Education

The Neglected Muse: Why Music is an Essential Liberal Art


Reprinted with gracious permission from The Imaginative Conservative, where it first appeared.

Music transcends the classroom, the concert stage, and professional recordings. It pervades life. Mankind has long used music in all sorts of ways, to celebrate, to lament, to dance, to pray, to soothe or arouse, to woo, to infuse courage and terrify an enemy, to commemorate, to unite a community. Even the most primitive societies are keenly aware of the power of music, and various myths from cultures throughout the world confer on music and musicians a lofty, even divine significance. In some myths, notably in Plato’s dialogue Timaeus, the world springs from the composing power of a musician-god.

That music is a vibrant part of life is especially clear in the case of the young. Most young people cherish their favorite music as their most intimate friend and their absolute refuge from care and stress. When we get older, music is inevitably bound up with nostalgia. We older folk have only to hear a song from our youth in order to be magically transported, as if by a familiar scent, to a former time, place, self, or love. Music does not merely sound: It casts a spell and conjures worlds. Music is no mere addendum to human life, no historical accident that might just as well have never been, but an essential part of who we are as human beings.

Why should young people study music? One answer presents itself on the basis of what I have said so far: Music has a central place in the lives of young people. For many, music is their life. Teaching music to the young is therefore much more than conveying historical information and technical facts, or helping students develop their musical talent. It is more than the effort to make them competent and aesthetically refined. In getting young people to engage in a serious study of music, we are giving them an opportunity to know themselves better by becoming more precisely aware of the amazing power that music has over them. Also, as we shall see, we are giving them an opportunity to deepen their knowledge of the natural world – and of our connection to it – by becoming more aware of the mathematical order that underlies music.

Listening and Singing

In my three decades at St. John’s College in Annapolis, Maryland, where all students are required to study music for two years, I have learned that students cannot engage in substantive musical learning without actual musical experience. Such experience takes two forms: listening to and making music.

Listening is an obvious requirement, but it is harder than it might seem. What should students listen to in their music classes, and what should they listen for? We should, first and foremost, expose our students to great music in the classical tradition (e.g., works by Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, etc.) and then to other examples of great music (e.g., folk songs, blues, and jazz) – broaden their horizons, as the saying goes. But how to do this is difficult. It makes sense to start with classical works that are appealing and fairly short. For instrumental music, single movements from symphonies, piano sonatas, and string quartets work well. Perhaps the best “first thing” to listen for is simply that musical works have a beginning, middle, and end. Students can listen to a given piece several times, each time listening for some particular aspect of the work: a recurring theme, a rhythm, a moment of heightened tension, etc.

But listening by itself is not enough. Students, by singing or playing an instrument, must be made to realize that music is not the symbols on the page any more than a poem is the written word. Music and poem come to be what they are only in the act of sounding. The object of musical study is not the written symbol but the musical event – the living phenomenon, for which the score is but the recipe. More than anything else, singing brings music to life and overcomes the passivity that often attends the act of listening. In singing, students are the instrument and the music. Most important here is not that students sing well, but that they make their best effort. In singing great choral works, however imperfectly, students get to experience one of life’s most humanizing pleasures: that of cooperating with others in the attempt to form a beautiful whole that is more than the sum of its parts. Students thus attain in sound the ideal of a perfected human community – a perfected friendship that preserves differences but renders them harmonious. To sing is to transcend the isolation and vagary of selfhood. Such transcendence is one of the greatest gifts of a genuine liberal education.

Music’s Connection to Math and Nature

Music, amazing in its power over our emotions and character, is even more amazing because it is eminently capable of being studied. Traditionally, music is one of the seven so-called “liberal arts.” Liberal, here, has nothing to do with its current, political usage. It is not a synonym for progressive. Rather, it is derived from the Latin liber, meaning free, and is best associated with words like liberate. The liberal arts constitute the knowledge that free people need to guide them in their decision-making at home, at work, as neighbors, and as citizens. The system of seven liberal arts was first developed and taught in the Middle Ages and has continued to strongly influence education down to the present day. The liberal arts are divided into a trivium (which is Latin for the three ways or roads) and a quadrivium (meaning four ways or roads). The trivium consists of the arts of grammar, logic, and rhetoric; the quadrivium consists of the arts of arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and music. The former develops the arts of language, the latter the arts of measurement. Together they provide a template for a so-called “liberal education,” whose end is not a technically trained professional, but an educated human being.

As a quadrivial art, music has an exalted placement that points to the long acknowledged bond that music has with number and nature, and sharply distinguishes it from the visual arts. The connection between music and mathematics was established by the legendary Greek, Pythagoras. Pythagoras discovered that the most commonly used (and most singable) musical intervals had intelligible mathematical counterparts.

Let’s use the octave as an example. To the musician, notes that are one octave apart sound alike—the only difference is that one is higher, or lower, than the other. Modern science tells us that an octave is a musical interval in which one note has either double or half the frequency of another note—if one note has a frequency of 400 Hz (hertz or cycles per second), the note an octave above it has a frequency of 800 Hz and the note an octave below has a frequency of 200 Hz. So, the ratio for an octave is 2:1.

Pythagoras discovered this connection without the knowledge of frequencies: He simply divided a string in half and, to his utter amazement, heard that this division produced the octave. Likewise, he discovered that when one string is two-thirds the length of another, it will produce a higher note that fits another common musical interval, a perfect fifth (the first melodic interval in “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star”). This discovery – that notes that sound good together can be represented mathematically with ratios of small whole numbers – was far-reaching; it suggested that great music was not just a matter of taste and convention, but was grounded in the very nature of the physical universe – which could explain why humans respond to it. Our sensuous experience of music might, in fact, be a deep if unconscious response to an intelligible order: The most common and singable musical intervals might be ratios that we automatically sense. Moreover, it suggested the possibility of a mathematical physics. If precise, discoverable, numerical ratios were at work in the relationships between notes separated by common musical intervals, then wouldn’t they also be at work in, say, the relationship between distance and the time it takes for an object to fall to the ground?

It is easy, and fun, to recreate the Pythagorean discovery by experimenting with different divisions of a string on a device known as a sonometer or “measurer of sound.” Sometimes it is called a monochord because you need only one string to do Pythagorean experiments. But the device works best when it has two strings: one that is divided and another that is not, so that it can serve as a reference pitch. A sonometer is very easy to make, as I discovered when my son and I constructed one for his high school science project. All you need is a thick board, metal strings, a few screws, two small bridges to anchor the strings at both ends, a small moveable “bridge” that is used to divide the string at various points, and a meter stick to take measurements. High school students can use this simple musical instrument to verify that the most common musical intervals do indeed correspond to ratios of small whole numbers. They can do this in two ways. One way is to measure off a length of the string that corresponds to a given ratio (say, 3:2, or two-thirds the length of the undivided string), move the bridge into place, and then pluck the resulting partial length (the two-thirds length) to hear if the predicted interval sounds (the perfect fifth). The other way is for the students to move the bridge around under the string, plucking and listening at each point, until they reach what sounds like a given interval and then use a meter stick to determine the ratio into which the string has been divided. The octave is especially interesting because of its simplicity and familiarity. Knowing that its ratio is 2:1, students can divide a string exactly in half without ever using a visual measuring device. All they have to do is listen for the division that sings the octave.

This simple Pythagorean experiment is a real treat for students, who invariably experience amazement at the mathematical grounding of music in nature. The experience helps their learning in a number of ways. It makes them realize that the musical intervals and the scale acquire a precise definition only through the power of mathematics (ratios); that the practical problem of tuning a stringed instrument like a guitar or a piano is a mathematical problem of getting different ratios to fit with one another in a consistent scale; and that the tuning they have inherited (the 12-toned equal temperament in which an octave is divided into 12 equal half-steps) is the product of a rich, complex history marked by incredible ingenuity and laborious effort.

Music Shapes Us

Even apart from this profound connection with mathematics, music is pre-eminent among the arts for the order and clarity, the sharply defined character, of its elements. Music moves us, sometimes to overpowering emotion. It does so through well-defined structures, through an order of tones and rhythms. It is not the mere sound of drums but their rhythmic beating that stirs us. Here we come upon the central paradox of music, the paradox that defines music as a worthy object of sustained intellectual wonder: Music is the union of the rational and irrational, of order and feeling.

Ultimately, by shaping feeling, music shapes the whole human being. For a proper understanding of this, we turn to the ancient Greeks, for whom music, far from being morally neutral, played a decisive role in moral education. Aristotle’s Politics ends with an extensive discussion of the proper moral and political uses of music and the effect of music on the souls of citizens. In the Republic, Plato draws our attention to the power music has over the young. He places special emphasis on the danger of music. The severity of his critique underscores what we, in our effort to excuse or defend music, often fail to acknowledge: that music is a great power and, like any great power, can be used for great good or great evil. Why is music so emotionally powerful, far more powerful than the visual arts? Plato provides a possible answer. In the Republic, he calls upbringing in music “most sovereign” because rhythm and concord “most of all sink down into the inmost part of the soul and cling to her most vigorously.” In experiencing music, we do not behold from a distance but drink in and incorporate. Some forms of music, so Plato claims, are conducive to orderliness of soul and the love of grace and beauty; others indulge the baser passions and feed the lust for disorder and self-indulgence. Studying music as a liberal art gives students the opportunity to consider the possibility that Plato is right – that music is not limited to taste and enjoyment, but has a powerful influence on who we are and whether we are ennobled or debased.*

This leads me to the observation that we are shaped not only by music, but also by our opinions about music. It is all the more important to revisit the connection between music and moral education in a culture like ours, steeped as it is in self-indulgence and vulgarity. The study of music as a liberal art gives students an extended opportunity to scrutinize their opinions—and to confront the causes and effects of their passions.

Cultivating Musical Taste

By studying music, we want to cultivate our students’ taste, encourage their appreciation of beauty. But what is this beauty? Why do we say that an aria from Mozart’s Magic Flute or a movement from Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony is beautiful? Although a complete definition of beauty is beyond the scope of this essay, I will venture a few remarks on this topic.

I begin with the old saying, “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder” (or the ear of the listener). This saying is both obviously true and obviously false. True because beauty exists only in relation to a responsive subject: It must appear beautiful to someone. False because merely thinking that something is beautiful does not make it so – judgments of beauty are not relative. Thinking that they are confuses judgments of mere subjective liking with judgments of aesthetic taste, which always claim to be objective and universal. After all, beauty is not the same as pleasure. Just as beautiful things do not always immediately please, pleasures are not always beautiful. We can take pleasure in something ugly and base. Beauty is not a feeling in a human subject but a quality we perceive in an object. The perception comes first, then the emotional response. Beauty can take us by surprise. It strikes, pierces, even transforms us. This would not be possible if beauty came from us. Beauty educates us by taking us outside ourselves. It compels us to transcend self-interest and self-feeling. We do not merely behold beauty, but look up to it. In appreciating beauty, we admire that which deserves to be admired. To cultivate taste is therefore to cultivate judgment. Beauty, in short, is in the eye of the educated beholder.

Moreover, the beauty of a great musical work is not always immediately evident. Sometimes it takes time, and training, to realize that it is beautiful. Students often say that a piece they did not like at first became one of their favorites with repeated experience of it. Their taste changed, not because they got used to something they didn’t like, but because an inherent quality eventually became apparent to them. There is an ancient Greek saying: “Beautiful things are difficult.” This is true to our experience of beauty, which sometimes comes to us only if we make an effort to go to it.

In order for beauty to be admired, it must first be recognized. As discussed in the previous section, there is a long tradition that connects beauty and order, especially mathematical order. The musician and mathematician Edward Rothstein, in his book Emblems of the Mind, shows how mathematical relations underlie the beautiful in music. He writes: “A composition is a construction of patterns and proportions, resembling an argument in mathematics.” Relations like symmetry and various sorts of proportion are, in fact, evident in the works of the great composers.

But mathematics, though beautiful in its own right, cannot fully explain the beauty of music. By itself, it cannot explain our response to a Mozart aria or a Beethoven symphony. Why do these pieces continue to attract listeners who become familiar with them all around the world, not just in the West? These pieces seem not to have been written for one country, people, or time. They are universal and belong to everyone. They strike us with their amazing wholeness and perfection. Everything seems to fit and cohere in a carefully worked out scheme. The orderliness is not merely correct but inspired. With time and effort, most of us can detect the layers of order and the balance of forces at work in these pieces: the architecture of the whole. We can detect how tensions build and are sustained, and how they are satisfyingly resolved. We can even learn to identify the technical means by which these effects are produced. We hear how a theme is announced and then developed, how it seems to take on a life of its own, occasionally even seeming to spin out of control only to be brought back into the economy of the musical whole.

Beautiful music pleases and sometimes challenges us with its intelligence, depth, and complexity. It does not please for the moment, but invites endless re-experience and return. The more we listen, the more we hear. And the more we study the music, the more reason we have to find it beautiful. Music unfolds in time and exhibits a delightful play of forces or tensions. In music, the question of beauty comes down largely to this perception of how musical forces conspire to form a whole.† These forces or tensions are at work in the familiar major and minor scales, and in the chords of harmony. Great musical works exploit these tensions to the fullest. That is why they are both maximally ordered and emotionally potent, why, as we say, they are beautiful.

Learning from a Simple Melody: Scarborough Fair

Music education that aims at real knowledge requires careful attention to the elements of music: tones, time-values, intervals, etc. Students must learn to read music and correctly identify notes on a staff. Soon after this “basic training,” they should look closely at how the elements conspire to form significant musical wholes. These wholes need not be impressive compositions by well-known composers like Bach and Mozart – they demand way too much all at once. A better way to begin is with a folk song.

Scarborough Fair, the very old folk song made popular by Simon and Garfunkel in the ’60s, is a good example of a beautiful, simple melody that lends itself to close analysis. With the right guidance and materials, even the most musically naive students can begin to engage in a deep and thorough analysis of this haunting melody.

One of the problems in getting students to think about music is that it comes to us too easily. It seems to be right there for our immediate pleasure. Music does not, by itself, raise questions. One way to generate questions is with a series of “experiments.” Play the melody on the piano several times and have the students sing along. Then change one note and get the students to state, to the best of their ability, how they think the melody has changed in sound and “feel.” Do this with different notes in the melody and examine each change in turn. At each point, ask, “What happened? What was the effect of the change?” Changing a note in a melody – in effect, disrupting a familiar whole – is also a good way to get students to become aware that there is a whole. What is right sounding about a melody comes to light when we cause it to stray from its intended path and sound “wrong.” Students then begin to realize that the melody consists of carefully made choices, and that a change in one part is a change in the whole. Such experiments become even more revealing when we alter the melody’s rhythm.

Next, students should explore the connection between the notes of the melody and the words. To do this thoroughly, they should have access to the complete text (whose story is very sad). Does the sound of the melody fit the meaning of the words? What do the words gain in being sung? Does the melody make certain words stand out? How does the rhythm affect the mood of the song, the meaning of the words, and the story they tell?

Finally, students can compose a variation of Scarborough Fair, perhaps with their own lyrics. In this exercise (which I have found works beautifully in class), students learn, through direct experience, that composition involves revision: that certain musical choices don’t work, that some work better than others, and, more generally, that a piece of music (like a piece of writing) can be improved.

A simple, familiar folk song is a musical education in itself. The examination of simple melodies encourages students to give reasons for what they feel. This liberates them from the erroneous and stultifying opinion that a response to beauty is based solely on subjective feeling (that beauty is “relative”) or habit (that we hear musical events as we do only because we’ve heard them repeatedly). It reveals, in highly specific ways, that human feeling is complex, that our emotional response to beautiful sound is grounded in a remarkably precise, if usually unconscious, perception of order. Similarly, examination of simple melodies reinforces the trust that analysis, however abstract it may seem at first, can lead us back to our musical experience with renewed wonder, a keener sense for the details of a beautiful whole, and a more intense and discerning pleasure. By analyzing Scarborough Fair, we get a better idea of what to listen for in this melody. We also come to understand it better and, as a result, appreciate it even more. To borrow from Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s famous poem, it is like being able to “count the ways” in which we love someone.

Music as a Liberating Art

The study of music has several goals. One of them is to improve, through education, students’ aesthetic taste: to introduce them to truly great music in an effort to beget a love for all things graceful and well formed. As a music teacher, I hope that the study of music begets in my students a habit of searching for the causes and details of beautiful things, and that the love of beauty will nourish the love of knowledge and truth. As students’ intellects are opened to the power of music, I hope they will strive to imitate in their day-to-day lives the musical virtues of harmoniousness, proportion, good timing, appropriate flexibility or grace, and “striking the right note” in thought, speech, feeling, and action.

Music, as I noted earlier, is one of the traditional liberal arts. It liberates us from vulgarity, intellectual rigidity, and the tyranny of unexamined, popular opinions about music and beauty. Music does this by encouraging human fellowship (in singing), by inspiring a love of beauty that transcends the mere gratification of desire, by making us more attentive to the elements and causes of our emotional response to beauty, and by compelling us to test conventional opinions against the standard of our own experience.

Music, alas, is the neglected Muse of educational programs across the board, from kindergarten to college. One reason for this is a failure to perceive the importance of music in the education of the young and in human life generally. Another is the tendency to regard music as a “soft” subject– there for the sake of amusement or a vague sort of “music appreciation.” Yet another is the opinion that music is not basic to our human nature, but is the prerogative of a trained or gifted elite – something that only those with the potential to be professional musicians need study. I have endeavored to show that none of these is true.

