"Decorate" has gotten a bad rap: it used to be that human bodies, habitations (including barns for domestic animals), textiles, clothing, and ritual instruments (musical & otherwise) were "decorated" with potent signs and symbols for protection, fertility, proclamation, alignment, pleasure, etc. Most people with tattoos nowadays would recognize this significance.
A passage from Plato’s Laws is quite informative here (Book III, I believe). He makes a distinction between playing or dancing well, and the nature of the content actually being performed ie that not only the performance is “good,” but that what’s being performed is itself actually good. Two very different, yet intimately connected questions.
One can perform a Taylor Swift song very well, but is that the same as performing a Mozart violin concerto very well? Wherein lies the difference and is it just a matter of taste? What happens to a society that sees no difference?
I think that’s the central paradox being posed by Plato.
Plato also called songs “charms.” But here again, there are different kinds of charms… What exactly is society allowing itself to be charmed by? Are we allowed to ask that question, and what happens when we do? Are there both good and bad charms?
I think Plato, along with many others, were arguing that all is not just a matter of taste. In fact, the question of taste is of the highest civilizational, cultural and metaphysical significance.
A mature society cannot avoid these questions. And Plato, I reckon, would say that we ignore these questions at our own peril.
I think it goes back to what Plato laid out in his Republic and later dialogues. In fact, he technically set the bar for all future literary and artistic criticism.
The poets were the image-makers of society. So, in many ways they were the Hollywood and media of today. If we think of it that way, Plato was making a fair point when he argued that poetry and art were about more than just painting compelling images and rousing people into trance-like states. That happens whether the art is actually truthful, or simply compelling with catchy or memorable rhymes and rhythms.
I wrote a very extensive piece on this subject, as part of a much longer series “From Trance to Transcendende.” Here’s “Allowing the Poets into the Republic: Plato’s War Against Public Opinion.m”:
Right on, Ted! I think something similar has happened in medicine (Ardent’s “healing”). It’s not even not even “medicine” anymore, it’s “healthcare service delivery”, and “physicians” are healthcare providers and the sick are not patients they are clients or customers or, in many c-suites, just plain old “consumers”.
A couple of things occur to me. I haven't read other comments, so I don't know if mine will be redundant. I hope not.
1. I don't think I'm alone in this, but it has long been my sense that Plato, through his mouthpiece Socrates, had an ambitious project. He was hoping to displace Homer (and Hesiod too, I suppose) as the basis for wisdom and foundation for education for the ancient world. Thus, his disparagements of poetry, and Homer in particular in The Republic and other dialogues. One of the most amusing examples of that project comes in the dialogue Ion, when Socrates gets the award-winning rhapsode Ion to admit that he doesn't know skata about Homer.
2. I don't know what translations you're consulting, but in ancient Greece, the term "music" would not have distinguished between what we call poetry and music as we mean the word today. If Socrates was having dreams urging him to be a musician, it could suggest that the Muses were calling him through his dreams to assume the same bardic role that Homer had among the ancient Greeks.
3. Your comments on Smith's attitude about music and your inferences about Plato, Aristotle, et al. on the same topic underscore one of the key differences between the thinking that formed the ancient and modern worlds. We moderns are instrumentalists from the word go, whereas the ancients actually believed and promoted the idea that there were ends worth pursuing for their own sake. As an English teacher, I'm constantly finding myself at odds with students and parents who wonder what they're going to be able to do with what I'm teaching.
Good info on point 2, I thought Ted was referring to Phaedo but I didn't remember anything mentioned about music as the translation I read used the word poetry.
Charles Taylor's latest work "Cosmic Connections: Poetry in the Age of Disenchantment " argues that the arts , especially in this work, Poetry, provide a source of connection to the cosmos, that is a human need . This connection once provided by religion , mythology and ritual, but has since the late 18th and early 19th century been met by the arts. Taylor says in his preface: " The desire for this connection is a human constant, felt by (at least some) people in all ages and phases of human history, but that the forms this desire takes have been very different in succeeding phases and stages of this history."
