Introduction
This paper examines the acousmatic understanding of music sustained by Roger Scruton and explores the anthropology that accompanies it. It suggests that in order to adequately maintain the anthropology he desires, a cognitive rather than an ontological dualism, Scruton needs to integrate the materiality of music more fully into his account of musical understanding.
By highlighting the importance of music's materiality to Scruton's broader account of cognitive dualism, which focuses in particular on the significance of the physical gesture of the human person within the inter-personal encounter, the paper critiques Scruton's dichotomous analysis of the relationship between music as acousmatic and music as acoustic. It does so by highlighting the inconsistencies that such a view gives rise to in relation to musical understanding, and outlines some implications of such a stance for Scruton's conception of the human person. The paper points to the importance of gesture in music, which is embedded in a variety of physical factors, and suggests that it needs to be recognised in order to avoid an ontological dualism and to maintain a cognitive dualism. In doing so, it calls into question the strictly acousmatic understanding of music.
The relationship between music and sound
The relationship between music and sound is of a piece with the cognitive dualism Scruton upholds, that is, the recognition that the world can be understood in two incommensurable ways, ‘the way of science, and the way of inter-personal understanding’.Footnote 1 He suggests that, although music is constituted within and through the physical realm it is not explicable solely by means of it, something a ‘resolutely physicalist approach’ would maintain.Footnote 2 Rather, music emerges from sounds, becoming more than them. To explain: according to Scruton, sounds are not reducible to their causes and are therefore secondary objects. ‘They are produced by physical disturbances, but are not identical with those disturbances, and can be understood without reference to their physical causes’.Footnote 3 It is on this basis that Scruton posits sounds as ‘pure events’.Footnote 4 Sounds are ‘things that happen, but which don't happen to anything’Footnote 5 and it is this that enables humans to ‘impose upon them an order that is quite independent of any physical order in the world’.Footnote 6 Moreover, it is their detachability (in this sense) which grounds music:
The ability of pure events to stand in perceived relations to each other independent of any perceived relations between their causes is a deep presupposition of music, in which note follows note according to the internal logic of the musical line, giving rise to a virtual causality that has nothing to do with the process whereby sounds are produced … music is an extreme case of something that we witness throughout the sound world, which is the internal organisation of sounds as pure events.Footnote 7
On the basis of the detachability of sound from its source, Scruton maintains that our experience of music is ‘acousmatic’.Footnote 8 In music, Scruton maintains, people focus on what can be heard in sounds: ‘[w]hat they then hear is not a succession of sounds, but a movement between tones, governed by a virtual causality that resides in the musical line’.Footnote 9 Thus, ‘[t]he first note of the melody brings the second into being, even though the first sound is produced by someone blowing on a horn at one end of the orchestra, the second by someone pulling a bow across a cello string at the other’.Footnote 10
Analogy between musical understanding and inter-personal understanding
It is this relation between music and sound that enables Scruton to make an analogy between musical understanding and inter-personal understanding. In each case, experience emerges in response to something that appears at the brink of the empirical world. In the case of inter-personal understanding, I am addressed by another human person who, as such, is not only an object in the world but is also a subject. That is, like me, is self-conscious. Within this interaction my awareness of the person extends beyond what is immediately evident, that is, beyond the observable, and grasps towards an intentionality that can neither be captured by nor reduced to purely empirical investigation and causal explanation. ‘Each human object is also a subject, addressing us in looks, gestures and words, from the transcendental horizon of the “I”. Our responses to others aim towards that horizon, passing on beyond the body to the being it incarnates’.Footnote 11
Similarly, within its acousmatic space music exhibits intentionality, operating by means of the freedom and necessity implied by its virtual causality. That is, at least according to Scruton, in ‘successful’ works of music, wherein ‘there is a reason for each note, though not necessarily a reason that could be put into words. Each note is a response to the one preceding it and an invitation to its successor’.Footnote 12 It is on this basis that the analogy between musical intentionality and human intentionality is made:
It [music] moves as we move, with reasons for what it does and a sense of purpose (which might at any moment evaporate, like the purposes of people). It has the outward appearance of inner life, so to speak, and although it is heard and not seen, it is heard as the voice is heard, and understood like the face – as a revelation of free subjectivity.Footnote 13
Gesture, understanding and music
