And you’ll feel something akin to the electric thrill I enjoyed when Gilmour, Liberate, Pat Conway, the Great Creatore, W. C. Handy, and John Philip Sousa all came to town on the same historic day.
This, like everything else in The Music Man, is a lie. Professor Harold Hill was not there on that same historic day, not least because it never happened. And, owing to the show’s farcical tone, it’s a relatively innocent lie, one which we, the audience, and Marian the librarian are very aware of. We all know how it will go: Harold Hill will build up the con man’s jenga tower of lies and it will come crashing down. The plot of Music Man even throws a dash of romance into the story, but even then it does not stray from predictable lines. Marian, despite seeing through the con, begins to believe Harold Hill a redeemable man and perhaps even he himself begins to change–and so on.
But the Hollywood adaptation of the musical takes things a step further. There is, so to speak, a long con, a trap that is sprung at the very end of the film, when the farcical dénouement breaks from the predictable storyline. The film could have ended 3 minutes before it does, like the Broadway show, with the hilariously incompetent band performing Beethoven’s Minuet in G as the bathetic acquittal of Professor Hill. That would have fit the mocking tone of the film. But we, the audience, are the long con. We are suddenly caught up in the music’s magic as the incompetent band transforms, before our eyes, into a competent one. Johnny, Willy, Teddy, Fred suddenly keep rhythm. The costumes suddenly become more opulent. Where moments before was cacophony there is now the glorious euphony of a massive brass band. The townspeople watch with delight and an uncanny acceptance of this transformation. The quotidian reality of Iowa becomes the surreality prophesied in Harold Hill’s initial song “76 Trombones,” according to no logical impulse in the narrative other than the music wishing it were so.
I have often heard this moment described as “magical,” and usually it is meant as a compliment, but I use the term here in its full lexical sense, including the very negative. For this is the great danger of music that Brittany Petruzzi has already alluded to in quoting Augustine: music is magical. It overpowers our will and reason with its thick, occult haze. It is mumbled words over a pentagram, the enchantment of men into pigs, the dulling of senses into sleep. And while we are awake to surreality and asleep to reality, the Harold Hills of the world steal our reason and seduce our desires.
Of course I would be wrong (not to mention a hypocrite) if I thought all music was necessarily this way, but it is certainly the case that some music can be like this. Augustine’s comments on music are frequently quoted and almost never does somebody actually attempt to defend them literally, instead dismissing out of hand that his hesitations are justified. I’ve done this myself. But since I have been asked to respond to Brittany Petruzzi’s brilliant essay (which I find myself in almost total agreement with, I must admit, but I am here adopting the “cranky” persona), I may as well spice up the conversation by offering as robust a defense of the Augustinian position on music and theater as I can.
Let me quote again the relevant part of Augustine, from Book X of the Confessions.
But I ought not to allow my mind to be paralyzed by the gratification of my senses, which often leads it astray. For the senses are not content to take second place. Simply because I allow them their due, as adjuncts to reason, they attempt to take precedence and forge ahead of it, with the result that I sometimes sin in this way but am not aware of it until later.
What is Augustine talking about? He is borrowing a notion of the parts of the soul from Plato, described eloquently in Republic. Why is it that the human soul can know what is the good thing to do but yet choose to do what is not good? For Plato, this is a disorder in the soul, one part of the soul not staying in its proper lane. There is a reasoning part of the soul whose business it is to rule over the desiring part, and the desiring part to listen to the reason. If the desiring part is in charge, which Augustine says it is always attempting to be, the soul is disordered and will always tend toward injustice.
It is easy to caricature Plato’s vision, to accuse it of a gnosticism that sees all bodily desires as bad and privileges the cold logic and calculus of the mind. Yet, reading him charitably, this is not what Plato says; the desire itself is not the issue, but merely how the desire is fulfilled–is it fulfilled in obedience to reason or for its own sake?
Petruzzi’s essay has claimed that music, poetry, and drama attract each other into a single “razzle-dazzle” or, as Plato might call it, dromenon, making the highest art form known to man. And, in a way, Plato agrees: music, poetry, and representation all stand or fall together. As Socrates says to Glaucon at one point, “when the things of the poets are stripped of the colors of the music and are said alone, by themselves, I suppose you know how they look.” But unlike Petruzzi, however, Plato thinks they are all the more dangerous for their unity. Why? Because they encourage this disorder in the soul that Augustine describes. But why does Plato think that this sort of dramatic representation is inherently bad?
