1. Just as I am writing these words, Peter Szendy himself discreetly reminds me that Don Giovanni sings “ascoltando ti sto”! There it is, then: the echo had preceded me . . .
2. Suzanne plays on these two senses in The Marriage of Figaro when she slaps Figaro instead of listening to him: “senti cara!—senti questa!”
3. Of course we must not ignore the fact that this immanent structure of layering or folding over [pli ou repli] belongs to every register of sense, once again in all the senses. There is nothing visible, of course, without its immanent reflection. But the sonorous is in a way the origin and presentation of this structure for itself.
4. I am referring here to the decisive studies by François Nicolas. Thus, in La singularité Schoenberg (Paris: IRCAM–L’Harmattan, 1997), 18: “In music, the true subject is the work, not the musician,” an assertion that one should extend to every register of art, in keeping with the reminder in the previous note.
5. Ibid., 90.
6. “Listening” here would offer a differential in relation to and in the “presence-to-self” of the philosophical “voice,” especially the Husserlian voice, as Derrida has analyzed it.
7. Narcissism of complacency—“he listens to himself speaking”—and narcissism of compassion—“he listens to himself too much.” But we will see how, in a very precise way, Peter Szendy shifts “listen to oneself” to a “listen to oneself listening” that does not answer to any of these schemes.
8. It would be captivating to study the differences and resemblances between musical “synthesis” and visual “synthesis”: how the latter more obviously refers, at least at first glance, to the recomposition of already given forms, while the former seems more to extract new minerals from its machines.
9. In many respects, it seems to me (and if I dare speak from the depths of my incompetence), jazz has definitely constituted the first clear-cut emergence of a music ostensibly made to listen to itself in this sense: as much with respect to its social provenance as to its uniquely musical functions, jazz is stretched, or it will have been, towards its own assertion always still to come [à venir], always yet to be invented, and always disconcerting. I would readily say about jazz as a whole what Jean-Pierre Moussaron, who knew what he was about, writes about Helen Merrill and Stan Getz: “Starting from the perpetual de-centering of the conversations they’re having with each other, the being-together of their song emerges in the proximity of what does not stop arriving.” Feu le free? (Paris: Belin, 1990), 126.
Epigraph. Roland Barthes, “Écoute” (1976), in L’obvie et l’obtus (Paris: Seuil, 1982), 217.
1. As I write these lines, I come by chance—one example among so many others—on the program for the Strasbourg Philharmonic Orchestra for the 1999–2000 season; on the last page, I read: “For the comfort and serenity of all, we thank you to observe silence during the concerts and—especially—between the movements of the works. The use of cell phones is strictly forbidden.”
2. We will see in chapter 3 the conclusions that Schoenberg will draw from this regarding Wagner’s legacy.
3. I am purposefully borrowing these categories from Pierre Boulez (Jalons [Paris: Bourgois, 1989]), who has unquestionably been one of the great thinkers concerned with the structural, internal listening of music.
1. The scene is reproduced in the famous study by Raymond Klibansky, Erwin Panofsky, and Fritz Saxl, Saturn and Melancholy (New York: Basic Books, 1964). On “ringing” as a melancholic symptom, see the remarks by Giorgio Agamben in Stanze (Paris: Rivages, 1998), 35 (translated by Ronald L. Martinez as Stanzas: Word and Phantasm in Western Culture,[Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992]).
2. French translation by Pierre Maréchaux (Paris: Rivages, 1995).
3. Adorno, “Anweisungen zum Hören neuer Musik,” Der getreue Korrepetitor (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1976), 188–248.
4. 465 BCE. See Annie Bélis, Les musiciens dans l’Antiquité (Paris: Hachette, 1999), 163.
5. Martial Epigrams 1.52. Cf. Augustin-Charles Renouard, Traitédes droits d’auteurs, dans la littérature, les sciences et les beaux-arts (Paris: Jules Renouard, 1838), 1:16. The word plagium, originally, did not designate literary plagiarism, but the act of dealing in people, especially through sale. Various laws (to which Justinian’s Digests and Codex, among others, bear witness) thus punished the stealers of children, slaves, or free men.
