THE AESTHETICS OF MUSIC, by Roger Scruton. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997,
530pp., $39.95.
Like colours, sounds are presented to a single privileged sense-modality.
You can hear them, but you cannot see them, touch them, taste them, or smell
them. They are objects of hearing in something like the way that colours
are objects of sight, and they are missing from the world of deaf people
just as colours are missing from the world of the blind.
So begins Roger Scruton's Aesthetics of Music. It is a starting point that,
in its emphasis on sound and hearing, signals an intent to begin at the
very beginning with that which distinguishes music from the other arts.
By invoking the blind and the deaf, it also implies ramifications that make
the enterprise of beginning again seem more than a mere philosophical exercise.
For Scruton, in fact, the need has never been greater, the death of religion
having left a spiritual void that he believes only the aesthetic can fill.
Recent accounts of music, however, have increasingly moved away from aesthetic
interests, trapped on one hand by the challenges of defining a phenomenon
in a constant state of evolution and change, on the other, by the lure of
unlocking the intricacies and social trappings of the creative mind. If
the damage to the senses caused by a steady diet of the banal and the superficial
is ever to be reversed, Scruton contends, philosophy must effect a return
to the "purely musical," the power or presence music has in experience.
Eleanor V. Stubley
Faculty of Music
McGill University
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