How music can corrupt

Everyone from tyrants to admen knows the power of a good tune, says guy dammann

In greeting the recent revelations about Hitler's notably catholic and even pro-Jewish musical tastes, opinion is curiously undivided in expressing surprise at finding such cultivation nestling at the vanguard of 20th-century barbarism. But why should we be surprised?

The idea of music as a 'civilising influence' has an old and distinguished pedigree. Plato, who famously wanted to ban poetry on the grounds that it was morally and metaphysically compromised, argued that music made us better people. Rousseau, two millennia later, held that the emotional responses music draws from us act as a catalyst for our moral faculty. Nowadays, so assured of classical music's civilizing touch have we become that we use it in underground stations to defang hoodies. Mostly, it just terrifies them.

But while there is clearly something telling

As both Hitler and Stalin knew, music binds us more powerfully than perhaps anything else to a collective identity

about the link between musical and moral sensibility, counterexamples are hardly rare. Indeed, one needn't delve too far into the histories of fact and fiction to find the musically cultivated psychopath is something of an archetype. From Nero to Henry VIII and Lucrezia Borgia, marriages of moral corruption and musical cultivation were made for more than just convenience.

In fact, if one considers the extent to which the notion of free will is central to our very idea of morality, music seems the least 'civilised' of the fine arts in being the one that pertains most to coercion, to the obliteration of individual will and judgement. In films, operas, television commercials, music is used to manipulate our sympathies, often forcibly realigning our moral responses. Politically too, as we know from the anthems and songs buried deep in our collective psychology - as both Hitler and Stalin knew - music binds us more powerfully than perhaps anything else to an identity larger than ourselves.

Music makes for manners, but there's no guarantee that the manners will be good.