Musical Democracy. By Nancy S. Love. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2006. 168p. $50.00.

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.