Goehr On Scruton Aesthetics

Review
Reviewed Work(s): The Aesthetics of Music by Roger Scruton

Review by: Lydia Goehr
Source: Journal of the American Musicological Society, Vol. 52, No. 2 (Summer, 1999), pp.
398-409
Published by: University of California Press on behalf of the American Musicological
Society
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398 Journal of the American Musicological Society
needs different editorial policies? And if Somfai succeeds in convincing us, as I

believe he does, that for Bart6k the notation was not the finite object but the
raw material-that while it did not allow for infinite interpretations, it de-
manded to be re-created with each performance-would it not follow that
conflating sources and emphasizing consistency have little to do with the spirit
of the art we represent, but rather serve our need to live up to a prestigious
but perhaps not so honest scholarly ideal? It seems that we would do better to
give up insisting on the presentation of a body of material that is "complete,"
"authentic," "consistent," and "final." In the end, perhaps we must realize
that we cannot do more than publish our own version of versions of pieces.
Doing so would mean that musicology would follow slowly the develop-
ment that took place in philosophy some time ago with the works of Heideg-
ger, Levinas, and others. Like the Greek philosophers, the makers of critical
editions believe that one can get the closest to the essence of a work when one
removes it, as it were, from time: in the sentence "This is the composition,"
the word is means timelessness. Levinas, however, conceived of an "ontologie
dans le temporel," following Heidegger, who viewed existence and time
("Sein und Zeit") as inseparable phenomena: existence means being in time.
From Somfai's book we learn, in spite of his intentions, that we cannot escape
looking at the composition and at the critical edition "dans le temporel."
JUDIT FRIGYESI
The Aesthetics of Music, by Roger Scruton. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997.

xxi, 530 pp.
Reading The Aesthetics ofMusic by Roger Scruton, one might wonder whether
his cultural preferences follow from his philosophical principles, or his princi-
ples from his preferences. Scruton confidently claims the former: he has
"begun from first principles," he writes in his short preface, and has ended up
with "a philosophy of modern culture" (p. ix). His first principles derive from
an ontological investigation of sound and tone: he tells us what a sound is, and
what it means for us to experience one as a musical sound. Then, working sys-
tematically, in the analytic tradition of philosophy, through the traditional and
defining topics of the field-music and metaphor, representation, expression,
language, understanding, tonality, form, content, value, analysis, and perfor-
mance (topics that occupy chapters 3 and 5-14, respectively)-he arrives five
hundred pages later at his cultural vision for the music of the future. Asserting
that "the avant-garde persists only as a state-fimunded priesthood, ministering to
a dying congregation," he finds a little promise for redeeming our culture in
the "thin" (minimalist/tonal) music of contemporary composers Henryk
Gorecki and John Taverner, but more promise in the rediscovered tonal lan-
guages of compositions by Nicholas Maw, John Adams, Robin Holloway, and
Reviews 399
Alfred Schnittke (pp. 506-8). In making this final judgm

concerned to describe precisely what these preferred new
sist in; he simply wants to tell us that there are compose
finds real promise. He chooses his final words most care
"promise" but not yet "success" in the music of these co
ably meant to alert readers to the continued urgency of
to this cultural redemption.
This review focuses on two related strategies central t
First, contrary to his claim that his philosophy of modern c
his philosophical principles, I argue that Scruton implici
former in setting up the latter. Second, I argue that, for
sive discussion of musical works in their formal and
support these details give to his philosophical project us
too-quick translation of musical into philosophical de
a translation, say between musical harmony and the har
translation upon which his entire argument depends), al
rather too convenient matches between his philosophica
tural judgments. Overall, I think that the apparent ease
belies its extreme difficulties.
It must be stressed that one could read Scruton's book s
tion to the metaphysics of music by simply leaving his c
aside (effectively ignoring chapter 15). But this would b
project definitely against his own grain. In this review, I
project most seriously. But the truth is, I find myself far
cultural commentary (which is unabashedly conservative
terms) and much more interested in identifying the preci
sophical scheme where his cultural assumptions creep in
focus on the claims and assumptions he makes regarding
dence or purity of this scheme, a focus that challenges us
ously how we should philosophize about music.
Thus, for example, Scruton declares without apology
single-mindedly from his "dry" ontological questions to h
judgments, he will put a great deal aside-almost, he says
sophical discussion of musical aesthetics from the Coper
the present (p. vii). He also puts aside, through his choic
kinds of music not belonging to the last few hundred y
"European" culture. He employs many German and Engli
are French, and surprisingly few are Italian. There are m
amples than vocal, and a few, select examples repres
Fitzgerald) and rock (Beatles). Scruton's philosophical and
are connected. Copernican (i.e., modern and/or postmode
serts, represents the end and destruction of a Pythag
which music, and the philosophy that inspired it, played
Once, he argues, we assumed "the ordering of sound
ordering of the soul" (p. ix). When we abandoned that assumption, we started
to produce a nontonal or soulless music that destroyed our nature. "The
ethos" of the most soulless music, Scruton writes toward the end of his book,
is well captured by the immortal words of the group Nirvana:

