398 journal of the american musicological society · give up insisting on the presentation of a...

398 Journal of the American Musicological Society

needs different editorial policies? And if Somfai succeeds in convincing us, as I believe he does, that for Bart6k the notation was not the finite object but the raw material-that while it did not allow for infinite interpretations, it de- manded to be re-created with each performance-would it not follow that conflating sources and emphasizing consistency have little to do with the spirit of the art we represent, but rather serve our need to live up to a prestigious but perhaps not so honest scholarly ideal? It seems that we would do better to give up insisting on the presentation of a body of material that is "complete," "authentic," "consistent," and "final." In the end, perhaps we must realize that we cannot do more than publish our own version of versions of pieces.

Doing so would mean that musicology would follow slowly the development that took place in philosophy some time ago with the works of Heideg- ger, Levinas, and others. Like the Greek philosophers, the makers of critical editions believe that one can get the closest to the essence of a work when one removes it, as it were, from time: in the sentence "This is the composition," the word is means timelessness. Levinas, however, conceived of an "ontologie dans le temporel," following Heidegger, who viewed existence and time ("Sein und Zeit") as inseparable phenomena: existence means being in time. From Somfai's book we learn, in spite of his intentions, that we cannot escape looking at the composition and at the critical edition "dans le temporel."

JUDIT FRIGYESI

The Aesthetics of Music, by Roger Scruton. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997. xxi, 530 pp.

Reading The Aesthetics ofMusic by Roger Scruton, one might wonder whether his cultural preferences follow from his philosophical principles, or his principles from his preferences. Scruton confidently claims the former: he has "begun from first principles," he writes in his short preface, and has ended up with "a philosophy of modern culture" (p. ix). His first principles derive from an ontological investigation of sound and tone: he tells us what a sound is, and what it means for us to experience one as a musical sound. Then, working sys- tematically, in the analytic tradition of philosophy, through the traditional and defining topics of the field-music and metaphor, representation, expression, language, understanding, tonality, form, content, value, analysis, and performance (topics that occupy chapters 3 and 5-14, respectively)-he arrives five hundred pages later at his cultural vision for the music of the future. Asserting that "the avant-garde persists only as a state-fimunded priesthood, ministering to a dying congregation," he finds a little promise for redeeming our culture in the "thin" (minimalist/tonal) music of contemporary composers Henryk Gorecki and John Taverner, but more promise in the rediscovered tonal languages of compositions by Nicholas Maw, John Adams, Robin Holloway, and

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Alfred Schnittke (pp. 506-8). In making this final judgment, Scruton is not concerned to describe precisely what these preferred new tonal languages con- sist in; he simply wants to tell us that there are composers in whose music he finds real promise. He chooses his final words most carefuilly: that he finds "promise" but not yet "success" in the music of these composers is presumably meant to alert readers to the continued urgency of his own contribution to this cultural redemption.

This review focuses on two related strategies central to Scruton's project. First, contrary to his claim that his philosophy of modern culture follows from his philosophical principles, I argue that Scruton implicitly presupposes the former in setting up the latter. Second, I argue that, for all Scruton's impres- sive discussion of musical works in their formal and aesthetic detail, the support these details give to his philosophical project usually depends on a too-quick translation of musical into philosophical detail. Assuming such a translation, say between musical harmony and the harmony of the soul (a translation upon which his entire argument depends), allows Scruton to find rather too convenient matches between his philosophical principles and cultural judgments. Overall, I think that the apparent ease of Scruton's project belies its extreme difficulties.

It must be stressed that one could read Scruton's book solely as a contribution to the metaphysics of music by simply leaving his cultural commentary aside (effectively ignoring chapter 15). But this would be to read Scruton's project definitely against his own grain. In this review, I take his philosophical project most seriously. But the truth is, I find myself far less interested in his cultural commentary (which is unabashedly conservative and obvious in those terms) and much more interested in identifying the precise places in his philosophical scheme where his cultural assumptions creep in. In other words, I focus on the claims and assumptions he makes regarding the cultural indepen- dence or purity of this scheme, a focus that challenges us to consider very seriously how we should philosophize about music.

