Throughout my life as a musician, I have always been interested in the relationship between music and its influence on society. Such interest got fostered by observations made during piano performances and confirming the various effects different pieces had on listeners.

     A couple of years ago I went to Italy where I spent two years.  Coupled with my music studies there, I also took some Philosophy and Ethics courses at the Regina Apostolorum University in Rome and started reading about the theories of ancient Greek philosophers on the “ethos” of musical modes and the way they could be used to shape a person’s character towards either virtue or recklessness.  I found Plato and Aristotle’s writings on music and its impact on society fascinating and developed a great interest in the subject. It was then when I began to understand how crucial it is that musicians use their art with the highest purpose of improving society.

       For the Greeks, beauty was based on order and proportion, contrary to ugliness, which was the result of chaos.   Art was meant to be an expression of what was regarded as beautiful so as to bring order into the life of a society. 

     At that time, music and poetry were considered the most important arts.  Aristotle considered them to have the quality of imitation and be intimately bound together.  Like music, poetry combined words and rhythms in a melodic manner that imitated the objects of nature.  “Epic poetry and Tragedy, Comedy also and a Dithyrambic poetry, and the music of the flute and of the lyre in most of their forms, are all in their general conception modes of imitation.”[1]   According to Aristotle, imitation was one of our natural instincts. Therefore, through music we could instinctively imitate qualities of character like anger, gentleness, temperance, courage, among others.  He stated how “every tune, even if it has no words, has nevertheless character.”[2] Because music was able to imitate or reproduce “ethos,” it was also capable of shaping it.  For such reason, rhythm and harmony had to be ruled by reason in order to produce music that would contribute to the raising of virtuous citizens.  Aristotle believed that music, as a means of powerful emotional expression, should aim to spread moral goodness.

     Plato manifested a somewhat similar view to that of Aristotle in his book called The Republic. The word “republic” comes from the Latin “Res-Publica” which means “Public Matters.”  Music was one of the most important aspects of Greek society.  Man was not supposed to use the means of music (rhythm and harmony) for his own sake but give a purpose to it.  Such purpose was to discover the kind of music that would best contribute to the edification of culture.  Socrates said “we shouldn’t strive to have either subtlety or great variety in meter.  Rather, we should try to discover what are the rhythms of someone who leads an ordered and courageous life.”[3]

     Both Plato and Aristotle stated that musical training had to be given the greatest attention when educating the young.  Plato also states throughout the different “dialogues” in The Republic that music should not be regarded simply as a form of amusement.  On the contrary, he writes that when music is considered harmless and allowed license, “it flows little by little into characters and ways of life.  Then, greatly increased, it steps out into private contracts, and from private contracts, it makes its insolent way into laws and government, until in the end it overthrows everything, public and private.”[4]

     The foundations of the Greeks’ musical aesthetics were based on matching beauty to the result of good use of rhythm, harmony, and grace. Those elements would be transferred into man’s character as goodness and other virtues.  Rhythm was the strongest element of the three.  Indeed, Plato assured that grace, or the absence of it, was the result of good or bad rhythm.  The final effect of combining both good rhythm and harmony would help man discern what was good from what was not.  In other words, musical elements were considered to have a direct spiritual command on man that affected not only his aesthetical but also his ethical judgment regarding all matters.  That was the reason why philosophers like Plato, Aristotle and his predecessors (Socrates and Pythagoras among others), paid so much attention to the kinds of rhythms and harmonies that were used in their civilization, for “rhythm and harmony permeate the inner part of the soul more than anything else, affecting it most strongly.”[5]

     The matter of proportion in ancient Greece was applied from physical beauty to perfection of moral character.  They associated the beautiful to the good and considered order to be intimately related to both.  Plato identifies order and goodness in his concept of the universe’s creation when he says that God, who desired all things to be good, “finding the visible universe in a state not of rest but of inharmonious and disorderly motion, reduced it to order from disorder” as he judged that order was in every way better .[6]

The Artist as Artisan

      

