I once had a student whose name was Gudmund. He had red hair, and his heart and his mind were red, too. As we discussed what kind of music he liked, he would say: when I am with friends, with people I like, I also like the music we are listening to. So if I could bring him and his friends together in the Grieg Hall for a concert with – let’s say a Mozart Ouverture, a Brahms symphony and a Schönberg concerto, I suppose he would enjoy it all and say it was great music. And all would benefit from the experience, both Gudmund and his friends. Maybe even Schönberg!

How does music influence the development of identity for the individual, for the group, for the nation? Is it really so that the individual identity is rather harmless, whereas group identity is a bit more problematic or worrying and the national(istic) feelings that music arouses, is plainly destructive?

Will the music you hear, form and shape you, create your identity? Is there something in music itself that affects the individual and influences the freedom, the power? Does music therefore create our identity? Will a march necessarily make us militant and aggressive, and a springar (Norwegian dance) make us burst with self-righteous nationalism?

The nation

I lived for a few years in Germany. Every time when Grieg’s music was played in the radio (and occasionally Svendsen’s, too), I felt very proud. I am a Norwegian, I thought (which was of course right) and Norway is a great country - if not a very big one - with great artists and a wonderful culture. Nevertheless, I still enjoyed music from other countries, much unlike some well-known composers. Why? Because I was well educated, at the Oslo University.

But some people, of course, were not: About 1900 the Hungarians, especially the young Bartok, made some severe statements about foreign music. But over the years that changed, and he gave up his extreme nationalism. In Russland, the Mighty Five were just as hostile to German music – especially Mussorgskij, connecting poor Mendelssohn with musical slavery, beer and cigars - as was later Debussy in France, who despised not only Wagner, but also was very negative to Beethoven and Strauss.

In Wagner’s Meistersinger there is a famous moment in Sachs’s final speech where he underlines the difference between the French music and the German, of course praising the latter. However, this goes only for the art: the Germans should continue making German art, he claims, not imitate the foreign. And – what I find very important and often ignored - : this is what really matters. What happens to the German state, is of little or no importance, as long as the true, domestic art is flourishing. “Therefore I say to you: honour your German Masters, then you will conjure up good spirits!” Because then holy German art would remain. And yes, I do hope the art of every nation should survive, and their language, too, and not be swallowed up by English.

Do we feel embarrassed at our own heritage? Is it too personal, is it easier for us to show feelings and commitment in matters where we have a distance? Our time is characterized precisely by its disengagement, its cool distance, taught especially by French philosophers, as well as its globalisation, and also its uninhibited eclecticism.

Language and art are parts of our identity, and I hope always will be. For how can we understand and appreciate the art and language of others if we do not know our own? So national styles may be OK, but we also from time to time meet criterions that are over-national:

Marxist-leninist aesthetics in Eastern Europe are inclined to defend the opinion that only the artists who have the right (that is: the Marxist) view of the world, are able to reflect reality in the proper way. So even if the romantics often depicted the world in the age of class society with lots of sad dissonances, they lacked the solution, they flew from reality and sought satisfaction in their dreams, thus ceasing to fight, concealing the social opposites and lacking belief in the future. The twelve-tone music was of course still worse, lacking melody and only illustrating chaos. Among the best composers we must now count names like Arytunjan, Schtogarenko, Sweschnikow, Makarow, Mejtus, Seidl, Dobias, Jurowsky, Ocenas, Barvik, Stanislav, Podest, Suchon and Moyzes. However, Verdi, Berlioz, even Lortzing, are looked upon as progressive and revolutionary, so their music is not dreamy at all.

Still, this should not scare us into neglecting or relativizing the spiritual content of a work of art, like postmodernism tends to do, fearing that the message might be dangerous. It is how we handle these messages that creates our identity.

The group

Is not the context in which we experience music and art, the social connection, important for how we experience it, for the function it has, how it affects and influences us?

The guru of the Norwegian music pedagogues (actually a psychologist) sees no other function of music than helping you belong to a group. So joining an MC-club might be just as good, because it could provide the same effect.

 

This might have been true if music – and art as a whole – had no content, and it would have been all the more easy to manipulate us with music.

