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The wrong note: popular musics and people music 0:00 There we go, hello Dominique. Hello Aymeric. Hello everyone. We had planned to talk about sonic ghettos, which is a way of approaching… Yes, sonic ghettos is a notion that, quite simply, should be starting to become familiar to those who follow what I say about it. I'll allow myself to refer already to the excellent short film "J'en dis du bien," since it wasn't me who filmed it, it was our friend Aliocha, with the collaboration of Pierre-Alain, who worked on our website until he made it, on the Internet, into that very popular page, ever since he put it at the public's service with remarkable interactivity.
0:52 So, the same team had filmed, in the home of our friend Jean-Hermé—by the way, I take the opportunity to say that he kindly lent his apartment—a short film called "La fausse note." You can find it either on our site, the site of our association dominiquepagani.fr, sorry for the self-promotion, and there it's more to pay tribute to those who made the film, or else on YouTube, you type in Dominique Pagani, you'll get a series, and you look for "la fausse note."
1:28 So, either on the site or on YouTube, with "la fausse note," it's freely accessible, and in it I put on trial, in the analytical sense of the term, not the criminal sense, the musical consumption of the vast mass of young people on the planet. So, first observation—I said "on the planet," and here I have to pause for a moment, because someone would say, oh here we go, you're going to pull out the elitist stuff, annoyed by musics that have great popular success. No, no, no, I will never criticize popular musics, I would even say the opposite.
2:10 What I criticize is not popular music but "people" music—not in the plural, because popular musics are extremely differentiated. What relation is there between the polyphony of the Solomon Islands, which is extremely rich, of a polyphonic complexity one wouldn't expect from that region—I recall that in New Guinea people barely master fire, because of the double handicap of virgin forest and very high altitude.
2:43 So one shouldn't conclude that these musics are simplistic. Likewise, among the Pygmies you find very complex polyphonies that have been studied and listened to. On the other hand, it can be very simplistic in civilizations that, on the contrary, benefit from all the advances of technology. But that's exactly what I'm getting at. So popular musics must always be spoken of in the plural; they are, thankfully, as differentiated as the cultural variegation spread across geography thanks to history.
3:22 I'll note in passing—because he would rather like, in the wake of what is negative in Lévi-Strauss, that's my point of view, because I pay tribute to him often, in particular regarding his musical science. But on the other hand, he tends a bit to study cultures like animal species scattered in space. Without history. Instead of accessing their truth, which is one of rich diversity—I'm not denying that—but unfolded in time.
3:59 To the point that, otherwise, one falls into the misunderstanding of believing that one has grasped the difference between, say, West African culture—I'm saying anything, since we're in the realm of anything—and Western culture, by saying that over there, there's still a sense of the collective, of family, of solidarity. Well, you find that in our own countryside not so long ago. Yes, yes, sure. Often at the expense of another collectivity, moreover. Because people are very much in solidarity in the countryside, provided they lynch the first stranger when there's a rape.
4:33 I'm thinking of a village in the West, why not. Anyway. So people think they're talking about African authenticity when in fact they're talking about a moment in time that every culture has known. That of rurality, where it's better to stick together because otherwise salvation doesn't come from below. There you go. So, I repeat, I contrast the rich diversity of popular musics—which I don't dispute at all, but which on the contrary I fully intend to defend in my talk on sonic ghettos—
From rock'n'roll to disco: the great confinement 5:12 But I contrast it with, in the singular, "people" music, which has been invading the planet since roughly the 1950s. We could go back over the divisions since the appearance of what was first called rock'n'roll, which then became, by metonymy, "rock," designating very different musics. Rock'n'roll still had an alternation of beat and offbeat that borrowed from swing, that took a share from jazz. It was, dare I say, already a byproduct of jazz, which is rather well shown in the film Bird, where we see Parker completely stunned to see this new music arriving, with the saxophonist who has five rings on his fingers, about whom Parker says…
5:58 "Does this guy even know how to play more than two chords?" That's its beginning. The beginning of the great confinement. Yes, I'm using Foucault's phrase, inverting it. Yes, there was a great confinement. Yes, whereas he would have taken it for a great liberation. Yes, especially once he'd gone to California to take mescaline, to discover the absolute in hippie trances.
6:32 Well, that's not all there is in Foucault, but anyway, I mean, it's part of the biography. I do nothing about it and I'm not moralizing. He has every right to do what he wants. But one shouldn't confuse, as Hegel would say, the absolute with the night in which all cows are black, or more idiomatically in French, where all cats are grey. So there you go. Yes, the great confinement, almost literally. And here, the bars of the prison would be the bar line of the metric measure that characterizes what is common to all that music.
7:05 "People" music, however hard it tries to recover a fake diversity by changing names—rock quickly became twist, twist became jerk, jerk became… and each time it grows poorer, the more it grows poorer the more the names multiply or grow richer. Then there was disco. In disco, it's flat-out boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. There, there isn't even a beat and offbeat anymore. And there you are. These are the musics I take the liberty of putting on trial, once again in an analytical way in "la fausse note," proceeding in the opposite way from the trial usually made of them in a reactionary manner.
7:48 That is to say, "it hurts my ears, it disturbs my habits." For me, it's the opposite. I find it eminently conservative. Motionless—it hasn't moved since the 1950s in terms of metrics. And on top of that it has grown poorer in timbres, since, with a few exceptions, if I compare it—it's overwhelming, the comparison—to the richness of timbres. I'm sticking purely to the timbre factor, not to the parameter—let's be more rigorous—not the rhythm parameter, not the melody parameter, not the harmony parameter.
8:21 For now, I'll set all that aside. I'll keep only timbre. For fifty years young people have been condemned to ignore the rich diversity that distinguishes, as Verlaine would say, the dream from the dream and the flute from the horn. The flute, the horn, the oboe, the bassoon, the richness of these timbres and their diversity. Now there's real diversity. Reduced down to the amplified string. I say the amplified string to include the electric guitar and the electric bass. There you go. And then everything is amplified afterward, even the keyboard itself, isn't it?
8:52 It's no longer me producing the sound, it's the amplifier that takes care of it. There you go. And especially the monotony of timbres. This isn't a criticism of the fact that there's only a single timbre, in a sense, which is reductive, since what's more monotonous than a string quartet? It's the unamplified string. It's the unamplified string, divided from the first violin down to the cello, in terms of pitch. Yes, absolutely. But at that point… But there's a diversity of harmony, of rhythm.
9:24 There you go. The monotony of timbre is more than compensated. And that's why the quartet remains, even in the most avant-garde contemporary music, the survivor. I'm thinking of Ligeti's quartet, for example, off the top of my head. Which has survived as a genre and a form. We'll come back to that musical distinction. Which has survived everything that could be abolished in the avant-gardes. Symphonies aren't written anymore. Very few concertos are written, a bit more than symphonies.
9:56 Passions are no longer written, cantatas rarely. But the quartet remains, founded by good old Papa Haydn, whom we discussed last time. Developed also by Mozart. There you go, there you go. And as a tribute to Haydn, Mozart dedicates his quartets to Haydn. So, one arrives at the imperishable monument that is the massif of Beethoven's quartets, and Bartók's in the twentieth century, which stand as a kind of symmetry to them.
10:26 And often the parallel has been drawn. There are so many marvels, I don't want to list them all. So there, there is a monotony of timbre, largely made up for, as you say very well, by the incredible—it forces the composer to be much denser and more demanding at the level of surprises in the melismas, in the melody, in the harmonic boldness and in the rhythmic devices, in rhythmic subtlety.
10:56 And that's why the quartet remains a school, a sort of baccalaureate one must pass to be a good composer. It's a bit too easy to grab the audience with a wealth of timbres, it's a bit like color—it's a bit like a color film compared to a black and white one. Whereas, I mean, when all you have is the string quartet and you have to make a masterpiece, then you really have to know how to write. There, I repeat: I'm not criticizing the diversity of timbres, I'm criticizing the reduction on all parameters.