In order to draw out the connection between musical and inter-personal understanding, Scruton turns to the face and gesture. In terms of the face, Scruton says: ‘When I read a face I am in some way acquainting myself with the way things seem to another person. The face occurs in the world of objects as though lit from behind. Hence it becomes the target and expression of our interpersonal attitudes, and looks, glances, smiles become the currency of our affections’.Footnote 14 Scruton draws on Wittgenstein to elucidate this, and in doing so moves away from ‘meaning’ as such, towards ‘understanding’:
In his later philosophy Wittgenstein awakens to the true importance of Frege's insight, that we can speak of meaning only where we can also speak of understanding… We cannot give a sign a meaning, merely by associating it with an object, event or property. The connection has to be made in the understanding of those who use the sign, and this understanding is part of a complex social process.Footnote 15
In terms of music, ‘we have no idea what musical meaning might be, until we have some grasp of the distinction between the one who hears with understanding and the one who merely hears’.Footnote 16 As we shall see, this distinction motivates Scruton's prioritising of music as acousmatic. However, because this prioritising involves a modelling of musical understanding on the inter-personal understanding elicited through gesture, a tension emerges both in Scruton's account of music as acousmatic and in his anthropology.
Scruton notes that at many points where Wittgenstein mentions the question of musical understanding he connects it with facial expressions and the first-person case.Footnote 17 This, Scruton thinks, is crucial, for it is not that the first-person perspective reveals ‘some private fact, hidden from the publicly observable world’.Footnote 18 On the contrary, it is a perspective on ‘the very same thing you observe, when you see that I am thinking, angry or in pain. I learn what this thing is by sharing in the public discourse, which enables me to recognise your states of mind and to give them a name’.Footnote 19 Scruton explains:
First-person knowledge is knowledge of “what it is like”. This is not a species of knowing that, nor a species of knowing how: it is in fact entirely sui generis, and might be described as a ‘knowledge by acquaintance’, in order to emphasise that it is not knowledge of a fact but familiarity with it.Footnote 20
Although in agreement with Wittgenstein's understanding, Scruton is at pains to make clear that one needs to proceed beyond it, since for Wittgenstein the importance lies in and remains with the recognition of the expression rather than in the perception of any state of mind lying beyond that which is revealed.Footnote 21 The same holds for music: ‘the crucial fact, for Wittgenstein, lies in an act of recognition, comparable to grasping the expression on a face, rather than any familiarity with the state of mind expressed’.Footnote 22 For Scruton, such an explanation is not sufficient and, he argues, a move needs to be made beyond the simple recognition of facial expressions to an understanding that relies upon ‘the placing within the listener's first-person perspective a state of mind that is not his own’:Footnote 23
When we enter into another's physiognomy … we begin to imagine his state of mind. We don't necessarily have words for these states of mind, and our familiarity with them is purely a form of “imagining what it is like” – the imaginative equivalent of first-person knowledge. But by focusing on the other's features and gestures we find these states of mind unfolding within us – not really felt, but entertained in imagination … The recognition of expression is the first stage in the process whereby we recreate in ourselves the first-person viewpoint of another.Footnote 24
In the case of the interaction between human subjects, this sense of being addressed by something in the world that is not reducible to it becomes manifest in the question that other human subjects implicitly pose: ‘How can this thing which is not a thing but a perspective, appear in the world of objects where it occupies no place?’Footnote 25 In the case of music, the same sense arises from the fact that tones, since they are more than the physical reality of the sounds and seem to exhibit intentionality, also seem to offer some sort of perspective. This is because music does not have a subject as such. Rather it exhibits ‘a pattern of pure intention, each step an answer to the one before’.Footnote 26 Nor does music have an object: ‘it is not, in your way of hearing it, unfolding a thought about a specific thing, or addressing some identifiable target’.Footnote 27 Thus, in responding to musical tones, Scruton explains, ‘we hear beyond them, so to speak, to the subjectivity that they reveal. Yet it is a subjectivity without a name’.Footnote 28
Connections
As we have seen, Scruton models musical understanding on inter-personal understanding. However, his emphasis upon the acousmatic aspect of music and the ‘purity’Footnote 29 of experience it affords is not only limited to a partial reflection of the realities of music but also has important consequences for his anthropology. Thus, although Scruton ostensibly maintains a cognitive rather than an ontological dualism, thereby seeking to maintain a wholeness of mind and body, spirit and matter, his understanding of music depends ultimately upon its abstraction from the physical world, and threatens to weaken his account.
