Preference, Taste and Judgment: An Aesthetic Rumination on Spanish Train

 

I will begin by taking a page from Kant. Kant says the task of ethics is not to FIND arcane or hidden principles of judgment but to elucidate the principles that lie beneath the judgments we habitually make. On this ground I assert that aesthetic judgment exists. Everyone has heard the clichés that lie in the path of elucidating aesthetic judgment. Everyone knows that ‘beauty is in the eye of the beholder’ and that ‘there is no accounting for taste’. Everyone knows that of all things aesthetic judgment is the most purely personal and the most subjective. Fortunately for this piece, while everybody SAYS this nobody actually believes it. The people who repeat these well-known proverbs freely and cheerfully judge works of art to be good or bad, superior or inferior and argue passionately for these judgments. Tell a metal head that Black Sabbath stinks and he will tell you are wrong if he does not physically assault you. Moreover, there are entire publications, like Rolling Stone, which exist for no other reason than to guide the taste of its readers towards certain artists it judges to be excellent. If Rolling Stone compiled a list of the top ten guitarists and omitted Jimi Hendrix that would be considered an abdication of critical responsibility! Indeed, the Grammy Awards make a clear aesthetic distinction in the way they divide up prizes. The ‘Album of the Year’ category recognizes only pop music. A jazz album can only be best jazz album never best album.[1] This is clearly because pop music is the best kind of music. A pop record is really just a record without a modifier. It is ‘music’ while a jazz album is ‘jazz music’. The principle inherent in this classification is that genres like jazz or classical embody a crucial aesthetic fault: esotericism or perceived intellectualism. These kinds of music are faulty because they lack the directness and (apparent) simplicity that garners mass appeal.[2] As such they have a category of their own and are honored separately either offstage or at some point in the awards show when people are less likely to be watching.  Finally, I appeal to Ilana Kaplan who I discussed in my previous essay. At NO point in her piece does she justify her love for Taylor Swift by appealing to the subjectivity of taste. Her argument is that Swift IS a great songwriter and deserves to be recognized as such by others whether they are her fans or not. Her plea is that Swift be given critical recognition such as artists like Joni Mitchell or Aretha Franklin have been given. She wants HER taste validated by the recognition of others. She demands that WE recognize that, whatever our preferences in the matter, Taylor Swift is GOOD.[3]

I take it then as uncontroversial that aesthetic judgment exists on the grounds that everybody makes aesthetic judgments of some kind whether they consciously advert to them as such or not. They do so on two levels: between individual works and between genres taken as wholes. The metal head not only thinks Black Sabbath is better than Megan Trainor he also thinks metal is better than commercial pop. The Grammys think pop music is better in kind than jazz or funk because it is more democratic and more reflective of the general culture (and also, to be frank, whiter). Similarly, Ilana Kaplan clearly sees Taylor Swift as the best singer song writer because she dominates the most important field in which the most culturally significant judgments of taste are made by the best taste makers. They defend (at least implicitly) the objectivity of judgments of taste. Clearly, they think a. that aesthetic judgments can be made between works in the same genre b. that aesthetic judgments can be made between works in different genres and c. that judgments can be made between the value of different genres taken as wholes. Below I will defend the legitimacy of such judgments under certain limited circumstances leaving it open whether they can be defended in other circumstances beyond the ones I outline. In doing so I hope to shine some small light of the overall problem of aesthetic judgment.    

The problem can be stated like this: the experience of music or art has three poles and never exists without these three poles. These are preference, taste and judgment. Preference is the subjective pole of aesthetic experience: this is where we assert what we like or dislike. Judgment is the objective pole: this is where we assert what is good or bad, well done or poorly done. Taste is the compromise we make between our preferences and our judgments. This is why no one has precisely the same taste. Indeed, this is why so much confusion lies around aesthetic propositions like ‘Taylor Swift is really good’ or “Tiny Tim is really bad’. They have both a subjective and objective pole simultaneously and inextricably. They mix up accidents of sensibility with reason.  Indeed, the rational element of aesthetic judgment has nothing to work on at first but accidents of sensibility! This is why it is possible to recognize the value of art works one does not like.[4] In spite of this, let’s see if we can climb out of the cave of direct preference and glimpse some rational principles of aesthetic judgment. I will begin with a preference. 

