A Short Prehistory of Western Music, Chapter 3

20 P Tagg: A Short Prehistory of Western Music Chapter 3
In Ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia and China, then, not to mention, as we shall see,
India, Athens and feudal Europe, the ruling classes managed in various ways to relate
their musical practices with the supernatural, the immutable, and the apparently
suprasocial and unquestionable. In this way, an oppressive political system
can market itself as if it were just and permanent, and its representatives can
present themselves as the self-styled representatives of whatever god, gods, morals
and manners their own closely guarded class interests compel them to identify as
upholding and determining the fate of nature and society. Therefore, cultural practices
associated with the ruling classes have to be rationalised as closer to the divine,
closer to eternal values, less ephemeral than those associated with peasants,
slaves or any other popular majority. This means (i) preserving the musical practices
of religious rites intact; (ii) codifying relationships between music and the supposedly
eternal, immutable or unquestionable; (iii) constructing aesthetics of music
as theory and as practice debarring the uninitiated from both understanding and
mastery of the music of the ruling class. It is by such means that music can contribute
to maintaining not only the cultural but also the social, political and economic
status quo of an unjust system.