The history of Western music involves a transition from music understood as reflecting the harmony of the cosmos to the industrial production of desegregated sounds. From classical antiquity until the sixteenth century, music was a way to cultivate the senses for the good of a specific ethos. Politicians and physicians still talked about music when they searched for the right mixture of powers in politics or the right mixture of bodily humors in medicine. But with the demise of cosmological harmony manifested in Pythagorean proportionality, music became the disembedded art of sound production. Since the nineteenth century, modern music has been influenced substantially by scientific progress and its technological fallout. The technogenic production of sound reflects the disappearance of the traditional deep ethical relevance of music.

Music and Ethics

From ancient times to the sixteenth century, philosophers, musicians, physicians, and politicians understood music as an art intimately associated...