The Uses — and Miss-uses — of Music

On Tolstoy, Freud, marching bands, and why military music is to music what military justice is to justice.

Photo by Benyamin shamis on Unsplash

It is my opinion — and I suspect I am not alone — that music is the shortcut to the heart. All the other arts strive to achieve what music manages effortlessly, without visual or intellectual aids (e.g. words), to do the job.

Tolstoy, author of the famed Kreutzer Sonata (in addition to a little something called War and Peace), said that of all the sounds mankind makes, music is the worst.

To which his frenemy Turgenev replied, “Then why is it you weep whenever you hear Beethoven played?” To which Tolstoy insisted, “It’s a natural physiological reaction, same you’d get chopping onions.”

Sure.

Freud didn’t like music for the same implicit reason: because he could neither understand much less control its effects.

Music can make us happy or sad; music can thrill us as no other art can; music can make us wanna dance, or fuck, weep or sleep. It can fill us with wonder or drown us in despair.

And music does it very fast. No wonder Freud and Tolstoy were frightened by its power.

Who does not get goose bumps hearing the opening notes of Star Wars? Or feel suicidal ideation at the last movement of Tchaikovsky’s “Pathétique” symphony?

Whose heart does not beat faster at the opening trumpet call at the rousing conclusion of Rossini’s William Tell Overture (aka the theme from The Lone Ranger)?

Or feel sexed up dancing to “Stayin’ Alive”?

No one seems able to explain just how and why music is able to affect us as no other art seems able to manage. And music, it’s probably fair to say, has been around about as long as handprints on cave walls. (There’s a famous New Yorker cartoon of several cavemen with primitive instruments, and one of them saying, “Let’s take it from ‘Klonk.’”)

Yes, we concede that music a) seems always to have been with us — even if rhythm long preceded melody — and b) that music can make us feel ineffable, i.e. non-translatable, emotions.

But for today I want to focus on what we’ll call “military” music — typically marches — the one-two rhythm that imbues the simple act of walking with glamour and purpose, filling the breast with bombast and martial ardor, “inspiring” hearers with feelings of bravery, heroism, or at the least, inchoate significance.

It is no accident that armies from time immemorial have had musicians (drummers, at the outset) to accompany warriors, not only to coordinate their movements, but to instill “brave” thoughts and feelings in our fighters and possibly frighten our adversaries. (Think bagpipes.)

Who can listen to Tchaikovsky’s Marche Slav without feeling the thrill of martial ardor? Or John Philip Sousa’s jingoistic “Stars and Stripes Forever”? Both make you wanna go out and conquer something.

Or someone.

There are some who argue that this is not the best use of music — that such “martial” music is a pernicious perversion of music’s power when it is employed for such purposes. They argue that this sort of music appeals in a primitive and vulgar fashion to our basest instincts.

Of course disco does the same, encouraging our sexual impulses, channeled into versions of dance. (Marching is dancing too — only the rhythm is different.)

Military music, easily appealing and readily understood, is a far cry from, say, a late Beethoven quartet (or rap, for that matter) — music that demands introspection, sitting still, music that is not as easily assimilated, though its rewards may equal, if not exceed, “Stayin’ Alive” or “La Marseillaise” (you gotta hand it to the French; they got the best national anthem).

I believe it was the remarkable French premier Georges Clemenceau (”Le Tigre”) — who formerly taught at a girls’ school in Connecticut — who said:

“Military music is to music as military justice is to justice.”

I think in both cases — music and justice — Clemenceau was onto something. In military music and military justice, nuance and introspection take a back seat to versions of easy listening. Let’s not burden the audience or the court-martial jurors with anything but broad strokes, facile simplifications.

If you want examples close to home, you might wanna check up on the prisoners in Guantánamo.

Clemenceau also thought Dreyfus was innocent. He turned out to be right about that, too.

Military music is exciting but cheap; military justice is neither.