What Plato’s forms tell us about our identity and its relationship with our culture and music

What is it about music exactly which seems to be so profoundly meaningful to each and every one of us? It’s a question which, with a little exploration, will teach us a lot about ourselves and the eternal metaphysical reality we live in.

Watching the BBC show Rhythms of India recently, Richard Widdless interviews an Indian musician about the nature of the composition of Indian classical music. They discussed the Rag (or Raga) from Sanskrit, meaning “colour” or “passion” (Nettl, B), which is roughly like the concept of musical scales in the western world. However, the point of the Rag is much more about being an aesthetic or mood around which one improvises to create an expressive mood with a certain feel. Some of these Rags have been around for thousands of years.

Music and Plato’s Forms

Something about the concept of the Rag reminds me very much of Plato’s forms. In this theory, as you probably know well, all creations in real life are mere imitations, iterations, and reiterations of perfect abstract ideals of the thing. Suppose you ask ‘what is beauty?’. Plato’s answer would be that it is something which manifestly copies or shares the traits of the single, perfect form of beauty, and each beautiful person or thing is beautiful because it, or they, participate in representing this form of beauty, but the perfect form of beauty is eternal and unchanging.

In the Rag, we find a series of notes around which one improvises in order to manifest a certain feel, mood, or colour, for example. Each individual manifest interpretation of a Rag is like a real world iteration of a Platonic form.

I’m not sure that Platonic forms is a perfect analogy, however, and I think that the reason is quite important. The ‘forms’ of the Indian Rag differ from the ‘forms’ of western music. If I used a Western instrument, and improvised around a western scale, as opposed to an Indian instrument and a Rag, I would produce an entirely different set of feelings, a different set of ‘colours’. In short, each set of musical ‘forms’ is an ideal merely to the culture which invented them. Indian music within a certain culture (it has a definite north/south divide, for example) will have a consensus on what that perfect ‘form’ from which one may iterate and reiterate certain aesthetics is.

In this way, we see that we each ‘form’ is a motif agreed upon at one time or another, and developed over time to crystallize into a perceived perfectible ideal, however, being congruent to a particular social and cultural space in time.

Music, Forms, and Identity

The interesting thing to note here is that once we, as a culture and as individuals, perceive a certain set of ideals, it only makes sense that this entails that we base ourselves around them to an important degree. The forms of each culture in music, art, literature, each become formative of the identities within that culture.

One further thing which is pertinent to this discussion, is the idea of ‘having an ear for music’. For example, some people can listen to a piece of music and identify, with only a few notes, whether it is sad, happy, or a more specific mood yet- optimistic, nostalgic, and so forth. Further, they learn to identify a particular scale or Rag using only their ears.

This takes a certain amount of training to be able to do. Interestingly, it means that it takes a certain amount of training to be able to identify structural representations of emotions, moods, ideas. Once the musician, artist, and so forth, learns to identify them, they use them to represent the emotive properties of the forms, meaning that not merely are the idealized perfections of a scale/Rag culturally constructed, but so are the exact natures of the emotions we are meant to feel. Whilst not completely creating us as subjects, there is an element of truth in asserting that we identify with them and vicariously appreciate those moods, thus experiencing them firsthand, then having these emotions and moods to manifest as experienceable emotions further in the future when situations elicit them.

Changing Forms, Changing Identities

Finally, arts always assert themselves in two ways; firstly they assert the identity of the composer and culture to the listener, but secondly, they do it within a context either of a contrary mood and motif or a germane mood and motif to that context. A piece of music will either assert the consensus of identity of its context, or assert against it. Interestingly, it is the works which assert against the status quo which we remember.

This, of course is because the manifests of the arts which assert against the considered status quo are those which define new ways of feeling and identifying the world. If you think about the most iconic music in the UK, we instantly think of people who produced not merely a new musical paradigm, but a new cultural paradigm too- The Sex Pistols, The Spice Girls, Bob Dylan, et al. They are people who liberated themselves from the traditional representational forms of music to assert a new belief, truth, mood, or ideal into their own context- feminism, independence of identity, the disarmament of all nuclear weapons… With each example, their style, their new palette (or Rag, scale, motif, as you will) is thus established and emulated to produce the shared consensus of a culture at large or within a culture.

The metaphysical substrate from which we identify ourselves thusly changes over time, whilst also being perceived as eternal. This is because we can not identify ourselves with something changing, so it makes perfect sense to identify these forms as eternal; doing so gives us a more solid concept of our identity and culture.

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Citations

Nettl, B. (2019). Raga | Indian musical genre. [online] Encyclopedia Britannica. Available at: https://www.britannica.com/art/raga [Accessed 25 Jun. 2019].