—where “I’m listening” also means “listen to me”
I forget when I listened to music for the first time. Maybe some people remember the unique, singular impression that launched their history of listening. Not me. It seems to me there has always been music around me; impossible to say if—and when—it began one day.
Even more improbable, undiscoverable, as if it were drowned in the flood of shapeless memories, is the moment when I began to listen to music as music. With the keen awareness that it was to be understood [entendre], deciphered, pierced rather than perceived. If this moment, like the other, can’t be situated in my immemorial past, what I know or think I know, on the other hand, is that musical listening that is aware of itself has always been accompanied in me with the feeling of a duty. Of an imperative: you have to listen, one must listen. It seems to me that my activity as a conscious listener, knowingly listening to music for the music, has never existed without a feeling of responsibility, which may perhaps have preceded the right that was given me to lend an ear.
You have to listen! If the injunction, in this imperative, does not brook any question (you have to!), the activity it prescribes (listen) seems to me less and less defined: What is listening, what is the listening that responds to a you must? Is it even an activity? By thinking that I am doing something by listening (that I am doing something to the work or the author, for example), aren’t I already in the process of betraying the injunction itself, the you must that orders me to be all hearing, to do nothing in order only to listen?
There is a memory, perhaps a little late, but one that today seems just as closely linked to each of my listenings as that archaic you must: it is that of listening to music with the idea of sharing this listening—my own—of addressing it to another person. I remember, for instance, the fascinating hearing of the slow movement—“nocturne”—of the Music for Strings, Percussion, and Celesta by Bartók, in my uncle’s room, in Budapest. We were both listening to it, in silence, scarcely disturbed but rather confirmed in our listening by the crickets in the garden, at night. We were listening to a version I have forgotten, which figured in a compilation entitled Do You Like Bartók? (Szereti ön Bartókot?). An intense listening, indeed, full of adventures, strange events, dreams . . . but that did not come to itself until after the fact, when we decided to address it to someone else. This was my cousin: with her child’s ears (she was five years old and I was eight) she heard with terror something that, in the opening bars, must have seemed like a contraption of fabulous insects.
So it was in those moments that, not without some perversion, my uncle and I took pleasure in the terrifying power of this music over a child; it was in these moments that, addressed to another, our listening truly became ours: a sign of complicity, a work of collaboration.
Later on, and more simply, I wanted to share my listenings; I enjoyed doing so. As if I wanted to affix a lasting mark on them that would show they were mine and would make them, if not perennial, at least transmissible to others.
It’s true: each time I want to sign my listening. Not with the authority of the music critic or musicologist who would say: such-and-such version of such-and-such work is better than any other, such-and-such pianist played the Sonata Opus X tonight better than he ever played it before, by respecting its architecture, structure, details, phrasing, and so on. No, it is more simply as a listener that I want to sign my listening: I would like to point out, to identify, and to share such-and-such sonorous event that no one besides me, I am certain of it, has ever heard as I have. There is no doubt about that. And I am even convinced that musical listening exists only insofar as this desire and conviction exist; in other words, that listening—and not hearing or perception—begins with this legitimate desire to be signed and addressed. To others.
Except: How can a listening become my own, identifiable as my own, while still continuing to answer to the unconditional injunction of a you must? What space of appropriation does music reserve for its listeners so that they can in turn sign the listening of a work, an interpretation, an improvisation (in order to address it, to share it as their own)?
As a listener, I sometimes have the impression of having been in every music profession, occupied all the positions: by turns composer (of small forgotten masterpieces, ones that are simply imagined, glimpsed), editor, copyist (when I send you, on a little staff scribbled on a postcard, a theme I love so), improviser for a moment (when I try to add a few piano concertante notes to the orchestra of Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos, like a somewhat sacrilegious karaoke performer), even conductor (beating out the measure and signaling the entries, implacably marking the nuances of some favorite in my music collection) . . .
