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Transcript: Music and Objectivism

By Roger E. Bissell

February 16, 2024

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Date of recording: February 13, 2023, The Savvy Street Show

Hosts: Vinay Kolhatkar. Guest: Roger Bissell.

 

Editor’s Note: The Savvy Street Show’s AI-generated transcripts are edited for removal of repetitions and pause terms, and for grammar and clarity. Explanatory references are added in parentheses. Material edits are advised to the reader as edits [in square brackets].

 

For those who prefer video, it is here.

 

Vinay Kolhatkar:

Good evening and welcome back to the Savvy Street Show after a hiatus. We are on Riverside FM now, and I have a guest again today. His name is Roger Bissell. He has been a professional musician for somewhere around sixty years, and for about fifty years he has been reading and writing on philosophy as well, so he’s the perfect guest, for today’s topic is “Music and Objectivism.” Roger is also the associate editor of The Journal of Ayn Rand Studies. Welcome to the show, Roger.

 

Roger Bissell:

Thanks very much, Vinay.

 

Vinay Kolhatkar:

Okay, let’s see if we can start with a working definition of what music is. Can you give that to us?

 

Roger Bissell:

Music is the form of art that’s composed from the periodic vibrations of resonant objects or sonorous bodies.

Well, it’s the form of art that’s composed from the periodic vibrations of resonant objects or sonorous bodies. I noticed that the Harvard Dictionary of Music doesn’t have a definition of music, so you have to wonder if they know what they’re talking about. They probably do.

 

Vinay Kolhatkar:

All right. Ayn Rand offered one in The Romantic Manifesto. [It] was in an essay called “Art and Cognition,” which I would call a working man’s definition. Does that work for us here today?

 

Roger Bissell:

I think so. If you say that music is the art that’s composed with periodic vibrations of sonorous bodies, and then you say, well, I don’t hear any periodic vibrations of sonorous bodies, then it’s not music. So, you just negate the consequent and “if then, therefore,” you negate the antecedent, and that’s how that works. You have to hear musical tones which are how we experience those vibrations.

 

Vinay Kolhatkar:

Okay, terrific. I want to take your mind to a recent study. I think it was [a] 2010 study by Scientific American. They analyzed well over a million songs, and they came to the conclusion that in the five decades after the sixties, loudness had increased, and melody and variety had decreased in popular music, at least. Does that sound true?

 

Roger Bissell:

Generally speaking, yes. Everything is on a continuum, so I would say that there is some music that is not as loud as the average music from the sixties, and there was some music back then that didn’t have as much melody as some things that are composed now. But, generally speaking, if they have done a survey—and I admire and envy anyone who has that large a database and the capacity to gather all that information—it’s probably true. And if you wonder, well, why is that the case? I’d say it’s driven by the market, and the market is driven by the culture, which is the values and interests that the consumers of music have adopted. So, there’s a chain or a trail of breadcrumbs from this study in Scientific American that has to go back to what values the young people have absorbed. I’ve heard people criticize music from the last half of the twentieth century and today as being more primitive, more primitivistic, [or] simple. You can hear many exceptions to that. For instance, Burt Bacharach, who just passed away yesterday or the day before, composed very enjoyable melodic and rhythmic songs, and he was greatly successful. The Carpenters sang a lot of really great music. And this, of course, [was] largely in the sixties and seventies, and you don’t hear very much music like that written today. They didn’t have rap in the sixties and seventies, which, to me, is a kind of poetry with a drum beat and a very simple musical pattern that repeats in the background. I remember when I was growing up back in the fifties and sixties, they would have beatniks or beat poets who would recite their poems while they or someone else played the bongos, just to give a little bit of rhythmic accompaniment. And rap is more sophisticated than that, and some of it’s quite virtuosic. How in the world did they spit out all of their poetry so quickly? Some of it’s improvised, some of it’s made up on the spot, which is very impressive. Wish I could do that…not exactly like they do, but just to be able to be that quick on your feet and to compose something on the fly that has a coherence to it.

