Jacques Attali's Noise When Jacques Attali's spectacular book Noise: The Political Economy of Music was first published in translation by the University of Minnesota in 1985 (as volume 16 in its "Theory and History of Literature" series) and every time the book was reprinted, which happened five times between 1985 and 1996 it came carefully wrapped. In front of it was Frederic Jameson's seven-page-long "Foreword," and after it was Susan McClary's nine-page-long "Afterword." Such thick wrapping for a book so thin (only 148 pages and four chapters long)! And such heavy people to put the wrapping on it, too: Jameson, identified simply by the book jacket as William A. Lane Jr., Professor of Comparative Literature at Duke University, was at the time America's best-known Marxist academic; and McClary, identified as professor of musicology at the University of California at Los Angeles, was a rising star in academic feminist music theory (today she is a star). Why was such protective (explanatory) wrapping deemed to be necessary? Was it thought that Attali's book would not be understood, accepted or even read seriously by English-speaking academics if it did not come wrapped in long explanations by well-known experts? Was the text, originally published in French in 1977, really that difficult to comprehend? Or did it have to do with the book's ostensible subject matter (the history of Western classical music), widely known to be one of the most boring topics in all the world? In his "Foreword," Jameson locates the significance and originality of Attali's book in its contribution to "a general rivival of history, and of a renewed appetite for historiography," and in its specific insistence on "the possibility of a superstructure to | |
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