English translation of the French transcript, made with AI and not yet proofread — click a paragraph to jump to it. Show the French original
The definition comes at the end; the illusion of origins 0:20 I presume most of you are expecting me to start by proposing a definition. I'm going to refrain from doing that at the very start of my talk, out of respect for the word 'start' — because in the word 'définition' [definition], there's 'finir' [to finish] hidden in it, look closely, it's written right there. So it's at the end that we get a definition, not at the beginning. For the beginning, I ask you to keep in mind, for each and every one of you, the images that rush in, the representations that rush into your minds, every time we talk about music, quite simply. We'll manage to try to unify all that.
0:53 But yes, I tried to title this little chat between us 'the history of music and the music of history' — that's a bit my publisher's fault, who is present here by the way, and two of whose authors you've already seen come to Saint-Dizier, to the popular university, namely Annie Lacroix-Riz, as you recalled, and Vargas. My publisher, with great patience and delicacy, is asking me for a history of music.
1:23 For some time now, there have been plenty of histories of music, as you can see, in bookshops I mean — there's no shortage, it's a genre, the history-of-music section is well stocked. And often these aren't really histories, they're often geographies of music. I'm not playing on words, but for example, it's a history that completely ignores Japanese music, or the polyphonies of the Solomon Islands — we'll come back to that — and the extremely complex polyphonies deep in the Pacific, in the Solomon Islands, and among the Pygmies.
1:58 So it's... Well, sometimes there are those who, a bit more, put 'the history of Western music' — that already becomes more geographic, historical, you see, even though since we've known the earth is round, we wonder where the west actually is. 'The West' is a strange notion, journalists like to use it, 'the Westerners,' 'Saddam Hussein defies the West.' I'm running behind, myself. That's what — I'm just listening.
2:28 I'll try to raise my voice. Please, I'll take the mic. And... if I hesitate once again to start with definitions, it's because these notions, the further back you go toward origins — because often, when trying to make a definition, we try to get closer to origins, which is a bit of an illusion, because at the origin is precisely where the thing gets lost. Anyone who has gone up rivers to their source understands what I mean. There's nothing that resembles...
2:59 Two rivers never resemble each other as much as at their source, or at their estuary. It's between the two that there are meanders and different courses. But when you go upstream, whether it's the Amazon or a small local stream, when you reach the source, there are little rivulets wandering a bit between the feet, between the legs, flowing a bit from what's called, I believe, in geography, a 'cone of reception.' And it's a bit pointless to ask whether the origin of the Marne is here or there. The Marne begins, as we say in philosophy, with an 'always already' complex, as if there had already been a confluence of these little streams that suddenly make a river.
3:30 We find the same thing in music. What I mean is that jazz, for example, to take one of the eminent genres in music — if I go by what record dealers say, the genres are quickly listed: jazz, classical music, variety, world music, roughly speaking. It rarely goes beyond that. Which corresponds roughly to fairly real divisions, when you don't look too closely. But back to jazz. There are the origins of jazz, for example Africa. Yes, I lived 34 years south of the Sahara, I know a bit about African music, since I dealt with it professionally.
4:03 But still, there are more jazz clubs in Tokyo alone than on the entire African continent — that makes you think. There would never have been jazz without Africa, that's certain. Sorry, jazz without Africa, that's certain. It's funny, there wouldn't have been Africa starting from jazz. But if there had only been Africa, there wouldn't have been jazz either. Because, like all things culturally rich and interesting, it's impure at its origin. There's a mixture of what the former slaves brought, in particular the blues scale, etc.
4:34 I'll go fairly quickly, for those who know this. Then — no connection with the blues at all — but you have to go to church on Sunday, take off your 'savage' clothes, put on Victorian dresses, and go to church, and there you're going to sing like everyone else among the Protestants, right? The Lutheran chorale. People of African origin couldn't manage to sing it in tune, because in their scale — I don't want to get too technical — there aren't the two semitones that are in our scale. So, by singing out of tune, they created that miracle which is the blues.
5:04 And they made gospel — you know this, the spiritual, right? Which was strictly unheard-of until then, unheard-of in the literal sense that no one had heard it, and in trying to imitate, mind you, the Lutheran chorale of Bach and Handel, they created the spiritual. You see how going back to origins can be misleading. When you go back to origins, the thing gets lost. I'll take one last example to demystify the illusion of origins: the notion of bureaucracy — I'll take a very common notion in politics, in sociology, bureaucracy. When you see that the etymology of this word, if you go back to its origins, comes from the 'robe de bure' [homespun frock] of monks, who were the only literate people in a certain era, in the Middle Ages, as you know, who handled civil records, and who, as a kind of desk pad, on the wooden table where they wrote in their cell, would put down their frock.
5:49 And so the table became the 'bureau,' then by metonymy, as we say in linguistics, it's the room that became the 'bureau,' then the building in which the office is, and so on. There you go. So now I'm going to take, not one last example, but a first one about what interests us at the heart of the question of music. What do we call the traditional musician in Africa, in black Africa, to put it incorrectly? I say that because Africans themselves, who are — as they're always called by the Whites, in sub-Saharan Africa, to speak like international organizations, which starve them but are polite and courteous —
The griot, musician, historian, and genealogist 6:26 and who are politically correct. They're called griots. Some of you have heard of them, griots. But if you translate 'griot' as 'musician,' you haven't understood, because the griot, originally, is a historian. He's the one who knows the genealogy of the princes and kings in whose service he works. A bit like our jester, if you will, who was both a verbal improviser, a virtuoso of speech and the spoken word, who was a comedian, but who was also a historian, who knows the genealogies — so-and-so, son of so-and-so, son of so-and-so.
7:04 I remember a magnificent ceremony that exists — I had an extraordinary stroke of luck — it happens only once every 50 years, which is quite rare: certain ethnic groups have a ritual held once every 50 years, among the Dogon, in Mali. It's an ethnic group that has interested anthropologists a great deal, you may have heard of the Dogon. The Dogon hold their great gathering every 50 years, and I heard the griot calling out to the people coming from all the villages, from all the valleys, for this great gathering, saying: here are the Sidibés, the sons of Traoré, the sons of Touré, and then suddenly he'd stop, like a scratched record, and say, 'the centipede has too many legs, we can't count them.'
7:43 'The centipede has too many legs, we can't count them.' It means: I'm a griot, I have oral memory, I have no writing, I do what I can, I get this far — it was pathetic, you see, on my shoulders rests the memory. And in the Mandingo epic, which plays somewhat the role in West Africa that the Iliad plays in our civilization, if you will, which recounts the exploits of the 12th-century conquerors, that is Sundiata Keita — those are names like footballers, you see — the beginning is the griot speaking, and he says: I am a griot, my name is Djeli Mamadou Kouyaté — 'djeli' is a generic term designating griots — Djeli Mamadou Kouyaté, son of Bintou Kouyaté, griot from father to son, we are the sacks of speech; without us, the names of kings would fall into oblivion; without us, the names of kings would fall into oblivion. That means the poet is placed above even the kings — yes, so the griot is a musician, yes, but he's a poet, but he's a historian, but he's a genealogist, he's a jester, he's a bit of a Canard Enchaîné too sometimes, he allows himself now and then to needle the sovereign or the chief a little, I mean, something everyone else trembles to do, normally — so there you have it,
The old complicity between the philosopher and the musician 8:53 that's to warn us against the illusion that essence would lie in origins, whereas the richness of reality is what has formed since the origins — I'm not saying at random, I won't settle the question, but in any case, through the chance encounters and mutual enrichments — there you go. So, as Bertrand kindly reminded you, I'm a philosopher by training, I was one professionally for a few years, and then you remain one — there's no vacation from the concept, as a friend who has since died used to say. But why did I insist on talking about music when I'm supposed to be giving a philosophical talk?
9:36 I'll answer that in several ways. There's an old complicity between the philosopher and the musician that goes back practically to the beginning, in the double sense — chronological and logical — that is, both to the start, the emergence of the Socratic question around the 5th century BC, namely that of all the arts — especially when you set music against the plastic arts, for example, you see, things you can touch, a sculpture, an architecture, a painting, that's palpable; it's already more abstract because depth, you can't touch it, it's an illusion, it's perspective — it's Hegel in an Aesthetics who says very well that depth is an abstract dimension; there wasn't yet a notion of abstract painting at the time, but you see, depth was made abstract on the canvas.
10:22 But still, all that is plastic, material things. With music, you have the impression of entering pure immateriality, of trying to grasp a melody, to try to feel the timbre of an instrument, as Verlaine says — one of our most musical poets, as you know. In fact, when people told him he was a great writer, he'd say, 'Bah, I've only written songs.' And in his 'Art poétique,' which is a kind of manifesto in which the poet, within the framework of a poem, expresses his ideas about poetry, to go quickly —
10:54 Well, it's that famous stroke, that famous celebrated opening: 'Music before all else.' And to that, he adds — we're at the end of the 19th century — 'and for that, prefer the Odd, vaguer and more soluble in the air, with nothing in it that weighs or that poses.' You see, we're almost in the immaterial. 'Vaguer and more soluble in the air, with nothing in it that weighs or that poses.' How much does an air from Mozart's Magic Flute weigh? On a Roberval scale? So, what does that have to do with philosophy?
11:27 Philosophy — the first written system that has come down to us is Plato's, who listened to his master Socrates, who launched the movement but left no writing. These are important reminders. I say this — I have nothing against books, especially in the presence of my publisher. And I would not be what I am, none of us would be what she is, what he is, without the help of our readings, which have humanized us, civilized us in some way. But still, somewhere, we mustn't forget that philosophers have always recognized as their patron a man who did not write, who did not teach in state chairs.
12:04 Who addressed — sorry — public opinion by questioning people in the street according to their specialty. 'You, you're a general, you must know what courage is.' 'Well yes, courage is like what I did facing the Persians.' Then the artist — every time, he'd make his interlocutors stumble. 'Well, beauty, beauty, well there, it's the Parthenon. Look what I made, it's got some style, doesn't it?' 'Oh yes, but isn't the sunset beautiful too?' 'Well, that has nothing to do with the Parthenon.' 'Oh, damn.' Well, you see, that's how philosophy began, by questioning the words of everyday language. And in Plato's system — I'll go quickly, because some of you have heard about it, even practice it, have read it — there is a clear distinction and separation, it's a dualism, between the sensible world, that is, the world with which the senses put us in contact, what we see, touch, etc.
12:46 So I come back a bit to the palpable — that which is at the back of the cave, to speak in Platonic terms, which for Plato is a world of illusion. And then the intelligible world, after the 'cosmos aisthêtos,' the sensible world, the 'cosmos noêtos,' there, which I can never see or touch, but which I can only think — the 'cosmos noêtos' — but which is at the same time the true reality, whereas everything I see around me is mere nonsense. That's Plato — I'm not deciding, I don't know if he's right or wrong, that's not today's topic — but I note that music could only be a privileged mode of expression because of its immaterial side; it was like a kind of expression of the beyond, of the intelligible world.
13:27 That's why I wanted this quotation from Verlaine, 'music before all else, and for that, prefer the Odd, vaguer and more soluble in the air,' 'with nothing in it that weighs or that poses.' So very early on, there was this complicity, and moreover Plato had, among his inspirers before he began developing his system, one of those pre-Socratics of whom we know little, only a few fragments — we've lost most of their major works — but among these pre-Socratics, one of the twenty or so, was Pythagoras. Pythagoras was the first to sketch out, twenty centuries before Galileo, an applied physics, that is, to apply the laws of number or geometry to the string of the lute.
14:12 He noticed that by pressing on half the string, you got the octave, that is, a sound exactly twice as high. So for the first time, abstract things, abstract ratios like ratios of numbers, became concrete. And we well know the role acoustics played in Pythagoras's system, going as far as thinking about our solar system, which he didn't view at all the way we do — he still had the Earth at the center — with what he called 'the music of the spheres.' As if all these worlds were resonating with one another. So there's this old complicity that, I'll drive the point home, is tied precisely to this somewhat invisible side of music, to put it quickly.
