The Aesthetics of Music

Roger Scruton. Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1997. 530 pages. Also relevant: Understanding Music (2009), a shorter treatment.

Music is not a sequence of sounds but a sequence of intentions. To listen to music is to follow another mind in the act of choosing — choosing the next note, the next harmonic turn, the next resolution or deferral of resolution — and to approve or question those choices in real time. This is what distinguishes musical listening from the mere perception of organised sound.

The disciplined ear is not born; it is made. It is the product of repeated, attentive listening — the kind of listening that notices when a phrase fails its promise, or when a transition earns what it claims. The education of the ear is a long discipline, and Scruton's argument is that it is worth undertaking.

Scruton defends tonal music against the claim that atonality represents an equivalent or superior mode of musical organisation. His argument is that tonality is not a convention that can be abandoned without loss: it is the natural extension of the harmonic series into musical form, and its abandonment removes the primary means by which music creates meaning — the organisation of tension, expectation, and resolution that makes a sequence of sounds into a musical argument.

This is a contested position in contemporary musicology. The wiki takes no position on the academic debate, but notes that it bears on the practical question of what one should listen to.

Music, Scruton argues, most rewards the disciplined ear — the ear that has been trained, through years of listening, to hear what is happening in a piece of music. This is not the same as technical training, though it is compatible with it. It is the capacity to follow the musical argument: to hear where it has come from, where it is going, and whether it arrives.

The practical implication for the wiki: the canon exists not as a received authority but as a body of work that has consistently rewarded close listening over a long period of time. To begin with that body of work is to begin with the best available evidence for what rewards the disciplined ear.

The canon Scruton treats as central: Bach, Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Schumann, Brahms, Wagner, Mahler, Fauré, Sibelius, Shostakovich, Pärt. These are not the only composers who reward close listening, but they are the ones who have most consistently demonstrated that the rewards of musical listening increase with time and attention.

The Aesthetics of Music is the primary philosophical source for Domain III — Music. The wiki's argument in that domain will treat the canon, listening practice, and the empirical case from Art Cure in parallel — the philosophical and the epidemiological as two approaches to the same claim.