by R.A. Sharpe

Acumen Publishing, UK, 2004
McGill-Queens University Press, North America, 2005

I swear I can do this fast.

I picked this up at the bookstore because it looked like the kind of book that interests me, written in the kind of voice that appeals to me, and it had a nice cover. I was in a mood where the idea of reading non-fiction, philosophy in particular, seemed like it would be fulfilling. I resolved on purchase (in part because it was a bit expensive for a paperback) to read it attentively in its entirety. The prospect of ultimately committing my thoughts to public html here gave to that experience, as to others I have had in the past months, a kind of heft of well-formedness that satisfied me.

The book, though short, was frustrating to read and ended up taking me more than a month. My attention was not easily held, despite the fact that the subject matter and the nature of the discussion were both, as they say, right up my alley. I finished it in a spirit of determined loyalty to my needlessly formalized self-obligation, and here I am writing about it.

Because of my backlog here it’s been yet another month since I finished it, and I’ve had a lot of time to plan what I wanted to say about this book. Mostly I wanted to quantify what was wrong with it, because make no mistake, I did not enjoy it. My plan until recently was to start with the very last thing in the book, which is a brief, annotated discography: the author names some recommended recordings of a few of the works that he has mentioned in the text. Mind you, none of these works are analyzed in detail or even written about at any significant length; they are all passing examples, invoked to make passing points in the flow of the discussion. Nonetheless the author lists the recordings he likes. I don’t have the book in front of me but I’m pretty sure that what I’m about to say is a fair representation. The last recording he mentions is of Thomas Tallis’s work Spem in Alium. He says something about why he likes the recording, and then writes, “Imagine dying and never having heard this music!”

This little comment, in my plan for what I was going to write here, was going to be taken to epitomize what’s wrong with the book. The general idea was going to be that this silly construction reveals the author to be too enamored of his own tastes, too enamored of the glory and quality of the music he endorses, and too lazy of rhetoric to ever write a treatment of this subject dispassionate enough to be valuable. Because while reading the book, that was my assessment, and my principal annoyance.

In the course my college music education, I witnessed many of my professors make passionate show of the fact that they instinctively and whole-heartedly identified the work of Bach, say, as being of near-holy perfection. I was vaguely put off by the seemingly demonstrative and self-satisfied flavor of these pronouncements, and also distressed by the way they left my ambivalence – perhaps unschooled ambivalence, but ambivalence all the same – out to dry. If their sanctification of “the greats” was, as it seemed, at the core of what they wanted to convey to me as my education, what was I to make of my own uncertainty in the face of the ostensible transcendent? The implication, which I came to resent, was that I was constitutionally barred from the elite and lucky group to which they belonged. “Imagine dying and never having heard this music!” indeed. I for one have never heard Spem in Alium. I am, as per your request, Professor, imagining my death now.

Having left college behind, however, I was able to come to a new and freeing realization, one that had been with me all along but that, like Dorothy, I had had to learn for myself: classical music professors are nerds. Nerds express their enthusiasms intemperately and with little regard for their listeners; my professors had more likely than not simply been letting their likes and dislikes fly with recklessly overblown abandon, and revelling in the decadent atmosphere of academia, where for once in their lives, such indulgences were encouraged. Furthemore, to compensate for a general sense of impotence, it is textbook nerd behavior to jockey fiercely for status within a well-defined niche, somewhere on the far fringes of actual social relevance. And so it is entirely possible that I was witness to displays that were indeed meant to demonstrate that my professors were closer to God (= Bach) and more sensitive to that infinitely delicate substance, genius (= Bach) than I, but these displays reflected only their tragically elaborate ego choreography, and had very little to do with music, and certainly nothing to do with me. A further thought, that I’ve had only still more recently, is that classical music professionals spend a great deal of time engaged with 18th and 19th-century aesthetic thought, to the point where the intellectual climates of the 18th and 19th centuries may be semi-permanently emulated within their psyches. So it also seems possible that I was merely witnessing the unwitting emergence of antiquated notions and once-fashionable formulations about genius and art and such, which, by virtue of their astonishing anachronism, had sounded to me like a kind of vainglory.*

In short, I was able to see that my relationship with music was not so necessarily inferior, and that I had no reason to feel, as I had, like an uninvited boor in the cathedral. Thus freed from the intimidating and discouraging effects of classical music nerdiness, I moved to my present attitude toward it**, which is exasperation. How can we ever discuss the aesthetic qualities of Beethoven if the “greatness” of Beethoven is axiomatic? How can we ever talk about “taste” if we begin with the belief that certain assessments are undeniable?

