Many anxious folk have been wanting to know what we think about Taking all musics seriously – a response to Peter Maxwell Davies, the hymn to relativism which appeared in August’s Music Teacher. Alarmingly, what first comes to mind is the scene in Monty Python’s Life of Brian, when the People’s Front of Judea ask each other what the Romans have ever done for them. Similarly, we can imagine a huddle of malcontent educators and apparatchiks, wanting to cut the detested elitist edifice of Western Classical Music down to size. ‘What has it ever given us?.... All right, but apart from notation, harmony, counterpoint, choirs, orchestras, pianos, organs, strings, woodwind, brass, percussion, symphonies, sonatas, concertos, cantatas, oratorios, opera, chamber music, what has classical music ever done for us?... Oh. The tonal system? Shut up!’

We can comfort ourselves – though coldly – with the knowledge that the doctrine of equivalence goes far beyond music. In our gloomier moments (and because we know music best), we might feel it has a unique hold over our art. Not so: this particular intellectual current has been gathering pace for well over half a century, and is now an orthodox strand of thought across all the arts and humanities (so far as music is concerned, Wilfred Mellers probably opened the sluices in the 1960s at York University; and the current Tovey professor of music at Edinburgh University is a sociologist whose mission is to make people take popular music seriously). It has some merit as a device for questioning received wisdom. But it has also been given some vigorous ideological pushes by creeds which, for example, have enabled academics in American universities to denounce much literature as tracts by Dead White European Males, which embody oppressive power structures, etc etc, and are irrelevant to modern progressive thought. Within this conceptual structure, entertainment is quite as valid as ‘serious’ art, and a book’s cover is as significant as its contents. The subjective experience of the viewer, reader or listener is the ultimate arbiter of worth: it is as important to be able to say how it felt to be in the Blitz as to remember the dates when it happened.

The ground is well-trodden, so an exchange of views can easily become sterile. More interesting is the debate about how relativism came about, and where it might lead. Considering what has been, for example, we might find that some of our most admired heroes planted many of the sticks of dynamite whose results so vex us. And considering what might be, rather than what is, leads into all kinds of speculation about the future of art and society. If, for example, the overriding aim of public policy is to create an open, inclusive, multicultural, democratic population, brimming with empathy and oozing emotional intelligence, then it makes a sort of sense to reassure every individual that their own cultural manifestation, and their own opinion, is as valid as the next person’s; and any apparent sacrifice of technical expertise is a price worth paying. The alternative, technocratic approach could be caricatured as a process which can create highly accomplished, decisive, egotistical bullies, who care little for anyone else’s opinions, whose idea of a conversation is a self-justifying monologue, and whose type created social divisions and the carnage of the 20th century. Bizarre; though stranger things have underpinned policy.

But well-meaning legislators have a habit of ignoring the law of unintended consequences, and respect is an indivisible entity. As a noted fictional violinist put it, ‘These are deep waters … deep and rather dirty’ – as always, things are more complex than they might appear. Still, at least we are not being given two days by the People’s Popular Music Liberation Front to dismantle the entire apparatus of the Capitalist Classical Imperialist Musical State.

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