The summary which follows gives a fuller explanation of the five broad purposes of Scottish Voices enumerated in the sub-headings above. Taken together, they constitute the aims and objectives which motivate the projects described in the pages of this website. The five purposes could, however, be summarised by a single over-arching idea, which is that of attempting to build a reconciliatory cultural practice.
This attempt is nevertheless a difficult task in the present social and cultural climate, which was described by eminent Scottish historian Niall Ferguson (in a recent lecture in Hong Kong) as The Age of “Radical Uncertainty”: a term taken from the book Radical Uncertainty: Decision-making for an Unknowable Future (2020) by Mervyn King (former Governor of the Bank of England) & Jonathan Kay (Oxford University Economist).
What “The Age of Radical Uncertainty” suggests is that it is becoming evident that, at the very least, European society is approaching the end of the post-World-War-2 global order, mapped out by the 1941 Rooseveldt/Churchill Atlantic Charter, and that many social, economic and cultural attitudes and practices are changing dramatically as a consequence. An even more radical view, widely espoused amongst younger generations and by several of the writers herein mentioned, is that many aspects of the social, economic and political order, including culture and music, are disintegrating into chaos, resulting in a broken politics, a divided social order characterised by tribal and narcissistic cultural and musical practices driven by a combination of self-, sectional-, vested- and class-interest: local, national and international. Scottish philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre, in one of the most influential works of moral philosophy of the late 20th century (After Virtue: third edition 2007) explores the consequences of Radical Uncertainty: one of which he calls Emotivism (sometimes now called “virtue signalling”: the ascendancy of what feels virtuous to the doers over what actually does good in society as a whole). Ross Douthat (New York Times) goes even further: describing the present era as one of Decadence: viz “…economic stagnation, institutional decay and cultural and intellectual exhaustion, at a high level of material prosperity and technological development” (The Decadent Society (2020)).
The 2020 Davos Forum featured a shouting match between a 73-year-old (President Donald Trump of the United States) and a 16-year-old schoolgirl activist (Greta Thunberg). And a 2020 poll of the 18-25 generation of Britons suggested that, if that generation had been the only voters in the British General Election of December 12, 2019, the result would have not have been 317 to 262 in favour of Boris Johnson’s Conservative Party but 500 to 4 in favour of Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party. Generational Division is the factor to which that most prolific, widely-read and influential musicologist of our time, Richard Taruskin, attributes much 21st-century practice and teaching in musical composition: a Division between themes espoused for 50+ years by the “boomer” generation, which he sees as reflecting a series of failed 20th-century cultural ideologies, and attempts in subsequent years to recover from these failed ideologies. Indeed, several of the other authors quoted herein have considered cultural ideologies as reflecting a much broader series of failed 20th-century economic, social and political ideologies, and the institutions which embodied them (eg the Soviet Union, the Third Reich, the British and other Colonial Empires, Lehman Brothers: all now as Dead as the Dodo). Our five themes (Finding Roots, Connecting Generations, Healing Divisions, Sharing Cultures and Crossing Musical Frontiers) therefore constitute attempts to develop practices along lines by means of which current generations are attempting to recover from these failed 20th-century ideologies.
Ferguson and McIntyre, as well-known members of the Scottish Diaspora (raised and educated in Scotland, but long living and working abroad) also point to the need to heal yet another Division: the considerable regional gulf between Diaspora cultures, including that of the Scottish Diaspora (prioritising the celebration, continuation, renewal and sharing of its heritage) and that of Home cultures (prioritising proprietorship, cultural metamorphosis, innovation, institutional subversion and utopian dreams of what culture ought to be, even over how it actually is (the “Nirvana Fallacy”). The different priorities of Diaspora culture are one of the reasons why Scottish Voices has several times taken the opportunity, when offered, of conducting projects within Diaspora communities.
George Will (Washington Post) thinks Class War has revived: albeit in place of the former 19th/20th-century Class War between Workers and Bosses, a new species of Class War which is specifically of the 21st century: a Class War between the hubristic Regulatory Overclass (a sort of educated, wealthy Magisterium), united by class interest as much as by ideology (in Will’s formulation, a class united by political attitudes, assumptions, values, mores, customs and dispositions, and a creature of the strong, the organised, the educated, and affluent). This Regulatory Overclass is located above all inside the “echo-chambers” of a few educationally-priviledged sections of society (most notably the media, management, academic, arts and political sections), and is ranged against the interests of the Regulated Underclass (the limited-education, low-wage Precariat), which is constrained to suffer subjugation by having their interests ignored.
Michael Lind (in The New Class War) proposes that the Political Class, of both Left and Right, is engaged in marginalising the low-wage Precariat, even though it comprises the majority of the population. Jonathan Rauch (in Demosclerosis) suggests that governments can’t support the low-wage Precariat even if they want to, because they’re in thrall to Lobbyists and Activists who are hostile to the interests of the 60% of the population who constitute the Regulated Underclass. Jerry Pournelle (American essayist) considers that contemporary institutions (including cultural and musical ones), whatever their stated intentions, always end up with a powerless majority (the Underclass) which supports the institution’s noble aims, regulated and ignored by the hegemonic policies of a powerful minority (the Overclass) which merely draws sustenance from the power of the institution.
