SIMON FRITH

Why music matters

Inaugural lecture given at the University of Edinburgh, 6 March 2007

I should begin this lecture by saying that I feel very privileged and even more surprised to be addressing you this afternoon as the Donald Tovey Professor of Music, and it is perhaps appropriate to introduce my remarks by referring to an essay written by Paul Johnson in The Spectator a couple of months ago under the heading: The best thing ever written about music in our language. Johnson opens his essay with these words:
If I had a teenage child with a passion for serious music I would not hesitate to give him or her Essays in Music Analysis by Donald Francis Tovey.1

The basis of these essays was the programme notes Tovey wrote for the concerts he conducted with the Reid Orchestra, which he founded when he became Reid Professor of Music at Edinburgh in 1914. Johnson calls Toveys Essays his masterpiece, his monument and his achievement, without parallel in the history of music in Britain. Having begun by describing Tovey as one of the three greatest writers on music in English, Johnson concludes that he is the greatest, because of his combination of originality, authority (based on his enormous knowledge) and nerve. In occupying the chair bearing his name, I suppose the only one of these qualities I might possess is nerve. (And certainly, on this occasion, nerves.) But, in fact, Donald Francis Tovey and I do have two things in common. First, we both went to Balliol College, Oxford though admittedly he had a music scholarship while I read Philosophy, Politics and Economics. Second, we both wrote musical entries for the Encyclopaedia Britannica, though admittedly his entries were devoted to what Paul Johnson calls serious music while mine covered rock music, the novelty song and the pop ballad.

166 Critical Quarterly, vol. 50, nos. 12 I have no idea what Professor Tovey would think of someone like me occupying a chair in his old department in his name though in his views of the significance of recording, for example, he was much less conservative than one might expect. But I have no doubt at all that Paul Johnson would be appalled. A little over forty-three years ago, on 28 February 1964, Johnson wrote another essay on music, this time for the New Statesman rather than Spectator, under the title The Menace of Beatlism. I remember reading this article when it first came out I had left school but not yet started university and in retrospect I can see that it had a significant influence on my academic career, if not quite for the reasons Johnson might have intended. It should be stressed that Johnsons article was not called The Menace of the Beatles. He had no interest in the Beatles music; he assumed its worthlessness. What concerned him was intellectuals taking such music seriously. Of course, he wrote,
our society has long been brainwashed in preparation for this apotheosis of inanity. For more than two decades now, more and more intellectuals have turned their backs on their trade and begun to worship at the shrine of pop culture. Nowadays, if you confess that you dont know the difference between Dizzy Gillespie and Fats Waller (and what is more dont care) you are liable to be accused of being a fascist. To buttress their intellectual self-esteem, these treasonable clerks have evolved an elaborate cultural mythology about jazz, which purports to distinguish between various periods, tendencies and schools. The subject has been smeared with a respectable veneer of academic scholarship, so that you can now overhear grown men, who have been expensively educated, engage in heated argument as to the respective techniques of Charlie Parker and Duke Ellington. You can see writers of distinction, whose grey hairs testify to years spent in the cultural vine-yard, squatting on the bare boards of malodorous caverns, while through the haze of smoke, sweat and cheap cosmetics comes the monotonous braying of savage instruments.2

Johnson could only explain such intellectual treachery by reference to what he called the new cult of youth. And here, he suggested, intellectuals were wilfully misreading the Beatles significance. At sixteen, he writes,
I and my friends heard our first performance of Beethovens Ninth Symphony. I can remember the excitement even today. We would not have wasted 30 seconds of our precious time on The Beatles and their ilk. Are teenagers different today? Of course not. Those who flock round The Beatles . . . are the least fortunate of their generation, the dull, the idle, the failures: their existence in such large numbers is a fearful indictment of

Why music matters 167

our educational system, which in ten years schooling can scarcely raise them to literacy.

