TOEFL Listening Practice: Lecture05

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TOEFL Listening Practice: Lecture05

MP3 – SoundCloud

SOLO ENGLISH · TOEFL Listening Practice: Lecture05

Answer

C
A
C
A, B
A
D

Transcript

Professor:	For the past few days, we’ve been listening to traditional music from around the world. Mostly concentrating on the characteristics and distinctive styles of each type, or what kind of instruments have been used, I’m thinking of doing something a bit different today. All we’ve seen is what sounds familiar and what sounds strange. Yes, many of you may remember that some of them were definitely strange.
	We’ll start with western music, and use ancient Greece as a vaulting point. But there’s a catch to this; we won’t be talking about the music itself. Instead, we’ll be focusing on the beliefs that Greeks had about their music.
	Now, you may be wondering what the point in approaching the music this way could be. Well, first of all, we really haven’t studied much ancient Greek music at this point – we physically can’t. According to historians, only about 45 pieces survived the passage of time. Not a very good number, for anyone who wants to study that part of their culture in depth, right? Well, most of those are a record of poems and songs, and we aren’t quite sure how to reproduce the musicality of these songs, since the melody and rhythms were apparently made up on the spot in many cases.
	What we can conclude, and the point of this lecture today, is that Greek music and Philosophy continues to influence western attitudes and engagement with music to this day. Their performances, for instance, were a vital part of the music. Of course, there were festivals with music, and we have many pieces of art showing people listening to music in the same way we do today. But you have to keep in mind, that this isn’t the whole story.
	The type of music that we’ll be studying, and the type that the greeks believed in, was governed by mathematical rules. If anyone here is also in a music theory class, you’ll probably know what I mean.
	For the Greeks, the math-based rules that wove into music and drove the sounds forward was the same as the mathematical rules that governed the rest of the world. Greeks believed that Math patterns drove human character. They thought a person’s character was music-sensitive, and that if you started toying with the rules of music, changing the mathematical order, you could actually do serious harm. That’s why music was considered so powerful.
	On one hand, If you knew the rules of music and used them well, you could lift a person’s behavior and character. On the other hand, If you misused the music, breaking the rules, they thought you could do some pretty harsh things to a person’s character.
	So, there we have it. The Greek idea that music is correlated, if not firmly connected, to human personality and character.
	So if music can influence a person’s character, the music should play a part in education.
	Plato, the famous philosopher, mentioned this concept in relation to education. To him, music could play a vital part in the education and development of a person – but it had to be the right kind of music. Plato said the kind of music that builds character, is what children should listen to, and what a future leader should keep in their heart. Likewise, he thought poorly made music could make a person weak in mind, and soft.
	Some have criticized Plato, pointing out that he had a very traditional, specific kind of music in mind when saying those things. Plato even mentioned that breaking tradition and structure when it came to music would directly lead to serious social problems, possibly even the dissolution of a structured society.
	Honestly I keep imagining back when I was a teenager, listening to rock ‘n roll. My mother and father said it was a bad influence, that it would be the cause of misfortune and dumb mistakes. If you paid attention, people said the same thing about jazz when it first came about.
	Actually, there are records going back thousands of years, of people being upset that the printing press was invented, and they thought people would forget how to write. I think it’s pretty interesting that, even after all these years, the same arguments are being made about music and influence. Perhaps, like the Greeks, we are all capable of recognizing – perhaps even fearing – the power of music.