     One of the earliest musical treatises written by Guido de Arezzo tells us how Pythagoras, the great Greek philosopher and mathematician, came to discover the proportion of numerical ratios in relation to the harmonic consonance of sound.  While walking by a workshop where five hammers were beating out tones, Pythagoras came to realize that four of the five possessed a quality that made them sound well together.  He was able to recognize the one that was dissonant so he took it apart from the others and weighted the other four.  The hammers weighted twelve, nine, eight and six units.  “Thus he learned that the science of music depended upon numerical ratios and comparisons; for there was precisely the interrelationship among the four hammers that there is among the notes A, D, E and a."[7] The result of Pythagoras’s experiment showed a perfect consonant tetrachord in which the four notes corresponded to the ones that formed the diapason.    

     From the times of Plato and Aristotle through the Renaissance era, musicians, poets, sculptors and painters were all considered to be artisans.  They were required to make and organize certain elements.  Stravinsky in his Poetics says that for the Greek philosophers “…the single word techne embraced both the fine arts and the useful arts and was applied to the knowledge and study of the certain and inevitable rules of the craft.  That is why Aristotle’s Poetics constantly suggests ideas regarding personal work, arrangement of materials, and structure.”[8] Such idea of arrangement was connected to the fact that art had to bring order out of chaos.  Stravinsky speaks about the need for some kind of “dogmatism” which allows us to discern order.  Even though an artist may choose to arrange elements in a certain way and dare to explore new territories in the field of aesthetics, he still has the need to focus on some objective truth given by the laws inscribed in the physical and metaphysical levels of the universe.  The aesthetic decisions taken by the artisan and his creative process have to “operate in a pitiless light.”[9] 

     Stravinsky explained that in the art of making music, elements given by nature are like promises yet to be fulfilled.  “Sounds suggest music but there are not yet themselves music.”[10] We should perceive them as its formal components. However we can neither emancipate nor isolate them, attributing a random combination of sounds the label of music.  Music implies the work of a human being who listens to the sounds given by nature and possesses the aesthetic sensitivity and talent to put them together into a certain order.  That is the meaning of every true art. 

      Stravinsky said that art “is the contrary of chaos.  It never gives itself up to chaos without immediately finding its living works, its very existence, threatened.”  However, what we have come to realize in the last century is that all disciplines of art have fallen into a chosen chaos.  In other words, artists seem to sympathize with the idea of chaos as a means to innovative.  In music, such trend started developing in the early twentieth century.  “Our vanguard elite”, states Stravinsky, “expects and requires that music should satisfy the taste for absurd cacophony.”[11] Stravinsky blames it on the snobs who delight to find themselves among the incomprehensible, not searching for beauty but rather condescending to their audiences with sensationalism and the effect of shock.[12] At this point, order and proportion have been misinterpreted.  What trend of thought is at the root of such misinterpretation?

Relativism of Beauty: A philosophical stand

    

     Dr. Brian K. Etter, a contemporary philosopher, states that music and philosophy are intimately connected and their relationship is crucial to understand the “dogmatism” in music, as Stravinsky would regard its laws of order.  He explains how the current problem of “understanding a subjectivist aesthetic value arises only because the historical quest for knowing the good has been abandoned.”[13] Goodness and Beauty were attributes intimately related by the Greeks.  In his Philebus, Plato stresses that “The power of the Good has taken refuge in the nature of the Beautiful.”[14]   Therefore, if one ceases to exist the other will also decay. 

      In the fourth century, Augustine asserted in his treatise “De Musica” that beauty “is not relative to the perceiver but only appears to be because of the imperfect nature of the process of perception.”[15]   Therefore, the roots of relativism in beauty are to be found in the relativistic approach which states it first stems from the mind, a stand that has been largely adopted by the West.  Such approach gained particular strength throughout the second half of the twentieth century and has prevailed into our current century.   The crisis of calology is to be found in ontology,[16]a crisis which has subdued all arts (including  music) to the extremes of both rationalism and subjectivism.  The particular characteristics of art, which reside in appealing directly to the heart and evading the analytical process of intellect, have been forgotten and replaced by “philosophical statements”.  Artists are no longer the artisans, the craft-makers of beauty, but individuals who isolate themselves in their own perception of reality.  They bring to their works an unintelligible reflection of personal experience which, to others, acquires new subjective meaning.   

