Of Music Boethius Analysis

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How does music influence an individual’s personality and actions? The Roman scholar Boethius was convinced that music has morality and that it holds the power to make people behave in specific ways. In his essay, Of Music, Boethius speaks of the influence music can have on people. He considers music as a vital and charismatic aspect to people’s life, and that it has the power to. This idea spawned from Plato’s teachings, a person Boethius found to be an extremely important figure as many of his writings and teachings are rooted in philosophical ideals Plato wrote about. According to Boethius’s teaching, music is thought to hold the power to stimulate the human experience through like events and desires presented in a musical score. Some music has lyrics that appeal to someone’s life or circumstances; or, there is a relationship through resemblance that people share with harmonies and dissonances found in music. There is a fundamental cohesion, so he suggests, that human’s and their experience have with the nature of music. He pushes the point that music has morality; that there is godliness in the entertainment and praise that is brought forward in the art of music. The notion that music can be a catalyst for people to commit unvirtuous acts is a long labored and ill-supported fallacy that only fear mongers on …show more content…

The goal of the study was to see if, on average, students performed poorly if they listened to music deemed explicit. The study also looked at parents’ perceptions of how they believed the music their children listened to affected the child’s grades and code of conduct. While the study found that a large majority of children listened to explicit music and half their parents found that there was a negative of effect on the gilds grades, there was no conclusive relationship that could be found between grades and