According to them, music represents or imitates the dispositions of the soul. By evoking our sympathetic enjoyment of these dispositions, music invites us to make them our own, and thus to become, in effect, a certain kind of person. The right sort of music, by cultivating our taste for the fine and noble dispositions, prepares us to acquire the virtues; the wrong sort has the opposite effect. Hence the central importance of music in moral and civic education.

Music so understood is a theme, not of "aesthetics," but of political philosophy. But is this view of music defensible today? Is it relevant for contemporary democracies? We will discuss these questions.