What the Beatlists failed to realise, in Johnsons words,

is that the core of the teenage group the boys and girls who will be the real leaders and creators of society tomorrow never go near a pop concert. They are educating themselves. They are in the process of inheriting the culture which, despite Beatlism or any other massproduced mental opiate, will continue to shape our civilisation.3

Even when I was a teenager Johnsons argument seemed boneheaded. I was someone who had (not atypically) queued all night to get Beatles tickets while revising for A levels, and I was listening at this time, with equal excitement, to Jerry Lee Lewis and Dave Brubeck, Gilbert and Sullivan and Penderecki, Dusty Springfield and Mahlers Song of the Earth. I certainly didnt regard myself as the least fortunate of youths. And, on the other hand (and even putting aside Johnsons class snobbery), the account of civilisation he offered seemed remarkably limited, implying that the musical activities and pleasures of the majority of the worlds population had nothing to do with culture at all. My response to Johnson, in short, was a conscious decision to become a treasonable intellectual, to treat popular music as serious music. More particularly (and it took my undergraduate degree to help me make this an academic decision), I decided that music was a suitable subject for sociology and, further, that there was no reason for a sociologist to accept a priori any difference between serious and popular music at all. I need to make clear what I am arguing here. It is obviously the case that by the end of the nineteenth century one could describe, in broad terms, two different musical worlds in Britain, organised in different institutions, understood according to different musical discourses. Various (not altogether satisfactory) labels can be applied to these worlds the high and the low, the serious and the popular, art music and commercial music, and so forth. Such distinctions both shaped and were further institutionalised by the new mass media of the twentieth century recording, the radio, et cetera. But, from a sociological point of view, these worlds were aspects of a single music culture, a music culture that developed in response to the experience of social change in the nineteenth century industrialisation, urbanisation, globalisation and all the other consequences of the rise to dominance of liberal, market capitalism.

168 Critical Quarterly, vol. 50, nos. 12 My concern here, though, is not this history but its effect on how we now think about music, and my point is that the separation of musical practices and experiences into the high and the low is not helpful when we seek to understand how music works in our lives its role in human development, in peoples sense of personal and social identity or when we try to explain the nature of musical pleasure and value whether for performers or listeners. To start from a premise that only music made in the Western classical tradition is worthwhile is to beg all the questions that are interesting. How peculiar it would have seemed, for example, if my esteemed colleague (and current Reid Professor), Nigel Osborne, had named the IMHSD the Institute for Serious Music in Human and Social Development. We must start from the assumption that music is music. From this perspective the high/low construct is, if you like, a cultural aberration, a way of thinking that may not even be the most helpful way of approaching the problem it emerged to resolve: the problem of making music in the marketplace. On the one hand, from the high perspective, there is a tendency to assume that high music music made in the Western classical tradition, with a particular concept of art as motivation is autonomous, has nothing to do with market forces, while low music, popular music, is driven only by commercial calculation, and therefore isnt really music at all. Until really quite recently university departments of music thus excluded many kinds of music from their curricula. The assumption here is clearly expressed by the pianist Susan Tomes in her collection of reflections on the craft of performance, Beyond the Notes. We dont need to consider pop music in a study of musical performance, she suggests (and her definition of pop music includes rock her contrasting term is folk). We dont need to consider it because, in her words, pop music is cynically designed to be short-lived, entirely commercial.4 The problem of such an assertion, common enough in the classical world, is not simply that it misdescribes how pop works, but also that it suggests a depressing lack of curiosity. The question thats interesting about rock performers is precisely how their performing craft has developed to take account of such commercial pressures pressures not entirely unfamiliar in the classical world. On the other hand, from the low perspective, there are equally problematic populist assumptions about high music, most obviously, of course, the customary philistinism of the popular press, dismissing high music as difficult, elitist, inaccessible, pretentious, et cetera, familiar enough in Scotland from long years of the problem of Scottish Opera. But what concerns me more is the equally problematic assumption that, by contrast, popular music making is easy, as if it somehow doesnt involve skill, hard work, discipline and, indeed,

Why music matters 169 pretension. Just as high/low accounts of music are constructed in relation to each other, so elitist/populist discourses simply reflect each others limited accounts of why music matters: because it is popular; because it is unpopular. From my perspective, as a sociologist, the problem of making music in the marketplace which all kinds of performers face is therefore better understood along other axes, according to different sorts of opposition, which run across high and low music alike. Take, for example, the perceived tension in music policy between access and excellence. In a speech to the Association of British Orchestras on 30 January 2006, the then Westminster culture minister, David Lammy, acknowledged that
As a Culture Minister, theres nothing that I or any of my colleagues in Government can do to create a musical genius. No-one can legislate to produce a Mozart. But what we can do is try to create the conditions in which world class ensembles can thrive and make sure enough people have the means to access what they offer. And I am under no illusions about which of these two things, the twin pillars of arts policy for as long as we can remember excellence and access should come first. Work of the highest quality must take precedence. Every time.5

