Ideas - Why music — even sad music — is 'inherently joyful'

Episode Date: May 19, 2025

Music is joy declares Daniel Chua. The renowned musicologist says music and joy have an ancient correlation, from Confucius to Saint Augustine and Beethoven to The Blues. Of course there is sad music, but Chua says, it's tragic because of joy. Chua delivered the 2025 Wiegand Lecture called Music, Joy and the Good Life.

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Okay, here's today's show. Welcome to Ideas. I'm Nala Ayed. Is music joy? Now you might say, well, of course, but it's not that simple. The Confucian Book of Rights announces, music is joy. However, this joy is not of the auditory cheesecake variety, which is merely a nice but unnecessary pleasure. Joy is a moral disposition. It's a path of righteousness. Without music regulating society with its joy, we would literally lose the way. That's Daniel Chua. He's an internationally renowned musicologist, scholar, and chair professor of music at the University of Hong Kong, and author of five books, including Beethoven and Freedom, and Music and Joy, Lessons on the Good Life.

Chua delivered the 2025 Wiegand Memorial Foundation Lecture at the Jackman Humanities Institute at the University of Toronto. The lecture's namesake, William Wiegand, was deeply interested in how scientists and philosophers approach the larger questions confronting humanity today, particularly the issues that arise between science and faith. Here's Daniel Chua with his lecture, Music, Joy, and the Good Life. Dr. William Wigand was a pioneering scientist and also a brilliant humanist who studied theology and philosophy and classics. And he tried to bring science and faith together to answer some of life's biggest questions. So when Professor Alison Keith invited me to ponder these issues for this memorial lecture. I said, yes, of course,

that would be a great honor. What I actually thought in my head was, what? You've got to be kidding me. I'm just a musicologist and you want me to talk about science and faith and theology and classics to answer humanity's biggest questions. I'm doomed. Nevertheless, I will try and comply. My lecture is in four parts, okay? But I only actually ask one question in this lecture. So all four parts have exactly the same title. So here is the question for my talk. Is music joy? Nice, right? What's there not to like about this benign question? But nice might just be its problem. You see, nice questions are not urgent questions in today's crisis-ridden world. Nice won't save the planet. Nice won't save Canada from being the 51st state of America. And besides, everybody really enjoys music. So why pursue the question further?

Well, because such an answer would indeed make the question inconsequential. Music would be nothing more than a bit of auditory cheesecake, as the evolutionary psychologist Steven Pinker describes it. Its joys would have no greater purpose than to tickle our ears with the occasional, if deliciously full-fat, thrill. Music like cheesecake would be nice, but unnecessary. But my question is music joy. It's not really a nice question. What I'm

really asking is whether music is essentially joy, is it fundamentally joy? So I've just turned my nice question into a really stupid question because the answer is obviously no. No, music is not fundamentally joy and there are many reasons why this is the case. For example, sad music exists. Duh, right? Or what about music is too complex to be reduced to just one thing? In fact, of all things, why an emotion? The method is arbitrary.

And in any case, no one does this reductive thing anymore, to boil music down to its essence risks, essentializing music. And given our sensitivity these days to cultural diversity, its claim to universality is morally dubious. Plus, it's out of date. The term joy has long been overtaken in academia by happiness research. Happiness is mindful, it's measurable, it's modern. I mean, after all, the Americans have been pursuing happiness for over 200 years now in their search for independence and good luck to them. Whereas joy is a bit pre-modern, is a bit pre-independence.

So methodologically arbitrary, morally dubious, and socially out of date, is music joy is a miserable research question. It should be abandoned and my talk should end here. Thank you. Yes. But I have a better idea. I have a better idea. Rather than end the talk, I thought we should punish the question for being so stupid and ask the opposite question. Is music sad? And curiously, in today's intellectual climate, this turns out to be a very profound question. Music has been fundamentally sad for many years now in the West, and paradoxically, the proof of its tragic state is found in the most celebrated piece of joy on the planet, Beethoven's Ode to Joy.

Now you would think that Beethoven's Ninth would make a case for joy as the paradigm of music, but no. The explosion of joy in the finale was thought to be utterly grotesque by some early commentators. The theologian David Fiedrich Strauss described the last movement as an ugly head attached to an otherwise pristine torso. It was a monstrous end to a classically proportioned work. So what kind of joy is this? It certainly isn't nice.