      “Art, the queen of a language that tended towards universal communication, winds up as the spent, lamenting song of many separate individuals who continually look only upon and speak only to themselves.  Exhibits have become the “confessional” of what happened within persons no longer able to go out of themselves.”[17] Such statement can be deemed to very accurate to describe music over the last decades.  From the dawn of serialism through the most advanced so called “experimental music” of our days, musicians have distanced themselves from musical reality.  Cage’s 4’33” represented a sort of anthem to musical relativism and a passport to those who were interested in pursuing the trail of greater innovators.  Silence, as the absence of sound, was celebrated as music.

‘L’Art pour L’Art’

     “One thinks only for the sake of one’s idea.  And thus art can only be created for its own sake.  An idea is born; it must be molded, formulated, developed, elaborated, carried through and pursued to its very end.  Because there is only ‘l’art pour l’art’, art for the sake of art alone.”[18]   According to this statement, any idea can be turned into art.  However, it can be said that everything created in the universe has a purpose.  Even the most primitive forms of existence have a reason for being. Likewise, it may be stated that man, with his highly intellectual and spiritual faculties, acts with a purpose when carrying out all his conscious acts.  It is impossible for art to exist deprived of meaning and purpose, for art is the product of the cooperation between man and creation.  Whenever man assumes the role of an artisan, he unavoidably makes something which, depending on the rules of craft he chooses to follow, would define the final product as something that is beautiful or not.  The final product of a work of art does not stand by itself nor has any intrinsic value.  The worth of a musical work only suffices as long as it fulfils its formal purpose: to please the listener.  As clever as the works of some composers who belong to the modern school of thinking may seem, they will mostly fail in achieving the primary task of musical arts.  There has been an endless debate about aesthetics in music that tries to discern what lacks musical value and what may just be the consequence of our ears not being used to listening to new kinds of musical expressions.

      Human beings possess an innate capacity for recognizing consonances.  This is rooted in the laws of physics and the harmonic series given by nature.  The closer the proximity of the overtone to the tonal center, the more the ear gets pleased.   At this point, it is relevant to recall the experience of Pythagoras discovering the diapason in the hammers.  He listened and was able to identify the hammer which did not match the other four pitches of the diapason.  There was no research done on the nature of the hammer. It was just his ear which discriminated the one that did not belong. 

     Carl E. Seashore, a psychologist who devoted his work to the investigation of the musical phenomena in human beings explained how even the “untutored and relatively unmusical tend to experience an immediate feeling of pleasure in the art forms, even they lack any capacity for knowing wherein the beauty of the music lies.”[19]

      During my time at New York University I  had the opportunity to teach about sixty university students who were coming from various fields other than music.  I made the same sort of experiment with each of them.   At some point during the first two lessons I would play a dissonant chord.  Ninety-eight percent of all students reacted immediately by saying “that sounds wrong.”  To Bernstein, such sense of tonality “is built into the human organism.”[20] He explained that whenever we hear two isolated tones, we immediately impute unto them a tonal relationship.  Even though the tonal meaning we infer may vary, we do recognize an interval which belongs to a tonal center. 

      In another study on behavior related to music, Dr. Clifford K. Madsen, a Florida State University Professor, found that music appreciation seems to exist in every human being.  He explained that “musically trained adults do not seem to differ appreciably when compared to other non-musically trained adults… Additionally, it seems to me that subjects in all these studies were responding to emotional aspects elicited by the music regardless of the “aesthetic” definition.  These results raise some interesting questions. If the most “beautiful,” or “emotionally pleasing”, as well as the most important music of our Western cultural tradition can be attended to and assimilated by most people, then the idea that formal training predisposes one to be more aesthetically inclined or enhances one’s “appreciation” begins to be suspected.”[21]

      Schopenhauer also supports the aforementioned theory, stating that “whatever ability the artist must possess must be possessed too by his audience: “this ability must be inherent in all men in a lesser and different degree, as otherwise they would be just as incapable of enjoying works of art as producing them.”[22]

