Art Matters Forum on Music

Toronto, Monday, March 2, 2009

This is the 35th Art Matters public forum, and for the first time we are holding it here in Toronto. During our travels through the provinces and territories of Canada and abroad, the Governor General and I like to hold such forums because they provide a space for dialogue with the cultural community, including artists, managers, decision-makers, academics and others who make culture a daily reality. I would like to join my wife in recognizing the presence here this evening of the Governor General’s Performing Arts Awards recipients for 2009. I would also like to take this opportunity to thank the Governor General’s Performing Arts Awards Foundation, the City of Toronto and Mayor Miller for their assistance in organizing tonight’s forum.

Turning now to our theme—How does music bring us together?—let us approach our subject by first distinguishing the high culture music taught in institutions and the traditional music that is passed orally from generation to generation within a cultural tradition.

Then there is modern popular music—the various trends such as rock in the 1950s, then pop, then rap and so on right up to the latest electronic music.

The reason one trend follows another as the generations pass is that the audience for each type of music is mainly young people. Rock was the first of these youth-related popular musical trends.

According to Edgar Morin, it was in the 1950s that youth became self-aware as a distinct age group with its own imagination and cultural models. This was first expressed in cinema, with James Dean as the archetypal teenager, and then in rock music and dancing.

I think we need to look closely at this relationship between popular music and youth, and try to answer the question: why is each generation of young people attached to a particular type of music? This will lead us to look at the function of music and how music relates to socialization and institutionalization.

To see why a new type of popular music appears with each generation, we need to understand the relationship between popular music and youth.

One way to do this is to say that music is functional, that is, it has its origin in events. Popular music is functional in several ways. It is central to festive occasions. It is also a means of socialization in the sense that through music, young people experience a relationship to the world and an engagement with social roles and thus create themselves. From this point of view, music does not have value in itself; its esthetic qualities are in the background, while what music does is to the fore.

Young people’s relationship to music can however also be understood in esthetic terms. Here music is not a tool of society but rather an artistic activity. Popular music is marked by the creation of a “world of art” in H.S. Becker’s sense: musical professions become established, musical conventions arise, and music becomes an end in itself.

For me, the debate on music is between these two approaches—the functional and the esthetic.

Play on!