To answer this question, we need to return to the place where it all began, on Beethoven's working desk. On its surface, there are three unrelated objects. A paperweight, an Egyptian inscription, and a tiny statue of the first consul of the Roman Republic, Junius Lucius Brutus. Now, these are just arbitrary things, and yet as emblems of the composer's creative vision, they provide an insight into the kind of joy shaping Beethoven's last symphony.

So first, the bust of Brutus. Take a long, hard look at Brutus, because that's exactly what the statue is doing to you. And in this staring contest, you would definitely blink first. Now, the finale of the Ninth begins with a dissonant shriek. Dissonant shriek, known as the Schrecken's Fanfai. It's a sonic roar of terror. It is against this terror that human voices are mobilized to declare a state of joy. Friends, not these tones sings a solar voice. ["Friends, not these tones!" singing in German.]

Rather, let us strike up more pleasant and joyful ones. And so, a brotherhood of joy is forged in the face of terror. The counterforce, this counterforce is seen in the stony glare of Brutus. If there's joy etched in his features, it can only be one of austere resistance. Brutus, you see, was the face of the French Revolution. He was the model of an unmoved and immovable force against the ancient regime. In the Ninth Symphony, we can hear the stoic, principled, and unyielding force as the joy that withstands the assault of the enemy.

And aptly, the form of the finale is organized like a military campaign. The first thing that is required after the Declaration of Joy is a long march to gather the forces and unite the people. The famous joy theme is transformed into a recruiting song. One man soon becomes an army as the chorus of people gather from far and wide, building momentum until the joyful throng becomes a stampede. Wagner describes this force as battle music. What it started out as a solitary march ends as a cavalry charge trampling over every obstacle in its path. Brutus, the immovable, becomes Brutus the unstoppable. So what kind of joy is this? In the Ninth Symphony, joy turns out to be a moral force that defines itself violently against violence.

This is the heroic joy of a defiant freedom fighter raging against unsurmountable forces. Now this should be of no surprise, since the Ninth Symphony is often deployed as a soundtrack for gratuitous scenes of carnage on the modern screen. Die Hard, the title of the movie says it all. Joy in the Ninth Symphony lives by dying hard. And that brings me to the second object on Beethoven's desk. The paperweight, or rather two bronze paperweights, each depicting a Cossack soldier galloping on horseback.

In the 18th century, the Cossack people were a military class within the Russian Empire highly feared by the Napoleonic army. Perhaps while composing, Beethoven played with these paperweights like toy soldiers in a war room. After all, his music often glorifies war. The Eroica Symphony and the Fifth Symphony are narratives of military triumphs. Beethoven's compositional strategies often resemble highly disciplined military formations. They are battle plans. The ultimate purpose is the charge of a vast musical terrain

in order to seize the final chord as victory, which of course is exactly what the Ninth Symphony does, and you just heard that in the music from Die Hard. If Brutus represents the joy of resilience, then the paperweights represents the joy of rampage. This is the joy of speed. Attack is the jubilant cry, and the same command closes the 9th symphony. But instead of writing, attack, Beethoven gives the command

to accelerate. It marks the final charge to victory. The closing section is a military frenzy that routs out the enemy. This is a joy that is as terrifying as it is exhilarating, as violent as it is victorious, and as tribal as it is total. And now if concrete proof of its violence were needed, Wagner deployed the Ninth Symphony to incite an insurrection during the 1848 revolutions.

When fires broke out in Dresden, a guard standing on the barricades expressed his euphoria to Wagner by shouting the opening lines of the ode to Joy. Schöner Goethefunken! I did that just to wake you up. Joy's divine spark had set the city ablaze. Now, sadly for Wagner, that spark was soon snuffed out by reactionary forces. With the failure of the revolution, triumphant joy was replaced by a metaphysical doom.

But these foreboding tones are already promised by the third item on Beethoven's desk, a piece of paper bearing an ancient inscription from the temple of Sias in Egypt. It concerns the veil of the goddess Isis. The inscription begins, I am all that has been and is and shall be. No mortal man has lifted my veil. Beethoven believed his art had the power to unveil immortal truths.

But such oracular powers can be deadly. After all, these mystical lines are warning. Friedrich Schiller in the ballad The Veiled Image of Isis tells the tale of a young man who lifted the veil only to be ruined by the knowledge of an unutterable truth that carried him to an early grave. In the political context of 1848, the failure of the revolution unveiled a terrifying truth for Wagner. Surrender is the only meaningful act. The composer turned to the ideas of a philosopher who, according to Martin Heidegger, made grumpiness

the principle for philosophizing the world, Arthur Schopenhauer. Schopenhauer extolled music as the deepest expression of cosmic reality, and so doomed music to universal grumpiness. Behind what the philosopher calls the veil of Maya is a terrifying reality. There's no access to this naked truth, but with music, you can get real close. To listen to music is to lift the veil and experience the most direct representation of an undifferentiated, impersonal, cosmic will that drowns out our cries for individual meaning of the currents of the Yukon River.

