Plato (c.427–347 bce) is the first Western thinker in whose work we can trace an extensive critical interest in music. The subject provides material for philosophical analysis in his dialogues on four main levels: first, as a set of practices whose widespread social, religious and educational uses in the Greek world prompt general questions about music’s cultural influence; second, as a particularly potent art form (or an element in several art forms) whose effects on the mind raise issues of philosophical psychology; third, as an exemplar of values and qualities (concord, integration, unity) which function as a model for other human activities and experiences, including philosophy itself (called “the greatest music” by Socrates at Phaedo 61a); finally, as a system of ordered beauty which may even reflect, and be a guide to, the fundamental nature of the cosmos. Although the hundreds of references to music in Plato’s dialogues cover a multitude of details, from the practical to the theoretical, the most prominent concern is with the challenge which the intense, seductive yet obscure pleasures of music pose to any attempt to philosophize the operations of the mind. For the purposes of this account, I draw no distinction between Plato’s authorial position and the views put in the mouth of Socrates.
Plato was born and spent most of his life in a cosmopolitan and democratic city, Athens, whose culture (including its social and religious festivities) was saturated with forms of music. Most of this music, as in the Greek world at large, was performed by a solo wind or stringed instrument: principally, the reed-pipe, aulos (usually the double-aulos, i.e. a pair played by one person) and the lyre, of which there were several varieties. Most music also served as an accompaniment to sung/chanted words (especially in the performance of poetic genres) or to dance, and sometimes to both, as, for example, in the choral odes of tragic and comic drama. Relatively little Greek music was purely instrumental, though in Plato’s own lifetime a trend of avant-garde musical experimentation, often called the “New Music” by modern historians (West 1992: 356–72; D’Angour 2006), produced a heightened interest in melodic complexity and ornamentation which sometimes broke free from a song-text: this is clear from the complaint voiced by a Platonic character at Laws 7.669e. Although the New Music is referred to more than once in Plato’s work (see below), for the most part his dialogues address questions relating to long-established and deeply embedded features of music’s pervasive importance in Greek culture.
That importance was crystallized, among other things, in a set of educational practices and values. Learning to sing and to dance, especially in a group (a Greek choros was in the first instance a dance-group, secondarily a singing “chorus”), had long been a typical part of the upbringing of young males of the leisured classes; many girls too received such training. More variable, though not uncommon, was the acquisition of some facility in playing a lyre; the aulos was always more the preserve of professionals. Ability to participate in and/or to appreciate the beauty of song and dance became entrenched as a central element of Greek musical sensibility; Greeks imagined even their Olympian deities, including the lyre-playing Apollo and the ecstatic figure of Dionysus (for the relationship between these gods, see below), as devotees of music. It is standard for characters in Plato’s dialogues to share this perspective on music’s life-enhancing status: Protarchus, at Philebus 62c, anticipates Friedrich Nietzsche’s “without music life would be a mistake” by saying that music is essential “if our life is really to be a life of some kind.” (See Chapter 32, “Nietzsche,” in this volume.) But the idea of music as necessary for a fulfilled existence is both expanded and complicated, by Socrates in the Republic and by the Athenian in Laws, into a distinctively Platonic conception of music’s (dangerously) powerful role in the shaping of both individual and collective psychology.
Greek views of music’s potency were reinforced by the fact, already indicated, that most music was an accompaniment to poetic texts. This meant that appraisals of music’s value tended to become part, as we shall see, of a larger conception of the value of song. This did not, however, block the appreciation of qualities of musical form (i.e. melodic, rhythmic and, in a broad sense, harmonic features) in their own right. The two sides of this picture can be seen even in a brief passage such as Protagoras 326a–b. There the sophist Protagoras explains how one stage in the education of Greek boys involves being taught to sing poetry by a lyre-teacher (a kithara-player). Protagoras suggests that the benefits of the experience come partly from the insights contained in the poetic texts. But he also speaks of rhythms and melodic modes, tunings or pitch-patterns (harmoniai, plural of harmonia) as being assimilated into the children’s souls and conduct: “all human life needs beauty of rhythm and melody.” This ethical-cum-existential conception of music’s significance lies at the root of the extended Platonic passages to be considered below.
