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Books
The Aesthetics of Music by Roger Scruton
Jane O’Grady describes the musical mysticism of Roger Scruton.
Under the Stalinist regime, the last movements of Tchaikovsky’s 6th Symphony were often reversed in order to bring the work to a triumphal, rather than despairing, conclusion. The reason that listeners find this reversal unsatisfactory, says Roger Scruton, is that the third movement cannot be heard as an answer to the fourth. But why does its failure to respond seem wrong? Why should we even expect to hear it as an answer? Is music a language? And should we describe the Sixth Symphony as an expression of Tchaikovsky’s despair, an evocation of its listeners’ despair, or the depiction of despair in general?
Such questions, never satisfactorily answered, trouble musical aestheticians, and are tackled by Scruton’s impressive book. His quest begins with the rudimentary but difficult question ‘what is a sound?’ and, using musical illustrations, builds up through music’s aspects to its place in morality and culture. Sounds, Scruton argues, are ‘pure events’, which do not happen to any thing.
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