The abstraction of music from the physical is strongly articulated within a recent consideration of music. Considering the aesthetic application of the notion of transcendence, Scruton suggests that music allows empirical phenomena to be presented in a transcendent way. In doing so, he makes clear that aesthetic presentations give expressions of emotion ‘a completeness and purity that, in everyday life, they could never attain’.Footnote 30 He says: ‘Always our feelings are mixed, contaminated by other concerns, by needs and distractions. Never in everyday life can we give ourselves completely to love, joy, forgiveness, grief or worship’.Footnote 31 It seems that these ‘concerns, distractions and needs’ are a less than ideal element of the human condition and it is thus that the importance of music arises, since within the musical realm aesthetically presented emotions ‘conjure a pure world of sympathy, in which they exist in their completed form, unsullied by self-interest’, such that they form ‘objects of contemplation which bear their meaning entirely within themselves’.Footnote 32
An acousmatic understanding of music, wherein tones peel off from their physical production, clearly facilitates the imaginative attention with which Scruton is concerned. This is further facilitated by a particular type of listening, which is prioritised. For, in order to fully appreciate that which is presented musically, the attentive listening condition becomes paramount, enabling the listener to fully enter into the experience. ‘Maybe listening in motionless silence is a sophisticated latecomer to the repertoire of musical attitudes. But it might, for that very reason, provide us with the laboratory conditions, so to speak, in which we can best study what is involved, when rational beings hear sounds as music’.Footnote 33 The ‘silent’ and ‘motionless’ listening of the concert-hall facilitates a purity of focus. In sum, just as music yields ‘unsullied’ forms of expression, so the concert-hall listener extricates herself from the worries and concerns of the everyday, something enabled by the ‘atmosphere of reverential attention’.Footnote 34
Music and anthropology: bearings and implications
Before addressing the problems that are generated by emphasising gesture as key to musical understanding both in relation to music and to Scruton's anthropology, there is one criticism often levelled against Scruton that needs addressing, that of the type of music that informs his aesthetics. Indeed, it its clear that the Western-European classical tradition is paradigmatic of ‘music’ for Scruton and that popular forms of music are less well regarded. However, this is obviously not a reason for discounting the arguments made. Indeed, as Philip Bohlman notes, the process of canonisation is inevitable when thinking about music:
Very few of musicology's endeavours fail to exhibit some investment in canons and canonising. Whatever else one might say about the scholarly study of music, one has to say that musicologists through their diverse activities are in the business of defining musics, delimiting their internal patterns of coherence, and identifying their relations with some sort of external order.Footnote 35
Bearing this in mind, what is more profitable than disagreeing with Scruton's choice of music is to identify points of tension within his argument, thereby bringing to the fore matters that need addressing. I will therefore focus on the emphasis placed upon music as acousmatic and the consequent stress upon the concert-hall style of listening.
Music as acousmatic
There are clear reasons why Scruton adheres to an acousmatic view of musical understanding. It resonates with the Kantian inflection of his thought as well as guarding against the reductionism that can and does characterise certain approaches to the world. Nonetheless, although Scruton's account of music captures something vital about it, namely its acousmatic aspect, it does so at the expense of another vital quality of music, its physicality.
