Philosophy-RAG-demo/transcriptions/HoP 133 - Strings Attached - Music and Philosophy.txt

 Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of King's College London and the Leverhulme Trust, online at www.historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode, Strings Attached, Music and Philosophy. Doing this podcast has given me many opportunities to be grateful. Above all, to you, the listener, without whom the whole thing would be even more pointless than the UK at the end of a Eurovision Song Contest, but also to numerous colleagues who have helped out. I'm thinking not only of the many interview guests I've had on, but also scholars who have given me expert input on scripts and suggestions about which topics to cover. I owe another debt to those who have helped with music for this series. For ancient philosophy, it was Stefan Hagel who let me use clips of him playing reconstructed ancient instruments. When I got to philosophy in the Islamic world, I approached a number of musicians who do classical music from this tradition and got more help than I really needed, enough to put together an album when all I needed was an introductory clip or two. That gave me an idea. Why not do a special episode on music and philosophy in the Islamic world and play you some of the music that has kindly been made available to me? This would be a good idea even if I didn't have such nice music to include. As I mentioned at the end of the last episode, the ancient tradition, and then the medieval traditions that drew on the ancients, recognized mathematics as a branch of philosophy. To be more accurate, it was often described as a preliminary or propedudic discipline, one to be studied in preparation for the chief philosophical sciences such as physics and metaphysics. The precedent for this was about as good as precedent gets. Plato declares in the Republic that students of philosophy should begin with mathematics, and then adds in the Timaeus that without the mathematical science of astronomy, mankind would never have started to do philosophy at all. Then, in an influential passage of his Metaphysics, Aristotle divides philosophy into three branches, physics, mathematics, and theology. Whereas physics studies things in the material world, and theology deals with things free of matter, mathematics considers things that are in matter but can be separated from them. An example might be the circular shape that exists in, say, a well-made pancake. We can abstract the circle from such objects and apply the discipline of geometry to it, though to be honest I'd rather leave the circle where it is and apply some maple syrup. The same goes for music. On a stringed instrument, you can create notes at different intervals by plucking strings of different lengths or blowing into a tube stopped at different positions. The ancients developed a science, often called harmonics, which abstractly studied the mathematical proportions that are physically realized in string instruments, like the lyre or the zither, or wind instruments, like the Greek flute known as the aulos. That's the instrument you heard in the clip I used as music for the first episodes in the podcast series. Philosophers sometimes look down on the actual making of music. It was often seen as a lower-class activity, especially when certain instruments were involved. Aristotle tells us of a legend that the goddess Athena invented the aulos but then threw it away because playing it made her face contort grotesquely. This same instrument is among those excluded from the ideal city in Plato's Republic. Yet, whatever these authorities said about actual music-making, harmonics was accepted by Late Antiquity as one of the four standard mathematical disciplines. In the Islamic world, authors inspired by the Hellenic tradition duly included harmonics, or music, in their overviews of the philosophical curriculum. For instance, in his overview of the work of Aristotle, al-Kindi faithfully records that there are four mathematical sciences that serve as preliminaries to philosophy. He tactfully avoids mentioning that there are nonetheless no works on mathematics by We even see the emergence of the Arabic word al-musiqi, a loanword from the Greek musike. Naturally, one didn't need to read Greek works in translation to have the idea of making music. Of course, there was a musical culture among the Arabs even before the advent of Islam. One story making the rounds by the 9th century reports that the ancient tradition of singing to camels began when a man with a beautiful voice fell off his camel, broke his hand, and burst out in melodious Arabic ya ya dar, oh my hand. This had a beneficial effect on his camel's emotional state, proving that music soothes even the beast that isn't so savage, or possibly just that camels have a rather sadistic sense of humor. Following the spread of Islam, various musical traditions swirled together, much as did cultural streams in literature, religion, science, and language. Persian music exerted a particularly strong influence, as we can see, for instance, from the names of the four strings on a kind of lute used in the Islamic world, the ud. Its highest and lowest strings have Persian names, zir and bam, whereas the two middle strings are called mathna and mathlath, which simply come from the Arabic for second and third. Much as the piano nowadays tends to figure centrally in the study of music theory, the ud plays the key role in philosophical treatments of music in the Islamic world. As usual, Akinde was the first to tackle the topic. He wrote several musical treatises that survive today. In one, he talks