Tyler Cowen: belief

Transcript context

…And Gulda’s an amazing guy. I don’t know why he’s forgotten. He’s also a great composer. His compositions should be resurrected. Occasionally I see someone play them. But a fascinating guy, and he’s one of these people that was punished by being able to do too many things well because society wants to put you in a pigeonhole. I felt this in my own life. Society wants to put you in a certain pigeonhole that you just do this, and if you don’t want to live in that narrow space, you’re punished. And Gulda was like that. If we think about the accelerated advancement of women in music — today it might be St. Vincent, Laura Marling, but there are many, many more. Do they fit into the shaman model the same way that the men do? Well, my book shows that, again and again, throughout history, female musicians were innovators. Then once their work was assimilated by the broader society, these origins were hidden from view. One of the reasons why women were innovators is because their music tended to tap more into the emotional power of music. If you go back to Plato, it’s very clear that there are two kinds of music. There’s a music that he favors, which instills order in society. It sings the praises of great men, and it brings people together for the social good. But he understood that there was a second kind of music that was really involved in personal emotion and self-expression. He associated that with women, and rightly so, because that really comes out of Sappho. And it comes out of what I call the three Ls of female singing: the lullaby, the love song, and the lament, always associated with women. So the idea that women have a special place in musical culture going back for thousands of years is something I take very seriously. And I think it’s surprising, in fact, nowadays, how much connection there is between the music women sing now and the origins of the music that came out of women thousands of years ago.…

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