MDDM Ch. 26 Summary, Notes

[Dave Monroe]

Okay, because I don't recall it coming up ...

--- jbor <jbor at bigpond.com> wrote:
> 
> The sounds and sights of the new continent are
> strange to Cha. and Jere. when they arrive in
> Delaware Bay in mid-November 1763. 

   "'How not?' protests Ethelmer.  'Excuse me,
Ma'am,--but as you must appreciate how even your sort
of Musick is changing, recall what Plato siad in his
'Republick-,-- 'When the Forms of Musick change, 'tis
a Promise of Civil Disorder.'
   "'I believe his Quarrel was with the
Dithyrambists,' the Revd smoothly puts in, '-- who
were not changing the Forms of Song, he felt, so much
as mixing up one with another, or abandoning them
altogether, as their madness might dictate.'
   "'Just what I keep listening for, 'Thelmer,'
Euphrenia nods, 'in the songs and hymns of your own
American day, yet do I seek in vain after madness, and
Rapture,-- hearing but a careful attending to the same
Forms, the same Interests, as of old,-- and have you
noticed the way ev'rything, suddenly, has begun to
gravitate toward B-flat major?  That's a sign of
trouble ahead.  Marches and Anthems, for Triumphs that
have not yet been made real.  Already 'tis possible to
walk the streets of New-York, passing among Buskers
and Mongers, from one street-air to the next, and
whistle along, and never have to chang Key from B-flat
major." (M&D, Ch. 26, pp. 261-2)

>From Jacques Attali, Noise: The Political Economy of
Music (trans. Brian Massumi, Minneapolis: U of
Minnesota P, 1985), Ch. 1, "Listening," pp. 3-20 ...

   "Among sounds, music as an autonomous production is
a recent invention.  Even as late as the eighteenth
century, it was effectively submerged within a larger
totality.... it has invaded our world and daily life. 
Today, it is unavoidable, as if, in a world now devoid
of meaning, a background noise were increasingly
necessary to give people a sense of security.  And
today, wherever there is music, there is money.... 
Music, an immaterial pleasure turned commodity, now
heraldsa society of the sign, of the immaterial up for
sale, of the social relation unified in money.
   "It heralds, for its is prophetic.  It has always
been in its essence a herald of times to come.  Thus,
as we shall see, if it is true that the political
organization of the twentieth century is rooted in the
political thought of the nineteenth, the latter is
almost entirely present in embryonic form in the music
of the eighteenth century.
   "In the last twenty years, music has undergone yet
another transformation.  This mutation forecasts a
change in social relations...." (pp. 3-4)

   "In the chapters that follow, music will be
presented as originating in ritual murder, of which it
is a simulacrum, a minor form of scarifice heralding
change.  We will see that in that capacity it was an
attribute of religious and political power, that it
signified order, but also that it prefigured
subversion.  Then, after entering into commodity
exchange, it participated in the growth and creation
of capital and the spectacle.  Fetishized as a
commodity, music is illustrative of the evolution of
our entire society: deritualize a social form, repress
an activity of the body, specialize its practice, sell
it as a spectacle, generaliuze its consumption, then
see to it that it is stockpiled until it loses its
meaning.  Today, music heralds ... the establishment
of a society of repetition in which nothing will
happen anymore.  But at the sam etime, it heralds the
emergence of a formidable subversion, one leading to a
radically new organization never yet theorized, of
which self-management is but a distant echo."  (pp.
4-5)

   "No organized society can exist without structuring
differences at its core.  No market economy can
develop without erasing those differences in mass
production.  The self-destruction of capitalism lies
in this contradiction, in the fact that music leads a
deafening life: an instrument of differentiation, it
has become a locus of repetition.  It itself becomes
undifferentiated, goes anonymous in the commodity, and
hides behind the mask of stardom.  It makes audible
what is essential in the contradictions of the
developed societies: an anxiety-ridden quest for lost
difference, following a logic from which difference is
banished.
   "Art bears the mark of its time.  Does that mean it
is a clear image?  A strategy for understanding?  An
instrument of struggle?  In the codes that structure
noise and its mutations we glimpse a new theoretical
practice and reading: establishing relations between
the history of people and the dynamics of the economy
on the one hand, and the history of the ordering of
noise in codes on the other; predicting the evolution
of one by the forms of the other; combining economics
and aesthetics; demonstrating that music is prophetic
and that social organization echoes it." (p. 5)

   "Yet music is a credible metaphor for the real.  It
is neither an autnomous activity nor an automatic
indicator of the economic infrastructure.  It is a
herald, for change is inscribed in noise faster than
it transforms society...." (p. 5)

Ch. 2, "Sacrificing," pp. 21-45 ...

   "Music, then, rebounds in the field of sound like
an echo of the channelization of violence: dissonances
are eliminated from it to keep noise from spreading. 
It mimics, in this way, in the space of sound, the
ritualization of murder." (p. 28)

"The code of music simulates the accepted rules of
society." (p. 29)

   "The idea that noise, or even music, can destroy a
social order and replace it with another is not new. 
It is present in Plato:

This is the kind of lawlessness that easily insinuates
itself unobserved [through music] ... because it is
supposed to be only a form of play and to work no
harm.  Nor does it work any, except that by gradual
infiltration it softly overflows upon the chracters
and pursuits of men and from these issues forth grown
greater to attack their business dealings, and from
these relations it proceeds against the laws and the
constituion with wanton license till it finally
overthrows all things public and private....  For the
modes of music are never disuturbed without unsettling
of the most fundamental political and social
conventions....  It is here, then, that our guardians
must build their guardhouse and post of watch.

[Plato, The Republic, Book X, Sec. 424, trans. Paul
Shores, Loeb Classical Library (New York: Putnam's,
1930), pp. 333-4]

"This relates to the idea of rupture/rearrangement in
the space of value: 'In history as in nature,
decomposition is the laboratory of life' [Karl Marx,
Capital, Sec. 4, Ch. 15].
   "But this order by noise is not born without
crisis.  Noise only produces order if it can
concentrate a new sacrificial crisis at a singular
point, in a catastrophe, in order to transcend the old
violence and recreate a system of differences on
another level of organization.
   "For the code to undergo a mutation, then, and for
the dominant network to change, a certain catastrophe
must occur, just as the blocakge of the essential
violence by the ritual necessitates a sacrificial
crisis.
   "In other words, catastrophe is inscribed in order,
just as crisis is inscribed in development.  There is
no order that does not contain disorder within itself,
and undoubtedly there is no disorder incapable of
creating order...." (pp. 33-4)

For Plato, The Republic ...

http://plato.evansville.edu/texts/jowett/republic15.htm

For Attali ...

http://www.attali.com/

And B-flat is, of course, not only the standard tone
for orchestral tuning ("concert B-flat"; once [still?]
"H" in German notation, see, e.g., Douglas Hofstadter,
Godel Escher Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid), but also
(roughly) the frequency of American household current
(60 Hz).  And see as well, e.g., ...

Weber, Max.  The Rational and Social Foundations
   of Music.  Trans Martindale, Ridel and Neuwirth.
   Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1958.

May yet be back on any and/or all of this, and then
some ...


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