Rhythm versus meter: code and message 11:26 All the parameters, yes. Rhythm reduced to the metric, to the TGV, or rather even to the train that preceded the TGV, where you no longer feel the jolts between the rails. The TGV, even smoother. Or rhythm, what they call rhythm but which is in fact only the measure—there's nothing more mechanical than the measure. The measure is what's written on the score even before a single note has been put down on it. A sheet of music paper is a paper on which there are signs.
11:58 With the measures, we still have nothing. The bar lines aren't necessarily even taken up. That means that time is divided abstractly, as a Kantian a priori, quite simply. And then it's up to the composer. And here, on the other hand, I pay tribute to Lévi-Strauss for saying that all the composer's talent lies in anticipating this expected metric on the part of the listener, either by delaying it or by speeding it up—in any case, by catching up while maintaining rigor. And so rhythm is rather what opposes the metric, what surprises it.
12:28 It's also the talent of great dancers to always be, pardon the barbarism, "challenging" the center of gravity, taking risks in relation to falling. "Challenger"—that's old French. Ah, well, thank you. Thanks for the validation. No, I'm being a bit Canadian. There you go, that's it. Québécois. Hence the syncopations, indeed. Greetings to our friends across the Atlantic, where I have quite a few… Sorry? Hence the syncopations, where you play with, but against, the bar line.
12:59 It never falls exactly on the beat, precisely. Exactly. Syncopation is one of the most fundamental forms of this attempt by the good composer to catch out the expectation of what should be obvious in the listener's anticipation. And of course the listener is both frustrated and fulfilled, isn't that so? By this play between… let's be clear, between the code and the message. There you go, another dialectic.
13:30 There you go, exactly. A tension to be maintained between two parameters. There you go, I take the opportunity to recall—for what it's worth, all this is approximate—that Lévi-Strauss makes a tripartition, not such a bad one, of the musical repertoire, if only sticking to the classical repertoire, saying that there are musicians of the code, musicians of the message, and musicians of the myth. That's his tripartition. He gives an example: Bach is a musician of the code, we roughly understand what he means.
14:01 He is perpetually in command of a code, being a star of the first magnitude, precisely in the way he… He pushes it to the extremes. He always pretends to transgress it at the very last minute. So we saw an example the other day with the canon from the Art of Fugue, where there's that surprising blue note. So Bach is a musician of the code, Beethoven is a musician of the message, typically—Beethoven is fairly indifferent, not to timbre, but well, I mean, that's not what's most interesting about him.
14:32 What are the timbres of a Beethoven symphony compared to those of Russian music, for example? There's very little orchestral color. Ravel, for instance. Or Berlioz. Thanks for that correlation. The French and the Russians, always in a relation of equivalence in music, it's very curious. You can confuse Ravel and Prokofiev at times. You'll never confuse a Russian musician with a German musician. With a Frenchman, it happens often. And by the way, extending your parenthesis, along the Debussy-Mussorgsky line, for example.
15:03 No, but people used to say to Stravinsky, "Admit it, you ripped off Debussy." To which Stravinsky replied: "I gave back to Russia what Debussy had taken from it." He had taken, yes. Fine, fine, we're not going to keep score. We're going to be like children where it started. But it's true that these are two schools that echo each other. So there is an orchestral richness, an incomparable palette. Which is not the case with Beethoven—you play "da-da-da-dum" on the piano, it's the same message.
15:36 It hasn't lost any of its force. It grabs you immediately. Or it could be done all of a sudden by a men's chorus. But even Wagner on the piano, it works very well. Of course. Tristan on the piano gives you almost Bill Evans if you had the right rhythmic backing. Yes, exactly. All right, well, jazzy. There you go. So, at the level of poverty of timbres, reduced to the amplified string, give or take very little.
Poverty of timbres, rhythms and melodies 16:08 With, from time to time, a brass instrument dropping by, like that, with a note on the fifth, on the dominant. Sorry, the fifth and the dominant are the same thing. On the tonic and the fifth. On the third. I'll give an example, it makes me laugh so much. Major chord, minor chord, but never a seventh. Let's take a hit everyone remembers, by Claude François. "Pour un flirt avec toi, je ferais n'importe quoi," if you recall. Not that it has to be that Claude François song, but it's the same, yes, I understand. No, but… It's three major chords, I think.
16:38 When it breaks off, there are three sad little trumpets going "ta-ra-ta-ta, ta-ra-ta-ta, ta-ra-ta-ta." There you go, that's what we've come down to. I mean, we're a long way from Telemann's trumpet concerto. Just sticking to that, and let's not even mention the trumpet's part in the wonderful first piano concerto by Shostakovich, where the pianist even converses with the trumpeter, who comes in as another soloist in that marvelous concerto.
17:09 I especially recommend the finale. So, poverty of state. Absolute rhythmic poverty, since rhythm is reduced to its zero degree, which is the measure, and within the measure, the binary measure. Why is it that it's recognized as still being in four beats? Sorry? Why is it recognized as still being in four beats and when do we move to two beats, in fact? No, no, no, I'm not talking about binary in the sense of measures, in the sense of…
17:40 No, no, I mean binary in the arithmetic sense. Arithmetic, yes, that's true. Whether it's two or four, all right? These are the musics of symmetry, that's what I mean, arithmetically. The odd is always more subtle. A waltz is always more subtle than a military march. Military marches are always in two or four beats. Exactly. You can go from two to four, the American way, thanks to the swing brought by syncopation, originating with the slaves' work songs from the cotton plantations.
18:21 Americans have often turned the 4/4 of military marches into 2/4. The march of… There you go, and then there's a little offbeat. So, poverty of rhythms, poverty of timbres, melody—let's not even talk about it—sometimes it comes down to a single note.
18:57 Or else a jingle. With two or three notes, or else the simplest possible ditty, with the most basic notes of the scale. It turns its back on everything that could be creativity. Because I don't want this to be misunderstood, as if I were saying that a piece of music has to be complex and difficult to interest you. In Schubert as in Mozart there are melodies of such simplicity. Nothing simpler than that.
19:28 But precisely, that's going to be the subject of an unbelievable set of variations. But there you go! You know the sonata where there's a set of variations? Nothing can be hidden from your musical culture, indeed, yes. It's the statement of the theme followed by a series of stunning variations that end up producing… sorry, sorry, I've got a thread caught between my fingers.
1950s, United States: birth of the sound ghetto 19:58 There you go! So, poverty of themes, poverty of melody, poverty of harmony—this ghetto. Who locked young people into this ghetto? Now, this is where it gets interesting. Because chronologically, these ghettos begin in the 1950s. In the immediate postwar period. I haven't said that before that there was excellent popular music. There was rubbish too, often presented as such, songs made to have a laugh, in a music-hall setting.
20:28 "My spleen's aching, my liver too." Of course, I mean, it was more like a show than concerts that were more interesting for the humorous complicity of the audience than for the strictly musical content, which people hadn't come for anyway. In popular song there are banalities just as there are absolute masterpieces equal to the summits of the so-called noble repertoires.
21:04 I mean, "Le temps des cerises," both in its words and in its melody and the harmonies that enrich it, hasn't aged a bit and there's nothing to redo about it. I mean, there's nothing to add. So, there you go, something happened starting in the 1950s.
21:37 First, as it happens, it comes to us from across the Atlantic. So there's a date, a chronology, for time, and there's a place, for space. Isn't that so? It comes, after all, from what was first called rock'n'roll. And I'll point out that the first big stars, the ones who racked up the sales, were white. Which speaks volumes right off the bat, but I mean, it's Bill Haley, a bit before Elvis Presley—people always think it started with Elvis.
