Our mind is made in such a way that we will never have the last word on anything: scarcely had we escaped from the traditionally “musical,” the conditioning of civilized musical man, to discover the reservoir of musical potential in the sound object, than we had to allow not only musically trained listening to this object but, furthermore, equally musicianly invention of objects suitable for the musical. In this to-ing and fro-ing from the conventionally musical to still untamed sound, we should nevertheless note that we are becoming richer, freer at every stage: the question raised by the sound object and the ways of listening to it make us reflect on what we call the musical. Reapplying this purified, liberated musical intention to the sound object, we discover potentialities there that, even if they are not easy to use, are nevertheless consonant with activity that is both musicianly and musical, and through which music was and is still being invented.
Now, all our listening exercises have led us to distance ourselves from two things: the present musical system, which restricted our ears to conventional “values,” and natural listening, which referred back to indicators or sound anecdotes. We have gained from these acrobatics. In fact, we have continuously oscillated between two ways of using sounds, mostly mutually exclusive: their use as indicators, focused solely on the event, and their use as signs, entirely subjugated to the code. A piece of musical research can only avoid choosing between these two poles by taking them both on board. The essence of the phenomenon of music may well be in this dividedness, this ambivalence.
We must now draw out the consequences of these two sorts of statements:
• The musical message, contrary to the message of codes, is not used up in a series of signified-signifier relationships, any more than the element of music is reduced to a sign defined exclusively by its role in the context.
• Moreover, far from specializing his phonations, the nature and the ways of using sources and sounds, the musician combines them, as it were, at will: cowbells, drums, strings and wind, human and electronic sounds, the old and the new, the barbaric and the refined.
We cannot but ask, yet again, the same two questions:
1. Alone among other “speakers,” the musician has not managed to define the musical object. Does he not know his own code? Or is it only partly a code, in other respects obeying natural laws?
2. Alone among so many users of sound, the musician uses disparate sources. Does he therefore, implicitly and approximately, possess the key to sound objects?
We will try, hypothetically, to see what research based on one of the two hypotheses would be like: the hypothesis that sees the essence of the phenomenon of music in the sign, defined by its function in a conventional system, and not the one that considers the essential to be the sound object, recognized as a unit in perceived structures.
What we have learned from linguists helps us no longer to confuse the sign with a physically preexisting reality: even if the definition of pertinent features, or values, appears to be relevant in a given musical system, we will stop trying to interpret other systems in terms of the pertinent features of our own. There is no doubt that in contemporary musics, even orchestral, a study of this kind gives us other constituent objects in addition to those indicated by a no longer adequate notation—provided that this study of structures is done after the event and is not confused with the a priori schemas of composers.
We would stop here if, as is the case with linguists, our subject were simply based on observation. All we would then have to do to give an account of the nature of musical objects as opposed to their function would be to describe the instrumental conditions for their realization and their acoustic properties. Where perception is concerned, only the various conditioned musical perceptions would be of interest to us. We would gain access to the generally musical by comparing systems; it would simply be their shared structural laws. It would be superfluous to go back to the musical object.
This approach is convenient. We cannot do without it. We cannot know the results until it has been attempted. We must not forget, however, that it will only inform us about musical language systems: it would remain to be proved that language systems are the most important thing in music. We have seen that this is only true at the limits, with so-called pure musics—that is, musics genuinely represented by their symbols. Above all, it would only tell us about musics that have already been made.1 Now, our subject, we must not forget, deals with musics that are possible just as much as and even more than these. So our study must be seen not as a posteriori but as a beginning: at this stage we cannot tell what our choice of objects or their relationships will be or how they will be defined.
We will now move on to the opposite argument. This time, we are not dealing with a system that can be analyzed into meaningful elements since we are starting out from sound as given. How will we go about it?
