With all due respect, this debate on the political nature of music, while focusing on the aesthetic interpretations, misses a much simpler point: how music is being produced or, more precisely, what kind of resources are needed to produce it. To produce, say, a piece for an orchestra you need a lot of resources and labour -- you need a dedicated building where the music can be played (you cannot play it outdoors or in someone's flat, you need a symphony hall), hence you need an army of labour and those who can command that army. Next you need service and technical personnel, instrument makers and, of course, classicaly trained musicians which, in turn, implies an institution that trains them. Finally, how the music is actually reproduced also matters: it is an assembly of music workers *directed* by a single individual. In a word, to produce a certain kind of music you need a quite elaborate division of labour and institutions with substantial material resources at their disposal. Of course, a rock-and-roll concert does away with the director, but the size of the technical and service personnel, and those who command them, as well as resources (esp. electricity, ligts, sound equipment) increase dramatically. Or take the New Age music -- its production heavily depends on synthesizers and kindred products of the electronic industry. The same point can be made about visual art, of course. Take impressionism, for example. This particular style of painting was made possible thanks to the introduction of new pigments and hence became the symbol of industrial modernity. The point I'm trying to make is quite simple. Certain kinds of music (and art in general) can only be produced in a certain institutional background, with the army of support labour at one's disposal, and with ceratin technology. The easthetic qualities of that art tangential, but become associated with the class that controls the means of production that made the production of that art form possible. Max Weber called that elective affinity as he explains how a certain religious heresy, aka Protestantism, became affiliated with the growing bourgeoisie. Therefore, it is the mode of the artistic production that decides the political nature of the art form. Music that can be played by a solo performer can hardly become imperial -- the emperors need to show that they command the armies of labour, and that is reflected in the production of "imperial" music. wojtek sokolowski johns hopkins university baltimore, md 21218 [EMAIL PROTECTED]
