Nearly all the major developments of Western culture - philosophical, economic, religious, political, even military - can to a certain extent thus be charted. Music bears witness not so much to its own time as to a time that came before, for major concerns find expression in art only after they've ripened and proven their durability. There's always a lag - like a glance at the rear-view mirror, an examination of music tells us where we've been.

But now along comes a French economic theorist who claims that music can tell us where we're going.

''Music is prophecy,'' declares Jacques Attali in the first chapter of ''Noise: The Political Economy of Music,'' a slim book published in France eight years ago and recently brought out in English translation (by Brian Massumi) by the University of Minnesota Press.

''[Music's styles and economic organization are aheadof the rest of society because it explores, much faster than material reality can, the entire range of possibilities in a given code. It makes audible the new world that will gradually become visible, that will impose itself and regulate the order of things; it is not only the image of things, but the transcending of the everyday, the herald of the future.''

It's a provocative statement, and indeed Attali's revisionist reading of music history is already stirring the intellectual waters in this country. His views were much quoted in a paper University of Minnesota musicologist Susan McClary read earlier this year in Minneapolis at a conference titled ''Music and Society: The Politics of Composition, Performance and Reception.'' A long article on the conference, devoted mostly to an expansion of McClary's (and Attali's) thoughts, appears in the most recent issue of Opus magazine. A review of ''Noise'' in the September issue of Musical America says of Attali that ''anyone interested in our contemporary world can no longer afford to ignore him.''

THE TEMPTATION to ignore Attali is great, of course. This 42-year-old professor of economics and advisor to France's President Mitterrand makes no secret about his leftist bias. Like most radical polemicists, he cites only those historical facts that serve his argument and shamelessly ignores those that might blur the issues. Like most French writers of non-fiction today, he traffics in hyperbole, exhortation and slogan; for all its color and drama, his prose is often as ''noisy'' as the modern world that is the focus of his attention.

Yet much of what Attali says makes sense.

The dichotomy upon which Attali bases most of his thesis pits noise (i.e., discord, revolution, freedom) against harmony (i.e., order, regulation, constraint), and the image from which he draws his ubiquitous metaphors is a Breughel painting titled ''Carnival's Quarrel with Lent.'' Paraphrasing the Hegelian dialectic of thesis + antithesis  = synthesis, Attali says that every major development in music or anything else starts with an outside noise intruding on the existing harmony; eventually, he says, those noises that persist are absorbed into the harmony, creating a new harmony that will have to try to hold its own against some unknown noise of the future. The sobriety of Lent will always be countered by a joyous Carnival, Attali says, and where the two modes of behavior meet there will always be Quarrel.

That much is easy to understand, and any person familiar with the basic course of music history will probably nod in agreement when Attali looks at various episodes in the light of his noise-harmony polarity.

A MORE DIFFICULT part of Attali's thinking has to do with his division into three ''zones'' of the ''strategic uses of music by power.''

''In one of these zones,'' Attali says, ''music is used and produced in the ritual in an attempt to make people forget the general violence; in another, it is employed to make people believe in the harmony of the world, that thereis order in exchange and legitimacy in commercial power; and finally, there is one in which it serves to silence, by mass-producing a deafening, syncretic kind of music, and censoring all other human noises.''

Attali's history is the story of how music gradually traveled from the first zone to the third, how at each stage of the game noises within music pre-echoed noises in politics and economics. Attali is pretty pessimistic by the time the chronicle reaches the late 20th century. He's at his wordiest, and preachiest, in this penultimate chapter. At the same time, it is with his analysis of the state of music today that his argument is the most pointed and the most brilliant - his notes may be sour, but most of them ring true.

Whereas before the Industrial Revolution music-making was largely a matter of performers ''representing'' a composer's work in exchange for wages, Attali says, in the modern world music is little more than a commodity whose value is determined by its viability on the mass market.

''Repeating'' has become more important than ''representing,'' Attali says. For most listeners, he says, performances today are regarded as little more than live replications of recorded music. The music industry's main concern is not the production of supply but the production of demand, he says. Attali damns the music of composers such as Boulez, Stockhausen and Xenakis as ''elite'' and ''bureaucratic,'' the result of ''a frenzied search for universal abstraction by men whose labor has lost its meaning.'' He warns that Muzak ''may be the herald of the general silence of men before the spectacle of commodities, men who will no longer speak except to conduct standardized commentary.'' He notes the similarity between the banal rhythms of Top 40 rock and those of military music. He says that pop music and avant-garde music, for all their differences, are really in the same boat:

''ONE USES THE most traditional of harmonies to avoid startling anyone, while the other is inscribed in an abstract search, in a theoretical corpus in crisis, and refuses to accept the dominant trends and cultural codes. One addresses itself to a mass audience with the aim of inciting it to buy, the other has no market or financial base other than patronage, public or private. Yet both belong to the same reality, that of hyperindustrialized Western society in crisis.''