6. Quoted in Hansjörg Pohlmann, Die Frühgeschichte des musikalischen Urheberrechts (Kassel: Bärenreiter, 1962), 39–40.
7. Ibid., 87ff.
8. Carl Dahlhaus, The Idea of Absolute Music, trans. Roger Lustig (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 55.
9. Friedrich Wilhelm Marpurg, Historisch-Kritische Beyträge zur Aufnahme der Musik (Berlin, 1757); quoted in Pohlmann, Frühgeschichte, 95.
10. Gazette des tribunaux, August 9, 1834. Quoted in Christian Sprang, Grand Opéra vor Gericht (Baden-Baden: Nomos, 1993), by far the best study on musicians’ law in the nineteenth century.
11. See Hermann Danuser, “Auktoriale Aufführungstradition,” Musica (July–August 1988): 348ff.
12. See John Small, “J. C. Bach Goes to Law,” The Musical Times (September 1985): 526–29.
13. See Mark Rose, Authors and Owners: The Invention of Copyright (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993).
14. See Paul Olagnier, Le droit d’auteur (Paris: Librairie générale de droit et de jurisprudence, 1934) 1:176–79, which quoted a royal ruling of 1697 concerning the relations of “Messrs. the Authors with the Actors of the King”: “Monsieur the Author will dispose of the Roles of his Play as he wishes, following the Characters of each, as he has always done; And the Actors will comply with his intention.” See also the Traité de la legislation des théâtres by Vivien and Blanc, published in Paris in 1830: the author “must attend the rehearsals; he can give the actors whatever advice seems fitting to him, order changes by which the staging would show him to a better advantage, and, on all these points, his opinions must be followed. Whatever concerns the performance of his work, the means to produce it, the interpretation of his thoughts, belong to him by rights; that is his innermost right.”
15. See Sprang, Grand Opéra, 178ff.
16. Hector Berlioz, Memoirs, trans. Ernest Newman (New York: Dover, 1960), 344–45.
17. This is what is testified by an affair in 1824 involving Rossini and his French publisher, a certain Troupenas (see Sprang, Grand Opéra, 41ff.). He had acquired, to the great displeasure of other publishers, exclusive rights to the composer’s works for France. Troupenas’ disappointed rivals, especially Camille Pleyel and Antonin-Joseph Aulagnier, nevertheless published, in the context of the success of The Siege of Corinth, all kinds of “fantasies,” “mélanges,” and other “quadrilles” beginning with “the prettiest motifs of Mohammed, insertted (sic) into the Siege of Corinth.” This kind of arrangement, essentially made for dance, had immense public success. Troupenas, fearing he would lose a large part of the benefits that his dearly acquired exclusivity promised him, attempted to bring suit against his rivals, accusing them of counterfeiting. Counterfeiting, in French law, is an economic harm done to the author or to his legal heirs by illicit competition. But in the Rossini affair, the courts were of the opinion that no wrong had been done to Troupenas, since he himself had not published any “fantasy” or any “quadrille” on The Siege of Corinth. The arrangements of this opera, since they did not figure on the same terrain as it, could not truly be regarded as competitive. So Troupenas was forced to bear the expenses of the trial and to pay damages to the accused.
18. See Sprang, Grand Opéra, 120ff.
19. See note 17.
20. See especially the knowledgeable entry, “Rossini,” in the New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians.
1. In Leopold Stokowski, with the Philadelphia Orchestra, Bach Transcriptions, compact disc, Pearl, 1994.
2. Which is not in the least dishonorable or “sacrilegious,” quite the contrary: everything I could say about the arrangement and a certain plasticity of the music should also be regarded in the context of the reading that Eisenstein suggests, called “plasmaticity” and elasticity of bodies, in the wonderful collection Eisenstein on Disney, trans. Alan Upchurch (London: Methuen, 1988).