If studied as a liberal art (i.e., in order for the student to become more inquisitive and reflective and more aware of music’s power) rather than as a fine art (i.e., in order for the student to become a musician), music gets students to look beyond surface distinctions in order to seek out deep, underlying harmonies or bonds between things apparently remote. In the breadth of its domain, in its union of the mathematical and the poetic, and in its involvement of the whole human being (body, heart, and mind), music is an essential liberating art.

*It is interesting to note that the Greek word for beautiful (kalos) also means noble just as the word for ugly (aischros) also means base.

†For discussion of the treatment of tones as forces, see the Sense of Music by Victor Zuckerkandl, Princeton University Press, 1959.

Business

The Mozart Effect


EDITOR’S NOTE: This essay is reprinted here with the gracious permission of First Things, where it first appeared.

It can cure backache. And asthma. And obesity, writer’s block, alcoholism, schizophrenia, prejudice, heart disease, drug addiction, headaches, and AIDS. It makes bread rise better and improves the taste of beer. It can even make you smarter – so smart that in Florida it’s now the law that all child-care facilities receiving state aid include at least half an hour of it every day. The governors of both Tennessee and Georgia give newborns in their states examples of it along with cards reminding their parents of their tykes’ immunization needs. At a community college in New York, administrators have set aside a room in their library for it. Across the nation, professional educators pelt school boards with demands for its inclusion in the curriculum. An Indiana obstetrician even markets a device that administers it in utero.

What is this philosopher’s stone that can so dramatically change the world? It’s music. Or better, Mozart’s music, or so says Don Campbell in his best-selling The Mozart Effect: Tapping the Power of Music to Heal the Body, Strengthen the Mind, and Unlock the Creative Spirit (Avon Books, 1997). In high demand as a speaker, Campbell addresses a different conference almost weekly, hop scotching across the nation from his base in Boulder, Colorado. Trademarking the name “Mozart Effect,” Campbell has even gone cable with infomercials for his book and its accompanying compact discs and cassettes. In the great tradition of P.T. Barnum and the “Veg-O-Matic,” Mozart has now hit the mainstream of American life.

The impetus for this remarkable turn of events was a modest letter by Frances Rauscher, Gordon Shaw, and Katherine Ky published under “scientific correspondence” in the October 14, 1993 issue of Nature. In their barely three-column report, these University of California at Irvine (UCI) researchers summarized the findings of an experiment conducted upon thirty-six UCI students. After ten minutes spent either listening to Mozart’s Sonata in D major for Two Pianos, K488, to a “relaxation tape,” or simply sitting in silence, the students were given a paper folding and cutting test. (A piece of paper is folded over several times and then cut. You have to mentally unfold it and choose the right shape from five examples.) The students who listened to the Mozart sonata showed a 89 point increase in their IQ scores over their scores when they took the test after either a period of silence or listening to the relaxation tape. The bump in IQ was temporary, not lasting beyond the time required to sit through the experiment.

The researchers were testing the suspicion that there might be a kind of “music box” analogous to Chomsky’s famous yet-undiscovered “language box.” Might the symmetries and patterns characteristic of music be fundamentally connected to the symmetries and patterns researchers were tracking in brain waves? If so, might not music really be tapping into a structure inherent in the brain itself? And if this were true, ultimately might music be a kind of fundamental, or pre-linguistic – or even supra-linguistic – speech? The researchers tested Mozart’s music because they thought that if anyone was “tapping into this inherent structure for patterns,” it was Mozart. Who else was composing music so early and so well?

Although the researchers were professionally circumspect with their conclusions, the media that reported them were not. The story that “Mozart makes you smarter” made network news, and the wire services carried it to newspapers and magazines across the country. The Mozart Effect was born, and began its trek from the lab to the publishing house to the legislature.

Well, not born really. Reincarnated, let’s say. And it wasn’t so much a trek as a march along a well-worn path. The notion that music has properties and powers that can sharpen the mind and transform the soul is ancient. Such ideas formed the basis of Confucian civilization in China. In the West, they are attributed to Pythagoras and his followers and played a central role in Plato’s ideal state.

Greek intellectuals generally had little patience with the gods of mythology, preferring to view the world in more abstract ways. At an early date, they observed that the basic condition of their world was change (we grow old, rivers flow, winter becomes spring, etc.), and reasonably concluded that if so, the basic condition of divinity (or otherworldliness) would be the opposite of it – or changelessness. This changelessness they considered perfection. Such divine perfection they couldn’t see in the world around them, but they could observe it in the stars, in arithmetic, and in geometry. They credited Pythagoras with discovering that such divinity could also be encountered in music.

Pythagoras argued that music was divine because it was constructed of musical intervals that could be defined by mathematical ratios. Take a string and pluck it and you get a note. Divide it exactly in half, pluck it, and you get the same pitch an octave above it. Take that same string, divide it in thirds, hold down that string at a point two-thirds along its length, pluck the longer side, and you get a pitch a perfect fifth above the note you get plucking the whole string undampened. In a similar way each interval can be described by number. The octave by 2:1. The fifth by 3:2. The fourth by 4:3. The major second by 9:8. The major third by 81:64. And so on and so forth, every interval being described by an unchanging ratio. Because one, two, three, and four added together equal the Pythagorean perfect number ten, the intervals defined by these numbers are themselves also perfect (which is why we still refer to the octave, fourth, and fifth as the “perfect”).

The Pythagoreans believed that number was the core to the universe and that because numbers do not change they were of divine origin. Since musical intervals were an expression of number, they too were divine. But the Pythagoreans themselves had little or no use for real music – that is if by “music” we mean musical compositions, or actual musicians for that matter. At least according to Aristides Quintilianus, an early Pythagorean, listening to actual music just got in the way. Best just to stick to thinking about the ratios.

In spite of this warning, tales developed of music’s supernatural abilities. Orpheus charms Hades by his singing. Terpender of Methymna is credited with calming a revolt by his music. The mighty Alexander the Great is driven to murder – and remorse – by the playing of a servant. Even David’s soothing of Saul’s rages is probably rooted in a notion of music’s supernatural nature being able to restore equilibrium. But no one makes music more central to his thought than does Plato. In the Timeaus creation myth, he makes music the essential stuff of the cosmos. In The Republic, Plato develops it into the notion of the “doctrine of ethos.”

Plato’s purpose in writing The Republic is to describe the ideal state. Since an ideal state cannot be made up of un-ideal people, a good deal of his discussion concerns how to educate boys into the kind of men who would lead such a society. Briefly put, he thinks that this could best be accomplished by stressing two things in elementary education: gymnastics and music. The ways in which gymnastics would train the body are pretty clear; similarly, music was supposed to mold the spirit.

Plato held that music does not merely depict qualities and emotional states but embodies them (this is the “doctrine of ethos”). A performer singing about the rage of Achilles, for instance, would not only be depicting the emotional states of anger and violence and the personal qualities of Homer’s hero but would be experiencing those things himself. And not only the performer – so too would the listeners. Plato believed that music encodes ethical qualities already found in human conduct and that music feeds those qualities back into the soul of the performer and his listeners. Thus certain sorts of music would educate boys into living highly ethical lives while other sorts could educate them into baseness.

Plato forbids music in the Mixolydian and intense Lydian modes for his boys (they are “useless even for women if they are to be decent”) as well as the music in the Ionian and lax Lydian modes (which are “soft, lazy, and fit for drunkenness”). Boys should be allowed to hear music only in the Dorian and Phrygian modes. In this way they might imitate the actions of a brave man “defending himself against fortune steadily with endurance.”

Plato’s ideal state was never established in antiquity. But his musical ideas weren’t forgotten. In 1570, as France was being torn by the wars of religion, Charles IX’s Catholic intelligentsia prodded him into creating the Académie de Poésie et de Musique. In the lettres patents which created the academy, the king declared that “it is of great importance for the morals of the citizens of a town that the music current in the country should be kept under certain laws, all the more so because men conform themselves to music and regulate their behavior accordingly, so that whenever music is disordered, morals are also depraved, and whenever it is well ordered, men are well tutored.”

It was the king’s hope that proper music-making would restore order to his land, ending the bloodshed between Catholic and Protestant, or, if not ending it, at least making the Protestants take their humiliations a little more quietly. Here we have the “Mozart effect” roughly two hundred years before Mozart’s birth.

Problem is, it didn’t work. French Protestants and Catholics did not lay down their arms and embrace each other upon hearing the strain of fifes playing music in the Dorian mode. Plato’s educational theories – on this point at least – are sheer nonsense. Do we really believe that training in ballet (which is really the union of gymnastics and music that Plato is talking about) is the best preparation for politics? Should Winston Churchill have spent more time in a tutu? The idea that requiring boys to listen to music in a particular mode will make them act with courage is perhaps the stupidest notion a great mind has ever come up with. Play whatever music you like for them – boys will be boys. And Pythagoras was wrong. The perfect fifth is not the temporal manifestation of supra-cosmic divinity sent to illuminate the land with transcendence. Moses did not come down the mountain with a tuning fork (nor, for that matter, did Muhammad or Jesus or Joseph Smith).

And the “Mozart Effect” is no effect at all. Soon after the original Irvine project, researchers at the University of Auckland tried to replicate Rauscher’s results. They were unsuccessful, and concluded that listening to Mozart had no effect upon short-term IQ. Although Rauscher has replicated her original findings in a subsequent project, the conflicts between the studies have yet to be resolved. In any case, the parameters of the study weaken under scrutiny. Did the students really listen to the Mozart, or were they just in the room while the music was going on? Did the students who listened with care – in other words, listened to the music as it is supposed to be listened to (following the change of themes, the modulations, noting the surprise deceptive cadence near the close) – perform differently than those who just sat back and let the music wash over them?

The researchers seemed surprisingly unaware of the music itself. When they suggested parameters for further investigation, they hypothesized that “[music] which is repetitive may interfere with, rather than enhance, abstract reasoning.” Yet the movements of the sonata they selected are themselves highly repetitive. And the choice of work is regrettable, since the second movement is probably one of the silliest things Mozart ever wrote. The very best thing that could be said of their experiment – were it completely uncontested – would be that listening to bad Mozart enhances short-term IQ.

Prof. Rauscher has since joined the faculty of the University of Wisconsin at Oshkosh, where she is now studying the effects of music upon rodents. While her and her colleagues’ findings remain controversial, these folks are insightful scientists and did not exaggerate their findings. Don Campbell knows no similar inhibitions. Using Rauscher’s research as his base, Campbell has legally laid claim to The Mozart Effect™ and launched a commercial enterprise independent of the scientists whose curiosity initiated the investigation.

The claims that Campbell makes for music are of an almost rococo flamboyance. And like the rococo, just about as substantive. The ailments that head this article are part of a list of nearly fifty problems Campbell suggests that music corrects. His evidence is usually anecdotal, and even this he misinterprets. Some things he gets completely wrong. For instance, Campbell cites Georgie Stehli’s famous cure from autism as an example of music’s therapeutic effects. But in her autism, music, and indeed almost all sound, was a source of tremendous pain to little Georgie, not comfort. Her therapy was successful because it desensitized her to sound.

And the whole structure of his argument collapses under simple common sense. If Mozart’s music were able to improve health, why was Mozart himself so frequently sick? If listening to Mozart’s music increases intelligence and encourages spirituality, why aren’t the world’s smartest and most spiritual people Mozart specialists? According to the argument in Campbell’s book, the world’s intellectual and spiritual center, populated with our civilization’s most generous and healthful beings, ought to be where Mozart is most revered, studied, and performed; in other words, some place like the Metropolitan Opera’s canteen during the intermission of Cosi fan tutte. It isn’t.

The world’s greatest orchestras have a good number of people in them who passionately hate each other. (The principal oboe and flute of one of our major orchestras so detested each other that no one remembered a time when they spoke.) And far from being healthy, orchestral musicians are beset by ailments. Carpal-tunnel syndrome, back problems, high blood pressure, exhaustion, diabetes, depression; look down from the balcony on the orchestra and you’re looking on a group of men and women poised on the brink of physical collapse.

Music academics are no better. The annual meeting of the American Musicological Society is full of displays of one-upmanship, conceit, and subtle and not-so-subtle public back-stabbing and professional murder. And our greatest musicians, the star virtuosi, are more than infrequently notorious for their cruelty, faithlessness, arrogance, selfishness, and stupidity. And in all of these areas, Mozart’s music only makes matters worse. His work is so technically demanding and his textures so lean that little less than a perfect performance will do. Almost any musician would prefer the gymnastics of Rachmaninoff to the delicacy of Mozart since with Mozart you always perform without a net.

In short, musicians – the ones who know Mozart best – are cantankerous, egotistical, selfish, stupid, cowardly, generous, even-tempered, compassionate, intelligent, humble, and kind in about the same proportion as Teamsters
– who, for the most part, hardly know any Mozart at all.

Music can do many things. A work song can coordinate physical labor. A march can keep an army in step. A bugle call can signal retreat and a melodic phrase can assist in the memorization of Torah. And art music, or that music which is intended to be primarily listened to for its aesthetic content, can be a powerful means for emotional self-reflection, self-illumination, and expression. But the one thing that music most certainly cannot do is overcome the will.

Music is not a drug that incapacitates the listener and produces a predictable result. A whole lifetime spent listening to Bach will not automatically make a woman love God. And – despite the warning of two generations of moralists – a lifetime listening to the Rolling Stones will not make a man fornicate. Particular kinds of music may express things that appeal to the listener, and the listener may select a particular kind of music because he finds that it resonates with his own pre-musical emotional condition, but the music itself can never cause the listener to act. Action is a function always of the will, and while music may prod, and it may suggest, it cannot force. We must indeed pay the piper, but we always choose the tune and decide whether or not to dance.

Poor Mozart. Where is he in all of this? Lost. Mozart’s magnificent dances, the terrifying thunder of Don Giovanni, the bliss of The Magic Flute, the harmonic intricacies of his symphonies, and the transcendence of the final works: the “Ave verum corpus,” La Clemenza di Tito, and the Requiem – all of this is lost in the rabble of Campbell’s traveling snake-oil show barker’s sales pitch. Mozart’s greatest music isn’t about being intelligent, or acquiring power. It’s about becoming a human being and living, as he signed his scores, in nomine Domini. That is what the Mozart effect is supposed to be.

Philosophy

Music and the Idea of a World, Part I


“Music, too, is nature.”
—Victor Zuckerkandl, Sound and Symbol

 

This lecture explores the differences between two perspectives on music: one ancient, one modern. The texts I have chosen are Plato’s Timaeus, a dialogue that freshmen will read in seminar toward the end of the year, and Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and Representation, a great book not on the program. Each of these works presents an all-embracing account of the world – a cosmology – that highlights the bond between world and music. I hope that my study in contrast will lead us to a deeper understanding of music as it relates to the whole of all things, our human condition and our happiness. I also hope that it will show why music is the most comprehensive of the liberal arts, and why it is the case that to speak about music is to speak about everything.

My talk has three parts. In the first, I focus on the central role that music plays in Timaeus’ cosmological optimism. According to Timaeus, the world of Becoming is a beautiful work of art ruled by the supreme goodness of intelligent divinity. In Leibniz’s phrase, it is the best of possible worlds. In the second part, I turn to Schopenhauer’s cosmological pessimism, according to which the world is not the shining forth of intelligent purpose but the work of a blind urge that Schopenhauer calls the will. Music, for Schopenhauer, is the most potent and truthful of the arts because it is a “copy [Abbild] of the will itself.” In the third part of my talk I offer, by way of a coda, some thoughts on music and world in the context of the Bible.

 

Rootedness and Musicality

The Timaeus is Plato’s most overtly musical work. Music is prominent in other dialogues as well, notably in the Republic and Laws, and in the Phaedo, where Socrates calls philosophy “the greatest music” (61A); but it is so much a part of the form and substance of the Timaeus that the dialogue may be said to be all about music.

The projected drama of the Timaeus is a performance by three illustrious political men, whose task is to entertain Socrates with a feast of speech: Timaeus of Italy, Hermocrates of Sicily, and Critias of Athens. A fourth was supposed to have joined them, but he is a no-show. The men who did show up form a trio of poet-rhetoricians, who have agreed to gratify Socrates’s desire to behold his best city, which he had described on the previous day, engaged in the words and deeds of war (19B-20C). The star of the show is officially Critias, who boasts about how he will harmonize the particulars of Socrates’s city in speech with those of an ancient unsung Athens. This Athens of old, Critias claims, really existed once upon a time and nobly fought against the insolent kings of Atlantis. But Timaeus upstages Critias with his long speech about the cosmos and proves the superior poet. How can one top a magnificent, richly detailed speech about the whole of all things – the cosmology that is the unmatched model for all cosmologies to come?

Early in the Timaeus, we hear about the importance of music in human communal life, as Critias recollects what his great-grandfather and namesake experienced when he was a young boy. This Critias joined other boys in a music contest in which they sang poems recently composed by the lawgiver Solon (21B). The contest was part of the boys’ initiation into their family tribe and took place during a festival in honor of Dionysus, the god of intoxication. It depicts the very moment in which impressionable youths are officially rooted in their tribe, and by extension their city. Through the act of singing, the opinions of Solon take root in these young souls and become authoritative. They become things not merely heard and obeyed but imbibed, incorporated and cherished. A similar ritual enrooting is at work, as we shall see, in the speech of Timaeus.