The will is both fateful and fatal. Resistance is futile. So post 1848, how can the ode to joy be joyful? Well, somehow Wagner's young admirer, Friedrich Nietzsche, gets Schopenhauer's philosophy to party. In his first publication, The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche imagines the finale of the ninth as a nihilistic rave. Life is nauseating, declares the philosopher.

But rather than struggle against this truth, humanity must affirm its futility and celebrate the wisdom to die soon. From this perspective, the Schreckens' fanfare is no longer a force to resist, but a fate to embrace. In this way, terror becomes a rave, and joy is the drug that induces an ecstatic state of brotherhood as an individual quest for meaning dissipates into a collective death drive. Nietzsche turns the table on the heroic. Die hard becomes die soon. Nietzsche may celebrate the ode to joy, but his essence is not joy.

The title of Nietzsche's book makes this clear. The birth of tragedy is through the spirit of music. If music is joy, then it is paradoxically a tragic joy. It is fundamentally sad, even in its greatest moment of euphoria. And Nietzsche's solemn tones have resonated all the way to the grumpy old man of philosophy in our postmodern times. Here, for example, is a quote from Philippe Lacour-LeBart. What moves me in music is my own mourning.

And here is a statement from the father of postmodernism himself, Jean-François Lyotard. Life laments its precariousness in an ever-forgotten, anonymous death rattle. I maintain that music gets its beauties and emotions from the evocation of this condition of abandonment that is loud and mute, horrified, moist, with a promiscuity without alterity. I'm not exactly sure what this means,

but it's definitely grumpy. So we have a problem. We have just established that my question is fundamentally wrong. Is music joy is socially irrelevant, methodologically flawed, and philosophically sad? But this is not the real problem. Part two of my talk makes the case that my premise is fundamentally correct. Music is joy. Now this is a disconcerting thought.

It implies that the seemingly obvious arguments outlined in part one are blind to the meaning of the question. So it is not the question that is wrong, but our context. We are the problem. So how do we see this question in the right context? Well we need to be in a different place and it turns out that my out-of-date question is not out-of-date enough. Is music joy is a question that seemingly only makes sense in the ancient world? So we need to get into a time machine and go on an ancient tour of

places that William Wigand as a theologian and classicist would love to visit. We begin our journey by dialing back the clocks some 2,400 years to ancient China. Imagine yourself in ancient China. Our research question would have the opposite effect here. Is music joy would not be worth asking, not because it is obviously false, but because it is obviously true. In Chinese, music is joy, quite literally. The character for music in Chinese is also the character for joy.

Although pronounced differently, the character yue, meaning music, is the same as the character le, meaning joy. Music and joy in a homographic relationship. They look the same, but they sound different. So every time you look at the character music in Chinese, you will also see joy. Now, we could quibble over whether this homograph is merely coincidental, but both the Confucian and Taoist classics clearly equated the two meanings and aligned them with the way, the Tao. Not surprisingly, then, the Confucian Book of Rights announces, music is joy. However,

this joy is not of the auditory cheesecake variety, which is merely a nice but unnecessary pleasure. Joy is a moral disposition. It's a path of righteousness. Without music regulating society with its joy, we would literally lose the way, the Tao. So the mutual association between music and joy wasn't just a nice bit of wordplay, it had massive consequences. Now I discovered the significance of this

in 2011 as a tourist in Beijing. I was visiting the Forbidden City with a rather unusual tour group, a motley assortment of music theorists from the West. And our conference didn't go particularly well, so we felt a bit down as we meandered through the palatial complex. But as we clambered up the steps from one great hall to another and read the inscriptions above their entrances, we soon realized that had we been music theorists in ancient China, we would have been at the center

of all knowledge and power. Alas, we were born too late. Even the names inscribed above each of the great halls sounded like the subtitles of our books. The Pavilion of Uniting Harmony, the Pavilion of Central Harmony, the Pavilion of Supreme Harmony. Somehow it seemed that the Forbidden City had been dedicated to us. Music and joy, then, is not simply a play of words.