3. See the 1927 facsimile edition published by Martin Breslauer Verlag.
4. See chapter 2 of Carl Dahlhaus, Musikästhetik (Cologne: Musikverlag Hans Gerig, 1967); and Lydia Goehr, The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 116ff.
5. Charles Burney, Dr. Burney’s Musical Tours in Europe, Vol. II: An Eighteenth-Century Musical Tour in Central Europe and the Netherlands, ed. Percy Scholes (London: Oxford University Press, 1959), 207.
6. Hector Berlioz, “The Musical Customs of China,” in The Art of Music and Other Essays, trans. Elizabeth Csicsery-Rónay (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), 178.
7. Mémoires d’Hector Berlioz, ed. Pierre Citron (Paris: Flammarion, 1991), 97, 358, and passim.
8. “Sixth Letter,” in Franz Liszt, Pages romantiques, ed. Jean Chantavoine (Paris: Éditions d’Aujourd’hui, 1912), 187.
9. Quoted in Michael Walter, “Die Oper ist ein Irrenhaus,” in Sozialgeschichte der Oper im 19. Jahrhundert (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1997), 232.
10. We could cite a parallel here to the practice of cinema where, unlike in the theater, the actor does not embody a character liable to be continually reincarnated (Oedipus, Hamlet, etc.), but a role for which he is already the type. Film, after that, comes under the jurisdiction of the remake:“A film,” writes Peter Greenaway, “cannot be re-worked, it can only be re-made.” The Stairs (London: Merrell Holberton, 1994), 4.
11. Quoted in Walter, “Die Oper ist ein Irrenhaus,” 235.
12. Franz Liszt, “De la situation des artistes et de leur condition dans la société” (1835), in Pages romantiques, 71–72.
13. Antoine Berman, La traduction et la lettre ou l’auberge du lointain (Paris: Seuil, 1999), 49.
14. Momigny writes: “The best way to make the true expression known to my readers was to join words to it”; or again: “The feelings expressed by the composer were those of a mistress who is on the point of being abandoned.” On the grafting of a monologue by Hamlet onto the Fantasia in C Minor by C. P. E. Bach by Wilhelm von Gerstenberg, see Georg Schünemann, Bach-Jahrbuch (Berlin: Evangelische Verlagsanstalt, 1916), 24. On Beethoven and the parolisation of his symphonies, see Helmut Loos, “Zur Textierung Beethovenscher Instrumentalwerke,” in Beethoven und die Nachwelt, ed. Helmut Loos (Bonn: Beethovenhaus, 1986).
15. André Madrignac and Danièle Pistone, Le chant grégorien (Paris: Champion, 1988), 42.
16. Colley Cibber (1671–1757), Poet Laureate and director of the Drury Lane theater in London, watered down Shakespeare’s plays.
17. “Lettre III—À M. Adolphe Pictet,” in Lettres d’un bachelierès musique (Paris: Le Castor astral, 1991); emphasis mine.
18. Hanslick, Du beau dans la musique (Paris: Bourgois, 1986), 97; emphasis mine.
19. Ibid., 93–94; emphasis mine.
20. Paul de Man does not contradict this in the seminar he devoted to the famous essay by Walter Benjamin, “The Task of the Translator” (see “‘Conclusions’: Walter Benjamin’s ‘The Task of the Translator,’” in The Resistance to Theory, [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986], 80).
21. Letter 128. I say “seemingly” since we would also have to analyze the complex system of utterance in the Persian Letters; and the words that are generally attributed to Montesquieu—the condemnation of translation, pure and simple—would certainly not emerge unscathed. Who, in fact, is speaking in this dialogue? And above all, in what language? What implicit movements of translation traverse this Persian letter whose (fictive) author transcribes a dialogue heard in French in Paris?
