Question Nr. 30

Plato’s most quoted sentence in Laws is:

Education has two branches,—one of gymnastic, which is concerned with the body, and the other of music, which is designed for the improvement of the mind [soul].

Plato, Laws, 795d

Today, does anyone care?

Question Nr. 31

The ancient Greeks gave great weight to the value of music in establishing and revealing character. Athenaeus in Deipnosophistae114.628 tells the story of Cleosthenes, the ruler of Sicyon, who in observing one of his daughter’s suitors dancing in a vulgar posture, announced, the “young man had danced away” his marriage.

It is understood that a pianist must, in a recital, become Beethoven, who cannot be present. But at the same time, does the performance also reveal the pianist’s character?

Question Nr. 32

Plato, in his writings on music education, stressed the value of music in character building and the teaching of morals and ethics. For him, music was clearly a required core subject. In Laws1804d he wrote:

In these several schools let there be supplied dwellings for teachers, who shall be brought from foreign parts by pay … and the children shall come not only if their parents please, but if they do not please.

When will our society discover that it is only educating one-half of the child?

Question Nr. 33

Who among us is not moved by the thought of Mozart dancing at night in the winter in Vienna with his wife to keep warm because he could not afford fuel, or of Beethoven restricted for three days in his apartment because he had sent out his only pair of boots to be repaired? Either of them had sufficient skills to earn a comfortable living had they turned to popular music, but they chose not to.

Plato, in his Republic,19.591d framed the question thus:

How can an artist allow himself to be dazzled by the foolish applause of the world, and heap up riches to his own infinite harm?

Question Nr. 34

Aristotle (b. 384 BC), in writing about education, in Ethica Nicomachea,11103a,25 and following observed that

states of character arise out of activities … It makes no small difference, then, whether we form habits of one kind or another from our very youth; it makes a very great difference, or rather all the difference.

How do we teach character today in our indoor musical ensembles?

Question Nr. 35

Aristotle wrote, in On Interpretation,

  • Spoken words are symbols of emotion.
  • Written words are symbols of spoken words.
  • Written words are also speech and differ with all races, but
  • Emotions are the same for the whole of mankind.

This is the key to what we call Universality in music. Does it not also remind us that no matter how music is used (church, military, circus, public performance) the fundamental purpose of music is to communicate emotion?

Question Nr. 37

Aristotle, in Ethica Nicomachea, discusses at some length the relationship of the quality of a man and the quality of the music he listens to, for example, “A good man is one that delights in virtuous actions and is vexed by vicious ones, as a musical man enjoys beautiful melodies but is pained at bad ones.” Aristotle in fact makes this one of his basic principles of music education.

This general topic would be present for the next 1,500 years and finds an echo in William D. Revelli’s famous observation,

A boy who blows a horn will never blow a safe!

Should indoor music education today be concerned with developing character in the student?

Question Nr. 38

How are we to answer Aristotle’s question in Problemata1917a.5

Why is it that some men spend their time in pursuits which they have chosen, though these are sometimes ignoble, rather than in more honorable professions? Why, for example, should a man who chooses to be a conjurer or an actor or an oboe player prefer those callings to that of an astronomer or an orator?

Question Nr. 39

There is a cycle one finds in ancient societies that as a society becomes prosperous performing music is given over to slaves rather than the educated person. This results in passages such as the following in Plutarch’s Life of Pericles:

It was not said amis by Antisthenes, when people told him that one Ismenias was an excellent oboe [aulos] player, “It may be so,” he said, “but he is but a wretched human being, otherwise he would not have been an excellent oboe player.”

This question one finds frequently throughout the middle ages and beyond as well: Can a bad man make good music? Today, in one form or another, this question is present.

The important question today is a moral one: Do we take the total experience of the student/listener into consideration with respect to the music we present our students?