IN MANY WAYS, music and politics have always been in a relationship with one another, albeit not always a harmonious, or necessarily a balanced one. The potential(ly negative) influence of music on politics has especially interested thinkers throughout the ages. As early as the fifth century BCE, Plato warned “against innovations in music … counter to the established order,” since “the modes of music are never disturbed without unsettling of the most fundamental political and social conventions.” Plato's student Aristotle follows suit, and discusses music and its role in the polis in his Politics, concluding that music has “a power of forming the character.” He highlights the connections between music and emotions, as well as the manipulative power music can exert: “rhythm and melody supply imitations of anger and gentleness, and also of courage and temperance, and of all the qualities contrary to these, and to the other qualities of character, which hardly fall short of the actual affections, as we know from our own experience, for in listening to such strains our souls undergo a change.” As an effective means of communication that can cause “our souls [to] undergo a change,” music is always inextricably linked to society and its various concerns, and insofar as an individual's character is affected by music, and the individual is part of society, music has an undeniable effect on the political sphere of that society. Music thereby acts as a link between the private and the public spheres, between the personal and the political, which invariably inform and fertilize each other. Richard Taruskin even goes so far as to describe it as “a powerful form of persuasion that does work in the world, a serious art that possesses ethical force and exacts ethical responsibilities.”