22. Walter Benjamin, “The Task of the Translator,” in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1969), 81.
23. De Man, “‘Conclusions,’” 82.
24. Especially that of the Aeolian harp, evoked when Benjamin mentions Hölderlin’s translations of Sophocles (“The Task of the Translator,” 81).
25. See Lettres d’un bachelier ès musique.
26. Brendel, “Où le piano devient orchestre. Les arrangements et paraphrases de Liszt,” in Réflexions faites (Paris: Buchet/Chastel, 1979), 152–53.
27. Especially measure 21.
28. Measure 72. Instead of the octave interval (fa-fa) of the first version, the left hand must cover an interval of a tenth.
29. At measures 21, 68, and 72 of the Pastoral, the lower-register sections (cellos and double basses) are arranged according to a rhythmic superimposition that was singularly complex for Beethoven’s time: on the same fragment in the F-major scale, the cellos play five notes (a quintole) and the double basses four (sixteenth notes). From this superimposition (five against four), a complication of rhythm results that gives rise to a complex sonority: it gives the effect that a shaking camera does in photography. Whence we hear a noise, an effect of timbre, that we interpret as a sonorous painting of the rumbling of thunder (according to the indications Beethoven’s titles give for the movements of this “program” symphony). No pianist’s left hand could play this complex superimposition by itself.
30. Quoted by Osamu Tomori in the Cahiers F. Schubert 11 (October 1997): 43–44.
31. Schumann, “H. Berlioz, ‘Symphonie fantastique’ (Op. 14),” in Sur les musiciens, trans. Henry de Curzon (Paris: Stock, 1979).
32. Robert Schumann, Schriften über Musik und Musiker, ed. Josef Häusler (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1982), 101 [French translation modified (233)].
33. See Richard Wagner, The Art-Work of the Future and Other Works, trans. William Ashton Ellis (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1993).
34. On this “early romanticism,” see Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy, L’absolu littéraire (Paris: Seuil, 1978); English translation by Philip Barnard and Cheryl Lester, The Literary Absolute: The Theory of Literature in German Romanticism (Albany: SUNY Press, 1988). See also Antoine Berman, L’épreuve de l’étranger (Paris: Gallimard, 1984); English translation by S. Heyvaert, The Experience of the Foreign (Albany: SUNY Press, 1992).
35. “Wert der Bearbeitung,” in Von der Einheit der Musik. Verstreute Aufzeichnungen (Berlin: Max Hesses Verlag, 1922). I provide a translation of this text in Arrangements, dérangements (Paris: Ircam–L’Harmattan, 2000).
36. Cf. the extraordinary correspondence collected in Correspondances, textes (Geneva: Contrechamps, 1995); especially the letter from Schoenberg on August 24, 1909, in reply to Busoni, who had offered to publish the two versions side by side:“It is truly impossible for me to publish my piece with, next to it, an arrangement that shows how I could have done it better. That would show, then, that my composition is imperfect.. . . In that case, I would have either to destroy my piece or rework it myself.” We are far from Schumann’s idea of the perfectability of works, and arrangement has become an exclusively authorial affair (or autocorrection). (I have analyzed the arrangement of op. 11, no. 2 by Busoni in “Bref Schoenberg,” in La liaison, ed. Bertrand Rougé [Pau: Presses universitaires de Pau, 2000].)
37. Adorno, “Zur Problem der Reproduktion” (1925), in Musikalische Schriften VI (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1984), 442–43 [French translation by Szendy].
38. Berg, Écrits (Paris: Bourgois, 1985), 24ff.
39. Reich,“Re-Schoenberg,” in Arnold Schoenberg (Paris: Théâtre musical du Châtelet, 1995). See also, in the same vein (although with weightier ideological presuppositions), the recent Requiem pour une avant-garde by Benoît Duteurtre. In National Hebdo, the newspaper of the extreme right in France, close to Jean-Marie Le Pen, Duteurtre’s book was reviewed and “dodecaphonic” music was characterized as “totalitarian”; a “Communist” totalitarianism, obviously, since it grants “equal rights” to the twelve tones!