As a child I was quite enthralled by Spanish Train and Other Stories by Chris de Burgh. Listening to it now it still falls easily on my ears. This is in spite of the fact that its blend of folk pop and tacky music hall is, to my mature judgment, aesthetically terrible. It is a guilty pleasure: a thing that interacts in a compelling way with my preferences, my immediate likes and dislikes, while repelling my taste and judgment. It is worth considering why I so liked music I now find a bit cringy. Reason one is contained in the title. Each song on the record creates a distinct and memorable scenario in satisfying variety. We have aliens visiting earth, God and the Devil playing cards, soldiers writing home from the front. This is especially satisfying to a child who, above all, wants to imagine something novel or emotionally compelling happening. The thing I recall liking most, though, was the variety of instrumentation employed. I still feel a shiver of delight when wispy recorders chime in on a song called ‘The Tower’. Plus, towers are just cool in any iteration. This may be connected with the fact that as a child I played the recorder. Moreover, even at their kitschiest, the melodies had (and have!) a pleasing sweetness. This is the level at which music interacts with your physiology and nervous constitution. There is no accounting for such things and consequently they are not a matter of judgement or argument. An art work must not only embody the general features of artistic excellence but be congruent or correspondent to a given system of sensitivity (which embraces the nerves at the base physical level and various kinds of cultural or psychological conditioning at higher levels).  

Let’s consider though the principles implicit in my liking both the record in question and the individual songs on it. A distinct and memorable narrative scenario is a kind of unity. An impression is distinct by being integrated in itself and differentiated from others. We might call this aesthetic effect ‘coherence of impression’. Spanish Train not only created a coherent impression in each of its songs but as a whole. In part this is because of the fey, folksy sensibility of the artist. The album works as a whole because the style and manner of the artist is stamped on each part of it. Within this general integration though is another aesthetic quality I call complementarity. The individual ‘stories’ cannot create a pleasing unity of impression unless they are sufficiently distinct with respect to one another. Some stories will be sad, some uplifting, some comic or sentimental. In the same way some songs, in a musical suite or album, will be slower and faster or vary in emotional tonality. A satisfying work, then, is one in which a unified impression is embodied in complementarity. Of course, individual works may tend to value unity over complementarity or vice versa.[5] Any musical work, though, must have SOME degree of either. A nursery rhyme has complementarity of individual notes and even work as disparate as that of American composer Morton Feldman has the unity of HIS style and manner. Here, then, are two features we can look at when faced with a question of aesthetic judgment. Of course, in the play of these two features we have the other elements of music; expression, mood, color, movement and so on. 

With these criteria in mind we can listen through Spanish Train and decide which songs on it best exemplify the talents of the artist. As fans we do this all the time. Some Dylan songs are definitely superior to others. Plus, we can take Spanish Train and compare it to other albums by the same artist. Again, as fans, we do this all the time. Thirdly, we can compare the album and the artist to others in his genre. At each step comparison is possible because the principles of judgment remain the same. Now I am going to leave the easy path of consensus and make one further claim. The same broad principles which allow for judgments within the canon of an artists and between artists in a similar genre can, in certain specified circumstances, allow comparisons between genres both in terms of individual examples of those genres and the genres as totalities. Thus, I can compare Chris De Burgh to other ‘singer-songwriters’ like Cohen and Dylan and judge that his work lacks their sophistication and depth. All three can create memorable tunes but the latter two are vastly better poets. Their lyrics represent value added. I can also take singer song writers as a whole and say that, for the most part, their music (as music) does not measure up to jazz in complexity or expressiveness because, of course, it is meant to support poetry. Dylan can create a great song by matching a lyric to a tune as simple as ‘Rollin’ and Tumblin’. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-RVY3NEWlrc) Still, Rollin’ and Tumblin’ is not ‘So What’ by Miles Davis (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ylXk1LBvIqU) just considered as pure music in abstraction from the words: Dylan’s band playing this tune without Dylan may be a tad dull. Being a singer song writer imposes musical limits for the sake of realizing other artistic values. We might, then, say that jazz musicians, simply as musicians and taking no other factors into account, tend to be better than singer song writers. 