If we were a philosopher, or rather a pure mathematician, we should be tempted to treat this problem in the absolute, from sound objects in general, of which there is no prior definition, except this: “everything that is audible.” And then? With a little thought we can quite soon see that, however infinite the diversity of these objects, we can quite easily list some of their “infinities.” For these objects are not abstractions. They must have a source somewhere and come from an energetic agent that gives them life. The question we must therefore ask ourselves is this, surprising in its simplicity: “What can produce sound in this world in which we live?” Not so very many categories of things or beings. The elements to begin with. Then living things. Among these, humankind. Among human noises, those that are used to communicate. Among these, those that have a musical intention. Thus, in six concentric circles we have, with disarming ease, enclosed five “infinities” of sound production, but it will be very difficult to go on listing them. We will not even try, satisfied that we have so quickly obtained a result that is rudimentary but undisputed.
This general schema of natural listening, opposite the summary of listening modes in our earlier chapters, explains how it works. The elements, by definition, have no intentions toward us, at least since mythology went out of fashion. Those who communicate, including animals, obviously have. The concentric circles above were only concentric through logical listing, an anthropomorphic focusing. We already find ourselves obliged to differentiate between, first, sounds without intention (including living beings making a noise) and, second, intentional sounds, made with the aim of communicating (and here we would certainly include animal cries, human speech, and Morse code or tom-tom signals).
And what about those who have the intention of making musical sounds? Where do they fit in?
Apparently at the junction of that strange pair, the musical agent and the message: the intention to make music consists in taking sounds from the first category (unspecialized in languages) and making them into second category communication (but which has no desire to say anything). And here we are, once again, caught between sound object and musical structure, between sonority and musicality.
In chapter 18 we analyzed the persistent dualism of musicality and sonority at the heart of the traditional system. We find it underlying the most tried and tested musical activity. We are therefore justified in going back to this experience, with a view to generalizing it. We will look at how we introduce a new element, a present-day invention, in fact, into a somewhat fossilized musical heritage that is, however, nothing other than the summation of successive inventions, going back through history, a whole evolution of musical concepts, always related to the means available to music.
Now, mostly, we only think of music in its static state. We are recipients of it, as it is, and the musician only has to play it in accordance with the notes he has been taught and the instruments he has been given. He receives these notes and those instruments from society, and the musical is thus reduced to a passive adherence to the state of affairs. People listen to music; they no longer invent it. The musician is himself no more than a listener.
What is musical listening? The meaning that this word has taken on in our musical civilization is this: refined but fossilized listening. We could set against this the term musicianly listening, which would denote the renewal of listening, investigating the sound object for its potential.
It could be said, and it would be more than a play on words, that traditional musical listening is listening to sound in stereotyped musical objects, whereas musicianly listening is musical listening to new sound objects produced for use in music.
By listening to sound we mean here the sum of the sonority of objects that have ordinary musicality, which we investigated above. And in this way we account, with great accuracy, not only for the meanings of the terms but also for the very common ways of speaking and thinking among professionals.
At this point we must clarify what we called an activity going against the flow, a counteroffensive that aims to reverse the current of ideas. As long as we stay with stereotyped objects, in fact, we are sure to find, opposite them, the intentions on which they are based. Now, we cannot cheat with these systems. It has been said that they must be approached tangentially. But what is this tangent, if there is no cheating?
This is a new subject: no longer an intention but an invention, and the tangent is reduced listening, applied to the sound object. The only thing, in fact, that homo faber can do for us is to give us objects that are not too demanding and that lend themselves to this difficult exercise, both shocking and sufficiently pared down to awaken a new ear. So these suitable objects will constitute a creative, and doubly creative, activity. Through musicianly invention, inherited from ancestral ways, we will endeavor to create sound objects that lend themselves to a new form of music. And once we have them, we will further endeavor, through decontextualized musical listening, to hear them as conveyors of intelligible elements into new systems yet to be deciphered.
So we must no longer consider these new intentions (to invent) to be opposed to the natural or conventional, sound or musical, object. It is already an original activity, whose perceptual structures develop little by little as circumstances and training allow. The intentions we are talking about involve the inventiveness of the musician and the invention of the musical. They are action structures: the renewal of sources to create objects and of connections to create structures. We will go back to a whole body of work against culture and against nature, coming from the depths and overturning the traditional way, moving from sound to the musical, and no longer from the musical to sound.