We know from the Republic that music, which for the Greeks includes poetry, is dangerous. Because music has the power to shape the soul for good or ill, to make it orderly or disorderly, an account of the best regime must include a critique of music as one of its prime components. At one point Socrates tells us why:

So, Glaucon…isn’t this why nurture in music is most sovereign? Because rhythm and concord most of all sink down into the inmost part of the soul and cling to her most vigorously, bringing gracefulness with them; and they make a man graceful if he’s nurtured correctly, if not, then the opposite.[3. 401D5-E1]1

The passage underscores the tremendous power of music and shows why music is crucial to moral-political education. It recalls the final book of Aristotle’s Politics, which treats the musical education of those who are to be free human beings and good citizens.

Plato and Aristotle realize that we are on intimate terms with music. The intimacy verges on the supernatural, since music seems to be a kind of magic that causes the listener to be held and spellbound. Music, like Orpheus, enthrals. Aristotle observes at the beginning of his Metaphysics that sight is the privileged sense, the one that we hold most dear and that most reveals the differences of things. Musical hearing can lay claim to another kind of privilege. Music has an intense personal inwardness, an immediate emotional effect and a power to form our character, opinions, and way of life. In moving our affections it moves our whole being. This is the ground of the danger that music poses. In music there is no safe distance between perceiver and perceived, as there is in sight. There is also no refuge: we cannot turn away from music as we can from a thing seen, since music is not spatially bounded but sounds everywhere. Moreover, in listening to a piece of music, we are not free to survey its parts at will, as we can with an object that is seen, but must wait for a moment to sound.2 The tones come when they want to. And yet, listening to music is more than mere passivity, for it affects us by virtue of its forms and structures. Listening, in other words, is an act, in which we not only feel but also perceive. This is the paradox that is music, which can overwhelm our reason and self-control but always through the order and precision of its tones and rhythms. To borrow terms made famous by Nietzsche, music could not be Dionysian if it were not thoroughly Apollinian, which it must be if it is to be an art at all.

As I mentioned earlier, Timaeus’ speech – or, as he famously calls it, his “likely story” (29D) – is an effort to put the world of Becoming in the best possible light. It is a defence of Becoming in response to Socrates’s indictment in the Republic. In that dialogue Socrates tells Glaucon that genuine education turns the soul away from Becoming or flux and toward the changeless realm of Being (7.518C). It leads the potential philosopher out of the cave of opinion and up into the sunlight of truth. The likely story takes us in the opposite direction – from Being down to Becoming. It tells us how a craftsman-god, who is without envy and very ingenious, and who gazed on archetypal Being, brought order to the primordial chaos through a combination of providence and the beautiful structures of mathematics. Timaeus calls his speech both a mythos or story and a logos or account. Socrates calls it a nomos, which in Greek means law and song, as well as custom and convention (29D). The word implies that Timaeus’s cosmology is a form of quasi-political music. This music establishes our right relation to the cosmic whole whose offspring we are. It makes us law-abiding citizens of the world—good cosmopolitans. By playfully re-enacting the birth of the cosmos, Timaeus is attempting to persuade his listeners, Socrates in particular, that the world of body and flux, properly understood, is worthy of our serious attention, emulation, and praise. All the mathematical constructions and stories are songs that commemorate the Great Founding. By “singing” these songs of law and order, we celebrate our cosmic roots. Moreover, since the world for Timaeus is a god (34B), physics comes on the scene as the truest act of piety.

Musical references abound in the likely story. The primordial chaos is said to be unmusical or out of tune (30A), and the movement of the stars resembles a choric dance (40C). The elusive receptacle or matrix – the cosmic “mother” who shakes the four elemental bodies into their proper places when they wander, like wayward children – gives the world a rhythmic sway (52C-53A). The sway is evident in all cyclic movement: our heartbeat, breathing and walking, in the vibrating string and pendulum, swings and cradles, and the undulating surface of the sea. The construction of the regular geometric solids is also music. Here Timaeus ingeniously harmonizes these beautiful sphere-like shapes – tetrahedron, octahedron, icosahedron and cube – with the observable properties and behaviour of the four elements: fire, air, water and earth (53D-E).

The greatest musical moment in the story is the construction of the musical scale out of ratios of whole numbers (35A-36B). It is based on the Pythagorean discovery that the intervals that make up melody – octave, perfect fifth, perfect fourth, etc. – are produced by string-lengths that are in small whole number ratios. Much can be said about the god’s act of scale building, especially in light of the problem it solves, namely, the natural incompatibility of some intervals with others. Here I must rest content with a brief summary. Timaeus’s god builds the world soul out of musical ratios, having first mixed together forms of Being, Same, and Other. He then cuts and bends the scale-strip to form the rotation of the celestial sphere and the orbits of the planets (36B). These periodic movements, which constitute time, are not only the music in the sky but also the reflections of divine thought, whose image we carry around in our sphere-shaped heads.

For Timaeus, musicality is the sum of human virtue and the ground of happiness. By musicality I mean the adjustment of all our actions to the regular, periodic movements of the heavens. To be virtuous and happy is to conform to the cosmic law and to move in sync with the music of the whole. It is to live a life that is in every respect well timed, symmetrical, and balanced – the life of a star. We achieve balance when, for example, in devoting ourselves to study, we also make sure we get enough rest and physical exercise (88A). The most essential human musicality comes from astronomy. This is not because the beauty of the whole is most apparent in the visible heavens, but because the heavens are the home of thought in its healthiest, most regular form. To think the heavenly motions, to discern the ratios in the sky, is to be one with that condition of intellectual health and consummate musicality enjoyed perpetually by the world soul.

I have said that the likely story is a song that celebrates our cosmic roots. But it is also the story of a fall. In the book of Genesis, there is creation and fall; in the Timaeus creation is fall. As I noted earlier, world building starts at the top and goes down – just like a Greek musical scale. It goes from Being to Becoming and from the best things in the world to the worst. The lower, subhuman animals are generated by intellectual devolution. This is the process in which human beings lose their divine intelligence by having lived an acosmic, disorderly life and must re-enter Becoming in an animal form suited to their moral and intellectual degradation. The likely story begins with the heavens and ends with shellfish, creatures that contain the souls of humans who in their previous lives exhibited what Timaeus calls a “total lack of musicality” (92B).3 But even these lowest beings enhance the beauty of the whole, since without them the cosmic scale of life would lack its lowest notes and be incomplete.

According to Timaeus, our souls originated as pure intellects, each living in its own star. In being born, we become profoundly disordered. We leave off being star-lords and become mindless, inarticulate babies, beings incapable of controlling any of their movements. That is why education is necessary – because, as fallen stars, we must recover “the form of [our] first and best condition” (42D). Mathematical astronomy is the most important part of education because it is the means by which we humans, whom Timaeus calls heavenly plants, return to our roots in the sky (90A). It is also the highest form of therapy. By engaging in astronomy, the human intellect, which grew ill at birth, comes to itself and recovers its circular movement, former health, and proper functioning as the guide and navigator of daily life. We study astronomy so that by “imitating the utterly unwandering circuits of the god [Cosmos], we might stabilize the wander-stricken circuits in ourselves” (47C). Music that is heard and felt plays a similarly therapeutic role. The gods gave us music “not for the purpose of irrational pleasure…but as an ally to the circuit of the soul within us when it’s become untuned, for the purpose of bringing the soul into arrangement and concord with herself” (47D-E).

On this note of music as therapy, I conclude the first part of my talk. I next turn to a very different account of music and world.

Endnotes

1 I have slightly modified the translation by Allan Bloom, The Republic of Plato, Basic Books, 1991.
2 For a discussion of the difference between seeing and hearing, see Hans Jonas, The Phenomenon of Life: Toward a Philosophical Biology, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966: “For the sensation of hearing to come about the percipient is entirely dependent on something happening outside his control, and in hearing he is exposed to the happening…he cannot let his ears wander, as his eyes do, over a field of possible percepts, already present as a material for his attention, and focus them on the object chosen, but he has simply to wait for a sound to strike them: he has no choice in the matter” (p. 139).
3 Translations of the Timaeus are from my edition for Focus Press, Newburyport MA, 2001.

Philosophy

Music and the Idea of a World, Part II


EDITOR’S NOTE: This essay is the second part of a three-part series.
You can read the first part here.

From Divine Circles to the Wheel of Ixion: Music in a World of Woe

The first and main volume of The World as Will and Representation is divided into four books.1 Thomas Mann, the greatest admirer of Schopenhauer in the 20th century, called it “a symphony in four movements.”2 Mann, himself a cosmological pessimist, was keenly sensitive to the role that music plays in the work. In his essay on the philosopher, he observes that Schopenhauer, who was very musical, “celebrates music as no thinker has ever done” by making music metaphysically significant. Mann proceeds to speculate: “Schopenhauer did not love music because he ascribed such a metaphysical significance to her, but rather because he loved her.” For Mann, will rather than intellect is the source of Schopenhauer’s metaphysics of music, where will signifies everything in us born of passion and feeling. The supremacy of will over intellect is the most important respect in which the world of Schopenhauer differs from the world of Timaeus.

As its title indicates, The World as Will and Representation depicts the world as having two distinct sides or aspects. One side, representation, is the topic of Book One. As representation or Vorstellung, the world is everything that is vorgestellt, “placed before” us and made present in the daylight of consciousness. Although a more accurate rendering of the word would be “presentation,” which suggests original coming-to-presence as opposed to derivative imitation, I have chosen to keep the traditional term. Representation is the realm of perceived objects – finite determinate things and all their properties, which appear in space and time and interact according to the principle of sufficient reason, that is, through the relation of cause and effect. Representation is the world as a well-ordered surface. It is what most of us would call the world simply.

Schopenhauer turns to the other, inner aspect of the world in Book Two. He uses terms from Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason: whereas representation is the world as appearance or phenomenon, will is the world as thing-in-itself or noumenon. Will, here, is not a psychic faculty. It is not my will or your will, or God’s will, since for Schopenhauer there is no God. Will is the universal force and infinite striving that underlies all things and rises to self-awareness in man. Schopenhauer calls the will “eternal becoming, endless flux” (164). As the world’s “innermost being” and “kernel” (30-31), will is the source of meaning (98-99).3 Will reminds us that life is more than the cool perception of objects: it is also feeling and care. Objects of representation are vessels of my care. They are meaningful, important to me in all sorts of ways. This object I desire and strive to possess, that one I avoid. This event I hope for, that one I dread. This human being I love, that one I despise. My body is the embodiment of my care. It is the seemingly concrete reality to which I am intimately joined and which I care about in a thousand ways. My living body reminds me that I am constantly in the condition of seeking to preserve my life and to stave off harm, pain, frustration, and death. My being and my life consist in striving to be and to live. I cannot escape striving, not even when I sleep, for it is more obvious in dreams even than in waking life that representations matter to me and are the creatures of my care. Dreams are my hopes, fears, anxieties, and desires made into a private movie, often a surreal one. Most of us would say that as a human being with a certain nature I am subject to this care. Schopenhauer is far more radical: for him, I am this care, this infinite striving to be and to live as this individual with this body.

Dreams are to desire what the whole phenomenal realm is to the noumenal will. Schopenhauer reminds us repeatedly that what we call life is a dream. The will is not the cause of the world, since causality operates only within the dream world of phenomena or appearances. There is no intelligible principle or intelligent god (as there is for Timaeus) that is responsible for the natural order. Nature is unaccountably there, just as human beings are unaccountably there, “thrown” into existence. The will does not cause nature but rather objectifies itself as nature – just as our care objectifies itself in dreams. Hence the phrase, “the world as will and representation.” The self-objectification of the will is the basis of Schopenhauer’s cosmology. The will objectifies itself in a fourfold way: as inorganic nature, plant life, animal life, and human life. Schopenhauer constructs an ingenious isomorphism or analogy between these four grades of nature and the tones that make up the major triad with its octave (153). The work of the will is especially noteworthy in the case of our bodily parts, which are so many ways in which the will objectifies itself: “Teeth, gullet, and intestinal canal are objectified hunger; the genitals are objectified sexual impulse; grasping hands and nimble feet correspond to the more indirect strivings of the will which they represent” (108). This striking rendition of the human body is a modern counterpart to Timaeus’s outrageous stories about our bodily parts, which are mythically represented as manifesting, and ministering to, our souls. But whereas Timaeus is tongue-in-cheek, Schopenhauer is in deadly earnest.

The identity of will and meaning shows why music is metaphysically significant. As Schopenhauer writes in another work, music, especially melody, “speaks not of things but simply of weal and woe as being for the will the sole realities.”4 From the standpoint of the will, being is meaning. Music is unique among the arts because it depicts the inner world of care – pure meaning apart from all objectivity. It represents not the rational world soul but the passionate world heart.5 Music, moreover, is not an elitist Pythagorean who speaks only to her learned inner circle but rather the “universal language” that is “instantly understood by everyone,” intuitively and without the aid of concepts (256).

In my account of the Timaeus I highlighted the therapeutic function of astronomy and music, both of which minister to fallen man. They are a corrective to the cosmic necessity of our having been born as mortal beings subject to mortal flux and mindless desire (42A ff.). Being born, for Timaeus, is in one sense a gift – the gift of organic life. But it is also, for the reasons I mentioned, our burden and our fate. Being born is a mixed blessing. For Schopenhauer it is an outright curse. To be born is to become an egocentric individual afflicted with insatiable desire, in particular sexual desire. To be is to be subject to “the miserable pressure of the will” (196). The will, as I noted earlier, is infinite striving – striving with no ultimate good or end. Moments of contentment and joy appear, but only as passing tones, ripples in a sea of frustration, ennui, and renewed desire. To live is to suffer. Schopenhauer here reveals the hard edge of his pessimism and his “tragic sense of life.”6 He cites approvingly poets like Calderon who define original sin as “the guilt of existence itself,” and who affirm that it would be better never to have been born.7

Schopenhauer’s recurring image of life as suffering is the wheel of Ixion. Ixion was King of the Lapiths. After being shown hospitality by Zeus, he lusted after Hera and tried to seduce her. For this attempted outrage Zeus bound Ixion on a wheel of fire and consigned him to Tartarus. Only once did the wheel of torment stop – when Orpheus descended to the Underworld and charmed its inhabitants with his song.8 This, for Schopenhauer, is the human therapy that all fine art offers, in particular the art of music. Music represents the will as thing-in-itself, meaning apart from all things and pictures, and is for this reason metaphysically significant. But music also gives us momentary relief from the fiery wheel on which we are bound, the wheel of infinite longing. In music, as in all aesthetic contemplation, we are no longer self-interested individuals but “pure, will-less subject[s] of knowing,” subjects who are “lost in the object” (209). In art, as Schopenhauer puts it, “We celebrate the Sabbath of the penal servitude of willing; the wheel of Ixion stands still” (196).

The third part of Schopenhauer’s book is devoted to the arts, which are beyond the principle of sufficient reason. This is evident in music, where tones, though tightly connected, have no causal relation to each other. The opening phrase of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, for example, does not cause the second.9 Unconcerned with causality and deduction, art is the intuitive apprehension of the Ideas, which Schopenhauer takes from Plato, for the most part from the Timaeus. The Ideas are the eternal archetypes of nature – the four grades of the will’s self-objectification that I mentioned earlier.10 In the human realm they are the universals of experience. Shakespeare’s plays, for example, are a distillation of what is eternally true of human life. In the complex ambition of Macbeth, jealousy of Othello, and tragic integrity of Cordelia, we behold archetypes of will at its highest grade.11 Art is therapeutic because, as the aesthetic contemplation of universal Ideas, art detaches us from the particular objects of our care. That is why we take pleasure in even the saddest music, which calls upon us not to weep but to listen.

Art, however, is not an enduring release from Ixion’s wheel and offers only “occasional consolation” (267). The fourth part of Schopenhauer’s book takes us from artist to saint, who alone is truly happy – if one can call resignation happiness. The saint has neutralized the will to be and to live through the knowledge that objects of care are nothing but illusion (451). He needs no artworks. This neutralization of the will makes the saint good. In the obliteration of his ego, he is released from his private sufferings and free to take compassion on the suffering of other human beings and even on that of animals (372).

I now turn to Schopenhauer’s metaphysics of music, which appears in Volume One of his book and again in Volume Two. These chapters contain the most fascinating discussions of music one will ever read. They are an attempt to identify music as a source of truth, indeed the deepest truth: “The composer reveals the profoundest wisdom in a language that his reasoning faculty does not understand, just as a magnetic somnambulist gives information about things of which she has no conception when she is awake” (260). Schopenhauer illustrates his general ideas with many references to specific musical phenomena. I shall address only a few of them.

I begin with music as imitation. According to Plato and Aristotle, music, in its tones and rhythms, imitates the dispositions and passions of the soul. As Aristotle observes in the Politics, melodies and rhythms are “likenesses of the true natures of anger and gentleness, and also of courage and moderation and all the opposites of these and the other states of character” (8.5).12 Aristotle is referring to the Greek musical modes – Dorian, Phrygian, Mixolydian, etc., which achieve their different effects through a different placement of half steps in their scales. The Dorian mode, Aristotle says, gives the soul “a moderate and settled condition,” whereas the Phrygian “inspires.” A difference in mode can be heard in our familiar opposition of “bright” major and “dark” minor. This huge musical difference hinges on no more than whether there is a whole step or a half between the second and third degrees of the scale. It is gratifying to hear Schopenhauer, a philosopher, respond to this fact with fitting amazement (261).

