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PARTISANREVIEW
easy to demonstrate. It seems more plausible, for example, to assume that
Le
Sacre du Printemps
and
Pierrot Lunaire
reflected social changes which
had already occurred than to imagine that they helped to cause World
War
I.
Plato rej ects the view that music is "only a form of play," and thus
does no harm:
Nor does it work any .. . except that by gradual infiltration it softly
overflows upon the characters and pursuits of men and from these is–
sues forth grown greater to attack their business dealings, and from
these relations it proceeds against the laws and constitution with
wanton license, Socrates, till finally it overthrows all things public
and private.
The mesmerizing crescendo of music's effects is also duplicated
by
Plato's prose. By a sleight of hand (keeping 'music' the subject of this
sinuous sentence) he blames music - accused only of changing men's
character and pursuits - for all the harm men subsequently do.
It
seems
that for Plato, music does harm (or inculcates principles of law and or–
der) without our knowledge, whether we listen or not, and perhaps
more effectively if we don't. This view of music is certainly suggested
by
Wagner's description of its subversive power (in a letter to Hans von
BUlow):
. . . art consists precisely in communicating the strongest and most
unusual feelings to a listener in such a way that ... he
yields
unre–
sistingly, as it were, to an ingratiating allurement and thus
involuntarily assimilates even what is most alien to his nature.
It is essential to Wagner that such assimilation of (ideological?)
poison take place subliminally - one reason for hiding his orchestra un–
derneath the stage. Film music, too, should not be too obtrusive
if
it is
to mold our emotional responses without our knowledge; and to
listen
to muzak (whatever its pedigree) is to see through its attempt to make us
buy things or to allay our anxiety in airports or elevators.
Plato's view of music leads naturally to the desire to control it, as if
it were a potentially dangerous drug. This desire is not less ominous
when one's program for music is populist or "democratic": music
"of
the people, by the people, and for the people" is the ideal of totalitarian
Philistines like Goebbels and Zhdanov. Yet the alternative (viewing music
as having no social or political impact) is almost equally unattractive. We
can claim that the more attention we pay to music (which is to say: the
