Dissertation

The political economy of music and musical discourse: After Attali's ‘composition’

Szekely, Michael David

2004

Overview

In this dissertation, I challenge the presuppositions of certain dualist approaches that result in an impoverished conception of music, in which music is taken to be at once ubiquitous and abstract, contextual and autonomous, and fulfilling both an ordinary and transcendent role in our social lives. I argue for what I call a more immanent approach, in which music is intimately involved in some of the central discoveries and relations we make and explore in life on various levels in the social, cultural, political, aesthetic, and ethical domains. Music's immanence lies in its ability to blur lines and bridge gaps in these realms. As a heuristic framework, this dissertation focuses on the implications of composition, a term given by Jacques Attali to what he believed to be a coming stage with respect to the increasingly changing nature of the relationship between music and society. In Attali's forecast, this change would be largely the result of significant developments in cultural, artistic, and technical production—from small, self-produced concert series and festivals to local and global underground networks of musicians, from sampling and multi-tracking to downloading, file-sharing, and sensor-wearing. In this dissertation, I explore various ways in which Attali's prediction has apparently been fulfilled, especially in light of how our experience and practice of music, as well as our discourses surrounding music, have effected changes in both the roles of the various participants involved in musical cultures and the codes and uses of music they employ.

• Publisher: ProQuest Dissertations & Theses
• Subject: Music / Philosophy
• ISBN: 9780496109609, 049610960X