What Timaeus and Schopenhauer add to the imitative relation between music and soul is the connection between music and world. We are responsive to music because the so-called external world has an interior, as do we, and is always already music-imbued. For Timaeus, music in the form of the diatonic pattern – the recurring order of whole and half steps – is woven into the fabric of the cosmic soul, of which our souls partake. That is why we respond to the diatonic modes. We look with longing at the stars because that is where our souls come from, and we take delight in identifying Same and Other in the things of the world because our souls are made of Same and Other. So too, we welcome music into our souls because we detect in it the inflections of our psychic modalities – our various soul possibilities. Where there is music and listener, music calls to music. It is a case of sympathetic vibration grounded in the nature of the ensouled cosmos.

Schopenhauer differs from Timaeus in his understanding of interiority. He rejects the soul as a principle of being on the grounds that it makes real what is in fact illusory, namely, our individuality.13 The principle of individuation in general, like the principle of sufficient reason, applies only to the world of phenomena, which Schopenhauer regularly calls the “veil of Maya” or illusion. In listening to music, we suspend our individuality and are in touch with will as process rather than with a stable mode of soul and character.

From a musical standpoint, Schopenhauer differs from Timaeus by going beyond the Pythagorean idea of interval as sensed ratio and treats music as the embodiment of tension or force. This modern concept of force, also known as conatus or endeavour, is prominent in the physics of Newton and Leibniz and was introduced into natural science by Hobbes, who, like Schopenhauer, rejects a highest good and depicts desire as an infinite striving “that ceaseth only in death.”14 Dissonance in music is a kind of tension or force. As the vector-like impulse to move in a definite direction, it is the analogue of desire.15 The suspension is a good example of how dissonance works in music. In a suspension, two lines or voices start out in consonance but then produce dissonance when one of the voices moves while the other holds its note. A resolution of the dissonance then follows. Schopenhauer writes: “[Suspension] is a dissonance delaying the final consonance that is with certainty awaited; in this way the longing for it is strengthened, and its appearance affords greater satisfaction. This is clearly an analogue of the satisfaction of the will which is enhanced through delay.”16

The word “analogue” is important here. The suspension is not the image or likeness of a specific desire that is eventually gratified but rather a tonal event that communicates, in a purely musical way, a universal truth about the will. When Schopenhauer says that music is the universal language, he is not being poetic. He means that although tones are not words, they function intuitively in the same way that words function conceptually – not as likenesses of the things they signify but as symbols, bearers of universal meaning. In the case of music, this meaning is perceived and felt rather than inferred. Listening to music is non-verbal symbol-recognition.

Music as force flourishes in the tradition of modern tonal harmony. This long and glorious tradition reaches from Bach and Handel, through Mozart, Haydn and Beethoven, up to Brahms and Wagner, and continues in our own century. Tonal music, as opposed to the mode-inspired music of the Middle Ages and Renaissance, exhibits the directed tension I mentioned earlier. There is a play of forces – tonal dynamism. Needless to say, such music is friendly to the language of will, for will is tension, and force is will that has not yet attained self-consciousness. The musicologist Heinrich Schenker applied this very term to music: Tonwille, the will of the tones. In tonal harmony tension is not confined to isolated events, like the suspension, but pervades the whole of a musical piece and constitutes its unity. The term “tonal” refers to the rule of a single tone, the tonic or keynote, to which all the other tones in a tonal work point or, as some theorists prefer to say, the centrality of the tonic triad, the I-chord. These tensions – Victor Zuckerkandl calls them dynamic qualities – compose the major scale and cause it to sound like a journey with clearly defined stages and a predetermined end: 1-2-3-4-5-6-7-8.17 Tension is especially urgent in degree 7, which strives toward 8, as desire craves its satisfaction. Degree 4 tends, less urgently, down to 3. Together, degrees 4 and 7 produce the dissonant interval of the tritone. This is the best example of directed tension in music, since the tritone, when combined with degree 5 in the bass, makes up the dominant seventh chord, which points to the tonic triad and so fixes the music in a key. Thanks to their dynamic relations, which operate at many levels, tones and the triads they form generate musical wholes through the artful prolongation and eventual resolution of their will-like tension.

I cannot leave the topic of musical tension, and of tone as the symbol of desire, without citing Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde. In this work we hear extreme chromaticism, constant unresolved cadences, and the deceptive shifting of tonal centers. These phenomena form the tonal analogue of eros as infinite longing. As others have noted, the work pushes tonal harmony and musical tension to the absolute limit by extending the striving of tones over the course of several hours. The historical connection between Wagner’s musical drama and Schopenhauer’s book, although fascinating, is beyond the scope of this lecture. Here I simply observe that the opening phrase of the Prelude, with its famous “Tristan chord” resolving to a dominant-seventh chord, is perhaps the most powerful evocation of tension-as-desire in all of music. Wagner’s phrase sets up a cadence that is not completed until the very end of the work, when the crashing waves of the orchestra overwhelm the transfigured Isolde before settling into the blissful, post-climactic froth of B major. In Schopenhauer’s terms, this immense prolongation of musical tension is the noumenal interior of the lovers’ prolonged phenomenal eroticism. More cautiously stated, it is the analogical, symbolic representation of that interior. The universal, undying truth of the story is not in the death-bound characters but in the tones.

The central teaching of Schopenhauer’s metaphysics of music is that music is “a copy [Abbild] of the will itself,” not of the Ideas of the will, as in tragedy (257). To be sure, all the arts objectify the will, but the non-musical arts do so “only indirectly.” They present universality through the medium of things, whether the Parthenon or the complex individuality of Cordelia. Music, by contrast, makes no such appeal and represents, imitates, the world’s pure subjectivity. It does so through tones all by themselves.

We must bear in mind when reading Schopenhauer that by music he means “the sacred, mysterious, profound language of tones.”18 This signals the primacy of what Wagner called “absolute music” and we now call instrumental music.19 Music as the language of tones, captures, for Schopenhauer, the Absolute through non-visual representations. It is the will “speaking to us” through the medium of composers, who are the will’s symbolists, somnambulists, and high priests.20 Because tones are meaningful all by themselves, Schopenhauer can make the astonishing claim that music, in passing over the Ideas and everything phenomenal, “to a certain extent, could still exist even if there were no world at all” (257). The reason is that music, in negating the world as thing, contains that world from the perspective of its deepest interior, its immortal heart. Schopenhauer states this with maximum concision in the other work to which I referred earlier: “Music is the melody to which the world is the text.”21 In other words, tones all by themselves represent the indwelling, immortal spirit of the world. If we imagined the phenomenal world as a staged opera or a movie, then the orchestral parts and score would stand to it as inner to outer, essence to appearance, truth to seeming. As I observed in the case of Wagner’s Tristan, the real drama, the world in its truth, would be taking place not in what we see but in what we hear. It would be a drama of tones.

But although music transcends the world as thing, it also has a profound connection with that world – again, by analogy. Schopenhauer is fascinated by this analogism and speaks like an Archimedes who has just made remarkable discoveries and cries “Eureka! I have found it!” As I mentioned earlier, the major triad with its octave captures in symbolic form the four natural grades of the will’s self-objectification and is a mirror of the Whole. The ground bass mirrors inorganic nature. Each note of this bass functions as the fundamental to the overtones that faintly sound above it (258). This mirrors what happens in nature as a whole, where higher grades of being develop out of the lowest, and where organic nature constantly depends on the inorganic, as the upper partials depend on their fundamental. The tones between the bass notes and the melody that floats above are the musical analogue of plant and animal. These tones form the harmonic organism that binds lower bass and higher melody. They mirror the way that plant and animal life mediate between the inorganic realm and our higher, human nature. This analogy exists within the scale itself, where the hierarchy of tones mirrors “the whole gradation of the Ideas in which the will objectifies itself” (258). To hear an ascending scale is, in a sense, to hear the entire cosmos. Even the inevitable impurity of intervals that exists in all tuning or temperament is an analogue of phenomenal nature. An interval that is slightly “off,” say an equal-tempered major third, mirrors natural idiosyncrasy – “the departure of the individual from the type of the species” (258-9). The incompatibility of some intervals with others, the very problem that makes temperament necessary, is also an aspect of the will: it is the musical analogue of the will’s “inner contradiction,” which is the whole concern of tragedy (266). Even death finds its way into the world of tones. Death occurs, says Schopenhauer, in modulation, where a change of key “entirely abolishes the connection with what went before” (261).

Finally, there is melody as the musical analogue of phenomenal man: “in the melody, in the high singing, principal voice, leading the whole and progressing with unrestrained freedom, in the uninterrupted significant connexion of one thought from beginning to end, and expressing a whole, I recognize the highest grade of the will’s objectification, the intellectual life and endeavour of man” (259). Melody, the ultimate mythos and symbol of human life, “relates the story of the intellectually enlightened will, the copy or impression whereof in actual life is the series of its deeds.” But melody, for Schopenhauer, “says more” because it goes beyond outward deeds and events. It also “relates the most secret history [my emphasis] of the intellectually enlightened will, portrays every agitation, every effort, every movement of the will, everything which the faculty of reason summarizes under the wide and negative concept of feeling, and which cannot be further taken up into the abstractions of reason” (259).

To sum up, there is nothing in the natural world, or in the inner and outer life of man, that does not find its counterpart in the all-embracing realm of tones. Music as symbol is the whole of all things. It is the world. That is why, as Schopenhauer says, “we could just as well call the world embodied music as embodied will” (262-3).

Continue to the final part here.

Endnotes

1 The second volume consists of supplements to the four books in Vol. 1.
2 “Schopenhauer,” Thomas Mann: Essays, tr. H. T. Lowe-Porter, New York: Random House, 1957.
3 Numbers in parentheses refer to page numbers in the edition by E. F. J. Payne, New York: Dover, 1969.
4 Parerga and Paralipomena, Vol. 2, tr. E. F. J. Payne, Oxford: Clarendon, 1974, p. 430.
5 “The heart, that primum mobile of animal life, has quite rightly been chosen as the symbol, indeed the synonym, of the will…” (Vol. 2, p. 237). The atheist Schopenhauer says at one point: “…like God, [music] sees only the heart” (Vol. 2, p. 449).
6 The title of Miguel de Unamuno’s book.
7 Schopenhauer quotes from Calderón’s Life Is a Dream: “For man’s greatest offence is that he has been born” (Vol. 1, 254). This is “the guilt of existence itself”—original sin. Death is, in effect, the correction of an error. Schopenhauer would say to the dying individual: “You are ceasing to be something which you would have done better never to become” (Vol. 2, p. 501).
8 Ovid, Metamorphoses 10, 42.
9 Schopenhauer makes this point in The Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason: “In just the same way, the succession of sounds in a piece of music is determined objectively, not subjectively by me the listener; but who will say that the musical notes follow one another according to the law of cause and effect?” (p. 127, tr. E. F. J. Payne, La Salle: Open Court, 1974)
10 It is important to note how the Ideas for Schopenhauer differ from how Plato describes them. For Schopenhauer, the Ideas cannot be genuine beings, for that would undermine the ultimacy of the irrational will. They are simply eternal modes or ways in which the will objectifies itself. The Ideas are more like adverbs than nouns.
11 These archetypes recall Vico’s “imaginative universals.” See The New Science of Giambattista Vico, tr. Thomas Goddard Bergin and Max Harold Fisch, Cornell NY: Cornell University Press, 1988. See Paragraphs 381 and 460.
12 Translations of Aristotle’s Politics are from the edition by Joe Sachs for Focus Press, Newburyport MA, 2012.
13 “…soul signifies an individual unity of consciousness which obviously does not belong to that inner being …The word should never be applied except in a metaphorical sense” (Vol. 2, p. 349).
14 Leviathan XI.1.
15 “Hitherto, the concept of will has been subsumed under the concept of force; I, on the other hand, do exactly the reverse, and intend every force in nature to be conceived as will” (Vol. 1, p. 111).
16 Vol. 2, 455-6. An even better instance of the connection between dissonance and will is the appoggiatura or leaning tone. This unprepared dissonance on a strong beat delays a tone of the melody and intensifies expectation. It is the perfect musical imitation of longing. A fitting example occurs in Tamino’s love song in the Magic Flute. Tamino gazes on a picture of Pamina and falls in love with her. By singing in response to a picture, he moves from the world as representation to the world as will. His repeated leaning tones on the words “I feel it,” “ich fühl es,” embody the universal truth of erotic love.
17 The Sense of Music, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1959, pp. 18-28.
18 Parerga and Paralipomena, Payne, Vol. 2, p. 432.
19 See Wagner on Music and Drama, selected by Goldman and Sprinchorn, New York: Da Capo Press, 1988, p. 171.
20 For a critique of the thinker’s claim that “through him speaks the essence of things itself,” see Jonas, ibid. In his chapter “Heidegger and Theology,” Jonas connects Heidegger with Gnosticism and finds in Schopenhauer’s theory of music the sole philosophic precedent for Heidegger’s claim that poets and philosophers embody “the voice of Being” (p. 257). Jonas comments: “Schopenhauer’s fantasy [unlike Heidegger’s] was innocent, for music is nonresponsible and cannot suffer from the misconception of a duty it does not have” (p. 258). There is good reason to think that music is not as “innocent” or “nonresponsible” as Jonas thinks.
21 Parerga and Paralipomena, Vol. 2, Payne, p. 430.

Philosophy

Music and the Idea of a World, Part III (Coda)


EDITOR’S NOTE: This essay is the coda of a three-part series.
You can read the first part here and the second here.

Another World of Longing

I end my musical-cosmological reflection with a piece of music that depicts the world as a certain kind of music, polyphony. It is Palestrina’s motet, Sicut cervus. Beloved by St. John’s students, the piece is a musical setting of the opening of Psalm 42 in the Vulgate: Sicut cervus desiderat ad fontes aquarum, ita desiderat anima mea ad te, Deus (“As the hart longs for flowing streams, so longs my soul for you, O God”). The motet is a good example of what Nietzsche called Palestrina’s “ineffably sublime sacred music.”1

Every musical composition is both a world unto itself and an image of the world. This is the central proposition of my lecture. The world of Sicut cervus is that of the Bible and the biblical God. Creation, here, is good. It produces beings, not images of intelligible originals or illusory phantasms. The world is not confined to head and heart, to our subjectivity, but is “out there” and solidly real. The God of the Bible is not a craftsman who leaves the world after having made it, or an indifferent prime mover, but the God of promise and history – the God who makes covenants with his people. He is someone to whom one can pray. Salvation comes not from dialectic, or astronomy, or art, or the death of care based on the gnosis of cosmic nothingness, but from faith in God.

Although the words of the motet express longing, the tones do not represent longing as stress and strain. The music is a continually graceful gesture that transmutes the pain of longing into a serene order of voices – voices that seem always to know their place. Sicut cervus is composed in two senses of the word: it is well constructed, and it has an unperturbed disposition. During the piece, motion goes on and time passes, but the overall “feel” seems beyond time and change, like a musical emanation of the nunc stans or eternal Now. It is as if grace were already present, and the singers were experiencing, in the very midst of their yearning, prospective joy in the object for which they yearn. Aquinas cites three criteria of beauty: wholeness, consonance, and radiance or claritas.2 Sicut cervus has these in abundance, especially radiance. The music seems to be suffused with warm light. It is full of feeling but also sounds intelligent, lucid, and self-possessed. The movement is a continuous flow, in imitation of the waters for which the hart thirsts. The tones move, it seems, not because they have to but because they want to, not out of compulsion but out of freedom. The sound is a spontaneous unfolding, as if the four vocal parts are miraculously improvising their lines as they go along, only gradually discovering the perfectly coordinated whole they are in the process of forming. Dissonances occur to enhance consonance and beget motion, but they are not prominent, and the piece as a whole could not be described as a play of forces. Sicut cervus is music without will.

This brings me to the most important respect in which Palestrina’s motet is the image of a world. Sicut cervus is polyphony that lacks (because it does not need) the tonal-harmonic principles at work in the polyphony of Bach. Vertical relations are for the most part the result of simultaneous horizontal relations. The four voices that compose the piece enter one at a time in points of imitation. The voice that follows seems to be inspired to enter by the one that leads. The parts move in obedience to the rules of good voice leading but do more than exhibit formal correctness. They seem to delight in each other’s company and to be naturally social. At times, they even graciously step aside for each other, as if rejoicing in the being and individuality of other lines. Sicut cervus, in its non-urgent flow, is a musical community that captures the sound of friendship. And just as friends engage in all sorts of play, the vocal lines play off one another, often exhibiting contrary motion – simultaneous movement in opposite directions. Thanks to this friendly contrariety, which keeps the parts audibly distinct, the voices celebrate, contrary to what Schopenhauer asserts, the reality and truth of the principle of individuation, as they conspire to form a perfect, natural sounding republic of tones. The voices of Sicut cervus, in this respect, may be said to enact the contrapuntal play that we find among souls in Dante’s Paradiso.

