Music is Reason

I was given a discussion topic in school about the Middle Ages and The Renaissance. Specifically in regards to music. My professor made the comment that people believe The Renaissance or 'rebirth' is the period that followed the Middle Ages or 'Dark Ages,' and that these terms can be misleading, because history tends to move continuously rather than by leaps and bounds. The disusion was to talk about the gradual improvement of music through these periods.

First it is necessary to disprove the statement “these descriptions can be misleading as history tends to move continuously rather than by leaps and bounds.” This is false. After the fall of the Roman Empire western world did not see many of the necessities Romans took for granted for almost one thousand years. It wasn’t until St. Thomas Aquinas rediscovered Aristotle in the 13th century that we began seeing the emergence of the Renaissance. When I say rediscover, I mean rediscover in the true context of Aristotle’s writings. The Greek language, culture and more was all but lost for a thousand years after the fall of Rome. The barbarians who destroyed Rome found they had nothing of significance to replace it’s splendor with. St. Thomas Aquinas was an Aristotelian, and fortunately, he brought back reason to our world. After the rebirth i.e. renaissance began, man was able to begin considering himself an individual. It would take hundreds of years for this to fully take effect, but eventually rebirth would give way to enlightenment. In enlightenment we see the signing of the Declaration of Independence, the American Revolution, the French Revolution, the Polish-Lithuanian Constitution of May 3, 1791 and much more. For once men shrugged off the shackles of God and King, and realized his own greatness.

Next we must define what art is and what music is to our cognition. Art is a selective re-creation of an artist’s metaphysical value judgments, and, as such it is an indispensible medium for the communication of a moral ideal. Looking at a piece of art injects several abstractions; life, death, hope, love, hate, fear etc, and it is how we react to these things which indicates what our sense of life is. A sense of life can be defined as something that happens before our concepts, on a more emotional level, the way we react to art helps us to indicate what our sense of life is, but it does not define it. Our sense of life can be developed in two ways; by a conscious effort or be chance. We either choose what values we hold by deciding basic philosophical premises such as; where we are, how we know it, and what to do, or we evade such actions and come to these conclusions based off of our friends, family, or teachers. This latter method is very dangerous.

Looking at a painting can invoke certain emotions. The painting uses certain abstract and concrete concepts in order to fill the viewer with certain emotions. Music on the other hand does not have the ability to show anything, music uses different sounds produced by periodic vibrations of a sonorous body. Music works in reverse of a painting. It does not invoke images directly, but indirectly through your subconscious. While listening to a piece of music you may feel yourself seeing random images as if from a dream, but this is actually your subconscious at work and is not random but carefully selected. Let me give some examples: A piece of music can’t show you what it looks like to be about to kill someone, but it can give you the feeling. It cannot show you what it is like to be in love, but it can give you the feeling. It cannot show you a beautiful garden, but it can give you the feeling. Another great example of this is in the move “Immortal Beloved” where Beethoven tells a future servant of his that the music he is hearing is his frustration at not being able to get to his lover. As an aside, for great examples of music and the emotions they convey see the aforementioned movie. What is important to follow here, is that the emotion is conveyed by the composer whether that is happiness or anger, and how the person reacts to it are dependent upon their sense of life.

Now, looking into the middle ages, it is important to remember that the church pretty much had a monopoly on the arts for almost 700 years. During this time the main form of music was ‘Gregorian Chant’ a rather ominous and morose kind of monophonic sound. The art of the time was meant to convey a sense of uselessness. It was meant to keep the average person from realizing his or her own potential and condemn them to a life in fear of mystical leering gargoyles and an eternal hell. Going to church was not the celebration as it is to some today; it was as if going to mourning. They were mourning life. In “Music an Appreciation” by Roger Kamien he illustrates that many of the secular songs were about love. Note however, that the majority of these songs and illustrations weren’t predominant until the 13th century. This is not to say that there were no secular songs before then, just very seldom. Secular music and secularism in general began appearing more and more after reason was re-introduced.

For more on this read Ayn Rand’s The Romantic Manifesto