We are more musically sophisticated than ever before. But, argues Joseph Bottum, the relentless soundtracking of our lives has left us saturated in meaningless noise
The first time anyone acknowledged music as a weapon may have been during the 1989 invasion of Panama, when American soldiers bombarded the Vatican envoy's house with rock'n'roll to chivvy out the fugitive Manuel Noriega. But the truth is that we are all terrorised with music nowadays, everywhere and all the time.
It is not so much the high-school kids parading down the street with their boom boxes, the college students partying away a Saturday afternoon, the insomniac in the next apartment pacing up and down to Beethoven at 3am. It is rather the merciless stream of Sixties golden oldies drenching suburban malls, the disco-revival radio thumping out Donna Summer in the back of a taxi, the tastefully muted Andrew Lloyd Webber seeping from speakers in the men's room. We are drowning in sanctioned music, an obligatory orchestration cramming every inch of public space.
Perhaps it was Hollywood that taught us to expect that life should come with background music, a melodic commentary on the movie of our lives. But we are soundtracked nowadays with a relentless demand for only the most obvious and officially appropriate emotions: you should be as bright and bubblegummy as The Monkees' "I'm a Believer" when you shop for a new pair of blue jeans; you ought to be as sophisticatedly ironic as Frank Sinatra's "They've Got an Awful Lot of Coffee in Brazil" when you go out to eat; there's something wrong if you aren't as moody and melancholy as the Cowboy Junkies' whispery version of "Sweet Jane" when you sit in a midtown bar.
In 1981, Alasdair MacIntyre published After Virtue, his influential attack on the fragments of Enlightenment philosophy that constitute our contemporary moral discourse. But in his devastating account of the rise of 20th-century "emotivism", nearly the only thing he missed was its curious parallel with the rise of recorded music: people first began to imagine that morality was a set of feelings rather than a system of ideas at around the same time as they began to be able to evoke any mood they wanted by putting a record on a gramophone.
The significance of this parallel has gone largely unremarked. When you add up the radio stations, the dingy used-record stores, the $1.3bn market for rap and the $1.9bn spent on revivified country and western, music ranks among the largest industries ever to exist. In the midst of this fantastic investment in an all-enveloping cloud of sound, hardly anyone seems to remember that music stands fairly low on the scale of devices by which we try to understand human experience. A people that takes music as its highest expression has cut itself off from narrative, epic, allegory - the explanatory arts that could put to use the emotions that their music represents.
Contemporary critics typically imagine that the problem lies uniquely in the particular forms of music they happen to dislike. But it doesn't matter how good or bad the music is if we lack any point for the emotions it excites. In a day in which the melodic line of a typical pop song runs fewer than 12 bars, the 32-bar scope of a Broadway number from the Twenties (to say nothing of the 200 bars of a 19th-century symphonic melody) may sound like the solution to our listening woes. But, in fact, the sheer accessibility of things such as those Broadway show tunes - the kind of music sold in expensive boxed CD sets - is what has created our musical problem.
The explanation for why this happened isn't all that complex. Like every art, music naturally grows more sophisticated as its creators and audience grow more educated about a particular form - and then naturally rebels as musicians become sated and listeners prove unable to follow their technical advances.
But this pattern of sophistication and rebellion underwent an odd twist in the 20th century. One cause was the rise of the music business, called into existence by the phonograph and radio stations with airtime to fill. "Concern with the social explication of art has to address the production of art," claimed Theodor Adorno in one of his most dated Marxist rants against the west's commercialised culture - but, in this case, he happens to be right. The appearance of an enormous industry, strenuously trying to predict and create shifts in public taste, meant the wild acceleration of the cycle of sophistication and rebellious return.
A more important cause, however, was the final disappearance of that old shared Beethovenesque belief in the intellectual coherence of human beings and the world. What, nowadays, is music for? We have a name for sophistication and complexity for no purpose: we call it "decadence". But in an age without a coherent public philosophy - a more or less universal agreement about the point of at least the most important things - all sophistication turns out to be purposeless and all complexity ends up as decadence.
In our music-inundated world, we suffer a peculiar, masked decadence: the incredible sophistication of the whole is hidden by the stupidity of the parts; the enormous width is obscured by the shallow depth. In all previous ages, a new musical form succeeded by replacing its predecessors. But now each new form joins its predecessors in our endlessly expanding library of music. This is what Adorno missed when he claimed that the shallowness of western pop songs would make us "forcibly retarded".With our vast knowledge of the range of music, we are the most musically sophisticated people who have ever existed - and ours is an extraordinary kind of sophistication that can never be rejected without creating yet more sophistication, shallower but wider, and yet another musical form to know.
Even those who appreciate music in all its breadth - who can tell Mozart from Haydn, Duke Ellington from Count Basie, Willie Nelson from Waylon Jennings, U2 from REM - must recognise that music cannot express an actual idea. Plenty of ideas exist in music; they are just not what we mean by ideas in any non-musical sense. They express musical techniques and music's root mathematical structure, and quite what these chess-like ideas have to do with what we experience while listening is something no one has ever explained. Music stands, at last, as "evocative", a word whose only other use is in advertisements for expensive eau de cologne. Music is chess drenched with perfume: it's both the most rigorous of arts (that's the chess) and the least rigorous (that's the perfume).
