As I observed the musicians (including my adorable 14-year-old soprano) and their adoring parents at a recent school concert, my thoughts turned to one of my late father’s favorite movies, “The Music Man.” I was thinking of the concluding scene in which the inept, untutored youth band is transformed in the eyes of the students’ parents into a glorious and accomplished marching band in full, blazing-red uniform. As I watched a pair of parents obviously moved by the objectively quite mediocre performance of the daughter whose solo they were video-taping, I experienced the charitable impulse to consider that they were not altogether wrong to experience something transcendently moving, even holy in the artistically primitive performance that transfixed them. That is, simply, the musical moment, set in motion by an aspiration (however ridiculously short of accomplishment) to enact a product of high culture (John Rutter’s Requiem I think it was), provided the occasion to appreciate a very ordinary person’s opening to something higher and eternal, and thereby the occasion to appreciate the value of a very ordinary person, perhaps to glimpse something of God’s love for a very ordinary person. For me (but I am given to sentimentality, if you hadn’t guessed), this was a little enactment of what Charles Taylor calls the sacredness of the ordinary, a key legacy of Christianity to our modern world. Now it occurs to me that this revelatory enactment of the sacredness of the ordinary would not be possible without deference to the ideal constituted by individuals of extraordinary talent (like the composer, exemplary performers, etc), without high culture, a cultivated and elite musical tradition. When the common becomes self-satisfied, refusing to defer to authoritative understandings of what is “higher,” it becomes vulgar, leveling, commodifying. (Chesterton said something like this, didn’t he? Remind me.) At the same time, less obviously, let me submit that high culture would not be possible without drawing upon and in some way appealing to a sense of transcendence shared by very ordinary human beings. (When high culture abandons this link with common humanity, it is no longer high or even culture, but drifts into a sheer, snobbish formalism.) The extraordinary and the ordinary need each other, indeed refer back to each other. Recall Plato, introducing the idea of the Good ( Republic VI ): Now, this is what EVERY SOUL PURSUES. What every soul pursues, only those who combine virtue with extraordinary virtuosity can represent. This dialectic has consequences for politics and political philosophy (since every such representation is in some way partisan) — to be revealed later.