Also I believe that you may have already mentioned this video in a prior post but just in case , for the curious here's a performance of reconstructed ancient scores for the Aulos and chorus: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4hOK7bU0S1Y
These last few weeks were getting me down in the dumps. It came a head when the Supreme Court made its latest ruling on allowing Trump off the hook. And then the case of stealing files from Wash DC was dropped.
My only saving grace, at that time, was music. When confronted with text messages from my friends, l answered that l had to stop listening to the news and said that music was the only thing that made sense to me now. It saved me at that crucial time.
I got my degree in music in 1978. My instrument was classical guitar. I had intended to become a public school music teacher. I started guitar in 1968 when I was 16, the same year I began making photographs in the darkroom. By 1978 I had already begun to make a living as a photographer and print maker. I shot weddings and portraits.
After I finished at SF State University, my father started his own photo business and asked me for help. I worked part time for him while finishing my degree. By the time 1978 came along, his business was thriving and I found myself supervising over 12 employees. So I remained in the photographic industry until 2014 when I finally closed my own photo lab in San Francisco.
Today, my daughter teaches music in the middle school where she (and I) attended. She was assigned the guitar class to teach, so I help her teach guitar two days a week. I am finally teaching music as I had intended so many years ago.
I gave up my darkroom just last year; I set up a black and white lab after I closed my color lab and I began teaching film photography on youtube. I decided to stop doing photography when I felt that I had taught everything I wanted on youtube. It was then that I began to play guitar again for myself.
Since I was teaching pop tunes to the kids at the middle school, I wanted to do something totally different. I began to pick up jazz guitar. I had delved into it many years ago but was never proficient in it. The band teacher at the middle school helped me as he is an excellent jazz guitarist himself.
Because I needed to find peace in an endeavor to not focus on my country's troubles, I began to lean heavily on jazz music in order to find some kind of sense of being. Funny thing, improvising began (finally) to make sense.
So, in order to answer your question, it was jazz music that saved me from going insane. One more thing. Ted Gioia mentions that an early drawback to music making was that it was gone as soon as it was made. This gave music a bad reputation and caused some to discard it as a waste of time. Well, when I improvise and feel good about something I just made up, it feels SO GOOD! It is true that it is gone as soon as it's done. And, if I happened to have recorded it, and I listen to it, it may sound okay, BUT IT DOESN'T MAKE ME FEEL AS GOOD AS WHEN I PLAYED IT. Does this discount the music making? No, because I live for those moments. God knows it's a better feeling than when I listen to the news.
"Music is our most trusted pathway into a world of beauty and enchantment. It transforms our lives in a way that everyday products of consumption can’t replicate"
Beautiful. And count me in on side 2. Music is the only sensory experience I'd lay down my life to protect. All my life, it's been my most reliable and often only conduit to whatever we want to call God.
A complicated issue indeed, but you seem to be conflating marketplace value with personal spiritual value. Perhaps Socrates' end-of-life conclusion about music was about striving for a nobler path as opposed to materialistic pursuits of the marketplace. Seen in this way, music is a kind of higher calling - a "blessed vocation" as you say. It's fine to advocate for better compensation for average musicians (I'm one myself), but arguing on one hand that music is a glorious and lasting end in itself that transcends the marketplace, and on the other, complaining that the marketplace doesn't want to pay money for it seems incoherent. I totally get the tension though, and have struggled with it my whole career. Love your writing! Thanks for what you do.
I think Smith may have been referring to music's utility as a product. While it is true that I value it a great deal myself, I often find myself adopting the Cage position--that is that we organize sounds into our music ourselves.
I think perhaps he saw no real utility to the occupation, but the three arts the Greeks mentioned had one thing in common-they were curative arts and could calm or excite people (The Greeks, despite their intelligence, had some rather odd beliefs around the use of modes, which, to this day I find very funny!)
