English translation of the French transcript, made with AI and not yet proofread — click a paragraph to jump to it. Show the French original
Resuming the series; music, philosophy and immateriality 0:00 Yes, hello everyone. So, this is the 16th episode of Musicosophie, resuming after a slight delay caused by the two of us, actually, for a certain reason, but the motivation is always the same. And we've prepared lots of subjects, lots of themes to tackle. I believe today, Dominique, you wanted to talk about programme music in relation to pure music, at least start from that distinction. Yes, yes, it's a great debate that mainly began in the late 18th, early 19th century, but before that, let me go back a bit, because we're finding our audience again.
0:36 And it's kind of you to say it's the fault of the two of us, I mean, the fault—well, the fault, it's the fault of a little health issue I had, which prevented me from doing the Musicosophie originally scheduled. But let's say it worked out well for you, since you were on holiday. There you go, that's much more to my credit. There you go, so it's good for everyone. And as for the audience, I hope that precisely this deprivation has sharpened their desire to have a follow-up to our conversations.
1:12 There we go, no, I'm very happy to find them again and I'm very touched by their loyalty, because I often get letters, either collective ones, or video comments, or personal ones, which touch me a great deal. On that note, regarding the interest of this series, which we haven't unrolled like a computer program though, I mean, it's neither stupidly chronological. There can be a very intelligent chronology, but that hasn't been our choice.
1:45 And I'll take the opportunity to say that everything we've done, we're now at the 16th episode of Musicosophie. It seems to me that it's a great clearing of the ground. I'm not saying that to the detriment of something organized, because those who follow us closely can see there's a continuity. I'll give an immediate example. If I'm speaking today, if I'm keen to explore this theme of programme music versus pure music, it's because last time we talked about music and philosophy.
2:19 And we raised, precisely—we recalled that one of the relationships confirmed over the centuries between discourse on music and discourse on philosophy is that there was an appearance of immateriality in both cases. The history of philosophy begins with idealist systems, I'm putting lots of quotation marks around that, but I mean that Plato is known as a realist of the Idea.
2:50 It's a bit complicated if we start muddling things. The Idea isn't just in my head for Plato. Careful, on the contrary, it's reality par excellence. There's a realism of the Idea, and there's a metaphysical idealism, on the other hand. The world around us, itself, doesn't exist, does it? But it isn't absorbed either, as in Schopenhauer, into my subjective representation. It's simply a world of illusions. So, in any case, there's a privilege in Plato, it's the idealist side, of everything invisible, of everything that, in his work, is not merely apparent, but posited as immaterial.
3:32 He called that the intelligible, the noetos, right? As opposed to aisthesis, to what is sensible, to what the senses—let's not forget that 'anesthesia' means our sensory connection to the world is cut off, quite simply. Before being a discipline, aesthetics is first of all what has a relation to our senses, in the most bodily sense. So there had always been a complicity between music—which, among all the arts, is the one whose matter seems the most subtle, without deciding whether it's immaterial or material—in any case, if it is material, it's a very subtle matter, one that diffuses through the air, doesn't it?
4:17 How does Verlaine put it? 'More vague and more soluble in air, with nothing in it that weighs or poses,' right? He was talking about odd-numbered meter, precisely. So we had seen this kinship. Now, that would mean there's something pure—here we get to today's subject—and that there is indeed a continuity, if one pays attention, in musical expression, and that any reference of a piece of music to something extra-musical, to a literary, theatrical, choreographic, religious program, Mass in C minor.
4:57 Well, Requiem in D minor, I'm taking two references from Mozart here. I'd be sort of—not sullying, but let's say troubling the purity of musical art, which is the art of a somewhat total absence of reference to the outside world. Whereas Fugue in G minor, that's perfect. And so, my starting point... An absence of the signified, even, in fact. There you go, an absence of an outer referent. A referent, rather, sorry, that's what I meant to say. To stay cautious, to use the broadest possible terms, which exclude nothing.
Disney's Fantasia, publisher's titles and Wagner's leitmotifs 5:31 But that's why I'll begin my remarks, my first example, my first reference—in the sense of illustration—with the opening of Walt Disney's famous film Fantasia. By Dukas, well, music by Dukas. Which brings together several pieces of music, some borrowed from what is supposed to belong to pure music, a symphony. And even more radically pure, the very first piece in Fantasia is precisely Bach's Toccata and Fugue in D minor.
6:05 So pure that Walt Disney, in a stroke of genius—well, by Walt Disney's pen—gives it as... it's the only piece in the film. I'll remind you that the film runs through several famous pieces of classical music set to storylines with visual dramatization.
6:35 So there's Mickey, who is the hero of The Sorcerer's Apprentice. It's a very beautiful cartoon, Mickey with his brooms, trying to deal with the flood. There you go. And there's an exception, precisely the first piece, Bach's Toccata and Fugue in D minor—in a stroke of genius, to pick up my thread again, Walt Disney depicts it with abstract lines. But abstract in the sense of abstract painting, as if for such music, any figurative depiction...
7:06 sorry for my redundancy—any properly figurative representation would be a disfigurement, to play on my root word for 'figure.' There you go. So it's interesting to see that even in a film which nonetheless aims, whose purpose is to illustrate, to leave pure music in order to illustrate it, thus to turn it into programme music, right from the start, one senses a dichotomy between works like Bach's fugue, which here would be an emblematic representative of pure music, and, I don't know, let me take two examples, Beethoven's Pastoral Symphony, in which Beethoven introduced elements that seem programmatic, for example the scene by the brook, the title of the second movement, which is 'Szene am Bach,' meaning literally 'scene at the brookside.'
8:13 Right, and then... The title is his own, whereas it's not the case with the Moonlight Sonata... Of course. The Moonlight... Yes, right, right, right. That's very rare... Because we expect, I don't remember, but... No, that's not his either. It's very rare for a composer to give a title. You're right to bring that up, because it's right at the heart of today's topic. Most of the time, it's the publishers who know that the public—we'll come back to this—likes to latch onto something less indeterminate than music itself. Yes, yes. Isn't that so? And so it's the publishers who invent things like that...
8:44 I'm thinking of the leitmotifs in Wagner. None of the leitmotifs—that of the sword, that of the bird, that of redemption through love, whether they're abstract ideas, objects, beings, animals, men—none of them was codified by him. None was named by Wagner. Right, so there isn't a completely univocal side to the leitmotifs. When it's the love motif, it can be more ambiguous. There, I'm glad you say that, because if we wanted to speak in even more rigorous terms, borrowing from set-theoretic mathematics, we'd say that there's no bijective relation between the list of leitmotifs and a determinate content.
