Off the charts Book

There's a moment about halfway through this deeply frustrating book where Attali makes the claim that subscription concert series in eighteenth-century Paris and London were perfectly silent ' that at that specific moment, music became a one-way "representation." It struck me then that so many of the arguments he makes are at best oversimplifications of what actually happened in the weird, uneven, and deeply contradictory history of musical production. It follows that the almost completely rigid, strictly linear periodization of music he undertakes would fall apart altogether without these near-falsifications of history.

That wasn't when I lost hope, however. That happened at the point where he insisted, with very little preface, that the music of the Common Practice period was predicated on "combinatorics," in order to furnish some metaphor. It was then that I understood what this book is ' not, as it may appear, a transgressively political rewriting of the history of music, but simply another entry in the kind of music theory that takes as its goal the mapping of an ungovernable discipline onto a metaphoric structure that lends it some teleology: This time, it just happens to be political economy rather than language, or rhetoric, or narrative, or any of the other hacky analogies that I'm accustomed to hearing more often from dead-eyed Schenkerians than from wild-eyed peddlers of Theory. This sort of thing betrays condescension on the part of the writer toward art, made even more disappointing in this case that an in-depth economic history is indispensable to understanding the aesthetics of western music. If you're looking for a genuine linkage of politics and music, you won't find it here.