Reading TLS

on Good Music

Roger Scruton
UNDERSTANDING MUSIC
Philosophy and interpretation
244pp. Continuum. £18.99 (US $29.95).
978 1 84706 506 3

Although music has always stood comparison with the other arts, its oddness is something we rediscover each time we try to describe it. When we speak of interpreting works of art, for example, we refer to the practice of deciphering their single or several meanings. But to interpret music, in the classical tradition at least, has come to refer simply to playing it; that is to executing a set of more or less clear instructions left by the composer. Similarly, in eighteenth-century France, when the concept of mimesis harboured the images of excellence in all the arts, and no one troubled to discuss the arts without discussing their success in imitating "la belle nature", the sole entry on musical imitation listed in Diderot and d’Alembert’s Encyclopédie discussed only the purely technical matter of one part imitating another in polyphonic music.
None among the numerous such pitfalls is more hazardous than the idea of musical understanding. Ordinarily, when understanding something, such as a sentence, we are grasping its meaning. But while most people are clear that the phrase "to understand music" is not itself without meaning, agreement on what is understood in the musical case is less forthcoming. We might not hesitate to criticize an otherwise note-perfect performance for "lacking understanding", but it might take us longer to specify what it was the player had failed to understand.
The elusive question of musical understanding lies both at the centre and in the margins of Roger Scruton’s latest book. It is central in the sense that a key chapter addresses the subject directly, and that much of the rest of the book reflects on various normative issues that follow from the concept of musical understanding (such as which kinds of music lend themselves best to being listened to in this way). It remains marginal, on the other hand, in that no substantial theory of musical understanding is in fact advanced, though this is largely on account of the volume being a collection of somewhat disparate philosophical and critical essays. Nonetheless, there is a tantalizing sketch of such a theory, and in this respect, the present volume constitutes a genuine advance on the earlier, and very influential, Aesthetics of Music (1997). In addition, it permits the reader to grasp the relation between Scruton’s thoughtful aesthetic conservatism and the more general social and political conservatism which many of his critics idly suppose derives from a reactionary and unashamedly bucolic nostalgia.

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