Music, Education, and the Liberal Arts

Principles & Distinctions

Distinction #1

Music as Liberal Art vs. Music as Fine Art

Prior to the enlightenment, the distinction between practitioners of music and scholars of music seemed to be common knowledge, and it is central to the work of Boethius (ca. 500 AD) and Guido of Arezzo continued to reference the “great distance” between performers and scholars about 500 years later. In my own experience, this is very much a true distinction. There are a great deal of incredible singers, composers, and songwriters who experience and understand their craft at a purely practical and affective level. They seem to understand music in the same way that a carpenter understands geometry — they have well-developed instincts of what works and what doesn’t, without really knowing why.

In a word, I noticed that the performance or composition of music was really more of a skilled trade or craft, and that the liberal art must be something different. I was surprised when I found that Hugh of St. Victor affirms the exact same conclusion in his treatise on the liberal arts Didascalicon (ca. 1127). He refers to music as it is performed, composed, or practiced to entertain or express something as theatrica, which he identifies as being a genre of skilled trades, alongside things like carpentry, farming, and toolmaking. What he calls musica, or the liberal art of music, has more to do with hearing, understanding, and discerning harmony.

The irony is that this musica sounds a lot more like what we’d call “music theory” today, and it’s something that is usually reserved for people who are already on the path to becoming professional performers or composers. This is actually an inversion of what it ought to be.

Music is an integral part of the quadrivium, the four-fold way knowing mathematics. This means that the liberal art of music is a central part of all education, directly comparable to arithmetic, geometry, and grammar. It is not a specialized practice for people with “talent.” What is specialized is the public performance of music. Everyone should learn geometry, but not everyone needs to become carpenters.

Explore the distinction between the craft or “fine art” of music, and the liberal art of music using the drop-down menus below.

  • The fine art of music is the skilled trade of composing or performing music. It is predicated on principles of music that can be learned practically or intellectually, and is generally learned by apprenticeship and experience, such as private lessons, performance in ensembles, and practice at home or with others.

    The fine art of music results in an artifact, or a work of art. A song or piece of music that is heard, for whatever reason or audience.

  • I have been performing professionally since 2013, and have worked as a singer, dancer, percussionist, drummer, pianist, bassist, and guitar player, in various theaters, theme parks, big bands, churches, restaurants, recording sessions, and more.

    I’ve also worked in supporting or technician roles for live sound, lighting, and production.

  • Yes and no.

    What I will do is provide consulting, professional develpment, and coaching for leaders of music ministries and school music programs to help develop a better program, culture, and execution.

    I do not work one-on-one with students over time to learn, develop, and perfect their technique and repertoire on a particular instrument or as singers.

    In general, I’m more oriented toward the big picture — mission, vision, what you’re setting out to accomplish, and precisely what is necessary to do so.

  • The liberal art of music refers to music insofar as it is an integral part of an authentic education. Specifically, it refers to music as it is found in the quadrivium: the four-fold arts of applied and theoretical mathematics.

    However, this does not mean that music ought to be taught mathematically, as a seminar on ratios and acoustics. Instead, I am convinced that it means that there is a way of knowing mathematics that can only be accessed through sound, specifically harmony.

    This means that the liberal art of music isn’t about understanding music mathematically, but rather understanding mathematics musically. It is the musical way of knowing mathematics.

  • The area of mathematics which only music is capable of accessing is specifically the relationship between numbers, which is measured quantitatively as a ratio, and is experienced aurally as an interval or chord of a particular quality which is either in or out of tune.

    Justice is, by definition, concerned with right-relationship. By studying the liberal art of music, we learn to discern justice from injustice in sound by learning to recognize the different types of authentic harmonic relationships, and discern whether they are “behaving” rightly or wrongly.

    This begins with recognizing intervals which are tuned to whole-number ratios, such as a perfect fifth, which is produced by a 2:3 ratio between sound frequencies. Recognizing and discerning simple intervals is comparable to learning addition and subtraction, or telling the difference between a square and a triangle.

    In short, music is the study of right-relationship between numbers.

  • Unlike the fine art of music, learning the liberal art is not about training the voice or the hands, but about cultivating the ear and soul to hear and understand harmony — the relationship between numbers which we experience in sound.

    This means that it begins with a lot of listening, ear training, interval identification, sight singing, dictation, and learning to read and audiate music, and it probably ends with something very similar to functional harmony music theory.

  • The biggest challenge is that the specific relationships in sound which are distinct, memorable, and serve as the necessary foundation for this are impossible to produce on a piano or organ, because of tempered tuning. They do not poduce whole-number ratios, but close approximations which seem to be similar enough to pass as “right” but not memorable in the way that true intervals are.

    When a well-tuned interval is sung, two pitches are no longer perceived, but only the quality of the relationship that exists between them. The relationship is what is distinct and memorable. If you’ve ever heard a good barbershop quartet sing, you’ve heard the difference.

    I am confident that the wide usage of the piano in ear training and choral singing is the very reason that so many people think that they cannot carry a tune — because they’ve been trying to memorize and reproduce something which is characteristically vague and approximate, instead of the crystal-clear identities of intervals produced by whole-number ratios.

    A simple exercise to discover this is to sing a scale over a pedal-tone or drone pitch, and pay attention to how each scale degree “locks in” to a particular quality, and to observe that the sung pitch which produces that distinct quality is different from the closest note on a piano.

Distinction #2

The Authentic Identity of the Liberal Arts

  • Today, the term “liberal arts” is widely used to refer to a generalized education which is broadly oriented toward the humanities, culture, and otherwise sophisticated things like sociology, politics, or languages. Some colleges use the term to simply indicate that they have general education requirements.

