The great ancient Greek dramatist, Euripides (480-308 BC), describes a listener:
My body rocketh, and would fain
Euripides
Move to the tune of tears that flow:
For tears are music too, and keep
A song unheard in hearts that weep.
Have you heard silent music?
Euripides asks, when musicians have the talent to do so much good, why do they waste their talents on “idle song” for banquets? Why do we even need music for entertainment at banquets, he wonders, when a banquet is itself entertainment?
Today we might ask, with 500 TV channels, movies and sporting events beyond counting, should it be the school system’s job to provide the public with more entertainment?
Socrates:
Philosophy has been the pursuit of my life, and is the noblest and best of music.
Beethoven:
Music is a more lofty revelation than all wisdom and philosophy.
What higher wisdom do you experience in music?
Plato had great difficulty in defining Beauty. If Beauty existed, he thought it must be capable of rational definition. He makes, in Greater Hippias, a pretty good case:
All these things can be described by the left-hemisphere, but it bothered Plato that not everyone agrees when it comes to an individual art object. In the end he complains, “All that is beautiful is difficult.”
Is there more to Beauty than left-hemisphere definition?
Plato, in Philebus, 17c., has a dialog in which Socrates explains that like language, music has grammar [music theory], “but you would not be a real musician if this was all that you knew.”
Why then is American music education based largely on grammar and not on music itself?
[I once wrote the editor of the MENC Journal asking them what the “M” in their title stood for?]
Plato presents many questions about the arts which will only be answered later when Aristotle founds the new branch of philosophy, Aesthetics. Plato’s most important book dealing with artist and audience, Ion, is an interview with one of the ancient near-musicians called Rhapsodists. What does Plato mean when he has this artist conclude:
If I make them cry I myself shall laugh, and if I make them laugh I myself shall cry, when the time of payment arrives.
When anyone says that music is to be judged by pleasure, his doctrine cannot be admitted … And those who seek for the best kind of song and music ought not to seek for that which is pleasant, but for that which is True.
For the next 2,500 years philosophers would agree. What do they mean by Truth?
Virtually the entire concern with respect to music by Plato had to do with the impact of what he called “good music” vs entertainment music on both the player and the listener. In his mind the questions raised had been discussed and already resolved from a period 10,000 years before his time. The whole question was for him one of ethics, on both the personal and national level. He seems astonished when, in Gorgias,1501b and following he observes, “A man may delight a whole assembly, and yet have no regard for their highest interests.”
When you listen to popular music do you ever think about the ethics of the performer?
Chief among Plato’s list of skills needed to be a good music student are: [1] Musical insight, not mere technical ability on an instrument, and [2] The ability to inspire through music.
Thinking about our system of the end of semester “juries,” where a tired and bored faculty sits all day writing about intonation, technique and dynamics, can you imagine this scene if the only question on their adjudication sheet was: Did the student inspire me?
One of the small, but interesting, books by Aristotle is called Questions, consisting only of questions but with no answers provided by Aristotle. In this spirit, here is a series of questions about music and, like Aristotle, I shall leave to the reader the answers.