about the symbolic meaning of the number of strings on each string instrument. The four-stringed lute stands for a wide array of fourfold divisions in the world around us. Akinde mentions the quarters of the sky, the four elements, the four winds, the seasons, the bodily humours, and so on. Despite this widespread rule of four, not all cultures adopt four strings. Rather, every people has used an instrument with a number of strings appropriate to their beliefs. For instance, in India, they had a one-stringed instrument reflecting their belief in monism. Since I live in Munich, I thought I'd test Akinde's theory by asking a German if he would be willing to tell me how many strings they have here, but he said nine. About now, you may well be wondering what an ud sounds like. Here then is a track by Muhammad al-Qasadji, a master of the ud who played with the famous singer Umm Qalfum. I'd like to thank Mike Malek, who runs the website Mike's Uds, for making this track available to me. Having heard that, how do you feel? Akinde would say that it isn't only camels that can be deeply affected by music, but also humans. To some extent, this is common sense. Everyone has had the experience of being cheered up by joyful song, or saddened by a mournful dirge. But Akinde goes well beyond this everyday observation, explaining that the skilled musician can affect others by influencing the bodies and souls of his audience. I mentioned that he relates the four strings of the ud to the four humours of the body. For instance, the highest string, the zir, corresponds to yellow bile, and the mafna, or second string, to blood. Since our emotional states depend in part on the balance of humours in our body, the musician can manipulate our bodies and thus our emotions, simply by playing the strings of his ud. A story handed down about Akinde illustrates how this might work in practice. A merchant's son, who kept track of his father's accounts, was struck by an illness which rendered him catatonic. The father had always despised Akinde, but turned to him in his hour of need. Akinde instructed some of his students to play the ud to the boy. The boy revived, and sat up for long enough to give crucial information about the family business to his father. But when the students stopped playing, the son fell back into his former state and then died. Akinde explained that God sets the term of each life, and that this is beyond the power of music to change. All this sounds like magic, but a reasonably sophisticated and even plausible theory underlies it. Let's think about why Akinde might believe that the strings of the ud correspond to the four humors. Well, the strings are in a certain mathematical relationship, a proportion, and there is also a proportion between the humors. By creating a harmonious, or discordant, proportion in the ud, one can induce corresponding proportions to arise sympathetically in the body. For Akinde, it is no coincidence that the same mathematical structures would be found in such different things. Under the influence of mathematical works of Pythagorean authors like Nicomachus of Gerasa, Akinde sees the whole universe as having a mathematical structure. He wrote a treatise in which he used this idea to explain why Plato's Timaeus relates the fundamental elements of physics—fire, air, and so on—to geometrical shapes. No wonder, then, that he would think it necessary to study the mathematical disciplines, including harmonics, or music, before moving on to engage in philosophical study of the natural world. Thanks to the workings of divine providence, the natural world itself is full of mathematical structure and harmony. Akinde's theories about music struck a chord with later authors, especially a group of mysterious thinkers writing in the 10th century who called themselves the Brethren of Purity. I'll introduce them properly in a couple of episodes. For now, I'll just tell you that they were a group of anonymous authors based in the Iraqi city of Basra who wrote a collection of letters covering a huge array of philosophical, scientific, and religious topics. Adopting the traditional approach, they devote the opening epistles in their collection to the mathematical disciplines. The fifth letter deals with music and closely follows Akinde's ideas. The Brethren, too, match the strings of the Oud to the Elements to the Four Humours, and so on. They even claim that its proportions match those between the sizes of the elemental spheres. For instance, the ratio of the highest and second highest strings is said to be equivalent to that between the thickness of the spheres of elemental fire and air. I've been suggesting that music affects us emotionally by affecting our bodies, and certainly that is one mechanism that could be invoked by Akinde and the Brethren of Purity. But the Brethren make it clear that music can also have an influence on our immaterial souls, something Akinde, too, would probably accept given the long-standing Platonic and Pythagorean idea that the soul is somehow characterized by mathematical proportion. If you think way back, you may recall the idea of Plato's student Xenocrates that the soul is nothing more less than a number. To illustrate the way musicians can influence us, the Brethren talk about music being used to diffuse a drunken brawl. Yet, despite their idea that music has the power to affect the immaterial soul, the Brethren are very clear that music itself is a physical phenomenon. They tell us that sound spreads like ripples through air in all directions, like an expanding sphere, something they rather beautifully compare to the expansion of a ball