MUSIC IN EVERY SENSE

Frédéric Chaslin

MUSIC IN EVERY SENSE Translated by David J. Baker, 2011

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© Copyright 2011 by Frédéric Chaslin All rights reserved.

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CONTENTS

PREFACE.................................................................................................................................................. 3 PRELUDE......................................................................................................................................... 10

FIRST MOVEMENT: WHAT IS MUSIC?..............................................................................14

1 THE FUNCTIONS AND AIM OF MUSIC................................................................................... 15 2 ALCHEMY AND THE NUMINOUS, or ELEMENTS AND PRINCIPLES OF MUSIC......24 3 FROM PYTHAGORAS TO STRING THEORY...................................................................... 38

SECOND MOVEMENT:........................................................................................................... 48 THE LANGUAGE OF MUSIC.................................................................................................. 48 4 5 6 7

MUSIC AND SEMIOLOGY...................................................................................................... 50 BODIES OF SOUND................................................................................................................ 65 MUSIC, LANGUAGE OF THE SOUL?..................................................................................... 79 THE BEETHOVEN PHENOMENON..................................................................................... 85

THIRD MOVEMENT: MUSIC AND MODERNITY.............................................................93

8 ANATOMY OF MODERNITY “It is essential to be absolutely modern.”................95 9 FROM CLICHÉ TO PSYCHIATRIST’S COUCH A Brief Supplementary Discussion on Modernity..................................................................................................................................... 104 10 THE LAW OF TONE ROWS............................................................................................... 110 11 A BRIEF HISTORY OF MODERNITY, FRENCH STYLE................................................119 12 CRITICISM AND AUTHENTICITY...................................................................................... 142

FOURTH MOVEMENT: MUSIC AND DESIRE.................................................................148

13 THE GOOD PLEASURE......................................................................................................... 149 14 HUMANS AND DESIRE..................................................................................................... 157 15 THE FORGOTTEN LOVER............................................................................................... 162

FIFTH MOVEMENT: MUSIC’S NEW PATHS....................................................................165

16 IN SEARCH OF PARADISE LOST.................................................................................... 166 17 ALL NEO, ALL THE TIME................................................................................................. 171 MUSIC WITHOUT TEMPERAMENT?...................................................................................... 174 19 WHICH MUSIC FOR TOMORROW?............................................................................... 177 Select Bibliography....................................................................................................................................... 188

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PREFACE A Dissonant Dialogue Serving to Introduce The Main Characters and Their Agendas Setting: a concert hall in a major city. Intermission.

MUSIC LOVER: Hello. You look familiar. Aren’t you the composer -- of that piece we just heard?

COMPOSER: “Composer”? That’s an oversimplification. What I do is conceptualize events intended to stimulate the cognition of acoustical objects through channels of intersubjectivity between originator and listener.

MUSIC LOVER: Uh…of course! What was I thinking? And I suppose you’ve been doing that for some time, and that you developed your musical vocation at a very young age?

COMPOSER: You persist, I see – schematizing on the basis of obsolete notions. There is no such thing as a “vocation,” or “music” either. What does exists is an evolution in approaching acoustical phenomena, to which I strive to apply a structuralism that is at once rigorous and constantly unfolding in a process of becoming.

MUSIC LOVER: Of course. But I’m just a music lover. You know, someone who derives pleasure from music-COMPOSER: Stop right there! You are not a “music lover,” you are the principal agent, in fact the center, of the arena that we geometers and acousticians – call us acousmaticians – construct around you, as a function, of course, of your sensory organ, but in full consciousness of the prodigious potential for auditory apprehension that we provide for you in such abundance. As for pleasure, allow me to remind you that we are adults, we are no longer animals. I can only hope that, where you are concerned, this notion of pleasure has been left behind as you begin to grasp the need to free your ego from domination by the id.

MUSIC LOVER: Well, to be honest, music is not my profession, it’s just a refined leisure pursuit and— COMPOSER: Stop! Spare me the dilettantism and the childishness too. Just what are you telling me? Do you mean to say that your senses, ears, and I can only add, your eyes, your whole mode of thought, only operate intermittently? That those faculties are merely employed part time? That you walk down the street with your eyes half shut to avoid seeing too much, with your nostrils and ears plugged to keep you from hearing or smelling too much? In short, are you saving wear and tear on the equipment so that you will get to use it longer, pursuing some program of deliberate drabness and mediocrity?

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MUSIC LOVER: Now just a minute! All I’m saying is that you’re a specialist, while I am just— COMPOSER: You’re just an idiot. Your brain is as idle as your ears, if you don’t mind my saying so.

MUSIC LOVER: Please – feel free.

COMPOSER: Well, now that that’s clear, let’s try a brief experiment. Tell me, at this very moment, exactly what you’re hearing here and now. Tell me every sound your ears are picking up.

MUSIC LOVER: All right, in the foreground I am hearing you pontificate, not without certain sputtering sounds…

COMPOSER: Very well. Go on.

MUSIC LOVER: Then I’m hearing the background noise of this intermission crowd packed close, as we are, around the bar.

COMPOSER: Right. Keep going.

MUSIC LOVER: All right. Next, I just heard the muffled vibration of the subway passing under us, from right to left, which seemed to surround the ground-bass of the chorus of music lovers. There are clinking champagne glasses, at various distances— COMPOSER: Spatialized sounds, my friend, spatialized!

MUSIC LOVER: Right. And then, certain individual exclamations that pierce the carcass of sound— COMPOSER: Call it texture, please.

MUSIC LOVER: Of course. And then the braying of a buxom lady whose plunging neckline has just been baptized with chilled white wine. And a champagne cork that popped. All the paradigmatic signs of an ideal urban evening.

COMPOSER: Excellent! Thus, by making the effort to listen, you have heard just about everything. Did this require you to be a specialist?

MUSIC LOVER: Certainly not, but you, the man of art, I’m sure you’re hearing more than I am.

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COMPOSER: Nonsense! I’m simply listening more, and above all analyzing, practicing a certain triage, but with the same ears as yours. Go on, with your eyes shut, how many persons are there in this lobby?

MUSIC LOVER: Let’s see – about sixty, seventy?

COMPOSER: Correct. And how many frequency levels?

MUSIC LOVER: I beg your pardon?

COMPOSER: How many layers of bass sound? And on which instruments?

MUSIC LOVER: Well, I’d have to say those are the male voices. There’s a deep rumbling, they must be the baritones. Then there’s a layer of higher voices, forceful tenors.

COMPOSER: That’s exactly right! You are gifted.

MUSIC LOVER: Then the women’s voices, also in two layers. And also some nasal or shrill frequencies, between those first two groups. That would be the critics, I daresay?

COMPOSER: Let’s try not to degenerate into vulgarity. But in any case, the rest of your analysis is excellent. And now the tempo…

MUSIC LOVER: Well, it seems to me that, the higher the vocal range, the faster the rate of words per minute. Would you allow me to draw a sexist conclusion?

COMPOSER: Absolutely not. And what of the spatialization? Wait, let’s circle around the lobby, and you can describe to me the acoustical changes you are detecting.

MUSIC LOVER: Let’s see…It’s obvious that my left ear is picking up the sounds in the room as echoes bouncing off the wall as we walk along it, whereas with my right ear I’m catching the sounds directly.

COMPOSER: “Sounds”? You mean acoustic events, no doubt.

MUSIC LOVER: Whatever you say. And now, no longer being in the center but moving through the crowd, I’m hearing far more….soloists, if you get my meaning.

COMPOSER: Permit me to translate: The spatialization allows you to sample individual aggregates of frequencies in an almost aleatory manner.

MUSIC LOVER: And, by the way, we just passed a pretty attractive aggregate, wouldn’t you agree?

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COMPOSER: I have no idea what you’re talking about. I have just demonstrated to you that there is no need to be a specialist to be able to listen, that you need only to open your ears and focus your attention, and here you are falling back into your primal hedonism.

It’s totally unacceptable.

MUSIC LOVER: Very well, let’s talk about that. All right, I played along with your little game. I came, I saw, I listened. To the crowd here, and your composition before that. And don’t think I was dozing, either. I listened, I tried to understand, to sort through it, to get something out of it, just some little sign, something simple that would touch me, move me, trigger some feeling, and do you know what? I really think that, for me at least, you are expressing nothing at all but chaos, angst, fear, ugliness, and-COMPOSER: How can you presume to break down a work – a work conceived in the most rigorous structuralist logic – with the help of nothing but your feelings? Do you think that in the act of composition I am thinking of your miserable gut? Or that I’m guided by my own?

MUSIC LOVER: Guts, heart, mind, soul – it’s all the same to me. You believe in pure mind, no doubt?

COMPOSER: Do I ever! I write armed with nothing but my neurons, focused on nothing but yours.

MUSIC LOVER: But my good man, don’t you understand that our dear neurons, in fact, are never alone? It’s time to change roles here. You’ve been a bit red in the face for a while now. What’s bothering you?

COMPOSER: Well you see, my friend, this discussion is beginning to make me a bit hot under the collar.

MUSIC LOVER: Well, score one for pure mind. Listen to the sound of this crowd. Does it inspire you in any way?

COMPOSER: Bah—I can’t wait until they’re all back in their seats and dead quiet. It gets a bit oppressive after a while.

MUSIC LOVER: Yes, possibly a bit of discomfort in the pit of the stomach?

COMPOSER: I don’t deny it.

MUSIC LOVER: Surprising, aren’t they, the reactions that can be set off by this phenomenon of “pure” acoustical cognition. What about that voice that just exclaimed: “I adored that contemporary work”?

COMPOSER: Well it’s always a pleasure to hear that.

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MUSIC LOVER: And all at once the cramp in the stomach disappears, the chest expands, you’re not red in the face or irritated, your maxillary and zygomatic muscles decontract.

COMPOSER: Are you a doctor?

MUSIC LOVER: Exactly. To summarize, then, a subjective message, caught on the fly, concerning a work that’s purely cerebral, has just unleashed in its listener at least one emotion, then the cancellation of the preceding negative emotion, and a sequence of four immediate facial symptoms. Not bad for someone who is pure mind. Thus you see, my good man, this is precisely what occurs when I, the music lover, listen in the manner you have taught me, and when I feel the way you felt just now. And inasmuch as you feel, I feel, we feel, there must inevitably be some emotion at work: surprise, pleasure, fear, anger…

COMPOSER: Hmmm…Analysis does not assume the intervention of affect.

MUSIC LOVER: But it triggers affect when it reveals sensitive motives. Now in my case, your music triggers only negative feelings.

COMPOSER: But of course! You are merely a crude hedonist, who attends a concert the way you would visit a house of ill repute.

MUSIC LOVER: If so, we would have to consider Mozart, Beethoven, Debussy real prostitutes. And we’d have to call concert halls, up to the time of Schoenberg, bordellos.

COMPOSER: New music has created new urgencies, new imperatives. And to you, a physician, I would say: a new histology of the auditory tissue.

MUSIC LOVER: For you, sir, because you have declared your little revolution entirely on your own. Because in the final analysis, who are you writing for? For the public, I assume?

COMPOSER: For those capable of understanding me. For myself alone, if need be. If there’s only one person left…

MUSIC LOVER: Well that’s exactly how I feel listening to you. I’m shut out of your work. It does not invite me in, or take me into account, so I, your “other,” I am not one of your parameters.

COMPOSER: Well, excuse me! So I’ll just have to produce ready-to-wear goods. And what size is the gentleman? Does he dress to the left or the right?

MUSIC LOVER: You take refuge in sarcasm when I catch you in a narcissism, an egocentrism that’s incompatible with the very notion of art.

COMPOSER: So artists are not narcissistic, not egocentric? Since when, may I ask?

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MUSIC LOVER: Damn! Now you’re the one not listening. I said art. Not artists. Is Wagner’s music anti-Semitic?

COMPOSER: Of course it isn’t.

MUSIC LOVER: You see. Your music, on the other hand, does not communicate anything sympathetic to me, and please take that term in the medical sense because your music is entirely conceived around your system, which itself is just an extension of your will to dominate.

And that’s something I feel – and oppose – fiercely. Your work does not even speak to me about you. It only tells me that you are trying to engulf me in your mental constructs, as in a labyrinth.

COMPOSER: Pure delirium! Senseless logorrhea! I am trying at best to open up new acoustical horizons to you.

MUSIC LOVER: Using what kind of key? You’ve scrambled all the codes!

COMPOSER: I’ve invented new ones.

MUSIC LOVER: I don’t recognize them. They mean nothing to me.

COMPOSER: Listen, and listen again. Over and over. Learn.

MUSIC LOVER: That’s what I’ve always done. And it always used to work, at least until your little…revolution.

COMPOSER: Well, what can I say? Your children, your grandchildren, one day perhaps…

MUSIC LOVER: So you’re abandoning me?

COMPOSER: To your sad fate, exactly, and without the slightest hesitation.

MUSIC LOVER: I’m afraid you’re more abandoned than I am. After all, I still have all of classical music. What you have is a handful of devotees, half of them opportunists…

COMPOSER: That’s right, live in the past, to your heart’s content, parade up and down through the fine museum of your conservatory. But don’t forget that music can rub off on the spirit! Listen to nothing but Bach, but please, be sure to wear only a frock coat and powdered wig, so that the façade reflects what’s inside.

MUSIC LOVER: But why wouldn’t you make the effort to come closer to me, to write with me sometimes in mind?

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COMPOSER: Because that is not my role, or music’s either. Make the effort to understand me and you’ll find yourself growing.

MUSIC LOVER: But the point is not to understand. We’re speaking of arts, not science or philosophy. The point is to feel. There’s no way I can draw closer to you if I feel so much hostility toward me in your music.

COMPOSER: This conversation is absurd. Please excuse me, but I don’t want to miss the start of the Missa Solemnis.

MUSIC LOVER: Neither do I. It’s amazing, look! The program booklet includes a photograph of Beethoven’s manuscript. He wrote some words on the front page: “From the heart, may it go to the heart.” In fact, he was under no obligation to—Hello? Sir? [The composer has already returned to his seat in the hall, oblivious to the last comment from his intrusive companion.]

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PRELUDE The time is long past when Goethe declared: “Most people think that books, like eggs, are best consumed fresh. That is why people always prefer novelty.” And it has been nearly as long since the music-loving public felt the same way. The perennial dichotomy between information and knowledge has been reborn today in the daunting clash between leisure and culture, prompting a question that would have seemed incongruous to a nineteenth-century listener: Which music for which audience?

Let us be clear: by “audience,” I do not mean the global mass that economists call the “market,” and which they divide up into segments; instead I refer to the music-loving public in its entirety, the audience that, until the early twentieth century, listened to music without distinctions of “repertoire,” rushed to hear new creations, and usually only new works. Occasionally, of course, like filmgoers today, they enjoyed revivals of major successes of yesterday while spurning products from the day before that -- as no longer quite “fresh.” That audience had not yet heard such notions as classical, romantic or, still less, contemporary music. There was the music that people absolutely wanted to hear, which for most listeners meant newly composed works, thus “contemporary” with their listeners, and more contemporary than what’s given that name today, when it can take in music several decades old, sometimes by composers now dead.

That public, paradoxically, had a lower life expectancy, and yet it had more time, time that it filled better, even while filling it less.

Consider a comparison with a music lover in Milan on his way, on February 9, 1893, to the La Scala opera house for the premiere of Verdi’s Falstaff. He makes the trip on foot or in a carriage, after a day structured by activities performed at human tempo. He attends the opera to perform a cultural act, because Verdi is the greatest operatic composer living at this turn of the century and this new work will provide its share of novelties of which our listener is fond, yet, all things considered, with the assurance that Verdi, as per his custom, will be able simultaneously to astonish and delight him.

And now take a look at his counterpart in New York, London or Paris, in the year 2011, rushing by car after a day’s work, a day that’s been overfilled, stressful, with a succession of obligations that do not let him catch a breath. If our listener, already running late, is heading for a performance, motivated not by a commitment to the cause of modernism but rather by the need to experience a moment of intense musical pleasure, to enjoy a bit of leisure, who will think of blaming him? If he lacks the willpower to attend the premiere of an avant-garde musical work, knowing that its harsh dissonance will only aggravate the tension that has built up in the course of his day, who dares brand him an ignoramus?

And if composers, for their part – at least, composers of what has to be called “learned music” now that the term “serious music” has become politically incorrect – if composers refuse to become the genial hosts of instant gratification in our leisure society, if these composers strive for a place carrying on the great work initiated more than five centuries

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ago, a process of edification and transcendence, a pursuit of the essential, a quest for the absolute, for the perfect language – who can fault them for that?

The fact is that musical language, like the language of all modern art in general, does not evolve as the spoken language does, as a function of a usage ratified by the public or a monarch. It develops as a function of the artists themselves, who have become the primary users of the language. This is the true meaning of the revolution waged by the twentieth-century avant-garde.

Clearly, then, we are confronted by an old couple, the music lover/composer duo, which no longer has the same existential needs. And much more than toward a Manichaeism of leisure versus culture, each side has evolved on its own, one side toward the cultivation of leisure, the other toward the cultivation of culture. Is this an inevitable, irreversible divorce? If I thought so, I would not be writing this book.

So many of the givens have changed since Falstaff. The public of the day, essentially the leisure class, has grown and, potentially at least, the listening options have become democratized. On the other hand, a leisure and consumption industry has emerged to satisfy these new “ears to fill.” What we have is a convenience industry, a bottom-line culture, all too often the cult of the mediocre. But it’s an industry that has managed, far more successfully than our monastic composers, to use, exploit and develop the two main forces intrinsic to music: first of all, its power as a sign; and second, its emotional power.

In fact, music signifies – in other words, points toward – something, since otherwise no one would listen to it. Moreover, music speaks to our body, and through our body it touches an intimate part of our psychic anatomy. The soul? Sentiment? Emotion?

If contemporary music fails to communicate its signs, if a vast majority of today’s cultivated music lovers no longer succeeds in perceiving music as an infinitely pleasing source of intellectual edification, the fault does not lie with modernity. To turn backward, to write – or at least attempt to write – like Mozart to “give pleasure” to the listener, would be as vain and idle as striving to bring back the horse and buggy or powdered wigs. As I will attempt to show, modernity is consubstantial with art, since art is an echo of the world, this world in a permanent state of self-realization. The world in which we live is increasingly complex; art, which reflects the contractions and contradictions of that world, cannot fail in turn to be increasingly complex. To demand a simple art is to go against the current of one’s time. On the other hand, we must demand a sensitive art, and by that I mean an art that speaks to the listener’s senses but also to his or her sensibility and, in a more radical way, an art that is conscious of the Other.

This is why we must not denounce modernity, but only certain currents that embodied it for a certain time, and only in part; these currents, however, for too long have barred all alternatives, frozen the modes of creation using a theoretical discourse that is opaque, and even trading in insult and threat. In the final analysis, they killed modernity in two ways: first by becoming an official avant-garde, embalmed in its fiats, institutionalized – tendencies that call for a healthy subversion in the faithful pursuit of modernity. The

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second death blow came about by identifying modernity with progress, a notion more akin to engineering than to art, as we will see farther on.

Music is endangered, as we see daily. The decline of the recording industry is a first symptom, one with obvious causes: overexploitation of the classical repertoire, and the failure of contemporary music to impose itself on the public as the continuation of this repertoire.

Every music lover owns one or two versions of his favorite classics, while only the most fervent fans or collectors push the game of comparison any farther. What’s worse, there are already many people who, rather than go out to the movies, prefer to watch a film from the intimacy and comfort of their couch or bed. Given the sophistication of the stereo and the home cinema, it may not be long before people do the same for a concert or opera. Since contemporary music no longer guarantees continuity for the broad musicloving public, people turn more to lighter forms of entertainment, which they end up associating with avant-garde creativity. For many, the most recent musicals, whose reason for being has become primarily commercial, are the worthy successors of Verdi and Wagner. The sound merchants package a music that is constantly growing more minimalist and reductive, for ears grown more and more sclerotic from laziness. How did we manage to reach this point?

Since music is as old as the world, I decided to start my pursuit of it by way of the foundation myths of human thought, to investigate the notions of language, semiology, modernisms as desire.

I will proceed by epanorthosis,1 regularly reverting to an idea or notion already enunciated, to deepen it, enrich it, sometimes to modify it. This study will invite the reader to reflect on a certain number of dualities to which I’ll return in each of the book’s five parts, varying them as a function of the particular theme. Altogether, the book adheres absolutely to the formal structure of a symphony, in which themes travel from one movement to another, undergoing variations and metamorphoses.

To the extent possible for an artist for whom absolute objectivity is impossible, I attempt to strike a middle position between the public and the creators of music, in order to remind music lovers that this art, like everything else, is something we learn in the course of a lifetime, that this apprenticeship consists in acquiring signs, ever greater in number and richness, signs serving to reveal priceless auditive felicities; to remind composers of their duty to present signs to the listener in an exoteric2 manner, and without having to move backward, to be aware that music is the sign of emotions, a sign it addresses to the body as much as to the mind.

1

This term is not found in most current dictionaries. The Oxford English Dictionary defines it as “a figure [of speech] in which a word is recalled, in order to substitute a more correct or stronger word.” Epanorthosis is thus called “correction,” or “improvement.” Shakespeare uses the figure, for instance in The Tempest (I, 2): “Thou let’st thy fortune sleep – die, rather…”

2 Exoteric (adj.): having the quality of being capable of being revealed (as opposed to esoteric).

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If the current between music lovers and creators of music could at last be restored, it could mean an end to useless classifications, to “classical music” and “contemporary music,” and a return, finally, by everyone together, to the world of music.

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FIRST MOVEMENT: WHAT IS MUSIC?

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1 THE FUNCTIONS AND AIM OF MUSIC “O man! Fear nothing! Nature knows the great secret, and smiles.”

Victor Hugo, Les Rayons et les Ombres Physicist Stephen Hawking, in setting out to unify quantum physics and the theories of relativity, asks an extraordinary question, one that seems to relate more to poetry than philosophy: “Why does the universe go to all the bother of existing?”3 In considering the ultimate aim of music, it seems natural to paraphrase Hawking and ask: “Why did humanity go to all the bother of inventing music?” When we address an individual composer, the question becomes slightly different: “What is it in music that transcends and drives you?” It is essential to distinguish this ultimate purpose from any concern with the functions of music.

First, though, we need to remind ourselves that music is natural to human beings. Even if your neighbor claims that Mozart has the ability to charm his cat, music in its essence as well as its methods is by definition the translation into sound of the human saga and the human drama. But, I repeat, it is natural; that is, humans invented and developed it just as we invented and developed our consciousness and our cognitive functions, out of the need to assume our entelechy, the fine but forgotten term designating anything that contains within it its own realization. And so, just as humans were consubstantial with nature, and for this reason arose from nature itself, so too music is consubstantial with humankind. It appeared wherever there were human groups, as surely and naturally as a leaf sprouts on a branch with each return of spring.

We can imagine that the first modulated sounds emitted by humans were inspired not just by a curious spirit of experimentation, but also, and no doubt from then on, by the pleasure, the emotion that humans derived from feeling themselves vibrate this way from inside, as well as by the variations in pleasure that corresponded to the modulations of the sound. Because this pleasure and these emotions, as we will see later, are the instruments of human physiological homeostasis – in other words, of people’s “well-being,” a wellbeing known to be crucial to the proper operation of our vital functions – the need to produce the modulated sound must be recognized as a consequence of the survival instinct.

Humanity evolves only through the innovative spirit and temerity of the few, despite resistance from the greater number. Because the art of teaching singing properly is about as rare as the mythical unicorn, the first “musicians” were not, we can be sure, legion. It is more than likely, moreover, that the modulated sounds were heard and interpreted not 3

Hawking, A Brief History of Time (New York : Bantam Books, 1998), p. 190. See also his Web site, http://www.hawking.org.uk.

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just as a variant on the cries and other grunts that made up our ancestors’ vocabulary; otherwise they would not have stood out from the body of practical communication. It appears also that song and language were combined in proportions that varied by language group, as is borne out by the particularly advanced musicality of some languages in comparison with others.

French, which is pronounced in the back of the throat and modulated very little, is far less musical than Italian or Georgian, which both contain a number of sounds not perceived by our ears. Rhythm is also distributed very unevenly among languages: in contrast to French with its uniform rhythm, it is interesting to consider languages that place a powerful stress on certain syllables and also have accelerations or de-accelerations in the course of a sentence. Italian, again, uses constant rubato, whereby the tonic accents of the sentence hurry their syllables and then halt the flow on the actual accent. Such variations in rhythmic and melodic properties serve to explain the great disparities in musical quality among languages, and these disparities in turn shed light on the role of music in a country’s culture. The fact that French is only slightly modulated or cadenced could explain, in part, the lesser importance and interest accorded to music, as opposed to literature, in France.

The earliest documented sounds tell us that at some time speech was declaimed almost to the point of being sung; we can justifiably assume that this phenomenon is more pronounced the farther one goes back in time, and that music and language at a certain point must have blended enough to be undifferentiated. It is also clear, however, that at another juncture in our history, modulated sound, singing, became the vehicle for something else. Perhaps this something else was itself the cause of the first song, growing inside our ancestors until it erupted like the Word in the Gospel account of creation.

We’ll call this something else “the ultimate aim of music.” Like the principle of ancient traditions, it is both cause and end, it brought about the birth of music and through it music evolved and spread; this something else is what motivates and guides the creator, whether or not he feels himself to be determined by something greater. We can say that, among all the modes and variants of the act of making music, it is the most basic aspect, the most nobly human, and the most intimately bound to the saga and drama of humanity as a whole.

On one side we have the ultimate aim; on the other, functions. The aim can take one of four different forms. The functions, on the other hand, are more numerous, and we will do no more than cite a few of them as examples.

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AIM

FUNCTIONS

To create, through sound, a link to one’s own nature. Sound is experienced through the body.

priestly military entertaining educational therapeutic background noise

To create a link to nature (experiencing sound in space but also through natural instruments) To create links to the Other (performer – listener, performer + listener) To create a transcendent link (mystical experience of communication) This simple scheme reveals an essential property of the aim of music: it stakes out a place, a territory determined by the links it establishes on four distinct levels of experience.

Function answers the question, so aberrant when we speak of art, “What purpose does music serve?,” paired with a second reductive question, an implicit one: “What purpose does this music serve?” – for instance, to make people march in step, to fill a silent background. But music, when it serves its fundamental aim – in the sense of a gift – in the practical sense serves no purpose at all.

Since music most likely was born of isolated, solitary experimentation, it is reasonable to think that, in its origins, it was not a function but rather the discovery of an essential link between the interior being and nature. Later, on the margins of music’s evolution in a metaphysical sense, or during an initial period that was at least ontological, some shrewd characters must have quickly sensed the advantage they could derive from these sounds with their enchanting effect. Thus, from the eighth century B.C.E., music was associated with magic and had the virtue of calming and curing. From magic to religion was but a brief step, and so music with a religious function was born, followed closely, as was only to be expected, by military music. I would emphasize here music with a religious function rather than religious music, as the distinction is critical.

It is interesting to note here the extent to which the three great philosophical figures who shaped our Western thought – Pythagoras, Plato, Aristotle – differed in their views of the function and the fundamental aim of music.

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Listen first to Plato: Music must be “the keystone of education because rhythm and harmony are particularly apt to penetrate the soul and touch it strongly, and because, through the beauty that follows them, they adorn the soul, if there has been a proper form of education, whereas it becomes ugly in the opposite case, and also because musical education, if properly administered, makes one very sensitive to negligence and ugliness in works of art and of nature. In that case one is properly scandalized, and even while praising beautiful things and joyously taking them into one’s soul as its sustenance and thus to become an honest man, one condemns vices in fact, one hates them from childhood, before any ability to apprehend them by reason, and when reason comes, one embraces it, recognizing it as a parent, with all the more tenderness if one has been nourished in music.” “It is for this reason that one must attend to the type of music that is tolerated in the City. Bad forms of music, he says, insinuate themselves gradually into the soul and make it lose its bearings, in a manner completely imperceptible at first. And what are the bad types of music? Those that, the more one hears them, render the character violent or too languorous or sad, or else lascivious.”4 Plato’s case for using music for educational purposes is noteworthy for two reasons. First, Plato considers that music prepares the young child for the exercise of reason; thus he attributes geometric virtues to music through the agency of rhythm and harmony, and this geometry in sound has an impact on the soul, the soul on the judgment and, later, on reason. Later, however, Plato admits the existence of nefarious types of music. This can sound awfully “politically correct” to our libertarian age, but basically the idea that one form of music can be therapeutic, as we freely admit today, and thus act mechanically in a sense on our psyche, makes it totally plausible to assume the idea of an inverse impact that would be harmful. Some concerts that convey nihilist messages, certain pop artists praising death, are quite adept at using the “dark side” of music, thus offering a perfect demonstration of Plato’s position.

His best-known disciple, Aristotle, cannot be said to share this view. He states, for instance: “This is why our fathers included music in education, not that it is necessary; it is not; nor that it ranks in importance with writing, which is useful in commerce, domestic administration, sciences and most civil functions; or with painting, which enables us to best judge the work of artists; or with gymnastics, which are of benefit to health and the development of strength; music can do none of those things. But at least it allows us to spend our leisure time pleasantly.”5 Even if, in another context, Aristotle attributes medical virtues to music, it is interesting to observe that he denies that music possesses any necessity or therefore any ultimate purpose. A pleasant pastime – this and nothing more. But isn’t this the very function to 4

Plato addresses the subject of music elsewhere as well, particularly in The Timaeus, 47c-d and 80b, The Republic, Book VII, 530d, Book X, 616, and The Laws, Book II, 654, 667 and Book VII, 798d, 802 and 814e. There are allusions as well in Courage, 188d, The Symposium, 215c, The Theaetetus, 145d, as well as in Philebus, 56a, 62c.

5 Aristotle, Politics, Book 8.

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which our own era strives to reduce the art of sound: an enjoyable way to spend our leisure time?

Pythagoras, to whom we will return in some detail, is far more concerned with transcendence. He seeks the links between music and the cosmos, as is natural for the man who invented the very word “cosmos,” as well as the term “philosopher.”

Others, like Sophocles, Euripides and Aeschylus, proposed the use of vocal music in theaters, with accompaniment by instruments, restricting it here, again, to its entertaining function. It is important to recall, however, that the music of this period was monophonic and thus infinitely less developed in its expressive capacities.

Later, in the Middle Ages, which were far more enlightened than is generally acknowledged today, and much less narcissistic than the Renaissance, the septum or liberal arts were divided into the trivium or language arts – grammar, rhetoric, dialectic – and the quadrivium or arts of nature, which accorded music a major role in the acquisition of knowledge, alongside astronomy, geometry and arithmetic.

Music as entertainment already existed, as the music of the Troubadours, but it was clearly isolated from the “learned” music of the monasteries.

The modern world has lost sight of Antiquity’s music with its pedagogical function, because the idea that sound can have an influence on character and moral sense, or that we would prefer the forms of music that encourage the virtues and ban those that incite to vice, is too distant from our way of thinking and formulating. We have replaced such notions, through a subtle shift, with music that has a therapeutic function, or musicotherapy, which both in its aims and in its methods is much closer to Plato’s ideas.

However, it is contemporary considerations, so highly consumer-oriented in nature, that we have to thank for the most degraded variants of the music of functions: background music, which we no longer listen to but which supposedly makes us purchase more in the supermarket, comforts us in the lowest subbasement level of the parking garage, or helps us cool our heels in the waiting room of a train station or airport. Music in most modern discothèques, often reduced to an obligatory pulsation in which the bass and drums literally erase the melody or lyrics, is every bit as functional as military music – which is likewise manipulative and normative -- and just as devoid of artistic aspiration.

Now that we have broached the notion of art, it is time to ask ourselves what it encompasses. Humans built churches during the centuries of the Roman period and then, suddenly and everywhere at once, the cathedrals sprout up. Humans start drawing or painting other things besides ornamentation for doors or books, and here is the era of great painting that fans out from Flanders to all of Europe. There is the consciousness, one day, of a higher level, a new possibility, of a new necessity. Just as humankind is the ever-growing awareness of its human condition, art is the consciousness of a new condition and new modes of production and perception of the gesture. This includes the pictorial, sonic, poetic, choreographic gesture – any act that embodies the human drama.

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But art is also a capacity to exacerbate the essence of the subject in the object and, through the object, to ensure the subject of an endurance not just in relation to himself or herself but also in relation to the artist and to those who will witness the artist’s work.

Thus the artist ensures the survival of the work, of the subject of the work, and of his or her self.

The human being began to make art unknowingly, just as Molière’s Monsieur Jourdain (the Bourgeois Gentleman) unwittingly spoke prose, finding all necessary material in this inexhaustible factory, to borrow the term used by Gilles Deleuze to depict the unconscious. Then, at some point, emerging from the unconscious, the artistic gesture acquired its consciousness and its name while developing its productive techniques.

Music, in the sense of an art, conceived of itself as such, independently of any function, or any responsibility toward society; in other words, the idea of an artist who was free and responsible only to himself, free to express something besides things obviously perceived, appeared only in the modern era, that is, roughly in the period of Guillaume de Machaut (ca. 1300–1377) and the Ars Nova (fourteenth and fifteenth centuries), after which the linear evolution and the updating of the notion of the “modern” took hold.

To sum up: music was born of a deep need, which was already an ultimate aim in embryonic form, a spark of transcendence, the intuition that music could communicate to humans a secret that was potent and miraculous. Then function appeared, when use had given music – and the other arts – the force of a sign. From this moment, and for a long time to come, the sign concealed the ultimate aim, as the musician became the instrument of the function. This was captured perfectly by Roland Barthes’s statement: “the function becomes pervaded with meaning...as soon as there is a society, every usage is converted into a sign of itself.”6 In other words, music emerged, bent upon a sublime goal, but because of society this wealth was monopolized, diverted, used, functionalized. Music became the sign of something no longer transcendent but practical: military, ritual, and other useful kinds of sound.

The emergence of the artist, after several millennia, reconciled music with its ultimate purpose. The artist did not free himself, he freed the vehicle through which to express himself.

Now that we have fully understood the difference between function and aim, it seems that the latter will no longer have the same meaning; it depends on whether one is a composer, interpreter or listener.

6

Roland Barthes, Elements of Semiology, trans. Annette Lavers and Colin Smith (New York: MacMillan, 1977), p. 41.

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A person is not driven to compose, to play an instrument or to attend a concert for the same reasons. But the ultimate aim, what one expects to derive from the musical experience, remains unique. It is precisely this, moreover, that makes music a language.

It is no doubt in the relationship between this identical aim and this diversity of reasons that we find the cause of the misunderstanding between the music-loving public and the music of our time.

To make this clear, let us consider first what are the different reasons, and thus what are the different categories of listeners and of composers. Interpreters, who share in both phenomena, are found literally in the middle.

DIFFERENT CATEGORIES OF LISTENER Those who are “tone deaf,” for whom no music is perceived consciously as such, but only as an indistinct part of the ambient noise. They are not associated with any social class in particular. The poet Théophile Gautier once said: “Music is the most expensive of noises, but also the most unpleasant.”

Passive listeners. They listen to everything and anything provided it “squares” with their mood of the moment. For them, listening to music is associated with the same need as raising or lowering the thermostat in the room. They belong to the type called emotional-carnal.

Active listeners who give precedence to the heart and the emotions. They drift more naturally toward classical music, traditional jazz, the music that gives them pleasure.

They are of the emotional type.

Active listeners who give precedence to the intellect. They listen to music to stimulate their analytical and conceptual capacities; they seek out cerebral adventure. They are militant, sometimes undiscerningly so. Their category is the cognitive.

Listeners who have merged the “two sides of the brain.” They derive authentic enjoyment, pure emotion, from listening actively and analytically to a piece of music.

They will not applaud just anything that’s offered on the pretext that it is modern, and will reject types of music marked by dilettantism or eagerness to please at any price.

Born into a society of pleasure and consumption, they nevertheless go to concerts, as they go to restaurants, to be surprised and to learn, as much as to gratify their hedonism. They belong to the type that is rare.

DIFFERENT CATEGORIES OF COMPOSER The composer who is deaf to others, for whom the creator has no goal but his creation itself, aside from any consideration of presentation. For him the musical work has no justification or destination other than the work itself. This can lead to all kinds of results, from the most dilettantish to the most elaborate. This does not mean that the

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musical work does not function, but simply that it was not conceived primarily to function.

The composer obsessed by others. Generous, disinterested, he wants to please and to give pleasure. He will adjust his language to any and all circumstances, but what makes him appealing is his absence of personal ambition. He considers himself to be useful in the same way as chocolate.

The composer obsessed with himself. His work is his mirror. It is his standard, the arm of his social recognition and of his personal accomplishment. He will cultivate opportunism, facility, whatever will allow him to succeed at any cost. He is the most egocentric and the most invasive.

The composer as pedagogue. He considers his work as a mission and a form of humanism, even if he has other motives that supersede that one or operate parallel to it. His relations to others are generous and intense. He is constantly interrupting speeches as well as speakers. He will overwhelm language – in the etymological sense of the term “overwhelm” – to the extent that he can overwhelm – in the figurative sense – the person receiving it. Conscious of the boundaries that can be crossed in reforming an art, which is also a mode of communication, he will take to heart, and to mind, the need to keep musical language in an evolutionary perpetual motion, provided that this movement corresponds to his milieu. The composerpedagogue founds a school, of course, even at times against his will.

The genius. Enough said. He is flagrant, dazzling, universal.

Clearly, each category of listener establishes a rapport with the environment, while each category of composer establishes a rapport with the Other. The question I posed in the Prelude – which music for which public? – can be summed up graphically by an interlocking network of relationships between the two classifications above, classifications that I admit are subjective and incomplete although they represent “generally recognized” models in which the relationships establish a level of attraction or repulsion.

The obvious crisis of communication in contemporary music derives from a dual movement inside this framework. On the one hand, there is the emphasis on the form of the message, structuralism pushed to an extreme to deduce the musical object through analysis and wind up with “conceptual” music rather than inducing it through synthesis, or what was once known as “inspiration”; moreover, we see in particular an abandonment of the codes and conventions that has confined the avant-garde composers to category 1 or 4 in the best-case scenario. On the other hand, the downward slope of facility and an overload of supply in “easy” music genres, inducing a laziness of the ear that is more and more pronounced, are channeling the alternatives and massively regrouping the listeners under categories 2 and 3.

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To which we can immediately raise the objection that hedonism has always been the motor of musical listening and that pinning one’s hopes on a class of “ideal” and highly gifted listeners can only spring from naïve idealism.

I would answer that, in every period, learned music, which is elaborated, required a minimum of effort in order to be approached, understood, felt, lived and enjoyed. Today, no less than yesterday, you do not approach Wagner’s Ring without a modicum of preparation.

Where the upheavals of the avant-garde differ is in the fact that the great majority of music lovers won over by learned music, and thus convinced of the efforts required for appreciating the new music, have massively given up on mustering the necessary effort of multiple hearings, in a patient and trusting spirit; and this lapse has always occurred for the same reason: in what they are hearing today they recognize no continuity with what they were listening to yesterday. They do not recognize this music, they’ve lost the codes, they’ve lost their way among the new signs.

The most brilliant defenders of the contemporary cause have in fact wearied of their favorite excuse, which is the necessary time that must be devoted to the novelty for it to become incorporated into day-to-day life. Arguing that Beethoven and Stravinsky were not understood in the beginning, they plead with us for ten or twenty years of patience.

This argument is now more than a half-century old and contemporary music still has the same problem being accepted.

We are indeed confronted by a labyrinth which we shall have to decide to enter, seeking one by one the meaning of concepts such as music, musical language, sign, code, pleasure, inspiration, style, modernism…

To do so, and this is typical of labyrinths, will require us to accept the confrontation with strange objects, strongly scented with archaism, since no journey into the heart of music can fail to proceed by way of archetypes.

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2 ALCHEMY AND THE NUMINOUS, or ELEMENTS AND PRINCIPLES OF MUSIC “The primary interest of my work is not in treating neuroses but in drawing closer to the numinous…That is the true therapy.”

Jung Everyday usage continues to create new words, which gain a foothold in common currency – and the dictionary – all the faster if they are of common origin. Less often a word appears, coined by a thinker, to fill the vast gaps in our dictionary that keep us from contact with the Eternal. This is the case with the Numinous.

Invented by German philosopher Rudolf Otto,7 but employed especially by Carl Gustav Jung, this term designates everything that allows our mind, through any of the senses – but usually through sight and hearing – to grasp the mystery of our condition: our confrontation with the Universe, its Infinity and its Eternity.8 The Numinous, in a nutshell, is therefore the “perception of Grandeur.” In no way does it mean Knowledge, but rather a vector of knowledge. To any of us who might consider ourselves great, it indicates our true dimension. It generously shows the direction, the path to follow, in its pursuit. Above all, and this may be its most precious attribute, it silences in us the hubbub of parasitical emotions and thoughts; it connects us to our essential Being.

We have all verified its existence, because all of us have been confronted by the Numinous. We may have had this experience while stretched out on the ground in a silent place, gazing up at the stars. Or while seated looking out to sea on a beach or an isolated rock. Or, most typically, by contemplating those human works whose function it is to deliberately provoke the Numinous. By this I mean such stoneworks as the pyramids and cathedrals, and also music, through which the revelation of the Numinous, or of grandeur, includes the participation of the body and the emotions. Therefore music has the unique power of connecting us to the Numinous, not just of allowing us to contemplate it.

Most likely our species became human and began to walk upright at the point when the first contemplation of the Numinous awoke in us the first inkling of something that transcends us, that dominates the image we had of ourselves, something that makes us eager to climb higher.

Inversely, it is also conceivable that the Adamic or prehuman stage, as well as animal consciousness in general, amounts to a perfect homology with the Numinous. Who can prove that the bird singing atop a great tree, intoxicated with the infinite echo of its own 7

Otto Rudolph, Das Heilige (1917), The Idea of the Holy, translated by John W. Harvey (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1954).

8 The word numen in Latin has the following meanings: power, majesty, grandeur, divinity, god, goddess, force.

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song across the forest, is anything other than the permanent experience of the Numinous, since in human beings it became an intellectual state only later? Or that the famous Fall of Adam is not the stage at which, preoccupied with material contingencies of survival and with the greedy appropriation of his neighbor’s property, the human being gradually became detached from the Numinous, indifferent to it.

When you are lost in contemplation of the Milky Way, face to face with the Immensity, are you thinking of Good and Evil? Inversely, when your mind is harassed, tormented by considerations of good and evil, is your consciousness connected with the Grandeur? And isn’t Adam’s Fall from grace in fact the knowledge of good and of evil?

Evil is forgetting, as some have claimed. This is true if we think of forgetting a sense of proportion, of course, or forgetting Grandeur. There has never been more than a tiny minority of people who, lowering their eyes from the starry dome overhead, have vowed to rule their lives and to align their aims with this grandeur, which, in turn, never loses sight of us.

So the ultimate aim of music, which I said above tends to magnify the creator and the listener, finds its privileged mode of expression in the Numinous. The Numinous is a symbolic mode, and as such it brings us a message of which we subjectively decipher only part, but of which we feel the infinite possibilities. Music too is like this.

I wanted to introduce this notion because I will be illustrating it later and because Jung explicitly makes it a key to his quest – the same Jung who interrogates venerable Alchemy, aware of the depth of its roots in the structure of our culture and of our common psyche, to which he gives the appealing title the collective unconscious.

It is not our business here to dash off a half-chapter on the history and aims of alchemy. I will just recall, in passing, a few facts: that alchemy is the ancestor of chemistry,9 that its aim is not to produce gold as a source of wealth or an elixir of eternal youth, that highly reputable figures in science and philosophy took an interest in it,10 testified to its results,11 or used the profound trace of its message in our culture in their quest for our essential nature.12 What stimulates us in Alchemy is that it obliges us to think differently, to reshape our conceptual processes, to develop a deep consciousness both of our narrow connection to 9

We can cite, among others, Mary the Jewess who invented the double boiler, and the medieval alchemists who discovered nitrogen and sulfuric acid among many other substances.

10 Isaac Newton, in particular. See Jean-Paul Auffray, Newton ou le Triomphe de l'alchimie (Paris: Editions Le Pommier, 2000).

11 Spinoza reported on a transmutation to which he was an eyewitness, according to E. J. Holmyard. For modern physics, transmutation is possible, but unthinkable with only the tools of the alchemist. The last alchemist who reportedly performed a transmutation before witnesses was Fulcanelli in the early twentieth century. In alchemy, the route is more important than the result, which is sometimes viewed as allegorical.

12 Carl G. Jung, Psychology and Alchemy, vol. 12 in Collected Works (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1953).

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the world and of what links each element of this world with all others. The keys to alchemical thinking are analogy – what’s above is comparable to what’s below – and universal medicine – everything that exists tends toward perfection, the mineral in the earth as much as the human being. The alchemist is thus the doctor of the mind and of matter, correcting both to attain Gold, or fulfillment.

Basically alchemists are artists, because their thinking deals in myth and their grasp is intuitive; their “art” becomes projection in its aims, and synthesis in its means; fed by the world, it must serve the world. But in fifteen years devoted to this venerable ancestor of the sciences, what I have found most comforting are the solid foundations on which it rests and above all the confirmations, by the discoveries of the most recent work in physics, of notions that, just a few decades ago, were consigned to the realm of extravagant fantasy.

Thus, each of the premises of alchemy leads naturally to modern chemistry, while its fundamental principles turn up in the most adventurous and most recent scientific thought. This applies to the “universal fluid” that alchemists seek to capture and distill through all their efforts, and which they describe ever since the Middle Ages in terms remarkably similar to scientists’ accounts of neutrinos, which were made manifest in the early 1990s. Alchemists’ working method is purely scientific, while they rely on a language marked by poetic extremes, an allegorical language, which does not exactly enhance a close pairing of text and reality.

Alchemy is especially relevant to this study, since it has more than one analogy with music and draws on a source common to both domains: Pythagoras, of course, that fervent disciple of the art of Hermes, an art whose secrets he had the opportunity to acquire during his apprenticeship of many years in Egypt. He also invented the musical scale that bears his name. Even earlier, the two fields share a common tradition, the same quest for principles and causes. Finally, to conclude this introduction, let it be noted that Music and Alchemy emerge from the same mould, from the same mental format, and that they are closely linked in their theoretical and practical modes to the bond that humans establish with Nature.

I will limit myself to using, by analogy, the classical theory of the four elements and the three principles, which I apply somewhat broadly in order to demonstrate the fundamental quality of music – as a “first principle.”

The Four Elements Alchemy, as I’ve said, is based on the principle of analogy between macrocosm and microcosm13 -- in other words, a vertical analogy – as well as between everything that makes up a common level of reality, everything built on the same scale – thus a horizontal analogy. This dual analogy is traditionally illustrated by a cross with arms of 13

The resemblance between atomic structure and the planetary system is an example of this analogy between infinitely great and infinitely small.

