The unhappiest man in the world is the hero of the feast. A hungry crowd exploits and delights in his cries of pain, his tears. Respected even by wild animals, he will have no such respect from the experts. Does he not already observe them with a tear-filled and hypocritical eye? Can true grief admit such affectations? Is it possible to weep for Eurydice and yet play the lute?
No one will make us believe that Orpheus can so easily be spirited away or that there is not something ritualistic lingering in latent form in our most disembodied concerts. As the accepted frontiers of belief are pushed back, the sacred deconsecrated, and myths demystified, other magicians, cunning and well-bred, will take their place, with the mien of distinguished colleagues or senior civil servants.
We had become accustomed to the fresco, however, now faded, of this beardless and yet more reasonable false Christ, who asked less of us. The man of Art, less fanatical, more controlled, was still vaguely inspired by folklore. Plunging into the depths of the Hell of the Unknowable, rather than telluric fire or archaic terrors, for want of a wife, he brought back a grief that inspires. What we could no longer describe as unbelievable, or suggest was undoable, could be entrusted to this go-between, this daughter of man: now divine mediator, now courtesan.
Given over to these two uses, we cannot say that music has not submitted; from the sacred to the profane, from the cantata to the ditty, from liturgy to the music hall, she has worn out her hands in prayer, her lips in kissing, her eyes in weeping: might we find her repellent now, grown old and ugly, given over to merchants and doctors?
There is now as great a distance between us and Orpheus as between that lyrical singer and Neanderthal man. How, then, should we rediscover, in the words of Francis Ponge, the “original onomatopoeia”?1 Surely, to cry out, that man must have breathed in and out? These two halves of life, this fundamental alternating movement of all living creatures as of all spirituality, have always been propounded, have always been valid throughout time: how well is this two-stroke engine of inspiration and expression working today?
So here we come to the ultimate question, which, however, we had promised ourselves never to ask. Why should we indulge ourselves in wondering about the ultimate aims of music when we will doubtless have no more to say than anyone else? Is it simply to assert that this question should not be avoided? Certainly. Asking such questions about the inspiration and the goal of music is playing the agent provocateur. It means that we will probably be taken for a fool or an upstart. But we do not very much like the wisdom of the day, which consists in doing anything at all, provided no thought is given to what it is for. It seems to us that in these huge devices, these never-completed adventures into which our contemporaries so readily throw themselves, philosophy is in rather short supply.
The order may well have been final: there must be no turning back; to catch sight of Eurydice is to lose her. But we can ask ourselves about the meaning of the instructions and Orpheus’s situation: much less alone than the play represents him. For even if Orpheus does not know where he is going, he must know who compels him and what inspires him.
To change this demigod into a music dealer is a bit much all the same. And this is doubtless what we should have to do if we followed the trend and launched ourselves into a serious examination of music as historically determined, conditioned as is to be expected by socioeconomics . . . (or perhaps the sociocultural grabs us?). We will leave this question to the academically competent. We have a short-cut to suggest. Indeed, the problems of dissemination are important, and they will always bring the guardians of Culture and the industrialists of Art into conflict with one another. However divisive the problem, and however real the pressure of dissemination on consumption, and thus in the long term on production and on the musical environment especially, we will not attempt to track the whole process. Rather we will look at what this musical environment is.
Otherwise, we would be caught between the frying pan and the fire: what is secretly brewing in our studios, and what is shouted from the rooftops. As far as the studio or laboratory is concerned, we must confess that we cannot bury our research there. We may well involve all of sound, extract the object from it, summon witnesses to experiments for this purpose, and improvise with them a metalanguage for the initiated, but this is not the whole story. We must accept that many other considerations, apart from logical, physical, physiological, or psychological, preside over the creation of present-day music. A whole series of factors inspires its favorite techniques, its organizational trends, its vocation to become a particular kind of message. But there is a considerable distance between a select private circle and mass communication: it is between these two extremes, not necessarily precisely halfway, that we will find the true environment.
Now, in music everything happens as if, ultimately, the mass of present-day consumers were of no importance. In fact, we have only to think about two environments where the exchange between doing and listening takes place. One is that hypothetical and historical environment where we more or less placed the developments that over millennia, then centuries, enabled the musical object to be extracted from its gangue of sound. The other is the one that surrounds us and that the musician hardly ever mentions. He desires the opposite from it: that people mention him. So the situation could not be more confused. In many cases later generations have only retained from traditional heritage what its contemporaries had either hated or not understood—which motivates the innovator rashly to pursue his course and listeners who wish to be sophisticated to avoid making their ancestors’ mistakes. Such is the starting point of these microenvironments that, these days, make or unmake reputations, will or will not hear musics, consent or refuse to play them.
