6 Music’s social powers Music has organizational properties.It may serve as a resource in daily life, and it may be understood to have social ‘powers’ in relation to human social being. The previous chapters have moved from music’s connection to what are generally thought of as the innermost recesses of the self – emotion, memory, self-identity – through music’s interrelationship with the body,to music’s role as an active ingredient within the settings of inter- action. Music is but one type of cultural material; volumes could also be written about the role of many other types of aesthetic materials – visual, even olfactory – in relation to human agency. And music’s ‘powers’ vacil- late;within some contexts and for some people,music is a neutral medium. At other times, music’s powers may be profound. In a footnote to his famous study of encephalitis lethargica survivors, Oliver Sacks speaks of music’s liberating ‘power’in relation to Parkinsonism sufferers: This was shown beautifully, and discussed with great insight, by Edith T., a former music teacher. She said that she had become ‘graceless’ with the onset of Parkinsonism, that her movements had become ‘wooden, mechanical – like a robot or doll’, that she had lost her former ‘naturalness’ and ‘musicalness’ of movement,that – in a word – she had been ‘unmusicked’.Fortunately,she added, the disease was ‘accompanied’ by its own cure. I raised an eyebrow: ‘Music,’ she said, ‘as I am unmusicked, I must be remusicked.’ Often she said, she would find herself ‘frozen’, utterly motionless, deprived of the power, the impulse, the thought, of any motion; she felt at such times ‘like a still photo, a frozen frame’ – a mere optical flat, without substance or life. In this state, this statelessness, this timeless irreality,she would remain,motionless-helpless,until music came:‘Songs, tunes I know from years ago, catchy tunes, rhythmic tunes, the sort I loved to dance to.’(1990:60n,emphasis in original) Upon hearing or imagining music,Edith T.explained to Sacks,her ‘inner music’ – the capacity to move and to act – was returned. ‘It was like’, she said,‘suddenly remembering myself,my own living tune’(1990:60n). Sacks refers to Kant’s conception of music as ‘the quickening art’, a means for arousing a person’s liveliness. For Edith T., as Sacks puts it, music aroused,‘her living-and-moving identity and will,which is otherwise 151 dormant for so much of the time’ (1990:61n). He goes on to say, ‘this is what I mean when I speak of these patients as “asleep,” and why I speak of their arousals as physiological and existential “awakenings,” whether these be through the spirit of music or living people, or through chemical rectification of deficiencies in the “go”parts of the brain’(1990:61n). This link between music and ‘awakening’ is not metaphorical, it is fiduciary,in the sense that music provides a basis of reckoning,an animat- ing force or flow of energy, feeling, desire and aesthetic sensibility that is action’s matrix. The study of music and its powers within social life thus opens a window on to agency as a human creation,to its ‘here and now’as existential being. This vista abounds with life; it has vibrancy, a busy or tapestried quality. In his introduction to his phenomenology of everyday experience, Alberto Melucci eloquently defends the importance of this realm: Each and every day we make ritual gestures, we move to the rhythm of external and personal cadences, we cultivate our memories, we plan for the future. And everyone else does likewise. Daily experiences are only fragments in the life of an individual, far removed from the collective events more visible to us, and distant from the great changes sweeping through our culture. Yet almost everything that is important for social life unfolds within this minute web of times, spaces, ges- tures, and relations. It is through this web that our sense of what we are doing is created, and in it lie dormant those energies that unleash sensational events. (1996b:1) The playing out of social change, politics, social movements, relations of production is experienced and renewed from within this ‘web’, as Melucci calls it;it is from within the matrix of ‘times,spaces,gestures and relations’that these ‘larger’things are realized.Put differently,the theatre of social life is performed on the stage of the quotidian; it is on the plat- form of the mundane and the sensual that social dramas are rendered. In a chapter devoted to the body,Melucci observes,as he puts it,the ‘earthly consistency’ of emotions, ‘fed as they are by moods and sounds, by odours and vibrations. Fear and joy, tenderness and sorrow are not merely ideas but tears and laughter,warmth and trembling’(1996b:72). In this book I have sought to illuminate but a few of the ways in which music features in this life-web. My aim has been to delve into the matter of how music is constitutive of agency,how it is a medium with a capacity for imparting shape and texture to being,feeling and doing.I have tried to show how music works in this regard through specific circumstances and for particular individuals. Moving between so-called ‘normal’ and ‘dis- abled’individuals,across settings and life stages,I have tried to show that music is not about life but is rather implicated in the formulation of life;it is something that gets into action, something that is a formative, albeit 152 Music’s social powers often unrecognized, resource of social agency. In this final chapter I want to dwell upon the matter of how music works, how its powers come to be harnessed for and converted into