22:09 Bill Haley, Elvis Presley, of course, and it took years before a Ray Charles began to become known. And Ray Charles used to say, "What I can't stand more than anything is the way I get ripped off." I'm thinking of a hit like "I Got a Woman," which became one of Elvis Presley's great successes—he never credited it—but which is a Ray Charles composition. Comparing the two versions is damning. There you go, I won't say for whom—you just have to listen, you'll see soon enough.
22:41 So this is where we see that the art of interpretation, by the way, is the same song, the same melody. But Ray Charles accompanies himself on piano, and we always forget that he's an extraordinary keyboard player, since he plays the organ, of course, as well as the piano. And he has one great flaw, which is that his solos are a bit short. We'd love it to last a bit longer. So this begins in the United States in the immediate postwar period, like the 1950s, that is, the start of the Cold War.
A targeted age group and prevented sublimation 23:23 I'm not saying there's a cause-and-effect relationship, I'm not being mechanistic. I'm not injecting meaning. I'm establishing correlations. In any case, there's nothing inaccurate in what I'm saying. It begins in the 1950s. It comes from the United States and it targets an age group. In any case, the first articles that say "Oh dear, all the seats were smashed in a concert hall in Nice." That's how it started, I remember. I was a kid. And dare I say it, I was drawn to that rumor.
23:53 I hadn't yet heard a single note, which proves it wasn't the music that was attracting this crowd. There's already, and here I'm borrowing from Clouscard's analyses, of course, there's already a posture, a mechanical imitation being offered as a behavioral model. I admit I felt like going and smashing things. You know, when you're 12 years old, I mean, I used to hack away at the plants in my garden with a wooden sword. I mean, at that age, you have destructive urges that it's better to...
24:27 Fortunately, without any means to act on it. That's it. A parenthesis—you who have a wonderful brood of children, you must notice, I don't know anymore, I know parents don't want to buy aggressive toys for their kids. I don't know, a plastic gun with rubber-tipped arrows, etc. It's better for them to exercise their aggression "for fun," as children say, without it counting for real. Agreed?
24:57 Because if that aggressiveness doesn't find an outlet, it risks being exercised later not "for fun" but for real. There you go. I mean, there comes a moment—just look at the legend of Saint Hubert, the patron saint of hunters, who began by exterminating I don't know how many hundreds of deer and so on, in the legend. Until the day he saw the stag, trying to escape him, leap over a staggering chasm, and it had a cross between its two antlers. Well, it's a legend, of course, medieval and Christian.
25:28 But there you go, and then he gave up hunting—or of course there's Perceval too, quite simply, who wounds the merlin-hawk and saw three drops of blood on the snow. So, I was 12 years old, and I already, I already wanted to be one of those young people smashing up chairs, which isn't a big deal to think, in a hall, even though I hadn't yet heard a single note of that music. Television hadn't yet reproduced it, there you go.
26:01 So it targets an age group, the one in which there's an aggressive urge, which has nothing pejorative about it. In fact, that's what's called social engineering, that's exactly it. Puberty is a surge of adrenaline, I can't help it, puberty is the age group targeted. I said 12 years old, that's pre-pubertal. The age group targeted is the one where a surge of adrenaline—I'm no specialist, it's a substance, forgive the pun.
26:39 But I mean, in any case—and here I'm leaving the physiological realm, which isn't my field, for the symbolic field—it's well known that libido is a reserve of aggressiveness. Of course. And the whole point is to sublimate it, to use a Freudian concept, so that, for the moment, it does no damage, but is instead gratifying. There you go.
27:09 Let's stop there before we get bawdy. So, yes, there is indeed a targeted age group, and there's a terrible impoverishment. I just used the word. I'm going to talk about sublimation. A terrible blow to the potential for sublimation present in each of these children, these young people. Yes, but it's true. Because this aggressiveness—wait, Beethoven is a thousand times more brutal than any rock has ever been, at certain moments.
27:42 I use that word deliberately because it fits him. But Beethoven can surprise you with a fortissimo right when you least expect it, right when you were drifting off to sleep in a dream. Since he's not a lyricist—we've already seen this—he's not essentially a lyricist like a Schubert or like most Romantics, like a Brahms or a Chopin, but rather a dramatist, so that just when, as a listener, you're settling into one of the feelings he's been lulling you with, he can suddenly wake you up with a brutality.
Hypothesis: environmentalism, meter and ontologisms 28:13 That's precisely what's proper to the composer. I think that's the difference between the composer and the mere music-maker. I think that's exactly it—composing means moving from one moment to another. You were looking for an equivalent, for music, of the actor's craft for the performer. Yes, that's it exactly. So there is indeed a genesis to these ghettos. Where I speak with a bit more gravity is that I'll go so far as to say—I'll say it for now without proof, because I want to stay within the musical subject, I don't want to broaden the debate too much into other fields—but I'll put forward the hypothesis, which we may have occasion to support at least in sequence, that environmentalism—I do mean environmentalism, not the legitimate concern for our environment, which is trampled on by the rage of destruction, or 'exterminism,' to use Georges Gastaud's term for capitalism.
29:23 So, environmentalism, on the other hand, and its hyper-conservative, reactionary, even fascistic naturalism—environmentalism, the metrics stemming from rock, which we were just talking about, originally from rock, that of the sonic ghettos, and the other forms of ontologism based on race, on color, on visible minorities, as they're called, on the struggle between the genders.
29:59 It's well known that women's enemies are men. Men have done terrible wrongs to Madame Lagarde, or to Condoleezza Rice. I'm speaking of women who are war criminals or peace criminals, whichever you prefer. I say that because after Madame Lagarde's tenure, elderly Estonian women had their pensions cut to 50 euros, some fifteen years ago. About ten years ago. There's a woman at the IMF, so everything's fine.
30:30 There you go, we're in agreement. And much more recently, that is, the other day, Madame Yellen, in Biden's future cabinet, isn't that right? There you go. I mean, a woman can be far more destructive toward the female gender. It's a fact. Just as much, just as much. I don't know, but just as much, yes. Madame Condoleezza Rice, I mean, was a hawk and was behind the famine of many little girls in Iraq.
31:03 Isn't that right? No, no. Madeleine Albright too, Madeleine Albright. There you go, Madame Albright, she's a champion. She even justified that famine. Oh yes, yes, in fact, well yes, meaning: to make an omelet, you have to break some eggs. In the eggs, there were women. Oh yes, indeed. So, this kind of ontologism—that of woman as gender, as biology, that of color, as if Obama could only be a Democrat because he's Black.
31:38 Yes, yes, that's how it's done. So he must have been a civil servant in Indonesia. So he didn't start more wars than that scoundrel Trump. But at least an unmasked scoundrel is always a bit less dangerous than a masked one. That's a personal view, I own it. They're scoundrels and scum in every case. What did you say? I interrupted you. No, no, it's just that Obama's parents were present for the CIA in Indonesia. But of course, of course, of course. No, no, but it's...
32:08 He's someone who advances masked, but not for the same reasons as Descartes. So, once again, the fact of staying like that, of targeting an age group at the time of the Cold War and preventing it from sublimating by doing everything possible for all these reductions we've discussed, which up to now have been descriptive.
One only hears what one expects: Autumn Leaves 32:45 Agreed? After all, I showed that there can be, in Schubert or Mozart, hyper-simple melodies without that being... But no, if you reduce one factor, you reduce all the others too. You reduce all the others. There you go, there you go. At the same time—melody, timbre, rhythm, harmony... When all the parameters are impoverished, that's extremely serious. That means... I see the damage this does, scientifically, I see it at the auditory level. I developed this in La Fausse Note, but it's well known to everyone who has done research on it, including behaviorism—it's extremely precise, with measurements and experiments on sound perception, that we hear only what we expect, that there are...
33:30 ...that perception is predetermined by cultural grids. That's obvious in linguistics, what I'm saying. I remember an experiment done in a behaviorist context, precisely. I found it in Watson's writing, where it's stated that a number of Europeans of different nationalities—a Portuguese, a Czech, a Scot, a Pole, whoever—are made to listen, with their backs turned to the experimenter, who taps on a table at regular intervals and accents every third or every second beat, I don't remember which, it doesn't matter, accenting one at a given moment.