The entire universe and the governance of a vast empire was at stake in this homograph. So as I stood in the pavilion of supreme harmony, I could feel the joy of music rushing to my head. Somehow in this very spot, the moral well-being of the entire universe had been entrusted to me. Now, what would a music theorist do in such epic circumstances? Now, you might imagine that the first thing I'd need is a secluded study for erudite contemplation. But you would be wrong. My first scholarly activity would be foraging. Now this research project dates back some 400 years. Legend has it that the yellow emperor sent

his trusted scholar, Ling Lun, to the Ran Yu Mountains to collect bamboo. The task at hand was to find the perfect bamboo pipe to sound the fundamental pitch of the cosmos and so legitimize the rule of the new emperor. It was a tall order for what would be just a four inch tube. But to blow into this pipe was to hear the winds of heaven blow across the hollows of the earth, harmonizing the two realms as one tone. Joy was both yin and yang, heaven and earth in harmony. This story founded a practice.

In accordance with the myth, each new emperor in China needed to find his personal tone to resonate across his kingdom. Without his new tone, the emperor would be institutionally tone deaf and cause his reign to go out of tune with heaven and earth and bring discord to his people. He would lose the mandate of heaven. Now, this tone was a ruler in both senses of the word. The dimensions of the new pipe literally set the imperial standard for measure, volume and weight and regulated the entire economy of the kingdom.

Music really was the measure of all things. Hence, in another play of words, the bamboo pipe, lu, doubled as the law, lu. To be in tune was to obey the rule. Joy then was not so much an emotion as a regulation that brought all things into balance, upholding the moral integrity of the universe from the movement of the stars to the political affairs of court. It was all very, very proper. We might call this relation between music and joy an aesthetic propriety because its beauty is predicated on a certain fittingness between things. To be in tune is to fit. Perfection depended on the exact relation or as Confucius puts it,

it is from music that one's perfection is achieved. Oh dear, we've spent far too long in ancient China. So please fasten your seat belts because now we need to make a whistle stop tour to Greece and North Africa to visit Pythagoras in Samos, Clement in Alexandria and Augustine in Hippo. You're listening to Music, Joy and the Good Life. and Augustine in hip-hop. You're listening to Music, Joy and the Good Life. Elect…

Okay Canada, you have a new government, a new era in federal politics, an untested Prime Minister and opposition parties retooling for whatever comes next. It's a lot. But keeping track of it all, more importantly understanding it all is simple. Your World Tonight from CBC News. About 25 minutes every evening, a full wrap on the news while you're riding home or winding down. Listen and follow us wherever you get your podcasts. nationally renowned musicologist, Daniel Chua, on CBC Radio's Ideas. I'm Nala Ayd. Let's return to Professor Chua as he reaches past Asia

to look at music and joy in ancient Greece and North Africa. Ancient Chinese music theory had a parallel universe in ancient Greece. It was less yin-yang than big bang because Pythagoras famously heard the harmony of the spheres at a smithy where the blacksmiths were inadvertently blasting out harmonious intervals on their anvils due to the proportion of their hammers. Incidentally, this was the founding of heavy metal. [♪ Music playing, no vocals, only guitar playing. Ah, yes, so bad.

I mean, ahem. Instead of a yin-yang circle, harmony for Pythagoras was arranged as a triangle known as a tritactus. The numbers represented by the four rows of dots, one, two, three and four, made up the ratios that kept the Pythagorean cosmos in perfect proportion. These four integers justified the rationality of the universe. And joy, in the form of these well-tempered ratios, expressed a state of perfect equilibrium. To be in tune with the cosmos was to experience the joy of a well-balanced lifestyle.

On the island of Samos, the smithy may be the hottest party in town, but to be honest, Pythagoras' ratios are so perfect, timeless and immaterial that its joy is a bit boring, really. And there are no surprises, there are no wow moments to get its timeless inertia moving, at least not yet.

It took a paradigm shifting movement to bring this joy to life within the perfectly rigid cosmos of the Tetractis. The advent of the Christian gospel was an eruption of joy in history that shook these immutable numbers, or as the Christmas angels sang, behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy. The second century theologian, Clement of Alexandria, was among the first to hear this sense of Jewish messianic time quivering in Pythagoras' timeless universe. In Clemes' book, music for the first time in its history is described as autonomous music.

Now, auto-nomos is normally used as a political term, meaning a self-given, the auto-law, nomos. But nomos in Greek also means melody. And in the text, Clemens plays with this word nomos to mean both law and melody. The music of creation is both a permanent law of creation and a spontaneous melody of recreation. Joy is the musical autonomy of the created order celebrating the goodness of creation. Now, let's fast forward 200 years. It's dawn on Easter day.

