Our Music, Our Higher Selves

CSS managing editor Lindsay Eberhardt recently examined the nature of architecture and the truths our cities’ buildings reveal about our nature. In response, CSS research fellow in music studies, Benjamin Crocker, offers a parallel story about the nature of the musical arts.

By the end of the CD era, I had worn out my sole physical copy of the great French conductor Pierre Monteux’s 1961 recording of Cesar Franck’s Symphony in D Minor. The internet mercifully intervened: Monteux’s interpretation with the unsurpassed mid-century Chicago Symphony Orchestra now lives on YouTube.

Monteux and the C.S.O. did a great service to the musical world in recording the masterworks of the western canon during his tenure. But as they were recording Franck’s symphony at 220 South Michigan Avenue, bulldozers were moving in to the west, right behind Symphony Hall. Chicago’s iconic Federal Building was being reduced to a pile of rubble. Like the Franck symphony, the building was a first-class cultural product from the late 19th century. It represented the Midwest's premier example of the French Beaux-Arts style that had once characterized much of the country’s civic architecture.

 [Beaux-Arts Chicago Federal Building]

The irony was stark: Monteux, the great French artist, had become a beloved conductor for American audiences. But as he was perfecting his craft in America’s preeminent musical institution on South Michigan, across the street on South Dearborn a great French architectural style (once the darling of American city planners) was ground into dust by America’s preeminent institution—the federal government. In its place, came the Kluczynski and Dirksen Federal Buildings and Courthouses—two of the most menacing objects ever to dominate Chicago’s skyline.

[The monolith from 2001: A Space Odyssey]

With Pierre Monteux’s record still ringing in my ears, I recently conducted Franck’s Symphony in D Minor for the first time. It is still one of my very favorite works. Since first hearing it seventeen years ago, I have thought about it at least once a week—sometimes for hours, but most often for a few shimmering seconds, long enough for the 3rd movement cello melody to waft lazily through my head, or to be startled by a heroic trumpet call. It transfixes me in the same way it did listeners a century ago: in 1899, the Boston Herald noticed that the symphony exerted a “certain weird fascination” on the public.

For half of the 20th century, the American public shared my fascination. The New York Times reported last year that Franck’s Symphony in D was the Beatles before there was the Beatles. In that blissful time when art still held primacy over the artist, Franck’s forty-five minutes of triumphal orchestral lyricism easily filled stadiums in East Coast capital cities.

[Cesar Franck (1822-1890)]

So, what happened? Should we despair that the music that fills today’s stadiums is of a significantly lower intellectual and spiritual order?

The deep appeal of civilization’s greatest music lies in its beauty and elusiveness. Franck’s Symphony, a stunningly captivating aural picture, shows us how. It sings lustily, mourns sorrowfully, and dances irrepressibly. Its first movement moves between menacing and joyful. The second is sacred and even, at times, medieval. The third movement drives the listener to joyful ecstasy during each and every listening.

Despite my long-held love of the work, I’m at a loss when trying to describe what the piece is truly about. No one can say if it is properly Belgian, French, or German, or if it has indeed become American. Nor can anyone say if it is sacred or secular. And musicologists are divided on what musical era it represents. Composed in 1888, the Symphony appears on the surface to be a wholly Romantic work, but the three movement structure suggests a nod to simplicity and that Franck is paying subtle homage to a more distant Classical style. 

But that ignorance doesn’t really matter. Not knowing what the piece is frees us to know what the piece does to us when we hear it. It uplifts us; it unveils a cast of noble characters and invites us to journey with them. The work gives us enough time and space to learn who these characters are, without ever fully seeing them. We adventure with them through the two outer movements—soaring above the clouds with the trumpets, running faster than humanly possible with the violins, and serenading lovers with the wind instruments. In the middle, there is respite—some time to meditate, and to pray.

[Sir Roger Scruton (1944 - 2020): Like Plato in antiquity, and Adam Smith in the Scottish Enlightenment, Scruton was deeply concerned with the question of music and moral character]

Sir Roger Scruton argued that these unique kinds of expressive capacities reveal a work’s innate musical potentiality. Great music contains beauty without literal meaning. It presents itself as ineffable: it doesn’t tell us explicitly what it is. Rather, it demands that we take the musical journey and work that question out on our own. We listeners must hold ourselves in collaborative sympathy between the work’s phrases, entering its argument without ever having its facts dictated to us by the composers. Through this process, we practice our highest reasoning faculties—we sift truth from falsehood, tie off loose ends (thank you, Plato), and habituate ourselves toward the higher character the music presents to us (thank you, Aristotle). Great music then, is dialectic. It is an exterior harness to the soul’s self-conversation and can only reveal its ineffable meaning to the listener by way of the listener’s individual agency.