9:28 As is the case with the highway code. That's going to get so technical. You mustn't get it wrong on exam day. The highway code, when it says 'no left turn,' you mustn't say 'no right turn.' There, it's really a bijection. To each element of the source set corresponds one and only one element of the target set. That's what a bijection is. It's not at all the case here. As you put it very well, why, when Wotan puts his daughter to sleep at the end of Die Walküre, do we suddenly hear the renunciation-of-love theme? So we learn that he loved his daughter with love.
10:00 As you say, it's the ambivalences of feeling admirably expressed here by the music. At the same time, it's complicated. Because it's the renunciation of paternal love which is the supreme proof of love—passing through the circle of fire that only the fearless hero will cross, because that's precisely the point of cutting the paternal umbilical cord. Yes, but a circle of fire that he agreed to set at his daughter's urging, since she says he's surely not going to leave her at the mercy of anyone.
10:31 Yes, of the first comer. Yes, that's true. All the same, his daughter. There you go, and besides, a warrior maiden isn't the first Olibrius who comes along. And the fire is Loge himself. Absolutely. So he gives her, as guardian, the most ambiguous of the gods. Yes, that's it. The most cunning. There, we see clearly right from the start—and I wouldn't want the audience to grow impatient with all the difficulties we're going to raise.
11:08 I find that they whet the appetite, that they make us want to explain. I'd like to problematize the discussion. I'm not going to stop. I'll take as an example here. Example of... First, let's be clear about the concepts. A pure music, the epithet is borrowed—let's borrow it from chemistry. What is a pure substance? Pure water is water where there's only water.
Pure music defined on the model of a pure substance 11:38 There's no lemon juice in it, no sugar. It's pure water, there's only H2O, if you do the analysis. There you go. Well, pure music is music where there's only music—no literature, no text, no program, no religious or political purpose, a national anthem. No purpose for dance either—that's already the first exclusion.
12:10 That's the most surprising thing, actually. It's very simple to state, but it gets complicated as soon as you take particular cases. Because that would mean that a piano sonata is pure music, whereas the farewell quintet in Così fan tutte, which is drawn from a dramatic work, right—dramatic doesn't mean tragic, let's not confuse the two, even if it's comic at times.
12:43 And it's impure, because there it serves a text, a story, whereas nothing is more overwhelming, more miraculously pure than the properly musical beauty of that quintet—someone who knows nothing about what's happening in the opera, all the characters, right, can still experience an auditory pleasure or be overcome with auditory happiness listening to that quintet. That's where you see it gets complicated, somehow.
13:15 It would be simple to sort things out, to say, well, only instrumental music can be called pure music, since as soon as it's vocal, there's already a text, an extra-musical material, and so on. It's not that simple. Conversely, there can be music which apparently presents itself as pure and which, in fact, is over-thought.
13:46 It doesn't follow a properly musical logic, but follows a logic—I don't know—psychological or metaphysical or whatever. That's why I'll take the example of Berlioz and his Symphonie fantastique, because it's no accident. The notion of music—let me stay a bit with our dichotomy of instrumental music versus vocal music, because we might confuse our initial dichotomy of pure music versus programme music with... Instrumental music only develops in Europe from the 15th century onward.
Music long in the service of other ends 14:16 We mustn't forget that if we call impure, non-pure music, all those in which music is used for purposes other than music itself—religious, wedding, nuptials, banquets—then the whole history of music from its origins up until fairly recently is not pure music. In the Middle Ages, when there's music, it's either secular music with peasants dancing in the middle of the village because there's a wedding—people haven't come to listen to the music, they've come to congratulate the newlyweds and enjoy eating a bit better than usual.
14:53 The celebration—I'm thinking of an admirable painting, though now I'm no longer talking about music, a painting by Bruegel, Peasant Wedding, for example, Bruegel the Elder. Or else, quite the opposite, a completely internalized music, Gregorian chant—watch over the salvation of Christendom. Not good. That's still a program. But it's a religious program, and not the same one depending on whether it's the Mass for the Dead. I'm thinking of Ockeghem's admirable Requiem—we're no longer quite in the Middle Ages, we're a bit at the transition between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, at the height of what's called polyphony.
15:33 And Ockeghem is a representative of what's surely best in that current, polyphony. That is, I'm not talking about polyphony in general, meaning music with several voices, but polyphony in the sense used in the history of music, especially in the 15th and 16th centuries. That is, the Franco-Flemish school, because most of them—Ockeghem, that's already a rather Flemish-sounding name. And Roland de Lassus, Orlando di Lasso as he was called in Italy, apart from Palestrina and a few others—it's mainly the Franco-Flemish school that illustrates this point.
16:09 See the Mass of Courtrai, for example, called Kortrijk—I don't know how to pronounce it in Belgium. Courtrai, that's the Battle of the Golden Spurs. You pronounce it better than I do, exactly. Yes. So we always have to be ironic with our Belgian friends, who are nonetheless so kind, and whom we annex. I'm making a parenthesis here, but I mean, Belgian musicians, I'm thinking of certain violinists—we absorb them, treat them as part of French music, a bit like the Swiss, like Godard, who's a French filmmaker, isn't he, even though he's Swiss.
16:44 Yes, so I was saying, this polyphony doesn't produce the same music depending on whether it's for a Mass for the Dead, Ockeghem's Requiem, to come back to it, or for the Cries of Paris. I'm thinking of Clément Janequin, who made admirable vocal music, which I recommend. Allow me to mention—I'm not advertising, but on Harmonia Mundi there's a very fine version of the Cries of Paris, where you can hear the street cries at the market, imagine Rue Mouffetard in the 15th century, I mean, it's quite extraordinary.
17:28 Yes, it's really Rabelaisian stuff. There you go, exactly. So, in the land of the best cooking, if I may say so. So, it's historically and anthropologically recent, the appearance of music—I won't yet say pure, but instrumental. Then, the idea that this instrumental music should not illustrate any extra-musical subject only appears at the end of the 18th century, and we always come back to the same gaping break, the one that defines the emergence of modernity—I'll get to it—because this debate, the debate we're having today, is a typical debate of modernity, that is, this debate doesn't appear before the late 18th, early 19th century, in short, before the French Revolution, before the Industrial Revolution, before the shift from countryside to city, from accelerated urbanization, from the rural world—things get serious.