As we will see, it is all about invention, both musical and musicianly, without which we cannot help but fall back into classical ways of structuring, even well “intentioned.”
(a) We are trying to familiarize ourselves with sound. And so, with an inquisitive, attentive ear we listen to the creaking of doors and the singing of birds. We do, indeed, discover what we said: an easy structuring that enables sources to be identified. One door can be told from another, and the chaffinch from the warbler. So we find something familiar to the musical: a timbre and melodies. In fact, we have already gone beyond sound. We suddenly find ourselves at the highest level of structure and meaning, which seems natural to us. Even if the languages of the birds are incomprehensible to us, we hear them, by and large, as we would hear a foreign language system. In any case there is no reason why we should not make a study of their throats and the sounds they make, with the aid of the Sonagraph, which would introduce us to a phonetics of bird modulations but with a code that would probably remain impenetrable to us, for if bird language has meaning, it is, clearly, on another level.2
Where the door is concerned, it is quite another matter. Unlike the birds, it is not trying to communicate (the wind is moving it, not a speaker who might be using it as part of a code). Its activity, nevertheless, has a meaning, here focused on the event, and its “language,” metaphorically speaking, comes from the wind playing with the door. If a composer comes forward and substitutes himself for the wind, our interest changes direction. His agency may make a whole door solo or a dialogue between a door and a sigh meaningful or expressive.3 Is this music yet?
Let us say that here we have a study in instrumental modes of play and (musical) instinct, a very interesting experiment. Limited in this way to a domain of objects defined by their common source, the experimenter, here a composer, explores the entire range of expression possible for these objects, resulting from the variety of playing modes available to the instrument. There can be no better way of demonstrating the existence of meaning in the ordering of objects, even if we refuse them the status of musical objects. Thus experimental composition reveals the potential for undreamed-of ways of listening and some parallel system to be elucidated. This is not our aim, for, however odd it may seem, it concerns the higher level of composition and not the theory of objects suitable for research, which is our subject.
(b) One could even, in most cases, say that experimentation such as this in an instrumental domain is the main pitfall in research. We are only too tempted, in fact, at the beginning of a piece of research, to turn to instruments, to put sheet metal with sheet metal, ondes with ondes, membranes with membranes, and so forth, just as our ancestors put strings with strings, wind instruments with wind instruments, woodwinds with woodwinds to confuse sound bodies with the sound objects they produce.
We may also too facilely, and often conveniently, put sheet metal into scales4 or make bow-sticks into a keyboard. We disregard complex sounds and ruin our ear when we try to describe the originality of the former through the easy route of the latter. At the very most, such registers may be used for labels, manufacturing techniques, or means of identifying not the object but its instrumental formula. Tinkering with the keyboards of sound bodies like this is to reject forms of instrument making that sometimes took several years to produce balanced instruments. All this for aesthetic reasons. But as for logic, how can we not see in this approach an ambition to rediscover only what we already know, the determinist nature of the system itself?
So we can see that the two ways of inventing the musical (a) and the musician (b) are not so easy.
We know all about the two pitfalls mentioned above: they threaten just as much those who want to hear as those who want to make something different. We might ask which of the two will get the credit for being the first to get out. Will it be the listener, filling his ears with a mass of sounds, decontextualized enough to structure them in a different way? This would be to underestimate the prime of place of both conditioning and making, as soon as we want to break with them. So we turn once again to homo faber. However ingenious he may be, is he not himself his own listener? So is he not in the same boat? Is he not also, and especially, the prisoner of timbres?
We have already seen them in action, those children with their grass or their violins; and the inventor who, according to the Gospels, will not enter into this kingdom unless he becomes like one of them, would do well to be inspired by them. Although the latter is destined for the traditional and the former for an experimental system, they are both groping in the dark, and the important thing is to recognize what they have in common: both are making the sound object for aesthetic reasons, and both are using it to achieve certain values, explicit or otherwise. So let us repeat that homo faber, conditioned just like the listener, has only one advantage over him: he links the sender and the receiver of every sound object, making while listening and listening while making, and this is what leads his listening on to reduced listening, if he wants to free himself from habit.