action,and how this process can help to illuminate our understanding of social agency. ‘Sleepers awake’– music as a resource for human being In 1731 J.S. Bach wrote the famous cantata, ‘Wachet auf, ruft uns die Stimme’ (BWV 140) for the twenty-seventh Sunday after Trinity. The opening of this work exhorts those who have been sleeping to ‘wake up’ and quickly join the procession of the Trinitarian King. Underpinned by dotted – agitated? – rhythms,the sopranos sing the three-syllable message (‘Wachet auf’) on three sustained notes of the E flat major triad, and this tonally centred,authoritative ‘call’is underpinned by a busy counterpoint of the altos, tenors and basses and a ‘rushing’, forward-moving obliggato in the treble instrumental accompaniment. (The opening is illustrated in figure 7.) The metaphor of using music to call ‘sleepers’ to action is apposite. For agency is perhaps the opposite of social ‘sleep’.To possess agency,to be an agent,is to possess a kind of grace;it is certainly not merely the exertion of free will or interest. It is, rather, the ability to possess some capacity for social action and its modes of feeling.Judith Butler makes this point clearly in her conceptualization of gender as an outcome of recurrent cultural per- formance, as the result of how actors mobilize cultural forms and dis- courses such as language.As she puts it,we need not ‘assume the existence of a choosing and constituting agent prior to language . . . there is also a more radical use of the doctrine of constitution that takes the social agent as an object rather than the subject of constitutive acts’ (1990:270–1, emphasis in original). To be an agent, in the fullest sense, is thus to be imbued – albeit fleetingly – with forms of aesthesia.Feeling and sensitivity – the aesthetic dimension of social being – are action’s animators; they give action and actors a life spark and a particular energy shape that burns, like a comet or a firecracker,for a time and along a trajectory or path.Following the etymological sense of the word,to be aestheticized is to be capacitated, to be able to perceive or to use one’s senses, to be awake as opposed to anaestheticized, dormant or inert. It is also to be awake in a particular manner, to possess a particular calibration of consciousness, an embodied orientation and mode of energy, a particular mixture of feeling. It is in this sense, then, that aesthetic materials such as music afford perception, action,feeling,corporeality.They are vitalizing,part of the process through which the capacity to articulate and experience feeling is achieved and located on a social plane,how it is made real in relation to self and other(s). Music as a resource for human being 153 What, then, does it mean to speak of entering into or identifying with music such that one may become aestheticized? If music is a ‘quickening art’, then how does it work? And how does an understanding of music’s mechanisms of operation help to advance sociological conceptions of agency? To address these questions properly requires consideration of how our very concept of social order and its basis is historically specific. 154 Music’s social powers Va 13 9 5 Viol. I Ob. I Ob. Ob. II, III Va Viol. II Ob. Str. Ob. I, II Corno Taille Viol. picc. Viol. I, II Va Continuo I Figure 7. Johann Sebastian Bach,Cantata BWV 140,‘Wachet auf,ruft uns die Stimme’ Non-rational orderings Just as it is customary within sociology to distinguish between ‘tradi- tional’ and ‘modern’ societies (Beck et al. 1994), conventional distinc- tions are also made between ‘traditional’ and ‘modern’ musical practice (see, for example, Nettl 1990:1–3; Bebey 1975; Crozier 1997:124). In the latter form, characterized by a commercial and pro- fessional mode of music production,and also a pop–serious music aes- thetic divide, the activity of music consumption or use is depicted as a relatively private affair, and the predominant category of analysis devoted to this topic is the idea of taste, value and the affiliation of musical predilection with social standing. By contrast, musical use within ‘traditional’ societies is portrayed as deeply embedded in tem- poral and ritual custom and in communal practice. The implication is that musical experience is impoverished in modern cultures; this assumption often derives from a tendency to romanticize ‘exotic’ and ‘folk’cultures,to imply,pace Weber,that aesthetic and affective bases of action have declined in relation to bureaucratic and rational modes of ordering. Sociological discourse itself is biased against the perception of the aesthetic dimension in modern life. Instead, the sources of orderly conduct are depicted as residing in rules, knowledge, skills and sanctions. This aspect of sociological discourse separates individual from society, subject from object, and culture from agency. It achieves this separation through its use of concepts such as ‘interest’, ‘rational- ity’and ‘free will’. The notion of ‘disenchantment’ so pervasive in Weber and Adorno (Greisman 1976), and which usually trails this discourse, orbits around the idea that the aesthetic and sensuous bases of human subjectivity and human activity have been eroded by the tide of rational administration and rational, calculative modes of consciousness. This notion may, however,be an artefact of ‘modernistic’sociological discourse,a part of the discourse’s tropes rather than an accurate description of social and aesthetic practice. Indeed, as was discussed in chapter 5, the notion of disenchantment has been subject to revision in recent years (Campbell 