracle and enduring promise.
Understanding Music
As good philosophers do, Scruton devotes much time to definitions. The first six chapters of Understanding Music define and clarify what our experience is when music is made. Scruton goes to great lengths to explain what is human about experiencing music, helpfully drawing the reader’s attention to the difference between animals that can merely hear sounds, and human beings who can make musical sense of those sounds. This is a critical point of discussion, and one that will challenge the erroneous and oft-made assumption that musical understanding is a ‘naturally’ occurring phenomenon, in the way that birds tweeting and waves crashing are in a sense, ‘musical’. In drawing this distinction, Scruton links the development of musical understanding with the development of human civilization.
In this opening section there are further chapters on Wittgenstein and the Philosophy of Music, Movement (and/or the perception of movement) in music, and what constitutes musical expression. The truly revelatory moment however, lies in the chapter entitled Rhythm. Here is Scruton at his scintillating best, as he effortlessly draws together the threads of philosophy, musical performance, art history, and anthropology to explain the effect of Rhythm and Beat on the human condition. He illustrates how history’s greatest music draws on patterns which express the rhythm of lived experience. He contrasts this with the oppressive ‘invented’, or ‘superimposed’ rhythms of avant-garde, pop, EDM, or simply shallow and unthinking compositions, and sounds a warning at the deleterious effect such music has on our emotional faculties over time. This constitutes part of the inter-generational dulling of our artistic and spiritual instincts - a subject which Scruton has explored in his broader body of works, and which he believed posed a grave threat to human flourishing.
The second half of Understanding Music is devoted to case studies of composers, pieces, and major thought-movements in music. The sections on Mozart and Beethoven are deeply moving, and should humble all readers before the genius of those two incomparable composers. On Mozart, Scruton’s thrust is toward Mozart’s embodiment of enlightenment ideals. On Beethoven, he performs the heroic feat of disentangling the 9th Symphony from the morass of critical claims against it. Scruton is determined to extract the musical truth out of the cultural fallacy, his critique ringing with a Burkean vigor;
“[Beethoven] conceived the finale of the Ninth Symphony as an answer to the private and inward-directed emotions of the initial three movements, an answer which would turn the spirit once again outwards - not to a narrow community conceived, as the French revolutionaries had conceived it, in nationalist terms, but to the universal community of mankind”
Also featured in this book is Scruton’s exploration of Central European music. He is effusive in his praise of Janacek, Scriabin and Szymanowski, who he considers to be the true torchbearers of the Western tonal tradition from the 19th into the 20th Century. He is cutting in his criticisms of Arnold Schoenberg and his great advocate, the cultural critic Theodor Adorno. In particular, he links Schoenberg’s 12-tone system and the hijacking of the classical tradition to the broader globalist project which sought to destroy local culture and community;
“Schoenberg is not able to win through to the human heart, since the heart is fulfilled not by abstract laws or a universal culture but by the concrete customs of a community rooted in a place and time”
There are also two chapters dedicated to Wagner, where Scruton makes the case for the great ring-cycle operas as representing the zenith of all human artistic achievement. Wagner, of course, has been a prime target for those who like to scream ‘Nazi!’ at their political opponents since long before it became fashionable to do so. That Wagner held some repulsive, anti-semitic views is not in doubt. However, he was hardly the all-consuming Hitlerian that some historians would have him painted as. The Ring Cycle, contrary to the protestations of the noisier members of the peanut gallery, is not an anti-semitic treatise. It is refreshing then, to have Scruton offer a well-reasoned explanation of where Wagner’s anti-semitism ends, and where his sublime musical genius begins.
Music as an Art
Music as an Art was published in 2018 and is a similar book to Understanding Music, albeit with one critical difference. That difference is in the urgency of the writing. It is clear that in the decade that has passed, the aforementioned ‘fight’ for classical music has slipped further into confused chaos.
For some context, in the past ten years, ‘woke’ programming has infested the orchestras of North America and Europe, with proven musical quality increasingly taking a back seat to the fads of musical intersectionality and virtue-signalling. There are more than passing suggestions of a return to unscreened auditions, in order to redress ‘racial and sexual injustices’ in the constitutions of our leading music organisations. Further, many of our once-great conservatories are engaged in the wholesale trashing of the Western tonal tradition, with Brahms, Beethoven and Bruckner being ousted in the name of ‘de-colonising’ the academy. As Scruton’s own cover note makes clear;
“We live at a critical time for classical music, and it is my hope that this book will contribute to the debate, of which we stand in need, concerning the place of music in Western civilisation”
As in Understanding Music, Music as an Art has six preliminary chapters which deal with the philosophy of music, before the rest of the book is devoted to musical case studies.
