ABSTRACT
The topic of political song and its ontology is one that leads quickly to issues of the kind that have preoccupied contributors to this book, that is to say, issues concerning those aspects of immanence and transcendence that characterise music and our experience of it. Moreover – and for just that reason – it offers a significant challenge to certain deep-laid assumptions concerning the status or mode of existence proper to musical works. Those assumptions have primarily to do with the formal autonomy of such works and hence with their supposed capacity to transcend the order of merely contingent events, whether singing events (for example, in this context, street performances) or events of a more directly political character.