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equal size, an important alchemical symbol, which in the Art of Hermes is imbued with numerous other meanings.

Derived from this double analogy are the four elements – fire, air, water, earth – along with the three principles – sulphur, mercury and salt.

It is important to repeat that the theory of the four elements is not a fantasy of eccentric souls in conical hats, but instead has held a place in the basic principles of science and philosophy from the Greeks down to, and including, Newton. The Chinese saw fit to add wood as one more element. For Democritus or Aristotle, who developed the atomist theory after Leucippus and based only on their rationalist intuition, the four elements were an apodictic certainty.14 Remember that the four elements are qualities: thus, fire is obviously present in the flame of a candle, but also in the reinvigorating heat of a broth or a hot bath. The metamorphoses of H2O, namely ice, snow, water and steam, are considered from the alchemical viewpoint as a change in proportions of a single substance, which incorporates more fire and less earth as the material becomes heated. To have the “spirit of alchemy” means being able to recognize an element when, and even though, it seems totally absent. Modern physics would tell us that the bath is hot through the effect of the energy transmitted to the water, energy that could derive from a windmill moved by the action of the wind, the consequence of the heating of masses of air by solar radiation.

Indirectly, the hot bath thus transmits to us an energy from a star and, going back farther yet, from the Big Bang. Alchemy says nothing different, but says it through allegory.15 By virtue of the principle of analogy it is possible to encounter this division into four elements and three principles – sulphur, mercury, salt – in all the great mental disciplines, for the simple reason that they are branches of the same common traditional tree.16 Music is no exception, and the art of sounds can easily be divided into four elements – melody, harmony, rhythm and timbre. It may seem arbitrary to match up in this way the components of music and the traditional elements. I should point out therefore that I am taking the viewpoint of the alchemist here, not the musician. For the alchemist, association by similarity, or by natural affinity, is the very basis of the work. To establish pairs, I will make use of a byword of the Hermetists: solve et coagula, dissolve and coagulate. For the alchemist, the densest matter contains subtle elements that must be liberated, and the ethereal substance must be condensed to be worked upon more easily.

The same notion is translated by the famous formula “spiritualize matter and materialize the spirit.”

14

It was apparently Empedocles (ca. 493-433 B.C.E.) who first set down in writing this theory of the four elements.

15 I like to pose the following riddle to those attracted by alchemical thought: fire in water is fairly easy to identify; you need only to take a hot bath to feel it. But water in fire?

16 As I recalled above, the “liberal arts” of the Middle Age were divided into 4 + 3 disciplines.

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Thus it is quite obvious that melody possesses the virtues of air, as the first means of expression in music. Melody was transmitted first of all by song or by rudimentary wind instruments, thus by a bodily experiment with air.

Harmony, which we could consider the vertical condensation of melody, is thicker; it solidifies the melody by augmenting the number of voices; it will be close to water, the element of union and mixture par excellence, just as harmony, as the basis of the chord, unites several melodies on a perpendicular plane.

Rhythm has a telluric or earthly quality; it has become commonplace to state that when the task is to evoke an earthquake, from Rameau to Stravinsky, you will use percussion and its rhythmic fortes.

Less anecdotally, it must be stated that rhythm, for its interpreter and its listener alike, invokes a relationship that is a true state of domination. We have all experienced forcefully rhythmic music that makes us tap our foot unconsciously, even with music of inferior quality, provided its pulse is strong and regular. Appealing to rhythm means laying down an anchor, seeking bedrock, a pulse in the deepest recesses of the person, a link that can only be with the earth.

With timbre we come to the most elusive of the elements, the one that lends color and temperament to sound, in other words fire. Changing the orchestration of a work means changing the regimen of its fire. Wagner, who added unprecedented numbers of brass instruments to his orchestra, understood this well.17 The commentators describing his music refer constantly to Vulcan and his works.

For the alchemist, the proportions among the four elements determine the qualities and appearance of everything. What about music? Are there always four elements in every form of music? Some might protest that monophonic types of music, the bare a cappella chant, are void of melody, or in other words, of water. This is not true, because every natural sound produces a series of harmonies based on the basic sound, harmonies that are difficult to identify for an unpracticed ear but yet confer on the instrument or the voice its specificity, its timbre. The element of harmony cannot therefore be dissociated from any sound, just as in water vapor the element of earth, tenuous in the extreme, will be seen by the Hermetist in, for instance, the materialization of the veil of mist on the mirror.18 Here the analogies end and the differences begin. In nature, it is sufficient for the elements to be present for them to be made manifest. Since it is the aim of music to be listened to, it is also necessary for the elements to be perceived and recognized in order for the listener to have the sensation of listening to music, not some chaotic clump of sounds.

17

Wagner was as passionate about alchemy, the art of Hermes, as Debussy.

There is of course the extreme case of pure sound, produced by synthesizer, but its poverty makes it intolerable to the ear for more than a few seconds.

18

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Here we see the major obstacle against which avant-garde music collides: A sound that has been made extremely complex becomes inaccessible to its perception as such.

As for melody: the great aberrations that have been pushed to the point of caricature in the twentieth century – or even the suppression of the notion of melody in order to provoke an explosion of the musical line and thus force harmony and rhythm into the same “redemptive” dissolution – have completely disoriented the listener accustomed to the guideline of melody, or at least to the “melodic line” which represented the best possible path into the heart of the discourse.

As for harmony: for the non-professional listener, there is no distinction between a “cluster,” or a harmonic aggregate composed of numerous dissonances, and a barrage of notes beaten out at random on the piano by a child or an unschooled layperson indulging in idle curiosity. The Western ear, trained for several centuries to recognize emotion as a function of harmonic color, often perceives the learned contrivances of contemporary music as symbols of chaos, anxiety or aggressivity.

As for rhythm: to be perceived as such, a rhythm needs, first, a minimum of stability, which is expressed through a perceptible tempo for a minimum duration, and second, repetition, conjoined or disjointed, of a minimum of rhythmic cells. Stravinsky, who launched a veritable revolution in rhythm by giving it primordial importance in his musical fabric, understood this better than anyone. In fact, the relationship he sustained with rhythm was nothing less than carnal. Rhythm, like sound itself, had to pass first of all through the body, and therefore, as Ernest Ansermet reported, Stravinsky owned a set of drums on which he tried out his musical ideas. Scholars who have made cerebral analyses of his rhythmic structures ought to remember this, or risk remaining limited to painful numeric studies.

Bartók sought his rhythmic figures in Hungarian folklore, which he set out to explore and catalogue, armed with tape recorder.

As for Messiaen, whose rhythms are of a complexity matched only by their clarity and naturalness, who was better at turning this teaching to good account?

Too complex a rhythm, that is, one that is constantly changing tempo and character, is no longer perceived as anything but an aleatory series of events.

Now rhythm is certainly the most unifying element in the process of listening. To be convinced of this, you need only listen to certain avant-garde jazz groups, who use the techniques of contemporary music while retaining a rhythm that is very strong and “profiled.” In this music the apparent absence of melody or harmony – in fact, their great complexity – is compensated by a strong, identifiable rhythm; the music passes, it functions. It does not always go so far as to charm or enchant, because two elements escape the listener’s codes, but it is anchored by its earthiest part.

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Timbre is essentially the only one of the four elements that has gained from a growing sophistication. We could even say that the unprecedented enrichment of orchestration, for more than a century now, is the single greatest advance in the music of our time. The more complex the combinations become, the more magnified music becomes as a result.

Berlioz may have been the first to launch this dizzying pursuit of delight, this dazzling timbre. It is fascinating to observe that at a certain point composers vacillate between a music in which the timbre is something like an “option,” to a music in which it is a crucial component, which cannot be changed without betraying the composer’s central idea.

Thus, nearly all the music of Bach can be played on practically any instrument. But as we approach the twenty-first century, orchestration evolves; from a simple accessory, which can be changed as easily as a wig, it becomes a fundamental element of the musical language.

To anticipate later chapters, timbre has become an emotional signifier, bearer of a perceptible message from the composer. It has taken the development of a sufficiently varied luthier’s art, of a sophisticated polyphonic language and of new acoustical considerations to put timbre at the center of the preoccupations of modern composers.

Part of the musical output of the second half of the twentieth century can be considered a failure, from the viewpoint of communication and thus of transmission to the listener; it is nevertheless a fabulous catalogue of orchestral inventions, which composers of the twenty-first century, reconciled to their responsibilities, will know how to exploit.

The Three Principles To reiterate, the three traditional principles of alchemy are sulphur, mercury and salt.

Unlike the four elements, which are qualities that allow an entity to be broken down into its parts and described, the three principles are functions. The three principles are also much easier to apprehend by our logical, materialist minds; we need only compare them to an egg.

Sulphur, which corresponds to the element that is fertile, active, warm, is similar to the egg yolk. It contains the seed, the life principle that is ready to develop.

Mercury, the nourishing element, passive, cold, a welcoming matrix within which sulphur can grow, is analogous to the white of an egg.

As for salt, the French word sel in the Middle Ages was written scel and thus had a second meaning as “seal” or “stamp” (modern-French sceau), the element that gives a thing its particular, visible aspect, enclosing and shaping it, in a close analogy with the shell of an egg.

So it is only natural that the three principles should be aligned analogously with music:

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Inspiration, the principle of fertility.

Style, the pervading milieu, congenial to Inspiration.

Form, within which the first two principles are crystallized and conjoined.

Inspiration Inspiration was struck from the vocabulary – and from the preoccupations – of composers when they shifted allegiance toward another Muse: Science. While the new era depended on a geometry or a mathematics of a basically simple form to produce its masterworks, it was now unthinkable to do as composers of the tonal period had done: cling to an old, faded chimera.

We will consider in a later chapter19 what is concealed under the term “inspiration,” which seems finally to have become blurred rather than truly outmoded in the minds of our contemporaries. As will be discussed later, the term designates in particular a force of synthesis, a spirit of synthesis, oddly rather neglected in our time, when people are fonder of engaging in analysis, even or especially during the act of elaboration. This force, moreover, acts just as much on the listener, who will see more genius in a work if it seems to him or her to have been inspired.

The work will seem to the listener to be inspired when there is an intuitive perception of three things: first, a balance, or general harmony, then an emotion, the force of which will increase on successive hearings, and finally an impression of transcendence, the clear sensation that the work is conveying to us a fundamental message that no words could express, that it is opening a door onto a beyond that is indescribable but almost tangible. It’s the failure to find these three entities that drives the modern listener to desert the learned music of his time.

Balance, the apparent harmoniousness and form of the work, will become increasingly inaccessible to the listener as the musical language it uses is stripped of landmarks, repetitions, notable events. This takes us into the realm of musical semiology, which we consider a bit later.

Emotion is in fact a reflection of the composer’s skill, her ability to make use of her tools.

It can be triggered by a judicious utilization of the codes and harmonic conventions, but also – as proven by a work like Stravinsky’s Sacre du Printemps -- by bending and mixing these codes.

The notion of transcendence is much more subtle; it reveals the composer’s ability to use the music as a symbolic mode, and no longer as “simple” semiology. This is another theme that will be pursued later in this book. The fact remains that inspiration is this ability, this gift on the part of the composer, to achieve a synthesis in his creative gestures between these three components, which basically come down to the conceptual, the existential and the essential.

19

See “From Cliché to Psychiatrist’s Couch.”

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2. Style It is impossible to conduct a serious study of modernity without addressing ourselves to the notion of style. Each evolution in modernity implies a change in style: thus modernity, concocting new possibilities that become part of its era, follows each of its great thrusts with a hollow footprint that is called style; the space is filled by streams of individual talents.

The term style can be broken down on three distinct levels: Individual style, made up of components that are stable, recognizable, usable as a factor in the study and interpretation of the work of a single artist. These components are recurrent in analysis and inferential in creation. In other words, from a comparison between the recent work and those that preceded it, the critic deduces elements of the style; and the composer will deduce the most salient elements, the most personal and effective, in the present work, which will be the style of the next work.

Local style – regional, national in character – which makes it possible to classify various forms of music under different labels: Italian music, German music, tango, bossa nova, and so on. Style remains strictly local as long as it evolves only internally or does not evolve at all – in the manner of traditional types of music.

Its utilization by foreign musicians and its cultural hybridization inevitably impose an evolution, a change of status: no longer a geographic reference point, it becomes a marker in chronology.

Historical style, which classifies types of music according to the sequence in which they appear and succeed one another. Examples: Renaissance polyphonic style, gallant style, classical style, romantic, jazz, contemporary and so on.

All forms of culture, the totality of human expression, are found in these three categories, though always, internally, with nuances related to the degree of rapport that the cultural agent establishes with his sponsors, a rapport that defines nothing other than a degree of freedom of expression.

Thus literature will base its style on the rapport between res et verba, thing and word, content and form. Visual art will develop more through the dialectic of norm and departure. In music, form is a matter for specialists, it is perceived by the music lover only as part of a backdrop; on the other hand, every stylistic departure from a known norm is perceived with considerable force. In language, the evolution occurs by a series of accretions validated by the mass of language users; in music, it is a matter of individual leaps or advances. It is rare to find, in literature, the equivalent of an accretion of a quantity of new signs, through the act of a single author, such as those employed by Debussy or Mussorgsky, for example.

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Beyond the three categories of style associated with works or with artists, it is necessary to add one more, which is in a sense the consequence, first, of the diversity of styles that have proliferated from the Baroque to our own time, and second, of the petrification and what could be called “classical music” in the confines of its own Museum: I am speaking of the listener’s style, regardless of whether it is professional or not.

Something I have always considered more than odd – extremely exotic, in fact – is this attitude of exclusivity on the part of the consumer of Western art, in terms of a period, genre or tendency. A person fixates on one style, starts to idolize it and to detest everything else, by virtue of mysterious laws of affinity.

For instance, you must hate Picasso if you love Kandinsky; loving Robbe-Grillet makes it your duty to scorn Gracz, while a fan of Bergman heaps contempt on David Lynch and on and on. I was asked one day by a certain dolt: “Is it acceptable to like Brahms today?”

And so each chapel has its zealots who, like the devotees of cigars or fine wines, cannot summon enough praise for the objects of their addiction, or enough disdain for the “shop across the street.”

But my interest extends here only to the style of the creative gesture. As stated, style is above all an environment: academic composers, moreover, are content to acquire this environment as prefabricated by their predecessors, and to luxuriate in this borrowed mantle to which they are careful not to add the slightest trace of anything truly new.

Admittedly, the era – or eras – of the one Exclusive Style, when one needed only to learn the techniques and assimilate the aesthetic canons in order to develop and shore up one’s own ideas, was infinitely more comfortable than the need, as felt today, to create your own language on your own and to develop it as a function of a shelf life that is so much more compressed and constrained than the “style” of old: beware of anachronisms, of the “déjà-entendu,” sounds already heard.

What’s more, the “old style” had a unique advantage: in that context, genius was instantly discernible. There was no hiding behind a façade of complexity; you had to pay cash on the barrelhead. The audience was in place: talent had the art of enchanting or shocking, while its absence meant boredom.

The flowering of the three major elements of music – melody, harmony and rhythm – led of course to a certain confusion in the perception of styles. Without being a professional musician, and/or knowing the works, it is practically impossible for a music lover, even a real devotee, to situate a modern work in time and space.

I have had the experience of directing concerts that included four world premieres by composers from very different countries and cultures, and of realizing that these four works, so scrupulous in their perfect contemporary orthodoxy, forgot to convey anything of the persons who had created them: I was at a loss, with the score in hand, to place them in either time or space -- which is, however, the virtue of style.

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This, then, is the paradox of our time: style at one time was imposed on composers, by the intermediary of a language with clearly codified rules, but these creators, through the force of their personality, left a deep imprint on this language so that it was possible to recognize each composer from his style.

Nothing, today, is imposed at the outset, except perhaps an obligatory complexity, and the interdiction of any reference to an element of the tonal period – and the result is a language uniformly insignificant – meaning-less – for the musical public, a non-style that, willy-nilly, remains the signature of an era; but it’s an era that, as time passes, seems to become eternal, turning in a circle around the same sonorities and the same processes.

We are speaking of course of the official Avant-Garde. We should not forget either the independent composers, more numerous all the time, or especially the great creators who went their way, imperturbably, across the twentieth century, blithely oblivious, caring little for the chimeras of serialism and its sequel because they had no need of it: a Strauss, a Prokofiev, Sibelius, Janàcek, Britten or Dutilleux and more.

Even within the Avant-Garde, we can observe a renewal of interest in certain elements, rhythmic elements in particular, as well as in the domain of timbre, with a strong geographic stylistic connotation, yet more beholden to a fascination with the “noble savage” imported in the colonial era, via Bali, and yet enduring in the inescapable marimbas, bongos and other Tibetan gongs.

Apparently, aside from Luciano Berio and Olivier Messiaen, nearly all the “official” composers parted company with a major environmental stylistic component: folklore, popular music. And I am no longer speaking here, as just above, of the importation of exotic effects, but rather of the rigorously structural application of a traditional environment for the elaboration of a work with a universal vocation.

This is an important topic, and one I will be addressing repeatedly, but for the moment I would stress only that, since the influence of these forms of music was exerted in large part in terms of rhythm, it was natural for the moderns from Russia or Hungary – Stravinsky, Barók – to integrate them into their language, giving it a pregnancy that, in part, explains their great success. The French, for instance, on the other hand, who had no such folklore at their disposal with such a varied or typified rhythmic quality,20 either imported, like Ravel or Debussy, effects of Spanish rhythmic figures or, like Messiaen, constructed their own personal rhythmic language based on Greek metrics or birdsong, a language that allows this music, despite its remarkable complexity, to function – to communicate.

As for those who, like Pierre Boulez, have turned toward serial calculations to deduce rhythmic structures – I am not speaking of his recent works, such as the opening of 20

I am speaking here of the three or four ditties, such as “Au clair de la lune,” that are drilled into French children in complete ignorance of a heritage that is extraordinarily rich but totally unexplored.

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Répons, in which you can sense the touching influence of Messiaen – they have deprived themselves voluntarily, we might even say heroically, of a powerful vector of communication.

In any case, jazz and its derivates, to speak of the popular types of music that are closest to us, could not offer anything at all to a composer who was so ignorant of the literature to be able to write – in 1951, it should be noted, in his defense – “jazz has been credited with having brought to music a considerable rhythmic renewal, through its poor and unique syncopation and its inseparable four-beat measure.”21 3. Form In dealing with form, we enter directly into the realm of time, and in music, more than in any other intellectual discipline, it can be said that time unifies form; it is at once the germ and the envelope of the musical object. This is the result of a particularity of musical form: it is shown in two distinct instances, that of conception and that of execution, constructed time / experienced time, or in other words the composer’s time on the one hand and the listener’s on the other.

Constructed time, that of the composer at work, is comparable to another dimension, in which it seems to pass differently from “real time”; this is familiar to anyone pursuing a creative activity. This has been proven repeatedly by the many tempo corrections that composers themselves make in their work at the instant when it emerges from paper for the first time: time does not flow in the same way in the domain of conception as in the domain of projection.

But the composer has an additional constraint when compared with painters or writers: he must not only elaborate a text of which the addressee will take notice in his rhythm, but must also dominate this rhythm in an absolute manner – there can be no thought of the reader’s freedom – and the form of his work, to a great extent, will be determined by the rhythm and the tempo of the enunciation that he has imagined and that I am calling constructed time.

To undertake a study of constructed time, that is, of musical form from a technical point of view, would be beyond the scope of a work meant to be accessible to all music lovers.

Experienced time, on the other hand, while not escaping the relativity implied by all subjectivity in listening, possesses a few common properties that are perceptible to listeners, professional or not. In a work from the tonal period, a practiced ear will be able to reconstruct the structure of the score, as far as the memory can capture and play back the perceived events.

On the other hand, for a contemporary score, the expert and the amateur will be similarly disoriented and forced to rely on impressions, rather than any intellectually reconstructed “plan.” Boulez himself tells us the reason: “When it hears a rapid succession of complex 21

Pierre Boulez, Notes of an Apprenticeship, translated by Herbert Weinstock (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1968), p. 73.

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chords ... or a single complex chord of extreme brevity, the ear is incapable of even an intuitive analysis of the relations between the pitches; it is saturated with complexity, and, globally, perceives noise.”22 We could respond, somewhat mean-spiritedly, that, since contemporary music makes such ample use of rapid series of complex chords, it is perceived globally as nothing but noise… Another conclusion might be that it seems made for the eye more than the ear. I do not share such views, but I find it astonishing to hear none other than Boulez implicitly repeating one of the accusations that music fans have perennially hurled at the avant-garde.

In all honesty, the dispute between listeners and contemporary music is not based on this saturation of the synapses but primarily on a double conflict between passive listening / active listening and discrete listening / linear listening. In fact, even in music of the classical period, a number of devotees listen “in spurts,” letting their intuition guide them from one pleasant stimulus to another, without truly experiencing or listening to the line – the musical line – that separates these two “pleasant” points.

Even in the case of works that are familiar down to the last note, this discrete listening style prevails. Composers of the tonal period, who combined their talent with a certain pragmatism, knew how to dose their formal effects to keep listeners aware at regular intervals of certain peak moments that could seize and hold the attention.

What’s more, classical forms made steady use of repetition, whether this meant repeating a note, a theme or entire pages, the practice known as da capo. Repetition, along with those peak moments, was the standard method for stimulating the memory and instilling the work – I would even say drilling it – into the listener’s mind.23 In its first period, the serialist avant-garde banned all forms of repetition, both of individual notes and of cells; not content with a difficult new language, it made sure that memorization was impossible.

The result is that, with such methods banned, experiencing a new work requires, more than ever before, multiple hearings, and this reiteration is an integral part of what I’ve called active listening.

Ideally, this activity should consist of a first hearing during which you follow the musical discourse with the utmost open-mindedness and with unwavering attention, so that you can decide at the end whether the work makes you eager for a second hearing. The aim of a second hearing is to confirm first impressions while starting to probe the shadows cast 22

Boulez, Boulez on Music Today, translated by Susan Bradshaw and Richard Rodney (Harvard University Press, 1971), p. 43.

23 And even at the dawn of the modern era, we can recall the example of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, which repeats scarcely any elements in the course of the work and yet still proceeds by way of “blocks,” within which the motives are amply repeated, even if almost always with variations. Just think of the first bassoon solo!

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by the form, or in other words to reconstruct little by little the composer’s constructed time.

We should keep in mind Debussy’s warning: “The idea that one can judge a work of art on the basis of a first impression is the strangest and most dangerous of illusions.”24 Form, like timbre, is the musical component that has gained the most from experimentation, but the increased difficulty for the listener to gain his bearings in the midst of the work has kept form from having the success, the authentic apotheosis that marked the evolution of timbre. And it is timbre that has been called upon the most, for more than a century now, to replace melody, harmony and rhythm in their role as indispensable guideposts within the musical form, or experienced time. Unusual instruments, unprecedented use of the more standard instruments, powerful impacts of massed sounds, diaphanous effects, all these techniques serve form, they all can still please the public, and all, for this very reason, are exploited to the utmost.

Anyone reading the last several pages may be assailed with doubt: Did composers in the twentieth century truly resolve to write music while abstaining from melody, harmony, rhythm, inspiration and style? Or did they, at the very least, distort and dismember the first three and conceal the last two? In so doing, have they been guilty of acts of egotism and irresponsibility? Did they, within a few years, exhaust the evolutionary possibilities of the language of music, as humans can exhaust the resources of a plot of ground, and as a generation of mindless, selfish exploiters can pillage an entire planet? Or were they instead sounding an alarm, urgently demanding something more universal, in the sudden consciousness that music was created to open up unprecedented perspectives to the human spirit, rather than just to flatter the listener’s hedonism?

Even as it was severing ties, one by one, with its founding principles, going so far as to abandon “temperament,”25 or the tempered chromatic scale, the legacy of Pythagoras, contemporary music seemed eager to elaborate increasingly vast compositional systems as a way of establishing a universal link between sounds and all manifestations. This would mean a return to the conclusion voiced by Pythagoras, master of Samos: that music is everything and everywhere, even in the heavenly spheres.

24 25

Claude Debussy, Monsieur Croche (Paris : L’Imaginaire, Gallimard, 1987), p. 335.

See the chapter “Music without Temperament?”

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3

FROM PYTHAGORAS TO STRING THEORY

“Numbers rule the world.”

Pythagoras “It is in music that nature seems to teach us the physical principle of these first purely mathematical notions on which all the sciences are based: I am speaking of the harmonic, arithmetic and geometric proportions…”

Rameau All of human knowledge can probably be reduced to the study and knowledge of proportions. This undoubtedly applies, at least, to mathematics and its derivatives, geometry, physics, astronomy. We can view philosophy as the study of the proportions between different modes of perceiving, thinking and expression. Certainly politics is a matter of proportions between power and freedom. Music, most obviously, is a series of proportions between pitches, dynamics, durations and timbres.

Small wonder then that it was a mathematician, Pythagoras, who, through a play of proportions based on the first whole numbers, established the system called the Pythagorean scale, from which are derived all the later musical systems, in the West at least, and in particular the “tempered scale,” so dear to the keyboard works of Johann Sebastian Bach.

For Pythagoras, numbers governed music, just as they ruled every other phenomenon. He claimed, in fact, to have elaborated a scale based entirely on the proportions between the numbers 1, 2 and 3 rather than on musical instruments, or what’s called “the ear.”

Pythagoras based his reasoning on lengths of vibrating string, which he measured precisely; a vibrating string that was one foot long produced a certain sound; a string a half-foot long played the same note but an octave higher. (Example 3.1)

C

C

1 foot

½ foot

A vibrating string two feet long produced the same note, but this time an octave lower.

(Ex. 3.2)

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C

C

1 foot

2 feet

The ratio of 1 to 2, which generates the octave, recurs therefore for all the other notes of the Pythagorean sale: the frequency of each note, multiplied by two, produces the same note but an octave higher; the frequency divided by two gives exactly the same note but an octave lower.

With the proportion of 1 to 3, Pythagoras rendered all the other notes in his scale.

If you multiply the frequency of a Pythagorean C by 3, you obtain the frequency of the note of G, but one octave higher. (Ex. 3.3)

C

G

By multiplying the frequency of the Pythagorean G by 3, you obtain the note of D, one octave higher. (Ex. 3.4)

G

D

Taking the frequency of a Pythagorean D and multiplying it by 3 yields the A, at the octave above. (Ex. 3.5)

D

A

And so on‌

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Readers who have studied some music will have recognized by now what’s called the series of fifths: C, G, D, A, E, B. On the basis of C = 1, Pythagoras established twelve ascending fifths. (Ex. 3.6)

C

G

D

A

E

B

F#

C#

G#

D#

A#

E#

B#

Proceeding analogously, but this time with a series of descending fifths, he obtained a total of twenty-five notes in the octave (Ex. 3.7):

rather than the twelve in our scale (Ex. 3.8):

The Pythagorean scale with twenty-five steps demands a finer ear, capable of hearing subtle intervals. This scale is still used, in its original form or close to it, by traditional Turkish music, to cite just one instance.

The existence of these “micro-intervals” in traditional Eastern and Near Eastern music traditions gives them an incomparable richness and a subtlety far superior to those of our Western music, at least if we restrict the comparison to monophony, that is, the use of just one musical line, a chant that has no accompaniment but a rhythmic one.

With the birth of polyphony, intervals of less than a semitone inevitably caused problems.

Giuseppe Zarlino (1517-1590) gave these minute intervals the name coma; for example, on a piano, the B-sharp and C are exactly the same note, obtained by pressing down the same key, but on the violin, for instance, the subtle difference between these two values -the coma, amounting to a few Hertz -- can be made audible. Zarlino tried to maintain the principle of “natural” intervals by constructing a complex mathematical model, but one that once again was incompatible with the need to combine several parts. It was Andreas Werkmeister, in the late seventeenth century, who invented temperament, the well-known tempered scale used today, permitting the harmonious blending of modern instruments, especially the piano and violin.

But, to return to Pythagoras and his discovery: the production of a scale with a development and applications that are so harmonious, by using whole numbers that he

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considered intrinsically natural, allowed him to conclude that Nature was made up entirely of harmony, in the sense that she conformed to the intransigent rigor of numbers.

Pythagoras and his disciples applied their worldview to the universe in its entirety, notably to the movements of the stars. For Pythagoreans this movement had necessarily to reflect the harmony of the world: they placed the Earth at the center of the universe, with the movable stars – the planets and the sun – revolving around it on circular trajectories. Each of these orbits was conceived as a vibrating string whose note had to be in harmony with those of the other heavenly bodies.

The seven bodies – Moon, Mercury, Venus, Sun, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn – and the sphere of the stars were believed thus to play a complete scale, in perfect harmony: the music of the spheres. This brings us back to the cosmology specific to alchemy, in which the seven planets correspond to the seven basic metals, whose ascending scale leads finally to perfect gold.26 What stands out here is this absolutely fantastic idea, so poetic and apparently removed from all common sense, whereby the whole universe was said to be composed of music: Because everything was derived from the first whole numbers, creation in its entirety must vibrate and resonate like a gigantic symphony. Of course this theory was gradually consigned to the collection of totally zany yet very appealing ideas in the history of human thought.

Then, around the middle of the twentieth century, a few physicists began to pore over the apparently inextricable incompatibility of two great theories that describe our universe, general relativity for the infinitely large scale and quantum physics for the infinitely small. Some accepted with fatalism the idea of a universe ruled by two theoretical systems, while others were unable to resign themselves to it and fought on in search of a unifying principle.

In the course of the past decade, string theory, and then superstring theory, began to attract attention and to gradually win the support of a major part of the scientific community. There was still some reticence, all the same: this approach required you to think of the universe no longer in four dimensions, according to the teaching of Einstein, or three spatial dimensions and one temporal dimension, but instead in nine to twentyfive, depending on the school! Above all, however, this theory gave renewed vigor to Pythagoras’s idea that everything is music, but this time on the scale of the infinitesimal.

The words of physicist Trinh Xuan Thuan, in his preface to the French edition of Brian Green’s remarkable work,27 which provided me the inspiration for this chapter, could not 26

We find a perfect illustration of this alchemical theory in Botticelli’s The Mystical Nativity. This artist, devoted to the art of Hermes, as alchemy was known, used angels here to symbolize the twelve heavenly constellations and, above the retable (or altar shelf), the seven metals or planets, each cloaked in its traditional color.

27 Brian Green, The Elegant Universe (New York: W.W. Norton, 1999; reprinted 2003, 2010); Trinh Xuan Thuan, from preface to French edition: L’Univers élégant (Paris: Robert Laffont, Chaslin

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fail to resonate pleasantly in the ears of a musician: “Just as the vibrations of the strings of a violin produce varied sounds and their harmonics, the sounds and harmonics of superstrings are manifested in nature…in the form of photons, protons, electrons, gravitons… These superstrings sing and oscillate around us, so that the world is nothing but a vast symphony.”

Green not only introduces us to the physics of string theory; he enjoys the luxury of making the most entertaining, game-like presentation of the theories of relativity and of quantum physics, which in his talented hands seem almost to be self-evident – a deceptive impression. It’s with a pleasant sense of surprise that you discover perfect analogies between alchemical theories of matter and the most recent discoveries on particles.

The four elements, for instance, which are qualities of matter allowing it to form combinations or to divide itself, are associated with the four fundamental forces: gravitational force, electromagnetic force, strong nuclear force, and weak nuclear force.

And corresponding to the three principles are the three families of particles: electron, muon, tau. The unity principle, or unity of the Principle, is generally symbolized in ancient traditions by a point within a circle to express the creation of the cosmos out of the absolute One which can only be the mathematical point. It finds its fullest justification in Green’s argument, which invites us to draw a conclusion that is as radical as that of the ancient philosophers themselves: “…as the clock is turned back to ever earlier times, the whole of the cosmos is compressed to the size of an orange, a lemon, a pea, a grain of sand, and to yet tinier size still. Extrapolating all the way back to ‘the beginning,’ the universe would appear to have begun as a point … in which all matter and energy is squeezed together to unimaginable density and temperature. It is believed that a cosmic fireball, the big bang, erupted from this volatile mixture spewing forth the seeds from which the universe as we know it evolved.”28 String theory offers a glimpse into worlds ruled by the incommensurable. The orders of magnitude are generally at the power of plus or minor 33; thus a string with a length on the order of a millionth of a billionth of a billionth of a meter will have a tension of several million billion billion tonnes. A string will thus be measurable, computable, manipulable in theory but absolutely unthinkable if it comes to a depiction from our imagination, which in the order of the infinitely small is capable of conceiving only in millimeters and grams. To be able to “look at” a string would require construction of a particle accelerator whose size and energy would be close to those of the Universe itself.

Far more than for the atom, the only instrument at our disposal for conceptualizing and manipulating the universe of strings is computation, or the use of numbers.

At the two extremities of the history of thought, we find, first, the idea of a universe ruled by numbers, whose most minute as well as greatest combinations set up vibrations according to the law of these same numbers, and, second, the idea that at the origin of every manifestation – matter, light, energy – there is a vibration.

2000).

28 Green, The Elegant Universe, p. 83.

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This will have three major consequences for us: It is easier to understand the human being’s visceral attachment to the phenomenon of sound, our “desire for music,” and the fact that, wherever human groups are found, there is music as well, when we know that we are made up in our entirety of vibrating structures.

Analogies between sounds and colors seem familiar to us when we realize that sounds and colors are merely diverse modes of vibration, distinguished only by their frequencies. This gives a deep, truly metaphysical meaning to the theories developed by Olivier Messiaen on correspondences between timbre, harmony and color – see the discussion of Messiaen in the chapter “A Brief History of Modernity, French Style.”

The vertical structure of music, that is, harmony and polyphony, was possible only by arranging the scale of frequencies according to a rigorous symbolism of numbers, derived from Pythagoras and organized so as to make this verticality possible: 7 notes in the diatonic scale, 12 chromatic semitones, a harmonic system based on the perfect chord, or the superimposition of a third and a fifth, i.e. 3 and 5. This same rhythmic patterning is found in human lives: 7 days to the week, 12 months to the year, and the omnipresence of 3 and 5, for their part, in our structures, both physiological and social.

The Golden Ratio There is another domain, a vast and imposing one, in which the number truly plays the role of the demiurge, the matrix of all things – namely, the system of the divine proportion or the golden ratio. This is another notion whose name is widely known but whose principles are a closed book to most persons. Yet its theoretical statement is simple and elegant while its applications are infinite, in music as well as elsewhere, both for the important role played by the golden ratio in the organization of the scales of frequencies – musical scales – and for its precious contribution to the luthier’s art, in particular concerning the proportions of the violin.

In the third century B.C.E., Euclid, in his book The Elements, elaborated the most ancient definition of the golden ratio, which he called the cutting of a line “in mean and extreme ratio,” and from which he derived the first geometric structures. But the term “golden ratio” as such was actually coined by the German philosopher Adolph Zeising (18101876). As for the Greek letter phi, which represents it, it too is not actually from Euclid although it is often attributed to him. It was Theodore Cook who proposed it, in 1914, as a tribute to the Greek sculptor Phidias (490-430 B.C.E.), most famous for his decorations of the Parthenon in Athens.

To simplify this notion in the extreme, we have only to say that, when there is between two lengths a proportion such that the ratio of the smaller to the greater length is the same

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as the ratio of the larger of the two to the total of both, this relationship shall be equal to phi. It is seen most simply in this sketch (Ex. 3.9):

It can be seen at a glance that, in fact, the small segment of the length of the rectangle has the same proportion to the longer segment as the longer segment has to the total length.

In more literary terms, one would state that this rectangle is divided according to harmonious proportions.

Another scheme that not only shows very clearly the “divine proportion� but also indicates how it is propagated from the line segment to organize the entire universe, from atoms to the galaxy, is the plot of a spiral. (Ex. 3.10)

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Here we can see most precisely how the spiral is organized, so that it circles about multiple invisible rectangles, each of which, from smallest to greatest, is in divine proportion with the preceding one and the one that follows. Starting from the minuscule rectangle at the origin of the spiral, we can compare its proportions with the one that is next larger, and continue on through the remainder of the drawing. Observing the sequence of rectangles demands a “circular” gaze, which thus follows the unfolding of the spiral. The idea that such a harmonious figure, one whose flowering has the grace of choreography, should be reflected at the heart of the most important organizing systems of our world – that a number should be the crux of this configuration – all this prompted Matila Ghyka to remark: “Number is the essence of Form.”29 Without going into the details of the equation that yields the famous phi, we note merely that its value is 1.6180…, since phi (like pi, with which it is often confused), can be calculated to infinity. An illustration of this value was popularized by a recent best-selling thriller, about the Fibonacci Sequence. The sequence, as is well known, is 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, 89…

Each term in the series is obtained by adding the two that precede it: 3 equals 2 plus 1, 5 equals 3 plus 2, and so on. One of the remarkable properties of this sequence is that starting with 5, each term can be divided by the preceding one to obtain a value that grows constantly closer to phi, or 1.6180. For example, 5/3 yields 1.6666, but 89/55 brings us close to 1.6181. Here we find the spiral, which is invisible, winding itself around the numbers.

And what about music in all this?

Well, as Leibnitz recalled in 1712: “Music is an exercise in secret arithmetic, and the man who pursues it does not realize that he is manipulating numbers” – and one of the most 29

Ghyka, Le Nombre d’Or (Paris: Gallimard, 1931), p. 25.

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important of these numbers is phi. It is found in the organization of the intervals of the first scales, notably that of Zarlino, as well as in our tempered scale.

Thus, consider a C major chord – C, E, G – the major chord being the most important component in Western music. This chord is made up of a major third plus a minor third, or in the language of non-musicians, of an interval of four half-tones plus an interval of three half-tones. The side of our rectangle, that is, the fifth C-G, is therefore divided into two segments, one of which is larger than the other, and the total has the appearance of our divine proportion even if, strictly on the level of frequencies, we approach phi only roughly.

Anyone with access to a piano may find it fascinating to play the complete sequence of half-tones that make up the interval from C to G, assigning a number to each note. Thus, C will be 1 and so on up to G. It will be no surprise to find E corresponding to 5 and G to 8, and to conclude that the scale based on the perfect chord leads us directly to the Fibonacci Sequence.

The luthier’s art, as we have said, especially for the creation of the violin, has recourse to the golden ratio. Stradivarius built his instruments applying the divine proportion to all their parts.

Numerous composers were inspired by the divine proportion in constructing their works, but it was surely Bartók who laid claim to the process the most overtly. Hungarian musicologist Ernö Lendvai has revealed that the first movement of Bartók’s Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta was constructed on this principle. The movement consists of 89 measures. Measure 56 – here Bartók let the demands of the music prevail over pure mathematics – corresponded to the golden ratio and marks the culmination of a progression that started at the beginning of the work.30 Of course, by virtue of the theory that “one lends money only to the wealthy,” the greatest composers, Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, have often been studied in the light of the golden ratio. It is not impossible that they may have consciously referred to it. But it cannot be denied that their intuitive genius may have quite spontaneously led them to this proportion that is found in the natural state in countless structures. After all, the sunflower surely grows without direct knowledge that its seeds are organized according to the golden ratio.

It is clear, in this first part, to what extent music is intimately intermingled with our deepest nature, whether of our body or our mind, and how closely the phenomenon of sound is linked with the very principles of the world.

It is precisely because it engages the body as much as the mind that Music possesses this power over our spirit, far more than the other arts, or any other human discipline in general. But this force and this presence are not due to the nature of the raw material 30

Cited by Gérard Assayag and Jean-Pierre Cholleton, La Recherche, special issue on numbers: No. 278, July/August 1995.

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alone. It was also essential for there to be, over the course of ages, a fully worked-out articulation of sounds, an architecture of forms, a development of styles. It required, in a word, the establishment of a language.

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SECOND MOVEMENT: THE LANGUAGE OF MUSIC It may seem ingenuous to ask whether music is a language; after all, some people take that association for granted, while for others it is merely a figure of speech. In its most frequent usage, in fact, the expression “the language of music” becomes metaphorical, and persons using it to describe a work usually follow it with comparisons from painting or dance. It is less common to hear musicologists evoke the “linguistic system” of a work, which is not the same thing at all. But fundamentally, both groups will make use of the word “language” to speak of music’s modes of exteriorization. All encyclopedias, in fact, agree in telling us that a language is a communication system. To speak of a language of music is therefore to evoke the composer’s intention to communicate, to express something.

Linguistics, on the other hand, to borrow the definition by Ferdinand de Saussure, is the science that deals with “language considered in itself and for its own sake.“ Thus it can be applied to any work at all, however “esoteric.” If a composer does not have the ultimate aim of touching, moving, transporting his fellow humans, but rather is content with conceptualizing to the utmost, it will always be infinitely easier to speak of his linguistics than of his language, something that, in passing, will not fail to flatter the creator’s own self-satisfaction.

For its part, language is defined as such. Music, if it is indeed a language, must be able to define itself in the final analysis as a language and nothing else. But studying a language means learning it “in vitro,” independently of any emotional impact, of any personalizing factor, and especially of any subjectivity. We do not speak of “music as it is spoken” but rather of “the language of music.” In fact, Russian, for instance, is a tongue spoken by a well-defined population; but if this group should come to adopt a different tongue – as the Franks long ago abandoned Latin – and if their tongue disappeared as a spoken language, it would nevertheless remain, in the terminology of historians studying its fate, a language, which would have lost, as is true of fossils, the flesh of its usages, the fluids of custom and of daily use. Does music then, in the final analysis, define itself as a language and nothing else? Obviously not, because the universal nature of music, which makes the Japanese gagaku listenable to the Western ear, its innate character, the fact that we can listen to it without learning it, as well as the extraordinary subjectivity of its expression, which can make one piece of music seem insipid to my neighbor while I may swoon over it -- in a word: its extreme abstraction -- is incompatible with the strict definition of a language.

In music there is, more precisely, a level “beyond language,” just as there is something beyond language in literature. Maurice Blanchot, Roland Barthes and a few others have repeatedly affirmed that language tends naturally toward its own destruction, that the contemporary history of literature is the story of the murder, and then the absence, of writing; yet this absence is not an absence of the writer, of the book, of the act of reading,

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of the reader; it is the drive toward self-abstraction of any historico-cultural model of writing.

In parallel to this, the early twentieth century saw the abandonment, or “murder,� of classical musical language and then the withdrawal, the very absence, of language and thus of communication between composer and listener, but without any possibility of assuming that we remained in the domain of music.

As I have said, we are more likely to find models for studying and analyzing the phenomenon of music in the structural domain. Far more than linguistics, which can help us when we want to observe surface events, it is semiology, the science of signs, that will let us understand music not only in its manifestation but also, and above all, in its essence.

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4

MUSIC AND SEMIOLOGY

“An artist’s importance is measured by the number of new signs that he has succeeded in introducing into language…”

Louis Aragon In his memoirs, Igor Stravinsky states that music “is, by its very nature, essentially powerless to express anything at all, whether a feeling, an attitude of mind, a psychological mood, a phenomenon of nature, etc.”31 Coming from a mind as precise as Stravinsky’s, this declaration, no doubt uttered to be provocative, or in a sense to justify his own artistic choices, seems to have been delivered on the spur of the moment and to be singularly lacking in clarity. Aside from the fact that any artist aspires to express himself through his art, the verb “express” etymologically means “push outward,” from Latin ex-primere.

The Larousse French dictionary gives it the meaning “to manifest one’s thought, one’s impressions,” and farther on, “…one’s feelings, by an artistic means.” The American dictionary, Merriam Webster, defines it as “to give expression to the artistic or creative impulses or abilities of (oneself).” The composer does nothing other than “push out of himself,” manifest and thus express his thought, his impressions, his feelings.

Thus Stravinsky had simply used the wrong verb, and we will not indulge in the sophistry of pretending to ignore what he actually had in mind. He meant that music is incapable of making the feeling of the creator as he creates coincide with that of the listener who is hearing.32 And so, for example, Tchaikovsky, conveying the agonies of his private life through his Symphonie Pathétique, will not succeed in completely communicating this suffering to us, nor even, of course, the thoughts that evoked it. All that we can perceive of this emotion, if we are sensitive to his music, is an approximate value; what becomes the “emotionally competent object”33 is Tchaikovsky’s symphony itself, not the composer’s own sad thoughts.

Stravinsky’s critical comment about music, moreover, is not new; it had been applied to the tools of language for some time. Thus John Locke, in 1690, affirmed: “The chief end of language in communication being to be understood, words serve not well for that end… when any word does not excite in the hearer the same idea which it stands for in the mind of the speaker.”34 31

Stravinsky, An Autobiography (New York: W.W. Norton, 1998), p. 53.

Arthur Rubinstein, incidentally, who was a close friend of Stravinsky, was convinced of the purely provocative nature of this comment, which he called a quip.

33 The term “emotionally competent stimulus” or “emotionally competent object,” discussed at length in the next chapter, is from Antonio Damasio, Looking for Spinoza: Joy, Sorrow and the Feeling Brain (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2003), p. 50.

34 Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (W. Tegg and Co., 1879), p. 386.

32

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The composer has the intoxicating faculty of reifying, that is, turning mental musical images into real entities, on an intimate level where subject and object in fact are merged and where, for the composer alone, the heard sound is the direct, spontaneous expression of his immediate feeling, even if he is driven to rework it thereafter.

Now the concrete object itself, once expressed, is nothing but a quantity of animated air that begins to resonate in another body and arouses a sheer sensation. But at this level the sound-object still does not exist. It is perceived as such only in response to the action of a sign, that is, a mediation between subject and object. Here semiology, the science of signs, by training our faculty of composing new codes and interpretants, can help us to resolve this rupture in intersubjectivity between the composer, for whom the message is homogeneous with the code, and the listener, for whom it no longer is.

Before going any farther, and to help the reader to understand the importance of considering music as a semiotics, or language of signs, and the consequence this implies, namely the necessity for the listener to acquire, by attentive listening to music, new signs for the greater enjoyment of music, I am going to take a detour into the world of perfume or scent, for three reasons: Scents too are a semiotics; you smell a rose-scented perfume and instantly, provided your experience has allowed you to smell this flower in the past, you will think “rose.” The scent is the sign of something quite precise.

The language of scents is, like music, practically unknowable through words. As Umberto Eco said so well: “think of having to describe in words alone the smell of rosemary.”35 Just think of having to compare, in words alone, the difference in sentiment experienced on hearing a Beethoven quartet and your favorite Beatles song.

And yet, deep inside us, this difference is extremely clear, it’s “on the tip of our tongue,” we experience and feel it in all our being. We are dealing then with a metalanguage, a language of another mental dimension.

