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As an investigation into the fetishization of music and the regression of listening, Noise: The Political Economy of Music manages to fail in interesting ways. Attali attempts to provide a historical investigation into the development of music from its origins in ritual through to the development of modern recording. To achieve this, he draws on an approach heavily influenced by Theodor Adorno and Critical Theory. The result is at times brilliant as it traces the economics of nineteenth and twentieth century music production and reception and frustrating in its overly broad and oftentimes unsubstantiated claims of the ur-history of music prior to the age of capitalism.

The failure of the book rests on three factors, each in its own way undermining the whole of the thesis. First, as a materialist history of music, the book takes in a much too broad aesthetic category over a too large period of time. In the nineteenth century alone, the divergent musical forms distributed over both high and low cultures would require a tome of considerable length, but Attali glosses over this and not only includes the one century but the entire history of music. As a consequence, we end up with the second factor undermining the book, a series of unsubstantiated generalizations such as music is ritualized human sacrifice. Attali does not have the time or the capacity to substantiate the claim, but instead relies on an interpretation of a work of visual art, Brueghal’s Carnival’s Quarrel with Lent, to assert his thesis. Finally, because the theory relies so heavily on Adorno, Attali fails to give sufficient consideration to the liberationist elements within music, so that musical innovation can only be reducible to market demand and exploitation. There is no dialectic of technological repetition. To this end, the book could use a little Walter Benjamin and the revolutionary potential of Technological Reproducibility.

At the same time, though the book fails, it does fail in interesting ways. When Attali is focused on the political economy of nineteenth and twentieth century music, he does offer fresh insight into the economic exploitation of music. The history of copyright ownership, technical reproduction, commercial performance and innovation all reveal ways in which external economic factors drive music’s development in the last two centuries. In these discussion, Attali is at his best as he provides descriptions of how musical forms were developed or marginalized depending upon the markets and the technologies of different eras. The history of the relationship between music, technology and capitalist economics, essentially the process whereby music production became a monetized activity, are revealing and instructive for understanding musical history. Frustratingly, here where he is most interesting, Attali is also uninterested in providing a greater degree of depth because his theory of music as murder interferes with the much richer materialist dialectic between music and capitalism.

I can’t say I would recommend this book. For a person interested in this general area of music theory, How the Beatles Destroyed Rock and Roll offers a much more interesting take on the relationship between technology, economy and music, one that is stronger because of its more narrow focus on twentieth century popular music in America.