The Ariel Quartet put on quite a moving show. When I say “moving,” it was just that. In years past when the quartet had come to play at VMI, I had never paid much attention. In this attendance, however, I felt myself analyzing the sound of music like I have never before. I noticed the smoothness and upbeat rhythms. I noticed the stories being told through song. As I listened closely, I started to recognize the individual instruments’ sounds and noticed how they varied. Rhetoric lies most certainly inside the music we hear. This performance made me consciously aware of that. The Sophists and Gorgias were all about using words to influence people. Their material back then was mostly in the form of words and sentence structure. I think that they would agree with me when I say this form of rhetoric is just as powerful. The sounds made the scene feel timeless. Much like rhetoric in the form of words, the music is able to influence the audience. The changes made in tempo and synchronicity can make the mood change without much effort. We become so involved with what’s going on onstage that we become apart of the performance itself.