Screwing up with dignity — wouldn’t the sincere person have prepared well enough that screwing up was at best unlikely? Does Xunzi never speak of “shi li” 失禮?

http://lrc.reviewcanada.ca/index.php?page=the-karaoke-classics

It feels like a stronger point, something like: musically harmonious individuals can’t fail to be socially harmonious individuals. Perhaps the belief is that musical harmony requires the recognition of, and appreciation for, the way difference can be made to work together in an aesthetically pleasing manner. As a result, appreciating musical harmony will spill over into one’s interpersonal relationships — one would not bear to see the sight of people interacting in a way that lacks this kind of aesthetic. Xunzi talks this way in places (I don’t know the references offhand) — as if the sage kings and exemplary people are repulsed by the ugliness of what lacks social harmony.

Or perhaps your point can be consistent with this one: perhaps if Yang Hu bothered to learn musical harmony, he would be repulsed by his brigand ways, and would be forced to reform himself.

Chin’s explanation of it seems to remove a bit of the “magical” causal efficacy of music, if I’m reading it correctly. If the soldiers dispersed because Confucius singing convinced them he wasn’t Yang Hu, that leads me to think something like “oh, heck, Yang Hu can sing better than _that_!” or something of that nature (or maybe Confucius sang better than Yang Hu).

I don’t know the story, though. Is there something I’m missing?

Or was it rather something like this: they were thinking “someone who can sing so well can’t possibly be in league with that brigand Yang Hu!” If so, that would restore a bit of the “magical” nature, or at least suggest that the capacity for musical harmony is linked to an ability for interpersonal/political harmony in some way.

But I’m just speculating here. What’s the rest of the story?

And I just found something fun in Annping Chin’s book, The Authentic Confucius (p. 104). She is recounting a Han dynasty account of the trouble Confucius ran into when he was traveling in Kuang. Apparently, Confucius and his crew were surrounded by enemy soldiers. And what did they do to get out of it? The Han text reports this:

[Confucius said]“Why don’t you sing a melody and I will do the harmony?” Zilu sang and Confucius harmonized. After three rounds, the soldiers dispersed, and the siege was over.

Chin then adds: “According to this Han writer, it was, therefore, with “the sound of strings and singing” that Confucius persuaded the crowd in Kuang “he was not Yang Hu”: “he did not have to resort to words to defend himself.”"