Music Is Invisible
I love reading the ancient writings of Plato. Though I certainly don’t agree with all of his beliefs, I appreciate that his writings force me to think critically and examine my own beliefs about everything. Plato’s dialogue Phaedo gives an account of the final hours of Socrates’s life as he discusses the nature of the afterlife. Socrates has been imprisoned and sentenced to death by an Athenian jury for supposedly not believing in the gods of Athens and for “corrupting the youth.” Being sentenced to death does not prevent Socrates from spending his final hours doing the very thing that earned him that unjust sentence - insisting that the citizens of Athens think for themselves and examine their lives.
In one section of the Phaedo, another philosopher named Simmias is arguing with Socrates about the existence of the soul in an invisible realm. Socrates considers there to be two types of existence - the visible and the invisible. A visible existence includes things that can be perceived by the senses, such as the human body. An invisible existence would describe the human soul, which is something that exists, but is not perceivable by the senses. Socrates insists that the soul continues to exist even when the body ceases to exist. Simmias challenges Socrates and likens the soul to musical harmony and the body to a stringed instrument called a lyre. Simmias proposes that if the lyre were destroyed, the harmony would cease to exist.
Now, I do not struggle with my belief about the body, soul, and the afterlife. Socrates believed that the soul continues to exist through reincarnation after the body has died. I do not belief in reincarnation, but I very much believe that the soul will exist in the either Heaven or Hell after the body is dead. What this particular exchange between Socrates and another philosopher provoked me to think was how simple minded Simmias is about music, and thus, how many people today - even those that play music - have a shallow, egotistical view of music.
Simmias is wrong. Music doesn’t need us. It exists without us, and often in spite of us. Simply destroying the lyre will prevent the lyre from expressing harmony again, but it won’t destroy the harmony that already exists. Socrates seemed to agree with Simmias that harmony is a slave to the lyre: “the lyre and the strings and the notes, though still unharmonized, exist; the harmony is composed last of all, and is the first to be destroyed” (Phaedo, 92c). But many would agree with these two, believing that harmony is created by instruments. If that were the case, then where do all the harmonic rules and principles come from? Why do we desire the music to do certain things? Is that through conditioning? I say no. Those of us who have studied music and have furthered our fundamental musical knowledge have developed ears that can accept certain dissonances as pleasing and certain polyrhythms as resolute that uneducated people cannot. This isn’t because of our instruments, but rather due to the fact that we have studied music and all of its possibilities. And now I can hear harmonies in my head when I look at a piece of printed music (and even when I don’t). I don’t need an instrument to create the harmony for me, but rather to help me in expressing the harmony that already exists. That’s why learning to play an instrument is often a struggle - we are trying to figure out how to express what we hear and what we’ve heard. Harmony doesn’t need us. Music doesn’t need us. But we need it.