If mass communications blend together harmoniously, and often unnoticeably, art, politics, religion, and philosophy with commercials, they bring these realms of culture to their common denominator-the commodity form. The music of the soul is also the music of salesmanship. Exchange value, not truth value, counts. This obsessive ideal springs above all from frequent contact with enormous cities, from the junction of their innumerable connections. Since music is a language with some meaning at least for the immense majority of mankind, although only a tiny minority of people are capable of formulating a meaning in it, and since it is the only language with the contradictory attributes of being at once intelligible and untranslatable, the musical creator is a being comparable to the gods, and music itself the supreme mystery of the science of man, a mystery that all the various disciplines come up against and which holds the key to their progress.
Good music is very close to primitive language.
The new sound-sphere is global. It ripples at great speed across languages, ideologies, frontiers and races. . . . The economics of this musical esperanto is staggering. Rock and pop breed concentric worlds of fashion, setting and life-style. Popular music has brought with it sociologies of private and public manner, of group solidarity.