Nor does the addition of words seem to help. "Nothing is capable of being well set to music that is not nonsense," Joseph Addison gibed. The most famous setting of a poem to music remains Friedrich Schiller's "Ode to Joy", which - Freude! Freude! - Beethoven in his Ninth Symphony made sound as though God Himself were speaking. "Ode to Joy" is perfectly serviceable parlour verse, but profound is not exactly the word for it: "He who has a noble wife,/Let him join our mighty song of rejoicing!" And it doesn't magically cross over into profundity when sung by massed choirs backed with roaring timpanis and trilling violins. It only sounds that way. What Schiller becomes in Beethoven's hands is not wise, but only sensible: we grow confused and imagine that we must be having a deep thought because we feel it so deeply.
And yet, this sort of mocking at words set to music is too easy. The most interesting thing is not that millions of us can laugh at the bad lyrics we know, but that millions of us do know the bad lyrics we know. How could we not become ironic when so much of our public knowledge - the shared stuff with which the public mind has to work - consists of thousands of lines of song lyrics? We share an enormous amount of information, and we know it doesn't mean anything, and we smile wryly at one another as we sing along.
You could learn how to live from Woody Guthrie's songs, Bob Dylan once claimed. It isn't true; mostly, what you can learn is how Thirties political radicalism, when fitted to the guitar-chord progressions of West Virginia, can be made to sound like the ancient wisdom of the American soul. But Dylan was nevertheless on to a truth about certain pieces of music.
You can feel that truth in ancient plain-chant and Charles Wesley's hymns. You can sense it in William Byrd's Mass on the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin, Bach's St Matthew Passion and Handel's Messiah. There's an echo lingering in old blues tunes and Mahalia Jackson's gospel. It's there in the Enlightenment confidence that runs from Mozart down to Beethoven, trailing off in Brahms. You can sometimes catch it in folk tunes - the sensation of proceeding from a world where, even if only tragically, God and man and nature still made sufficient sense that there could be a cathartic purpose to the emotion the music evoked.
But our ability to sense this old music's meaningfulness is not the same as an ability to sense its meaning. Its purposefulness is not a purpose; our awareness that it once fitted somewhere is not an awareness of where now to fit it. What does a genuinely tragic folk song tell us, except that we no longer know what to make of tragedy? It's like peering in the window of a room we cannot enter.
In "Peter Quince at the Clavier", Wallace Stevens wrote: "Music is feeling . . . not sound;/And thus it is that what I feel,/Here in this room, desiring you . . . / Is music." Stevens is the American poet most fascinated by formal logic, and he probably intended us to notice that the argument in these lines - "Music is feeling, so my feelings must be music" - commits the fallacy that logicians call illicit conversion: that all cows are mammals doesn't make all mammals cows; that music is feeling doesn't make all feelings music.
Or perhaps Stevens didn't intend us to notice, for this is the fallacy that defines our modern experience: the faith that we can play upon the instruments of ourselves - like DJs, sampling record tracks. It's as though music were trying to illicitly convert us to the belief that each of us is a musician: a professional performer on the organ of our emotional selves, producing the great music of feeling.
The result could not be other than the emotivism that MacIntyre pointed out in After Virtue. How could we not translate everything from a system of ideas judged true or false to a set of emotions judged only good or bad? And just as intelligence turns ironic when reduced to sophistication for no reason, so something peculiar happens to emotion when it has no purpose except to be felt. Do we actually feel - listening, say, to one of Byrd's 16th-century antiphons - the intensity of religious mood felt by his Renaissance audience, who shared a use for that mood? Do we actually feel as much as Beethoven's Enlightenment listeners, for whom his thunder echoed in a landscape of generally agreed upon ideas about God and man and nature?
Adrift on a sea of sound - washed by waves of The Monkees in a clothing store, Frank Sinatra in a cafe, the Cowboy Junkies in a bar - you have to wonder whether Stevens and Adorno didn't have it backwards: the promise to make us performers of the music of ourselves didn't stupefy us intellectually, it stunted us emotionally. After almost a hundred years of being increasingly surrounded by music, public emotions have actually grown thinner, poorer, sadder - as though we were no longer fully capable of feeling what we feel, as though our breadth of musical knowledge were gained by sacrificing depth of musical emotion.
It seems a cruelly small profit on our vast sophistication and wiring of the entire nation for sound. Everyone I know adores music, as I do. But our elevation of a secondary art has pinned us down; it costs us something, for music cannot build a culture, and music today is in the way - keeping us from the higher arts that might aim at a unified idea and a public metaphysics, a purpose and meaning for our all- encircling noise.
Joseph Bottum is the books and arts editor of the American magazine the Weekly Standard
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