Power

Historical References to Music's Power

In Western thought, these discourses traditionally draw upon a corpus of texts that span from the works of Plato in the 5th century B.C.E. to the writings of Boethius at the turn of the 6th century C.E. In the Renaissance, scholars, musicians, poets, and their patrons paid particular attention to the alleged power of ancient music to control and discipline the human mind and body. The musician Timotheus was thought to have aroused Alexander the Great to a rage by the sheer effect of his performance at a banquet. Pythagoras, whose study of musical ratios was thought to have illuminated the harmony of the cosmos, was believed capable of controlling a man's furor by selecting the right harmonic mode to temper him.

These observations paralleled mythical deeds: Amphion raised the walls of Thebes by commanding stones with his lyre; Orpheus gained passage to the underworld, tamed beasts and demons, and reclaimed his beloved Eurydice from the god Hades, all with the power of his voice and lyre; and the sirens' entrancing song lured nearby sailors to their doom. Music, commanded alternatively by Dionysus or Apollo, could successively bring one to frenzy or order.

Renaissance academies, where musicians, poets, and aristocrats assembled, sought to harness the power of ancient music by engineering a new union of poetry and music that yielded, among other things, the genre of opera. In a fitting illustration, composers regularly appealed to the very stories that had motivated the genre's invention, from Monteverdi's L'Orfeo (1607) to Handel's setting of John Dryden's ode Alexander's Feast; or, The Power of Music (1736). The power of ancient music long remained a central tenant of Western musical discourse, particularly as regards the value of modern European music and the nature of other music. To the present day, the idea that music is a power to reckon with remains a topos of political discourses (e.g., on music education) and scientific studies (from neuroscience to evolutionary biology).

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