When a person represents another character, in the act of mimesis, that representation stands in relation to its reference as the real thing stands in relation to the ideal form. That is, if an artist represents a cup in a painting, the cup is a shadow of the real cup I’m drinking out of, just as my cup is a shadow of the form of the cup, the idea in Plato’s heaven. Yet Plato notes that that artist knows nothing about making cups, any more than he knows about making couches or beds or jewelry, but strangely he can represent all of those things without much domain-specific knowledge. This, Plato concludes, the artist does because he is tricking the intellect. He is bypassing the normal way in which we see the world, which is one step removed from the forms. It is a gratification of our basest instincts. Painting is a kind of music in this sense–it is appealing first to the gratification of our senses and bypassing our reason.
Thus corruption can enter the city. The music, paired with the poetry and drama, can steal its way into our souls without the consent of our reasoning inner guardians, just as Harold Hill distracts the townspeople with his fictitious band–and just like the musical itself distracts us from its inherent absurdity through this spectacle at the end.
And isn’t this what music theater is doing most dangerously of all now? It is all Disney musicals, in particular, have done for quite some time: slip in any number of fictions, about absolute autonomy of the individual (“There Must Be Something More than This” from Beauty and the Beast), about their right to express artistically over against any authority (“How Far I’ll Go” from Moana), about their own well-being being the prerequisite to their others’ well-being (“Let It Go” from Frozen), about the plasticity of nature and infinite malleability of self, structure, culture, language, and so forth (“Reflection” from Mulan). Disney may be low-hanging fruit, but isn’t this also “My Shot” from Hamilton, reducing the hero’s service to society to nothing more than self-interest and self-actualization? Isn’t this the entire plot of Fiddler on the Roof–give up your oppressive, religious traditions and allow your daughters to determine who they want to be? Aren’t Plato and Augustine right? Hasn’t this dangerous combination of music and poetry lessened our powers to resist our own desires, that most fundamental source of slavery, and hasn’t it all corrupted the state? Hasn’t music attempted to take precedence and forge ahead, and we are only aware of the sin later?
John Ahern is a graduate student pursuing a PhD in musicology from Princeton University. He is a substitute organist for the Princeton University chapel on occasion. He loves his wife and son, and they all frequently sing, to greater and lesser degrees of success, Renaissance bicinia over dinner.
And you’ll feel something akin to the electric thrill I enjoyed when Gilmour, Liberate, Pat Conway, the Great Creatore, W. C. Handy, and John Philip Sousa all came to town on the same historic day.
This, like everything else in The Music Man, is a lie. Professor Harold Hill was not there on that same historic day, not least because it never happened. And, owing to the show’s farcical tone, it’s a relatively innocent lie, one which we, the audience, and Marian the librarian are very aware of. We all know how it will go: Harold Hill will build up the con man’s jenga tower of lies and it will come crashing down. The plot of Music Man even throws a dash of romance into the story, but even then it does not stray from predictable lines. Marian, despite seeing through the con, begins to believe Harold Hill a redeemable man and perhaps even he himself begins to change–and so on.
But the Hollywood adaptation of the musical takes things a step further. There is, so to speak, a long con, a trap that is sprung at the very end of the film, when the farcical dénouement breaks from the predictable storyline. The film could have ended 3 minutes before it does, like the Broadway show, with the hilariously incompetent band performing Beethoven’s Minuet in G as the bathetic acquittal of Professor Hill. That would have fit the mocking tone of the film. But we, the audience, are the long con. We are suddenly caught up in the music’s magic as the incompetent band transforms, before our eyes, into a competent one. Johnny, Willy, Teddy, Fred suddenly keep rhythm. The costumes suddenly become more opulent. Where moments before was cacophony there is now the glorious euphony of a massive brass band. The townspeople watch with delight and an uncanny acceptance of this transformation. The quotidian reality of Iowa becomes the surreality prophesied in Harold Hill’s initial song “76 Trombones,” according to no logical impulse in the narrative other than the music wishing it were so.
I have often heard this moment described as “magical,” and usually it is meant as a compliment, but I use the term here in its full lexical sense, including the very negative. For this is the great danger of music that Brittany Petruzzi has already alluded to in quoting Augustine: music is magical. It overpowers our will and reason with its thick, occult haze. It is mumbled words over a pentagram, the enchantment of men into pigs, the dulling of senses into sleep. And while we are awake to surreality and asleep to reality, the Harold Hills of the world steal our reason and seduce our desires.