Music is a very strange thing. Literature teaches, architecture is lived in, paintings furnish. In the most disinterested arts there is still something functional. Now the first performance of a work summons a society to a language it cannot understand and to an enjoyment that is very unlikely. This is not because society is not open or well informed but because this is the linguistic fact of the musical: we must first hear it without understanding it and gather together to do so. Isn’t that interesting?
Now, there are always people responsible for music: they are two people in conversation, which must not be confused with the composer-public pair, in which we find only a secondary echo, a more or less loud “resonance” of a “criterion of attack,” as it were: the patron-composer pair. These terms are not offensive. They are necessary for the development of a process we do not see could take place otherwise. The patron has doubtless been democratized. He is no longer the Enlightenment prince. But the patron community, ultimately, rests on a few promoters with private or administrative budgets. The patron’s motive may have changed: it is no longer to do with small pleasures, perhaps hardly even “the pleasure of music.” What else could it be?
We need to look around a bit. If it is true that music is a community language threatened with destruction, it has never defended itself so well, thanks to its dissemination through mass media. While the painter can always paint, the novelist is finally published, the architect eventually finds some chinks for new ideas in the welter of new developments, music, a treasure for popular consumption, has also “gone wholesale,” no longer allowing the slightest degree of freedom. It is true that new musics were born in those very studios that broadcast a mass language: the fact is that a civilization, even an all-consuming one, contains the seeds of its own destruction. But this is a marginal and long-term problem, which does not in any way change the present-day problem of the musician involved in his linguistic revolution. Now, he needs means for performance, which he can only obtain from society itself: sixty players, a recognized conductor, illustrious concert halls, a budget requiring only popular success to be profitable, and more.
Where can we find a justification for this “music in itself,” which does not fulfill any natural need, which, hypothetically, clashes with society? How can it in some way become functional again? Through an unexpected, though absolutely logical, turnaround. Giving offense to an entire people and foreign to the court, intolerable to the faithful themselves, it can only be performed and gather together its means and its audiences by becoming the sign of a new caste, the prerogative of a new elite. Not that snobbery is the only element in a certain measure of success or justifies what is being attempted now in music. But it would not be very scientific to deny its fundamental importance or even the way it confirms the nature of the musical as something into which we have to be initiated. Some people begin to grasp this; others pretend: no one has “stayed with it.” Thanks be, then, to snobbery, the modern form of collective solitude, without which, doubtless, nothing decisive would be attempted in the development of music.
Theodor Adorno has shown this very clearly, in choicer terms than ours:
The possibility of being heard by many is at the very root of musical objectification, and where this does not take place this objectification is necessarily reduced to something fictitious, the arrogance of the aesthetic individual who says “we” when it is still only “I,” and who nevertheless cannot say anything without also postulating a “we.” . . . His rigidity is the anguish of the work in the face of despair about its own truth. It tries convulsively to get away by losing itself in its own law, but by the same token its nontruth increases along with its substance. . . . The rigor of its own logic increasingly petrifies the phenomenon of music; from being something that signifies it turns into something that is simply there, impenetrable to itself. . . . What is still simply there by dint of heroic effort could also not be there. The suspicion previously formulated by Steuermann is plausible: the concept of serious music itself—now taken over by radical music—could belong to a specific moment in history, and in the era of ubiquitous gramophones and radios humanity may quite simply forget the experience of music. Purified into an end in itself, it suffers from its pointlessness no less than consumer goods suffer from being made to serve particular ends.2
This sociological approach is obviously much more attractive than a mass-consumption approach, which follows after an interval of several decades, if not centuries. Hence the particular responsibility our “microenvironments” have. It would not be enough to analyze them only insofar as they are in conflict with general consumption. And we should also include the psychology and sociology of the musician, some archetypes for which are found in Epinal prints.
These prints, of the solid and naive type, still quite recently represented the musician as misunderstood and miserable in his calling, giving pleasure to others largely posthumously. Several biographies, radio or television programs for the “general public,” which smack more of the soap opera than music, bear witness to this. We have changed all that. The modern musician generally enjoys good health, is no more unhappy than the next man (or at least he carefully hides the fact), and in order to live, modestly it is true, but with dignity, displays exceptional gifts. The music he produces being practically unfit for human consumption, we may conjecture that this involves quite a lot of energy and some bitterness on his part.
