It is not uncommon for the sounds of another classroom to spill over into mine, especially when there is a disturbance or another teacher is trying to get control of a class. In response to such a recent interruption, one of my students commented, “That lady’s voice is loud as hell!”

I do not think he is literally right, but his offhanded comment made use of an expression that reveals an intriguing idea: that hell is loud.

In Dante’s Divine Comedy, there is no music in hell, only noise, and it is loud. In fact, it is literally as loud as hell. Purgatory and Paradise, on the other hand, have music. Dante not only tells us this but manages to convey it throughout the work, a poetic indication of the meaning and the power of music.

I have heard a story about an ancient Chinese emperor, a story which I have not been able to verify, but which should be true if it is not. The emperor took the throne in his youth. While he did not possess much education in government, he had an ear for music. So, he dressed as a beggar and traveled from province to province in that vast country, and he could tell by the music if there was going to be a rebellion or not. There was no recorded music, so the styles of music were truly localized. Whenever a rebellion was breaking out, he had anticipated it, and troops were able to put it to rest. The emperor ruled in peace throughout his life by using his ear.

Shakespeare, in a famous monologue from The Merchant of Venice, tells us that,

The man that hath no music in himself,
Nor is moved with concord of sweet sounds,
Is fit for treasons, stratagems and spoils;
The motions of his spirit are dull as night
And his affections dark as Erebus:
Let no such man be trusted.

In other words, the kind of music that moves us, or even whether or not music moves us, tells us about who we are.

In physics there is a principle called resonance, which is most easily grasped by thinking about pushing a child on a swing. If you push with the right frequency, the swing will go higher. If you push with the wrong frequency or at random times, the swing will start and stop and never really get going in a smooth rhythm (and you will induce a state of frustration for the child in the swing). The particular resonant frequency of any object depends on its characteristics. So it is with what music resonates in our souls.

Somehow (incredible and joyful mystery!), music gets right past the intellect and exercises the emotions directly. Just as magnetism pays no heed to mass (it is a different fundamental force with a power of its own), music pays no toll at the gate of the mind and passes directly to the heart, beauty’s unharried and direct route. Such, perhaps, is the way of all art.

There is a caveat: the type of music that resonates inside of us depends on who and what we are. As we grow and mature, our taste for music changes. What we find beautiful tells us about our own internal makeup. Heavenly music finds a home in heavenly souls, hellish music in hellish souls.

There can be no doubt that music is powerful, not only as an indicator to us, but also as an education. Aristotle wrote that music teaches us to love and hate rightly and that music “has the power of producing a certain effect on the moral character of the soul” (Politics 1340b). Plato, too, emphasized the power of music in cultivating right affections and producing beauty in the soul. One well-educated in music “would praise beautiful things and take delight in them and receive them into his soul to foster its growth and become himself beautiful and good” (Republic 401e).

Take the idea of resonance. For a teenager who is full of angst, disorder, anger and resentment, what kind of music is going to resonate in the heart of that person? And what will happen to those sentiments by listening to that music? They will be strengthened.

And since we are conscious beings with free will, and since music is so widely and easily available, we can and should make intentional decisions about the music we listen to and play for each other. Try to imagine the kind of music that would resonate in the heart of a well-ordered soul, and listen to that music. If we find ourselves without a taste for that music, the music we think would be most beneficial for us, the good news is that tastes change, and tastes can be acquired.

I refrain from trying to identify the specific kinds of music because I don’t think I really know, but I also think the reader should form his own judgments. I do not presume to know exactly which forms are heavenly and which are hellish, and the reader may balk if his or her musical preferences are not affirmed. What I can say, because I have learned it from others wiser than myself, is that prayerful, honest reflection followed by action in obedience to what we know will lead to further insight.

The great danger, though, is that a noisy soul does not know that it is a noisy soul. We can only make conscious decisions about the things we are conscious of. Fools think they are wise, but the wise know they are fools, and those who have no concept of the power of music or the value of virtue will be completely incapable of making good judgments about their music. If hell is loud, then the hell inside of us can drown out the sweet music of truth, goodness and beauty, and there, but for the grace of God, go all of us!

I will end with an anecdote from Robert Greenberg’s course How to Listen to and Understand Great Music. When Handel’s Messiah was first performed, a friend congratulated him on the “noble entertainment” he had given to London. Handel replied, “Sir, I should be sorry if I merely entertained them. I mean to make them better.”