St Augustine is about to be baptized by Bishop Ambrose in Milan. It was during his conversion to Christianity that Augustine started work on his treatise on music, De Musica. De Musica is all about rhythm. Now there are six volumes in De Musica and the first five volumes are pedantic plod of metrical feet. It is truly pedestrian. Augustine famously defines music as the science of measuring well and true to form, he does a lot of mind-numbing measuring of long and short syllables. But suddenly, in volume six, something unexpected happens. It is as if music theory itself had been baptized by Bishop Ambrose.

In the final volume, the music is bathed in a theology of music, and Augustine declares that God, the creator of all things, is music. And therefore, all things are created in rhythmic proportion. So everything is number. The qualities of these numbers are arranged in ascending order, like a ladder rising from the material realms of the senses to the eternal realms of reason where music in its numerical perfection is declared the hymn of the universe. So any passing pleasure that music gives on earth only finds its joy when directed towards its highest immutable state in God.

So by the end of De Musica, music is not simply the science of measuring well, it's just a science of divine joy. So, we've come to the end of our tour of the ancient world. In the ancient world, music is joy. It is something prior to us, that surrounds us, and will one day outlast us. In this sense, humans do not make music. We can only seek it and obey its regulations because music is ultimate reality. It is God, truth, Tao, Logos, reason, the mandate of heaven. Joy

is to be in tune with this reality. Hence joy is not merely an emotion, it is a well-tempered disposition, characterized by a propriety that is harmoniously fitting and perfectly balanced. Are you still with me by the way? Yes, good. Part 3. So in the ancient world music was joy but is it joy? Is it joy today? Sadly the answer is no. Why? Because everything has changed. Joy has changed, music has changed, science has changed. Let's examine these three changes. One, music has changed. No one is going to download Pythagoras' greatest hits

on their iPod because they're inaudible, immaterial, and timeless, which basically removes everything that makes music music today. Even if you turn your volume knob up to 11, Pythagoras is not going to rock. Today, music is real, not ideal. Two, joy has changed. To imagine joy as a ruler keeping us in line with the cosmos sounds a bit grim for today's

hedonistic society. A ruler seems less like an instrument of joy than a stern implement to smack your backside precisely because you were having too much fun breaking the rules. And finally, science has changed. Wisely, it no longer employs music theorists to explain the universe. So my question is music joy is still a big problem. Of course, when the ancient writers equated music and joy, they were not simply playing with numbers in their minds. It was a practice, a form of the good life. Their science may have been wrong, but joy and music still provided a genuine structure

for human flourishing. Life was real, even if the music was ideal. So the question we need to explore if we're to retrofit ancient values to modern music are about the good life. So part three attempts to retrofit an ancient lifestyle for the modern world. And this is no easy task since music and joy would need a modern makeover. Their relationship needs to be scientifically measurable, musically analyzable, and joyfully livable by today's standards. Now to simplify the process, let's break the tasks down into three steps.

One, retrofit ancient joy to modern living. Two, retrofit ancient music theory to modern music. Three, connect the two retrofitted objects, joy and music, to modern science and reposition them in the cosmos. Easy. Now, if this works, William Wigdon would be really, really happy because science and faith would connect and ancient and modern thought would be united and music would be joy today. So step one, retrofitting ancient joy to modern living. In the past, joy was measured by music and cosmology.

Today, it is measured by psychology and neuroscience because joy is more a state of the mind than a state of the cosmos. In current psychology, joy is one of six basic emotions famously identified by the neuroscientist Paul Ekman. Joy, anger, disgust, fear, sadness, and surprise. Now aptly, the idea of categorizing these primary effects can be traced back to the Confucian book of rights. In the book of rights, each basic emotion, of which there are also six, has a particular

sound. Sorrow, for example, is sharp and fading away, and anger is coarse and fierce. The key, however, is not to define these emotions, but to keep them in balance. These diverse sounds need to be in harmony. They need to be in a state of joy. Joy is therefore both inside and outside the system. In modern terms, ancient joy is not merely an emotion but a form of emotional intelligence that manages our affective reactions. Now in

contrast, the modern basic emotions are innate reflexive behaviors hardwired in the nervous system designed for evolutionary survival. They're not heard but seen, showing up automatically in our facial muscles as indicators of a primary emotional state. They are emojis rather than sounds. Ekman's claim is that these emotions are not culturally specific, but intrinsically human. In this sense, joy is universal.

