Computer Music and the Post-Modern: A Case of Schizophrenia
Dominique Richard · Computer Music Journal · 1994
Music has often held a privileged position in the pantheon of the arts. Indeed, in his Republic (1968), Plato included music with arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and rhetoric in the core education of the golden character, the rulers of the ideal city. The rearing in music is sovereign because the man properly reared on rhythm and harmony has the sharpest sense for what has been left out and what is not a fine product of craft or what is not a fine product of nature (p. 527). At the same time, he held literature and writing in contempt because they were twice removed from the truth (p. 597). During the Enlightenment some 20 centuries later, Jean-Jacques Rousseau also placed music at the origin of language in his Essay on the Origin of Languages (1967), when he postulated that the voice singing a melody must have been the first human expression, which was later transformed into spoken language. As soon as vocal signs strike your ear, they announce to you a being like yourself. They are, so to speak the organ of the soul (pp. 63-64). Thus, in our culture, music exudes an aura of purity and sanctity. It has been heard as a Supreme Being's voice, rarely open to criticism or revision.