There are, of course, many good objections to making such a claim. If I say, not that any given piece of jazz is better than any given piece of commercial pop (this would be untrue!) can I really say that the best examples of jazz are better than the best examples of commercial pop? Further, can I really say the reason for this is connected with the genre itself? The primary objection to this assertion is that genres of music are analogically distinct and incommensurable where aesthetic judgment is concerned. This is a strong objection because in many instances it is surely true. There seems on its face no answer to a question like ‘is Indian classical music better than Chinese classical music’ because common terms of comparison between musical traditions so different seem to be lacking. Coherence complementarity and play seem to lack univocal referents in either case as we are dealing with the aesthetics of distinct cultures. The same may be the case in the example above: singer songwriters use music for different ends than jazz musicians and for that reason it may be neither fair nor intelligible to compare them. This seems quite clear in certain instances. For example, it seems to me make no sense to say that classical music is better or worse than hip hop because the musical accompaniment to hip hop has a different structural function i.e. to support the rapid recitation of dense text.  

My problem with leaving the question here, however, is that this argument seems to prove too much. If different genres are ALWAYS sui generis and not to be judged by a common standard why can’t we say this of works within genres? Why isn’t every single song or piece its own separate event to be judged by nothing but itself? Why can’t we say this of EVERY Dylan song or EVERY Swift song? This, of course, would be to reduce both taste and judgment to preference as any comparative judgment must compare two things under a common term and taste is distinct from preference on the grounds that it embraces judgment. Thus, it seems likely that at least in some instances judgment between genres is as possible as judgment within genres and that if the former is really impossible so is the latter. I will now attempt to define one such instance. I think it is possible to define certain milieus that tend to the production of more interesting music than others. Musical milieu is perhaps a better concept than the fuzzier ‘genre’ though the two terms overlap sufficiently for our current argument: a milieu is a community of musicians who share a common set of standards and aims.[6] A milieu imposes constraints and rules even if that constraint is something like ‘avoid all traditional harmony’ as in free jazz. If I take a community of musicians like ‘aspiring top 40 musicians’ I can immediately see that the constraints are considerable. The form is rigid and dictated by extra-aesthetic considerations. The song has to be a certain length to be played on the radio and this (historically)is dictated by the needs of advertisers who don’t want longer songs cutting into commercial time. The song must use certain chord progressions, have a distinct and catchy chorus or employ various other musical devices based on what has been successful in the immediate past. The lyrics may have to drop the names of drinks or cars as product placements that connect the glamor of the singer to the glamour of a product (like a top forty song that rhymes off brands of vodka!). If sex is hot this year one may have to toss in the p-word! In sum, the commercial pop writer must be risk averse from an aesthetic point of view: she must always provide familiar markers for the people who buy her records because few people buy music to be disoriented by it. For instance, the range of pop hits has been dropping to meet a growing demand for simpler tunes that fit easily over an electronic beat. In spite of these constraints (or perhaps because of them?) there are nonetheless many pop songs that are successful aesthetically as well as commercially. This is no doubt because constraint can be liberating as we see when poets impose on themselves a certain form like the triolet or sonnet.      

Of course, for the poet these constraints are self-imposed NOT market imposed. The poet is not required to twist every one his poems into a triolet to make sure there is enough air time for commercials. She can be as free or constrained as she thinks the work requires. Ideally, a musician should have that freedom though material requirements always make this vexed. There are aesthetic milieus where more freedom is possible and in which we expect that musicians will do more rich, complex or expressive things than are possible elsewhere. Of course, we then face the difficulties outlined above concerning aesthetic judgment between works that may have incommensurable aims. However, there seems to me at least one clear instance where we are not faced with this problem. This is where two aesthetic milieus share a common background and a common musical language. There are a number of pertinent examples of which I will note three. The first is the relationship between medieval folk songs and the sacred polyphony that based itself on them. The song “L’Homme Arme” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NWhCXECuxQ0) is quite tuneful and that is part of why composers like Ockhegm, Dufay and Josquin used it in their mass settings. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hUW9A6cskCE) This snappy tune, though, is not an aesthetic achievement on the scale of Josquin’s two ‘L’Homme Arme’ masses or the Ockhegm mass cited above. These latter works are fuller, richer, denser experiences as individual works: by this I mean that coherence of impression maintains itself though stretched by more complementarity and more play. Also, a mass is a fuller, richer, denser KIND of work than a folk tune for the exact same reason. The mass by Josquin is, if you like, what the original tune is and far more. The tune, fine on its own, is even better when taken up into a larger whole. This though is a matter of judgment: it is perfectly acceptable to prefer the tune on its own or to find it more to your taste. I suspect, though, that I am applying on a macro-scale no other principles that we apply on a micro-scale as when we say a cover song or remix surpasses the original or that an interesting demo by an artist is surpassed by the completed song. In each case we are saying that something has been worked into something else that expands upon and enhances its original qualities. 

