Noise: The Political Economy of Music

Noise: The Political Economy of Music is a non-fiction book by French economist and scholar, Jacques Attali.

Attali's essential argument in Noise: The Political Economy of Music (French title: Bruits: essai sur l'economie politique de la musique) is that music, as a cultural form, is intimately tied up in the mode of production in any given society. For Marxist critics, this idea is nothing new. The novelty of Attali's work is that it reverses the traditional understandings about how revolutions in the mode of production take place:

"[Attali] is the first to point out the other possible logical consequence of the “reciprocal interaction” model—namely, the possibility of a superstructure to anticipate historical developments, to foreshadow new social formations in a prophetic and annunciatory way. The argument of Noise is that music, unique among the arts for reasons that are themselves overdetermined, has precisely this annunciatory vocation; that the music of today stands both as a promise of a new, liberating mode of production, and as the menace of a dystopian possibility which is that mode of production’s baleful mirror image."

Attali believes that music has gone through four distinct cultural stages in its history: Sacrificing, Representing, Repeating, and a fourth cultural stage which could roughly be called Post-Repeating. These stages are each linked to a certain "mode of production"; that is to say, each of these stages carries with it a certain set of technologies for producing, recording and disseminating music, and also concomitant cultural structures that allow for music's transmission and reception.

Sacrificing refers to the pre-history of modern music—the period of purely oral tradition. In historical terms, this period could be dated to anytime before about 1500 AD. This is the period before mass-produced, notated music—a period when the musical tradition exists solely in the memory of people, generally in the form of oral songs and folktales. Here, Attali characterizes music as being contrasted to the "noise" of nature—of death, chaos and destruction. In other words, music stands in contrast to all of those natural forces that threaten man and his cultural heritage. The purpose of music in this era is to preserve and transmit that cultural heritage, by using music to reinforce memory. Music in this period is ubiquitous and often tied up in festival. He calls the chapter Sacrificing because in this era, music is a ritualized, structuralized sublimation of the violence of nature.

Representing refers to the era of printed music—roughly 1500-1900 AD. During this era, music becomes tied to a physical medium for the first time, and therefore becomes a commodity for sale in the marketplace. During this era, Attali characterizes music as being a spectacle that is contrasted to silence—think of the hushed anticipation that greets the professional performer in the concert hall. During this era, music also becomes separated from the human life-world: no longer the purview of peasants at their labor, music becomes a highly complex, mechanical process that is articulated by specialists. He calls this chapter Representing because the project of the performer is to "re-present" music—to bring it out of absence and into presence by drawing the intent of the composer from the page and articulating it to a waiting audience: