The company we keep...

Bad company
I can't deny
Bad, bad company
Till the day I die

PAUL ROGERS, SIMON KIRK, Bad Company 1974

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Buddhist monks, I'm told, are all good people.  Too bad I'm not interested in meditation, gardening, and other things with which they occupy themselves in their monasteries.  What I am interested in is what composers and musicians do.  Unlike Buddhist monks, however, musical artists are a checkered lot.  The ranks of even the most distinguished ones include murderers, supporters of totalitarian regimes, plagiarists, racists, pedophiles, fraudsters, pederasts, sadistic bullies, abusive husbands, habitual liars, and just plain assholes.  In short, with respect to variations in moral character, musical artists do not differ significantly from members of other professions, which is to say that, as a group, they are worse than Buddhist monks but better than convicted felons.

Despite its triviality, this sociological fact has given rise to countless hand-wringing think pieces by musicologists, historians, critics, and assorted cultural commentators, all asking if it is morally O.K. to enjoy musical works "when good art happens to bad people".  The need for such periodic soul-searching strikes me as strange.  After all, there have been no anguished think pieces about cases when, say, good plumbing happens to bad people.  And the reason there have been none is that no-one seems to think that the function of a plumbing installation has a moral dimension, or that one's use (appreciation, enjoyment) of a plumbing installation constitutes endorsement (if only implicit) of the plumber's private life.

To think that art music differs from plumbing in the above respects is to maintain a rather atavistic conception of art, one that reaches back to the days of art patronage by the Church, or perhaps to the Romantic period when artists had to reinvent themselves as a priesthood responsible for giving us access to the otherworldly realm of spiritual values.  To me, this view of art as applied metaphysics is no more credible than explanations of weather events by actions of Olympian gods, but this is not to say that art music is little more than glorified plumbing.  One relevant difference is that a piece of art music aims to elicit emotional and intellectual responses which are both rewarding and repeatable.  And here lies the problem.  The listener's responses can be sabotaged by all sorts of things, including extra-musical (biographical, political, historical) information linked to  the work in the listeners's mind.  Worse, the effect may vary dramatically depending on the listener's nationality, ethnicity, age, gender, and other individual characteristics.

All this may be of interest to psychology of art, but there are no moral dilemmas to be massaged out of the fact that we may perceive some evils in this world as personal and, as a result, do what we can to avoid works of art which connect our minds to such evils.  Rational as they are, these are not moral decisions.  They are manifestations of psychological defense mechanisms and that's all there is to them as far as art is concerned.  Today civilized people surely deplore the evil of the Spanish Inquisition, yet they do not seem to mind the public display of  El Greco's well-known portrait of the Grand Inquisitor Fernando Niño de Guevara.  The passage of time does not make evil acceptable.  It only makes it impersonal.

Which is why I do not consider myself a moral defective for listening to music composed by card-carrying Communists or recorded by card-carrying Nazis.  Or for enjoying operas whose librettos are full of misogyny and sexual violence.   And when it comes to the music of Elliott Carter - the music which over the years has meant more to me than that of any other composer save for Beethoven - I feel no need to make excuses for returning time and again to concert recordings of Carter's works by the now disgraced American conductor James Levine.  Whether in Carter's late-period Three Illusions (Boston Symphony, 2007) or in the early Variations for Orchestra (Munich Philharmonic, 2003), Levine's measured tempi, rich (but never thick) textures, and vocal shaping of melodic lines offer a fascinating alternative to the coolly analytical readings of Pierre Boulez or the airy, fleet, and sparkling interpretations of Oliver Knussen.

I do not know if the allegations against James Levine are true; and as far as I can tell they are likely to remain just that - allegations.  In any case, as the sordid details of Levine's private life fade with time, he may eventually join the still growing company of sinners of art music, the company we keep because, for us, art is what gives life much of its meaning.

For others, there is always the company of Buddhist monks.