Scruton clearly does not completely disentangle musical understanding from its physical ground, but the priority is clear:
Even if we are aware that music is a performance, and that in listening to music we are hearing the real actions of real people, putting themselves into the sounds that they produce, this awareness must be registered if it is to be musically significant. When a violinist strains to produce Bach's great D minor Chaconne, it is not the strain in producing sounds that we appreciate, but the legacy of that strain in the virtual world of tones.Footnote 36
The significance of the virtual musical realm means, for Scruton, that the acousmatic ought to be foremost in the formulation of music theories since it is this that grounds musical understanding. Thus, Scruton argues that the person who hears only the acoustical properties of sounds (their position, loudness, physical causes and effects) is not hearing music and that, by contrast, the one who is ‘absorbed in the musical line but has no idea of where the sounds are coming from or how they are made’ is hearing the music (even if also missing something).Footnote 37
It is true to say that the physical aspects of sound are important in relation to the virtual causality of musical movement. However, it seems that the division between the acousmatic and the acoustic is a little too stark, and the question, simply put, is why the physicality of music must be cast to the periphery when formulating accounts of music. To do so is surely to overlook the way in which physicality is built into the musical ‘work’ so conceived.Footnote 38 The strain conveyed by the Bach Chaconne, for example, does not simply result from the singular effort of a performer who negotiates the physical and musical challenges of a piece, but arises from the fact that the musical line of the piece, written for violin, is designed to convey intensity through the musical gestures it employs. That is, one can see this ‘strain’ in the notated form of the Chaconne, which is appreciated fully when the gestures that enable this are brought to life in performance, but the sense of strain itself emerges from the material affordances of the instrument for which the work is written, namely, the violin.Footnote 39
To explain: specific instruments afford different resistances, and these resistances have the power to effect or neutralise the virtual causality of a musical line.Footnote 40 The power of Bach's Chaconne arises from the resistances imparted by the violin's physical structure.Footnote 41 Thus the effect of the musical line when played on the violin is very different from when played on the piano (say, for example, in Busoni's transcription of the piece). The sense of distance travelled in the lines of the piece seem more traversable on the piano, which can play in full chords with little sense of movement between low and high, since everything is within easy grasp. This is in contrast to the violin which due to the angle of its strings on the bridge of the instrument has to sweep upwards in order to speak its melodic line as well as voice its accompaniment. The disjunction created in this process of sounding notes at the bottom of the violin's range whilst also moving with swift manoeuvre to the upper register creates a sense of effort, of a struggling to speak. This is enhanced by the bowing action of the performer which is far more dramatic than the movements that sound the musical line of the Chaconne on piano.Footnote 42
These are not things that Scruton denies in overt terms. In drawing attention to them, I want to complicate the idea, as others have done (but in a different way), that the physicality of music is separable from and subordinate to the virtual musical line and to imaginative engagement with it. Yes, the efforts of the performer are important in how they impact upon the performance of the virtual musical space, but the connection is more integral than this, since the virtual musical space is bound up with material objects which, through the affordances and resistances of their physical structure, determine the way in which the virtual is configured. The musical line is not detachable from the physicality of music. Indeed it is changes in instrumentation that elucidate this all too clearly. It is how the line is sounded, conditioned by material parameters, which include the physical gestures and instruments required for performance but also the conditions which the instruments exert upon the conception of the musical work, that makes all the difference.
Concert-hall listening
In the same way that the physicality of musical production is somewhat sidelined due to an emphasis upon the acousmatic, so the type of listening embraced is one that is to some extent disembodied, since it involves the contemplative, abstracted mode of listening that is characteristically presumed to occur in the concert-hall.