A “true” composer, tied down to the contingencies of the profession, could hardly admit to this without betraying himself or his clan. For the circumstances of contemporary musical creation are very much like those of a totalitarian universe. You must do the same as everyone else or perish. Without that fierce energy, those tight calculations, the musician is lost, for he has become an outsider who speaks no known language and who, perhaps, admits to himself in secret that he does not even know what language he is speaking. A Hiroshima bomb has fallen on music. Until the Austrian serialists started mining their seam, there was still a musical language system, more or less taught, more or less practiced, more or less shared. The 1939–45 war and its upheavals, and the exchanges that followed, make the series compulsory, at least for the minority who wants to be active. Why? We may well wonder, so unpleasant is this music, “radically” contrary to ancestral musical practice.3 There is only one answer to explain the involvement of certain people, their courage and their aggressiveness, their faith and their bad faith: because it is new. Is this the criterion for art, or our time, or the art of our time?
To have brought together so many “disconcerted” concert audiences, there must have been reasons over and above snobbery; snobbery itself must have needed reasons. Whether we are talking about real musical discoveries that will be validated by posterity, or false initiatives, bluffs, half-truths, untruths, or, in short, suchlike experiments, there must have been motives and possibly ideas. When music wants to put itself together again after falling apart, to be relearned in the midst of the cut-glass environment of dilettantes and connoisseurs, it needs attention-grabbing superstructures for its structures laboring to be born.
Now, just as we find Napoleon in Beethoven or Schoenberg, pegs on which to hang our cloudy thoughts in Wagner or Mahler, nymphs in Debussy and boleros in Ravel, we had to have the frills and furbelows of some fabulous inspiration, truly of our age, an age in which myths are statistics, playthings cybernetic, and painting an object. Rigorous, therefore, will be the music of a civilization armed to the teeth, which possesses the atom, which cries for the moon, on condition that we do not tamper with tribal taboo, that we never loosen the girdle of fortune, that we never look where we are going. “That objective rigor of musical thought itself, which alone confers dignity on great music,” this is what a whole generation, with Adorno, is demanding. It is the most commonly found word in concert programs, the quality most generously recognized in musics that are the most insecure in their principles (but, it is true, the best calculated in their detail). “The development of a logic of musical rigor such as this, to the detriment of the passive perception of sounds for their sensory qualities, distinguishes art from below-stairs humor.”4 Strong words. So no more sensuality, and no more of what goes with it: no more Amours du poète, Hymne à la joie, Ich weiss dass mein Erlöser lebt. Thus denied, inspiration is still inspiration. Passion, fervor, and faith, spiced with ordinary biographical details, the whole lot now ultimately thrown into the purifying inquisitorial fire. The empty wineskins finally deflated, the bloody brotherhoods stripped of their face paint. Why, then, so much emotion? Icy rejections, distant silences . . . Rejections, simply.
Extremes meet. Objects in themselves as much as insensible objects, the pretension to objective rigor in the same way as “below-stairs humor,” are the victims of the same contagion. On the one hand, to be a force for equilibrium, the arts must reject any usefulness, any function. On the other hand, the “inspiration of the moment”—while strictly refusing useful subjects or usable ideas—causes them to seek their fundamental structures in the same processes whose quasi-magical omnipotence—new idols, new beliefs—dispenses at one and the same time the economy of opulence, the ultimate weapon, and gadgets. So concentration on things is displaced: from the thing made to the thing usurped by what is being done with it. As for meaning, there always is some, whatever we do: art for art’s sake meaning. But, out of politeness, we will call it hypermeaning or hypomeaning. Otherwise, it does not really matter whether we apply one or the other description to these two types of “artistic” expressions that rub shoulders daily and of which it may be said that each of them, in effect, aims both above and below itself: those that acrobats entertain us with and those given over to the pontifications of scribes.
So deny the work: it’s action that counts. If breaking a piano becomes painting, crushing a keyboard with both forearms with all desirable compunction and 333 times in a row can contribute a most serious item to the concert, especially if it is based, and why not, on Zen philosophy. In this art galore, everything is permissible, except one unpardonable error: doing what might already have been done. Hence an enormous expenditure of energy and imagination to find something new, new and yet again new, and you have to take your hat off to it all: these children of the times never have more than two hands and two feet, two eyes and two ears, are 1 m 70 cm tall (increasing, it seems), have a few sensitive organs, among which a sex organ losing its oomph, which is also beginning to turn its back on consumption.5 Of course, you can make naked girls straddle motorcycles, squash chicks with nostalgia for the black masses of yore (but no more religion, too bad, no more black masses!); you can crush a few cars (sculpture at last, cars have a soul!) or give a few roars in a theater between two happenings: it is difficult to rise to the demands of “what’s in” on a daily basis and constantly merit the pass mark “it’s different.” All this, as the expression goes, has gotta be done. Truth comes out of the mouths of these babes. They’ve said everything. Action is clearly entertainment, commitment, emotion, and communication at one and the same time. They must have been pretty frustrated to get to this point!