1. Cf. Bernard Stiegler,“Programmes de l’improbable, court-circuits de l’inouï,” in InHarmoniques 1 (Paris: Ircam-Bourgois, 1986), 126: “When he was twenty, [Parker] carried two musical instruments on his early tours: his saxophone and his phonograph—as well as records by Lester Young.”
2. Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1969), 221.
3. Béla Bartók, “Mechanical Music” (1937); I give a French translation of this text in Instruments (Les Cahiers de l’Ircam 7).
4. Rodolphe Burger, “Loop,” Revue de littérature générale 1 (Paris: POL, 1995).
5. Adorno, “Du fétichisme en musique et de la regression de l’audition,” trans. Marc Jimenez, InHarmoniques 3 (Paris: Ircam–Bourgois, 1988).
6. Quoted in Sprang, Grand Opéra vor Gericht (Baden-Baden: Nomos, 1993), 238.
7. I give a general outline of this history in “De la harpe éolienne à la toile,” in Membres fantômes. Des corps musiciens (Paris: Minuit, 2002); English translation forthcoming.
8. La Tonotechnie ou l’art de noter les cylindres . . . par le père Engramelle, religieux augustin de la Reine Marguerite [“Tonotechnia, or the art of notating on cylinders . . . by Father Engramelle, Augustine friar of Queen Marguerite”].
9. Quoted in Sprang, Grand Opéra, 243, from which I am borrowing the details of the affair.
10. In the sense of the right to publish [droit d’éditer] that the revolutionary decree of July 19–24, 1793, allocated to the author: “The authors of writings of all kinds, composers of music, painters, and sketch artists who engrave paintings or drawings, will enjoy, during their entire life, the exclusive right to sell, have sold, or distribute their works in territory of the Republic and to transfer the ownership of it in whole or in part.” This decree constitutes the counterpart to that of 1791, establishing a right of representation.
11. Cf. Georges Sbriglia, L’exploitation des oeuvres musicales par les instruments de musique mé caniques (Paris: Arthur Rousseau Éditeur, 1907), 29, from which I have taken all the following citations.
12. The law of November 10, 1917, “rescinding the law of May 16, 1866,” is quoted in Philippe Parès, Histoire du droit de reproduction mé canique (Paris: La Compagnie du Livre, 1953), 23–24.
13. Adorno, Essays on Music, trans. Susan H. Gillespie (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2002), 277.
14. The Greek eidos, or idea, as has often been stressed, refers to sight.
15. See Andre Millard, America on Record: A History of Recorded Sound (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 25.
16. See Parès, Histoire du droit, 34ff., as well as for the following quotations.
17. The ruling of the Court of Appeal was very explicit in this regard: “Considering that in fact records or cylinders . . . receive a graphic notation of words pronounced, that the thinking of the author interpreted is as if materialized on it in multiple grooves, and then reproduced in thousands of copies . . . and distributed outside with a writing that may indeed be special but that may be legible tomorrow to the eyes . . . that, thanks to this repetition of printed words, the intelligence of the listener is penetrated with the literary work through hearing, as it would have been with a book through sight, or with the Braille method through touch; that, henceforth, it is a mode of publication perfected by performance . . . and that the rules of counterfeiting are applicable to it. . . . Considering that we could not object to the law of May 16, 1866 . . . that in fact this text, in its explicit terms, aims only at ‘musical airs’ and not at words; [the court] rules that the inscription on records or cylinders of phonographs or gramophones of literary works without song or else accompanied by music . . . is an infringement of the monopoly of commercial exploitation of the authors and their agents; Rules, on the contrary, that there is no counterfeiting in the phonographic edition sui generis of musical airs, without words.”
