Sunday, February 14, 2010

Scruton - Music and Morality

"David with his harp" Paris Psalter,
c. 960, Constantinople
Roger Scruton, philosopher and modern defender of truth, goodness, beauty, extols the virtues of the same in music:
Faced with youth culture we are encouraged to be nonjudgmental. But to be nonjudgmental is already to make a kind of judgment: it is to suggest that it really doesn’t matter what you listen to or dance to, and that there is no moral distinction between the various listening habits that have emerged in our time. That is a morally charged position, and one that flies in the face of common sense. To suggest that people who live with a metric pulse as a constant background to their thoughts and movements are living in the same way, with the same kind of attention and the same pattern of challenges and rewards, as others who know music only from sitting down to listen to it, clearing their minds, meanwhile, of all other thoughts—such a suggestion is surely implausible.
Read more of Music and Morality here.

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