of molten glass when it is being worked by a glassblower. Later, they draw an analogy that brings a whole new meaning to the term songwriter—airs like paper, songs like what is written on the paper, the notes of the song being like letters, and the playing of strings like the strokes of a pen. As that comparison suggests, the Brethren tend to explain music using concepts borrowed from the analysis of language. This is especially true when it comes to their account of rhythm. So far, I've been talking mostly about pitch and the relations between pitches, the intervals between notes produced by plucking strings of the Oud, for instance. But music unfolds over time, and this introduces the dimension of rhythm. The Brethren tell us that there are certain standard rhythmic sequences which they understand as combinations of attacks on an instrument which may or may not be followed by a pause. My German friends would want me to illustrate with an example from Beethoven. By the way, notice how many symphonies he eventually wound up writing? Nine. Maybe there's something to that theory of alkindis. In the case of the opening of the Fifth Symphony, we have the rhythmic sequence Da da da da, da da da da. The Brethren would understand this in light of their analogy with language. The rhythm is a repeated cycle of three syllables with short vowels followed by a syllable with a long vowel. Given that songs, then and now, are frequently accompanied by words, we thus have an intimate double relationship between music and language. They match structurally, and this facilitates the matching of words to the tune. That seems like a good cue to break for our second musical clip, which is brought to you by the Ensemble de Musique Classique Arabe, a group founded by Nida Abu-Mrad at the Antonine University in Lebanon. The work of this ensemble brings me to an interesting question. Is it possible for musicians nowadays to recreate music from the period I'm discussing in these podcasts? The answer is yes and no. This ensemble has released an album of music based on a set of notations by the music theorist Safi ad-Din al-Ummawi, who died in 1294 and whose musical theory was tremendously influential on the later tradition. Al-Ummawi lived at the twilight of the Abbasid era, several centuries after alkindi and the Brethren of Purity. In fact, he was attached not only to the late Abbasid court but also to the Mongols after Baghdad fell to them in the mid 13th century. How music actually sounded even in this period, never mind in the 9th or 10th century, is to some extent a matter of speculation, despite the information provided by al-Ummawi. So, it is a controversial question how music of the modern era relates to music that was made in the classical Islamic world. Let's now go back to the relationship between music and language, in particular poetry, which was often paired with music. Another author who wrote about music and, like the Brethren of Purity, lived in the 10th century was the historian Abul Faraj al-Isfahani. He spent 50 years producing a vast collection of poems that had been set to music, listing the melodic and rhythmic modes used. At that time, perhaps no other activity had the cultural centrality of poetry. Writers in all genres, including philosophy, frequently quote Arabic poetry, sometimes from poets who wrote before the advent of Islam. This close association of music with poetry tells us that music wasn't just used to calm down camels. Thanks to its strong links to poetry, it had a central place in the culture of the Islamic lands. It is a frequent topic in works of what is called adab, a difficult word to translate but perhaps refined and improving culture would be close to the mark. The word adab can simply mean education, but came to refer to a whole genre of writing in Arabic, which used literary flair to fuse edification with entertainment. Adab could also refer to an instructive anecdote or saying, hence the title of a collection ascribed to the translator and doctor Hunayn ibn Ishaq, Adab al-Fadasifah, or Sayings of the Philosophers. This is an early example of a common genre of popular philosophical literature in Arabic, which puts amusing or wise remarks into the mouths of various sages, often figures chosen from the Greek philosophical pantheon. I suspect that the average aristocrat of, say, 10th century Baghdad would have thought of Hellenic philosophy as consisting primarily of this so-called wisdom literature, rather than logical or metaphysical treatises by Aristotle and Plotinus. Proving the connection between adab and music, Hunayn's collection includes a whole section of wise sayings on music. Al-Kindi and the Brethren of Purity also include such wisdom sayings about the topic in their writings on the subject. My favorite item is found in the Brethren. A philosopher hears an incompetent musical performance and remarks that the sound of an owl is said to foretell death. He then adds, this musician is foretelling the death of the owl. A good story puts me in the mood for a good tune, so let's now have our next musical clip. Here we're looking ahead to the later centuries of Islam, because this one comes from the Bezmara Ensemble, who perform early Ottoman music. I'd like to thank Fikret Karakaya for permission to use this selection from their album, Splendors of Topkapi. So I like that one so much that I'm going to use it as introduction music later on, when we begin to look at the later tradition of philosophy in the Eastern Islamic world. For now though, we're staying in the 10th century and turning to what is probably the most philosophically interesting work on