Thus, for example, Scruton declares without apology that, to travel so single-mindedly from his "dry" ontological questions to his culturally specific judgments, he will put a great deal aside-almost, he says, the entire philosophical discussion of musical aesthetics from the Copernican Revolution to the present (p. vii). He also puts aside, through his choice of examples, most kinds of music not belonging to the last few hundred years of "high" and "European" culture. He employs many German and English examples; fewer are French, and surprisingly few are Italian. There are more instrumental examples than vocal, and a few, select examples representing jazz (Tatum, Fitzgerald) and rock (Beatles). Scruton's philosophical and musical dismissals are connected. Copernican (i.e., modern and/or postmodern) thought, he asserts, represents the end and destruction of a Pythagorean cosmology in which music, and the philosophy that inspired it, played so central a role. Once, he argues, we assumed "the ordering of sound as music [to be] an

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ordering of the soul" (p. ix). When we abandoned that assumption, we started to produce a nontonal or soulless music that destroyed our nature. "The ethos" of the most soulless music, Scruton writes toward the end of his book,

is well captured by the immortal words of the group Nirvana: I lease it, lease, yeah. Ev'ryone is how old? Pick me, pick me, yeah. Ev'ryone is waiting.

The dance becomes a lapse into disorder, a kind of surrender of the body which anticipates the sexual act itself. This decay of dancing is a necessary con- sequence of democratic culture, and an irreversible feature of the postmodern world. And it goes hand in hand with a decay in musical resources. The gestures that attend the new forms of dancing require an abdication of music to sound: to the dominating beat of the percussion, and to such antiharmonic de- vices as the "power chord," produced by electronic distortion....

... If [this sort of] music sounds ugly, this is of no significance; it is not there to be listened to, but to take revenge on the world. (pp. 499-500)

If this sounds a bit like Allan Bloom's closing of the American mind, it's supposed to. "The decline of popular culture," Scruton explains, "leads precisely to an impoverishment in the means of expression, with the result that ordinary emotions are crusted over with a stagnant film of clich6" (p. 157). And if readers do not understand the words of Nirvana's song, they are not meant to. Beware the dangers, Scruton wants to warn us, of music that moves our bod- ies but whose words we do not understand, whose words we do not want to understand or judge. "The anomie of Nirvana and REM is the anomie of its listeners. To withhold all judgement, as though a taste in music were on a par with a taste in ice-cream, is precisely not to understand the power of music" (p. 502).

Scruton identifies musical sins with the democratic, judgmentless, and "anything goes" tendencies of this century. Yet he explains them far more often by reference to philosophical principle than to complex developments in recent history or culture, leaving the question of why musicians have commit- ted the sin of producing soulless or ugly music profoundly unexplained. Thus, we learn only that these musicians have somehow worked against the over- arching principle that how we order sounds into musical forms mirrors how we order our souls. In Scruton's argument, the ordering principle of our souls, or of our human or "rational" nature, is always "harmonia"; the correspond- ing ordering principle of music is always "tonality." The cultural "ought" should always follow the natural "is." The way we compose music should mirror the way we order or experience sound. "A musical culture," he writes,

introduces its participants to three important experiences, and three forms of knowledge. The first is the experience of melody-of musical thinking, as it begins in tonal space and leads onwards to an apt conclusion. In singing a melody we understand the relation between phrases, the way in which tone calls to

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tone across the imagined space of music. Melodies have character, and in singing them we imitate the forms of human life. Musical education teaches us to be alert to this character, and to understand that the rightness or wrongness of a tone is the rightness or wrongness of a gesture. In singing we rehearse our social nature, just as we do in dancing. And it matters that we should sing in courteous and cheerfiul ways. (p. 501)