14:48 Because 'immaterial' would be a bit excessive — there are still tiny particles of air colliding with each other every time my voice reaches your eardrum. Which makes me think, not a digression, in passing, that as for sound systems, the quality of sound reproduction, I have nothing against digital, I'm not going to come across as an old nostalgic — but still, without settling the debate between those nostalgic for tube amps and analog sound, you can have all the digital intermediaries you want, the digital player, the digital amp — your ear, the eardrum, is analog.
15:24 It's a membrane that vibrates, that's what the eardrum is. So I mean, analog sound is fundamental in some sense. I'll close the parenthesis. So those are the deep reasons for this invisible, quasi-immaterial side — let's remain cautious, let's say an art that seems less material than the others — music. So, first thing, I'll say it timelessly for now, a bit within the eternity of what might be definitions, so it stands opposed to the plastic arts as being the art of the invisible.
Music, an art of time; the definition of definition 15:56 But there's something else, which is music's relation to time. Second determination that will help us give a definition, I hope, or propose one, if you agree with me. The relation to time. The plastic arts are all arts of space. A painting, a sculpture, a monument, a building, occupy a certain portion of space. Now, that implies constraints, logical constraints — the hardest of all — logical constraints, meaning: if A equals B, then B equals A, no exceptions.
16:28 Namely, that in the world of space, philosophers know this well, it's the world of 'partes extra partes,' it's the world of simultaneity, of spaces. You have a painting by Poussin or Picasso, whichever, in front of you — the left and the right of the painting are at the same hour. Your gaze can wander from one to the other, but all the parts of a plastic work are simultaneous, co-present, as we say in classical metaphysics, co-present — whereas, to listen to the slightest 'Au clair de la lune' or an opera aria, it's the opposite of simultaneity, that is — you're taking the words out of my mouth — succession, the order of time is that of succession, exactly the inverse of space.
17:12 I could take another example, if you like — I buy a new house, I don't have the means to say so right away, but let's say I do, and I send the photo to a friend to show him what it's like. Well, he sees it all at once, right there, the place, all at once, simultaneously — it's a photo, so it belongs to the plastic arts, the visual. But if instead I had written to him to describe my house, because speech, like music, is an art of time, I would tell him: you first enter a hallway, then you turn left — yes, that's the successive order, you can't, in temporal order, show him all the parts at once like that, they're not in the same time.
17:44 And in a Beethoven concerto, at 4:00 and at 4:10, you're not hearing the same things at all. Music needs time. So you see, somewhere in the definition of music, there will be the notion of time. If we manage to agree on a definition, the notion of time will be in it somewhere. Because often people say music is the art of sounds. Personally, I wouldn't have started with a definition like that. But definitions, you know, always have two opposite drawbacks. Either they're too general — I just gave one that's too general. You ask me, what is Mozart?
18:14 I answer: it's Austrian music, period. That's not false. It's not inaccurate. But it's wrong in the sense that it's abstract — I've told you nothing about Mozart. He's Austrian, well, so was Hitler. I haven't taught you much about Mozart by telling you he's Austrian. A few aspects, when he winks at Tyrolean tunes, at German dances, he knows his audience well. And if, on the other hand, you're too precise, you'll give a definition that's valid for Western music and that completely drops the quarter-tones of Far Eastern music, for example.
18:50 So, since we're doing philosophy, allow me — not to make a detour, we're right at the heart of the problem — to propose to you a definition of definition. We owe it to Aristotle — I didn't invent it — who asked himself a great deal about this kind of logical problem. And Aristotle says this sentence which sounds abstract but is extremely precise: to define is to give the genus plus the specific difference. I'll speak plain French afterward. But to define is to give the genus — the proximate genus, he adds — plus the specific difference.
19:23 It's quite simple. I see an animal, there, my cat, let's try to define it. First, I give the genus: the cat is an animal. That's a rather distant genus, animal, because to distinguish it from flies isn't very complicated. So, we'll say the cat is a mammal, a somewhat closer genus than 'animal,' you see, which has less extension but is more precise, more concrete. And once I've classified it among all the other beings that share with it the trait of being mammals, I'm now going to give its difference within the genus, which makes it a species — specific difference, you see, what's precise is that it has retractable claws.
20:01 Felines, cats have claws — felines have retractable claws, to such an extent that — not my topic — some zoologists doubt whether the cheetah is a feline, because the cheetah doesn't have retractable claws. There you go, I submit that to you... And you can have the look of a cat and not be a feline. So, there's the definition of definition: give the genus plus the specific difference. Man — I'll take definitions that can be debated — man is a rational animal, as in antiquity. I first give: man is an animal, the genus, plus what makes his difference, rational.
20:33 Or 'man is an animal that laughs' — Rabelais, laughter is proper to man. There you go. Quite so, the specific difference. But it's not a 'plus the specific difference' that simply gets added onto the genus. If you look closely, there's a tension between the two. Because when I say man is an animal, I first classify him within something vast. And then I do the opposite: within that vast thing, I extract what is proper to him, which excludes everything else. You see? So, there — I want to draw your attention to this somewhat dramatized side of every definition.
21:03 A definition is work. You don't just get it straightforwardly like that. Even mathematicians, who are quite right to start — they're very democratic about it — by defining the terms they use before using them. It's not like the moderators of TV channels, etc. Before speaking of a circle, we call a circle the locus of points equidistant from a single point in a given plane, from a center, in the same plane, etc. So, they have the honesty to define things, to propose a definition to us before starting to work with it, to be sure we're really talking about the same thing.
From noise to sound, a time without figuration 21:39 So, back to my point: the two specific differences of music that we've seen in relation to the plastic arts. So, the tendency toward the immaterial, and the relation to time. And that second one is even more important because it's what is properly musical about music — this management of time. You see, you can live through a real adventure, a drama, while following a quarter of an hour of a Tchaikovsky concerto, etc.
22:11 I'll say, with twists and turns, deaths, rebirths, hopes, terrors, triumphs, following one another — I don't know — over the span of one movement of a concerto or symphony. There you go. Now, where it gets complicated is that music itself can deny itself from the sonic point of view. That's why I started with the definition 'the art of sounds.' First, a small distinction. The very notion of sound also needs to be used precisely.
22:46 There's a word that resembles 'son' [sound] — which one? You heard 'son'? You can say 'j'entendais' [I was hearing]. Yes, that's practically the same as sound, but noises. Right? Well, it's not the same. There's even a Lévi-Strauss — who is nonetheless an anthropologist with an admirable musical culture. He's not on my side, if I may say so, if there are even sides in this. I'll drop the military overtone of that term, but I mean I have plenty of disagreements with Lévi-Strauss, but on this he knows music well. He had one of the finest musical cultures in Paris. And in the preface to 'The Raw and the Cooked,' one of his most famous works, right?
23:19 He's an anthropologist, an ethnologist — the raw, nature; the cooked, culture. And between the two, cooks — cooks have known this for a long time — what is both raw and cooked, you see what I mean? Fermented, marinated, Tahitian-style fish, it's cooked, but without fire, chemically, you see, after a marinade — it's interesting what we see in Lévi-Strauss, in between. The green veins in Roquefort — that's not quite raw.
23:50 Lévi-Strauss saw this aspect of the relation to time very clearly. Because, as I was telling you, he's the one who says there are noises, to put it quickly, in nature, and there are sounds in culture. It took millennia of elaboration to go from noise to sound. And I don't have a sound-playback device here, but I could easily do it with YouTube — you have everything at your fingertips nowadays.
24:23 I'm thinking of the ballet music that Stravinsky wrote for the ballet Petrouchka, which was one of the strong moments of the emergence of contemporary music. Petrouchka plays roughly the same role, along with The Rite of Spring, as the Demoiselles d'Avignon in the history of painting — breaks, ruptures, right. And I'm not here to give a detailed history of music, that would take me three years, but to show you the stakes of a history of music today and to get us interested in it. So this Petrouchka is a ballet supposedly set in Nizhny Novgorod, which is now called Gorky, at the time of the Great Fair, one of the most famous fairs, like the one in Lyon — Gorky, so very colorful, very Russian, full of colors.
25:04 So, at the start, we're plunged into the din of the crowd, of the fair, you see, with all these simultaneous sounds — here there are bear trainers, there there are barrel organs, over there children laughing, etc. Well, you see the elaboration involved in what would be a tape recorder placed directly in the middle of the fair — hyper-realism, if you like — and what Stravinsky does with it, the transfiguration through the art of sound, he makes us feel even more inside the festivity and the fair, if you like, but these are elaborated sounds. Already, I don't know if you've ever tried to draw a sound out of a violin lying around, it's dreadful.
25:40 Before managing to produce a sound, you spend three years making noises on a violin. You see what I mean. So if I had started by saying, to sum myself up, that music is the art of sounds, you see what confusion we would have been dragged into somewhat. After all, speaker manufacturers, the cabinetmakers who work on high-end speakers, they too work in the art of sounds. I mean, that doesn't define music. The relationship to time, yes. Because no other art uses time to that extent, and I'm now going to add a new determination: without figuration.
26:17 Because there are other arts of time, I mean arts where the work requires a certain amount of time to unfold. Cinema. The arts of speech in general — theater, cinema, poetry — those are the arts of time. It's a course, a progression. By the way, earlier when I quoted the griot, that magnificent opening of the Mandinka epic, he said his name was Djeli — I don't know if you remember, Djeli Mamadou Kouyaté. And Djeli is a generic term meaning griot. Now, the term that designates the river, you know, in those dry countries on the edge of the desert, water — that's where I couldn't understand why green was the color of paradise for Muslims.
26:53 It's quite simple if we talk about it. You just have to look at Niger, where everything is ochre like that in the Sahel for nine months, and say to yourself, in the middle of October, look at the sky and say there won't be a drop before June. Let's hope there is some in June, because if it's in July, there's famine. All these convergences bring us to this third determination, which makes it an art of time, but of a time without figuration.
27:28 Because unlike poetry — poetry has figures. When I spoke to you of a poem about an animal, a castle, a king, we picture things, and we come back to the visual world. We come back to a somewhat more material and objective world. Music doesn't have that. Pure music — it's a much-disputed expression, so I put it in quotes — the kind that isn't in service of a commission for sacred art, like a mass, etc., where you have to follow a ritual with constraints that don't come only from the music. And pure music — you have the impression that it's telling a story with staggering precision in detail, in the nuances of the slightest feeling, but we're not going to put a word on it every time.
28:07 It's this mysterious quality that has inspired both philosophers since Antiquity and avant-garde poets, let's say starting with Baudelaire — I'm speaking like literature textbooks, they say modern poetry begins with Baudelaire — Rimbaud, who is hardly suspected of allegiance to academicism, that age is merciless — himself said at seventeen, in a letter, that Baudelaire was the first of seers, king of poets, a true god, but he adds: that age is merciless, he lived in too artistic an environment, and the form so often praised in him is petty.
Constant meter re-spatializes music 28:38 That means there are new things appearing in Baudelaire, but he's still in the old form of the alexandrine, in short. What am I in the process of saying? I'm saying that — and this is where I had left off in my last talk — music can forget its own temporal essence and remake itself as plastic. When you listen to a Vivaldi concerto, a rock song, a jazz piece, what do these three have in common — I'm not talking about value judgments, there can be masterpieces in what I just mentioned, or worthless pieces, I'm talking about genres. And between us, I prefer good popular music to butchered classical music, I mean, it's not about which is superior.