In scent just as in music, we acquire interpretants, that is, the codes required to go from the scent of the rose to the mental concept of rose, then to the appearance in the mind of the word “rose,” by practice and education. It is obvious that for a “nose,” the olfactory world is infinitely more expressive than for just anyone. Consider this quote from the novel Perfume by Patrick Süskind: “…everyday language had soon become insufficient to designate all the things he had collected inside himself, like so many olfactory notions. Soon he no longer smelled just wood, he smelled varieties of wood, maple, oak, pine, elm, pear, he smelled old wood, yellow, moldy, rotten, mossy, he even smelled a particular log, a single splinter, an individual grain of sawdust – he distinguished them by smell better than other persons could have done by sight. It was the same with other things. The fact that this white drink that Madame Gaillard dispensed each morning to her boarders was uniformly referred to as milk, while for Grenouille it had a different scent and a different taste every morning depending on 35

Umberto Eco, The Search for the Perfect Language, translated by James Fentress (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 1995), p. 24.

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its temperature, the cow from which it came, and what that cow had eaten, the quantity of cream that had been left in it, and so on.”36 The hero of this novel has such a rich olfactory vocabulary that he comes close to that “perfect language” that, as St. Augustine tell us, “would not be made up of words at all, but of things themselves, so that the world would appear to be a book written by the finger of God.”37 What better way is there, in fact, to know a thing, to take possession of it, to become that thing, than by its scent? In any case it speaks to us “louder,” on first approach, than just a name.xxx The same can be said of music. It is a meta-language that speaks to us of a different state, a different dimension, a different perspective not only on the world but on ourselves. If scent reveals to us the intimate nature of things, sound can open up the depths of our inner selves, provided only that we have the will to master its signs and codes.

The entire problem of miscommunication in contemporary music resides in this deficit in codes, which is what makes the listener call this music complicated, or etymologically, “folded in on itself.” This music, with few known and recognized interpretants to offer, obliges the composer to explain it, in words or in writing, and often in a laborious manner that’s even more off-putting than the work itself.

Before learning to create new codes, let us consider the way composers used to work in the past.

For the composer of the tonal era, the creative process consisted most often in “digging around” in a library of elements acquired over time as generally significant, and allowing his intuition, or inspiration, supported by the technique of writing, to imbue these elements with an optimal expressive force. Compliance with the rules of harmony and counterpoint was in itself an assurance of the good linguistic etiquette of the work, which was a semiotic whole.

It could even be said that genius most often took the form of some degree of subversion of these rules, while remaining within the general framework that they defined and which permitted genius to manifest itself.

36

Süskind, Das Parfum: Die Geschichte eines Mörders (Frankfurt: Büchergilde Gutenberg, 1985), pp. 31-32.

37 Quoted in Eco, The Search for the Perfect Language.

One might object that, in an extreme case, the composer could be his only listener and consequently “self-validate.” I would respond, first, that this a terribly solipsistic view of creative work and, secondly, to use linguistic jargon, that the “I” of the narrator/composer implies a “you” of the reader/listener, who could perhaps permutate into the “I” but could not coincide with it on pain of nonsense, and could not imply that the listener is a “he,” that is, according to linguist Emile Benveniste, the absent one, the non-person, the one excluded from discourse. And yet the moderns, by rejecting the “old sign,” have in fact, involuntarily, relegated their public to the role of the “he ”.

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The modernists’ willful – it’s tempting to call it heroic – rejection of these inherited reference points left the listener no choice but to recreate on his own the sets of codes required to im-press within himself what had just been ex-pressed outside him.

Imagine that one fine day we learned that the authorities had decided to change all the road signs during the night, and to replace them with new codes that were absolutely incomprehensible without the correct manual. This is exactly the situation in which listeners, music lovers, and even a number of musicians found themselves after the serialist revolution and its aftermath. And possibly even earlier. Debussy, so often invoked by the moderns, even Debussy is on record as saying: “Stravinsky worries me; he is starting to write with something that is no longer music.”

The problem, however, is not what is and what is not music, because basically every sound-object elaborated by a human being, subject to certain conditions that are those of the limits of art, can be called music.38 What matters are the codes that allow us to interpret, to feel, judge and validate these sound-objects.

We might even hazard here an ontological definition of music: Music is what is validated by the listener.

To return to our example of the automobile, it appears at a certain distance that the moderns have acted with enthusiasm but precipitately: Changing the signals without taking the time to inform the “users” could not fail to lead to the utmost confusion. On the other hand, these users seem to have taken refuge in an attitude of willful boycott, close to laziness, as if they had taken a pious vow to travel exclusively on foot, rather than seek to understand the meaning of new signs.

But because the mis-understanding arose from the sign, it is also through the sign that I venture an attempt at reconciliation, by trying to penetrate the esoteric layers – from Greek esôterikos, “reserved to experts alone” – of the sound-phenomenon, or in other words the implications of which the codes are like the genes of the exoteric soundphenomenon – from exôterikos, “addressed to the public.”

In approaching semiology we must keep two basic premises in mind: The sign is an entity substituted for something else.

38

It might be argued that, in an extreme case the composer could be his sole listener and consequently could “self-validate.” I would respond, first, that this is a terribly solipsistic view of the job of creation and, second, to apply linguistic jargon, that the narrator/composer’s “I” implies a “you” that is the reader/listener and could possibly trade places with the “I” without coinciding with it – at the risk of writing gibberish and, even more, of implying that the listener is a “he,” that is, according to linguist Emile Benveniste, the absence, the non-person, excluded from the discourse. And yet the moderns, by rejecting the “old sign,” have willy-nilly relegated their public to the role of “he.”

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The sign is an entity that participates in a process of signifying.39 And this prompts a first question: If music is made up of signs that replace something else, what then is this something else? The response is found in the elucidation of the second proposition above. The sound-object, if it is to be ratified as a sign, must signify something. And that is difficult to identify, since music is the most abstract of all modes of communication. Thus the “something else” must perforce be located at the level of subjective perception, of feeling, of the emotion experienced while listening.

A horse sketched on a poster will refer without great difficulty to its concrete object in the mind of most observers of the sign. An arrow inclined toward the right on the same poster will be less explicit, requiring some notion of context in addition to the codes pertaining to the concept of arrow. On the other hand, it is far-fetched to associate a major or minor chord, an interval or a rhythm with a precise meaning, let alone one that is universal and thus a defined aim.

Nonetheless, listeners who participate in a common culture and shared musical affinities will agree in recognizing that, in a Brahms symphony for instance, they experience the same feelings at the same moments. In the case of Wagner devotees, this becomes quite obvious. This unity of impressions appears to correspond to the force of signs as signification, and I would argue that those things that are replaced by these signs are the emotions and sentiments experienced by the listener.

Before continuing, I should recall that there are two categories of signs: those in the written score and those in the music as heard. Thus there is a sign within the sign, or more precisely behind the sign.

The first-category signs carry no intrinsic expressive or emotional charge; they are indications of the manner in which the work has been conceived and is to be played.

Returning to our first argument on the pertinence of the term “musical language,” we can assume that written signs are that language that is “nothing other than itself.” The written sign is born in the mind of the composer, perfectly codified for him and him alone, whereas the revelation to the listener takes place only little by little in the course of various interpretations. The most popular works are no exception to the rule: among the multitude of signs of which they are composed, many are entirely “esoteric” and thus need the exercise of analysis in order to be understood and perceived, even by the most accomplished musicians.

Giacomo Puccini’s opera Tosca contains an example that I use each time I am conducting the work, to show the singers how the composer can hide the clue to a melody that is nevertheless quite apparent.

39

One of the best introductions to the world of signs is found in Umberto Eco, Le Signe (Paris: LGF, 1992), which is not however available in English.

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Thus, when Scarpia is mulling over his desire for Tosca, early in the second act, he remarks in a soliloquy: “I cannot draw chords from a guitar, nor horoscopes from flowers” (Ex. 4.1):40

Under the word “accordi” (chords), Puccini has concealed a harp chord that, pitched a half-tone lower, repeats the sequence of open chords on the guitar, which is quite obvious when you play it alone: (Ex. 4.2)

(E, A) + (D, G, B, E) Later, when Scarpia becomes insistent: “I won’t sell myself to a beautiful woman for money” and at the end of the act, before his “Tosca, finally mine!,” the notes of the chord are played in sequence and slightly varied to form a new melody. (Ex. 4.3)

(D, G, B, E)

(+A, E)

To anyone sharp-eyed enough to have picked up the origin of this melody, it adds of course an extra relish to the singer’s performance, but it is an internal sign, hidden, a wink from the composer to an attentive musician.

This type of sign, which in my example is rather a synecdoche,41 is, along with the notes, the rhythmic values and the interpretive indications, one of the signs addressed to the 40

All the examples in this book can be heard on the site www.chaslin.com by clicking on the icon of the book, and then on “exemples musicaux ”.

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execution of the work. Once put into practice, they deliver the sound-object and immediately a new sign appears, one pointed toward the listener, who will react as a function of his sensibility and education to this emotionally competent object.

Another example, better known to musicians and especially to certain attentive conductors, is the quotation, in Richard Strauss’s Salome, of the love theme from the opening of Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde. A young soldier in Herod’s service, readers will recall, is desperately in love with Salome. From the first page of Strauss’s score, Narraboth sings of his tearful admiration for the princess, and the four famous notes appear in the bass register of the orchestra. They cling to the character of the young soldier, accumulating, multiplying and finally carrying away the unfortunate young man who ends up committing suicide in desperation.

In the example from Tosca we have the case of a sign whose origin – the notes of the guitar – is impossible to detect from a hearing of the work, unless one already knows it, whereas Strauss’s borrowing from Wagner, since it is instantly recognizable and amply repeated, gives the character of Narraboth an especially tragic tonality that makes perfect sense to anyone who knows the origin of the musical sign that serves as his leitmotiv.

Strauss, as we will see later, was one of the most adept users of the emotional sign, which he employed with complete deliberateness.

Certain musical objects have a remarkable pregnancy, which assures them a universally recognized identity. They are the logical starting point for understanding the mechanism of the musical sign.

Thus I find that of all signs the one that lends itself most immediately to interpretation is the crescendo.

The crescendo awakes in us a feeling of displacement, of a change of condition, or rapprochement, elevation, openness, which is translated by a feeling of exaltation, even ecstasy (Ex. 4.4) but also, if it is prolonged and further amplified, of oppression, being overwhelmed. (Ex. 4.5) The decrescendo provokes different sensations, though not systematically opposite to those of the crescendo. The distancing, letdown, closing that it evokes are not experienced as a loss but rather as a contraction that demands ever-greater attention, the focal length of listening.

These two signs correspond to a tension, with the relaxation occurring when the variometer is stabilized at the neutral point.

41

A rhetorical device consisting in using the whole to refer to one of its parts: Scarpia is signified through the notes of the guitar, a seductive weapon.

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Acceleration and ritard have the same immediate expressive force; the listener who is truly involved in the listening process will feel carried away by an accelerando and restrained, held back by a ritardando. (Ex. 4.6) If these musical objects, which are in fact parameters, have such power over us, it is because they act directly on our physiology, the crescendo by saturating our ear, the accelerando by playing with our biological rhythm, and so on.

I notice almost daily that, when I listen to music while working and this music has a stable pulse, my cardiac rate adapts to this beat and actually becomes fixed on it. Not infrequently, feeling a sudden agitation and noticing an increase in my pulse rate, I become aware of the acceleration of the music, which I had somehow relegated as a backdrop to my work.

Another category of musical objects with strong evocative power is timbre. Thus some instruments have such a “personality” that apprentice composers are always advised to use them with utmost caution. This applies to the tam-tam, gongs, bells, the organ, the low notes of a contrabass ensemble.

It should be noted in passing that these instruments, through their amplitude and their gravity – to use the term in the triple senses of deep, severe and attractive – evoke the numinous of which we spoke at the beginning of this work, and herein I believe we see the source of their power over the listener. These sounds moreover, especially if they are perceived live, vibrate at frequencies that touch our body in its lower parts, its “gut.”

In approaching elaborated musical objects, such as melodies, classic chords, rhythms, we are entering the cultural domain that is specific to the listener, where the sign needs more codes in order to be interpreted.

And yet rhythm is still the most explicit of these objects, no doubt because we are ourselves subject to a rhythm, a regular cardiac pulse rate. Listening to a series of steady notes immediately gives us a sense of stability. This is true of the opening of the Beethoven Violin Concerto. (Ex. 4.7) These four tympani notes are enough to impose a feeling of peace, but also a state of concentration, both of which are similar to those experienced by a being in repose.

Popular music, of all periods, is based especially on rhythms that establish the ethnic category and identify it. We will be more strongly touched and attached by any such type if we know the cultural codes that correspond to it. But rhythm has this remarkable power to initiate the listener, as if during a hypnotic séance, into the intimacy of a world that he does not know. Without ever having gone to Brazil or Argentina, you immediately feel Brazilian or Argentinean on hearing a few measures of a bossa-nova or tango rhythm.

Obviously it requires geographic codes to be able to associate “x” with Brazil and “y” with Argentina; but I recall having had recordings of these types of music as a small

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child: “x” brought me a savage joy and “y” a feeling of solemn strength. That experience, like many others, from an age when I had very few codes, convinced me very early that music conveyed, ahead of its signs, emotions and sensations that, as such, involved the human body in its entirety, because they were conceived, in the case of popular types of music, by the gesture of this same body that they transmitted and thus, no offense to Stravinsky, expressed.

To approach melody and harmony in their nature as signs, I shall proceed in the sequence prescribed by Rameau, who states that “it belongs to harmony to move the passions; melody draws its strength entirely from this source.”

Harmony, then, is more salient, more significant. Harmony is the sign that is quicker than melody to be interpreted. Of that there can be no doubt.

Remember that harmony, speaking schematically, consists of: chords, sound-objects generated by the simultaneous juncture of sonorous lines, as the vertical dimension in music while melody is its horizontal dimension.

The sign, as we know, is a matter of codes and conventions. Tonal music had established a certain number of these codes, corresponding moreover to a real and spontaneous correspondence between the emitted sound and the felt emotion. Thus the major chord (Ex. 4.8) corresponded to positive feelings, while the minor (Ex. 4.9) was generally associated with melancholy, sadness, and the like.

(Ex.4.8)

(Ex.4.9)

Some chords create a tension and demand what we call a resolution. The fact that we expect a conventional resolution (Ex. 4.10) of this chord gives the force of new tension to an unexpected resolution (Ex. 4.11). The music of Berlioz, for example, is entirely based on these absolutely unforeseeable sequences.

(Ex.4.10)

(Ex.4.11)

In the field of melody, certain intervals were more natural than others, and the diminished fifth – or augmented fourth – because of the relative difficulty of performing it, especially by the voice, earned the nickname “the Devil’s interval.” (Ex. 4.12)

(Ex.4.12)

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These few rudimentary examples serve merely to introduce to the reader the notion of musical semiology. For a masterful, developed treatment of the subject, I recommend the very remarkable works by J. J. Nattiez.42 Therefore, the sound-texture can be considered a plane in two dimensions, horizontal and vertical. But we can go farther and say, taking the listener’s perspective, that we are dealing here with a dichotomy between object and discourse.

In fact, for the one who listens and receives, there are two sorts of perception, to which are associated two very different types of sensations: that of harmonic objects, whose emotional impact is direct, which actually play with our body and awaken often complex sentiments; and that of the discourse, which accounts for the specificity of music through its dependence on the unfolding of time. The substance of the discourse is not so much the statement of the work as the expectation by the listener, and that is borne out in every work conceived to function, to communicate.

Through the analysis of a composition, we reveal the composer’s consciousness of these expectations first, and the elaboration of the discourse as a consequence. A certain effect of surprise, a certain unexpected modulation, a tension resolved in a particular relaxation, all that is nothing but a game based on the expectations of the Other.

Melody of course is not the sole element of the discourse, a discourse that envelops all the actors in the sonorous drama. But it is a guide, Ariadne’s thread, and with its help the listener most easily keeps his bearings in the very heart of the musical development.

In the same way, harmony is just one of the objects. Certain “effects,” of rhythm or orchestration, the unexpected use of an uncommon instrument, also have the value of objects. In fact, in the framework of a semiological approach to music, objects are all that interests us.

Consider an example, one so naïve that we must beg the “experts” in advance for indulgence, but one whose familiarity makes our job of practical demonstration far easier: the first phrase of Beethoven’s Für Elise. It is fair to say that the discourse corresponds to the entire phrase (Ex. 4.13):

(Ex.4.13) But observe that the chromatic ostinato, which I am calling “A,” and which is a sloweddown trill, constitutes an object in its own right, through its remarkable nature, its position at the start of the phrase and its repetition throughout the piece. If Beethoven had used a less striking element, his Für Elise would not have become so famous.

42

Jean-Jacques Nattiez, Music and Discourse: Toward a Semiology of Music, translated by Carolyn Abbate (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1990).

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The same process occurs in Mozart’s G Minor Symphony, Number 40 (Ex. 4.14):

(Ex.4.14) This same ostinato on Eb – D gives the musical phrase, in both examples, an extraordinarily touching character, as if it hesitated to present itself, or better, as if it were oscillating between two dimensions. But in the case of Mozart, this hesitation is increased to the point of torment by the rhythmic structure, which is exactly the same as in Cherubino’s aria in Le Nozze di Figaro, in which he sings, “I don’t know anymore what I am, what I am doing” (Ex. 4.15):

(Ex.4.15) In both these passages, then, Mozart is using the same rhythmic structure, which he repeats four times; this makes it tempting to interpret the opening of the Fortieth Symphony with our heads full of the anxious, impatient words of Cherubino.

That is how the musical sign functions: it transmits to our body, in the manner of the arm of a phonograph, the oscillations, vibrations, frequencies, whose shaping is elaborated in the mind of the composer, but which acts on the deepest aspects of our physiology.

The musical sign, as we see in the next chapter, acts on our brain as the trigger of a new perception of the state of our body, the perception that Antonio Damasio calls an emotion. However, returning to our musical examples, they can assume the value as a sign and thus touch the listener only in the very precise framework of a language that is codified, rich in conventions thanks to which the most subtle subversion of the code – here, Mozart’s chromatic oscillation or his jerky rhythm – provokes a tension, even unconsciously, answered by an emotion, even a tenuous one.

There is one domain in which the quality of emotional sign in music is particularly obvious; I am referring to stage music, in the theater, or especially to soundtrack music in the world of film.

I would like to invite the reader to consider the viewpoint contrary to the one evoked so far in this discussion, that is, to imagine the work of the composer who “plays” with musical objects/signs, trying on various combinations and calculating, guided only by his intuition and his emotional instinct, the impact of the combination of sound and image. It

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is truly fascinating to observe the degree to which a scene can be heightened, magnified by music whose affective power can reinforce the emotion contained in the image, or even reveal impressions that, without music, would be downright invisible.

There are three traps to be avoided in current practice: pleonasm, in which the music is content to “follow” the image, adding nothing except perhaps a certain weight; contradiction, in which the sound unsettles the visual perception by furnishing a contradictory sign, a combination that sometimes, when handled deliberately and with brio, induces a creative tension, whereby we behold an artistic object that now “adheres to” the film; and finally, parasitic music, whose presence monopolizes and diverts attention to the point of forgetting image and action, consigning them to the background.

Anyone is free to perform a demonstration of all this, which is quite easy with just a video player and a few recordings: by viewing the same scene from a film against different types of music, one immediately perceives changes of atmosphere at work, which can range from fruitful combination to a total mismatch.

The rejection of signs and conventions at the turn of the twentieth century corresponds, both with painters and with musicians, to a quest for truth, or rather for a different truth, to a refusal of the classic sign that had become too ambiguous because it was too implicated in a reproduction of the “natural” that, inevitably, can only be a lie. And it is precisely because it tends toward a maximum truth that art will be split between a fragmented language with no possible point of reference, a language that is believed to bear its truth within itself, on the one hand and an absolute search for the imitation of the real or the natural on the other hand: photographic painting and minimalist or neoclassical music.

What was forgotten here, no doubt, was that classic art, because it tended toward the natural without ever claiming to reproduce it completely, maintained an eternal fiction that alone, apparently, was capable of perpetuating the genius that had conceived it.

However, I do not want to close this chapter on musical semiology without adding a nuance concerning the very concept of semiology applied to music. In fact, as Eco demonstrates,43 the sign is controlled by codes and conventions that link it to its signified; it should be easily possible to proceed from one to the other, and vice versa. In music, one undoubtedly has the impression of perceiving something that “signifies,” but without any law, rule or convention helping us to identify the tenor of the referent. It seems that music, more precisely than a semiotics, is a symbolic mode in which, still according to Eco, there is invention, and then recognition, without any interpretive agreement having been concluded between sender and receiver. The content is thus sufficiently imprecise to allow an infinity of interpretive nuances – the condition of the symbol.

I myself would go farther, repeating my distinction between function and ultimate aim in music, and suggesting that the qualitative difference between these two categories lies in 43

Umberto Eco, Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language (Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 1986), pp. 130-188.

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the fact that music that serves a function tends more to use signs, summoning them to accomplish this very function, which requires precise tools, while music geared to an ultimate aim, or transcendence, makes use of symbols, which are more indirect in their relation to signifieds, but more capable of developing amplitude, poetry and depth, in other words, more capable of art.

Consider the example of an instrument: the trumpet. In music serving a military function, it is the sign of something well defined: meals, rest, assembly. In films, the sound of a fanfare announces a cavalry charge or the entrance of gladiators. It is clear, precise, effective, it is a sign, and these are all forms of music that serve a function.

Now let’s take the opening of Gustav Mahler’s Fifth Symphony (Ex. 4.16). The instrument alerts us in no uncertain terms to its presence. This prominence is due to the use of the instrument in the lower register, which is quite uncommon. Once again, the deviation from a convention leads to an implicit tension. But are we justified, unequivocally, in declaring: “That means a funeral march,” or “It’s a military fanfare played slowly,” or again, “It’s the expression of a heroic feeling”? The interpretations are multiple: we are in a symbolic mode, this music is a vast symphony, we are in the realm of the ultimate aim.

So I can now refine what I stated earlier, namely that there exist two types of signs in music: the written sign, on the basis of which the interpreter produces the sound-sign, addressed to the listener. It is now clear, in fact, that in the case of music oriented toward an ultimate aim, only the notes written on paper are a sign, while the sound produced by the interpreter, for its part, is a symbol, since there is apparently an analogy between the perceived sound and a “something” that cannot be spoken; the quality of ineffability being the criterion for the symbol.

It is crucial to bear in mind that a symbol establishes, through its “missing half,” an intimate relation, which is closed, a rapport of completion; whereas the written musical sign, once interpreted, delivers a signified that in turn can be considered a signifier, one that is richer but whose relation with the “definitive” signified can be all the more ambiguous. Thus, a signboard indicating the sea is a sign that is not the sea, but summons in us the notion of sea. There then appears in us an image, a memory, that will be a more sophisticated sign, but which, because it is less abstract, will remain all the more distant from its destination. For example, I may see the word “sea,” and this word will awake in me the image of a beach in Normandy; if I am in Florida, it is likely that the real vision will differ from what I imagined.

Thus the interpreter of a score will have in front of him a series of signs, for example a simple C major chord. If he reads this score without playing it, the chord will trigger in his mind the sonorous image that he has of it after numerous years of practice, with the timbre of an instrument he knows well, and the acoustics of a hall in which he has played before. All that will provide a “mental” result, quite complex but all the more removed from its real execution because the interpreter will have added personal, subjective parameters to the mental image that he will create for himself alone. This particularity of

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the world of signs, moreover, is not a handicap for the performer, who will have the advantage of making a “trace” of the ideal interpretation that he hopes to give, while rehearsal offers him the opportunity of adjusting this mental trace to the reality of practice.

But when he finally produces the sound signified by the notes, the sonorous message thus delivered will belong to the symbolic mode; this can be demonstrated easily by the simple fact that, between the symbol and the thing symbolized, there will no longer be this stratificaton that is found in the world of signs and above all, of course, by the indecision as to the nature of what we feel on hearing a sound.

We can now explore the nature of certain traditional types of music, particularly Hindu ragas, codified in the extreme, which demand a more mental way of listening than our polyphonic types of music that are more “sentimental.” In this particular case, we are dealing with a set of signs in which the interpretive conventions are known by both parties. Is this therefore music with a religious function? Isn’t it a type of music drawn toward transcendence? The answer is on the level of the sign: what is it pointing toward?

In the raga, each sign refers to a precise symbol of Hinduism, one that in its essence is a tool of transcendence. Thus, just as in the West the written musical sign – the notes – is a sign pointing toward another sign or symbol – the sound – which will be functional or transcendent depending on its nature, traditional music acts as a double sign, the second of which acts on the symbolic mode and consequently in the realm of the ultimate aim.

But, without looking too far into the next chapter, dealing with emotions as the ultimate signified of the musical sign, the Hindu systems give us a perfect illustration of codes and conventions concerning music/feelings. This can be seen in the following table, provided

by Alain Daniélou, one of the foremost specialists in Indian music: Name

Quality

Modern scale

Tîvra Koumoudvatî Mandâ Chhandovatî Dayâvatî Rajanî Ratikâ Raudrî Krodhâ

intense, acute, poignant, forceful white lotus, lunar flower slow, perverse, cold, apathetic stallion sound, measured sounds Compassion, tenderness pleasant, colorful, libidinous pleasure, sensuality burning, forceful wrath, fury thunder, steel, diamond, severe, insolent diffuse, penetrating, timide pleasure, love, delights purifying, ornamental, excuse pardon, destructible, earth

Bb min B B maj C Db min Db min D Eb min Eb

Vajrikâ Prasârinî Prîtih Marjanî Kshitih

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Raktâ Sandîpanî Alâpinî Madantî Rohinî Ramyâ Ugrâ Kshobhinî

red, passionate, colorful, playful stimulating, passionate speaking, conversing erotic, springtime, intoxicating young girl, lightning, flowering night, love, pleasure, rest, calm sharp, passionate, cruel, formidable, powerful irresolute, agitated

F# F# maj G Ab Ab maj A A maj Bb

Thus, whether they are monophonic or polyphonic, traditional or evolutionary, serving a function or an ultimate aim, the various qualities of music act in the same way on our body, by modifying in minute yet perceptible ways the awareness of our present state.

Through his research in neurology Antonio Damasio has initiated a major advance in our understanding of the mind, as well as an enterprise promising applications in the field of music that are somewhat adventurous: to reconcile the modern composer with the body, the sentiments and emotions…

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5

BODIES OF SOUND

“To go all the way to the naked flesh of emotion…”

Debussy “Love is not natural, and desire itself is not natural for long. But true sentiments are works of art.”

Alain, Remarks on Happiness During the past thirty years, neurology like all the modern sciences has opened up new horizons that can be called not just epistemological, but truly philosophical and metaphysical.

But because neurology, owing to its field of research, borders on intimacy, on the deep essence of our being, as well as on our consciousness of that being, these discoveries have remained until now a subject of some sensitivity, provoking highly emotional reactions.

It is impossible to do as neurologist Antonio Damasio has done -- trace the origins of our consciousness and our feelings – without venturing into pathways riddled with traps: religious taboos, rationalist biases, all born of fear, the daughter of ignorance. In the heart of science itself, resistance has long held sway because “feelings … remained elusive… private and inaccessible… feelings were beyond the bounds of science, thrown outside the door not just by the naysayers…but by card-carrying neuroscientists themselves, proclaiming allegedly insurmountable limitations.”44 Damasio’s basic assumption is, first, that everything, in our most sophisticated thoughts, our most complex feelings, our most brilliant intuitions, our most prophetic dreams and visions, can be observed, explained, “inserted” by the neural structures of the brain; and, second, that what happens in the brain is permanently interconnected with the entirety of our body.

On the basis of these two premises, Damasio demonstrates that our emotions, and especially our feelings, are born of a certain perception by the body, this body that is stimulated and reconfigured by “emotionally competent objects.”45 In exchange, these emotions and feelings will trigger new thoughts and bodily sensations thanks to chemical and hormonal substances secreted by the brain. “Feeling, in the pure and narrow sense of the word, was the idea of the body being in a certain way…Its contents consisted of representing a particular state of the body.”46 We have here, then, a truly alchemical vision of the human being in its entirety, a vision that reminds us that “what is above is similar to what is below.” The “inferior” and 44

Antonio Damasio, Looking for Spinoza: Joy, Sorrow and the Feeling Brain (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2003), p. 4.

45 Damasio, Looking for Spinoza, p. 50.

46 Damasio, Looking for Spinoza, p. 85.

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material body will influence the mind as a function of its humors and its condition, and mind will respond by a feeling that, in turn, will “redescend” into the dense matter of the body to play with its somatic system and give it a new configuration.

Damasio opposes the mind/body duality upheld by Descartes. Asserting his philosophical allegiance to Spinoza, for whom there was “but one unique substance in man,” Damasio attempts a unified theory of body, brain and mind/consciousness, which leads to a major practical result: mind and intellect, if they are capable of understanding how the emotions function and how they are linked to the body, can, if controlled by the body, renew contact with the emotions and channel them. In other words, a mind that suffers, a sick mind, by knowing the links between body and brain, can regain control over itself – with all the practical applications this can imply in treating numerous psychiatric difficulties.47 Where do God, the soul, and music figure in all this?

We will see a bit later how such a materialistic theory of the human mind can accommodate the principles of causality and metaphysical concerns.

For the moment, we are concerned with noting how these discoveries show that the human being, permanently subject to the five primary emotions48 and to their variations, reacts almost like a sensitive “drum” on which these emotions play; the drum sticks used by these particular musicians are what Damasio calls “emotionally competent objects,” or ECO, a term we will use frequently in this chapter. An ECO could be a dog that looks threatening, the thought of a loved one, a repulsive sight, anything that calls forth an emotion in us.

So, thanks to Damasio, we understand that this dog that has just leapt out at us and is frightening us has triggered an emotion that can take the form of a series of physical symptoms: stomach cramp, perspiration, feeling of oppression…

But primarily, and most importantly, any series of physical sensations, even without the presence of an ECO that is either threatening or benevolent, will cause the appearance of a feeling, even an emotion.

Thus Damasio demonstrates that a vague feeling of sadness or of ill humor can find its cause in a passing malfunction by the body: indigestion, a slight pain in a limb. The “body map” becomes modified thereby and our mind interprets this change by a feeling of unknown origin. Damasio shows, in fact, that it is easy to trigger an outburst of tears or

47

For a practical development of these methods of control, I recommend David Servan-Schreiber, The Instinct to Heal: Curing Depression, Anxiety and Stress Without Drugs and Without Talk Therapy (Rodale, 2003).

48 According to Darwin’s classification: fear, sadness, happiness, anger, and disgust are comparable to the three primary colors, which generate infinite combinations. See Charles Darwin, The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002) and Liliane Maury, Les émotions de Darwin à Freud (Paris: PUF, 1993).

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hysterical laughter merely by stimulating a zone of the brain that controls the insertion of a part of the body.

Reading these works, we realize that the cause-and-effect relationships between feelings, stimuli or ECO, and the sensations of the body, are much more complex than we had previously believed; we are inclined to follow either Descartes and his mind/body duality or the more “New Age” theories about the mind’s omnipotence in controlling and curing physical ailments. Thus, in a psychosomatic change, which one came first? The body, the mind, or our environment, the source of the ECO? The most powerful of these emotionally competent objects or stimuli are those that trigger fear or anger, in circumstances in which these emotions represent a survival reflex. It is normal and salutary to experience an instinctive fear at the sight of a potentially dangerous animal or at the memory of such an encounter.

But the ECO that we seek most eagerly are those capable of triggering pleasure, since our being in its entirety, from brain to heart to stomach and down to our very marrow, seeks out positive emotions, quite simply because they help our organism – body plus mind – to live in homeostatis49 and because this homeostasis is necessary for a life that is long, healthy and happy. “For Spinoza organisms naturally endeavor, of necessity, to persevere in their own being; that necessary endeavor constitutes their actual essence. They strive to achieve a ‘greater perfection’ of function, which Spinoza equates with joy.”50 Better yet, neurology proves to us today that feelings and positive emotions, pleasure, joy, correspond to higher levels of mental activity: “In the sadness condition there were marked deactivations in prefrontal cortices… In the happiness condition, we found the opposite… These findings accord well with the fact that the fluency of ideation is reduced in sadness and increased in happiness.”51 Of all the positive ECO, which point toward pleasant feelings, music is one of the most powerful. We will see precisely why in the chapters devoted to desire, but it is obvious that music “plays” on our body, leading to a complex musical score made up of infinite nuances, a quasi-ecstasy for music lovers, from the most spontaneous to the most mystical, or quite simply toward a simple but ample feeling of well-being.

Even what we believe is a strictly intellectual pleasure, from listening to music that is purely conceptual and sophisticated, remains a pleasure, that is, an insertion by the brain into certain regions of the body that react harmoniously to what is heard and generate a feeling of pleasure that we would like to believe is entirely cerebral. It is obvious, as we will see later, that music can “excite” negative feelings – sorrow, anguish, and so on – but that the listener, instinctively, will grativate to sound-objects that are able to provide a vital homeostasis.

49

Homeostasis is the ability of any system to maintain its balanced functionality despite any constraints from the outside.

50 Damasio, Looking for Spinoza, p. 12.

51 Damasio, Looking for Spinoza, p. 101.

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The very terminology of ECO, emotionally competent object, when applied to music, invites us to consider it as a valid semiological group: Objects, in this case sounds, that take the place of something else.

Emotionally competent objects, that is, signifying something to our body, which consequently will react.

Now because the thing signified, namely the feeling on hearing sound-objects, is this “something else” that is the first prerequisite of a sign, the circle is closed; and finally, mixing semiology and neurology, we reach an approach to music as a semiology of the emotions.

A musical work, considered from this viewpoint, will have the remarkable property of being played “on” our sound-bodies, which like a great organ with multiple registers and keyboards, will be able to create the most elaborated emotional complexes. Music, which adds nuance to the five primary emotions, will authorize transitions, variations based on these basic colors, generating truly “ineffable” feelings: since unspeakable, inexpressible, inexplicable are in fact among the most common terms in music.

Some may object here that music, if it is a semiotics or a symbolic mode, means more, to many listeners or musicians, than a set of emotions or feelings. That is perfectly true, and reminds us of the categories of listener cited at the beginning of this work: from indifference to swooning, by way of cerebral listening, music invites us to react very diversely, depending on our temperament. And yet, sometimes without our knowledge, music, as a physical phenomenon of vibrations, induces above all certain changes in our perception of our body.

In any case, it is essential to recall that we are permanently subjected to an emotional state, even if tenuous, and that music systematically amplifies this state. Damasio, whom I asked whether there existed an “absolute zero” in emotion, a threshold of neutrality, of perfect calm, answered without a moment’s hesitation: “Absolutely never.”

If pleasure, the positive feelings, go hand in hand with a higher level of mental effectiveness, we can observe nevertheless that, ever since the height of the romantic era, creators laid claim to non-well-being, existential angst, pain, indeed self-destruction – all considered virtues; while they viewed happiness, joy, gaiety as just so many proofs of amateurism or stupidity. A state of unhappiness or depression, until the late twentieth century, was proof of intelligence and lucidity. Rather than seeing this as contradicting Damasio, I can conclude that these artists took pleasure in their suffering, no doubt a masochistic pleasure but one that in fact acted, like any other positive stimulus, on the brain’s process of ideation; this was a paradoxical pleasure that fed on particular ECO, extending from opium to a melancholic trance.

We are forever in a state of emotional receptiveness, a state that varies depending on the stimuli from the outside world, and among those stimuli, music is one of the most potent.

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That statement has two consequences: For the composers of our time, it is no longer conceivable – if and only if one wants to be played, heard and understood – to be unaware that music can of course be a sophisticated language, belonging to a high and sublime region of our psychic anatomy, but that is in no uncertain terms a language of the emotions and feelings, which in turn influence and directly rule the most ethereal zones of our mind. The fact that the “higher” zones, as Damasio demonstrates, can exert a control over the “lower” zones, and vice versa, leads to the second consequence: For the listener, the quantity of emotions that can be derived from hearing a piece of music will depend on his particular faculty to respond to a greater number of ECO. Since these ECO are signs, they have codes, which are born of conventions. The preceding chapter showed that there are codes that are acquired innately, while others are assimilated instantly because they are attached to our common ancestral roots, and still others, finally, come into being gradually with the more or less rapid evolution of language. In that third category, the more complex music becomes, the more numerous are the new codes that need to be learned. As for the symbols, they also belong to two categories parallel to those of the codes: acquired symbols, which the composer mines from a library that already exists, and elaborated symbols, which he conceives himself.

The habit of passively listening to the radio or to recordings of a given genre, without venturing to discover types of music that remain strange or foreign to our ears, not only limits our repertoire of ECO and thus our range of reactions, our flexibility, and the variety of our musical pleasure, but worse yet, deeply distorts our taste, freezing it in a sense within narrow borders, making the ear too lazy for subsequent exploratory effort.

Isn’t this just like what happens when a child gets to indulge every whim about what to eat and when? A child is almost always inclined to eat the same things in a very narrow range, and such indulgence will undermine his persistence, taste or curiosity to explore new flavors. It would mean a steady diet of burgers and fries for the rest of his life.

That’s just what we see occurring in music. Let children grow up in a musical setting that is meager and limited, and they will have no spontaneous wish, later, to listen to anything but musical fast food.

Let music lovers listen exclusively to works from Bach to Debussy, and they will develop no interest in addressing their sensibility to music that is different or more modern.

Exposed to types of music based on new codes, they will insist they are hearing nothing at all.

And yet there is no piece of music that is totally neutral, or emotionally incompetent. The fear, disgust, anger, displeasure felt by music lovers put off by contemporary music are the direct result of their perceptions of the ECO, but they are unable to imbue the musical sign with a precise meaning, a meaning illuminated by the study of the composer’s

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intentions. And therefore this music is experienced, at the worst, as anxiety-provoking, frightening; at best, as a source of boredom.

All of this, of course, comes down to one and the same thing. Non-tonal music inspires a strongly negative emotion, which points to a sign that cannot be interpreted, a sign that causes internal imbalance leading to negative emotions and feelings.

We would draw composers’ attention to a certain fact: neurology teaches us that there is one way to induce a negative emotion in a listener – submerge him for an extended period in an auditory or visual milieu in which he can find no point of reference. It works almost every time.

A bored listener can end up in one of three possible situations: In the first case, he or she is an excellent musician, to whom the work “speaks” but says nothing. That proves nothing definitive about the work itself, which may well reveal itself to the expert in a second hearing. In the second case, the listener is “tone deaf,” a listener belonging to our first category,52 for whom all sound is just a part of the general ambient noise. The third type, finally, is an individual who, even though lost amid the codes of the score, will react to this disorientaiton with indifference rather than anxiety. Not everyone panics in a labyrinth.

The reader may object that, if there are positive musical works, positive ECO, then there must also be negative musical ECO, and that the listener’s education has nothing to do with whether he is repulsed by certain music; all he is doing is receiving the composer’s message, which is negative.

There is truth in this argument, but even if the creator, unknowingly or deliberately, were inclined to transmit negative emotions, that would not prevent us from exploring his world and seeking out new auditory pleasures.

It is perfectly obvious that composers, like all twentieth-century artists, authors or intellectuals, have been the spokespersons for a generalized malaise, a nihilism that can take the form of war on the large scale, or of an artistic manifesto for the individual.

Equally true, the artist always reflects the world in which he lives, and so the products of this epoch – hardly a “Belle Epoque” – could not help being, as a rule, dark and pessimistic. Even later, when those like Barraqué or Zimmermann took their lives after an itinerary marked by despair, while Aragon and his ilk said no to everything,53 and Breton and company urged everyone to “grab a revolver, go out on the street and fire at random, as much as possible, into the crowd, to achieve the simplest of all surrealist acts,”54 these were not especially joyous ECO. 52

See Chapter 1, above. ”We love neither art nor artists; [we wanted] no more painters, no more musicians, no more sculptors or authors…no more anarchists ro socialists… no more police, no more fatherland. In a word, enough of all these stupidities, we want nothing, nothing, NOTHING, NOTHING, NOTHING.” Louis Aragon, 1920.

54 André Breton, Second Surrealist Manifesto, 1930.

53

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But, as I showed in the chapter on semiology, the creator’s ideas tend to become reified, incarnated into the product, which for the creator, and for him or her alone, is the sign pointing toward his own thoughts, his era, the circumstances in which he created. Once the product is set in orbit, it undoubtedly possesses an expressive coloring for the human community that can be more or less forceful, but it will be a sign only to the extent that the recipient is able to perceive it as such.

The various attacks by Breton or Aragon have lost the brutality they enjoyed while still new; today they are artifacts among the rich legacy of manifestations of extremes, of nihilism, which had already turned up well before the time of Turgenev, the popularizer of that term. The “contextual sign” thus wears thin, leaving the semantic sign, the combination of those signs that, if and only if the work possesses some degree of stature, will succeed in touching us, no matter what may be the place, the time or the circumstance.

Thus, to take an example from painting: the celebrated landscape Guernica, painted by Picasso at a frightful moment of the Spanish civil war, almost in the very midst of the cries and blood, painted with the artist’s tears and cries of pain, will evoke a whole range of emotions depending on the interpretants present in the mental “library” of visitors to the Prado.

A tourist, dressed in shorts, will pass by quickly, satisfied at having seen a famous painting, even if he had expected it to be a bit smaller…

A veteran of the war in Spain will have to struggle not to avert his eyes from the painting, he’ll probably have to sit down, overcome with emotion, since he alone is so closely involved in the painter’s lived experience, so deeply initiated in the same mystery.

I have personally observed and studied the painting, as a spectator born in the 1960s, far removed from that war, and after more than an hour spent analyzing the shapes and lines, I suddenly felt a shock on discovering a movement in the composition, from right to left, and I could literally “see” the violence, I understood why the faces are ravaged, why the horse rearing up has its eyes flared, while the lamp in the upper area, at center left, screamed in my head, its light catching me off guard just as these people were caught by death.

But in the end, on leaving the gallery, I was filled, for some time thereafter, with a powerful sense of aesthetic delight, because that is the ultimate aim of every work of art.

I was not suffering like Picasso, much less like those people in the painting. I had had the dual experience of an artistic transfer and of human compassion. But this transfer took place only at the cost of a long, intense period of contemplation.

The extremely negative ECO of this work, transcended by Picasso’s genius, transmitted to my mind a paradoxical message, a painful pleasure that we are correct to question. Is it

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masochistic? Or rather, as stated above, since the human being is a tragic animal, more skilled and better “outfitted” for suffering than enjoyment, do we set ourselves up precisely to find, in art, in transcendence, a truly alchemical process for transforming our negative emotions into a pleasure that is pure, intense and truly acidic?

The example of Guernica should suffice to prove that listening to a piece of music that is atonal, dissonant, strange can be, even if it’s the product of pessimists and desperate men, the occasion for an enriching artistic experience. I repeat, and I insist, that no musical work is a vehicle for intrinsically negative ECO; it’s the listener, through his own degree of culture, sensibility, curiosity, who raises these ECO to a higher level where he can truly contemplate them with pleasure. The listener, basically, not only interprets but actually re-composes the work that is presented to him.

Damasio gives us a clinical explanation for the phenomenon: “…the brain has a direct means to respond to the object as feelings unfold.…The brain can act directly on the very object it is perceiving.…In some instances the changes may be akin to taking a brush and fresh paint and modifying the painting.”55 Here is another example of the extreme subjectivity of ECO and of music in general. Like it or not, admit it or not, we are all sensitive to our national anthems, whether they trigger in us a feeling of pride or, if we’re in revolt against society, of rejection, but we rarely remain indifferent. That is completely normal, because a national anthem is functional music at its most potent, symbolizing as it does our cultural and geographic moorings, even our ethnic roots.

In some ways it is a powerful image of our social identity.

As a sonic image, it acts directly on our whole body and consequently on our emotions.

And so, after watching our national soccer team pull off a superb exploit, at the first notes of our national anthem, we can feel our chest swell, as a shiver runs up our spine and our eye tears up.56 And now listen to the opponent’s national anthem. The listeners and athletes on that side are overcome by the same syndrome of hyperemotivity, while we remain cold and indifferent, not from hostility toward our adversary but because that music, unknown and devoid of intimate connections for us, absolutely fails to move us.

And this proves that there is nothing in national anthem A or B that is intrinsically beautiful, touching or overwhelming. But rather, quite simply, anthem A is an ECO that 55

Damasio, Looking for Spinoza, pp. 91-92.

“For curious reasons, certain musical instruments, particularly the human voice, and certain musical compositions, evoke emotive states that include a host of responses such as making the hair stand on end, producing shudders…chills and shivers down the spine.” Damasio, Looking for Spinoza, pp. 102-103.

56

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provokes ready-made responses within listeners from country A, because anthem A is a sign for which they possess the interpretive codes, known in semiology as interpretants.

Most instructive here is the fact that non-musical interpretants, such as patriotism, team spirit, love of a sport, in short, codes that are social and not particularly artistic, can inject such potent emotional triggers into music that, we must admit, is not in itself endowed for overwhelming the listener, music that, in another context, would already have found its way into the History of Art filing cabinet.

An important point to meditate: in some types of music, what touches us most deeply is not necessarily music.

All forms of functional music derive from the same phenomenon. Entertainment music responds to codes involving shared friendship, conviviality, flirtation, seduction, membership in a clan and the like. In punk rock, for instance, the wild rhythms and saturated timbre are the signs, or semiotics, of membership in the punk movement, in exactly the same way as the Mohawk hairstyle and khaki pants. The quality of the message, or of the score, makes little difference; all it takes to fulfill the function is the presence of a certain number of parameters.

It’s no longer quality that’s at stake in functional music, but merely the marshalling of a set of necessary ingredients to impose the desired atmosphere. Punchy sounds for disco, pipe organs for the devout, fife and drum for a parade.

I remember a very religious lady who once explained to me that the sound of an organ, mixed with the chiming of bells, were indispensable conditions for her spiritual preparation for a church service. She was absolutely not a music lover; she admitted to me that she never listened to music, because she found it boring. On the other hand, she could not imagine church without the sound of an organ. It would be hard to find a better example of music used for its function.

Conversely, music lovers of little or no religious fervor will relish a toccata by Bach for its musical qualities alone, without the slightest metaphysical aspiration. Both groups will have the same feelings on hearing an organ, but one will be manipulated by an emotion that depends on a function of the music, on sounds associated with social-religious concepts, while the other will experience emotions liberated by their active listening linked to the ultimate aim of the music, which is to magnify in full consciousness. What we are basically dealing with here are different levels of freedom.

