“Do you like good music?”

          There’s definitely something a little (a lot) magical about music – it travels through some different mode of movement than the rest of the world; vibrates through souls.  I haven’t quite figured it out, and to be honest, I don’t think I ever will because it’s a force that much greater than I am.  But there’s something about music that marks it different from anything else.  Music moves in rhythms so powerful, dangers arise.  Music is mysterious; “mysterious,” not quite worthy of being an adjective at its side.  Music is personal and universal, in impossible simultaneity; it pulses with the beat of your heart and palpitates in the beat of the world, forging the two into one.  Music is more than the sum of its sound waves; music is timbre, and pitch, and a pinch of the stuff God used on his First Day.

          It’s no wonder Plato was so concerned.  It’s revolutionary stuff, this music – he knew that it could easily become “that luxurious excess” from which the commonwealth needed “purging” (IX.3.399).  He sensed well that the “ultimate end of all education is insight into the harmonious order (cosmos) of the whole world,” because “musical expression and rhythm, and grace of form and movement, all depend on goodness of nature” (IX.3.400) – that it is in the world, yet of the world, as well.  To him, too, it was evident that we needed to be educated in its cadences, for “rhythm and harmony sink deep into the recesses of the soul and take the strongest hold there,” constantly molding us, nourishing us, unbeknownst to us, into beings of “noble spirit” (IX.3.401).

           All of this, yes, answers: “I love good music,” so much so that sometimes it makes me afraid. “Then is not our account of education in poetry and music now complete?  It has ended where it ought to end, in the love of beauty” (IX.3.403).

           I agree.