Review: The Aesthetics of Music

Looking at Roger Scruton’s political credentials, it’s easy to imagine him as some kind of slobbering reactionary, the philosophical equivalent of Victor Davis Hanson and John Heath. I was quite disheartened when I saw this, because I had already committed myself to reading The Aesthetics of Music and wasn’t eager to subject myself to a 500-page book that would be more accurately entitled Bitching About Schoenberg. Luckily for everyone, Roger Scruton is not nuts; he just has some bad philosophical odours here and there. A quick glance through the preface was enough to set my mind at ease. Whatever else he may be, Scruton is a real philosopher and a real musician interested in making a real contribution to the field of aesthetics, and though he ultimately comes down against the Schoenbergian tradition, he gives Schoenberg his due as a composer.

As Scruton notes in the preface, music is extremely important to the philosophy of art, but it has been under-served by the great philosophers. On the few occasions they do turn their attentions to music, many of them (e.g. Kant) only show their ignorance and apathy. The fanciest pre-20th century thinkers to remark on music are Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, and Boethius, and all of them are writing about something so removed from our experience of music it hardly seems relevant (as I recall, Augustine’s treatise never mentions pitch). Whole aesthetic philosophies have crumbled because their creators never bothered to consider how music fits into their scheme. The 20th century saw a proliferation of aesthetic philosophies and therefore a large number of works on the aesthetics of music from various perspectives, but we have seen very few accounts as complete as Scruton’s and his work would be valuable for this alone, even if it was completely incoherent.