1987; Hetherington 1998). In its stead, culture’s role in modern soci- eties has been made more central in relation to the structuring of social action. The study of musical practice in modern societies – what one might refer to as an ‘ethnomethodological ethnomusicology’, if it were not so clumsy to enunciate – has the potential to enhance significantly this neo-Durkheimian strand of thinking about culture and agency. Contrary to received notions about music’s waning role within modern cultures: Non-rational orderings 155 in advanced industrial societies music is all around us, a major element in our culture,in contrast to the situation in pre-electronic times when it was a much less pervasive medium,and a much smaller part of most people’s experience.It is this contrast, though, that may serve to arouse our sociological curiosity: instead of just taking music for granted, we might begin to ask why it has come to occupy such a prominent place in our world.(Martin 1995:1) A sociology of music concerned with the ground level of musical prac- tice (Weber’s (1958 [1921]) was not), quickly leads to the idea that it is probably more reasonable to propose that music’s relation to forms of social order within Western cultures is not inactive, but, rather, usually unnoticed by social scientists. This is not to say that there are no cross- cultural and historical differences in music’s social position, its functions and uses; there are many. But the central difference between so-called ‘modern’ and ‘traditional’ music cultures, probably does not reside in music’s disembeddedness from social practice,its disjuncture from social ‘function’ and its reinstatement as an object of ‘listening only’, from the processes of putting together subjects and situations. By contrast, the major differences between music in modern versus traditional cultures can be seen to lie in the relations of music’s production – how and where music is created, how musical forms undergo change, how music is per- formed and the quality of the performer–consumer relationship (for example, modes of attention, spatial relationship, who may count as a musician and how evaluation takes place and how music is distributed – such as many to many, one to one, one to many, many to one). Key, here, is the issue of how music distribution is controlled and, in modern soci- eties,consolidated,as with the large record production firms and the bur- geoning empires of music distribution.Key,too,are the social relations of how music is deployed within settings and the degree to which sound- tracks for settings are negotiated. There are many informal ways in which music is employed as an order- ing device in social life within modern societies. This book has only scratched the surface of this topic. At the level of individual experience, these practices may not be overtly regulated at the communal, collective level (apart from criticism, professional or lay), though they are typically oriented to imagined communities and imagined (and often aspirational) scenarios – peer groups, idealized situations, conventional images and associations. A given individual may turn to a wide gamut of recorded music for any task and at any hour of the day and, if using a Walkman, may listen to music nearly anywhere.At the same time,musical practice is by no means individuated; regularities of musical use abound, as for example when retail outlets draw upon conventional notions of musical energy levels at different times of the day or week, or when transport sta- 156 Music’s social powers tions employ Vivaldi, Mozart and Delius to soothe irate travellers and to disperse potential hooligans. A thorough examination of these practices would have the potential to illuminate the (typically overlooked) aesthetic structures of social action, structures that undergo constant revision and renegotiation at the level of action. Seen in this light, the recent theoriza- tion of aesthetic reflexivity only serves to reveal matters that are – in more traditional cultures – more explicitly recognized as central to aesthetic ordering and its practice.How,then,might we account for the invisibility, within daily life,of music’s powers to produce order? Ever since Beethoven uttered the notorious phrase, ‘I will not play for such swine’(in response to some aristocratic listeners who talked through one of his performances), Western music has been encumbered with the paraphernalia of ‘high art’; ‘good’ music has become, and been designed as,an object upon which to reflect,an object for rapt contemplation.This ideology has also been projected backward on music that was originally designed to be heard within social contexts: Telemann’s Tafelmusik is perhaps the most famous example, but even Mozart was often heard amidst cries from the sausage sellers.The august music patron Baron van Swieten was described by one of Mozart’s nineteenth-century biogra- phers as exerting: all his influence in the cause of music,even for so subordinate an end as to enforce silence and attention during musical performances. Whenever a whispered conversation arose among the audience,his excellence would rise from his seat in the first row, draw himself up to his full majestic height, measure the offenders with a long,serious look and then very slowly resume his seat.