Stapert note only demonstrates the unity of the Father’s critiques of pagan music, but he also documents their influence on Reformers such as Calvin. The Genevan reformer echoed the Father’s rejection of pagan music (195). More generally, Stapert notes that most people in most times and places have recognized the moral influence of music, in contrast to modern skepticism on this point:
One’s music Clement [of Alexandria] believed, is not merely a reflection of the kind of person one is; it is, to a certain extent involved in shaping a person. Clement and the church fathers were in general agreement on this point, and they were united with Plato and most of the thinkers of antiquity. For that matter, they are united with most people at all times and in all places—ancient and modern, East and West, primitive and literate, sophisticated and unsophisticated, civilized and uncivilized. Of course, there have always been skeptics too; but the biggest concentration of skeptics appears to belong to modern Western civilization. Modern Western skeptics have a strong inclination to dismiss the subject out of hand with absurdly reductionist rhetorical questions, such as, ‘How can a C-sharp make me evil?’ The answer, of course, is that C-sharp is not music. Nor is a scale or a chord or a rhythm or melodic motif. Music involves all of those things, but none of them is music, and no one ever claimed that those ingredients by themselves have an impact on a person’s character.
Calvin R. Stapert, A New Song for an Old World: Musical Thought in the Early Church (Eerdmans, 2007), 55-56.