I suppose if we were to tell our friend Jeeves that there is a crisis in the arts, he would say something like, “I had received that impression, sir.” Ours is a society possessed by vulgarity and loudness, and much of our music is notable, if that’s the right word, for being vulgar, and loud, or at the very least lacking in beauty. I could go into the grisly details, but you all know what I am talking about.
I used to be a music critic, so I keep files on these things, and in preparation for tonight’s ceremony I went to the clip file and found this:
Our composers are not altogether on the level of the Muses themselves. The Muses, we may be assured, would never… make a pretended presentation of a single theme out of a medley of human voices, animal cries, noises of machinery, and other things. Whereas our mere human composers tend to be only too fond of provoking the contempt of those of us who, in the phrase of Orpheus, are “ripe for delight,” by this kind of senseless and complicated confusion.
It sounds like a review of the latest opera by Philip Glass, set to a libretto by Howard Stern. In fact, it’s Plato, from Book II of his Laws. And Plato could well have been thinking of gangsta rap and such eminent artists as Snoop Doggy Dogg when he wrote, in the Republic, “there could be no greater detriment to the morals of a community than a gradual perversion of chaste and modest music.” My point is that the crisis in the arts—the one that has us so confused we really need to tell Jeeves about it—has been around for a long time.
At the end of the 1980s, August Everding, then general director of Bavarian State Theaters, gave a speech in which he said,
Art does not function smoothly. It jabs spokes into the wheel to test the quality of the material. Our emissions are often toxic, because it is our duty not to create the illusion of a clean reality but to show how polluted reality is and thus to provide an opportunity for purification. It is our job to rouse and arouse people around us so that they can help change things for the better.
Now, Everding was and is a formidable administrator and a gifted director, even if his views are all too typical of a man who has gotten used to receiving 85 percent of his operating budget from public funds. The problem is that from here it is just a short fall into anarchy, on one side, or political correctness on the other. Both are dangerous. We must beware of those who would turn art to their own ends, who no longer are content to portray characters or “arouse” emotions, but insist on using art as a cudgel to hammer us with their convictions and opinions.
Of course composers and other artists should be free to put the stick between the spokes of the wheel. Indeed, there are times when they must do so, as Beethoven did. The arts are one of our best protections against dogmatism of any stripe, and a powerful weapon against complacency. But showing us how rotten reality is and how twisted we are is not their only purpose. Nor is the pursuit of complexity for its own sake a valid aim. Yet that seems to be what most twentieth century art has been about. Process has become synonymous with progress, and a vast array of methodologies—artificially contrived systems and procedures based on mechanical or mathematical concepts—have taken the place of straightforward communication.
Music, by its very nature, has been an easy victim of this trend toward reductionism. To take one prevalent line of twentieth century musical thinking as an example, it doesn’t make a difference whether a melody goes backwards or forwards, it is the same idea. In case that isn’t clear, let me repeat: idea same the is it, forwards or backwards goes melody a whether. Or, as a true proceduralist would say: “.aedi emas eht si ti, sdrawrof ro sdrawkcaB”
Just as dancers must deal with gravity and painters must work with surface and light, just as novelists, playwrights, and poets must consider syntax and the temporal implications of narrative, so musicians must acknowledge the physics of sound and the rules of harmony. We are learning new things every day, but already in the fifth century B.C., Plato knew enough to propose, in Timaeus, that “the soul of the universe is united by musical concord.” Taking his cue from the same dialogue, St. Isidore of Seville stated in his Etymologiarum (ca. A.D. 633): “Thus without music no discipline can be perfect, for there is nothing without it. The very universe… is held together by a certain harmony of sounds, and the heavens themselves are made to revolve by the modulation of harmony.” One wonders what he would have said if he had known as much as we do about the family resemblance between the laws that govern sound and those that apply to gravity, light, and the rest of the electromagnetic spectrum.
But music must discipline itself if it is to recover the notion of harmony, and all that that implies, let alone lead other disciplines toward perfection. What should the composer’s guiding principle be? Jeeves would know in a flash. Often, after he had come up with an idea that was a real corker and left everybody wondering how he had done it, he would simply brush all the commotion off with the remark, “We aim to give satisfaction, sir….”
On receiving the first Aspen Award, in 1964, Benjamin Britten put his answer in almost the same words: “It is a good thing to please people, even if only for today. That is what we should aim at—pleasing people today as seriously as we can, and letting the future look after itself.”
The true artist must seek to give pleasure, to create things expressive of beauty and truth. As we know, the truth can sometimes be troubling. It can also be powerful, dramatic, moving, consoling, and celebratory. This concept of the artist’s mission was what guided Mozart, and Michelangelo. And in their hands artistic expression became, in effect, praise of creation and of the Creator. But what of music in particular? It need not always edify, but it should seek to entertain. It should develop our capacity for feeling, deepen our compassion, and further our quest for and understanding of what Aristotle called “the perfect end of life.” In short, it, too, should seek to draw us closer, not to mere “reality,” but to God.
“Innocent pleasures are not only in harmony with the perfect end of life, they also provide relaxation,” Aristotle wrote in Book VII of his Politics, in a passage devoted to music. In assigning to music such an important role in the functioning of the well-governed state, Aristotle was merely acknowledging what was known to him and his contemporaries and has been forgotten by too many of us, namely that music can have a beneficial influence over the character and the soul, and can show a person what is possible and becoming in life.
But if Plato, Aristotle, and Isidore of Seville seem to embody too much of the gravitas we have been urged to avoid on this occasion, let me turn, in closing, to P. G. Wodehouse himself, who wrote more than 100 books, collaborated on eighteen musicals, lived to be ninety-three, and still has us laughing. We do well to celebrate his zest for life and his remarkable accomplishments at this banquet. Many of us could look high and low and not find a better model for our careers. Here was someone who understood that delight is, and should be, at the heart of creation.
I am flattered to have been thought worthy of an award named for his most sagacious character, and honored to stand here among the other first recipients. Of course, I don’t deserve it.
To which Jeeves, I’m sure, would say, “Quite so, sir. Quite so.”