One consequence of the cultural landscape sketched above is that the Greek term mousikê itself – literally “art/activity of the Muses” – came to be used, in Plato and elsewhere, with a flexible semantics. In its narrower usage, it refers to structures of rhythm and melody/pitches per se. But it can also designate the larger cluster of poetico-musical arts, including dance; and, more broadly still, it comes to denote the whole sensibility and refined cast of mind which sustained appreciation of these arts was believed to inculcate.
That normative sense of “musical” value had in turn been carried further by one particular group of Greeks, the followers of Pythagoras. Although the details are obscure, Pythagorean thought was certainly known to Plato and had some influence on him. Two ideas in particular stand out here. One is the notion of “the harmony of the spheres” or music as a sort of (symbolic) cosmic concord: this is undoubtedly in the background in a passage such as Republic 10.617b–c, a mythical and astronomical vision of the ordered beauty of the universe (Halliwell 1987: 181–2). The other is the view of music as a form of soul-changing therapy. Among various testimonies to this view is the claim of Aristotle’s student Aristoxenus that Pythagoreans “used medicine to purify the body and music to purify the mind/soul” (West 1992: 31–3); the likelihood that some Pythagoreans espoused a conception of the soul itself as an “attunement,” harmonia, of the body (see Phaedo 85e–6d), may also be pertinent here. While this precise model of psychotherapy is not found in Plato’s own writings, it is likely that Pythagorean convictions about the power of music helped to shape the seriousness with which its psychological effects are probed in the dialogues. A connection can be detected, moreover, between the astral and the psychological aspects of Pythagorean influence on Plato. This is clearest in the idea at Timaeus 47c–d that music connects the “orbits” in the soul with the orbits of the cosmos: musical order is a link between microcosm and macrocosm. On the other hand, passages such as Republic 530e–31c and Philebus 56a–c show that Plato was resistant to (Pythagorean) attempts to turn the study of music into a mathematical science.
The Republic’s main discussion of music occurs in Book 3, 398c–403c. Two general features of this discussion bear out points already adumbrated above: first, the treatment of music stands as an adjunct to, and complements, the principles laid down for the content and form of poetic texts at 2.376e–3.398b; second, the whole poetico-musical side of education (the part dealing with the psyche just as gymnastics deals primarily with the body) is called mousikê at 2.376e and subsequently. So the analysis of music proper is presented as one facet of the philosophical regulation of an educational, psychological and cultural constellation of activities. Socrates considers rhythmic and melodic structures (the latter taking the form of harmoniai: tunings, modes or scales, Barker 1984: 163–8) as elements in compound art forms; they work in liaison with the discursive logos of the texts they accompany (398d). But he nonetheless ascribes to those musical structures expressive qualities of their own.
The nature of those qualities is brought under the heading of mimesis, a concept normally rendered as “imitation” by most modern translators and scholars but which often functions in ways that overlap with later ideas of representation and expression (Halliwell 2002). Socrates introduces mimesis at 2.373b as a compendious category of imaginative simulation as practiced in both visual and musico-poetic art. He later employs a narrower definition of the term to cover the dramatic or “enactive” mode of poetic discourse (3.392d) as opposed to poetry in third-person narrative. These uses of the terminology of mimesis cannot be reduced to a conceptually tidy essence. When Socrates starts to speak of melodic/modal mimesis at 3.399a–c, his meaning is not self-evident. But he clearly supposes some kind of expressive correspondence or correlation (a sort of isomorphy of “movement,” according to Politicus 306c–7c, a later work) between musically organized sounds and the emotional-cum-ethical traits of characters depicted in poetic texts. On this understanding, followed in many respects by Aristotle Politics 8.5 (Halliwell 2002: 234–49), music allows processes and impulses of feeling to be captured in the movements of sound and thereby transmitted to and replayed by other minds.
