A Contemporary music does
not think alone!
Our musical between-times raises two questions:
-
How
do we come out of musical modernity with a unilaterally subtractive orientation
(a-tonal, a-thematic, a-metric) proceeding from the top-down (in an affirmative
manner), not from the bottom-up (by sinking into the nihilistic modernism of
systematic deconstruction)?
-
How
do we put this musical modernity to the test of a non-musical heterogeneity if
it is true that music as thought, and so as art (not as cultural function)
implies, particularly today, its renewed confrontation with the non-musical?
To examine this first question, we
will set out from the manner in which the poet Mallarm,
in his Coup de ds,
orients his specific between-times (between the alexandrine and free verse)
towards a new type of global Metre and we will sketch a musical problematic
intertwining anew fresh harmonies, rhythms and Gestalts (gesture-figures).
For the second, we will set out from
the manner in which the mathematician Dedekind revolutionised number theory by extending the field of the rationals by the adjunction of cuts and we will sketch the manner in which music
can extend its space of thought by adjoining to itself other types of discourse,
in particular of a linguistic nature.
To send contemporary music to the
schools of poetry and mathematics in this way leads us to examine the manner in
which our two questions - the one endogenous, the other exogenous - respond to
each other and intertwine, while sketching the path of a modernity fighting
simultaneously on two fronts (against nihilistic modernism and against
academic traditionalism) to better affirm a contemporary musical art thinking
with others according to the heterophony of composite musical works.
*
Towards a terza pratica extending
the Music-world by the adjunction of
heterophonies
(Contemporary music does not think
alone !)
Musical
practices – Continuities and transitions
(The Twelfth International Conference of the
Department of Musicology of the Faculty
of Music, University of Arts in Belgrade)
Belgrade, 25 April 2014
Video:
http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x1vemj1_terza-pratica-f-nicolas_music
Thank you for your invitation in this very
interesting City of Belgrade.
My position in your topic "Continuities
and transitions" will be very specific: I will try to present you a way of
thinking that combines continuation and "revolution". My question
will be: how is it possible to continue a way by a jump but without transition?
A friend of
mine, the french Philosopher Alain Badiou, has
written: The rupture has for essence,
not interruption, but adjunction.
So, I want to present you how an extension by
adjunction makes possible a continuation by a jump without transition.
I have modified the title of my paper to better
reflect my subject. It is now: "Towards a terza pratica extending the Music-world by the adjunction of
heterophonies"
*
Barefoot, you wander
from word to word. Branko Miljković
Music, in particular the music that we call, in
France, contemporary, does not think alone.
How can it think with others?
I would like to examine this problem with you
by posing a more delimited question: how can we conceive today of a terza pratica?
As a quick
outline of my intentions, I would like to
- First, show the musical pertinence
and urgency of a terza pratica - I
will explain, of course, what I mean by that.
- Secondly, show that such a terza pratica could
find its musical principle in a heterophonic logic extending ancient polyphonic
logic.
- Thirdly, indicate by which concrete
compositional processes we could envisage such a musical extension.
- Fourthly, determine how to think
this terza pratica with
other types of thought: on the one hand with a mathematical thinking of
adjunction and of extension, on the other with a philosophico-political
thinking of justice.
*
Why a terza pratica?
I will
employ this term in direct reference to what Monteverdi called secunda pratica. The
associated musical practice is that which consists in setting words to music.
I will distance myself, in doing this, from the
sense that my musicological friend, Clestin Delige,
gave the term in the nineties of the twentieth century[1] (Clestin
Delige was, I believe, a regular visitor of your musicological meetings and it
is for me a joy to recall his memory here). He was inspired
then by Hegel - his three stages of the work of art - rather than by the question Monteverdi posed to the vocal musical work.
To recall
Monteverdis operation:
Monteverdi
tried to give music new expressive powers by putting it to the service of the
words that it welcomes and it accompanies. It is in serving the words that
music masters the new expressivity that authorises the new tonal system.
The
previous practice - prima pratica - was founded on modal counterpoint. This
counterpoint ordered the musical composition of the voices according to a
step-by-step construction, point by point (punctus contra punctum).
This
element-by-element, note-by-note algebraic construction was the law of
composition on which the words were arranged - ought to be arranged: at that time (the Middle Ages), music
commanded the words, and the words served the music.
Monteverdi
wants to reverse this rapport: he revives the ancient hierarchy of Gregorian
monody where the Latin prosody commanded the expressivity of the musical neumes.
In
following this attitude, Monteverdi will reinvent melody in the new harmonic
context that authorises tonality: this melody can no longer arise, like the
voices of counterpoint, from a note-by-note algebraic construction - we know
elsewhere the difficulties there will be in conceiving of treatises of melody
as though they were treatises of counterpoint, of orchestration or even of composition
-. A melody is a musical topology subtly and globally espousing an autonomous
prosody.
This
resurrection of melody, subtly weaving itself around a
prosody of an lingual order,
comes to modify the musical category of the voice.
In the prima pratica,
a musical voice had for its partner another musical voice - such is the very
principal of counterpoint. Polyphony then resulted from weaving the voices
between themselves, stitch by stitch, and constituted in this way a homogenous
plurality. Certainly, the possible Cantus Firmus
singularly served as a matrix, but it was itself algebraically framed without
being melodically ornamented. In this way, the Cantus Firmus
reinforced the skeletal logic of the
voices of counterpoint, of polyphonic counterpoint. In total, it fixed the
common law for a collectivity of voices that one can
declare to be of a fraternal type.
