“Our kingdom is not of this world,” say musicians,
for where do we find in nature, like the painter and the sculptor, the prototype for our art? . . . Sound inhabits everything; but sounds, I mean melodies that speak the higher language of the kingdom of the spirit, dwell only in the breast of man. However, does not the spirit of music, like the spirit of sound, embrace the whole of nature? The sound body, touched mechanically, awakens into life, makes manifest its existence or rather its structure, and thus comes to our consciousness. And what if the spirit of music, similarly aroused by the initiate, were to express itself, harmoniously and melodically in mysterious chords, intelligible to him alone?
Thus, the musician’s sudden inspirations, the birth of melodies within him, would be the perception, the unconscious, or rather ineffable, conception of the secret music of nature, considered as the principle of life or of all vital activity. Hence, must the musician not stand in the same relationship with nature as the hypnotist with the sleepwalker?
. . . Hearing is seeing from within . . .”1
Hoffmann’s text carries, as lightly as Kreisleriana’s 150 years of age, the problem of today and always. But romanticism has lordly posturings that we have had to shed: they were naive and generous; we are competent and reserved. Which one of us, even in other terms, would dare to interrogate Music in this way?
Such boldness, however, inspires us. Even if we no longer invoke Nature by its stage name since it is now Science, and even if the spirit, called up without a capital letter, is examined in all its mechanisms for the phenomenon of knowledge of which it is the instrument, we are hardly any clearer. Knowledge increases; experiments grow ever more numerous; the field of investigation becomes larger and fragments. It is only on the face of it that relationships are set up between different fields now marked out by technique and technology, instrumentarium2 and acoustics, music theory3 and composition, psychology and musicology, the history of musical civilizations and our own. The rifts in a land now so vast are perhaps deeper for being less apparent, better camouflaged.
The challenge of synthesis is always tempting but divides two sorts of minds: those who think that the accumulation of knowledge provides the solution, and that eventually music will be put into an equation, and those who know that well-conducted thought leads back to simple questions on which rest both the equations of science and the intuitions of art.
There is scarcely a philosopher or a true scholar, whatever his discipline, who has not at some time or other formulated a thought like this, such as this from Claude Lévi-Strauss: “Perhaps one day we shall discover that the same logic is at work in mythical and scientific thought, and that man has always thought in the same way. Progress—if indeed the word still applies—would not have had consciousness as its domain, but the world, where a humanity endowed with unchanging faculties would, in the course of its long history, have been continuously grappling with new objects.”4
Seen in this way, music would have provided a highly original opportunity for research and scrutiny. Indeed, in no field, just as in no other language, do the objects seem so precisely given while the ways of choosing and assembling them seem so free. So in its development music could be seen as being linked to scientific progress—insofar as it takes its means from acoustics, and now from electronics and electroacoustics—but it should be possible, with so many new sound objects, to discern the permanent structures of human thought and sensibility. We should then see, in this complementariness of naturally given means and cultural structures, the resolution of numerous superficial contradistinctions, between the ancients and the moderns, the arts and sciences, sound and the musical. This is the dialogue, dreamed of by Hoffmann, between the spirit and Nature.
The whole plan of this book is inspired by this dualism. It aims to cover the ever-increasing domain of sound objects and to see how musical structures derive from phenomena whose more general laws they simply verify in one highly important particular case. Thus, from one discipline to another it should be possible to find the missing link—not based on physical content or literary analogy, those crude or fragile linkages, but on a transverse relationship whose original mechanism we hope to discover.
Even, however, with these twin objectives in mind, it is not so easy to split up our thought processes, and our account is limited to a run-through; all the more so as, even if it aims to bring together various categories of minds and abilities, it hopes to attract each of these with what is most familiar, unless our reader, through a spirit of inquiry that we would also like him to have, turns to the discipline that is the least familiar to him. Thus, this zigzag run-through, in seven leaps called “books,” aims to move from current information on making and hearing (books 1 and 2) to two meditations more specifically inspired, one (book 3) by physics, and the other (book 4) by philosophy. Scarcely have these words been written than we must think again. These two books do, in effect, touch on subjects from the discipline in question, but our main aim is to catch a glimpse, on the frontiers of these disciplines, of the little-explored zones of the domain of music. So we would suggest, to everyone, to give priority to the account that is not written in their language.
Last but not least, the musician should be reassured, since the entire work is addressed primarily to him. But he should not expect a “theory of music” here: it merely concerns the practice of the musical object. Even if music theory is essential for expressing the problem of musical composition conveniently, we must allow that it does not remotely claim to tackle the art of composition itself. The musician reading this book, if eager to get to the morphology of sound and the theory of the musical, can certainly run more rapidly through books 3 and 4, if only to be sure of the rudiments he will find applied in the final books. Perhaps then he will think that these deserve revisiting. The effort demanded of him in these philosophical and scientific fields is justified; contemporary music often strays too naively on to one or the other for us to be able to find satisfaction in such a superficial approach.
As for the last book, it is not written with the same pen as the earlier ones. The author admits that he allowed himself to speak more personally here. He would not therefore blame the reader for not following him right to the end of his conclusions. But he asks him not to be offended by them and to study the earlier books dispassionately: they are the fruit of almost twenty years of experimental work carried out with the intention of bringing disciplines face-to-face.
When, for years and years, one pursues a fundamental piece of research like this, which in many ways also appears to be an original discipline itself, the right moment to present it to the public never seems to come. Even if the starting point is full of promise, and the method coherent, what one learns above all, from stage to stage, is how little one knows and how vast the whole research undertaking is. But then there would be no reason ever to publish, and we would find ourselves in a position entirely contrary to our method, which presupposes group research.
We are well aware that this way of proceeding is quite at odds with contemporary practice: no one should publish without great care, in a very narrowly defined area of his expertise! Where we find all these areas of expertise together, we are disarmed indeed. Unraveling the knots of the most diverse, and often the most divergent, disciplines, we are stuck with them all. An unfair fight: all these Curiatii5 assail us at once, each in perfect health, while we will soon be showing signs of exhaustion. If only we were bearing the olive branch! But it is to be feared that the author, through temperament even more than necessity, has armed himself with some sort of powder to make the specialists sneeze.
Another reason compels us. This book, the fruit of teamwork, is a source of information now indispensable for those who wish to use our work and for those who wish to pursue it. The work of synthesis it represents is naturally the responsibility of the author, but it also rests on much related work and the cooperation of a whole group. This was the case from the very beginnings of this original research in 1950. Technical imagination came from Jacques Poullin and Francis Coupigny,6 while musical experimentation was a “chain reaction” in which Pierre Henry, Luc Ferrari, and François Bayle7 were the most essential links. More recently, Guy Reibel and Enrico Chiarucci8 have made documentary and experimental contributions in the field of acoustics. Finally, editorial tasks have been shared with Pierre Janin and Sophie Brunet,9 which, in the case of the latter, does not say nearly enough. My heartfelt thanks to all of them.
Moreover, the same team is tackling a complementary task, the results of which will be published in the form of several gramophone records at the same time as this work: it is the sound counterpart of the text, the indispensable listening material that alone can give the reader the means to move on from concepts to perceptions.
It would be most ungrateful, finally, to pass over the constant support of the Office de radiodiffusion-télévision française (ORTF), which, from the first words of encouragement from Wladimir Porché, in 1948, to those of Jacques-Bernard Dupont,10 has generously supported this strange research.
Paris, August 14, 1966