Socrates advances here a fundamentally “narrative” model of musical semantics. He works with a principle on the lines of “prima le parole, poi la musica” (399e–400a, 400d). His prescriptive choices/exclusions of musical modes (un)suitable for the poetry which will be performed by young guardians, that is, future rulers, in the ideal city (Callipolis) are an extension of the judgments which he earlier made on (un)desirable poetic representations of characters and their attitudes. Thus, for instance, his exclusion of modes or tunings expressive of “lamentation” (398d–e) is aligned with his earlier repudiation of poetry which depicts gods as causing, and heroes as afflicted by, circumstances of tragic suffering (387d–8d). Socrates (or Plato) does not purport to be offering a comprehensive account of the possibilities or uses of music. He is testing the logic of a model of musical significance (ultimately, its capacity to find expressive equivalents to the defining qualities of particular paradigms of “life,” 399e–400a) as applied to the art forms of an imaginary society in which certain ethical, political and cultural goals are to be pursued with ideological single-mindedness.
Socrates seeks a kind of “purity” or simplicity which will avoid complexity in the melodic and rhythmic constituents of music (399e, cf. 404e) and in the experiences such complexity stimulates in the minds of hearers. Complexity is regarded as threatening the overriding principles of psychic unity and stability; note the pointedly musical comparison for unity of soul at 4.443d–e. There is also a hint at 399e that complexity is Dionysiac rather than Apollonian; the satyr Marsyas, mentioned here, has links with Dionysus (Rocconi 2009: 570; cf. Plato, Symposium 215b–c). Apollo and Dionysus are later mentioned together, in connection with religious festivities (and their music), at Laws 2.653d: Nietzsche knew both these passages well. In associating styles of music with kinds of character and “life,” Socrates professes to be guided by the theories of a contemporary intellectual called Damon (400b–c; West 1992: 246–7). According to 4.424c, Damon claimed that no change in musical styles could take place without (causing? and/or reflecting?) a corresponding change in the general values of a society. This remarkable tenet clearly left its mark on Plato’s lifelong interest in music. It is subtly echoed later in the Republic by the premonition that even the ideal society will decline when its guardians neglect the standards of music (8.546d, 548b). It is also the earliest known version of a doctrine of music’s necessary implication in the dynamics of a culture as a whole – a doctrine whose modern adherents include Adorno.
While the discussion in Republic Book 3 stresses the need to make music “fit” and “follow” the content of a verbal text, Socrates does allow for distinctively musical beauty of rhythmic and melodic form (400c ff.). However, the relationship between such beauty of form and its discursively underpinned expressiveness is not transparent. At 400d–e it is suggested that formal beauty may involve correspondence (“likeness”) to the verbal content and ethical tenor of the total art form. But the larger aesthetic of beautiful form (in both artifacts and nature) at 401a–d, an aesthetic which treats a culture as a holistic fabric of value (Burnyeat 1999), cannot be exhausted by the kind of meaning which is explicable in wholly discursive terms, since it encompasses objects (such as buildings and plants) which typically lack a narrative content. Socrates seems to allow at any rate that melodic and rhythmic patterns in music can possess an orderliness which is good in its own right, even if he ultimately wants it to be held accountable to an ethical, “life”-defining reckoning. When he calls formal properties “akin to” as well as mimetically expressive of ethical qualities (401a), he perhaps implies that music can itself serve as a model for, and not just a reflection of, the beauty of a unified soul.