29:13 But I've just taken three genres where the rhythm doesn't move. Take a Brandenburg concerto by Bach. I'm taking an example almost everyone knows, even by ear. It doesn't move until the end, the tempo, there. You could keep time like this, like in swing, all the way to the end, to the very last chord. That was the era before the French Revolution, good evening sir, where there was a place for everything and everything had its place. That's the era when La Bruyère wrote his Characters.
29:43 For eternity, you are the distracted one, or the miser, or the jealous one, you see — there's no evolving conception the way we have, like the hero — I don't know, Stendhal's, from The Charterhouse of Parma, Fabrice — where there's the becoming of a hero who changes completely as the novel progresses. It's not that. So I attach great importance to this aspect. The fact that there's this constant meter is a constraint of the plastic arts on music. It's a way of re-spatializing music. Why? Because, you see, I have the impression that all the segments of time that come are marked out, like guardrails marking the highway.
30:16 It's like driving in fog. At regular intervals, like on the TGV — boom, the drummer, boom, the drummer, boom. It's music that no longer moves. And here I'll issue a warning: for 50 years now, young people — and not only in our regions, believe me — have been in what I call a genuine sonic ghetto, a music that hasn't moved in more than 60 years now. In a meter that no longer changes, because even though the names vary — it's true there are small nuances, rock rhythm strictly speaking from the fifties, rock'n'roll, then twist, then I'm skipping stages, I don't know, rumba, whatever, that was before the war.
30:50 I could multiply examples, it stays the same binary meter, it stays the same timbres. Take a classical orchestra, not even a very large one, you have flute — a richness of timbres, flute, horn, oboe, bassoon, strings — I'll quote Verlaine again: 'For we still want nuance, nuance alone weds dream to dream and flute to horn.' And here, for 60 years young people have been condemned to hear only a single timbre, the amplified string, whether it's electric guitar or bass guitar — it's the amplified string.
31:25 It's an unprecedented impoverishment. You can make masterpieces with that material — Bach with a solo violin, don't worry, he made partitas that have held up for a century now. But that's not the point. And again, I told you, I'd rather hear a rock'n'roll played a thousand times well and tight, than a classical piece that forgets the tempo or lacks inspiration. So that's not the point. But there is a genuine sonic ghetto that corresponds to historical moments. You're starting to understand a bit what I mean by 'music of history' — determined, if you like. This rhythm I was talking about, which I illustrated with Bach, proof that you can make masterpieces — I'm not condemning a meter.
32:02 But when the meter is regular, it's poor, if you like. You've heard one bar of rock, you can skip listening to the 500 bars that follow, they're going to be exactly identical. But there's another interest that can come from timbres, from distortions. Bach needed no convincing. The meter — and that's not him, that's the music of his era — being constant, he enriches through the two dimensions that remain outside rhythm, harmony and melody. He's going to make astounding harmonic complications, he's going to make melodies of great complexity with interweavings counterpointed through what's called polyphony.
32:38 You know, almost all of you — and maybe there are professional singers among us, but that's rare — it's not simple to sing in tune a tune you've heard, alone, without accompaniment. When you have to follow six at once, that's polyphony — yes, it's complicated. So there you go, when you have a meter that's poor, you can make a masterpiece and rich music by playing on the other parameters. Conversely, I think of late Beethoven, the one who, for most contemporary musicians, saw the music of the 20th century coming — and he's not a precursor because he's ahead, it's those who come after who are precursors — the one of the last quartets, where you'd think you were hearing Bartók at moments, even though we're in 1815, 1820, this is a guy contemporary with Napoleon — a quartet is very poor in terms of timbre, you have four string instruments, the differences coming only from pitch, and the pitches actually echo the vocal divisions — it's always the voices that are at the origin of how instrumental music's divisions are named, I mean there's the soprano voice, the tenor voice, the baritone voice.
33:48 So in the quartet you find the violin, which is like the soprano, the viola, which is like the alto, the baritone, which is somewhat the cello, which is somewhat the baritone, and there you go — so it's very poor, there's only, as I said earlier about rock, only amplified string; here there's only bowed string, as they say, with the bow. Well then, Beethoven makes famous worlds pass through by way of harmony, melody, dramatization, etc. You see, so I'm not condemning a meter, but I am warning you. When we talk about music and want to evaluate a piece of music, we have the right to make value judgments.
Return to baroque and rock: the same need for reassurance 34:23 We have to be careful to aim at properly musical notions, because there are many spatial notions in music. So, to go back — I was talking about Vivaldi and seemed a bit disdainful — I love listening to Vivaldi, that's not the point, but with him one concerto resembles another like two peas in a pod, he made 600 of them, mass-produced, and the meter is a bit always the same. Now, that repertoire of constant meter — you'll tell me, but what's the connection between rock and baroque music, from the 17th century past to the 1950s? Precisely — you've heard about the vogue for baroque music. That was now a bit more than a generation ago. It was a repertoire that had been practically forgotten until around the 1950s or so. There was first what's called the return to Bach, then the baroque revival, then now the return — playing it on a period instrument, which gives you the 'baroqueux.' Historically it came — and here it's objective, you just have to measure — this vogue came at the end of the 1950s, at the very same moment rock arrived. I don't believe in coincidence, as if humanity at that moment, through different modes of expression depending on whether one lives
35:33 in a housing project or in one's country house, listening to Schubert quartets in front of the sunset — in both cases you have the same rhythm, as if there were a need to reassure oneself in this somewhat worrying modern world, you see, with this regular rhythmic pattern, the meter that repeats. You see, when I say 'music of history,' I mean that somehow, to know what really happened in our history, one must listen to the musicians — the music of an era expresses the inner intimacy of what peoples experienced more deeply than any other mode of expression. That's what I'm saying. So that's why I hesitated to say 'music of history' — first because I was afraid people would understand it as musicians who specialize in sonifying the Battle of Vittoria with cannon shots, which happens in Tchaikovsky — there's an orchestral overture where you hear cannon shots, alluding to the Battle of Borodino with Napoleon. Fine, in the Rhinegold you hear real anvils when you're in the underground world and in the forge. I didn't mean 'music of history' in that picturesque sense. More deeply, I was saying that perhaps historians and sociologists are missing something.
From Haydn to Beethoven, from Gregorian chant to polyphony 36:44 When it comes to history — I'm talking about really knowing what changed in humanity at the end of the 18th, beginning of the 19th century, for example at the end of the Age of Enlightenment, when fractures occur, as they do roughly every 15 centuries — the industrial revolution in England and the political revolution in France, a few years apart — that produced the world we live in today. Now, if you look at the music from just before the revolution, the last quartets of Dalayrac, which isn't very well known, or of Haydn, who was Beethoven's first teacher — from the very first bars you feel like you're in a little Louis XV Rococo salon — I'm not saying that pejoratively, it's a style, again it's at the individual level that there are failed works and successful works, there's no style that's bad or good in itself — and so a well-enclosed world, you feel like you're having tea at the Trianon between two games of blind man's buff, and again I say that with no pejorative connotation. You listen to Beethoven's first compositions, and you feel like you're on another planet, a chaotic, anguished world.
37:54 which can only triumph after struggling — what happened in between? There were three or four years — nothing happened, so to speak — the French Revolution, that didn't affect Germany, and yet Beethoven is in Germany, the news arrives from afar, but be careful — this news mattered not just for France. The French Revolution, Kant — the philosopher known for his regular Protestant German life, again, nothing pejorative here, every people has its faults and its qualities — his little walk, it's well known to those familiar with the anecdote: he would work, writing the Critique of Pure Reason, the Critique of Practical Reason, etc., and then his walk at six o'clock up to a certain point and not one meter further, and then he'd come back and get back to work. He was so afraid of wasting time that he had hung handkerchiefs on strings in the libraries so he wouldn't have to search his pockets to pull one out. You see, someone very organized — twice he transgressed his regularity, twice he extended his walk: the day he learned that Rousseau's Social Contract had been published, to get the first copy, and the second time, to get news from Paris on the day of the storming of the Bastille. And Kant was in Königsberg, which is almost in Russia
39:04 now — almost, it's called Kaliningrad now — it's him whom Nietzsche called, betraying his own tenderness for Kant despite himself, 'the great Chinaman of Königsberg.' It's a bit hard to read Kant. So you see, there are truly gigantic differences in the music, as if three centuries really separated the last quartets of the 18th century and Beethoven's first ones. And yet no — not much time had passed, but there were events that completely tore apart the European soul — well, that tore it apart, that made it explode, that did something else. That's important to understand. And even this music — I come back now to before the French Revolution — this admirable music of our monarchical periods, the terms are a bit vague, Renaissance music first, then so-called polyphonic music, then what's now called baroque music — that's a name that comes from Northern Europe, from the Germans and Dutch in particular, in the 20th century — but of course the people of that time were never called baroque, mainly the Italians, not exclusively, but mainly
40:14 this music is modern for its time, because before there wasn't even more than one voice — you see Gregorian chant, because we still hear it sometimes at Mass, right, per omnia saecula — there's only one voice. For purists, that's the absolute form, it's the line — if there were a graphic equivalent, it's the pure line, the pure melody, without embellishment, without orchestration or orchestral color, without rhythm, without anything, without bells and whistles — the pure line. Now when you listen to the first emergence of polyphony, when the two voices begin to diverge, in what's called the School of Notre-Dame — that's it, because it's between Paris and Saint-Denis that what was called at the time the Novum Organum, the new music, was invented, roughly speaking. It begins with Gregorian chant, there's the prologue of John as in all Mass rituals, then you see the two voices separate — exactly like the ribs of our cathedral vaults, you see on the columns all these parallel lines, and then reaching the top like that, they split apart, into a fan. So, I mean, music is an extremely sensitive sensor of the movement that stirs the soul of peoples — I emphasize the word soul to use a big word.
Baudelaire and the heresy of teaching 41:24 but because it's fairly precise, I'm not using it to muddy the waters — and on the contrary, I'll quote Baudelaire again to talk about the soul, here I'm speaking of Baudelaire the critic, he's an immense critic, it's fairly rare for a creator to also be a great critic, and in this 'New Notes on Edgar Poe' — he fought to make Poe's work known, which is now universally known, we owe that partly to him, and he was his translator even though he knew English poorly — this admirable preface called 'New Notes on Edgar Poe,' which for those who want to look it up, you find it in the paperback edition of the New Extraordinary Tales by Poe, not the Extraordinary Tales, he also wrote a preface for those, but I'm talking about the second one, the one he wrote for the New Extraordinary Tales — it's that preface called 'New Notes on Edgar Poe,' and at one point there's a passage where he lays out a bit of his theory of art in general and poetry in particular, where he speaks of — this is his expression — 'the heresy of teaching.' He says that for him, what has killed — the greatest danger poetry faces — is this heresy that makes us believe poetry must teach a message
42:34 moral, political, scientific — I'm saying anything, I say that because we can't say the same of music, and he does say — I'm not saying music can't improve us, I'm saying that if the musician pursued that goal, he has already ruined his work — that his work should have as a final result doing good, etc., or even doing harm, that's another matter, but it must not be his goal. You sense that he went through art for art's sake, and not art commissioned by the archbishop to write a requiem, or art for the anniversary of a victory — in short, music summoned for something that isn't itself. So we really need to insist on this: musical expression, to sum up a bit what I've been saying since I abandoned the old definition, is an art that, turning its back on plastic representation, on space, is an art of time, and an art of time without figuration — I insist on this — it's with sounds that one must be precise, and not with concepts.
