RYTHMES RÉPUBLIQUE

RYTHMES RÉPUBLIQUE

01-07-2016

"Musical innovation is full of danger to the State, for when modes of music change, the fundamental laws of the State always change with them."

- Plato, The Republic

"The introduction of novel fashions in music is a thing to beware of as endangering the whole fabric of society, whose most important conventions are unsettled by any revolutions in that quarter."

-Plato, The Republic

For as long as there has been music, there have been persons worried about its ability to influence behavior. The ancient Greeks were convinced, anecdotally, that a certain king had been stirred to arms by the sound of a flute playing a tune in the Phrygian mode. Plato was certain that the mixolydian mode would make young men "effeminate."...

During the later Middle Ages the writings of men like Plato and Aristotle, so long forgotten when Rome fell, were rediscovered, which led to a renewed interest in modes. It now appears that the theorists of that day got all of the Greek modes mixed up, but here is how they have come down to us.

There are seven: Ionian , Dorian , Phrygian, Lydian , Mixolydian, Aeolian, and Lochrian....

Since more modern ears found modal tunes too alien, some of them tune have been translated into our 'modern tonal centers'; major & minor. Some pitches have been changed to fit, particularly the ones at the end, so that there is a greater lean toward the keynote....

However, the battle is not over. Very often, one will hear a combination of both Dorian and minor mode, keeping the strongest elements of the minor key we are so accustomed to, but preserving that "wild" high note in the first part.

Plato would not have been amused.

Mixing, matching, and borrowing from one mode in the middle of a piece which seems principally composed in another represented an impure conjunction of moods and states of mind that ought to be kept separate, he warned.

Plato would not have enjoyed the music of Schubert, who liked to write melodies filled with such joyous grief that seem to be in both major and minor at once, or the modal flights of the ambiguous Brahms.

Tragedy was one thing, he opined. Comedy was another. And never should they be mixed together. But of course, artists have been doing that for centuries, and, thanks to folks like Plato, every time they do it, they are heralded as great innovators!

People like Shakespeare, who call for comic characters to play clowning scenes in between scenes of great drama to relieve the tension and let us laugh for a moment before the next round of bad news.

It is hard, though, for a thing to maintain its identity when it is mixed with so many other things, and Plato was sure that every mode had a particular characteristic, and that it was not appropriate to put elements of one kind of mode into another.

But it was not enough simply to regulate the modes; Plato wanted to limit them. In his book (ten books, actually) Republic, Plato manages to argue away most of the modes. He wanted strong and courageous leaders, and any music that promoted weakness, or intemperance, was not a mode for him. Dirge-like modes, like the Lydian mode, are out, as is the Ionian, for it promotes sloth and drunkenness, he feels.

One has to be amused: the Ionian mode is the one that, according to Middle Age theorists, sounds exactly like our modern day C major scale! So if you've been feeling slothful lately, blame it on half the music you've been listening to!

And so he settled on just two: the Dorian and the Phrygian. The Dorian, he said, would "fittingly imitate the utterances and accents of a brave man who is engaged in warfare," while the Phrygian was suitable "for a man engaged in works of peace."

What led him to these conclusions is unknown. It is likely that some kind of tradition had grown up in the artistic community that led them to associate certain modes with certain styles of music.

In our modern era, composers often feel that different keys express different moods. And there are more practical considerations; for instance, a man writing a military Symphony would want to use trumpets and drums. For much of the 18th century, trumpets did not have valves and could only play certain notes. If you wanted to use trumpets you pretty much had to write your piece in D major.

In consequence,  that key became associated with official sounding, courtly, or battle, music. If Plato had been born into the 18th century, he probably would have picked up on this tradition, and assumed that D major was a noble, courageous, key, suitable for leading troops into battle. 

Since music written in that key was often in celebration of the king or his prowess, it would have seemed to back up his claim.

There were modes, and then there were modes. As has been mentioned, certain ones were cause for alarm. It was not the excessive volume or the lyrics that young people had to be guarded against, it was the construction of the melody itself. Certain tunes in our own day may seem to actually sound more "immoral", partly because of a web of associations we've all gotten used to (think of all the movies you've seen where the saxophone begins to play a slithery tune at the least hint of innuendo...), and certain conventions have grown up about how the music should sound to accompany certain emotions (...or those breathless passages in the low bass of the piano that always signify a chase scene in an action movie). 

Romantic pieces have their own vocabulary, as do moments of great tension and anxiety. We may not have any idea how to write a film score, but we certainly know what kind of music to expect in each of the pivotal moments. Those more mundane bits in the middle require no music at all; it is only when we should share some strong emotion with the onscreen characters. We still expect music to provide an emotional content, and we expect that it will move us in some way.

In our own day, various musical "artists" have been held in contempt for the kind of music that they are feeding our youth;

Plato's alarm, in some regard, looks like an early attempt to protect against the pernicious influence that immersion in some kinds of music may have on them. But Plato's idealism went a good deal farther. He envisioned a just and equitable city-state, with all of the elements acting together to produce wise and honorable and brave citizenry. Music, he argued, was one of the forces that should bring about that end.

Ref: Pianonoise (n.d.)

Kingsley J.E.K Acheampong
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