34:12 And each person is asked, there's the proof, which beat the accent falls on. Everyone heard it on the second, on the third, on the fourth. No one agrees, for heaven's sake! First finding: no one agrees. Second finding: not only are the answers not randomly distributed—because you might think one person just has a bad ear, who knows—it depends on the tonic stress? Each person answers based on the placement of the tonic stress in their own language.
34:42 That's called pre-structured perceptual expectations. Yes, that's it. For music, even more so. And I give a precise example in the short film La Fausse Note. I take the well-known melody that became a jazz standard but, for once, is of Parisian origin, thanks to the great love between Miles Davis and Juliette Gréco—since she passed away not long ago, this is a way of paying tribute to her.
35:13 Everyone knows this melody. There you go, I made a cadence, what's called a harmonic cadence. I started from the tonic and returned to it, passing through a few neighboring keys. All notes and back to the tonic. Miles Davis, in a famous recording, one of the first he made with Coltrane and his famous quintet, does this instead. He ends on the tonic, yes.
35:45 It's the same for the whole. There you go. Exactly, he completely thwarts our expectation. Certainly. Except that this E natural is so close to the E flat that it should have functioned like an appoggiatura. It's actually a leading tone, in fact.
36:34 It's the leading tone of the dominant, it's the leading tone of F. Whereas we're in G minor, that is, with B flat as the relative major—let's not bore people with technicalities. But in any case, it's just as scandalous as a leading tone from the old tonal regime. That is to say, it's something condemned by modal music. So, what I'm showing here is that I did the experiment with young people.
37:05 They all hear it—no, they don't perceive it, that's the point. They expect so strongly to land back on the tonic that their ear stays fixed on the fundamentals, and as soon as a slightly more complex piece of music departs from that, even just a little richer, they don't hear it. And yet we didn't play with quarter-tones, we stayed within the division of the well-tempered keyboard. A very basic example, very, very basic on purpose.
37:38 We see the damage being done here to auditory potential. I'm not making an aesthete's case here, saying oh dear, this music is poor. No, it's much more serious than that. That is... The worst part is that you picked an example that's almost a joke, actually, because it's a deliberately emphasized example, it's really a wink, this business of changing right at that exact moment. Of course, of course.
38:10 So look it up on YouTube, you'll find whatever you want. Autumn Leaves, isn't that right—the literal translation of "feuilles mortes," autumn leaves. Miles Davis, Autumn Leaves—make sure it's the version with Cannonball Adderley, because he recorded this tune 36 times. And in that version, with none other than Bill Evans on piano, we hear that famous "wrong note," so to speak, isn't that right? That masterfully calculated "wrong note," as the kids would say, by Miles.
38:42 There you go. So there's everything we're depriving ourselves of when it comes to later getting a young person to listen to music far more complex than this little infraction we've just seen. It's like lifting the weight of Sisyphus. To lift so heavy a Sisyphean weight, your courage would be needed. There you go. Yes, he was thinking exactly that. But that's saying something.
Media, Radio Classique and the dialectic of freedom 39:13 So when I speak of a sonic ghetto, that's what I'm alluding to. And I also observe the media levels—the music segment on the major media channels. Radio stations, but mainly, of course, most often, television channels. The segment is called, "and now, we move on to a music segment," and they bring in the music specialist.
39:44 It's nothing but that kind of music anymore. You'd think this would be the perfect opportunity, given the educational role of a mass medium like television, to draw out—not just young people, but the public in general, and especially young people, but not only them—out of this ghetto and give them access to what the multinationals... Yes, absolutely. I'm even thinking of another ghetto. You tune into Radio Classique in your car.
40:15 You always get the same hits. In a way, you get one movement of a sonata, but not the whole sonata. So in a sense you lose the entirety of the piece. And it's always the same movements we're supposed to know. But it's meant to be reassuring, actually. Because it's true, you get the impression you're comforted in a sort of half-culture, really. It's a real ghetto too. Yes. Because it forces us to do a bit of philosophy, to recall some elements of a philosophy of music.
40:46 That's what we're here for—namely, as we saw earlier, that all the pleasure of listening to music comes from a certain balance between what is expected and what is heard. From a gap. There's a dosage of discrepancy. A dose of discrepancy between what's expected and what's heard. Earlier I made a sort of quip in the form of a maxim, saying we only hear what we expect.
41:23 We'll be waiting even more for that wrong note. So, in other words, there's always a gap, and an age no longer hears. Yes, is it better now? What's glitching? Yes. Hold on, there's a gap, no worries.
41:54 Hello? Yes, listen, no, it's fine, I've got the connection back. No, no, I... So we'll leave a little gap for... We can't make it out. Listen, there's no explanation for that. We'll leave a small gap for editing, there you go. Yes, yes, of course, it's not... Yes, so there's always a gap between the code and the message, to generalize. Between what's expected, which belongs to the order of the code, and the message. That's where we see how considerable the philosophical stakes are.
42:27 It's the relationship between freedom and constraint. The dialectic of freedom and law, which are inseparable. Rousseau speaks of freedom as obedience, and not as the fact of obeying nothing and no one. I think of Rimbaud, a great moment of revolt, if not revolution, where he says, "It is laughable for parents to laugh at the sun, but as for me, I laugh at nothing, and free-being is my misfortune." Or as he says in a magnificent letter, "What I loved was liberty at liberty."
43:01 And Rousseau shows—and here we move from revolt to revolution—precisely that being free, as he says somewhere in Emile so magnificently, is less doing what pleases us than not depending on the labor of another. And obeying the law one has prescribed for oneself, and not one that has been prescribed for you, of course, by some master who would have imposed it arbitrarily and by force. So I'm reminding us here that the music of Bach, around whom there is near-unanimous consensus among practically all musicians that he's truly the master, as they'd say in Africa, was very early on—contrary to what people think, I mean the early-music enthusiasts try to define themselves against a Romanticism supposedly marking the beginning of the end of music, bad taste, etc.—whereas it was actually the Romantics who created the vogue for Baroque music.
Bach rediscovered by the Romantics 44:03 We're dealing with the history of music here, we need to dwell on things like this. Yes, that's true. The St Matthew Passion, one of the summits, to use Furtwängler's phrase, of all Western music, the St Matthew Passion had fallen into disuse by the generation of a Beethoven, for example, practically at the time of Bach's death and even in his final years, since his own sons were already calling him "the old wig." And it became less appreciated because people were moving toward sonata form, toward the new sensibility, which is far less demanding in terms of compositional complexity, particularly contrapuntal complexity.
44:38 ...which was performed for the first time in concert and no longer for the religious service for which it had originally been commissioned—the Passion for the Easter service, of course, for Good Friday—which Mendelssohn, a Romantic, before an audience deeply moved, made up exclusively of Romantic-generation listeners, performed solemnly in Leipzig, something that hadn't been done in a very long time: the St Matthew Passion.
45:12 Beethoven always kept The Well-Tempered Clavier on his piano. Schumann lived his whole life in the cult of Bach. Schumann is a great critic. And all the great musicians after Bach, whether they were fond of counterpoint or not, always end up returning to it in the final phase of their work. I'm thinking of course of the fugue, which multiplies from Beethoven's last sonatas onward, and in the quartets—not even to mention the Grosse Fuge, since I'm speaking of the quartets.
45:42 I'm talking about the fugues found in—especially in—Opus 109, 110, 111, and I'm not even mentioning the countless fugatos, that is, the fugue-like passages found in other sonatas. And as for Schubert, he took counterpoint lessons—in his short life, poor man, he died at 31—he took counterpoint lessons a few months before his death. It was the dimension that he himself felt he lacked.