18. Parès, Histoire du droit, 55ff.
19. Sbriglia, L’exploitation des oeuvres musicales 112 ff., as well as for the quotations that follow.
20. André Lange, Stratégies de la musique (Brussels: Mardaga, 1986), 117.
21. Parès, Histoire du droit, 26ff. During the conference dedicated to revising the Berne Convention, which took place in Berlin in 1908, it was admitted that “authors of musical works have the exclusive right to authorize the adaptation of their works and their public performance by means of instruments serving to reproduce them mechanically.” This revision put an end once and for all to the freer arrangements that had prevailed since 1866.
22. See Igor Stravinsky, Correspondence, vol. 2 (New York: Knopf, 1984), 219.
23. He sold the rights for this new version to the Chester publishing house. This resulted in a dispute involving Chester and the Jurgenson firm in Leipzig. Chester lost the trial and threatened to turn against Stravinsky, accusing him of having sold what he did not possess.
24. See Eric Walter White, Stravinsky (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1966), 154, as well as Louis Andriessen and Elmer Schönberger, The Apollonian Clockwork: On Stravinsky (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 32.
25. Schoenberg, “Igor Stravinsky, le restaurateur,” in Le style et l’idée (Paris: Buchet/Chastel, 1977).
26. Igor Stravinsky and Robert Craft, Expositions and Developments (New York: Doubleday, 1962), 166.
27. Schoenberg, Stil und Gedanke (Frankfurt: Fischer, 1976), 390–91.
28. Schoenberg, Style and Idea, ed. Leonard Stein, trans. Leo Black (London: Faber & Faber, 1975), 371ff.
29. See Michel Gautreau, La musique et les musiciens en droit privé français (Paris: PUF, 1970), 318ff. Furtwängler had recorded for the radio broadcasting organization of the Third Reich. After Berlin was captured by the Allies, Soviet authorities seized hold of Furtwängler’s recordings, then released them to authorities in East Germany, which in turn yielded them by contract on November 5, 1952, to Urania Records in New York. This firm then produced a record with Beethoven’s Third, distributed in France by the company Thalia. Furtwängler died in 1954 and his legal successors served subpoenas on the American and French companies. The ruling of January 4, 1964, speaks of “violation of the rights of the artist over the work his interpretation constitutes.” After the passage of the law of July 3, 1985, called the “Lang Law,” the right of the interpreter, like that of record producers, is only a “subsidiary right” of the author’s right.
30. See the ruling of March 13, 1957: “Recording and sonorous reproduction of musical pieces and songs constitute an original work protected by the laws of 19–24 July 1793, in that the creation of such a work necessitates for its author a certain technical and professional knowledge, a skill and an ability to implement the best technical procedures in order to ensure a faithful reproduction of music and the recorded voice.” Quoted in Marie-Claude Dock, Étude sur le droit d’auteur (Paris: Librairie générale de droit et de jurisprudence, 1963), 168.
31. “Melody is . . . appropriable in itself, whereas harmony and rhythm can be protected only when applied to a melody.” Henri Desbois, Le droit d’auteur en France (Paris: Dalloz, 1978), 138.
32. Commercial companies that sell sounds are often confronted with legal difficulties: when Bryan Bell, who had worked with the musicians Herbie Hancock and Neil Young, founded a company called Synthbank in order to publish sounds, he found that “the U.S. Copyright Office simply did not provide a means for copyrighting sound apart from music.” Steve Jones, “Music and Copyright in the U.S.A.,” in Music and Copyright, ed. Simon Frith (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1993), 73.
33. Quoted in Michael B. Sapherstein, “The Trademark Registrability of the Harley-Davidson Roar” (1998), from Intellectual Property and Technology Forum, Boston College Law School, http://www.bc.edu/bcorg/avp/law/st_org/iptf/articles/index.html.