The tension Lammy is describing here is between two different approaches to educational and cultural policy. Should the state invest in the technical education of the talented few, subsidise centres of excellence? Or should it develop music education for the participation of the many, invest in community musical activities? Is the experience of musical engagement more or less important than the quality of the music or performance resulting? But the terms here and this is what makes music such an interesting form of human activity may not be quite the right ones. Music, that is to say, may be made by the few a few with great skill and discipline but to be enjoyed by the many, who engage with music at quite profound levels, without themselves having, or even necessarily understanding the meaning of, those skills and discipline. To put this another way, musical excellence and access are not necessarily contradictory. Im not convinced, for example, that music education is necessary for musical appreciation or that music appreciation is necessary for musical experience. It is a common trope in the autobiography of musicians that they heard a piece of music by chance at a concert, on Radio 3, on someones record player that so moved them that they then pursued a musical education. The same experience is common in popular music. The reason I was so knocked

170 Critical Quarterly, vol. 50, nos. 12 out by black American rocknroll in the 1950s heard on Radio Luxemburg and AFN was that it sounded so odd, so different, so difficult even. Access is about music being available not about it being easy or familiar. What matters is that people hear the music and then access affordable instruments and teaching. How much this can be the result of rational educational planning I dont know. Or take another common opposition, culture and commerce. In music, perhaps more than in any other cultural area (and in spite of the significance of market forces on musical tastes and practices), there is, in fact, a significant blurring and overlap between the amateur (the music lover) and the professional (the music worker), between those musicians whose careers and livelihood depend on music making and those for whom it is a leisure activity, a hobby, something done for its own sake. Sociologists like Robert Stebbins and Antoine Hennion have pointed out the paradoxes here it is the amateurs who enjoy music more, who are more committed to performance as performance, rather than as a way of keeping the money coming in.6 But what interests me is something different. While there is a clear difference between the musical amateur and professional in terms of career commitment, selfdefinition and, of course, playing skills, there is a less clear distinction in what might be called the musical commitment involved. An amateur musician must also practise, be disciplined, take on something difficult that needs work, take part in performance practices in which self-expression is subordinated to collective ends. Amateur ability, that is, depends on skills and aptitudes that must be learned, worked on, developed. As James Fenton noted in the Guardian last year, reflecting on his return as an adult to piano lessons, I am learning to play for my own pleasure is a misleading statement that pleasure involves a high degree of self-discipline and a submission to authority, the authority of the tutor (person and book), the authority of a grade examiner.7 And much amateur performance involves professionals too to provide accompaniment, as soloists; just as in the popular music world being a professional musician describes a part of a career that begins and ends and is interspersed with living as a music amateur. When reading such dire warnings as Sir Peter Maxwell Daviess that our appreciation of serious music is at risk of being destroyed by television and pop,8 or Sir John Eliot Gardiners that Britains music culture is getting worse9 it is worth noting, then, the sheer amount of music making that amateur musicians take part in daily. A 1991 UK survey, for example, suggested that as many people in Britain (2 per

Why music matters 171 cent of the population) sang in choirs as were engaged in playing rock and pop music and I doubt if the figures have changed much since then. The Music Industries Association follow-up 2006 survey of Attitudes to Music in the UK concluded that 21 per cent of the population over 5 played a musical instrument and that 11.25 million households owned at least one. (The most musical population in the British Isles, it seems, with 28 per cent of the population able to play an instrument, is Central Scotland.10) Im not altogether convinced by such figures (drawn from a telephone survey of just 1,000 households in the UK) the 1991 statistic for people over 5 years old playing a musical instrument was 5 per cent but as the RSAMD 2003 audit of youth music in Scotland, Whats Going On, concluded, to look at what people actually do is to look at an amazing range of activity.11 And looking at the professional end too at chamber groups and choirs and contemporary and experimental ensembles, at jazz, folk, traditional and Gaelic music, at rock and pop in all their various forms these do seem rather good times for Scottish music. Ive certainly been to as many good concerts in Scotland in the last twelve months as at any time in my life. To talk, like Davies and Gardiner, of a crisis in musical life seems odd. It could certainly be argued that if music is just something we do, as humans, as members of society, then music making will go on irrespective of market forces, educational decisions or music policies. That said, music making can be helped and hindered by such forces and decisions and policies, and there are two issues I want to discuss here one concerning Scottish music education, one concerning Scottish music policy that in my view reflect the continuing unhelpful effects of the high/low distinction Ive been seeking to critique.