Palestrina: “Sicut cervus”

With this non-tragic image of the world, my study in contrast, with its Biblical coda, reaches its end. These two great books, Plato’s Timaeus and Schopenhauer’s World as Will and Representation, differ greatly in how they view being, becoming and the human condition. But they also go together because, more than other great discussions of music with which I am familiar, they invite us to consider that music is more important than even music lovers might think – that music is, to quote Mann, metaphysically significant and captures the whole of all things, not in concept but in image and feeling. Are the cosmologies of Timaeus and Schopenhauer, separately or together, an adequate account of music? I think they are not. There are limits to the hyper-rational Pythagorean approach to music, just as there are limits to Schopenhauer’s Romantic conception of music as representing feeling and irrational will. Both accounts are nevertheless inspired efforts that hit upon certain undeniable truths.

My closing note is inspired by the philosopher Schopenhauer’s personal love of music, which I share. Music, even the saddest music in the world – music that is worlds apart from Sicut cervus and may even be the sound of despair and crushing grief – is dear to us and makes us happy, if only for a while. Maybe this is because music, as a living presence that comes to us, offers itself to us, assures us that we are not alone: that there is something out there in the world that knows our hearts and may even teach us to know them better. Thanks to music, we experience what it means to be connected to the whole of all things, even when that whole seems tragic; what it means to have a soul and not just a mind; to have depth, and not mere rightness, of feeling and being; and, above all, what it means to be open to ourselves and our world through listening.

Endnotes

1 The Birth of Tragedy, 19.
2 Summa Theologica I, 39, 8c. For an excellent discussion of the three formal criteria of beauty, see Umberto Eco, The Aesthetics of Thomas Aquinas, tr. Hugh Gredin, Cambridge: Harvard U. Press, 1988, pp. 64 ff.

Composition

Suprised by the Beauty of 20th-Century Music


EDITOR’S NOTE: This essay is reprinted here with the gracious permission of The Catholic World Report, where it first appeared.

Robert R. Reilly has written about classical music for more than 35 years, including for Crisis magazine, where he was music critic for 16 years. He has also written about music for High Fidelity, Musical America, Schwann/Opus, and the American Record Guide. He is the director of The Westminster Institute, which was established in 2009 to “promote individual dignity and freedom for people throughout the world by sponsoring high-quality research, with a particular focus on the threats from extremism and radical ideologies.” During a quarter century of government service, Reilly worked in the Office of the Secretary of Defense, in the White House under President Ronald Reagan, and in the U. S. Information Agency; he was also the director of Voice of America. In addition to his writings about music, he has written widely on foreign policy, “war of ideas” issues, Islam, and culture.

Surprised by Beauty, by Robert R. Reilly
He recently corresponded with Catholic World Report about a new and expanded edition, published by Ignatius Press, of his book Surprised by Beauty: A Listener’s Guide to the Recovery of Modern Music.

CWR: You have been in the military, served in the White House under President Reagan, and were director of Voice of America. How did you become a music critic? And how, in particular, did you become interested in modern classical music? How did you end up writing music reviews for Crisis magazine?

Robert R. Reilly: Well, I was thunderstruck by music when I heard, quite by accident, Jan Sibelius’s Fifth Symphony. By the time the recording was over, I was a changed person. I was 19 years old at the time; my music quest began. I plunged in in search of the experience and for an explanation as to why I had had it. What was it about? French poet René Char wrote that the “grace of the stars resides in their compelling us to speak.” This music compelled me to speak. So, some 15 years later, after I gained the right vocabulary and enough experience, I began writing about it and the other treasures I had discovered. As you pointed out, this was not my day job. My day job was fighting the Evil Empire.

So, as an avocation, I wrote for a number of musical journals like High Fidelity and Musical America. Then Deal Hudson, whom I did not know at the time, moved to Washington, DC, to take over Crisis magazine. He came to my house and, out of the blue, asked me to contribute a monthly article about classical music. He is one of those rare conservatives who are culturally literate in every sphere, including classical music, about which he is equally enthused. I did that for 16 years.

It was Deal who suggested that we publish a book of my essays. It turned out that most of what I had written was about 20th century music. That had not occurred by any design of mine or his. That book, the first edition of Surprised by Beauty, came out in 2002, with Deal as the publisher.

Lo and behold, some 14 years later, now the second edition of the book is out – this time from Ignatius Press. It is more than twice as long as the original and completely revised. There is so much more good news about the recovery of modern music in this listening guide. I hope readers will be enticed to explore some of the many CD recommendations in it. I emphasize that this is not a book with technical jargon written for music specialists. It is for the general reader who has an open mind, an open heart, and who opens his ears.

CWR: The terms “modern music” and “modern classical music” are usually not met positively by those who hold to more traditional beliefs about the arts, culture, and religion. Is it the case, however, that stereotypes and assumptions have obscured necessary distinctions between various composers, movements, and schools of music?

Reilly: Modern art strove hard to earn its bad reputation. It succeeded. People fled the concert halls because they did not want to hear what sounded like a catastrophe in a boiler factory. Likewise, many people shunned modern painting when canvases looked like someone had spilled a plate of spaghetti. Modern architecture seemed to be a contest as to who could design a building that best disguised the fact that human beings would be in it.

Unfortunately, the avant-garde gained control over the levers of the art world – by which I mean the commissions, the prizes, the positions in academe, the cultural press, etc. Unless you played ball with the avant-garde, your artistic goose was cooked. This was not true for some of the giants who continued to write in the traditional tonal manner, but it was decidedly true for the up-and-coming younger composers from the mid-20th century until about 20 years ago. They suffered a lot.

The whole point of my book is to announce that it is safe to come out of the bomb shelters now. Not only is beautiful music being written again but, it turns out, beautiful music was written all along, throughout the 20th century. It simply went underground. Some of it was suppressed (literally the case in some Communist regimes), some of it was simply neglected, but it is surfacing once again. And it is glorious. These are the composers I write about in this book, along with the recommended recordings of their works. They are the other 20th century about which most people have never heard – though there are a number of composers, like Samuel Barber, Benjamin Britten, and Ralph Vaughan Williams, whom they probably have heard of, who are in the book. Of course, I also include contemporary composers. The tremendously good news is that we are living at the time of a major musical renaissance.

CWR: In the Introduction, “Is Music Sacred?”, you explain how the destructive musical revolution of the 1920s, directed by Schoenberg and others, rejected tonality and melody. What were some of the deeper reasons for this revolution? In what way does that revolution relate to the cultural upheavals in Western societies?

Reilly: Yes, there were deeper reasons that were ultimately metaphysical and spiritual. Music, art, and architecture reflected a wholesale rejection of form, which is another way of saying Nature. I recall one artist saying, “If I don’t do anything else in my artistic life, I want to smash form” – which expresses, shall we say, a certain resentment of reality.

Going back to Pythagoras, the traditional understanding of music held that it was somehow an approximation of “the music of the spheres.” In fact, Pythagoras thought that music was the ordering principle of the world. The whole point of approximating the heavenly harmony was to instill inner harmony in the soul. Following Pythagoras, Plato taught that “rhythm and harmony find their way into the inward places of the soul, on which they mightily fasten, imparting grace, and making the soul of him who is rightly educated graceful”. This idea of “the music of the spheres” runs through the history of Western civilization with an extraordinary consistency, even up to the 20th century. At first, it was meant literally; later, poetically.

Then it was rejected. The radical metaphysics of modernity denied the existence of Nature as a teleological order. Things no longer had inbuilt ends or purposes. In other words, there was no longer a “harmony of the spheres” to approximate. Some such understanding led Arnold Schoenberg to his chilling statement that he had been “cured of the delusion that the artist’s aim is to create beauty.” Here we see the complete loss of vocation. Ugliness became a norm. If external order does not exist, then music collapses in on itself and deteriorates into an obsession with techniques. Music degenerated into a manipulation of sounds without discernible form. The new serial school of music, created by Schoenberg, systematized dissonance in such a way that harmony could no longer be heard. He claimed that tonality did not exist in Nature, but was simply a convention that man made up. Harmony and melody went out the window. Of course, to a large extent, I think this happened because of a spiritual crisis, a loss of faith. The most popular American classical composer today, John Adams, said that he had “learned in college that tonality died somewhere around the time that Nietzsche’s God died, and I believed it.”

The impact of nihilism on the arts of the 20th century was succinctly explained by the late English conductor Colin Davis in an interview:

Have you read The Sleepwalkersby Herman Broch? In it, Broch analyzes the disintegration of Western values from the Middle Ages onward. After man abandoned the idea that is nature was in part divine, the logical mind assumed control and began to try to deduce the first principles of man’s nature through rational analysis. The arts followed a similar course: each art turned in upon itself, and reduced itself further and further by logical analysis until today they have all just about analyze themselves out of existence.

I think we should also not forget the contribution made by the horrors of World Wars I and II. I think one thing that drove artists deeper into abstraction was what they considered the ugliness of reality. The uglier the reality, the more abstract the art – as a means of escaping from it. Of course, at a certain point the art was no longer “abstract” – as it was not a discernible abstraction of anything. It was really an attempt to create an alternate reality – what turned out to be a false reality. For instance, Schoenberg said that, through habituation or conditioning, we would soon hear dissonance as consonance. Of course, this did not happen. German composer Claus Ogerman hilariously referred to many modern avant-garde compositions by saying, “It’s as if you had a factory producing things that weren’t working.”

Just as the loss of tonality, melody and harmony in music reflected a spiritual loss, composers like Adams speak of the return to tonality in today’s music as, first and foremost, a spiritual recovery.

CWR: You offer a striking quote from British composer John Tavener – a convert to Eastern Orthodoxy – about recovering “one simple memory from which all art derives.” What is that memory? And how do you think it relates to Beauty as an objective, eternal quality?

Reilly: Tavener answers your question as to what it is a memory of. He said, “The constant memory of the Paradise from which we have fallen leads to the Paradise which was promised to the repentant thief.” Most movingly, he elsewhere wrote, “The gentleness of our sleepy recollections promises something else; that which was once perceived ‘as in a glass, darkly’ we shall see ‘face to face’.” Obviously, Tavener speaks here from Corinthians explicitly as a Christian, as it is Christ whom we shall see “face-to-face.” This is what his music is about.

Other composers make it clear in different ways that the highest vocation of art is hieratic – to make the transcendent perceptible. Sibelius said that in his struggle to compose his Fifth Symphony it was as if “God the Father had thrown down pieces of mosaic out of the heaven’s floor and asked me to solve how the picture once looked.” That is a lovely Platonic reflection. Elsewhere, he wrote that “The essence of man’s being is his striving after God. It [composition] is brought to life by means of the Logos, the divine in art. That is the only thing that really has significance.”

As to your other question, God, of course, is Beauty. So if music is going to make the transcendent perceptible, it has to be beautiful. But this beauty is not necessarily soothing. It can shake you to the core of your being, as can any encounter with the Divine.

CWR: One idea that is repeated throughout the book is that the many composers you write about reject the idea that “the past has no meaning.” Why is this stance so important? How does a composer’s view of the past affect their writing?

Reilly: The goddess Mnemosyne was mother of the arts – the nine muses – in ancient Greece. Her name means “memory”. Without memory, there is no art – or really anything else. Some modern artists developed the artistic equivalent of Alzheimer’s. Schoenberg said, “I am conscious of having removed all traces of a past aesthetic.” Indeed. Even worse, French composer Pierre Boulez proclaimed, “Once the past has been got out of the way, one need think only of oneself.”

The serial method guaranteed disorientation – so you had no means of telling where you were in a composition. British composer Nicholas Maw spoke specifically to the loss of memory that this involved: “The problem for me was that serialism rejected whole areas of musical experience. I later realized the difficulty was that it’s an invented language that deals only with the moment as it passes. There is neither long-term nor short-term memory. You could even say that the memory is suppressed.”

My late friend, American composer Steve Albert, said to me, “What was going on was the massive denial of memory. No one can remember a twelve-tone row. The very method obliterates memory’s function in art.” “There is no virtue,” declared American composer George Rochberg, “in starting all over again. The past refuses to be erased. Unlike Boulez, I will not praise amnesia.” So Rochberg strove “for authenticity linked to the longing for immortality” and against “the forgetting of being.” As he expressed it to me in a personal letter, what stands out clearly is “my insistence on memorability, remembering, remembering, remembering, without which we know not ourselves or anyone, the past, the evanescent present, [and] face only a blank future.”

The end result of the Alzheimer school of music is that the work of its adherents has itself largely been forgotten – because it contains nothing memorable. Part of the good news is that their game is up.

CWR: In your extensive study of these neo-tonal composers, who seek to bring beauty and tradition back into “classical” music, have you noticed any common threads regarding religious belief and/or practice (or even searching) among them?

Reilly: Well, the thread in common is the underlying spiritual thirst for beauty, rather than any specific religious belief or practice, though a number of the composers I cover are Christian. For instance, here is what Rochberg, the American composer who had more to do with the break from Schoenberg’s serialism than any other, told me when I read to him Schoenberg’s remark about being “cured of the delusion that the artist’s aim is to create beauty.” Rochberg responded, “But I have re-embraced the art of beauty but with a madness. Absolutely. That is the only reason to want to write music. The only reason. But what do I mean by what is beautiful? I mean that which is genuinely expressive, even if it hurts… Music remains what it has always been: a sign that man is capable of transcending the limits and constraints of his material existence.”

I think that very effectively sums it up. Beauty – transcendent beauty – is the only thing that can slake their thirst, and that is what they seek.

CWR: Some of the composers you discuss came of age after the school of Schoenberg began its damage to tonality, and reacted against this from the start. What are some reasons they give for that reaction? Others wrote atonally themselves before changing their tune, if you will. What sort of things seem to have effected their change of heart?

Reilly: Actually, almost all of the composers in the book were schooled in Schoenberg’s system; it was still de rigueur indoctrination in the music schools. And most of them initially wrote in the serial system. They turned against it for various reasons, but most of them experienced what Plato would call a turning of the soul. What sparked that turning of the soul? Some of them will talk about it; some of them will not. When Arvo Pärt turned against modernism, he retreated to a Russian Orthodox monastery for several years of silence. The Soviet authorities were not too pleased when he emerged and began composing again – because he wrote Credo.

Some composers I know of turned against it because of its inadequacy to deal with what they experienced in a death in the family. To express what they needed, they had to return to tonal music. Others, like Finnish composer Einojuhani Rautavaara, simply said, “I realized that I was not able to express myself according to the laws of Darmstadt, of serialism.” He told me he completely agreed with Sibelius’s description of a composer’s vocation.

To get some overall perspective, here is something worth quoting at length from Ken Fuchs. He wrote to me:

It is amazing to see now, from the vantage of over 25 years, what was actually happening. We really were at the beginning of a movement. The whole generation before that was so musically dry and barren and acrid and arid. Thank God people had the courage of their convictions to write music invested with feeling and emotion! . . . I remember all too well, as a student at Juilliard in the late 70s and early 80s, what that felt like. Even during those years, well after the shift had started, it was a very steep climb out of a trench… it took a LOT of courage in that heady environment to write truthful music in a style that would eventually become part of “the new Romanticism.”

CWR: Who are some composers whose change regarding atonality was particularly dramatic or surprising?

Reilly: That’s easy to answer: George Rochberg. He was the golden boy of the American avant-garde, the most accomplished American composer in Schoenberg’s serial system. Then he turned against it, and returned to tonal music. It caused an absolute scandal. Why did he do it? He said, “I could not continue writing so-called serial music. It was finished, hollow, meaningless.” In this case, his conversion was occasioned by his teenage son’s death from cancer. Rochberg said, “It was a shock of a kind that necessitated a new sense of how I had to live the rest of my life.” He told me, “I couldn’t breathe anymore. I needed air. I was tired of the same round of manipulating the pitches, vertically and horizontally… You have to work your way out of this labyrinth, this maze, so that you can be free and you can once again sing.”

This led Rochberg to issue a kind of manifesto when he published his great Third String Quartet. In part, it said:

The pursuit of art is much more than achieving technical mastery of means or even a personal style; it is a spiritual journey toward the transcendence of art and of the artist’s ego. In my time of turning, I have had to abandon the notion of originality in which the personal style of the artist and his ego are the supreme values; the pursuit of the one idea, uni-dimensional work and gesture, which seems to have dominated the aesthetics of art in the 20th century; and the received idea that it is necessary to divorce oneself from the past…. In these ways, I am turning away from what I consider the cultural pathology of my own time toward what can only be called a possibility: that music can be renewed by regaining contact with the tradition and means of the past, to re-emerge as a spiritual force with re-activated powers or structure; and, as I see it, these things are only possible with tonality.

I think that about says it all. Rochberg was a hero to me, and I was very moved by the fact that we became friends. What a privilege!

CWR: Which of these composers or compositions have had a special or personal impact upon you as a listener, critic, and lover of beautiful music?

Reilly: Well, I’ve already told you about Sibelius’s Fifth Symphony, but I continue to be surprised by beauty. There really seems to be no end of it, which is a joy that I want to share. My one frustration was with the large number of composers I had to leave out of the book because it was getting too big for Ignatius Press to handle.

Wait till your readers discover John Kinsella, the octogenarian Irish composer who just finished his Eleventh Symphony. Did you know there was a major symphonist working in Ireland who has created music that is viscerally thrilling and possessed of true magnificence? It’s extremely exciting to make discoveries like this, and then have the privilege of communicating with the composer, as I have over the past several years, about his life and work.

Then there are the contemporary American composers like Ken Fuchs, Morten Lauridsen, and Jonathan Leshnoff who are writing such startlingly beautiful music. There are also amazing discoveries from the past, like the symphonies of English composer Edmund Rubbra, a Catholic convert, who wrote 11 symphonies, four Masses, and a good deal of chamber music. His music is ruminative, rhapsodic, and, finally exultant, ecstatic, entering heaven in a vision. It is not to be missed.

