Jacques Attali's Concepts of the Political Economy of Music

The purpose of this research is to examine Noise: The Political Economy of Music by Jacques Attali. The plan of the research will be to set forth the principal focus of Attali's argument that the shape of culture in general and music in particular is a function of the distribution and organization of resources to satisfy human and social wants, and then to discuss how the relationship between political economy and music affects the shape that each phenomenon assumes in the modern period, especially in the nation-states of industrial capitalism.

The two concepts Attali uses to demonstrate the interpenetration of social structure, which entails a full range of social values and the economic facts of resource distribution, and the dominant musical forms are representation and repetition, the former referring to "the system of commerce . . . which arises from a singular act" and the latter to what is "mass-produced. . . . One provides a use-value tied to the human quality of the production; the other allows for stockpiling" (Attali, 1996, p. 41). By no means does Attali's distinction amount to a dialectic, with one modality somehow "good" and the other somehow "bad." Nor does the dyad constitute the whole of Attali's argument on the social and economic role of music. Rather, repetition (also called reproduction from time to time) and representation in music implicate a complex and fluid reality in the organization of social and economic relationships, even though in general terms

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emblem of social order more generally. Elsewhere, Attali says that music as representation of harmony and order has the effect of "making people believe by shaping what they hear" (p. 61). This is more possible when music is under elite/royal control but still possible when it is an artifact of shared aesthetic and social experience, for example in a concert hall or theatre. It becomes increasingly less possible as the image or shadow of such experience is replicated (for example in recorded concerts), whether by art or science, rather than duplicated (for example in repeat live performances). The more music evolved away from a modality of representation, or presentation for shared immediate experience of examples of social and melodic harmony and formal order, and toward a modality of repetition that is both easily accessible and easily ignored by individuals, the more it evolved from presentation as art and shared social experience and toward presentation as science, or perhaps memory or image of such experience. This does not mean that all scientific applications of music are equally pernicious. In Attali's view (1996, p. 84), "radio made representation free." Radio--by which Attali appears to mean live radio performances of m

Category: Arts - J