Frith Response

“Music constructs our sense of identity through the direct experiences it offers…which enable us to place ourselves in imaginative cultural narratives”. Music may seem like a frivolous commodity of society, serving no purpose other than to entertain, however, it serves an important role as a shaper of the public’s collective cultural identity. Frith explains that this can be done through aesthetic judgement. “-an aesthetic judgement (this sounds good) is necessarily also an ethical judgement (this is good)”. Therefore, when we hear something that we find aesthetically pleasing, we are also passing an ethical judgement of the music in question, saying that it is ethically good. As such, that which we think sounds good formulates our imaginative sense of ethics and, as a result, identity. The music produces an identity which attracts people to it. If a person likes the aesthetic appeal of the song, they will adapt the identity and integrate it into their own. As Frith explains, identity is not a thing, but a mobile process, and music is an experience of this process of developing the self.
Eventually, people form groups through similarities in aesthetic appeals and in doing so they also share ethics. How and why these groups form are due to musical tastes. Frith explains that certain musical tastes are linked to specific class and age cultures as well as subcultures. Certain ethnicities may have musical tastes that relate to their backgrounds and where they are originally from. An age group can be unified by a musical taste that other age groups don’t like. These groups form because the music is what produces the individual’s identity. If they enjoy similar music, then they must have similar identities. As a result, music forms society by creating identity groups. They may sometimes be bound by cultural stereotypes such as age, ethnicity, and class, but they result nonetheless from a shared interest in music. The atheistic appeal of a song represents its ethical appeal. As a conclusion, Simon Frith notes, “-we are only where the music takes us”.