Music and Politics, an Ancient Marriage: Origins (1)

This series of articles offers a wide-ranging overview — both thematic and chronological — of the various relationships between music and the space of the City across the ages. The first in the series, divided into three parts, examines the origins of the bond between music and 'the' political — both as concept and as practice.

It is somewhat perilous to attempt to date with precision the beginnings of politically engaged music. What is certain, however, is that it did not begin with Bob Dylan, nor with the Negro spirituals, nor even with La Marseillaise… but with music itself — that is to say, in fact, with the very beginnings of the organisation of society and its relationship with the notion and practice of power. It is possible to say, without too much risk of error, that music has constituted, in this sense, one of the means available to men seeking both to govern and to escape that governance.

The right question to ask is not when music became political. It always has been. The question is rather: what kind of politics are we speaking of, in whose service, against whom, and by what means? There is no simple or clear-cut answer to these questions. Music, like everything that operates within the symbolic imaginary, inhabits the world of nuance. It thus serves, simultaneously, both sides… or rather a vast multitude of sides… even those that refuse to constitute themselves as sides. It celebrates the sovereign and conspires against him, often in the same breath, sometimes to the same tune. At once power and counter-power — since time immemorial.

This ambivalence, far from being an accident of history, is rooted in the very nature of sound, which acts upon bodies before it reaches consciousness, and crosses boundaries that the written word cannot traverse. Music can be heard without necessarily being understood… and constitutes a form of resistance that ontologically resists censorship…

Political power has always needed music, and has always feared it for the same reason. And it is precisely this founding paradox that this series sets out to explore.

Sound, a Matter of State

This axiom had already been formulated with great acuity by ancient Greek culture. Plato thus saw music as one of the foundations of civic life. Certain musical modes of the era, such as the Dorian — austere and virile — were deemed, in this perspective, suited to forming courageous citizens; others, too languid or too stimulating, threatened the order of the City and had to be proscribed. The Republic treats music as an affair of State because Plato had understood very early that music shapes bodies before it shapes minds — a central idea in Greek philosophy. It installs dispositions, interior rhythms, or ways of inhabiting time that, in the eyes of the Greeks, are political before they are aesthetic.

Aristotle may nuance Plato's thought, and Pythagoras may reduce it to numbers, yet all three agree that sound cannot be analysed under the sign of neutrality. It 'governs' at times, at other times “disturbs” or “offends”, and sometimes does both simultaneously. Even when it takes no position in the strictly political affairs of the City — that is, in the stakes of power — it participates, by its very existence, in the political space, and in the formation of the citizen and his thought.

The Greek intuition traverses traditions that have no contact with one another, yet arrive at the same practical conclusions. In Confucianism, ritual music is the mirror of the moral and political order of the realm: a sovereign whose music is just rules with justice, and a sovereign whose music is corrupt governs a state in decomposition. The Book of Rites, for example, establishes precise correspondences between musical modes, seasons, and political virtues, because music, in this cosmology, participates in the same principle of resonance that connects Heaven to earth, grounding political hierarchy in cosmic harmony itself. Music is at the heart of the constitution of order.

In Japan, the Norito — ritual formulas chanted to the kami, spirits, divinities, and sacred beings — simultaneously organise the relationship to the sacred and the social hierarchy, just as the Vedic hymns of India establish a cosmology in which sonic order and social order partake of the same principle… And this was very probably the case since Sumer, whose royal lyres of Ur and hymns to Inanna already bear witness to a deep entanglement of sonic rite, dynastic power, and cosmic order.

What all these traditions share, in fact, is a fundamental mistrust of “unregulated” music, because it is a source of power and therefore, potentially, of danger. For all organised political societies, viewed from the perspective of hierarchy, music — and art in general — that escapes all control is capable of producing a disorder that is not confined solely to the aesthetic framework, but can spread politically into the civil and political space. This is why all great civilisations, without exception, have sought to regulate it, while also granting it — precisely because of this danger — a central place in their most important ceremonies.

To pose the problem of music in terms of political philosophy is immediately to pose the problematic of the tension between power, authority, freedom, censorship, and despotism.

The “Bard's Paradox”

But every form of control has always had a reverse side, or even a boomerang effect — the famous “return of the repressed”.

The very same societies that regulate music also give it the means to subvert that regulation. It is no accident that Cacofonix is constantly reduced to silence at the banquets in Asterix. Fulliautomatix the blacksmith — the most brute and martial figure of power — insists that he “sings off-key”. He must therefore not sing at all.

The underlying idea is far deeper than the simply hilarious anecdotal leitmotif of Goscinny and Uderzo: Celtic bards who sang the genealogy of the king possessed a dreaded power of defamation. A well-crafted musical satire could ruin a reputation, destabilise an alliance, or even precipitate a downfall. The Occitan troubadours who composed for seigneurial courts were simultaneously inventing a coded language of courtly love that constituted, depending on how one reads it, a resistance to ecclesiastical authority, or a cartography of desire that refused the boundaries imposed by the feudal order.

Likewise, the griots of West Africa, guardians of dynastic memory and official musicians of royal courts, were also the only ones authorised to say in public what no one else could formulate without risking their lives. Their function of praise was inseparable from their critical function. They verbalised “the truth”, to be sure, but from the only position that made this possible… formalised proximity to power.

This paradox — of being in the service of power as a condition of possibility for resistance to power — constitutes the permanent structure, the backbone of the relationship between sound and politics. One must first be admitted to the courts in order to be able to satirise them. One must sing the saints in order to slip between their praises a message that only the initiated will decipher. Or one must master the legitimate forms so that their subversion remains legible.

This logic of détournement, perhaps the most discreet and most durable political gesture music has ever accomplished, was to find in the classical Arab world its most accomplished formulation.

The “Double Language”, from Hafez to the Maqamat

In the classical Arab world, this tension takes — beyond the merely musical — a particularly elaborate form, through the melodic system of the maqamat, which structure all Arab music, creating a cosmology of sound in which each mode corresponds to emotional states, moments of the day, or dispositions of the soul.

The maqam Rast invites clarity and balance; the Hijaz, with its characteristic augmented second, evokes desire, exile, the nostalgia for an elsewhere that bears no political name but carries an existential one… the ancestor of the saudade? The poet-musicians who traversed the Abbasid, Umayyad, or Ottoman courts used this system as a language with a false bottom: what the surface of the text said was audible to all, but what the modal structure and melodic ornaments communicated was legible only to those who knew how to truly listen through the melody.

It is in this space that Rumi composes, writing in Persian, at the heart of Islamic Sufism rather than within the Arab courts properly speaking, yet animated by the same intuition: that sound, in the mystical intoxication of the sama, guides the soul back toward a direct relationship with the divine that short-circuits clerical mediations and, by extension, temporal ones. Hafez of Shiraz does the same: each ghazal about wine and love is simultaneously a metaphysics, an eroticism… and a critique of power. And far from being accidental, this ambiguity is aimed specifically at surviving censorship… by rendering it impossible. How does one ban a poem about love without admitting that one sees politics in it…?

Pure genius.

Many other chapters would merit their own unhurried attention: the polyphony of the Renaissance and its bitter conflicts of jurisdiction over sacred sound, the Lutheran chorale as a weapon of the Reformation, baroque court music in its absolutist splendour from Versailles to Vienna. It is nonetheless in eighteenth-century Europe that the debate on music and freedom will truly take on an explicit philosophical form, openly claiming its own political status.

And it is Jean-Jacques Rousseau who will be its centre of gravity.