2. Rhetorical music = rhetorical speech

Probably most people you meet think they have a clear idea of what 'music' is; but if you explore what it means to them, you might find a great variety of associated ideas and concepts - Mozart, Beethoven, Bach; the Beatles, Abba, House music, Hip-hop; hymn-singing, pub-singing, a choir festival, your mother humming to herself as she does the ironing, an African group of men; an orchestral concert, a street musician, a symphony of sirens on the beach; playing the piano at home, singing in the back of the coach after a school trip. Someone might have heard the music made by the wind caressing the strings of a harp or guitar, sooner or later someone will talk about the music which the waves make on the beach, a compliment might be described as 'music to my ear'. And then someone will say 'but that's not real music’ ...

In earlier times, for anyone whose education was influenced by the thinking of the ancient Greeks - which is everyone in the western world up to mediaeval times - the concept of 'mousike' in Greek or 'musica' in Latin was much wider than 'music' is today, encompassing everything which has to do with culture, the arts and communcation: Apollo was a kind of Minister of the Arts and he worked through nine different departments, each the work of one of the Muses - Terpsichore for dance, Erato for love-poems, Polyhymnia for sacred songs and so on. Rhetoric is a communication skill, the art of transporting your listener from one emotional state ('affect') to another, whether your purpose is political and military like Cicero, medicinal like the legendary Pythagoras stopping the youth from burning down the house where his friend was entertaining his lover, or educational like Plato (or Lozanov) chosing the style of music to fit the subject being learnt. Music is the branch of rhetoric which uses sounds, as dance is the branch with uses movement, painting the branch which uses pictures.

"As it is the task of an orator, not only to decorate a speech with beautiful, lovely and lively words and delightful figures, but also to perform well and to move the emotions and in this he sometimes raises his voice, now lowers it, sometimes speaks with a full voice, now softly and gently: in the same way, it is the task of the musician not only to sing, but to sing artistically and beautifully: and so the listener's heart and emotions are moved, and so the song may reach the goal it was made for."

Michael Praetorius (1618, tr. DK)

Scientists, musicians and listeners would say that there is much to distinguish speech from song, as they are used today. But for those who lived in ancient times, the only difference between speech and song is that in song you can measure accent and rhythm with greater exactness. To explore what difference it makes to adopt again the older way of thinking, can lead to exciting ’new’ (i.e., old, but forgotten) possibilities for making music more natural, more easily approachable, more satisfying and more enjoyable.

As a side note, the Greeks recognised as cold reality the business of being possessed by your muse so that you can't think about eating or sleeping until your project is finished, and gave it name, 'musamania'. In a world where other kinds of selective concentration like dyslexia and DAMP are well in focus, I think it's high time we recognised again the reality and validity of musamania and stopped making people leave what they're doing just to attend to such peripheral and inconsequential matters as eating or sleeping or going to school or going to work ...