Romanticism, classicism and the separation of genres 18:26 Why? Because the aesthetic model, up until the end of the 18th century, had been the plastic arts. It was painting that defined the formal element par excellence. And so there's a reaction on the part of... Music becomes abstract before the plastic arts. Of course, there you go, it's funny, you're picking up an intriguing and pertinent remark, and a slightly—not ironic, but slightly disparaging—remark by Lévi-Strauss regarding the twelve-tone school.
19:02 When he says—to poke a bit of fun at contemporary music in general, of which he's actually fond, but at a certain kind of contemporary music—when he says: it's worth noting that when painting became abstract, we started talking about concrete music. He's also talking about... It's not really... He's not talking about dodecaphony, he's talking precisely about concrete music in the sense of... Yes, that's more it. That's more it. That's playing a bit on the term. Yes, Pierre Henry or Pierre Schaeffer, I can say—it's surely a remark he makes regarding Concerto for a Door and a Sigh, where you hear a door creaking for several minutes.
19:41 There you go. Concrete music. So it's no accident that the insistence on there being a pure music that owes nothing to what is extra-musical—we'll come back to these still problematic notions, I maintain it's not obvious—from the moment Romanticism starts to emerge as the emblematic expression of modernity, that is, we're taught this in schools, even outside of musical education, that what's proper to classicism, which Romanticism opposes.
20:16 You always have to see green against red or red against green to really characterize it, rather than turquoise, where you no longer know if it's blue or green. So, Romanticism mixes the genres that classicism was keen to keep separate. You don't see Racine doing what the emblematic author of the Romantics does—who wasn't himself a Romantic, that would be an anachronism, I'm thinking of Shakespeare—but I mean, in Shakespeare, in the same play, there can be, in Hamlet for example, some very comic passages, some hyper-tragic passages, etc.
20:48 In Racine, it's tragedy; there can be comedy, that does happen, take Les Plaideurs, but the two aren't mixed. And generally speaking, the genres are kept separate. And this is an old tradition that, like all classicism, goes back to the Hellenic requirement, to the classical period of the Hellenic world, where great emphasis is placed on what does or doesn't belong to a genre. The genre of satire isn't the same as the genre of comedy, isn't the same as the genre of... There you go.
21:18 And here again, there's a continuity in our discussions, because I recall we did an episode on mode and tone. This is the place to recall what a mode is, under Plato's pen, who reviews all the Greek musical modes in the Republic—the mode is in fact extra-musical, because he highlights, he singles out and gives as a privileged reference point in what musical education in the Republic should be, the Phrygian mode, because it's the one that encourages warriors to bravery as they go into battle, and he disparages the Lydian mode, which would be, as we'd say today—no, after International Women's Day, let's not say effeminate, but soft, decadent, a bit—there you go—a bit too much end-of-banquet, the Lydian mode, the mode on which Alcibiades surely must have burst in at the end of the Symposium, dead drunk, carried in by flute girls, there you go, so, you see, here 'mode' means—
The program of Berlioz's Symphonie fantastique 22:28 we no longer have any relation whatsoever with music in the pure sense, but it designates something happening in the world, a relation to the world, something dramatic—so, I'm going to start with a Romantic composer just as representative of French music as Berlioz, with his Symphonie fantastique, which already poses all the problems we're discussing today, insofar as it's a symphony, it should belong to pure music—a symphony, let's recall, is a genre, the symphonic genre is the set of pieces that must be performed by a symphony orchestra or a philharmonic orchestra, that's a quantitative difference between the two, and as opposed to vocal music, right, and moreover, it's a symphony, which characterizes it—here I'll emphasize the prefix syn, there's an M because it's before a P, but it's S, Y, N—it's synthesis, it's unification, there mustn't
23:38 be too much privilege given to one instrumental group over another—the symphonist's art is to bring out all the resources of the most differentiated orchestra possible, and there you go, exactly—whereas in a concerto, I mean, the orchestra becomes a bit like the chorus in Greek tragedy, serving to set off a character who emerges above it, a powerfully unified individual, who is the soloist—concerto for piano, concerto for cello, and so on.
24:10 So here, it's a symphony, we're therefore within the genre, apparently pure music—but here's what Berlioz declares when he has the score of his music published. He gives a program, the very opposite of pure music, and he says this: 'The composer's aim has been to develop, in whatever is musical about them, various situations in the life of an artist.' There you go, all of a sudden, what was supposed to be pure music must consist of so many passages illustrating the stages of the new Romantic genius of the artist—I don't know—that is, of himself.
24:49 Well, here we find, of course, several Romantic tics, if I may say so. Hugo, let's recall, said, 'When I speak to you of myself, I speak to you of yourself,' so Berlioz has every right to want his symphony to express the stages of his own life, of his own journey. 'The composer's aim has been to develop, in whatever is musical about them, various situations in the life of an artist. The plan of the instrumental drama'—here's yet another new notion, which is why I'm referring to this text, which poses the problems well without resolving any of them—'the plan of the instrumental drama, deprived of the help of words'—if we stay within the purely symphonic genre—'needs to be laid out in advance.'
25:35 So there has to be the programme that I'm handing out to you now, a verbal one, to make up for what seems to be a fault in music, in the sense of a lack, namely that music makes nothing explicit. The following programme should therefore be considered as the spoken text of an opera, serving to introduce pieces of music whose character and expression it accounts for. The distribution — that's the last sentence of the excerpt I'm isolating — the distribution of this programme to the audience, at concerts where this symphony is performed, is indispensable for the complete understanding of the dramatic plan of the work.
26:19 One couldn't put it better — I'm stretching it a bit, but in the end, if I apply what he just said, it means: my music is not sufficient in itself to be appreciated unless there is this programme and this text telling you how it should be understood. Namely, by referring to things that have nothing to do with music. It's when I discovered Harriet Smithson, the English singer I fell in love with, or when I was ruined, or on the contrary, when Paganini, mind you, bailed me out with his usual generosity just as I was about to kill myself.
26:52 Yes, the different stages of an artist's life. But indeed, there is a generosity — the great virtuosos, Liszt and Paganini, were each of them, the two greatest virtuosos, each in their respective instruments, the violin and the piano — or rather the piano and the violin — were known for their generosity. You'd meet Liszt and say, 'I've got problems, the bailiffs took everything,' and he'd say, 'wait, I'm giving a concert tomorrow, I'll give you half the takings, I'll bail you out,' because he was sure to fill the hall as soon as his name was on the bill.
27:26 What greater generosity than to make as many transcriptions as Liszt did? Exactly, but of course, that's why we're wrong to always play the same ten pieces by Liszt when his catalogue has 1,200 numbers. We're taking this rather high — we'll perhaps do an episode on that one day. So, it seems clear enough: Berlioz is saying music, pure music, yes, fine, but still, if music is truly pure, something is missing from it.
