Body and soul: the musical miseducation of the youth

Public Interest, Spring, 1998 by Martha Bayles

Yet "Body and Soul" emerged from a musical culture that is still, despite its dominance in the West (and by extension the world), prone to intellectual distortions. These distortions matter, not only because they have affected the cultural position of jazz but also because they have decisively shaped the musical culture of youth. My argument with Allan Bloom, which I once had the satisfaction of inflicting on him while sipping Scotch and (I regret to say) mooching his Marlboros, is that his critique of rock music rests more on these distortions than on solid ground. Like most arguments with Allan Bloom, this one was well worth having nine years ago, and would be still. I wish he were here to respond with the same playful grace.

Plato and the romanticists

According to Robert Asahina, Bloom's editor at Simon & Schuster (who takes pride in having placed the chapter on rock at the front of The Closing of the American Mind), it was that chapter that made the book a best-seller. Whether or not they understood the rest of what Bloom was saying, the thousands of people who read him on rock assumed that here at last was an in-depth treatment by a real-life philosopher.

Was that assumption correct? To some degree, yes. With his characteristic eloquence, Bloom elucidates the Socratic view of music, beginning with Plato's assertion that the pure elements of music - melody, harmony, and rhythm - cannot be trusted because they are the language of the barbarous or non-rational part of the soul. The more beautiful and compelling the music, the greater its capacity to stir the passions, which is why Plato placed music at the core of education. The virtues govern the passions, so the way to develop the virtues is to channel and refine the passions, a task that requires the aid of music because music resonates with the passions on the deepest level. But music is only an aid, and must be handled with care. Writes Bloom: "According to the Socratic formula, the lyrics - speech and, hence, reason - must determine the music - harmony and rhythm."

Bloom also reminds us, by quoting The Merchant of Venice and other works of literature and philosophy far removed from Plato's time, that the Socratic formula has played a central role in Western musical thought. Reinforcing that role (though Bloom does not mention it) is the warning, passed down from the Hebrew prophets, that too much music will confuse the mind and distract from the Word of God. Thus the early Christians spurned the rich instrumental homophony of pagan music in favor of a spare vocal monophony. During the late Middle Ages, when vocal music had moved toward polyphony, the Church explicitly revived Plato's teaching that music with more than one melody was inimical to the exercise of reason. Distrust of polyphony reappeared in the late sixteenth century, when the Florentine Camerata banished both polyphony and complex melody in an attempt to revive what they imagined to be the musical practices of ancient Greece.

I say "imagined" because very little is known about the musical practices of ancient Greece. For one thing, Plato rarely wrote about music in isolation. For his contemporaries, music and poetry were one, a fusion of words and melody chanted or sung to instrumental accompaniment and often dance. The Republic offers great wisdom about the temptations and indulgences of what we would call literature. But about musical sound, its wisdom has worn less well.

What specific observations does Plato make about musical sound? The two most frequently cited are the Chaldean-Pythagorean teaching that the harmonic intervals of the Greek scale corresponded to the laws of the universe, and the view that Dorian melodies are nobler than Phrygian ones. What wisdom can we find in these? Our scales, not to mention our scientific laws, have changed quite a lot in the last 24 centuries.(1) And the difference between Dorian and Phrygian melodies is lost to us. Scholars speculate endlessly about the nature of ancient Greek music, but as the historian Donald Grout has remarked, "No field of musicology has produced a richer crop of disputation from a thinner soil of fact."

To be sure, that soil has also yielded a general truth, here summarized by Bloom:

Civilization or, to say the same thing, education is the taming or domestication of the soul's raw passions - not suppressing or excising them, which would deprive the soul of its energy - but forming and informing them as art. A man whose noblest activities are accompanied by a music that expresses them while providing a pleasure extending from the lowest bodily to the highest spiritual, is whole, and there is no tension in him between the pleasant and the good.

The trouble is that no one, not even Bloom, can apply this abstraction to actual music without standing on shifting ground. Take Bloom's view of romanticism. He finds in Plato a cogent critique of both the Enlightenment philosophers and their romanticist successors. The mistake of the Enlightenment, says he, was rationalism, or an excessive attachment to reason that, among other things, led to a dismissal of the role of music in education. It was in response to this anti-musical rationalism that romanticism was born: "Only in those great critics of Enlightenment and rationalism, Rousseau and Nietzsche, does music return, and they were the most musical of philosophers." Yet Bloom also faults Rousseau, and especially Nietzsche, for going too far in the opposite direction and seeking "to cultivate the enthusiastic states of the soul and to re-experience the Corybantic possession deemed a pathology by Plato."