|
Music is more than an object of study: it is a way of perceiving the world. A tool of understanding.
Today, no theorizing accomplished through language or mathematics can suffice any longer; it is
incapable of accounting for what is essential in time - the qualitative and the fluid, threats
and violence. In the face of the growing ambiguity of the signs being used and exchanged, the
most well-established concepts are crumbling and every theory is wavering. The available
representations of economy, trapped within the frameworks erected in the seventeenth century or,
at latest, toward 1850, can neither predict, describe, nor even express what awaits us.
It is necessary to imagine radically new theoretical forms, in order to speak to new realities.
Music, the organization of noise, is one such form. It reflects the manufacture of society; it
constitutes the audible waveband of the vibrations and signs that make up society. An instrument
of understanding, it prompts us to decipher a sound form of knowledge.
My intention here is thus not only to theorize about music, but to theorize through music.
... |
|
Jacques Attali
Political Economy of Music
from: Noise, The Political Economy of Music, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, USA 1985
|
|
SOUNDBAG is an internet project by Rolf Langebartels. A collection of
items relating to Sound Art and Audio Art. Contributions are welcome.
Please send them to the email address below.
|
| | Deutsche Version | |
|