Of course I would be wrong (not to mention a hypocrite) if I thought all music was necessarily this way, but it is certainly the case that some music can be like this. Augustine’s comments on music are frequently quoted and almost never does somebody actually attempt to defend them literally, instead dismissing out of hand that his hesitations are justified. I’ve done this myself. But since I have been asked to respond to Brittany Petruzzi’s brilliant essay (which I find myself in almost total agreement with, I must admit, but I am here adopting the “cranky” persona), I may as well spice up the conversation by offering as robust a defense of the Augustinian position on music and theater as I can.
Let me quote again the relevant part of Augustine, from Book X of the Confessions.
But I ought not to allow my mind to be paralyzed by the gratification of my senses, which often leads it astray. For the senses are not content to take second place. Simply because I allow them their due, as adjuncts to reason, they attempt to take precedence and forge ahead of it, with the result that I sometimes sin in this way but am not aware of it until later.
What is Augustine talking about? He is borrowing a notion of the parts of the soul from Plato, described eloquently in Republic. Why is it that the human soul can know what is the good thing to do but yet choose to do what is not good? For Plato, this is a disorder in the soul, one part of the soul not staying in its proper lane. There is a reasoning part of the soul whose business it is to rule over the desiring part, and the desiring part to listen to the reason. If the desiring part is in charge, which Augustine says it is always attempting to be, the soul is disordered and will always tend toward injustice.
It is easy to caricature Plato’s vision, to accuse it of a gnosticism that sees all bodily desires as bad and privileges the cold logic and calculus of the mind. Yet, reading him charitably, this is not what Plato says; the desire itself is not the issue, but merely how the desire is fulfilled–is it fulfilled in obedience to reason or for its own sake?
Petruzzi’s essay has claimed that music, poetry, and drama attract each other into a single “razzle-dazzle” or, as Plato might call it, dromenon, making the highest art form known to man. And, in a way, Plato agrees: music, poetry, and representation all stand or fall together. As Socrates says to Glaucon at one point, “when the things of the poets are stripped of the colors of the music and are said alone, by themselves, I suppose you know how they look.” But unlike Petruzzi, however, Plato thinks they are all the more dangerous for their unity. Why? Because they encourage this disorder in the soul that Augustine describes. But why does Plato think that this sort of dramatic representation is inherently bad?
When a person represents another character, in the act of mimesis, that representation stands in relation to its reference as the real thing stands in relation to the ideal form. That is, if an artist represents a cup in a painting, the cup is a shadow of the real cup I’m drinking out of, just as my cup is a shadow of the form of the cup, the idea in Plato’s heaven. Yet Plato notes that that artist knows nothing about making cups, any more than he knows about making couches or beds or jewelry, but strangely he can represent all of those things without much domain-specific knowledge. This, Plato concludes, the artist does because he is tricking the intellect. He is bypassing the normal way in which we see the world, which is one step removed from the forms. It is a gratification of our basest instincts. Painting is a kind of music in this sense–it is appealing first to the gratification of our senses and bypassing our reason.
Thus corruption can enter the city. The music, paired with the poetry and drama, can steal its way into our souls without the consent of our reasoning inner guardians, just as Harold Hill distracts the townspeople with his fictitious band–and just like the musical itself distracts us from its inherent absurdity through this spectacle at the end.
And isn’t this what music theater is doing most dangerously of all now? It is all Disney musicals, in particular, have done for quite some time: slip in any number of fictions, about absolute autonomy of the individual (“There Must Be Something More than This” from Beauty and the Beast), about their right to express artistically over against any authority (“How Far I’ll Go” from Moana), about their own well-being being the prerequisite to their others’ well-being (“Let It Go” from Frozen), about the plasticity of nature and infinite malleability of self, structure, culture, language, and so forth (“Reflection” from Mulan). Disney may be low-hanging fruit, but isn’t this also “My Shot” from Hamilton, reducing the hero’s service to society to nothing more than self-interest and self-actualization? Isn’t this the entire plot of Fiddler on the Roof–give up your oppressive, religious traditions and allow your daughters to determine who they want to be? Aren’t Plato and Augustine right? Hasn’t this dangerous combination of music and poetry lessened our powers to resist our own desires, that most fundamental source of slavery, and hasn’t it all corrupted the state? Hasn’t music attempted to take precedence and forge ahead, and we are only aware of the sin later?
John Ahern is a graduate student pursuing a PhD in musicology from Princeton University. He is a substitute organist for the Princeton University chapel on occasion. He loves his wife and son, and they all frequently sing, to greater and lesser degrees of success, Renaissance bicinia over dinner.
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