I am, among other things, a professional orchestral musician. My instrument is the French horn, which is so universally recognized as producing one of the most beautiful sounds that nearly every piece has some sort of solo for it. I have found music to be a powerful form of expression. I will select just one example.

I was performing a piece called “Music for Prague 1968” by Karl Husa. The performance was in a university in the Czech Republic. The piece is about the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 to suppress the democratic reforms that were beginning to sweep across the country. The piece is woven with a melody that has, for more than five centuries, represented resistance and hope to the Czech and Slovak peoples. To me, all of this was very external: I had been told a little about what had happened in 1968, but it was not terribly real. Nevertheless, there was a deeply human power in that music that spoke to me, and that I worked to give voice to. I could tell during the performance that the audience was deeply moved: they were unusually still, and at times when the texture of the music was very thin, I could hear sobs.

After the concert, we were mobbed by members of the audience coming to express their appreciation. One woman in particular stood out to me: she was very old, bent with age, and time and care had carved deep lines on her face. We shared no language, and so she didn’t even attempt to speak; she only came up to me, took one of my hands firmly between her leathery ones, and looked me full in the face. I gazed back, desperate for understanding. Her eyes were full of tears, and it looked like she might dissolve into sobs at any moment. After fixing me for several long moments with that intense stare, she nodded emphatically at me and patted my hand a few times. I knew what she meant: I brought up my second hand to grasp hers and squeezed them firmly, nodding back. We both knew pain, we both knew loss; and in that moment, she was thanking me for the space I gave her to commune with her own, and for the healing that comes with the fact that remembered pain is remembered and therefore over.

In the classical tradition, music is spoken of as a quadratic (that is, mathematical) art. Music treats of number in relation, as opposed to arithmetic, which treats of number in itself. Now, when I look at discussions of music according to its role as a quadrivial art, I find that such treatments differ greatly in kind from the way that I approach music as a performer and listener. And the classical tradition concurs: music shows up again in the dramatic arts, which are, from about the middle of the Medieval period, held to be mechanical arts. This is the musica instrumentalis, about which the great writers like Hugh of Saint-Victor have almost nothing to say.

There’s a lot of archaeology to be done about the way music has been considered in relation to education, which I shall not attempt here. Instead, I will venture this claim: music as a quadrivial art (and therefore as one of the seven liberal arts) is much more like our contemporary discipline of music theory than it is to music performance. The fine art of music, music as it is performed, is, in the classical tradition, the mechanical art of drama.

And this is where I think we need a serious rethinking of the classical priorities and interpretation. Because I don’t think this provides the proper resources for assessing what happened at that concert in the Czech Republic, and what it facilitated between that woman and me.

Right away an objection rises against me from Bonaventure, a 13th-century theologian who says that the dramatic arts are ordered to console the heart of sorrow and cause delight. Is that not what happened in that moment: the woman’s sorrows were consoled by the music? Was that really what happened, though? She had not been feeling that sorrow until our playing took her back to the memory of that time, back to what she lost and endured. What if something else was going on? What if what was happening was that she was led to higher order reflection on the experience of sorrow, perhaps even on the very nature of sorrow?

My contention is that music, and especially but not exclusively that of the classical tradition, is a liberal art. If we were content to treat the liberal arts as those that only men of leisure have the freedom to pursue (as seems to have been thought at least sometimes), then we can be content that the fine arts be left out of them, as well as literature and philosophy and so on (although these are the practices most often alleged to require the freedom of wealth). But if we intend to speak of the liberal arts as arts that make people free, then we cannot afford to leave out the vehicles of so much cultural striving, reflection, deduction, and meaning. If the liberal arts are ordered to the transcendentals (the Good, the True, and the Beautiful), then they cannot exclude the vehicles of beauty in cultural production. They must include Plato and Dante, Milton and Proust; but if they must include these, then they must also include Sophocles and Shakespeare (dramatists), and Beethoven and Mahler.

I’m afraid we have a great need to revisit the division of the arts, and to expand the canon of liberal arts beyond seven.

Junius Johnson (PhD, Yale University) is an independent scholar with expertise in theology, philosophy, literature, and the classical tradition. He is the author of 5 books including On Teaching Fairy Stories (CAP 2023) and is the Executive Director of Junius Johnson Academics.