Plotinus’ short remarks concerning music in the first section of his treatise “On Beauty” (En. I.6) both reveal something interesting about his aesthetics and demonstrate the need to historically contextualize his work.
Plotinus begins his chronologically very first treatise writing that
τὸ καλὸν ἔστι μὲν ἐν ὄψει πλεῖστον, ἔστι δ’ ἐν ἀκουαῖς κατά τε λόγων συνθέσεις, ἔστι δὲ καὶ ἐν μουσικῇ καὶ ἁπάσῃ· καὶ γὰρ μέλη καὶ ῥυθμοί εἰσι καλοί
“That which is beautiful is often found in that which is seen, but also in things which are heard, that is, in the composition of words and in music in all aspects: for melodies and rhythms are also beautiful.” (En. I.6.1-3, my translation).
Already from the start, even if Plotinus following in the general Platonic framework connects Beauty primarily to the sense of sight, he shows a serious interest in mousikē – that pertaining to the nine Muses, which in theory could include a variety of arts but contextually seems referring more to music and poetry – through his digression into the aspects of music. Andrew Smith notes the use of τε “suggests strongly the live seminar nature of Plotinus’ writing style of composition, as if he is creatively thinking as he writes” (Smith 2019, 24). This digression then reveals something about the rhetorical style of the Plotinian seminar.
Plotinus’ analysis of music into three component parts – logoi (words), melē (melodies) and rhuthmoi (rhythms) – corresponds (Kalligas 2014, 195) to the threefold division of music in Republic 398d: λόγου τε καὶ ἁρμονίας καὶ ῥυθμοῦ (“… of word and of harmony and of rhythm”). This threefold division is flexible enough to cover a broad range of the sense of mousikē. Take, for example, the first words of Virgil’s Aeneid or Homer’s Iliad:
Ar-ma vi-rum-que can-o …
μῆν-ιν ἄ-ει-δε θε-ὰ…
Even if these are recited without instrumental accompaniment, we can observe the meanings of the words themselves (logoi; “I sing of arms and a man…”, “Sing the anger, O Goddess…”), the accentuation (with more complexity in the polytonic system of Greek pitch accent) of those words (melē or harmonia) and the metrical structure of the verse (rhuthmoi, long syllables marked in bold). Though melodic and rhythmic components would be even clearer in Greek and Latin lyric poetry, such as that of Sappho, performed over the music of a lyra.
Plotinus moves on from this digression into music to frame his general questions and aporiai for the whole of the treatise, before tackling a view of beauty held by “virtually all” (En. I.6.1.21), that “symmetry among parts towards each other and towards the whole, with good coloration added, makes beauty appear to the eye” (En. I.6.1.21-22). He is again prioritizing beauty in sight, and as Gerson, Smith, Henry and Schwyzer and many others note, he appears to be attacking a view defended by the Stoics. But Kalligas notes that this view was also present among non-philosophical literature produced by artists themselves, as he cites a fragment (40A3 DK) from the Canon of the sculptor Polykleitos preserved by Galen’s On the Doctrines of Hippocrates and Plato V.3.15-17 (Kalligas 2014, 196). Appropriately, Plotinus’ response to the view includes, among other arguments, a rhetorical appeal to arts and to artists, too: namely, to musicians.
He begins to ask a series of rhetorical questions, giving examples of things which are simple and non-composite which we find beautiful, but which a theory of beauty as symmetry among parts cannot explain given their partlessness. Following these, he says that
ἐπὶ τε τῶν φωνῶν ὡσαύτως τὸ ἁπλοῦν οἰχήσεται, καίτοι ἑκάστου φθόγγου πολλαχῇ τῶν ἐν τῷ ὅλῳ καλῷ καλοῦ καὶ αὐτοῦ ὄντος
“And concerning [the beauty] of sounds, they will disappear in the same way, even though often in a whole [musical composition] each voice is also itself beautiful.” (En. I.6.1.34-36, my translation)
Two things are noteworthy about this reference Plotinus makes.
Firstly, it is an example of what Ota Gál calls the “distributive notion” of Beauty, where the Beauty of the whole is extended to the parts themselves (Gál 2022, 20-22). For Plotinus, the whole musical performance is beautiful, and this is accounted for by the symmetrical theory of beauty as it is a composite of a variety of voices and instruments and because, as discussed previously, music itself has a threefold division. But Plotinus here wishes to argue further that each individual voice within a musical ensemble is beautiful, and even that each sound they make is beautiful. This is to say, he wants to argue that beauty is distributed among the parts of a beautiful thing as much as it is present in the whole.
Secondly, it reveals how Plotinus thinks about musical compositions and shows the historical contingency of his understanding of music.
If we apply what Plotinus is saying to a piece of Western Classical music, his argument may not be particularly clear. For example, for the first measures of the “Ode to Joy” choral ode from the 4th Movement of Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9, the voice of the bass is not singing a melody which is interesting or moving in its own right. The first measure is simply four G notes in a row, and following these it is clear the bass voice is tracing the root notes of chords formed by the higher voices. Indeed, the simplicity and stability of bass allows for more dynamic melodies in the tenor, alto and especially soprano range (the melody which he remember when we hum the “Ode to Joy” to ourselves is not the bass melody). This example really seems to mitigate against Plotinus’ argument, that each voice is itself beautiful, given that the beauty of the bass voice in “Ode to Joy” is only manifest in harmony with other voices (it may be really beautiful, but only because of the whole).
This is a clear example of why historicizing Plotinus’ allusions is important for understanding his arguments. A polyphonic composition in the Western Classical style would be extremely foreign to the world of Antiquity, and the musical compositions which survive from slightly before Plotinus’ life (from Mesomedes of Crete, who flourished during the reign of the Emperor Hadrian), show a heterophonic or monophonic structure – where either one voice would sing the melody, or multiple voices would sing largely the same melody with slight ornamenting variations. One example of this can be seen in a reconstruction of a piece attributed to Mesomedes by Farya Faraji, where the latter half of the performance includes multiple voices singing in the same melody:
The song, as Farya has arranged it, demonstrates Plotinus’ point rather well: the latter half of the performance shows multiple voices singing a beautiful piece, but this would retain its beauty if sung by only a single voice. In fact, it is demonstrated to do so, as Farya begins the piece with only a single voice.
While not a historical reconstruction from Plotinus’ time, the song “Ya Mash’al Yabin Ammi” by the El-Funoun Palestinian Popular Dance Troupe may demonstrate Plotinus’ argument more clearly. As a piece composed in the Middle Eastern modal tradition, one which is quite similar to that of Ancient Greek Music, it also is not structured around harmonic progressions but around a single melody shared across voices. Interestingly, this piece toggles back and forth between roughly the same melody being sung by one voice and being sung by a chorus.
If we approach Plotinus’ comments about musical compositions, about single voices and multiple voices and their beauty, from the framework of modern Western music, we will likely misunderstand the point he is trying to make.
By looking to musical examples, as much as possible, from his historical time period, we can better see how his allusions to music serve his broader arguments. However, due to a paucity of surviving musical compositions from Plotinus’ time, listening to musical compositions from living musical traditions which share the modal framework of Ancient Greco-Roman Musical traditions can also put us in a position to better understand how Plotinus’ examples serve to illustrate his ‘distributive’ theory of beauty: something like the relationship of the singular melody to the variety of voices and instruments within a heterophonic, modal musical tradition.