Referring yet again to the Brueghel painting that decorates the covers of both the French and English editions of his book, Attali concludes that whatever variety there appears to be in today's musical mainstream is just a thin veneer over intellectual and esthetic standardization. ''Everywhere,'' he says, ''diversity, noise and life are no longer anything more than masks covering a mortal reality: Carnival is fading into Lent and silence is setting in everywhere.''

Just when the music-loving reader is ready to hang his head and weep, Attali offers a ray of hope.

There is a new noise in the air, Attali claims in his last chapter. It is ''one that can neither be expressed nor understood using the old tools, a music produced elsewhere and otherwise,'' he says, and the society it foreshadows is nothing less than a utopia in which men and women will once again be able to live their lives to the fullest.

And just what is this musical harbinger of redemption?

Attali doesn't get very specific about it. Apparently, though, what he's talking about is a kind of do-it-yourself music, not so much ''a new music but a new way of making music.'' Attali titles his last chapter ''Composing,'' because he feels that when the dawn comes every person will compose his or her own music, a noncommercial music produced ''for pleasure outside of meaning, usage and exchange.'' Attali's brave new world ''presupposes the coexistence of two conditions: tolerance and autonomy.'' If it comes to pass, everyone's music will be OK, and so will everyone.

EXCEPT FOR those whose music he doesn't like, Attali mentions no contemporary composers in his book. In her afterword for the English edition of ''Noise,'' however, Susan McClary does deal with the real world. In language far more lucid than Attali's, she suggests that ''composing'' has already made inroads into the mode of ''repeating,'' and she offers numerous examples - ranging from New Wave rock bands to ''performance artist'' Laurie Anderson - to illustrate how the phenomenon of home-made music has indeed already burgeoned.

Regarding the book's potential influence, McClary says: ''. . . If Attali can serve to jolt a few musicians awake or to encourage those attempting to forge new compositional or interpretive directions, then the hope he expresses for a new music - controlled neither by academic institutions nor by the entertainmentrecording industry - may be at least partially realized.''

Like it or not, though, the word does figure into conversation about orchestras these days.

Sometimes it's meant almost literally. It's an apt term for describing the Kansas City Philharmonic, for example, which went belly-up five years ago and then was re-born - with a new administration and a new board of directors - as the Kansas City Symphony. And it's an appropriate modifier for the Oakland Symphony, which, since it ceased operations last year, at least seems to have given up the ghost.

The orchestras in Dallas, Houston, Denver, Phoenix, New Orleans, San Diego, Buffalo and Rochester aren't quite in such bad shape, but their financial conditions are certainly critical, and people in those communities h ave good reason to wonder if their orchestras, too, might not soon be as ''dead'' as the proverbial doornail.

People have to wonder about that even in St. Louis, where early in 1985 the executives of the artistically thriving St. Louis Symphony had to seek an emergency $2 million loan from the state government in order to ensure the organization's survival for at least a few more seasons. It's a horrible image, the ''dead'' symphony orchestra whose individual members are in fact fit as fiddles.

So let's dismiss it for now and look at other ways in which observers of the scene use the word.

''The symphony is dead,'' Leonard Bernstein declared in his 1965 book ''The Infinite Variety of Music.'' He wasn't discussing the symphony orchestra; rather, he referred to the large-scale multimovement musical form whose name has become practically synonymous with the ensemble for which such music has typically been written.

Bernstein's comment prompted The New York Times to solicit, in 1968, thoughts on the matter from prominent critics and composers. The symposium was headlined ''The Symphony: Is It Alive? or Just Embalmed?''

Recent seasons in St. Louis and elsewhere have indeed introduced works whose titles as well as content demonstrate that they flow more or less directly from the symphonic tradition.

But in the big picture of contemporary music, pieces like William Bolcom's Symphony No. 4 (premiered here in March) and Edward Applebaum's Symphony No. 2 (premiered here in October of 1983) are oddities. People still write symphonies, obviously, especially when they're commissioned to do so. For the most part, though, composers today are interested in smaller forms and smaller ensembles. And for the most part, the symphonies that symphony orchestras do play are the handicraft of composers long in the grave. The symphony is alive, but just barely.

And what about the orchestra that plays these mostly antique symphonies? Is it, like the musical genre that lends it its name, an institution on the road to extinction? We know that the symphony orchestra in Oakland is dead. But what about the symphony orchestra in general?

The question - ''Is the symphony orchestra dead?'' - is posed by Samuel Lipman in an article in the current issue of The New Criterion. Lipman concludes on a note of guarded optimism.

