as profound as that which took place in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries which we call the Renaissance, and that this transformation, like the Renaissance, is taking place not just on the level of conscious opinions and concepts but, more importantly, on that of perception and the often unconscious habits of thought on which we base our everyday speech and action. And since it is perception and the subconscious that are the concern of art, it is the methods of art rather than of science which can provide a model and a guide for the new conceptual universe towards which we are moving.
It is a grave but common error to think of the aims of art and of science as identical, or complementary, or even much in tune with each other. Art and science, it is true, are both means of exploration, but the intention, the method and the kind of reality they explore are very different. This is not simply the Cartesian split between matter and mind (we must indeed start from the assumption that they are identical); it is rather that the aim of art is to enable us to live in the world, while that of science is to enable us to master it. It is for this reason that I insist on the supreme importance of the art-process and the relative unimportance of the art-object; the essential tool of art is the unrepeatable experience. With science it is the finished product that counts, the theory, the hypothesis, the objectified knowledge; we obtain it by whatever means we can, and the tool is the repeatable experiment. Art is knowledge as experience, the structuring and ordering of feeling and perception, while science is abstract knowledge divorced as completely as possible from experience, a body of facts and concepts existing outside of and independently of the knower. Both are valid human activities, but since the Renaissance we have allowed the attitudes and values of science to predominate over those of art, to the detriment of the quality of our experience.
Our schools, for example, concern themselves almost exclusively with abstract knowledge, which pupils are expected to absorb immediately and regurgitate on demand. The pupils may or may not wish, or be able, to absorb the knowledge, but the one lesson that all do learn is that they can be consumers, not producers, of knowledge, and that the only knowledge that has validity is that which comes to them through the school system. They are taught much about the world, but their experience of it, apart from the hermetic world of classroom and playground, is seriously impaired. And so, too, of our culture as a whole. We know more about the world, and experience it less, than perhaps any previous generation in history; so, too, musicology has made available to us more knowledge about music than ever before, and yet our experience of it is greatly diluted by being mediated through the knowledge of experts. We become afraid of the encounter with new musical experience, where knowledge and expertise are no guide and only the subjective experience honestly felt can serve, and retreat into the safe past, where we know what to expect and connoisseurship is paramount.
This book will suggest that artistic activity, properly understood, can provide not only a way out of this impasse in musical appreciation, in itself an unimportant matter, but also an approach to the restructuring of education and even perhaps of our society. Simply because the artist sets his own goals and works with his whole self—reason, intuition, the most ruthless self-criticism and realistic assessment of a situation, freely, without external compulsion and with love—art is a model for what work could be were it freely and lovingly undertaken rather than, as it is for most today, forced, monotonous and boring. The spectacular changes which western art has undergone in our century are metaphors for changes that are still only latent in our culture. They show, however, that there are in fact forces within the matrix of society that are favorable to these changes, which could bring about our liberation from the scientific and technocratic domination of our lives, from the pointless and repetitious labor that passes for work for most people, and, for our children, from the scars inflicted by our present schools, well-intentioned though they may be, on all those, successful and unsuccessful alike, who pass through them.
A Different Drummer—American Music
From Music, Society, Education
(1977)
It is a characteristic of tonal-harmonic music that it requires a high degree of subordination of the individual elements of the music to the total effect. Not only is the progress of each individual voice required to conform to the progression of chords, but also each individual note or chord is meaningless in itself, gaining significance only within the context of the total design, much as the authoritarian or totalitarian state requires the subordination of the interests of its individual citizens to its purposes. It is therefore interesting to see in the music of those British colonies, which become the United States of America, a disintegration of tonal functional harmony taking place long before such a process became detectable in Europe, and it is not too fanciful to view this as one expression of the ideal of individual liberty on which the United States was founded, an ideal that, however meagerly realized or even betrayed during the course of its history, has never quite disappeared.
The colonists who arrived in New England in the early seventeenth century had left behind the last days of a golden age of English musical culture. Many were, in the words of the first Governor of the New England colonies, “very expert in music,” and although the Pilgrims and Puritans favored sacred over secular music, they had no objection to secular instrumental music, and even dance, as long as decorum was preserved. However, the Mayflower and her successors had little room for any but the most essential cargo, and only the smallest and hardiest musical instruments could be accommodated—certainly nothing so bulky and liable to damage as a virginal or organ. So far as is known, the early colonists could and did enjoy only music that was simple and functional, that is, social music and worship music. As far as the former is concerned, we do know that there were instruments around, though what they played is unclear—possibly from English collections like those of Thomas Ravenscroft, and later John Playford. Secular song was not unknown, not only in the Anglo-Celtic ballads, which belonged to the ancient oral rather than to the literate tradition, and which in America proved extremely durable, but also songs from the various collections that had crossed the Atlantic with them. Worship music, on the other hand, meant almost exclusively the singing of the psalms in metrical translation, a practice that was not unknown in England even in the Established Church. This may seem a limited repertoire, but there are after all a hundred and fifty psalms, many of which are very long, and their emotional range is very wide. The version favored by the early colonists was that of Henry Ainsworth, who used a variety of poetic meters and provided no less than thirty-nine different tunes, which were printed at the back of the book in the form of single lines of melody. Dissatisfaction was, however, early expressed by the Puritan divines, who alleged that faithfulness to the literal word of God was too often sacrificed to literary grace, and in 1640 a new metrical translation was made by a committee and published—the first book to be printed in the New England colony.
The translations were made into only six metrical schemes, mostly in four-line stanzas, so that the same tune could be used for several psalms, and the number of tunes that needed to be learnt was kept to a minimum. The new psalm book was adopted, after much disputation, throughout the New England colonies by the end of the seventeenth century; under the name of Bay Psalm Book it ran through innumerable editions over the next century. It was not until the ninth edition, of 1698, that tunes were provided—a mere thirteen—to which the psalms could be sung.
Irving Lowens makes a valuable comment on the American culture of this period:
The story of the arts in seventeenth century New England is the tale of a people trying to plant in the New World the very vines whose fruit they had enjoyed in the Old, while, at the same time, it is the chronicle of the subconscious development of a totally different civilization. The seventeenth-century history of the Bay Psalm Book is a case in point, for although the psalm-tunes may superficially appear nothing more than a parochial utilization of certain music sung in the mother country, a mysterious qualitative change took place when they were sung on different soil. Here, they proved to be the seed from which a new, uniquely American music was later to flower.1
The first