A well-known local University provides an example in its recent creation of a new management team for “World-Changing Research”, to assist (= oversee and control) the research and technical lower orders with their research-funding applications (= to ensure that those orders raise sufficient funding to facilitate financial provision for further increases in the staffing numbers and power of the Regulatory Overclass and redundencies amongst the Regulated Underclass (those charged with doing the actual work)). To put this attitude in the form of a parable: “We need more Archbishops of Salzburg and fewer Mozarts”.
Ironically, when members of the Overclass come to argue with one another, the tension between Truth and Self-interest (that is: one’s own Truth and other people’s Self-Interest) are often recognised readily enough. Richard Rex (eminent Cambridge historian), reviewed the recent publication Enlightenment Now by Stephen Pinker (eminent Harvard psychologist) as excellent when evaluating evidence of material progress in recent times (eg “the world today is populated by more, healthier, wealthier, longer-lived, better-hosed, better-educated and better-equiped people than ever before”), but, when it comes to values and judgements, subject to “mission creep”: exemplifed by Piker’s answers to certain questions which are, in Rex’s view, essentially class-based (Question 1: What is Great Enlightenment Thought? Answer: “Stuff I like” and Question 2: Who are the Great Enlightenment Thinkers? Answer: “People Like Me”). One could add another score of such political, social, philosophical, economic, cultural and musical Self-interested Tribal Divisions between answers claiming to be Truth.
To sketch in some consequences…….
Professor Taruskin (author of the vast, monumental, 6-volume, 300,000-word Oxford History of Western Music and many other books and articles, and winner of the nearest thing in music to a Nobel Prize, the prestigious Kyoto Prize) has explored, in some of his recent lectures and publications, the thought that the tradition of Western Classical Music may be in its death-throes (“gone to seed”), after almost a millennium, ie the 1000-year period since the first work of the Classical Tradition whose composer we know by individual name, and whose date and place of composition we know (the Apostolic Mass for St Martial, composed by Adémar de Chabannes in the Limousin in 1031). Indeed, if we consider the pre-history of the tradition, eg in the various forms of anonymous liturgical chant and related material, that period should probably be accounted two millennia. Here, in a single sentence, is an instance of how Taruskin expresses that line of thought:
“It is a remarkable story, in which a philosophical doctrine that posited the autonomy of beauty and disinterestedness of artists, and thus vouchsafed an unprecedented artistic flowering in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, underwent a metamorphosis in the nineteenth and twentieth through which autonomy shaded into irrelevance, and the flowering went to seed” (Music & Letters vol 88 no 1 (2007)).
In such words (part of a review of South African author Peter Van der Merwe’s book Roots of the Classical),Taruskin is ventilating a more sophisticated, nuanced version of an opinion widely-held by the General Public and those unencumbered by vested interest (a view voiced in rather popularistic language by Van der Merwe in his characteristically forthright, albeit perhaps somewhat melodramatic rhetoric) that the Classical Tradition may be alreadydead:
“…for the general public, classical music belongs mainly to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, carries on with diminishing vigour into the first few decades of the twentieth, and has ceased to exist by 1950″ (Roots of the Classical (2004)).
Scottish Voices attempts to respond to the issue raised by Taruskin…and to the (no doubt rather crude) way in which Van der Merwe formulates a broadly similar view, via projects which pursue a strategy hinted at in the final sentences of Roots of the Classical:
“But let us be optimistic. Let us suppose that, some time during this century, the classical does revive…the revived tradition must reduce the whole material of music to something unified and manageable. To do so…it will need to go beyond the great works of the past. It will also need to draw on…the archetypal and indestructable patterns that give meaning to all music. In other words, it will need roots” [our italics].
Recognition of “The Need for Roots” is not confined to Van der Merwe of course. Simone Weil (1909-1943) is but one example, among many possibles, of a twentieth-century philosopher gripped by that need, as outlined in her eponymously-entitled book (The Need for Roots (1943)): an increasingly influential volume in the twenty-first century.
What “The Need for Roots” implies could be understood in several ways, of course, one of which is “continuity between the generations”, as encapsulated in the oft-quoted aphorism from one of the greatest of eighteenth-century Irish parliamentarians and political writers, Edmund Burke (1729-1797):
“Society is indeed a contract…As the ends of such a partnership cannot be obtained in many generations, it becomes a partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born.”
However, “The Need for Roots”, in Van der Merwe’s formulation, also implies that one of the core components behind the success of “The Classical” between the eighteenth and early twentieth centuries was its capacity for combining elements of the Classical tradition from across classes, regions, generations and cultures, as well as with elements drawn from the popular genres of current and historical eras: consider the Dance Suites of Bach and Handel, the Country Dances of Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven, the Ländler of Schubert, the Waltzes of Brahms, the blues, ragtime and jazz elements in Gershwin and the other contributors to the “Great American Songbook” tradition, and that a revival of “The Classical” will depend on a renewed capacity to do likewise in the twenty-first century
