A Musical Education

To my pleased surprise I finally got hold of a copy of The Vintage Guide to Classical Music by Jan Swafford yesterday. I've been on the lookout for months, Swafford being the author of my all-time favourite book related to music - a superb biography of Charles Ives. I'd recommend the Ives biography to anyone, even someone who can make no sense at all of Ives's oeuvre. You'll go back to listening with massively renewed understanding. And that's what I was hoping for from the new Guide, a kind of broad musical education. I've already greedily read a few of the sections, the ones on Ellington, Gershwin, Britten, Vaughn Williams and Mozart and they do not disappoint. Swafford writes with genuine wit and clarity, a claim made on the back cover, and a sort of earthy, common sense directness which is enormously appealing and convincing. He makes the music he loves sound like it must be listened to for the sheer pleasure of the experience, which is, of course, the whole point.

Or is it? A couple of days ago I chanced upon this interesting interview with philosopher Roger Scruton here. I've always enjoyed reading Scruton, even though his generally conservative, right wing stance is not a position I can find much sympathy for. But he's the kind of opponent who thinks with a clarity that can only help you make your own ideas clearer (and make you aware that it's quite reasonable for others to hold views almost diametrically opposed to your own.). And in the realm of ideas related to aesthetics I find him enormously fruitful as a thinker. In the interview Scruton makes some interesting points about the value of serious/classical music in relation to the general lack of such value in popular music and I must say I think he's essentially on the right track.

Where he goes a bit wrong, I think, is in not recognising the range of nuance in the best of popular music. He gets close to this in an attempt to appreciate The Beatles and the great songwriters like Cole Porter, and it's interesting and laudable that he tries to stretch to some understanding of Metallica. But he clearly doesn't know the field. However, I think he's absolutely right in citing Oasis as an example of the narrow range of expression of most rock music and its concentration on the self and the performer. And I believe he's got something when he talks about the educational power of pure music in terms of implanting some kind of emotional rhythm or movement within that unfashionable facet of our being, the soul