Plato was right, music is dangerous. Long before jingles sold toothpaste and Pachelbel repelled loiterers from shopping plazas, Plato and his cronies contemplated the mind-controlling applications of music and its potential to incite revolution.
“Any musical innovation is dangerous to the whole State … When modes of music change, the fundamental laws of the State always change with them,” the toga’d one wrote in Book IV of The Republic.
Someone was listening, because music has become the most insidious method of social influence in the manipulator’s arsenal, inspiring allegiance to jingoist regimes as well as open rebellion against imposed order. Unwatched, musicians breed chaos, Plato thought. Let them run free and the next thing you know, the Republic will be knee-deep in whistling revolutionaries and no one will take out the trash.
On the other hand, in his 1852 essay “The Opera,” Thomas Carlyle wrote that “music is well said to be...
Mark D. Dunn, a musician and poet, teaches writing and music history at Sault College. His most recent book is Fancy Clapping (Scrivener Press, 2012).
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