Frustrated, they are indeed. The parents drink; the children chink glasses. Except for the leather jacket—but they had helmets, and with horns—the Valkyries “were doing it” here on horseback, there under the sea, shot straight from Valhalla, caving in the deep, these lasses did not have cold eyes, sang at full throttle, all of it truly in the flesh. With Wagner (he did it as well) our ancestors took pleasure in a very different way from us: the whole thing leading to two world wars and rising again, as best it could, from the world of the concentration camps. We can understand why the most serious people mistrust this music, which is far from being a civilizing influence. It is only too right that we should have become ashamed of our more ostentatious feelings, our repugnant aesthetic emotions, that we find old songs disgusting, the systematic exploitation of the official symphony revolting. It is better for a music with nothing left but skin and bone that a wind, if not of purity, then of drought, should blow on it with all its locusts than that it should be satiated and paunchy. But the demon of lying doesn’t mind a joke, and austerity befits him after feasting. Let us have the benefits of fasting but acknowledge that we haven’t much left to get our teeth into. Let the scribes and Pharisees veil their faces and entwine themselves with phylacteries! It is always the original man, the ordinary man who will get the better of them.
The gap between what Hegel calls “dilettantes” and “connoisseurs” has existed for all time. If we can ignore the middle-class dilettante, suspected of being a consumer of music for shameful reasons, what, these days, has become of the competent listener? Adorno himself frowns: “The connoisseur has turned into an expert, and his knowledge, which alone still gets to the heart of things, has become routine and pretentious information that is killing him. Everywhere where technique is no longer considered as an end in itself, we come up against a mixture of corporate intolerance and obtuse naiveté from him. . . . His gesture is reactionary: he monopolizes progress. But the more evolution makes the composer into an expert, the more the contributions of the expert, as the agent of a group that identifies with privilege, enter into the intrinsic composition of music.”6
If this is the case, the musician is in good company. He is not the only one to possess “this mixture of corporate intolerance and obtuse naiveté.” He is surrounded by numerous colleagues: the experts, just as distinguished, and contemporary techniques. Intolerant they certainly are, for the accumulation of knowledge, the speed of developments, the incalculable—or sometimes all too foreseeable—consequences of their actions give them every reason to be demanding, even if it only means sharing those skills and responsibilities with a more and more limited number of people. But the same process is repeated everywhere and for many others. Those gigantic forces, those radical transformations, those divergent powers no longer see eye to eye but overspill the boundaries of all reasonable information, all reasoned knowledge. Happy are those who are not at work on some venture openly devoted to cooking up some deadly weapon of which it is said (and this is where the obtuse naiveté comes in) that it will be supreme against what it is about to cause: war. There is at present such a gap between technical sophistication and common sense, collective responsibility and personal irresponsibility, that there is now no point in looking for a “decent man” in our midst. This expression, once full of meaning, is now nothing but a joke . . . of the “below-stairs” variety.
Now it is difficult for a man to put up with this. As he cannot attack what oppresses him, or direct the purpose of the device he is helping to make with such great skill and scrupulous labor, he looks for excuses for himself precisely on both levels where his conscience is pricking him. He cannot fail to notice the explosion of knowledge and the way it is increasing. He will therefore make haste to absorb some concentrated measure of it, to add some foreign ingredient to his own concoction. But, still debarred from any end result and from values themselves, he will seek out some tiny corner in the most limited sphere to defend, some “motivation” for a joust condemned to take place in the closed field. Hence these general features, which can be found everywhere or in most people: a feeling of power all the more pronounced the more pathetic or sibylline the conquests are, an inverted moralizing that takes professional punctiliousness to the point of absurdity. And so we see the humanities colluding with the general madness, and, for example, the psychosociologist working with the merchant and the money lender to exacerbate perfectly fallacious needs, in order to sell off the overwhelming torrents of merchandise.
It is time to close this door, which for a moment stood ajar. Not to breathe in the atmosphere of the times would be to deprive ourselves of our daily inspiration. The excesses of thingism are a direct result of it. It would be pointless to object that music has nothing to do with it and in any case can do neither good nor ill. In the same way that we can neither impute the atomic threat solely to academics nor entirely absolve them, we cannot let artists off the hook, those loners, witnesses, and finally—sometimes without their knowing—heralds of their age.