Music education
Most of my colleagues in university music departments in Scotland would agree, I think, that changes in the last few years in the curriculum and standards of Music Highers and Advanced Highers have had a deleterious effect on students applying from Scottish schools to do music degrees. I could point to specific issues here the downgrading of instrumental performance grades needed to achieve Higher/Advanced Higher passes; the downgrading of aspects of music theory harmony and counterpoint, for example, the notational bases of Western classical (and popular) music; the lack of discipline required now for invention; the shifting use of the term creative to mean personal work rather than to describe a displayed understanding of compositional processes.

172 Critical Quarterly, vol. 50, nos. 12 But the issue here is not simply that would-be music students now leave school without the technical knowledge and aptitude that university teachers once took for granted. The issue, rather, is that music has been changed from a difficult to an easy subject, in which the emphasis on access and self-expression and the incentives for pupils to work in and with forms that are entirely familiar, remove precisely the challenge that is necessary for the emergence and development of musical talent. This is nothing to do with high music or elitism, but concerns the way in which one learns the mental and physical skills necessary to express musical ideas fluently and interestingly in the first place. When the Herald reported the anxieties in the Scottish music world about the revamp of Highers and Advance Highers, the key quotes came from jazz rather than classical performers, from Tommy Smith and Cathy Rae.12 The issue, to put it succinctly, is that the new curriculum seems more concerned to give children the chance to experience music than to learn it. This is not just a Scottish issue. The UK-wide National Association for Music in Higher Education has expressed similar concerns about what is happening to A levels. In the Associations words,
The sheer breadth of choices within the A level syllabus means that those of us in higher education can no longer depend on students having a knowledge of concepts previously regarded as core (Bach chorale harmonisation, for example). Nor can we assume much familiarity with essay writing on musical topics.13

For NAMHE the problem lies partly with the low levels of musical skills that some teachers, particularly those in primary education, have, and one effect of this situation is that the sort of musical instruction that universities presume in terms of both instrumental teaching and music theory increasingly happens only outside the state school system in private tuition, in fee-paying schools. Youth Musics survey of The Musical Engagement of Young People Aged 719 in the UK, published in May last year, indicates the effects of this in class terms: 33 per cent of the AB respondents played a musical instrument, only 17 per cent of the DE sample.14 In both England and Scotland governments have responded to what is clearly a problem in the extent and quality of music education available to children. In England the Music Standards Fund was established in 1999; in Scotland the Youth Music Initiative was launched in 2003, on the back of a pledge that by 2006 all schoolchildren should have had access to one years free music tuition by the time they reach P6. In both cases central government made

Why music matters 173 funds available to local authorities to develop their own music programmes, and the reports on how the money was spent the DES Survey of Local Authority Music Services 2005 and the SAC Report on Local Authority Attainment over 3 years Youth Music Initiative, 2007 make interesting reading. Both reveal the continuing disparity between different local authorities attitudes to music; both suggest that the funds are giving schools some encouragement to restore music to the place in the primary curriculum that was once before the curriculum shake-up and resource cuts of the 1980s taken for granted. And both reveal that, for most children in most (but not all) authorities, to pursue instrumental tuition means paying for out-of-school lessons.15 No one can doubt, reading the SAC report on the Youth Music Initiative, that there are many imaginative music education projects in Scotland. But no one can doubt either that theres a slightly dispiriting attitude here as to why music education matters. Unlike David Lammy, for example, Patricia Ferguson (then Scotlands minister of culture) clearly put access at the centre of Scottish music policy. To quote:
I am delighted that local authorities have embraced the Youth Music Initiative with such enthusiasm, helping to achieve targets across all 32 areas. Musical activities boost childrens confidence and raise a childs awareness and appreciation of different styles and forms of music. It can also help raise attainment levels and equips them with transferable skills for their future studies and employment.16