The same relationship exists between jazz and the show and pop tunes on which jazz musicians base their improvisations. ‘My Favorite Things’ is a clever tune by Rogers and Hammerstein (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bACiODIbf84) that John Coltrane thought a perfect vehicle for exploring new concepts of modal harmony in jazz.[7] His thirteen-minute improvisation on it puts the original tune on steroids. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rqpriUFsMQQ) Part of this is down to his own excellence as an improviser and part to the fact that the jazz medium allows him to engage in this kind of play where other mediums may not. The same relationship holds between European concert music and popular songs and dances. One clear example is the waltzes, klezmer tunes, landler and other folk materials that ricochet about Mahler’s symphonies taking on surprising and sometimes grotesque forms. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G2ztYoegnhM) In all three cases the musical expressiveness of the basal elements is, by a kind of alchemy, transmuted and elevated into more ambitious forms (something the milieu of a village dance would not allow you to do!). In this process something of their original charm must nonetheless be preserved which is not a simple given: I have heard many ‘classical’ arrangements of folk material that are mind numbingly boring and sedate and kill rather than enhance or transmute the qualities of the original. What Mahler, Coltrane and Dufay did was something at which it is all too easy to fail!    

Now the reason we can convincingly make such comparisons is that one type of work is directly based on the other. One type is a building block for the other. Moreover, both types of works come from the same culture and time and represent overlapping milieus which share common forms and musical values. For this reason, we can make an aesthetic judgment that may well be independent from our preferences and even to some degree from our taste. In this sense we might say what I said in my previous piece concerning pop songs: there are excellent pop songs but pop songs are not the best kind of thing. They are surpassed by genres that use them as the basis for other, larger, more ambitious works (such that if we put the BEST pop song against the BEST jazz improvisation we will find the jazz improvisation better because jazz is a more sophisticated, flexible, expressive medium). This is NOT to say, however, that any given jazz improvisation is better than any given pop song because there is bad jazz that fails and good pop that succeeds. Success in any medium is better than outright failure in any medium. It is to claim, however, that one genre or milieu has greater potential than the other with regard to producing compelling musical artworks. Nor does this preclude outliers: one might well single out someone like Stevie Wonder as a genre transcending artist whose best work compares with the best work of jazz musicians. Now, to be frank, I also think a raga by sarod master Ustad Ali Akhbar Khan is better than ANY POSSIBLE commercial pop hit as I have defined that here. This, however might just be a determination of taste rather than judgment because of the difficulty of formulating the terms of comparison between musical languages so different. I may not have means to DEFEND such a judgment as a judgment. That, though, is for another day.   

 [1] I have noticed that on those RARE occasions when the Grammy’s DO honor an ‘outsider’ musician like Beck or Esperanza Spalding people are annoyed or upset. They think their taste has somehow been de-legitimated if it is not nakedly privileged in every possible instance. I recall distinctly the ridicule and incomprehension of ‘pop critics’ when the Grammys honored the great bluegrass musician Bill Monroe. Clearly it was an insult to THEIR favorite music to have to share time with something so rustic and embarrassing. This is mass taste in its fascist mode. In fact, one can never effectively challenge mass taste. If one pushes the merits of Coltrane or Mahler one is guilty of snobbery and spurious intellectualism (and of course fans of those artists only PRETEND to like them out of pretension!). If one pushes bluegrass or other folk artists one is being a hick. Whoever deviates from mass taste is always already too falsely sophisticated or too crude to be taken seriously!   

