Plato & Socrates: the musical mind police

May 01, 2010

Preparing Louis Andriessen’s“De Staat” for a performance next week in Zankel Hall, I got to thinking about Plato and his strange comments about music.

“De Staat,” which is Dutch for “The Republic,” is a 35-minute setting of several of Plato’s texts about music and politics for a quartet of amplified female voices and an industrial-strength ensemble of brass, electric guitars, winds and pianos. Composed between 1972-76, it is a fabulously high energy meeting of Stravinskian primitivism, funky American bebop and ritualistic Indonesian modalities. It is a masterpiece, emphatically one of the best works of the early era of Minimalism.

Plato’s writings about music go with Adorno’s about jazz. You read them and seriously wonder how a great analytic mind could make such bizarre evaluations and see such subversive evils lying hidden behind the tones.

In the composer’s note to the score of “De Staat,” Andriessen writes:

“Many composers view the act of composing as somehow above social conditioning. I contest that. How your musical material, the techniques you use and the instruments you score for, are largely determined by your own social circumstances and listening experience, and the availability of financial support. I do agree, though, that abstract musical material—pitch, duration and rhythm—are beyond social conditioning: it is found in nature. However, the moment the musical material is ordered it becomes culture and hence a social entity.”

Andriessen uses Plato’s texts, texts which in part warn about the evils of certain musical modes and their deleterious effects on the citizens, “to illustrate” how musical materials can become a social entity, admitting that Plato’s words are “downright negative: everyone can see the absurdity of Plato’s statement that the mixolydian mode should be banned as it would have a damaging influence on the development of character.”

This reminds me not only of Adorno’s disparagement of American jazz but also of Alan Bloom’s tirades about rock in his once popular “The Closing of the American Mind,” a neoconservative critique of contemporary American culture that for a brief period in the late 1980’s captured the imagination of those who were certain that Prince was on the verge of deposing Mozart and that all hopes of maintaining a cultivated, educated elite in this society were headed for oblivion.

The gist of it all is that Plato saw music as a potentially virulent threat to a smoothly functioning society. In one of the passages from “The Republic” that Andriessen sets to music, Plato warns that music that “suddenly changes mode” is not recommended for his ideal society, because it is too emotionally manipulative.

Plato is pretty specific, too. He is against “many-keyed” instruments, presumably because they are capable of too much harmonic hankie-pankie. (You don’t want to upset the populace with music that arouses its passions or, in the case of soldiers, might make them “slack” and too “soft and convivial.”)

Thus by all means make sure your National Guard men and women don’t have anything on their iPods in the Ionian or Mixolydian modes. If those modes are allowed your whole army is likely to be rendered useless, gone over to “drunkenness, effeminancy and idleness.”

Alan Bloom, a classics scholar who knew his Plato, loathed rock and professed only the highest tastes in classical music (although if we are to believe Saul Bellow’s portrait of him in his novel “Ravelstein,” what really got Bloom off was Rossini). In “The Closing of the American Mind” Bloom says that in his early teaching days his innocent and naive students “hardly paid attention to the discussion of music itself and, to the extent that they even thought about it, were really puzzled by Plato’s devoting time to rhythm and melody in a serious treatise on political philosophy. Their experience of music was as an entertainment, a matter of indifference to political and moral life. “

Eventually Bloom’s students began to understand why Plato saw music as potentially dangerous, and they became infuriated with him. “They know it [music] affects life very profoundly and are indignant because Plato seems to want to rob them of their most intimate pleasure.”

Plato, according to Bloom, teaches that music,
by its nature, encompasses all that is today most resistent to philosophy.” And one presumably could substitute “reason” here for “philosophy.”

Bloom takes Plato’s warnings a few steps further, applying them to the contemporary scene and to rock music in particular. Rock music provides a kind of false ecstasy that drains the listener of any real capacity to feel or react. For him, ‘addiction” to rock music is like addiction to drugs. When the addict finally kicks the habit, he or she is never the same, never again really able to experience wonder or joy or true ecstasy.

It’s hard not to feel that in Andriessen’s relentless poundings and frantic boogying, he’s mocking Plato and the long line of philosophers and pedants, Bloom included, who throughout history have cited Plato while fretting about the evils of whatever the latest musical shocker is, be it the introduction of the major third into medieval polyphony, the rude hammering of Beethoven, the erotic nihilism of “Tristan,” the carnal atavism of “Le Sacre,” the mindless simplicities of Minimalism or the subversive “dangers” of certain contemporary operas.

In the end “De Staat” is so overwhelming you just forget about Plato standing in the back of the hall shaking his head, wagging his finger and rolling his eyes. Maybe it’s a bad thing to let the music sweep you away. Maybe not. Maybe the uncertainty is exactly what Louis Andriessen had in mind.

Comments (7)

Ammon Allred
May 2, 2010

I'm not familiar with Andriessen's piece, and will have to hunt it down soon, but as a philosopher who's spent a good deal of professional time thinking about the issues you raise here, I hope you won't mind a few observations.

Although I think that the substance of what you say about Plato is right, it's important to notice that is understanding of the power of music is far more subtle and sophisticated than Adorno's complaints about jazz (if not Adorno's work on other forms of music) and than Bloom's absurd attacks on modern culture and rock music.