The upshot of all of this is that we need to be able to identify the manipulative power of a piece of music before deciding to yield to its charm lucidly and actively, at the risk of being its dupe. I’ll give a final example to support my argument. At the end of many Hollywood productions there comes a moment when the hero, who after an actionpacked story has just saved the world, launches into a great vibrant speech, glorifying his dead companions and the rescued ideal. Just then, without fail, a trumpet is heard in the background, slowly and evocatively, which serves the function of triggering the

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spectator’s customary little tear. Personally, I always refuse to give in to this packaging of my emotions, my moral or patriotic sense. In a word, I refuse to be manipulated.

But giving in to emotion can be very satisfying, provided we know we are playing the packagers’ game. Damasio has another explanation for this: “…emotionally competent stimuli can be detected. Subsequently, attention and proper thought can be diverted to those stimuli.”57 And Damasio might well add, concerning music: diverted to those stimuli, or else by those stimuli. This, then, is where the choice comes in – active, free listening, or else manipulation.

This strong-willed attitude, complementing the listener’s enterprise, as demonstrated in the example of Guernica, of recomposing the work being experienced, is based on a dual desire to be alert and to protect one’s freedom of judgment. It goes without saying that people love to manipulate other people. In a book on music, it makes sense to emphasize the fact that this art can easily be used as powerful influential leverage.

We turn now to the positive side of music’s power to play on our feelings and transform our body/mind into a veritable “emotional organ.” The composer aspires to create the numinous, to seize and hold the listener, to open up unknown worlds of delight.

Thus, the first half of the nineteenth century, notably under the influence of Beethoven, saw music develop new emotional spaces entirely through its power as a language, and, at least in an initial period, independently of the size or effects of the orchestra.

I cannot resist sharing Berlioz’s impressions on hearing Beethoven’s String Quarter in C Sharp Minor: “I came under the influence of the genius of this author. Imperceptibly, its action grew in strength; I felt an unaccustomed circulatory disturbance, my pulse became faster; starting with the second movement, which follows the first without interruption, I turned, petrified with astonishment, to one of my neighbors and saw his face, pale and bathed in perspiration, and everyone else motionless as statues. Gradually I felt an awful weight on my chest like a horrific nightmare, felt my hairs stand on end, my teeth clench forcefully, all my muscles contract and finally, on the emergence of a phrase of the finale, rendered with the utmost violence by Baillot’s forceful bow, cold tears, tears of anguish and terror, forced themselves painfully through my eyelids and brought the crowning touch to this cruel emotion.”58 Professor Damasio could hardly have dreamed of a patient with such strong reactivity, or a richer, more intense clinical description of the spectacular effects of the musical sign on an individual’s psychic anatomy. It is always easy, of course, to dismiss such testimony as another instance of Dr. Berlioz’s alleged romantic hypersensitivity.59 But for my part, I see no great difference, at the level of exaltation, between that condition and the nihilist 57

Damasio, Looking for Spinoza, p. 61.

From “Du sentiment de l’art chez les masses,” in La revue et gazette musicale, 21 February 1836.

59 Berlioz had of course started out as a medical student.

58

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hysteria – more approved in the twentieth century of course, though no less excessive – of many artists and intellectuals of that period.

The second half of the nineteenth century, in turn, discovered the emotional potency of timbre, especially that of the brass instruments – horns, trumpets, trombones and so on – but also of the sonorous volume; Wagner’s orchestra, refined as never before, knows how to inspire total commitment by the public at regular intervals by means of an instrumental panoply of unquestioned intrinsic musical quality and is never for a second unaware of the fatal charm it exerts on the consenting listener.

Contemporary music is not far behind when it comes to the use of bewitching orchestral colors. To echo my discussion of the four elements, instrumentation, along with form, is the only parameter that has sustained a linear, regular development in terms of communicating expression, whereas the three others have been deliberated attenuated.

The moderns’ use of contrast between extreme nuances, their crescendos and decrescendos stretched to such scope and length as to play the role of leading actors, their unheard-of instrumental combinations and colors, qualify as very strong ECO of course, but obviously, for the musical public, they still fail to compensate for the absence of landmarks, except for one – disorientation itself. It bears repeating that, in contemporary music, for the public at large, bereft of others that would be more immediately usable, disorientation becomes the sign. And the public, interpreting this sign as an anxiety, has no other response but to reject it.

To conclude, let me say that there is a necessity for the music lover to develop his listening abilities, to exercise his attentive faculty, and use this alertness in the course of successive hearings of a work, to trace the emotional lines of force of music, just as attentive observation of a painting allows us to follow its axes and tensions. This active listening posture has no need to be analytical, I hasten to reassure the listener, but only to be attentive, concentrated, open, so that after a certain time it can liberate thoughts, emotions and feelings that are close, similar, analogous to those of the creator, as was demonstrated by my experience with Guernica.

The upshot of this “exercise” is the creation of a link that, if it is not quite a perfect coincidence between the feeling of the creator creating and that of the listener listening, is still strong enough to contradict Stravinsky’s claim about the inability of music to express anything.

For the composer, the conscientious use of the emotional potential of the work of music cannot be ignored, or regarded as futile, trivial or superficial. There is an urgent necessity to consider a systematic exploration, and then – to borrow Damasio’s term – an insertion of the relations between the musical phenomenon and the genesis of emotions and sentiments.

I consider these attempts just as important as all those eminently useful and honorable studies that have been conducted on acoustics and musical electronics, because research

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into the emotional state implies that we are concerning ourselves with music’s ultimate aim, which is, among other things, to be played, appreciated, not only by a small militant community but by the music-loving public at large, just as it always was in the past.

And no one should argue here that because the musical sign is highly subjective, such a private matter inside the creator and the listener alike, the intersubjectivity established at the moment of listening will make any systematization or codification of a possible musical language emotionally impossible.

To that I would respond with an example, a deliberately spectacular one, the emotional analysis of the opening bars of Richard Strauss’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra, one of the world’s two or three best-known sequences of classical music, thanks to the often abusive uses to which it has been put in film or television.

Let’s consider how Strauss brings together musical elements that, instantly, set free in the listener’s mind certain feelings apt to associate this sequence with the numinous, the trancendent, conquest, victory or even doubt – which is expressed at the very end of the work.

We should point out before beginning that everything in this sequence has been conceived

by Strauss in total awareness of the symbolism of numbers; people interested in this symbolism will easily understand what is enunciated in the following paragraphs.*** First of all, a C in the extreme low range, barely audible, establishes on the first note of the scale what is not yet a key, since it is too low to be perceived as such, but rather a true representation of the spirit of Genesis floating on the dark waters at the beginning of time. Wagner uses the same procedure at the beginning of his Ring, but with the note of E-flat.

Then the trumpets, in unison, play three notes, C, G, C, or a fifth and a fourth, which, in combination, produce an octave and thereby immediately evoke a chord stretched to its limit, an arc, a closed circle. Of course, the first C evokes the One, while the G evokes the Duality and the second C the third that leads to unity.

(Ex.5.1) The tension is resolved in the double major/minor chord, as searing as the first “Fiat Lux,” “let there be light.” The forces of the universe appear to look alike. A strong feeling of expectation overcomes us. The fact that Strauss puts the major chord first – the chord emotionally perceived as open – and then the minor, or closed chord, makes us realize intuitively tht an introspective tension has been established and that, perforce, this tension toward the interior has to be followed by an opening, by the contrary or minormajor…

The Word expresses itself…Wisdom! (Ex. 5.2)

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The timpani sound twelve beats on the notes C and G, tonic and dominant, the two pillars of tonality. In a work based on Zarathustra, a namesake for Zoroaster or for the Zarastro of Die Zauberflöte, it is not surprising to find the figure of the twelve contellations. This sequence on C, G, C, etc., recalls the C, G, C of the trumpets, like a response, an echo of the whole cosmos to the initial call of the three notes. (Ex. 5.3)

The trumpets repeat the ternary motif, and this time, just as expected, the double chord that literally explodes is minor/major – opening. After “let there be light,” major/minor, we have “and there was light.” The word is fulfilled…Force! (Ex. 5.4) (Ex. 5.3) Again we hear the same twelve notes by the timpani.

Then the trumpets resume, for the third time, announcing the apotheosis. This time the light burst forth in all its splendor and Strauss uses the fourth degree of the scale, a cunningly calculated surprise effect, because until then he had contained us in an extreme tension on the first degree of tonality in C. This fourth degree, F major, is experienced by the listener as the ecstacy of contemplation, creation presented in all its luminosity… Beauty! (Ex. 5.5) Clearly, Strauss composed the opening of this long symphonic poem – followed by four minutes of a very lovely music following this introduction – perfecdtly aware of the emotional impact of the sound elements, or emotionally competent objects (ECO), of the traditional symbolism of numbers, as well as the role of memory in listening and in the transformation of feelings.

Music, unlike painting, is in fact dependent on the passage of time, and memory, by establishing reference points, creating expectations, is the principal factor in active listening. This is confirmed by Damasio: “We process not only the presence of an object but its relation to others and its connection to the past. In those circumstances the apparatus of emotions naturally evaluates, and the apparatus of the conscious mind thinkingly coevaluates.”60 A final word: basically the most objective type of listening imaginable is never more than a game conducted according to certain rules. Where do the rules come from? Roland Barthes has a good answer, in relation to reading – and everything that follows applies closely to listening to music – “these rules come from a millenary logic of narration, a symbolic form that constitutes us even before our birth, in a word, that immense cultural space of which our person … is only a passage.”

60

Damasio, Looking for Spinoza, p. 54.

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Barthes, again, who basically ratified Damasio’s theories twenty years earlier by writing: “Reading puts our whole body to work…summoned by the signs of the text, by all the languages that traverse it and that make up, as it were, the deep moirée of sentences.”61 And he adds a bit farther on: “In reading, all the emotionsof the body are present, mixed, rolled up: fascination, vacation, pain, voluptuosity; in reading, the body is overwhelmed.”

What composer contemporaneous with Barthes would have dated to write anything approaching that?

And yet nothing exists in music outside of emotion: musicals and their combinations trigger perception and thus, immediately, emotion, tenuous though it may be. The combined emotions in a piece of music generate a particular state, which will be more or less elaborated depending on the listener’s degree of expertise, but which will always be, like it or not, in the field of emotion. Contemplation, admiration and even the purest meditation, all those terms refer to a state of mind, and thus of the body and consequently to an emotion. The desire to deny this is no longer hypocrisy, it is ignorance, pure and simple.

What is the source then of this aversion felt by twentieth-century composers – those most militant members of the avant-garde – toward the body and its upheavals: emotions, feelings; and this fascination for exegesis that is logical, rigid, not to mention frigid? No doubt there was a desire to put an end to the imagery of troubadours, damned aratists, hairy, alcoholic youths? And what of this recourse, not to mention retreat, into the jargon of Science?

Science, rehabilitated, sometimes abused, was summoned to rescue a music that was in search of a new identity. Science, with its invulnerable prestige, its implacable methodology, its incontestable results. And Science, above all, a new vector of the human genius, this genius that seems to travel through the ages, like a cloud, from one realm of the spirit to the other, by a pendulum-like historic movement, the genius of physics and metaphysics for the Egyptians, a philosophic and aesthetic genius for the Greeks, political and military for the Romans, Genius of poetry, then painting and then music for the West, and now seemingly ready to abandon Art for Science, or at least to condemn art to more ephemeral works.

In the twentieth century, in fact, the musician invested Science out of fear of losing his soul together with his genius, whereas the soul is perhaps the true ultimate aim of music.

61

Roland Barthes, Essais critiques (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1981).

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6

MUSIC, LANGUAGE OF THE SOUL?

“Music is perhaps the unique example of what could have been – had there not been the invention of language, the formation of words, the analysis of ideas -communication between souls.”

Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past The history of music from the beginning is basically the history of two movements: the quest for the perfect language and the quest for the universal language. The two are in fact not at all synonymous, as Umberto Eco reminds us: “It is one thing to search for a language capable of mirroring the true nature of objects; it is quite another to search for the language which everyone might, or ought to, speak. There is nothing that rules out that a language which is perfect might be accessible only to a few, while a language that is universal might be also imperfect.”62 His words sum up precisely the distinction between introspective, speculative musicians on the one hand, and prodigal, extroverted musicians on the other.

Marcel Proust, cited just above, would have agreed with Socrates, who, in Plato’s Kratylus, posited an approach to knowledge not at all through words, which are weak and imprecise, but through things or, better yet, through ideas.

Saint Augustine follows that same path, developing an idea that, visibly and in keeping with Eco, obsessed Europe in its infancy: “...European culture arose as a reflection on the destiny of a multilingual civilization…a remedy for linguistic confusion needed to be sought. Some looked backwards, trying to rediscover the language spoken by Adam.

Others looked ahead, aiming to fabricate a rational language possessing the perfections of the lost speech of Eden."63 A language made up of pure ideas without recourse to the word would be ideal, if of course we were not obliged, to reach that level, to make use of words, the motor and fuel of our consciousness.

Music cannot lay claim to the role of natural universal language, because it cannot communicate complex thoughts, or even simple ones, such as “What time is it?” – except by singing it – in other words, nearly all of verbal knowledge escapes its power of emanation.

It is therefore by extrapolation that we speak of language, or better, of musical language.

62

Umberto Eco, The Search for the Perfect Language, trans. James Fentress (Cambridge, Mass., and Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1995), p. 73.

63 Eco, The Search for the Perfect Language, pp. 18-19.

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On the other hand, the universality of music, the fact that a Mozart symphony can be appreciated as much in Paris as in Tokyo, and this strong impression of something transmitted to us from the “great beyond,” as well as its intimate connivance with Number and Principles, has kept inspiring the hope, at all periods, of developing a perfect language through music.

But it would be the language of disembodied beings, or rather liberated from all dependence, from any need to ask for the time or to submit a stock market order. Or else it would be an additional language, the language used to express ineffable things, to communicate purely abstract and essential concepts. In a word, what musicians are doing every day when they meet up in threes or fours to play chamber music.

It has to be noted that before and after what’s known as “classical music,” or the Golden Age of music for the most nostalgic among us, composers are essentially speculative.

There is much experimentation, from Pythagoras to the medieval Franciscan monks, from Schoenberg to the composer-researchers of IRCAM. In antiquity they sought links between numbers and sounds, in the hope of deducing from there a universal mechanics of sound, just as others, today, are seeking new sonorous spaces in their musical laboratories. All of that derives from the quest for the perfect language, or in other words from an attempt to express the nature of things directly or to explore and reveal what is hidden behind things.

At the opposite extreme, the period from Bach to Debussy is marked by the development of a language of universal accessibility, its phenomenal success and the facility with which it spread across our world. And of course, we should not forget the nostalgia that we can harbor for that era.

Composers of that period were more concerned with expression than experimentation. Or more exactly, their research in sound-material, their rapport with this material, was more sensual and, in the noble sense of the term, more sentimental. Their enterprise was less intellectual, more intuitive. Their password: inspiration.

And yet it makes little difference what idol, perfumed or not, is venerated by the creator in the act of creation; it is secondary to know if he believes in the muse or not and if his rapport with the act of composing is cerebral or spontaneous.

What we want is the awareness of that part of our psychic anatomy on which music operates, above the simple emotions. Common usage, to describe what is most subtle in us, has ratified the term “soul,” even if, for many persons, an unwelcome confusion arises between soul and sentiment, or even sentimentality.

Damasio, and Darwin before him, have told us: sentiment belongs to the body, it is the body. Soul, whatever our spiritual options – or lack of them – may be, is the symbol of what is no longer body, or at least of what is absolutely independent of it.

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Let us leave aside any attempt to isolate or analyze the soul, a subject that has never been exhausted by the works of philosophy, theology and metaphysics; we can also pass over the innumerable famous quotations on soul and art, soul and literature, soul and cuisine, and so on.

All of us are more or less in agreement about what we mean by soul. Nevertheless, I will attempt a provisional definition: soul is everything we do not know in ourselves, everything that is not us.

The unconscious is not the soul, because it is the unknown-us. The soul is the known “non-us,” and through that light of consciousness that it illuminates in our mind, it is even what we know factually the best. But factual knowledge is not true knowledge; we do not have true knowledge of either the location or the nature of the soul, we know factually only that it is the most subtle level of our psyche. And when I say that it is not us, the statement applies both from the religious viewpoint, according to which the soul is the fraction of God – thus a borrowing – that animates us, and from the physiological viewpoint, since we say that no element of body or mind has any power or influence over the part “inside us.” Otherwise it would no longer be the soul. Thus, “in us” but not “us,” known factually but not at all deeply known.

Buddhism is the philosophy that best analyzes this apparent paradox concerning the levels of being, and best demonstrates how the soul is essentially depersonalized, just as our pitiable attachment to our personality keeps us from “seeing” our soul.

The soul’s special preserve, the place where it reveals itself most clearly, is the realm of the numinous, of which I have already spoken. Confronted with the manifestation of the numinous, the body seems disconnected, feelings fall silent and the interior silence that ensues is basically the very aim pursued by the work that conveys the numinous. This must be made clear: the true silence and true grandeur of a cathedral are the silence and grandeur that it reveals in us. The true immensity and true peace of a great, beautiful mountain are the immensity and peace that the sight of this mountain awakens in us.

What we feel at such a time ought to be called meta-feeling, beyond feeling, because what this meta-feeling reflects is no longer “the perception of a certain bodily state,” but rather the appearance of the soul naked and whole, that is, a region of ourselves that, until now, no one succeeded in identifying, locating, analyzing.64 That applies to music as well. Emotional music, sentimental music, cerebral music: they all speak to the soul, but the first one has an emotional backdrop that is so strong that, on hearing it, we have difficulty distinguishing what vibrates in our body from what is illuminated in our soul, what transports us from what transcends us.

To truly identify what speaks to the soul, we must silence the fanfare of the emotions. To listen to Tchaikovsky, for example, in order to locate the most subtle part of our psyche 64

Of course, this vision itself triggers a feeling of well-being, but this feeling, in the case of the confrontation with the numinous, is always a matter of making ourselves accessible, which takes the form of great tranquillity.

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would be totally futile. That music, moreover, which possesses a large, beautiful soul, speaks primarily to our body, it is visceral, it unleashes the whole range of the emotions.

I claim, on the contrary, that it is the most cerebral types of music that point us most clearly toward the soul. Foremost among these types of music is Bach, for whom emotion, always present, is triggered only by the totally clear “feeling,” on listening, of being connected with the soul, and by the soul to something even greater. I deliberately use the term “feeling” to paraphrase Damasio, in a sort of wink, and to indicate here the perception of a state that is not of the body but of the subtle spirit – of the soul.

But I want to establish clearly here that all those who happily confuse soul and feelings – the true feelings, the emotional ones – those who say, “This music has no soul,” to indicate that it elicits no goose bumps, no tears, and in fact no fainting spells for the most tender-hearted, such persons have missed the point. Soulful feelings and other “bruises to the soul” may sometimes produce lovely books, but they leave the object of discussion in a tangle of contradictions.

The soul, if it exists, is not at all us, at least not of our flesh or even of the flesh of our mind, since Damasio shows that that flesh depends closely on our body. The soul, a matter of Faith – as is perfection, truth, or even freedom – if it claims to be what it is, must be entirely free. Free of any bonds with the emotional, unstable animal that we are.

Another important definition of the soul is based then on its most obvious quality: stability. Thanks to this quality, I personally have “caught it in the act” and established my faith in the soul.

As a child, I was obsessed by this idea of the soul, which I took to be the necessary condition for any ulterior act of faith, any metaphysical commitment. If I failed to prove to myself that I had a soul, I would have no further reason to be concerned with God, or Fate. Of course, I was determined on a leap of the soul that would go well beyond the depiction of reality. I had therefore worked out this very basic bit of reasoning: if a soul, that is, a thing that preexists and will continue to exist after me, resides in me, it must be independent of all the turbulence of my body and mind.

At the first flu, which did not fail to occur several times each winter, causing me violent fevers, I noticed that, in the delirium of my body temperature and my medications, I was able to take shelter in a place in my mind, a place secure from the storm and whirlwinds that kept me unable to move, speak or even to think. And there, to my great surprise, through some form of meditation, going into what I identified as a tiny room, I found a place that was perfectly quiet, stable, dispassionate, where I could think and reason – and amused myself by counting and by reciting to myself the poems I had learned by heart. I was no sooner out of this refuge than I succumbed again to the torment and was again incapable of thinking coherently.

Experience with music has given me more than one opportunity of locating that state, which I see as a place rather than as an entity, and as I said, the most appropriate music

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for this intimacy of the soul is, necessarily, the least impassioned, although it’s often the most exciting.

In music I feel, we feel, a great stability, inherent in any elaborated syntax, increased by the directive, structuring notion of tempo, but above all an interior stability, a stability of subject, independent of the torments and passions unleashed by the score itself. Such is the ultimate aim of music, its soul, which speaks to our soul and is the fixed point, the axis of the pendulum, immobile and perfectly tranquil, when the great whirlwind of passions invades the emotional space of our individual self.

And by virtue of this stability it is possible to say, without any risk of romantic nonsense, that music is the language of the soul. Because, to recall something obvious, music, unlike other art forms, moves in time like a river. But it is a river that carries us with it, with its own rhythm from which we cannot deliver ourselves, on pain of abstracting ourselves from the work, of sinking in a sense.

Remember, then, the parable of Heraclitus: “We enter and do not enter the same rivers, we are and are not.”

In fact, if we enter into a river, it continues to flow and is no longer, at moment “y” the river it was at moment “x.” We are in the same river and we are not there.

It is an excellent metaphor for our relationship to the world, which changes outside of us as we do outside of it, at least if we consider this “we” to be the mind/body unity.

The unique, powerful magic of music is its ability to carry us off in a river that flows with us and consequently gives us the certainty that we are entering a world in which, paradoxically, time and space are turned upside down, as if abolished, so that “it follows that by listening to music, and while we are listening to it, we enter into a kind of immortality,” as Claude Lévi-Strauss has written.65 Time no longer changes independently of us, but with us. Space, for it is the sound-objects that structure time and fill space, is everywhere and nowhere at once. Better yet, since Heraclitus says that the river is never something fixed, that can be grasped in a given state, and thus never is, the experience of music thus becomes a unique experience of ontological validation: flowing in a stable way, in phase with our stable soul, it offers us a unique opportunity of living, to our heart’s desire, as often as we wish it, the miracle of union with the Principle.

But this troubling experience is addressed only to the soul, as can easily be demonstrated: in a piece of music – especially one from the romantic period – as soon as a passage moves us particularly, we seize reflexively on the sound that has just touched us, we try to hold tight to it and to make it relive its magic, in sum we stop flowing with the river.

We break away from the work.

65

Claude Levi-Strauss, The Raw and the Cooked, translated by John and Doreen Weightman (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), p. 16.

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This can be seen every day at the opera, where, after the tenor’s high C, the public, pumped full of adrenalin, applauds and shouts, giddy with pleasure and gratitude, in total contempt for the music that has just resumed. The same thing occurs for the final measures of most Italian operas, where the audience, emotionally destroyed by the death of the heroine – the tenor sometimes has the gallantry to die too, with her or, better, in her place – the public with its thunderous ovation drowns out the poor orchestra, trying valiantly to end the work just where the composer wished.

This type of rupture has no danger of occurring in works that appeal to the numinous.

This state, in fact, is not the enemy of the sentiments, but on the contrary the expression of the sentiment of the soul confronted with grandeur. Thus, at the end of Wagner’s Parsifal, it submerges us in the final contemplation of an ultimate facet of its mystery, which has held us suspended above the waves and without risk of sinking, for more than four hours. Four hours that have been strangely contracted, with all their substance, into a space-time that we carry away with us, for a few hours, in our body and for eternity in our soul.

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7

THE BEETHOVEN PHENOMENON

“I know no other sign of superiority for a man than kindness.”

Beethoven To conclude this part of the work devoted to music as language, and before approaching the question of modernism, it seems judicious to explore, albeit incompletely and on what linguists call the “surface level,” certain aspects of Beethoven’s musical language. He is, in fact, the composer who, at the turn of the twentieth century, most forcefully accelerated the drive to modernity, by the quantity of new signs he introduced into the syntax, but also by the increase in the library of objects with the value of ECO (emotionally competent objects) that those new signs generated.

As we have already seen, a sign exists only on the condition that it has been perceived as such, and the musical sign is perceived only if it is experienced. In speaking of form, we noted that the more complex the music, the less cerebral is the experience of listening and, consequently, the more the listening experience must be based on feelings triggered by the new signs. A composer who wants to be at once modern and understood must therefore create new signs that the listener can interpret no matter what. There are two primary conditions for attaining this state of equilibrium: first, that the new signs do not saturate the discourse, and second, that they are wisely deployed, like “registered” mail, by signs already known to the listener. In this perspective, Beethoven’s contribution is phenomenal.

What makes Beethoven a phenomenon is that no other composer ever succeeded in being at the same time so innovative and so popular. We can even say that Beethoven invented and propelled modernism in music. Even more than Mozart or Bach, he explored the possibilities of the sound-material, the musical objects.

And if he has become so very popular, it is because his exploration had only one aim: to give his music the strongest possible human impact.

Beethoven was interested only in Humanity, addressed himself only to the heart, and had no desire to flatter the intellect or to charm an elite. His work in its entirety is a gigantic effort to raise humanity a tone higher, on his Herculean shoulders. To do this, Beethoven marshaled his mental forces, which were immense, in the service of a Promethean inspiration.

Consider for a moment the fact that this man, whose music is, on analysis, of an endless complexity, wrote the greatest number of “smash hits” in classical music and you will understand what can be accomplished by a mind that can link genius to awareness of the force of signs. From his Fifth to the Pastoral, from the Moonlight Sonata to the Ode to Joy, not to mention his Für Elise, the Spring Sonata – so many universally known themes, so many messages addressed to humanity in its entirety.

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I would like to attempt an analysis here of what it is that gives Beethoven’s music this phenomenal universality, the versatility of a music that is both intellectual and popular.

While Beethoven’s genius resists any effort to analyze or reduce it to a formula, the secret of his production may nevertheless reside in one of the constants of German classical and romantic music: the generalized use of the arpeggio.

An arpeggio is the series of notes that form a chord (see Ex. 7.1).

An arpeggio can appear in the successive order of the scale (7.2):

or in a broken sequence (7.3):

Any chord, even a very dissonant one, can be arpeggiated.

But arpeggios, in the music that interests us here, are the ones derived from the perfect major chord (Ex. 7.4) and perfect minor chord (Ex. 7.5).

These chords, as I demonstrated in speaking of signs in music, have a strong power of association with emotional states. Music built on structures that, as base material, rely on these chords or their arpeggio, will therefore have an immediate power of signification.

But let’s immediately demonstrate this omnipresence of the arpeggio by citing an example of a Beethovenian litany that will speak for itself.

We start with the first piano sonata (Ex. 7.6):

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The Moonlight Sonata, first movement (Ex. 7.7):

and its third movement (Ex. 7.8):

The Appassionata Sonata (Ex. 7.9)

In the Fifth Symphony, the Eb-G-C-Eb arpeggio is slightly disguised by the addition of a foreign note – the Ab – but is as present as the weight-bearing structure in an architectural plan (Ex. 7.10):

Eb G C Eb The storm in the Sixth Symphony, known as the Pastoral, consists of an arpeggio in F major and then in D minor (Ex. 7.11):

F major

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The scherzo from the Seventh Symphony (Ex. 7.12):

The four movements of the Ninth Symphony, based on the same arpeggio in D minor, D-A-F-D: First movement (Ex. 7.13)

Second movement (Ex. 7.14)

Third movement (Ex. 7.15)

Here the D minor arpeggio is cleverly hidden inside a tune in Bb major, of which it forms the skeleton.

Fourth movement (Ex. 7.16)

And of course the principal theme, known as the Ode to Joy, contained entirely within a chord in D – but this time D major. Beethoven, after having maintained thus far his D material inside the yoke of the minor, will, only at the end, free the light contained in the major key and thus make optimal use of the semiological capacity of the major as a sign to convey joy (Ex. 7.17):

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Those are just a few examples among dozens of others, not to mention of course the developments that are themselves often based on arpeggios of the initial themes, or on the transformation of non-arpeggiated themes into arpeggiated motives.

Later in the history of German music, the most famous works will also be the ones based on arpeggios, and the most famous of all, Wagner’s Ride of the Valkyries, sounds in fact like a veritable “ode to the arpeggio” (Ex. 7.18):

Beethoven not only possessed the genius of development, but gave it an importance unheard of until then in musical discourse, a groundbreaking importance in the gestures of writing. Use of arpeggios, or of other figures derived from the perfect major or minor chord, has the advantage of providing a strong sign, instantly valid for the listener, of putting her or him somehow at ease, before whirling them off into the labyrinth of its multiple variations.

The theme, the fundamental cell, will be subject to all sorts of treatment, to the point of becoming unrecognizable, and quite often turns into a new theme that, itself, will immediately evolve into something else again; but the start-up signature will remain, like an element that is extremely sympathetic, in the etymological sense.

Let’s return, though, to the famous Fifth.

I would like to show, without requiring any musical expertise to follow the discussion, how Beethoven uses elements that are simultaneously simple and strong, extremely brief, almost like a chromosome that, in its microscopic branches, potentially contains the structure of the entire body.

The basic sequence (Ex. 7.19):

implicitly evokes the C minor chord (Ex. 7.20):

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But Beethoven omits the C, known as the fundamental note in this chord, placing this two-note broken chord in a position of harmonic ambiguity: in fact, a chord made up of two notes can belong to several very different keys if we add one or more other notes, but in the form as announced in the first two measures of the Fifth Symphony, the ear remains in a state of expectation and suspense. At this point in the work, that is, before the third measure, if hearing it for the first time, we could think that this symphony starts either in C minor or in Eb major, since the two repeated notes, G-G-G-Eb, are common to both those tonalities and you need only to add a C in one case to make the minor key become explicit, or else a B-flat to transform it into the major (Ex. 7.21):

This is why the second sequence is indispensable (Ex. 7.22):

-- to make clear that we are indeed in C minor, not B-flat major. In fact, even if we again have nothing but a pair of notes, and thus another possible ambiguity, listening to these two series in sequence provides us implicitly with the “missing” information, telling us that we are in C minor.

Thus, Beethoven could have composed a happy symphony if, instead of the known opening, he had written, for instance (Ex. 7.23):

The only purpose of this little music gag is to show you the force of simple musical signs and the emotional referents that are associated with them: poignant and mournful in one case, light and humorous in the other. Change the meaning of the sign in music, and you’ve got a change of traffic sign that reverses the traffic flow.

Let’s take a look now at the rhythmic impact of those four notes, which gives them their true tragic force.

The “program” of the symphony is human destiny, laid out from one’s birth – from the very first measure – by the prospect of death, which as certain musicologists have said, “knocks at the door” at the start of this work.

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The elements Beethoven chooses, the completely familiar four notes, are those of a funeral march. There are two traditional funereal rhythms. One of them, as in the famous march by Chopin (Ex. 7.24):

and the other, the one we are studying today. Both are made up of four notes; only their rhythm differs.

This is somewhat like what occurs for a wedding march: there is the one by Mendelssohn known to one and all, or its alternative, the one by Wagner, from his Lohengrin.

The theme Beethoven uses for his Fifth Symphony, but also for the slow movement of his Third, is the one that Mahler would later choose to open his own Fifth Symphony. The funereal theme is played much more rapidly in the Mahler, the four notes being enunciated at first entirely on C-sharp, followed by the development of an arpeggio, giving us another very fine example of a theme built on an arpeggio (Ex. 7.25):

The use of a single note and the greater speed of enunciation of these four notes make the parallel between the openings of these two works less obvious. Their kinship appears more clearly in the opening of the third movement of Beethoven’s symphony, where he “flattens” his original theme, reducing it to G alone, but retaining the rhythm of the funeral theme (Ex. 7.26):

It’s hard to imagine a simpler beginning than these four notes. And yet, thanks to the choice of signs, and the awareness of their emotional weight, they are sufficient to serve as the gene for an entire work.

I would like to be able to take the reader on a tour through the signs of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony and, measure by measure, demonstrate how minutely the composer calculated this “emotional voyage.” That is not practicable here, but I will offer a quick scan to emphasize Beethoven’s fidelity to his system, the reliance on the arpeggio, on simple

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emotional material, minimal material in fact, which becomes complex in the course of its development.

The second-movement theme is secreted around a skeleton of interwoven arpeggios (Ex. 7.27):

Ab maj

F min

Bb min

7th arpeggio C maj F maj

Bb min 7th

Ab maj

The third movement, or Scherzo, starts with an arpeggio (Ex. 7.28):

And the theme of the final movement is nothing but scales and arpeggios (Ex. 7.29):

This continues through almost all of Beethoven’s works, up to the final quartets: the complexity of the form and of the development is equaled only by the simplicity of the basic thematic elements. These simple elements will undergo an infinite number of metamorphoses, and it is this process that is evoked by philosopher Gilles Deleuze when he writes: “Music is precisely the adventure of the refrain.”66 For Beethoven, that could mean just one thing: that his work, as sophisticated as it may be, could not for that reason lose sight of its ultimate aim: the Other. And what better way is there to touch the other and bring him/her on a dizzying voyage through the mind’s complex byways than by using strong, clear signs?

Through this ultimate aim, Beethoven imprinted his work on his time and projected it into eternity.

That gesture made him a true modern.

66

Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, translated by Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), p. 333.

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THIRD MOVEMENT: MUSIC AND MODERNITY When we consider the history of modernism, in any domain at all, at some point we face the quandary of the chicken or the egg: composers and musicologists debate whether it was Debussy, Stravinsky or Schoenberg who invented twentieth-century music. In any case, we are obliged to go back to the “father” and seek the origin of this phenomenon a bit earlier: with Wagner, then from Wagner back to Beethoven, then to Bach, and so on.

Before we know it, this game could take us back to the Tigris and Euphrates.

Another problem arises when we try to define the very essence of modernity: for some, it is purely aesthetic in character and belongs entirely in the framework of a history of art.

For others, the “upheaval” of the avant-garde has to be seen in the psychoanalytic context, by virtue of the Freud/Schoenberg axis, which can explain the compulsive quest for the “tabula rasa,” the aesthetic avatar of the Oedipal act.

For many, the rupture of modernity can only be political in nature, above all in art: art evolves, at least in the West, by subverting established conventions. Obviously the political analysis of modernity is at least hazardous: for one thing, the great majority of creators are solitary individuals, totally wrapped up in their interior universe, and secondly, the political event is among the factors external to the artist, part of a world that he sets out to remake into a prospective resonance. This event, whatever it may be, will act as an emotional, energetic explosive, but in no way as a mode that works on the artistic material.

It seems perfectly bizarre to argue that Schoenberg would have liked, in a single wave, to shatter the classical music system and the bourgeois social order. The bourgeois order managed very nicely, before, during and after Schoenberg, who incidentally never failed to prosper ever since modernity began its march, as we will see shortly; it could even be said that the twelve-tone system,67 because its manifesto is more progressive than modernist, because its laws are rigid and its high priests reject any attitude or discourse that could endanger their little kingdom, that this serialism or twelve-tone system aped the bourgeois order far more than it challenged it. The “bourgeois tranquillity” of the tonal system is nothing in comparison with the serial super-system’s certainty of being “a thousand times right.”68 It is precisely because modernity was conceived as being essentially political that the name “revolution” was given to the aesthetic changes at the beginning of the twentieth century, a revolution that, with all due apologies, I have to call quite naïve. Art, in the West, undergoes constant evolution; why would it need a revolution? To destroy what, and why? To install what in exchange? To break with a system whose economy was in 67

The twelve-tone, or serial, technique gives a uniform importance to all twelve notes of the chromatic scale, thus avoiding tonality altogether.

68 Pierre Boulez, preface to Boulez on Music Today, translated by Susan Bradshaw and Richard Rodney Bennett (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1971). Pierre Boulez, preface to Penser la musique aujourd’hui (Paris : Gallimard, 1987).

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fact based on the successive addition of elements, on a progressive process of complexification, at a pace that made it digestible, a system that ensured it infinite durability and renewal?

More important than deciding if modernity is indispensable in art, since it so patently is just that, at least in the West, we need to clarify its definition to make its boundaries understandable. A parallel to the search for the perfect language, of which Umberto Eco has spoken, is the search for the perfect work that resides in every creative artist.

Until the beginning of the twentieth century, each composer reprised the work of his predecessors, writing basically the same symphony over and over, again and forever; composers are “inspired” by one another, claiming to use a quotation only as a pretext, or else quoting while pretending not to notice – as with Mahler and the opening of his Third Symphony, taken from Brahms’s First. But beyond such anecdotal evidence, there remains the quest for the absolute. Modernity can be considered a new step toward this quest. But here we become entangled in a definition that matches that for progress, which we will see later is quite different from the concept of modernity. I am more persuaded by the definition that calls modernity the set of parameters of the current time, a definition more horizontal and imaginary, therefore, than the vertical, temporal definition of a progress that people are fond of considering the fruit of a revolution while, on the contrary, as we see a bit later, it is that revolution’s worst enemy.

It would be unnecessarily cruel to affirm that the failure of that revolution is proven by the massive rejection by music lovers and a great number of musicians, and that the emergence throughout the twentieth century of great independent geniuses who were superbly oblivious of the “revolution,” speaks for itself. In fact, those like Bartók, Britten, Shostakovich, Prokofiev, Janácek were every bit as modern as the “revolutionaries,” and, considering their presence at the front rank of the concert repertoire, they were clearly far more successful at transforming the search for modernity. The reason may well be that they had a more refined definition of that term, one more in harmony with the essence of their art.

Between those who want to destroy everything, always, and those afraid of the slightest change, modernity traces a path quite natural for anyone who keeps an ear alert to his own time.

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8

ANATOMY OF MODERNITY

“It is essential to be absolutely modern.”

Arthur Rimbaud “Moreover, since when have we needed a new perfume every season?

“Was it really necessary?

“The public of old was also very content with violet water and a few simple scents based on flower extracts that we very slightly modified, maybe every ten years.

For millennia, people had made do with incense and myrrh, a few balms and oils, and dried aromatic plants.”

Patrick Süsskind, Perfume Mode and Modernity It would be interesting to convoke the whole of Academe to analyze in detail the concept of Modernity, which differs from, though often is confused with, that of Novelty, a term that serves nevertheless as its pilot fish, since Novelty often serves as a harbinger of Modernity.

One of the most tired, and tiring, old saws, one that recurs as surely as snow in January, is the statement, so dear to naïve souls, that “in modernity you find mode,” i.e. fashion,69 implying that modernity cannot escape being an ephemeral attitude, subject to the increasingly frenetic tempo dictated by the culture market. I say no, and again no!

First of all, etymology teaches that “mode” comes from modus, manner. There is no notion of evolution, or transformation, in the very root of the word mode; it is a manner, today’s manner for our Western civilization, but also the manner of all times, for the millenary cultures that never change their “modus vivendi.”

If the “mode” changes, it is because the necessity of being in a certain manner has itself changed. There has never been a time period allotted to a new condition of the mode, and no one ever launched a new style by announcing that it would be invalid as of some very specific date.

Modernity, modern, come from modernus, which itself is from modo, meaning recently. The word, then, has a semantic range anchored in the temporal, and indicates what has changed or is changing. Space on the one hand, time on the other.

69

The word mode has several meanings, of course, including both “manner” and as used here, in the quoted line about modernity/mode, “fad” or “fashion.”

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It is interesting to observe that etymology evokes an image contrary to the one we have today of the concepts of mode and modernity: we believe that a mode is a matter of time and that modernity has to do with attitude. It also happens that we associate the two, merging them in total confusion. The worst error, however, is to consider that it is the mode that determines modernity; as we have seen, the modo or recent change, innovation, is what motivates the updating of the modus or manner of being. It is because something has changed deeply that mode becomes the echo of that change and the public feels ready to welcome it. Mode is thus the effect; modernity, the cause.

Moreover, as we have said, modernity is pregnant with the innovations of tomorrow, but it is quite often brought into being by innovations of a recent past, a fact that takes us back to its etymology. Debussy or Schoenberg, by their respective innovations, initiated modernity, which developed throughout the twentieth century, and Messiaen, for example, conscientiously espoused the current of modernity induced by Debussy, in turn creating a certain innovation.

Yet it is not conceivable for a composer to be satisfied with inheriting a style and just adding a certain number of signs to it; the composer must guarantee that the new codes, invited into his language, possess a force, an impact sufficient to ensure the survival of his work, the condition of art. Mode has no such problem.

The manner is more concerned with creating provisional codes, and therefore an ephemeral semiotics of dress or appearance, the innovation of fashion, is especially dependent on the consumer’s cyclical amnesia – and I would add that I am employing “mode” as current fashion, as the most current semantic unit, the most common usage of the word, that of the “manias,” or automatisms and mimetisms. Better to say “modes,” plural; we are still far from the complex language of signs that belong to the “system of fashion” of Roland Barthes.

Because modernity changes in a linear way. The way it changes is of course irregular, by fits and starts, what could be called “feverish” change, but without the nostalgic, inevitable returns of the mode to what “used to be,” justifying the expression “the fashion of the day before yesterday is the fashion of tomorrow.”

By keeping this notion of linearity firmly in mind, we can resist the temptation of the neo-this, neo-that, neo-tonal composers, neo-romantics, which go back, worse yet, to the world of fashion shows and offer us a grotesque parade. But we are speaking here of the “passive” neo-phenomenon, the one that, since the late 1950s, limited itself to turning out “pastiche,” forger’s art. Modernity can perfectly well go its way while borrowing elements from the past, which it recycles or “repurposes.” The bottom line, for remaining modern, is that the elements being used must be in sync with the period. So a certain reconciliation with the musical language that predates the serial revolution cannot fail to harmonize with the deep awareness that has incited our civilization, for a few decades, to question the meaning and the dangers of a blind rush to progress and to make peace with our traditions or, more precisely, to seek the means of renewing and updating them. We might then venture a first definition of

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modernity: it is the sum of the components of what is current.

Returning to the identification of modernity with mode/fashion, the latter is not the business of art itself, of its content or its modes of expression. Mode is instead due to certain poses, on the part of minds stratified in a thought pattern, one that they consider final and unshakable, on the occasion of one of those pauses in modernity during which the new beliefs tend to want to become institutionalized, a period preceding a new surge of innovation. During these moments of consolidation, it is tempting to take the most recent breakthroughs for untouchable dogmas of the new artistic orthodoxy.

Now Berlioz already said it: nothing is more ephemeral than the fruits of modernity: “At first a succession of consonant chords, with a few suspensions here and there, was considered ‘music.’ When later Monteverdi dared to introduce the dominant seventh chord without preparation, he was violently blamed and abused for this innovation. In spite of all this, the chord was soon generally accepted, and so-called learned composers eventually came to look down with contempt upon any harmonic sequence that was simple, clear and natural. They admitted only compositions that, from beginning to end, abounded in the harshest dissonances (minor and major seconds, sevenths, ninths, etc.).

That these chords were used without reason or method did not matter; it almost seemed as if there were only one intention: to make this music as unpleasant as possible to the ear...What originally was mere reaction had grown into exaggeration."”70 As is well known, the contrary tendency would be considered today as reactionary. And this polarization is regularly reversed, pendulum-like, implying “correct thinking” without truly influencing the course of modernity; on the contrary, modernity, each time it bursts on the scene, sets off the wrath of the new popes, whichever sect they may represent.

Art and Modernity One of the memorable definitions of modernity was given by Baudelaire in his Curiosités esthétiques:71 “... it is much more convenient to state roundly that everything is hopelessly ugly in the dress of a period than to apply oneself to the task of extracting the mysterious beauty that may be hidden there, however small or light it may be. Modernity is the transient, the fleeting, the contingent; it is one half of art, the other being the eternal and the immovable."

In other words, without modernity, art, or at least Western art,72 is deprived of its 70

Hector Berlioz, Treatise on Instrumentation, translated by Theodore Front (Alfred Music Publishing, 1985), p. i.

71 Published in English as “The Painter of Modern Life,” in Charles Baudelaire: Selected Writings on Art and Artists, translated by P.E. Charvet (Cambridge: CUP Archive, 1991), p. 403.√ 72 In Hindu music, for example, the existential, or “the transient, the fleeting,” is guaranteed by the extremely controlled, sophisticated improvisation that is the basis for all interpretation, since the notion of composition or of written music does not exist and “the eternal and immovable” consists in scales and improvisational codes, all inspired by the rigorous religious tradition.

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existential side and, reciprocally, without the eternal and immovable it is deprived of its essential side.

We shall see later just what this essential half consists of. For the moment, we should try to understand what constitutes modernity in music, or the “transient and fleeting” part, and what makes it inseparable from art.

1. Modernity and Progress First we must distinguish the concept of modernity from that of progress, since unfortunately the confusion between them has engendered so many misunderstandings that underlie the schism between contemporary music and the music-consuming public.

Progress, a notion essentially bound up with science, charted the successive steps as that discipline inched ever closer to truth. In everyday life, progress marks the successive steps on the way to improvement.

Science makes progress when it ratifies a new theory or when an amendment, or even a refutation, comes along to modify or banish an existing theory. In other words, for science a gain and a loss are equally profitable, provided they bring you close to the truth.

For the individual, on the other hand, progress takes the form of a gain or an improvement: faster, more comfortable, safer…

The music world, for about the past half-century, seems to have opted for this consumerist interpretation: modernity is progress and progress is exclusively the “more”; more signs, more novelty, more wowing of the bourgeoisie, more provocation and subversion. Now to apply the idea of progress to music would come down to saying that Debussy is better than Mozart but not as great as Boulez, who in turn would be inferior to one of his disciples. Or that Wagner’s use of chromaticism, a general trait in his late works, would invalidate the preceding ones such as Lohengrin or Tannhäuser and would be comparable to the latest version of a computer program, which makes the preceding version de facto obsolete. Progress, contrary to modernity, dispenses with everything it replaces, consigning it to the rebus, the museum or the history book – whether this is a theory, a medicine, or a clock radio.

The only progress to which the artist can remain attached, and on which he or she depends closely, is that of lutherie, instrument-making. But even there, in the invention of instruments, progress is neither bulimic nor monomaniacal; it aims only to reach a certain approximation of the desired perfection.73 Take the most striking example: the violin.

73

We have to make an exception here for electronic instrument manufacturing, with a nuance that says a lot about the validity of progress in this field: every month brings a new instrument capable of “more,” but musicians prefer to chase down adaptations of old ones like the Moog and other Korg products of the 1970s.

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The violin attained its ideal with Stradivarius and a few other luthiers of his era, when they applied to the manufacture of their instruments the golden proportion, whose role in world order we have already discussed, plus a few other secrets including the famous varnish.