Now, all these professions have their rights, responsibilities, duties. Explicit and clearly codified, after a long judicial history, fascinating and conflicted. But what about me? Me as a listener? Does my you must, this injunction that accompanies me, have anything to do with the prescriptions that rule said musical professions?
As a listener, so often occupying or usurping all roles, it seems that I have no duty, no responsibility, no account to make to anyone. Flighty and fickle or attentive and concentrating, silent or dissolute, is listening strictly my private affair? But then, from where does this you must, which dictates my duties, come to me? And what are these duties? This you must that always accompanies me, that sends this demand to me: to whom am I accountable, to whom and to what do I have to answer?
There is, to my knowledge, no explicit mention, in the entire history of texts forming the corpus of what we call author’s rights [droit d’auteur] or copyright, of any sort of listener’s rights [droit de l’auditeur]. Nothing about what he has a right to expect, nor his possible responsibilities, nor his duties. And yet, in this vast field of history of law in music, which is still largely unexplored, I look unceasingly. For what, exactly? Probably for the implicit outlines of what could be my right, my jurisprudence, my legislation. As a listener.
My explicit obligations (for I exaggerate, there are a few) can be counted on the fingers of one hand: keep silent during classical concerts (an obligation often printed on the back of programs);1 pay for my seat; pay tax on copies and recordings for private use (it is included in the price of new tapes or compact discs) and do not use them for public purposes or commercial distribution; finally, sometimes but not always, keep the noise level below a nighttime or daytime racket. That’s about it, I don’t think I’ve left anything else out.
Of course, this you must that has always accompanied me is not reduced, far from it, to these few objective external constraints, even if it is still not independent of them. But I am just as convinced that this you must is not purely internal either, subjective, singular. It has a history: a history that is not only my history.
That is why I look desperately, in the forensic history of music, for any place where there is a question of me, the listener. I know in advance that this quest is doomed to failure. But I’ll go look anyway: for my rights and my duties, since they have never been explicitly codified, stem implicitly from laws that, little by little, have ended up ruling musical life: authors, adaptors, arrangers, publishers, record producers, interpreters . . . I can, up to a certain point, find myself in them, investigate the objective history of their you must to reflect on my own and put it in perspective. And moreover, it goes without saying, their disagreements—especially those innumerable and fascinating trials that we can find in archives and transcripts—have so often been pleaded, regulated, negotiated for me: taking me, the listener, as a witness or pretext for their conflicting interests.
Who has a right to music? Who can hear it as if it belonged to him, who can appropriate it? Who has the right to make it his own?
Every listener asks these questions, whether he is aware of it or not, whether he wants to or not. I ask these questions as soon as I want to make you hear this: some bars from Don Giovanni, some of Glenn Gould’s breathing, some murmuring in an improvisation by Keith Jarrett, some accent or silence in Bill Evans, some throbbing in the Sacre du Printemps, what else . . . In short, a “beautiful passage,” a favorite moment in my own musical library. Simply to prepare you to hear these moments as I hear them, I begin to describe them to you—but barely—with words. And immediately I begin to lose them. When we listen, both of us, and when I sense, as if by telepathy, that what you are listening to is so far from what I would have liked to make you hear, I tell myself: this moment might not have been my own, after all. For what I wanted to hear you listening to—yes: to hear you listening to!—was my listening. Perhaps an impossible wish—the impossible itself.
Despite my vexation (it is always immense), I wonder: Can one make a listening listened to? Can I transmit my listening, unique as it is? That seems so improbable, and yet so desirable, so necessary too. For I imagine that this irrepressible desire is not only my desire as a simple listener: I imagine that a pianist, a composer, in short a musician who, unlike me, is not content with playing words or his record player also wishes, above all else, to make a listening listened to. His listening.
What can I do, then, to make this listening listened to, my own? I can repeat, I can replay a few measures over and over, and I can say and say again what I hear. Sometimes I manage it. Sometimes you listen to me listening. I hear you listen to me listening. But it’s so rare.