When he first starts out, however, we will see him obstinately endeavoring to find new timbres. He will strive to repeat traditional values that his experiment, if it is innovative, will deny him with the same obstinacy, whereas it would give him others if only he knew how to draw them out and integrate them.
What will happen if he becomes bolder and familiarizes himself with his own research? He will not immediately be able to discover the (new) sonorities of (old) musical objects but the (new and not so easily found) musicality of objects that are incontrovertibly sound objects (but perhaps ill chosen, unsuitable, which he does not yet know how to listen to, i.e., identify and describe). Obvious examples of these are those sound objects that were so interesting, though as yet apparently so unsuitable: the grass sounds and the creaking door.
So it is with the creator of sound objects that we can find in embryo both the musicianly and the musical invention that is our aim and that can only come into its own gradually and by dint of great patience. Even if, in the next chapter, we describe this more general system using a logic peculiar to it, we cannot overemphasize the trial and error that have accompanied its coming into being. The objects provided by experience are, in fact, already in groups (through causality or intention), and a certain amount of arbitrariness is required to decontextualize them, just as a certain amount of imagination is needed to regroup them naturally or conventionally.
Our homo faber would not get by without that aim that makes him look for a meaning in what he is doing. We are not talking here about primitive man with his calabashes, or the violin maker from Cremona, or the electronics engineer from Cologne. All of these were musicians passionate about music as an immediate objective. As researchers, they applied themselves to an art; they did what might be called applied research. If our homo faber is a researcher into fundamentals, his immediate aim is not the result—that is, material immediately appropriate for making music. His research is into the musical itself, the musical concealed in sound. He knows he is a prisoner of established values; he also gradually discovers (and this is much more important because it is much more unexpected) that he is a prisoner of the natural timbres of the groups of objects linked to instrumental sources. What is to be done, then, except to ungroup them and compare object with object, each from different sources? Is this not the first act toward releasing structures that are natural and, this time, belonging to sound as well as the musical? Thus he notices that a metal sheet, when struck, may resemble a bass note or chord on the piano and that the same metal sheet, stimulated with a bow, will be like a double bass. This directs him toward new values, still quite unclear but already attached to the properties of the object and no longer those of instruments. In addition, as we suggested to him in book 3, he will have compared the pizzicati of various instruments, sustained sounds, profiled sounds, and in this way he will have learned to compare morphologies belonging essentially to the object and not the instrument.
What may have seemed curious in the earlier books is that, although concerned with a more general range of sound than the musical, we have so often taken our examples and our demonstrations from the most traditional domain. But there is nothing odd in this. How should we learn about sound if not from the musical? If we admit, as we must at present, that the musical is no more than suitable sound—that is, purified, simplified, graded in order not to be too complex—how should we not classify sound as a musical differently understood and analyzed?
So we come back to one of our earlier formulae. If good (traditional) musicians have worked at hearing the sonority of (conventional) musical objects, we have inherited that ear from them, even if it means taking on research that they have not done. So we are tackling musical objects in general or, at least, those objects that seem to us to be suitable. This means that we will listen to sound objects with a musical ear, give ourselves suitable sound objects, and, consequently, shape them and take them from their natural context: this is the musicianly invention that comes from artistic creation. Focusing on hitherto unnoticed qualities in them, naming these, using them to describe the objects—this can only be done by making links that are both unusual and adequate: this is the musical invention that comes from research strategies.
In other words, we take an experience of sonority from traditional music and transfer it into a more general field of sound. This is the technique of successive approximations practiced in the experimental sciences. We will see how far the new system we are aiming for complements the first and runs parallel to it. It is developed through a reversal of the processes of structuring. Identification of the musical and description of sound exchange their fields of operation and their priorities.