Everybody experiences joy. But for modern joy to truly resonate with its ancient counterpart, it would need to be more than one of six universal emotions. It would have to function as a universal set for these emotions. Now of the six emotions, joy is unique as the only positive emotion. So can Joy's positivity regulate the other affects

as a form of emotional intelligence? Well, possibly. Neuroscience cannot put a finger on joy's whereabouts. It turns out that joy is not simply a discrete emotion. It is all over the place. Unlike anger, grief, or fear, neuroscientists have not found a specific center in the brain for joy. Pleasure does have specific locations in the brain, but these pleasure centers are related

to addiction, appetite and sexual drive. They loop as self-affirming reward circuits. It just wants more of the same. In contrast to pleasure, joy, as the psychologist Sylvan Tomkin notes, can't be self-induced. You can't just make it happen by yourself, because joy is a relation that places its well-being in the interest of the other. It is an outward connection rather than a self-rewarding circuit. As the moral philosopher Robert C. Roberts puts it,

"...joy is not a sensation, but a delight in the way the world is." Now given this all-embracing relation, modern joy begins to resemble the harmonious fittingness of ancient joy. In evolutionary terms, we might call this the survival of the fitting. If joy is founded on fittingness, then equilibrium is its evolutionary goal. This process is nascent in any state of homeostasis. For the neuroscientist Antonio de Masio, this is evident in the simplest life form.

A single-cell organism automatically reacts to changes in its environment to regulate its life. This is basic chemistry, a tiny code of balance scribbled within a cell. Writ large in humans, homeostasis is virtue, chemistry, a tiny code of balance scribbled within a cell. Writh large in humans homeostasis is virtue, is joy as virtue. Arriving at joy is simply a matter of climbing up what de Matthew describes as an evolutionary tree.

It looks a little bit like Augustine's ladder. It begins with reflexes and immune responses and goes all the way up the emotions to feelings, and then to reason where desires become concerns. And at the top of the tree, neuropsychology branches out into moral psychology, and here joy flowers as a virtue. Once at the top, the neural maps associated with joy, states D'Amacio, signify states of equilibrium for the organism. Joy, in this very modern sense, is not dissimilar to joy in its very ancient sense.

It is a harmonious and balanced disposition. So, we have accomplished step one, retrofitting ancient joy to modern living. Neuropsychology can map joy as an evolutionary virtue and put a smiley face on ancient forms of propriety. This means that we can text a happy face emoji to Confucius, and he would give it a thumbs up. But can this newfound joy be music? To answer this question, we need to take step two, Can this newfound joy be music?

To answer this question, we need to take step two, retrofitting ancient music theory to modern music. In the ancient world, harmony was the basis of music. It's tuning defined joy. The question for music theory now is whether harmony should still be the basis of music and if this basis can be the foundation of joy today. So we need to ask two fundamental questions. Is music harmony and is harmony joy?

And we begin with the second question. Is harmony joy? The answer is well yes and no. It depends on how you count. Now you might think there's not much to count. Just say one and you're done, game over. Well yes that's how we count in the modern world today. But this is not how the ancient world counted. If you look at the yin-yang symbol, unity is a relation between two elements. Similarly in the arithmetic of ancient Greece, the smallest number is two because one is their combination.

And Christianity goes one step further. One is triune. In ancient thought, then, one is irreducibly plural. But in the modern world, it only has one sound, the total. So modern harmony may not be joy. It may be fear, a kind of killjoy harmonic theory for authoritarian control freaks. I don't know any of those people in academia.

This is a huge problem for my question. And this is why we need to ask, is music harmony? Because if music is not fundamentally harmony, joy need not be defined by harmony in the first place. Now to find out, here is a thought experiment. I want you to imagine a music without harmony. What did you hear? A tabla? A rap? An Art Blakey drum solo? You see, music can exist without harmony. Now, I want you to imagine a music without rhythm. What would you hear? You would hear no music.

In other words, everything in music is fundamentally rhythm. This is why the philosopher Gottfried Leibniz famously speaks of music as the hidden arithmetic exercise of the soul that does not know that it is counting. In the book Alien Listening, I call the theory of repetition an intergalactic music theory of everything because everything in the universe repeats, from the looping membranes of string theory to the massive shutter of gravitational waves. This rhythmic strip represents the background hum that is a fundamental condition for the existence in space-time.