Scruton believes that his dismissal of so much of the post-Copernican discussion of musical aesthetics follows directly from his philosophical theory. But how, as readers, should we understand the dismissal? Scruton often rejects only how post-Copernican philosophers have contributed specifically to musical aesthetics, a specificity that allows him to acknowledge and use their more general contributions to philosophy whenever it suits him. Why, one wonders, did they go so wrong with music? Perhaps because they have engaged in the metaphysician's art at the expense of music. A correct musical aesthetics, Scruton argues, should take knowledgeable account of the formal principles of composition, performance, and listening. This should please musicians and musicologists. But note that Scruton himself actually attends to composition and performance very selectively and nearly always in the light of what he wants to claim about listening. For in Scruton's metaphysics, it is listening- how we hear sound as musical sound-that gives him his starting point. "Music begins," he writes (in a typical pronouncement), "when people listen to the sounds that they are making, and so discover tones. Of all musical experiences, there is none more direct than free improvisation (whether vocal or instrumental): and this should be understood as a paradigm of listening-the form of listening from which music began" (p. 217).

Further, Scruton detests those thinkers-"Marxists," "feminists," and other "ideologues," as he labels them-who choose to historicize or politicize their subject matter, for they commit the sin of compromising the timeless content of philosophical questions that have True and redemptive answers. As readers, we can ignore Scruton's most pugnacious dismissals here (even if we find them irritating): usually they are flippant one-liners (and, as in political debate, who listens to one-liners?). More telling is that Scruton, in differenti- ating himself from these so-called ideologues, rejects the space he might have left in his own philosophy for genuine cultural change or psychological, historical, and social variation. But isn't it precisely variation and difference that one finds in the sort of musical knowledge Scruton claims he wants to bring to his philosophy of music? Paradoxically, for all the musical details he provides and all the examples he gives, Scruton offers, I find, a surprisingly static, philosophical account of an ideal listener who perfectly matches an ideal judge, who in turn perfectly matches an ideal or paradigmatic musical work-indeed, the philosopher's favorite: that unspecified "Beethoven symphony." Fortunately, it is a most lucid and well-constructed metaphysical account, but these assets are too often achieved by setting aside the sort of variation that I, for one, would much prefer to see left in. Let us now look more closely at his account.

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Scruton articulates his first principles through an ontology of sound. Sounds are heard, he says in chapter 1, much as colors are seen, but unlike colors, sounds are not secondary qualities. They are not qualities at all. Rather, like rainbows, they are phenomenal objects. Of course, sounds are emitted from objects, but experientially they are separable from them. Sounds occupy a strangely independent, "acousmatic" sphere in which hearers "sponta- neously detach the sound[s] from the circumstances of [their] production, and attend to [them as they are in themselves]" (pp. 2-3; here Scruton is drawing on the work of Pierre Schaeffer's Traitd des objets musicaux). This detachment lies at the heart of the musical-listening experience. We listen to musical sounds in separation from their causal sources, as constitutive of pure or independent events. This detachment is also entirely consistent with our aesthetic interest, which is solely in appearances. As listeners, we are interested in our world as experienced, as purely heard.

To hear sounds as constitutive of pure events is to hear them as temporally and spatially ordered. Both sorts of ordering are essential to how we experience sounds musically and how we generate musical meaning. We hear the sounds as "nearby" and "far away." Yet sounds do not themselves move through space; rather, spatial relations are heard, as it were, between the sounds, in their interrelations. Moreover, the sound world is not a space into which we can enter; it is a world we treat at a distance. This distance produces a mysterious gulf through which we are able to experience, and come to know, "the very life that is ours" (p. 14) or "the experience of life conscious of itself as life" (p. 35). In a mixture of Kantian and Husserlian terms, Scruton often reiterates this main conclusion: we see the way we are (in nature), and thus the way we (should) live, through the way we intentionally construct or order the musical world. The musical world is one made unique by its special mode of organization.

Scruton dismisses the question of whether music may be subject to any sort of organization as empty of philosophical interest. "Although we have para- digms of musical organization, in the canon of masterpieces," Scruton writes (and I quote him now at length):

it is not obvious that these are all organized in the same way, or that they ex- haust the possibilities. Some may argue that the electronic noises produced on a computer by such "radical" composers as Dennis Lorrain are music; others may make similar claims for such purely percussive sequences as Varese's lonisation, or collections of evocative sounds in the style of George Crumb, as in his Music for a Summer Evening. Modernism has been so prolific of deviant cases that we hesitate to call them deviant, for fear of laying down a law which we cannot justify: even John Cage's notorious four minutes and thirty-three seconds of silence has featured in the annals of musicology. So how do we begin to define our theme?

