Interpreting Society Through Music: The Theories of Jacques Attali

The only thing common to all music is that it gives structure to noise, the economist Jacques Attali believes. Our musical process of structuring noise is also our political process for structuring community. This is the theme of his book, first published in English in 1989, Noise: The Political Economy of Music.

Attali used to be a neighbour of Nicholas Sarkozy; they are still on excellent terms even though his views are considerably to the left of those of the President of France. Attali used to be an adviser to the socialist President Mitterrand. He is now head of a non-profit organization that focuses on microfinance, and is active in many areas. He is, in fact, a public intellectual. Conversations with him appear regularly in L’Express.

There are twenty books of his, mainly on economic subjects, in the Robarts Library of the University of Toronto.

When he discussed the political economy of music he went beyond the organization of music-making, distribution and consumption to the function of music itself. “Music runs parallel to human society,” he wrote. “It is structured like it and changes when it does.” It is our “collective memory of the social order.”

Noise, according to Attali, is violence; music reflects the way society subdues it.

This is a huge thought. When we (those of us over twenty-five) see, on the bus or subway, young people listening to their music on their iPods with enigmatic expressions on their faces – or none – and are wondering what on earth is going on in their minds, we might well choose to conclude, if we follow Attali, that they are, in some strange way, absorbing the means adopted by society to devise meaningful control of – and substitutes for – noise. This, of course, in addition to the aesthetic pleasures yielded by the art form.

Attali anticipated our question.

“In the final analysis,” he wrote “to listen to music…is to rewrite it, ‘to put music into operation, to draw it toward an unknown praxis,’ as Roland Barthes writes in a fine text on Beethoven. The listener is the operator. Composition, then, beyond the realm of music, calls into question the distinction between worker and consumer, between doing and destroying, a fundamental division of roles in all societies in which usage is defined by a code; to compose is to take pleasure in the instruments, the tools of communication, in use-time and exchange-time as lived and no longer as stockpiled.”

Thus, to quote from a review of his book in Net – the Internet Classical Music Source, “Attali is looking forward to a radically changed society in which all activity is free from the rigid molds of capitalism. The image of this future utopia in contemporary music he finds in such phenomena as an increasing number of amateur musical organizations, free jazz, and new orally transmitted and improvised music bubbling up from the oppressed margins of society (‘the workers of the big industrial cities, Black American ghettos, Jamaican shantytowns, Greek neighborhoods, etc.’).”

For all we know, Attali is now working on the way our kids with their iPods are the prophets of the future.