So, as a musician myself, I can understand Smith's position. Why IS Taylor Swift paid so much. I think the music is okay, but I have also been around long enough that people value music as a shared social experience as well. Music, by itself, as a valued commodity, has little value to some people and a great deal of value to others, depending on what they EXPECT the music to do for/to them. The value isn't explicitly in the music; it's in the shared experience. And its current commercial weight, to a degree, distorts artistic adventure.
Absolutely. I am an old man ,but a while back thought - I should check this out anyway. SInce I am a Multi -Instrumentalist /performer /vocalist for over 50 years.
I had already been aware of what she looks like & how she dresses in her Modern "stage attire" ( sorry - to me, not interesting ,desirable or sexy at all. She reminds me of a slightly overweight ,overdressed cheerleader in sparkly suits. Ugggh).
Then I listened to the music - for about 2 or 3 minutes. Definitely insipid & uninspired. Not much soul ,funk ,swing or charisma whatsoever. Sorry - but I found it to be lame pop I had hear a Hundred times before.
Ted, you're not doing justice to Aristotle here. I'm sure you've read his Politics numerous times, where he writes at length about the importance of music in education, concluding that "it is for that part of life one spends in leisure", which is "the way of life suited to free people" (1338a20-25). Thus "music is to be used to enhance the joy of living and a way of life suited to freedom" (1339b4-5). Aristotle prized leisure (scholē) far above mere busy-ness; earlier in the Politics he had said that "Nature itself strives not only to be busy in the right way but also to be capable of being at leisure in a beautiful way. For this one principle governs everything, so let us speak about it again. If one has need of both, but being at leisure is more worthy of choice and more an end than being busy, what needs to be sought out is what one ought to spend one's leisure doing." (1337b28-33) Maybe he didn't like the aulos, but he deeply valued music (of the right character-forming variety, anyway) and in the Nicomachean Ethics frequently used kithara-players as examples of craftspeople - and thus of practical wisdom. You know all this, so it's disappointing that you don't bring Aristotle in as an ancient witness for the transformative power of music.
Years ago I knew a brilliant girl, a flute player, graduating high school with a 4.0 grade point average. Heading for college, she was torn between majoring in mathematics or music performance. Without counseling her which to choose, I pointed out that math shows us how to build; music shows us how to live.
“Musical innovation is full of danger to the State, for when modes of music change, the fundamental laws of the State always change with them.” - Plato, "The Republic"
The Memory for Music section makes me think of the Jean Michel Basquiat lines
“Art is how we decorate space;
Music is how we decorate time.”
Our memories are of moments in time.
"Our memories are of moments in time."
Love that line.
I thought of this as I was reading, too! Thank you for posting the actual quote🙏
"Decorate" has gotten a bad rap: it used to be that human bodies, habitations (including barns for domestic animals), textiles, clothing, and ritual instruments (musical & otherwise) were "decorated" with potent signs and symbols for protection, fertility, proclamation, alignment, pleasure, etc. Most people with tattoos nowadays would recognize this significance.
I read "decorate" here as something like "sanctify by adorning."
A passage from Plato’s Laws is quite informative here (Book III, I believe). He makes a distinction between playing or dancing well, and the nature of the content actually being performed ie that not only the performance is “good,” but that what’s being performed is itself actually good. Two very different, yet intimately connected questions.
One can perform a Taylor Swift song very well, but is that the same as performing a Mozart violin concerto very well? Wherein lies the difference and is it just a matter of taste? What happens to a society that sees no difference?
I think that’s the central paradox being posed by Plato.
Plato also called songs “charms.” But here again, there are different kinds of charms… What exactly is society allowing itself to be charmed by? Are we allowed to ask that question, and what happens when we do? Are there both good and bad charms?
I think Plato, along with many others, were arguing that all is not just a matter of taste. In fact, the question of taste is of the highest civilizational, cultural and metaphysical significance.