Such questions have bedevilled aesthetics in our times-and unnecessarily so. For they are empty questions, which present no real challenge to the

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philosopher who has a full conception of his subject. Whatever it is, music is not a natural kind. What is to count as music depends upon our decision; and it is a decision made with a purpose in mind. That purpose is to describe, and if possible to extend, the kind of interest that we have in a Beethoven symphony. Other things satisfy that interest; and there is no way of saying in advance which things these will be-not until we have a clear idea of what exactly inter- ests us in the Beethoven. The question whether this or that modernist or postmodernist experiment is a work of music is empty, until we have furnished ourselves with an account of our central instances of the art. Only then do we know what the question means. And even then we may feel no great need to answer it.

The best way of summarizing those central instances is to say that they each achieve, though not necessarily in the same way, a transformation of sounds into tones.... it is only rational beings, blessed with imagination, who can hear sounds as tones. (pp. 16-17)

Scruton's effective dismissal of so many modernist and postmodernist ex- periments depends on an interesting, but complex, methodological twist. We know he does not want to assert that music is a fixed, natural kind that has a single, essential kind of organization. He only wants to stress that an aesthetics of music should first provide an account of its "central" (paradigmatic, indis- putable) instances. Fair enough-but note that this starting point is starkly opposed to one that uses borderline examples to reveal something about the concept's center, perhaps with the purpose of challenging the idea that the concept has such a center. Scruton always starts from the center because he finds there, if not essential musical organization per se, then at least musical organization that purportedly conforms to human nature (the way we intentionally construct musical space, the way we hear sounds as tones). And once he has located human nature, or the most human acts of imagination, he believes himself justified in putting aside culture's periphery. Thus, he is not com- pletely candid when he says that he needs to look at central instances first; he really thinks he need only look at central instances. For, as we have just read, he thinks that his account of central instances will render the "modern" or "postmodern" questioning implicit in the extreme instances redundant, or "empty" (as he puts it). Readers might still hope that he means redundant only to his philosophical account. Not so: redundant (or "empty") also signifies a cultural judgment. Yet what will be left of"the center" when it has lost its "radical" periphery?

In his account, Scruton mentions the unspecified Beethoven symphony as exemplary. Exemplary or central instances, he says, allow listeners to achieve the transformation of sound worlds into musical worlds, the hearing ofsound worlds as musical worlds. Note that Scruton's philosophical focus is always on this achievement of the ideal listener rather than on the particular structure of the exemplary works. This focus is again very Kantian: if the "something in common" is not found in the objects experienced, it will have to be found

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in the experience itself; in our rational nature, our wills; in the play of our imaginative and cognitive faculties.

The shift in emphasis, from music's nature to the listener's activity of "hearing-as," allows him to draw an analogy between music and language. Just as we hear language not merely as a string of sounds, but as a voiced message "broadcast into the landscape," so we also instinctively hear music as attempt- ing to communicate. Though Scruton mentions only Aristotle here, surely he is also thinking of Rousseau when he writes that, in the intentional presence of music, "we feel ourselves within another person's ambit" (p. 18). When music moves, it moves us, and when we are moved we participate genuinely in the spiritual (or communal) life that is ours. "Hearing-as" lies at the heart of Scruton's view of music as social communication. It also lies at the heart of his cultural critique. It allows him to say that even a work that is composed "un- naturally"-perhaps an atonal or serial composition-might still be heard "latently," as "musically," "tonally," or "naturally" organized (pp. 294ff.).

