Best-Of Best Quotes: Attitudinal Muzak

As per usual, the writings of Harold Best are constantly rocking our world here in the music department at Mars Hill. The following are a few quotes from Music Through the Eyes of Faith. You can read the full article titled “Musical Perception and Music Education” here.

On music as a contextually generous soundtrack to life: “For music itself is naively generous; it gives of itself far more than many of its performers and scholars allow. Its very ubiquity–its contextual generosity, its natural tendency to join forces with whatever surrounds it, so often condemned by the absolutists and prostituted by the pragmatists–needs to be recognized, celebrated, disciplined, and protected.”

On High, folk, low and kitsch art: “Popular culture appears to be America’s indigenous speech, as familiar as its fast-food apple pie and as much a part of its persona as its technological, military, and economic institutions. popular culture appears to be America’s indigenous speech, as familiar as its fast-food apple pie and as much a part of its persona as its technological, military, and economic institutions”.

On depth and shallowness of music not being synonyms for quality and or junk: “Clean water may run shallow or deep; in either case it remains water and remains clear and clean. Milk, in the nutritional sense, is not as strong as meat. Comparatively speaking, milk is shallow and meat deep. But it is no less legitimate or complete. And for the milk drinkers, it is whole, it is deep, and it is complete. Applying these analogies to music, we can say that music can be of high artistic quality and still be shallow. We can also say that music can be extremely simple and short-lived and still be deep”.

On attitudinal Muzak: “There are those for whom great music has been turned into Muzak, simply because of a perpetual habit of trivial–not shallow–engagement with meaningful content. As suggested in the section on popular culture, we might call this ‘attitudinal Muzak.’ And in a culture that has become so addicted to music as insignificant significance–when virtually an entire culture turns into one grand Stratford Mall–it is no wonder that even some of the most well-intentioned musical efforts become lost in the larger morass of pleasurable insignificance”.

On engaged entertainment: When societies or individuals include both diversion and engagement in their perceptual lives, and when quality and the pursuit of excellence drive the whole of the creative continuum, entertainment can be right as rain.

On the obligation to engage: “If and when an individual or a society becomes exclusively an entertainment society and when entertainment is stripped of its obligation to engage and legitimately divert; when the continuing and only object is to disengage; when shallow engagement with shallowness of content is the only allowable possibility; when easy entrance into, trivial engagement with, and easy exit from, an experience dominate the whole of perceptual engagement; when greatness is trivialized by trivial and trendy uses of greatness–high art as a synonym for affluence, history as docudrama, the sexualization of culture (which in turn guarantees the trivialization of sex), masterpieces as top 40 hits, religion as top 40 morality and spirituality–then we can truly say that entertainment is not just shallow; it is a deep evil from which society must extricate itself”.