46:16 Mozart — the anecdote is well known — Mozart was a great friend of Johann Christian, Bach's son, and visiting one day at Johann Christian's — it's Johann Christian himself who tells the story — he sees the very young Mozart, 16 years old, dumbfounded before the scores that Johann Sebastian's son had just brought out for him, scattering them over the carpets, marveling at the fugal writing. This gave us masterpieces such as Mozart's Adagio and Fugue in C minor. Of course, the most grandiose example is the finale of the Jupiter Symphony, the finale of his last symphony, the 41st, Köchel 551, but also the marvelous fugue to which almost the entire overture of The Magic Flute comes down.
Baroque vogue and rock: the same reassuring meter 47:06 And then it passes to the other voices and it passes through all the timbres. Right. So, all this to support my thesis: it's Bach's posterity that created the vogue for baroque music. Why do I dwell on this? Because I'm coming back to my rock'n'roll and the sonic ghetto. It's still incredible that chronology obliges us to say this is measurable. We're no longer in doxa, in opinion, nor in value judgments. That the vogue for the baroque repertoire arises in the 1950s, right when rock appears for a different audience.
47:43 It's curious. What they have in common is the meter. How curious. Not the rhythm — the rhythm is far more complex in Bach than in rock'n'roll. But the common point is that the meter is invariant from one end of the piece to the other. It... it doesn't move until the end of the movement. Furtwängler says it very precisely in his conversations on music. In Bach, rhythm is never an independent element.
48:16 We can see that clearly. Except that here it's the opposite of rock. That is, we don't just have the beat. There are constantly these extraordinary syncopations in Bach. The syncopation of the horns in the first Brandenburg Concerto, from which comes an irresistible urge to dance — one could almost believe it's the sonic transcription of Bruegel's Wedding, Bruegel's Peasant Wedding.
48:49 So it's rather curious that suddenly, in the postwar period, a certain bourgeoisie, which thanks to the Marshall Plan recovers some of its habits of comfort and consumption — you know I have nothing against consumption when it's at the expense of the producer, the creator of goods, the one who gets the least of it — this bourgeoisie suddenly rediscovers this repertoire that had been neglected during the previous century, from Vivaldi's Four Seasons to Bach, let alone.
49:31 The return to Bach had preceded, in the 19th century, all that. Albinoni. And the famous Albinoni Adagio, which was the most widely broadcast hit of the 60s-70s and which is a fake. The public rarely knows it's composed by a contemporary, Giazotto, who arranged a vague basso continuo, without at all the syrupy strings found in the version passed off as Albinoni's.
50:01 There you go. The genius of it is having made fake-old, actually. Yes, exactly — fake old, yes, fake. There's something profound there. I mean, I'll stop being ironic. As if, whether on a sophisticated mode — I won't say noble, that's a social value judgment — that is, the baroque repertoire, or whether the extremely impoverished sonic ghettos reserved for young people in the suburbs, for example — the meter is nonetheless the same.
50:38 As if it corresponded to a need for security, since the regular meter mainly serves to make the stretch of time opening before me not threatening, since I can predict it — it repeats identically. When you have one bar of a rock beat for three seconds, you can be sure the others will follow. There won't be a break. There. The break in the history of music, you'd date it to Mozart, I think, regarding the sonata form?
Haydn and Mozart: the break with continuous meter 51:13 Of that meter? The break in that meter, the fact that we play entirely on silence. There's silence and silence, indeed. Let's say — I said last time, I'll recall it — that Haydn is the first to break this continuous meter, this continuo bass. Yes, yes, exactly. The obbligato bass, as they say in musicological terms. Figured bass, a technique later taken up by jazz.
51:46 We use it for the chords exactly as in the baroque era. Yes, Haydn — when I say the first, be careful, let's leave the very first to the specialists. It's not purely a matter of chronology. There's always someone earlier who made timid attempts. In fact, the sonata form, for example — it's Haydn who's the first to give it masterpieces through his compositions. But it's little known that it was the so-called Mannheim school, with lesser-known composers like Stamitz, who perfected the form at that time.
52:18 There you go. So there are two births for a musical form. There's its properly chronological, material birth, so to speak, and then its birth as the first masterpieces that make this form resonate. So Haydn is the first to produce breaks in the musical narrative, questions without immediate answer, delayed resolutions, which well reflects the new form of anxiety beginning to emerge in modernity — expressed elsewhere too, I think, in literature, in what's been called the Sturm und Drang school, pre-romantic if you like.
53:06 On the other hand, I'm thinking of the clarinet concerto, which is... There are moments where this break becomes overwhelming and grave as a stake, under Mozart's pen. And indeed, in the clarinet concerto, which is one of his very last works, Köchel 620 and some, in its finale precisely, which is a kind of rondo where the clarinetist shows off all his skill, his flourishes — that's the purpose of a concerto at the time.
53:50 The finale must leave the listener on a cheerful note, so rather a bit like... especially when there's no scherzo, as is the case in the concerto, on a note that contrasts with the melancholy of the slow movement, which is almost paradisiacal in the case of the clarinet concerto. To break with this fascination with melancholy, it's been noted that the clarinet as a timbre, and the key of A major, that of this concerto, are always connoted with sensuality in Mozart.
54:29 We find it again of course in the admirable clarinet quintet with strings, also in A major, and the piano concerto in A major, which also bathes in a kind of autumnal melancholy full of voluptuousness — not a deathly melancholy, not at all, on the contrary. So, languor, yes, very 18th-century. Now, in this finale, these flourishes, these rondos, these scales, these runs, these arpeggios, suddenly stop.
55:08 An angel — I don't know how many angels — passes, and the rondo resumes as if nothing had happened. As if Mozart had suddenly been overcome by weariness. As if he were saying, 'Will I be able to keep up my role as courtly musician to the end, delivering my finale, leaving the listener on...' He drops them right at the worst moment, actually. He has anti-romantic modesties, if ever there were any.
55:42 This time, in the laudatory sense — as someone put it very well — tears bead in Mozart, but they don't flow. And that's the case with this passage of the clarinet concerto you were alluding to. It's strange, because compared to 18th-century sensibility, moreover, the fact that the tears don't flow is an extreme restraint, because when you think of Rousseau, coming back from the house where he saw Diderot and had his intuition regarding... If it was, as you said, really a thing of the era, Diderot, shedding whale-sized tears over Greuze.
56:17 'I was bathing my waistcoat in tears.' Exactly. Because he has an intuition en route. There you go. And when he comes back, he himself notices that his waistcoat is wet. That's it, exactly. So, we talk a lot about the 18th century. It's a given fact. And Diderot raves over Greuze's paintings where everyone is crying. Before the December of... — no, there's definitely something of the era there, for sure. And... they say everything ends in songs, but everything also begins in tears.
56:52 But in Mozart, there's obviously the imprint of the galant style, as it was called at the time. Of course, of course. And since I mentioned the finale of the Jupiter Symphony earlier, where he recovers the unheard-of mastery of writing of his great ancestor Johann Sebastian, his great predecessor, we've spoken about this movement as an unprecedented union of the galant style and the learned style. There you go, the reunion of the two.
A black hole: people music levels popular musics 57:22 Well, we clearly see all these musical paradises, don't we, of which — I come back to it — millions of young generations are deprived by being locked into a ghetto. I think we're understanding more and more precisely what I call the ghetto, a bit like a black hole. One of its characteristics is such gravitational density that not even light manages to escape it. The more this music is hammered — and I return to what I was saying earlier about the media — the music section now, instead of covering at least several musical genres.
58:02 I don't know, say on Monday the music section covers classical, Tuesday jazz, I'm just making it up, Wednesday world music, playing Moroccan Gnawa music — I don't know if the world is rich, or the music accompanying traditional Japanese theater. Then Thursday rock'n'roll, Friday rap — there's plenty to draw on. No.