''The symphony orchestra is very much alive, if by 'alive' one refers to the interpretation of some of the greatest works of art for audiences composed of sophisticated listeners and new cadres coming to beautiful music more or less for the first time,'' he writes. ''By performing this task, the orchestra is accomplishing the vital function of preserving and extending civilization. Because it performs this task it is worthy of support by all those responsible for the future of our society.''

But, Lipman continues, ''The fact that the symphony orchestra is alive and is performing a vital cultural function does not mean that its present condition is either healthy or happy. The problems with orchestral life, and with musical life as a whole, are great. . . . They stem from internal difficulties in the musical creativity of our time, and from the way the resultant artistic vacuum has been filled by extraneous economic and social forces. . . . There is nothing wrong with musical life that serious conductors in charge of great orchestras, playing new compositions of permanent value, cannot cure. In any case, there is little likelihood that our salvation will come from administrators whose skills lie entirely in the merchandising of that which has already become famous somewhere else.''

Lipman's essay, which includes an exhortation for orchestra members to take their artistic futures into their own hands, was triggered by the commencement address Ernest Fleischmann delivered at the Cleveland Institute of Music in May of this year.

For almost 20 years Fleischmann has been executive director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic. He's a flamboyant impresario whose personal style is well-suited to his Southern California environs. He's also one of the most savvy, most competent administrators in the orchestra business. Doubtless he shocked the instrumentalists in the Cleveland graduating class when he told them, flat out, that ''the symphony orchestra as we know it is dead.''

The main problem with the symphony orchestra, Fleischmann said, is that its members after a while begin to feel they are no longer artists but merely unionized workmen who can express themselves only at the negotiation table.

The pressures to perform flawlessly are, of course, great. But even more debilitating is the dullness of the routine. Year after year symphony musicians do the same old things in the same old ways.

''No life for a real musician this, with little opportunity to develop as an artist, let alone as a human being,'' Fleischmann said. ''Why the hell should anyone then contemplate an orchestral career?''

Fleischmann, of course, is not about to retire. His obituary for the ''burnt out'' symphony orchestra was packaged with a proposal for something he called the ''Community of Musicians,'' a gigantic pool of performers that would service almost all of a metropolis' musical needs.

Employees of this larger, more flexible group would be able to function sometimes as chamber music players, sometimes as members of chamber orchestras or pit orchestras for opera and ballet, sometimes even as soloists. The repertoire would be infinitely more diverse. The warhorses would be trotted out less frequently. Performances would be fewer and thus more eagerly anticipated by audiences. More time could be spent on rehearsals, especially on rehearsals of difficult new scores. Educational activities would be more ''enlightened.'' Fund-raising efforts would be more concerted. And everyone would be happy.

Lipman is right, I think, in labeling Fleischmann's idea ''utopian.'' He's right, too, in suggesting that an official consolidation of musical forces would probably do more harm than good.

Unlike their counterparts in Europe, most American symphony orchestras are monopoly organizations. The ''musical condition of creative exhaustion'' which, Lipman says, plagues the symphony orchestra in this country has a lot to do with the simple fact that there is no competition for audiences.

A mega-ensemble of the sort Fleischmann proposes - of the sort which Fleischmann, presumably, would like to run - would probably just make the status quo all the more static.

In a sense, a Community of Musicians already exists in many American cities. It certainly exists in St. Louis, where members of the St. Louis Symphony perform on their own Chamber Orchestra and Chamber Music St. Louis series, accompany Opera Theatre of St. Louis productions, teach at the St. Louis Conservatory, serve as artists-in-residence at various colleges, conduct amateur orchestras and fill the ranks of the Kammergild and countless other ad hoc instrumental groups.

But there's a difference between this ''community'' and the kind that Fleischmann has in mind.

The musicians here get paid for their moonlighting, of course, but most of them engage in it for reasons that have to do more with art than money. They work outside the confines of the symphony orchestra not because they have to but because they want to, because alternative activities offer them a respite from the symphony orchestra routine.

More important, their alternative activities give them opportunities to make artistic decisions - even the opportunities to take artistic risks - that are denied them by their primary employer. The St. Louis Symphony moonlighters are their own bosses. They benefit immensely from that artistic independence, and so do their audiences.

How much music would there be in St. Louis if all the members of the St. Louis Symphony suddenly, uh, disappeared? That's a morbid question, but one worth asking when one considers the matter of the ''dead'' symphony orchestra.

I've nothing against dinner music in general. What irritates me - especially when I have to experience it myself - is inappropriate dinner music. It's not bad music that turns my stomach; my objection is to the dinnertime use of perfectly good music that deserves better than to be merely heard from afar.

Regardless of what Emily Post and Amy Vanderbilt have to say on the subject, in my book it is exceedingly poor manners to dilute even a third-rate specimen of concert-hall music by accompanying it with candlelight and a delicious filet mignon. To play a recording of one of the world's great masterpieces while people are chewing on pizza is perhaps doubly boorish, but that depends on how much cheese is on the pizza.

