Overheard.

Sir Roger Scruton on the value of real music ...

The background sounds of modern life are ... less and less human.  Rhythm, which is the sound of life, has been largely replaced by electrical pulses, produced by a machine programmed to repeat itself ad infinitum, and to thrust its booming bass notes into the very bones of the victim.  Whole areas of civic space in our society are now policed by this sound, which drives anybody with the slightest feeling for music to distraction, and ensures that for many of us a visit to the pub or a meal in a restaurant have lost their residual meaning.  These are no longer social events, but experiments in endurance, as you shout at each other over the deadly noise.

There are two reasons why this vacuous music has flown into every public space.  One is the vast change in the human ear brought about by the mass production of sound.  The other is the failure of the law to protect us from the result.  For our ancestors music was something that you sat down to listen to, or which you made for yourself.  It was a ceremonial event, in which you participated, either as a passive listener or as an active performer.  Either way you were giving and receiving life, sharing in something of great social significance.

With the advent of the gramophone, the radio and now the iPod, music is no longer something that you must make for yourself, nor is it something that you sit down to listen to.  It follows you about wherever you go, and you switch it on as a background.  It is not so much listened to as overheard.  The banal melodies and mechanical rhythms, the stock harmonies recycled in song after song, these things signify the eclipse of the musical ear.  For many people music is no longer a language shaped by our deepest feelings, no longer a place of refuge from the tawdriness and distraction of everyday life, no longer an art in which gripping ideas are followed to their distant conclusions.  It is simply a carpet of sound, designed to bring all thought and feeling down to its own level lest something serious might be felt or said.

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