This implication is extended at 401d–e. Socrates says there that rhythm and melody “reach into the interior of the soul,” take hold of it, and impress on it a good (or bad) form. So if music can embody patterns which somehow correspond to the qualities of a soul figured in the music, the response to musical beauty on the part of the listener equally involves psychic “internalization” and assimilation of the musical order (Schofield 2010). This process is initially a matter of sub-conceptual feeling (i.e. prior to logos, 402a), though ethical values are already being shaped at that level (400d–2d). The more experienced listener will develop ways of hearing which are both affective and cognitive. It is a premise of this phase of the argument that a cultivated responsiveness to artistic beauty involves a capacity to “recognize” images, as well as the intrinsic forms, of good and bad states of mind/soul (402a–c). The implications of this premise, for music as for other art forms, are much more sympathetic and positive than the notorious (and rhetorically provocative) treatment of poetry and other mimetic image-making in Book 10 of the Republic. Despite the restrictions he had previously placed on the music allowed in Callipolis, Socrates’ case builds to the resounding proposition that the goal of all music (here in its wider cultural sense) is “the erotics of beauty” (403c). At least part of the force of this proposition is an acknowledgment of music’s power to arouse feelings which carry with them an impetus of intense desire.
The Laws returns to and reconsiders many of the same principles of musical education that Socrates had outlined in the Republic. Although the work is sprawling, unfinished, and without the dramatic flair and finesse of the Republic, it is nonetheless remarkable for the way in which it persistently circles round the importance for the well-ordered society of mousikê in both the narrower (“music”) and the wider (“education”/“culture”) senses of the term. This material can be examined only selectively here.
The most sustained passage on music per se is in Book 2 (653c–671b). The Athenian, the work’s main speaker, thinks of musico-poetic performances, not least those of choruses (who dance as well as sing), as belonging above all to communal festivals which both unite a society and connect it to its gods (including Apollo and Dionysus, 653d: see above). To that extent his conception of music is culturally normative. But it is also biologically rooted. (One might note here, obliquely, the soothing and entrancing power which music is said to exercise even over certain animals at Politicus 268b.) The Athenian regards rhythmic and melodic form as reflecting a fundamental human capacity for, and pleasure in, “ordered movements,” which can be physically embodied in dance but are equally enacted in the patterns of sound itself (653e, cf. e.g. 664e–5a, 672e–3a). At the same time, these movements synchronize, as it were, body and soul: just as Socrates spoke of music “reaching into the interior of the soul” (see above), so the Athenian speaks of the movements of the (singing) voice as “penetrating as far as the soul” (673a). Accordingly, in Laws as in the Republic “good” musical forms are deemed to be images of ethically admirable traits (655a–b). All music is counted as a kind of mimetic (representational-cum-expressive) “image-making” (668a–b), though it will be suggested later in the dialogue that when stripped of a discursive (poetic) basis the mimetic meaning of music becomes obscure or uncertain (669b–670a).
All this draws the Athenian into wrestling with the problem of musical pleasure. He is anxious to assert the need to recognize “correct,” that is, ethically grounded, standards of (psychological) pleasure and pain, and to deny that pleasure in itself can be the sole criterion of musical value (654c–d, 655c– d, 667e–8a). He suggests that in responses to music an interplay takes place between the hearer’s own character and the kinds of qualities expressed in the music itself; but if the latter is enjoyed, then the hearer’s soul is inevitably assimilated to the musical patterns (655d–6b). The Athenian knows that prima facie music generates its own, pleasure-driven standards of stylistic evolution and cultural success. This makes him all the keener to ward off what he sees as the threat posed by the predilections of “mass” audiences (657e–660c; cf. Republic 6.493d), a move which prefigures many modern debates over musical values. In a striking gesture, he holds up a non-Greek society, that of Egypt (interpreted here as unbendingly traditionalist), as the only one to have laid down and maintained appropriately strict norms of musical (and other artistic) form (656c–7b, cf. 7.799a–b).
Despite what is obviously, on one level, the statement of a deeply conservative stance, the Athenian’s reflections can also be read as groping for a formulation which will manage to integrate plural criteria of aesthetic merit; Plato signals at least some awareness of the difficulty of doing so (Halliwell 2002: 65–71). The Athenian speaks of pleasure, “correctness” (in part a measure of how far artistic form does justice to its content), and “benefit” (the ultimate effect on the audience’s lives) as the three essential criteria in question (667b–c). In attempting to configure the relationship between these, he uses also the vocabulary of “beauty,” a vocabulary which in Greek always has the scope to embrace both sensory appearances and ethical excellence. In a very difficult passage, he sums up his view by saying that good music involves “likeness to the representation of what is beautiful/good” (668b). The obscurity of this phrase need not prevent us, given the larger context, from seeing that the Athenian wants to acknowledge a role for both “internal” (formal) and “external” (world-reflecting) factors in all mimetic art, including music. He remains troubled, however, by a possible tension between these: even the creators of musical works may themselves be expert in rhythms and melodies while not knowing whether what they produce is beautiful or good (670e, cf. 7.802b–c).