Humans only hear a narrow bandwidth in this spectrum, but we are embedded in this greater rhythm. Our human music therefore becomes a disclosure of the space-time universe we inhabit, but scaled solely for our ears. Music keeps us in time with the universe. So now step three, which involves repositioning music in the modern cosmos, becomes possible. But the question is, is this music joy? If music is fundamentally repetition, is rhythm joy? So what is the difference between a harmonic universe and a rhythmic universe as a measure

of joy? In a harmonic universe, everything is perfect and everything is simple. This cannot be said of a rhythmic universe. It is a complex adaptive system. No disruptive element can throw rhythm off balance, because there is always more time to recalculate the pattern and riff off the difference. A harmonic universe, on the other hand, is dangerously fragile, precisely because it has to be perfectly proportioned.

The slightest crack and the whole thing caves in, which is precisely what happened to Pythagoras' theory in the modern world. But that's a story for another day. Rhythm in contrast does not promise a perfect world. After all, the world is not perfect, but it can be what Leibniz famously called a best possible world. Rhythm makes the best of what is possible in any given state. Now Leibniz was ridiculed most famously by Voltaire and his satyacondite for proposing

such a Panglossian world, especially in the aftermath of the Lisbon earthquake of 1755. But Leibniz did not propose a perfect world, which as with the Pythagorean cosmos, would collapse with the Pythagorean cosmos, would collapse with the slightest fracture. The best possible world for Leibniz remains joyful in all circumstances, however earth-shattering. Leibniz declares all happiness is harmonious, but his concept of harmony is riddled with dissonances. So, joy for Leibniz is marked by suffering and marred by evil, requiring a rhythmic resolution.

Joy then is no momentary feeling for Leibniz. It is a pre-established disposition that generates a boundless rhythmic optimism. The philosopher Gilles Deleuze is one of the few commentators on Leibniz who realized that a new musical system in the 17th century, tonality, enabled Leibniz to reimagine the harmony of the universe as cascading folds of rhythm. Inspired by Leibniz, Deleuze with his co-author Felix Guattari would reassemble their own cosmology with the music of the 20th century. For Deleuze and Guattari, as it was for Leibniz, everything is rhythm. But the new music of their day was not

governed by Leibniz's tonal system. Inspired by the music of Olivier Messiaen, they heard an off-grid rhythm composed of divergent, dynamic, asymmetrical forces that literally make time on the go. Given such ecstatic, open-ended fecundity in the making of time, Deleuze and Guattari declare, music is never tragic, music is joy. 2,500 years after the Confucian Book of Rites declared music is joy, Deleuze and Guattari make exactly the same statement. But the path from the first to the second statement is divergent, a movement from harmony to rhythm and from a proportional fit to a disproportional proportion.

So now we have completed our three steps. We've retrofitted ancient joy to modern living by plugging cosmic harmony into neuropsychology. We've retrofitted ancient music theory to modern music by subsuming ancient harmony under rhythm. And we've reconnected the two retrofitted objects, joy and music, to modern science and repositioned them in the cosmos. Alright, so this is the last part. So the good life.

What does all this mean for our lives? In the concluding part of my talk, I return to Saint Augustine, because he provides the most powerful theory of joy as a rhythm to live by. It is a theory of disproportional proportion, which Augustine himself names joy. And this alternative rhythm is the melisma. A melisma consists of notes that extend wordlessly from a syllable as a form of rhythmic effusion, like, rejoice. Rejoice, rejoice.

Now, if theorized in the musical, or if you hear me sing it, such extended syllables would sound rather silly. But to grasp this joy, the final book of the musical needs to be read in conjunction with Augustine's commentaries on a tradition unrelated to Pythagoras, the Jewish sultan. Psalms are not just songs, but often songs about singing.

For example, Psalm 32, which begins with the exhortation, sing to the Lord a new song, is not only a song, but a song that commands ones to sing with joy. Indeed, if properly enacted, it generates what joy to sing, a new song in the form of melismatic improvisation. As a performative speech act, the melisma is not only about jubilation, it is the act of jubilation itself. For Augustine, it is joy improvised.

As such, there is nothing rarefied about the melisma. In fact, for Augustine, the melisma is a sweaty, smelly, bodily, earthy act performed every day by ordinary people going about their normal business. To describe the joy of the melisma, Augustine references the jubilus, a repetitive chant heard from laborers harvesting in the fields of North Africa as they move rhythmically to the strain of their toil. It arises, observes Augustine, from any work that goes with a swing. Now, this swinging rhythm expresses the joy of abundance,

the imminent harvest. Greatly cheered by a plentiful crop, writes Augustine, the laborers rejoice over the bounty of the earth by interjecting shouts of joy between the words they sing. In the jubilus, what begins with a few words proliferates into a bumper crop of rhythms. Augustine likens this rhythmic holler to the exaltation in Psalm 32 to sing for joy. What is it to sing in Jubilation? To be unable to express in words what is sung in the heart.

