At a moment when considerations of community, belonging and exclusion have become essential to public discourse, Naomi Waltham-Smith's Music and Belonging between Revolution and Restoration offers an especially timely reflection on how community is constructed and how procedures of inclusion and exclusion may be disrupted through listening to music. The question that motivates her investigation into the classical-era style exemplified by the instrumental works of Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven is no less than what it means to be human, or – perhaps better – what is required for membership in the human community.

Rather than take that question at face value, Waltham-Smith seeks to deactivate the binary of human/not-human by disrupting entrenched modes of thought. To do so she employs two areas of study, postmodern philosophy and Viennese classicism, constructing a dialogue between them in order to demonstrate that shared properties and qualities are not necessary conditions of belonging. Waltham-Smith inherits this programme of disruption from politically oriented post-deconstructivist thinkers such as Jean-Luc Nancy and Giorgio Agamben. But she transforms that programme by exploring the ways in which philosophical notions that deactivate traditional models of relationality (such as conceptual thresholds: zones of indistinction between concepts) can be exemplified in particular musical moments and, thus, made available to listeners via sensuous experience. Accordingly, she argues that this repertory can make intelligible the notion that nothing is necessarily shared in the experience of this music, which none the less involves the activity of sharing in the experience of listening. In this way the music vivifies what it could mean to belong without ownership, offering a truly new way of envisioning membership in the human community.

Viennese classicism's ‘enduring potential to unravel the logic of the proper and of belonging’ (39) is largely due to its intimate relationship with conventionality. Because of this relationship, the music has the capacity to make palpable the appropriative – and even co-creative – nature of listening, troubling traditional notions of musical authorship and ownership. Further, this repertory's capacity to exemplify and make vivid postmodern strategies that supplant binary models of engagement with the world indicates an intimate kinship between the music and philosophy, and the monograph can be productively read as an exploration of what it might mean for music to do philosophy.

In positing a productive relationship between music and postmodern philosophy, Waltham-Smith contributes to an emergent body of scholarship that brings theory into conversation with musical praxes, including J. P. E. Harper-Scott's interrogation of the Badouian event of musical modernism (The Quilting Points of Musical Modernism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012)), Olivia Bloechl's recent monograph on the political significance of tragédie en musique (Opera and the Political Imaginary in Old Regime France (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017)) and the excellent and necessary work done by music scholars such as Michael Gallope and Martin Scherzinger in the 2014 collection Music in Contemporary Philosophy (ed. Martin Scherzinger (New York: Routledge, 2015)). She further aligns her work with Scherzinger's by offering an alternative to cultural-historical accounts of music's political value. Her interest is in the possibilities this music holds for listeners today, and she makes few claims about how the music has been understood, concerning herself, rather, with what it allows for. This interest, in both the unrealized possibilities inherent in musical phenomena and the potential of music to open up in listeners politically powerful ways of thinking, closely connects her work with a tradition of leftist philosophers and social activists who envision a central role for music in projects of human progress.

Waltham-Smith integrates music-analytic insight and postmodern theoretical argumentation in a manner both deft and dizzying. Working fluently in two distinct languages, she presents a dialogue that zooms in and out – at one moment probing the possible significance of a musical passage, at another interrogating a series of other scholars’ analyses of that same passage set alongside her own reading, say, of Agamben reading Aristotle. Yet even in a work that marries, to great effect, so many voices in so many registers, the most significant philosophical voice in the text is Agamben's, evidenced not only by the ways in which his work and his readings of the work of others act as touchstones, but also by the ways in which some of the philosopher's preoccupations (notably with Roman law) arise and are repurposed for Waltham-Smith's own ends. While she frequently appropriates Agamben's ideas and strategies straightforwardly, she approaches many of the other theories she employs (both philosophical and music-analytical) as she does musical works: reading them against the grain and mining them for inherent possibilities.

Each chapter contributes to the larger project of unravelling the machinery that upholds the human/not-human binary. The opening chapter seeks, through an exploration of conventionality in Haydn's music, to demonstrate how the experience of listening to his music – and music of the classical style more generally – may both make available for the listener a double sense of belonging (as membership and as possession) and open up a space in which to problematize this model. Waltham-Smith argues that, as material becomes highly conventionalized in late eighteenth-century repertory, it develops a kind of autonomy and can be appropriated variously by listeners, performers and composers – at no time belonging wholly and unproblematically to any of these groups or individuals. In positing a model of belonging without ownership, she suggests a paradigm of community founded on the relation of ownerless sharing rather than shared property.

Subsequent chapters further develop this notion of ‘belonging without ownership’, whilst also seeking to disrupt the ‘necessary’ conditions for inclusion in the human community: sovereignty in the guise of ‘belonging-to-oneself’ (2 and 5), capacity for labour (3), capacity for self-expression (4) and man as a being-in-time (6). In the second chapter Waltham-Smith intentionally misreads Badiou's claim that Haydn's music marks a radical break – or rupture – with the conditions of the eighteenth century. In her reading, Haydn's music can effect a Badouian rupture because it has the capacity to foreground and deactivate the aforementioned double sense of belonging. She employs analyses of both the concluding gesture in the string quartet Op. 33 No. 2 and the moment of surprise in Symphony No. 94 in order to demonstrate that it is precisely in these disruptive moments that the co-creative relationality of listening is made intelligible.

