Music, philososphy, and generation Y

"Is there such thing as an evil sound?"

That question, one of the most interesting I've been asked, was posed by a young musician named Kevin Max Smith at a lecture I gave in Nashville to a group of rock musicians who were also evangelical Christians. Smith was with a band called dc Talk, which started out as a rap group then switched to a mixture of styles. But many genres were represented in the room, including heavy metal, which is usually not associated with Christianity.

Smith's question cut to the heart of the ancient view of music, older than Christianity, that I call didactic. The ancients ranked musical sounds in a hierarchy understood to be causally related to the hierarchy of human virtues and vices, in the soul and in the polity. Says Socrates in Plato's Republic: "Never are the ways of music moved without the greatest political laws being moved." Confucius, incidentally, said something similar: "If you would know whether a people are well governed, and if its laws are good or bad, examine the music it practices."

I respect this didactic view because it respects the powers of music. These powers range widely. At one end of the spectrum, music has the power to soothe, to calm, to "sing the savageness out of a bear," in Shakespeare's words. At the other end, music can also drum the savageness back into the bear. Flaubert had this in mind when he wrote sarcastically, "Music makes a people's disposition more gentle: for example 'The Marseillaise."'

This is why the ancients sought to control the effects of music. Allan Bloom summarizes Socrates' teaching with his customary eloquence. '"he taming or domestication of the soul's raw passions," he writes, must not mean "suppressing or excising them, which would deprive the soul of its energy" but rather "forming and informing them." The trouble comes when we try to apply this wise abstraction to actual music. To do so is to shoot at a moving target, because Western music has long been violating Plato's specific prescriptions.

For example, Plato taught that too much music confuses the mind and distracts from logos. The Hebrew prophets took the same view, which is why early Christians spurned the rich instrumental homophony of pagan music in favor of a spare vocal monophony, a single melodic line sung without accompaniment. But during the late Middle Ages, the monks in Notre Dame began to interpolate new sections of chant containing more than one melodic line. This switch to polyphony, or harmonic counterpoint, gave birth to the glories of Western music.

To put my point in a nutshell: we may believe that Bach and Mozart are good for the soul and good for the polity, but we should also keep in mind that they violate quite promiscuously the specific rules set down by Plato.

Where does that leave us? Disinclined, probably, to issue any specific decrees about musical sounds. To the question posed above, "Is there such a thing as an evil sound?", my initial response is "no." No sound by itself is evil. Sounds that are harsh, ugly, or disturbing can be used in aesthetically and morally admirable ways. And the sweetest, most pleasing sounds can be put to evil uses. So it's a matter of how the sound is employed.

If we look at contemporary music in Socratic terms, and ask how well it is forming and informing the raw passions of individual souls and of the polity, what do we see?

To judge by the opinion of many experts, we see a stratified musical landscape in which some people listen to "serious" music, others to "popular."

For some critics of our democratic culture (Allan Bloom again), the mere existence of vulgar music exerts a fatal and irreversible downward pressure on the soul, the culture, and the polity. It's a persuasive argument, if all we look at is Mozart on the one hand, and the grossest and most offensive popular music on the other.

Which is pretty much what Bloom did in his famous chapter on music in The Closing of the American Mind. He focused on the stuff that Tipper Gore went after in those famous Senate hearings of the mid-'80s: rapaciously violent heavy metal, hardcore and punk bands out to shock what was left of the bourgeoisie; Madonna in her underwear phase; Prince at his most priapic.

I, too, have criticized this vulgarity. But I also contend that the vilest strain of popular music, and of popular culture in general, arises less from ordinary vulgarity than from cultivated perversity.

American popular music has not always been vile. On the contrary, certain strains of it, notably popular song and jazz, have achieved worldwide distinction in a century when socalled serious music embraced rationalism, mathematics, noise, and games of chance to the point of cutting itself off from the educated as well as the popular audience.

If you look closely, you see that the most troubling impulses in popular music came from the artistic elite. The process began in the late 1960s, when the counterculture went sour, and rock'n'roll began to attract the sort of people who were less interested in music than in using such a popular medium for their own culturally radical purposes.