Ken Myers is a writer, editor, and radio personality who created Mars Hilll Audio in 1992 with the aim of producing “creative audio resources that encourage Christians to grow in obedient wisdom concerning the cultural consequences of our duty to love God and neighbor.” He sat down with The Collegian during a recent visit to campus as a part of Hillsdale College’s annual “Faith in Life” lecture series. He spoke on music and its part in the Great Tradition.
Why are you passionate about this subject?
I am interested in this partly because I think that we are surrounded by more music than any other culture, thanks to i-pods and all sorts of recording technology, but I think that we are much less aware of how music works and how it communicates than other cultures. Because we are surrounded with so much music I think we learn to put it in the background and we do lots of other things while music is playing. We are not attending to the music itself, not attending to what it is doing, and not attending to how it is doing it.
Does music have a place in the Great Tradition as significantly as, say, politics?
We ought to be as attentive to what the Great Tradition taught with regard to music as we are attentive to what the Great Tradition taught with regards to politics. Plato and many political philosophers after him were very concerned about the political role that music played because of the fact that music excited the passions. And the passions could interfere with reasonable deliberation of our political life. And they felt it was important that political life be conducted reasonably so actually there is a connection between politics and music.
What has been your personal experience with music?
I have been involved as an amateur all my life in music, but also I was involved with National Public Radio for three years and was arts producer and so was involved with music programs and producing a lot of interviews with musicians, composers and with music critics.
How well does modern culture comprehend and appreciate music?
I think modern culture understands or assumes things about music that are very different from what was assumed prior to the 19th century. From Plato on, including many Christian sources, music was understood to be reflective of cosmic realities. It was not just personal or interior, but it actually expressed something of the order of reality. As a result of that, in the classical tradition personal musical taste was not that important. Music has an objective meaning and an objective value. To become musically literate is to recognize what music is doing.
What is a problem you see in music education today?
I think many schools have abandoned music education. I know that when I was in school, back in the dark ages of grade school and junior high, we had required music courses where we had to learn the notes of a scale. We had to learn how to read music. It was part of being educated. Also to know something about the canon, the collection of great works in Western musical history.
Has music become less intricate over the last few decades?
If you listen to popular songs today and go back to 1950 or even earlier and just figure out how much is the melody moving along. “Somewhere over the Rainbow” is an example I am using. It starts by jumping an octave, then it jumps all over the place. And it is rare for a popular song to have that kind of melodic structure and harmonic structure as well. In a lot of earlier popular music, the number of harmonic changes chord to chord to chord in the course of a song have shrunk. The only thing that has increased is the volume of the music. I first read this on Yahoo, some story saying “your parents are right the music is louder and stupider.”
In what way should the conservative community as a whole reform to facilitate music appreciation?
Back in the 1980s there was a great battle about keeping Great Books as part of the curriculum in college. And I asked why, when we were fighting to defend great books didn’t we defend great music at the same time? Why when we were defending Shakespeare and Dante weren’t we defending Mozart or Bach? And I am very intrigued just with the historical question why that is the case. Why did we decide that it is OK to leave music aside from our concern and from sustaining the western tradition? In other words, why did we let the multi-culturists win with regard to music when we don’t want them to win with regard to literature, political theory, or how we understand history?
So part of what I am trying to do is to get conservatives particularly to ask whether they are as conservative as they think they are and as traditional as they think they are with regards to this very important part of life.
Compiled by Leslie Reyes