(Jahn 1882,II:385) Within the modern institution of ‘serious’listening,to listen ‘correctly’ is to be ‘transported’,to abandon,albeit temporarily,the realm of material and temporal being, to allow oneself to be taken over by music’s textual time. In this sense, ‘serious’ music may have been the earliest and most elaborated form of virtual reality. The abstraction of music from the flux of daily existence, and its excision of the body – both in terms of bodily rhythms in compositions and in terms of the motionlessness stipulated as appropriate listening conduct – have served to obliterate the none the less vital tradition of other music and its role in social life outside the concert hall, its role as it is woven into the tapestry of social life through the informal singing of songs, the pop concert, the car radio, the jukebox, ambient music,organizational music,amateur music production,singing, whistling and humming,and the playing of records,tapes and CDs.It is in all of these locations – from gilded concert hall to mega-mall, from bus terminal to bedroom – that music makes available ways of feeling, being, moving and thinking,that it animates us,that it keeps us ‘awake’. Non-rational orderings 157 Reprise – what does music do? Auden once said of poetry that it ‘makes nothing happen’,but rather that it survives as, ‘a way of happening, a mouth’ (1940). Music, too, is a way of happening, it issues as an audible channel, a series of audible articu- lated signals. In this sense, music is not ‘about’ anything but is rather a material that happens over time and in particular ways. Music is a medium,par excellence,of showing us how happening may occur;its forms and gestures stand, in Eyerman and Jamieson’s (1998) sense, as exem- plars. One against many, all together, fugal, homophonic, softly, loudly, gentle or abrupt, legato, staccato, relaxed, tense, juxtapositions, varia- tions, monotony – music is a medium that shows us ways of happening and, in common with dance, drama and cinema, music moves through time; indeed, it creates its own time and its own history, cyclical, linear, recursive. Music is also a physical medium, one that in and through its production shows us actors as they are engaged in forms of embodied production – the alarmingly extended cheeks of Dizzy Gillespie, the ‘throaty’ voice of Louis Armstrong, the apparent ease of Joan Baez’s upper range,the oarsmen-like approach of a tutti string section.Just how these things are perceived, what they are taken to mean and what they may afford cannot be specified through musical analysis, traditionally conceived. These matters are, as was argued in chapter 2, best pursued through ethnographic investigation. In the earlier chapters of this book, examples were provided where music was seen to work as a model – for conception, for a range of bodily and situational activities,and for feeling,whether as emotional work or as a way of heightening particular modes of feeling. We have also seen how the appropriation of music as a model often occurs at the semi-conscious, non-rational level of human existence even as and when its appropriation may be understood as aesthetically reflexive action. Music may serve, for example,as a model of self,a resource for articulating and stabilizing self- identity (‘the me in music’, as Lucy put it). One can find one’s self in music’s ways of happening, draw parallels between it and one’s self such that one may say to self and others, ‘as this music happens, so do I’. One can also recall one’s self on rehearing music (for instance, ‘as this music happened, so did I’) and music is a key resource for the production of autobiography and the narrative thread of self. We have also seen how music may serve as a model of where one is,is going,or where one ‘ought’ to be emotionally (‘it gets you in the mood’),such that an individual may say to him or herself something on the order of, ‘as this music is, so I should or wish to be’. Music is one of the resources to which actors turn when they engage in the aesthetic reflexive practice of configuring self 158 Music’s social powers and/or others as emotional and aesthetic agents, across a variety of scenes,from quasi-public (a ‘buzzy’barbecue or a ‘sophisticated’cocktail party) to intensely private (an intimate encounter). In public, music may be most effective at times when individuals experience social and aes- thetic uncertainty, such as that described in chapter 5, where music may proffer cues and models for ‘appropriate’ agency within a setting. There, too,we saw music as providing a way of modelling future action and inter- action, ‘setting the scene’, so to speak, by exemplifying action styles and ways of happening. Music’s capacity for exemplification arises from its primary and secondary significations; actors may refer to music’s sensu- ous properties as well as to the connotations they perceive within its structures. As a model, music serves as a resource for the generation and elaboration of ways of happening in many other realms.In this capacity it also serves as a means of melding present to future in so far as it may be applied in ways that permit cultural innovation in non-musical realms.As music is seen to be organized, so too can people and institutions be orga- nized. In this sense, music may serve as a resource for utopian imagina- tions, for alternate worlds and institutions, and it may be used strategically to presage new worlds. As Pelle Ehn describes this role of ‘sensuous knowledge’ in the workplace (Ehn 1988:449), so, too, music provides a fund of materials that serve as paradigms, metaphors, ana- logues,hints and reminders of activity,practice and social procedure. But music’s powers extend beyond its capacity to serve as a paradigm. Its temporal dimension, the fact that it is a non-verbal, non-depictive medium,and that it is a physical