Perhaps the central mystery to Roger Scruton was why a Professor of Aesthetics and the author of book simply called “Beauty” dressed so badly. Actually that is unfair. He did wear suits with the same relaxed demeanour that a psychiatric patient wears a straightjacket. However Scruton was much more at home in the tweeds, pullovers, and waxed jackets of the college don and country squire that he wished and worked himself into being (although his origins were quite different). To my knowledge, he did not go down the Petersonian route of dressing like a 1930s Batman villain so we must be thankful for that.
Scruton could write a sentence and he loved music. In 1997, Scruton published The Aesthetics of Music where he exhaustively processed his love of music through philosophy. His whole enterprise was centered on notions of judgment and taste. His judgments were as much about morality as they were about musicology: “Our moral judgements tend to focus on the virtues and vices of people. In the same way, aesthetic judgement discovers virtues and vices—often the same virtues and vices—in works of art.”
But what underpinned these judgments? The “ick” factor:
“We should begin by studying our reaction to bad taste—for example, to such kitsch as the guitar music of Luiz Bonfa (Ex. 11.2), or the film scores of Vangelis. Such music prompts that peculiar ‘yuk’ feeling, the sense of being contaminated, which sends spasms of recoil through the body. The ‘yuk’ feeling is a common social response: to obscenity, to disgusting habits, to unwanted attentions. Perhaps the most important instance of it is the response to an unwanted sexual advance. When a woman feels disgust that this man should put his hand on her knee, something of great moral significance occurs. It is not that she dislikes having a hand on her knee: she does not want the hand of this man on her knee. Her revulsion is not like the physical revulsion that we feel when we step barefoot on to a slug. It is the refusal to be drawn into and compromised by another's desire. When people experience the ‘yuk’ feeling from music, they often have a comparable sense of being drawn into a relationship that is repugnant to them. They are being compromised, presumed upon, placed in an alien ambience. This experience of contamination is at the same time a social response. To avoid it, people may place around the offending work of art an ironical fence of inverted commas, dismissing it with a smile as ‘kitsch’”
Scruton heard the scores of Vangelis as equivalent to being groped and violated. This is not a judgment I agree with - at his worst, Vangelis is like a model train enthusiast explaining the difference between the N and TT gauges. He never reaches the intensity of violation.
While there was an extensive intellectual architecture to Scruton’s positions, there were also bodily responses. The references to sexuality are not incidental. Scruton wrote at length about sexual desire from a conservative perspective. The ick is strong in this one. And then we get to one of Scruton’s particular icks:
“Listen to a gavotte from the late Renaissance, and imagine the mores of the people who danced to it. Then listen to a track by Nirvana, and imagine the mores of the people who can dance to that.” (emphasis Scruton’s).
Scruton did not like Nirvana nor REM (he spent much of the early 90s in the USA). His love of popular music ended abruptly with his adolescence in the 1960s. He liked Nat King Cole. He liked The Beatles. But modern popular music is terrible beyond belief.
BTW it is worth exploring his invitation to compare a gavotte to Nirvana. The late Renaissance was very violent. There was a whole lot of murder going on in Europe. The dancers of the gavotte likely cut throats with their bare hands. The dancers to Nirvana barely cut their own hair. Unless Scruton saw smoking dope as worse than war.
Meanwhile.
Rob Fleming knows all about judging music and the people who listen to it. Rob is the narrator of Nick Hornby’s 1995 High Fidelity. And he’s often excruciating company. The owner of record shop in North London, Rob’s obsession with differentiating good and bad music is a symptom of his fundamental insecurity. He may not have those markers of success like a partner, children, or a career; but he has superior taste. Not for Rob the warm embrace of tweed, he’s more of a jeans and leather jacket kinda guy. Late in the book, his on-again-off-again girlfriend, Laura, takes him to see some friends of hers for dinner. And Rob has a great time. And then Laura points him towards their music collection.
“So I wander over to the shelf, and turn my head to one side and squint, and sure enough, it's a disaster area, the sort of CD collection that is so poisonously awful that it should be put in a steel case and shipped off to some Third World waste dump. They're all there: Tina Turner, Billy Joel, Kate Bush, Pink Floyd, Simply Red, the Beatles, of course, Mike Oldfield (Tubular Bells I and II), Meat Loaf . . . I don't have much time to examine the vinyl, but I see a couple of Eagles records, and I catch a glimpse of what looks suspiciously like a Barbara Dickson album.
'You did that deliberately,' I say to her on the way home. 'You knew all along I'd like them. It was a trick.-' 'Yeah. I tricked you into meeting some people you'd think were great. I conned you into having a nice evening.' 'Everybody's faith needs testing from time to time. I thought it would be amusing to introduce you to someone with a Tina Turner album, and then see whether you still felt the same.'“
80s Tina Turner gives Rob the ick (although he probably likes 60s Ike & Tina). Of course, what Laura is pointing out to Rob is the fundamental foolishness of trying to judge people’s moral worth by their musical tastes. At the very least, it suggests a lack of empathy. It closes down opportunities for dialogue, growth, and fun.
I don’t think forming a sense of taste is bad. Our senses of taste are expressions of our own values, desires, and experiences. However we should be curious about the senses of taste of others or we risk ending up alone in the dark with our perfect music and no one to share it with.
Roger Scruton: Owner of Championship Vinyl