Understanding Music

This review of Roger Scrutton’s new book (I’d highly recommend it) is a helpful explanation of meaning in music itself. Here’s a little snippet using an explanation that I use everywhere I speak:

Just as facial expressions do not communicate something that can be understood so much as enjoin us to imagine what it feels like when we ourselves make such an expression, so too, according to Scruton, does some elemental aspect of musical experience enjoin us to engage our imagining in similar fashion. In this way, and because the experience of music is not, at least not typically, heard as a single expression, the imagination is forced to grapple with the musical shapes and forms as they unfold over time, following its movement as it echoes in, or is anticipated by, the movements of our body and rational imagination.

It is in this aspect of “enjoinment” – of the way we join with the music – that is the key to Scruton’s conception not only of musical understanding but also of its wider cultural and social value. Just as a grimace demands that we imagine the complex of unpleasant feelings and thoughts behind that particular belligerent facial expression, so too music may require us to identify with a world of sensibilities which happens to sit ill with us. We may refuse to acquiesce, but, as Scruton puts it, in connection with the hit song “Angel of Music” from Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Phantom of the Opera, we may also be “seduced”. In which case, “we become the music, while the music lasts. Into our own first-person perspective there creeps a phoney state of mind that sits uncomfortably with our sense of who we are. It is surely one of the roles of taste or aesthetic judgment to discriminate between the expression with which we might identify, and the expression that invites us to sympathize with a state of mind that in our better moments we seek to shun”.

Read the review and buy the book.

© 2009, Scott Aniol. All rights reserved.

Scott Aniol

Scott Aniol holds a bachelor's degree in church music from Bob Jones University (Greenville, SC), a master's degree in musicology from Northern Illinois University (DeKalb, IL), and has studied theology at Central Baptist Theological Seminary (Plymouth, MN) and Detroit Baptist Theological Seminary. He was ordained to to the gospel ministry by First Baptist Church (Rockford, IL) in April of 2004. As the executive director of Religious Affections Ministries, Scott speaks on the subjects of music and worship at various churches and conferences. His most recent speaking engagements include the Preserving the Truth Conference, Central Seminary’s Foundations Conference, International Baptist College, and Bob Jones Seminary. Click here to read and/or listen to important talks from Scott Aniol. Curriculum vitae

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