Writing recently in the book pages of The Wall Street Journal, the constitutional scholar Hadley Arkes noted that
in malls throughout the country, managers have found a simple device for preventing teenagers from taking over the public square: They pipe in Mozart quartets and the youngsters flee. Something in their souls cannot bear Mozart, which is another way of saying that their souls have been formed by another style of music.
Indeed. No one would mistake the accoustic assaults of groups like Nine Inch Nails or Smashing Pumpkins for Mozart, or anything like Mozart. Professor Arkes made this observation at the beginning of his review of Slouching Towards Gomorrah, Robert Bork’s new book about the culture wars. It was exactly the right anecdote for the subject. For the relevance of music—or perhaps we should say the relevance of the perversion of music—to the contemporary culture wars cannot be overstated. At least since Plato, thinkers have recognized the uncanny power of music to educate the emotions—or “soul,” as Professor Arkes, with Plato, puts it. And like all education, the indelible lessons music teaches can form root emotional habits for better or for worse. Today’s youth, reared on rock ’n’ roll, flee from Mozart because for them the sense of order, articulately contained passion, and emotional delicacy that Mozart communicates are distasteful, unintelligible, or both. What they reject in music they also reject in their lives—with the predictable results that we see all around us.
What has happened to music in our culture? Anyone concerned with the fate of our civilization must ponder this complex question. It is not easily answered. Rock certainly represents one species of musical perversion: music decapitated or lobotomized. But there are other perversions and detours as well. The English philosopher Roger Scruton traces some of them below in “The Eclipse of Listening,” his important contribution to our series on “The Future of the European Past,” which in this issue temporarily shifts its focus to deal with the fate of a specific art form.
The “root cause” of our musical crisis, Professor Scruton suggests, is the “same as the root cause of so many other crises during our century: namely, the rise of the intelligentsia as a priesthood of unbelievers.” In this sense, Professor Scruton argues, the suspicion of tonality is like the Marxist’s suspicion of private property or the existentialist’s suspicion of the bourgeois family, “part of the almost universal alienation of Western intellectuals from the legacy of bourgeois culture during the late nineteenth century: … an act of rebellion against the only way we have of making sense of things.” Rock music is only part of the story. As Professor Scruton shows, the real problem is reinvigorating a culture in which the spiritual legacy of Mozart continues to speak to us—not merely as a historical artifact but soul to soul. Such a culture is necessary not only for the preservation of what Mozart accomplished, but also for the possibility of what any future Mozarts might accomplish.