Schumann's anger and national identities 27:56 What is scandalous — a musician who took quite a while to move from piano to orchestra, and beyond the orchestra to the voice — is Schumann, at the same period; I'm deliberately taking contemporaries, and romantics. So I cross the Rhine and I note… In Schumann, what's incredible is the explosion of lieder in the year 1840. There it is — the year of the lieder.
28:32 Sorry, I need to find it — there, excuse me, let me find this for you… There. So, as I just quoted Berlioz, I now quote Schumann writing a review of Berlioz's Fantastique. That's enough about the programme.
29:03 All of Germany sends it back to him — the programme, he throws it away, he makes him re-cross the Rhine, but in the other direction. Well. And yet he's someone very generous, Schumann too, very devoted to the genius of others, to Chopin, etc. Well. And one of the best critics — Schumann. And one of the best music critics there's ever been. So what's got into him? He has a fit of anger, which is rather rare for him. 'That's enough about the programme, all of Germany sends it back to him,' about such a manual of use. Here's how he speaks of Berlioz's programme, of such a manual of use: 'there's always something about it that smacks of fraud' — the word is harsh.
29:38 Something degrading. In any case, the titles given to each movement would have sufficed on their own. 'The march to the scaffold' — these are titles corresponding to parts of the Symphonie fantastique, 'The march of triumph,' 'Beloved mortals,' etc. It's reminiscent of Beethoven. In any case, in a word, the German. So now this becomes a national quarrel, pure music versus programme music. 'In a word, the German, with his delicate sensitivity, his most receptive personality, does not tolerate being guided in such a brutal manner in his thoughts.'
30:15 An inversion, suddenly, of all the epithets. Generally it's the German, the Prussian, who is brutal, and the Frenchman who is delicate, charming. We're after the Napoleonic occupation. There you go. You can see clearly that these nonsense national identities really depend on the era. I'm opening a little parenthesis here, but for a reference you know better than average, since you have a classical culture — I'm thinking of Tacitus. Alias Tacite, the Latin historian, the Roman historian, one of whose best-known works is The Germania.
30:51 This is the first time we're talking about it. The Germans, yes. Right? Yes, it's a good example. Let's be clear, it's an Italian talking about 'Krauts.' I'm deliberately using slightly loaded words… Right? It's an Italian and a spaghetti-eater — the pizza-eater, as they say about you. What does he say? They're dirty, undisciplined, we won't get much out of them. They're lazy, they're brave — that's the quality they're recognized for in battle. So this is an Italian saying about the Germans everything the Germans will say about the Italians in our own era.
31:23 I believe they say they spend their time on animal skins, sleeping on animal skins. But yes, it's actually become an expression in German, by the way. To mean 'twiddling your thumbs,' roughly. I swear. So the eternal national genius, as a substance, takes a hit. As a substance, yes. On the other hand, there are national realities that express themselves at a given moment depending on different… Absolutely, absolutely, but on condition, precisely, that we don't take them as an eternal substance, but that we tie them to determinations — plural — historical determinations that gave them weight, substance this time, but not as a timeless essence, quite the opposite.
32:04 I remember an example from Losurdo that was very telling. He said: 'The revolutionary country in 1914 is Germany. And the one that doesn't finally make its revolution, in 1918, is France.' That's exactly what it means. The war, the war. There you go. Generally it's France that takes to the streets. Yes, that's it. So at that point, the fronts are reversed. But of course. So, after this little geopolitical parenthesis, I'm sure we'll have occasion to come back to it.
32:35 Still, I note that this sentence — 'in a word, the German, with his delicate sensitivity, his most receptive personality, does not tolerate' — I don't know if it applies to the German, but it certainly applies to Schumann. Delicate and receptive sensitivity. Isn't that so? 'He does not tolerate being guided in such a brutal manner in his thoughts.' He had already felt insulted by the Pastoral Symphony, as if Beethoven had doubted his ability to guess the character of the work without the help of a clue.
33:15 So he, who has a wild admiration, like all the romantics, for Beethoven, nonetheless reproaches Beethoven, in the Pastoral Symphony, for having specified 'scene by the brook,' 'peasants' merrymaking in the countryside' in the third movement, the scherzo, etc. Look, I'm not resolving anything here, on the contrary I'm showing how the problem keeps bouncing back. As soon as you want to draw a clean line between what is pure music and what is programme music, you keep showing that the two call to one another. Look, I move on to Beethoven, to the Pastoral Symphony. It's true, to give Schumann his due, that there are indeed programmatic elements that Beethoven himself specified for this symphony, with the titles he adds to its parts.
Beethoven and Vivaldi: sensation rather than painting 33:56 Except that Beethoven specifies clearly, and this sentence is crucial. Sorry, my mouse is having a little problem. Beethoven says this: 'More'
34:29 that's how he speaks of his symphony, he comments on it: 'More an expression of feeling than painting.' Now wait, let me stop here. Because we're at the very beginning of the nineteenth century, we're in the years between 1810 and 1820, this is Beethoven of his second manner. We're still in the Napoleonic interlude, neither in the Ancien Régime nor in the New, but in the vast whirlwind between the two.
35:01 And he says something that anticipates what will become the most modern thing, namely Impressionism — he says literally 'more an expression of sensation' — not of feeling. One would think that as a romantic he's going to speak of the expression of feeling — no, of sensation. The cold, the warm, the heavy, the light, the rough, the smooth — these are not feelings. 'More an expression of sensation than painting.'
35:32 Implying that as soon as one is… So here we find another dichotomy: the plastic arts, the arts of space, versus the arts of time, which are more interiorized — between programme music and pure music. You see? And he also notes — I quote Beethoven's sentence — 'The Pastoral Symphony is not a painting,' so again, you see, opposed to painting. 'One finds expressed there, in particular nuances, the impressions' — this time sensation is replaced by the term, let me explain, impression — 'that man' — 'gut'
36:05 'Eindruck,' I believe, in German, as opposed to 'Ausdruck,' 'expression'; 'Eindruck,' 'impression.' There, there. 'The impressions that man savours in the countryside.' There, so you see that it's not simple, I keep problematizing the subject, and I recall, since I'm now going back historically, that instrumental music itself, gradually emerging from vocal music, whether popular or sacred — instrumental music appears as early as the fifteenth century — but Vivaldi already, in his Four Seasons, is somewhat the creator of programme music.