Something similar can be seen in the Westminster governments Music Manifesto, established in 2004. In the second Manifesto report, published last year, the central recommendation is
Putting group singing at the heart of all primary school musical activity . . . Supporting the primary school campaign will be a wider initiative, backed by the music industry and the media, to create a singing nation, promoting the benefits of singing in terms of health, education and community.17

As someone who wrote his PhD on the history of working-class education, I can only say: weve been here before in the nineteenthcentury promotion of the sol-fa system in working-class elementary schools, in Cecil Sharps early twentieth-century advocacy of folk singing in the curriculum, Music matters, says the Scottish Arts Council rightly, but too often it seems to matter as an aspect of social or health policy, as a means of social inclusion or to develop social skills. The qualities that are needed

174 Critical Quarterly, vol. 50, nos. 12 to make music well need equal emphasis. Ill come back to this point but, first, I want to say a few words about music policy.

Music policy
My starting point here is the reconfiguration of cultural policy as cultural industries policy and Ill focus on a question that has been a recurring policy issue since I came to Scotland in 1987: what should policy makers and politicians do to ensure that Scotland has a flourishing music sector? Read any academic study of music scenes and cities written over the last couple of decades and its clear that a vital music culture calls forth a successful music industry rather than vice versa.18 Music lawyers, PR companies and managers make money because their clients make effective music. Musicians dont make good music because theyve got good lawyers, PR companies or managers (though much cultural industry policy seems to take the latter view). What, then, is needed to sustain a vital music culture? To answer schematically:  Music resources: music lessons, teachers, affordable instruments  Music spaces: rehearsal rooms, promoters and venues of varying kinds, art schools, universities, conservatoires, record shops  Time: being a student or unemployed  People: mentors, models, other musicians to play with, networks, friendships across generations, across musical genres and experiences  Mobility: the movement in (and out) of new faces, new ideas, new sound What is not so significant is a commercial, industrial infrastructure record companies, consultants, management companies, media, et cetera. These follow gravitate to successful scenes; they dont create them. What I want to stress here about this picture, though (as a matter of sociological common sense), is that the cultural strength of a music scene lies in the fluidity of the people involved, the musicians, and the flexibility of resources (venues, for example). The most successful such scenes blur the distinctions between high and low in terms of who went through what kind of music education, who plays with whom, and so forth. And note also that the most significant policy decisions in the making and unmaking of local music cultures are not music policy decisions at all, but involve things like licensing and planning (which affect the distribution of venues), housing and education (which

Why music matters 175 determine the nature of student populations) and employment and unemployment regulations (which affect musicians use of time). To replace cultural policy with cultural industries policy in the music sector is, then, to move attention from the conditions for music making to the conditions for music exploitation. On 27 February 2007, the then deputy first minister in Scotland, Nicol Stephen, announced that
Scotlands music industry is to benefit from extra and better coordinated support from the countrys enterprise network. A key element of this will be a new d500,000 fund the Scottish Music Future Fund to support the music stars of tomorrow. The new fund will be made available across Scotland.

Further,
The industry asked us to support the proposed new Scottish Music Industry Association. Scottish Enterprise and Highlands and Islands Enterprise will now contribute to the creation of the new association. [Matching, I should add, the commitment to the SMIA already made by the Scottish Arts Council.] (Scottish Executive press release)

