The Mundane Music : An Ideal Type Analysis of the Role of Music in the Society Dominated by Writing

The purpose of this study is to investigate the potential contrariety between the concepts of art and music, and in the case of its existence what social factors can be seen as its root causes. Specifically, the concepts of artistic quality and musical quality are in this attempt defined respectively using the Swedish cultural policy objectives and Friedrich Nietzsche's The Birth of Tragedy, ultimately to be compared in the form of an ideal type analysis. The conclusion reached in the study is that there is a certain conflict between the concepts of art and music, primarily in their relation to individualism and complexity, and that this can be related to the dominance of vision as a means of gaining access to the world – the so-called ocularcentrism – in Western culture, as well as commercial ideas such as marketing and ownership. A model is constructed out of the ideal types musical quality and artistic quality, which is intended for practical use in connection to assessment of the quality of an artwork for potential government funding