Book Review
Jan. 1st, 2019 09:48 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kenjariNoise: The Political Economy of Music
by Jacques Attali
This was some heavy and heady stuff. Attali posits that music (at least in Western culture and history) is not just a reflection of its social, political, and economic times but also a predictor of change, an abstract anticipation of the new conditions ushered in by these changes. He traces the development of music in Western society through its progressive positions as ritual, representation, spectacle, and repetition, elucidating what these have meant in terms of the production of music and the economic and political structures of each stage of development. Attali then posits the coming of a new stage, composition, where music is produced individually for personal pleasure, which he dubs composition, and makes some conjectures about the political and economic conditions this stage may predict.
I am going to be thinking about these ideas for a long time. Some of it resonated with me a lot, some I'm not sure I entirely buy. My two main criticisms are that Attali equates and conflates the content and form of music (e.g., atonality) with the way music produced and disseminated (e.g., the recording industry), and that he kind of ignores the role of the subjective experiences of musicians and listeners in favor of the workings of systems. On the other hand, I found a lot of his ideas about the end of the repetition stage and the possibilities of the composition stage very intriguing, and surprisingly prescient for a book written in 1977.
by Jacques Attali
This was some heavy and heady stuff. Attali posits that music (at least in Western culture and history) is not just a reflection of its social, political, and economic times but also a predictor of change, an abstract anticipation of the new conditions ushered in by these changes. He traces the development of music in Western society through its progressive positions as ritual, representation, spectacle, and repetition, elucidating what these have meant in terms of the production of music and the economic and political structures of each stage of development. Attali then posits the coming of a new stage, composition, where music is produced individually for personal pleasure, which he dubs composition, and makes some conjectures about the political and economic conditions this stage may predict.
I am going to be thinking about these ideas for a long time. Some of it resonated with me a lot, some I'm not sure I entirely buy. My two main criticisms are that Attali equates and conflates the content and form of music (e.g., atonality) with the way music produced and disseminated (e.g., the recording industry), and that he kind of ignores the role of the subjective experiences of musicians and listeners in favor of the workings of systems. On the other hand, I found a lot of his ideas about the end of the repetition stage and the possibilities of the composition stage very intriguing, and surprisingly prescient for a book written in 1977.