I ask these questions rhetorically; “obviously we can’t,” is my answer. In his book, however, R. A. Sharpe, asks these questions literally. He can’t imagine dying without hearing Tallis, and he really and truly can’t imagine a reasonable and educated person not liking Beethoven. The philosophical problems he tries to untangle stem, for him, from that sort of “observation.” He gives examples of subjects on which taste might reasonably diverge, like Tchaikovsky, and those where it might not, like Beethoven. The discussion proceeds with a tone of curiosity, but the landscape he is exploring is that of his own imagination, and it is as rigidly pleased with its own status quo as any of my canon-touting professors. It seemed outrageous to me, while reading it, that this book, which by its own description was an attempt to sort out the problems that surround questions of taste and value in art, was actually a completely nerdbound tour of those problems from the inside, by a philosopher who chooses to be intellectually brave not by abandoning any of his confusedly self-satisfied notions but rather by reaching and publishing the conclusion that ideas about taste and value in art are fundamentally inconsistent and thus do not submit productively to philosophical analysis.

I was going to write this, and say that this was the principal flaw of the book. But that, I have since decided, would not be quite fair, because, to be honest, I was never entirely certain that I had correctly identified the author’s shortcomings. Repeatedly, I would begin reading a section and think, “I can’t believe these are your assumptions! They completely beg the question; it’s no wonder that you find yourself tangled up in contradictions if you investigate everything except yourself and yet base the whole thing on your own opinions!” … and then, somewhere late in the discussion, would find that he did, eventually, entertain the idea that perhaps he had been wrong all along. Sometimes he would say something like, “in fact, as we will see, I do think I have been wrong, in a certain sense.” Then the subject would disappear for a while, and only reemerge in the context of a different discussion. All this would disorient me. Perhaps I was actually only reading a book that assumed its readers to have certain biases, and was first trying to appeal to them by acting as though those biases would go unchallenged. Or perhaps he was intentionally constructing his chapters to begin with that which would later be rejected, because he thought that was good philosophical form. I just couldn’t be certain, though evidence like the “Imagine dying and never hearing Tallis!” comment supported my thinking that he was just a sloppy thinker and a sloppy writer.

What is undoubted is that the book did not shed any light on its subject matter. It did not offer me even a transitory experience of clarity, and is that not the one thing we can ask of philosophy? It may be because I misunderstood him throughout, but in that case I blame his writing, which generally meandered with no clear trajectory and never even revealed a retrospective architecture (he does, after all, end by saying he must conclude that there are few conclusions to be drawn), and which lapsed constantly and ambiguously into enthusiasms and/or tradition, to no clear intellectual purpose. He may have had one in mind, but it was never clear.

So that was the principal flaw of the book. Through one shortcoming or another, and I really can’t say for sure what it was, this book failed to offer me any sort of help in sorting out these issues. And it sure seemed to be because my guide was so fond of the hallowed haze with which he was surrounded.

By contrast, I recently sat at the library and read the Introduction to Richard Taruskin’s gigantic Oxford History of Western Music, which, in laying out his attitude about how to write music history, cleanly and convincingly sliced directly through the scatterbrained shrug of Sharpe’s book. Art is a social phenomenon. Art reception is a social phenomenon. A history of music is a history of social phenomena and can only be sensibly treated as such. The “greatness” of Beethoven, he says, is of objective importance as a concept because it influences so many people who subscribe to it, but only in this form does it have any place in a scholarly study of music history. By contrast, in that book Move Closer that I enjoyed so much, the author is writing about art’s aesthetic value to the individual, and says that this sort of value is necessarily specific to the individual’s experience; that the moving and enriching qualities of aesthetic experience are fundamentally not social phenomena, they are uniquely private. To me, these two attitudes are not only compatible, they form a complete and straightforward picture. Sharpe and some of my old professors let that picture smudge together in the center and then, like alchemists building their elaborate towers of half-baked science, delve into the smudge in search of its secrets.

There is a general principle here that I would like to be able to name. It comes up all the time in bad philosophy of all sorts. Essentially, it is the inability to look at a million ants walking in a line and talk intelligently about the fact that they are discrete ants AND that they are a line. Yes, some of the ants might actually be slightly to one side or another of “the line.” Yes, the “line” itself does not actually exist in any pure and continuous form. But this is how things are. We all get it. There is nothing here to be confused about, and yet would-be thinkers seeking to “problematize” their world find this principle endlessly susceptible to abuse, which is unfortunate as it underlies the nature of all matter, all meaning, all experience. Can someone give me a name for this? I would love to be able to dismiss these things by saying, “well, that’s just a form of THE SUPRA-REDUCTIONIST FALLACY,” or something like that, and have everyone agree. “Incompatibilism?” Anyone?

Oh man, I so didn’t do it fast. Sorry.

* “Vainglory?” Who’s writing this?

** Or more generally toward any sort of aestheticization, in the humanities, of the canon. And, I suppose, even more generally, toward treating taste as a human virtue rather than a means to experience.