ABSTRACT
The thrust of this philosophical view is summarized neatly in the following statement: “Music is an inherently social phenomenon: the patterns and regularities that exist in physical sounds only take on musical meaning when they are interpreted as such by groups of people.”1 In a previous chapter, we saw that Eleanor Stubley placed music in a social context. A generation before her, Theodor Adorno and Jacques Attali used this idea as a cornerstone of their philosophies. In this view, we can only understand music in the social context in which it is heard and experienced. Furthermore, music is an important agent of social change.
