Moments in Musical Philosphy

[christopher3393]

7 hours ago, Solstice380 said:

Without music, life would be a mistake

 

Me: Hmmmm...could you put that in context?

 

N. Sure.

 

"How little it takes to make us happy! The sound of a bagpipe.—Without music, life would be an error. The German even imagines God as singing songs."

 

Me: er, ok, tx. (bagpipes? seiously?) Got anything else?

 

N.: You betcha! Try this out:

 

"Music, as we understand it today, is also a total excitation and discharge of the emotions, but it is just the leftover of a much fuller expressive world of emotion, a mere residue of Dionysian histrionics. In order to make music possible as a separate art, we have immobilized a number of senses, the muscular sense above all (relatively, at least: for all rhythm still appeals to our muscles to a certain degree), so that people no longer immediately imitate and represent with their bodies everything they feel. Nevertheless, that  is the truly Dionysian normal state, or at least the primordial state; music is the specialization of this state, a specialization which has been achieved slowly, at the expense of the most closely related faculties."

 

Me: ah...dude, maybe you just party with the wrong people. I'm Irish.

[christopher3393]

In the eleventh century, the Ikhwan Al-Safa, a priesthood of Islamic scholars who lived in what is current day Basra, Iraq, compiled their philosophy of music in epistle 5 of "Epistles of the Brethren of Purity".

 

Members of this priesthood were scholars of Plato and Aristotle’s writings on music, among many other traditions of ancient thought. Chapter 16 is entitled “On the Wise Sayings of the Philosophers Concerning Music”. Here is one of those sayings:

 

"Although an instrument is inanimate, it gives clear expression, revealing the secrets of souls and the innermost recesses of the heart, but it is as if what it says is in a foreign tongue that needs an interpreter, for its utterances lie deeper than words."

 

The "proof text" that is offered is a poem by the great Persian poet, Rudaki (d.940):

 

The nocturnal lament of the lute string

 is sweeter to my ear than [the cry of] 'God is great!'

 If the plaint of the lute string - and do not think this strange –

 attracts its prey from the wide plains,

 With no arrow it yet from time to time

 pierces its body, the dart transfixing the heart,

 Now weeping, now grief-stricken,

 from break of day through noon till dusk.

 Although bereft of a tongue, its eloquence

 can interpret the lovers' story,

 Now making the madman sane,

 now casting the sane under its spell.

[christopher3393]

"We live in an age in which it is regarded both as offensive and as false to suggest there is not democratic equality among all kinds of music in their artistic value and among all listeners in their understandings of music. It seems also to be widely held that understanding comes simply as a result of one's giving oneself over to the music (as if there must be something wrong with a work that does not appeal at first hearing). The ideas that there are worthwhile degrees of musical understanding that might be attained only through years of hard work and that there are kinds of music that yield their richest rewards only to listeners prepared to undertake it smack of an intellectual elitism that has become unacceptable, not only in society at large but in the universities. 'Anti-democratic' ideas are rejected not just for music, of course, but across the social and political board, but the case for musical 'democracy' is especially strong, since almost everyone loves and enjoys some kind of music. Nevertheless…many music lovers mistake the enjoyment they experience for the pleasure that would be afforded by deeper levels of understanding." (p.232)

 

Stephen Davies, Themes in the Philosophy of Music (2003)