presence whose vibrations can be felt,all enhance its ability to work at non-cognitive or subconscious levels. Indeed, to speak of music merely as a kind of exemplar is to remain com- mitted to a cognitivist conception of agency,one that is organized around the notions of mental skill and interpretive practice. Such a conception stops short of the more profound levels on which music also operates,the levels on which we do not turn to music as a resource but are rather caught up in it, find ourselves in the middle of it, are awakened by it. Victor Turner, whose work offers one of the most extensive theorizations of culture-as-performance,has himself emphasized this point,suggesting that the notion of the cultural paradigm, ‘goes beyond the cognitive and even the moral to the existential domain’(1981:149). In the discussion of music and aerobic exercise this point is perhaps most strikingly illustrated. There, when music is used successfully to configure the aerobic embodied subject over forty-five minutes, we can actually see music as it configures,reconfigures and transfigures subjects, their modes of consciousness and their embodied capacities. There, music works as a prosthetic technology of the body, heightening and Reprise – what does music do? 159 extending bodily capacities. There, too, different types of music enable different relocations and levels of awareness,heightening and suppressing bodily energies and capacities, modes of attention and feeling. In the examples where actors used music to facilitate concentration, to vent unpleasant emotions, to manage and modulate emotional states, and to relive past emotional states, we can see music getting into action in ways that elide conscious reflection. In the retail realm, where music is used to instigate modes of orienting to goods, actors also enter into musical moods and rhythms. In these examples, music is much more than a model, much more than an object upon which to reflect and from which to get ideas or take inspiration. Rather, music can be seen to place in the foreground of perception an ongoing, physical and material ‘way of hap- pening’ into which actors may slip, fall, acquiesce. This passing over into music, this musical mediation of action, is often observable, often known to self as a feeling or energy state. It is also a local phenomenon, some- thing that occurs in the here and now of action’s flux, as actors interact with music’s presence in an environment or social space. This aspect of music illuminates the body as an entity configured in relation to its mate- rial-cultural environment. It speaks directly to medical and physiological concerns. Musical power and its mechanisms There is little evidence in favour of a behaviourist conception of music’s powers in respect to agency, though, as discussed in chapter 2, it is perhaps to be expected that certain, to some degree predictable, associa- tions between music and action have come to be established and main- tained to varying degrees.Arguments such as those advanced by Aristotle or the Parents’ Music Resource Centre, that certain melodies are ‘con- ducive to virtue’or destructive of well-being are non-explanatory;they do not offer any account for the mechanisms through which music comes to produce its alleged effects.On its own,music has no more power to make things happen than does kindling to produce combustion. In both cases, certain catalytic processes need to occur. Theorizing the catalyst that conjoins music and human being is,however,no easy task. One entry to this topic can be found via the concepts of embodied awareness and latching,as described in chapter 4.These terms were used in relation to non-cognitive, non-conscious, embodied engagement with music that is the first step to becoming a musically enlisted,musically ani- mated agent. Latching, which is a kind of musical version of Callon’s interessement (1986), is always a local process; it occurs in relation to music as it is encountered in the here and now of social life.The simplest 160 Music’s social powers example of such latching involves movement to music, whether toe tapping or finger snapping,or more complex movement styles that merge into what we would normally refer to as dance. In these examples, the body actually engages in movements that are organized in relation to,and in some way homologous with,music’s properties,its ways of happening, such as tempo,rhythm or gestural devices,and so becomes entrained with the music.Certainly,no music will reliably move all listeners.But for par- ticular listeners and perhaps types of listeners, certain musical figures, devices, genres, forms or works may serve as triggers or latches that draw music’s recipients into the process of entrainment and hence into particu- lar modes of agency.