The most interesting discursive aspect of this announcement is Nicol Stephenss references to the Scottish contemporary music industry. What is meant here by contemporary? Stephen undoubtedly takes the term from the Cross Party Group on Contemporary Music the lobbying body behind his announcement. The Cross Party Group, in the words of the Scottish Executive press handout, believes that Scotland has the potential to be a world leader in the creation and marketing of contemporary music. Now contemporary music has long been the label applied to contemporary art music (for which the term classical is clearly inappropriate). Hence the Contemporary Music Network, or ECAT, the Edinburgh Contemporary Arts Trust, chaired by my colleague Peter Nelson. From this perspective an example of the creation and marketing of contemporary music would not be Paolo Nutini and the seventeen other acts subsidised by the Scottish Arts Council to attend the South By South West rock industry trade fair in Austin, Texas, but 7Hings, the avant-garde label supported by Edinburgh University and my department. For the Cross Party Group, by contrast, contemporary music is defined against traditional music (which has its own Scottish lobbyists) but also against classical music (complaints about how much subsidy Scottish Opera and the RSNO receive are commonplace at Group meetings) and so, by default, against

176 Critical Quarterly, vol. 50, nos. 12 contemporary work in what is seen by the group as the high music world. The shift from culture to cultural industry policy, in other words, seems to become a shift from supporting high to supporting low music (the popular, the commercial) without a proper understanding that in terms of the words like creativity and talent that are bandied about music cannot and should not be so divided up. It would be an interesting piece of sociological research to trace how one network of influence in Scottish music policy making (rooted in academic and classical worlds) has been replaced by another (rooted in the world of music industry bodies and consultants). One unduly narrow world, that is, by another. But I want to conclude with a different question. What is the place of a university music department in the contemporary music situation? My starting point here is that such departments should be unashamedly elitist, concerned with the best students, teachers, research, ideas, arguments, performances, compositions. But this is the context for three specific tasks. First, university music departments should be the setting for experiment for what in the sciences might be called blue sky thinking whether such experimentation involves technology or technique, the exploration of new musical languages or forms, the understanding of music as an aspect of cognition and motor skills, social relations or sound experiences. The point here is that university music education is not in the contemporary sense of the word vocational; it is not a preparation for a professional career. This has to be understood if only because there are not enough professional music opportunities available annually to absorb the number of music graduates. (It is hard to get UK figures on this but a systematic survey of what happened to graduates of German music academies from 1998 to 2000 suggested that less than 9 per cent got employment as music professionals. I doubt that the situation would be different in the UK.)19 But theres a broader point here. By and large popular music has become part of the curriculum of FE and HE institutions as a vocational subject (a Music Teacher survey in 2002 suggested that there were at least 200 popular music courses in the UK and that the number was still rising20). Popular music courses prepare people for music industry careers (and in recent years the government-funded, music-industrysupported training agency Creative and Cultural Skills has moved increasingly into the role of benchmarking and auditing popular music teaching21). The problem of such industry validated courses is that they are invariably conservative and backward-looking, whether

Why music matters 177 in terms of the technology training provided short term practicality, in Philip Taggs words or of the structure of the music industry implied. As Tagg has written,
I dont know how many students have followed relatively recent music business courses whose practicalities were based on observing industry structures from the phonogram era (c1900c2000): fantastic if you wanted a job in the industry in the 1980s! It reminds me of all those classical ` cle performers who still produce as if we were all living in fin-de-sie Vienna.22

This is the context in which elitism means exploring musical possibilities (on the basis of embedded musical skills and theoretical knowledge, including Western tonal music theory) rather than subordinating oneself to commercial or bureaucratic or indeed academic practicality. The second, related, task of a university music department is to develop through practice the idea of creativity a term much abused by being applied currently, it seems, to every aspect of government and corporate policy. In the history of British popular music it is striking how much more significant art schools have been than music schools or vocational music courses. The point here is that for various reasons art schools have been, until very recently, the only British educational institutions that take creativity seriously, seeking to understand it, nurture it, assess it, display it. Musical creativity may not be quite the same thing as artistic creativity it is necessarily a more collective and collaborative process but it is not a quite different thing either, and music degrees and conservatoire courses need to take issues of creativity as seriously as art schools do. And this leads to the university music departments final task: to be a site for the development of and reflection on music teaching as centrally important to the ways in which music cultures work. The role of the music teacher has always been central to the classical music tradition a performers provenance is established by whom they studied with; music teachers are central to the history of music theory and analysis. As we have seen, much current music education policy is driven by the need and the problems of getting music teaching and teachers back into the school system. (And one of the major problem of the present plethora of vocational music courses is the very variable standards of teaching involved.) Teaching, in short, whether done formally or informally matters to music making it cant simply be regarded as an adjunct to research it is an aspect of what research in music means. And this is as true for popular as for classical music in