Scruton is careful not to exclude others engaged in music activity from the act of listening, acknowledging that they can be, for example, a dancer or performer.Footnote 43 In doing so, he implicitly allows for the fact that these other types of listener can provide insight into musical understanding. He says: ‘it is here that understanding resides, and it is through “taking up” a work of music in our own response to it that we show our grasp of its expressive power’.Footnote 44 However, ultimately, this form of engagement is subordinated to concert-hall listening:
Music is an action, and in certain circumstances it is also an invitation to action on the part of its listeners – for instance, in dancing. But this invitation can be resisted; and it is precisely when resisting, so as to contemplate the musical movement as something objective, outside us, occurring in a space of its own, that we feel its “transcendental gravity”. It is in these circumstances that music seems to lift us free from our ordinary preoccupations.Footnote 45
In concert-hall listening, the separation of the musical experience from its embodied element is present. Of course, listening involves the body, but it does not necessarily follow that motionless listening is better than one that emerges in action. To suggest so is to neglect the process by means of which the acousmatic space, its virtual causality and imaginative involvement with it, arises, namely in real time with real people. Specifically, it overlooks the way in which music-making induces a musical contemplation that is related to concert-hall listening, but has an added benefit, since both the mind and body are incorporated within it. Importantly, the mechanism for this integration is gesture. Thus, in practice and performance, the musician faces outwards both imaginatively and physically, caught up in the virtual movement of the acousmatic space which she is simultaneously involved in creating. The physical impact upon the instrument moulds the sound that is produced through some form of gesture, and this transforms into music, which then feeds back into the physical process, which shapes the next physical action and, thereby, the subsequent sound and direction of the musical line. In this way the musician is caught up in the physical pattern, its sonic corollary and its musical outcome, and contemplation and imaginative engagement occurs in action rather than through some form of disembodied consumption.Footnote 46
Music, gesture and anthropology
If Scruton's account does justice to the phenomenon of music, but only partially, how does it stand in relation to the anthropology that he attempts to sustain? In one sense, emphasising an acousmatic understanding of music enables the opening of a space that renders it irreducible to the physical and therefore as distinct from the ‘way of science’. Scruton says: ‘we enter another space from the one occupied by the performer, and in that space a kind of free causality opens to our perception’.Footnote 47 However, if the modelling of musical understanding on inter-personal understanding is to work, which seems fundamental to the cognitive dualism that Scruton posits, the parallel made between gestures within each realm needs to be more fully embraced. Just as the gesture of a person is fully integrated with and reliant upon its physical production for its significance (and the nuance of its significance) to be communicated and entered into through imagination, so must the physical production of musical gesture. For, as noted, it is worked into every level of music making in a fundamental way: the character of musical gestures are determined by the material conditions of instruments, they are harnessed in musical compositions, and they are enacted in musical performance.
It is in this way, by an exploration of gesture, that Scruton's anthropology can be buttressed. The significance of musical gesture, just as in the case of human gesture, arises both within particular inter-personal encounters and within networks of inter-personal encounters: it is only on this basis that ‘knowledge by acquaintance’ arises, as the significance of gestures are interpreted and elaborated. Indeed, it is the subtleties comprising physical gestures that enable departures from that which is familiar to be discerned. Happiness and sadness, anger and joy, are ambiguous, and physical gestures communicate something of this. In musical terms, it is by virtue of previous musical gestures that subsequent gestures and expression accrue significance and it is also thereby that they provide a frame for new shades of gesture and expression.
In addition, by emphasising the concert-hall mode of listening, a contemplative mode of attention is favoured. It is this that is posited as the proper form of attention since it facilitates musical understanding. Unfortunately for Scruton's anthropology, this implicitly reinforces a dualism of mind and matter, requiring that the listener be extracted from the everyday and that the body be stilled so that the mind can enter into the space of music and its field of meanings without ‘distraction’.
Conclusion
In sum: the frame underpinning both Scruton's acousmatic account of music and his exposition of musical understanding is clear. Taking a position against forms of reductionism, Scruton locates the significance of music in the field of meanings that is generated in the virtual realm of tones. However, as we have seen, such a move overlooks the integral way in which physical production is bound up with this virtual realm, not only in its performance but also in the conception of a piece of music. It also does not do justice to those forms of attention and musical understanding that are yielded by a more enacted form of imaginative engagement. As a result, although Scruton seeks to uphold an anthropology that supports the holistic union of body and mind, his reluctance to embrace the embodied aspects of music means that he ends up closer to Cartesianism than he would perhaps have intended.