music from the formative period, Al-Farabi's Great Book of Music. Characteristically, his agenda here, or part of it, is to apply to music the understanding of the philosophical sciences he takes from the Aristotelian tradition. One might suppose that in doing so, he is merely signaling that philosophy sings from the same hymn sheet as the culture around him. After all, before that last clip, I was saying that music played a major role in the refined culture of the Abbasid age. But in fact, the delights of song were not welcomed with a universal chorus of approval in Islamic lands. Already in al-Kindi's day, a theologian named Ibn Abi Ad-Dunya had written an attack on musical entertainment, and there continued to be figures who found music at best frivolous and at worst impious. Even the Brethren of Purity remark that most people use music for mere pleasure, for instance at weddings. You can almost hear the disappointment in their voices, as they draw attention to this rather debased use of an art that should exploit and celebrate the divinely imposed harmony of the cosmos. The dispute concerning the permissibility of music in Islam would continue for centuries to come, with figures like Ibn Taymiyyah joining the critics. There was religious ammunition for both sides of the debate. Music could be defended by quoting anecdotes about the Prophet that seemed to indicate his approval. Drawing a strong connection between music and the more universally admired practice of poetry, as the Brethren do, was another strategy. It is one that Al-Farabi also adopts. In fact, he says that the most perfect kind of music always involves poetry that has been set to melody and rhythm. We've seen that he gives music the dignity of a full-blown science, and this is a further way to burnish its reputation. But Al-Farabi is not saying that every oud player is on a par with an Aristotelian philosopher. Rather, he distinguishes between the practical and theoretical sides of music. A music theorist needn't even be able to sing or play an instrument, something Al-Farabi illustrates by referring to Ptolemy, the great mathematician. He wrote on harmonics, but confessed to having a tenure. Conversely, the practice of music doesn't require a theoretical understanding. Indeed, Al-Farabi says, music was practiced for ages before the underlying theory was eventually discovered. The practical side of music has two further subdivisions, composition and performance. Here, we need to be careful. It isn't clear that there is a rigorous distinction between inventing a tune and playing it, since the performer might have considerable scope for improvisational variation. But, basically, Al-Farabi's idea is that these are two different abilities, something explained in terms of the differences between the imaginative faculties of various people. For it is in the imagination that music is conceived. Though music can be used merely to give pleasure, as the Brethren of Purity also admitted, it also has the power to represent things symbolically. For instance, one might represent a certain emotion with a certain kind of music. People with very powerful imaginations might be able to sit quietly and invent a song within their souls, whereas others need props to help them compose. Whereas we might imagine the songwriter trying out melodies on a piano, Al-Farabi gives the considerably more picturesque example of a musician who composed by tying bells to his clothing and ringing them with bodily motions. All of this should itself ring a bell. It chimes well with Al-Farabi's account of prophecy. After all, he told us that a prophet is precisely someone with a very powerful imaginative power who uses it to devise symbols for the truths grasped more explicitly and adequately at the level of intellect. This helps to explain why the theory of music and its practice are so distinct, to the point that they may be found in different people. Musical theory involves the intellect, whereas musical practice uses the imagination. And nothing guarantees that intellectual ability will come along with a powerful imagination, or vice versa. In fact, Al-Farabi goes so far as to say that it is not essential to music theory that it can actually be put into practice. In this, it is like geometry. As it happens, geometry can be used for practical purposes, like designing houses, but it is not intrinsically a practical science. A contrasting case would be medicine, which is inextricably bound up with the practical business of healing human bodies. This close association of practical affairs with medicine is again something we've seen before in Al-Farabi. You might remember that he compares the ideal ruler to a doctor. We find a similar idea in other authors of this period. In and around the 10th century, a number of authors expound the notion that ethics is like medicine, or rather is medicine, a kind of medicine that aims at treating souls rather than bodies. So prevalent is this idea that I am going to devote a whole episode to it, surveying texts on ethics that take the cue not only from Plato and Aristotle, but from that most famous of doctors, Galen. We'll be looking at ethical writings by two familiar figures, Ahrazi and Ibn Adi, and introducing a new thinker who will take us up to the time of Avicenna. For now though, I'll end with an extended version of the music I've been using for the current series of podcasts, from the album Anwar by the ensemble Maraghí, kindly made available to me by Giovanni de' Zorzi. Enjoy, and don't miss your appointment next week for some spiritual medicine, here on The History of Philosophy, without any caps. you