A Concise Survey of Music Philosophy

Donald A. Hodges

• Verlag: Routledge
• Jahr: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317356479
• Auflage: 1
• Thema: Media & Performing Arts
• Thema: Music

A Concise Survey of Music Philosophy helps music students choose a philosophy that will guide them throughout their careers. The book is divided into three sections: central issues that any music philosophy ought to consider (e.g., beauty, emotion, and aesthetics); secondly, significant philosophical positions, exploring what major thinkers have had to say on the subject; and finally, opportunities for students to consider the ramifications of these ideas for themselves. Throughout the book, students are encouraged to make choices that will inform a philosophy of music and music education with which they are most comfortable to align.

Frequently, music philosophy courses are taught in such a way that the teacher, as well as the textbook used, promotes a particular viewpoint. A Concise Survey of Music Philosophy presents the most current, prevalent philosophies for consideration. Students think through different issues and consider practical applications.

There are numerous musical examples, each with links from the author's home website to online video performances. Examples are largely from the Western classical canon, but also jazz, popular, and world music styles. In the last two chapters, students apply their views to practical situations and learn the differences between philosophy and advocacy.

"Hodges has written an excellent resource for those wanting a short — but meaningful — introduction to the major concepts in music philosophy. Applicable to a number of courses in the music curriculum, this much-needed book is both accessible and flexible, containing musical examples, tables and diagrams, and additional readings that make it particularly useful for a student's general introduction to the topic. I especially like the emphasis on the personal development of a philosophical position, which makes the material especially meaningful for the student of music."

—Peter R. Webster, Scholar-in-Residence, Thornton School of Music, University of Southern California, USA

Section II

A Review of Major Music Philosophies

8 Contributions to Music Philosophy from the Ancient Greeks

Because of the tremendous importance of music in ancient Greece, philosophers wrote extensively about music. Many of their thoughts are still influential today and anyone seeking to develop a philosophy of music should have a basic familiarity with the main ideas they espoused. In the brief account that follows, it is important to remember that the time span is so extensive and the writing so voluminous that what follows is only a synopsis. Synthesizing nearly 1,300 years of historical writings from approximately 800 BC to AD 500 means that many details and interesting points have been omitted. Nevertheless, it is possible to identify some major ideas that you may wish to consider. Before we delve into these philosophical ideas, a brief look at music in ancient Greece will provide some context.

Music in Ancient Greece

What we know about ancient Greek music comes from physical remains of musical instruments and depictions of musicians, music making, and dance on vase paintings and sculptures, and even a few fragments of musical scores.¹ There are also a few archeological finds, such as monuments and the Odeion,² a roofed concert hall that was built in the Athenian acropolis in the second half of the 6th century BC. Numerous written sources provide descriptions of the role of music in society and its perceived aesthetic functions. These literary references include hymns, wedding songs, threnodies (songs of mourning or lamentation), drinking songs, love songs, and work songs, among others.³

Music played a vital role in both private and public life in ancient Greece. It was heard in religious worship and festivals, in public ceremonies, in performances of both tragedies and comedies in the theatre, in athletic contests, in warfare, and, of course, at home for dinner parties and other intimate family gatherings.⁴ In addition to vocal music, three instruments (among many others) were the most commonly used—the kithara, the lyre, and the aulos.

• The kithara⁵
  
  was a large, wooden lyre associated with Apollo.⁶ Most often, the kithara had seven strings and was plucked. It had a hollow sound box that became narrower near the flat base, and a cross-bar at the top to which the strings were attached. A highly trained male musician stood while playing the kithara and sang while he played.
• Lyre refers to many different types of plucked string instruments, including the kithara. Unlike the larger kithara, the smaller and lighter lyre or chelys-lyre⁷
  
  (tortoise lyre) was played sitting, reclining, or walking.⁸ The right hand plucked the strings with a plectrum, similar to playing the kithara. The sound box was made by covering a tortoise shell with leather. Women are depicted playing the chelys-lyre in wedding processions and domestic scenes.⁹
• Although the term aulos¹⁰
  
  may refer to other hollow tube instruments such as a single-tube pipe or even a trumpet, most often it refers to a double-pipe wind instrument with double reeds.¹¹ Amateur musicians, such as shepherds, likely made their auloi from reeds. However, specialist instrument makers made professional instruments of wood, ivory, bone, or metal, and fashioned reeds from specially grown reed plants that came from specific islands.

