What you dance to is dangerous, according to Roger Scruton in his essay: The Decline of Musical Culture. The way you sway your hips, rock and dip suggest who you are and what you stand for. When you dance, you are sympathizing with the music and its messages. So what do you sympathize with? What do you think you should sympathize with? If you are unsure, philosopher Roger Scruton certainly has an answer; “Taste in music matters, and [the] search for objective musical values is one part of our search for the right way to live…”(Scruton 125). Scruton recommends the “moral refinement of Bach, Mozart, and Schubert” (Scruton 132). However, if you disagree with Scruton’s taste and would rather listen to Led Zeppelin or Nirvana, award winning philosopher, Theodore Gracyk offers an essay you may enjoy. In Music’s Worldly Uses, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and To Love Led Zeppelin, Gracyk challenges Scruton, in a “family” manner, with his belief that the exaltation of classical composers “seems to be a pretty limited thing to think about if you want to think about music” (Gracyk 142) and asserts that we use music to express our own identities and to give us an opportunity to imaginatively explore other identities. Both philosophers suggest that something can be said about your disposition and the disposition of your community based on what music you sympathize with. Were Grayck and Scruton to assess the disposition of the listening community of the popular rock artist St. Vincent, how would they characterize them? “The Bed”, off her 2009 album, Actor, offers insight into the sympathies of her community.
Art matters, according to Scruton, because, “through the free play of sympathy in fiction our emotions can be educated and also corrupted.” So it is interesting that St. Vincent is influenced by popular film fiction and uses it to communicate with her audience. In an interview with the popular music magazine Pitchfork, St. Vincent described her process during the scoring of Actor: “I would just watch films on silent and think, ‘How can I score this scene?’ as a writing exercise. So I envisioned the whole thing to be a film score” (Pitchfork). Scruton would pay particular attention to the kind of films she envisioned her audience would dance to. He asserts that:
In responding to a piece of music we are being led through a series of gestures which gain their significance from the intimation of community. As with dance, a kind of gravitational field is created, which shapes the emotional life of the one who enters it. We move for a while along the orbit of a formalized emotion and practice its steps. Our truncated movements are also acts of attention: we do what we do in response to the sounds that we hear, when we attend to them aesthetically. If this is what it is to hear the meaning, then hearing the meanings is inseparable from the aesthetic experience.(Scruton 125).
According to Scruton, what matters about St. Vincent’s “The Bed” would be the meaning found in the gestures and dance that the music leads one through. So how do people dance to St. Vincent? It is important to point out that when Scruton refers to dancing, he is referring to both the performed kind as well as “the kind of dancing [resembling] our experience in the concert hall, which is itself a kind of truncated dance” (Scruton124). This can be the way we sway to music, or tap our feet, and when we do this truncated dance our “whole being is absorbed by the movement of the music, and moves with it, compelled by incipient gestures of imitation. The object of this imitation is life-- life imagined in the form of music.” He is claiming that there is a sympathy that is conveyed through the gesture that incorporates not only the dancer, but the “sympathetic space” of the entire community as well (Scruton 123). In the case of The Bed, the sympathetic space, the community, and the intimated meaning is sympathizing with the nostalgia of Disney and all that it represents.
Gracyk would agree that gestures to music suggest sympathy with the meaning of the music, but would add that the meaning is hinged to the “informed listener,” not every listener. It is not in the actual formal elements of the music—the tonic and harmony— that the listener is sympathizing with, but in the intentional realm. He would say that only those who are familiar with St. Vincent’s musical references to Disney would be able to be a part of the sympathetic community. In the same way that most contemporary audiences could not sympathize with Mozart or Schubert because they simply do not know how to listen to them. Gracyk says: “When I sit down to write, I have the option of working to the percussive flow of a Javanese gamelan orchestra, to the bleating trumpets of a Tibetan Tantric Buddhist ritual, or to a choir trilling traditional Chinese folk songs. But that music wouldn’t really yield a musical experience to me, because I don’t really know how to listen to it” (Gracyk 137). He might say that St. Vincent and her audience know how to listen to Disney film scores, not Milhaud, Schoenberg or Stravinsky. Gracyk gave the example of the scene from the 2000 film Almost Home in which a homesick rocker and his band mates take a sullen drive back to their little community after a tumultuous tour. The radio begins to play Elton John’s Tiny Dancer and at first, only a few sing. The protagonist joins in and then his mates and road crew follow suit. He is told: “You are home” (Gracyk 144). The same effect happens in St. Vincent’s music. When her flutes flutter and ghastly violins flurry, nostalgia and whimsy are induced in the informed listeners. She uses these devices as compositional and emotional indicators for the audience that references a strong, familiar sensation that is unexpected and fantastic. The common characteristic of this response is the defining element of the relationship within the community of listeners. It is in this way that one can begin to see how St. Vincent’s music can describe a person or community through a familiar nostalgia that one must have experienced in order to be a part of the informed community. He says that, “music does not yield its meaning to listeners outside the continuing culture that gives the music its significance” (Gracyk 142).