But once the ideal instrument and the point of equilibrium are attained, the race for progress becomes futile: given sufficient luck and talent, one forces oneself to do equally well, to attain the finesse of the old-time artisans, since the violin as such has achieved a status close to perfection. But the production of the violin, or of any instrument, is a matter of modernity, since each represents an innovation capable of generating other innovations: adapted instruments, literature for these instruments, artists to play them, and so on.

But it is precisely this confusion between progress and modernity that has led to a particularly troublesome thorn in the side of the music world: this frenetic race for innovation, copied from the models in science and in consumer society. Not only is each composer duty-bound to offer a sound-world that is totally new, but on top of that he is expected to renew himself from one work to another. How many times have we read or heard: “The latest creation by Mr. X was not bad, but it repeats itself, we’ve already heard it…” Readers satisfied with such paltry criticism would have had some difficulty, had they lived in the eighteenth century and been present at the premieres of works by Mozart, Beethoven or Haydn, composers who, while they no doubt evolved, did so slowly, remaining all the while singularly true to themselves. Mozart’s first twenty symphonies, and the first sixty by Haydn, are extremely close in style as well as in composition.

Moreover, each young composer sets out assimilating his colleagues: the young Beethoven was a Haydn knockoff.

Debussy was certainly correct in writing: “I believe the principal fault of the majority of writers and artists is having neither the will nor the courage to break with their successes, failing to seek new paths and give birth to new ideas.”74 Yet Debussy, from one work to another, remains truly Debussy, recognizable with his whole-tone scale, his pentatonic scale, his ninth chords, and so on. But Debussy uses his material, which is his language, to allow him to say new things each time. Pelléas is not the same as the twenty-four Préludes, they differ radically in form, but the opera uses a language very close and even recycles, nostalgically, several elements of Parsifal. Today, we expect a composer to offer up his most intimate musical attributes as a sacrifice, to shed his skin like a snake, and basically leave it behind. Such a trick is available only to true masters and should not be required of apprentices.75 74

Claude Debussy, Monsieur Croche. English version cited in H. Charles Romesburg, The Life of the Creative Spirit (Bloomington, Ind.: XLibris Corporation, 2001), pp. 239-40.

75 To cite Debussy again: “Hardly has a composer appeared than one begins to devote essays to him; one pounces upon his works…the moment has not yet come to judge the younger Hungarians like Bartók and Kodály. They are both extremely interesting and deserving young artists, eagerly seeking their way…” Debussy on Music, translated and edited by Richard Chaslin

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The point is that an individual, just like a society or a culture, is elaborated by individuation and then differentiation. Unfortunately people too often confuse these two processes, whose sequence cannot be reversed; one constructs oneself first and distinguishes oneself thereafter. It is essential to establish the mass of particular qualities of one’s individuality before submitting them to differentiation, especially because the difference must arise from internal necessity, not from a strategy. Trying to begin by being different at any price is chasing chimeras, one after the other, only to wind up as something neither apprehendible nor distinctive.

To expect new composers to recreate the world from the start means inciting them to a charade, to artificiality and, at the same time, depriving oneself of an entire generation.

2. Modernity and Historical Validation The other thorn inherited from the confusion between modernity and progress is that extremely current mania for validating or invalidating a work depending on a so-called chronological scale. Britten “has no right” to compose what he did because, thirty years before, Schoenberg invented serialism and because you must either write serial music or not write at all.

First of all, the Brittens of this world are perfectly entitled to write what they have a mind to; history will decide and judge – as it has done. Second, serialism and its successive avatars have shown their limitations and, having largely failed to impose themselves as the way to regenerate musical material, cannot lay claim to the role of all-knowing, triumphant prophetess, awarding sanctions and prizes.

But above all, if this principle of historical validation were widely enforced, the repertoire would be emptied of its greatest masterpieces. Thus, no one would continue to play the Art of the Fugue, on the grounds that Bach’s own sons, at the same time as their father, were writing works in a language that was well ahead of his. Wagner should have tossed his Meistersinger to the flames, since its diatonic qualities were an insult to the chromatic inventions of Tristan.

3. Modernity and Subversion Let it be said straight out: progress, and the dependence on progress that closely resembles addiction to a drug – that need for “my dose” of innovation, now, immediately, the new, more powerful computer, the faster car – are bourgeois aspirations. You need not have read Zola to know that the bourgeois motivation for progress is born of the drive for self-preservation and self-regeneration.

Langham Smith (New York Alfred A. Knopf, 1977), p. 319.

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The bourgeoisie seized power from the aristocracy more than two centuries ago and intends to keep it. In this perspective, progress is its closest ally: it does not take a historian to point out that the industrial revolution followed on the heels of the social revolution. The individual, caught up in the spiral of progress and obsessed with the “dose” that it would bring him tomorrow, whether in the form of social progress, a technological innovation or a new scrap of information or voyeurism, had no further thought of subverting the system, but merely, at times, aspired to attack one of its superficial aspects, by a strike or a tentative protest. With the perpetual promise and expectation of progress making the citizen intimately dependent on the system surrounding him, no revolution was henceforth thinkable.

But let me be clear: I am not putting either progress or the bourgeoisie on trial, since both play their roles in our world. I am pointing to the simple fact that the bourgeois mentality – and its dread of subversion – a mentality embodied in progress, is the opposite of the artistic spirit, which is embodied in modernity. And in fact, ever since art entered the progress derby, it has become far less subversive, first of all because it has lost almost any impact on the wider public, and then and above all because it has become cut off from its ultimate aim, which is to reveal and to magnify the Other, two notions that are perfectly useless to the bourgeois mentality, which wants its citizens submissive and as far from “enlightened” as possible.

Here then is one of the spectacular paradoxes, I daresay one of the great fallacies, of modern art: in its desire to be extraordinarily subversive at a specific moment in history, it exhausted once and for all any capacity to generate the unexpected; once you have pounded on all the keys on the piano at the same time, what more “modern” tricks are there to bring to the harmonic language? Micro-intervals? A return to classical harmony?

The solution, in fact, lies not in a change of language but in a change of action.

It may well be time, then, to make a clear lexicological distinction between the progressives, who define modernity as a function of a “better”/”more” polarity of production, and the moderns, those for whom modernity is based on a natural evolution, by which I mean a non-concerted movement between phases of acquiring innovations – what is sometimes called, after the fact, the emergence of a movement or school – and phases of rest, in which the world consolidates the new codes.

Modernity and Renewal The confusion, in the mind of many composers, between modernity and progress, arises however from a good intention. Starting with the Darmstadt school, composers have begun to be fascinated by the advances of science and especially by its methods of theorizing and modeling. Desperately seeking an exit from a serialism that is running out of steam, even more so than Schoenberg fleeing romanticism, they saw in the discourse and applications of science an infinitely renewable source of material and of its means of exploitation.

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All this was perfectly consistent and promised fruitful discoveries, but the discussion began to borrow the letter, not the spirit, from science. It became dogmatic. And when science, via quantum physics and string theory, opened itself up to perspectives that were vertiginously metaphysical, poetic, and artistic; when science, in both its discourse and its aims, came together with art and poetry, musicians in their white shirts were still pedaling along with their post-Lavoisier, positivist, dry, ascetic jargon, which derived less from art than from engineering, since engineering, ontological by necessity, serves the established system and could never tolerate subversion.

Modernity, the true modernity, has contempt for the established order.

Modernity, as I’ve said, is a crystallization of what happens now, made up of innovations of recent origin, whence its etymology. In revealing itself, as a snapshot of the time, it will give rise to movements, schools, isolated artists that, in turn, will create innovation and so on. Scientific or commercial progress can only play the role of actor, one among many in the human drama of which modernity is the reflection. To be modern is to be of one’s own time.

That’s all, but it is a lot.

I will be told that this definition is a slippery slope, leading first to the craze for the “neo.” No doubt, neo-anything – romanticism, classicism, tonal, whatever – was for a brief time part of the modernist décor, but it cannot be considered the modernity of its time because it does not generate, in turn, any innovation capable of inventing the modernity of tomorrow. Innovation, not progress. A new perspective, a new way of seeing, of hearing things that are seen or heard. The philosopher Alain said in fact: “For my taste, travel means going a meter or two at a time, stopping and discovering afresh a new aspect of the same things.”76 It’s exactly what Baudelaire tells us. We need to see in a new way “the eternal, the unchangeable.” To seek new perspectives for contemplating eternity, which for its part does not change. As Messiaen recalls, “Time responds to movement while eternity remains the same.”77 To be modern is fundamentally an entirely western way of meditating collectively on Being and Becoming.

I say this because we are truly the only ones, we westerners, who concern ourselves with innovation, modernity, progress. The other cultures have developed a mode of knowledge-transmission called Tradition, which, because it is most often oral, has no tolerance for the slightest approximation, transformation, evolution. Faith in the infallibility of Tradition, its perfection, its divine provenance, has given non-western cultures the conviction that the future cannot bring any revelation except just the confirmation of what has already been said, or more exactly, “prophesied.” Traditional music does not escape this rule; it is codified ad infinitum and far more cerebral than our 76

Alain, Propos sur le bonheur (Paris: Gallimard, 1976).

Olivier Messiaen, “Temps et éternité,” in Traité de rhythme, couleur et d’ornithologie (Paris: A. Leduc, 1994).

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polyphonic music. It makes no claim to transcendence on its own, but rather seeks, somewhat like breathing in Prana Yoga, to help in illumination. It is, if I may be pardoned this pronouncement, the servant of Tradition. For this reason, among others, it has never had the universal distribution that is enjoyed by western music.78 Traditional societies have therefore developed techniques, of which music is only an accessory, to meditate, contemplate the secrets of the world and, if possible, achieve enlightenment. In this framework, the only conceivable progress is individual progress toward this knowledge. This progression is, in the manner of French philosopher Alain, a way of contemplating reality, after each step that is taken, in a new perspective. The aim is to see what is, differently and more deeply each time.

And it is in this sense that I recognize the quest of modernity of western society as a form of collective meditation, which Jung would not have denied. Modern art is the most recent manner that artists have found to express a collective vision of Being and Becoming. This new perspective owes nothing to the established order, or to progress. It can, it has the right to, go against the current, in total revolt against order and progress, if order, as is more and more the case, makes itself the puppet of a mercantile order that remains contrary to the essence of the human being, to human dignity and its survival.

Modernity owes nothing to progress. It is in symbiosis with the numinous and with the numbers of the Principle, which it exposes at each period although in a different way. It is the ultimate variation on a theme announced at the beginning of time.

Because it is not pointless to recall one last time: modernity is made up of those innovations that Baudelaire called “the fleeting, the contingent, one half of art,” those innovations that crop up without warning like flowers, that we must pick quickly to extract their perfume and anchor it in the present, whose atmosphere it dominates.

This is a perfume that can sometimes seem astringent, but did Baudelaire ever suggest that his “flowers of evil” were a bouquet of roses?

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In the case of Hindu music, it is essential to remember that its extreme complexity is, in itself, contrary to any vocation to universality, just as Hindu religion remains alien to all proselytizing.

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9 FROM CLICHÉ TO PSYCHIATRIST’S COUCH A Brief Supplementary Discussion on Modernity “The program is no longer what it once was, the struggle of the new against the academic, of subversion against the crusty conformist, but rather: we need a simplified art at all costs...”

Philippe Sollers, Preface to Les Ambassadeurs de Morain You can be intelligent and still love clichés. To claim the opposite would be a cliché, but would not prove a lack of intelligence.

Moreover, the dictionary, which ratifies common usage and is so fond of Polaroids of all kinds, would be, if it were not for clichés, cut off from usage and all the more from the common and thus reduced to the function of a mere lexicon.

If we have to love clichés, it is precisely to be able to play with them: to extract their nectar of common sense, filter it, and mix it with the lemon of the critical sense.

Thus, in the field that we are concerned with, a solid convention reigns: it claims that modernity is the opposite of the popular, the monopoly of a certain cultivated, clued-in elite, and moreover that the “popular” is conservative and reactionary, the enemy of progress and defender of tradition. We can leave aside the morbid faith in a pseudomodernity of the left or the right: this schoolboy dispute is meaningless and there is no need to appeal to some socio-philosophical model to prove it; it’s sufficient to cite a few simple facts.

Modernity springs up everywhere at once: in songs, pop, rock, in any popular “gesture,” but also in the more conceptual spirit of “learned” musicians, who regularly exchange their discoveries with one another: jazz thus has been impregnating music since Debussy, while the avant-garde sonorities gradually begin to invest pop and jazz.79 Reaction and corniness, for their part, are not exclusive to any class. The academicians of all times, those who, crowned with laurel wreaths scented for their nostrils alone, pore over the products of their little shop, or the “studio sharks,” hucksters and lumberjacks, devoid of both shame and talent, who exploit the latest pulse of fashion as long as it pays -- they are the true enemies of modernity.

So it is not a matter of class, but a matter of mass, as that term is defined in physics: a tiny minority of curious, inventive, adventurous spirits run up against a large inert mass, which will absorb the assaults of modernity only gradually and reluctantly. With this 79

I am taking the liberty of reducing the infinite variety of current trends to two terms, for convenience. As the father of two adolescents, I am fully aware of “house” and “garage” music, heavy metal, and so on.

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assault coming from all sides at once, the mass has no choice but to integrate these intruders and, through this co-optation, to evolve. Elitist spirits who imagine that they alone incarnate a redeeming modernity by way of an omnipotent complexity, must become aware of the vanity and perilousness of their position; without this back-andforth activity between “what is above” and “what is below,” to borrow terms from alchemy, there can be no living, valid, fertile evolution.

What makes popular music unique is its spontaneity and its identity that is renewed by what is happening now, the roots, the essence, and the generosity with which it produces new sound-material and generates new signs.

What makes learned music indispensable is the technique that allows it to organize and give eruptions the value of an emblem, give the sign the value of a symbol, and the form the value of an archetype.

What is the true gesture of modernity, celebrated for all times by the great composers? It is to constantly renew the fruitful contact with popular music, draw on that resource, find unifying elements there. For the pop musician, it is to open up to the techniques of learned music. Wasn’t it Gustav Mahler who said that music had no value for him unless it found its roots in folklore?

That link that we need to rebuild is as important for the artist as for the community: by enclosing themselves in an inaccessible asceticism, cutting themselves off from the origins, the moderns opened up a breach for all the mediocrities, which are always prompt to bury themselves to satisfy an orphaned music lover.

This is the source of that cliché, which reflects a certain condition of twentieth-century modernity but not at all a functioning mode for modernity itself. And that of course is why we love this cliché, in the way a doctor loves the symptom, because it helps to identify the illness.

Modernity’s illness is the elitism of some and the opportunism of others, and of the two, the elite are preferable, being more honest than the opportunists.

You may argue that there are imposters who pretend to modernity out of opportunism.

Their fakery can deceive only their own kind. The Darmstadt masters, though sometimes guilty of intellectual narcissism, are no less masterful for that, since their work is honest, their vision profound, their ideals solid. Their refusal of existing signs is like the asceticism of the prophet demanding chastity from the mob: an unlivable idealism, in urgent need of updating.

And yet the urgency of the sign does not mean a return to the cliché. While we are at it, there is another cliché that is also pretty thick-skinned and that, you could say, motivated the writing of this book: namely, that the avant-garde, or a certain segment of twentiethcentury modernity, is inaccessible to emotion, to inspiration or to fantasy.

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Admittedly, the modus operandi of the modern composer is far more analytical than that of the classical or romantic composer. The latter both proceed by synthesis, thus imitating the gesture of the demiurge. The modern composer practices self-analysis in real time, accounting for each moment of his creative work; true, many distrust their instincts, their emotions, which are non-quantifiable and invalid in the detailed minutes they believe they owe to posterity. This generalized practice of auto-analysis by the composer merely reflects a global change in the cultural world at the turn of the twentieth century. Who better to express this than Freud, who said: “Some rationalist, or perhaps analytic, turn of mind in me rebels against being moved by a thing without knowing why I am thus affected and what it is that affects me.”80 This is the same Freud who used to call himself “ganz unmusikalisch” – completely amusical – and whose couch became the pretext for so many major clichés of the twentieth century.

After Freud, the least we can say is that psychoanalysis has shown the same distance, if not to say indifference, toward music, barring a few exceptions. There is, for example, Theodore Reik (1888-1969) and his Haunting Melody: Psychoanalytic Experiences in Life and Music (1960) or, in our own time, Marie-France Castarède, who passionately explores the relations between music and psychoanalysis.81 Another exception is Jacques Lacan, who seems to have been intuitively aware of the profound action of the sound-world on our psyche, by way of affect, through which he treats the voice as an impetus. Nearly everyone else seems to politely ignore the fact – and we can understand this, now that we know that it is a language of signs deeply linked to our body and mind – that music is a world of emotional archetypes, which support an important task of transference and sublimation. Such a task, in fact, is the prerequisite for a masterpiece. This has become understood gradually thanks to Mahler, not only because he is the contemporary and compatriot of Freud,82 but above all because he was the first to explore the origin of many musical elements heard since childhood, especially those associated with strong personal situations, from which he drew the material for his symphonies.

Thus, in attentively studying twentieth-century musical and musicological literature, we perceive that the true work of rapprochement between music and psychoanalysis owes more to musicians and musicologists than to psychoanalysts themselves. It is instructive to consult the records of some recent symposiums on the subject:83 psychoanalysts seem to concentrate on exciting technical considerations, which increase exponentially, but, 80

Sigmund Freud, Writings on Art and Literature (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1997), p. 122.

81 Marie-France Castarède, La voix et ses sortileges (Paris: Belles Lettres, 1989) and Les vocalises de la passion. Psychanalyse de l'opéra (Paris: Armand Colin, 2002).

82 Mahler met Freud for just a single conversation, of which nearly no trace exists. The composer wanted to consult the psychoanalyst to find an answer to his marital problems with Alma, but also to attempt to overcome a momentary crisis in his creative work.

83 An interesting site for this purpose is www.entretemps.asso.fr Chaslin

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like a spiral, always farther removed from the heart of the problem: the musical object as emotional archetype.

Analysis vs. Synthesis And yet, despite this lack of enthusiasm toward our art, psychoanalytical research can provide a better understanding of the mechanism of creative intuition, through that of the unconscious, whose work figures so importantly in creativity.

Analysts, as logic requires, say little about synthesis, whereas Freud helps us understand the process of synthesis through his studies of dreams, considered until his time as an allegorical mode, which everyone and anyone was confident of being able to interpret, and which he elevated to the level of a symbolic mode, no longer to be merely translated, but analyzed.

Dreaming, after all, is most decidedly a process of synthesis performed by the unconscious, but in no way a linear discourse that need only be realigned in order to become readable like a story, from beginning to end. The dreamer places themes amid a myriad of more or less ornamental elements. And those themes are symbols; just as the symbol is originally half of a coin, perforce drawing attention to the missing part that it replaces or “symbolizes,” and inviting us to find that part in order to reunite the Whole, so each part of the dream is a symbol for an element of the dreamer’s waking life, either conscious or unconscious, an element that it is the psychoanalyst’s job to recover in order to restore harmony in the patient’s mind.

Does this make the dreamer a creator? Yes, in part, and our astonishment after a night filled with visions, or totally baroque and exotic stories, which make us wonder: “How could I have invented that?” – our astonishment is there to underline it. And in part the answer is No, to the extent that the creative act, that of the composer or painter, is controlled, continuous, and deliberate.

Yet the dreamer is of interest to us because he uses his synthesizing capacities to create a certain reality.84 That creative capacity, which is demonstrated daily but of which he is generally deprived in the waking state, has analogies, in the physiological means it marshals and by the state in which the dreamer finds himself, with the state of mind often described by composers of the past when they were in thrall to inspiration. That term, generally execrated today, nevertheless designates a superior synthetic capacity by which the composer accomplishes an intellectual exploit of which he is generally incapable in his “normal state” – think of Mahler, unable to compose except in the quiet of his summer residence – any more than the dreamer, once he is wakened, is capable of conjuring before him what he had somehow created while asleep.

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It is philosophically acceptable to call “ reality” that which, throughout the process of a dream, is perceived as such. The increasingly large, increasingly “real” role played by the “virtual” in our daily life is there to demonstrate the elasticity of the concept of reality.

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There is no actual sorcery in venturing on this process of synthesis, nothing but an intense, sustained concentration. But, owing to the objects that it manipulates – symbols, signs, emblems, linked to complex emotions or feelings – the creative musical activity often seems close to a kind of trance. The best description of it comes, once again, from Mahler. While submerged in composing one of his symphonies, he had a vision of his own body stretched out in a coffin in the opposite corner in the room where he happened to be. Mahler, we recall, told of going to bed at night with a problem he had to solve, and waking up in the morning with the solution, something that is far more common.

Mozart conceived most of his works “in the background”: their elaboration took place practically unconsciously and the work emerged, as he described it himself, “like lightning,” in a kind of flash, after which he had only to copy down what he had “seen” instantly. Beethoven wrote only after a long meditation in his beloved Vienna woods, where the trees seemed to be singing and nature to dictate his melodies.

Messiaen, closer to us, told some of his students that he did not improvise as often as he would have liked, “to avoid exhausting the inspiration.” That statement suggests, then, that he believed in inspiration.

What all these examples show is that the great composers, more of less all of them, gave free rein to their mind, leaving to another region of their psychic anatomy the concern with elaborating the mysterious fusion of intuition and the sound-material. That other region, in which the process of synthesis was realized, and which we are free to call inspiration if we like, has been described by certain researchers in neurology as being rather a threshold of a certain frequency. Such a notion, unfortunately, has been adopted many times by certain “merchants of the bizarre,” but we need to cite it for the record, allowing everyone to draw conclusions as they see fit: our brain, like a car, has several gears depending on the task to be accomplished.

In the course of intense alert activity, the brain waves are at their most rapid, producing the beta waves. Then, when we are relaxed, we send out alpha waves, which are divided into several subcategories, including an alpha 1 phase, which is that of deep meditation, in the course of which we liberate many images originating in the unconscious. It was probably in this state, due to an intense concentration of the hypnotic type, that Mahler had his hallucination.

Returning to psychoanalysis, I believe it could profitably study the generally psycho-rigid attitude of the serial and post-serial composer, whom I would define as a suppressed hyper-romantic. In the case of Schoenberg, it is absolutely obvious and observable: after having lived to the hilt a romanticism of an intensity probably surpassing even that of Wagner, expressed in a language that was voluptuous yet painful, wrenching, overwhelming, the creator decides to perform Abraham’s sacrifice on himself, severing the live substance that he had created, suppressing a flamboyant romanticism that persisted nevertheless in transpiring, though in a fossilized state, in his later works.

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Among Schoenberg’s successors the suppression occurred much earlier, at the source, and took the form of the same symptom of extreme rigidity in language and sometimes also in the individual attitude. But let’s be clear about this: what’s the good of a rigidity of ego except to contain something that is trying to break out? And what might this thing be, other than an effervescent romanticism, flamboyant, glorious, for which the modern creator can feel only a shameful nostalgia? Think, on the other hand, of Debussy and in particular of numerous scenes in Pelléas et Mélisande, to observe the strengths of a romanticism that is absorbed, calmed, lightened, sublimated. After all, to borrow from psychoanalytic terminology, romanticism is typically one of those anal drives in which the collective unconscious of a period quenches its thirst for self-realization. It takes the form initially of an intense creative activity, then the reaction of a suppression or else a sublimation. Schoenberg chose suppression, Debussy sublimation. The entire twentieth century obeyed – some following the first, some the second – but, oddly, the polite tone, the official course of modernity of the salon, would be suppression.

We can understand what drove the first moderns to reject romanticism, that great expansiveness, that immodest display. But it is a false perspective.

In fact, romanticism becomes intolerable when it is combined with the academic to become nothing more than a pompous, vain tic, a pretentious, hollow soufflé.

What is good about romanticism is just that liberation from inhibitions, that total absence of suppression; romanticism is the divan on which the creative spirit lets itself go, frees itself to express its most intimate drives. When the composer takes it into his head to want to control not just his material but also his alibis, it is clear that, from such house arrest imposed on affect and drives, nothing will emerge but elements that are filtered, censured, enclosed in a work that becomes even less capable of revelations to the Other because it is less revealed to its own author.

I make no claim that composers must eat hallucinogenic mushrooms or attempt to make coffee cups levitate. But I believe it is interesting to stress this suppression and this dichotomy between spirit of analysis and spirit of synthesis, the different modes of using brainpower that these terms imply and, quite logically, the difference in the results that can be expected. It is interesting, too, to see a parallel between contemporary music’s break with the world of emotion and of the human body. And interesting to inscribe these two facts in the perspective of Freud’s words, which now take on even more meaning: “Some rationalist, or perhaps analytic, turn of mind in me rebels against being moved by a thing without knowing why I am thus affected and what it is that affects me.”

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10

THE LAW OF TONE ROWS

“There is still a lot of music left to be written in C major.”

Arnold Schoenberg Serial music, twelve-tone music, or serialism, is a bit like the Pythagorean theorem: everyone has heard of it, but far fewer people can offer a precise definition.

For the music lover, on the other hand, it is an often unpleasant term that marks a boundary, the point of no return, after which he or she stops listening or attending concerts. Rather than vilify these persons, let us attempt to see, with them, what is concealed behind this term, which indeed designates a movement that led to one school of composers becoming detached from its public.

What Is a Tone Row? Everything, and its opposite, has been written on the subject of serialism: “Serialism was a historical necessity,” some affirmed, while others objected: “Serialism is a form of terrorism.”

To the first group I would respond that the twelve-tone system was, without any doubt, a historical necessity for its inventor, Arnold Schoenberg, allowing him to escape the centripetal force of post-Wagnerism in which he seemed to be sinking inexorably, even if this submersion fostered the flowering of such masterpieces as Transfigured Night or the Gurre-Lieder. But for others, and I am thinking of Debussy in particular, the prodigious acceleration imposed by Wagner on all aspects of the composer’s “saga” was incorporated naturally into a very personal language, without any need to sever the roots, change the system, or scramble the codes linking the creator to his public.

If serialism had given us nothing more than the works of Webern and part of what was written by Schoenberg and Berg, it would seem to be amply justified. However, when we see the place assumed by the works of Debussy in the concert repertoire and equally in the heart of musicians, works composed in a language that was modern but accessible at every instant because it was part of a continuity, we can only dream of what those first serialists might have written without the straitjacket of their new system: We might expect the same rigor and the same sense for the rare sound, abetted by a subtle bending of existing codes, while the survival of those codes ensured the communication of works to a wider public and, finally, a music simultaneously new and open to all ears.

First of all we have to say that this term “serial” is a little misleading, or at least wily, if only by the use of that very word. A mathematical series, which seems to justify the solemnity with which composers threw themselves into this musical mechanic’s game – and that includes the author of this book as well – is, by definition, a sequence of values

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that increase or decrease according to a certain law. A series is infinite and does not repeat any of the numbers that compose it.

The musical series, or tone row, for its part consists in playing twelve notes contained within a single octave without repeating any of them, or not replaying any note until the eleven others have been introduced. So it reflects the “simple” definition of the word “series,” that is: sequence, succession. And that is of course far less impressive, especially because any piece of music, whatever it may be, is a series of notes. Arnold Schoenberg, inventor of serialism, gave it the German name “zwölf-Ton-Musik,” twelvetone music, also known in English, a bit more pompously, as serialism.

Well, all that does not help us much, since all music in the West is made up of these twelve notes.

The main interest of the serial system was in provoking a radical change in aesthetics.

Just as cubism imposed a visual revolution by abandoning figurative literalism, the series, in its “philosophic” principle, denied any possible affinity or attraction between certain intervals on the scale, certain chords, and, in its “mechanical” principle, suppressed all obligatory recourse to the musical figures that constitute the tonal language. That, at least, is what occurred with the advent of the generalized series, in which composers followed the principle of “non-repetition” for rhythms, nuances, timbres and so on.

With the immense advantage of automatically creating the sound-alienation to which the first moderns aspired, the series had a virtue that the shrewdest of them did not fail to pounce on: it gave an immediate impression of diversity, richness, sparkle. Since no single note was repeated in its immediate vicinity, the risk of “déjà entendu,” or something previously heard, was automatically ruled out and the result possessed the unique charm of kaleidoscopes; with the corollary of ennui, which sets in after fifteen or twenty minutes, thanks to the difficulty of repeating anything in this sound-labyrinth. We must admit, though, that this ennui is nothing compared to the boredom, worthy of a Chinese torture, that consumes at us on hearing repetitive music, the invention of which claims to be a salutary reaction to the cerebral nature of serial music.

Limits of the Series If the series found its place in the history of music more than in the great repertoire, it is no doubt owing to an internal contradiction.

In fact, the chromatic scale, or tempered scale, that is, the twelve half-tones that make up an octave, is a system of frequency distributions.

Another system would have been possible with the twenty-five divisions of the octave established originally by Pythagoras, or still more if the system by twelves had not revealed itself, in practice, as the most malleable, the most apt to develop and to engender polyphony.

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Once this system is in place, it is essential to make it say something, that is, to enact rules and establish a style. That is what the classical musicians did by instituting harmony, counterpoint, forms like the sonata, fugue, and so on.

Serialism, installing a system within the system, acted at the same time as both a rule and a style, a style that very quickly proved resistant to evolution. Nothing resembles a “row,” and a combination of rows, more than another combination of rows.

The very factors that allowed this school to obtain instant variety also condemned it to a historical immobility. This immobility, this monotony of production, were due precisely to this redundancy of the system within the system, and this very redundancy is what I call internal contradiction: the second system turns out to short-circuit the first by an excess of constraint.

To illustrate, I propose a comparison to a game of chess.

Each player has eight pawns and eight other players, or sixteen moveable elements comparable to our twelve notes of the octave. These sixteen pieces and the sixty-four squares on the board are the system, that is, the manner in which the space is divided up and the players are organized as minor and major figures, just as the tempered chromatic scale is a distribution of frequencies within the octave and a hierarchical organization of possible modes and harmonies. The modes governing how each piece can be moved are contained in the rules of the game of chess, which corresponds to the rules of composition. Corresponding to the style of classical music is a style of play in the strict sense.

Other systems were possible and did exist in the past.

Thus, one of the ancestors of chess, Chaturangâ, from India, about the year 750, was played with eight pieces per side: a ship, a horse, an elephant, a king, and four pawns. At the same period in the West, music used the system of modes, another way of breaking down the octave, but into fewer divisions.

It is possible to imagine an evolution of the game of chess – even if each attempt has failed so far – for example, a game on two boards, or on a sphere, or with a greater number of pieces, and so on. In other words, it would have meant changing the system.

Though possible, such a change has never seemed to satisfy the players. As for music, changing the system means breaking down the octave differently, abandoning “temperament,” and this is the direction pursued by composers exploring micro-tonal possibilities.

But to install a system within the system would come down, in our example from chess, to preserving the sixteen pieces, suppressing the rules for moving and substituting for them a sequence for moves, in other words establishing that pawn A1 will move first, wherever it chooses, then any other piece, as long as A1 does not play again before the seventeenth round. While that might seem at first to make the game more exciting, it

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would prove, in the long term, to ensure nothing but chaos and boredom – and the reader is invited to try this experiment with a fellow chess enthusiast.

To create a system within another system, therefore, was not the miraculous recipe by which Schoenberg had hoped to renew music for several generations to come. And, little by little, serialism was abandoned.

Nevertheless, according to the well-known effect of the stimulating constraint, this system had the virtue of inspiring numerous composers who “visited” it without lingering for long, like Stravinsky. As for the serialists of the initial period, they can be said to have played hide and seek with their invention, flirting with it, then distancing themselves and finally returning, aside from Webern of course, who succeeded in creating a sounduniverse that was truly original and of a vertiginous artistic density, no doubt because he avoided the pitfall of monotony mentioned above, by limiting himself to extremely brief works – from a few seconds to a few minutes in length.

The composers most fully committed to the generalized tone row later loosened the reins, but without foregoing one of the major elements of this technique: the identifiable nonrepetition of a note or of a sound-object.

A look at a recent score by Boulez or Stockhausen, for example, provides an apt illustration. This is no longer the rigorous tone row, but the imprint of the phenomenon still remains. To it they have added a suppleness that is indispensable if the soundmaterial is to follow its creator’s evolution.

In other words, they no longer strain to count their sixteen notes rigorously, as a housewife counts the plums she is making into preserves, but they ensure that a certain Bflat heard previously will not return before the listener has nearly forgotten it.

This method, among the “founding fathers,” was the equivalent of a style. But the procedure persists even now, even among certain very young composers, with the aping that this implies. It is only natural to call this way of continuing to make music a bit peculiar today. This process aimed at an “automatic variety” may seem a ruse to disguise a lack of melodic invention.

Moreover, this ideology, this quasi-religion of non-repetition, this horror of the “déjà entendu,” will never convince me of the so-called originality that can be drawn from what ends up becoming more of a neurosis than a true method. Johann Sebastian Bach, for example, would never have been able to write the theme of the famous D minor fugue (Ex. 10.1):

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in which the note A appears sixteen times in two bars, in which the melisma of the lower part turns on the same notes. And yet these two measures alone are every bit as original as many a serialist work, and also more celebrated.

With Bach, the analysis of certain works, such as the Musical Offering, which contains “mirrors”85 of a remarkable complexity, opens up perspectives that are more dizzying than the works seeking complexity for its own sake. With Bach, among others, the symbolism of numbers that presides over the elements and forms is in the service of something else, a “beyond” that is also evoked by other great seekers of the number and the numinous, like Beethoven or Messiaen.

Because number is not an excuse, a pretext or alibi. It is an end, for number is at the heart of the Principle. We saw this with Pythagoras and string theory: number rules everything, it is at the center of everything. Kabala teaches us that number, for believers in God, is the most direct, most knowable manifestation of the Principle. To be content, as twelvetone music is, with the ability to count to twelve means treating number as a dupe.

Number is at the heart of living matter, it is intended to exalt, not to enslave. This, moreover, is why any musical system that aims for effectiveness will be based on the logic of numbers, but at some point will have to lend its architecture a certain suppleness.

That is precisely what temperament did to develop the polyphonic world we know, by “cheating” on the frequencies of certain intervals.

Broadening the Concept of the Tone Row The tone row, in a more general sense than as used in strict serialism, is thus an attempt – by a system of distribution based on a model not so much mathematical as merely arithmetical – to exert total and rational control over a material -- music, whose effective and affective modes remain obscure, indeed mysterious. This is an attempt to merge with the Demiurge, which invokes forces and incites forms.

But in this perspective, a work of genius such as one of the final symphonies of Mozart for instance, in which each notes seems indispensable and the slightest addition or the least permutation would shatter the global equilibrium clearly, perceptibly, can be considered a super-row, a meta-row, a perfect distribution system in which every element has its place assigned by an inexorable law, though it is not formulated, being nonformulable.

This law is harmony, within which the techniques – harmony, counterpoint, rules of style – are necessary but not sufficient conditions.

Harmony, which can be defined as the perception of a certain equilibrium within a certain group of attributes, allows us by intuition to create enormous complexes, aural, visual, 85

Mirror : a process in which a musical figure is repeated strictly in reverse, as if read in a mirror.

Mozart, for example, composed a short piece for two voices, in which each part is the exact mirror of the other.

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poetic complexes, and this intuition of harmony is what at one time was called inspiration.

In harmony, some romantic spirits see a function of nature. By thinking harmony, mankind began to think art.

Nature may well be, as Einstein asserted, an infinite mathematical formula in which everything is contained, even or especially the chaos that makes up a major part of our universe. Harmony, on the contrary, is a purely human effort to balance and lend proportion to the elements that emerge from this chaos, and it would be tempting to say that, in this sense, harmony is not natural, or rather is supernatural, because it is a concept of the only superman whom Claude Lévi-Strauss grants the right to bear the name, that is, human collectivity.

In this sense, a meta-tone row, as we consider it in certain masterpieces of classical art, depends on a highly complex mathematical distribution to reach this state of perfect proportionality that is perceptible to all. Despite everything, the mathematical model that would permit us to predict such a masterpiece is inconceivable; analysis can only function after the fact.

Better than the Row: The Kabala It is possible, however, in rereading Umberto Eco,86 to trace the history of the diverse attempts, all more or less harebrained but equally exciting, to discover the formula, the principle, the machine for modeling the infinity of names and of their combinations, to rediscover the divine model, the lost original Consider, for example, the wheels of Raymond Lulle, which made mechanical associations among simple concepts, from which infinite numbers of original philosophical propositions could be deduced.

Or consider Father Marin Mersenne, schoolboy friend of Descartes, who around 1636 invented a system for generating chants ranging over three octaves without repetition, true ancestor of serialism, and who declared that “to write down all these songs would require enough reams of paper to fill in the distance between heaven and earth, even if every sheet contained 720 of these 22-note songs and every ream was so compressed as to be less than an inch thick.”87 The same Father Mersenne formulated the concept of “frequency” and was a very important figure in the art of sound.

Giordano Bruno, Pico della Mirandola and many others were all seized with this combinational frenzy, from the same yearning for the infinite, the ideal.

86

Umberto Eco, The Search for the Perfect Language (New York and Oxford : Wiley-Blackwell, 1995).

87 Eco, The Search, p. 141.

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The epicenter of this craze seems to have been the year 1492, a doubly critical date in the history of the Western world.

On October 12, 1492, of course, a sailor in the crew gathered by Christopher Columbus caught sight of the coast of the New World.

Shortly before, on Tuesday, July 31, 1492, when Isabella the Catholic expelled all the Jews from Spain, there were two hundred thousand persons expatriated. A minority chose the Magreb, or north Africa, and nearly all sought refuge in France or Central Europe, including a few rabbis who had been working since the twelfth century to develop the Kabala,88 known today as a mystico-linguistic system.

However, the most basic Talmudic spirit leads me to cast some doubt on the terms “system,” “mystical” and “linguistics,” applied to this discipline.

Kabala, through its three modes of decryption of the Torah89 but especially through the permanent openness that it imposes on words and ideas, by the letter as well as the sound, cannot easily be encapsulated either in a notion or in a lexicology.

From the most intellectual approach to the most ecstatic, the Kabala has in common with alchemy the fact that in it one can see several disciplines almost distinctly: just as for the purely speculative alchemists the art of Hermes is a technique of personal realization, just as for the practitioners it is a path of mystical union with the principle through work on nature; some cabalists seek new interpretations of the Torah by “opening up” letters and words; while others, like a certain rabbi in Prague who is credited with having created the legendary Golem, seek thaumaturgical powers; still others seek the mystical ecstasy through the infinite permutation of the letters of the divine Name and of its variations. It is interesting here to draw a parallel between what Umberto Eco says of the Kabala: “The practice of reading by permutation tended to produce ecstatic effects…if we add that the recitation of the names was accompanied by special techniques of breathing, we begin to see how from recitation the adept might pass into ecstasy, and from ecstasy to the acquisition of magic powers,”90 and what François Florand said of Bach: “To build a development, Bach will happen to prefer a means … by introducing a progression that comes entirely from the melodic current itself…like a river that could be seen to rise without any exterior cause…an interior accumulation of energy of emotive force, to the point where the author and the listener are saturated and as if inebriated…from turning and returning his theme, the author’s own head seems to spin.“91

88

We should recall that several spellings of this term are possible, but the Q for Qabala is the best rendering of the Hebrew letter Qof. 89 Notarikon, the mode that uses an acronym (taking each letter of a word as the initial letter of another word); gematria, which works with a numerical value for letters or words; and temurah, using permutations of letters as in an anagram.

90 Eco, The Search, pp. 30-31 91 François Florand, Jean-Sébastien Bach, l'oeuvre d'orgue (París: Éditions du Cerf, 1947).

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From these two texts we can see clearly what links the Kabala and music: they are both a game of permutation of words and notes, of thematic elements, of micro-structures and, by linkage, repetition, transformation, an energy is created the accumulation of which will have clearly creative effects on the mind both of the one who conceives it and of the one who receives it: the creation of sounds for the composer, the creation of strong emotional images for the listener.

This is true because the Kabala, just like music, is based on a transmission/reception duality. And as Marc-Alain Ouaknin reminds us, “the Kabala, ‘reception,’ is not a ‘receiving’ but a ‘constructing’… the reader must recreate the word himself. It is at this stage that the reader meets the creator, who, as he steeps himself in the writing, has the intuition of the book.”92 But why bring the Kabala into a book on the music of our time? First, because its influence, dating from 1492, by fermenting linguistic and mystical inquiry, precipitated all categories of thought into an ardent quest for sense, in both meanings of that word: sense as meaning, and as sensory perception. The quest for the perfect language would extend to music itself, through the more or less conscious penetration of the Cabalist spirit among musicians, either directly or through the intermediary of poetry or the reading of philosophers influenced by the Kabala.

Therefore I can say without hesitation that the Kabala is at the origin of the phenomenon that I call modernity in music.

If music began to evolve from monophony to polyphony (the Notre-Dame school of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries) and from oral to written form, with notation of measured rhythm (Ars Nova and the treatise of Philippe de Vitry in the fourteenth century), there was a development, directly or indirectly influenced by the Kabala, of an endlessly moving spiral whose expressive scope grew at each juncture, a linking of innovation, consolidation of this innovation, and the fertilization arising from that consolidation, what we call modernity.

I make no claim here that composers, through direct study of the Kabala, could have sought to push music into a pursuit of combinations, or a quest for hidden meanings.

What I do think is that the spirit of Kabala reached them through the mediation of poetry, literature, philosophy and mysticism, all of which were more directly influenced by studies of letters and numbers. The greatest readers and researchers in Kabala were such figures as Raymond Lulle, Giordano Bruno, Pico della Mirandola, and Dante, who all handed down the taste for plays on words, permutations of letters, a curiosity to open up the word the way one tears into a fruit to extract its pulp and its juice. Quite naturally, then, they profoundly influenced musicians who were bent on exploring the very heart of their material. Thus it is possible, proceeding a contrario, or by dismissing the opposite, to discover the apparent traces of Kabalistic processes, what Ouaknin calls “running into the words,” or “bursting out reading,”93 through the poetics of Mallarmé or of Joyce.

92 93

Marc-Alain Ouaknin, Concerto pour quatre consonnes sans voyelles (Paris: Balland, 1991).

Ibid.

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Today just as in the past, moreover, the Kabala offers the composer new models of thought and of approach: an approach to sound, structures and form that are no only mathematically exciting but in addition derive from an infinitely more vital model, one that is more spontaneous and intrinsically more creative than serialism.

On closer study of the Kabala and its explorations, with consequences for poetry, literature and music that were to be incalculable – notably on Gesualdo – how can we fail, in comparison, to find the serialist system very limited; how can we not wonder how Schoenberg, whose Talmudic spirit combined fertile doubt and creative force, could have been content with a distribution system that was so narrow?

The application of serialism to the sound-material reminds me of the feet of those tiny Chinese women, wrapped in bandages to stifle growth. In the case of Schoenberg and of his two fellow Viennese – Berg and Webern – there is no doubt that the tone row, by imposing an internal constraint, afforded a redemptive diversion from unbridled postRomanticism, which had an influence in the Germanic countries – post-Wagner, who had injected drama deep into the veins of music – that was infinitely more overwhelming than elsewhere in the world.

And it was only by managing to keep his cultural distance that a Debussy, among a few others, was able to find his own way without recourse to any system other than that of pure aesthetics.

We must admit that his diagnosis of the symptoms of the “great illness”94 is original and incisive: “All in all, the application of symphonic form to dramatic action succeeds in killing dramatic music rather than saving it, as was proclaimed when Wagner was crowned king of opera.”95 Thus, arguing a contrario, Debussy de-dramatizes music, letting poetry alone, which is consubstantial with the art of sound, dictate the objects and forms, offering no foothold to any exterior system at all.

No, for Debussy as for so many others, serialism would prove not to have been a historical necessity.

94

“Is Wagner a man at all? Is he not rather a disease? Everything he touches he contaminates. He has made music sick.” Nietzsche, Nietzsche contra Wagner, The Case of Wagner, and Selected Aphorisms (Project Gutenberg Ebook #25012, 2008), p. 12, http://www.gutenberg.org/files/25012/25012-h/25012-h.html.

95 Debussy, Monsieur Croche et autres écrits, quoted in Claude Debussy, François Lesure, Richard Langham Smith, Debussy on Music: The Critical Writings of the Great French Composer (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1977), p. 36.

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11 A BRIEF HISTORY OF MODERNITY, FRENCH STYLE

In declaring that “music still awaits its Lavoisier,” Stendhal was not just flaunting his ignorance; he was committing a blasphemy, something enormous, almost as if Berlioz, near the end of his life, had quipped: “Literature is still awaiting its Darwin.”96 That would have implied that the literary jungle had need of a taxonomical system, as if Berlioz were unaware that a start had been made on just that in the form of comparative linguistics.

Stendhal was indeed showing a flagrant ignorance, because a certain Jean-Philippe Rameau in fact, a century earlier, had taken music from a mystical to a more scientific approach, just as Lavoisier had accomplished the transition from alchemy to modern chemistry.

The statement was blasphemous if we reflect that in the country where the writer was king, no one could be unaware, or pretend to be, that a Pico della Mirandola, for example in his Discourse, had been the incarnation of the literary Renaissance man.97 To downplay a fact of this importance, in France, would have led to a total expulsion from literary society.

But Stendhal can be excused: the French, who played Voltaire off against Rousseau, the rationalist against the artist, display a haughty, downright shameless ignorance of Rameau, which must seem excessively exotic to a German, for example, who would never dream of overlooking Bach.

We need to take a look at Rameau, then, since he is so perfectly attuned to the subject of this book.

We will discover in fact that he conceived of music as a catalyst of the emotions, leverage for the soul, and a science of nature.

Rameau was a man of refinement, modest, honest and prolific: thirty-two operas, the greatest output in the genre after Donizetti (who wrote more than seventy) and Scarlatti (more than one hundred six!), a large number of keyboard works and, above all – though disgracefully neglected by our conservatories, which do not regard him as one of their

96

He could have said it, because Berlioz (1803-1869) could have read Darwin (1809-1882), who published his On the Origin of Species in 1859.

97 See, on this subject, historian Jules Michelet, who “invented” Pico della Mirandola as the literary prototype of the Renaissance.

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pillars98 -- an imposing Treatise on Harmony Reduced to Its Natural Principles. That title says it all.

The French musician enjoys the role of pedagogue and reformer. A pedagogue through his works, or by virtue of the number of disciples he can claim. A reformer by tradition, the legacy of the age of Enlightenment.