In other words, Scruton is sensitive and sensible enough not to want to dismiss, say, Schoenberg's works as unmusical. But for what reason would he judge as unmusical the experimental nonorganizations of John Cage, for example? Because they are not tonally organized? not naturally organized? Because they cannot (by anyone?) be heard as tonally organized or as naturally organized? Might one not interpret Cage's works as remedial attempts to show by radical means that the production of high, European music had reached the limits of artificial and institutional organization, and that it was time to turn to a more natural (indeed universal) play of natural sounds? Might it be that what differentiates Scruton's conservatism from Cage's radicalism is the trust they have in the naturalness of the listener's intentional organization? One might say that whereas Cage did not trust the intentional organization of the sound world into the institutionalized musical world, Scruton does. Cage's works (4'33" especially) forced listeners to question the overdependence their intentional constructions of sound had come to have on established forms of institutional (concert hall) organization. But is not Scruton claiming the same thing for his philosophical work (and perhaps even for his own musical works he tells us he has recently been composing)? Scruton would presumably add that if we had the right kind of institutional organization-one that was based on nature, reason, or tradition-there would be no need to sever the dependence between how we naturally listen and institutional organization. But Cage, too, could claim this, even if he had a different view about the kind of organization desired.

We are approaching the real difference between Scruton and the producers of peripheral examples of music. Scruton sets these examples aside because of his (and therefore anyone's) inability to hear the sound or noise worlds as musical worlds. They cannot be heard as exhibiting the kind of tonal organization that tells us something about "the very life that is ours." But peripheral works

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-and Cage's are exemplary-are often composed to tell us something about the life that is ours (perhaps by showing us how far our imaginations can take us). It is just that the life that is ours is not always mirrored in an idealized form of intentional organization or in a tradition of canonic examples. Sometimes it is shown better in the works that shatter that mirror. Scruton likes to shatter mirrors too, but he does it by speaking from the purported authority of the center. The tradition of tonality is "our" tradition, he asserts; it is the most rich and fertile that has ever existed. Cage, by contrast, spoke from the periphery, often deliberately to lampoon the centrists.

At this point in my critical summary of Scruton's view, I have only reached the end of his first chapter. Yet this chapter is certainly the most important one, because it sets out the first principles from which everything else-especially his controversial final chapter on culture-is intended to follow. My point in focusing on this first chapter of pure principles is, again, to demon- strate how much of the final chapter is already presupposed by it, a presupposi- tion that is shown by what Scruton allows into his account and what he leaves out. Perhaps, I should reiterate, readers should read the last chapter first so as not to be misled by the purported purity of the metaphysics dominating the first 456 pages.

Through repetitive technique, Scruton encourages us to read each of the chapters following the first as an elaboration of all that is involved in our intentional ordering of musical space, an ordering that differentiates this space from our basic experience of sound. "We should not," he writes (while referring us to chapter 1 for the argument), "attribute to music the kind of experience that is made available already by sound." The experience of sound "is only part, and not the most mysterious part, of the experience of music" (p. 50). Scruton now explains the mystery of music through a theory of metaphor (chap. 3): What distinguishes sound from musical worlds is that the latter alone are deeply filled with meaning that is intentional, metaphorical, heard in the sounds. Only rational or human animals are capable of hearing (through acts of the imagination) metaphorical or musical meaning in sound worlds. A comparable claim was most succinctly made by Eduard Hanslick: even if music is founded on nature, it is not found in it. Bird song is not music. Scruton is less worried about metaphor than was Hanslick: it allows him to move all the way from a sober commitment to musical syntax to music's expressive import, and eventually to its most profound (human-cosmological) mystery. His account is not without the influence of Roman Ingarden's description of the intentional constitution of the literary work, though Scruton says he is unwilling to commit himself to Ingarden's strata (pp. 371-72).

In chapter 4, on the ontology of musical works, Scruton argues that works are fully identifiable through their specific notational systems, although these systems do not represent the works' meanings. Those meanings are not

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represented at all. Rather, they are expressed in the intentional activity of listeners who hear the sound-patterns as musical. Of course, music might have representational content (Scruton wants to accommodate opera and Lieder), but when works are heard as musical works, what matters is expression, not representation. Thus, he concludes, the work qua musical work is just the set of salient features that "contribute to its tonal organization: the organization that we hear, when we hear sounds as tones" (p. 110).