    Suffice to say, this is not at all what the ancients and medieval scholars meant when they spoke of the liberal arts. It is a kind of equivocation, in which the liberal arts are “liberal” in the sense that they are pursued free of any particular professional orientation, apart from developing a certain kind of institutionally minded illusion of sophistication. The sort of education that makes people use a lot of funny words and drop a lot of old names without actually meaning or saying much of anything.

  • It might be easier for us to understand the “liberal arts” as the “liberating arts.” They are not characterized only by the freedom of a particular practical end, but by the fact that they are the studies which are suitable for — and decisive for producing — authentic interior freedom.

    My own position is that the liberal arts are the habits of perception and thought which render the created order clear and intelligible to us. They are not a Western invention, but real epistemological “paths” by which the Creator made is creation intelligible, and gave us the capacity to perceive and understand it.

    This means, on one end, that they are genuinely universal. A boy playing with wooden blocks and observing their angles and dimensions is beginning his study of geometry long before he ever encounters Euclid’s Elements. They are in no way unique to Western culture, they are simply something which people like Plato and Boethius recognized as important enough to write about at length.

    It also means that they are essentially the means by which man learns to understand and engage with the world as it is, and there is no true scholarship which does not come from the womb of the liberal arts, whether they are acquired intentionally, or we stumbled upon them entirely by accidental exposure.

    Traditionally, the liberal arts consist of the trivium and the quadrivium, and Hugh of St. Victor identifies that one who has learned both is fully equipped to learn all other things on his own.

  • The Trivium, literally the “three-fold way” refers to the arts of language: grammar, logic, and rhetoric. Dorothy Sayers believed that these are also representative of pedagogical stages. If they are, then it ought to be clarified that they are so by analogy, not by substance. This is to say that there is a stage of intellectual and moral formation that is fundamental like grammar, one that is increasingly analytical like logic, and then a stage that is oriented toward communication and interlocution, like rhetoric.

    Grammar seems to be primarily concerned with the composition and order present in coherent language itself. It is something distinct from, but present in, any particular language. In my own estimation, we simply need to learn the garmmar of particular language(s) because that is the medium in which Grammar is made accessible to us.

    Logic, sometimes refered to as dialectic, refers to the composition of ideas and syllogisms themselves. In the same way that one who is fluent in grammar can discern proper speech from improper speech easily and naturally, one who is fluent in logic can discern coherent reasoning from incoherent reasoning with the same natural ease.

    Rhetoric, then pertains to the specific ability to make knowledge common, or to communicate. It is possible to have perfect grammar and airtight reasoning, but still fail to communicate what one has to say. Bridging this gap — which seems to be the most nebulous and challenging — is the business of rhetoric.

    It becomes evident, then, that these are not quite subjects. They may very well be analagous to pedagogical stages. But at their core, they are the interior habits which allow one to freely and generously engage with the realm of Words and Language.

  • The Quadrivium, or the “four-fold way” (or crossroads, or four-way intersection), are the arts of applied and theoretical mathematics. While the trivium gives one free access to (and through) the world of language, the quadrivium gives free access to (and through) the world of numbers. It is made up of arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and music. The traditional formulation is to say that:

    • Arithmetic is the study of discrete quantity (pure number and its properties / functions)

    • Geometry is the study of magnitude or contiguous quantity (dimension, shape, etc)

    • Astronomy is the study of magnitude-in-motion (essentially “Geometry in motion)

    • Music is the study of number-in relationship (ratio).

    I think of music and astronomy as being almost almost like dynamic forms of arithmetic and geometry respectively. The former each study the movement and relationships between the objects of the latter.

    In the same way that we learn the “laws” by which words, and propositions abide, and can easily distinguish between a statement that is coherent and true and one that is not, the quadrivium teaches us the laws by which numbers behave through the various mediums in which they present themselves to us. Arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and music are these four archetectonic mediums.

  • By no means. Modern education is built upon the philosophy of pragmatism. If you’ve ever heard a boy frustrated with his math homework say “When am I going to use this in real life?” you’ve encountered pragmatism first hand. In this case, our schoolboy is not being difficult: he is actually seeing a very real pattern break between what he was promised, and what is being done to him.

    What is being done to him, it seems, is that he is being taught something perfectly useless — such as geometry — as though it were purely practical. In such a case, he is not being taught the liberal art, he is effectively only being given intellectual busywork that resembles geometry on its surface. This kind of busywork is the only thing which modern education and curriculum is really capable of presenting to children.

    If we take the modern system, then, and simply insert “the liberal arts” or “the great books” into it like a curriculum, we do not succeed in fixing the system. Instead, we place the liberal arts into a procrustean bed that strips them of the very qualities which make them liberating. In my own estimation, this may actually be worse, because the pattern break between the promise and the reality is both wider and more subtle than it was for our schoolboy.

    I would argue that the liberal arts are interior habits which correspond to real, epistemological viae by which reality is made legible to us. They are arts, but their artifact is exclusively interior freedom and clarity.

    The difficulty is that the habit is often cultivating by studying the subject, although not all study results in the habit (hence the procrustean bed principle above). For example, we can learn about music trivially (using words) or philosophically (by reading Boethius, St. Augustine, or similar authors) without ever actually acquiring the liberal art of music, because we have not actually engaged with the uniquely musical way of knowing.

    In both cases, we have missed the point. The aim was never to learn about music, but to cultivate the uniquely musical way of knowing mathematics. Music itself is the matter in which it takes place, but what is really being learned and cultivated is knowing via musica, rather than via arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, grammar, logic, or rhetoric.