The aesthetics of music or musical aesthetics is the quality and study of the beauty and enjoyment (plaisir and jouissance), the aesthetics, of music.
Music has the ability to affect our emotions, intellect, and our psychology; lyrics can assuage our loneliness or incite our passions. As such, music is a powerful art form whose aesthetic appeal is highly dependent upon the culture in which it is practiced.
Simon Frith (2004, p.17-9) argues that, "'bad music' is a necessary concept for musical pleasure, for musical aesthetics." He distinguishes two common kinds of bad music; the Worst Records Ever Made type, which include:
"Tracks which are clearly incompetent musically; made by singers who can't sing, players who can't play, producers who can't produce,"
"Tracks involving genre confusion. The most common examples are actors or TV stars recording in the latest style,"
and "rock critical lists," which include:
"Tracks that feature sound gimmicks that have outlived their charm or novelty,"
"Tracks that depend on false sentiment (...), that feature an excess of feeling molded into a radio-friendly pop song."
He later gives three common qualities attributed to bad music: inauthentic, [in] bad taste, and stupid. He argues that "The marking off of some tracks and genres and artists as 'bad' is a necessary part of popular music pleasure; it is a way we establish our place in various music worlds. And 'bad' is a key word here because it suggests that aesthetic and ethical judgements are tied together here: not to like a record is not just a matter of taste; it is also a matter of argument, and arugment that matters." (p.28)
Source
Washburne, Christopher J. and Derno, Maiken (eds.) (2004). Bad Music: The Music We Love to Hate. New York: Routledge. ISBN 0415943663.
The aesthetics of music or musicalaesthetics is the quality and study of the beauty and enjoyment (plaisir and jouissance), the aesthetics, of music.
As such, music is a powerful art form whose aesthetic appeal is highly dependent upon the culture in which it is practiced.
In the 1700s, music was considered to be so far outside the realm of aesthetic theory (then conceived of in visual terms) that music was barely mentioned in William Hogarth's treatise, The Analysis of Beauty.
Consequently when discussing music, we must, Scruton argues, be careful not to commit the error of mistaking sound for music, that is, the material substrate for the ideal object, even though the temptation will be great given the material substantiality of sound.
Popular music ceases to be music, just as sexual love ceases to be love: nothing less than this is required by the new form of life--the fear, inadequacy, and anger that attend the attempt to live without the blessing of the dead--is itself expressed by the popular culture and reabsorbed by it.
Scruton attributes this "death" of music to the triumph of democratic culture and the leveling of taste that goes with it, but it is equally possible that such loss of faith, as it might be called, has as much to do with a general reflection of democratic culture on its own conditions of possibility.
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