That last complaint opens the way for the Athenian to undertake a larger critique of musico-poetic history. This critique is an extension, au fond, of the Republic’s Damon-indebted model (see above) of music’s place within the larger dynamics of a culture. In Book 3 of the Laws (700a–1b) the Athenian uses music to illustrate the thesis of a supposedly general Greek decline from cultural “lawfulness” to “lawlessness.” There once prevailed, he claims (with a convenient disregard for various complicating factors), a musical culture in which established genres of song had their clearly marked rules and could not be mixed; a culture, moreover, in which audiences were obedient, accepting recipients of what was offered to them. But what has now come about, he continues, is an era of constant experimentation, innovation, and genre-crossing in both poetry and music. Composers have laid claim to a freedom which recognizes no standard of “correctness” other than the hearer’s pleasure, and audiences have become correspondingly assertive as the collective arbiters of taste: musical “aristocracy” (rule of the best) has been replaced by “theatro-cracy” (rule by mass audiences), 700e–701a. What’s more, music has been central to the wider dissemination of the idea that everyone can judge everything: music (of certain kinds), it seems, is a breeding-ground for an ideology of the supremacy of popular opinion and taste.
The Athenian’s sweepingly elitist attitudes imply censure of the democratic culture which his own city had developed over the previous century and more. The censure encompasses, among much else, aspects of the theatre of tragedy and comedy, themselves forms of “music drama” (note e.g. the later allusion to tragic music at 7.800d, matching Republic 3.398d–e, mentioned above). But his picture of a collusion between composers and general public, bringing about a radical shift from conservative traditionalism to experimental modernism, applies more specifically to the phenomenon of the New Music (see above). This is particularly clear in the description of promiscuous innovation and “rule-breaking” – including daring juxtapositions of register, novel rhythmic figurations, and “heterophonic” instrumental accompaniments – at 669c–e, 700d, and 7.812d–e. The last of those passages, ascribing a penchant for “bacchic frenzy” to modern composers, gives a Dionysian shading to the disapproved styles in question.
But when the Athenian returns to the subject of music in Book 7 (798d–802e), a paradox emerges from the heavily negative slant of his argument. Having originally defined music as intrinsically concerned with “order” (taxis) of sound and movement, his case for the re-imposition of supposedly traditional standards and values leads him to distinguish between “ordered” and “disorderly” music (802c–d). Yet he does not actually count the latter as non-music; indeed, he stresses the pleasure popularly derived from it by those immersed in its styles through their upbringing, just as, for that matter, he had earlier acknowledged the natural creative talents of the composers of such music (700d). Although close in places to a parody of ultra-conservative conformism, his position depends on a recognition of the psychic potency of richly intricate musical textures. Like Socrates in the Republic, the Athenian is not simply dismissive of new types of music. He even allows himself, at one juncture in Book 2, to admit a need for constant change and variety in order to maintain the city’s appetite for and gratification in music (Laws 665c). But he is nonetheless fearful of ways in which the impact of novel musical forms can change both the individual soul and the entire sensibility of a society. Between them, the main speakers in Plato’s two longest dialogues represent an anxiety about substantial musical innovations which has had many analogues right up to the cultural clashes of modern times.
Many references to music in Plato are related either to ideas of system and order or to the “soul-changing” power of musical expressiveness. There is always a tacit and sometimes an explicit connection between these two things. The soul itself, qua plurality of psychological functions, needs ordered unity above all else. The power of music can either foster that unity by its own patterned movements or threaten it by its transformative capacity to excite complex, shifting states of mind. In the Republic and Laws the issues raised by what is perceived as this ambivalent power are pursued, as we have seen, on the level of an authoritarian cultural critique, though more subtly and tentatively in the earlier of the two dialogues. But the authoritarianism is always a response, at its roots, to what is taken to be music’s potential for deep psychological penetration.