Rameau perfectly fits this prototype of the “honest man of the Enlightenment,” as a friend of Voltaire, who provided him with four librettos for operas, and an accomplice of the encyclopedia authors. He was more an accomplice than a true partner, for Frenchmen at that time distrusted musicians even more than they do today. While a Boulez is called upon these days to write reference articles for our encyclopedias, back then it was unthinkable that a Rameau should criticize or mock the sometimes grotesque errors found in musical entries in the new bible. And Rameau was virtually banned, even posthumously when care was taken to purge the repertoire of his operas, as thanks for his enlightened criticism. So much for the Enlightenment – which at times could be dim indeed.99 But my concern in this chapter is not just to rehabilitate Rameau; I want to show, by comparing their writings, how Berlioz, Debussy, Messiaen and Boulez too, in their own eras and from their own often contrasting viewpoints, kept French music – and other music – attuned to modernity, that is, to ferment and creative fluidity.

These composers fought against the inertia that seeks to freeze a particular cultural moment into a beatific but sterile and immobile certitude.

The common matrix of their modernity is, without any doubt, a deep sense of poetics, that special compartment in linguistics invented by Roman Jakobson to collect any statement that emphasizes the form of the message. The study of geometric proportions in the elements of sound, culminating in ingenious evocations of the natural elements, in the operas of Rameau; the original, always unforeseeable harmonic syntax in Berlioz; symbolism and newly created forms in Debussy; global textures derived from individual constructs, so dear to Boulez; the non-retrogradable rhythms of Messiaen – all of that belongs to poetics.

And to a certain idea of the French tradition, expressed in analogous manner by Boulez: “French tradition, if such a thing can be said to exist: harmonic legibility and formal 98

They could find great inspiration if they were to take as a second pillar the Traité de rythme, de couleurs, et d’ornithologie, by Olivier Messiaen, which teaches so much about music and the world.

99 Berlioz warned his readers: "So see here, young students, young composers...Try not to get on the wrong side of us present-day philosophes. Steer clear of our disapproval, don't do anything to upset us...we'll get our revenge by refusing to mention your name in our sublime writings.”

Hector Berlioz, Les grotesques de la musique, translated by Alastair Bruce as The Musical Madhouse (University of Rochester Press, 2003), p. 151. But Berlioz can rest easy; the shrewdest of our moderns have taken the lesson entirely to heart.

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dissection”100 and by Debussy, in a more lyrical and alluring formulation: “a pure French tradition…made up of delicate, charming tenderness, precise accents…this clarity of expression, this precision and compactness of form…”101 Rameau, though he wrote his French Treatises on Music, was content to remind readers that “French taste is concerned first of all with singing,” which he deplored because this preference was indulged to the detriment of harmony, which for Rameau constituted the true expressive force in music. This sense of harmony would be developed most particularly in Germany and would be imposed on France by way of Gluck, who was championed by Berlioz but deplored by Debussy for a Germanic imprint, which he blamed for destroying French musical identity.

Some may be astonished not to find Henri Dutilleux represented in this chapter, but the aim here is to quote the composers themselves, to elucidate their approach to the creative act through commentary that they have left us. And Dutilleux did little direct writing, instead expressing himself essentially in his conversation notebooks. Therefore, we pay a brief but enthusiastic homage here to that one Frenchman, contemporaneous with the writing of this book, who had the rare distinction of having his music played, loved by musicians and audiences alike; he has a definitive place in the repertoire, rather than being programmed from sheer opportunism, or from the wish to prove his orthodoxy to any decrees from the modernist salon.

Rameau There can be no doubt that it was Rameau, through a great phenomenological shortcut, who traveled the entire distance covered, after him, by the successive pioneers of modernism.102 He starts from a description of a primordial condition: “Music is natural, and we owe only to pure instinct the agreeable feeling that it allows us to experience.” On that basis, he clarifies his aims and methods: “Music is a science, which must have its solid rules, drawn from an evident principle, which in turn cannot be known to us without the help of mathematics.”

If in fact a “cabal” of his philosophe friends were responsible for the eclipse that followed Rameau’s death later, there was another factor, no doubt, in his continuing exclusion; it is because his notion of nature and the natural – natural to human beings – is so viscerally alien to the cultural milieu of the first six decades of the twentieth century and systematically demanded by it as if in a leitmotive. It is not surprising, then, to observe Rameau’s revival, along with that of the entire Baroque movement, at a time when the individual began to be reconciled with his original milieu. But we still need to agree on what Rameau meant by natural.

100

Boulez, preface to Olivier Messiaen, Traité de Rythmes, de Couleurs et d’Ornithologie (Paris, A. Leduc, 1994).

101 Debussy, Monsieur Croche (Paris: L’Imaginaire Gallimard), p. 91.

102 All of Rameau’s theoretical works are listed on the Web site that accompanies this book. Those are the works from which all quotations in this chapter were taken; that is www.chaslin.com.

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Boulez’s “definitive” case against Rameau – as can be seen below in the section on Boulez – suggests that he may have read Rameau a bit hastily.

In fact, if the fathers regularly cited by Boulez – Debussy and Messiaen – appeal so widely to “natural nature” as the source of their own inspiration,103 Rameau in his theoretical writings speaks of nature and the natural only as an allusion to a sense of order, the natura rerum, or nature of the world, which depends above all on numbers and mathematics. It is, basically, a singularly Boulezian attitude. The same applies to his avoidance of imprecise concepts such as inspiration, which appears twice in a total of some six hundred sixty pages of various treatises, or fantasy, barely eighteen times, and used rather as a synonym of “discretion”: “at the author’s fantasy.”

Exactly what managed to shock the thinking and offend the “amateurs,” at the dawn of the Romantic era, was this imperious need for order, a Pythagorean order, in which everything was in its place by virtue of the qualities attributed to nature, a nature that, in the eyes of the Samos master and those of the Dijon master, reveals itself first of all through numbers and the laws derived necessarily from them, naturally.104 Naturally, too, Rameau defended temperament, or the tempered scale, against Zarlino’s scale, at times even against Pythagoras himself, by which I mean, as explained in my discussion of the subject, against the slavish application of the Pythagorean scale and of its octave of twenty-five intervals.

If Rameau believed in temperament, it was because he believed in a natural order: “There is in nature an order, primitive and invariable, on which everything must be based,” and for him this order found its optimal expressive strength in temperament, the sole system capable of developing polyphony and a harmonic system, thanks too the “anti-natural compromise” that it established: “First I demonstrate the necessity for this temperament by an infinite number of incontestable experiments, and then I base them on progressions that this principle gives me. I prove that, as the principle cannot be in a harmonic proposition, it must at least follow the geometry contained in this progression, and finally I push things to the point of yielding the Method in its full powers.”

Of course, Rameau often refers to nature as a character in his musical drama. Who can forget the ingenious evocations of the elements in Les Indes Galantes? In this context, Rameau wrote: “It is essential to be aware of spectacle, to have studied nature at length to be able to paint it as truly as possible.”105 To which Debussy would reply: “Why did he 103

Debussy: “Musicians listen only to music written by expert hands; never the music written in nature. Watching a sunrise is more useful than listening to the ‘Pastoral’ Symphony.” Monsieur Croche, Paris, Gallimard, p.52. Messiaen: “The musician of our time has every reason to listen to and take note of the sounds of nature.” Traité de rhythme, de couleur et d’ornithologie (Paris: A. Leduc), p. 53.

104 Debussy wrote in fact: “ He [Rameau] was perhaps wrong to write his theories before composing his operas, for his contemporaries found this an opportunity to draw conclusions about his music in the absence of any emotion.”

105 The last three quotes from Rameau are from a Lettre au secrétaire perpétuel de l’Académie de Lyon, and from a Lettre à Mongeot, published by Le Mercure de France, July 1765.

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not follow the good advice he gave us, to observe nature, before trying to describe it to us?”106 But, again, we are speaking here of nature in the sense of a representation, in other words an aim, while Rameau’s prolific theoretical literature presents us the means to it.

With no disrespect to Stendhal, the six principal treatises by Rameau are quite often comparable to works on the geometry, acoustics and physics of sound-objects, which also contain brilliant reflections on sensibility and imagination, seemingly transcended by the presentation of what we must finally call pre-structuralism, a century and a half before Claude Lévi-Strauss.107 And what better demonstration could we find for our purpose than this affirmation, which one might have taken for something by Roland Barthes or Michel Foucault if the term “music” were replaced by “literature,” and “sound” by “writing”: “Music is the science of sounds; consequently, sound is the principal object of music.”

However, the exposition of rigorous principles is always counterbalanced by that of the aims, which must possess the elegance, suppleness and beauty of both art and nature.

Thus, having made ample use of geometry and based his research on “two discoveries, namely geometric proportion in the resonance of the body of sound and the origin of dissonances in a proportional fourth,” Rameau warns: “The geometer’s music is guided only by calculus, and thus the musician has never cared to listen to it.”

By itself, this phrase seems to look far into the future and to justify the backlash against the rigid geometers of our time.

But basically, Rameau is a student of number. He is a rebellious son of Pythagoras and sometimes leads us astray into metaphysical disputes on the predominance of threes, posited by the master of Samos: “Everything in the Denarius announces that Pythagoras and his Sectators considered his system as representing universal music; otherwise this 106

Debussy in Le Figaro, May 8, 1908.

For experts and novices alike, I propose a sampling from the Code de Musique Pratique: “Every body of sound, taken in particular, is always supposed to bear in itself the same harmony as it makes resonate, it is the generator, as I call it throughout; and if several of them should be found, I call each of them indistinctly its fundamental. The first of all of these, from which the others take their source, is always indicated by unity, unless, to avoid fractions, one is forced to round it up to a composite number; and, this once established, one sees suddenly emerging the harmonic proportion 1 1/3 1/5, of the body of sound, of its fundamental sounds, the nature of which prescribes the choice and the limits by the product that results, in a geometric proportion between the generator and the two corresponding terms of each of the first two proportions, 3. 1.

1/3 on the one hand, and 5. 1. 1/5 on the other, but to avoid fractions 3. 1. 1/3 is expressed as 1. 3.

9 and 5. 1. 1/5 as 1. 5. 25, where the triple can also be seen between its triple and its third, and between its quintuple and its fifth, with no need to concern oneself with the place that the multiples and submultiples occupy there, because that depends only on the object to which they are applied, either to the magnitudes or the vibrations,” etc. Would Lavoisier have expressed that any differently?

107

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philosopher, the arithmeticians and musicians would never have called the number seven perfect by its nature,” and later: “The Sectators of Pythagoras, that is, all the known Geometers, would they not have joined in his opinion in favor of numbers, that is, that the power of the number three extends to universal Music, that it composes it, and in even more superior fashion, Geometry too?”

All this, today, may seem quite obscure to persons little versed in the symbolic power of numbers. But the essential question to which this leads, one that remains with us, is the following: “Does number have some power over the ear?" Is it number that implants in us the feeling of consonances and of more or less perfection among them? What virtue can number have before we have found the relationship of a consonance? Is it number or the ear that guides the needles of a compass until they reach fixed points that make us hear this consonance in its perfect justice, of which the ear alone can judge? It is thus consonance that, by determining measure, determines the numbers that must indicate it.

Will we ever believe that the number has the virtue of dividing up a chord, when we see it forced to divide itself in half by the octave, in third by the twelfth, in fourth by the fifteenth, in fifth by the seventeenth, et cetera and when we see at the same time a perfect order, of which numbers as well as our perception follow the law?”

Rameau’s entire theoretical system, which we leave it to the reader to explore more fully, is just an immense development of these interrogations concerning number.

The person of sensibility, for his part, expresses himself in letters, and articles for reviews. For example, to begin with an affirmation in which its author seems to be thumbing his nose at himself: “It is possible to excel in the practice of music without knowing the theory. Without a certain sensibility…no one is a perfect musician,” a statement he goes on to refine: “There are certain perfections that depend on genius and on taste, and for which experience is an even greater advantage than science itself.”

As if anticipating Damasio and the recent research on the emotions, Rameau declares that “music has as its aim to please and to excite in us diverse passions,” and later, that “music is the language of the heart.”

Debussy would reply with his famous “Music must seek humbly to give pleasure,”108 for which a good many moderns, less inclined to humility, have never forgiven him.

Rameau prefigured that semiology of the emotions of which we spoke earlier and that is contained in music owing to the “natural” relationships of intervals and chords: “What man will not admit to owing to nature, to its pure instinct, that agreeable feeling he gains on hearing a certain relation of sounds…” Because that scientific spirit, that man of principles and systems, on being exposed to music, appeals above all to instinct to guide his listening. “To enjoy to the utmost the effects of music, it is necessary to be in a total surrender of oneself…nature…has made us a gift that can be called instinct.”109 108

Debussy, Monsieur Croche (Paris: Gallimard), p. 279.

All the quotations in these last few pages come from Daniel Paquette, J.P. Michau, JeanPhilippe Rameau, musicien bourguignon (Saint-Seine-l'Abbaye, France: Editions de Saint-Seine109

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This dual attitude, rigor and surrender, is more than modern. To us, at the turn of the twenty-first century, it can seem downright avant-garde, a perfect illustration of the theory of the “two sides of the brain” that has been so much in the air in recent years.

It is essential to read Rameau and, above all, to listen to his music. Nothing new has been written about his art since then – and those who claim the opposite have read only the chapter titles in his treatises – except as a copy, adaptation or transposition of the natural principles so dear to this master of all the moderns.

Berlioz No composer of the Romantic period could have boasted of being as controversial as Berlioz. From the listening public to the musicians themselves, some recognized his genius while others would not grant him the most basic mastery of musical composition.

We will dispense with the trying details of a long technical argument; let’s just say that this is a matter of personal taste, but to love his music, it is sufficient to be sensitive to the freedom and temperament of Berlioz, qualities that are expressed through every one of his musical attributes, from timbre to rhythm, including a harmony whose unforeseeable fluctuations have perplexed many a listener. That is the essence of Berlioz.

For those who are indifferent to this freedom, Berlioz’s music no doubt resembles those popular “Père Duchêne” newspaper articles by Hébert who, as Roland Barthes reminds us, never started one without “adding a few ‘screw it’s and ‘bugger’s.”110 To delicate ears, the music of Berlioz seems to be full of swear words.

But we do not find the essence of his modernity in this autonomy with regard to the canons of composition. Others well before him, like Palestrina or Gesualdo, showed the same spirit of independence.

No, this composer’s defining stance is summed up in the first sentence of the first chapter of his Treatise on Orchestration: “Every sounding object employed by the composer is a musical instrument.”111 This brief statement, launched with a kind of sovereign detachment as if in passing, is heavy with consequence and rich with all the later adventures of music history. Earlier, music was made with clearly determined notes and instruments, drawn from a library and an arsenal to which any additions were made only very gradually, prudently and above all with the Prince’s accord. With Berlioz and after him, music would be made with sounds of whatever kind, drawn from anywhere at all.

For Berlioz, this will mean the use of violin harmonics of to evoke a phantom – “In the Cemetery,” fifth of the Nuits d’Été – or bells – Symphonie Fantastique – as well as customary instruments put to unexpected uses, in extreme registers, for instance. l'Abbaye, 1984).

110 Roland Barthes, introduction to Writing Degree Zero 111 Hector Berlioz, Berlioz’s Orchestration Treatise, with translation and commentary by Hugh McDonald (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 5.

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Wagner would be the first to exploit the full freedom of this breech opened in the formalism of the time and, while he remained faithful to traditional lutherie – adding little more than the anvils of Das Rheingold and the bells of Parsifal to the hardware of an orchestra not essentially much larger than Meyerbeer’s great “machines” – he exhausted all possible effects of the classical instruments: the tuba to evoke the dragon Fafner, an echo from the Berlioz Requiem, or rhythmic ostinatos like the one portraying the galloping horses from the opening of Act III of Die Walküre, directly repeating the idea of the same wild ride at the end of La Damnation de Faust.

But Berlioz was not a man to set himself up as a historic landmark; in fact, he was second to none in self-derision.

Thus he tells a charming anecdote that perfectly stresses his reputation as an inventor of sounds: “A musician known to all of Paris…came to see me one morning, bearing under his arm an object carefully wrapped up in paper: ‘I’ve found it! I’ve found it!’ he cried like Archimedes …Look at this instrument, just a white-metal box pierced with holes, with a string attached. I’m going to make it spin wildly like a sling and you’ll hear something marvelous. Listen: Hou! Hou! Hou! Such an imitation of the winds – so much better than Beethoven’s famous chromatic scales. Oh! my friend, what a discovery. And what an article you’ll write for me about it! After that, feel free to make use of my discovery in your symphonies!”112 It is well known that the English are the greatest admirers of Berlioz,113 while the French, if not completely disdaining him, have always taken him a bit for granted. The reason, no doubt, is that, in an immense literary output, far more copious than his musical production, he has left us too many letters, intimate confessions, satirical and humorous articles, and too few weighty treatises, essays, learned and complex reflections on his art.

A man of fiery, romantic, revolutionary temperament, Berlioz had failed to consider this remark by Napoleon: “I conquered the French with earnestness. Men always respect the qualities in which they fall short; well, the French lack earnestness.” Other moderns, very Napoleonic in their taste for power and their propensity to stifle any form of opposition, would not fail, later, to exploit that weakness.

Debussy Debussy a modern?

Many would not even think of posing the question. Certain mandarins, however, enjoy debating which of his works, Jeux or Pelléas, was first to bear the stamp of Debussian modernism, while for most music lovers, indifferent to musicology, his music is simply part of twentieth-century classicism, or simply “classical music.”

112

Berlioz, Les grotesques de la musique (Paris: Gründ, 1969), p. 39.

Following Colin Davis’s work in the 1970s, John Eliot Gardiner has now recorded the most striking version of Berlioz’s complete works.

113

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But what of the composer himself? Did he consider himself a classic or a modern?

Debussy, the soul of modesty and discretion concerning his private life,114 nevertheless left a few reflections that shed light both on his overall view of music and on his personal aesthetic options. Thus, concerning modernity, Debussy calls himself a man of continuity within innovation, rather than an artist of rupture: “I revolutionize nothing; I demolish nothing. I quietly go my way, not making the least propaganda for my ideas, which is the nature of revolutionaries.” “I am called a revolutionary, but I invented nothing. At most I presented certain ancient things in a new way. There is nothing new in art. My musical linkages…are not inventions…I have heard them all. Not in churches. In myself.”

Debussy does not reject innovation; he refines its definition, basically bringing it closer to that of modernity; he simply turns his back on any innovation that is merely superficial, unnecessary for the current time. “I detest doctrines and their impertinences,” and he makes this more precise: “I believe that the main fault of most writers and artists is not having sufficient courage and will power to break with their success, not seeking new paths and ideas…What joy, to discover in yourself something new, which surprises you and fills you with delight!”

And for those who considered him a classicist, he warns: “What do you consider classic?

Believe me, many have been called classic who would not have agreed to that and who cannot imagine being taken for such.” Elsewhere he takes this farther: “In the affirmative sense, it is safe to say that everything beautiful becomes classic with time. In the negative sense, if the classical spirit becomes confused with the academic spirit, well then, it is my opinion that we also need academic works to satisfy timorous minds by giving them the illusion of certitude.”115 That last sentence illuminates for us an astonishing, unique aspect of Debussy’s personality, a particularity of mind that makes him a modern man, far more so than most of those who, after him, seized on his anti-dilettantism like a leitmotive, as if it constituted his whole way of thinking. In fact, Debussy still and always asked himself the question that this book started with: What music for what public? And he conceives of the possibility of different levels of sophistication, thanks to which music addresses itself automatically, naturally, to the public intended for it. The theme recurs endlessly, throughout his articles and his musical works alike, without any concerns about sometimes contradicting himself, as if Debussy, a demanding artist but a sensitive human being, regularly wavered between his contempt for the “broad public”116 and an innate taste for simplicity that drew him periodically to music for children – La Boîte à joujoux, Children’s Corner – which he asserted proudly: “I want to sing of my interior landscape

114

“As a rule, you see, I care little about explaining myself. What we have conceived, the meditations that led to our work, what we sought to express, who needs to know that?” Monsieur Croche et autres écrits (Paris, l’Imaginaire Gallimard), p. 326.

115 All these quotations and those that follow are from Debussy’s Monsieur Croche.

116 “As for the beautiful works, they will impose themselves by their own means, and the broad public is not what counts in this respect because it understands nothing about it.” Op. cit., p. 297.

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with the naïve directness of childhood. No doubt this innocent grammar of art …. will always shock the partisans of artifice and lies.”

Debussy’s concern, which he shared with Ravel and which goes a good way toward explaining the universal success of both composers, was in fact to provide, for each public, a music of quality and not to abandon the masses to mediocrity. Whence his comic praise for the barrel organ, combined with caustic humor: “I’ll have you know that the Shah of Persia has an electric organ that plays the prelude to Parsifal… If you think that these performances in harems flatter Wagner…” and his profound, prospective considerations: “to those who find ridiculous this defense of the barrel organ, I would answer that this is in no sense a case of dilettantish taste but rather of a defense against the mediocrity of soul of the mob.”

He goes on to propose other methods of popular culture. He evokes café-concerts: “Without defending the habitué of the café-concert more than the patron of the [classical] Concerts Lamoureux, it must nevertheless be conceded that both of them are correct in their own emotional means” as well as open-air concerts, which he appreciated as long as they were carefully organized; otherwise they represent “the best conduit for mediocrity that could be dreamed up.”

He shows great sensitivity to space by declaring, still on the subject of the outdoors, that “such a harmonic succession, which can appear abnormal in the confined atmosphere of a concert hall, would certainly find its real value here.”

Thus, Debussy refuses to desert the broad public, which unfortunately our avant-garde has been doing for more than sixty years, at the risk of seeing this public slide inexorably down the slope of least resistance, which the merchants of musical mediocrity are delighted to keep polished for them.

Debussy wrote for children, as would Bartók later, because he considered it his duty. He wrote Spanish music – Iberia, La Puerta del Vino, Evening in Grenada – because he was fascinated by the power of good popular music: “Practically all of modern Spanish music comes directly from the popular repertoire. And yet it never lacks variety, so much so that you can judge just how inexhaustible this source is,” and elsewhere: “This admirable popular music, combining so much dreaming with such rhythm, making it one of the richest in this world.”

He was absolutely convinced of the benefit that learned music could derive from a crossbreeding with this folklore, even if “a kind of scruple about enclosing so many fine improvisations in this formulaic framework held back the so-called professionals.”

Buffeted by his changing moods, Debussy can be elusive. Thus he declares in 1901: “It seems to me that, since Beethoven, the uselessness of the symphony has been amply demonstrated.” But just two years later: “When people complain of the scarcity of symphonies that France can hold up to the rest of the world, the fault may well lie with

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the Prix de Rome,” and yet, as Henri Dutilleux very rightly emphasized,117 Debussy himself composed a symphony in three movements: La Mer. Or else he voices his contempt for the mediocrity of the masses, in moments of pique: “Public education seems to me the most futile thing in the world… Have the fine products of the Renaissance ever been appreciated amidst the ignorance in which they took root?” Elsewhere, however, he is concerned for the sensitivity of the multitude: “Shouldn’t we be mindful of the Greeks? Wasn’t it Euripides, Sophocles and Aeschylus who gave us those great movements of humanity, so simple in outline, so naturally tragic in effect, that they could be understood by the least filtered souls, as well as the least informed…Wouldn’t that be closer to the people than all the psychological or worldly finesse of the contemporary repertoire?”

He proposes a kind of synthesis of these two positions when he concludes: “What do you expect? The public prefers those effects that it finds overwhelming, enervating, moving.

The public is not asking for its feelings to be analyzed…what it wants is to those feelings themselves.”

Emotion, pleasure – these are words that recur constantly in Debussy’s words: “To go all the way to the naked flesh of emotion,” “Music must seek humbly to give pleasure,” but at the same time Debussy refuses to be the plaything of his senses, or to manipulate others through sound. Which explains his unconditional love for Rameau and his distrust of Wagner, of the verists, of all who use music to “enervate” the listener, the better to control him. Debussy admits to having been that very listener, submissive and consenting, “in the period when I was Wagnerian to the point of forgetting the simplest principles of civility.” Debussy has so often been accused of being an anti-Wagnerian, which is just stupid.

The truth is in this statement: “I admire Beethoven and Wagner, but I refuse to admire them in totality just because I am told they are masters! I want the liberty of saying that a boring page bores me, whoever may have written it.” A quotation like that should be learned by heart by every apprentice musician and every convinced music lover.

Everything else that Debussy may have written should be measured by the yardstick of that sentence.

Debussy’s artistic sensibility, as well as his aesthetic researches, drove him to develop and defend a French identity that he considered lost ever since Rameau, drowned as it was in fascination with the Germans, ever since Gluck and in large part because of him: “I have never understood why everyone who studies music…has to have a German foundation. It will take France countless years to free itself from this influence, and if we consider the original French composers like Rameau, Couperin, Daquin…we can only regret that this foreign spirit has been superimposed on what should have been able to become a great school.”

117

Henri Dutilleux, Mystère et mémoire des sons (Paris: Actes Sud, 1997), p. 73.

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Such comments may grate on our ears today, like echoes of old conflicts arising from the past, especially when Debussy seems to be denying the universality of music and of the human soul: “We clap our hands for a work that comes from afar…without asking ourselves if we can experience a sincere emotion at the frissons of souls alien to our own.” But today, when “afar” no longer has much meaning, the notion of a style, of a national school, seems to take on new life, and this is fortunate, after several decades of an “international” musical language analogous to the language of contemporary architecture with its single style and its interchangeable modern cities.

If this quest for universality is understandable, being the reflection of the famous “pensée unique” (single doctrine) that has been seeking to impose itself for the past few decades, and if this unitary idea, in turn, can be identified as the last avatar of the quest for the perfect “behavioral” language, it is nevertheless permissible to wonder if, on the artistic level, a single language can possess enough strength and potential – I would almost say “biodiversity” – to renew itself. Or, if this is not terribly sterile: consider the simple fact that, with the score in hand, it is impossible to identify the origin of a work, even within a range of ten thousand miles or thirty years.

Debussy, we must repeat, is enamored of humankind, which moreover is what separates him from Wagner, “that man who needed only to be a bit more human to be completely great,” and he builds his “system” on humanity and naturalness. Nature and freedom are the basis for his modernism, which he describes in two key sentences: “Research conducted earlier in pure music had led me to despise classical development, whose beauty is entirely technical… I wanted to see in music a liberty that it perhaps includes more than any other art, not being bound to reproducing nature more or less exactly, but instead dealing with the mysterious correspondences between Nature and Imagination.”

That is another sentence that ought to be taught and repeated to apprentice pianists, composers, or conductors who hope to interpret Debussy: he turns his back on the classical form of development, notably that of the sonata and symphony, to seek in the very interior of the basic musical material the forces and directions of the unfolding of this material. This insight has infinitely more depth than the epithet “symbolic,” in which people have always wanted to cloak him, out of laziness, a term he dismisses with “I admit I don’t understand this excessive need for symbols. People seem to have forgotten that what’s most beautiful is still the music.”

In applying this love of freedom and nature to all the developmental modes of his art, Debussy came to Pelléas, which was severely criticized at first as an attempt at lyric art without lyricism, whereas on the contrary, as its composer asserted, “Pelléas is nothing but melody. It’s just that this melody is not cut up, not divided into slices according to the ancient rules. My melody is intentionally uninterrupted, for it aims to mirror life itself.”

Eight years earlier, Debussy had expounded his ideas on the interaction between drama and music, in a chapter that is crucial to understanding both this composer’s creative alchemy and the factors that set him apart from Wagner and the German school: “Music has a rhythm whose secret force guides its development; the movements of the soul have another, more instinctively generalized and subject to multiple events. The juxtaposition

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of these two rhythms gives birth to a perpetual conflict. The process is not simultaneous: either music runs out of breath from chasing after a character, or the character sits on a note to allow the music to catch up with him.” That last clause may amuse devotees of Italian opera: how often do we see a tenor or soprano “sit” interminably on a note, stopping the action to “allow the music to catch up.”

Debussy paid more than twenty tributes to Rameau in his writings, and I leave the writer the pleasure of reading them, to convince himself of the true genealogy of modernity in French music, starting with an Enlightenment spirit that was overtly scientific and secretly poetic, and continuing with a soul that was hypersensitive but devoted to balance and clarity.

Debussy bequeathed to the twentieth century not just his works but also a certain number of crucial ideas: the necessity for the composer to be conscious of nature, of the emotions, of simplicity, of the different categories of audience, of the strength of popular music forms, and of the importance of a French style, a French school.

Yet it is the twenty-first century that seems poised to draw strength from him.

Messiaen “Olivier Messiaen, Ornithologist and Rhythmist”: that was the title on the great French composer’s business card. His masterly theoretical work, in which he summed up his experience as man and musician, reflects in its title the mark of this mental diversity and curiosity: Treatise on Rhythm, Color and Ornithology.

A personality like that of Olivier Messiaen can be approached only gradually and from various angles, at the risk of reaching hasty, reductive conclusions. The man and the musician are too rich, too complex to be judged only by caricatures: some have enjoyed at times mocking his love for birds and the child Jesus, forgetting that in this organist, composer, pedagogue, ornithologist, inquisitive about everything, devoted to science, permeated with religious faith, these different levels are mutually complementary, not superimposed on one another, and that in each case we are confronted with a remarkable personality.

The pedagogue, first of all. Many composers devoted themselves extensively to teaching, but none could claim to have had as students nearly everyone in the two generations that followed his and to have had in his class – we should say his classes – the greatest names in music today. With Messiaen, teaching was not a necessity imposed by the need for material support, it was a thirst to communicate, and to learn in exchange. Love of teaching for him was the continuation of the love for his neighbor. Here we encounter the most disturbing aspect for some persons: the devout composer, a man of mystical, absolute fervor, inspired by a faith that would incite him to faithfully retain his post as organist at Trinity Church in Paris, a faith that would dictate the themes and titles of a great part of his musical output, but also, especially, a faith that would color his music

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down to the most infinitesimal elements, all for the simplest of reasons: for Messiaen, music, his music, must express only joy.

This idea of religious jubilation is not confined to the Christian faith; the Hassidic movement in Judaism favors dance and song to evoke joy, which also serves to preserve one’s physical and mental health; Tibetan Buddhism for its part invites people to discover happiness.

What is new, on the other hand, is for a composer to turn his back on negative feelings, so dear to the romantics and moderns, on the depiction of the existential anguish that haunted the entire life and works of “accursed” composers like Barraqué or Zimmermann, and to convey only joy and the contemplation of beauty.

Messiaen drew this joy and this beauty from the loving observation of nature. Messiaen the great teacher, whose strong theoretical tomes are brilliant in their erudition and of analytic power, pokes fun, in passing, at his most famous pupils, when he speaks of the “super-serialists” who shout: “My intelligence! My brain! My rigor! My lucidity!” and advises them to go, like painters, and take their lessons from the mountains and canopies of foliage, like Debussy, who “loved nature as one loves a woman,” or like Berlioz, who in his Damnation de Faust communicates “the trace of a visual communion with the forceful mountains of Dauphiné,” or like Wagner, led by his Ring cycle to “contemplate and gather all the natural forces and the most diverse creatures.”

The Melody of the Birds Messiaen, then, presented himself as an ornithologist and dedicated a great part of his life and work to drawing up a catalogue of birdsong. With his music notebook in hand he crisscrossed the world’s back country, taking dictation from the whorls of sound that met his ear. After making the most precise transcription possible, he entrusted to his genius as a composer the task of transposing these calls into melodies and rhythmic structures that, we can rightly say, starting in the late 1940s, made up the major part of his material.

Messiaen loved birds because they are, he thought, “the best musicians in the world.” But not content to transcribe their sound in music, he describes them in greedy words, sometimes in a gentle, innocent style, then theatrical and incantatory like an organist’s sudden tutti. A few examples: “The timbre of the robin, soft, liquid and so sweetly friendly; the young, springlike timbre at forte, authoritarian at fortissimo, like xylophone and metal spheres, of the song thrush; the nightingale’s timbre like a wet piano; the bluejay with his turnstile and coffee mill; the musical bark, the tragically desolate glissando and the wild acceleration of the curlew; the tawny owl’s maddening, terrifying vociferousness like a child having its throat slit,” and so on.

He entrusts to the birds, then, the task of inspiring his melodic language, from the “bird catalogues” to Eclairs sur l’au-delà (Illuminations of the Beyond), affirming, “Birdsong is the source of all melody. I can declare that everything I know of melody was taught me by the birds.”

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Rhythm and Eternity In Messiaen’s treatises, the studies and analyses of rhythm make up the greatest part. And if the master develops an infinite catalogue of rhythmic figures, assigning them a name and origin, he is not content to furnish an analysis by an expert bookkeeper; he takes us to the origin of rhythm, to time, and Eternity, citing Saint Thomas: “Eternity is entirely simultaneous, while within time there is a before and an after.”

For Messiaen, time is not the sole domain reserved to humanity. As eternity itself is the protected refuge of the gods, he entrusts to it the task of inspiring him, of transmitting to him the music that is imbued in the spirit of the World. He assigns to time the task of organizing and playing out this music.

Thus on the one hand there is revelation; on the other, transmission.

Here too, Messiaen draws up a catalogue, not only of the different rhythms but also of the different types of time: relative time, biological time, stellar time, mountain time, human time. And within the heart of time and of rhythm, Messiaen of course places number and “the abstract and intellectual delight of the number, unique delight, which exceeds the quantitative order to attain the greatest of all rhythmic orders…the order of interior rhythm.”

Harmony of Colors As for the third element of the musical alchemists, by which I mean harmony, Messiaen sees it as closely connected with color, affirming that he has always “seen” colored specters while listening to music, and in particular in its harmonic, vertical dimension.

More particularly, Messiaen recalls: “In the course of my captivity,118 dreams in color generated the chords and rhythms for my Quartet for the End of Time.

But discussion has often focused exclusively on the harmonic dimension in the influence of colors on Messiaen: in fact, the walls between the worlds of rhythm, timbre and harmony are porous; “harmony thus depends entirely on rhythm and timbre, it unites rhythm and timbre by emphasizing the one and the other…it creates colored rhythms.”

Messiaen goes rapidly from his considerations on the “intellectual” apprehension of a colored vision of music to the observation of true neurological phenomena of synesthesia, or color perceptions inspired by sounds, which he calls “an agreeable ailment,” which afflicted one of his friends.

This famous person, Charles Blanc-Gatti, made a number of paintings of visions inspired

by Messiaen’s works for organ. From there, the master, whom one is often pleased to describe as an ascetic priest, reveals to us the virtues of mescaline, which “transforms auditory sensations into visual sensations of color…What’s more, it destroys the notion 118

Messiaen was a prisoner during the Second World War.

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of time…The brain is astonished by an abundance of images that it is not accustomed to perceiving in such numbers in the same time frame…My colored dreams were of the same nature.”

It is a surprise and a delight to find this almost enthusiastic description of a psychedelic substance in a work that is serious at the very least. But it is important to recall that Messiaen was open-minded and curious about everything, and that alongside the professor and organist he remained childlike, capable of writing in his treatise a touching chapter called “Why I Love Mozart,” in which he reveals in all simplicity: Mozart is the most musicianly musician; you will search in vain for an error in his works,” and childlike too in confiding to us: “I have always loved monsters…those of the Cretaceous…and the painters of monsters: Bosch, Goya, Dali, Picasso, Ernst. Later I tried to produce monsters in music; I never succeeded. Music can render the terror, the fear, the supernatural…but in the art of sounds and rhythms there is an intellectual voluptuousness that is absolutely unsuited to monstrosity and disgust – as it is to laughter and the comic – as all things rest exclusively on criteria quite remote from musical abstraction.”

That is why I love Messiaen.

Boulez In a book with the aim of reconciling the listener with the music of his time, or more precisely of giving the listener the means of apprehending, judging and selecting, it is important to simplifier Pierre Boulez, as much to do him honor as to dissipate a certain number of misunderstandings in the mind of the public.

Few artists have aroused such violent and murderous polemics. The fault for this lies in the perpetually bellicose tone of a major part of his writings, from the very first youthful essays right up to the most recent articles.

Few artists have been at once so famous and so little known. The fault for this lies in the thick veil of complexity with which both the composer and the essayist surrounded his works.

For the great majority, Boulez remains someone difficult, a sort of whipping father, enemy of stargazing, indeed simply the icon of a less-than-pleasant part of twentiethcentury modernism.

For so many of those who became close to him, on the contrary, he is an illuminating force, so dazzling that a number of licensed “Boulezians” often seem overcome in his presence by a mental numbing, a willing, ecstatic surrender of personality, a submission to an invisible decree that they do not understand.

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Now one and all undergo the effects of the same process of complication set up so methodically by Boulez in the 1950s, a complication of musical composition but especially of the critical discourse with which Boulez continually accompanied his own musical production.

And yet both the method of composition and the critical discourse are less complicated than they seem. More exactly, the Boulez composition method is neither more nor less complex than that of a Beethoven or of a Berlioz if you consider that the most difficult part, the “tour de force of the creative act,” consists in the production of a language with universal diffusion, of a work that offers itself at the service of the world, rather than seeking simply to conquer it.

Boulez’s theoretical statement of his own methods of composition is of course impressive, and would no doubt have caused furious complexes among the greatest geniuses in the past, but basically isn’t the greatest difficulty, as we have seen for Beethoven, the marvel of being innovative and universal at the same time?

What’s truly complex is thus that word so gleefully scorned by the moderns: inspiration, a term that is fundamentally poetic, symbolic, practical when it comes to designating the origin of a great mystery: why did one composer produce a work loved and understood by all, while another did not?

On the other hand, when it comes to organization and what I would call the “groundbreaking” of the work, Boulez as a foreman is absolutely matchless. Armed to the teeth with diagrams, organization graphs, schemas, equations, his work, and those that he analyzes with such spark, suddenly appear to us in the dizzying splendor – it’s the effect he aims at – of a baroque profusion of algebra and arithmetic of which, of course, the immense majority of readers, led by the fervent Boulezians, understand not a word.

What is truly remarkable is that once a close light is shed on this luxuriance, this orgy of complex demonstrations – I recall in particular his analysis of Stravinsky’s Sacre du Printemps – you can be quite startled at the meager harvest of absolutely original “discoveries.”

Boulez, who castigates shopkeeper analyses, those little studies that line up a work, label and classify it, without getting anywhere near the heart of the thing, is merely working on a different scale: from the corner shop he moves on to mass distribution, replacing labeling with a computer database. As for the heart of the problem, that remains just as mysterious and inaccessible, even if the brilliant demonstrations and the furious injunctions give us the impression of being admitted into the realm of absolute certainty.119 119

Such certainty is purely relative. The simplest demonstrations sometimes contain errors of statement, or useless details, which can inspire doubts concerning the more complex arguments.

Thus, in his analysis of the Sacre du Printemps (in Points de repère, C. Bourgeois, p. 93), Boulez refers to a cell of five notes, or quintolet, made up of a C played three times, then a B and a Bflat. The author says, “The first note of the quintolet is repeated three times, the two others just Chaslin

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But then, we should simplify and soften this personage, because beneath this “world policeman” of musical thought, under this “general watchdog” who castigates “the great vacuity of thought”120 in referring to the works of his colleagues, there is a great master, whose genius is equaled only by the propensity to falsify his own image to his liking.

Consider first, though, the complexity of his discourse. We have to remember that Boulez came of age just as structuralism was taking wing, and I am thinking particularly of that branch that developed in the late 1950s with Michel Foucault, the period when Boulez made his true breakthrough, more than the structuralism of pioneers like Claude LéviStrauss, who always confessed his reservations concerning music after Debussy. The motto of the structuralism of the 1950s and 1960s was complication, in the etymological sense of the term. Barthes said, for example, that he took up a notion to complicate it, or in other words to reduce it to its intimate structure, which no doubt would reveal a new faculty for redevelopment, that is, for explanation, and thus for yielding a new concept.

This way of looking at things, which functioned for philosophy and literature – although it has not aged particularly well – was translated in music by an atrophy of the emotional space and a hypertrophy of the accompanying discourse. One forces oneself to justify even the slightest sixteenth note, convincing oneself that the satisfaction of having understood will compensate for the frustration of not having felt anything.

And in parallel with a new method of thought there developed a method of speaking, a true war of language of which Barthes made himself the chronicler.121 Thus, a typical sentence from Boulez, such as “Another confusion is produced between the statement of the resulting structures obtained by a determined set of processes of engendering or of combination, and the investigation implied by the real study of the processes themselves,”122 can be translated quite simply as “One still confuses the scholarly analysis of music with the deep study of musical composition.” But, of course, that does not pay as well.

In that period the priority was to dazzle and to subjugate the music world under torrents of complex statements, the tenor of which was at bottom quite simple, and at the same time to charm the new political and philosophical elite, with its sweet tooth for jargon, by demonstrating to them that you spoke the same language and were from the same caste.

once, which is quite amusing: by logic, a note repeated three times would have to be heard four times, a first time plus the three repetitions. Logically, if we say, “This note is repeated once,” that would make two notes, and so on. Moreover, since there are five notes altogether and three of them have already been heard, we should thank Boulez for explaining for us that the two others will repeated only once. You may accuse me of splitting hairs, but I would reply that Boulez has a reputation for infallibility that needs urgently to be reexamined, realizing that, for his part, he has never shown a sign of the slightest indulgence.

120 Introduction to Pierre Boulez, Penser la musique aujourd’hui (Paris: Gallimard, 1987).

121 Roland Barthes, “La Guerre des langages,” Essais critiques (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1981).

122 Preface to Penser la musique aujourd’hui, op. cit.

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Once this gobbledygook is translated into simple terms, as we saw in the preceding example, what we find is a nice little idea that leads us to conclude: “All that, for that?”

What is basically so unfortunate is that, to charm the crowd, to vituperate, to proclaim his superiority, Boulez expends an energy and a true literary talent that finds expression in magnificent turns of phrase such as: “no doubt Debussy wanted to suggest that one’s revolution, no less than being built, had to be dreamed.”123 And now for the complexity of the musical language.

Two words have been perpetually debased, as much by Boulez as by his admirers: science and mathematics. For lack of anything better to say about his work, people praised its mathematical organization and admired his “scientific” discourse.

Now throughout such works as Penser la musique aujourd’hui (Boulez on Music Today) or Relevé d’apprenti (Notes of an Apprentice), we find in fact numerous explanatory tables and schemas on the Boulezian organization of sounds, but they depend merely on a good understanding of algebra, mathematical progressions, very limited series in comparison with strictly “mathematical” series.

Boulez himself started the movement by writing: “When one studies…the thought of the mathematicians or physicists of our time, one assuredly understands what an immense path musicians have yet to cover before arriving at the cohesion of a general synthesis.”124 This was followed, thirty-nine years later, by repentance: “I realized that it is very difficult to make scientists and musicians rub shoulders, more so than I thought… scientific intuition not having the same databases as musical intuition…a lifetime would not suffice to absorb all the specialized forms of knowledge implied by these two cultures.”125 This explanation has the advantage of shedding light on a major difference between Boulez and Messiaen: throughout his writings, Messiaen demonstrates to us his attachment to the most daring, most creative, most speculative science, whereas from reading Boulez in Penser la musique aujourd’hui with its interminable classifications, labelings, diagrams and schemas, we understand that Boulez restricts the term “science” to that of engineers, geometers, that he devotes himself basically to “notes of an apprentice.” In fact, the computer scientists at IRCAM, remarkably expert, have a totally different frame of mind that perhaps, as Boulez wrote, does not at all coincide with that of composers. But the latter are in perfect symbiosis with the theories of relativity, feel at home with quantum physics, and are in seventh heaven with string theory.

So there is science and science.

123

Points de repère I, p. 221, Ch. Bourgeois Penser la musique aujourd’hui, op. cit. p.28 125 Boulez, Pierre, L’écriture du geste (Christian Bourgeois, 2000), pp. 95-96.

124

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But back to our de-dramatization of Boulez. He is a unique case in the history of music: in dispensing censure and gold stars, he condemns those who do not please him, along with their works, to the stake and the pillory. His method breaks down into four parts.

First comes an affirmation of the uselessness of any non-Boulezian idea. This too unfolds in four phases.

In the first, anyone disagreeing with me is useless: “Let us declare, for our part, that any musician who has not felt – we don’t say understood, but indeed, felt – the necessity for twelve-tone language is USELESS.”126 Phase two: I shall now demonstrate for you that I alone hold the keys to this ideal system – the famous line “What do I care about some beachcomber? My opinion counts a thousand times more than his; it’s mine that people will retain,” in the preface to Penser la musique aujourd’hui.

Phase three: even those who adhere to the system but have not made an act of allegiance to my person are, if not useless, at least of little use: “Organizing congresses…falsely doctrinaire, absurdly conservative, they preside, stupid and pudgy, for the greater glory of the avant-garde.”127 Phase four: only a few of the deceased escape unscathed: Webern and especially Debussy, who seems the only one to be truly spared, even if one has to struggle to excuse him for shameful statements on emotion and pleasure.

It may seem remarkable that Boulez has never sought any paternity, even if only theoretical, with Rameau, the one classical composer who, however, was clearest about his attachment to a learned approach to music. In fact, the younger composer’s opinion of his forbear is unyielding: “The era of Rameau and of his ‘natural’ principles is definitively behind us.”128 He has faith in an incomparable judgment and, through the magic of that “definitively,” faith in a unique capacity to build the future, in seculae seculorum.

This dismissal of a colleague, whom common sense would have “naturally” designated as a precursor, derives in part from the fact that the two men are of a radically different nature, as are their aims. For the one, who is the modest, honest man of the Enlightenment: research is a means, while nature remains an end; science is not nature, but the means invented by humans to understand and reveal nature. For the other: the scientific spirit of new music must be taken, not as a metaphor but a change of nature; thus, as for “true” science, research becomes an end in itself, all progress leading to new research.

126

Points de repère I, p. 265.

Points de repère, p. 264.

128 Penser la musique aujourd’hui, p. 30.

127

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The three other arms in the Boulez method are insult, affirmation of his superiority, and intellectual terrorism. This triple procedure, introduced on the occasion of his Penser la musique d’aujourd’hui, was repeated throughout his career right up to his recent interviews for a French daily newspaper. In an article in Le Monde, Boulez goes to the trouble of skinning alive a few Parisian composers, vassals of his, and to remind everyone that he alone has had a career “going beyond the confines of the outer Paris boulevards.” Coming from a great master, this comment is astonishing for its nouveau riche smugness.

Among his insults, one need only quote this exquisite morsel, vintage 1954: “We are still in the era of whorish mudslinging by horrific degenerates, whose lack of scruple seems to make them innocent of their filth.”129 If this accusation can seem to us today unbelievably violent, it is because we live in a world in which people are trying to base themselves on peaceful values. Boulez is above all the contemporary of a world at war; his immediate predecessors were Breton and Aragon, who were equally lethal.

