Rancière is the first to admit that he is ‘neither a musician nor a music historian’, and indeed, the subject I propose here – ‘Rancière on music’ – risks curtailing itself through a relative absence of materials. A seminar paper from 2003 on contemporary music and history remains Rancière's only sustained discussion of music, and even here he does not so much tackle a music-specific history as unpack a more general historiography through approximate musical contexts. The unobtrusive conjunction of our volume’s title, Rancière and Music, thus forecasts a productive convergence between the philosopher and his most evaded art form with an optimism that in some ways contradicts Rancière's own confessed reticence. By his own account, this small word ‘and’ paradoxically includes a very specific exclusion, a silent but palpable disjunctive conjunction: Rancière or Music. Precisely because the applications of Rancière's political aesthetics are so demonstrably varied – and even, as my colleagues have shown here, musical – the need to hear Rancière speak on the art of music is all the more urgent, as is the suspicion that Rancière's relationship to music is not only diffident but perhaps also deeply uneasy. The fact that Rancière says little about music is a statement in and of itself, and it is this statement that I will pursue here.

Directing Rancière's words to speak more directly to music in some respects seems more of an exercise in ventriloquism than textual interpretation. However, this strategy might in fact prove enlightening; after all, the philosopher's own indirect discourse practises a type of ventriloquism that invites exactly this approach. Indeed, Rancière's ambivalent relationship to music is not entirely his own but rather one that he inherits from his source materials. For example, the project of intellectual emancipation that Rancière adopts from his nineteenth-century counterpart Joseph Jacotot relies on a source that is vehemently opposed to music: François Fenélon's epic novel Les Aventures de Télémaque, which already at the time of its first publication in 1699 defined itself as a manual for emancipation through an explicitly anti-music moral. Fenélon's controversial novel endorses a strict political-aesthetic order in which music represents a corrupting influence. Thanks to its symbolic authority in Rancière's foundational text The Ignorant Schoolmaster, the novel inevitably transfers its antipathy towards music to the Jacotot–Rancière adventure.