43:45 with notions, because table, glass, microphone — all of that is concepts — after all, we have both images in our heads and functions. To go from there to saying — it may seem a bit bold — that to understand the profound transformations that occurred between the end of the 16th century and the classical era, or between the Ancien Régime and the world we live in now, one must be attuned to the music expressed at that time. It goes without saying that what I'm saying happens without the musician's awareness — if the musician were conscious of all this, he'd make bad music. I'll give you an example borrowed from poetry, since I don't have audio on hand, but all poetry is partly musical — that's the third point I wanted to address with you, it's not a digression, quite the opposite, let me explain — if only the meaning of the words mattered in poetry, the message I'm delivering, I mean, it wouldn't be an art. I'll take a line from Racine, from Mithridate, where the son — the traitor, the one who wants to steal his father's woman and collaborate with his father's enemies, that is, with the Romans
Racine, the three V's, and the unconscious of expression 44:55 which isn't nice — as one might believe, once the father is dead, as often in Racine — he says to the girl: come on, let's go to Rome, let's get out of here, and it ends with him speaking of the ships awaiting him, and 'at the foot of the altar you may board, sovereign of the seas that owe you passage' — 'sovereign of the seas that owe you passage,' three v-sounds, 'sovereign of the seas that owe you' — you see, fantastic Racine, that sort of fluid, magical verse — but if he had said, yes, you're going to sail on ships that belong to your crown, it's the same meaning, but there's no more poetry, there's nothing left, no more art. So to go from prose to poetry, an injection of music is needed, because the three v-sounds there have nothing to do with concepts, they don't represent any object, it's purely for the ear that it makes a difference — because if he had said 'qui doivent vous porter' instead of 'qui vous doivent porter' — 'qui doivent vous' — well, that's not beautiful, and by instinct the poet, Racine, makes himself avoid, like a good musician, this clashing of consonants, just as one avoids a hiatus when two vowels meet. So I'm saying
46:05 that all this happens without the creator's awareness, thankfully — imagine, no computer could ever hold in its 'head' — I speak like the Anglo-Saxons, but no computer could hold in its processing all these parameters, right — but he does better than think it, he says it, he writes it, he expresses it. And this reminds us a bit of what you've heard about psychoanalysis — it's Freud who revealed to us that we say much more than we think. We believe we're in control of the game, that we hide things from others — we tell everything in the form of slips of the tongue, parapraxes, whatever. I remember he quotes this professor — a very funny book I recommend by Freud, not everything is funny in Freud, far from it — poor unfortunate people, often, in The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, which you find easily in the Payot editions, and which is the psychoanalysis of all of us, not for once of patients, of the sick, but as the title indicates, it's our slips, our parapraxes — oh, I can't find my keys. Well, he cites the example of this anatomy professor he'd had at the Vienna medical university, who was talking about the nasal cavity — that was the day's chapter — and who exclaims, being a specialist in it, and says: I warn you, listen carefully
47:15 because the nasal cavity is complicated, and throughout Vienna the people who really know it well can be counted on the fingers of a single hand — he meant to say the five fingers of one hand, but there are fifteen fingers on one hand — and me, he said — one time he was proposing a toast to their director and he said 'we're going to burp to our director' — he meant to say 'toast,' because in German it's 'anstoßen,' well. So let's not attribute to Racine's thought the example I gave you — he didn't think about every consonant, every vowel — he just feels when it works and when it doesn't, no more than that, but he does better than think it, he expresses it. And in our expression — that's why I come back to music expressing history, you see, you think I'm making detours, but I'm keeping to my thread — expression is always much richer than the part of it that was consciously thought. If I buy a shirt because I like it, that's a value judgment — it's pretty, it's not pretty, it's ugly, that's a value judgment. And here I'd like to make a small reminder that will help us in talking about music in general — it'll help us in aesthetics but especially in music — value judgments
Value judgment, pleasure, and common desires 48:25 are opposed to judgments of existence — sorry to sound a bit dogmatic, but it's as simple as a multiplication table. A judgment of existence: this table measures 4 meters — it's not the case, but say it is. A value judgment: this table is very well made — that doesn't mean anything on its own. The value judgment — I could say this stadium is well made, but if I don't know whether it's built for ice hockey or football, how could I know if it's well or badly made? You can't tell just by looking — you need to know for what purpose it was made, and that's not visible on the stadium itself. In other words, there are judgments of existence, which are objective — we quickly agree, we just measure, this table measures such-and-such meters, fine — but knowing whether it's well or badly made, we all know that supposes we know the function it's meant to serve. I'd say a hammer is well made when I can hang my picture on the wall in 5 minutes without smashing my thumb and without the hammer breaking, the metal head flying off one way and the handle the other. In short, I'll pass quickly over this because we all agree — when something pleases me, I'm not going to say it's because it fulfills the function I assigned it well, you'd agree — but when I say this shirt pleases me, well, why — what function, what desire does it come to satisfy in me?
49:35 I don't know, but this desire is satisfied since I'm happy when I see it — I'll come back to music, it's a bit easier than the plastic arts, so with the visual, I went through the shirt first, but you see, it's really extraordinary, it's almost humiliating for us — it means that this object in the shop window knows more about me than I do myself, good grief — it knows what I want, and it comes to satisfy it. At the extreme, the desire I have, I would never have been conscious of it if this shirt hadn't come to satisfy it. You know, someone who drinks without being thirsty — it's almost an insult, drinking without thirst. If I feel pleasure, it's because I had a desire, you agree — here we're in the realm of axioms, we're in mathematics. I get no pleasure from drinking if I'm not thirsty at all — I might enjoy chatting with friends at the local café, but I get no pleasure from drinking to drink, I get it when I'm thirsty. So if I feel pleasure, it's because I had a desire, and here someone tells me, no, not at all, I like this shirt because it pleases me, I like this dress because it pleases me, that's all. Well, that's called tautologies — it pleases me because it pleases me, obviously, and why is it pretty? Because it pleases me. Why does it please me? Because it's pretty. We're not making progress. So when you tell me, yes, I like that, but this music doesn't please me, you're not telling me about
50:45 the music, you're telling me about yourself. Once a student at the École des Beaux-Arts, when Gustave Moreau the painter was its director — there were such eras — came and said, 'Sir, I don't like Michelangelo.' He has the right to. Now, you or I might not have gotten angry, but we would still have said, well, keep working a bit, one shouldn't jump to conclusions on a first impression. You know what Gustave Moreau answered? I would never have thought of it, but how effective it is — he said, 'That's fine, my boy, that's not a problem at all, that's your problem. What is that going to change about Michelangelo's work, whether you like it or not? Nothing.' That defines rather the problem, my own state, the impression it makes on me for better or worse. There's music I adored when I was 12 that I find a bit ridiculous now, or the opposite, I remain very loyal because there are memories, like all of you, like each of us — it even happens sometimes that I recognize the properly musical worthlessness of a piece, but I've stayed attached to it anyway because it's connected to other things, right. So there you go, I've insisted a great deal on this notion of temporality, because, and to conclude — I'll finish, I'd like to give you the floor — on this notion of the unconscious
51:56 of the unconscious — here I wouldn't want to say collective, because that would be confused with Jung's ramblings and all that, but I mean an unconscious that is common to us at least — and from there I'd like to give the floor to the room, but as I told you, I'll finish with this precise sentence: if we feel pleasure in certain music, and if this pleasure is shareable, and no longer tied, as I just said, to my personal memory or yours, if it's shareable, if it has something universal about it, then we have common desires that this music satisfies, and that's rather good news if we're to agree on things together. I want to hand over the floor — I think it's been more than an hour, hasn't it?
Anticipation, contemporary music, and double grids 52:33 Thank you — with pleasure. With classical music, we're not looking for a balance that would correspond to our inner balance, so much so that I adore classical music but I can't stand contemporary classical music. I'm surprised by the following sentence, really it bothers me, I need you to explain your point, which is very precise, even if it could be shared by many people here — may I ask, where do you stop?
53:29 You say you don't listen to contemporary music — where do you stop? I mean Debussy — no, no, contemporary music is today's, today's composers. But classical, you're not talking about rock and popular music? Yes, yes, of course, but then you drop off starting from Boulez, things like that? Fine, of course, you're not the only one, of course, I myself listen to all kinds of music, I'm a bit spoiled that way, but that's not the point — but I'm responding to a very specific part of what you said, that in the music I love, I can anticipate what's coming, you see, like this, it repeats — and you say that reassures me. Sir, you just confirmed here the rhythmic element I was speaking about earlier, that there's a way of reassuring us moderns — the fact that we go back to baroque, the fact that young people turn away from their problems to shut themselves in their metric ghettos — I'm being harsh here but I do it on purpose, and I say that because all the students I've made listen to, whom I get to leave that ghetto, are the first ones delighted about it, to develop a hunger for other music. I'm not asking them to give up the music they listen to, but not to confine themselves to it, which isn't quite the same thing. Well
54:40 What you said about the time of anticipation made me think again — I quoted Lévi-Strauss earlier, he said that with music, everything happens as if music enters time in order to exit it. I mean by that, and you all know this, when you know a piece well, whether classical or otherwise, or a song, I mean, and so you can anticipate what's coming, you evaluate a new performance you hear of that piece much better, because you know, you know where it's going to go, you know in advance that there's going to be a turn there. You're not aware that when you listen to a tune that seems as simple as 'Au clair de la lune,' you have A A B A — I mean it's very, it's super simple — the first melody, 'Au clair de la lune, mon ami Pierrot,' second, 'prête-moi ta plume,' it's the same melody, it's the words that change, so musically there's no difference at all, so second A, 'ma chandelle est morte' — ah, there the melody changes, that's what's called in jazz the middle part, the bridge, the B, 'ouvre-moi ta porte, pour l'amour de Dieu,' to conclude, same melody as at the start, 'au clair de la lune, mon ami Pierrot, ouvre-moi ta porte, pour l'amour de Dieu' — it's the same melody, you agree, A A B A
55:51 these structures are completely unconscious in us, and that allows us to anticipate, as you say, and what throws us off with contemporary music is precisely that it no longer follows these codes, which make it so that after the ending there's a reprise, then there's the repetition, and that after the first, somewhat virile theme, in sonata form — I'm thinking of Beethoven — a few bars later there's a feminine theme, a tender theme, suddenly feminine — the imagery, well, there are women sturdier than me — but then Beethoven, the whole interest of his music is how to manage the tension between these two themes, everything opposing them — it's not one theme asserting itself and another that's internalized and sentimental. So these anticipations, depending on whether the musician plays with them, delay a bit what was expected, or bring it forward — that's not what — that's what makes all our pleasure. But you say if there's no structure, no landmark, there can't be — that's indeed it, I'm not betraying your thought — and breathing — I'm glad you say that, exactly, so precisely, but here I — not that I would put myself — but I do warn — including myself — against
57:01 improvising — people, they carried people out on stretchers, some fainted, like Monteverdi, the 16th-century composer writes — people talk about modern cacophony — inaudible! So that's why I warn — I'm like you, I have habits, it's a bit hard to be disturbed in those habits, but I make an effort to stay connected with novelty, I have my old records, like all those who listen to great pianists across generations, there are eras like that, privileged eras where there are great conductors, then there are lulls, then it comes back, but I make an effort to listen to young pianists who've just won a conservatory prize, because if we always stick to the same references, we grow impoverished, that's what I mean. So notwithstanding this counter-argument, we must be careful, because sometimes what a contemporary musician does is perfectly predictable, but within a more complex structure than the one we're used to, so we believe it's unpredictable, to compensate for this complexity
58:11 there's a well-known solution: repetition. You have to listen to it several times, and that's mainly thanks to your question — I don't want to keep you standing, I see you very well, I'm Corsican myself, it tires me to see you standing, if I may say so, you're kind — and I try to combine the two, if you like — a piece of music must sustain this expectation, I don't know, at the risk of disappointing it or fulfilling it, playing on it a bit. And you were quite right to allude to rhythm in the plural, to organic rhythms, to the point that — again following Lévi-Strauss, since he's one of the first to theorize all this — to the point that we all have within us two completely unconscious musical codes: a natural code, as you said very well, you hear the boom boom of the cymbals — sorry, the timpani — at the start of the funeral march from Twilight of the Gods, in Wagner, you truly hear heartbeats, obviously tragic, Siegfried has just been killed, a moment of breathing
59:26 the alternation of tension and release, which is so cruelly lacking often in rock and which is present in jazz, instead of always being behind the beat, as in old New Orleans jazz too, which doesn't swing precisely because it's always behind the beat, there are only downbeats, because it's the rhythm — these are marching rhythms, in the streets of Antibes, you know, New Orleans, these were parades, they're marching rhythms — it would take time before swing arrived, that is, an alternation of tension — that's what 'to swing' means in English, to sway — this alternation of tension and release makes up the whole interest of breathing. So I come back to these organic rhythms, but I see that perfectly — ethnology is only ever part of sociology, it's not in the natural sciences, it's in the human sciences — all of that comes from nature, if that were all there was, there would be no music in the cultural sense — there's a second grid, this time cultural, no longer natural, that's added on, and that was inspired by linguistics. You know that all contemporary linguistics, starting with Saussure, comes from the discovery of the double level of articulation — I'm less competent a linguist than my publisher, I speak under his supervision, but perhaps we could discuss it — anyway it was, it seems to me, an important step, the double level of articulation, which for the first time allowed us to speak of human language without drowning it
1:00:36 in animal communication — everyone knows bees or dolphins have very elaborate modes of communication, but which have nothing to do with language, precisely because what's specific to human language is that there's a double level of articulation. Let me explain: a first level of articulation, produced by the throat, which is purely natural, is the set of sounds the human throat can emit, which is not the same set of sounds a finch can emit, alas, and which is the object of phonetics, which catalogues, roughly, all the sounds, and which is a natural science — phonetics, as distinct from phonology, which retains only the sounds that exist in a given language. So, for instance, you don't have the sound 'u' in English — so the 'u' exists in phonetics, among the sounds the human throat can produce, but it's not in British phonology, for example. You see, it's interesting that there's a cultural sound. In other words, every culture, in addition to these natural constraints, has its own grids, and like any grid — you know, placing a grid over something, like for crosswords, a grid simultaneously reveals and conceals what it wants to reveal and what it wants to exclude. Now, what is our grid? It's tonal, for example, we're in tonality — I won't refine this further — since the 16th century, and the smallest interval in our Western music
1:01:46 That's the semitone, the one between the two notes that touch each other on a piano, the two adjacent notes, it's the smallest — I said the semitone, yes that's it, the semitone. Now, Far Eastern music, especially Chinese music, refines things down to eighth-tones and twelfth-tones that we can't hear — well, we no longer hear them, not because our ear is any more stupid, but because we're no longer used to listening for intervals smaller than a semitone, which means a note will seem monotonous, a bit long to us, like that Chinese piece, whereas he's actually doing fifteen things and having a great time. So yes, there's a double natural grid — breathing, thank you, heartbeat — and a cultural grid, so that in all African music you have the pentatonic scale, for example, for those of you who play a bit of piano, you just play the black notes, you have the pentatonic scale, you just play the black notes and you'll think you're playing Chinese music — look, just try it, I want to play a Chinese tune, just play the black notes of the piano in any order and it works really well because there aren't — there aren't the two semitones. So there, I went on a bit long to answer your question, but I really wanted to, because this power of anticipation...