A mature society cannot avoid these questions. And Plato, I reckon, would say that we ignore these questions at our own peril.
David, you raise a thought-provoking point about the nature of artistic and cultural values.
How do you think modern society can engage in meaningful discussions about the quality and impact of the art and media we consume?
I think it goes back to what Plato laid out in his Republic and later dialogues. In fact, he technically set the bar for all future literary and artistic criticism.
The poets were the image-makers of society. So, in many ways they were the Hollywood and media of today. If we think of it that way, Plato was making a fair point when he argued that poetry and art were about more than just painting compelling images and rousing people into trance-like states. That happens whether the art is actually truthful, or simply compelling with catchy or memorable rhymes and rhythms.
I wrote a very extensive piece on this subject, as part of a much longer series “From Trance to Transcendende.” Here’s “Allowing the Poets into the Republic: Plato’s War Against Public Opinion.m”:
https://ageofmuses.substack.com/p/allowing-the-poets-into-the-republic?utm_source=substack&utm_campaign=post_embed&utm_medium=web
It was partly written in response and dialogue with Ted Gioia (and Plato, of course).
"But where the party consists of thorough gentlemen who have had a proper education"
Doesn't sound like a very fun party. Bring on the flute girls!
Cool name!! We must battle the windmills, I mean tech giants, and spread this hope:
“believe music is a source of enchantment and a change agent in human life.”
Thanks! I'm pretty proud of it - it suits me and the tone I want for my Substack well. Do you know the Joni Mitchell reference?
Yes, sir! Love Joni💕
“We are all hopelessly oppressed cowards
Of some duality
Of restless multiplicity”🎶🎶
Right on, Ted! I think something similar has happened in medicine (Ardent’s “healing”). It’s not even not even “medicine” anymore, it’s “healthcare service delivery”, and “physicians” are healthcare providers and the sick are not patients they are clients or customers or, in many c-suites, just plain old “consumers”.
Gillian Welch encapsulates the streaming monsters in this wonderful song:
Everything is free now
That's what they say
Everything I ever done
Gonna give it away
Someone hit the big score
They figured it out
That we're gonna do it anyway
Even if it doesn't pay
I can get a tip jar
Gas up the car
Try to make a little change
Down at the bar
Or I can get a straight job
I've done it before
Never minded working hard
It's who I'm working for
And everything is free now
That's what they say
Everything I ever done
Gotta give it away
Someone hit the big score
They figured it out
That we're gonna do it anyway
Even if it doesn't pay
Every day I wake up
Hummin' a song
But I don't need to run around
I just stay home
And sing a little love song
My love, to myself
If there's something that you want to hear
You can sing it yourself
'Cause everything is free now
That's what I say
No one's got to listen to
The words in my head
Someone hit the big score
And I figured it out
That we're gonna do it anyway
Even if it doesn't pay
A couple of things occur to me. I haven't read other comments, so I don't know if mine will be redundant. I hope not.
1. I don't think I'm alone in this, but it has long been my sense that Plato, through his mouthpiece Socrates, had an ambitious project. He was hoping to displace Homer (and Hesiod too, I suppose) as the basis for wisdom and foundation for education for the ancient world. Thus, his disparagements of poetry, and Homer in particular in The Republic and other dialogues. One of the most amusing examples of that project comes in the dialogue Ion, when Socrates gets the award-winning rhapsode Ion to admit that he doesn't know skata about Homer.
2. I don't know what translations you're consulting, but in ancient Greece, the term "music" would not have distinguished between what we call poetry and music as we mean the word today. If Socrates was having dreams urging him to be a musician, it could suggest that the Muses were calling him through his dreams to assume the same bardic role that Homer had among the ancient Greeks.