36:58 We mustn't forget that originally Vivaldi said very precisely that each of these concertos — there are four of them, the Four Seasons — came to illustrate four sonnets, each respectively corresponding to each of the four sonnets he prescribed, a bit like Berlioz, as we saw earlier, handing out texts. One had to read the sonnets while listening to the music. Whereas now, when we listen to the Four Seasons, of course we can perfectly well ignore the sonnets — the solidity of the musical discourse seems autonomous enough to do without any external reference. But still, I mean, one notices that the Four Seasons follow the lines of the four sonnets faithfully. I'll point out to those listening, if it interests them, that on Wikipedia, under Vivaldi or under Four Seasons, in both cases you have the text of the four sonnets, so you can follow simultaneously, so to speak, the passages of the concertos and the passages of the sonnets
The symphonic poem: Don Juan by Richard Strauss 38:08 that correspond to them — so there's our subject. So of course, what pushed me to choose this theme now, once we've seen that it's a theme worth digging into because it raises problems that are not obvious and that run through a not-insignificant part of music history — it was first of all a hearing I had, but like a shock right in the face, an exceptional one, I recommend it — a horrendous recording, an old one, mind you, prior to what's called high fidelity, a so-called historic recording, an archival recording, call it what you will. It's a Russian conductor — I'll dwell on this a bit because he's less well known, there are immense Russian conductors, well known, well known to music lovers at least, even Mravinsky for instance, who is out of the ordinary, a cult conductor
39:19 in Russian music, he conducts everything else very well too, but I'm talking about a conductor who is even less known than Mravinsky, and yet it's thanks to him that the Americans got their first philharmonic orchestra that had nothing to envy in European orchestras — I'm thinking of the Boston orchestra, of course, where we've seen a succession of immense conductors like Erich Leinsdorf or people like that. You know that American orchestras took time to reach the level of European symphony orchestras, and it happened thanks to the misfortunes, plural, of Europe — it's thanks to all those who fled either anti-Semitism or wars, and I'm thinking of Eugene Ormandy, who built up the Philadelphia Orchestra — mostly from Central and Eastern Europe, those who suffered the most historically at that time, and I'm thinking — I'll now say his name — I'm thinking of Koussevitzky, who is much less known, K-H-O-U-S-E-V-I-S
40:30 then K-Y-K-I, as if you needed that — but I believe you can hear him in Prokofiev, if I recall correctly, his Scythian Suite is quite extraordinary, and what I was listening to by Koussevitzky was an emblematic work of programme music, a work belonging — I'm deliberately building suspense here — to a musical genre called the symphonic poem, which is a good way of laying out the problem. I was about to say Mussorgsky, Pictures at an Exhibition — because there, as it happens — bravo, because I was setting a trap by making you think it was Russian music — no, he's not performing Russian music here, he's performing Richard Strauss, quite simply. It's Don Juan — Don Juan is by Richard Strauss. Generally the symphonic poem as a genre, if I talk about it like this without playing the music, is exactly what would seem to immediately repel someone like Schumann earlier — what is this way of butting in, of proposing a theme to me, Don Juan,
41:40 a story, whereas I'm going to look first at whether you know how to write music or not. You can have, with the same theme of Don Juan, a masterpiece and a dud — I won't say — and here I'm thinking not of Schumann but of someone even more demanding, even more critical of any romantic, programmatic, extra-musical derivation — I'm thinking of Debussy. Debussy, who, at almost the same moment when the Impressionist painters took their easels and set them up in front of the flowering cliff, or elsewhere, in Normandy — sorry — that same Debussy said it was better to watch a sunrise over the sea than to listen to Beethoven's Pastoral Symphony, if you wanted — oh, absolutely, and besides, this isn't a programme — Debussy's Préludes aren't programme music, since the title only comes at the end of the score — there's nothing you can hide from us — so, let's say it, repeat it, because the public doesn't know it, it's exceptional — yes, yes, go ahead, I don't know whether all the scores have it, but normally an original score, outside the text, by Debussy
42:50 for the Préludes, it begins in medias res with the music — there, the title of the piece is actually only given at the end — there, with three suspension dots before the title — I'm a stickler for detail of the signifier, Lacanian side of things, I don't know — so it's not programmatic. The three suspension dots mean: by the way, it could have been called 'Heather,' since one of them is indeed called that — but he doesn't want the performer to be blinded precisely by something external to the music. So first you play the score — that's my job, to write a score, you work it out with G's, F's, fifths, inversions, etc. — afterwards you can say, this makes me think of something — I'll even offer, for example, it could have been called 'Heather,' it could have been called — I'm giving you what you're saying, what you rightly recall, applies to the Préludes — the Préludes for piano, solo piano, there are two books, and in each book there are twelve preludes, so twenty-four in all — that makes you think of Bach, we think again of the two books
44:00 of the Well-Tempered Clavier's preludes. So we're right in the middle of a pure music that pays homage to a pure music — I'm multiplying the quotation marks — nonetheless, we say it's pure, but there are these titles that come at the end, some of which even make you dream — I'm thinking of 'The Terrace of Moonlit Audiences' — so we're suddenly rather in the Hindu world, aren't we, a Maharajah kind of thing, 'The Terrace of Moonlit Audiences,' where there are pieces by Debussy, outside the Préludes, called 'And the Moon Descended on the Temple That Was' — it's rather decadent, not pejoratively, but you can clearly see the fin-de-siècle atmosphere, there's a lot of moon — he's above all known for 'Clair de lune,' isn't he — all of which is going to be swept away by The Rite of Spring, which is going to bring — like Valéry, isn't it — no, no, standing, in the ensuing era, one must try to live — but still, why am I alluding to Debussy when I was talking about Richard Strauss — I'm not confusing everything, because Debussy writes a review
Debussy salutes Strauss; Yves Nat's image for the Appassionata 45:10 in the press when there are the first performances in Paris of Richard Strauss's Don Juan — which should repel him the most — Debussy, the champion of French music reacting against the diktat of German music, a reaction that began with Fauré and Saint-Saëns etc., that culminates with him roughly, and that ends during the war of 1914 — going back to confinement, he starts signing his scores 'Claude de France,' you see — well, there are periods like that. Nonetheless, so there's everything to repel him, a post-Wagnerian enthusiast of Wagner like Richard Strauss, in short, and yet Debussy says: 'One cannot resist Monsieur Strauss,' who has nothing to do with the Blue Danube — there, he first recalls that it has nothing to do with the Strauss waltzes — Strauss is a surname, one of the most common in Germanic countries, it means 'bouquet,' I believe — so, and he says, 'one cannot resist,' he pays a tremendous tribute to a work — you see how these problematics that should have unfolded a programme — but precisely Richard Strauss