Musical memory and critique of geopolitics 1:02:56 ...shows clearly that everything is in the management of time — in music, the management of time. Music has a way of bringing back a memory you thought was buried since — yes, if there were an art of perfumes — unfortunately there is an art of great perfumers, but I mean an art of perfumes in the sense of reproducing them at a distance, as we do with sound and image, we talk about it a lot, I know, but there would be, as in Proust, the power of evocation from a smell or a taste, perhaps a whole swath of the past that was thought gone. Music has an extraordinary power, and young people today, whatever music they listen to, you rarely see them wandering the museum corridors looking at Botticellis, between us, with their cap and sneakers — but you do see them hooked on some music or other, whatever it is. It's really an art that takes hold of you; there's an investment in music among young people in particular that's found in hardly any other art, even above cinema, and that's saying something, since cinema includes sound and music as well. So, are there other questions, please, madam — in the first part of your talk you spoke about the relationship...
1:04:06 ...of music to time, and of the plastic arts to space — yes — you also spoke of history and geography — yes — and in these two fields we often see an expression used that's a bit fashionable: space-time. It's hard to define — how would you define it? Well, honestly, I'll say first where it comes from: it comes from Einstein's theory of relativity, mustn't forget that — it's an import, and afterwards it gets played with, of course, it's a metaphor; obviously we can't understand anything about the theory of relativity, which is my own case at the level of popularization where the man in the street stands, I mean. But it's because starting with Einstein, time gets integrated as one of the dimensions of all reality, the dimension of time — I won't dwell on that too much, and it's no doubt the most decisive aspect of the relativistic revolution. On the other hand — and here I'm answering more precisely what seems to me to underlie your question — there's a term that's used even more commonly right now, and it's not current events that are making the theme rarer, it's the term geopolitics. You hear it more and more often, given the turmoil gripping the planet on the geopolitical front. It's a notion I question — what does it represent, if you look closely...
1:05:16 It comes from 'geography' to begin with, even the root — the Earth, geo, Gaia — but if you look closely, geography doesn't mean 'study of the Earth,' it means 'drawing of the Earth' — graph. Now you can only draw on a surface; if you go underneath, that's geology. You see, these concepts are useless once you interrogate them — what am I getting at? I'm getting at something, and you'll see I'm much more subversive than I look. When people say the Cold War is over — if the Cold War meant a confrontation in space between a Soviet space, roughly speaking, and a Western space dominated by the Atlanticists, with an American fleet, an American flagship, I mean — yes, that's over, if it's that dimension, that's horizontal, we stay on the surface, we're being superficial with this notion of geopolitics. If we go underneath and say it's the struggle between the rich and the poor, I don't see how that's over — the East-West confrontation was only one moment of it. Yes, I think a certain number of values between the two — both sides...
1:06:26 ...both are right, both are wrong — one is wrong, the other is right, that's not my problem — I note that it hasn't disappeared, precisely at the moment when the camp that won believes it can finally venture forth without taking any more precautions since Moscow is no longer there facing it. I don't know if the older among you remember — maybe — it was tense, you know, French housewives were running to the grocery stores to buy sugar, do you remember? We were on the brink of a third world war, we were in danger of nuclear apocalypse, because Moscow had said, after our aggression against this new Hitler — you know we collect new Hitlers, we Europeans who manufactured the Hitlers, we designate others, the Saddam Husseins and the Gaddafis, every time we have an enemy it's the new Hitler, it's marvelous, especially when it's us who manufactured this individual, with Saddam Hussein, who was a corporal, a nobody plucked from obscurity because he was a killer of communists, the British put him in power, there — and then afterwards he becomes inconvenient, don't worry, that's not my subject. So this new Hitler was Nasser — how could he not be seen as Hitlerian when he demanded to nationalize the only thing that brought in a bit of money in Egypt, the canal — there's no oil in Egypt, it was the Suez Canal — and it belonged...
1:07:36 ...to private Western interests. Appropriate an Asia — well, war was made, there was intervention, the French and British landed. I said this for younger generations who don't know this well — it's far more serious than now; now people hesitate to intervene in Syria, back then they didn't hesitate, and the Soviets said, 'pack up and go home,' or else this time it's nuclear missiles — the Americans said, 'go on, clear out, we're not going to start a world war for Nasser's pretty eyes.' There you see geopolitics — if the difference is purely on the surface, again we stay superficial, but underneath there was something else in the confrontation between the two superpowers, between the billionaires of the West Coast and the muzhik with a knife between his teeth or not, isn't that so, who comes from not so long ago out of serfdom, still recent, isn't it — there are also class differences: the German has historically despised the Pole over the centuries, taking a step back — 'the Polack,' as they say, is like 'bougnoule' for us, you see, it's really the pejorative and racist term — I can't find an equivalent — but the Pole has the same thing for the Russians, always; you always find someone poorer, more primitive than you as you go East. You see why I answered with this detour through geopolitics regarding your question — space is deceptive...
1:08:47 And besides, I come back to my little aporia from earlier — I had set it aside to develop it now. What is the West? When people didn't know the Earth was round, one could speak of the West in a strict sense, and there really is a location of the West, where the sun sets, and there's a location of the East — yes, well, Germany is west of Poland and east of France, we can't help that, West and East mean nothing. When you're on a sphere, you're west of wherever you want, even at the North Pole you're west. So this is a way of answering your question more directly than it seems, I mean, and you have to be careful with representations — space is the place of the stage — yes, of illusion. I love that, I love theater, I love illusion, I love being fooled, hypnotized if you like, so long as you know you're in a theater and that backstage there's something else, there are machines that explain everything, so that people are no longer completely captured by the image. So, are there other questions, madam — you mentioned polyphonies earlier...
The polyphonies of the Solomon Islands and the Pygmies 1:09:57 ...I'd be very curious about them — you're asking a word-visit, because it's a universe — I'm sure you're asking the question because these poor things are ignored. Let me say — try to listen, sorry, Hervé is going to try to play the polyphonies for us — perfect. Most of the time it's for bamboo flutes — I wouldn't want to seem, I'm not at all xenophobic, these are populations that among our ancestors would have been called among the most 'savage' there are, the Solomon Islands, like the Papuans if you like. This contradiction that gets made when people say: we have a complex music, polyphony, the 'savages' have rhythm — it's beautiful, it's interesting, but it's a bit more basic — there's nothing more complicated to analyze than Solomon Islands polyphony. There's even something similar among the Pygmies, and in both cases these are forest peoples, humid regions — I'm not sure enough about this to know if there's a link, but I note this often goes together, just as desert music — sorry, shepherd's music — I'll explain: the man who is alone on the moor with a flock, the others are far away, whether friends, family, or the beloved, they're far away, and shepherds' songs are always a bit melancholic and always on a single instrument, before: pipe, flute, oboe; in Africa, the same, the algaita of the Fulani shepherds — there's a young voice...
1:11:33 ...a bass voice, if you look closely, that comes in from time to time to conclude the phrases — I believe this is a funeral chant. Thank you very much, thank you Hervé. So, as I said about that word, the principle among the Pygmies is that one person starts with a voice, a small rhythmic motif, one voice, repeated twice like that, then another starts by taking up the same melodic contour but with small variations, which is much more complicated than 'Frère Jacques,' then a third — and as I said it's a forest country, I wonder if any of you have been in forest countries at night — that extraordinary polyphony you get in the forest at night, you have a sonic backdrop like a wall of bronze made of billions of insects, with soloists, monkeys here, other things there, and I wonder if that doesn't play a small part in this polyphony. Anyway, it exists, I recommend it if you're interested, in the Auvidis collection made by UNESCO, very well done — it's not at all 'world music' arranged with a djembe, which is the...
1:12:44 ...the fig leaf or the guarantee of Africanness, and with amplifiers — no, no, these are really pieces recorded in situ, right, and in the Auvidis World Music UNESCO collection you have some very beautiful recordings of this Solomon Islands polyphony which can have 5, 8, 12 voices — these are complex polyphonies that can rival the Art of Fugue — I'm not saying in beauty, I'm not making a value judgment, but in complexity. If there's another question — yes, sir, hello — hello sir, I can hear you a bit faintly — you spoke earlier about being able to be a musician and become a musician — you can — well, that's a very good question, because I took the example of the three V's — you have the ear — I took the example of the three V's to show...