I lease it, lease, yeah.
Ev'ryone is how old?
Pick me, pick me, yeah.
Ev'ryone is waiting.
The dance becomes a lapse into disorder, a kind of surrender of the body
which anticipates the sexual act itself. This decay of dancing is a necessary con-
sequence of democratic culture, and an irreversible feature of the postmodern
world. And it goes hand in hand with a decay in musical resources. The ges-
tures that attend the new forms of dancing require an abdication of music to
sound: to the dominating beat of the percussion, and to such antiharmonic de-
vices as the "power chord," produced by electronic distortion....
... If [this sort of] music sounds ugly, this is of no significance; it is not
there to be listened to, but to take revenge on the world. (pp. 499-500)
If this sounds a bit like Allan Bloom's closing of the American mind, it's sup-
posed to. "The decline of popular culture," Scruton explains, "leads precisely
to an impoverishment in the means of expression, with the result that ordinary
emotions are crusted over with a stagnant film of clich6" (p. 157). And if read-
ers do not understand the words of Nirvana's song, they are not meant to.
Beware the dangers, Scruton wants to warn us, of music that moves our bod-
ies but whose words we do not understand, whose words we do not want to
understand or judge. "The anomie of Nirvana and REM is the anomie of its
listeners. To withhold all judgement, as though a taste in music were on a par
with a taste in ice-cream, is precisely not to understand the power of music"
(p. 502).
Scruton identifies musical sins with the democratic, judgmentless, and
"anything goes" tendencies of this century. Yet he explains them far more
often by reference to philosophical principle than to complex developments in
recent history or culture, leaving the question of why musicians have commit-
ted the sin of producing soulless or ugly music profoundly unexplained. Thus,
we learn only that these musicians have somehow worked against the over-
arching principle that how we order sounds into musical forms mirrors how
we order our souls. In Scruton's argument, the ordering principle of our souls,
or of our human or "rational" nature, is always "harmonia"; the correspond-
ing ordering principle of music is always "tonality." The cultural "ought"
should always follow the natural "is." The way we compose music should mir-
ror the way we order or experience sound. "A musical culture," he writes,
introduces its participants to three important experiences, and three forms of

knowledge. The first is the experience of melody-of musical thinking, as it be-
gins in tonal space and leads onwards to an apt conclusion. In singing a melody
we understand the relation between phrases, the way in which tone calls to
Reviews 401
tone across the imagined space of music. Melodies have charact

singing them we imitate the forms of human life. Musical education
to be alert to this character, and to understand that the rightness or w
of a tone is the rightness or wrongness of a gesture. In singing we re
social nature, just as we do in dancing. And it matters that we shou
courteous and cheerfiul ways. (p. 501)
Scruton believes that his dismissal of so much of the post-Cope

