Chapter three turns to scenes of Apollo Kitharoidos, the god most associated in contemporary scholarship with musical performance. In order to analyze how the surviving representations make visible Apollo’s music to the ancient viewer and how the god’s music is shown to have an effect on both his human and divine audience, Laferrière examines black- and red-figure vase-paintings that depict the god playing his lyre. Apollo’s powerfully affective music informs the scene’s composition, whether it is through the physical position of the figures, who direct their attention to the god’s music, or through the repetition of similar lines and forms among Apollo, his instrument, his audience, and the plants and animals that accompany him. She argues that the formal aspects of the composition can be discussed in terms of rhythmoi, symmetria, and harmonia, which are all integral concepts within ancient discussions of music and art theory. In making the sounds of Apollo’s music visible in this way, Laferrière shows that Apollo’s music has a unifying and harmonizing effect on those who listen to it, so that the music he plays both embodies and creates the harmonia with which he is associated.

This chapter examines the music created by Hans-Joachim Roedelius, Dieter Moebius, and Michael Rother, under the band names Cluster and Harmonia. It makes the case that this music exists in a different relation to post-war Germany than that of Kraftwerk or Neu. Cluster/Harmonia created music deeply informed by the rural setting in which the musicians worked; in doing so, they engaged with one of the archetypal signifiers of German identity – the German landscape. The improvisatory nature of their work both allowed them to respond directly to the influence of their environment, but also created a template that proved very influential – not least on the work of Brian Eno (who collaborated with them in the mid-1970s).

We understand Aristotle’s soul–body hylomorphism better if we first understand the critical discussions of his predecessors which occupy most of the first book of his De Anima.  Given that he regards his view as preferable to all earlier approaches, he must also think that his alternative, hylomorphism, avoids the pitfalls he identifies in those positions. In some cases, it is easy to see why he might think hylomorphism is defensible where they are not: for instance, he regards the reductively materialistic views of the earliest natural philosophers as explanatorily impoverished. In other cases, however, this is far from clear. Aristotle highlights for special consideration the view that the soul is a harmonia (attunement) of the body, a view which, as was noted in antiquity, bears more than a passing resemblance to his own hylomorphism. It proves both difficult and instructive to determine, then, how he supposes hylomorphism avoids the problems he identifies in the doctrine of the soul as a harmonia. The core difference, it emerges, turns on Aristotle’s thoroughgoing teleology: the soul, he thinks, unlike a harmonia, has an intrinsic good toward which the body is orchestrated.