Music -- Physiological effect; Music, Influence of
For the Greeks to whom we owe the origin of the word music, Apollo
served as the God of both medicine and music, and there were some among
them who suggested its use for both mental and physical disease. “Plato
and Aristotle claimed that the Dorian mode was regarded as virile,
energetic, and proper for the perfect citizen; the Phrygian made them
headstrong and the Lydian included effeminacy and slack morals. The
modes of Asiatic origin were considered suitable for banquets.” Five
hundred years before the birth of Christ, Pythagoras[I.] founded a
brotherhood “based on music as a means of life and moral uplift.”[70]
The influence of music was so great among the Greeks that it is not
surprising that they used it in all walks of life, including medical
treatment. The extent to which they and the peoples who followed them,
used music in this manner will be more fully discussed in the first
chapter.
Nicholas Murray Butler once stated that “An expert is one who knows
more and more about less and less.” There is much truth in this
facetious definition. In ancient civilization the known facts were
so few that it was possible for some scholars to acquire all the
knowledge available. The professional thinkers or philosophers had a
comparatively complete familiarity with biology, law, music, medicine,
government and theology, and could easily write authoritatively about
most of them. Some of the important discoveries in the arts and
sciences were made by men equally well known in entirely unrelated
fields. As late as the Roman Era, Celsus wrote a series of books
on different subjects, each of which was so complete that it was
considered an authority in its field. To cite one example, the ten
volumes on medicine were accepted for the next thousand years as its
gospel text. Although specialization was known to ancient society, its
foundation was one of individual will rather than basic training in
facts. With the passage of time more and more knowledge developed till
the single volume could no longer hold all the known facts of a science
and what had been titles of chapters became the titles of books.
Knowledge may really be said to have progressed when books are written
on subjects about which only one sentence could have been written
previously, but knowledge progressed very slowly until the fifteenth
century. The Renaissance in art and science developed simultaneously
in a relatively small area. The Renaissance of both medicine and
music, was in Italy during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.
Here, instrumental music was asserting its importance over vocal
music, and accurate descriptions of human anatomy finally replaced
the old erroneous conceptions. Both of these changes were necessary
for progress in these fields, but progress was slow in each because
there is always a reluctance on the part of the people to accept new
concepts. Individuals may be intellectually progressive, but the people
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