If I were a musician, more a musician than a simple listener or player of record players and words, I would probably begin to rewrite. To adapt, to arrange. I would emphasize a phrase, I would repeat a note, I would shorten a measure to highlight a theme, I would imagine and perhaps transcribe the virtual orchestra that I hear so that it plays to you, under my direction, the exact inflection of this moment, duly prepared and artfully abandoned, as it resounds exactly to my ear. I would make myself into an adaptor, transcriber, orchestrator—in short an arranger to sign and cosign my listening in the work of another.
There in fact exist, in the history of music, listeners who have written down their listening. These are so-called arrangers, who have fascinated me for a long time, such a long time.
A theme of so-and-so arranged in the style of someone else, Ellington in Monk, Bach in Webern, Beethoven in Wagner . . . The arranger (who can moreover be an author now and again) is not merely a virtuoso of styles: he is a musician who knows how to write down a listening; who knows how, with any sonorous work, to make it listened to as . . . It’s a little like my uncle and me, with the addition of writing and art. It’s a little as if my uncle and I had decided to make our listening recognized, not to save it for one single person, for a child; as if we had wanted to address our listening to a real public. And it is from this public quality of the arrangement that all the legal questions follow: namely, the necessity of obtaining the author’s agreement, faithfulness or unfaithfulness to the original, possible accusations of plagiarism or pastiche, in short, the right, this time explicit and vigilant, that traces the outlines and legitimate frontiers of the adaptation of a work.
Let us suppose, then, that, like Liszt transcribing Beethoven, like Schoenberg orchestrating Bach, like Gould adapting Wagner for the piano, I manage to make you listen to my listening. Do I have the right to do that? Do they have, did they have the right? And if yes, what, beyond the simple desire or pleasure of someone or other (my own, their own), justifies such a transcription? Isn’t that the worst of betrayals of what, precisely, one should have wanted to make heard? Can one only make one’s listening heard by rewriting, by radically crossing out the work to be heard? Can one adapt, transcribe, orchestrate, in short arrange in the name of the work? In the name of a listening to the work?
These are the most pressing, most urgent questions in this book.
Who has a right to music? Who can make it heard as he hears it?
These questions have often given rise to sociological answers: according to the “cultural capital” we possess, according to the education we have received, and so on, music—especially what we Westerners call great music—is more or less accessible, or is strange, or incomprehensible . . . These sociological viewpoints are always necessary. But they answer only a small part of the questions posed above; they do not address the way that, implicitly or explicitly, works configure in themselves their reception, their possible appropriation, even their listening.
So it seems necessary to let the question of the right to music resound according to a somewhat different formulation: What place does a musical work assign to its listener? How does it require us to listen it? What means does it put into play to compose a listening? But also: What scope, what space for play does a work reserve, in itself, for those who play it or hear it, for those who interpret it, with or without instruments? How, through its own construction or architecture, does a musical work keep possibilities of active appropriation in its heart? Possibilities for adaptations or arrangements?
Who has a right to music? This question could be rephrased this way: What is, as it is outlined and destined in the works, the subject whom music addresses, or rather the one it constructs? And what falls to this subject as something still to be done? In other words: What must this listener-subject, subjected to music, do in order to have a right to it?
I will try to give a historical perspective to these questions, by retracing the joint and interdependent genesis of a certain idea of work and a certain regime of listening that responds to it. For that is the final horizon of this book: Where does the modern listener and his activity of listening come from? According to what necessities is this activity essentially determined in a figure of subjection to the work? And what reserves of other possible attitudes toward listening do these historical necessities harbor? Which is a way of saying that I will basically attempt a critical history of listening.
Who has a right to music? This question can also be reformulated thus: What can I make of music? What can I do with it? But also: What can I do to it, what can I do to music? What do I have the right to make of, do with or to music?
