6 lines
12 KiB
Plaintext
6 lines
12 KiB
Plaintext
|
<html>
|
||
|
|
<head></head>
|
||
|
|
<body>
|
||
|
|
REVIEW: JACQUES ATTALI'S "NOISE: THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF MUSIC" Attempt to discuss music in relation to politics have always seemed fraught with danger. By its irreducibility to mere words, music has encouraged and shunned such attempts, which can lead even a sophisticated theorists like Theodor Adorno to state that, in Stravinsky's music "the relation to fascism is beyond question". Men of Power, too, from Plato to Zhdanov, have been uneasy about music's ambivalence, and have sought to control it. In "Noise: The Political Economy of Music", published in France in 1977 but only recently translated into English, Jacques Attali displays no fear of such precedents in discussing the links between change in music and change in society. Attali is one of those French intellectuals who made the transition from 1968 gauchisme to accommodation with Power. He seems to have adopted the slogan "Imagination to power!" as his own: he became Mitterand's Special Councellor, his "Ideas Man", even while continuing to write prolifically on subjects often far from his home territory of Economics. (He has been previously known in this country only for the controversy around his "Histoires du Temps", when lengthy unattributed quotations from other writers were found to have been included in the text.) Attali sets himself an ambitious task: by means of "theoretical indiscipline" he intends "not only to theorise about music, but to theorise through music. The result will be unusual and unacceptable conclusions about music and society, the past and the future". He constructs his political economy of music around four successive codes: - Sacrifice: the ritual code based on fear, when violence is channelled into acceptable rituals binding the group. - Representation: the code based on exchange and harmony. - Repetition: the age of sign exchange, dominated by a "speech without response" and a code of normality. - Composition: the possibility of passing beyond sign exchange into a new community. Attali's interest is in the breaks between these codes, when "noise" intrudes and shows the potential of another form of organisation. He will try to show that, contrary to Marxist models which consign music to a "superstructure" relative to the "productive" base, music has often anticipated developments in production. Furthermore, music has been experiencing the current social crisis for some time, and can now be the harbringer of another social order altogether. In the Sacrificial code, music channels chaotic violence, affirming the very possibility of sociality upon which power rests. The musician occupies an ambivalent position as the reviled and revered victim (such as the griot in West Africa). This analysis rests heavily on Rene Girard's notion of the function of the scapegoat in establishing order. In the European Middle Ages, musicians were sometimes Court functionaries, sometimes vagabonds: no distinction existed between High and Low Culture, and music had no value outwith its performance in a setting. He locates the emergence of the code of Representation in the 18th century: no longer an activity, music became an object of exchange. With the rise of publisher and promoter and the emergence of copyright, music no longer had a "use value" outside exchange. And internally, harmony would prefigure developments outside music: "The concept of representation logically implies that of exchange and harmony. The theory of political economy of the 19th century was present in its entirety in the concert halls of the 18th century and foreshadowed the politics of the 20th." The Star system, too, emerged earlier in music than elsewhere, with the constitution of the classical repertoire "when Liszt in 1830 began to play the music of other contemporary composers in concert and Mendelssohn played Bach... Liszt gave repertory a spacial dimension and Mendelssohn a temporal dimension" By the first decade of the 20th century, harmony was in crisis. The emergence of the code of Repetition came through the intrusion of two types of noise: internal noise as possibilit
|
||
|
|
</body>
|
||
|
|
</html>
|