Artists reflect their age. In his discourses, especially those immediately after the war, Boulez bears the violence of a Europe that was given over to an apocalypse. Moreover, Boulez was seeking to find his place; his first essays were his equivalent of Napoleon’s Souper de Beaucaire.130 He needed to gain attention by violence, impress people with jargon. All that needs to be seen anew in its correct perspective; all that should matter is the value of the work, and his work, in the final analysis, cannot be appreciated by standards drawn up by the composer himself, but only in view of his effectiveness with respect to his ultimate aim, the ultimate aim of all music, which is not to please, to sell itself, to function, all of which are transitory values, but instead to be the new sentence, the new chapter in the great Book of the World.

We must not be afraid of Boulez, then, or allow the perfumed cloud of intellectual fawning to take advantage of our ignorance and give us any false assurance of “belonging.” Boulez is a composer who has his place in the history of French music, but let’s not present him as the exotic cross between Einstein and Rameau.

Undeniably Boulez is a great master, but incontestably he is a master in the French manner, in that way of being French usually encountered in politics rather than art.

The taste for power or for insult is not part of the manner of the French composers, and especially not of the “father,” Debussy.

Boulez is a special case. Something of a Bonaparte of the dulcimer, he bears the virtues of the coup d’état on paper as well as in institutions.

129

Points de repère, p. 33.

This was a manifesto by the young Lieutenant Bonaparte aimed at gaining the attention of his superiors, and as a result he was given command of the siege against Toulon.

130

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But like him or not, his work on the ground will remain. His recordings are landmarks, and IRCAM as well as the Ensemble Intercontemporain are institutions of global impact and clear necessity.

No one will ask Boulez to change, of course; on the other hand, one might have wished him to indicate the path himself with more openness and generosity of spirit, or to show the way out of a system of thought for which, as he says himself, he is “100 percent Marxist-Leninist.”

From Rameau to Boulez: the itinerary of modernism “in the French manner” seems to have been a game of permanent hide-and-seek between the arts and the sciences.

Claiming incontestably to be more allied with poetry and painting than with geometry, Berlioz and Debussy were no less influential on the music of their contemporaries and of the generations to come. Declaring quite distinctly their link with science and mathematics, Rameau and Boulez seem to have both suffered from the same reputation for dryness, lack of humanity and emotion, a reputation absolutely false in both cases.

Messiaen alone, fundamentally, appears to have accomplished a perfect synthesis. We must consider this the fruit of a wider approach, more visionary, to the concept of science: there has always been, and there always will be, a difference between what we call the science of the great intuitionists131 -- Newton, Einstein, De Broglie – and the science of the engineers. The latter group apply what the first have discovered, and speak a language less adventurous and especially infinitely less subversive.

Certainly, until the twentieth century, one could be content with the generic term “science of music,” in that a certain geometry seemed to govern the elaboration of classical forms.

Musical analysis, to sum up, possessed incontestable analogies with basic mathematics.

On the other hand, when it comes to evoking the higher powers of the mind, intuition, imagination and – let’s go mad! – fantasy, inspiration, the realms of the ultimate aim in music, we have to seek the appropriate resonances in fields like quantum physics, relativity, string theory.

Boulez and Rameau will speak to us only of geometry of forms, of structures, indeed of the acoustic spaces. Messiaen, who could conceive of musical thought – or rhythmic thought, to use his preferred terminology – only devoted in its entirety to the elevation of the soul, will prefer for his part to seek his scientific references much farther afield. Is that the reason that the music of Messiaen touches us more and functions better?

For my part, I prefer to see, paradoxically, a structuralist explanation. Thus, to borrow the terms of composer Francis Bayer, there are two categories of composer: the “constructivists” and the “intuitionists.”

For the constructivists the priority is the act of composing, whereas for the intuitionists the result of this act is the essential aim. The problem with the constructivist approach, in 131

With the meaning that Heyting and Brouwer give to this term.

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the terms of philosopher Tzvetan Todorov,132 is that “in this case, you are making one of the consequences of the process into the description of the process itself.”

Todorov is speaking here of the functioning of symbols, but he points out an ontological short-circuit that is perfectly applicable to our purpose: “I compose to compose”: the process is identified with the consequence of the process and that takes us back to the first category in my classification of composers, those who no longer designate the Other, the exterior, the result as a final aim of their work, but limit themselves to a purely reflexive act, and become their own exegesis, their own criticism.

132

Tzvetan Todorov, Symbolisme et interpretation (Paris: Editioins du Seuil, 1978).

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12 CRITICISM AND AUTHENTICITY Before closing this third part devoted to modernity, there remain two points that, in view of their growing importance in the art of music today, cannot be omitted from the discussion: critical activity and, directly linked to it, the fad for “authentic” interpretations, which is so well entrenched by now as to be an established manner.

The word “critic” is of course from Greek kritikos, discerning, suggesting the task of separating true from false, or more precisely the “better” from the “less good.”

Criticism and Its Purity of Reasons In the realm of music, we have to distinguish four distinct activities that fall under the term “criticism.”

There is of course journalistic criticism, known to one and all. This activity has been in existence for several centuries without evolving much, except perhaps in the nineteenth century when it was regularly practiced by the greatest composers of the day, including Schumann or Berlioz of whom we possess numerous “papers.” In our own time, few composers stoop to this difficult exercise, and criticism has truly become specialized. The critic is most often a musicologist whose field extends to journalism. He or she no longer writes only reviews as before, but also interviews, background pieces, basically reporting.

Throughout the twentieth century, especially after the Second World War, musicological research developed on the subject of ancient, sometimes very damaged scores, scattered, fragmented, on which all possible light was shed in order to establish a “critical edition.”

Here that research is branching off in two different directions, one leading to the publication of a standard score, an indispensable tool to guide musicians toward the “truth” of interpretation, and the other involving solitary work by some of those musicians themselves who seek to reconstruct not just the text but the context, the whole environment of the work, from the instrument used at a certain period, the way of playing it, down to the slightest details of interpretive techniques of the era. This leads to “authentic” interpretations, of which we speak a bit later.

And finally, more recently still, there are two contemporary activities on the part of creators themselves: the composer’s criticism of his own work, and not only a posteriori, but indeed in advance of the elaboration of the work, throughout its gestation. And then, the fourth and final form of criticism, practiced either by the composer himself or by one of his exegetes: explication, commentary, indeed a staged lecture, with many musical examples.

The first of these two modern forms of criticism was theorized by Berlioz, who expressed himself on the subject starting in his very first writings. For him, this constitutes a work of accompaniment that allows him to reformulate himself permanently. In “Critical

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Probabilities of the Composer,”133 Boulez speaks of “this need, this obsession with the need to specify one’s field, one’s research.” But this is still an eccentric activity, a public exhibition. Later, Boulez reveals to us “a sort of incantation that presides at the genesis of the work as such.” As his own critic, the modern composer, launching into the profound analysis of his aims and his means, seems to enter into a kind of reflexive trance – with the risks associated with a too systematic and too “perfect critical definition of oneself… to what extent can this critical analysis manage to be accomplished without danger…the work in that case would scarcely have a chance, being short-circuited in its very genesis, by a total absence of necessity.”

Yet basically, all composers or nearly all, starting with Rameau, practiced some form of self-analysis or self-criticism: Messiaen, warning his pupils to write, as they composed, a brief analysis that would allow them later, in the manner of Hansel or Gretel scattering breadcrumbs, to retrace the path of their thought. Mahler, leaving numerous letters exhaustively detailing his twists, turns and discoveries along the difficult pathways of creation. Debussy, as already seen, declaring wisely that the composer’s research was strictly his own business and that the public ought to be concerned only with the result.

But there’s the rub: for more than a half-century, the result is far from being attractive enough to allow the work to get by on its own, so the composer, once his own critic, has had to become his own exegete, or to court the talents of others for this role, thus giving rise to this fourth form of activity.

Explanatory criticism, practiced by the composer or the visual artist himself, or by the journalistic critic, or by any licensed or self-styled “art specialist,” is assuredly the cultural activity that has known the greatest boom in the past several decades.

The more the work is obscure, provocative, indeed “absent” – such as in those empty canvases, those silent musical works – the more the critical activity is justified, and the more its importance is assured, to the point of triumphing, and in some way overriding the work itself.

The expert in charge of explanation becomes a prestidigitator: where before nothing had existed, there suddenly appears a work. Where you could once detect only the gratuitous desire to be provocative, a profound intellectual motivation is unveiled. Where once nothing was understood, now everything becomes clear.

But above all, more recently still, with critical discourse being distilled almost in a subliminal way, by words snatched here and there, in the manner of a treasure hunt, the spectator or listener being invited to complete the criticism – and thus the work itself – these spectators become part of the creation and this sudden importance that anyone at all can assume for a few instants, helps explain the great success of modern visual arts, even when certain works are quite patently nothing but charlatanism, attaining prices out of all proportion with their true value.

133

Boulez, Points de repère (Paris: Ch. Bourgeois), p. 27.

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The invention of the concept of the spectator – or the listener – as creator is one of the greatest inventions by those “salesmen” assigned to market the vacuum in our time. No matter that Cinderella’s splendid coach, at the end of each demonstration of this artifice, is turned back into a pumpkin; the process works and will always work, for the simple reason that it flatters the ego of the visitor, but even more of the “prestidigitator” assigned to conduct the tour, who amazes himself at his ability to pull so many rabbits from an empty hat. No doubt there truly is “creation,” or rather playful chitchat, when someone is able to obtain something out of nothing. To present a gloss of an object devoid of all artistic value of its own, and to give it an importance proportional to the orator’s talent, magnifies that person and gives him a considerable dominance over the artist and the work.

Everyone stands to gain: the artist, as surprised as anyone at his success, the magician dazzled by his own artifice, and the public, that collective Bourgeois Gentleman, flattered to think he has understood.

Thus, what we shall call “event criticism” has become the major winner, almost the main actor, in the art of our time.

Even if the caricature situation I am describing here relates more especially to visual arts, this form of explanatory criticism has become so necessary to contemporary music that entire concert programs have been dedicated to lectures, which sometimes draw on the efforts of a full symphony orchestra, in support of creations that last no more than a few minutes.

The question whether these costly lectures, attended in any case by a pre-sold public, fulfill their mission with the musical public, is not even asked.

The author of this book often engages in the indispensable exercise of the “notes” in a concert program, or of “a few words of explanation” from the stage, before the performance of a work. These are not true, long-term solutions allowing the great mass of listeners to enter into the composer’s sound-world.

No lecture, however fascinating, can ever replace the repeated hearing of a work, which is the necessary condition for its assimilation.

No other technique can convince a reluctant public to give a chance to a piece it dislikes on first hearing, except perhaps the association between music and a supporting visual image, a subject that will be explored in the final chapter.

Therefore the activity of the event critic contributes far more to visual art or architecture than it does to music, owing to the emotional tenor of the signs in music and its close rapport with time: it is difficult simply to cheat with the listener by charming him, surrounding him in a discourse, no matter how brilliant, and then leaving him alone with a message whose content remains hostile or void of meaning (which comes down to the same thing as hostility).

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The visual arts or architecture leave the spectator free, to move, wander, evade the work, go on to the next one, and to refuse it. The visual spectator is the master of the time factor, while the listener is subject to the composer’s timeframe. Finally, the emotional signs of painting pass through the eye, and it is well known that the visual operates less rapidly and less forcefully on the neuro-vegetative system than the auditory, which in turn is less reactive than the olfactory.

The association of eye and ear seems truly to be the only salvation of modern “complex,” “dissonant” music, and everyone comes together here, because this association, including the visual, creates a new opportunity to the prestidigitators of the word just where every simply “musical” attempt seems to have failed. The combination of sound and image gives the critical activity a new start on truly virgin soil, promising infinite explorations, because the combinations are inexhaustible.

Did Someone Say “Authentic”?

Musicological critical activity knew its glorious success, as we know, during the revival of the baroque repertoire and of interpretations on ancient instruments.

When this phenomenon got started, there was of course the aberration of applying romantic interpretations to the early repertoire, so that you could hear Bach or Lully played by symphony orchestras at full force, or the wind instruments doubled in Mozart symphonies, not to mention blunders of phrasing, articulation and more.

We can only admire, and bow in respect to, the Harnoncourts, Christies, Gardiners and Jacobses who devoted their entire lives to the establishment of interpretations of a beauty that convinced and won over the mass audience, with a stupefying speed: that public, finding nothing to its taste in contemporary works, but nonetheless thirsty for novelty, thus took the reverse route and the parade of new “creations” took place in period costume.

Once this paradox settled into custom, it became an important element in new modern culture, open to different periods and frontiers: the old can become the new.

Yet, despite my obvious enthusiasm for the contributions of this marvelous baroque epic, I feel compelled by the critical spirit of this chapter to add a few reflections, or at least to underline a few disturbing ambiguities.

First, there is the fact that every one of the masters just cited was delighted to present himself as the discoverer of the truth, the guardian of the sole canons of authentic criticism. We spoke of chapels, and we are thus entering an almost religious setting: what god to believe in? who is more correct than his neighbor? who is more authentic than the rest?

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Then there is the question of the composer’s will: interpreters strive to reconstitute not only the letter but also the spirit, but when we approach the question of the contemporary instrument, we often forget that nearly all the composers prayed for the modernization of the pianoforte, of the wind instruments, of the bows. When we hear string sections without vibrato, which sound a bit like an old harmonium, or a period piano that evokes a tired honkytonk, it is difficult to see that in parallel with the pressing letters of composers to their carpenter or luthier, interrogating them on their latest breakthrough, jumping with joy at the new sound from Mr. Steinway.

Finally there are two major contradictions that seem not to bother anyone.

The first is this “purity” of the ancient style, so eagerly sought after, which seems a healthy reaction to the romantic excesses. But one has to wonder whether our researchers are looking in the wrong direction. In fact, the purging of every “glissando,” or every trace of vibrato among singers, or for the rolled “r”s, to cite just two effects, seems to me in total contradiction to what the earliest recorded testimony reports: in fact, we know that nineteenth-century actors declaimed in a manner that, today, would seem downright grotesque, the singers we hear on ancient records have the same effect on us, and we could bet that preceding generations played or sang in similar manner, or even more exaggerated, but it is not likely that in the eighteenth century one played in that style purged of anything not on the printed page, this implacable rhythm worthy of a fitness gym, which is of course the sign of our period, proper and attentive to the text alone.

Hearing the instruments themselves enlightens us on this point: earlier, people were fond of rubato, “slides,” improvisation, all the signs of a great freedom and spontaneity, which became progressively more anemic until today. “Period” interpretations are based on a fidelity to the text that, in itself, is not a fidelity to the spirit; quite the contrary. The problem, impossible to solve, is of course that that freedom and deviance, because they were never annotated, are impossible to reproduce. We see this with jazz, where many, many elements of interpretation remain in the realm of “oral” tradition. Now it seems that the elements on which we have only very little information made up a very major part of what one heard in periods when, once again, the personality of the interpreter and his freedom toward the text played a major role in executing a work.

Therefore this notion of authenticity must be taken with the greatest prudence. It seems to me, paradoxically, that the “period” recordings that we have been hearing for more than a decade finally reflect the spirit of our period in a remarkable way: textual purity, since we are in a period that loves objective reality, whether in the form of vulgar tv “reality,” films “based on a true story,” or historical fiction. At the other end of the spectrum, the public is hungry for “fantasy,” medieval epics, and ancient music thrusts it into an atmosphere of dungeons and knights in armor responding thus to two apparently contradictory expectations.

Finally, our harried period, always in a hurry, loves rapid tempi and implacable pulsations: we continue to hear, one after another, new versions of the symphonies of Beethoven or Mozart interpreted with a discotheque rhythm, entire movements without

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the slightest fluctuation in tempo. Furiously evoking the bodybuilding session, the conductor in a jogging outfit on the podium à la Jane Fonda, the drums amplified as if to mark the opening of hunting season or perhaps just the ennui of the sound engineer dreaming of a Heavy Metal sequence.

Authentic? All this may well be just that. But authentic to which period, that is the question.

The second contradiction that I wanted to underline here concerns the wonderful intellectual gymnastics engaged in by all ensembles, and in the most gleeful disorder, the actors from the world of opera in particular: on the one hand we experience an increasingly assertive intransigence regarding authenticity of text and of musical interpretation, while on the other hand this same intransigence is applied to demanding an increasingly modern stage direction, ahistorical, innovative. It would seem logical to strive to regale the eye with the same attention to detail and “truth,” to authentic period style, a sort of label or brand (like an “appellation contrôlée” for fine wines), but apparently this is a privilege reserved for the ear alone. Or else, to approach the problem in the other direction, it would seem normal for music to be able to enjoy as much freedom of text and of style as the stage direction allows itself.

A wider and wider gap, therefore, comes to separate what we hear from what we see.

Of course it would be intolerable to have stagings with candle and powdered wig, but still, how do you reconcile the pit, always more “ancient,” and the stage, always more modern?

The response lies partly in what was said above: in any case, this authenticity is only an illusion. The more one seeks to reproduce an ancient era, the more in fact one exposes the values of the one to which one belongs. Is this a paradoxical result, or a hidden wish on the part of our beloved masters of period style?

Whatever the answer, it is undeniable that the extraordinary success of the “baroque” reflects, at least in part, the penury of modern creativity, the disarray of the public and its voracious appetite for novelty, even when it derives from some time machine.

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FOURTH MOVEMENT: MUSIC AND DESIRE

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13 THE GOOD PLEASURE “The first rule is to please…”

Jean Racine Please; pleasure.

Two words that are quite distinct in modern usage, yet united by the same etymology, Latin placere, and by the churning fermentation of an invisible “I want.” It is like the double serpents intertwined on Hermes’s symbol for medicine: the “I want to please” of the creator and the “I want my pleasure” of the spectator.

And when the spectator becomes the prince, pleasure becomes a demiurge; it is the “good pleasure” of the King that dictates the rules, of which “the first … is to please,” sets the style along with the pay rates, stimulates vocations and, like a good captain who is at the same time the spirit of the winds, keeps the compass set on an aesthetics that is fortifying, reassuring, reinvigorating.

This was how Western “great music” was born. From desire, at the good pleasure of the princes who summoned it as much as by those who invented it: like a double waving motion, animated by the placere, a veritable placenta of their hedonism, the creations of some responding to the desire of others.

There were the servile, the grovelers, those who chiseled, cut, adjusted to fit; the Lullys and Salieris, sound-gardeners of the Court, chefs preparing and slicing on demand.

There were those who bowed obediently while totally ignoring the command, holy terrors and geniuses who preferred insubordination or a flight into deafness rather than hear the reproaches, the injunctions to write “fewer notes.”

And there was Wagner, the King’s fool in the amorous sense of the word, who raised the good pleasure all the way to the rank of Total Art. Interwoven in the sonorous entertainment was that vein of modernity, moving at first like a stream, then overflowing, bounding, roaring. Modernity that, until the advent of the Man of the Hill, the true “old man of the mountain,” had been merely the expression of a pleasure always more demanding, toward the end bordering on onanism.

Always stronger, more sophisticated, more powerful and pleasing, more contagious and dominant, these were the motivations of the pleasure of creating modernity: to forge for oneself the means of enjoyment to the maximum, and to please the Prince. The good pleasure, turned into a sadist trance, had attained the overdose; there remained only death or withdrawal.

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Death in oblivion, or withdrawal by asceticism, these were the two commands, Debussy or Schoenberg. One went “as far as the bare flesh of emotion,” but superbly oblivious to dogma and Scholasticism; the other, drunk on dark nostalgic delights of a Paradise Lost – Transfigured Night, Gurre-Lieder – applying fruitful Talmudic doubt to the music system he had inherited, only to sterilize it by denying all rapport of affinity between certain notes or intervals, forbidding musical elements from coupling by inclination, which he opposed, like the chaperone standing guard at the virgin’s door.

Where is the good pleasure in all that?

In the manner of monks inventing plainsong and polyphony in the secrecy of their monastery, the “moderns,” wearing the conical hat of the contemporary alchemist, from now on were distilling their own secret pleasure, hermetic, the pleasure of learned concoctions, of the most complex combinations, the most refined sound textures or the most unheard-of, the rarest of atmospheres.

The moderns took their pleasure in silence, finally rid of the “Prince” and of his yoke.

The public, henceforth playing the role left vacant by the silent partner, had to submit, bend low and accept the obvious: the crown had changed heads.

Lagging a hundred years behind human society, musical society had finally realized its revolution.

Today, brazenly and officially, the community has proclaimed itself the Society of Pleasures. To cast doubt on this principle would be the gravest blasphemy, a taboo barely thinkable. People acclaimed anew the melodious woodsmen, even if they are cut from the lowliest boxwood shrubs, the chefs are summoned as reinforcements at the spit to regale us abundantly with some barbecue that is vile or at least insipid.

Such are the “neo-things,” the “techno-thingamajigs,” and their products conceived to please us, to make us buy, to deceive us, corrupt our taste and blunt our judgment.

What is the way out, for those born in a wholesome democracy and poorly informed of the good pleasure of old, not much inclined to identify with a ruling, dominating entity, but still hoping of course to enjoy a good time at the expense of music, but in perfect coherence with its ultimate aim: to participate, for the length of one hearing, in the world soul, in their own essence?

What alternative do they have, among the soldier-monks, jealous of their rarefied pleasure, and the merchants in the Temple, ready to serve up full barrels is you pay cash on the barrelhead?

Salvation, as in any self-respecting trap in the ground, is from above.

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By training the ear, practicing the gymnastics of auditory prehension, mastering codes and rules. Listen, listen twice, listen five times until the ear tames itself.

To the listener, I would say: you have everything to gain, in terms of pleasure, in acquiring a wider field of perception, a more open sensibility, a more tolerant ear.

Do you like Proust, do you like Gracq or Joyce? They are not easy on first approach, but do you not feel how your soul opens and rejoices better in those rarer, more subtle atmospheres? Do you realize how the least word, the most tenuous verbal stimulus, reacts in you and invites you to the adventure of opening a door that, somehow, had been there forever?

Well it is exactly the same with music. We believe we can only appreciate simple harmonies, quickly identifiable tunes; we condemn ourselves, out of fear or laziness, to another form of deafness.

To stand outside the gates of the Temple when you have the keys in your pocket is worse than being expelled from it.

But to its guardians, those soldier-monks who stand guard, wrapped up in themselves like a Brünnhilde on her rock, over the mysteries of auditory felicity, demanding trial by fire from each listener like another Siegfried, to them I would recall that the ultimate aim of music is the Other, and the ultimate aim of the composer is to magnify the Other through sound.

Magnify: make larger, etymologically.

Not to make oneself greater by an intellectual exploit that one hopes will astonish, but instead to raise the world a degree higher, which is a considerable exploit in another sense.

Because they have been able to hide their intentions, cloak them in the most caressing attire, “suffer the little children to come unto them,” and to show these charmed children the visible part of the Garden of Eden: they, the Bachs, Mozarts, Beethovens, kept their motives to themselves, the immense but hidden complexity of their works, and offered nothing visible but the magnificence of the hearing experience.

The moderns, on the contrary, concealed their pleasure, which they enjoyed however on their own, solitary, exhibiting, at times like excuses, their “justifications,” constructions fabulously complex on the outside but which often foil the quest for access or depth.

The moderns have severed what attached them to the world, because they wanted to sever ties with the Prince above, but also with the prince below, emotions, feelings, the body.

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For, as we know, Pleasure is a tyrant who manipulates the strings of our psyche, using and bending to his aims, which are nothing but our survival,134 the most intimate structures of our physiology. The philosopher Alain said rightly: “It is no small task to accord wisdom and music.”135 If emotional mankind fails to find its pleasure with the moderns, it offers itself like a courtesan to those able to satisfy it at a low price.

134

Damasio insists that homeostasis, the search for positive emotions, pleasure in listening, is just an attempt of the body/mind to attain and preserve psychosomatic balance and thus, in the final analysis, to survive.

135 14 HUMANS AND DESIRE “The basis of effort, volition, appetite, desire, is not that we judge something good; on the contrary, we judge that a thing is good because we tend toward it by effort, volition, appetite, desire.”

Spinoza, Ethics III As stated at the outset, a composer is driven to write, and a music lover to listen, for quite different reasons. They are nonetheless united by a desire, for emanation in the case of the creator, where the desire is the cause of the object, and the desire for prehension by the listener, where the object is the cause of the desire.

We are dealing in fact with a form of eroticism – the desire is present with its object, in accordance with the definition of eroticism.

The emotional, sentimental relation to the musical sign is matched by an intense, passionate love relation with the sound-object, which suffices to explain the downright irrational behavior that can be observed on the part of many music lovers, notably among the “fans” of opera. Hostile or enthusiastic reactions are, in most cases, delirious, while inhibitions fall and the mass becomes a mob.

Observing an audience in the throes of collective passion is a constantly fascinating spectacle for the artist. And yet, to think for a second that this passion could have the artist himself as its object would be extremely naïve. The public falls in love with the sound, which is borne by the artist, and the public acclaims the sound through the person offering it to the multitude, or spits on anyone who spoils it, like Perrette in the fairy tale who spills her milk can. The public will judge the interpreter according to the fidelity with which he will render the object, which is loved, awaited, known, because the public, monogamous in its desire, returns to the same object, known as the “repertoire.” But when the music lover prepares to hear a novelty, when he attends a premiere, this desire Chaslin

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We should ascend, therefore, to them, the moderns, since any other path is harmful, but they must take some steps as well, descending toward us, without any loss of rank, in order that all meet up and rejoice in music, since that is its good pleasure.

is combined with the mixed pleasure of a de facto polygamy: the music lover prepares to love new sounds. To betray this expectation, to frustrate these hoped-for pleasures, would be to break the bond with the listener. To frustrate and betray him for a period of decades is to teach him never to return.

Ask a music lover what draws him to the concert hall or opera house, and he will most often reply: the chance to escape the ordinary world, to experience an exceptional moment. It’s the same alibi used for all amorous behavior. Barthes recalls this: “The amorous subject, as we know, is marked by a retreat from reality, he disinvests himself from the outside world.”

There is thus another possible classification of the music lover, based on his desire, complementing it, as stated at the beginning of this book, and it is based on his relationship with the environment. This new nomenclature indicates new expectations that must not be betrayed, since the inverse of desire is disgust and frustrated desire leads to rejection or anger, passions in every case that help us understand the difficult, tense relations of the listener with the music of his time.

A first degree of this desire is the stage of voyeurism.

It functions in all listeners like background processing by a computer, and it is not impossible that this desire to enter into the sprit of a creator, even partially, is the motive for all interest in the disciplines of art and thought. All readers of Remembrance of Things Past know the pleasure of being in Proust’s mind, observing his minutest variations in feeling. Magazines specializing in the private life of stars and paparazzi know very well this voyeurism leverage, and what functions for the uninteresting, often falsified gossip columns works all the better when it comes to insinuating oneself in the imaginary world of a genius. It is worth viewing once again the film Being John Malkovitch, which uses an ingenious parable to depict the process of infiltration into another mind. The element of prohibition in voyeurism, moreover, only increases the desire.

The next degree of desire is fetishism. The music lover finds pleasure in sounds, certain sounds, certain arrangements of sounds. Then, with habit and a certain culture, he seeks certain traditions, he awaits a cadence, a high C that is unwritten but conventional, certain retards, certain colorings. Fetishism is the degree that triggers the most violent reactions, Chaslin

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14

HUMANS AND DESIRE

“The basis of effort, volition, appetite, desire, is not that we judge something good; on the contrary, we judge that a thing is good because we tend toward it by effort, volition, appetite, desire.”

Spinoza, Ethics III

whether in sexual eroticism or the sublimated version found in musical listening. The fetishistic listener tolerates no variation in his pleasure ritual, once he himself has established it. In opera especially, this tendency makes any attempt to approach a classical work in a fresh spirit a highly problematic enterprise.

Finally we reach a more subtle degree, one that sometimes requires prior experience in one of the two preceding states; it is the degree of the feeling of osmosis with a superior state of mind. This is no longer voyeurism, or “being in Mozart’s head,” one of those purely tourist attitudes that no more allows a listener to identify truly with Mozart than it allows a passerby to think he has become some statue or monument. Just as a conversation with an extremely brilliant person can raise our own level by stimulation and force us to be our best selves, so the hearing of a sublime work can magnify us for a few moments. This too is a variation on the erotic act, that is, an appropriation, or at least a sharing, of the qualities of the desired person; between two human beings, this can be kindness, beauty, intelligence, wealth, anything – but it is rare to have desire for a person who has none of those qualities.

On a higher level yet, we reach the degree of ecstasy, where listeners expect a work or an interpreter to lead them, by way of the beloved sound, to a mystic communion beyond words, which is another form of sublimated eroticism. I remember the final three concerts

by Herbert von Karajan, which I had the good fortune to attend, at the Salzburg Easter Festival, and especially the Verdi Requiem, his final one, after which I was simply incapable of speaking a word for some two hours. I had gone through all the degrees of pleasure including ecstasy, and I was so filled up with sounds, all marvelous, that I was incapable of uttering one myself.

Thus, in the creator and in the listener, there exists the same motivation by way of desire, but a work cannot function unless these two desires meet. First, by virtue of the different categories of composers that I catalogued at the beginning of this book, the composer, driven by a desire to write, will not necessarily have the listener’s desire. Remember what Barthes said of reading: “What we desire is…the desire that the writer had to write, or again: we desire the desire the author had for the reader when he wrote; we desire this love me that exists in all writing.”

Let us be clear: In the course of the complexity of post-Schoenberg music, there was no renunciation of the love me, but rather there was a love only me, exclusive and Chaslin

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As stated at the outset, a composer is driven to write, and a music lover to listen, for quite different reasons. They are nonetheless united by a desire, for emanation in the case of the creator, where the desire is the cause of the object, and the desire for prehension by the listener, where the object is the cause of the desire.

We are dealing in fact with a form of eroticism – the desire is present with its object, in accordance with the definition of eroticism.

The emotional, sentimental relation to the musical sign is matched by an intense, passionate love relation with the sound-object, which suffices to explain the downright totalitarian. The composer does not isolate himself behind a rampart of cerebrality; he expects from his listener an act of total love, in which the effort and the absence of compromise of the disciple prepare him for initiation, the disciple’s total offering of himself. You have only to watch the militancy of the avant-garde public – which for some time included the author of this book – to be convinced of this process. If this intense labor, this act of adoration, is not performed, the composer’s gesture will come to seem vague, it will be perceived as disdainful distance.

I can best illustrate this thesis with an example from a film. In Woody Allen’s Deconstructing Harry, we see a character who, while shooting a film, is out of focus on camera. After all the controls have been checked, he proves in fact to be truly out of focus. When the film “tilts” into narrative reality, Allen, who plays the role of the narrator, relives the moment when, as a writer, he had become out of focus himself, physically, and his girlfriend at the time explains to him: “You wanted to be beyond the grasp of your readers, you demanded that they perform immense efforts to understand, to come to you, you became so unbelievably arrogant that you became out of focus for the rest of the world.”

We gain a new perspective now on comments made earlier, concerning emotionally competent objects, the composer’s need to take into account the role and the weight of feelings during the process of creation. The composer dries up and asceticizes his discourse from the desire -- in a sort of osmosis in which the more saturated body frees itself into the one that is less so -- to force the listener to surrender his own emotions, to make a gift of his own desire.

The love me of the classical and romantic composer was more generous, giving and receiving a good deal “in real time,” at the moment the creation emerged – didn’t Mozart write that he saw an entire symphony appear to him, like a bolt of lightning, and that this “vision” was the most beautiful ecstasy possible? Such, after all, is the virtue of Inspiration: the instant awareness of the erotic power of music at the very instant when it erupts in the mind of the composer. We have all experienced this, at the moment when a musical idea “clicks,” which we know is going to work, to cause pleasure and induce a desire to listen further.

But this notion of pleasure, in turn, with the procession of emotions and feelings associated with it, can become suspect and nauseating, with good reason, for any creator Chaslin

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irrational behavior that can be observed on the part of many music lovers, notably among the “fans” of opera. Hostile or enthusiastic reactions are, in most cases, delirious, while inhibitions fall and the mass becomes a mob.

Observing an audience in the throes of collective passion is a constantly fascinating spectacle for the artist. And yet, to think for a second that this passion could have the artist himself as its object would be extremely naïve. The public falls in love with the sound, which is borne by the artist, and the public acclaims the sound through the person offering it to the multitude, or spits on anyone who spoils it, like Perrette in the fairy tale enchanted with the absolute. The classical composer’s pleasure in giving pleasure, the famous “from the heart, may it go to the heart” from Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis, were not yet polluted by the pleasure of mass consumption such as we have experienced it at the end of the twentieth century. We must have some understanding for composers who do not see themselves in the role of Thailandese masseuse for Western ears. When one reads the fascinating New York Times article by Nicholas Wade summing up recent studies on the psychophysiology of listening to music, and when a serious Harvard professor compares the experience to the pleasure of eating cheesecake, it is understandable that some do not identify with the role of pastry chef. The Times article explains basically everything one needs to know about the functioning of music as function: recreational, amusing, relaxing, exciting, indeed orgasmic, since another very honorable professor mentions in the same text the fact that some rock musicians use the emotional factor of the music to expand infinitely their opportunities for sexual relations.

It goes without saying that the ultimate aim driving the composer, from his earliest age, to create music, is situated a bit higher than these bestial considerations, and I think that the hostile reaction to the world of auditory recreation, the break with the signs and codes of gustatory tonal music, with the body and its desires, its drives and temptations, summon us back to the ideal, the absolute, in a word the aim of music.

We need to remember all this before throwing a stone at the avant-garde.

But then, shame duly admitted, we must reflect on the rarely voiced notion of the status and social responsibility of the creative artist.

Does it exist? And toward whom? I return to the question raised in my preface: which music for which public? If the ultimate aim of music is incompatible with an emotional excess that, finally, borders on pornography, then the frenzied asceticism, a consequence of a violent narcissism, for its part stigmatizes a sado-masochistic complex in which the relation between composer and listener is also removed from any sense of transcendence since the Other is placed outside the work, so that some creative artists even proclaim a desire to disorient the listener as the prime alibi of their work.

When we abandon all dignity, to wallow in pathos, slickness, bargain-price oversweetness, we are drawing the listener into an addictive slide toward acoustical indulgence, from which it is very difficult to pull oneself back.

Chaslin

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who spills her milk can.136 The public will judge the interpreter according to the fidelity with which he will render the object, which is loved, awaited, known, because the public, monogamous in its desire, returns to the same object, known as the “repertoire.” But when the music lover prepares to hear a novelty, when he attends a premiere, this desire is combined with the mixed pleasure of a de facto polygamy: the music lover prepares to love new sounds. To betray this expectation, to frustrate these hoped-for pleasures, would be to break the bond with the listener. To frustrate and betray him for a period of decades is to teach him never to return.

Ask a music lover what draws him to the concert hall or opera house, and he will most often reply: the chance to escape the ordinary world, to experience an exceptional moment. It’s the same alibi used for all amorous behavior. Barthes recalls this: “The amorous subject, as we know, is marked by a retreat from reality, he disinvests himself from the outside world.”137 There is thus another possible classification of the music lover, based on his desire, complementing it, as stated at the beginning of this book, and it is based on his relationship with the environment. This new nomenclature indicates new expectations that must not be betrayed, since the inverse of desire is disgust and frustrated desire leads to rejection or anger, passions in every case that help us understand the difficult, tense relations of the listener with the music of his time.

A first degree of this desire is the stage of voyeurism.

It functions in all listeners like background processing by a computer, and it is not impossible that this desire to enter into the sprit of a creator, even partially, is the motive for all interest in the disciplines of art and thought. All readers of Remembrance of Things Past know the pleasure of being in Proust’s mind, observing his minutest variations in feeling. Magazines specializing in the private life of stars and paparazzi know very well this voyeurism leverage, and what functions for the uninteresting, often falsified gossip columns works all the better when it comes to insinuating oneself in the imaginary world of a genius. It is worth viewing once again the film Being John Malkovitch, which uses an ingenious parable to depict the process of infiltration into But when we deliberately choose to distance the discourse from the desire/pleasure spiral, and present the listener with a work in the form of a riddle to be solved, a labyrinth to be negotiated, with the promise of a greater felicity at the end, which will ensure us of a more secure hold on the listener, we have to assume an unavoidable risk: to become out of focus, to cease being anything other than a truly weak and improbable object of desire.

Alain, Propos de littérature (Editions Gonthier, 1964).

One has only to watch how the tenor, worshipped yesterday, will be booed tomorrow for a botched high C. Perrette’s tale is told by Jean de la Fontaine in his fable “La Laitière et le pot au lait” (The Milkmai and the Jug of Milk), in The Fables of Jean de La Fontaine (online: Project Guttenberg).

137 Roland Barthes, Essais critiques, op. cit.

136

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another mind. The element of prohibition in voyeurism, moreover, only increases the desire.138 The next degree of desire is fetishism. The music lover finds pleasure in sounds, certain sounds, certain arrangements of sounds. Then, with habit and a certain culture, he seeks certain traditions, he awaits a cadence, a high C that is unwritten but conventional, certain retards, certain colorings. Fetishism is the degree that triggers the most violent reactions, whether in sexual eroticism or the sublimated version found in musical listening. The fetishistic listener tolerates no variation in his pleasure ritual, once he himself has established it. In opera especially, this tendency makes any attempt to approach a classical work in a fresh spirit a highly problematic enterprise.

Finally we reach a more subtle degree, one that sometimes requires prior experience in one of the two preceding states; it is the degree of the feeling of osmosis with a superior state of mind. This is no longer voyeurism, or “being in Mozart’s head,” one of those purely tourist attitudes that no more allows a listener to identify truly with Mozart than it allows a passerby to think he has become some statue or monument. Just as a conversation with an extremely brilliant person can raise our own level by stimulation and force us to be our best selves, so the hearing of a sublime work can magnify us for a few moments. This too is a variation on the erotic act, that is, an appropriation, or at least a sharing, of the qualities of the desired person; between two human beings, this can be kindness, beauty, intelligence, wealth, anything – but it is rare to have desire for a person who has none of those qualities.

On a higher level yet, we reach the degree of ecstasy, where listeners expect a work or an interpreter to lead them, by way of the beloved sound, to a mystic communion beyond words, which is another form of sublimated eroticism. I remember the final three concerts

by Herbert von Karajan, which I had the good fortune to attend, at the Salzburg Easter Festival, and especially the Verdi Requiem, his final one, after which I was simply incapable of speaking a word for some two hours. I had gone through all the degrees of pleasure including ecstasy, and I was so filled up with sounds, all marvelous, that I was incapable of uttering one myself.

Thus, in the creator and in the listener, there exists the same motivation by way of desire, but a work cannot function unless these two desires meet. First, by virtue of the different categories of composers that I catalogued at the beginning of this book, the composer, driven by a desire to write, will not necessarily have the listener’s desire. Remember what Barthes said of reading: “What we desire is…the desire that the writer had to write, or again: we desire the desire the author had for the reader when he wrote; we desire this love me that exists in all writing.”139 Let us be clear: In the course of the complexity of post-Schoenberg music, there was no renunciation of the love me, but rather there was a love only me, exclusive and 138

Lacan confirms this when he says that “the unconscious shows that desire hangs on the forbidden.”

139 Op. cit.

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totalitarian. The composer does not isolate himself behind a rampart of cerebrality; he expects from his listener an act of total love, in which the effort and the absence of compromise of the disciple prepare him for initiation, the disciple’s total offering of himself. You have only to watch the militancy of the avant-garde public – which for some time included the author of this book – to be convinced of this process. If this intense labor, this act of adoration, is not performed, the composer’s gesture will come to seem vague, it will be perceived as disdainful distance.

I can best illustrate this thesis with an example from a film. In Woody Allen’s Deconstructing Harry, we see a character who, while shooting a film, is out of focus on camera. After all the controls have been checked, he proves in fact to be truly out of focus. When the film “tilts” into narrative reality, Allen, who plays the role of the narrator, relives the moment when, as a writer, he had become out of focus himself, physically, and his girlfriend at the time explains to him: “You wanted to be beyond the grasp of your readers, you demanded that they perform immense efforts to understand, to come to you, you became so unbelievably arrogant that you became out of focus for the rest of the world.”

We gain a new perspective now on comments made earlier, concerning emotionally competent objects, the composer’s need to take into account the role and the weight of feelings during the process of creation. The composer dries up and asceticizes his discourse from the desire -- in a sort of osmosis in which the more saturated body frees itself into the one that is less so -- to force the listener to surrender his own emotions, to make a gift of his own desire.

The love me of the classical and romantic composer was more generous, giving and receiving a good deal “in real time,” at the moment the creation emerged – didn’t Mozart write that he saw an entire symphony appear to him, like a bolt of lightning, and that this “vision” was the most beautiful ecstasy possible? Such, after all, is the virtue of Inspiration: the instant awareness of the erotic power of music at the very instant when it erupts in the mind of the composer. We have all experienced this, at the moment when a musical idea “clicks,” which we know is going to work, to cause pleasure and induce a desire to listen further.

But this notion of pleasure, in turn, with the procession of emotions and feelings associated with it, can become suspect and nauseating, with good reason, for any creator enchanted with the absolute. The classical composer’s pleasure in giving pleasure, the famous “from the heart, may it go to the heart” from Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis, were not yet polluted by the pleasure of mass consumption such as we have experienced it at the end of the twentieth century. We must have some understanding for composers who do not see themselves in the role of Thailandese masseuse for Western ears. When one reads the fascinating New York Times article by Nicholas Wade140 summing up recent studies on the psychophysiology of listening to music, and when a serious Harvard professor compares the experience to the pleasure of eating cheesecake, it is 140

New York Times, September 16, 2003.

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understandable that some do not identify with the role of pastry chef. The Times article explains basically everything one needs to know about the functioning of music as function: recreational, amusing, relaxing, exciting, indeed orgasmic, since another very honorable professor mentions in the same text the fact that some rock musicians use the emotional factor of the music to expand infinitely their opportunities for sexual relations.

It goes without saying that the ultimate aim driving the composer, from his earliest age, to create music, is situated a bit higher than these bestial considerations, and I think that the hostile reaction to the world of auditory recreation, the break with the signs and codes of gustatory tonal music, with the body and its desires, its drives and temptations, summon us back to the ideal, the absolute, in a word the aim of music.

We need to remember all this before throwing a stone at the avant-garde.

But then, shame duly admitted, we must reflect on the rarely voiced notion of the status and social responsibility of the creative artist.

Does it exist? And toward whom? I return to the question raised in my preface: which music for which public? If the ultimate aim of music is incompatible with an emotional excess that, finally, borders on pornography, then the frenzied asceticism, a consequence of a violent narcissism, for its part stigmatizes a sado-masochistic complex in which the relation between composer and listener is also removed from any sense of transcendence since the Other is placed outside the work, so that some creative artists even proclaim a desire to disorient the listener as the prime alibi of their work.

When we abandon all dignity, to wallow in pathos, slickness, bargain-price oversweetness, we are drawing the listener into an addictive slide toward acoustical indulgence, from which it is very difficult to pull oneself back.

But when we deliberately choose to distance the discourse from the desire/pleasure spiral, and present the listener with a work in the form of a riddle to be solved, a labyrinth to be negotiated, with the promise of a greater felicity at the end, which will ensure us of a more secure hold on the listener, we have to assume an unavoidable risk: to become out of focus, to cease being anything other than a truly weak and improbable object of desire.

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15

THE FORGOTTEN LOVER

“To be superior to others never took real effort unless it included the lofty desire to be superior to oneself.”

Debussy, Monsieur Croche, antidilettante To characterize the absence of competence or of professionalism in an individual or his work, we regularly speak of dilettantism and amateurism.

Dilettante, a word of Italian origin, means, in fact, amateur, though it comes from dilettare, diletto, which, depending on the ending, means to charm, or charming, or heart’s delight.

Amateur is from Latin amator, one who loves.

How do the two terms used to denounce the lazy, the ineffectual, the one who, well established, licensed and authorized, does not deliver the well-wrought work that his creditors deserve – how do we lodge these serious charges on the basis of roots that are so positive, charming, and light? “Lightweight,” true, indicates another serious fault, another word twisted from its function to designate superficiality and, what’s more, it is not favorable in our eyes. But lightness? What can you have against lightness?141 Is weight, heavy-handedness, preferable? If not, why then impose this usage of such a pleasant word and turn it into a fault? Ditto for the dilettante, and for the amateur. Why? It is not my intention here to fight the dictionary, nor to play Don Quixote to some hypothetical windmills of everyday usage, but, as usual since the beginning of this book, I want to try to understand what is concealed behind the crisis of modern art in general and of music in particular. There is a crisis of communication, obviously.

Therefore, one who loves is not to be taken seriously.

Are we to infer that the taste for well-executed work, hallmark of the good artisan, as essential to the artist as talent, prohibits from the outset any pleasure in performing one’s task? Are we afraid that this pleasure in the creative act could corrupt the material and the intentions? Do we want an artist who is cold and objective about his task, just as we would demand that an interpreter keep a distance from the emotion he expresses, at the risk of expressing this emotion only for himself? Or is it pleasure itself that has become tarnished, as art grows too serious, too committed, too political to lower itself to giving pleasure? But, but – we live in a world in crisis, or have you forgotten?

141

It is logical that English should associate lightness with charm (delight), both of which put light in what we can only call a positive light, a defense of lightness.

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As for the charm of the diletto, the grace by which the pleasure of sounds elevates an audience, did it have to become the sign of the opportunist, the charlatan, the cautious academic? At least, could we not have framed these accusations using more appropriate etymologies?

I cannot help seeing here a deliberate effort to condemn, once again and in a Cartesian lineage, the bodily aspect, considered frivolous and lacking in gravitas, in favor of the role of pure spirit, which by the way has never existed, as the University is my witness.142 Pure spirit, inaccessible to pleasure, to charm, to smiles, laughter, grace, is totally focused on conceptualizing a model of self-justification of its presence on the art scene, while the work resulting from this model has often been nothing but an alibi.

But if this were merely a war of words, the problem of the amateur and of amateurism would not be of much weight.

In all domains, the amateur has always been a formidable ally, a way station, and an amplifier, independently of any evolution in the modes of diffusion of music. Well before the invention of recordings, in salons or living rooms, the musical amateur, well-heeled or not, took it on himself to make new creations known in his circle. For the entire symphonic and operatic repertoire there always existed piano versions for two or four hands, of which amateurs were very fond and which filled the long winter evenings with the sound of freshly minted works. With the advent of recordings, this custom unfortunately disappeared.

Today sports amateurs, especially for golf or tennis, being so numerous, give these activities the status of a global phenomenon. Amateur astronomers for their part discovered a good number of the heavenly bodies currently known, and they are sometimes consulted even today. Chess owes its status as an important cerebral sport to the vast numbers of amateurs devoted to it.

As for music, it draws relatively large crowds to its concert halls only because of the many amateurs who are so militant among their ranks.