Poetry, opera, rap: rhythm and meter 1:13:54 ...how hard it is to cut things off with an axe and say, here's poetry, here's music, because poetry is already the union of language and music. When Rimbaud, who's a poet, says 'I became a fabulous opera,' it's not entirely by chance — what is opera? It's the coming together of everything, of all the arts, even the plastic arts, since there's set design, painting, drama, sound, lighting — and that's a bit what poetry does. And that's why the philosophers who first produced a systematic aesthetics — that's recent, aesthetics; art is much older, cavemen didn't wait for us, and made masterpieces on top of it — whereas reflection on music and aesthetics, that part of philosophy that reflects on the beautiful and/or art, and here in particular on music, is fairly recent, you have to wait until the 18th century. There's no aesthetics before — the word itself practically never appears before the late 18th century, it's well known, the Baumgartens and people like that, one can forget the name — and the first philosophical aesthetics worthy of the name is Kant's, you have to wait until the end of the 18th century, and right after, Hegel. I'm not counting Plato, Plato who...
1:15:05 ...with an aspect that liberals would call totalitarian, because he wants to banish the poets from the city because they come to disturb things a bit — he himself was the greatest poet of his time, if you look closely, the greatest artist of his time with a pen — that's Plato, his dialogues were a thing of beauty even in his own day. And a second example, twenty centuries later, is Rousseau — the parallel has been drawn, there have even been agrégation exam topics citing decadence in Plato and Rousseau, two thinkers who belong to an era when one world is handing over to another. In Plato's time, the city-state as a political model is collapsing, handing over to the Macedonian and soon Roman Empire — the model of the ruined city-state, that's the crisis expressed by Socratic questioning. And at the end of the Ancien Régime, the Enlightenment, and Rousseau, who goes even more radical than the other Enlightenment figures, since he even goes so far as to question property — not the property of my toothbrush, nobody wanted to take that, I say this because there are people...
1:16:15 ...who still believe — I remember, I'm not at all from a family of communists, but there was a time when there were posters: 'the communists are going to take your land' — in the countryside, and that poster, 'the communists are going to take your land' — since then, farmers have had their land taken away, the communists aren't there anymore, haven't been for a long time, the communists — like the closure of a farm operation, I mean — that's how it was. So to be honest, to answer your question, I'd love to tell you, as we said earlier about painting being the plastic arts, music being an art of time — well, between music and poetry, poetry sits in an impure way — not pejorative when I say impure, it's rich, impurity like mixing, if you like, and we only enrich ourselves through the encounter of difference. All poetry is already — this is a bit what I wanted to show with the three V's — already the instillation of a purely auditory element into language, which in principle is a conceptual event, of thought and reflection. So any poetry worthy of the name — if it's not thought put into verse, it's easy to make rhymes and lines, and that's poetry...
1:17:25 ...that can be thrown in the trash, or that leaves no posterity — remarkable, there's plenty of it in history, we just don't read it — people who recount their life or their political ideas through verse, alexandrines, whereas, again, as I showed earlier, it's the unthought part that's often decisive in a work of art, which doesn't mean it isn't rigorous and precise. When a carpenter or cabinetmaker — to widen art to craft, the word 'art' is written into 'artisan' — the cabinetmaker's hand knows to within a tenth of a millimeter where it's going, even if he can't justify why he preferred to make the curve this way rather than that way. So this poses the problem: when you also have to unite poetry and music to make an opera, you see the problems your question raises, it's even more impure. Or setting to song, as Léo Ferré did with Aragon's poems, I don't know, or Jean Ferrat, or setting to song a poem that already sounds like a song itself — 'the long sobs of the violins of autumn' — that's already song, isn't it. Or setting music to images, quite...
1:18:36 ...please — it's a poem that doesn't even need music, they sound so much like music already, and give the impression of offering a whole feast — I get the sense we're thinking of something specific here — go ahead — Victor Hugo — yes — Jean — that's not it, I was sure — it's an exercise in auditory prowess, and I was thinking of that earlier when you mentioned rhythm — ah yes, that's the example that came to mind — yes, and Hugo was — it's true, he was a virtuoso, he was a text, he could decide in the evening: tonight we'll speak only in alexandrines — then in freestyle, as today's rappers would say, in freestyle he would improvise in alexandrines all evening long. And there's something that — someone told me it's a bit close to that — it's slam — yes, yes, exactly, I was talking about rap and I was about to make a small digression about that when I talk about freestyle, I wouldn't want to be misjudged about what I said earlier about sonic ghettos in which young people get locked up — I didn't say young people let themselves be locked in there, because I note that they have a demand that saves them, doesn't it, from the trap set for them. As much as the meter of rap...
1:19:47 ...is, to me, terribly poor — the meter, I said, not the rhythm, the measure — as much as the placement of the voice, what's called strict rapping, this time the intervention of the voice relative to the meter, to the bar line, is an extraordinary freedom, is a — thank you — is an extraordinary richness. So there, don't think I'm a purist, I mean, I'm proposing a synthesis, that is, a flow just as interesting as that of rappers but freed from the straitjacket that goes with it, which isn't even done by an instrumentalist anyway, it's pre-recorded. I'd advise them to listen to George Russell — easy to remember, George Russell, a common name, jazz composer-arranger-pianist — a record made in 1959, I shouldn't even say it because I had students in Niger and Ivory Coast guess it, they were convinced it had been made the day before. It's a rap-like sequence, that is, intermediate between speaking and singing, a problem classical music has known forever — in German there's the Sprechgesang...
1:20:58 ...sprechen, to speak, gesang, to sing — Sprechgesang, you find it in Monteverdi, the very emergence of stage music, it's not yet theatrical drama, it hasn't yet become opera — you find the same thing in the Orfeo. Psalmody, the muezzin calling to prayer in Islam, is one of the most beautiful musics there is — spoiled now, though, by saturated loudspeakers, out of laziness to climb up the minaret. I organized Quranic recitation contests — I had the chance to live in Niger, a country 98% Muslim, in a music center — and it was marvelous to see young Africans of 14 years old, sometimes in a contest financed by petrodollars, well, you take money where it is, and for the recitation it's a musical moment, a bit like flamenco, like a flame rising, going up, coming back down, rising again, it's extraordinary. In all three cases I wouldn't want any misunderstanding — if these same rappers worked with a jazz drummer, who's a thousand times more complex — you need to be more supple, if you like — a bad drummer...
1:22:08 ...is one who, every two words, puts a period in your text — it's a bit crude, but if you compare a good drummer to punctuation — here a period, here a comma, here I suspend, for instance — it's even more subtle than that, but roughly that's it — here an ellipsis, I let the mystery hang, there I make up the lost time, there I replace the ellipsis with an exclamation mark. So there's a management of time, you see, down to the finest degree. At that point I'd buy rap records all day — there's a musical time you haven't addressed, it's beatboxing, there's tons of it, I don't have time to — and it doesn't use any instrument except the mouth — yes, of course, of course, but that's exactly why, when people talk, most confuse rhythm and meter, one should be a bit more precise about that — that'll let me — okay — measure is what's written on the score, sometimes even before the first note: 3/4 for a waltz, 4/4, 3/4, 2/4 for a march, etc. So it's a kind of a priori structure, a direct constraint that you have abstractly in your head before starting. Whereas...
1:23:19 ...rhythm is the way I surprise the listener relative to what they expected based on the meter — it's almost the opposite. You have an athletics track, there's a curve, 400 meters I think — there aren't two runners who take exactly the same curve down to the millimeter, so each has his own way of realizing the constraint, with infinitely many variables — that's the principle of improvisation, improvisation on something that isn't improvised. As I used to tell my students in Niger, improvisation doesn't get improvised — the more you work, the better an improviser you are, because if you don't work, at the piano you just fool around, it's the piano imposing these conditions on you, that's all, you plateau after five minutes with the same clichés. Whereas if you work, the piano will do what you impose on it, not what it imposes on you — the more you work, the more you can improvise in this style or that. So jazz itself, which is the music — see how tricky this is — if I'd told you 'classical is written music, jazz is improvised music,' you often hear that, it's completely false — there were no tape recorders...
1:24:30 ...at the time, but Bach and Mozart spent their time improvising, we have the testimonies — I told you Beethoven had listeners carried out on stretchers, the shock was so violent, right — and as for Bach, when he was invited by the King of Prussia, who'd heard there was a German who wasn't half bad — because with the Italians it was on commission, good music could only come, like good thought, from Paris; that same king who invited Voltaire had Italian musicians at almost every court, and then along comes a German who's not bad at all, and he brought him in and he composed. The king, who dabbled a bit on the flute, proposed a small theme they could improvise on, and Bach improvised an eight-voice fugue in front of the astonished king and court. So — yes, one mustn't confuse rhythm and meter — rhythm is what meter didn't foresee, it's life suddenly, because if there were only exhale, inhale, that's still monotonous, it would be like eating lentils every day — I love lentils, that's not the point — but even, even flambéed ortolans in cognac every day — sorry, there was a question, that's why...
Is rhythm innate? 1:25:40 Yes, a question — I don't really have one, more a question to ask, because I've sometimes tried to understand — is rhythm, that is, what we hear, how we grasp it — some people have great difficulty with it, and I wonder if it's not innate. My question is: do we have rhythm in us, are we born with it? Because I've met people — I was a teacher and I gave salsa lessons — they'll never get it, salsa's a fairly complex music too — salsa, yes of course, yes — and I asked myself all sorts of questions to try to understand what makes it so that some people, right off the bat, get into the rhythm and grasp it, they can move to it, and the other person never can. Is it innate to have rhythm in you, is it tied to one's personal history, is it biological? No, I'm smiling because you say 'I'm asking myself the question,' I'm sure you have the answer — you think it's innate, that's noticeable in the way you phrase the question — no, but honestly, most people always attribute...
1:26:50 ...to the innate whatever happens — ah, he takes after his grandfather, oh yes, in a way, I mean, one has to be careful — I didn't say it's not innate, but we have a first tendency — we've never seen knowledge, science, arise as an extension of our spontaneous intuitions; in general real science is the exact opposite of what we'd expect. Would you expect a lead ball and a feather to fall at the same speed? Yet that's what physics says — real science is always a break with our intuition, not an extension of it — small preamble. But apart from that, I won't decide, but I'll say there can be events that occurred in a person's life in their early years — I'm somewhat in the analytic field here, which one can complicate, one can bring in social determination alongside Freudian determination, call it class or whatever you like, or combine the two — in short, there can have been dramatic or traumatic events that mean someone will be condemned their whole life either to overcome it through a particular affinity for rhythm, or on the contrary through an inability to swing, to use jazzmen's language. So I don't believe...
1:28:00 ...that it's innate in the biological sense, there. If you tell me — I follow you — that there are some who will never manage it, unfortunately that's true, or at least only at the cost of enormous difficulty, and others who seem to be right at home with it from the first contact — that doesn't mean it comes from biology and genes. I'm wary of cognitive science, because it ends up with inferior and superior races — I'm not saying that's what you're saying at all, but you see the dangers, given the times we're living in, when these stories about innateness fall into certain ears, one has to be careful, I don't know. On the other hand, I could say the same thing about sport — it's well known to everyone who's done athletics training that one of the most technical disciplines is jumping — jumping is extremely technical, there are tricks, and a pole vaulter has markers down to the millimeter, with tape marks, to find his takeoff foot exactly there, etc. Someone who has perfectly mastered this technique, who has trained courageously for years, can jump over 4.80 meters — today we're at 6 meters. Well, if on top of that he has what's called good spring — because the innate side...
1:29:10 ...among athletes, for jumping, that's called spring — there are some who without a run-up — sorry, exactly, but I was thinking especially of pole vault — that spring which means some can touch the basketball hoop just like that with their hand without a run-up, vertically. How can you know, at 20, when you're training, whether my ability comes from my birth or from my training? What I'm sure of, politically in the sense of policy, not politician — if one deals with sports policy, that's not my field, but it applies perfectly to music. Plato said that ideal education in the ideal city was gymnastics for bodies and music for souls — that's not a bad program. And if it were only a matter of talent — suppose a kid, I don't know by what biological magic one could prove that in such-and-such a gene he was clearly the most gifted of his generation for the high jump, if he never trained, on competition day he'll come in below someone who knows all the tricks and who'll beat him by a meter. So you can't know from the result — everything's mixed together, it takes a long analysis, which is the whole object of philosophy, in any case what should follow...