 

Vinay Kolhatkar:

Rand did make that point, that [the state of music] is reflective of the culture going backwards, and she referred to Helmholtz, a German (who had done some mathematical analysis of music back in the 19th century). Is there a way we can show this mathematically between two songs just taken arbitrarily, or a few songs from the sixties or seventies or eighties and a few contemporary, and show, mathematically analyzing the patterns, that, yes, the melody is less? Or is it just that everyone has their favorites? My favorite decade [for music] is the eighties. And is it just a reflection of our age that we think that was the best music, or the sixties were good? By the way, I do think the forties, fifties, and sixties were very good as well. Is that just completely subjective, or is there an objective analysis that shows why we have gone backwards?

 

Roger Bissell:

I think we’re going to look at melody and harmony and rhythm, and we’re going to understand how each of those can be used to embody something meaningful about the world. I think we would analyze music ultimately the same way that we would analyze prose or a novel’s plot.

Well, you asked more than one question, and I’ll try to unpack it the best I can. In her article “Art and Cognition,” which, goodness, she wrote over fifty years ago, Rand proposed that someday musicologists or music theorists would do an analysis using, I guess, the computer. They would gather a lot of data. To me, there does need to be a study of the components of music, but I think that the level of study or of focus may not be on the individual notes and patterns of notes but may be on the level of phrases and harmonies and progressions. I don’t think that the effect that music has is on the subatomic level, as it were. I don’t mean literally subatomic. I mean like gathering the notes and the frequencies, and then some pattern is going to jump out at us from an analysis of the pattern of frequencies. I don’t think that’s where we’re going to find out where musical value [or meaning] is. I think we’re going to look at melody and harmony and rhythm, and we’re going to understand how each of those can be used to embody something meaningful about the world. I think we would analyze music ultimately the same way that we would analyze prose or a novel’s plot and dialogue and characters, and so on. In other words, it’s the level of analysis. I do think something like that could be done to answer your question about whether it’s objective or subjective. Right now, a lot of it is just: can you give a clever description of what somebody has written and how it’s evocative or virtuosic or whatever, and that’s all fine if that’s all we have, like you write program notes for the symphony or for the newspaper. But I think that there are people who have done this kind of analysis in little, fragmentary sorts of ways, and that’s what I’m interested in. If I had a university or foundation’s grant money and some little gnomes who would run the software and feed in all the songs, I could give you some really interesting stuff, and I think that’s where it’s at. I’ve done a little bit of this myself but not in any kind of massive, organized way.

 

Vinay Kolhatkar:

Lovely. I hope you, or someone else who is up to it, does get a research grant to do an objective analysis of music which, you know, Rand said could be done in the future. Going back to Rand again, she gave us a definition of “art.” By the way, I do think The Romantic Manifesto was in many ways perhaps her most insightful work. And that definition was “a selective re-creation [of reality] according to an artist’s metaphysical value-judgments.” Would you agree with that definition?

 

Roger Bissell

What reality is music recreating?

Yes. I thought about that long and hard when I was young, and I thought, well, does it apply to music? What reality is music recreating? Some people say music is “the language of the emotions,” and they say it goes directly to the emotions, unlike the other arts, and I don’t think that’s true. I think that it goes to the emotions a lot like when you’re watching a stage dramatization, like in a play. Rand made a very insightful point in one of the first four essays in The Romantic Manifesto—and she said that when we are responding emotionally to a character in a story, what we are doing is drawing a parallel, drawing an abstraction, some similarity between our own experience and what the character in the story is going through. So, in a way, we are entering into the imaginary character’s actions, events, relationships, and so on, and so our response to what is going on is as if we were undergoing it, and I think the same thing is true in [music]. I wouldn’t say all music. I wouldn’t know if that would at all apply to Asian music, Eastern music, or to African music, and so on. But I think it applies to the vast majority of popular music over the last 150 years, say, or longer. I think it applies to the vast majority of what we call “classical music,” which includes the Baroque, the Classical, and the Romantic onwards up to at least the early twentieth century, before they started splintering music into music that doesn’t have melody or that doesn’t have regularly patterned, graspable coherent music. So, I do think that a great deal of music from the last, say, four hundred years does work a lot like the other arts, what is going on in the music, and you have to analyze it, you have to have some musical theory ability and knowledge and experience to go ahead and start picking apart the melody, to start picking apart the harmony and the rhythms. I’ll give you some simple examples of what I’m talking about, because all this sounds like just a bunch of terminology.