The chapters When is a tune, and Music and Cognitive Science offer an introduction to how we might think more deeply about what music is. They are not easy chapters, especially for readers absent a basic musical education. They throw down the challenge for us to take the musical artform more seriously, to respect it for the difficult-to-master, but deeply rewarding intellectual form that it is.
The next series of chapters are where the thrust of Scruton’s argument for music as a pillar of Western Civilisation is constructed. In Music and the Moral Life he draws the reader to an understanding of music as a shaper of personal virtue. Scruton proposes that in listening deeply, we in essence ‘dance’ internally in sympathy with a given musical work. If that work is imbued with a deeply noble character (Say for example, an Elgar symphony), then through listening we can reach communion with a conception of nobility, shaping our own virtue in it’s image. If enough people listen deeply, then we can, as he says ‘improve the moral temper of humanity’.
Music and the transcendental and German idealism and the philosophy of music set up an understanding of the way music can move us beyond what we perceive to be normal earthly experiences. These chapters explore some of the ideas of Kant and Hegel, and have a strong thematic link with much of the writing in Scruton’s 2012 book The Face of God.
Of the musical case studies in this volume, it is Schubert, Britten, and the contemporary British composer David Matthews that Scruton advocates most vociferously for. These chapters are crucial reading for all music students, and should post-haste be made part of any serious Conservatoire curriculum. In them, Scruton connects the technical skill of harmonic composition to a philosophical exploration of human existence. This is a near impossible task to undertake, and we should be eternally grateful to Scruton for carrying it off with such flair.
It is important here to understand why Roger Scruton was so unique an author on this subject. It is quite possible that no other person on the planet does, or ever has simultaneously possessed the degree of skill in both musical analysis and philosophical inquiry as Roger Scruton did. We would have to go back to Nietzsche (himself a failed composer) or more likely, to Schopenhauer, to find authors with a comparable confluence of interdisciplinary abilities.
From this unique position, Scruton is able to illustrate how a deep understanding of melody and harmony must be the foundation stone for a composer concerned with uplifting humanity through art. As schools and universities increasingly turn away from the proper teaching of harmony, rewarding students for mere sound-effects over real musical composition, Scruton shows us why a return to learning music’s melodic and harmonic roots is of critical importance to its survival.
Roger Scruton could fight like a savage whilst maintaining the air of a gentleman. His skill at the deft takedown of ideological opponents gave great heart to his supporters, and infuriated his adversaries. Scruton’s chief musical opponents are Arnold Schoenberg and Pierre Boulez. Whilst Schoenberg is dealt with throughout both books, Boulez receives his own dedicated shellacking in the closing chapters of Music as an Art. And not before time. For decades, Boulez has been an unapproachable figure, an uber-elite member of France’s artistic aristocracy. As a self described Marxist-Leninist for much of his career, he subscribed to that religion of perverse destruction, making himself responsible for the evisceration of Western music’s sacred inheritance. Scruton exposes the damage Boulez has done to the common man’s confidence in serious music. He dismantles the Boulez legacy with clinical precision, exposing his fraudulent claim to music’s future, and highlighting the real and tangible harm done to classical music in his wake.
The fight for music that Roger Scruton engaged in was, and still is, a vital one. We should be eternally grateful that he was willing to have it. Though his passing - two years ago this month - remains a huge loss for the musical world, we are lucky that in his volume of works, he leaves behind the foundations of an argument for music, and its place in Western Civilization. In particular, the two books explored here, Understanding Music, and Music as an Art, should be read, studied, and promoted by musicians, philosophers, students, teachers and interested listeners alike. Like so many of Scruton’s works, they provoke us to examine not just the subject matter at hand, but the very question of what it means to be human, and what it takes to reach out without fear for the true, the good and the beautiful in our lives.
Benjamin Crocker
January, 2022
Benjamin Crocker currently resides in Washington D.C, as a Ramsay Centre for Western Civilisation Postgraduate Scholar at St John’s College, Annapolis. Ben has previously taught at The University of Sydney, conducted the Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra, and recorded new music for radio, for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC Classic FM).