Humanities scholars will call me naïve, but I have really been enjoying a couple of terrific blogs on the topic of rationality: Overcoming Bias and its more community-oriented spinoff Less Wrong. These are devoted to finding ways to do a better job of understanding the world as it is, of forming true beliefs, and so on. Needless to say, the kinds of people who post at Less Wrong place a pretty high value on making correct statements, understanding the complicated relationship between “fact” and “opinion,” and so on.
These aren’t the type of people who casually insult entire fields of human endeavor or human learning.
But that’s exactly what, in an otherwise thought-provoking post, a Less Wrong contributor named Phil Goetz does when he claims the following:
There’s not much downside to art. There are some exceptions – romance novels perpetuate destructive views of love; 20th-century developments in orchestral music killed orchestral music; and Ender’s Game has warped the psyches of many intelligent people.
What is this guy talking about? He clarifies in comments:
Orchestral music is dead. Name one great composer since Stravinsky. With the money we spend on music, and the number of composers trained, we could have had a dozen, maybe a hundred, Beethovens since Stravinsky. What do we have? John Williams and Danny Elfman.
There may be great orchestral composers out there somewhere, but the orchestral music scene is too dead to find them.
So let’s see here. We’ve got someone whose concept of what it means to be a “great orchestral composer” is pretty much entirely defined by what’s been marketed to him as a great composer. You can be sure he doesn’t attend actual orchestral performances: he couldn’t do that without encountering the work of the countless successful, engaging orchestral composers who are working today and for the last 50 years. You can be sure he doesn’t browse the offerings of any decent music stores or online outlets like Arkiv Music. You can be sure he doesn’t speak on a regular basis with anyone who is in a position to know anything about current orchestral music. You can be sure he doesn’t so much as scan the music coverage in the newspaper of any major American city.
And yet he feels completely comfortable pronouncing judgment on the combined output of the field of “orchestral music” since, apparently, 1971 at the latest (the year of Stravinsky’s death). What if I said something like: “As everyone knows, the last great computer scientist was Alan Turing.” Well, Phil Goetz and everybody else would jump down my throat for (a) saying something I obviously lacked the requisite knowledge to say anything about, and (b) thereby insulting the literally thousands of great computer scientists since Turing, and, by extension, the entire field of computer science and everybody associated with it. They would accuse me, absolutely correctly, of the informal fallacy known as “the argument from personal ignorance” — “I don’t know about it, so it must not exist.”
In the time it took me to get around to writing this post, a commenter (one Komponisto) has dispatched with this well enough (the comment is longer than this excerpt and worth reading):
Yes, art music has a PR problem…but then, so does science, at least among the general public. I presume people here, including yourself, know better in the case of science, so what gives?
I ask the following not (merely) as a rhetorical question, but out of a genuine desire for insight: what on Earth gave you the impression that you were in a position to judge the state of contemporary orchestral music?
The question is exactly the right one, but I think I have an answer: it’s fine to rag on music this way in public. It’s fine to casually accuse composers for the last 4 decades of … not being great composers, or something (the substance of his critique is astoundingly vague, another thing that surely wouldn’t fly if he were talking about a field other than music). As long as you’re talking about music, it’s fine to present your own reactionary, ill-informed point of view as a widely-agreed-upon fact. It doesn’t matter if you wouldn’t make similarly ignorant claims about virtually any other field in the arts or sciences.
You’re extremely unlikely to suffer even such mild consequences as being publicly disagreed with, let alone publicly shamed for such unhygienic epistemological behavior, because that’s about the level of regard music and musicology are held in, generally speaking. Even on a site devoted to the furtherance of human rationality, statements about music are simply freed from the ordinary requirement that they should correspond to reality in some way.
(Frankly, a decent bit of the rhetorical force of this post is diminished by the fact that Phil Goetz did get called out on being an idiot by a commenter, which really delights me. Maybe it’s just that the violation here was so egregious and pointless, but it’s rare for this kind of thing to receive any pushback whatsoever.)
Posted by The Grouchy Musicologist 
The Grouchy Musicologist 