On the first page of her book, Nancy Love asks, “how might musical practices further our understanding of democratic politics?” This is a permutation of the vast question of culture and politics investigated with regularity since the Sophists (“court music” in Egypt, Persia, and China suggest it is even older). In Musical Democracy, focus on the aural/oral excludes comparable topics concerning representation, iconography, idolatry, and so on. This moves the inquiry away from critical perspectives of modern philosophical aesthetics (from Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten to Walter Benjamin). The author makes instead a not unprecedented but important turn to rhetoric.

Other very old approaches to music are also excluded, such as the Pythagorean/humanist identification of music with order and common ritual use of music for social control (in court, in church, on the battlefield). As this book is not about politics in general but specifically about democracy, these exclusions may be justified. But they raise collateral questions about the frame within which democracy itself should be interpreted. Moreover, music as “order” or “control” rejoins democratic political theory through reflexive consideration of education (as in Pythagoras, or Isocrates, or Plato; but also in the quadrivium, or along the Rousseau-Pestalozzi-Dewey line). Thus, even within a narrow construal of democracy, one may be surprised to find only tangential mention of music education (p. 61).

The implicit time and place of the book is the United States of the last several generations. Two types of relationship are examined —how music functions as a metaphor and as a model for democracy—and roughly half the book is devoted to each. The author points to metaphorical language in Jürgen Habermas (Chapter 2) and Rawls (Chapter 3), which is said to expose their claims about democracy as too cold and dry. Register and address shift when music is taken as an experiential model for democracy through consideration of “women's music” (activist singer-songwriter Holly Near in Chapter 4) and “freedom songs” (especially the uncategorizable development of African American a capella group singing by Sweet Honey in the Rock in Chapter 5).

Each of these topics opens onto its own vast literature; to make “music” the leitmotif in the issue of culture and politics is to identify the purpose that unifies such diverse materials. Love offers some genuine rhetorical insights concerning, for example, the balance between audience and performance (p. 82) and how social movements rely on orality (p. 68). She is also occasionally caught off base, for example, in embracing rhetoric as “visceral … energies” (pp. 106, 30–1, and passim) while criticizing Habermas for rejecting it as “prelinguistic” (p. 31) or “unruly … language” (p. 22) (neither is correct); in suggesting that with the use of metaphor Rawls “does not limit himself to the tools of reason” (p. 47) (in fact metaphor is essential to reasoning); or in making misleading identifications of “movement music” with “blues, folk, gospel, jazz, rap, rock” (p. 43) or of the “symphony orchestra” with a “musical form” (p. 44).

The word “aesthetics” appears frequently in the text but, in fact, the framing issues are drawn from rhetorical traditions and for just that reason are more apt. Political thinking begins from and attends to relationships conducted in speech, yet much contemporary political theory evades this primary fact. Rhetoric tackles it head-on. In this spirit, Love attempts to bridge politics and music through “voice” (ignoring Aristotle's distinction between “voice” [φονη] and “speech” [λοδος]; emphasizing Walter Ong's rhetorical account of the “presence of the word” in “space-time”).

This intriguing move falls short. While a commonplace view sees music epitomized in the voice (here citing Wilhelm von Humboldt [p. 52]), Love would have it the other way around by proposing “voice as music” (pp. 11, 67). The vast majority of the author's critical and positive claims concern uses of the human voice and the voice's inherent characteristics (sound, rhythm, rhyme, etc.) and implications (bodily presence, plurality, relation, etc.). Almost no effort is made to distinguish “music” from “voice” or to show, on the basis of that distinction, what literally or metaphorically is gained by referring “voice” back to “music”. The reader may admit that much of what Love says about “voice” and “politics” is correct and still deny that “music” adds anything at all. Why is “music” better than or even different from “voice?” Love often alludes to this additional step (e.g., p. 37) but rarely demonstrates it.

The author's rhetorically oriented insistence on orality is a real virtue; perversely, this exacerbates the problem just mentioned. From ancient Greek “music” [μουσικη] to medieval bards to contemporary rap, the distinction between “poetic” words sounded with pitch modulations and “music” has rarely been clear; “political music” often means political lyrics set to music (e.g., the “Marseillaise,” Hanns Eisler's Brecht settings) or tunes that evoke slogans without voicing them (e.g., Rzewski's “The People United Will Never Be Defeated”). (I do not understand an appeal to John Shepherd (p. 72) that seems to accept Saussure for language but not for music.) Is, for example, “We Shall Overcome” (which Love misleadingly gives as an example of improvisation rather than of oral culture transformation) a song or, as a former Freedom Rider says, a prayer (p. 100)? After John Cage, it may be that “sonic design” (Robert Cogan and Pozzi Escot, 1976) and “sampling” are the field in which “poetic” language finds its public, and what we call “music” today is merely a phase in the history of poetry. Love correctly suggests that voice/orality holds together different registers of democracy but also adds that music provides a model for this; this key point is not developed. Orality may be (as she insists) a marker for emotion, but, for example, novels also evoke emotion and sometimes inspire readers to politics.