Refusing to integrate music into Time is already to take a stance. It amounts to saying that musical activity takes place outside the real. It is also saying that music is all, and the rest is worthless or else that musicians are neither influenced nor influence. We only have to make these statements to see that they are false. But then where do we go? Why talk about what is better unsaid?
Because musicians are being pointed in two directions, and they are not the right ones. One is political commitment, justified by some theory about the function of art in the city. We know all too well that its being used for a purpose is no better than its being used in commerce. Hegel had already grumbled about this: “The composer concentrates only on the purely musical structure of his work and the ingenuity of its architectonics . . . often remaining all his life among the most unaware and insubstantial men.”7
Another verdict that needs scarcely any explanation. Were all these helots to produce just one genius per generation, we should be overwhelmed! What a useful citizen. . . . But that musician is not the one described by Adorno either, trapped in a load of gobbledygook about truth and nontruth, draped in his primordial pointlessness. To contrast the nonconsumerism of Art with functional overconsumption, the abstruseness of an elite with mass communication, amounts to refusing to fight, accepting humanity exactly as we are making it, worshipping the idols of the day.
For we will end up turning to Magic when we run out of arguments. The new all-modern man is still Neanderthal man, who, in our opinion, could be thought to be exclusively devoted to concrete or electronic musics. But this man is also a diplomat and a general, the head of businesses and squadrons, a university professor, a bishop, and equally a motorist and a television watcher. He has—too bad for him—many other weapons at hand. All the same, we observe each other, poker-faced, in a cold panic, not without a shade of suspicion, and the winner is he who does not laugh last. Nobody dreams—we’re not mad—of seriously challenging the idol; the boldest among us gestures with his fan, cuts off a cuticle, flicks a finger; out of the question to spit on it, he would be lynched.
It is in this circus that Orpheus appears, like an inverse Futuristic Figure: obsolete rites, lost from sight. We observe each other. Will he offer the sacrifice in the manner of the ancients? Will he swap the lyre for the guitar? Intone plainsong on three notes8 (the text in French) as in Parapluies de Cherbourg? Or surrounding himself with architects, foremen, astrologers, will he build castles in the air and recite the logarithm table? Is he going to make films, stereo sound recordings, do card tricks? Summoned, nevertheless, to go down into the Underworld, will he mobilize steam shovels, bulldozers, and Bull machines to make excavations on a truly grand scale, announcing from time to time in a more and more inhuman voice, over the vocoder, the odds on the lowest point?
There is another, more plausible, way. Why jump on our high horses? People will say:
These problems arise, certainly, but what do you suggest? A new alchemy? As for your interdisciplinary teams, what elixir are you expecting them to find? It’s all much more simple. The music you call radical or the research you call musical are only particular sections, important certainly, fundamental as you say, of an extensive domain, the functions of which are no mystery: all musics, from the most common to the most erudite, the most sensual to the most intellectual, are justified, each in its own way. In truth, music acts on man in all sorts of ways, from emotion to dance, from meditation to conditioned reflex, from intelligence to sex, from nausea to frenzy. This is true of all musics in the world and across all ages, except that in this age musics have become specialized, and what you call “music” now only interests the few, and their thoughts about it seem to be quite disproportionate: some too lightweight, and others rather mad.
So we need to go on various information-gathering missions. Thus we would set out, our tape recorders under our arms, in pursuit of lost musics and their functional secrets. . . . We may go and steal the secrets of ragas and their action on the stomach, gamelans and their tonic virtues, erotico-maniacal tom-toms, gagakus that made the Samurai, guitars that unmade Hawaii. . . . Is this really what we want? . . . This colonial-helmeted musicology, this pharmacopeia in a bandolier is only equaled in ridiculousness by its Phrygian-capped colleague, aesthetoscope round his neck, a heart specialist. This face-pulling from both sides rightly reminds us of our emptiness, which will not be filled by either of the equally crude approaches via function or consumption. Here we are again with our backs to the wall.
If it has secrets to yield up, the past is well defended; other civilizations, as well, keep their lips sealed. Moreover, were we to find any Masters, they would not chatter about music; they would make us make it. Perhaps, then, they would focus on the precise point where we place our hyphens: matter-spirit, sentiment-sex. For such phenomena cannot be studied; they are lived.