‘Juicy chords’,cha-cha-cha rhythms,slow ‘smoochy’ vocals, biographically significant pieces, formal developments – features such as these were able to move particular actors in or on to particular states or trains of feeling, moving and acting. These features will be significant for actors;they will stand out in some way. Tuning in to music also involves a kind of identification, a recognition, at a sympathetic and embodied level of the various shapes and textures of ‘happening’, of, as discussed above, the body in music (in Barthes’s ter- minology, the ‘grain of voice’ (1977)) and of the ways in which music handles itself. Perhaps music has the capacity to be socially powerful as a resource for agency because, as a way of happening that moves through time, it allows us, should we latch on to it, to engage in a kind of visceral communion with its perceived properties. We can imagine and ‘feel’, for example,the close-knit texture of dissonant polyphony,or the ‘wide-open spaces’ of fifths and fourths, or the ‘depressed’ character of the minor triad.Perhaps the clearest and most dramatic example of this process can be found in medical-based music therapy, where music is employed as a template for bio-feedback, where one may, in and through identification with particular musical properties, alter physiological and emotional states and bodily awareness. Under such circumstances, music can be said to reformulate parameters of embodied experience, to alter pulse or breathing, for example, to diminish awareness of pain. One’s pulse ‘becomes’ – is modified in relation to – that of the music; one’s pain ‘replaced’ by the state of music. Examples such as these, where music is employed deliberately so as to reformulate embodied agency, show music’s formative powers in relation to agency across the flux of social existence. Music’s recipients may not become the music per se, but they become music filtered through themselves and it is this that should be meant by the concept of music’s powers to mediate and to inform. In all of these examples,articulations are made,within the web of daily existence, between musical procedures and social and social psycholog- ical ones; in all of these examples, music serves as a medium in, through Musical power and its mechanisms 161 and against which feeling, perception, attention, consciousness, action and embodied processes are produced. At times, actors may engage in this appropriation process with deliberation, knowing how certain music works on them from past experience. But at other times, music may take actors unaware. The matter of how music is distributed is thus inextrica- ble from concerns about social control,from the matter of how a citizenry or a workforce is constituted, and from the issue of how desire may be manufactured. Politics of music in the public space In his pioneering history of background music, Joseph Lanza quotes Howard Martin, a researcher at the forefront of background music design, who, rather alarmingly, compares music to a drug (and so echoes Jimi Hendrix’s view that ‘music is ...a safe kind of fix’): He is among a new generation of thinkers interested in advancing the background music philosophy further: ‘People will start to look at music the way they used to look at dope. They will see music for its specific psychological effects. Music has the power to change moods and attitudes. Using music with these applications makes more sense now with the time crunch everyone’s in.’(1994:231) Lanza goes on to report on recent trends in Japanese office music provid- ers who have now expanded the concept of muzak to the total office environment – ‘Sense Business’ or ‘New Office’ – dedicated to creating ‘the good human environment of sound, vision, and aroma’ (1994:231), reviews the dis-utopian objections to such a vision but concludes that: A world without elevator music would be much grimmer than its detractors (and those who take it for granted) could ever realize.This is because most of us,in our hearts, want a world tailored by Walt Disney’s ‘imagineers’, an ergonomical ‘Main Street U.S.A’,where the buildings never make you feel too small,where the act of paying admission is tantamount to a screen-test – and where the music never stops.(1994:233) In this passage,Lanza glosses over a key issue,one that lies at the heart of why music is, more than ever, a topic for sociology. If music is a medium for the construction of social reality,then control over the distri- bution of the musical resources in and through which we are configured as agents is increasingly politicized and the movements, such as Pipedown in the United Kingdom,against piped background music,have been spawned in reaction to what is perceived as the commercial domi- nance of the public sonic sphere. At issue here is the matter of consciousness itself and how actors come to connect with the musical resources which are agency’s building 162 Music’s social powers materials and how this process transpires across a variety of social scenes and settings. There is a significant difference between employing music that one makes oneself (performing or composing) for this purpose and employing music that just happens to occupy a social setting; that difference consists of the degree to which one may negotiate the aesthetic parameters of action. As was described above, there are times when the ability to control one’s aesthetic environment is crucial to individuals – in intimate settings, at times of stress, to afford concentration, to vent aggression,to avoid painful music.To the extent that music can be seen to get into or inform subjectivity and action, then, the issue of aesthetic control and its relation to the constitution of agency is serious, particu- larly as organizations and marketeers are becoming increasingly sophisti- cated in their deployment of music. Further explorations of music as it is used and deployed in daily life in relation to agency’s configuration will only serve to highlight what Adorno, and the Greek philosophers, regarded as a fundamental matter in relation to the polis, the citizen and the configuration of consciousness; namely, that music is much more than a decorative art; that it is a powerful medium of social order. Conceived in this way, and documented through empirical research, music’s presence is clearly political,in every sense that the political can be conceived.