178 Critical Quarterly, vol. 50, nos. 12 this respect Tommy Smiths case for a Jazz Academy in Scotland is incontrovertible. The title of this lecture is Why Music Matters and it might seem by now that I have rather rambled off my subject, so let me finish by saying where I think Ive got to. Underlying what I have been saying about music in universities is the belief that the value of music does not lie in what it is good for. Music doesnt matter because it has a positive effect on childrens behaviour or a communitys health, because it improves exam results or makes people feel more patriotic or less depressed, or better able to deal with memory loss. If these were the reasons for musics value then it could, in principle, be replaced by pharmaceutical discoveries or new behavioural modification techniques or indeed by a better distribution of income. Rather, it is because music matters that it has or can have these other effects. Music may be useful psychologically, socially, politically or whatever. But thats not why people do it. Music matters because it is pleasurable to do and to experience and because it is a necessary part of what we are as humans, as feeling, empathetic beings, interested in and engaged with other people. To study music is to study what it is to be human biologically, cognitively, culturally; to play music is to experience what it is to be human physically, mentally, socially, in an aesthetic, playful, sensual context. Music matters, in short, because without it we wouldnt know who we are and what we are capable of being.

Notes
1 P. Johnson, And Another Thing, Spectator, 13 January 2007. 2 P. Johnson, The Menace of Beatlism (1964), repr. in Mike Evans (ed.), The Beatles Literary Anthology (London: Plexus, 2004), 127. 3 Ibid., 129. 4 S. Tomes, Beyond the Notes (Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell Press, 2005), xx. 5 D. Lammy, speech to the Association of British Orchestras Annual Conference, 30 January 2006; http://www.davidlammy.co.uk/da/29578. 6 R. A. Stebbins, Amateurs, Professionals and Serious Leisure (Montreal: McGillQueens University Press, 1992; A. Hennion et al., Figures de lamateur (Paris: La Documentation franc aise, 2000). 7 J. Fenton, James Fenton Struggles with Piano Examinations, Guardian Review, 11 November 2006, 15. 8 I. Bell, Did TV Kill Classical Music?, Sunday Herald (Seven Days), 1 May 2005, 8. 9 N. Crowe, Melody Maker, Prospect Magazine, 2006, 124; http://www. prospect-magazine.co.uk/printarticle.php?id=7538.

Why music matters 179

10 Music Industries Association, Attitudes to Music in the UK a Nexus Survey (London: MIA, 2006). 11 Scottish Arts Council, Whats Going On? A National Audit of Youth Music in Scotland (Edinburgh: SAC, 2003). 12 J. Kemp, Chorus of Anger at Music Highers Lower Standard, Herald, 18 October 2005. 13 National Association for Music in Higher Education, NAMHE Newsletter, 1:2 (2006), 9. 14 Youth Music, Our Music: Musical Engagement of Young People Aged 719 in the UK an Omnibus Survey (London: Youth Music, 2006), 3. 15 S. Hilton, L. Rogers and A. Creech, Survey of Local Authority Music Services (London: Department of Education and Science, 2005); Scottish Arts Council, Report on Local Authority Attainment over 3 years Youth Music Initiative (Edinburgh: SAC, 2007). 16 Scottish Arts Council, Report on Local Authority Attainment over 3 years Youth Music Initiative (Edinburgh: SAC, 2007). 17 Music Manifesto, Second Report (London: Youth Music, 2006); www. musicmanifesto.co.uk. 18 See, for example, S. Cohen, Beyond the Beatles: Decline, Renewal and the City in Popular Music Culture (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007); B. Shank, Dissonant Identities: The RocknRoll Scene in Austin, Texas (Hanover NH: University Press of New England, 1994). 19 A. Barber-Kersovan, posting to IASPM list discussion What Do Classical Musicians Play for a Living?, 4 August 2006. 20 R. Mason, Hello, Pop Pickers, Music Teacher, February 2002, 267. 21 See R. Ashton, Skills Set to Lead Agenda of Government-backed Study, Music Week, 4 February 2006, 8. 22 P. Tagg, posting to IASPM list discussion Pop Theory, 13 January 2007.