46:21 says very clearly that this programme has nothing constraining about it, it doesn't lay out the story of Don Giovanni, it's simply, he says, so that the music — that's interesting — doesn't get lost in a void, that one has, as it were, a vague idea, a title, that gives this piece a tone that will not be the same as another symphonic poem — one of his best, perhaps the most avant-garde, Till Eulenspiegel, which has more comic, funny passages that could serve as illustration for cartoons, for instance. So these are general tonalities here, indicated by the programme — you see that our history of music — so I've just given examples of apparently programme music that can nonetheless perfectly well be appreciated, from the Four Seasons to Richard Strauss's Don Juan, perfectly well appreciated for their intrinsically musical value — that is, even if you know nothing of the extra-musical references and the programme — one can do the reverse
47:32 start from a work — a piano sonata with no title, nothing — well, the Appassionata, as we saw earlier, that's a publisher's title, Beethoven himself calls it Sonata Opus so-and-so, number so-and-so, in C-sharp minor — and Yves Nat, one of the greatest performers of Beethoven at the piano, said to one of his students — sorry, this was for someone who asked how to play the first fortissimo there, you know, because it begins, it begins very sotto voce, the Appassionata — because I have the recording — there, it starts like that, and suddenly there's a fortissimo that's terrifying, isn't it, it's the contrasts
48:42 typically Beethovenian — you're walking on eggshells, and suddenly there's an explosion, and so a student asks: how do you express this contrast? Yves Nat's answer: imagine you're tearing a sheet of paper — resorting to an image — and so there, we go from pure music the other way round, you see, we arrive at an image. So I'll pause here for a first stage, because I don't want you to think I take a malicious pleasure in saying that in fact pure music always has a figurative side, and figurative music must each time hold as pure music. I'd like to reach a stage now, in the order of — in fact the whole problem lies in the relation between the properly musical form and the extra-musical content it alludes to — what to my mind should be pejorative is the descriptive relation, if one assigns to music the task of describing — I'd even say illustrative, there
Baudelaire and the heresy of teaching 49:52 exactly, if it's not self-sufficient, if it's the metaphor for something else that is written alongside it — the music, that means it has something outside itself towing it along, right, and here we find — it's interesting because we notice that pure music simply means music, plain and simple — what is musical in music, you see what one would like to say — and finally what is properly artistic in music, because these problematics are found again in poetry — there I move into literature, right, but when Baudelaire exhausts himself saying, in the New Notes on Edgar Poe, which I strongly recommend since it's no doubt the summit of Baudelaire's critical work, who we know is the greatest critic of his century — I'm not speaking of Baudelaire the poet, but of the one who reviews the work of others, isn't it, and Edgar Poe, in France, a little after Nerval, but who didn't have the energy of a Baudelaire to bang on the table
51:02 the record — Nerval — so what does he say in this note on Edgar Poe, which, I recall for reference, serves as a preface found in all paperback editions — not to the Extraordinary Tales, where there's already an important preface where Baudelaire gives the life and work of Edgar Poe, but to the New Extraordinary Tales, hence the title New Notes on Edgar Poe. Now there's a passage there that's crucial for our purposes, where music will be discussed, moreover, where Baudelaire develops a theory of the beautiful that is visibly of neo-Platonic inspiration, as is often the case in the Symbolist current — namely, he rises up against the tendency, against what he calls, I quote, 'the heresy of teaching' in poetry. So let's pay attention now to the wording of these words — heresy is a term with a religious connotation, well, it won't surprise us that for Baudelaire poetry is a priesthood, poetry has a relation
52:12 with the sacred, the vates — yes, I should recall what sums this up in his work, namely the sonnet 'Correspondences': 'Nature is a temple' — there, it already begins — 'Nature is a temple where living pillars sometimes let confused words escape; man passes through forests of symbols there that watch him with familiar looks' — careful, not that he watches, but 'that watch him' — it's the symbols that watch man, that's a bit unsettling, it's not man contemplating the symbols, it's the symbols that look at man, isn't it, that's well observed — it's the trial of the subject, no, but 'with familiar looks,' as if man were more familiar to the symbols, whereas the symbols are enigmatic to man — well observed. Well, 'with familiar looks,' well, you can clearly see the relation to the sacred, in fact the relation to beauty that poetry tries to express through the tools of speech, so to speak
53:43 so why do I dwell on this example — because if he speaks of heresy, it's that a fault in poetry, a fault in a religious domain, resembles a heresy, so it's a serious matter. Now what does he call the 'heresy of teaching'? It's wanting poetry to serve as an illustration — you see, we find again our point about music — to be towed along by an intention that is not poetic but moral — because this is the whole case of eighteenth-century poetry — you see, you're taking up the same divisions again — it's at the end of the eighteenth century that the problem arises, the emergence of modernity — we're going in circles on purpose, and it's worth going in circles precisely — one describes a feeling, but not a sensation, one doesn't express a direct sensation — we're still there, exactly — it's Rilke who said, who will point a finger at a smell or the flavour of an orange, 'dance the orange,' as Rilke put it — that's why I use this passage, because he says
54:53 put poetry in the service of what — he gives three examples — in the service of truth, he says — the music — the music, you see my slip — poetry, its object is not necessarily truth, there's science for that, there's reason, truth has nothing to do with songs, he even says at one point, doesn't he, first — second, the heresy of morality — he doesn't say that poetry is completely indifferent to morality, he says that if it's a moral aim the poet pursued, he's diminished his power of expression, whereas if, as a final result, his poem has a good moral effect, that's not at all to be excluded, but it mustn't be the poet's aim from the outset — his aim must be to make something beautiful. We see clearly that this steps outside 'art for art's sake' — he steps out of that reaction from the mid-century, the disappointment after the failures of the 1848 revolutions, when everything turns inward, what's been called the 'school of disenchantment' — let's not forget that Les Fleurs du mal is dedicated to Théophile Gautier, who was a bit of a leader — sorry for this English term
56:03 of the movement — but the heresy of morality, the heresy of truth, and more surprisingly, the heresy of passion — you can clearly see that we're turning the page on Romanticism, and what does he hold against passion? We understand about morality, well, one might as well have a sermon, right, but a sermon is not poetry; truth, well, one might as well look toward Jussieu or the science faculty, in the end, or a logic course, nothing, or something successful in the historical sciences, which is rarer, because the heirs of Marx — I don't know many — well anyway, that's a claim and I stand by it — but there, poetry is not their field. On the other hand, what does he have against passion? It seems to me that there, poetry, on the contrary, could find material for inspiration in it. And he answers: because passion is natural, too natural — now I'm doing some intertextuality within Baudelaire himself, Baudelaire says elsewhere: the beautiful is always strange, the beautiful must surprise, it must suddenly transport us elsewhere