"Salience" aside, the word "contribute" reveals the pervasive ambiguity in Scruton's account between music's being tonally organized and its being heard as such. Remember that, for Scruton, nontonally organized music can still sometimes be heard (metaphorically speaking?) as tonally organized. Yet he also seems to allow that certain kinds of organization-presumably those that purportedly bring ruin to "our" culture---cannot be heard this way. Hence musical meaning cannot be all metaphor or merely a product of "hearing-as"; it must also be contingent on a work's structure. Scruton allows this, though he will not commit himself to a closed description of what the right or wrong structure is or could be. The most he will say is that, traditionally or paradig- matically, this structure has been tonally organized. But is he really able to say anything more about the relationship between music's organization and its being heard with such?

Scruton says more-much more-in his book. He offers a rich and de- tailed account of rhythm, melody, key, harmony, and so on. But still I find that each time he draws a philosophical conclusion, I am pulled away from his musical concept of "tonality" to a much vaguer metaphysical concept that accom- modates all and only the musical works that "make sense." Remember, only musical works that make sense reveal the life that is ours. So the question remains, can he be any more specific about the relation between his musical concept of "tonality" and his metaphysical concept of "making sense"? I don't think he can.

He could, were he to appeal to psychological, sociological, or historical de- scriptions, but he won't do this: "A philosophy of music offers neither psychological explanations nor critical recommendations. It attempts to say what music is, prior to any explanation or amplification of our musical experience" (p. 35). But what is left at this point prior to such explanation or amplification other than pure, and perhaps trivial, principles? Here is such a basic principle: that a musical work makes sense when its "salient features" allow listeners to transform a sound world into a musical world. Does this principle have any in- formative substance? If we gave it some substance by appeal to the historical development and variations in existing tonal systems, would we still be thinking purely philosophically? When Scruton wavers between metaphysical principles of ordering and empirically substantive claims about tonality, is he transgressing the philosophical? And if he concedes that he is, for what reason can he dismiss theories of psychology, history, and so on as irrelevant? Scruton

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answers, reasonably, that we should only thicken (with substantive informa- tion) our concepts when absolutely necessary: "We must... proceed with the greatest caution, if we are to introduce so theory-laden a concept where as yet we have no phenomenon that stands in need of it" (p. 219). But, in reverse, how thin or philosophically pure can a concept be made before it loses touch with the phenomenon under scrutiny? Scruton remains confident that his philosophy never loses touch. Why? Basically because his concepts always match-by design, it appears-the central instances of "our" tradition.

Claiming the authority of the center, Scruton is able to move swiftly and consistently through his book, all the time supporting conservative arguments of expression, composition, form, content, performance, and finally culture. For every argument, in every chapter, he reiterates the same principle. For example: for music to be expressive, it must be experienced as music and thus heard with understanding, and to hear with understanding is to hear accord- ing to natural principles of ordering (see chap. 6). Or: for music to be success-

fully composed, composers must observe the regularities in musical expression such that the gestures match the form (see chap. 10). But what happens, again, when Scruton actually exemplifies these principles? Does he show anything more than his own aesthetic preferences, which he is convinced he shares with other "persons of taste"? Certainly, his principles allow significant variations in how composers, performers, and listeners make sense of music, match gesture to form, and produce and experience regularities. But, still, are these philosophical principles really sufficient to determine the kinds of variations one wants to admit and those one does not, whoever that knowledgeable "one" happens to be?

Are even Scruton's "first principles" as neutral or as theory-unladen as he takes them to be? Suppose he had derived his central instances of music from the larger class of song and dance rather than from the smaller domain of absolute or purely instrumental music. Would he have spoken so quickly of music as constituting a pure, acousmatic sphere? Or suppose he had started with the performer rather than the "most cultivated" listener. Would he have cared so little about the causal source of musical sounds? Again, Scruton allows that all these cares are quite legitimate in the broad territory of musical activity. His point is only that they are inessential to establishing the philosophical claim based on his model of aesthetic experience, the experience of ordering sounds into music (see p. 169). Why?