For they who sing, either in the harvest or in some other arduous occupation, after beginning to manifest their gladness in words of songs, are filled with such joy that they cannot express it in words and turn from the syllables of the words and proceed to the sound of jubilation. The jubilance embodies an infinite, ineffable, disproportionately generative joy that only rhythm can articulate. For Augustine, the melisma names joy perfectly. Now this joy is not merely an emotion. The Jubilus expresses a joy for all seasons because it represents the entire cycle from

springtime to harvest. It rejoices even in toil in expectation of an abundant future. So for all its spontaneity, the joy expressed as a melisma is not some ephemeral emotion for Augustine. It is a disposition, a form of emotional intelligence predicated on ineffable joy. As with Leibniz's best possible world, the Jubilus rejoices in all circumstances even in the midst of suffering and evil. And indeed, the Jubilus has witnessed unimaginable suffering and evil. Its joy traveled as part of the African diaspora to strange

lands of desolation and oppression. It traveled here, to the slave markets of Canada and all the way down the Americas. Augustine would likely acknowledge the ecstatic, hand-clapping, feet-stamping, glory-shouting worship of the Black American Church as an echo of the Jubilus. But its origins are not from the harvest fields of North Africa, but from the cotton fields of the Deep South. The jubilus was made manifest as a sacred genre in the American plantations. In the work songs, spirituals, calls, and ring shouts of slave culture, the menasmatic

power of the jubilus was retooled to bring the spiritual realm of joy into the material present. Joy prophesied freedom into being. In fact, the ecstatic ritual known as the ring shout where slaves would shuffle rhythmically in a circle was known as a rejoice. You've got a right to the tree of life. You've got a right, you've got a right. You've got a right to the tree of life. You've got a right, you've got a right. You've got a right to the tree of life. You've got a right, you've got a right.

Rhythm is a rejoice. It was joy that enabled the slaves to reimagine the strange land as a promised land. Here was a defiant jubilance that gestured to the ineffable by refusing to capitulate to an unspeakable evil. Unlike the tragic joy of the Ninth Symphony, here was a defiant joy that refused to imitate the evil it wants to overcome, every shuffle of the ring shout plowed the earth with joy in anticipation of an abundant harvest of peace and justice. So some final speculations. Music does not need to be about joy to be joy. It is inherently joyful merely by being a melisma, which is to say that all music as

rhythm is already joy. Now what does this say about sad music? Remember all those grumpy old men for whom music is a kind of death rattle? Now obviously sad music exists. But ironically, this objection posited at the start of my lecture is the best evidence for my premise music is joy. Yes, sad music exists, but the very fact that it is music ensures an order that is fundamentally not sad. Otherwise,

we wouldn't listen to it. From this perspective, sad music is inherently contradictory. And this is precisely why sad music is so exquisitely expressive. So Nietzsche and his circle of grumpy philosophers are not wrong. They're just half wrong. Music is beautifully tragic because of joy. Now today, there is much to be sad about. Our politics is tragic. Our planet is in existential crisis.

In the ancient world, music taught us how we might govern our planet and our politics with the rule of joy. What about today? If music is joy, then music indicates a way of being in the world. Joy is a celebratory, co-creative relation that points to the goodness of our planet. Rhythm does not promise a perfect world, but the hope of a best possible world. It is like the ring shout, a rejoice that toils and suffers in expectation of a harvest of righteousness. Whatever the circumstances, however tragic or violent,

as long as music exists, nothing can seal our fate because in its very ineffability, music articulates a jubilance that refuses to end. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. You were listening to Daniel Chouin delivering the 2025 Wigan Memorial Foundation Lecture. It was called Music, Joy and the Good Life. It was held at the Jackman Humanities Institute at the University of Toronto. A link to the full lecture will be on our website cbc.ca. This episode was produced by Mary Link. Special thanks to the director of the Jackman Humanities Institute, Alison Keith. Technical Production, Danielle Duval. Our web producer is Lisa Ayuso. Senior Producer, Nikola Lukcic. Greg Kelly is the Executive Producer of Ideas.

And I'm Nala Ayed. For more CBC podcasts, go to cbc.ca slash podcasts.