I could go on, but the truth is that all the composers in the book had a special impact upon me, which is why I wrote about them.

CWR: This is the second edition of Surprised By Beauty. What are some additions and changes from the previous edition? How did Jens F. Laurson contribute to this new edition?

Reilly: As I mentioned, this edition is twice as long as the original and contains many more composers. Also, what was in the original edition has been revised, expanded, and brought up to date in terms of CD recommendations.

Jens Laurson is a brilliant young German music critic. We actually met when he was in Washington studying for a master’s degree back in 2002. He read the first edition of Surprised by Beauty and that began a very lively conversation between us. He could read music before he could read German. He sang in the Regensburg Choir, conducted by Benedict XVI’s brother [Monsignor Georg Ratzinger].

Jens then began writing music criticism for the Washington Post, WETA classical music radio station in DC, and Ionarts, an arts blog. Since returning to Germany, he has become one of the foremost music critics writing in Europe. Few can equal him in style or insight. I was delighted that he agreed to be a contributing author to this new edition. He has contributed new chapters on Walter Braunfels, Erich Wolfgang Korngold, Eric Zeisl, and Franz Mittler, Ahmed Saygun, Othmar Schoeck, and together we wrote the chapter on Shostakovich. What’s more, Jens helped to thoroughly revise the discographies for all the composers in the book and added his own CD recommendations to mine. I think that if there is a third edition of Surprised by Beauty in 10 years, he will be the main author and I will be a contributing author. At least, I hope so.

Philosophy

The Music of the Spheres, or The Metaphysics of Music


EDITOR’S NOTE: This essay is reprinted here with the gracious permission of Intercollegiate Studies Institute, who first published it in their Fall 2001 issue of Intercollegiate Review.

 

[In] sound itself, there is a readiness to be ordered by the spirit and this is seen at its most sublime in music.

—Max Picard

Despite the popular Romantic conception of creative artists as inspired madmen, composers are not idiots savants, distilling their musical inspiration from the ether. Rather, in their creative work they respond and give voice to certain metaphysical visions. Most composers speak explicitly in philosophical terms about the nature of the reality that they try to reflect. When the forms of musical expression change radically, it is always because the underlying metaphysical grasp of reality has changed as well. Music is, in a way, the sound of metaphysics, or metaphysics in sound.

Music in the Western world was shaped by a shared conception of reality so profound that it endured for some twenty-five hundred years. As a result, the means of music remained essentially the same – at least to the extent that what was called music could always have been recognized as such by its forbearers, as much as they might have disapproved of its specific style. But by the early twentieth century, this was no longer true. Music was re-conceptualized so completely that it could no longer be experienced as music, i.e. with melody, harmony, and rhythm. This catastrophic rupture, expressed especially in the works of Arnold Schoenberg and John Cage, is often celebrated as just another change in the techniques of music, a further point along the parade of progress in the arts. It was, however, a reflection of a deeper metaphysical divide that severed the composer from any meaningful contact with external reality. As a result, musical art was reduced to the arbitrary manipulation of fragments of sound.

Here, I will sketch of the philosophical presuppositions that undergirded the Western conception of music for most of its existence and then examine the character of the change music underwent in the twentieth century. I will conclude with a reflection on the recovery of music in our own time and the reasons for it, as exemplified in the works of two contemporary composers, the Dane Vagn Holmboe and the American John Adams.

 

According to tradition, the harmonic structure of music was discovered by Pythagoras about the fifth century BC. Pythagoras experimented with a stretched piece of cord. When plucked, the cord sounded a certain note. When halved in length and plucked again, the cord sounded a higher note completely consonant with the first. In fact, it was the same note at a higher pitch. Pythagoras had discovered the ratio, 2:1, of the octave. Further experiments, plucking the string two-thirds of its original length produced a perfect fifth in the ratio of 3:2. When a three-quarters length of cord was plucked, a perfect fourth was sounded in the ratio of 4:3, and so forth. These sounds were all consonant and extremely pleasing to the ear. The significance that Pythagoras attributed to this discovery cannot be overestimated. Pythagoras thought that number was the key to the universe. When he found that harmonic music is expressed in exact numerical ratios of whole numbers, he concluded that music was the ordering principle of the world. The fact that music was denominated in exact numerical ratios demonstrated to him the intelligibility of reality and the existence of a reasoning intelligence behind it.

Pythagoras wondered about the relationship of these ratios to the larger world. (The Greek word for ratio is logos, which also means reason or word.) He considered that the harmonious sounds that men make, either with their instruments or in their singing, were an approximation of a larger harmony that existed in the universe, also expressed by numbers, which was “the music of the spheres.” As Aristotle explained in the Metaphysics, the Pythagoreans “supposed the elements of numbers to be the elements of all things, and the whole heaven to be a musical scale and a number.” This was meant literally. The heavenly spheres and their rotations through the sky produced tones at various levels, and in concert, these tones made a harmonious sound that man’s music, at its best, could approximate. Music was number made audible. Music was man’s participation in the harmony of the universe.

This discovery was fraught with ethical significance. By participating in heavenly harmony, music could induce spiritual harmony in the soul. Following Pythagoras, Plato taught that “rhythm and harmony find their way into the inward places of the soul, on which they mightily fasten, imparting grace, and making the soul of him who is rightly educated graceful.” In the Republic, Plato showed the political import of music’s power by invoking Damon of Athens as his musical authority. Damon said that he would rather control the modes of music in a city than its laws, because the modes of music have a more decisive effect on the formation of the character of citizens. The ancient Greeks were also wary of music’s power because they understood that, just as there was harmony, there was disharmony. Musical discord could distort the spirit, just as musical concord could properly dispose it.

This idea of “the music of the spheres” runs through the history of Western civilization with an extraordinary consistency, even up to the twentieth century. At first it was meant literally, later poetically. Either way, music was seen more as a discovery than a creation, because it relied on pre-existing principles of order in nature for its operation. It is instructive to look briefly at the reiteration of this teaching in the writings of several major thinkers to appreciate its enduring significance as well as the radical nature of the challenge to it in the twentieth century.

In the first century BC, Cicero spelled out Plato’s teaching in the last chapter of his De Republica. In “Scipio’s Dream,” Cicero has Scipio Africanus asking the question, “What is that great and pleasing sound?” The answer comes, “That is the concord of tones separated by unequal but nevertheless carefully proportional intervals, caused by the rapid motion of the spheres themselves…. Skilled men imitating this harmony on stringed instruments and in singing have gained for themselves a return to this region, as have those who have cultivated their exceptional abilities to search for divine truths.” Cicero claims that music can return man to a paradise lost. It is a form of communion with divine truth.

In the late second century AD, St. Clement of Alexandria baptized the classical Greek and Roman understanding of music in his Exhortation to the Greeks. The transcendent God of Christianity gave new and somewhat different meanings to the “music of the spheres.” Using Old Testament imagery from the Psalms, St. Clement said that there is a “New Song,” far superior to the Orphic myths of the pagans. The “New Song” is Christ, the Logos Himself: “it is this [New Song] that composed the entire creation into melodious order, and tuned into concert the discord of the elements, that the whole universe may be in harmony with it.” It is Christ who “arranged in harmonious order this great world, yes, and the little world of man, body and soul together; and on this many-voiced instrument he makes music to God and sings to [the accompaniment of] the human instrument.” By appropriating the classical view, St. Clement was able to show that music participated in the divine by praising God and partaking in the harmonious order of which He was the composer. But music’s end or goal was now higher, because Christ is higher than the created cosmos. Cicero had spoken of the divine region to which music is supposed to transport man. That region was literally within the heavens. With Christianity, the divine region becomes both transcendent and personal because Logos is Christ. The new purpose of music is to make the transcendent perceptible in the “New Song.”

The early sixth century AD had two especially distinguished Roman proponents of the classical view of music, both of whom served at various times in high offices to the Ostrogoth king, Theodoric. Cassiodorus was secretary to Theodoric. He wrote a massive work called Institutiones, which echoes Plato’s teaching on the ethical content of music, as well as Pythagoras’s on the power of number. Cassiodorus taught that “music indeed is the knowledge of apt modulation. If we live virtuously, we are constantly proved to be under its discipline, but when we sin, we are without music. The heavens and the earth and indeed all things in them which are directed by a higher power share in the discipline of music, for Pythagoras attests that this universe was founded by and can be governed by music.”

Boethius served as consul to Theodoric in AD 510. Among his writings was The Principles of Music, a book that had enormous influence through the Middle Ages and beyond. Boethius said that

music is related not only to speculation, but to morality as well, for nothing is more consistent with human nature than to be soothed by sweet modes and disturbed by their opposites. Thus we can begin to understand the apt doctrine of Plato, which holds that the whole of the universe is united by a musical concord. For when we compare that which is coherently and harmoniously joined together within our own being with that which is coherently and harmoniously joined together in sound – that is, that which gives us pleasure – so we come to recognize that we ourselves are united according to the same principle of similarity.

It is not necessary to cite further examples after Boethius because The Principles of Music was so influential that it held sway for centuries thereafter. It was the standard music theory text at Oxford until 1856.

 

The hieratic role of music even survived into the twentieth century with composers like Jean Sibelius. Sibelius harkened back to St. Clement when he wrote that “the essence of man’s being is his striving after God. It [the composition of music] is brought to life by means of the logos, the divine in art. That is the only thing that has significance.” But this vision was lost for most of the twentieth century because the belief on which it was based was lost.

Philosophical propositions have a very direct and profound impact upon composers and what they do. John Adams, one of the most popular American composers today, said that he had “learned in college that tonality died somewhere around the time that Nietzsche’s God died, and I believed it.” The connection is quite compelling. At the same time God disappears, so does the intelligible order in creation. If there is no God, Nature no longer serves as a reflection of its Creator. If you lose the Logos of St. Clement, you also lose the ratio (logos) of Pythagoras. Nature is stripped of its normative power. This is just as much a problem for music as it is for philosophy.

The systematic fragmentation of music was the logical working out of the premise that music is not governed by mathematical relationships and laws that inhere in the structure of a hierarchical and ordered universe, but is wholly constructed by man and therefore essentially without limits or definition. Tonality, as the pre-existing principle of order in the world of sound, goes the same way as the objective moral order. So how does one organize the mess that is left once God departs? If there is no pre-existing intelligible order to go out to and apprehend, and to search through for what lies beyond it – which is the Creator – what then is music supposed to express? If external order does not exist, then music turns inward. It collapses in on itself and becomes an obsession with technique. Any ordering of things, musical or otherwise, becomes simply the whim of man’s will.

Without a “music of the spheres” to approximate, modern music, like the other arts, began to unravel. Music’s self-destruction became logically imperative once it undermined its own foundation. In the 1920s, Arnold Schoenberg unleashed the centrifugal forces of disintegration in music through his denial of tonality. Schoenberg contended that tonality does not exist in nature as the very property of sound itself, as Pythagoras had claimed, but was simply an arbitrary construct of man, a convention. This assertion was not the result of a new scientific discovery about the acoustical nature of sound, but of a desire to demote the metaphysical status of nature. Schoenberg was irritated that “tonality does not serve, [but] must be served.” Rather than conform himself to reality, he preferred to command reality to conform itself to him. As he said, “I can provide rules for almost anything.” Like Pythagoras, Schoenberg believed that number was the key to the universe. Unlike Pythagoras, he believed his manipulation of number could alter that reality in a profound way. Schoenberg’s gnostic impulse is confirmed by his extraordinary obsession with numerology, which would not allow him to finish a composition until its opus number corresponded with the correct number of the calendar date.

Schoenberg proposed to erase the distinction between tonality and atonality by immersing man in atonal music until, through habituation, it became the new convention. Then discords would be heard as concords. As he wrote, “The emancipation of dissonance is at present accomplished and twelve-tone music in the near future will no longer be rejected because of ‘discords.’” Anyone who claims that, through his system, the listener shall hear dissonance as consonance is engaged in reconstituting reality.

Of his achievement, Schoenberg said, “I am conscious of having removed all traces of a past aesthetic.” In fact, he declared himself “cured of the delusion that the artist’s aim is to create beauty.” This statement is terrifying in its implications when one considers what is at stake in beauty. Simone Weil wrote that “we love the beauty of the world because we sense behind it the presence of something akin to that wisdom we should like to possess to slake our thirst for good.” All beauty is reflected beauty. Smudge out the reflection and not only is the mirror useless but the path to the source of beauty is barred. Ugliness, the aesthetic analogue to evil, becomes the new norm. Schoenberg’s remark represents a total rupture with the Western musical tradition.

The loss of tonality was also devastating at the practical level of composition because tonality is the key structure of music. Schoenberg took the twelve equal semi-tones from the chromatic scale and declared that music must be written in such a way that each of these twelve semi-tones has to be used before repeating any one of them. If one of these semi-tones was repeated before all eleven others were sounded, it might create an anchor for the ear which could recognize what is going on in the music harmonically. The twelve-tone system guarantees the listener’s disorientation.

Tonality is what allows music to express movement – away from or towards a state of tension or relaxation, a sense of motion through a series of crises and conflicts which can then come to resolution. Without it, music loses harmony and melody. Its structural force collapses. Gutting music of tonality is like removing grapes from wine. You can go through all the motions of making wine without grapes but there will be no wine at the end of the process. Similarly, if you deliberately and systematically remove all audible overtone relationships from music, you can go though the process of composition, but the end product will not be comprehensible as music. This is not a change in technique; it is the replacement of art by ideology.

Schoenberg’s disciples applauded the emancipation of dissonance but soon preferred to follow the centrifugal forces that Schoenberg had unleashed beyond their master’s rules. Pierre Boulez thought that it was not enough to systematize dissonance in twelve-tone rows. If you have a system, why not systematize everything? He applied the same principle of the tone-row to pitch, duration, tone production, intensity and timber, every element of music. In 1952, Boulez announced that “every musician who has not felt – we do not say understood but felt – the necessity of the serial language is USELESS.” Boulez also proclaimed, “Once the past has been got out of the way, one need think only of oneself.” Here is the narcissistic antithesis of the classical view of music, the whole point of which was to draw a person up into something larger than himself.

The dissection of the language of music continued as, successively, each isolated element was elevated into its own autonomous whole. Schoenberg’s disciples agreed that tonality is simply a convention, but saw that, so too, is twelve-tone music. If you are going to emancipate dissonance, why organize it? Why even have twelve-tone themes? Why bother with pitch at all? Edgar Varese rejected the twelve-tone system as arbitrary and restrictive. He searched for the “bomb that would explode the musical world and allow all sounds to come rushing into it through the resulting breach.” When he exploded it in his piece Hyperprism, Olin Downes, a famous New York music critic, called it “a catastrophe in a boiler factory.” Still, Varese did not carry the inner logic of the “emancipation of dissonance” through to its logical conclusion. His noise was still formulated; it was organized. There were indications in the score as to exactly when the boiler should explode.

 

What was needed, according to John Cage (19121992), was to have absolutely no organization. Typical of Cage were compositions whose notes were based on the irregularities in the composition paper he used, notes selected by tossing dice, or from the use of charts derived from the Chinese I Ching. Those were his more conventional works. Other “compositions” included the simultaneous twirling of the knobs of twelve radios, the sounds from records playing on unsynchronized variable speed turntables, or the sounds produced by tape recordings of music that had been sliced up and randomly reassembled. Not surprisingly, Cage was one of the progenitors of the “happenings” that were fashionable in the 1970s. He presented concerts of kitchen sounds and the sounds of the human body amplified through loudspeakers. Perhaps Cage’s most notorious work was his 4’33” during which the performer silently sits with his instrument for that exact period of time, then rises and leaves the stage. The “music” is whatever extraneous noises the audience hears in the silence the performer has created. In his book Silence, Cage announced, “Here we are. Let us say Yes to our presence together in Chaos.”

What was the purpose of all this? Precisely to make the point that there is no purpose, or to express what Cage called a “purposeful purposelessness,” the aim of which was to emancipate people from the tyranny of meaning. The extent of his success can be judged by the verdict rendered in the prestigious New Grove Dictionary of Music, which says Cage “has had a greater impact on world music than any other American composer of the twentieth century.”

Cage’s view of reality has a very clear provenance. Cage himself acknowledged three principal gurus: Eric Satie (a French composer), Henry David Thoreau, and Buckminster Fuller – three relative lightweights who could not among them account for Cage’s radical thinking. The prevalent influence on Cage seems instead to have been Jean Jacques Rousseau, though he goes unmentioned in Cage’s many obiter dicta. Cage’s similarities with Rousseau are too uncanny to have been accidental.

With his noise, Cage worked out musically the full implications of Rousseau’s non-teleological view of nature in his Second Discourse. Cage did for music what Rousseau did for political philosophy. Perhaps the most profoundly anti-Aristotelian philosopher of the eighteenth century, Rousseau turned Aristotle’s notion of nature on its head. Aristotle said that nature defined not only what man is, but what he should be. Rousseau countered that nature is not an end – a telos – but a beginning: man’s end is his beginning. There is nothing he “ought” to become, no moral imperative. There is no purpose in man or nature; existence is therefore bereft of any rational principle. Rousseau asserted that man by nature was not a social or political animal endowed with reason. What man has become is the result, not of nature, but of accident. And the society resulting from that accident has corrupted man.

