Society

Since the emergence of European aesthetics in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, music’s relationship to society has only occasionally been a privileged topic of philosophical discussion. This chapter surveys and compares the work of five key figures in Western philosophy who thought carefully about the relationship between music and society: Plato, Aristotle, Rousseau, Du Bois, and Adorno. Guiding the discussion are two key motifs: imitation, in which music is taken to manifestly resemble various elements or processes in society; and codes, where, at a deeper and more latent level, music is taken to reflect or reveal some kind of obscure social meaning. In the final section, the chapter submits both categories to critique, contending that, while these philosophers’ writings remain highly instructive points of departure, they are of limited use in accounting for the many complex linkages between music and society within the globalized movements of twentieth-century popular music.