In particular, I think it's important to situate what Plato says about what we would identify as music with his broader relationship to Greek culture because what he identifies as music encompasses so much cultural expression. So, far example, in the Republic, the complaints you identify here concern what he'd call the style of music and can't be separated from his critique's of poetry, what he'd call the content of music. It's important to note here that music denotes the whole range of the education of the soul (what we mean by culture) and is contrasted with gymnastics (the education of the body).

It's therefore necessary to understand these complaints as part of a broader Platonic strategy, what we could call a mimetic rivalry (Socrates's complaints in the Gorgias about rhetoric are esp. important here --- it's been pointed out that here Socrates is literally wresting the capacity to disclose truth from poets and rhetoricians --- all of whom are, in a broader sense, also musicians --- think Homer).

Much like Adorno and Bloom, Plato understands full well the power of music (and remember that what he means by music is the educative power of culture) --- but where Adorno and Bloom are both ok with some of what we'd call music but deaf to other forms of music, failing to see how they disclose as broad a range of "spiritual" phenomena, Plato is against any form of non-philosophical music.

Philosophy is, however, itself a form of music for Plato (Nietzsche recognized this the most clearly of any great philosopher, but more recently people like Alexander Nehamas, Phillipe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy have all done great work with this concept, all under the influence of Nietzsche). Plato's objection that, as you point out, is to the polyvocity or lyricism of "non-philosophical" music, whatever that means...

But we could just as easily ask, on Plato's account how music is already and always philosophical --- if we reject his epic insistence on the priority of reason over desire, of the need for one narrative to master the state, this doesn't mean a defense of music over philosophy or even a defense of non-philosophical music over philosophical music, but rather an expansion of the philosophical capacities of music.

The crucial thing is that Plato recognized this, which is why he regarded it as dangerous. Adorno and Bloom failed to see that jazz and rock continued this same extension (which they admired in classical music --- modernist in Adorno's case and kitschy apparently in Bloom's), so they regarded it as stupid.

That's a huge difference, I think

Robert
May 2, 2010

Adorno's comments of Jazz have to be put in context. Adorno speaks about the Jazz of the 30's, and about the most commercial Jazz, the one used by the cultural industries.

The jazz itself has shown how Adorno was right, needing this technical improvement and its innovations to become a style which stays into the history.

Adorno would certainly have loved C. Parker, Miles, etc....

KenOC
May 3, 2010

Well of course Plato was entirely right, at least in principle. In the East, Confucius also agreed as he dedicated his life to rectifying government: "I care not who writes the laws, just let me write the songs."

For the record, I pronouce the music of John Adams as "safe." It must be if I, a certified curmudgeon, can enjoy it.

RSC
May 4, 2010

I agree with everything Ammon Allred said. To put "The Republic" in context, consider that when Socrates was around Athens had just lost the Peloponnesian War to the Spartans. Everyone was asking themselves, "How the hell did that happen?" because the Athenians were considered so cultured and civilized while the Spartans were, well, Spartan. Socrates' arguments against the arts are an implicit criticism of Athens of his day.

Now, why would the arts be so terrible? Because, in Plato view, the Truth was to be found in the world of forms. The world we live in is an imitation of the world of forms, and the arts are just imitation of our world. So, when people indulge in the arts they are living a life in error rather than in the pursuit of Truth. To the extent that Socrates would allow any music, it would only be music that would direct people to the pursuit of Truth.

The mistake of Socrates, and of so many philosophers after him, is to think that they have special access to the Truth by which they can make pronouncements as to what is right and wrong. History is riddled with people who have also thought that they have had this access and have thus gone about trying to wipe out everything they saw as being in error. And as much as I recognize that they sometimes meant well, communists such as Adorno were among the worst offenders.

In reaction against the atrocities of the 20th century, we've moved to a postmodern age in which "anything goes," in which we don't consider anyone to have that access to Truth. This has been liberating and has been a huge benefit for those who appreciate diversity and multiculturalism. But I think the problem we've created in the process is that we've made it harder to criticize each other or to challenge our preconceptions. We're too quick to say, "There's no accounting for taste."

SAL
May 5, 2010

I always loved the canon at the end of "De Staat," which I thought (or imagined?) that Andriessen saw as a musical depiction of democracy. The stuttering rhythms that result from superimposing triplets and sixteenths along with the transposition of the canonic voice create a volatile, feisty, and exhilarating musical surface that is full of energy and life. It sounds like intense argument and debate in which the parties manage to agree and yet assert their individuality, all kept in check by their willingness to play by the rules (the canon).

Or maybe it's just a fantastic canon.

Mark K
May 5, 2010

"Dad, that harmonic shift made me go all limp, do I really have to go to the TA recruitment day? I just want to listen to it a bit more."

"Hmm son...what mode was it in...?"

"Unng-uh...i think it was mixolydian....but then transposed to the dorian in a different key...."

"Son. Tut tut. A shameful faux-transcendent shift. None of that decadent avant-garde trash in my house"

"Military riddims. Yat." muttered his friend in the background.

"Oh well, I'll go Dad."

(Giggles : "lush man, that shift is phat")

Richard Friedman
May 10, 2010

Who takes what composers say about their music (that) seriously? %-)

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Hell Mouth is a blog about music (mostly contemporary), literature (mostly good), politics (mostly pernicious) and culture (mostly American). It is written by John Adams with the help of several “friends” who live in the redwoods of coastal Northern California.