The double upshot of this Platonic perspective is not only an attempt to philosophize the value of music but also to turn philosophy itself into a kind of “music” (“the greatest music,” as Socrates, possibly echoing a Pythagorean motif, says at Phaedo 61a when interpreting a dream-injunction to “make music” during the final days of his life). At Republic 3.412a, for instance, the most truly “musical” person (here, the successfully trained young guardian in the ideal city) is not the technically adept musician but someone whose soul possesses the highest degree of harmonious integration. But since that integration has (hypothetically) been achieved by means, above all, of musico-poetic education and culture themselves, the notion of the philosophically “musical” soul is not purely metaphorical. In the passage which has led up to this, in fact (410d–11e), Socrates very closely associates the virtues and balanced passions of “the philosophical nature” with a life which uses music as such correctly: a life which allows musical sensuousness to soften harsh, aggressive instincts, but which neither succumbs so completely to music’s melting effects that the soul is made effete nor shuns music altogether and thereby remains trapped in a beast-like savagery.
The “music” of philosophy, then, in some sense grows from and even models itself on the music that is conveyed in sound. At the same time, Platonic philosophy aspires to arrive at a position of transcendence beyond the material world, including the physical sounds of music. Republic 7.522a–b refers back to the music (including poetry) of the education system sketched earlier in the work as incapable of reaching the higher realms of philosophical truth. Real music, Glaucon (Plato’s brother) obligingly reminds Socrates, uses resources of rhythm and pitch-structures to educate by “habituation,” not by intellectual knowledge. It instills patterns of order and harmony in the soul’s impulses and ethical sensitivities, but it does not have a discursively transparent content which the rational faculty of the mind can grasp.
In the eyes of Platonic philosophy, music is both alluring and elusive. Its capacity to captivate and move the soul through the play of sounds makes it a model for a kind of beauty which fuses outer form with inner feeling; but the enigmatic nature of that capacity stands also as a challenge to the commanding authority of philosophical explanation. Even after the influences of Damon and Pythagore-anism have been factored in, therefore, it is legitimate to see Plato as instigating the history of the philosophy of music. The Platonic legacy to that history is no monolithic scheme of ideas but a set of problems as abidingly fascinating as they are resistant to confident solution.
See also Antiquity and the Middle Ages (Chapter 24), Arousal theories (Chapters 20), Music and politics (Chapter 50), Music education (Chapter 56), and Music’s arousal of emotions (Chapter 22).
Barker, A. (1984) Greek Musical Writings, Volume I: The Musician and his Art, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Burnyeat, M.F. (1999) “Culture and Society in Plato’s Republic,” The Tanner Lectures on Human Values 20: 217–324.
D’Angour, A. (2006) “The New Music – So What’s New?” in S. Goldhill and R. Osborne (eds) Rethinking Revolutions through Ancient Greece, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 264–83.
Halliwell, S. (1987) Plato: Republic 10, Warminster: Aris & Phillips.
—— (2002) The Aesthetics of Mimesis: Ancient Texts and Modern Problems, Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Rocconi, E. (2009) “Music,” in G. Boys-Stones, B. Graziosi, and P. Vasunia (eds) Oxford Handbook of Hellenic Studies, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 569–78.
Schofield, M. (2010) “Music All Pow’rful,” in M. McPherran (ed.) Plato’s “Republic”: A Critical Guide, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
West, M.L. (1992) Ancient Greek Music, Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Barker, A. (2005) Psicomusicologia nella Grecia antica, Naples: Guida Editore. (An advanced study of the philosophical psychology of music in Plato and other ancient thinkers.) Cooper, J.M. (ed.) (1997) Plato Complete Works, Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing. (The best complete translation of Plato.)