The point is, music that was designed to be listened to - with an audience's full attention - is ill-served when in any situation it is reduced to the level of background noise. On the other hand, there is a wealth of music written expressly for the purpose of making the ordeal of a fancy meal easier to swallow. It didn't get an official name until the end of the Renaissance, when German composers began to package collections of the stuff under the rubric Tafelmusik.

But ''table music'' existed well before the 16th century, and in one form or another it continued to flow long after the fashion for daylong feasts had run its course. Savvy musicians have always known which side of the bread the butter is on; some of the most talented have happily turned out pieces they expected would be taken with a grain of salt and a sprinkle of pepper. The season for dinner parties is almost upon us.

Committed public servant that I am, I herewith suggest some music that is certifiably suitable for meals. Playing it on the stereo won't make lousy food taste good, but perhaps it will lead your friends to think that in at least some respects you are a person of good taste.

Let's start with the composer whose name is most closely associated with dinner music. He's Georg Philipp Telemann, a German who lived from 1681 to 1767 and who was far more prolific than his contemporary J.S. Bach. Among his oodles of works are some 200 suites for small orchestra, three of which were published at Telemann's own expense and bore the title ''Tafelmusik.'' To digest all of the ''Tafelmusik'' at a single sitting would require a lot of food; the suites last, on average, about an hour and a half, and each of them consists of several multi-movement pieces - concertos, quartets, sonatas, etc. - that could easily be extracted from the whole. Numerous samplings of Telemann's ''Tafelmusik'' are available on compact disc; the only complete version is on Teldec 35670 HD, a re-issue of recordings from 1976 led by Frans Brueggen and featuring the Concerto Amsterdam.

As a term, ''Tafelmusik'' disappeared around the middle of the 18th century, but the idea behind it persisted. It is parodied in the second act of Mozart's 1787 ''Don Giovanni''; the scene is a banquet, and the guests are entertained - while they eat - by a wind band that breezily plays a medley of hit tunes from popular operas of the day.

While ''Don Giovanni'' itself is definitely not dinner music, Mozart wrote plenty of other pieces that were meant to be performed amid the pleasant din of conversation and clinking wine glasses. Almost any of his works that bear the name ''serenade,'' ''divertimento'' or ''cassation'' fall into this category. They are well represented on recordings; my favorites are renditions by such ''authentic'' instrument ensembles as the Academy of Ancient Music and the Orchestra of the 18th Century, on L'Oiseau-Lyre and Philips, respectively, but they are also available from a great many mainstream groups.

Haydn, too, wrote pieces of the ''serenade'' variety, and so did his most of his contemporaries. Like Telemann's suites, the examples of Tafelmusik from the Classical period tend to be unusually long; whereas the standard symphony of the day has only four movements, the ''party music'' compositions have seven or eight. Orchestras today sometimes present these pieces in concert situations, and they make a big mistake, I think, by not having waiters come around with trays of refreshments.

Speaking of concerts and refreshments, it should be noted that string quartets in the 18th century were seldom put on pedestals the way they are today. For the most part they were written for amateurs, not professionals, and their readings typically took place in a private space no larger than a living room. There is considerable anecdotal evidence that suggests the reading sessions were casual and shared with as many friends and neighbors as the chairs could accommodate; it's hard to imagine that the musicale's host would leave his guests empty-handed. To nibble politely on a Viennese pastry, of course, is not the same as seriously chowing down on a plateful of spaghetti. A string quartet by Haydn or Mozart ought to be primarily listened to, and any goodies that come with it ought to be frosting on the cake. Still, if the chatter is kept to a minimum, works of this sort - preferably by composers whose stature is somewhat less than Haydn and Mozart - might qualify as acceptable dinner music.

Not at all acceptable, unless the mood of the dinner party is very strange, is any music of a powerful dramatic nature. While a sprightly Chopin waltz might be OK, a brooding Chopin nocturne is a definite no-no. You can get by with some of Beethoven's early chamber music, but not with his symphonies and certainly not with his ''Missa Solemnis.'' For meals, Mahler and Bruckner, or Dvorak and Sibelius, or Schoenberg and Webern, should not even be considered.

What it all boils down to is the extent to which the music makes claims to one's attention. Since Beethoven's time, most composers have at least wanted to write interesting music; for the Romantics and for the Moderns, to be a composer was to be a Great Artist, and to be a Great Artist meant creating works of substance and depth. But in the 17th and 18th centuries, even the best composers thought of themselves not as artists but as artisans. They were skilled craftsmen who peddled their wares. They knew how to write important music for serious occasions, but they also knew how to write music that was deliberately insignificant.