cussion of musical aesthetics follows directly from his philosop
But how, as readers, should we understand the dismissal? Scruton
only how post-Copernican philosophers have contributed specific
cal aesthetics, a specificity that allows him to acknowledge and u
general contributions to philosophy whenever it suits him. Why,
did they go so wrong with music? Perhaps because they have en
metaphysician's art at the expense of music. A correct musical
Scruton argues, should take knowledgeable account of the formal
composition, performance, and listening. This should please mu
musicologists. But note that Scruton himself actually attends to
and performance very selectively and nearly always in the ligh
wants to claim about listening. For in Scruton's metaphysics, it
how we hear sound as musical sound-that gives him his star
"Music begins," he writes (in a typical pronouncement), "when
to the sounds that they are making, and so discover tones. Of all
riences, there is none more direct than free improvisation (whet
instrumental): and this should be understood as a paradigm of l
form of listening from which music began" (p. 217).
Further, Scruton detests those thinkers-"Marxists," "fem
other "ideologues," as he labels them-who choose to historicize o
their subject matter, for they commit the sin of compromising
content of philosophical questions that have True and redemptive
readers, we can ignore Scruton's most pugnacious dismissals her
find them irritating): usually they are flippant one-liners (and, a
debate, who listens to one-liners?). More telling is that Scruton, in
ating himself from these so-called ideologues, rejects the space h
left in his own philosophy for genuine cultural change or psycholo
ical, and social variation. But isn't it precisely variation and differ
finds in the sort of musical knowledge Scruton claims he wants to
philosophy of music? Paradoxically, for all the musical details he
all the examples he gives, Scruton offers, I find, a surprisingly s
sophical account of an ideal listener who perfectly matches an ide
in turn perfectly matches an ideal or paradigmatic musical work-
philosopher's favorite: that unspecified "Beethoven symphony."
it is a most lucid and well-constructed metaphysical account, but
are too often achieved by setting aside the sort of variation tha
would much prefer to see left in. Let us now look more closely at
Scruton articulates his first principles through an ontology of sound.

Sounds are heard, he says in chapter 1, much as colors are seen, but unlike col-
ors, sounds are not secondary qualities. They are not qualities at all. Rather,
like rainbows, they are phenomenal objects. Of course, sounds are emitted
from objects, but experientially they are separable from them. Sounds occupy
a strangely independent, "acousmatic" sphere in which hearers "sponta-
neously detach the sound[s] from the circumstances of [their] production,
and attend to [them as they are in themselves]" (pp. 2-3; here Scruton is
drawing on the work of Pierre Schaeffer's Traitd des objets musicaux). This de-
tachment lies at the heart of the musical-listening experience. We listen to mu-
sical sounds in separation from their causal sources, as constitutive of pure or
independent events. This detachment is also entirely consistent with our aes-
thetic interest, which is solely in appearances. As listeners, we are interested in
our world as experienced, as purely heard.
To hear sounds as constitutive of pure events is to hear them as temporally
and spatially ordered. Both sorts of ordering are essential to how we experi-
ence sounds musically and how we generate musical meaning. We hear the
sounds as "nearby" and "far away." Yet sounds do not themselves move
through space; rather, spatial relations are heard, as it were, between the
sounds, in their interrelations. Moreover, the sound world is not a space into
which we can enter; it is a world we treat at a distance. This distance produces
a mysterious gulf through which we are able to experience, and come to
know, "the very life that is ours" (p. 14) or "the experience of life conscious of
itself as life" (p. 35). In a mixture of Kantian and Husserlian terms, Scruton
often reiterates this main conclusion: we see the way we are (in nature), and
thus the way we (should) live, through the way we intentionally construct or
order the musical world. The musical world is one made unique by its special
mode of organization.
Scruton dismisses the question of whether music may be subject to any sort
of organization as empty of philosophical interest. "Although we have para-
digms of musical organization, in the canon of masterpieces," Scruton writes
(and I quote him now at length):
it is not obvious that these are all organized in the same way, or that they ex-
haust the possibilities. Some may argue that the electronic noises produced on
a computer by such "radical" composers as Dennis Lorrain are music; others
may make similar claims for such purely percussive sequences as Varese's
lonisation, or collections of evocative sounds in the style of George Crumb, as
in his Music for a Summer Evening. Modernism has been so prolific of deviant
cases that we hesitate to call them deviant, for fear of laying down a law which
we cannot justify: even John Cage's notorious four minutes and thirty-three
seconds of silence has featured in the annals of musicology. So how do we
begin to define our theme?
Such questions have bedevilled aesthetics in our times-and unnecessarily
so. For they are empty questions, which present no real challenge to the
Reviews 403
philosopher who has a full conception of his subject. Whate