3. Your comments on Smith's attitude about music and your inferences about Plato, Aristotle, et al. on the same topic underscore one of the key differences between the thinking that formed the ancient and modern worlds. We moderns are instrumentalists from the word go, whereas the ancients actually believed and promoted the idea that there were ends worth pursuing for their own sake. As an English teacher, I'm constantly finding myself at odds with students and parents who wonder what they're going to be able to do with what I'm teaching.
Thanks for another great post.
Good info on point 2, I thought Ted was referring to Phaedo but I didn't remember anything mentioned about music as the translation I read used the word poetry.
Charles Taylor's latest work "Cosmic Connections: Poetry in the Age of Disenchantment " argues that the arts , especially in this work, Poetry, provide a source of connection to the cosmos, that is a human need . This connection once provided by religion , mythology and ritual, but has since the late 18th and early 19th century been met by the arts. Taylor says in his preface: " The desire for this connection is a human constant, felt by (at least some) people in all ages and phases of human history, but that the forms this desire takes have been very different in succeeding phases and stages of this history."
Also I believe that you may have already mentioned this video in a prior post but just in case , for the curious here's a performance of reconstructed ancient scores for the Aulos and chorus: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4hOK7bU0S1Y
Thank you for the link. It's brilliant stuff.
These last few weeks were getting me down in the dumps. It came a head when the Supreme Court made its latest ruling on allowing Trump off the hook. And then the case of stealing files from Wash DC was dropped.
My only saving grace, at that time, was music. When confronted with text messages from my friends, l answered that l had to stop listening to the news and said that music was the only thing that made sense to me now. It saved me at that crucial time.
I like that Timothy, music has a powerful way of lifting our spirits and providing comfort during tough times.
What types or genres of music have you found most soothing or uplifting during these challenging weeks?
I got my degree in music in 1978. My instrument was classical guitar. I had intended to become a public school music teacher. I started guitar in 1968 when I was 16, the same year I began making photographs in the darkroom. By 1978 I had already begun to make a living as a photographer and print maker. I shot weddings and portraits.
After I finished at SF State University, my father started his own photo business and asked me for help. I worked part time for him while finishing my degree. By the time 1978 came along, his business was thriving and I found myself supervising over 12 employees. So I remained in the photographic industry until 2014 when I finally closed my own photo lab in San Francisco.
Today, my daughter teaches music in the middle school where she (and I) attended. She was assigned the guitar class to teach, so I help her teach guitar two days a week. I am finally teaching music as I had intended so many years ago.
I gave up my darkroom just last year; I set up a black and white lab after I closed my color lab and I began teaching film photography on youtube. I decided to stop doing photography when I felt that I had taught everything I wanted on youtube. It was then that I began to play guitar again for myself.
Since I was teaching pop tunes to the kids at the middle school, I wanted to do something totally different. I began to pick up jazz guitar. I had delved into it many years ago but was never proficient in it. The band teacher at the middle school helped me as he is an excellent jazz guitarist himself.
Because I needed to find peace in an endeavor to not focus on my country's troubles, I began to lean heavily on jazz music in order to find some kind of sense of being. Funny thing, improvising began (finally) to make sense.
So, in order to answer your question, it was jazz music that saved me from going insane. One more thing. Ted Gioia mentions that an early drawback to music making was that it was gone as soon as it was made. This gave music a bad reputation and caused some to discard it as a waste of time. Well, when I improvise and feel good about something I just made up, it feels SO GOOD! It is true that it is gone as soon as it's done. And, if I happened to have recorded it, and I listen to it, it may sound okay, BUT IT DOESN'T MAKE ME FEEL AS GOOD AS WHEN I PLAYED IT. Does this discount the music making? No, because I live for those moments. God knows it's a better feeling than when I listen to the news.
Thank you for telling this part of your story, it‘s so uplifting and confirming.
"Music is our most trusted pathway into a world of beauty and enchantment. It transforms our lives in a way that everyday products of consumption can’t replicate"
Beautiful. And count me in on side 2. Music is the only sensory experience I'd lay down my life to protect. All my life, it's been my most reliable and often only conduit to whatever we want to call God.
