Taste, snobbery and spiritual style in music

The writer uses his own autobiography as a professional musician in order to illustrate how musical tastes and prejudices are formed and discarded. He describes his life as a choirboy, a composer, an adherent and a rejecter of the avant-garde, and a seeker after the spiritual aspects of music. He questions the Platonic doctrine that music has an effect on morality, admits his own lack of authentic inspiration, and suspects that it is generally shared by modern composers. But the classics of the Western tradition continue to serve him as a source of quasi-religious wisdom. He realises that this ‘spiritual style’ at which he has arrived is an individual affair, and urges the reader to make a similar self-analysis

Aesthetics · Art · Biography · Doctrine · Epistemology · Literature · Morality · Musical · Taste · Theology · Musicology and Musical Analysis · Philosophy · Psychology