According to Rousseau, man was originally isolated in the state of nature, where the pure “sentiment of his own existence” was such that “one suffices to oneself, like God.” Yet this self-satisfied god was asocial and pre-rational. Only by accident did man come into association with others. Somehow, this accident ignited his reason. Through his association with others, man lost his self-sufficient “sentiment of his own existence.” He became alienated. He began to live in the esteem of others instead of in his own self-esteem.

Rousseau knew that the pre-rational, asocial state of nature was lost forever, but thought that an all-powerful state could ameliorate the situation of alienated man. The state could restore a simulacrum of that original well-being by removing all man’s subsidiary social relationships. By destroying man’s familial, social, and political ties, the state could make each individual totally dependent on the state, and independent of each other. The state is the vehicle for bringing people together so that they can be apart: a sort of radical individualism under state sponsorship.

It is necessary to pay this much attention to Rousseau because Cage shares his denigration of reason, the same notion of alienation, and a similar solution to it. In both men, the primacy of the accidental eliminates nature as a normative guide and becomes the foundation for man’s total freedom. Like Rousseau’s man in the state of nature, Cage said, “I strive toward the non-mental.” The quest is to “provide a music free from one’s memory and imagination.” If man is the product of accident, his music should likewise be accidental. Life itself is very fine “once one gets one’s mind and one’s desires out of the way and lets it act of its own accord.”

But what is its own accord? Of music, Cage said, “The requiring that many parts be played in a particular togetherness is not an accurate representation of how things are” in nature, because in nature there is no order. In other words, life’s accord is that there is no accord. As a result, Cage desired “a society where you can do anything at all.” He warned that one has “to be as careful as possible not to form any ideas about what each person should or should not do.” He was “committed to letting everything happen, to making everything that happens acceptable.”

At the Stony Point experimental arts community where he spent his summers, Cage observed that each summer’s sabbatical produced numerous divorces. So, he concluded, “all the couples who come to the community and stay there end up separating. In reality, our community is a community for separation.” Rousseau could not have stated his ideal better. Nor could Cage have made the same point in his art more clearly. For instance, in his long collaboration with choreographer Merce Cunningham, Cage wrote ballet scores completely unconnected to and independent of Cunningham’s choreography. The orchestra and dancers rehearsed separately and appeared together for the first time at the premiere performance. The dancers’ movements have nothing to do with the music. The audience is left to make of these random juxtapositions what it will. There is no shared experience – except of disconnectedness. The dancers, musicians, and audience have all come together in order to be apart.

According to Cage, the realization of the disconnectedness of things creates opportunities for wholeness. “I said that since the sounds were sounds this gave people hearing them the chance to be people, centered within themselves where they actually are, not off artificially in the distance as they are accustomed to be, trying to figure out what is being said by some artist by means of sounds.” Here, in his own way, Cage captures Rousseau’s notion of alienation. People are alienated from themselves because they are living in the esteem of others. Cage’s noise can help them let go of false notions of order, to “let sounds be themselves, rather than vehicles for man-made theories,” and to return within themselves to the sentiment of their own existence. Cage said, “Our intention is to affirm this life, not bring order out of chaos or to suggest improvements in creation, but simply to wake up to the very life we’re living, which is so excellent….”

That sounds appealing, even humble, and helps to explain Cage’s appeal. In fact, Cage repeatedly insisted on the integrity of an external reality that exists without our permission. It is a good point to make and, as far as it goes, protects us from solipsists of every stripe. Man violates this integrity by projecting meanings upon reality that are not there. That, of course, is the distortion of reality at the heart of every modern ideology. For Cage, however, it is the inference of any meaning at all that is the distorting imposition. This is the real problem with letting “sounds be themselves,” and letting other things be as they are, because it begs the question, “What are they?” Because of Cage’s grounding in Rousseau, we cannot answer this question. What is the significance of reality’s integrity if it is not intelligible, if there is not a rational principle animating it? If creation does not speak to us in some way, if things are not intelligible, are we? Where does “leaving things as they are” leave us?

From the traditional Western perspective, it leaves us completely adrift. The Greco-Judeo-Christian conviction is that nature bespeaks an intelligibility that derives from a transcendent source. Speaking from the heart of that tradition, St. Paul in his Letter to the Romans said, “Ever since the creation of the world, the invisible existence of God and his everlasting power have been clearly seen by the mind’s understanding of created things.” By denigrating reason and denying creation’s intelligibility, Cage severed this link to the Creator. Cage’s espousal of accidental noise is the logically apt result. Noise is incapable of pointing beyond itself. Noise is the black hole of the sound world. It sucks everything into itself. If reality is unintelligible, then noise is its perfect reflection, because it too is unintelligible.

 

Having endured the worst, the twentieth century has also witnessed an extraordinary recovery from the damage inflicted by Schoenberg in his totalitarian systematization of sound and by Cage in his mindless immersion in noise. Some composers, like Vagn Holmboe (19091996) in Denmark, resisted from the start. Others, like John Adams (b. 1947) in America, rebelled and returned to tonal music. It is worth examining, even briefly, the terms of this recovery in the works of these two composers because their language reconnects us to the worlds of Pythagoras and Saint Clement. Their works are symptomatic of the broader recovery of reality in the music of our time.

In Vagn Holmboe’s music, most particularly in his thirteen symphonies, one can once again detect the “music of the spheres” in their rotation. Holmboe’s impulse was to move outward and upward. His music reveals the constellations in their swirling orbits, cosmic forces, a universe of tremendous complexity, but also of coherence. Holmboe’s music is rooted and real. It reflects nature, but not in a pastoral way; this is not a musical evocation of bird songs or sunsets. Neither is it an evocation of nature as the nineteenth century understood nature – principally as a landscape upon which to project one’s own emotions. To say his work is visionary would be an understatement.

Holmboe’s approach to composition was quite Aristotelian: the thematic material defines its own development. What a thing is (its essence) is fully revealed through its completion (its existence) – through the thorough exploration of the potential of its basic materials. The overall effect is cumulative and the impact powerful. Holmboe found his unique voice through a technique he called metamorphosis. Holmboe wrote, “Metamorphosis is based on a process of development that transforms one matter into another, without it losing its identity.” Most importantly, metamorphosis “has a goal; it brings order to the process and enables it to create a pattern of the same perfection and balance as, for example, a classical sonata.” Holmboe’s metamorphosis is something like the Beethovenian method of arguing short motives; a few hammered chords can generate the thematic material for the whole work.

Holmboe’s technique also has a larger significance. Danish composer Karl Aage Rasmussen observed that Holmboe’s metamorphosis has striking similarities with the constructive principles employed by Arnold Schoenberg in his twelve-tone music. However, says Rasmussen, “Schoenberg found his arguments in history while Holmboe’s come from nature.” This difference is decisive since the distinction is metaphysical. History is the authority for those, like Rousseau, who believe that man’s nature is the product of accident and therefore malleable. Nature is the authority for those who believe man’s essence is permanently ordered to a transcendent good. The argument from history leads to creation ex nihilo, not so much in imitation of God as a replacement for Him – as was evident in the ideologies of Marxism and Nazism that plagued the twentieth century. The argument from nature leads to creation in cooperation with the Creator.

Rasmussen spelled out exactly the theological implications of Holmboe’s approach: “The voice of nature is heard … both as an inner impulse and as spokesman for a higher order. Certainty of this order is the stimulus of music, and to recreate it and mirror it is the highest goal. For this, faith is required, faith in meaning and context or, in Holmboe’s own words, ‘cosmos does not develop from chaos without a prior vision of cosmos.’” Holmboe’s words could come straight from one of Aquinas’s proofs for the existence of God. For Holmboe to make such a remark reveals both his metaphysical grounding and his breathtaking artistic reach. This man was not simply reaching for the stars, but for the constellations in which they move, and beyond. Holmboe strove to show us the cosmos, to play for us the music of the spheres.

Holmboe’s music is quite accessible but requires a great deal of concentration because it is highly contrapuntal. Its rich counterpoint reflects creation’s complexity. The simultaneity of unrelated strands of music in so much modern music (as in John Cage’s works) is no great accomplishment; relating them is. As Holmboe said, music has the power to enrich man “only when the music itself is a cosmos of coordinated powers, when it speaks to both feeling and thought, when chaos does exist, but [is] always overcome.”

In other words, chaos is not the problem; chaos is easy. Cosmos is the problem. Showing the coherence in its complexity, to say nothing of the reason for its existence, is the greatest intellectual and artistic challenge because it shares in the divine “prior vision of cosmos” that makes the cosmos possible. As Holmboe wrote, “In its purest form, [music] can be regarded as the expression of a perfect unity and conjures up a feeling of cosmic cohesion.” Arising from such complexity, this feeling of cohesion can be, he said, a “spiritual shock” for modern man.

 

Just as Holmboe, whose magnificent works are finally coming into currency, represents an unbroken line to the great Western musical tradition, John Adams is an exemplar of those indoctrinated in Schoenberg’s ideology who found their way out of it. Adams ultimately rejected his college lessons on Nietzsche’s “death of God” and the loss of tonality. Like Pythagoras, he “found that tonality was not just a stylistic phenomenon that came and went, but that it is really a natural acoustic phenomenon.” In total repudiation of Schoenberg, Adams went on to write a stunning symphony, entitled Harmonielehre (“Theory of Harmony”) that powerfully reconnects with the Western musical tradition. In this work, he wrote, “there is a sense of using key as a structural and psychological tool in building my work.” More importantly, Adams, explained, “the other shade of meaning in the title has to do with harmony in the larger sense, in the sense of spiritual and psychological harmony.”

Adam’s description of his symphony is explicitly in terms of spiritual health and sickness. He explains that “the entire [second] movement is a musical scenario about impotence and spiritual sickness; … it has to do with an existence without grace. And then in the third movement, grace appears for no reason at all … that’s the way grace is, the unmerited bestowal of blessing on man. The whole piece is a kind of allegory about that quest for grace.”

It is clear from Adams that the recovery of tonality and key structure is as closely related to spiritual recovery as its loss was related to spiritual loss. The destruction of tonality was thought to be historically necessary and therefore “determined.” It is no mistake that the recovery of tonality and its expressive powers should be accompanied by the notion of grace. The very possibility of grace, of the unmerited intervention of God’s love, destroys the ideology of historical determinism, whether it be expressed in music or in any other way. The possibility of grace fatally ruptures the self-enclosed world of “historically determined forces” and opens it up to the transcendent. That opening restores the freedom and full range of man’s creativity.

Cicero spoke of music as enabling man to return to the divine region, implying a place once lost to man. What is it, in and about music, that gives one an experience so outside of oneself that one can see reality anew, as if newborn in a strange but wonderful world? British composer John Tavener proposes an answer to this mystery in his artistic credo: “My goal is to recover one simple memory from which all art derives. The constant memory of the paradise from which we have fallen leads to the paradise which was promised to the repentant thief. The gentleness of our sleepy recollections promises something else. That which was once perceived as in a glass darkly, we shall see face to face.” We shall not only see; we shall hear, as well, the New Song.

Just for fun

Brussels, Music, and Humanity


EDITOR’S NOTE: This essay is reprinted here with the gracious permission of
The Brussels Times, where it first appeared.

Brussels is at its best in early Summer. It has nothing to do with the weather or Spring. The Grand Place is as beautiful as always and Gare du Nord as ugly as it is in every other month. The Cathedral of St. Michael and St. Gudula is still a triumph of the gothic style. And the Quartier Léopold – the European quarter – is still that very same exponent of postmodern architecture and style (or lack thereof). And yet in May something happens to Brussels that transforms it into the capital of beauty for at least a brief moment. It is a concentration of such beauty, talent and aspiration that it lifts the city out of the realm of everyday life. It is the Queen Elisabeth Competition.

Romantic souls tend to believe that true love never dies. “Though lovers be lost, love shall not” – Dylan Thomas wrote in one of his most loveable poems. I like to believe in that too, even though I have witnessed all too often how the bulwarks of reality break the waves of love and know that even the purest kinds of love can be exhausted and lose their energy. Yet it seems fair to say that queen Elisabeth’s love for music continues to live on in the concours that she first organized in 1937, and that to this day makes Brussels and the world, if only for a brief spell, a more beautiful place – perhaps even a better place.

At times I am willing to believe that music makes the world and people truly better. The relationship between music and morality is something that has puzzled philosophers and writers for ages. Some – like Plato – believed that music risks to corrupt the soul. The Hungarian writer Sándor Márai expressed the belief that music is dangerous, because “it seems to carry a larger danger in that it has the power to arouse the deepest emotions in people.” These words were written down in Embers, arguably Márai’s most beautiful novel, in which profound emotions turn out to be profoundly problematic.

Many others though have argued that music awakens humanity in humankind. That it lifts man to higher levels of mutual understanding and that it binds people together. That it stimulates the senses and makes us more sensible and sensitive. Simply put, music makes us better persons.

Such a view was the leitmotif of many of the writings of Vladimir Jankélévitch. The French philosopher – who was also a fairly talented pianist – wrote a great deal about music. He wrote books about Fauré, Ravel, about the expressiveness and morality of music. He held the view that music is a duo of hearts and that it leads to the “disarmament of the hearts” of those who listen and are listened to. Jankélévitch believed that people rarely live their lives to the fullest. Very often we just slumber through life and fall prey to l’ennui: existential boredom. We are not concerned with how best to spend our time, but with how we can let time go by. And yet there are also moments and ways in which we are awakened from the slumber of every day life. Moments that break the banality of being. They are intense and “adventurous” moments that open our hearts and challenge our minds to such an extent that we can no longer have the luxury to be bored and feel as if a deeper meaning in life is lacking. Love is such an adventure. And so is music.

Queen Elisabeth would undoubtedly have been inclined to agree with Jankelevitch. In her correspondence with her friend Albert Einstein she expressed the view that music gives meaning to life, it makes us reach for a world beyond, something more profound and deeper, perhaps even something divine. Moreover, it helps us deal with the whims of fate and cope with tragedy. As is well known, Queen Elisabeth’s life wasn’t destitute of tragedy – epitomized in the untimely death of her husband, King Albert I.

I would love to sympathize with that positive view about music and morality, and maybe I do – I am not sure. But if music really has such a profound moral meaning, if it makes our lives more meaningful and our hearts and minds less empty, if it makes us better persons – are there kinds of music that are better equipped to do this than others? Or does any kind of music possess the same power to awaken people from their existential slumber? Probably not. Probably it is true that not all music has the same capacity to awaken our moral senses. But that might be a dangerous truth, for it entails the view that certain forms of music are better than others. That certain kinds of music might not at all awaken our moral senses, but might even hamper their development. Such a view opens a path down history one should not be very willing to take. It is a path of inquisition and Entartete Kunst, of books being banned and burned, of paintings and painters being destroyed, and of terrible misery.

In the end it is difficult to disagree with the great essayist George Steiner, who argued that art and the humanities don’t humanize at all. Steiner found this hard to accept. He could not fully understand it, and yet he could not deny either that even a man of culture who has a civilized mind can have evil in his heart. Almost moved to tears, Steiner recounted stories of Nazi’s who loved Mozart and Beethoven as intensely as they detested Jews, Slavs and anyone they believed to be Untermenschen. At one and the same day these Nazi’s could kill a couple of people in the morning and go to the opera in the evening. Where are the humanity and the power of music in that? In the face of evil, all that is beautiful is powerless.

Education

Beauty in Music: Inspiration and Excellence


Reprinted with gracious permission from The Society for Classical Learning, where it first appeared.

I. Beauty in Music

“[A]nd the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and he became a living soul.” Genesis 2:7

Rhythms, melodies, harmonies speak to us of immaterial things

The modern world is full of false dichotomies. There are divisions between reason and revelation, fact and value, and male and female that require careful definition so that the desired joining of the two is possible. The division between the material and the immaterial, that is, the body and the spirit, is one of these. Genesis 2:7 speaks of forming Adam from the ground, and breathing into him the breath of life, or the spirit. Two things indeed, but curiously, the result of the combination of these two is the living soul. The one thing that seems clear here is that the soul is alive, and that it somehow is the combination of the two elements of matter and spirit.

The manner in which one walks can show the point of intersection between the physical and the spiritual – that is, the interface between the sensation of literal movement in sight and sound and the conclusions drawn about the intangible personality, mood, and emotional state of the walker. When the tempo of the walk is varied, observers draw different conclusions about the walker’s state of mind. What does tempo have to do with intangibles such as intention, friendliness, or confidence?

Plato’s famous lines in the third book of The Republic speak of how the musical modes are linked directly to the various character traits he is either for or against in his ideal City.

‘And which are the harmonies expressive of sorrow? You are musical, and you can tell me.’
‘The harmonies that you mean are the mixed and tenor Lydian…and such like.’
‘These then,’ I said, ‘must be banished…’

These modes are the basis for both melody and linear harmony, and when combined with rhythm made a place for music that was far larger in scope than that we offer today. That scope is nothing short of soul-shaping. In the conclusion to the Preface of his thoughtful book on musical aesthetics, philosopher Roger Scruton sees this scope:

It came as a surprise that so dry a question as “what is a sound?” should lead at last to a philosophy of modern culture. Had I thought more about the Pythagorean cosmology, and the true meaning of harmonia I should perhaps have known beforehand, that the ordering of sound as music is an ordering of the soul.