Let us return to Gudmund and his friends. The question is not what music is being played for them. The question is: What have they learned at school? What have they learned about music, about art, at the University or the University College? Is it certain that the music they are exposed to, cannot be misused?

This year The Bergen Festival tried to convince its audience that Mozart’s music is raw and brutal. In this particular case, the attempt to mislead the audience was caused by a wish to defend a stupid and speculative performance of a Mozart Singspiel. But are we sure that our students will know better, that they will see through this and other attempts to mislead them and manipulate their experience of music? For if now Gudmund and friends would like this Mozart music – which they are supposed to do – one could come and say to them: So you like this music? You know it is brutal and aggressive, so brutality is a fine thing, you see! You should practise it more often.

No! Instead, they should have learned that Mozart’s music is bearer of classical ideals, including moderation, refinement and clarity. The actual piece: The Abduction from the Seraglio, tells us the same as for instance a contemporary drama by Lessing: Nathan the wise man: it teaches you meekness, tolerance, reason. Why should we withhold this?

In Nazi-Germany, attempts were made to interpret for instance Adolf Hitler as an incarnation of Lohengrin: and the poor Elsa was – very differently from Wagner’s text - expected to be ready for every sacrifice for her beloved Führer, we read in a pamphlet from the late thirties. However, the people around Hitler had a more realistic opinion about Wagner’s works, and recommended that at least some of them should not be performed at all. So they actually played more Puccini than Wagner in the Third Reich.

The individual

This conference will focus on art’s role and importance in the labour for human rights and freedom of speech. An obvious question would be: what kind of music (and art altogether) has a general humanizing effect?

Let us turn to Plato: In his opinion, rhythm and melody penetrate the soul and make so strong an impression, that if someone is well educated, he will get the right form, he will see what is good and what is not as it should be, he will praise the good and beautiful and hate the bad and ugly, in all areas of life. This is then for Plato the aim of education in music, giving the young people the proper attitude. He calls it “the love of beauty”, because for him the beautiful, the good and the true are one.

For those who never care about art and philosophy, Plato has a grotesque description: “Those who have no experience in insight and goodness, but constantly give themselves over to sensuality and that kind of things, they are certainly moving downwards: they never turn their eyes towards what truly is “up”, and they do not know any true enjoyment, but like animals they are always looking down, and bent down towards the earth and the food they eat, gorge themselves and have sex, and in order to get the most of it they kick and knock each other with horns of iron and kill each other in their insatiableness, for what they fill themselves with, is nothing real.”

His pupil Aristotle argues in the same way: Music is capable of giving the soul a special quality and disposition. Our soul changes when we listen to it, he claims. So we must teach the young people to be pleased in the right way. By using the ethical melodies, our descendants will become purified and sanctified through fear and compassion. The term katharsis we know, of course, from Aristotle and his Poetics. In your encounter with art, your soul may be cleansed or healed.

How can these reflections be relevant for us today? What would be our equivalents to for instance the ethical melodies? I have heard that there is less violence in the London underground stations when classical music is played over the loudspeakers. Is this maybe a solution? Does it mean that the classical – whatever that may be – music makes us more mild and compassionate? Or is the simple explanation that the violent people can’t stand this dreadful boring music, and so go elsewhere to practise their violence?

There is a nice story from old Greece, where a gang of young men were so excited (musically) that they tried to force their way into the house of a famous actress. Now a musician came around, and he played a tune in another scale, changing only a semitone, and as a result the young men seemed completely to have lost their sexual power, and shamefaced they all went home.

Does this mean, then, that we are completely under the manipulating power of music? I don’t think so, because I am quite certain that he could never have achieved the same effect by playing his tune for the youngsters of our time. You have to learn that mixolydic makes you feminine and that the march can be used in war, not only at weddings. It is not self-evident. You have to learn it in a context very much like the way you learn your language or social behaviour.
Because spiritual values and processes do exist! Man is not just an instrument, reacting on physical stimuli, especially rhythmic patterns. If we are, and if our children are brought up as such robots, they will be easier to manipulate: just turn the switch on and see them moving! But man has to be understood, not just explained.

Could it be the other way around, then? That our identity is decisive for how we, through our inherited and acquired connotations, how we experience, apprehend and understand the music, and consequently use it?