 

Vinay Kolhatkar:

Okay, let’s go.

 

Roger Bissell:

The melody is the succession of tones that cohere, that hang together in one unified pattern. The harmony is not successive but simultaneous notes that are together, like a chord—a chord is a harmonic sound—and then the rhythm is the grouping together of sounds in a regularly patterned way so that it helps to give coherence to how the melody unfolds. Melody and rhythm, even if you had no chords at all, the melody and the rhythm would work together to provide that coherence, so that it’s not just a jumble, so that it’s not just a chaotic bunch of sound. So, I’ll give you an example. Now, this is an oversimplification, but we start simple and we build from there. I would say that if you have music in a major key, that that has a connotation of optimism…you have a happiness or positive outlook. If you have music in a minor key, it has some kind of negative connotation, whether it’s of fear or anger or sadness or whatever. And then, together with that—that’s the harmony of the melody; in other words, if it’s in a major key, the melody has that optimistic quality; if it’s in a minor key, it’s the pessimistic, negative quality—then if the melody is basically trending higher and higher in pitch, it has more of an aspirational or goal-directed…striving. I think that generally those words get the point across. And then if the melody is descending, then it has more of a settled [connotation], whether settled happiness or settled sadness. And angry music is more likely to be upward and minor, whereas tragic music is more likely to be downward in the melody and in minor. Heroic, triumphant music is more likely to be upward in the melody and in major; and jubilant, celebratory, joyous, happy music is more likely to be downward in a major key. So, there you already have a matrix, as it were: optimism, pessimism, striving, settled situation, before and after, okay? So that gives you a lot that you can look at with melodies. Now, no melody just goes straight up. At some point it has a contour, as if you’re looking at the diagram of the New York Stock Exchange, in which the stock prices go up and down, up and down, up and down.

No melody just goes straight up. At some point it has a contour.

But every song has a unique melodic contour and you look at those things, and you realize that there are patterns and that there are layers of structure, like, I’ll just give you an example. There’s a song called “My Heart Stood Still,” and listen to what it does. [Sings as a group of phrases in downward melodic motion, each starting higher than the preceding one.] “I took one…look at you…and all at…once I knew…and then my heart stood still.” So, there were four [actually, five] phrases that were [all] downward [melodic] motion, right? But each one of them was higher than the preceding one. So, the downward motion of each little phrase was happy, because this is in a major key; and the upward trend of the phrases was kind of a passionate building or aspiring or yearning. And when you listen to the words, you say, well, yes, the words really fit the song, because it’s a romantic song, the guy is saying that all he had to have was one look at her, and all of his romantic yearnings were lit on fire, basically. If you have the words in hand for a song, and you can start picking apart the melody for one thing like that, you can learn an awful lot about, first of all, do the words and the music fit, and if so, then it was either a great songwriting team like George and Ira Gershwin or a great songwriter like Richard Rodgers or Irving Berlin. [Rodgers was actually part of two different, very successful writing teams, with Lorenz Hart and Oscar Hammerstein III.] But these people, whether they did it “instinctively” or whether they studied it and were wizards who didn’t give away their secrets, they were able to do this. They were able to know how the musical materials worked, and I don’t mean each of the vibrations. I don’t think they cared about the vibrations. I think they cared about how to structure melodies so that they did have these patterns. I’ll just give another example, a very different mood, a man named Johnny Mercer, one of the great songwriters from the mid-twentieth century—“Autumn Leaves.” Okay [sings as a group of phrases in upward melodic motion, but each phrase beginning lower than the preceding one], “the autumn leaves…drift by my window…the autumn leaves…of red and gold.” There’s layering again, the melody goes up, but each successive phrase is lower in pitch, so you’ve got an upward movement on the [individual] phrase level, but a downward movement over four phrases. So, you can see that you’re stacking two different directions of motion, just like in the other example. However, in this case, it’s in minor, it’s a sad song, it’s about a guy who has lost his love, and he’s remembering how sweet it was to be with her, but now she’s gone, and since she went away the days have grown cold, and soon he’ll hear old winter’s song, And if you haven’t heard it two hundred times like I have—it affects you very deeply when you hear it; it’s a very well written song. It’s a work of art. It’s a work of art where the words and the musical materials were crafted in such a way that it embodied, it communicated the emotion of sadness. And yet, because on the phrase level it was upward, there was this yearning. Now, the yearning is, like, the object of your yearning is gone, because it’s descending, that means that the yearning is blocked. It means that the object of your yearning was there, but now it’s gone. And I think that the words, the lyrics of the popular songs back when they really knew how to write them—and they cranked them out by the trainloads—the words are like training wheels for analyzing the emotional and philosophical meaning of music.