We will therefore go so far as to say this. Throughout this work we have deferred to respect for humankind. We have never dared to take our idea of reduced listening as far as it would go. We have obeyed the implicit axiom of all Western knowledge, that it is merely of the intellect.
The underworld is not beneath the circus ring. All that can be done, terrestrially, has been or will be done, and everything will also be done to reach other Earths, without our having any reasonable hope of finding there the answers to the questions raised in this one. As, furthermore, the heavens are empty, it is difficult to see how Orpheus could go down into the Underworld except by going into himself.
This dialogue in the deeps, which can only connect him to others like him, is suggested to him by music, on the sole condition that he makes no deals with the enemy, that he does not refuse the mystery that he himself is operating. Can we not find some echo of this idea in contemporary thought?
Yes, occasionally, but muffled, as it were, tardy like repentance or some concession to a recalcitrant madman. For Adorno “the artist has become simply the one who carries out his own intentions, which present themselves to him as inexorable demands alien to him, springing from his works in progress.”9 Why “simply”? Did not that artist, in olden days superb, affirm himself through a nontruth that was about to change sign? Why foreign to him, these demands? What is this musician’s music, which is so different? The mind, refusing the whole enterprise of music at this point, is about to contradict itself gratuitously.
Freud also had noted the foreignness of the creative act: “Unfortunately the creative power of an author does not always obey his will; the work takes shape as it can and often stands before its author like an independent, indeed alien, creation.”10
Why describe this situation as unfortunate? If this work resists, stands, to the point of appearing independent, why not rejoice? What worse misfortune, for Orpheus, than to descend into himself and find only the void, no one to speak to? We are struck by the similarity of the reactions, and the words themselves, by a sort of disappointment coming after other ambitions; we should listen to Boulez:
The outlook is scarcely pleasing, and we are all too much inclined to let ourselves be hypnotized by the mirage produced by the ambition for rigor; the inquisition moves in; we pacify it. . . . We have no other aim than to try to seal ourselves off ever more stringently from predecessors on whom we are completely reliant. The analytical “account,” in fact, is neither valid nor disinterested: a certain number of procedures are highlighted, procedures that in the most plausible manner “account for” either the composition or the structure of a given work. Nevertheless, if we indulge in an exegesis of this sort, it is by no means only for the sake of the futile satisfaction of understanding “how” the composition works—a pleasure easily foregone—or to rid ourselves of curiosity. Great works, fortunately, never cease to yield a reward for their intransgressible night of perfection, if we are careful not to fall back on the humor of despair in the face of this mystery that spurns such an inquiry: a sort of act of faith that the trade will be passed down from generation to generation in this unique and irreplaceable way, although a second impossibility then arises: the work can never be entirely proportionate to us.11
When we get to this point, panic always sets in. At the outer limits of technology there are the closing words, the doffing of the hat, the two perilous leaps. Orpheus does not have faith.
We must be very clear about this word. We should like to rid it of all its tenants, its returned goods, its poor. We would go so far as to empty it of all content and retain only its driving force, the general attitude it conveys: an intention to believe. For faith thus understood is ultimately simply an orientation of consciousness. Just as consciousness cannot be void of an aim, it cannot be void of this inspiration: consciousness is always magnetized.
Now, the attitude of the musician is radically different depending on whether he finds a means or an end in his technique. So we will not escape the question of trust. Besides, it does not really matter what inspires him, provided it is something other, that he does not make his technique an end in itself. Reciprocally, it is important that everything should depend on the latter, since technique is magic, if we are willing to take this word seriously.
So it is foolish to look for contents in musical inspiration, and it matters little whether we focus our opera glasses on Olympus or Valhalla. But confirmed atheism does not allow us to consort with dubious idols, either, or to betray man by substituting inferior mechanisms for him in the most stupid way imaginable. So in the name of this equally radical faith we condemn the two compensatory mechanisms adopted by a good many pious souls of our time. Converting shaky beliefs into mathematical bigotry, these fanatics of a digital catechism turn their parameter mill, going into trances at the slightest electronic laying on of hands. But they are easily consoled by this, demiurge apprentices, creators of swathes of sounds, brandishing Poisson’s formula just like the lord his sparrow hawk or Jupiter, that electrician, his kilowatts.
But we must moderate our transports. It is the vexation at seeing so much talent going astray, so much time being wasted, so many shortcomings to be corrected and so many fatuous onlookers. It is also the horror of the void and that desire for nothingness that ultimately sickens and angers.
