Theodore Dalrymple, Why the Baroque is Superior to Rock

Theodore Dalrymple on why the Baroque is superior to Rock: high culture is no bulwark against barbarism - but Baroque does not make those already predisposed to violence even more violent

A recent lunchtime visit to a pub - and its thankful absence of music - causes Theodore Dalrymple to muse on the superiority of Baroque over Rock. As the Nazis amply demonstrated, an affection for high culture is no bulwark against barbarism - but Baroque does not make those already predisposed to violence even more violent.

Recently - and rather against my custom - I went to a pub at lunchtime. As I entered, I felt a wave of relief sweep over me. It was not because of the prospect of alcohol - in fact, I am rarely dependent upon alcohol for relief of anxiety or tension, and intended to have only some fizzy water - but because of a very noticeable absence, that of music.

There was no music and there were no flashing lights or flickering screens in the pub, just a few people gathered around small tables, chatting and having a quiet drink. Only an occasional burst of laughter rose above the sociable murmur. I cursed the electricity that produces so many little hells of electronic stimulation, until I recalled that I like my drinks cooled.

No music! That its absence should strike me so forcefully, rather as the heat when you step off an air-conditioned aircraft into a tropical country, demonstrates how insidiously pervasive it has become in our urban environment. It is like a poisonous gas that a malign authority pumps into our atmosphere, whose doleful effect, and probably purpose, is to destroy our capacity to converse, to concentrate, to reflect. It agitates us, keeps us constantly on the move, makes us impulsive and lacking in judgement.

As it happened, a newspaper called me on the day I went into the pub to ask whether I was willing to write an article on the beneficial, salutary effects of classical music. Apparently, a study had just been published to demonstrate that Mozart and Bach were good for your health; and since these days healthiness is next to godliness, or even superior to it, here was proof at last that classical music was superior to rock music. Unfortunately, I could not write the article because I was due that afternoon to attend a murder trial - of someone, of course, who was unaware that there was any other kind of music but rock music.

One of the reasons, I suspect, that defenders and advocates of high culture have been diffident about their claims, and reluctant to resist the relentless advance of a debased popular culture, is the historical fact that the Nazis enthusiastically supported at least some aspects of it. Not long ago I went to the home of an antiquarian bookseller acquaintance of mine, a devotee of classical music. When I arrived, he was listening to a recording of the Winterreise, a most beautiful and sensitive recording made in Berlin in 1943. Schubert at the very nerve centre of political barbarism: what use or benefit, then, is Schubert to the world, and how could anyone claim him as a manifestation or pillar of high civilisation? If Schubert brings tears to your eyes after a hard day's genocide, what moral superiority can be claimed for Schubert’s music, or the act of listening to it, compared with any other music?

It is a powerful argument, at least in rhetorical effect. And once the advocates of high culture have lost confidence not so much in its superiority over low culture, but in their ability to argue for it, the entire field is left wide open to the lowest of low culture to occupy. Indeed, such low culture can even argue its moral superiority, for not only is it of the People, self-evidently a good thing, but it is untainted by any association with the Nazis. What rock star does not espouse the best causes? No concentration camp commandant ever spent his evenings listening to Iggy Pop or the Boomtown Rats.

If the invocation of guilt by association is a permissible rhetorical manoeuvre, let us, however, be even-handed about it. Rock music formed a large part of the content of Radio Mille Collines, the radio station that instigated and incited the genocide in Rwanda.

Even if high culture is not by itself a sufficient bulwark against ideological barbarism (and, of course, the Nazis were in many respects aesthetic barbarians too), there is no reason to go over to other forms of barbarism. There is good reason to believe that rock music exerts a brutalising effect, and if it is not the sole cause of many of the unpleasantness of modern life, it aggravates them.

In the days when, as part of my medical duties, I had to visit police cells to examine the recently arrested, I went to a police station in which the custody sergeant used to play chamber works by Brahms (not always the most serene of composers, perhaps) to those whom I suppose in these consumerist days I must call his customers. He had found by trial and error, he said, that Brahms calmed criminals down while rock music made them more agitated and aggressive than they were already inclined to be.

A prison officer in the prison in which I worked, a man of Jamaican origin and therefore by no means culturally predisposed to such a conclusion, had found also that rock and baroque exerted quite different effects on the prisoners. The first agitated them to the point of violence, the latter soothed them to the point of docility. But he had difficulty in persuading the other officers of the value of his observations, for culturally they were themselves more inclined to rock than baroque. As to my proposal that the prison should echo to the sound of Gregorian chant, they thought it was merely a joke.

No doubt all of us have experienced the bass vibrations through the pavement under our feet of an approaching car, whose driver is in an enraged but trance-like state. The car is driven aggressively, as if invulnerable to accident. Of course, aggressive people listen to aggressive music, but no one is so aggressive that he cannot be provoked into further aggression.

Needless to say, the outright suppression of rock music in public places, while very tempting, is not the solution. What is required is the elevation of public taste. This, it seems to me, might take some time.

Theodore Dalrymple is a writer and retired earlier this year as a doctor.