There is a field here that musicology has only very rarely taken seriously: I can copy (plagiarize, steal, divert) music; I can rewrite (adapt, arrange, transcribe) it; I can, finally and especially, listen to it. Schematically, I’ll take the risk of regrouping these three possibilities under the generic term of appropriation.
(Interpretation, you will rightly point out, is also a form of appropriation of music. It is even, perhaps, the most important and most active form of this appropriation. But it seems to me that it is rarely interpretation as such that poses the question of the work as such. An interpretation that questions the very notion of a work would soon be qualified as adaptation or arrangement, a redirecting in the sense of a rewriting. But here it is a question—as I have said—of questioning the very notion of a work, and making this questioning the connecting thread leading to a critical history of listening.)
Who has a right to music? This question will be approached in three ways, in three historical and critical perspectives about the possible appropriation of music: (1) an archeology of politics and ideologies that imprint their mark on the apparatus of copyright and the droit d’auteur; (2) a reflection on the transformations in the practice of transcription or adaptation, in short, on the place of arrangement in musical life, mainly since Romanticism; (3) the sketching out of a history of listening, its organs and instruments.
If one had to gather together, condense these three approaches into a kind of allegory, the famous story told by Leopold Mozart could stand in this place: the allegory of Wolfgang, copying from memory Allegri’s Miserere, for which performance and distribution rights were strictly reserved for the Sistine Chapel (as the performance rights of Parsifal would later be reserved for Bayreuth).2 Mozart the father wrote to his wife:
You may have heard talk of the famous Miserere of Rome, so esteemed that the musicians of the Chapel are forbidden, under penalty of excommunication, to let the smallest part of this piece go, to copy it or communicate it to anyone? Well, we already have it [emphasis in original]. Wolfgang wrote it down from memory, and we would have sent it to Salzburg with this letter if we didn’t have to be present for its performance; but the way they perform it is more important than the composition itself, and so we will bring it home ourselves. Since it’s one of the secrets of Rome, we don’t want to confide it to strange hands ut non incurremus mediate vel immediate in Censuram Ecclesiae [so as not to run the risk, directly or indirectly, of censure from the Church]. (Letter dated April 14, 1770)
In other words, Mozart the son, whose incredible auditory capacities the father boasts of, could note down, that is, copy by listening to it, the “secret of Rome”: not just the work itself but its performance, which thus became transportable home, torn from their reserved and guarded place. We can hear in these lines both the violence of a right of listening regulated by relationships of power, and the phonographic power of active, expert hearing (Wolfgang does a kind of “sampling” before the technology exists), its subversive force unleashed as soon as it is linked with a technique of inscription (pending that propagation that recording technology would bring).
Every right to listening both opens up and closes, that is to say regulates possibilities of transfer (as we say in the vocabulary of modern recording). But phonographic recording confers on these possibilities an unprecedented power, which in law, precisely, reverses the established judicial hierarchies.
With what could be called the phonogrammatization of music in general, listening has in effect experienced an unprecedented transformation, which its technical equipment provokes and reveals. We have to face facts: there has been rupture, alteration, in what we might call the responsibility of listening. It is no longer borne mainly by the musical work, by its internal categories (melodic or rhythmic patterns, prominent timbres or harmonic events, “signals” in all genres carefully arranged throughout its formal “envelope” in order to inscribe auditory “landmarks” there);3 it has acquired a certain autonomy—it now has instruments (the disk, the sampler, the digital indexing of sound in general) to act on music. It no longer stems from a simple reception (or its semianagram: perception). Listening is configuring on its own, without being mainly subjected to a rhetorically articulated flux that orders it and structures it from the “interior” of the musical work.
From then on, we must look with a new light at this unusual responsibility of autonomous listening; we must think of the conditions and limits of the right of the listener.
If a certain regime of listening is perhaps in the process of coming to an end (and it is in fact to this ending that I would like to contribute), it remains for us to think about what listening means. I will argue at least that listening, insofar as it has a history, insofar as it is reflected and addressed, has always been plastic. Perhaps it is more so now than ever before.