 

Vinay Kolhatkar:

So, they’re consonant with the actual music.

 

Roger Bissell:

Yes. I think you can take the same insights, you could generalize and make principles out of them, and then you could carry them over to classical music where there aren’t [any] words, where there are just melodies and themes that are developed in big symphony pieces or string quartets or whatever. You can’t understand everything there is to know about music with this set of ideas that I’m laying out here, but you can understand a lot. I’ll just give an analogy which might be helpful. Some people are very interested in personality theory, and I used to study psychology, and I thought it was really interesting and fascinating; and there are some people who have done an awful lot of study, like these Scientific American people who gathered a lot of data, and then they crunch the data and see what patterns jump out of the data, right? Well, what they did was, they had these long lists of personality attributes, and then they would try to group them together, and when they got the clusters down to five—they could explain about fifty percent of the variation in personality from person to person. There is a model now called the Five Factor Model, and it doesn’t explain every last detail about the human psyche or personality, but it gives you some really clear and powerful categories for understanding how people differ in their personalities. I think the same thing is true about these kinds of categories of melody and harmony and rhythm. You’re not going to get the total, fine-grained readout of music, but you’re going to capture quite a bit of it.

 

Vinay Kolhatkar:

Okay, excuse the pun, but what you were saying just back then struck a chord in me, if you will, as a novelist, because a well-structured novel or a screenplay has that kind of structure. Ideally, you have an A story and a B story. If it’s not a love story, the B story would be the romantic story, and you have to have increasing jeopardy, but you have to have falls, [too,] and the emotion has to go up and down for there to be effective, what we call in aesthetics or cognitive science, “transportation.” Because if the story is ineffective, you don’t get transported into the story. One of the experiments we did…my wife said, try watching a good movie that you thought was good with the sound turned off, which I did once with the subtitles on, so you can follow and so she can go to sleep, and I can watch at night. But what happens is, the background score is not there, you can read the words, you can see the lip movements, maybe [at] a very low volume, and the impact of the movie [is] much less, the transportation is less, And the other thing that struck me was what you’re saying is kind of that music is just like any other art, and Rand said, okay, but music is different because it goes direct to the emotions. But in fact, she also said that there is no such thing as a causeless emotion, especially the large emotions that we get from music. So, I think what’s happening is there is unconscious or subconscious processing of the music, just like there is when you’re watching a drama or watching a play or watching a movie or reading a novel, and that unconscious processing leads to an emotion. So, in that sense, would you agree music is no different from any other art?

