On the social impact of making music – Reflections on SIMMposium London
As the purpose of classical music within our postmodern society becomes increasingly less self-evident, researchers and practitioners concerned with the sustainability of the art form try hard to answer the question of what creates legitimacy in (and of) the musical world. One of the most widespread and firmly defended commonplaces is the claim that music is a universal language capable of uniting people and of transcending all boundaries of time and space. It is a popular belief that the practice of making music enhances the social conditions of those involved. Being a most welcome legitimation for an art form that has been enduring an existential crisis for a long time, there remains little room (and even littler demand) for ambiguity of the social impact of making music. Our aim here is to bring some nuance into the matter. Music in the broadest and most trivial sense, as a sonorous medium for expression and communication, is indeed a universal language. Established, construed and institutionalized musical forms, however, are not. Every musical culture has a very distinct logic of semantics, and a proper understanding of a musical language requires familiarity with this codification. With its wide variety of cultural codes, music has always been a place of conflict and barriers in many ways. In this short reflection, we will shortly touch upon two levels in which music draws or reinforces social and cultural boundaries.
1. Musical praxis
While music might provoke feelings of wholeness and peace, the practice behind these manifestations is often a veritable battlefield. The symphony orchestra, for example, is often put forward by well-intentioned social workers as a perfect metaphor for ‘homogeneity within heterogeneity’: everybody plays a different and individual role in a project that can only be realized when every one of these small gears is in place; not unlike our own multicultural society. An obvious first remark would be that this feeling of constructive dependence is in no way different from the feeling one would get while partaking in other forms of art, or in team sports. The argument is not music-specific and therefore unsatisfactory. But, more importantly, this metaphorical approach to orchestral performance practice (or any form of musical performance) relies on romanticized and utopian assumptions about musical praxis. More often than not, a symphony orchestra is a highly competitive platform, where struggles are fought in concentric circles: clarinet against clarinet, clarinets against oboes, woodwinds against the brass section, wind players against string players, and all against the conductor. Until today, there is no empirical proof that the practice of making music actually unites people in a sustainable way. In his book El Sistema: orchestrating Venezuela’s youth (2014), Geoffrey Baker offers an eye-opening analysis of El Sistema, Venezuela’s impressive yet failing attempt to improve its youth’s social conditions by letting them play in well-equipped and government-funded orchestras. The bottom-line of his sobering analysis is that the competitive nature of orchestral performance reinforces the precarious social conditions in which the subjects were already embedded.
2. Musical works
A more indirect challenge to the idea of music’s alleged positive social impact concerns the body of musical works and their historical context. Today’s musical practice is strongly relying on the established musical canon: a more or less stable collection of musical works of unquestionable aesthetic quality. More than a mere set of musical works, the canon is an authoritative point of reference that provides a rule of conduct for musical construction and appreciation. The musical canon, in other words, is a regulative concept that sets boundaries of what can be legitimately accessed from an aesthetic point of view, and, at the same time, nudges ideal practices. Precisely because of these increasingly standardized and almost ritualized concert practices, canonical music strongly appealed to the higher bourgeoisie, struggling for its collective identity by the end of the 19th century. Music was appropriated by these higher classes and was used to promote social differences within modern society. The class-based distinction between highbrow and lowbrow culture added to the marginalization of musical innovation and the reinforcement of categorical boundaries defining ‘classical music’. That way, the stability of the musical canon, initially a matter of aesthetics, was further reinforced by ideological themes. From that point of view, the regulative force of the musical canon provokes the opposite of what we hoped music would do: a practice dominated by the musical canon is not inclusive, but exclusive. Be it often implicit, our western musical practice strongly relies on a form of elitist ideology, concealed by a veil of culture.
With regard to the social impact of making music, skepticism is due. Firstly, music should not be reduced to a methodology for social work. Secondly, we should remember that music is never free from ideology. Especially the idea of a musical canon that binds musical works together in a seemingly coherent narrative and, in doing so, sets boundaries of what is aesthetically viable, is by no means an inclusive or tolerant concept. Is there, then, no positive social impact of making music? To answer that question, it seems useful to reflect on the word ‘making’: in a musical context, ’making music’ can mean ‘to perform’ as well as ‘to create’. While performing music that already existed, or that is composed to be performed exactly as it is written, the meaning and impact of this music will be determined by its historical context to a large extent. Performers and audiences should always be aware of that. However, in the case of participatory music, like a group of people collectively improvising tunes, an ad hoc consciousness is shared by all participants. Here, the music can indeed be understood as a universal language, comprehensible at least for all participants. This distinction between presentational music and participatory music is crucial to properly understand the social impact of making music. In the author’s view, music can have a beneficial social impact only when it is created with, not performed for, people in precarious conditions. To impose the boundaries of classical music on people with a different social, cultural or historical background (a practice of which El Sistema is just one example) borders on the immoral practice of identity-assimilation.
Does this mean that we should cut off the final lifeline for classical music, namely its alleged constructive social impact? Certainly not. Music has the potential to strongly impact society, precisely by virtue of its ideological content. Music’s meaning is historically contingent and can thus be reappropriated. Not in the form of what some call ‘inverted snobbism’ (simply disengage the classical tradition from its original habitat to lower its threshold, like putting a popular DJ in front of an orchestra), but by composing new music with new contexts and ‘ideologies’, and by constantly explicitizing, rethinking, reevaluating and reformulating the ideological content or context of existing works. This reflective potential that is present in any kind of music (as it is in other art forms), is no final lifeline for music’s legitimacy in our society, but might well be a cultural lifeline for society itself.
Arne Herman
(Credits to the organizers and participants of the SIMMposium 2017, 8-9 July, Guildhall School, London)