57:13 it must always be an invitation to travel, to elsewhere, isn't it, come surprise us — now passion is natural, too natural, and for the subtleties of the soul, etc., which need to go beyond always repeating the wife who cheats on her husband and so on, jealousy — I'm caricaturing a bit but you get the idea — and now I come to the passage that concerns us, that brings us back to music, and the densest passage, which I now quote: 'beautiful for beautiful's sake' — 'it is this admirable, this immortal instinct for the beautiful which makes us consider the earth and its spectacles as a glimpse, a correspondence with heaven' — what Mallarmé will soon call 'the anterior sky where beauty blooms,' isn't it — and he says it is both through poetry — and through the expression is underlined, poetry, comma, through music, and it is through music that the soul glimpses the splendours situated beyond the tomb. There, I won't unfold the whole emanationist metaphysics I called neo-Platonic earlier that lies behind this, but on the other hand what's interesting
Musically restoring what is external to music 58:24 is that at the very same moment when there are those defending pure music against what seems to alienate it — what seems, again, perhaps not to sully it but let's say to alter its own expressive force — I'm thinking of Brahms reproaching Liszt and Wagner for talking about programmes, external literary elements, whereas he, Brahms, remained, without a title, within the quintet, the trio, etc. — that's entirely to his credit, in passing, and what he did best is no doubt his chamber music — I note that this problematic appears at the very moment when, as if by chance, in literature there's the same movement where poetry tries to free itself from everything it's been made to serve — but it must not be towed along, I come back to it — neither music nor poetry worthy of the name must be towed along by something outside them. That doesn't mean — and here we begin to see more clearly — that music has nothing to do with what is outside music, but that this thing
59:34 that is outside, and which no doubt inspires and matters to the musician, must be restored musically — that's the difference — and each of the modes of expression, painting, dance, literature, music, has its own constraints, which, like every determination, resemble a grid — I'm thinking of a grid in the sense of crossword puzzles — a grid that hides certain things and reveals others, that excludes this and, on the other hand, imposes that. That's how it is — you're right, sorry — Berlioz — music is mute at the level of meanings, it doesn't say the difference between a piano and a harpsichord, I mean with words — it can make you hear the timbre of a harpsichord and the timbre of a piano, yes, there — so we find here again, and it's no coincidence, I repeat, the fact that our opposition between pure music and programme music comes back to the problem we're getting used to
1:00:46 in my discourse, because it's a bit obsessive, I admit it, in me — it's confusion or separation of genres. There you go — one learns in school, in Classicism, that the hallmark of Classicism is to separate the genres, to be very clear about which genre one is in — is one in the genre of sacred music or in the genre of secular music? A parenthesis: Fauré's Requiem — Fauré himself said it had something dreamlike about it, you see, you don't hear trumpets of doom or anything like that, there's a somewhat 'Chinese' side to it at one point — yes, absolutely. And as for the Aria from Bach — you know, that's one of the most beautiful slow movements, the 'quarter of an hour' as Americans call it — in Sweden it's played at funerals, and it has nothing funereal about it.
1:01:57 but precisely so that it's brought peacefully to the cemetery, in rest and serenity, you see — so, confusion of genres or separation of genres. I insist here — let's forget music for a moment — on modernity, since that word keeps coming up in my talk, off the top of my head, its characteristics: the emergence of individuality, neurosis. There are works like Kafka's, like The Flowers of Evil — I won't even mention A Season in Hell by Rimbaud — that express a malaise, a mal du siècle, at a time that only keeps getting worse. Baudelairean spleen is more cruel, and has even a physical aspect that the voluptuousness of melancholy in Lamartine, for example, does not yet have. So you see, all of that is modernity. I'm relating this to the fusion of genres, as if separating them were a form of security, and joining them together brought
Mixing of genres, mixing of classes 1:03:08 new threats, but also perspectives that didn't exist before. What am I thinking of? I'm thinking of history and of politics here — forgive me, to those it might shock, about pure music being sullied by the ethereal spheres of pure music — I don't know, with the red of history — but still, I'm thinking of Louis XVI, when the people of Paris came to Versailles or to the Tuileries, I'm not quite sure, I have a slight doubt, but demanded that the king come out on the balcony and put on the Phrygian cap. What happened there all of a sudden? Something typical of modernity that will terrify the ruling classes forever after: it's the mixing of genres, the mixing of classes. Yes, there's that behind the mixing of genres, something disturbing, and there's the appearance of what we all are now, and that Clouscard calls the middle strata — not to say the middle classes, because if you say 'the middle class' it's such a broad extension — basically everything that isn't the poor wretches crossing
1:04:19 the Mediterranean, or who find their grave there, isn't it, the world proletariat in all the horror of poverty and exploitation — or on the contrary, isn't it the CAC 40 or the MEDEF, I don't know how to put it — that is, between the two, we're all in the middle class already, the wage-earning class, which is 90% of people, to make it very manageable. On the other hand, the middle strata — we've all left, that's where it gets decided, these middle strata which are going to — I think what Clouscard also meant is that they are dispossessed of their means of production, that's right, the middle classes of the early 20th century still had their small means of production — that's exactly it, you're taking the words right out of my mouth, I was about to talk about the crisis that dispossesses precisely, among these middle strata, those who were beginning to get out — not of poverty exactly — I'm thinking of the inverse reactions of Germany and France in the 1930s to the Great Crash of 1929. Why does Germany turn toward the Third Reich, toward Nazism, and France
1:05:29 toward the Popular Front. You see that the decisive factor for these popular strata depends on whether they have the dread of being contaminated by what is supposedly beneath them — the rise, the emancipation of the proletariat. And that's exactly the battle being fought in the streets of the big German cities throughout the twenties and thirties, between the Spartacists and the war veterans' leagues and other such groups, which are preludes to Nazism. And in France, on the contrary, it's going to be the Popular Front — the moment when the middle strata say: after all, maybe we have more to gain by allying with the working class than by blocking it. There's also the working class occupying the factories — yes, the working class had to pound the table for people to suddenly say, yes, by allying with us, don't worry, we're a force. All of this is felt in what we're saying now, because I'm coming back to my symphonic poem
