On music:
Music is among the great spring of joy among this vale of tears. The German philosopher Freidrich Nietzsche famously asserted that “without music, life would be a mistake.” You seemed somewhat tentative in your designation of music as art. On the contrary, some of Nietzsche’s earlier contemporaries considered music to be the purest of all arts in that it is not mimetic or representational. Because it is not bound to imitate one or another object, music is thus more freely creative.
In one of the exchanges in the Republic dialogue, Plato actually suggested that music somehow captures the soul of a people: “…when modes of music change, of the State always change with them.” It is very interesting to see music of a given era simultaneously as a kind of soundtrack for the Zeitgeist, or “spirit of the time.” I sometimes worry that some of the computerization…
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