Sometimes our little Masters also ogle the great ones, spying out their procedures, remembering from those faces only nods and winks that may bode well for them. To hear Bach or Mozart in this way is to deride the world. It amounts to mistaking the route for the destination, the shell for the nut, wasting the unhoped for, almost unbelievable, lesson that was sometimes given. It does not matter that Bach was Christian and that his music found that visible source of inspiration. We do not insult his memory by suggesting that if his music is religious, it is not in any way confessional. We should be pouring scorn on inspiration if we defined it as a compulsory relationship between a technique and ideas: the cantor was not in direct contact with dogma when he made a play on the four letters of his name or put together some already recurrent series. Such alphabetic games must not be confused with the message. It is remarkable, however—and it does not matter whether we believe in historical determinism or the God of ancient times—that the high points of music, from the Middle Ages to our day, from East to West, are religious and, as the etymology of this word suggests, link together scattered, unnamed, ineffable elements in man (which he often throws out in a naive description of the divine). Here tolls the bell of condemnation, so different from that which, according to Dante, adorns the entrance into damnation—it is solitude. It is not a question of abandoning all hope but of believing without seeing, feeling oneself followed by someone or something. If looking at it is against the law, the symbol becomes vulgar as soon as we reduce it to the mechanics of the absurd, or an old wives’ tale. If the partner could be looked at, it would be only a replica of ourselves. If it can direct us from behind and beneath, from below and above, it is because it is forever hidden from our overt investigations, which are perfectly inadequate in any case. The condition of this power is to be above knowledge. The expression of this power is music.
In a recent interview, Francis Ponge was explaining his work. To hear him, an inattentive person could have thought that he was recommending solitary poetry; an unthinking person could also come to the same conclusion, on reading pages laboriously devoted to the description of a glass of water or a meadow. Denying that he is a poet, or “writes poetry,” Ponge for his part demanded that we should cleanse language of its ideological associations and take it seriously, adopting (these were his very words) a phenomenological reductive approach. Refusing to use words to express some fortuitous idea, he would go so far as to keep the rough drafts of his writings to retrace their itinerary, in search of meaning. Thus he redefined poetry, of which it could be said that it is the inverse of utensilar language, as the musical object is the inverse of signs or indicators that go beyond the sound object. Nothing to do with poetry in itself, a pointless game of words or images. Analyzing his text, as the most fastidious professor of rhetoric might have done, delving into the substance of words, digging out the roots, Ponge discovered the meaning of what he was doing—and this does not exclude that exquisite form he occasionally cannot help using: not the work of an author who has something to say but work on words, which in the end say more than the author ever knew by moving toward meanings that he himself only perceives after the event. Nothing ersatz—sound alliteration or symbolic analogies—can henceforth satisfy our poetic hunger now that we have eaten of this bread.
These, then, are the two lessons he gives us. The first, it is true, derives from the semantic nature of language: “a palpable sign,” Ponge says, quoting Jakobson. This fact, “the mind’s salvation,” links words together and us to them. The second lesson derives from the declared purpose of this research: to rediscover, through a careful and obedient use of the objects of language, full of modesty, the way of mankind. There is no more whimsicality of expression or that other self-indulgence that consists in making an engine of despair for oneself, a pretentious toy, something to offer to a snobbery of nonconsumerism out of the sterility of one’s method. It all comes down to common sense: what things have to say to us has been buried away inside them by generation after generation, since the invention of language, since, as Ponge says, “the original onomatopoeia.” Here also, and for better reasons, we could invoke Zen, in that watchful noninterventionism that, sometimes, illuminates.
It is possible to devote six hundred pages to not saying what one had to say. As long as we are working on the object itself, we scarcely have time to speak about it. And if we do speak, we do not speak well.
He who gives an account gives an account of himself. That light we wanted to shed on the object also treacherously puts us in the limelight and makes us wince. Was it worth narrating this adventure, very modest in any case, and still so far from any convincing applications? Instead of pursuing—as common sense would have suggested—additional experiments on “correlations” or “studies with objects,” which are so necessary, here we are abandoning the experimental field to throw ourselves into the publication of what we dare to call a “treatise on the object.” So what is going on? We must turn to language. There will be some surprises.
The language of words, as soon as we begin to make an inventory of it, investigate its connotations, dig it out of its ruts and remove it from its false dawns, gives us, as it were, everything; we have to agree: it is all there; it has all been said. But it must all be said again, discovered again. The mirrors of the past are tarnished, the effigies gone; the most precious treasures are devalued, and some people would rather have the glitter of false gold. But if we take the trouble to examine these treasures, what teachings they provide, what hubs of meaning!