There is also juxtaposition in “The Bed” within its formal components. The music begins with the rhythmic melody of a modern, Fender Rhodes sound, and the classical percussion instrument, the tympani. Harp and clarinet enter in polyphony, yet the harp plays block chords in common tension and release often heard in Western Classical music. These progressions are considered to have their first and most prominent articulation in Bach (Bach). Gracyk would say that the song requires an ear for European harmony, and familiarity with Disney film scores and contemporary indie rock music. Although the structure and emotional landscape are arranged with the juxtapositions and theatrical freedom of indie rock, the instrumentation and arrangement are firmly rooted in classical tradition. Scruton would have to say that the sympathetic gestures that accompany this song can be paralleled with the “moral refinement of Bach “(Scruton 132). As the song continues, anchored by the tympani, woodwinds, strings, and organ accompany the leading chords that suggest deceptive cadences which pace the overall harmonic progression. Her voice leading on top leads the ear to suggest anxiety but suggests harmonic resolve on the tonic, mirroring the feeling of accompanying lyrics: “We’re sleeping underneath our beds to scare the monsters out. With our dear daddy’s Smith and Wesson. We’ve got to teach them all a lesson.” Scruton would have to admit that this is not the “brief [exhalations], which cannot develop since they are swamped by rhythm, and have no voice-leading role” (Scruton 132), as is prevalent in many styles of contemporary music. About the aesthetic (formal) arrangement of the song, Gracyk would note that “this music is multiculturalism in action. It reveals a cosmopolitan orientation in which cultural boundaries are continually erased and then redrawn, integrating diverse traditions without erasing differences and without any expectation that one dimension of one musical culture should rule supreme” (Gracyk 142). With an understanding of “The Bed”, Gracyk would be inclined to comment that the multiculturalism and juxtaposition can be extended to describe the community that listens to this music. The audience is informed about this new tradition of mixing classical and contemporary traditions, in the same way that the grunge community was informed in the distorted, expressive style of Nirvana. “The Bed” is about freedom in compositional expression—dipping in and out of traditions at will, Disney and Bach, with no concern of expectation or musical hierarchy. A quote from Gracyk about Led Zeppelin can be used to describe this music and its audience: “It abandons the presumption that there is one musical tradition that is inherently superior to all others and with it the view that there is only one right way to live. It deflates the utopianism of Scruton’s insistence on music as a realm of pure abstraction” (Gracyk 142).
St. Vincent is showing that she and her informed listeners are not ignorant of the past or its traditions. She uses, at will, references to contemporary and Classical culture. Perhaps she and her community are telling traditionalists like Scruton that it is he who is detrimental to society because of his myopic view of music. Perhaps it is he who is detrimental to the potential of pure music and higher culture. Gracyk certainly would be reinforced by St. Vincent. For many musicians, Scruton says “tonality has become a ‘dead language’, or a language that can be used only ironically—maybe even sarcastically—so as to neutralize the banality of its overexploited terms”(Scruton 121). St. Vincent shows us the myopic nature of Scruton’s point. She shows us that she can infuse classical tonality with indie rock juxtaposition with skill; in her new community, no one musical culture rules supreme.
Work Cited
"Bach, The Well-Tempered Clavier « Earsense Blog." Earsense—home. Web. 01 Mar. 2011. .
Gracyk, Theodore. "How I Learned To Love Led Zeppelin." Arguing about Art: Contemporary Philosophical Debates. Ed. Alex Neill and Aaron Ridley. London: Routledge, 2008. 137-48. Print.
"Pitchfork: St. Vincent Talks New Album, Aerosmith, Twilight." Pitchfork: Home. Web. 28 Feb. 2011. .
Scruton, Roger. "The Decline of Musical Culture." Arguing about Art: Contemporary Philosophical Debates. Ed. Alex Neill and Aaron Ridley. London: Routledge, 2008. 121-35. Print.
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