not a natural kind. What is to count as music depends upon
it is a decision made with a purpose in mind. That purpose is
possible to extend, the kind of interest that we have in a Bee
Other things satisfy that interest; and there is no way of
which things these will be-not until we have a clear idea of w
ests us in the Beethoven. The question whether this or that m
modernist experiment is a work of music is empty, until w
ourselves with an account of our central instances of the art.
know what the question means. And even then we may feel
answer it.
The best way of summarizing those central instances is to say that they
achieve, though not necessarily in the same way, a transformation of
into tones.... it is only rational beings, blessed with imagination, who c
sounds as tones. (pp. 16-17)
Scruton's effective dismissal of so many modernist and postmode

periments depends on an interesting, but complex, methodological
know he does not want to assert that music is a fixed, natural kind
single, essential kind of organization. He only wants to stress that an
of music should first provide an account of its "central" (paradigma
putable) instances. Fair enough-but note that this starting point is
opposed to one that uses borderline examples to reveal something a
concept's center, perhaps with the purpose of challenging the idea
concept has such a center. Scruton always starts from the center b
finds there, if not essential musical organization per se, then at least m
ganization that purportedly conforms to human nature (the way we
ally construct musical space, the way we hear sounds as tones). An
has located human nature, or the most human acts of imagination, h
himself justified in putting aside culture's periphery. Thus, he is n
pletely candid when he says that he needs to look at central instance
really thinks he need only look at central instances. For, as we have
he thinks that his account of central instances will render the "m
"postmodern" questioning implicit in the extreme instances redund
"empty" (as he puts it). Readers might still hope that he means red
only to his philosophical account. Not so: redundant (or "empty") a
fies a cultural judgment. Yet what will be left of"the center" when
its "radical" periphery?
In his account, Scruton mentions the unspecified Beethoven sym
exemplary. Exemplary or central instances, he says, allow listeners t
the transformation of sound worlds into musical worlds, the hearin
worlds as musical worlds. Note that Scruton's philosophical focus is a
this achievement of the ideal listener rather than on the particular st
the exemplary works. This focus is again very Kantian: if the "som
common" is not found in the objects experienced, it will have to b
in the experience itself; in our rational nature, our wills; in the play of our
imaginative and cognitive faculties.
The shift in emphasis, from music's nature to the listener's activity of "hear-
ing-as," allows him to draw an analogy between music and language. Just as
we hear language not merely as a string of sounds, but as a voiced message
"broadcast into the landscape," so we also instinctively hear music as attempt-
ing to communicate. Though Scruton mentions only Aristotle here, surely he
is also thinking of Rousseau when he writes that, in the intentional presence of
music, "we feel ourselves within another person's ambit" (p. 18). When music
moves, it moves us, and when we are moved we participate genuinely in the
spiritual (or communal) life that is ours. "Hearing-as" lies at the heart of
Scruton's view of music as social communication. It also lies at the heart of his
cultural critique. It allows him to say that even a work that is composed "un-
naturally"-perhaps an atonal or serial composition-might still be heard
"latently," as "musically," "tonally," or "naturally" organized (pp. 294ff.).
In other words, Scruton is sensitive and sensible enough not to want to
dismiss, say, Schoenberg's works as unmusical. But for what reason would
he judge as unmusical the experimental nonorganizations of John Cage, for
example? Because they are not tonally organized? not naturally organized?
Because they cannot (by anyone?) be heard as tonally organized or as naturally
organized? Might one not interpret Cage's works as remedial attempts to
show by radical means that the production of high, European music had
reached the limits of artificial and institutional organization, and that it was
time to turn to a more natural (indeed universal) play of natural sounds?
Might it be that what differentiates Scruton's conservatism from Cage's
radicalism is the trust they have in the naturalness of the listener's intentional
organization? One might say that whereas Cage did not trust the intentional
organization of the sound world into the institutionalized musical world,
Scruton does. Cage's works (4'33" especially) forced listeners to question the
overdependence their intentional constructions of sound had come to have on
established forms of institutional (concert hall) organization. But is not
Scruton claiming the same thing for his philosophical work (and perhaps even
for his own musical works he tells us he has recently been composing)?
Scruton would presumably add that if we had the right kind of institutional
organization-one that was based on nature, reason, or tradition-there
would be no need to sever the dependence between how we naturally listen
and institutional organization. But Cage, too, could claim this, even if he had
a different view about the kind of organization desired.
We are approaching the real difference between Scruton and the producers
of peripheral examples of music. Scruton sets these examples aside because of
his (and therefore anyone's) inability to hear the sound or noise worlds as mu-
sical worlds. They cannot be heard as exhibiting the kind of tonal organization
that tells us something about "the very life that is ours." But peripheral works
Reviews 405
-and Cage's are exemplary-are often composed to tell us s

