What is Good Music?

Abstract

I am speaking here as a sociologist but also as a pop fan and passive consumer. This is work in progress and I do not come to any conclusions: what I want to do is raise questions. And the question most interests me is what is going on when people in everyday conversation about use the word good, say, for example: that is a record, or that has a sound, or that is to dance to, or she or he has a voice. What is going on when such judgments are made? In this paper I only have time to consider a small part of this issue. I will not be able to discuss problems of musical cognition, for example, or to consider what it is in the people are actually hearing, to which sounds they are responding, when they make value statements. I want to focus, rather, on those statements themselves, on the discourses within which the value terms are embedded, on the general assumptions involved about how works. And to introduce what is going to be a somewhat schematic paper, I want to give you four examples of moments when discourses about have clashed, when accounts of good music have contradicted each other to ridiculous or outraged effect. Here, then, are four randomly chosen anecdotes which bring out the variety of ways in which musical value can be conceived. My first example comes from the autobiography of John Culshaw (1981), for many years head of the classical division of Decca Records. His autobiography is instructive in general terms - because he takes it for granted classical records are produced commercially. The tension between judgments of commercial value and judgments of musical value are ever present in his decisions. The nicest example concerns the original recording of Benjamin Britten's War Requiem. Culshaw was convinced of its musical and its commercial value - the Requiem was being given its first performance as part of the celebrations surrounding the rebuilding of Coventry Cathedral; its launch would be accompanied by a mass of radio, television and press publicity. Unfortunately, Britten was not, historically, a best-seller, and Decca's bosses were not convinced any classical sold particularly well - its place in the Decca catalogue was a matter of prestige rather than profit. Culshaw therefore lost the internal argument about how many copies of the War Requiem to press; its run was the same as for previous Britten works. In the event the pressing (which covered the North American as well as European market) turned out to be far too small; the War Requiem sold out in a week. Culshaw had to wait several months for more copies (Decca's pressing plants were fully booked up with pop product) by which time the sales impetus had been lost. Furious, he confronted the man who had made the initial pressing decision. The latter apologised and explained: Daren't take the risk old boy. First thing of Britten's that's ever sold at all. Do you think you could talk him into writing another Requiem would sell as well? We wouldn't make the same mistake twice. (Culshaw 1981: 317) Culshaw tells this story to get a laugh, but it would not be as funny if told about commercial pop composers like Stock, Aitken and Waterman. In Decca's pop division it would seem a perfectly reasonable thing to say write it again, we will know how to sell it this time. My first point, then, is there is a clear clash here between commonsense assumptions about what makes Benjamin Britten's War Requiem valuable as art and what makes it valuable as product. Or, to put it another way, when a tension between creative and sales processes began to be experienced within record companies' pop divisions, towards the end of the 1960s, it was a sign art discourses were beginning to be applied to popular musics. I will come back to this point later. My second anecdote comes from the biography of the novelist Radclyffe Hall who, it turns out, also wrote pop lyrics. …