Those that believe music has no value, yet make millions off of the musicians that labored to make it, have in themselves no value.
I'm no musician, but I am transported far away by the very thing that is so ephemeral, and beautiful.
A complicated issue indeed, but you seem to be conflating marketplace value with personal spiritual value. Perhaps Socrates' end-of-life conclusion about music was about striving for a nobler path as opposed to materialistic pursuits of the marketplace. Seen in this way, music is a kind of higher calling - a "blessed vocation" as you say. It's fine to advocate for better compensation for average musicians (I'm one myself), but arguing on one hand that music is a glorious and lasting end in itself that transcends the marketplace, and on the other, complaining that the marketplace doesn't want to pay money for it seems incoherent. I totally get the tension though, and have struggled with it my whole career. Love your writing! Thanks for what you do.
I think Smith may have been referring to music's utility as a product. While it is true that I value it a great deal myself, I often find myself adopting the Cage position--that is that we organize sounds into our music ourselves.
I think perhaps he saw no real utility to the occupation, but the three arts the Greeks mentioned had one thing in common-they were curative arts and could calm or excite people (The Greeks, despite their intelligence, had some rather odd beliefs around the use of modes, which, to this day I find very funny!)
So, as a musician myself, I can understand Smith's position. Why IS Taylor Swift paid so much. I think the music is okay, but I have also been around long enough that people value music as a shared social experience as well. Music, by itself, as a valued commodity, has little value to some people and a great deal of value to others, depending on what they EXPECT the music to do for/to them. The value isn't explicitly in the music; it's in the shared experience. And its current commercial weight, to a degree, distorts artistic adventure.
Taylor Swift? Sorry, I don't get it. She could stage a concert in my back yard and I'd make arrangements to be out of the house.
Absolutely. I am an old man ,but a while back thought - I should check this out anyway. SInce I am a Multi -Instrumentalist /performer /vocalist for over 50 years.
I had already been aware of what she looks like & how she dresses in her Modern "stage attire" ( sorry - to me, not interesting ,desirable or sexy at all. She reminds me of a slightly overweight ,overdressed cheerleader in sparkly suits. Ugggh).
Then I listened to the music - for about 2 or 3 minutes. Definitely insipid & uninspired. Not much soul ,funk ,swing or charisma whatsoever. Sorry - but I found it to be lame pop I had hear a Hundred times before.
Nope
No hostility. I realize it is the Bomb in our Weak & Lame ,Mediocre modern society but No thanks you can have it - & you will. I am totally irrelevant
Ted, you're not doing justice to Aristotle here. I'm sure you've read his Politics numerous times, where he writes at length about the importance of music in education, concluding that "it is for that part of life one spends in leisure", which is "the way of life suited to free people" (1338a20-25). Thus "music is to be used to enhance the joy of living and a way of life suited to freedom" (1339b4-5). Aristotle prized leisure (scholē) far above mere busy-ness; earlier in the Politics he had said that "Nature itself strives not only to be busy in the right way but also to be capable of being at leisure in a beautiful way. For this one principle governs everything, so let us speak about it again. If one has need of both, but being at leisure is more worthy of choice and more an end than being busy, what needs to be sought out is what one ought to spend one's leisure doing." (1337b28-33) Maybe he didn't like the aulos, but he deeply valued music (of the right character-forming variety, anyway) and in the Nicomachean Ethics frequently used kithara-players as examples of craftspeople - and thus of practical wisdom. You know all this, so it's disappointing that you don't bring Aristotle in as an ancient witness for the transformative power of music.
Years ago I knew a brilliant girl, a flute player, graduating high school with a 4.0 grade point average. Heading for college, she was torn between majoring in mathematics or music performance. Without counseling her which to choose, I pointed out that math shows us how to build; music shows us how to live.
“Musical innovation is full of danger to the State, for when modes of music change, the fundamental laws of the State always change with them.” - Plato, "The Republic"