34. Michel Guerrin, “Les photographes doivent faire face à une avalanche d’autorisations pour photographier un bâtiment, un parc, une gare” [“Photographers Must Face an Avalanche of Authorizations To Photograph a Building, a Park, a Train Station”], Le Monde, September 12–13, 1999, 8. In another register, the Caddie company recently sued some newspapers for using its name to describe supermarket shopping carts (see Philippe Rivière, “Mots interdits,” Le monde diplomatique, January 2000, 7). And a court had already passed a ruling, in 1980, declaring that “the act of using the word BIC, in order to designate a ballpoint pen in a novel, was . . . incorrect and detrimental since it participates in the process of generalizing the brand.” Quoted in Lionel Bochurberg, Le droit de citation (Paris: Masson, 1994), 5.
35. Cartier-Bresson, “Le honte me monte à la gorge . . .” [“Shame Wells Up in Me. . .”], Le Monde, September 12–13, 1999.
36. Quoted (along with the statements that follow) in David Gans, “The Man Who Stole Michael Jackson’s Face,” Wired, February 1995.
37. The Canadian journal Musicworks included with its issue no. 47 a cassette of the sonorous plunderings taken from this CD, which no longer exists.
38. As Jacques Derrida writes in Signéponge (Paris: Seuil, 1988), 47, a musician cannot “inscribe his signature . . . onto the work: the musician cannot sign in text. He lacks the space to do so, and the spacing of a language (unless he overcodes his music with another semiotic system, musical notation for example).”
39. Quoted in Bochurberg, Le droit de citation, 155.
1. Adorno, Introduction to the Sociology of Music, trans. E. B. Ashton (New York: Continuum, 1989).
2. In this order: the “culture consumer” (6), the “emotional listener” (8), the “resentment listener” (10), and, finally, the sixth and seventh types embodying the degree zero of listening, the “listener to whom music is entertainment” (16) and the “indifferent, the unmusical, and the anti-musical” listener (17). To be fair to Adorno, we should recall that his typology is obviously not prescriptive: “My point is [not] to disparage representatives of the described listening types negatively,” he writes, before adding that it would be “grotesque” to “posture mentally as if mankind existed for the sake of good listening” (18). However, despite all these precautions, Adorno’s typology does seem to be normative.
3. Noiray, in L’Avant-sène opera 172 (July–August 1996): 115.
4. Stare (“to stay” in Italian) is often translated “to be,” “to be in the process of”: stai ascoltando for “you are in the process of listening.” [In French, “je suis” can mean either “I am” or “I follow.”]
5. Memoirs of Hector Berlioz, trans. Ernest Newman (New York: Dover, 1960), 53ff.
6. Michael Walter, “Social History of Opera,” 332.
7. We can date its French beginnings from the foundation of Concerts spirituels in 1725, followed by Gossec’s Concert des Amateurs in 1769. See James H. Johnson, Listening in Paris: A Cultural History (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1995), 71ff.
8. This systematic conjunction appears clearly in the notes added to Robert’s discourse in chapter 15. Note 61 is dedicated to arrangers; here we can find the play on words that Berlioz (as well as Liszt) would adopt a few years later (arrangements-derangements): “A profession that is very fashionable today and quite lucrative for the one who practices it. They began by rising up against the right that socalled men of letters assume, to arrange in their own way works in the public domain; but they ended up regarding this kind of literary piracy as a completely natural thing, forgetting that, in a little while, we will have as many versions of one play or one book as there will be arrangers or abbreviators.. . . Everything is arbitrary in these kinds of arrangements or rather derangements; the poor authors are tortured without respite, and nothing suggests there will ever be an end to this literary and dramatic inquisition” (331–32). We also find this joint denunciation of arrangement and of the absence of a legislation that is more protective for authors in the remarks devoted to Castil-Blaze: “M. Castil Blaze is the author of a dozen operas for which he has written neither the words, nor the music” (137).
9. Tia DeNora, Beethoven et la construction du génie (Paris: Fayard, 1998), 43.
10. Quoted in K. M. Knittel, “Wagner, Deafness, and the Reception of Beethoven’s Late Style,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 51, no. 1 (1998): 53.