In addition to these three, other instruments included the krotala (hand clappers), kroupezai (foot clappers), kumbala (finger cymbals), seistron (similar to krotala with a higher, more metallic sound), rhombos (bullroarer), rhoptron (similar to a snare drum), drums, syrinx (reed pipe), hydraulis (a system of flue pipes blown by wind pressure), salpinx, and keras (horns).¹²

Shepherds played the pipe to their flocks, women and children played the lyre at home, and music likely occurred as a matter of daily living, although much less was written about these informal ways of music making. Commonly, educated males were taught to play and sing competently. However, professional musicianship was somewhat polarized. At one end, musicians were considered at the lower end of the social scale and they often led a meager existence.¹³ At the other end, the best virtuoso performers competed for prizes and occupied a very high social status. As we will see subsequently, philosophical beliefs also reflected this dichotomy.

Greek melodies were shaped by three aspects—rhythm, genus, and mode. Rhythm patterns, such as dactylic (long-short-short) or iambo-trochaic (long-short) followed the poetic stress-release patterns of the text.¹⁴ The basic interval in a genus was the tetrachord, or a perfect fourth. The upper and lower notes were fixed and the inner notes varied according to three principal types: diatonic, chromatic, and enharmonic.¹⁵ Finally, the modes consisted of scale structures called harmoniai (literally ‘tunings’): “The ones most often mentioned are the Dorian, Phrygian, and Lydian, but we also hear of Ionian, Aeolian, Locrian, Mixolydian, and others.”¹⁶ In spite of the information we have about Greek theory, we know remarkably little about the actual melodies that were played or sung. Altogether, we have only 45 intact melodies or fragments that span over 900 years,¹⁷ hardly enough to give us a very thorough picture of how the music actually sounded.

Philosophical Ideas

To the ancient Greeks, mousike was a broad term encompassing not only music, as we understand the word, but also poetry, drama, and dance.¹⁸ As indicated previously, music saturated nearly every aspect of life and philosophers were bound to comment on anything that assumed such importance. For our purposes, we will discuss these ideas under three major headings: music as mathematics, music as an imitation of harmonious balance, and music as an influence on human behavior.

Music as Mathematics

Pythagoras was a philosopher and mathematician who lived in the 6th century BC (perhaps 570–490 BC). Many students are likely to be familiar with the Pythagorean theorem from geometry class. More pertinent for our purposes, Pythagoras conducted experiments with a monochord.¹⁹

Dividing a fixed string length by adjusting a movable bridge, Pythagoras established mathematical ratios for various musical intervals: an octave is 2:1, a fifth 3:2, and so on. Thus, when he moved the bridge so that the longer portion of the string was twice as long as the shorter portion (i.e., 2:1), the result was that plucking the shorter section produced a tone one octave above the tone produced with the longer section. These ratios became the foundation for tuning systems in Western music, as Pythagorean tuning led to just intonation, meantone tuning, and eventually to equal temperament, among many different variants.

The discovery of simple mathematical proportions of musical intervals led to a much broader concept called the ‘harmony of the spheres.’ Pythagoras proposed that the sun, moon, and planets all co-existed in harmonious relationships, much like music. Thus, life on earth is part of a harmonious balance. These ideas were hugely influential and even centuries later Johannes Kepler wrote a book entitled Harmonices Mundi (Harmony of the World, 1619). Largely because of Pythagoras’s work, music was grouped with mathematics, geometry, and astronomy in the educational system adopted by Plato. Later, the seven liberal arts as codified in the Middle Ages included the Quadrivium (mathematics, geometry, music, and astronomy) and the Trivium (grammar, rhetoric, and logic).

“There is geometry in the humming of the strings, there is music in the spacing of the spheres.”

(Pythagor...