Cyrus the Great, the Persian leader, wrote:
An aulos player who saw some fish in the sea played his instrument in the hope that they would come ashore. When they refused to do so, the aulos player took a net, netted a large catch and hauled them in. See the fish jumping about he said to them, “It is too late to dance now; you might have danced to my music but you would not.”
Cyrus the Great
Can you think of an application for today?
Plutarch:
The Odeum, or concert hall, which in its interior was full of seats and ranges of pillars, and outside had its roof made to slope and descend from one single point at the top, was constructed, we are told, in imitation of the king of Persia’s Pavilion.
Plutarch, Lives: Pericles
Were you aware that concert halls are older than church buildings?
Xenophon of Athens (c. 434–355 BC) wrote that the best choirs were characterized by a high degree of discipline, long periods of training and expert conductors.
And they sang and rehearsed without music. Did you know it would be another 1,500 years before the arrival of notation? At the time of Plato and Aristotle they did not even have names for the individual notes!
Gorgias (c. 425 BC):
How can language even express what we perceive through our senses?
Gorgias
Thales (640-546 BC) famously observed,
A lack of culture is a serious thing.
Thales
Would he be uncomfortable today in America?
Heraclitus (c. 513 BC) was one of the first philosophers to question the consideration given by musicians to their audience:
What discernment or intelligence do they possess? They place their trust in popular singers, and take the throng for their teacher, not realizing that “the majority are bad, and only few are good.”
Heraclitus
Pythagoras (580-500 BC) has been judged by Walther Kirchner (1960) as “one of the most outstanding mathematicians of all times,” but by Heraclitus (c. 500 BC) as “the chief captain of swindlers.”
He is difficult to judge because, alone among all ancient philosophers, not a single word in his own writing survives. However, when we consider the utter failure of education during the past 100 years, should we now consider his model as a teacher who demanded that every student must remain silent and not ask a question during his first five years as a student?
Porphyry recalled that Pythagoras (580–500 BC) allowed no one to become a friend or associate without first being examined in facial expression and disposition.
To what extent do we do this today?
Pythagoras (580–500 BC) as a teacher is still remembered for a number of symbolic utterances. One was “Abstain from beans,” which meant “Avoid democratic voting.” He was not the only ancient philosopher who was distrustful of the democratic form of government because it allowed leaders to be elected by the uneducated lower class.
If we had this problem today, 2,500 years later, would we regard it as a problem with democracy or education?
Every aesthetic musician knows his purpose is to communicate his feelings to his listener. But he may not have realized that his role is first communicated in his very choice of music to perform. The ancient Greek playwright Aristophanes perfectly understood this fact.
Answer me. But you keep silent. Oh! just as you choose; your songs display your character quite sufficiently.
Aristophanes, Thesmophoriazusae
How are we to classify a modern band director who thinks himself an aesthetic artist, but programs mostly from the perspective of pleasing his students and the audience?