the life that is ours (perhaps by showing us how far our imag
us). It is just that the life that is ours is not always mirrored in
of intentional organization or in a tradition of canonic examp
is shown better in the works that shatter that mirror. Scruton likes to shatter
mirrors too, but he does it by speaking from the purported authority of the
center. The tradition of tonality is "our" tradition, he asserts; it is the most rich
and fertile that has ever existed. Cage, by contrast, spoke from the periphery,
often deliberately to lampoon the centrists.
At this point in my critical summary of Scruton's view, I have only reached

the end of his first chapter. Yet this chapter is certainly the most important
one, because it sets out the first principles from which everything else-espe-
cially his controversial final chapter on culture-is intended to follow. My
point in focusing on this first chapter of pure principles is, again, to demon-
strate how much of the final chapter is already presupposed by it, a presupposi-
tion that is shown by what Scruton allows into his account and what he leaves
out. Perhaps, I should reiterate, readers should read the last chapter first so as
not to be misled by the purported purity of the metaphysics dominating the
first 456 pages.
Through repetitive technique, Scruton encourages us to read each of the
chapters following the first as an elaboration of all that is involved in our inten-
tional ordering of musical space, an ordering that differentiates this space from
our basic experience of sound. "We should not," he writes (while referring us
to chapter 1 for the argument), "attribute to music the kind of experience that
is made available already by sound." The experience of sound "is only part,
and not the most mysterious part, of the experience of music" (p. 50).
Scruton now explains the mystery of music through a theory of metaphor
(chap. 3): What distinguishes sound from musical worlds is that the latter
alone are deeply filled with meaning that is intentional, metaphorical, heard in
the sounds. Only rational or human animals are capable of hearing (through
acts of the imagination) metaphorical or musical meaning in sound worlds. A
comparable claim was most succinctly made by Eduard Hanslick: even if music
is founded on nature, it is not found in it. Bird song is not music. Scruton is
less worried about metaphor than was Hanslick: it allows him to move all the
way from a sober commitment to musical syntax to music's expressive import,
and eventually to its most profound (human-cosmological) mystery. His ac-
count is not without the influence of Roman Ingarden's description of the in-
tentional constitution of the literary work, though Scruton says he is unwilling
to commit himself to Ingarden's strata (pp. 371-72).
In chapter 4, on the ontology of musical works, Scruton argues that
works are fully identifiable through their specific notational systems, although
these systems do not represent the works' meanings. Those meanings are not
represented at all. Rather, they are expressed in the intentional activity of lis-
teners who hear the sound-patterns as musical. Of course, music might have
representational content (Scruton wants to accommodate opera and Lieder),
but when works are heard as musical works, what matters is expression, not
representation. Thus, he concludes, the work qua musical work is just the set
of salient features that "contribute to its tonal organization: the organization
that we hear, when we hear sounds as tones" (p. 110).
"Salience" aside, the word "contribute" reveals the pervasive ambiguity in
Scruton's account between music's being tonally organized and its being heard
as such. Remember that, for Scruton, nontonally organized music can still
sometimes be heard (metaphorically speaking?) as tonally organized. Yet he
also seems to allow that certain kinds of organization-presumably those that
purportedly bring ruin to "our" culture---cannot be heard this way. Hence
musical meaning cannot be all metaphor or merely a product of "hearing-as";
it must also be contingent on a work's structure. Scruton allows this, though
he will not commit himself to a closed description of what the right or wrong
structure is or could be. The most he will say is that, traditionally or paradig-
matically, this structure has been tonally organized. But is he really able to say
anything more about the relationship between music's organization and its
being heard with such?
Scruton says more-much more-in his book. He offers a rich and de-
tailed account of rhythm, melody, key, harmony, and so on. But still I find that
each time he draws a philosophical conclusion, I am pulled away from his mu-
sical concept of "tonality" to a much vaguer metaphysical concept that accom-
modates all and only the musical works that "make sense." Remember, only
musical works that make sense reveal the life that is ours. So the question re-
mains, can he be any more specific about the relation between his musical
concept of "tonality" and his metaphysical concept of "making sense"? I don't
think he can.
He could, were he to appeal to psychological, sociological, or historical de-