      Bernstein declares that “the moment a composer tries to “abstract” musical tones by denying them their tonal implications, he has left the world of communication.”[23] Such could be the crisis of “new music” in our time. There is the search for novelty but such novelty lacks any communicative force or communitarian meaning.[24]

      Bernstein reminds us that a lot of people do not like modern music.  “No,” they say, “I can’t take all that cacophony and noise.  I may be old-fashioned, but I hate dissonance.  It is all so dissonant, and it has no melody.  It’s a sign of the times, of our machine age, of our neuroses …But the question they are really asking is: “What has happened to beauty, the kind of beauty we associate with Mozart and Tchaikovsky?” Have modern composers forgotten about beauty?”[25] 

The Question on Beauty

      

     In Bernstein’s 1976 Harvard lectures, which bear the name of “The Unanswered Question”, he queried where music was going.  His question still remains unanswered.  Over the last few decades, many composers have tried to experiment with innovative ways of delivering music. In the search for new sounds and more complex rhythms, music itself has been sacrificed.  However, questions are raised on what may be the musical language that composers of this kind of works are using or whether it may be an aesthetic language or a philosophical one.  Rhythm, proportion, balance and equilibrium, which sustain the unity of an art work[26] are no longer sought out and an ever changing meter gives the feeling of unbalance and instability.  Beauty, in many contemporary musical works that are widely acknowledged and appreciated, has ceased to exist.  But, why could a certain order and proportion, sustained by a rhythmic element, be of such importance to music? 

      The principles of symmetry and balance and their relation to rhythm are crucial not only to music itself, but also to music’s connection to the human body.  In his second of “The Unanswered Question” lectures, Bernstein explains that symmetry is “a universal concept based on our innate symmetrical instincts, which arise from the very structure of our bodies.”[27] In Aristotle’s Problemata, the Greek philosopher asks: “Why does everyone enjoy rhythm and tune, and in general all consonances?  Is it because we naturally enjoy natural movements? This is proved by the fact that newly born infants enjoy such.”[28]

      Our bodies are shaped by the double principle of “tension” and “release”.  Both of them are found in the function of organs that are indispensable for living: the heart and the lungs.  There is in us a rhythmic principle going on throughout our entire existence.  However, opposing principles are not limited to the physical body.  Our emotional expressions also carry within them the dualistic principle of action-reaction.  Rather than viewing these phenomena as an opposition, it is actually more appropriate to see them as complementary.  Such interaction, inherited from our human nature and the natural world as a whole (the movement of the astral bodies, the seasons, the cycle of life, to cite a few) is the phenomenon of “symmetrical balance”.  

      Different from symmetrical “mathematical proportions”, symmetrical balance takes into account many other elements that cannot be calculated by mathematical principles.  That is why human beings may be so touched and influenced by rhythm and why music (which aims to reach the highest aesthetic value) should pay close attention to the fundamental elements that modern music seems to forget.

      We should also take into consideration the need to find ways to make of music an art that may contribute to the building of a more humanitarian society.  Plato and Aristotle insisted in music as a “sine qua non of education.”[29] “…When Plato speaks of music – scientific as he is about almost everything else – he wanders into vague generalizations about harmony, love, rhythm, and those deities which could presumably carry a tune.  But he knew that there was nothing like piped music to carry soldiers into battle; and that certain Greek modes were better than others for love or war or wine festivals or crowning an athlete; and no amount of mathematics could or can explain that.[30]

      I believe that our quest for musical aesthetics must never cease.   On the contrary, we should look forward to enriching the legacy from the past, not by turning away from it but through the addition of both innovative and meaningful means of expression.  The ancient Greeks knew the power that exists within music and every work of art wherefrom true beauty stems.  Artists should aim to spread true beauty for “this world in which we live needs beauty in order not to sink into despair. Beauty, like truth, brings joy to the human heart and is that precious fruit which resists the erosion of time, which unites generations and enables them to be one in admiration!”.[31]