Bruce Baugh, "Prolegomena to Any Aesthetics of Rock Music"

Baugh Prolegomena to Any Aesthetics of Rock Music25cause of conditioned, subjective sensations andpleasures, which could form the basis only ofimpure and heteronomous aesthetic judgments.This, though, was only a first step in Hanslick'sproject of elevating music from the position oflowest of the fine arts to the highest and mostformal art of all. "Music is unique among thearts," wrote Hanslick, "because its form is itscontent and ... its content is its form" (Hanslick,p. 94). In music, unlike painting or literature,there can be no content apart from the formitself, no subject matter independent of the compositionor organization of the work. Musicalbeauty, then, is entirely based on form, that is,on tonal relationships (Hanslick, p. xxiii), andnot on any feelings or emotions aroused or expressedby the music (Hanslick, p. 95). By makingthe matter of music (musical tones) formal,and by making form identical with content, Hanslickmade the art Kant regarded as the basest andmost material into the highest and most formal.Of course, the story doesn't stop with Hanslick.The preoccupation with musical form continueson into twentieth century aesthetics, notablyin Adorno's philosophy of music, but in amore everyday way, formal concerns predominatein music criticism in general, from journalismto academia.4The obvious rejoinder to this characterizationof traditional aesthetics is that it is not exclusivelyformal, but takes into account non-formalor material elements as well. The timbre of avoice or instrument is clearly of great importanceto European concert music; if they weren't,top caliber bel canto sopranos and Stradivariusviolins wouldn't command so much respect andsuch high prices. Music criticism also takes performanceaspects of music into account. Buttimbre and performance are usually secondary,and are often discussed in terms of the "faithfulness"or "adequacy" of the performance/interpretationto the composition performed or tothe composer's "intentions." One justificationfor playing music on period instruments and inperiod style is that this better captures what thecomposition was trying to express, not simplythat it sounds better or is more pleasant to listento. In that case, performance and the notes'sounds are judged in terms of what the compositionrequires. In classical aesthetics of music,matter is at the service of form, and is alwaysjudged in relation to form. Even though tradi-tional aesthetics is not exclusively formal, formalconsiderations predominate.When this preoccupation with form and compositionis brought to bear on rock music, thechief result is confusion. Usually, rock music isdismissed as insignificant on account of the simplicityof its forms, a simplicity which is real,and not a misperception by those unfamiliar withthe genre. Alternatively, more "liberal" criticswill try to find significant form where there isvery little form at all, and at the expense ofneglecting what is really at stake in rock music.This liberal tolerance is a worse mistake thanconservative intolerance. In the first place, itis highly condescending to suppose that rockmusic has value only when it approximates thecompositional forms of baroque or romantic music.The Beatles, in particular, were victims ofthis patronizing attitude. Is "Penny Lane" abetter rock song than "Strawberry Fields" becausethe former contains flourishes of Baroquetrumpet and the latter doesn't?5 Does knowingthat "She's Leaving Home" ends on an Aeoliancadence add to our appreciation of it as a rocksong?6 I don't think so. Yet for a time, in the late1960s and early 1970s, critics fawned over complicatedworks by Yes or Genesis because traditionalaesthetics of music could find somethingto say about their form, never noticing that crite-ria appropriate to the music of Handel or Boulezmight be inappropriate when applied to rockmusic, and have very little to do with the informalstandards of practice and evaluation employedby people who actually perform or listento rock music on a regular basis.To the extent that some rock musicians tookthis sort of criticism seriously, the results weredisastrous, producing the embarrassing, pretentiousand-in the final analysis-very silly excessesof "art rock." To the extent art rocksucceeded, it did so because it was rock, notbecause it was "art." This was especially noticeablein the case of the mercifully short-lived sub-genre, the "rock opera." The Who's Tommy7 wasa good rock opera because it had good rockmusic and was done tongue-in-cheek (hence its"Underture"), but other attempts were merelybombastic, neither rock nor opera. Rock's borrowingsfrom "classical" music had similar results.Combining a soulful rhythm and bluesvocal with a Baroque organ line worked in ProculHarem's "Whiter Shade of Pale,"8 but in