Could he allow that different philosophical theories of music might take different tacit assumptions as their starting points and still reach the same place? Probably not. His first principles are metaphysically first; they are more than tacit presuppositions. We might then ask him whether he even wants his philosophy to capture some of the thickness and variation in all the world's musical practices. Surely he would say yes, but only if "thickness" and "variation" allowed for strong determinations of relevance and value. Not everything

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is to be included positively in a philosophy of music, and certainly not those

examples that show music and its philosophy in decline. In rejecting history and all forms of ideological inquiry, he writes:

The category of the aesthetic is a philosopher's invention. It came into being, not because of some oft-encountered metaphysical problem, nor through some puzzling usage which philosophy alone could be called on to straighten out. On the contrary, the problems of aesthetics were discovered by philosophers, in the course of shaping the ideas of aesthetic interest, aesthetic judgement, and aesthetic experience. (p. 219)

Presumably Scruton is arguing that the category of the aesthetic was "in- vented" because the problems of aesthetics were discovered, and philosophical problems (or "questions," as he puts it earlier [p. 98]) are, in his view, eternal: "Our ability to notice philosophical questions may change with historical con- ditions," he concedes; "the questions themselves do not" (p. 98). I think it relevant that he remains silent here on the status of the "answers" to these questions.

I do not want to conclude merely that Scruton has left too much out of his musical aesthetics. That is not, in itself, an interesting argument. Rather, my criticism has been designed to identify a fracture, almost a paradox, in his account that is revealed whenever he sets something aside as philosophically irrelevant. This fracture has appeared before in the philosophical enterprise. Generally put: the more pure a particular philosophy claims to be, the more impure it usually reveals itself; the more vehemently philosophers claim to be distanced, the more they usually prove themselves involved; the more totaliz- ing they claim their account to be, the more they usually have to put aside.

Note how Scruton engages in this philosophical act of putting things aside as he sets up the more tormented claims of his final chapter. Like musical experience itself, a philosophy of music is redemptive, he announces. It inspires and consoles us, so long as it is "unencumbered by the debris that drifts through the world of life" (p. 122). He later justifies his claim this way: aesthetic experience, like religious experience, aspires toward a condition of disin- terest, a condition that signifies a genuine participation in our world, orientated toward salvation, beauty, and truth. Anything that does not so as- pire to salvation, beauty, and truth (or Truth) is, for Scruton, debris. How do we disencumber ourselves of it? Scruton has shown us three ways. One is to stand firmly at the center of a tradition and set aside the periphery. Another is to standardize and idealize a past tradition of musical activity in order to give it the appearance of having evolved in harmony with nature. Yet another is to see the intentional construction of musical worlds, the filling in of metaphor and mysterious meaning, as a "pure" and "clean" activity of the imagination. None of these defensive or desperate strategies is particularly new, nor does Scruton intend them to be. They are supposed to pull us back to a pre-

Copernican world view. Richard Wagner, for example, sometimes urged simi-

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lar strategies, and this comparison helps situate Scruton's work in a more general post-Copernican tradition of philosophy that attempts to revive a pre- Copernican tradition. It also situates Scruton's work in a philosophical tradition that sets aside the so-called debris of human life to help articulate a utopian project for the future of humanity.

That Scruton works in this tradition does not particularly surprise me. I am not even surprised that he listens to music to help him escape his anxieties about the present world. What does surprise me is the philosophical confidence he has in his strategy of putting so much aside in order to preserve the al- legedly straight path from first principles to a philosophy of modern culture. Again, the issue is less with what he puts aside (though I have objections to that too) than with the uncritical assertiveness with which he does it. For with each instance of this uncritical assertiveness, from his very first line to his last, he renders his apparently straight philosophy conservatively crooked. Scruton shows, despite every intention not to do so, that the center is not straight, it only seems so. Similarly, with his claims of naturalness or of the pure activities of the imagination. Scruton has made his idealization too easy. Those who are not taken in by the ease or neatness of Scruton's account would be justified in thinking that he could have achieved far more philosophically had he said far less. (A philosophy starting from central or paradigmatic examples does have a long and important philosophical pedigree.) However, had he said far less, perhaps he wouldn't have got "all the way" from his first philosophical principles to his philosophy of modern culture. But perhaps a project that tries to get "all the way" to culture by purely philosophical means is misconceived to begin with. For what sense can we make of pure culture, and do we really desire it?

LYDIA GOEHR

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398 journal of the american musicological society · give up insisting on the presentation of a...

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