Music and Political Theory

Plato

For Plato and Aristotle, music is inherently political because it exerts a moral influence on the listener. In The Republic, Socrates considers the political implications of the various modes, rhythms, and harmonies and he warns of the special threat posed by musical innovations: “For they must beware of change to a strange form of music, taking it to be a danger to the whole. For never are the ways of music moved without the greatest political laws being moved” (Plato 1968, 102, 424c). 

The problem when it comes to ancient Greece is that we don't have a very good sense of what the music sounded like—though recent work on this is interesting:

• Armand D’Angour, Can we know what music sounded like in Ancient Greece?, Aeon, Aug 8, 2018.

Gerrard Winstanley

The Diggers Song

Anticipating questions taken up by socialist thinkers of later centuries, Winstanley’s political writings express a clear-eyed view of the connection between political power and control over the land. Yet, few of his written works share the blunt radicalism of the protest anthem he wrote for his short-lived movement. In quick succession, the song establishes a “right” of the people to maintain the land, dismisses the deceptions of lawyers and priests as so much self-serving ideology, questions the elite monopoly of violence (“the club is all their law”), and dreams of a world in which “the poor shall wear the crown.” But the song resonates beyond the lyrics; as a folk ballad sung in the traditional style of the English peasantry, the musical form also mirrors the target demographic of Winstanley’s political concerns: the “poor oppressed people of England.”

Thomas Hobbes

There is circumstantial evidence that Hobbes performed in the consort of lutes maintained by his patrons in the Cavendish family (Kassler 1995, 59). As he waited out the English Civil War in Paris (where he wrote Leviathan), it seems plausible that his musical interests would have drawn him to performances by the French violist masters. We know that he enjoyed the Commonwealth and Restoration-era composers, Henry Lawes and Matthew Locke. 

He owned a copy of Lawes’s anthology Ayres and Dialogues for One, Two and Three Voyces (1653) and enjoyed singing aloud to himself when no one else was around, “not that he had a very good voice” (Aubrey 1982, 158). One of the more beautiful compositions published in the Lawes collection is "Dialogue on a Kisse." Because there are no obvious parallels with his political work, the song qualifies as a moderate (B1) connection. Still, the song might be worth including, if only to provide a fuller contextual image of Hobbes as an individual with evident musical taste. It is certainly amusing to imagine Hobbes, the life-long bachelor, singing about kisses (“a creature born and bred/betwixt the lips all cherry red/by love and warm desires fed”). 

The historical period is an obvious place to begin. Henry Lawes’s arrangement of "Zadok the Priest" cites the Old Testament origins of monarchy and was performed at the coronation ceremony of Charles II upon the restoration of the monarchy in 1660. Hobbes had tutored Charles as a boy and the Stuart king would later look out for him when a heresy scandal threatened. The various participants in the English Civil War produced an abundance of political music, much of which captures the spirit of the times and provides a lively soundtrack to Hobbesian political thought. The popular royalist ballad, "When the King Enjoys his Own Again," for example, complements Hobbes’s acute interest in the causes of civil strife: 

There is no Astrologer, then I say / can search more deep in this then [than] I / To give you a reason from the Stars / what causeth peace, or civil Wars / The man in the Moon, may wear out his shoone / In running after Charles his wain / But all to no end, for the times they will mend / When the King comes home in peace again

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Rousseau described music as his “consuming passion” (Damrosch 2007, 110) and his interests extended widely across related fields, including musical antiquarianism, musical ethnography, music theory, operatic esthetics, and systems of musical notation. If Rousseau had never submitted an essay to the Academy of Dijon in 1750, he would likely be remembered today as an important musical theorist, critic, and composer. About 20% of his written work is preoccupied with music and much of it reflects his political interests, particularly the valorization of pastoral innocence, esthetic simplicity, and radical democracy. 