Plato seems to be recommending nothing short of government-run musical censorship. Our present-day enlightened embrace of all musical expressions is not so much the result of a hard-fought battle for individual freedom as a belief that music has no such powers to shape and affect the soul. If we really believed that music had the effect of training the next generation to be dissolute, irresponsible, and cowardly, we might find ourselves censoring music.

Listening to music is not the same activity as listening to sounds in general. The difference between them is that we listen to sounds in order to know the thing making the sound (the sound of a car or the sound of a baby crying), but we don’t listen to the sound of music to hear an oboe playing, or a guitar strumming. Rather, we listen to hear the sound it is making. We may recognize the sound comes from an oboe, but we want to hear what the oboe is playing. There is the source, but there is meaning in the order of the sounds themselves. The goal, when we listen to music, is to hear what it is saying: the contours of the melody, the harmony, the rhythm speak to us of a musical event. These elements are the medium by which the communications come – these elements are the language of the composer/performer.

Beauty is partly the correspondence between the material and immaterial

When we do hear these elements, we verbalize the experience in terms that are similar to other aspects of life. We describe personality traits, emotions, ideas, moods. Often unconsciously our minds are looking for patterns, symmetries, orders, and expressions that will speak to us of meaning. These physical sounds correspond to these intangible aspects of human experience. If there is a shape or trajectory to the experience of hurt in a broken heart, or the experience of awe before a King, it may be that composers can capture something of it in the various elements of a composition. The beauty of the work is partly the result of this perceived correspondence. There is something fitting, right, correct, or profound in a successful work that is beautiful, but to be able to perceive this correspondence, we need another element.

The imagination exists not so much for the purpose of making things up, but for recognizing correlation, relation between things – seeing connections. It is not by accident that we agree that the rhythm discovered in a brisk walk to the podium reflects confidence, or urgency, while a broken rhythm implies indecision, distraction, anxiety. We have experienced the connection between these things so often that we have learned to become fluent in this language.

Imagination is an organ of perception with which we can make this correlation: it pairs the physicality of a perceived music with human moods, characteristics, states of mind or personality. Just as we have linguistic metaphors, we also have musical metaphors. We describe the aspects of music in non-musical terms all the time: loud sudden outbursts may imply anger; melodies can be described as languorous, angular, smooth, tender, demanding, or questioning. These are by their linguistic nature metaphoric – the sounds themselves have none of these characteristics. Music is by its nature disembodied so if we are to speak of what it expresses, we are forced to use metaphoric language. The imagination grasps these relations. Could it be that our imaginations are not “making things up,” as much as recognizing a truth in correspondence? When we find just the right metaphor, when we hit on the right combination and communicate it precisely, it is part of the experience we call the perception of beauty.

The telos of music

Music is thought to be an entertainment, a diversion, a mood-setter, or a time-filler. But for the ancient and medieval scholars, music was a window through which one could see the created order, as well as a way of training the soul toward integrity.

The beauty of music is one of the sources of Plato’s hierarchy of love in the Symposium and in The Republic:

And therefore, I said, Glaucon, musical training is a more potent instrument than any other, because rhythm and harmony find their way into the inward places of the soul, on which they mightily fasten, imparting grace, and making the soul of him who is rightly educated graceful, or of him who is ill-educated ungraceful; and also because he who has received this true education of the inner being will most shrewdly perceive omissions or faults in art and nature, and with a true taste, while he praises and rejoices over and receives into his soul the good, and becomes noble and good, he will justly blame and hate the bad, now in the days of his youth, even before he is able to know the reason why; and when reason comes he will recognize and salute the friend with whom his education has made him long familiar…
…Thus much of music, which makes a fair ending; for what should be the end of music if not the love of beauty?

Plato taught that a love of music instilled a love of beauty that spilled over into all areas of life, leading up the hierarchy to love of justice. Roger Scruton has written, “…beauty is not simply a redundant addition to the list of human appetites. It is not something that we could lack and still be fulfilled as people. It is a need arising from our metaphysical condition as free individuals, seeking our place in an objective world.”

If the telos of music is beauty, how then do we teach music? By training our students’ imaginations, starting with how to hear the elements of music. The elements of Adam were matter and spirit, fused together to make a living soul that reflects the Imago Dei. The elements of music are: rhythm, melody, harmony, form, texture, and timbre, fused together to make a composition that can reflect the ideas, experiences, the very humanity of both composer and listener. Knowing what to listen for, we begin a new way of listening for the student. The ability to discern, to distinguish, to perceive the language of music is the beginning of genuine taste about music, and taste is a facet of wisdom. So music is forming our souls; it really does matter what we listen to, and what we offer in our services, just as it matters what our churches look like, and how our liturgies are designed, not only for didactic purposes – to have our theology correct – but to link the harmony of the Trinity with our daily lives.

So where does music come from? Is there more to music than emotional expression or mood setting?

II. Inspiration

“…I have called by name Bezalel…and I have filled him with the spirit of God, in wisdom, and in understanding, and in knowledge…” Exodus 31:2

The Greek Muses

Many of the Greek writers mention the Muses. Homer, Socrates, and others speak of them, but Hesiod is the one who speaks of the specifics that are commonly held. There are nine:

Calliope – eldest, epic poetry
Clio – history
Erato – love poetry
Euterpe – music
Melpomene – singer of tragedy
Polyhymnia – sacred poetry and geometry
Terpsichore – dance
Thalia – comedy and pastoral poetry
Urania – astronomy/astrology

These nine sing their inspirations. The Muses inspired far more than the subject of music only. Their subjects include all of our human artistic and intellectual pursuits, and the inspiration for each was conveyed by way of song. The very word music is taken from Mousike Techne (“the work of the Muses”). Nearly everything that we today refer to as “the arts and sciences” were, in the Greek mind, inspired through song by the Muses, and that inspiration leads Homer to compose The Illiad, leads Thucydides to write The Peloponnesian Wars, leads Sophocles to write Oedipus Rex, and leads Pythagoras to discover musical harmony and the music of the spheres. What comes is an approach which is so inspired, that is, that resonates with the truth to such a degree, that it will feed philosophers, scientists, and artists for millennia: the prerequisite for beauty is harmonia – the fitting, right, and mathematically sound interrelations of disparate objects. These Nine Muses were the keepers of the secret knowledge of harmony, and the significance of this knowledge and its power and influence over all of life are symbolized by the fact that they are the daughters of Zeus himself.

Beauty can be reflected in painting, sculpture, photographs, but there are arts such as plays, films, and music that include another aspect of human experience: time. As soon as you introduce the element of time, one’s perception of the work requires the ability to remember what has already occurred. Memory thus becomes a significant aspect in the immediate apprehension of these arts. To lose your memory is to lose yourself. If you can’t recall your identity, every effort must be made to rectify the situation. Memory is essential to identity. It is also essential to apprehending music, for exactly the same reason.

Music traces a pattern in the mind that lingers after the music moves on. The memory holds that trace, and the composer counts on our capacity to do so in order to describe the pattern fully. Like words in a sentence, we encounter music as moments in linear succession, but musical patterns are made without words; that is, the pattern is not literal but rather more like patterns in architecture or a garden because they too are each apprehended in succession. The Greeks gave one answer for both the questions: Where does music come from, and what part does memory play in its perception? We know that the father of the Muses is Zeus himself, but we seldom hear about their mother: her name was Mnemosyne (“Memory”). So, for real inspiration, great knowledge, for our right creative gifts to be released to do their jobs, to comprehend the nature of tragedy, epic, history, science, dance, even theology, we need the authority of Zeus, but we also need the knowledge of what has gone before – we need memory. This memory is not only of the previous words and notes in the artwork to which we presently attend, but the knowledge of our own history. What have great artists of the past done? How are we inheritors of their wisdom?

How then do we teach music? History. We need to remember. But there is one more thing to consider.

III. Excellence

“Finally, brothers, whatever things are true,… honest,…just,… pure,…lovely,…of good report, if there be any virtue, and if there be anything worthy of praise, think on these things.” Philipians 4:8

Our day is as much the product of history as any other day. We are the inheritors of a relatively new field of study called aesthetics. It is a modern word, first coined in the 18th century, and discussed at length by Immanuel Kant and others until eventually the whole line of inquiry was relegated to the subjective world of values, to join her sister faith in that limbo. As a result, in the last 225 years, our culture has assumed that beauty first is only a matter of individual experience, and eventually, a matter of purely personal preference. Once the goal is mislaid, it is impossible to gauge whether a work is growing closer to it, so the loss of a telos requires the loss of a concept of excellence. Innovation and technical ability soon take the place of real imagination, correlation, and beauty.

Thus, the loss of what the ancient Greeks and Christians, as well as the Medieval Christians, thought of as excellence in art in general and music in particular is really a modern loss of confidence. The literal meaning of confidence suggests acting con fide (“with faith”). A lack of faith in God leads eventually to a lack of the ability to produce “simple predication” (as Richard Weaver would say). At first we lose the ability to say, “This is the point of art.” Then we lose the ability to say, “That is beautiful and that is not.” Then “that is art and that is not.” And eventually we find we can only say, “There is nothing more to art than the shock of the new; the expression that forces an audience to respond.” Reinstate faith, and we find ourselves led back to a definition of beauty that finds its source in the perfect character of God, and once He is our standard, “better” and “worse” are meaningful categories again. Beauty is the goal of art – I don’t say “prettiness” is the goal – I say beauty.

Then what is this beauty? How many philosophers have run aground making rules about beauty? What we need are not so much cultural standards by which to retroactively judge the beauty of an object; what we need is a useful foundational principle and definition of the word “objective.”

Objective beauty is simply that which is found in the object rather than in the response of the viewer/listener. Thomas Aquinas held that beauty was defined both by the characteristics of the object and the effect that object has on the viewer/listener. Ultimately, the Christian view of beauty will include both aspects in imitation of higher models, but when one’s day is dominated by the subjective side of the spectrum, as we are today, a reintroduction of the opposite side is welcome. We must reintroduce the study of form. When one describes the contours of the piece of music itself, the way it is composed, the way it is performed, the form it offers for contemplation, the meaning of the words chosen, one is describing the object itself, and the resulting opinion offered based on these things should be called “objective.” Don’t make the mistake of hearing “objective” as a synonym for “truth” as some will assume. The truth is far more illusive, and we have hardly scratched that surface with this approach. But what we have done is regained a category for musical discussion that requires thought. What we need is a definition of objective that leads to a fuller understanding of the work instead of considering a work based solely on whether or not we are moved by it. Teaching objectively about music means that we will address three aspects (at least):

Performance (an evaluation of the virtuosity of the performer)
Composition (an evaluation of the means of musical expression)
Content (an evaluation of the message or statement of the work)

All three of these require study, and that study will not only reveal what there is to know about the piece of music in question, but also will hone the sensibilities of the listener to be increasingly able to discern and explicate music. Over time, exposure to this sort of approach feeds our starved imaginations on excellence, and we find that instead of having to tell students not to listen to music that we might consider bad for them, they find they simply aren’t all that interested in the trivial, the base, the coarse. There would be nothing more encouraging for a music teacher than to hear a singer screaming his one-dimensional song of pain and passion, longing to be taken seriously, only then to see his student yawn and change the station.

A Theological basis for excellence

What then would be a basis for a Christian school intent on teaching excellence? We teach that taste is more than personal preference; it is a facet of wisdom. Taste is the ability to discern between what is good and what is excellent. Discernment comes more by way of regular exposure and experience (as a master trains the wine-taster’s palate or the piano tuner’s ear) than with rules and requirements. What is needed is a master teacher who can not only know music but make connections from music, by the imagination through metaphors, to the realm of human experience, and finally to real theology.

Any work of art requires an element of unity and of diversity combined. The Greeks debated about the one and the many, but great works have both elements. The reason is that the Creation itself reflects both unity and diversity in each of its categories (such as tree, fish, man), and we find we are only satisfied when the two are present. Too much unity? Tedium. Too much diversity? Chaos. Why should it surprise us that both the Creation and our tastes are created by a God who is ultimately both perfect unity and harmonious diversity in His Trinity?

The basis for the work of art-making is found in the doctrine of the Incarnation. We are taking invisible things such as ideas, experiences, feelings, and making them perceivable through the various physical media we use (clay, film, stone, paint, music).

Even the basis for an understanding of why we need musical education is theologically based. Our imaginations are damaged by the Fall as well. Through the study of music (or art in general) we grow in our abilities to see connections between things. In modern thought the damage done to our tastes is ignored by simply relegating the entire category of beauty to the dustbin of subjectivity, but a kind of human maturity can come as the result of taking the claims of beauty seriously. The reality is that we are aesthetically damaged as well as in every other way, and the only way back to fuller humanity is through prayer and a rethinking of the definition of taste for His glory.

Education is more than teaching about subjects; it is the training of the sensibilities to love that which is worth loving, attaching the heart to the good. Music has been taught in the Classical and Medieval worlds as a means of shaping the soul to live the good life. We need to rekindle an appreciation for music in that way, rather than offering either standardless popular music or esoteric academic music. I am convinced that if we were to take the connections to our theology seriously we would find we could reintroduce the general public to the concert hall again, as the music there would be relevant again.

So, how then do we teach music? We do it by way of comparison. Compare the works of our composers in the past and the present, and offer the foundation of criteria to evaluate the object, beginning with the performance, the composition and the content. Then, include the aspect of making music, by piano, orchestral and band instruments, and choral singing. The composition makes use of the form and elements of music, and that, with a sense of what the music is saying, leads the performer to his interpretation. It is what makes music meaningful to all concerned.

IV. Conclusions: a sacramental view of the world

“For judgment I have come into this world, so that the blind will see and those who claim to see shall become blind.” John 9:39

The Naturalism that disallows serious consideration of the supernatural has led to many unforeseen consequences, not the least of which is the loss of the spiritual purpose of material things. When Jesus calls himself the vine and us the branches, he has opened our eyes to an aspect of the Kingdom of God, but in speaking so, he has also given a great honor to vines. Without the supernatural dimension in our thinking, we may still have vines, but on closer inspection, we will find that vines have lost something in the transaction. They are somehow less grand.

In the same way, a sacramental view of music grants a special honor and significance to music – a position that allows us insight into the mind of God and his Creation by way of harmony.

The combination of a sacramental view of the world with a holy imagination can feed the soul with visions of the transcendent through the details of the world. This is beauty – the correspondence of the material object with the transcendent spirit – a resonance of harmony heard through the din of the fallen world. Please note I do not say in spite of the fallen world – although it is that at times – but even by way of the fallen world. This is the power of God: to show His harmony even through the elements of brokenness around us.

A sacramental view of the world suggests a metaphoric relationship between the physical and the spiritual, and this in turn gives rich depth to metaphors of all kinds, including musical ones. It also gives us a purpose for art and music: beauty. Beauty is at least in part the recognition of the correlation of matter and spirit, and we need to teach the next generations to unpack those metaphors – to see sacramentally. This requires the inspiration of God the Holy Spirit, the true Muse the Greeks could only guess about, and the gift God gives us of an imagination.

Beauty has lost its way in the 20th century in that we have lost our connection with the transcendent – that is, you cannot have the experience of seeing through the objects of this world into the next if you no longer believe there is a next. Naturalism, that seemed so optimistic in the 18th century, now appears a dead-end intellectually. Nature apart from her Creator becomes meaningless matter, and sadly, human enterprise can aspire to nothing higher than that same soul-less existence. The modern man (and I include the post-modern man in this) is haunted by his own humanity, seeing the ghosts of meaning, significance, ecstasy, profundity, joy, in the daily grind of his life. When he stops to reflect, he senses the musical rhythm in his breathing, his heartbeat, his walking pace; sometimes there seems to be more to eating meals than sustenance; he catches the notion of harmony in a well-run football play; perhaps a momentary glimpse of unity where he most expects diversity, say in his marriage; or diversity where he most expects unity, say in his twin children; he may even lift his head from anxiety long enough to find a certain joy in the rhythm of sleeping and working, or maybe looking back on a long life, discern even a kind of melody in his days, a certain beauty in the rise and fall of his fortunes, each connected in a line to the others in ways that couldn’t be seen while going through them.

This is what music is for. More than simply a means of distraction from the hard aspects of life – like a sort of emotional drug used to deaden us or entertain us while we rest – music has the ability to outline something of the actual experience of living. It speaks of the human condition because it is, like any metaphor, the use of the physical material of this world to draw attention to that which transcends our present moment. It has the ability to both reflect our experiences and shape the way we see them.

Music education then, has the ability to remind us of the relation of this matter and spirit, shaping our souls to love the beauty of harmony. This is why the ancients educated by way of music and gymnastics. This is why music has always held the position it does in the Quadrivium. Musical education leads to a love of harmony in all things.

How do we teach music? The elements, the history, the comparisons of excellent works, and finally the extension of this harmony – which is the beautiful relation of disparate things – to all aspects of life: to justice, to marriage, to virtuous business relations, to love of those who are different than yourself, to math, science, philosophy, and ultimately to the Triune God Himself. The beauty of harmony tunes our affections to virtue, love, and the mind of God.

Music rightly understood cannot save our souls, but what writer and critic Donald Drew has said about great literature applies to music as well, “after experiencing it, there will be more of a soul there to save.”

 

Works Cited

Plato. The Republic, Book III.
Scruton, Roger. Aesthetics of Music.
_______. “Beauty and Desecration,” City Journal, Feb. 2009.

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