Now, the ancient simplicity of the most frequently used terms—form and matter, value and characteristic, indicator and meaning—leads straight to interdisciplinary research. Scarcely, by going on to higher ground, have we found the outline of cities buried under the sand, than we also discover new levels, recognize that materials have been reused, sometimes stolen.
How, in effect, can we not want music to be as modern and also as ancient as possible? How can we not consider its historical stature? How can we not want to bring past and future together, an even more problematic relationship than the one we are endeavoring to build between present-day disciplines?
The search for words makes us open the dictionaries at the word music. When we compare the volumes of the Littré dictionary and those, too recent, of the Robert dictionary, it makes our heads spin. Whereas the most recent work gives us what could be a series of howlers, which it would be all too easy to pursue, its elder brother takes no time at all to show how, in a century, the course of music could have gone downhill. In Robert, etymology is nothing but a shameful memory, but in Littré the file is still open; we have not only the nine Muses to testify to this: the movement of the Heavenly Bodies, according to Pythagoras, comes under this art, while Plato wisely observes that we cannot make any changes to it without changing the State.
The search for ideas around the word object, then structure, projects us, furthermore, into the dizzying chasm of the mind observing itself, reflecting back its own image in a series of mirrors, its most modern endeavor being to take a grip on itself and on what it might apprehend. Now, knowing why music—if we take it seriously—might escape this type of reflection is not the question. The real question is knowing why, in fact, it seems to have done so, the interest taken in it being vaguely respectful, consisting of polite ignorance and negligent or neglected sentiments. Those who would speak hide away. What is the point of continuing the debate? It is simpler to put down a marker stone to leave a sign for whoever would like to aim higher or use the gift of second sight.
Believe us, music, indeed like all the arts, will soon have to change status or else become part of the debris of under- or overconsumption. In effect, once the arts of our time have worn themselves out in various contortions and used up the last resources of execrable Western exhibitionism, they will indeed have to beat a retreat or go in for religion, to use this word in its earlier connotation. And this is what attaches us to music, when we rediscover the essential in it—when it has this grace. It can all be summed up in a very ordinary expression: man does not live by bread alone. If art gives him food, there will be no poison: fakes or feces. Now, these types of menus are in fashion, and respect for humankind wrinkles its nose. Art retains its capital letter, provisionally: it is the ass loaded with relics.
We will hazard a dictum: Art is simply the sport of the inner man. All art that does not aim to be this is pointless and harmful. There is a technique of the spirit, as well as the body, and the two are linked. Those who do not accept this, on both sides, are simply going back to the old antiphon of the dichotomy between body and soul and are postulating a dubious metaphysics. For those who have no soul, sport is recommended, and for those who have one, spiritual exercises as well. In both cases we are not talking twaddle but music theory. Like sport, art means working on oneself: from sensory perception to spiritual perfection, from the five senses to the threefold consciousness: intellectual, affective, and active.
But this total exercise has, fortunately, nothing to do with aesthetic narcissism. Consciousness, thus developed, is a consciousness made of objects and the ordering of objects: we are not being invited to the pelican’s feast. To measure ourselves in this way against objects and their ordering, to grasp other implications through them is ultimately to understand what we are. What we are offered, on the contrary, is a disintegration of the world: science on the one hand, art on the other, and between them, the approximations of aesthetics; this is not very cheering. So we look with envy on ancient simplicities, the intuitions of Greek thought, historic monuments covered with respect, dust, and finally condescension. But why should Pythagoras’s thinking not still be relevant today? The entire harmonic scale, which replicates the series of whole numbers, still presents the same enigma. What unacknowledged motives would turn away a whole physics- and mathematics-obsessed age from this fundamental thinking? The musical object, the most disembodied, the most abstract of all objects it is given to us to perceive, has, in fact, the virtue of being both the most mathematical and the most sensory. Perhaps it is that dazzling relationship that people turn away from: they are afraid.
So the mystery of music and its dualism cannot, fortunately, be resolved: it is here that men who believe just as much and simultaneously in man and nature, in their contradictory and reciprocal order, are drawn together.
Provided, certainly, that we confront this partner whose objects are a strange exception. All other objects of consciousness speak to him about other things than consciousness: in the language of men they describe the world to him in accordance with the ideas he forms of it. Sound objects and musical structures, when they are authentic, have no informative mission: they turn away from the descriptive world with a sort of reticence in order to speak all the better about it to the senses, the heart and mind, to the whole being, ultimately about himself. This is how languages take on a sort of symmetry. They are man, described to man, in the language of things.