For Rousseau, music captures the recursive relationship between the particular and the individual; the melody of a soloist expresses an individual’s “voice” articulated amidst the other voices of the community (Davis 2019). In his Dictionary of Music, Rousseau describes a Swiss mountain song, the “Ranz des vaches,” by which cowherds are said to have summoned their animals. This song, he writes, is “so cherished by the Swiss that it was prohibited from being played to their troops under penalty of death because it made those who heard it melt into tears, desert or die, because it excited in them the ardent desire to return to their country” (Simon 2013, 120–121). 

Rousseau’s esthetic concerns in his musical and political theory—as well as his musical compositions—stress authenticity, emotion and intuition over reason, simplicity and vernacular forms over sophisticated accompaniment, and an artless lack of frills. Rousseau’s opera, Le Devin du village (1752), launched him to fame as a leading composer of the age. Louis XV adored it and, according to Berlioz, “never tired of singing J’ai perdu mon serviteur, more out of tune than any of his subjects” (Bertram 2004, 13). 

With its pastoral themes and characters, the opera is readily interpreted as a musical expression of his social views (Scott 1998). In his political writings, Rousseau argues for the superiority of ancient practice, which he seeks to recreate in a modern context. Similarly, in his musical theory, as Scott argues, he “appeals to the powerful influence of music and language experienced among the ancients while seeking to rekindle it on the basis of a properly redirected modern philosophic approach” (Scott 1998, 304). Rousseau attributed the opera’s success to the “perfect accord between the words and the music,” which he believed demonstrate the same ideas and “feelings” of his political thought (cited in Scott 1998, 292). 

Rousseau’s role in the so-called querelles des bouffons, moreover, further underscores the importance of music as a central concern. The debate emerged in response to Pergolesi’s opera La Serva Padrona and centered on the respective virtues of French and Italian music, essentially a dispute over the place of reason and sentiment in art. Does esthetic pleasure derive from the mathematical elegance of harmony or from the emotional response to melody? Rousseau was predictably an advocate for the latter, pro-Italian camp. In a withering attack on French prioritization of harmony (“a continual barking, unbearable to all unprejudiced ears”) that won him lasting enemies, Rousseau argued that music should be driven by simple melodies aimed at arousing the listener’s passions (Rousseau 1998, 174).

Karl Marx

While Karl Marx is known to have enjoyed the standard array of German composers, it barely registers in his written work. There is a single reference in the Grundrisse to musical composition as “damned serious” labor, but this was not grounded in any firsthand knowledge. 

Engels seems to have indulged in musical performance before he became obsessed with political affairs, Marx and his wife Jenny Von Westphalen simply did not have the resources to spend on such things. Marx was notoriously profligate with the little money he had, but the main expenses in this regard seem to have been piano and singing lessons for his daughters, Jennychen, Laura, and Eleanor. Even by the standards of educated Germans of the time, music seems not to have played little role. 

Marx was more inclined to the literary arts in general. Still, there are some direct connections and amusing anecdotes. Marx’s taste seems to have been modestly conservative, which would resonate with what we know him. Unlike other leftist intellectuals in his circle, Marx had little interest in the artistic avant-garde and once reacted in dismay when a friend of the family played Wagner’s “music of the future” for them. In correspondence, Marx would call Wagner a “latter-day Prusso-German imperial court musician” and mock the bourgeois appetite for gossip about his personal life. Jonathan Sperber recounts an amusing story in his book Karl Marx: A Nineteenth Century Life:

Marx, Edgar Bauer, and Wilhelm Liebknecht had taken part in a pub crawl one night. After considerable consumption, they came to an establishment where a group of Odd Fellows, working-class members of an English lodge, were drinking. At first the encounter went well ... But gradually another mood took over and Edgar Bauer denounced English 'snobs,' followed by a drunken Marx, who launched into an enthusiastic speech praising German Wissenschaft and German music. No other country, Liebknecht remembered him saying, had produced musical artists like Mozart, Handel, Haydn, and Beethoven. ... The assembled Odd Fellows were less than happy and turned on their guests with cries of “Damned foreigners!” Just barely escaping a beating, the three émigrés rushed out into the street, where they began throwing rocks at gas lamps, and had to flee again to avoid being arrested by the Bobbies who had appeared to investigate the tumult.