11. Quoted in Knittel, ibid., p. 52.
12. Richard Wagner, Beethoven, trans. Albert R. Parsons (New York: G. Schirmer, 1883), 63ff.
13. Wagner, in fact, often quotes—in his Beethoven as well as in his other writings—Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and Representation. But, when he speaks of dream, it seems that he relies on the “Essay on Visions” (Versuchüber Geistersehen), collected in the Parerga et paralipomena (1851) of the philosopher, in which Schopenhauer names a certain “organ of dream.” Having established, with or following Schopenhauer, that “musical conception . . . can have its origin in that side of consciousness alone which Schopenhauer designates as introverted” (22), Wagner proposes to go “farther . . . in this path” by following Schopenhauer’s “profound hypothesis” concerning the phenomenon of “clairvoyance” [Hellsehen], as well as his “theory of dreams” (22). It is in fact when “introverted consciousness attains to actual clairvoyance” [Hellsichtigkeit] that “tone forces its way out” (22). This inner clairvoyance of consciousness is the result, Wagner says, of a “function of the brain . . . which Schopenhauer here terms the organ of dreams” (23). And from then on “the world of sound . . . bears the same relation to the world of light [i.e., appearances] that the dreaming state does to the waking” (23).
14. In Three Wagner Essays, trans. Robert L. Jacobs (London: Eulenburg Books, 1979).
15. Letter from 1930, cited in Josef Rufer, Das Werk Arnold Schönbergs (Kassel: Bärenreiter, 1959). I give a translation of this in Arrangements-dérangements.
16. Letter dated March 18, 1939, in Arnold Schoenberg, Correspondance, 1910–1951, ed. Erwin Stein, trans. Dennis Collins (Paris: Editions Jean-Claude Lattès, 1983), 210.
17. Letter dated March 23, 1918, ibid., 48–49.
18. In this same letter, Schoenberg writes, “I still have the same opinion about cuts that I did before. I am against the removal of tonsils, although I know one can continue to live after a fashion without arms, legs, noses, eyes, tongue, ears, etc.” On Schoenbergian organicism and the notion of the “member,” see my “Bref Schoenberg,” in La liaison.
1. Michel Butor, Dialogue avec 33 variations de Ludwig van Beethoven sur une valse de Diabelli (Paris: Gallimard, 1971).
2. See Carl Dahlhaus, “Thesen über Programmusik,” in Klassische und romantische Musikästhetik (Laaber, Germany: Laaber-Verlag, 1988), 365ff.
3. Roland Barthes, “Musica Practica,” in Image-Music-Text, trans. Stephen Heath (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977), 153.
4. One testimonial among others—that of Christian Marclay: “[My] disks were ‘prepared’ with inscriptions, indications of speed, selfsticking labels to indicate the beginning of an extract or to force the needle to jump and repeat the same phrase in a loop. . . . The score was thus written directly onto the disk.” “Le son en images,” in L’Écoute (Paris: Ircam–L’Harmattan, 2000).
5. Adorno, “The Form of the Phonograph Record,” in Essays on Music, 277.
6. Adorno, “Worte ohne Lieder,” Vermischte Schriften II (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1984).
7. See Carl Dahlhaus, The Idea of Absolute Music, trans. Roger Lustig (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 63: “Literature about music is no mere reflection of what happens in the musical practice of composition, interpretation, and reception, but rather belongs, in a certain sense, to the constituent forces of music itself. For insofar as music does not exhaust itself in the acoustical substrate that underlies it, but only takes shape through categorical ordering of what has been perceived, a change in the system of categories of reception immediately affects the substance of the thing itself.”
8. Mauricio Kagel, quoted by Werner Klüppelholz, in Mauricio Kagel 1970–1980, (Cologne: DuMont, 1981), 12.
9. Kagel, “Ludwig van,” in Tam-tam (Paris: Bourgois, 1983).
10. Duchamp du signe: Ecrits, ed. Michel Sanouillet (Paris: Flammarion, 1975), 37, 276 (1914 and 1948).