scriptions, but he won't do this: "A philosophy of music offers neither psycho-
logical explanations nor critical recommendations. It attempts to say what
music is, prior to any explanation or amplification of our musical experience"
(p. 35). But what is left at this point prior to such explanation or amplification
other than pure, and perhaps trivial, principles? Here is such a basic principle:
that a musical work makes sense when its "salient features" allow listeners to
transform a sound world into a musical world. Does this principle have any in-
formative substance? If we gave it some substance by appeal to the historical
development and variations in existing tonal systems, would we still be think-
ing purely philosophically? When Scruton wavers between metaphysical prin-
ciples of ordering and empirically substantive claims about tonality, is he
transgressing the philosophical? And if he concedes that he is, for what reason
can he dismiss theories of psychology, history, and so on as irrelevant? Scruton
Reviews 407
answers, reasonably, that we should only thicken (with subst

tion) our concepts when absolutely necessary: "We must... pr
greatest caution, if we are to introduce so theory-laden a conc
we have no phenomenon that stands in need of it" (p. 219).
how thin or philosophically pure can a concept be made bef
with the phenomenon under scrutiny? Scruton remains con
philosophy never loses touch. Why? Basically because his
match-by design, it appears-the central instances of "our" t
Claiming the authority of the center, Scruton is able to mo
consistently through his book, all the time supporting conser
of expression, composition, form, content, performance, and
For every argument, in every chapter, he reiterates the same
ample: for music to be expressive, it must be experienced as
heard with understanding, and to hear with understanding is
ing to natural principles of ordering (see chap. 6). Or: for mu
fully composed, composers must observe the regularities in m
such that the gestures match the form (see chap. 10). Bu
again, when Scruton actually exemplifies these principles? Do
thing more than his own aesthetic preferences, which he
shares with other "persons of taste"? Certainly, his principles
variations in how composers, performers, and listeners make
match gesture to form, and produce and experience regularit
these philosophical principles really sufficient to determine th
tions one wants to admit and those one does not, whoever t
able "one" happens to be?
Are even Scruton's "first principles" as neutral or as theory
takes them to be? Suppose he had derived his central instance
the larger class of song and dance rather than from the sm
absolute or purely instrumental music. Would he have spoke
music as constituting a pure, acousmatic sphere? Or suppose
with the performer rather than the "most cultivated" listene
cared so little about the causal source of musical sounds? Ag
lows that all these cares are quite legitimate in the broad terr
activity. His point is only that they are inessential to establ
sophical claim based on his model of aesthetic experience, th
ordering sounds into music (see p. 169). Why?
Could he allow that different philosophical theories of mu
different tacit assumptions as their starting points and stil
place? Probably not. His first principles are metaphysically fir
than tacit presuppositions. We might then ask him whether h
philosophy to capture some of the thickness and variation i
musical practices. Surely he would say yes, but only if "thick
tion" allowed for strong determinations of relevance and valu
is to be included positively in a philosophy of music, and certainly not those

examples that show music and its philosophy in decline. In rejecting history
and all forms of ideological inquiry, he writes:
The category of the aesthetic is a philosopher's invention. It came into being,

