Can Music Teach Us How to Live?

Can music teach us how to live? In this interview Evan Rosa invites Daniel Chua—a musicologist, composer at heart, and Professor of Music at the University of Hong Kong—to discuss his latest book, Music & Joy: Lessons on the Good Life.

Together they discuss the vastly different ancient and modern approaches to music; the problem with seeing music for consumption and entertainment; the ways different cultures conceive of music and wisdom: from Jewish to Greek to Christian; seeing the disciplined spontaneity of jazz improvisation fitting with both a Confucian perspective on virtue, and Christian newness of incarnation; and finally St. Augustine, the worshipful jubilance of singing in the midst of one’s work to find rhythm and joy that is beyond suffering; and a final benediction and blessing for every music lover.

Throughout the interview, we’ll offer a few segments of the music Daniel discusses, including Beethoven’s Opus 132 and the Ode to Joy from Beethoven’s 9th symphony, and John Cage’s controversial 4’33”—which Daniel recommends we listen to every single day, and which we’re going to play during this episode toward the end.

Show Notes

• Music and Joy: Lessons on the Good Life by Daniel Chua (https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300264210/music-and-joy/)
• Can music teach us how to live?
• The emotional relationship we have with music
• Everyone identifies with music
• How did you come to love music and write on it?
• Musicologist
• The Sound of Music soundtrack (https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLeSQLYs2U8X0nTi15MHjMAWim3PxIyEqI)
• Listening to music at a young age
• Love of Beethoven as a child
• What about Beethoven in particular spoke to you? Do you have memories of what feeling or challenges or thoughts or kind of ambitions were there?
• Beethoven as harder to listen to and sit through as it is quite disruptive and intellectual in style
• Beethoven and Freedom by Daniel Chua (https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/beethoven-freedom-daniel-k-l-chua/1126575597)
• What pieces in particular, or what about Beethoven’s composition was particularly moving to you?
• Beethoven’s final string quartets (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7qaq881bwRI)
• “It’s very strange. It’s like the most complex and the most simple music. And somehow they speak very deeply to my soul and my heart. And you just want to listen to them all the time.”
• A Minor String Quartet, Opus 132 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FUob2dcQTWA)
• A piece of thanksgiving to God
• Messages sent by music as a young person about how things come together
• Music interacts with us
• Playing to understand how it is that a piece works
• How do we replicate what music communicates in our daily lives?
• Beethoven’s Ode to Joy (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q0EjVVjJraA)
• Stephen Pinker - music is auditory cheesecake
• “If music is joy, then what is it? What kind of joy is it?”
• Consuming music is not the same as joy; music is not simply entertainment
• The fanfare of terror in Ode to Joy
• “Humans are strange. We are very sinful creatures so we tend to weaponize whatever we have to weaponize and we weaponize music too.”
• “Whatever we do with music as humans, there is something more in music that speaks beyond out puny human point of view of music.”
• Our view of music and joy today are too human; music is cosmic
• We tune ourselves, our virtues, our wisdom to the rhythm of the universe.
• Joy as something we obey, we listen to.
• “Music isn’t human. Music is actually creation.”
• Music, the Logos, and Wisdom
• Music as something that teaches us how to live.
• Wisdom taking delight, joy, in the universe.
• Music is deeply beautiful; there is profound goodness to it
• A lesson in flourishing found in music, in the tuning of ourselves
• Music is truthful; Christ as an instrument and salvation as being in tune
• Sheet music v performance as an analogy for incarnation
• Music as an event that is happening
• Harmony and coming together - finding one’s place within the turn; Taoist and Confucian traditions
• “Jazz offers this fantastic expression of a different kind of wisdom born through suffering and grief.”
• Improvisation in jazz; an exuberance - the weird and the spontaneous alongside the ordered
• Music as an opportunity for emotion and a way to communicate and understand; spirituals and slave hymns
• “The order of the cosmos is basically tragic. It’s a bad, bad world. And music is a kind of consolation in that.”
• “Music can’t help but be meaningful.”
• 4'33" by John Cage (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AWVUp12XPpU)
• Whatever we are, music is there.
• Using music to make sense of things; really attend to the world and its music.
• Augustine’s Book of Music “De Musica” (https://archive.org/details/augustine-on-music-de-musica/page/159/mode/2up)
• The spontaneous music of the world
• Defiant joy in the music of slave hymns; a joy that will not be crushed
• A robust understanding of joy
• Music tells us something about the world, the cosmos, of creation - Music reflects the heart of God.

About Daniel Chua

Daniel K. L. Chua is the Chair Professor of Music at the University of Hong Kong. Before joining Hong Kong University to head the School of Humanities, he was a Fellow and the Director of Studies at St John’s College, Cambridge, and later Professor of Music Theory and Analysis at King’s College London. He is the recipient of the 2004 Royal Musical Association’s Dent Medal, an Honorary Fellow of the American Musicological Society, and a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy. He served as the President of the International Musicological Society 2017-2022. He has written widely on music, from Monteverdi to Stravinsky, but is particularly known for his work on Beethoven, the history of absolute music, and the intersection between music, philosophy and theology. His publications include The ‘Galitzin’ Quartets of Beethoven (Princeton, 1994), Absolute Music and the Construction of Meaning (Cambridge, 1999), Beethoven and Freedom (Oxford, 2017), Alien Listening: Voyager’s Golden Record and Music From Earth (Zone Books, 2021), Music and Joy: Lessons on the Good Life (Yale 2024), ‘Rioting With Stravinsky: A Particular Analysis of the Rite of Spring’ (2007), and ‘Listening to the Self: The Shawshank Redemption and the Technology of Music’ (2011).

• Image Credit: “Beethoven with the Manuscript of the Missa Solemnis”, Joseph Karl Stieler, 1820, oil on canvas, Beethoven-Haus, Bonn (Public Domain, Wikimedia Link)
• Ludwig van Beethoven, String Quartet No. 15 in A minor, Op. 132: iii. “Heilige Dankgesang eines Genesenden an die Gottheit” (”Holy song of thanks of a convalescent to the Divinity”), Amadeus Quartet, 1962 (via Internet Archive)
• Ludwig van Beethoven, The Symphony No 9 in D minor, Op 125 "Choral" (1824), Concertgebouw Orchestra conducted by Otto Klemperer, Live Performance, 17 May 1956 (via Internet Archive)
• Traditional Chinese Music, Instrument: Ehru, “Yearning for Love” Remembering of The Xiao on The Phoenix Platform (via Internet Archive)
• John Coltrane, “The Inch Worm”, Live in Paris, 1962 (via Internet Archive)
• 4’33”, John Cage, 1960tr
• The McIntosh County Shouters perform “Gullah-Geechee Ring Shout” (Library of Congress)