 

Roger Bissell:

The dynamic arts unfold in time, and a novel is a story that unfolds in time, and the stage play or the screenplay, it unfolds in time, music unfolds in time, dance unfolds in time.

Exactly. Well, if we can make a basic distinction between the static arts—and that’s no insult intended to sculpture and painting or architecture—and the dynamic arts, the dynamic arts unfold in time, and a novel is a story that unfolds in time, and the stage play or the screenplay, it unfolds in time, music unfolds in time, dance unfolds in time. So, there are structural similarities between all the dynamic arts, and you were saying that to really respond to it, you have to be transported, you have to be drawn into what is happening so that you’re almost vicariously experiencing it; you can’t be detached with some kind of barrier between yourself and the artwork. It won’t work as an aesthetic experience. So, you have to surrender to the experience and let yourself be part of it.

 

Vinay Kolhatkar:

You can’t analyze that piece of art and experience it aesthetically at the same time. You can do it afterwards or before.

 

Roger Bissell:

That’s true, too. Multi-tasking is really hard to do. I get curious about things when I hear them, and if there’s a lull in the action, then I start trying to pick it apart, and then I’ll drift off into some thought process, and then I’ll miss some of the dialogue in the movie or whatever, and I say, oh, I should pay more attention. But you pointed out that parallel between literature and drama, dramatic movies, and so on, and music. There’s another one that’s very interesting. The analogy between music and literature, the literary musical analogy, has been discussed for 150 years or more. Especially since the time of Mozart and Haydn and Beethoven on for 150 years, music has a progression of action, and it leads to a climax, a peak of tension, and then to a resolution. Some songs have the peak in around the middle of the song, some of them two thirds of the way or toward the end of the song, but that’s neither here nor there. The idea is that, just as in literature, there are conflicts, things that need to be resolved, expectations that are built up and dashed, and surprises and new directions, and so on. This happens in music, and it is objective. It’s something that’s really there in the music. So again, there is another part of music that we can point to, and we can say, well, it’s not just my emotions. There are really these things going on in the music. There was a climax there. It built up to it. I think that when I talked earlier about the melodic contours, with the notes going up and down, and they don’t just go straight up…like even the example of “Do-re-mi” from The Sound of Music, “Do, a deer, a female deer, re, a drop of golden sun, mi, a name I call myself….” So, you can tell where it’s going, right? It’s going upward, but [sings again and demonstrates melody alternating up and down] even that has some pattern to it. It’s not just like that [gestures straight up], and so it’s very aspirational, even though you know they’re just trying to get to the highest note of the scale, and she’s teaching them a music lesson, and it’s a very cute song.

 

Vinay Kolhatkar:

Yes, I love that movie, actually.

 

Roger Bissell:

On the other hand, Handel back in the mid-1700s wrote a Christmas carol we sing all the time called “Joy to the World,” and if you listen to it, that first phrase is a pure example of what I was describing earlier as a downward melody in a major key. [Singing descending melody: “joy to the world, the Lord has come.”] Right, it’s like, he’s here. It’s not like, oh, if only we believe and work strong enough, someday the Lord will come. You know, like, “someday my prince will come.” That’s aspirational. The prince isn’t here, but I hope he is someday, whereas “joy to the world, the Lord has come,” here he is, he’s here, and then “let Earth receive her king,” so aspirational, “let earth receive.” Okay, earth, this is something you have to do, you have to do something and not just sit on your thumbs. So, you can see even on the level of the phrase, when it’s well constructed, you can see how the use of the melodic materials in music, particularly—I haven’t even talked about rhythm—but the use of the melodic materials really conveys the meaning of the lyrics, [when] they work together well.

 

Vinay Kolhatkar:

Rand was critical of tribal music, and is tribal music lacking contours and therefore, obviously, also lacking a climax.

Yes, it just struck me, Rand was critical of tribal music, and is tribal music lacking contours and therefore, obviously, also lacking a climax?

 

Roger Bissell:

Well, tribal music tends to be more repetitious. It tends to be more cyclical rather than, I would say, “goal-directed.”