58:32 It's always the same groups, of a lamentable monotony and a staggering musical poverty, that occupy the music section in the big mass media. It's not even 'youth hour,' it's 'music hour.' It's unprecedented, I mean. It's the first time in human history that the same tunes, the same refrains, the same tracks — to speak like iTunes — are heard between 10pm and 2am in a nightclub in Tokyo, in Abidjan, in Montreal, in Buenos Aires, in Paris.
59:14 In other words — and here I return to the criticism that would say you're defending elitist music against popular music — it's the opposite. This 'people' music has flattened the rich diversity of popular musics. That's never been seen in history, and even less so across geography. A popular music — I'll develop this now, giving an embryonic philosophical status to these words we often use without reflecting on them.
59:44 There are at least two meanings of 'popular music' that are not only different but can be opposed. A music is popular either because it's the expression of a determined people — thus, I'll tell you about the polyphonies of the Solomon Islands shortly, that's the music of the peoples who inhabit that archipelago. The popular music of Finistère isn't the same — I'm thinking of instruments that are anything but the Celtic harp, which never existed in Brittany, by the way, that's very 'people.'
1:00:29 There has never been a Celtic harp in Brittany. Well, but the Vieilles Charrues festival will make you believe otherwise, won't it? And watch out, I'll get lynched if I say that over there, because there are economic and commercial stakes now, with these festivals and this regionalism that always comes with the same dimensions — regionalism, anti-Jacobinism, of course, regress. We saw the red vests, the red caps, no? Weren't the red caps in Brittany? There you go.
1:00:59 Super-Poujadism, well, anyway, I'll stop there because otherwise I'll get worked up. A popular music, in the first sense, then, is the expression of a determined people. There's a whole heritage at stake here. And so necessarily diverse, since the accordion-based popular music of the northeast, for example, with the polka or the mazurka, is quite different from the tango they used to listen to in Toulouse.
1:01:29 Yes, exactly, in the southwest generally and in Toulouse in particular. All of that has been flattened. Now, from the 1950s on, it's either the Beatles for everyone, or... It's unprecedented. So there, I mean, we never talk about it. Yet these are strictly extraordinary phenomena, whether in historical terms or geographical terms — I'm talking about it.
1:01:59 He complains — rightly so — that because of our waste in the ocean, it has wiped out many species of marine fauna but also flora, and that only a single variety of algae still grows... This music is the equivalent of that, like a cancer. It has wiped out all other forms of vitality in order to spread like an impoverishing hydra.
Music education and world music 1:02:29 There you go, I interrupted you. No, no — I see a contradiction between the possible access to these musics, since after all it's now available from every direction, and the fact that it isn't happening. But it's also linked to music education, which isn't... which should be distributed rather... ear training. Well, I think that's also what hasn't followed. There's technical access, in fact, which doesn't develop productive forces that have worked through the relations of production, where precisely music education is always what comes last.
1:03:02 It's always what... And yet... it's part of humanity's very being. Just as the paintings of Lascaux clearly show we're a speaking species, we're also... a music-making one. I even think that since prehistory we see instruments. It's part of our being. It's even a negation of what we are to deprive ourselves of music, or to simplify it to the point of caricature. And it seems to me, yes, this contradiction is there — that at once access is possible and the desire to access it is repressed.
1:03:36 But it's a contradiction of the mode of production we live in, it seems to me. At least. At least, that's it. I don't have the solution by saying this, but at least we try to show the problem. And there, of course, the most important thing is what you're commenting on. But there, that's roughly to sum up what it evokes for me. I'll mark a pause for editing, because I'm going to go warm up a coffee if you don't mind. Yes, very well.
1:04:06 Excellent. There you go, because I'm keeping the thread. It'll be 33 seconds. Yes, yes. A reheating of this morning's coffee. Well, I think this chapter is important. Yes, yes, absolutely. There, I always record a priori, because otherwise I'd have trouble with the filing. You do what you want with it in editing afterward.
1:04:36 Yes, yes, or Pierre-Alain, whatever I'd like. I don't know how you two get along. Yes, yes, I send him everything. Don't worry, nothing's ever lost with him. Speaking of which, we should talk about it. I need to tell you something very quickly. Yes, yes. Wait, but is this still recording, Dominique? So, I don't know, but there are... All right, all right. Sorry. We'll talk about it afterward. I'll cut it out after. Yes, something that interests Éditions Delga.
1:05:07 There. I've set it to 52 seconds, it shouldn't be too long.
1:05:42 Thank you.
1:06:12 Sorry. It's true that music education — I can see it clearly even in France — at least from middle school onward, I think there's at least one hour of music per week in every middle school. Yes, a nicely watered-down sequence, you have to adapt it to children's level. Yes, there are different ways to dodge the issue.
1:06:42 What I'm saying is unfair to some who try to fight against this great enclosure, I mean, there are some. Yes, for sure. But it's unfortunately a minority. So, precisely, I... I think what's missing most is the militant aspect in this education, and that's why you're right. Resistance, there you go. We have to name the enemy, because otherwise... otherwise we fall into demagogy and lose the very meaning of what we're supposed to teach.
1:07:13 So... we have to name the enemy, because when we talk about 'world music,' for example, it's just a way of facing what I'm saying, the fact that there is indeed a music of 'the world' that has thus wiped out the rich diversity of popular musics. We forget that 'the world,' 'the globe,' is not a world without a master. Oh, certainly not. So it's the music of a single one.
The music center in Niger: demand exceeding supply 1:07:43 It's the master's music. Ein Welt, ein Reich, ein Führer. It's truly... So, musically, that's never been seen with such efficiency. Exactly. So you raise the didactic problem, of fighting it through music teaching. God knows what I've tried in my life. First, it was my job and my role as project manager of the Music Center in Niger, which operated thanks to your taxes, since it's the European Union — isn't it — that's now finished.
1:08:17 I was paid so well, thank you. And between us, I mean... Well, I'm spitting a bit in the soup regarding former employers, but still, let's be clear. I mean, the European Union — you should see the state Niger is in, where this center was set up, or Mali, equally among the poorest countries in the world, in what's called the LDCs, the Least Developed Countries. These delightful acronyms found in international organizations for development aid are, in fact, instruments that mainly serve to keep them in underdevelopment.
1:08:56 No but, it's true, isn't it — we squabble like ragpickers among French, Germans, English, Japanese and Koreans over who's going to sell their junk. All we'd need now is for Nigeria, with its 150 million inhabitants, to join the dance. Yes, yes, yes. Who's crazy? That's a very common expression in Abidjan, from the man in the street. Who's crazy? I've heard — it's not about creating one more competitor. We already have trouble with the ones that already exist...
1:09:26 Yes, of course, yes, exactly. Development aid doesn't mean anything, well, anyway, as long as it's not done by democratic communities, of course, among themselves. Yes, yes, I believe so. It's not Comic-Con, in any case, that's for sure. Well, there you go. So it's still no coincidence to notice that when you want to teach precisely, to establish resistance to this sonic diktat, at the start you're handicapped by what I raised earlier, the ear has become impoverished.
1:10:10 But when you persist and take your time, I've never seen a single young person who wasn't enthusiastic about the things they're introduced to. Otherwise, their demand is far greater than the supply offered to them. That's the new statement I wanted to make to you. Let me use a metaphor, for what it's worth, well, a comparison, a metaphor for what it's worth. But a guy coming out of the clink who's eaten what we can imagine for a long time, let's rather take a jail in a developing country to make it even truer, then they give him a stale crust of bread, it's like a brioche to him when he gets out.
1:10:51 It's Hegel's famous statement, that by the ease with which spirit is satisfied, one can measure the extent of its loss. So these guys jump at the first music that comes along because they have a demand that's invested in whatever offering they find nearby, unfortunately. So we need to enrich the offering that goes out to meet this demand. That's the heart of music education.