In the examples of sports and chess, it is obvious that they exist and prosper only thanks to their millions of amateur members. This same view could be extended to literature, and thus when Barthes quotes Roger Laporte saying that “the idea of a pure reading that would not evoke another piece of writing is something incomprehensible to me,�143 he is introducing the idea that the amateur of reading becomes, virtually, an amateur author.

Literature is too visceral a part of culture to allow such a major fact to be overlooked.

What then of music?

142

I refer here to Antonio R. Damasio, Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason and the Human Brain (New York: Vintage, 2006).

143 Barthes, Essais critiques, op. cit.

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What is the literature of the amateur musician? Just about all composers, at all times, have written easy pieces, those that were relatively accessible, and even after the fracture of serialism, important moderns like Bartók composed either works for children144 or socalled easy pieces. The greatest have never been too proud to produce such works, whether For Elise, or The Happy Farmer or a Marche Turque. It is true that, at that time, the sign of gratitude was genius, unmistakable, and its possession allowed all luxuries, including that of simplicity. The more laborious metabolism of the present-day composer does not allow him this leisure, not to mention the pressure of the “milieu” for which he produces as a priority, an audience that he is obliged to bedazzle.

If we make an exception, with irony, for John Cage’s piece 4’33”, in which the pianist has to remain seated without moving for the period indicated in the title, and not play a single note, we have to admit that the great pioneers of modernism have not given amateur musicians anything they can sink their teeth into.

Besides, it is hardly thinkable, during a private musical soirée, to pound out a series of clusters or a full serving of serialism for your friends. I think it is precisely this “smorgasbord” aspect of the amateur’s appetite that turns composers today completely off the idea of writing for non-specialists. It’s either Pollini at Carnegie Hall, or nothing.

A major part of the avant-garde would like to relegate the musical amateur to a status of amateur-consumer. Shut up and listen, and above all don’t touch anything. The amateur musician does not interest them at all. The modern composer, totally obsessed with the ambiguity and discomfort of his dreamed-of status as essential and inaccessible, trembles with horror at the very thought of compromising himself with an amateurism that threatens to be contagious.

Having had to renounce genius, which was too compromised by the execrated Inspiration, he can settle for nothing but a masterpiece, his masterpiece, which above all is a career, an accomplishment in the social sphere, from which the amateur, logically enough, must therefore be excluded.

I do not see the need to add anything at all to this enumeration of facts, which I simply offer as food for thought. If contemporary music has such difficulty imposing itself, it should ask itself: is it permissible to neglect, and to disdain -- as much by the words used to denote them as by the works from which they are excluded – the most vivacious, most active part of the mass of listeners, the second leg as it were, of the lame body that learned music has become in our time?

144

The Microcosmos by Bela Bartôk, collections of graduated pieces for apprentice pianists.

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FIFTH MOVEMENT: MUSIC’S NEW PATHS

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16

IN SEARCH OF PARADISE LOST

“Nostalgia for paradise is the human desire not to be human.”

Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being Linguists remind us that, in certain languages like Chinook, there are several past tenses including a mythical past.

The mythical past is generally the first tense taught in the conservatory. Classes in harmony and counterpoint deal lavishly with academic principles of the tonal language and “in concert” with the instrumental classes that flex the fingers on a literature that barely gets beyond Ravel, they impress upon the malleable mind of an apprentice composer, not particularly curious enough to imbibe at other sources, that mould that is more than a matter of stylistics.

It is a complete linguistics, it re-formats the sensibility, inculcates not just the creative modes of the classical period, which is all well and good, but also, more perversely, a deep nostalgia for the past.

The notion of a mythical past is very attractive, very poetic, and corresponds perfectly to the state of mind of an interpreter steeped in the study and execution of a classical work.

In fact, she is required to conjugate what she is reading in this parallel tense – especially in our time, so preoccupied with authenticity.

But for the composer, even before beginning his classical studies, it is urgent to create a “mythical present,” and even a “mythical future,” in which he must, so to speak, dream his revolution – and we are using the word both in the political and the astronomical sense.

I remember what I was writing before the age of thirteen, the age of my first class in harmony. It was, in all naiveté, and roughly speaking, very post-Ravel, a language in any case much more modern than the exercises that awaited me. I had in mind some things that were even more complex, but I still lacked the technical means of transcribing them The formatting imposed by the six years of the composition curriculum forced me to think, many hours a day, in the mythical past, and it would take me three or four more years to wreck the ship that had led me through all the seas of harmony, to learn again how to swim alone and, after long effort, return to the present and to my true nature.

Others remained down there, overcome by nostalgia for a lost paradise.

And I declare that lost paradise a perversity when it awakens the creative artist’s nostalgia. The artist inescapably creates the present; nostalgia is a strong desire for an

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irretrievable past. Thus it is an attitude both unrealistic and stupid, when one happens to be in the framework of Western art, which unfolds, which “flows” in a Bergsonian time.

It all comes down to a choice between Dante and Milton: the first seeks Paradise and recreates it in an attempt to invent the perfect language; the second mourns it and loses himself in nostalgia and dangerous conclusions.145 The notion of a lost paradise in itself, after all, can be an inexhaustible source of motivations for humankind. It is beyond our scope here to attempt to trace its history or to catalogue its infinite variations.

As for what does interest us, we are aware that the human being seeks transcendence, whether to escape death as some have claimed, or – as I claim in this book -- because this quest is our ultimate aim. And music’s ultimate aim serves this general ultimate aim of human beings, it is as if secreted by it, in both senses of that verb.

The quest for paradise lost is therefore, in a nutshell, a transposition to a radically existential mode of the search for the perfect language.

What is interesting about the lost paradise is that it sets a goal for us and gives us hope of attaining it: since we came from there, all it takes to return to it is volition. The aim, or content, of this paradise is of course proximity to God and the Garden of Eden, in which we can, with hands on hip and a daisy between the teeth, discuss one-on-one with the Prime Mover.

And of course, when we listen to Bach or certain pages by Mozart, we are tempted to believe we are getting as close as possible to the truth and that we need to stay as close as possible to these geniuses who, beyond any doubt, have the keys to the garden in their pocket.

But we’re forgetting that these great men, for their part, were thinking in the “mythical present” and building a “mythological future.” They did not ask when they would find the lost paradise, but where.

We, often lamentably bogged down in a mystical past, dizzying ourselves on misunderstood Kabala and loose ideas of alchemy, are forgetting that the lost paradise “flows,” to paraphrase once again Bergson’s terminology, parallel with us, or even downhill from us. It is the aim of our quest, farther along, higher.

We will never reach it with the passive nostalgia of a deconstructed past, or rather a past that has exhausted its capacity to form the present, but only by adapting principles and causes in a modern vision, one that is in phase with our time and its necessities.

The famous “Better to reign in Hell than be servile in Heaven,” from Milton’s Paradise Lost.

145

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I repeat: the ultimate aim of music is to magnify the Other, the receiver, and once transcendence has thereby been accomplished, by a reflexive movement, to transcend the creator in turn. No one can boast of having attained “his” aim if he has not first attained the Other. For this reason there is no forgotten, overlooked or misunderstood genius. It only requires one listener to be touched, magnified, transcended for the space of an instant by a work for said work, and its creator, to find their reason for being. A “neglected genius” is a creator who has transcended nothing, is nothing, or at best merely the seed lying in wait.

The lost paradise is thus not only now and later, as I’ve said, but it is also here.

It is the place where contact is established, where infinite possibilities open up, where everyone, seizing this infinity for a brief instant, recognizes the shape of his own possibility.

For a composer then, seeking the lost paradise means seeking the secret language, the “language of the birds,” so dear to the alchemists and to Messiaen – who sought it, studied and used it both in the letter and the spirit.146 This language is outside of time, which is why the mythical present suits it the best, because as Jean-Paul Sartre reminds us, the present does not exist.

Yet it must be mythical since music brings humanity close to its archetype, and this is why we make the distinction between the function and ultimate aim of music. The functional types of music, notably music of entertainment, do not have the vocation of unveiling for us our mythological dimension. Nor do they claim to open up for us the gates of the Garden of Eden. They speak a devil-may-care language, revealing to us nothing of our essence; they are the existential schools of music, fresh as spring water.

But what is elaborated in them are the mythological seeds of tomorrow, because they speak of humanity more naively, more spontaneously and authentically than “learned” types of music, and above all the true human of today expresses himself almost unconsciously in this music, which gives the sound substance its quality of compost.

The art of tomorrow is being prepared today, in the street. Mythical humankind, born in a stream, elaborates himself there so that, later, he will take on the force and vigor of the anvil spark of genius.

This is why the great composers, as will see in greater detail, always sought their raw material in the sources of folklore, popular music, whose last avatars were the diverse variants of jazz, rock and pop music.

But the “language of the birds” is more than just street talk.

We refer the reader to the many works of Messiaen based on birdsong, the Catalogue d'oiseaux, 7 Haïkaï, etc.

146

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The slang, or “argotique” in French, of the journeymen cathedral builders, which by semantic shift produced “art gothique” (“Gothic art”), 147 was the knowledge of the principles and causes, of their application in full awareness of the realms of the human. In art, this knowledge is usually intuitive and the application in full consciousness corresponds to the technique of writing.

Thus, at both extremities of the golden age of Western music, which we call for convenience “classical music,”148 we encounter founding composers in whom the technical data and metaphysical, even mystical, basis are in inverse proportion to one another. Thus, for French music we have Rameau or Messiaen.149 For German music, Bach and Schoenberg, he who in creating the serial system attempted a rationalization of the act of composition, not seeking a transcendence of humanity, but instead a transcendence of the very act of creating. And yet Schoenberg, the man of God with two conversions in his history, who wrote: “In fact, the concept of a creator and of creation must be modeled in harmony with the Divine Model. Inspiration and perfection, desire and achievement, will and accomplishment coincide spontaneously and simultaneously.”

If we think of it carefully, the distribution of the twelve half-tones according to the serial system is one application, among many others, of the great symbolic richness of the number twelve, associated with the Zodiac and the tribes of Israel.

Some may question my omission of Wagner from these major landmarks. But in the pagan universe of Tristan and especially of Götterdämmerung, we have the search for darkness, then for purification by fire, with a redemption by love that fools no one, rather than a quest for a paradise that Wagner, not content with the conflagration at the end of his Ring, brings down into the garden at Wahnfried with his Parsifal, a sort of portable paradise of which he is the guardian and master.

This is no doubt why romanticism ended up imploding once the Bayreuth comet had passed by: once divine fire has descended to earth and been brought to its peak, who could possibly push it any farther without getting burned, or paraphrasing? But does that leave no option but to throw yourself, with equal force but romantically reversed, into the coldest positivism, refusing to relate the composer’s object to anything but matter and the material, the game of concepts and functions, classifications and categories?

Does this mean we have to forget principles and causes, and confuse them with the petty concerns, the ones that led tonality to its own decadence?

147

See Fulcanelli, Le mystère des cathédrales (Paris: Editions Pauvert, 1970). Also Genevieve Dubois and Jack Cain, Fulcanelli and the Alchemical Revival: The Man behind the Mystery of the Cathedrals (Inner Traditions/Bear & Co., 2006).

148 Not to be confused with the classical era, which is a musicological classification.

149 For the curious reader as well as the musician, we recommend Messiaen’s Treatise on Rhythm, Color and Ornithology, in seven volumes, which starts with a long and absolutely fascinating study of time. Op. cit.

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Our own era is in need of new vectors, and especially, to avoid nostalgic pitfalls, it needs a transmitter. Olivier Messiaen, in the quantity – and quality – of the disciples he begot, was beyond a doubt one of these last conveyors. He had that power because of his mastery of the present, the past and the mythical future, joined to an unmatched appetite for teaching. Thus he did more than simply transmit data; he knew how to instill, in those who were prepared to receive it, the sense of quest and of the numinous, because more than anyone else he was open to a multitude of discourses: from the most arid, austere, ascetic to the most Dionysian.

The holy Grail, the “Wet Way” of the alchemists, the route to Compostella. So many designations for the same drive toward transcendence, with the same aim: to open up, here and now, the gates of paradise regained.

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17

ALL NEO, ALL THE TIME

“Young men are fitter to invent, than to judge; fitter for execution, than for counsel; and fitter for new projects, than for settled business.”

Francis Bacon This quotation seems to me, taken in the contrary sense, an ideal illustration of the “neo” phenomenon, which, to say the least, is nothing new but has managed for the past few decades to loom awfully large. Repetitive, minimalist composers fail to practice the unbridled, reinvigorating virtues of fruitful youth, but instead typify the morbid nostalgia of those whom I would have to call the “new old.”

This is the very feeling that overtakes us on hearing those forms of music: an absence of vitality, of leavening, a boredom that would take over even sooner if these neo composers did not appeal, almost systematically, to an obsessive rhythm as a crutch for deficient melody and harmony, about as mobile as a wheelchair: transporting us merely from one ennui to the next.

Each new growth spurt in Western music has inspired a movement by artists who were panicked by the change, and by the idea, as Euripides says in Medea, that “if you introduce new learning, the ignorant will think you unserviceable and not subtle at all.“ In other words, opportunists. Since neo is a reaction, in the decayed sense of the word, it does not know where, in terms of time, to “replace the cursor.” It thinks that musical evolution has turned out badly, that modern art taken altogether is a failure, and that it can restore the harmonious movement of history. Yet neo struggles to find the ideal original moment and, like H. G. Wells’s hero in his time machine, randomly jumps around in chronology. He often “lands” far too soon, well before the era when “everything was fine.”

But nothing is too simple for this nice New Age hippie, and the modal and “perfect” chords he discovers on leaving his time machine seem so delicious to him that he overdoses on them, repeating them to the point of hypnosis.

And so we have the birth of repetitive music, minimalist music, both of which, among a few others, are avatars of the “neo.”

The void thus produced, a paradoxical void created by replicating rhythmic melodies and figures until they become identical, is supposed to put us into a pseudo-Hindu or Tibetan trance, and I use “pseudo” most deliberately, having only too much respect for Eastern cultures. And behold, this brings us back to one of the functions of music, the desire to charm at low cost, while the ultimate aim is left behind in Mr. Wells’s time machine. But this function is the guarantee of an immediate success, if terribly ephemeral, since neo cannot stand up to comparison with the models it is intended to “renew.”

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The abandonment of the tonal system and of all the codes allowing perfect communication with the public was a fatal error. Falling into the opposite excess, namely the minimalist or repetitive temptation, basically means rehashing the most simpleminded codes to the point of saturation, somewhat like Alzheimer’s patients who relentlessly repeat their oldest recollections, in their inability to connect to the present and imprint it. Yes, in truth “neo” is a form of autism and amnesia.

On the other hand, we must not confuse this reductive process with the aesthetic explorations on the frontiers of tonality that were undertaken by many composers, in the wake of Stravinsky and his Pulcinella, which consisted in using harmony, melody, figures of style or well-known forms and giving them other meanings. The moment there is a gap, a slip, in a known code, we have the creation of a new code. What is not admissible, without making a pastiche in the framework, for example of a film score, is to use known codes in a retro, formal stylistic framework and end up saying nothing new and using these frameworks and codes out of pure arrivism.

Stravinsky was first to show the way in his Sacre du Printemps, by using the very classical seventh chord and combining it with the same chord a half-tone lower to create a combination that was both unique and nevertheless meaningful, since the ear, unconsciously, is capable of detecting the superimposition of these two familiar figures.

(Ex. 18.1) There is nothing more stimulating for a composer than to take the basic material that tonality furnishes to his art and to make it say something personal, and thus new, and by this gesture, to make it modern. The entire problem for the creative artist is to forge just this personality that will transcend codes and conventions. Minimalism and repetitiveness transmit nothing but flat or elliptical encephalograms. The masters of these systems seem to see tonality as “the ancient landmark” in the Bible (Proverbs 22:28: “Remove not the ancient landmark, which thy fathers have set”), so they sit on it rather than walking while keeping it in sight.

Yet I try to understand their approach. It consists in thinking: “The material is good, and may continue to serve for a long time yet. But we’ve gotten carried away; we have killed the goose that laid the golden egg. So let’s start again from the beginning, more slowly, while following nature’s rhythm more gently.”

But which nature are we talking about here? The only nature that rules music is human nature, which balks or enthuses as historical currents dictate. Slowing the rhythm of musical evolution, reversing or sidestepping it, would mean feeding the illusion that music can live on the periphery of the human community. But music is society. It grew up and evolved in response to society’s growth spurts. It is society’s echo, its sublime resonance.

Our society, hic et nunc, is pluralist, miscegenated, cosmopolitan. It is the reflection of a world that has never moved so much, in the literal and the figurative senses. Cultural

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melting pots are on their way to becoming the new culture, which as Roland Barthes reminds us, is a language. And from that language, who can say what will emerge tomorrow? Let us hope it is something more stimulating than the faded echoes of the “neo.”

After all, if there is a type of music that expresses our time, it must be a music in its image, the reflection of men and women who move, who travel through time on modes of information, just as they voyage in space thanks to means of communication.

Any music that aims to be truly new, “newborn” from the world melting pot, will have the characteristics of this world: genres and styles will be found cohabiting in it, united by the mind of a creator capable of making that synthesis. The extraordinary soundlibrary of the twentieth-century avant-garde can provide textures and especially timbres, jazz and its developments, unifying rhythms, and even certain canons of tonality, melodies, harmonies, forms can be employed for their great force as signifiers, as will – why not?—allusions more or less emphatic to previous styles, baroque, classic, romantic, to guide the listener in this discourse. That basically is the route shown to us, at the very moment when the great “fracture” was about to strike, by Alban Berg in his opera Wozzeck, that crucible of recurring forms and an evolving style, culminating in a kind of grimacing reconciliation with tonality. What’s needed, therefore, is a mixture that can achieve innovation, provided that it occurs without nostalgia, except the nostalgia for a future of great promise.

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MUSIC WITHOUT TEMPERAMENT? “I know that the human race will never exhaust all the possibilities presented by the twelve notes of each octave…”

Stravinsky The abandonment of the tonal language in the twentieth century provoked a traumatism fully comparable to that of the Tower of Babel: before it, everyone “understood” what composers meant and people were capable of quickly judging the value of a work, or at least of knowing if they were sensitive to it.

Afterward, with the implosion of the official, academic language of musicians, each creative artist became his own nomothete, or name-giver, generator of words, he who establishes language.

Each composer, identifying with the demiurge, became the founder of his own domain, with its own language and its particular rules.

When I speak of identification with the demiurge, it is more than mere metaphor. The search for a complexity that is ever more inextricable, in which the ultimate aim is no longer in the result but instead in the act of writing in its own right, elevates the composer to the rank of prophet: henceforth he is alone to know, to have control over his creation, over the code, as the listener as well as the interpreter is now abandoned to a role that is constantly more passive for the listener, ever more servile for the interpreter.

If the phenomenon is not quite such a caricature in the case of music that still uses temperament, or the Western chromatic scale of twelve half-tones, it becomes very obvious for the types of music that have abandoned it.

These schools of music generally call themselves “microtonal,” with particular subcategories such as “spectral music” for instance. “Musique concrète” of the 1950s exploited all sorts of sounds, especially exploring the possibilities of a tape recorder. As for the first micro-intervals, quartertones, they appeared starting in the early twentieth century.

Numerous composers today write using sixths, eighths, even sixteenths of a tone, which of course cannot fail to cause problems. The use of the large symphony orchestra, for example, is excluded for this type of music, for a practical reason: owing to the great number of musicians, intonation and exactitude are difficult to maintain, especially within string sections in which sixteen or more violins play the same part in unison.

Equivocation sometimes occurs, and the microtone does not really differ from classical error in precision. Boulez describes this phenomenon when he speaks of an earlier version of his Visage Nuptial that employed micro-intervals: “…the accuracy of the

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group, already delicate with the simple half-tone, becomes absolutely hypothetical in the case of smaller intervals.”150 Another example: the famous pianos tuned to an eighth or sixteenth tone sound strangely similar to a honky-tonk piano. This is because our memory possesses the heavily imprinted code of the “saloon piano.” This “modern” instrument is best integrated into an ensemble where it sounds a bit like a Hungarian cimbalom.

Thus, electro-acoustics is without a doubt the most pertinent field when it comes to composing with the help of micro-intervals; it’s also the most fascinating field and the most promising for the extraordinary sound palette that it offers, which is inexhaustible, infinitely renewable, and above all for the joint use with acoustic instruments, natural ones, and the use of “real time,” where electronics reacts while following the execution of a musician to whom it is connected.

Moreover, returning to semiotics, feelings and their perception, synthesized sounds can give rise to surprising sensations; some of them can even produce auditory illusions. One of the best-known of these illusions was discovered in the 1960s by Roger Shepard. It is perceived as a scale rising indefinitely or descending indefinitely, exactly like the classic illusion of the ball falling down an endless staircase. What we have here, visually, is the sketch of a series of new signs pointing toward complex feelings caused by these same illusions, and this is the direction in which composers are working who exploit the possibilities of spatialized sound.

Electro-acoustics, however, is at its best when it reprocesses natural sounds in real time, in a practice called sampling. The period of purely electronic sounds seems to have ended, and it is a relief not to have to endure those flights of seagulls, draining bathtubs, passing subway trains, in a word the clichés that no one seemed to stop using, of which we heard far too much.

Yet inevitably, in all these domains, we are still confronted, most acutely, with a whole set of questions that I raise in this book: what of the signs, communication, the codes and conventions between composers and listeners? And what of those types of music that cannot be heard analytically but only “sensually,” guided from one sound-color to the next: do they have a vocation to some form of transcendence?

Micro-tonal music, which ventures beyond the threshold of human perception in the West, is always trying to justify itself, both from the viewpoint of its ultimate aim and from the use of intervals less than a half-tone, in ways that are at the very least paradoxical, by reference to ethnic and traditional music that uses micro-intervals, that is, music that, in its essence, rejects evolution and modernity.151 This is music that, as the 150

L’écriture du geste (Paris: C. Bourgeois), p. 130.

“One has to admit that we have there a purely Western phenomenon and that in other musical civilizations there has never been any question of conceiving of no other basic intervals than the half-tone.” Pierre Boulez, Notes of an Apprentice, trans. Herbert Weinstock (New York: Knopf, 1968), p..

151

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oral transmission of a tradition, cannot permit itself the slightest change in codes and conventions, at the risk of deviating from this tradition.

I will cite Boulez once again, who acts as prosecutor of tonal music: “Why, in fact, consider sacred a decision that rendered immense services but now has lost its raison d'être … tonal organization …?”152 Now, just a page earlier, Boulez had offered the most blatant defense plea on behalf of temperament: “…temperament enabled Western music to realize the full amplitude of its rise – something that it is impossible to forget.”153 Precisely because temperament made possible vertical organization and polyphony, pillars of Western music, it is absurd to think of abandoning it before having validated a replacement system that has proven its value.

I therefore shall not dwell further on the subject of non-tempered types of music, despite my great personal interest in electro-acoustics in real time, and my personal conviction that the future of the mind – and of music – consists in going beyond the current thresholds of perception and understanding. I shall not attempt that here, in a book meant to be a work of reconciliation and progressive approaches. Now, this music of extremes offers no solution to the problems I raise, unless there can be recourse to audio-visual creations such as I speak of in the final chapter.

In the current state, the complexity of such works can surely be developed to infinity. We are plunged into uncertainty by the impossibility of identifying the scales of values, and this makes us perceive this music as a continuous randomness, a stochastics in sound.

How, by what miracle could this music claim, in the current state of human affairs, to take on any possible reference system whatsoever, semantic, semiotic, even linguistic, since linguistics is preoccupied with communication: this music has quite simply not been conceived to communicate, at least not with people here and now. The creators participating in these works have no such illusion either, they too are in search of the perfect language and their honesty invites us to respect them. They are seeking, without any desire to flatter us, and what they find will serve perhaps some day, or can serve now, integrated into a different context, as a “catalogue in sound.” Therefore we should be grateful to them for searching.

152

Op. cit., p. 225.

153

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19

WHICH MUSIC FOR TOMORROW?

“To get back one’s youth, one has merely to repeat one’s follies.”

Oscar Wilde, The Portrait of Dorian Grey Musicians of the twentieth century would perhaps have been wiser if, instead of putting tonal language on trial and declaring its obsolescence, they had chosen a middle road, one inspired by the words of Barthes on writing:154 “We find ourselves in that historical moment in our culture when narrative cannot yet abandon a certain legibility, a certain conformity to the narrative pseudo-logic that culture has placed in us and where, consequently, the only possible innovations consist not in destroying the story, the anecdote, but in making it deviate: to derail the code even while appearing to respect it.”

Instead, the avant-garde, ever since its appearance, has concerned itself above all with the materials and means, and no doubt a bit less with ends: “This music -- for whom?” was sacrificed to “This quest -- for what?”

And since, moreover, Schoenberg’s heirs had no choice but to push the master’s theories to their extreme limit, or the generalized tone row -- that is, a complexity of the act of composition that had no other aim but itself -- this complexity, with itself as aim and a method built on observing and imitating the aims and methods of science, could lead only to the search for an ever greater complexity, which justified itself, as it were, by itself.

This is complex music, and yet not at all “intellectual” music. That epithet, hurled as a condemnation by all those frightened by any form of music that is not exclusively and immediately hedonistic, gives no serious thought to a paradox that is nonetheless obvious: the fact that contemporary music, as I have said in connection with form, cannot be listened to in an analytic way,155 and when confronted with a display of complexity, the listener, professional though he may be, is in some way reduced to the same rank as the naïve listener, obliged to listen more qualitatively than quantitatively.

Conversely, tonal music, which can more easily be analyzed in real time, can give rise to a more cerebral way of listening.

Therefore, those who accuse modern music of being intellectual as a listening experience remind me of those soccer players who, if tapped on their knee, collapse on the ground holding their head with both hands.

154

Barthes, “Le retour du poéticien,” in La Quinzaine littéraire, 1972. Of course, this good advice came too late.

155 “In a supercharged context, events that succeed one another at a very rapid cadence will prevent any perception, even intuitive, of most of the individual acoustical relationships.” Pierre Boulez, Penser la musique aujourd’hui (Paris: Gallimard, 1987).

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It is quite obvious that the language of music, in order to continue evolving, to preserve its power of revelation, must constantly be making itself more complex. This is a movement that got started even before the Renaissance, which led to Western music as we know it and love it, and a movement that must continue, especially at a time when facility is venerated and this movement constitutes a healthy “reaction.”

But the language of music must also preserve its power of seduction, and when we adopt the perspective, as proposed by this book, of winning back the wider music-loving public, the question of complexity becomes secondary; complexity can flourish to its heart’s content, provided only that it serves an aim other than itself. At the risk of repeating myself, it is the ultimate aim, or the revelation of the Other, that must predominate in the mind of the creative artist; now this aim tolerates neither facility, since nothing can be revealed through mediocrity, nor superficial complexity, which cannot point beyond itself to any new field of perception of our essential nature. For the immense majority of our public, from the naïve amateur to the professional musician himself, the motivating factor in listening and validating a work is the emotion that can be derived from it, willingly or not.

Emotion will emerge from more or less conscious perceptions, which become enriched over the course of years of successive hearings of the same works. Such emotion will be all the more effective for imprinting itself on a certain foundation that is the listener’s history, on which certain immediate data take effect, such as the quality of the environment and of the interpretation.

It has been demonstrated that, for our wider public, the complexity of a work, if it is perceived subconsciously or, to borrow jargon from computer science, as a “background task,” plays no direct role in the quantity or quality of the pleasure or emotion derived from a listening experience.

Bach or Debussy – to cite the two extremes of the “range of median tolerance” of today’s music lover – will perform their “emotional score” within the listener, not as a function of their structural complexity as such, but as a function of the choice and organization by the composer of the materials likely to interact with the psyche of the Other.

In other words, in those works, complexity is located at the level of the organization of emotional signs, of the use of the rules of composition – or of the controlled derailing of those rules – in the aim of creating beauty and arousing feelings that correspond to it.

This awareness of the expressive weight and of its impact has always been very clear in the minds of composers of the tonal era, and remained keen with Schoenberg, Stravinsky, Bartók and a few others after them. It gradually disappeared among composers whose ascetic, rigid stance rejected any compromise with a language destined for oblivion, for exhaustion in a Bacchanale, as is perfectly understandable from a historical viewpoint, even if we are allowed to observe that some composers rather brilliantly finessed history.

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Paradoxically, those are the same composers who triggered the atonal offensive in the name of historical necessity, in a drive to depart radically from a romanticism that was still “warm,” and who moreover established the principle of historical validation of a work, or the obsolescence of any musical work not based on the new theories, whereas this principle was justified only in the “old world,” with its single style and the control of that style by the Prince. Modern society is pluralistic, and its data too complex to be subject to a grid of historical interpretation, or validation. To reject a work of value on the pretext that it “comes too late,” from the viewpoint of its surface structure, is totally aberrant in the twenty-first century. Conversely, to reject it because it is not related to present concerns, that it opens up no new perspective or possesses no emotional weight, in a word, that its gesture is not modern, seems to me more valid and at least more deliberate.

It does not appear that the notions of emotional weight, expression, inspiration – a term triply accursed, no doubt for its lack of clarity and the romantic excesses it authorizes – have regained any favor in the vocabulary of today’s avant-garde. Complexity, again and still, seems to be the only watchword and the only justification posited in the explanatory notes that accompany new works. One musical movement was even baptized the “new complexity,” a clear sign of its flavor.

And yet, as we have shown, this complexity, while it can be reassuring in terms of the credibility of a work that one is preparing to hear, is not perceptible and thus is not the unifying element that, in theory, should be the center and the arena of the composer’s efforts, if we can assume that the performance of his work and its afterlife figure at all among his preoccupations.

We should not fear complexity, therefore. From the composer’s viewpoint, we should taste of it, intoxicate ourselves with it, and accept it on faith – provided that it does something for us, that is, from the listener’s viewpoint, provided that it can be perceived and its effects enjoyed. And that can only occur, as we saw in analyzing the opening of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, either by way of a simplicity of material, sublimated by a complexity of development, or by a complexity of material which, in a first phase, will not be put through any major translation. If we want music to go over, then its complexity cannot be everywhere at once, or it risks being perceived as nowhere at all.

Can we dictate, on the other hand, that a work of music today can be as simple as possible, downright simplistic, provided that it can touch us?

Before proceeding, let us assume that it is useless, in justifying a return to some chimerical original purity, to refer to the past as some hypothetical lost paradise where everything was simpler, including composition itself. What applies to language is also valid for music; as Barthes reminds us: “There is no archaic language. Or, at the very least, there is no link between the simplicity and the ancient age of a language: ancient languages can be just as complete and complex as recent languages.”156 We know this about Hindu forms of music; their extreme codification makes them, from certain 156

Roland Barthes, “To Write, transitive verb,” in Essais critiques (Paris: Le Seuil, 1981).

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viewpoints, more intellectual than our Western counterpoint. But, closer to us, classical music can seem simple to us in comparison with contemporary music; that surface clarity still manages to conceal an unreachable depth.

Therefore a Mozart symphony can give rise to analyses “in a spiral,” from the most basic level of counting structures, all the way to an inebriation with the most metaphysical speculations.

This is a result of one of the particularities of the vast monuments to the human spirit: the great number of levels of apprehension and interpretation.

Consider the example of the Bible, the first of the great works of human genius, with apologies to anyone who considers the Bible as direct divine revelation; I content myself here with a descriptive study.

The Bible, then, can be read by everyone. For a long time it had been transmitted orally, for those unable to read, to bring them a message that was simple, rich in epic color and highly educational myths. It was studied by Gnostics, by Cabbalists, atheists, and musicians. The great composer Olivier Messiaen, grand figure in contemporary music and a teacher at whose feet the entire avant-garde came for enlightenment, composed nearly all his works on biblical themes. All of human society can find there some level of interpretation that speaks to it: fabulous, epic, mythological, mystical, moral, social, historical, political. The human drama in its entirety takes place in that work by the same spiral analysis proceeding from the simplest to the most sublime, and in this spiral it resonates and summons us.

The same is true of the great musical works of the past. A toccata by Bach will touch the shepherd who comes to pray in a church even if only through its function as liturgical music, and will saturate the life of the musicologist who will find in it a constantly renewed source of discovery and marvel.

To content oneself with providing pleasure, thus, means retaining from a fable nothing but farce. It means, from the spiral, preserving only one strand. Conversely, to wish to speculate entirely on complexity means transforming the spiral, a force of growth and ascent, into a vicious cycle.

At the end of the day we find ourselves confronted by the question that I raised earlier: which music for which public? The question does not extend only in a cultural space; its plaintive interrogation is also justified in time, when we observe that our era, harassed by appeals of all kinds to destroy codes and languages, gives itself up to the drunkenness of the ephemeral: musical works played and heard just once, buildings that fall apart after a few months – some will recall the Opéra Bastille in Paris, some fragments of which seem irresistibly attracted to the careless pedestrians and the entire carcass of which is incurable, covered today with protective netting, or we will be reminded of paintings that prematurely lose their pigment or from which the collages become detached during the night.

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Those works and buildings seem to have lived for about as long as a premiere, or an inauguration, a passionate, inspired speech and then, instead of filling the present and profiling the future, they go spinning off from their era, conjugating in the past any effort to seize the truth of the instant. They have fulfilled their mission: to inspire commentary, enlightened criticism, to dazzle the “scene.” Then they depart, ignorant of their ultimate aim: us, our posterity, the culture of now and tomorrow.

The composer who, despite temptations and easy opportunities, rejects the double impasse between blind complexity and the return to artificial paradises, faces the immense task of creating a language that is at once of its time, because of the gesture he will use – and I will return to this important notion of gesture – and of all times, because of the universality of his material.

Where, today, can we find these unifying elements that, magnified by the most highly developed science of composition, allow a work to be meaningful to the Other, whoever that may be?

Their quest puts us in mind of the raw material, or prime matter, of the alchemists, and it might evoke the same answer: you find it everywhere, at reduced price.

There is, first of all, the force of the base material.

As we have seen in the case of temperament, the numbers that govern the construction of the steps in the scale have the force of Major Arcana (from the Tarot deck). Every other system will function in the same way if it possesses this analogical, symbolic connection with the forces that govern the microcosm and macrocosm, of which we are more or less the median point, and to which we therefore react strongly. Such a “replacement” system, however, has yet to appear, for the very reason that it would aspire to supplant the former system by being superior to it. Serialism was only a “system within a system.”

Others, including the “spectral” movement that was very natural in its approach to sound, the “concrete,” and so on, worked on raw material, its harmonics, its divisions and fractals, in an approach similar to that of primitive forms of music, and their products have the beauty of the dolmen more than that of the cathedral, because “sacred geometry,” which the journeymen of the Middle Ages inherited from the pharaohs and transmitted to us in stone, does not govern the creation of their buildings.

But there remains raw material, the original material, street music, the noise of the world, which no composer down to Bartók, to stay within the genealogy claimed by the moderns, has neglected, and indeed which practically all of them used systematically – and, speaking of Bartók, which they explored with the minute attention of an ethnologist.

No period in the evolution of musical language prohibits the use of a jazz motif, or an allusion to the tango. Chronological distortion may seem a taboo, but actually is one only for people unaware that jazz and the tango – just to cite two examples – live and develop

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today as much as they did yesterday, and show at least as much vigor as contemporary music. You need only to have the talent for integrating this lively new blood, which is eager for a welcoming body.

But the most important element to ensure that music functions and communicates in phase with its time is the gesture.

It’s the gesture that imprints an era on the material of sound, the gesture that makes style emerge and that establishes a strong, spontaneous link with the listener.

The gesture affects all the parameters of composition; it is the healthy reaction – in the benign sense of that term – to the world and to present time.

The present acts on the composer, who in turn updates his art. This lever is what I call the gesture.

It is the way we behave, artists or not, and what identifies us with today. “In my day we did not speak like that…we did not dress like that. No one would have done that in my day…” Times change, and so does the gesture.

To acquire a set of gestures that functions, that is, one that comes from the world and acts on it, it seems to me indispensable to be infinitely on the alert, listening to the world.

The world today moves at its own speed, which is far greater than it was yesterday.

Above all, I notice one primordial fact that has yet to be adopted by the music of our symphonic concert halls: our brains have undergone what can be considered a veritable mutation, by which I mean our entry into the era of the image and the virtual.

The transition from the depiction of the world such as we saw it in the past – we saw here and now – to the world of today, in which we can see everywhere and always, and especially at a dizzying speed of connections, has given us at the very same time new capacities and new demands, which the creative artist can no longer ignore The eye today is more hungry and more acrobatic than before. Above all, it can be a valuable aid in interpreting what is presented by the other senses, because the eye has been trained for several decades to associate and correlate, to link and make explicit.

Now this capacity to decode and interpret can be immediately exploited for the acquisition of new semiotic musical codes, new emotionally competent objects.

Judicious use of the eye can accomplish what decades of merely listening to music have never managed to do in bringing contemporary music closer to the wide music-loving public.

All of us have seen any number of films, and I doubt that a single one of us ever walked out of a film theater, or changed a DVD, because the soundtrack was too modern. Never

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does music associated with an image seem to us cerebral or stupid enough to make us interrupt the experience we are undergoing.

And yet, in many cases, I would bet that hearing the soundtrack alone would suffice to send a good majority of spectators running for the exit.

Thus, in the film 2001: A Space Odyssey by Stanley Kubrick, the scene in which a team of cosmonauts unearth a strange black monolith on the moon is accompanied magnificently by Ligeti’s Requiem. It disturbs no one; in fact, the music gives that sequence all its force, the exact emotional charge for confronting this “total mystery,” and the image validates the sound.

How many spectators, delighted by what they are seeing and hearing, would experience the same pleasure in merely hearing the Requiem? On the other hand, once the association between music and image has registered, it becomes much easier to hear the Requiem without a visual component, thanks to the role of memory in recalling the image, or more exactly thanks to the emotional image that the combination of these two media has imprinted on the body. That may seem to some like an intolerable crutch, an unbearable exploitation of the musical work; I contend nevertheless that this is an excellent means of musical education and especially that it demonstrates a remarkable process of semiotic generation: the royal path to creating, in the listener’s mind, new codes for hearing music.

Here it is essential to state something axiomatic: there exists no combination of music and image that is not immediately nominalized in the sign, even in cases where the image and sound, taken individually, possess no identifiable code. This is due to the close link between musical rhythm and plastic form in general. Every form possesses a rhythm, and conversely every rhythm is an incorporation of space into time.

For this reason, the combination of any sound with any image becomes significant. By a remarkable process of autarky, sound becomes the sign of the image and vice versa. The emotional value of this combination acquires the complexity and richness of an infinitude of possibilities: this is almost comparable to the mixture of two scents, the combination of which submerges us into superimposed memories, evoking a composite that becomes a new fiction.

And what is valid for a combination of a dissonant music and an abstract image, two objects whose force as signs is reduced by the absence of conventions, but that are made significant by being brought together, is even more true in the case of the association between an image and a piece of music for both of which we are in possession of all the codes; in that case a remarkable phenomenon occurs: the fusion between the topographic signs of the image and the emotional signs of the music. Just think of the ballet scene with the space vessels in 2001: A Space Odyssey, to return to this film in which music figures as a principal actor, a scene accompanied by the Blue Danube Waltz by Johann Strauss. Once past the surprising impact – an effect cunningly calculated to give us a sense of anachronism, to distract us and distance us through a sort of rejection, then to

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pull us back in more firmly – we are subjugated by the perfect appropriateness between the waltz, with its circular rhythm, and the rotation of the spacecraft. If a different piece of music is superimposed on this sequence, it will take on a totally different emotional color and a wholly other plastic rhythm, the images will seem to tell us something quite different: they will change signifieds. I propose trying this with Arvo Part’s Fratres, a musical sequence that, this time, has no identifiable rhythm but develops a game of timbres on natural harmonics, which give it a truly “spatial” dimension, seeming to adhere perfectly to Kubrick’s image but almost in the manner of a pleonasm, far from the mind-boggling, revealing disparity of the combination with Strauss. A listener who tries this experiment will be able to compare sensations experienced in both cases, and rapidly become convinced of the validity of the principle of emotional sign. In so doing, he will grasp the importance of using correspondences between our sense to develop our capacity to decipher signs and their combinations, even in the most abstract artistic vehicles.

From this we can deduce that a new art is within our grasp and is there to be developed, but also that we are offered here a method for understanding the works of the recent past, what we still call “contemporary music.”

I am certain that the frequent, repeated perception of the association “image + modern music” will help to anchor in our minds, little by little, new sound-images, with the value of new signs. It is only regrettable that the film limits itself to the association “modern = angst / or suspense.” That is not due to an intrinsically and fatally negative tenor of contemporary music, but to a poverty of vocabulary in the listener and a library of interpretants, and of emotionally competent objects, that is too limited. Incapable of deciphering the signs, the listener perceives them only as hostile and thus anxietyprovoking. Again, and always, this fear of the Other and of otherness.

Here we must point out an excess that might well impose itself durably, possibly even definitively, after the image media, day after day, drive home this association “modern = angst” and give it the value of a symbol that will prove infinitely difficult to undo. Film and television create more than just faddish phenomena: they also act in the deep layers of the individual and collective mind to generate new signs, to establish new codes -planetary, omnipresent, addictive -- whose power is in the image of these media. A composer trying to ignore the value of these signs, as well as the codes and emotions associated with them, could find himself condemned to autism, or if he has the right flair, to the role of martyr.

The duty of the composer today is to seek the means of transmitting these signs. The time for insults and pies in the face has passed. The time for solutions must come, and now.

For my part, I favor a new art that, in the manner of opera, would be based on the association between eye and ear, but on the basis of pure images rather than a stage set, direction, and a text. It is revealing, incidentally, to observe that with so many crutches, modern music has had no greater success at winning over the public in the opera house than in the concert hall. I would even say that the rejection by the operatic public has been far more intense: nearly all the costly opera “premieres” are also farewells.

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The fact is, in the case of opera, melodic lines that ignore singing and a libretto that ignores the theater do nothing but confirm the perception of music already too dense for a genre in which, on the contrary, it is important to simplify157 and, if possible, write about stories that should have a bit of sex appeal.

Some, however, have successfully met the challenge: Nixon in China, by John Adams; Château des Carpathes, by Philippe Hersant; Hans Werner Henze’s Der junge Lord; Carlisle Floyd’s Susannah; Luciano Berio’s Un Re in Ascolto; some other composers like Wolfgang Rihm; and the new Finnish school, for instance.

Opera, though a genre with an uncertain future, was founded on the fusion between drama and music.

I urge the creation of a new genre, by fusing music and image, with both conceived together rather than glued together arbitrarily, with the musician and the visual artist, like composer and librettist, elaborating an audio-visual drama, a play of correspondences that explicitly respond to one another while guiding the listener-spectator without false steps through sensory spheres as yet unknown to him/her. Visual creations on computer have given the visual arts a new dimension, and the festival “Imagina,” which presents each year’s best three-dimensional animated works, shows that we are dealing with a new art form, one especially apt for application to this bipartite creation that I am proposing.

What I am not suggesting, contrary to what some have already objected, is an attempt at explanation or justification of sound by the image, any more than opera in its time was an attempt to explain what occurred in the pit by what occurred on stage.

I am inviting composers, moreover, to focus on the field of cinematographic rhythm.

We have become hypersensitive to the image, but also to sudden, repeated dramatic sequences. The nineteenth-century popular-theater public was subjected to extremely long sequences, and the rare “coups de theater” or dramatic bombshells could not, in any case, arrive faster than the backstage mechanics’ arms could arrange it. Filmgoers today, which means all of us, are conditioned, internally and profoundly, by the flood of situations, of flashbacks, virtual high-angle shots, all of which create in us, for better or for worse, new demands, new expectations.

What is it that we find most intolerable? A scene that drags on, someone who beats around the bush unable to gather his words or thoughts, a slowdown in traffic. It is essential, not actually for things to move fast, but to connect quickly.

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In fact, it is ridiculous to believe that starting with Wozzeck and Lulu, the complexity of operatic composition not only should, but could, increase exponentially, as a function of a need for linear progress, when we recall that opera, by definition, is composed around the human voice and its natural limitations.

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Of course, art is not obliged to imitate the twitching of a frenetic humanity, and especially not in an opportunistic way, to cater to it or flatter it. Certain commercial music takes good care of that. But Art must speak the language of its time, to the people of its time.

The mental structures, and especially the modern way of life, invite us to pluralism, to interbreeding of forms and sound-objects, and to the return of that music that, as Mahler said of his own symphonic universe, contains “all the noises of the world.”

In the chapter of this work on modernity we spoke of revolution, especially the aesthetic upheaval of the twentieth century. But if there is one revolution that is overdue, it is the abolition of stylistic unity.

If that rule – unity of style – was the glory of classical art, it was because it corresponded to the human being of that time, who was essentially the man of one place and the man of one God. Thus human beings, seeking to imitate the Creature’s act, and aware by tradition of the principle of unity, applied it to their own productions, in the Promethean hope of stamping them with the divine seal. And yet, according to the model of places like Venice, where influences mingled happily to create the illusion of a style, it was when they begin to combine and mix that people become creative. Unity of style has never been more than a deceptive, tyrannical error in perspective.

Today, this notion ought to be the watchword for curators and restorers, but no longer for creative artists. Human beings today, even if they do not travel, find it difficult to prevent the whole word from coming to them. Whether to deplore or extol this cultural crossbreeding is another issue; the fact is that today’s artist, if he wants to be of his own time and thus to be modern, must reflect this pluralism, which is not just geographic but also chronological. I see no reason to prevent a composer from mixing perfect chords, dissonances, jazz rhythms, ancient meters, synthetic timbres, and acoustical instruments.

The absence or rather the rarity of works of this stamp seems to me to prove that many creative artists have yet to acquire the gesture of our time.

There have been brilliant precursors, however, such as Maurizio Kagel or Luciano Berio, who showed the way, which can now lead us much farther yet.

Image, rhythm, stylistic pluralism: these are the most rapid, most effective tools for finally communicating, communicating anew, reestablishing links, opening up minds to new perspectives.

That task is incumbent on the composer, but an effort is required of the listener as well.

To enrich our palette of aural/emotional associations is much more than a personal aesthetic stake. Confronted by bargain-basement dream merchants of every stripe, the listener needs to have within him the means of judging and arbitrating.

Confronted by the flood of functional music, whether commercial, propagandistic or manipulative, the listener needs to shore up a protective wall of musical references, a veritable set of auditory glasses that will allow him to see the ugliness of sound that

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threatens to engulf him, but also the charms of new types of music, astonishing music, to which he has felt incapable of succumbing.

What is at stake is the independence of everyone, free will, and finally, freedom in the widest sense. The stakes are not just artistic, they are political. Surely that is worth the effort.

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