Chapter 3 undercuts the significance of the notion of the ‘labouring man’ by teasing out the political value of play through the lens of Mozart's use of variation. She argues that, in Mozart's hands, variation form vivifies the tension inherent in the experience of listening between potentiality and actualization, exhausting the significance of possibility (both actualized and unactualized) to our listening experiences. Utilizing a short story from Kafka and Max Kommerell's formulation of modernity, chapter 4 focuses on an analysis of the beklemmt section of Beethoven's Op. 130 Cavatina. Here Waltham-Smith seeks to disrupt the binary between convention and expression by arguing that the late works of Beethoven exemplify the notion that expression does not truly belong to the individual, but rather – in operating by publicly negotiated means – is always already beyond one's possession. The disruption of binaries is central, as well, to the project of chapter 5, wherein she uses the Deleuzian concept of ‘the fold’ to deactivate the binary mode of thinking that ascribes insides/outsides to sections of musical movements and to persons. She does this via an examination of the ways in which Beethoven folds material from slow introductions into sonata-form expositions in some of the late quartets. A further analysis of the interrelatedness of tonic and dominant keys in the opening movement of Op. 127 forms the basis of a critique of the binary of self/other.

The final chapter begins with the trill in late Beethoven, exploring its capacity – particularly at moments when it fails to announce a cadence – to make intelligible to listeners a temporal zone of indistinction between music's sounding and the time constructed by an analytic representation of that sounding. She refers to this dimension as ‘the time it takes to listen’, and argues that attending to it helps us to better understand what it means to listen – to have the capacity to step outside of temporal succession, reaching backward and projecting forward. We are left, at the conclusion of this final chapter, in an ambiguous and precarious position (one Waltham-Smith acknowledges); this repertory, even in its capacity to disrupt traditional understandings of what it means to be human, seems to posit a new definition of the human – a being who listens.

A great strength of Waltham-Smith's critical approach is her reimagining of well-known musical moments that become astonishing once again within the context of her illuminating analyses, such as the parallel she draws between the trills that conclude the Arietta variations of Beethoven's Op. 111 and Aquinas's concept of the halo. In contrast, her use of postmodern theory may have a distancing effect, and the complex theoretical framework she constructs may act as a significant stumbling-block to readers who have only a passing familiarity with the mechanisms of postmodern thought. She often does the essential work of clarifying key concepts, but occasionally she employs ideas – Foucault's dispositif, Derrida's signature – without explaining their meanings. And, while her musical examples effectively pin down abstract strategies of thought, a well-chosen example to clarify the life-or-death stakes of the underlying political project would have been welcome, since her discussions of the political significance of this repertory retain a residue of abstraction. (Explicitly bringing Agamben's formulation of the figure of the Muselmann into view, for instance, could have been used to make plain what is at stake in deciding between what is human and what is not). That said, even Waltham-Smith's most challenging and complex engagements with elliptical philosophical gestures snap into focus when she brings them into conversation with the music. Her first-order analyses of musical moments (and second-order analyses of music-theoretical scholarship) offer an embarrassment of riches for an avid listener. In addition to this, by teasing out a complex relationship between philosophy and music she allows the music to clarify a challenging corpus of philosophical literature. This may make this monograph especially interesting to scholars working on other musical traditions who seek new ways of exploring the intersections between philosophy and music.

Perhaps Waltham-Smith's most significant accomplishment, however, is the way she boldly weds musical insight to a political project of remarkable ambition. In placing the experience of listening at the centre of projects of human progress, she prompts us to contemplate fundamental questions about the value of musical (co-)creativity and its relationship to other human endeavours. She asks us further to consider, for instance, how music might reveal through sensuous experience new possibilities for engaging with our world. And she prompts us to question the force of the parallels she draws between music and philosophy. Is music's capacity to exemplify philosophical strategies powerful enough to disrupt entrenched modes of thought? Can we make sense of ‘the human’ without recourse to exclusion and the binary? Her brief epilogue leaves the reader with an intriguing claim, one meant to both address this last query and remedy the sense of precarity with which the final chapter concludes. She claims that the music of Beethoven's late period ‘casts off even listening and the ear as determination’ (247). The efficacy of the political project seems to turn on the sense we can make of this cryptic assertion. But even if the political path forward remains uncertain, Waltham-Smith's ingenious analysis opens up productive conversations between unlikely interlocutors (Deleuze and Caplin, Nietzsche and Mozart), prompting us to contend anew with what each can offer to our understanding of music and its value. And her insights into the musical creativity of Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven offer a novel way to engage with the enduring value of this repertory, and the real possibility of hearing this music with a new ear.