1:11:21 And I've never seen otherwise—on the contrary, I remember a kid in Niger, I say a kid, he was 17. I recall that this center was in a working-class neighborhood and that it was practically free, there was a symbolic registration fee, but I mean, given the average standard of living in Niger, it wasn't a matter of running a paying school. So these were people who came from social nothingness—socially, not sociologically—and coming from all over the region a bit.
1:11:55 Some of them were fleeing the massacres in Liberia, their younger brothers coming to take refuge in countries where there wasn't yet a war at the time. Since we've been doing what we know in Libya, the whole region has been in shambles, unfortunately. I had the pleasure of running into him again a few weeks ago. He left Niger, he's built a career in Abidjan, he teaches piano thanks to the training he received at the center back then. And I remember him because this kid, who knew nothing of Western music except Vanessa Paradis—I mean the hits of the time, there's worse, there's better—but who only knew the watered-down stuff offered by Radio France Internationale or whatever else they could latch onto.
1:12:43 I remember he had become smitten with Debussy, he had started... and also with Bartók's Mikrokosmos, very practical for this form of resistance you were alluding to. It's a method for learning music, with pieces that are technically very simple at the start, which right away play with other sonic scales, including even beyond the C-major mode, so it's unhoped-for. Well, this boy said to me, with a tear in his eye, 'Sir, don't you have any more scores by the French Impressionists?'
Rock musicians, jazz musicians and Jimi Hendrix 1:13:23 A few weeks earlier, he only knew the watered-down variety fare of Radio France. Yes, it happens very fast actually. It's really extraordinary, isn't it. So that's rather comforting. Yes, absolutely. And a few times, I've seen rock band musicians, guitarists, drummers, especially keyboard players—I say that because they're not pianos, most of the time they're synths.
1:13:55 And not even digital pianos—because I have nothing against digital pianos—but outright synths. Who would pounce on jazz musicians after a Nougaro concert. Nougaro is one of the singers who was best accompanied since the postwar period. He was backed by the cream of French jazz musicians. I'm thinking of Maurice Vander on piano, who plays through Schumann's complete works once every winter to keep his skills up, for example.
1:14:25 Who is a tremendous jazz improviser. I'm thinking of Eddy Louiss, who accompanied him, undoubtedly the greatest jazz organist in Western Europe, and who at 16 was one of the male voices in the famous vocal group Les Double Six. So it was a jazz elite that backed Nougaro's songs, an elite that knew its stuff very well. I actually met him once, I was with the fishmonger Luis Chiavo, in a jazz club that no longer exists, called Riverbop, right near Odéon.
1:15:02 And who could guess within a few seconds, from a three-note piano introduction, which theme the pianist was about to launch into. He had a vast jazz culture. Now why am I bringing this up? Because rock musicians would pounce on jazz musicians. It was he who told me this story. It's Maurice Vander. No, it's René Urtreger, same thing. The French Bud Powell, as he was called, who told me, 'He just asked us how you make that chord.'
1:15:37 Whoever can do more can do less. Exactly. When you see the harmonic, rhythmic and melodic diversity of a jazz pianist, of course the rock musician says to himself, well, maybe I could vary the effects by asking him how he does it. You shouldn't be content with doing something really basic when asked to play an A minor seventh. There are multiple ways to voice it. Let me give another example. If there's one absolute idol of the guitar at the popular level, it's Jimi Hendrix.
1:16:11 I even set aside the extra-musical reasons that make him a pop idol. I come back to drugs, since we mentioned breaking chairs earlier. To begin with, it's not really the music that's the main draw. The cursed-genius side that's always... The 'young at the time,' yes. There are also excellent musicians involved. Parker had the honesty to say, I never played so badly as when I was high. Yes, yes. We have to be clear about that. Good. And...
1:16:43 And when one of the greatest classical pianists—this makes me think of it, very little known to the general public because it goes back to the 1930s—but when one of the meteors of the history of contemporary piano, taking the 20th and 21st centuries, I'm thinking of Josef Hofmann, very little known to the general public, of Polish origin despite his German name, but who lived in the United States, who was an engineer, who made inventions, who had a prodigious memory, who had to...
1:17:16 For whom a foundation, American society ladies, forbade his father from having him perform because he was too young. It was a childhood... And so he interrupted his piano studies and resumed them at 18. He was ahead of all the... Joseph Hofmann. Look him up on YouTube, there are a few recordings, alas not enough, very technically unforgiving, but then you're stunned by what he does with pieces you thought you knew well. Look at what he does with Chopin's first ballade, or rather the fourth, I don't think it's the first, by him, it's staggering.
1:17:50 Well... Now, he left the stage at one point, around age 70, because he was an alcoholic. That's when he started to falter. As Parker said, I never played so badly as when I was high. But there are some for whom, on the contrary, it's in drugs that they'd draw their inspiration. Jimi Hendrix, even when he's on form, a guitarist who knows his instrument—well, I mean, you'd really have to never have heard a quarter of a solo by a Jim Hall, a Kenny Burrell, I'm speaking among jazz guitarists, by Barney Kessel, by Charlie Christian, of course by Wes Montgomery, or by Joe Pass, who spent 15 years in prison, because I believe he'd been in a gang that killed a policeman, and who came out of it as the leading guitarist of his generation, who made admirable duets with acoustic guitar and Ella Fitzgerald, a staggering version of Lush Life, there you go.
1:18:55 Not to mention the whole great tradition of Gypsy jazz guitar inaugurated by our own national Django, for whom, across the Atlantic, people still have the greatest respect to this day, by the way. It's hard to be satisfied with the ascending and descending blues chord runs of Jimi Hendrix, which he does very well, those ascents and descents, but still, it's far more monotonous and impoverished. I know I'm being sacrilegious saying this, people are so unlistened-to, they're sincere!
1:19:29 They're dazzled by his technique, it's true he knows how a guitar works, but it's far less difficult than what the people I just listed do, except they don't give the impression it's difficult, they don't show off. They don't race through arpeggios at top speed—no, that's not it—but they take harmonic and melodic risks, we're back to the same point, and rhythmic risks, which you rarely see in Jimi's music. That's it for that. But even so, in the 70s you still had a virtuosity that was appreciable in rock, with, as you say, solos that were often shortened.
1:20:08 Absolutely. But for example, solos completely disappeared after the 80s. They started by shrinking, with fewer and fewer notes, and disappeared entirely. Quite right, of course. Of course. The most stripped-down rock and roll. Another point, the principle of the cadenza, for example, the virtuosity of an instrument, that's something that came in a direct line from the concerto, ultimately. It was made for that, there was a little window of time in which the soloist had to show everything he could do. There you go.
The ghetto's jailer and its benefits 1:20:38 Exactly. That's part of the militant culture. Which was most of the time improvised and which, starting with Beethoven, began to be written down. That's it, that's right. It happens that Beethoven offers three cadenzas to choose from to soloists in his concertos. There you go. So, once again, when I speak of a ghetto, it's not an image chosen at random. It means there's a master. It means there's a jailer. It means there's an interest at stake. Because these young people never got to spread out into the region. It means there's a punishment.
1:21:09 It means... It means that we must always be wary of popular music left to its own devices, and not just reduce it to the monotony of pop music. Yes, absolutely. We mustn't forget the role of revolutionary songs during the Revolution. From the Carmagnole to the Marseillaise, and so on. And the success of a Béranger in the 1840s-50s, I mean, you have to look at the success of these songs in the opposition of the time.
1:21:44 And Gavroche dies singing. Of course. 'It's Voltaire's fault, it's Rousseau's fault.' I fell to the ground, it's Voltaire's fault. Nose in the gutter, it's Rousseau's fault. And if one dies on the ground, and so on. So there are multiple benefits to this sonic-ghetto operation. First, the aggressive drive is deprived of all sublimation.