1:30:20 ...the human sciences — but that requires an apparatus of historical analysis, we always come back to that, genetic in the sense of 'how did I get here.' And I'm very sensitive to your question because, you see, there's a Germanic settlement of the white American world, that's historically and geographically well known — a Germanic settlement in the broad sense, mainly German but not only, Norwegians, Scandinavians, English who are Germanic too first of all, Normans, Saxons — Saxony is the heart of Germany. So if I remove the Latinos, the Italian contributions etc., I'll say the WASP settlement, as they call it there, white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant, and mainly Nordic and Germanic. And I told you earlier — I didn't tell you, you're in private, I don't recount my life — that I had a German wife, and we still get along very well — who was a great jazz lover, and so she knew the two worlds well, Germany and the United States, and she told me: look closely at the furniture in Kubrick's films, whom she loved a lot, it's the German world. It's one of the great secrets of our 20th century: the average American is the average German who — combat the obsession with pollution, with soiling, with otherness, with apartheid, I'd say excessively. America has had immense...
1:31:30 ...fighters for progress, believe me, one mustn't take them for idiots either — I believe the best Proust and Aeschylus specialists are perhaps somewhere in the United States — so I'm not showing contempt, but still, except for one thing: Americans are Germans who swing, or Germans are Germans who don't swing, you see what you're saying — because the Lutheran chorale sung in church and all that isn't quite the Broadway march, a bit hip-swaying — yes — and with the little off-beat that would never have existed without the African contribution in military marches — yes, exactly, so it's in an indirect way, as we talk about it — I don't think it's innate in the biological sense, I'm answering you, but I believe there are structures — no, no, no, you say it as it's said, that's how it has to be done, otherwise we wouldn't have this discussion which enlightens us, you see, and I'm clarifying my own thinking as I answer you, these things are never quite clear, but we've made progress, we're not starting from zero, namely there's definitely something definitive there — I'm going somewhat in the direction of what you were saying, apparently you see what creates an obstacle to musical training etc.
1:32:35 ...or, on the contrary, what's perfectly suited — where I agree in a certain way of speaking is that it's not decided at the biological level, it's decided at the historical level in the deep sense, personal micro-history combined with macro-history — there, exactly, absolutely. I come back to a repertoire, to classical piano music — for a long time the Russians came very late to classical music; there's no Russian composer — well, when the greatest, the Mozarts, the Beethovens, the Germans, the Lullys, the Rameaus here, had already produced the bulk of their repertoire, there's not a single Russian composer — they're the savages, the muzhiks who took time to come out of the steppes of the East. And then it appears around the middle of the century, Glinka, who created the Russian school of music, not very well known, then of course there's the miraculous fountain, the Tchaikovskys, Borodins, Prokofievs, etc.
1:33:25 Very well, and afterward they compose their own music, which enchanted Paris in the era of Diaghilev's Ballets Russes, when all of Paris was pro-Russian, the era when Jules Verne was writing Michael Strogoff and so on — and then they became the reference performers of non-Russian classical music, of Chopin, Schumann, Schubert, mainly the Germans, but also Vladimir Horowitz, for those who know the great performers, the greatest performers of classical piano music, the Richters, depending on the style you prefer — it's the Soviet school of piano or violin that keeps carrying off all the top 15 prizes in Europe at every conservatory final. What am I in the middle of saying?
1:34:08 ...that muzhiks, savages — I make the comparison because I've had people judge in this way, that white Africans called 'savages,' [I mean] the Africans who were my students, ended up becoming the reference performers of the most refined music by putting their own stamp on it, because, no doubt about it, sense of rhythm — you all know Russians are great dancers, like the Spanish, if you please — there are peoples, I'll say, who have dance in their blood — I'm not going to contradict myself, am I — it's not in the blood exactly, but when I think of an African mother going to market in the morning, I'll pay a small tribute in passing — the woman, I won't take Africa in general but the Sahel, the region just south of the desert, who walks 6 km in the morning as soon as she wakes at 5 to fetch water, and would have walked 5 km to gather wood — sorry, to heat the water, I'd say I had to draw it — well no, because now she has to start pounding grain until the end of the day with a pestle — I can't hold it for more than 10 minutes, I get blisters, and being partly Corsican it's terrible — and all that with a child on her back...
1:35:18 ...and almost one on each hand. There, I wanted to pay tribute to the African woman, and not set her against — I'm not a feminist in the Fourest style, I mean who's there to divide, to wage civil war among the poor — I'm not saying, 'that bastard African man sleeping while his wife...' — no, meanwhile her husband has emigrated to Ghana because it rains a bit more there, he's a farm laborer, he'll come back when he has to earn a little money — yes, a sharing of tasks and hardships, you'd already have to be in material luxury to set the sexes against each other. So this African woman, I see her kid on her back — what a good system, the kid is never throwing a tantrum for attention, he has no — I never hear them cry, they're always even-tempered, on her back, you see, they observe the world — can you imagine the sense of rhythm that gives, with the mother moving like that all the time, when the mother dances he's on her back. So afterward people say he has it in his blood — it's almost the same thing. I couldn't have answered your question better than with that example — it's true it's instilled very early, and then there are peoples in whom dance has a different importance, as it once did in our own societies before — that's why I mentioned geopolitics earlier, I don't know if I made myself understood well enough — that we abandon the questions...
Dance, festivity, and reaction: Praetorius and Paul-Louis Courier 1:36:28 ...of distribution in space and geographies. As Europeans say, are they more selfish and individualistic, are Africans more welcoming and traditional? No — it's not Africa versus Europe, it's the countryside versus the city, because in Corsica a century ago people were welcoming, traditional, solidary within the clan — of course, necessarily — and as soon as you have a little money, etc., you need others a little less, you're a bit more isolated in your own flat. I mean, these are general laws, so we mustn't condemn Africans to being representatives of rural societies forever, they too have a right to development. That parenthesis aside, it's certain that in our societies too — look, I brought this here, but there'll be others, we're being listened to — I recommend, if you want references, since everything can be found now, on YouTube or wherever you like, you have Praetorius, a not-very-well-known musician, Praetorius, P-R-A-E like 'Praetorian,' Michael Praetorius, a 16th-century musician who left a treatise on harmony and put together a collection of dances — he composed ballets, but it sounds like rock, from the 16th century it really does — there are percussion instruments everywhere that disappeared in the 17th century to make room for more classical music...
1:37:38 ...less rowdy, you see, so that had been a bit repressed, because a certain rhythmic sensibility — there are transgressive traditions, celebrations, weddings, that sort of thing, you see. And I recommend — we were talking about it in the car this morning — I recommend one of the greatest stylists of the French language — ah, you say that, I'm a Frenchman, sure, but no, no — not to shove some other person's name at you, people who write admirably, Maupassant, no, Anatole France or Nerval — I'm going to give you Paul-Louis Courier — I don't know if anyone's heard of him — he specialized in a very specific genre, the pamphlet, but they're masterpieces of the genre, pamphlets as no one knows how to write anymore. He lived during the Restoration, 1820-1830, he died in a somewhat mysterious way, it's thought someone wanted revenge for his pamphlets. It's online, that's why — on Wikisource, read this title: 'Petition for the Peasants Who Are Being Prevented from Dancing, Written to the Chamber of Deputies in Paris by a Man from Touraine' — gentlemen, I'm from Touraine, I live in Luynes — because as soon as Napoleon disappeared, the last trace of the French Revolution, with the return of the kings, there was a return of clerical reaction that was terrible during the Restoration...
1:38:48 ...people were given rifle-butt blows, a peasant who hadn't taken off his hat quickly enough in front of a funeral, etc., there was a return, like all those who were afraid and who are mean — reactionaries are even meaner than conservatives because they've been afraid, they react — as the saying goes, 'those who have learned nothing and forgotten nothing' — they learned nothing from the Revolution, they still haven't understood, but they haven't forgotten that they were afraid, and they're mean. So this Paul-Louis Courier rises up — they had just banned dancing on the church square, something that had been done since the Middle Ages. Read his petition on behalf of the peasants prevented from dancing, with little fiddlers who used to come on Sundays — I've seen that in Africa too, when it's not the geographical basins — in Africa there are all sorts of traveling musicians going from village to village, on Thursdays for baptisms, 100 francs, on Sundays for weddings, you see, itinerant musicians, griots, with those social functions, almost — it was like that not so long ago, before there were sound systems, in public dances there were musicians, live music, as they say. So read that and you'll see that dance is always tied to — when you hear Gregorian chant, as I said earlier...
1:39:58 ...as we still hear it at Mass, with that sort of linear purity of pure monodic inflection, as they say technically — a single voice, mono-ode — one gets the impression that the Middle Ages was a purely pious era, all stained glass windows, etc. — that's fundamental, Christendom is extraordinary at the cultural level, at that level. But while the monks sing Gregorian chant with fervor under the vaults of the Romanesque chapel or church, at the same time you have peasants boogying on the square with other kinds of music, called the carole — it turns in a circle like a cart, you see, these were very repetitive dances. That's to tell you it's always existed — every era has had both its rock and its requiem, there you go, as far as rhythm goes. Are there other questions, we can take one or two more given the timing — yes, yes, of course — and publishers are treacherous people, it's worth it, and that's also why you need to write a history, I'm sure of it...
Adorno, Badiou, and bourgeois musical culture 1:41:08 Yes, you haven't done any music, but come on, no, you're joking, well no, you're not joking, but there are obviously canonical images of great philosophers who also have the double training of musicologist, like Plato, like Rousseau — that's rare, actually there aren't that many — no, it's very rare — that's why you should underline it, and there are — in what sense — you have a Marxist-leaning training, and I remind you, when you say two words, it's Adorno — with, on the other hand, some quite sharp choices in musical matters and an attack of open-mindedness, it seems to me — but that's kind — even Lukács, who was the great Marxist aesthetician of the 19th century — well let me tell you, in music, if you really look at what he wrote, Adorno was the reference point even for Lukács, of course. So how do you approach this mountain, Adorno, from which slope — beside which I'll bring in a bit of what we said about Badiou in the car this morning — decidedly, cars are inspiring, in any case the eastward road — but I prefer driving east because we go against the sun's direction of travel, we go back a bit in time, we gain time...
1:42:18 ...and we talked about Badiou, and I said Badiou wrote the most intelligent book I've ever read on Wagner, on Wagner's music — I didn't expect that from a former Maoist etc., a study on Wagner's music, usually classified on the other side politically, and I really didn't expect that — nothing leftist or whatnot in it — you can clearly see what the recurring themes are that come back in leftists' musical investments, and that wasn't the case here. And I got the key to the story: it's that when he was 14, his mother took him to Bayreuth — a cultured bourgeois mother. So I'm answering, first for Adorno, you understand my detour — it's that, fortunately for Badiou and for his musicological relevance, he had the inheritance of bourgeois culture and his mother's habits. Adorno is a formidable heir of an era of music that was probably the richest, it's fantastic, particularly in German-speaking countries, what happened, let's say, between Bach and the post-Wagnerians, let's say the young Schoenberg at the outside limit — Adorno is indeed the heir of that tradition, that has nothing to do...
1:43:28 ...precisely with his work of ideological, philosophical, and Marxist or Marxist-leaning militancy, depending on the chapter — that's the first thing. And what he keeps from this inheritance, which I call bourgeois — it's pejorative in the sense of civilization, not of class here only — and when I mean, when I admire the Taj Mahal, I don't admire the caste system or Hindu feudalism, I admire a splendid tomb. So our Adorno has that inheritance, but at the same time, in his way of approaching Marxist critique, unlike Marx precisely — Marx, too, is an extraordinary critic; when he reads an article by an English factory inspector or a trade unionist, I mean, he has a way of knowing, a way of knowing how to listen, isn't that so, to what's said with a lot of circumlocution — whereas Adorno...
