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Music and the Decline of Civilization
Both Greek and Chinese traditions see the abandonment of musical laws as calamitous for the common good.
“Possessed by a frantic and unhallowed lust for pleasure,” they “contaminated laments with hymns and paeans with dithyrambs, imitated the strains of the flute on the harp, and created a universal confusion of forms.” The result was the eventual descent of Attica’s musical traditions into chaos, which undermined both the genre system and the laws of harmony. The House of Zhou deteriorated and became decadent; the rites collapsed and music went bad; the various feudal lords acted according to their whims.… The tunes of Sang Jian on the upper banks of the Pu River, as well as those from the states of Zheng, Wei, Song and Zhao, filled the air and travelled far. One cosmological treatise from the Zhou period describes the planes of heaven and earth “jostling up against each other” and the contrasting energies of yin and yang “rubbing against each other,” 21 evoking an image of creative tension similar to the Platonic-Pythagorean concordia discors.
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