1:22:16 And so the rock fan bangs his head against the wall in time. You could say, it feels good when it stops. I don't know, I mean, but it's terrible. I'm thinking here especially—it's tragic what I'm about to say, but... Right after the fall of the Berlin Wall, we saw individuals of African origin, who were numerous as exchange students in the German Democratic Republic, get beaten to death with baseball bats in the outskirts of Dresden or Leipzig by skinheads, as they'd be called.
1:22:48 Now, they had their own music, it was hard rock, metal, heavy. Because you could draw distinctions within these ghettos. Within this sonic poverty, it doesn't have... it doesn't have quite the same content nor the same form, of course, depending on whether joints are being passed around in a luxurious apartment in the 16th arrondissement, in which case you'll be listening to whale song, making spacey ambient music. Whereas heavy metal will be reserved for the poor kid from the suburbs, or the one who's 18 somewhere in Lorraine, after three generations of unemployed people and industries there too razed and destroyed, riding around on his moped with the exhaust pipe sawed off to make noise, the only way left to feel he matters, really, is to annoy passersby.
1:23:41 Around the war memorial, wondering what to do with themselves. And those ones listen to heavy metal, of course, and resent Blacks, Arabs, etc. There you go, we always find the same content. So it's interesting too to see how it breaks down by audience. Latin music, which brings everyone together. Latin music is the extra soul, because there's a displacement, an off-beat, a syncopation, which lends itself better to dance, and so to conviviality, let's say, to sharing.
1:24:19 And since forever, my grandparents' generation listened to the rumba. Then it was the tango, chronologically, the biguine—Caribbean music isn't a thing of today. Now, from a certain generation on, it's been enriched with new rhythms. But I mean, there's always been, alongside the hard, metric hardness I've talked about enough, of Anglo-Saxon Nordic origin—I dare not say barbaric—there's always been the extra soul brought by the Latin component.
1:25:04 And that's what made it so that, for a long time, before Castro, Cuba was the bourgeoisie's brothel. Yes, it's a division of labor, a distribution of tasks, really. There you go. Haiti, the one for homosexuals from Florida, Americans in general, US citizens to be precise. Cuba, for all the addicts, right? You even see it in football, for example.
1:25:34 There's a way of playing, American-style, that's pleasant to watch, quite simply. Because you're not dealing with catenaccio, you're not dealing with people who play everything on brute force, booting the ball. You have to keep in mind that music and sport were, for a long time, the only two possible escape routes for African-American youth. How to get out of the ghetto—and there, the ghetto in the most literal or the most sordid sense, whichever you prefer—it's terrible in places like Chicago, it was either becoming one of the great sprinters of the era.
1:26:12 I notice, again, it's not in tennis or swimming that they were available. That requires equipment, that requires countries with a high standard of living. It's no coincidence. If the great gold medals in swimming and tennis for generations went first to Australians, white South Africans, and so on. If you fly over Cape Town or Melbourne, there are mosaics of swimming pools. So of course there are exceptions. That says that there, all you need is your own body. Athletics. Then basketball.
1:26:44 Those were the escape routes. Then American football. That and jazz at the time were two ways to make crowds of white people dance in the evening. We even find, in jazz, apparently the habanera is one of the sources among others of jazz. So we also find... The what, sorry? The habanera. Of course, of course. And which spawned offshoots even in classical music.
A listener's question on techno; danger and hope 1:27:14 There are habaneras in Ravel, there are some in Chabrier, there are indeed. There you go. So, I think we can leave it there for that. We could go on at length, but I wanted to sound a bit of an alarm bell against, I repeat, against this impoverishing cancer. Which... So, yes. Yes, yes, I would still like to quote this boy who's an illustration of it.
1:27:48 Here's the question I alluded to at the start of my talk. I'd like to close by dealing with this question, if I may. I need to redo the code. So, there. There. Hello. Having watched a few of your association's talks and videos, I obviously became aware of Mr. Pagani's musical knowledge. So I was wondering, being directly involved—the young man speaking—if he had studied, I'll say it in his style, whether he had studied and would like to share an analysis of techno music, of trance, T-R-A-N-C-E, as well as related styles.
1:28:30 I haven't read a great deal, but I believe rock, with the growing Americanization starting with the Marshall Plan, was a new code of integration into liberal-libertarian society. There's a young man—he says he hasn't read much, he's being modest, because he clearly managed to sidestep quite a few kinds of censorship in writing that. Good. I was wondering whether these more recent styles of music—more recent than rock, meaning techno, techno and electro—fit into the same process and the same analysis, or whether there was something extra, because I have the feeling, perhaps mistaken, quite nuanced, that there's something extra already in the use of drugs during these events.
1:29:15 [continuing the analysis]. There already were drugs before, I suspect, but different ones, I think. What I've noticed is that in rock, singers would smash their guitars on stage, or wouldn't hesitate to do anything at all, I'm quoting him, whereas at rave parties, there's more of an atmosphere of 'respect'—he put quotation marks around 'respect.' I'm not aware of a DJ who smashed his mixing table to create euphoria. People consume, but not too much either, not everywhere of course, people drink, but you always have to have fun, not be too forward on the dance floor.
1:29:46 Common sense. He's describing for us the well-tempered hooligan. So, to defend their rave party, he runs into the very critique Clouscard used to make, saying: 'The height of it is seeing that music of protest—rock, whatever, rap, what have you—is now supervised by riot police and gendarmes in some designated spot.' It's one of the... You negotiate with the concert organizer that nobody... It's already extraordinary.
1:30:18 Like the integrative power of capital over whatever claims to subvert it. It devours these musics whole. There's more of an atmosphere of respect at raves. People drink, but you always have to have fun, not be too forward on the dance floor. I go on being close to one another, but not too intrusive. In short, I was wondering whether this also had to do with the music itself, as such. Everything he says is very astute. So far he's only talked about extra-musical behaviors—smashing gear, smoking joints, etc.
1:30:50 But here, the music itself—in what way could it itself be, so to speak, reactionary? And he says the following. Music as such. In gabber music, for example, in the Netherlands, it's more about excess. There are more BPM. BPM, beats per minute. More metric constraints. Well, that's probably a trivial observation. How do techno music and its derivatives fit into the ideological developments since the start of the counter-revolution? To what extent does this get passed on?
1:31:22 Particularly in the rhythm, which is completely binary, with higher and higher BPM, beats per minute. Might there not be some part of this music... It's poignant. And I really commend him for his frankness and, in turn, the relevance of his question. Might there not be some part of this music that could be used for revolutionary ends? There's this wonderful parenthetical remark—because I really like this—'but I'd hate to be contributing to the counter-revolution.' Superb.
1:31:53 A political scruple. That's typically the kind of question where he already has the answer. The very fact that he phrases it that way means he already has the answer. He's saved, that one, he's saved. Thank you very much. I hope my question isn't too broad or too confused either. There you go. I don't think there's a better conclusion than seeing that there's both danger and hope at once. Yes, of course, exactly. There's a threat, and thankfully there are ways out. If only this could be heard by music education institutions in general—there's work to be done.
1:32:29 Yes, exactly. Absolutely. A job of passing things on. There you go. In any case, he wouldn't have sought you out if he hadn't already found you, at least in relation to his own anxiety. As for me, I'm also involved with Africa. That helped me become aware of all this. It's my African listeners. I mean, when I realized that street kids in Abidjan, guys who say 'I'll watch your car while you park,' really, socially, they do it. What's more, the kids who watch your car get shaken down afterward by slightly older ones, a year or two older, who slap them around to take the money you gave them.
1:33:08 When those kids know nothing of music except the commercial hits that come from over here, completely unaware of the richness of their own traditional music, that of their parents, it hit me somewhere. And seeing, in my music center, just how much—I'll name him, he was called Sido, Kaila—who said to me, with a tear in his eye, 'don't you have any new scores by the French Impressionists?'
1:33:42 So it came from that same soil. There you go. There's hope. Great, let's cut it there. I'm stopping the recording. Socialism is the youth of the world. Bravo. I'm stopping the recording.
