Historically, of course, music is no poor relation
of the arts and sciences. In the golden age of Greece it occupied a post
of honor. The Platonic dialogues show music to be never very far from the
thoughts of Socrates and his fellow Athenians. Besides offering witty,
elegant, and often profound comment on the subject, the dialogues give
music an important philosophical role. In the Timaeus, Plato tells
a “likely story” of a creator who imposed on
originally irreconcilable elements
the mathematical pattern of the ratios of a musical scale, in order to
fashion the soul of the universe. Elsewhere, as in The Republic
(Book III), Plato finds that music imposes order on the motions of the
body and the soul, teaching gracious and harmonious conduct and giving
the young student a knowledge of good and evil. Three years, says Plato
in the Laws, should be devoted to learning how to play the lyre
and to kindred musical subjects. Philosophical discussions must be included
so that the student will never be deceived by “appearances”
and forget
the true music of which this earthly music is only a shadow. For a music
lover only interested in sounds, the kind that conservatories then as now
produced, Plato had contempt. They are “the last persons who would come
to anything like a philosophical discussion, if they could help, while
they run about at the Dionysiac festivals as if they had let out their
ears to hear every chorus; whether the performance is in town or
country—that makes no difference—they are there.”
The moral benefits to be derived from the study of music as Plato saw it gave music great importance in the Academy of Athens, where its relation to geometry and astronomy was endlessly discussed. This early association of subjects later played an important part in the plan of the Medieval university. Here music, one of the “seven liberal arts,” now systematized as a discipline, became a branch of mathematics. As the art of measurement, it was an object of major study for several centuries. Under this alliance with what we today call mathematical physics, our aural art, though occupying a lesser position, was widely cultivated. And in the Renaissance, so long as Medieval thinking continued to dominate education, no education, according to Thomas Morley, was complete without some actual musical training in playing or singing. That the practice of musicians was deeply influenced by the liberal arts discipline is written on the pages of every treatise of the period. In turn, the practice of music itself influenced thinking in many different fields, as witness the treatises on architecture by Palladio and on astronomy by Kepler. Kepler in the early seventeenth century drew extended analogies between Copernican heliocentric theory and the art of polyphony of his day, contrasting it to Ptolemy’s analogy between Greek music and the geocentric theory. His method enabled him to describe the orbit of the planet Mars, a mathematical mystery before his time.
Elliott Carter
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