Plato and Music

I recently had lunch with the high school band director of a local school district, and as I ate my apple he told me his most recent complaint against the school administration. It seems that after promising him an additional music instructor for this year, they changed their minds and hired a reading teacher instead. Looking, as always, for controversy, I asked him why a music teacher ought to have been hired instead. He answered that music is just as important a subject as reading or math, and that it ought to receive equal funding. He then quoted a famous passage from Plato on the subject, something along the lines of music education being necessary because it ennobles the soul.

He did correctly remember that Plato talks about music in the Republic, and the passage goes something like this:

ἆρ᾽ οὖν, ἦν δ᾽ ἐγώ, ὦ Γλαύκων, τούτων ἕνεκα κυριωτάτη ἐν μουσικῇ τροφή, ὅτι μάλιστα καταδύεται εἰς τὸ ἐντὸς τῆς ψυχῆς ὅ τε ῥυθμὸς καὶ ἁρμονία, καὶ ἐρρωμενέστατα ἅπτεται αὐτῆς φέροντα τὴν εὐσχημοσύνην, καὶ ποιεῖ εὐσχήμονα,

Accordingly therefore, I myself say, O Glaucon, because of these it is necessary that nourishment in mousika be sovereign, since it enters exceedingly into the inside of the soul what [is] both rhythm and harmony, and is fastened to her most stoutly bearing grace, and making grace.

I do not have such revolutionary views regarding education as to insist that teachers must know what they are talking about. I do not insist, for example, that band directors know every clarinet fingering, nor that English teachers remember every sonnet of Shakespeare. I only insist that they are able to tell the difference. My lunch companion, unfortunately, was not able to do this. Music is a word that has passed down to us from the Greek in practically pristine phonological condition. It is itself a harmonious word, and like the antique word clangor its simple pronunciation conveys its own inmost soul. Unfortunately, the meaning of music has changed significantly over the past 2500 years, and the way Plato uses it he means much more a Shakespearean sonnet than a chart of clarinet fingerings. If I remember correctly, the Academy even turns instrumental musicians who aren't successful at their craft out of the city earlier in Book III.

In his excellent book Preface to Plato, Eric Havelock explains the Republic as an educational proposal, condemning poetry and exalting philosophy. Havelock argues that the Greeks used the poetic experience (memorization, oral transmission, performance, mimesis) to transmit the nomos and ethos to their young. Greek education was the experience of Homer and Hesiod; Greek moral education was thus the morality of the theatre, and specifically the experience of the theatre. Socrates, it seems, argues for an abstracted analysis of morality, one which requires the thinker to detach from the thought; to detach from the opinion of poetry into the truth of philosophy. It is only through understanding this educational skirmish that the theory of forms make any sense. At any rate, Plato eventually determines that  "The Supreme Music is Philosophy" Here is Havelock in summation: "Two protagonists have confronted us, in the shapes of two different types of mentality: there is the player we have labelled as Homeric, largely because that is the label Plato himself prefers for him; but he is really the pan-Hellenic performer of yesterday, the revered archetype of a long line of poets who is still good for one more turn. And there is his Platonic antagonist, young, sophisticated, discontented, who aggressively challenges his rival's prestige. The third person in this comedy stands between them and can be identified in Greek terms as the goddess "Music", or as "Paideia." She is a way of thinking and feeling and also of living..." For Homer and Hesiod, Music is the everlasting rhythm of dactyls and spondees, and the shining verbal scenery of the swift black ships upon the Trojan shores. For Plato, Music is professional thinking, the subtle beginnings of science and theory.

For neither is it instruction on an instrument, or group singing. This is the lowest music, musica mundi, a necessary and useful technique, but a relatively unimportant one. Mundane is the perfect word. And this is the truth that must be acknowledged before any meaningful discussion can be had on the subject of modern music education: It isn't as important as reading, mathematics, or philosophy. It just isn't. I intend to write more about the subject in future days, but it's nearly time to start preparing for my concert tonight, where I shall be paid for all of the countless hours that my music educators put into my training. (Guilt?) It would also be worth discussing at some point the mindset between experience and abstraction as modes of education as pertains to the modern church service.

Reading Aeneid 6, Iliad 3, Rev 15, Is 43, GKC on Shakespeare, and Udolpho. Playing La Mer!