GEORGE EDWARDS
695
of music, like all discussion of music, is forced to argue by analogy. We
cannot insist on scientific verifiablity; but we need not be bullied by
rhetorical devices disguised as evidence. When we read that "classical
music is deeply rooted in bourgeois society," we should be prepared to
resist the apparently inevitable conclusion that "classical music expresses
bourgeois values." Perhaps it does - but we are free to insist on better
evidence than the genetic fallacy can provide.
We must be alert to a favorite rhetorical device of postmodern
writers: making grandiose claims which they then implicitly retract. Here
is Richard Leppert's withdrawal from the abyss:
.. . music's role is limited to that of affirming ... policies of im–
perialist aggrandizement and suppression of human rights. This is not
to suggest that music and musicians . . . were responsible for the
British Empire and the East India Company. But it is to suggest that
the role assigned to music in the culture was primarily one of either
affirming the status quo or at least not tampering with it.
Similarly, Jacques Attali appears to regard the music pen as stronger
than the sword:
Later, Charlemagne would forge the cultural and political unity of
his kingdom by imposing the universal practise of Gregorian chant,
resorting to armed force to accomplish that end.
Such rhetorical dishonesty is almost inevitable when music is
subordinated to politics. Like many later writers about the political and
social significance of music (but for much better reasons), Plato, for ex–
ample, had no conception of music not intimately connected to verbal
expression or social circumstance. To find out what kind of music was
objectionable, he asked only with what kind of words or behavior it was
associated.
It
is in this light that we should understand a statement like
the following (which many parents of rock-loving teenagers would agree
with):
For a change to a new type of music is something to beware of as a
hazard to all our fortunes . For the modes of music are never distvrbed
without unsettling of the most fundamental political and social
conventions ...
But such claims, while often made, for instance, by Attali, are not
