"Beethoven was the first man of music to be free.
"To compose, at least by propensity, is to give to do, not to give to hear but to give to write
"music possesses this capacity to restore our sense of personal wholeness - in a culture which requires us to separate rational thought from feelings (about Music and the Mind - Anthony Storr)
"the pattern of music give structure and coherence to our feelings and emotions"
ABOVE:---From: Image Music Text by Roland Barthes-----------------------------------------------------------
BELLOW-
From: Noise: The Political Economy of Music by Jacques Attali
"Music is the herald, for change is inscribed in noise faster than it transforms society (...)listening to music is listening to all noise, realizing that its appropriation and control is a reflection of power, that is essentialy political.
"without the loudspeaker, we would never have conquered Germany-Adolf Hitler in Manual of German Radio-1938
"Music id prophecy.Its styles and economic organisation are ahead of the rest of society because it explores, much faster than material reality can the entire range of possibilities in a given code. It makes audible the new world that will gradually become visible, that will impose itself and regulate the order of things; it is not only the image of things, but the transcending of the everyday, the herald of the future.
"Music as the enemy of fate.
"The composer should give up the desire to control sound, clear his mind and set about discouvering means to let sounds be themselves rather than vehicles for man-made theories or expressions of human sentiments - John Cage
According to Jacques Attali the history of music could be divided into four great periods or ages:
"SACRIFICE - when music is used essentialy in ritual pratices of sacred societies
REPRESENTATION - when music-making is faced as a professional activity to the marketplace, with music itself as a commodity but still a live performance
REPETITION - the era of recording, when music as a commodity is offered in endless reproduction, with live performance secondary and the creation of demand all-important
COMPOSITION - a time where people will make their own music, for themselves, prefiguring a free and decentralized society and political economy.
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Note: This essay was published about 20 years before the big changes on musical industry and the explosion of musical production which the evolution of computers and software made possible to anyone, with or without musical formation, to produce their own music. Now we know he was right in his vision and just waiting for the social changes that according to the author music antecipates...
