the battle to summarise my dissertation continues!

My dissertation will either be entitled “Towards an Objective Aesthetic in music” or “On the cultivation of taste in music,” depending on what conclusions I reach based on my research.

In the piece I want to assess difficult arguments that present themselves when judging the quality of music. If music is a subjective experience how can we argue that some music is better than other music? What is bad music and what makes it bad? What is beautiful in music and what makes it that? Is music meant to be useful or beautiful in itself? 

While some of us may want to argue that Beethoven is a “better” composer than Katy Perry, what do we mean to say by better? Katy Perry is better for dancing and putting on at student parties. So is Stevie Wonder and he is a more sophisticated composer, but the quality of the music doesn’t reflect how useful it is for dancing. And then, no matter how many Adornos there are to demand that people want more out of art than immediacy, most people who listen to a Beethoven symphony will do it to help them relax while taking a bath.

It is hard to argue that there is an objective judgement of quality because all aesthetic experiences are in the subjective experience of the experiencer. On the other hand we know we know there is a distinction in the judgement of saying music is 'bad' as opposed to 'not my kind of thing.' 

  

This is the distinction between preference and taste. One has the right to prefer whatever they wish, but one ought to have a taste for what is fine.  The contention is that a great work does not yield its secrets upon the first listen.

When a qualified critic writes an essay in praise of a poem it is in the hope of showing others the beauty he sees in the art. A beckoning for them to share in a deeper knowledge of the joy that is available to them. Yes we often find “the beauty of simplicity,” but if you can recognise sophistication when you hear it you can be more appreciative of simplicity as well. The critic has to have a more cultivated taste than the public in order to offer genuine insight. If it’s all subjective then cultivating a taste is meaningless.

It could be that beauty is something that goes beyond the faculty of reason alone. We don’t use our eyes to hear, or our ears to see, and perhaps our sense of beauty extends beyond our sense of rationality to explain it. The trained ear experiences the nuances of a virtuoso playing a Bach piece on the experiential level, not by reason alone, while the untrained ear may miss them entirely.

In order to present my case I will be researching the history of the philosophy of art, familiarising myself particularly with arguments from those who focused on music such as Hanslick, Adorno, Dalhaus, Scruton and Kivy, but also acknowledging the views of big philosophers who wrote more generally (Kant, Hume, Mill, Aristotle.) I will present and address arguments to give my work some sense of historical context and to show that I am meaning to advance the dialogue by adding something new to what has already been written. It is important to me that the piece is philosophically rigorous so I will be making an effort to ensure that I address counter arguments that already exist to any points I want to raise so that the dissertation itself presents a dialectic of ideas that familiarises the reader with the history of these debates – they don’t have to have read everything that has already been written to have the foreknowledge required to make a good judgement because the relevant background will be contained and addressed within the text.

It could be that beauty is something that goes beyond reason alone. We don’t use our eyes to hear or our ears to see, and perhaps our sense of beauty extends beyond our sense of rationality to explain it. 

If having a trained ear raises your expectations and makes you less easily satisfied perhaps we best avoid it, there must be some net gain here!