Adorno as critic of Hegel: formalism 1:44:38 ...has this leftist side, in an almost sterile sense, I'd say — he always goes looking for what's more avant-garde than the avant-garde, which seems petty bourgeois to me. I oppose the avant-garde, or modernity, to modernity — the avant-garde ages fairly quickly, modernity doesn't; that's why I referred earlier to Beethoven's late quartets, it hasn't aged a bit. Contemporary musicians, those who make the most abrasive, ear-grating stuff, are still baffled today by how Beethoven managed to move from what was the musical code of his time to that kind of openness — or just listen to the very beginning of the Ninth, not the Ode to Joy, that's the finale, but the very start of the first movement — there's no theme, there's nothing, there's an accumulation of energy, a crescendo, there's no — it's a gestation of the Big Bang, sorry, Big Bang is something else. So where does that surge come from? Adorno is very attentive to that, but he always has this problematic of the avant-garde, and his critique of Hegel — I'm answering as a philosopher here — he never says...
1:45:48 ...anything stupid, he's a well-informed philosopher, Adorno, he knows his texts, his classics. But what does he reproach Hegel with, mainly, in particular by criticizing the principle of negation — sorry, of being a bit abstract, even though everyone knows that minus times minus makes plus, minus times minus makes plus, gives positivity, as negation of negation in Hegel. What does Adorno say? He says: yes, of course, Hegel's a bit too comfortable, there's the thesis and then the antithesis, but well, the antithesis is more tragic, it's dramatic because something that was unified gets torn apart, but the synthesis is going to unify it all again — so, happy ending, so it's phony, it's a false drama in which everything's rigged, it's like — I'll take the resurrection of Christ here — I go through Golgotha, sure, I'm game for the ordeal, if I'm sure I'll be resurrected afterward and have glory and radiance for 20 centuries. Well, that's not how it happens, because at the Mount of Olives, Christ said — Eli, Eli, sorry, that's on the cross, he says, in John's text, there — 'Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass from me' — Christ is on the verge of hesitating to fulfill his mission, he's afraid of death, he says so, 'my soul is sorrowful...
1:46:58 ...unto death' — a strong word, expressing something a bit like 'ennui' in the 17th-century sense, isn't it, ennui in a sense of deep anguish — we'd say today it's not violent anguish — he tries to wake the apostles who are sleeping, he's alone, as Pascal would say, delivered to the wrath of God, isn't that so — well, it's not Pascal who invents that, it's in the Gospel text. That means Christ, at that moment, according to Christian theology, truly assumed the human condition, because he went as far as the anguish of death — in other words, it's not certain that it's a good thing, and in that he is closer to man than ever. There, Adorno is mistaken — I'm doing this deliberately — and that's where we can measure the abuse of a certain reading of Nietzsche — I'm cutting corners — Nietzsche wanted so badly to be anti-Christian in order to be post-modern, as we'd say today, when he's probably the most Christian of his generation, poor Nietzsche, isn't he — but he wanted so badly, to flee his own anguish, to return to that era, that there's an explosion in the frequency of words prefixed by 'neo' — neoclassicism, neopaganism, neo-this, neo-that — that's always after Romanticism, that the Parnasse...
1:48:09 It's a neoclassicism — we called it neoclassicism for Gide and Valéry; we're going to talk about neo-tachisme or neo-pointillism or neo, I don't know, neo-abstract, meaning that something has become exhausted somewhere. Can you imagine Racine saying "I'm imitating the Greeks, I'm doing neoclassicism"? No, it's unthinkable, right? So, for Adorno, he was never able to free himself from the formalist temptation in aesthetics, and I say this here with all the depth contained in that term — you have to go by way of formalization, I'm paying tribute to mathematics earlier, that's not a coincidence, to modelizations. But formalism isn't just about form; it's when you systematically avoid content, historical determination in this case — you never get precise historical determination in Adorno, even though as a Marxist he calls himself a Marxist, so he invokes in general the importance of socio-historical determination on the thought, the art of an era, the law of an era too, the juridical as well, etc., in general, but never in detail. So it's a bit the same critique
1:49:19 that I make, or that Hegel makes, of the Kantian thing-in-itself — it's a way of talking about it that never gets there — or Althusser when he talks about economic determination, he who was the emblematic philosopher of Marxism at one time, he brings in economic determination, I quote him, "in the last instance," he says — you shouldn't bring in economics until you've explained aesthetics by aesthetics, the juridical by the juridical, you can't bring it in — never, to the point that soon, to be a Marxist, you'd never be allowed to talk about economics at all. Let's not push it too far — there, very quickly. But on the other hand, I do want to say he has the very sure taste of the bourgeois music-lover, and I say again, for me that's a very fine culture, it's not pejorative. He won't be wrong about a good performance of a Mendelssohn quartet, that's clear, he knows it well, he's a connoisseur — that's a specific term in aesthetics — between the value judgment but with ideological presuppositions that prevent him from arriving at a theory of, precisely, our program for today, that is, of history through music. Good, let's take one very last question, then
1:50:30 Mr. Chairman, just before — so let me clarify about the program, there will be another talk by Dominique at the bookshop at 5:30, for anyone interested, and afterward we can also chat with Aymeric and Dominique, and there are already lots of books waiting for you, and even DVDs — DVDs too. So, the last question, please. Yes, I just want to know the difference in music, because you told me earlier to listen to music from people who never went to music school — how can you give me your take on what I've heard? I talked quite a bit with someone who spent 30 years studying Pygmy music, who lives in Saint-Louis actually — it's a music that's essentially vocal. First of all, there's
Pygmy music, oral transmission, and functional music 1:51:40 fairly little development of instrumental music, even though Africa is the kingdom, is the dream country, the dream region of the world for idiophones. In ethnomusicology we don't say brass, woodwinds, winds — we say aerophones for all wind instruments, grouping together brass and woodwinds, since they're transmitted through air; chordophones, meaning the piano as much as the violin, strings — chordophones; membranophones, boom boom boom boom, membranes that resonate, percussion; and idiophones for castanets, the little metal jingles on heels — you see, in Brazil there's a lot of that, in Africa needless to say, and Africa has an extraordinary richness. A kid in the Abidjan market with a matchbox makes a richer rhythm than 15 rock bands with 18 tracks, seriously, it's extraordinary to hear — but there it's a sound coming from an object not made for music, an art of being able to turn into sound what until then was only noise, as we said earlier. So I don't know if you understood your questions well — they're vocal, there isn't much instrumental development, they're polyphonic, which means
1:52:50 a great complexity. You say they didn't go to school — they didn't go to written school, but they went to the school of uncle or dad, there's an oral transmission that's very much studied, not enough yet, but I mean the griot passes on to his little one, as we say, the rudiments — he can later be surpassed by his pupil, that's every teacher's dream, but there's a transmission, an oral transmission, and it's fascinating, that history of oral transmission — when there's no written record, the losses are tragic. There are great schools of singing, including in opera, that have been lost because the teachers died. So I don't know if I've partly answered your question, but there it is. And also, as is often the case in African music, but not only in Africa, in musics where work is still very collective, the notion of pure music, purely aesthetic, artistic, is historically recent — it goes back roughly to the 16th century, it's rather specific to Europe. Whereas, look at Niger for example, when it's harvest time — watch out, over there the harvest is the food crop, there can be a famine if the harvest is insufficient
1:54:00 every year there's the anguish, and the griot is there with the tam-tam, what specialists call the armpit drum, the one made with a little hook like that — I won't give the name because it changes from one region to another, the calangou, we don't say it the same way everywhere. He's there, sweating, next to the guy working the furrow, he's part of the harvest too; likewise he gives encouragement — it's not just rhythm, he gives courage. If you break down in the desert, in the sand or in the bush — here it's humid Africa, in Ivory Coast — if you break down, you're done for, it's nothingness, there's no one else for 300 km, you understand? There's always someone behind a rock in the desert with a little plastic jerrycan, because they know you have water, in the... and who helps you out — of course, it's providence. And you hear, for physical effort, one person shouts, the others respond, and you see the gospel coming, the preacher, you know, "my soul, my feet, yes my Lord," who responds — you see where it comes from, all of a sudden it clicks into place, you see, it's all done through crossing paths, encounter and enrichment
1:55:10 but I come back to it, these are functional musics. Among the Pygmies, for instance, there's a whole musical genre specific to the Pygmies, invented by Pygmy women when they go to do the laundry, wash clothes in the river, in spots of varying depth, and they noticed that by plunging their hands in like that, boom, it made sounds, and they managed to tune these sounds — but it's to help themselves work, that's what's called worksongs in Anglo-Saxon countries, just as the cotton planter in the South had taken up metrical music so as not to die of despair — it also lifts the spirits to sing. And so there are musics arising from this function of washing clothes, but the music doesn't wash the clothes whiter, that's not its function — it serves a deeper human function, that of remembering: we were girlfriends together, we're here, the men aren't here, we're a bit at ease, there you go. So there's all that in Pygmy music, there's all that, but it's extraordinary to have managed even to make music out of differences in water depth. I lived a bit with the Pygmies — oh really? Cameroon, Gabon, or Congo?
1:56:20 Central African Republic — oh yes, of course, of course, and it's also an excellent country for the sanza, in the blood so to speak. So, as in music theory, we say each — how to put it — there's another, among the different styles of music, blues music, Latino music — so in relation to music is there a definition in relation to that, or is it only the vocal, as you said? I don't know how much — what I'm sure of is that there are things found throughout the whole African diaspora, due to slavery, the diaspora, whether in the Caribbean, in the United States, with variations
The African diaspora and musical cooperation 1:57:30 but there are still, there are quite a few invariants. But you're bothered about school, you're quite right, about transmission. I had the good fortune to direct for a few years, in Niger — the first time there was a training center, that was the exact title, Center for Musical Training and Promotion in Niger, funded by — thank you for having fed me — funded by the European Union, so with your taxes; generally it had rather ruined me, like all of us, the European Union, but for once, for this occasion, it fed me. Good, and in that center I had people coming from every region, because I was saying to someone earlier, there's an awful racist prejudice, even when it means to be complimentary — racism doesn't always take the same forms, it can be cunning, you can pay a compliment that's fundamentally racist. For example, that was the example I gave this morning, it was with you in the car, I don't know if — when I held that position, I was administratively the project head of a music training center — a white man showing up who was selling tools or whatever
1:58:40 "And what are you selling here?" Because people don't ask what your job is, they ask what you're selling, in an expatriate milieu. "I deal with music," I say cautiously. "Oh really? They have music in this country?" Well, first of all, the guy who at home has one Claude François record and two Julio Iglesias records was asking me if they had music in that country — and that's to show you, there are plenty of white people, to speak plainly, who would tell me: "you're wasting your time, why bother, it's not their culture, teaching them jazz, classical music, it's pointless." And so I said, "Do you like African music?" "Yes." "Well I like it too," I said, "so, you take their music and you don't bring yours? That's not my vision of cooperation." The African musician doesn't need me to go copy his music, no — I need to put him in contact with musics that enrich him, just as he enriches us. There you go. But to finish your question, I don't want to drown the fish — regarding Pygmy music proper, not African music in general, it's full of micro-intervals. Now I'm making a hypothesis, I'm not a specialist, it seems to me that this is specific to forest countries, perhaps Central African Republic — you see the difference there is between the forest, where you can't see very far
1:59:51 where the view is always blocked, compared with the savanna, or the desert, needless to say, and it's not quite the same sensibility. There you go, very interesting. Good, thank you, once again, thank you all, it was great, thank you, thank you.