not because of some oft-encountered metaphysical problem, nor through some
puzzling usage which philosophy alone could be called on to straighten out.
On the contrary, the problems of aesthetics were discovered by philosophers, in
the course of shaping the ideas of aesthetic interest, aesthetic judgement, and
aesthetic experience. (p. 219)
Presumably Scruton is arguing that the category of the aesthetic was "in-
vented" because the problems of aesthetics were discovered, and philosophical
problems (or "questions," as he puts it earlier [p. 98]) are, in his view, eternal:
"Our ability to notice philosophical questions may change with historical con-
ditions," he concedes; "the questions themselves do not" (p. 98). I think it
relevant that he remains silent here on the status of the "answers" to these
questions.
I do not want to conclude merely that Scruton has left too much out of his
musical aesthetics. That is not, in itself, an interesting argument. Rather, my
criticism has been designed to identify a fracture, almost a paradox, in his ac-
count that is revealed whenever he sets something aside as philosophically ir-
relevant. This fracture has appeared before in the philosophical enterprise.
Generally put: the more pure a particular philosophy claims to be, the more
impure it usually reveals itself; the more vehemently philosophers claim to be
distanced, the more they usually prove themselves involved; the more totaliz-
ing they claim their account to be, the more they usually have to put aside.
Note how Scruton engages in this philosophical act of putting things aside
as he sets up the more tormented claims of his final chapter. Like musical ex-
perience itself, a philosophy of music is redemptive, he announces. It inspires
and consoles us, so long as it is "unencumbered by the debris that drifts
through the world of life" (p. 122). He later justifies his claim this way: aes-
thetic experience, like religious experience, aspires toward a condition of disin-
terest, a condition that signifies a genuine participation in our world,
orientated toward salvation, beauty, and truth. Anything that does not so as-
pire to salvation, beauty, and truth (or Truth) is, for Scruton, debris. How do
we disencumber ourselves of it? Scruton has shown us three ways. One is to
stand firmly at the center of a tradition and set aside the periphery. Another is
to standardize and idealize a past tradition of musical activity in order to give it
the appearance of having evolved in harmony with nature. Yet another is to
see the intentional construction of musical worlds, the filling in of metaphor
and mysterious meaning, as a "pure" and "clean" activity of the imagination.
None of these defensive or desperate strategies is particularly new, nor does
Scruton intend them to be. They are supposed to pull us back to a pre-
Copernican world view. Richard Wagner, for example, sometimes urged simi-
Reviews 409
lar strategies, and this comparison helps situate Scruton's wor

eral post-Copernican tradition of philosophy that attempts
Copernican tradition. It also situates Scruton's work in
tradition that sets aside the so-called debris of human life to
utopian project for the future of humanity.
That Scruton works in this tradition does not particularly s
not even surprised that he listens to music to help him esca
about the present world. What does surprise me is the philoso
he has in his strategy of putting so much aside in order to
legedly straight path from first principles to a philosophy of
Again, the issue is less with what he puts aside (though I ha
that too) than with the uncritical assertiveness with which he
each instance of this uncritical assertiveness, from his very firs
he renders his apparently straight philosophy conservatively
shows, despite every intention not to do so, that the center i
only seems so. Similarly, with his claims of naturalness or of t
of the imagination. Scruton has made his idealization too easy
not taken in by the ease or neatness of Scruton's account w
in thinking that he could have achieved far more philosoph
far less. (A philosophy starting from central or paradigmat
have a long and important philosophical pedigree.) However,
less, perhaps he wouldn't have got "all the way" from his fi
principles to his philosophy of modern culture. But perhaps a
to get "all the way" to culture by purely philosophical means
to begin with. For what sense can we make of pure culture, a
desire it?
LYDIA GOEHR

Goehr On Scruton Aesthetics

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Review

Reviewed Work(s): The Aesthetics of Music by Roger Scruton

American Musicological Society, University of California Press are collaborating with

needs different editorial policies? And if Somfai succeeds in convincing us, as I

The Aesthetics of Music, by Roger Scruton. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997.

Alfred Schnittke (pp. 506-8). In making this final judgm

is well captured by the immortal words of the group Nirvana:

introduces its participants to three important experiences, and three forms of

tone across the imagined space of music. Melodies have charact

Scruton believes that his dismissal of so much of the post-Cope

Scruton articulates his first principles through an ontology of sound.

philosopher who has a full conception of his subject. Whate

Scruton's effective dismissal of so many modernist and postmode

-and Cage's are exemplary-are often composed to tell us s

At this point in my critical summary of Scruton's view, I have only reached

He could, were he to appeal to psychological, sociological, or historical de-

answers, reasonably, that we should only thicken (with subst

is to be included positively in a philosophy of music, and certainly not those

The category of the aesthetic is a philosopher's invention. It came into being,

lar strategies, and this comparison helps situate Scruton's wor

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