Wagner's endless melody, demonstrated at the piano 1:06:39 you'll tell me, what's the connection? The fact that Richard Strauss says — I'm giving a literary idea like that, Don Juan, or Till Eulenspiegel, or Death and Transfiguration, borrowed so that the music doesn't lose itself in the indefinite. Very curiously, at the very same moment, Wagner speaks of endless melody, because that's how unendliche Melodie should be translated, rather than 'infinite melody,' which sounds a bit too metaphysical — but don't you see that the great formal innovation is that it's a music that doesn't conclude with cadences? That's the 2-5-1, right, that's it, we've arrived at a landing, right, that's it — and so Wagner is going to do that, it's a chaining of chainings. And that's linked to the fact that the social referent is no longer self-evident
1:07:49 there's no longer — at the other extreme there would be castes, if you like, where one is fixed. What did you play as the third chord? It's a seventh chord in your — I did two, D minor, D, and the second degree after C, so dominant C — G, sorry, G seventh, that's my first cadence, super classical, two-five-one, I say it for the uninitiated: two is D, five is G, the fifth of course, you have to find the framework of my three chords, right, and your Wagnerian example, right — but now, if I take the last chord, I modulate à la Wagner, it's the A-flat chord, we're outside, right, the neighboring tonalities in general — C, A-flat, that is, the one that's the tonic of what? Of the augmented fifth of C, we're really not at all, right, and moreover I've colored it
1:08:59 I didn't do — that is, I attached to the A-flat the G natural just below to make a major seventh — a second — yes, a minor second, yes, that's right, that comes back indeed, it's as if — there, the major seventh, right, and if I take the interval alone and not the chord, it makes a minor second, so we suddenly get the impression that the music can rebound, whereas in the previous cadence, in the 2-5-1, that's it, it's over, finished, curtain, a full stop — yes, that's it — but here it's a music — well, that's it — and it's often been said that in Tristan, the music is no longer a river, a stream flowing — that's the classic metaphor of melodic flow. I recall that in Bambara, griot is jeli, the traditional musician, jeli, and the river is called Joliba, that's the name of the Niger. It's beautiful
1:10:10 as an analogy, isn't it, but here, no, in Wagner, one might say yes, there is indeed a watery element, but it's the ocean, it's oceanic, it goes in every direction, there's no privileged direction like in a river, right, it can rebound at any moment, right, there. I wanted to problematize today — we won't resolve it — but these elements, to show that one must be careful with expressions, and that very often reference — not to pure music, which I respect, which is a legitimate demand in itself — but to purism, which isn't the same thing, that is, being a sectarian of pure music, is often something reactionary, someone a bit taken aback by innovations. Let's not forget, that's somewhat Brahms's position — I'm not going to say a word against the musician Brahms
Reactionary purism: Brahms, Boulez, Adorno 1:11:20 but against his discourse, right, his discourse saying that the moment you step outside the quintet or the trio, right, you're being unfaithful. Well, that's not going to stop him from writing a magnificent Requiem after all, right, or admirable settings of texts — that's rarer for him, but I'm thinking of his setting to music of an excerpt from Hölderlin, which is rare enough to be worth noting — and above all his immortal, I'll go that far, Rhapsody for chorus, alto voice, right, and orchestra, yes — speaking of mixing. But there, I want to say, what to make of film music — you see why — there are film scores that are worth — so hated by Boulez — but yes, yes, but precisely, there's nothing worse than the term 'film music' — do you want us to do a Boulez-Adorno series, it's the same series, they're the purists, not just people attached to the pure. There again, I make a distinction — I myself love Le Soleil des eaux by Boulez a lot, these are musically excellent works
1:12:30 I don't want to build a case for it right now, I'll act as though it's subjective, but in any case I'm often exasperated by these exasperations, which are moreover often full of contradictions. Few interpreters have had harsher words for Wagner than Boulez, when he wasn't yet known as a Wagnerian — that is, in the 1950s, in a book that made a lot of noise at the time called Penser la musique aujourd'hui, which is somewhat his theoretical work, his manifesto, right — he talks about Wagner, how does he put it, like Cocteau, that kind of Germanic tin-mongering, etc. — and then when he conducts him, when he's called to Bayreuth — because Bayreuth has always been a bit sulfurous and scandalous — Bayreuth, to celebrate Wagner's bicentenary, chooses two Frenchmen, to scandal, each of whom is moreover sulfurous in his own right, right, Boulez for the music and Patrice Chéreau for the staging, and it produces an excellent — it's for the centenary of the first performance
1:13:40 complete performance of the Ring — yes, but sorry, of 1976 — no, no, I'm right at the border, with the bicentenary — that's it, that's it — the Ring of '76, because it was in 1876 that the Ring was performed for the first time at Bayreuth under the conditions Wagner wanted. So I maintain that from that point on he has nothing but praise for Wagner, saying that what's most modern about him is that the music spends its time being metamorphic, progressing without ever going backward, without ever repeating itself — ah yes — whereas before that wasn't the case — that's it, exactly, that's it — and before, he used to say the only time he succeeded at anything was when, instead of painting inflated figures like gods, giants, dwarfs, he painted humans, quite simply — that is, Tristan and The Mastersingers, well, that's not bad taste either, that's true, but still, I mean, it's a bit disparaging, that's it. So I'd like to leave it there for today, but in the end one realizes that yes, to pure music, provided one clearly specifies the concept
Conclusion: a music that can have other destinations 1:14:50 and provided one realizes that there can be a purely musical interest — I prefer that expression, as I said earlier — a vocal quintet in the middle of a Mozart opera, and heaven knows that's often the case, right — so yes, a purely musical interest, but of a music that can perfectly well have other destinations, right, than that sphere — even if it wasn't its purpose, these are dance musics or musics tied to — of course, religious ones. Well since you mention it, I'll add a little appendix to my conclusion, a little appendix: there's a 'Que sais-je' called Dance Music, quite simply, written by musicologists, in which he identifies
1:16:01 in works apparently the furthest removed from dance, in Bach's toccatas and fugues for organ, or even in The Art of Fugue, motifs visibly borrowed, metrical patterns borrowed from dance, from the gigue for example, etc. So, a very good remark. I would not believe in a god who could not dance, as Nietzsche would say. But there it is, long live music that has a purely musical interest, even when it expresses something else. There, perfect, let's cut it there — and thank you, Dominique, for this new session, and we'll no doubt continue next week with great pleasure. Thanks to the audience and thanks to you, Aymeric.