[2] I recognize that ‘simplicity’ is an effect pop-composers can work hard to achieve. Some pop songs are, within their limits, quite sophisticated (I will discuss below what I mean by ‘within their limits’). However, all the art of the pop songster is directed towards achieving an apparent ease and familiarity however devious a route she chooses to get there. In this same sense a composer like Schubert can write simple tunes that SOUND effortless even though they are not. Defining ‘complexity’ in music is somewhat vexed for, of course, complex means can be directed towards the illusion of simplicity. Plus, complexity can be faked as when a composer simply noodles. Consequently, I don’t include complexity as a basic aesthetic value even though in many instances the pleasure of hearing a composer or performer do something difficult or even astounding can enhance artistic experience. The audible wizardry of contrapuntal masters like Bach or Ockeghm may fill us with legitimate wonder and awe though we do not need to prefer them on that ground to lieder by Schubert or Brahms. At the same time though, there IS music that can fail from excessive simplicity and repetition: true simplicity is hard to pull off and it can be faked as much as complexity can.        

  [3] Alas, there is sometimes an element of bad faith in this kind of plea. If one takes Swift seriously enough to begin comparing her poetry and songwriting to Mitchell or Dylan one will be accused of comparing apples and oranges. If one then responds by saying something like ‘Swift is excellent by the standards of commercial pop’ one can then be accused of condescension and putting a beloved artist in a ghetto. How then are we to gauge the quality of her work? What is the relevant term of comparison? The ‘Swiftie’ is playing a double game: pleading for objective critical recognition but then complaining about unfair standards when comparison of her work to others is not to her advantage. Her lyrics are put forward as poetry but, when techniques of poetic criticism are applied to them, revert to being simple songs which the critic is pedantically over analyzing.

[4] That judgment is not the same thing as preference is indicated by the fact that we can alter our preferences. I have learned to love a great deal of music that did not fall on my ears ‘just so’ at the first listen. Some times I did so because others made strong recommendations and I respected their opinion. Other times I recognized things were of great cultural and historical significance and that if they sounded strange or even off-putting to me at first that was my problem not theirs. In this way one’s preferences can expand into formed taste. Of course, judgment will never quite be identical with taste: some things stubbornly baffle our best attempts to appreciate them even though one recognizes their skill and quality. For me, that is the entire realm of dance. Taste still relates in some way to what above I called accidents of sensibility and one sensibility probably cannot react to every single instance of artistic excellence. Taste is subjective to the extent that such accidents limit it to this work and not that one or specific cultural milieus make certain kinds of aesthetic perception easier or harder (as ragas were too long for English colonizers!).    

[5] Poe, in a notorious article, claimed that coherence of impression was inconsistent with a work of art being any great length. For this reason, he preferred the lyric poem and wrote his stories to be read in a single sitting. If Poe was wrong (and he surely was) to dismiss the novel or epic he WAS right that one of the most basic aesthetic values IS unity of impression. In fact, I don’t think the question of aesthetic principle is really the difficulty in discussing art so much as the question of which objects instantiate those principles best. In Poe’s defense, there are indeed people who think a song that lasts more than three minutes has overstayed its welcome. I, however, think it a given that if a successful sonnet is good a successful epic is better and that the very best of Milton’s sonnets do not measure up to the achievement of Paradise Lost.    

[6] A genre like jazz or pop may contain multiple ‘milieu’ which differ dramatically as jazz contains both atonal free jazz and Dixieland. Thus, there is the question of where exactly a genre begins or ends. Is this song pop or jazz? If I have drums and a string quartet is that indie or classical?  If I am to say something like ‘pop is better than folk’ I will have to have some sense of the extension of these terms. We could easily perplex ourselves over whether Medulla by Bjork is classical music or indie pop or just pop. Thus, when I speak of pop-music here, I mean not indie or alternative forms but the mass market forms people employ who seek widespread recognition and a large financial reward. In this genre people compete for various metrics and benchmarks using a common set of techniques for song writing, arrangement, marketing and so on. This is a distinct ‘milieu’ or community of artists whose aims and paradigms differ substantially from, say, proponents of speed metal though both might fall under the rubric of ‘popular music’.    

[7] It has been suggested to me that taking a ‘trivial’ song like ‘My Favorite Things’ and improvising on it in Coltrane’s manner is actually a form of aesthetic bravado; as if the artist were saying ‘look at me, I can turn even THIS dross into gold!” For this reason, I include an explanation by a jazz scholar of just why Coltrane was attracted to this song: (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bg1RGmyl-_A.).