 

Vinay Kolhatkar:

When you play music, it’s the right brain that lights up, and when the baby hears speech, it’s the left brain that lights up.

Okay, let me go to the experiments Julian Jaynes (Princeton psychologist) informs us about in his magnum opus in 1976, where he said even [in] a newborn baby—if you did an EEG over the brain, then what is happening is, when you play music, it’s the right brain that lights up, and when the baby hears speech, it’s the left brain that lights up, the left hemisphere rather. So, [we] know music is a right-brained activity, but modern research says that’s only when it comes to listening, it’s primarily responding emotionally, it’s primarily a right-brained activity, but the construction of music, the composition and the [four-factor] analysis, would be left brained. Does that make sense?

 

Roger Bissell:

Oh, of course, it does, and I think you can see the analogy, like in a stage play, like if a baby was sitting with the parents in the audience, and the evil manipulative researcher had electrodes hooked up to the baby, as the baby watched the action of the people on the stage, I would imagine its right brain hemisphere is lighting up like crazy. And then, if they stand still and they start to talk, then the baby’s left hemisphere is going to light up. I really think that music with words is an interesting case because, are you listening to the words as speech, or are you listening to them as a marriage blending with the music? I would think that if you had a poorly-written song with words that did not fit the music, that a person listening to it would have a lot of activity going on between both hemispheres, whereas if you’re listening to a poem by Emily Dickinson or Longfellow or Whitman or somebody, that’s probably more right brained. Even though there’s language going on, it’s not speech. It’s more a patterned flow of evocative language, as opposed to the mama saying, “Well, now, sweetie, would you like a cookie?” Well, that might be music to the baby’s ears, but it’s not poetry. I think what Jaynes was talking about sounds very plausible to me.

 

Vinay Kolhatkar:

Okay. I think he would agree with you on the second part. On the first part, he would say: try this experiment, and I haven’t tried it, you plug in two earphones in your two ears, but link to two different songs, one that you haven’t heard before and you’re not familiar with, one where [upon hearing] the first word or the first note, you know what it is, and he said you listen to them for a minute or two, [then] take them [the earphones] off, and if you are a right-handed person, then your right hemisphere links to the left ear; [hence] the music that was in your left ear, you would remember it better, which I presume [applies to] both the lyrics and the melody. (Regardless of the prior familiarity with [one] song).

 

Roger Bissell:

I think that’s probably true, and I’ll tell you why I think that’s so. My understanding is that our spatial awareness—for right-handed people anyway—is on the right hemisphere, and music is, even though we think it’s sound [and] what does that have to do with space, but music is very positional. The notes occur in [space]; it’s even how it’s written on the staff. Those notes have positions, which mean higher or lower, and you learn where they are on your instrument or your voice, so I think that when we hear music, it’s in what’s called auditory or sonic space. There was a fellow named Edward Lippman who did his doctoral thesis back in the fifties. It was called Sound and Space, and he delved into the physiology, and so on, of how sound could come to have attributes that were analogous to spatial location, but he convinced me. This is an old thing. I don’t think it was ever published as a book. But it’s fascinating to understand how something that started out in fish as a lateral organ for sensing the depth by the difference in pressure; they could sense what depth they were at, and they would go up to the surface or go down, and eventually it turned into an organ for handling air vibrations that came to it, and the inner mechanism of the ear has places where each of the different frequencies vibrate the ear mechanism, and it’s all laid out on some kind of grid in the brain. I wish I understood it better, but I understand it well enough to know that it makes a lot of sense to me why musical perception would have a positional character to it, in addition to simply being [a] pleasant sound or lively or irritating sound.