This can be difficult to grasp, because it is something we take for granted, or at least don’t realize is happening when we listen to music. Consider this: a piece of music where the chords remain the same, the beat remains the same, and (God-forbid) the voice is auto-tuned to remain the same, is essentially dictated to the listener. Listening to it requires no collaborative effort. There is no conversation happening within the music. And without this conversation, an authentically sympathetic journey is impossible. This remains the case even if the work’s emotive nature convinces us we are listening sympathetically to any given song (thank you Taylor Swift).

In this way, the great works of the classical tradition are akin to the great works of classical philosophy. The great composers lead us dialectically. They take us by the hand and interrogate our souls by way of the intellect in a similar way to that of Socrates in Plato’s Republic. Through sympathetic interrogation, they encourage, aid, guide, and sometimes even cajole us to the discovery of truth and beauty, but they never dictate its terms to us absolutely.

I return now to Lindsay’s point from earlier this month: bad music, like bad architecture, reveals an uncomfortable truth about who we are. It reveals that we are fallen, ugly, battered, and in the case of mainstream popular music, dumb. Would it be absurd then to conclude that exposure to bad music would make us bad people?

Socrates himself believed that it did. Indeed, it is on the topic of music that he provokes one of his first—and perhaps most memorable—dialectic expositions within The Republic, when he notes that protecting the souls of the young from corruption will require censoring the city’s music. Countenancing this notion is a tall order for citizens of free and modern societies. Allan Bloom, the great translator of The Republic, and author of The Closing of the American Mind, wrote that his students at Chicago, Yale and Cornell “tended to be surprised that music above all else should be the theme of [Plato’s] censorship when what seemed to them to be the likely candidates were science, politics, and sex.”

[Socrates: In Plato’s Republic, Socrates challenges his companions to form the city in speech with certain musical modalities prohibited}

So, should we defy Socrates’ warning and permit ourselves to listen to “bad” music, if only because, as Lindsay illustrates, artistic expression of man’s fallenness will help us better understand that fallenness?

In reality, the decision has already been made. Pop, and the other gradations of “bad” music–whether they be the shoddy imitations of classical-lite compositions, the death cults of deep-metal, or just plain lazy artistry in any genre–are here to stay. That’s ok. The world won’t be rid of their ilk, but their presence needn’t precipitate our moral disintegration either. We should listen to the music our fallen modern culture has generated. And, if I dare say so, we should even enjoy it on occasion. I am a man of the late 20th century and so cannot divorce myself from the synthesizer or disco ball. I will listen to ABBA for one day every summer and I will enjoy it—for one day every summer.

But there must be a limit to our consumption, a limit to our tolerance, and a limit to how regularly we expose our children to music of this kind. As Socrates showed us, there is risk in exposing the young to art that encourages the destructive tendencies latent within every human soul.

When we engage in the arts in general and music in particular we should be most concerned with the problem that Aristotle draws our attention to in his Ethics: the habituation of the soul. We need to habituate ourselves to the beautiful, the uplifting, the heroic and noble, and that’s impossible if we’re engaging in artistic practice that denigrates these virtues. When we choose to listen to pop music, we are habituating ourselves to life as mere repetitions of bland stereotypes. We are, in essence, telling ourselves that we are as poor as the form we step into as listeners—as brief in intellect as the passage of a radio hit.

But when we listen to Beethoven, to Bach, to Brahms, or to my old friend Cesar Franck, we commit ourselves to extolling human virtue, not diminishing it. We are telling ourselves that our powers of reasoning should reach for the broad and expansive form of the great symphonists. We are telling ourselves that our creativity might hustle to keep pace with the inventive genius of a Mozart, not a Madonna, and that our innate tendency toward nobility might owe more to Beethoven than Britney. When we listen well then, we are telling ourselves that we are our higher selves.

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Ben Crocker is research fellow in music studies, and music editor, at Common Sense Society