To take further this restatement of the politics and culture question would mean to ask not only Is it the words or the music that transform the self, the symbolic order, or the social? but also What is music today? Love responds with functionalist propositions: “[M]usic can expand … public discourse and … democracy” by blurring “the boundaries of linguistic consciousness and … subjectivity,” “unsettling … identities,” undermining “the will to consensus,” and “encouraging a … responsible citizenry” (p. 71), preempting violence (p. 96), and so on. The book is less attentive to how music produces contradictory effects: focusing some people while distracting others (e.g., slave songs), advancing subjectivity or annulling it (e.g., Charlie Parker vs. karaoke), connecting people together through “profundity” (her term; cf. pp. 12, 41, 42, 58, 60, 106) but also through commerce.

Here, excluded perspectives on “music” become relevant, as for Love, “music” brings to democracy a response to the way literacy introduced “rationality” into linguistic relationships and overemphasized that feature of them. However, it mistakes a vast part of the musical avocation of humankind to set it apart from the development of rationalism, which characterizes many “musics” from Pythagoras to Arnold Schonberg or Pierre Boulez or, contrary to what Love says about “African American music”, John Coltrane. Appeals to topics like oral/written and rational/irrational are important, but can tell only a part of the story.

How “music” bears on democracy is complicated by the history of technics. Perhaps before sound recording, all “musics” had in common—and in common with “voice”—the attribute of interhuman resonance, and this specific concomitance had immediate bearing on political relationships (and could be elucidated by eighteenth-century moral philosophy concerned with sympathy and social distance, as in Hume [p. 129]). With the mechanical reproduction of sound, however, the literal vibration one feels is emitted by the transducer and not a human being; this categorical shift must alter the relation between “musical practices and democratic politics.” Is the same “political” present when Holly Near plays at a demonstration and when one listens to her CDs at home?

To take “music” as given and constant also limits Love's analysis of metaphor in Habermas and Rawls. Even assuming that the literal meaning of words like harmony and symphony is musical, it is difficult to see why they add content beyond the already rich vocabulary of “order,” “union,” “consensus,” and “voice.” The issue turns on “music” only if you presuppose what needs to be demonstrated here: “voice as music.” Likewise, Love seems to mistake gratuitous flourishes for hinge propositions, as when she refers us to “an important passage” in which Rawls “uses a musical example to illustrate the moral limitations of game theory” when, in fact, the musical figure stands for nothing more than the mutual obtrusiveness of room-mates [p. 54]). Simply, Love overinterprets poorly concocted ornamental metaphors by Habermas or Rawls, neither of whom may be rightly accused of being a poet.

Musical Democracy shows inadequacies of two approaches to democracy (“deliberative” and “aggregative”) and flirts with another (“agonist”), but ultimately alludes to “a more expansive definition of politics” (p. 106). What appears in the book, however, is mostly a familiar Platonic-Christian-Romantic reduction of politics to communion, a kind of fusional bodily experience of total presence, “profundity,” or concreteness. Indeed, “the claim that embodying communication matters more than the specific—literate or oral, visual or vocal—medium” (p. 102) suggests eccentrically that here, “politics” itself is derived from a parallel (familiar, pleasing) version of “music.” Either way, chicken-or-egg, if politics is characterized by social fusion, one may note that homologous “music” is not necessarily democratic (e.g., 500,000 Nazis at Nuremberg singing “Das Deutschlandlied”). By contrast, what anticommunitarian, rhetorically oriented political theorists have understood is that “voice”—specifically as λογος—is political because it interrupts the dangerous immediacy of relationships. Perhaps only musical rationalism (e.g., dodecaphony), shock (e.g., Marc Blitzstein's Brechtian Entfremdung), or irony (e.g., Trey Parker and Matt Stone's “South Park”) can achieve this “mediated-ness” and avoid what may be called, following Freud and Adorno, “regression.” One can agree that all politics is also visceral and still believe that without mediation democracy is diminished.

This book may bring together, around the topic of “music,” theorists of various orientations; it may provoke them to rethink their own and the other domains. The larger project—to re-explore the relationship of culture and politics through “music”—is more important than that. It poses a question of interest to all political theorists: What insufficiency in the now mainstream approaches to democracy is revealed by their incapacity to give an account of this transformative public form of expression and performative communication?