Maybe we should therefore not only consider how to make art accessible to us, but rather how we can make us accessible to art, as the German museum director Werner Hoffmann so wisely puts it. This is the crucial point!

The so-called Mozart-effect is well known. But even if Mozart’s music helps the cows to give more milk, and can be useful when you are giving birth to children, it is not quite obvious that it leads to freedom of speech. It could hardly be the question of direct, explicit influence, something like propaganda, but rather a general humanizing, that is: indirectly, through influence upon man.

Music relieves tensions and quiets destructive impulses, it has been argued. It resolves inner conflicts. The philosopher Beardsley often underlines this. Loud, aggressive music can make you upset. Quiet, slowly moving music might calm you down. But the theories go further.
When listening to so-called classical music, we have to listen over and over again. Through the complexity of the music and this repeated listening we learn to detect and discriminate, in other words: a formal education the way Plato wanted it. It can also make us become familiar with the different ways of musical expression. Then we can come to like various kinds of music, from different epochs and by composers with different backgrounds and ideologies.

Music develops the imagination, and also the ability of putting oneself in the place of others. In the Aesthetics of Theodor Lipps the key word is Einfühlung, sensitivity or empathy. Regarding art (and in this case music) as an expression of feelings, we will achieve a better understanding of other people’s way of feeling. Man is a unity, he argues, the soul is a unity, and that is why a feeling of solidarity is pleasurable. When other people’s pleasant feelings are the object of my delight or satisfaction, this has an ethical value, according to Lipps. This inner participation gives me joyful feelings that are not primarily physical, and if music is taught the way it should be, it develops my personal identity.

So maybe a more appropriate question would be: how can we teach people that true art is indeed humanizing? Can we, by influencing and changing the connotations connected with the experience of music, perhaps prevent the music from being abused, and rather contribute to its creating liberty and identity? Then maybe almost any music will do, if we are accessible to it. Other music and art may be different from ours, but perhaps we still like it. Could it be that the feelings and thoughts of other people, other cultures, also can be liked to a certain degree, or at least understood?

What is needed, then, is above all close contact to the music, to get a close, true, genuine, active relation to it, and to other arts connected to it. We must learn to understand the different expressions, how they reflect reality and how they try to answer its many questions. The aesthetic dimension – in the widest meaning – must come into focus! As the world’s most famous beagle once said: To know me is to love me! This is valid also for music and the arts, as everyone who has had students, certainly has experienced. What a pity that the teachers’ training of today tends to neglect this aspect!

The better educated we are, the less homogeneous we will be as a group, and the more difficult to manipulate. Peter Ustinov has a statement that may sound strange: “Doubt unites the people, conviction separates them.” As long as we are still individuals, he may be right. And he continues: “The crowd consists of people who have lost their voices.” That is: as individuals! We must still be individuals even when we are part of a community. Seeing oneself as belonging to a group is fine, but we must see ourselves and not only the community. This is mature identity.

So music is not creating our identity, I think, any more than our identity determines our experience of music. Of course, especially when we are young, the music we hear, will create preferences in us, will decide what we like to listen to. Later, however, if we are properly educated, like Plato and – hopefully – Gudmund, our knowledge about music and the meaning of art will become so deep and thorough that we appreciate it as human expression, even if its ideals may differ from ours. For we are all searching for the truth, also in art. Like St. Paul says: “Not as though I had already attained, either were already perfect … “

The German poet Ludwig Tieck has a beautiful vision, which we must transmit to our students: “All the works of art are part of one single poetry, one art, reaching from the past through the present day into the future. And the closer we learn to know strange and unfamiliar art, the deeper we will get to the bottom of the great secrets also in the works of former art, as they are all fragments of one beautiful pillar of paintings.”

This teaching would be the means, and I would like to finish by describing the goal, quoting another romantic, Hölderlin: “To be at one with everything, that is the divine life, that is man’s heaven. To be one with all that lives, in blessed self-denial to return to nature’s all, that is the peak of all thoughts and pleasures, that is the sacred mountain, the place of eternal rest, and all thoughts disappear against the impression of the eternal one world.”

 

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