 

Vinay Kolhatkar:

It certainly seems to have a position in the brain itself, and like we said in the case of the newborn baby or the fish, it’s more the unconscious, preprogrammed response. But then there’s programming that we do to our own bodies and our minds as we grow. And that is the subconscious response, to make that distinction clear. Jaynes then delves into an extremely controversial hypothesis which is that music is used to kind of get you emotional, therefore reduce your critical faculty, and we say that even in storytelling, good stories that transport you lower your critical faculty at the time, and therefore you’re more amenable at that stage to the messages being given by the artist or the director of the film. And music, Jaynes implies, was used by organized religion to bring more people into the fold. It’s an instrument of organized religion—not solely, but it was and it can be used like that because music lulls you into obedience, in a sense.

 

Roger Bissell:

Sure. Well, the architecture of the cathedrals and churches, the ones that didn’t look like Viking long houses anyway, the ones that had spires and the great statues and stained-glass windows, those were aimed at impressing and drawing in the people. I do think that the arts were used to attract people and say, you’re really getting something more than just sitting and listening to somebody drone on at you for thirty minutes. You’re getting something important when you come in here. You’re getting a full experience. You’re getting music, you’re getting architecture, you’re getting painting. This is to be a glorious, enriching experience. And I think they got it right. I think that whenever we gather together to celebrate, we should celebrate with good music, good storytelling, good art. I do think that there is a seductive power to it, and it’s like Marx said, “religion is the opiate of the masses.” I think Jaynes was in a way saying music is the opiate of the masses.

 

Vinay Kolhatkar:

Or the key drug used by religion. He [Jaynes] asked the question why does a lullaby put a baby to sleep?

 

Roger Bissell:

Well, now, if you want me to answer that, I would say, the best way I found to put a baby to sleep is to drive around with the baby in its car seat until it falls asleep. (Both laugh) Maybe it’s the regularity and rhythm. The regularity of the constant soothing motion or sound may be just all there is to it.

 

Vinay Kolhatkar:

Now, one last question. Are you planning, or can we expect, a book-level treatment? Because this is such a big topic, even just Music and Objectivism; you could write volumes on it. Are you planning a book on it anytime? Do you know a book that you could recommend?

 

Roger Bissell:

If I know what’s good for me, I will write this book.

I have many books I could recommend, but I don’t want to talk about other people’s books right now. I have a working title, and if I know what’s good for me, I will write this book. It’s called Serious Schmaltz and Passionate Pop, and it’s going to be about why The Great American Songbook songs stood the test of time, and why the best loved classical themes and melodies from the last several hundred years have stood the test of time—that they have certain strengths and powers of representing our feelings and emotions and views of life and the world. I do intend to do it, and I’m going to try to give enough examples that people won’t feel that I’m just cherry-picking the ones that support my theory, but that they can see that oh…this makes complete sense, and maybe give them some tools that they can use on their own when they get curious about why they like a particular song. Maybe it’s as simple as that’s where they first made love in the back seat of a car when they hear this song on the radio. But hopefully, people’s musical tastes are more than just nostalgia. But I happen to like country music and rock music as well as I like classical and jazz. I like everything. It’s like the old commercial about “give it to Mikey. Mikey will eat anything.” Well, I will listen to anything if it’s good. I will, and if it’s trash, it doesn’t matter [what style it is]. You asked me one time about…recently, is there even decent music anymore? Some of it is, and some of it’s horrible. There was a song twenty years ago called—and I think it won the Grammy or the Emmy or something—I think it’s called, “It’s hard out there for a pimp,” and my wife and I were watching this on the tube, and there are these people coming out with these Crayola-colored ghetto costumes, and the prostitutes and the pimps and the pushers are all dancing around singing this song, and we’re just horrified, and thinking, oh my god, Western music is dying.

 

Vinay Kolhatkar:

Well, we will conclude on that note, but we would certainly welcome you to go ahead and do the book. You are the right person to do it—as an artist, [and] as what you call yourself: a post-Randian Objectivist. Thank you for being here, and that brings us to a close on [podcast] episode number 14, “Music and Objectivism.” See you soon.

 

Roger Bissell:

Thanks, Vinay.

 

 

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