This notion
of voice, with its principle of modal and contrapuntal polyphony, will be found
relativised in the secunda pratica.
Understand
well: Monteverdi does not try to disqualify prima
pratica, he does not try to delete the polyphony
of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, he does not try to reject contrapuntal
logic; he tries to extend the notion of the voice by adding a new expectation
of expressivity to music.
In secunda pratica, the
voice once more becomes melody (as it
was in Gregorian monody), but this time it is a new type of melody, because it
is a tonal melody. In so doing, the
melodic voice will have for partner no longer another voice, as in contrapuntal
polyphony, but the functional harmony that the tonal system has just invented -
think, for example, of the compositional practice that Monteverdi will draw
from the simple tonic-dominant relationship at the beginning of his madrigal[2]
Hor chel Ciel e la Terra. A new system of melody (already harmonised and harmonically
accompanied) begins here, and we are familiar with the eminently fecund destiny
of it in the centuries that follow until today.
On this
point, a new musical power is inaugurated that comes to split the notion of the
musical voice into two types:
- the new melodic type;
- the old contrapuntal type, which will
internally weave functional harmony (one knows the choral destiny of the four
voices harmonically superimposed).
It is worth
noting in passing that this process liberates the melodic voice from properly
thematic functions - those that appeared in contrapuntal polyphony starting
with Guillaume Dufay and which agreed with the algebra of notes (pitches and
durations).
As such, in
this new polyphonic system,
- the melodic voice is not a thematic
voice (as the voice of the Cantus Firmus could be);
- the thematic voice is not one of the
four voices of harmony;
- the four voices - implicit or explicit
- of tonal harmony, those that put into movement tonal harmonic functions, are
not melodic.
We grasp
the considerable polyphonic possibilities that this secunda pratica offers. Polyphony is organised
from then on around a sort of musical division of labour:
-
on the one side, the melodic expressivity that exhausts the sung text and its prosody;
-
on the other side, the dynamic of tonal harmony,
materialised by a completely new combinatory of voices obeying the old
contrapuntal rules;
-
on a last side, some more properly thematic
functions brought to bear by such or such local
configuration of this system.
The
polyphony that proceeds from this intrinsic diversity of voices no longer has fraternity as a paradigm. On the one
side, the melody is a voice that demands its individuality; on the other, the theme affirms a musical consciousness of self. The harmonic
plurality finally materialises a body in
movement. All this turns around a voice that preserves its irreducible
specificity: by speaking at the same time that it sings. In sum, a sister voice
rather than a brother, and a paradigm that recalls love between two sexes
rather than the asexual fraternity of counterpoint - we are familiar with the
manner in which this harmonised melody will be able to celebrate the nuptials
of love.
These new
resources, patiently composed around an initial adjunction - the adjunction of
a melody in service of a prosody - will give music a new discursive power: it is in fact here that baroque music, as a
musical discourse of an entirely new
type, is born.
This new discursivity of music will authorise it to enter into
closer relationships with the discursivity of the
language that it sings: music will hierarchise and
segment its discursive flux according to properly musical - and no longer
lingual - laws. It will in this way be endowed with a sort of power of
nomination over the words that it sings: musical discourse phrases its discourse,
articulates the phrases produced into different segments, detailing these
segments as smaller entities so that it can double
the linguistic syntax of the words with an ersatz musical syntax. This doubling will give music the impression
that it comments on language.
As such,
music is endowed with a para-signifying capacity: not a signifying
capacity like that of a language - music does not signify, music is not a
language - but a capacity to declare that it, music, knows well what language
signifies, that it knows well that the words put to music are, for their part,
signifiers.
Music is
endowed in this way with a sort of signifying
aura, with a significance
that is not a signification, and it is endowed with it precisely by serving a
linguistic signification that remains fundamentally heterogeneous and
inaccessible to it.
*
We will
formalise this process engaged by the secunda pratica by passing over the mathematical models of
adjunction and of extension.
I will not
detail these models here. They are of three types:
- the cuts of Dedekind, then of Conway,
that enable the construction of the real numbers from the rational numbers,
then the surreal numbers from the real numbers;
- the algebraic extensions of fields that
enable the construction of the field of algebraic numbers from that of the rational
numbers, then the field of complex (numbers) from that of the real numbers;
- the generic extensions by forcing of
Paul Cohen.
It is worth
noting that, in the two first cases, the analogy with our three pratiche [comme pratik]:
- the cuts first of all pass from a
numerical prima pratica
- that of the rationals - to a secunda pratica - that of the reals - then from
this secunda
to a terza
- that of the surreals;
- the extensions of fields first of all
pass from a prima pratica
- the field of rational numbers - to a secunda - the field of algebraic
numbers - then from this secunda
to a terza
- the field of the complex (numbers).
Take from
this the following principal idea: one can pass from a secunda pratica to a terza pratica in the same way as one has
already passed from a prima pratica to a secunda pratica!
For each of
these three mathematical models (take my word for it!), the process properly
called adjunction consists of three
successive and cumulative stages:
1. first of all the construction of words,
or specific objects composing a lexicon;
2. then the transformation of these words
into names (apt to designate and
signify) by bestowing the previously constructed words with a properly
signifying face;
3. finally the construction of statements from these names in order to
control, from the inside of the original situation, the expected results in the
future extended situation.
Once this
adjunction is effectuated (with words becoming
names incorporated into statements), the process of extension
consists in making the new adjunct object interact with the original situation.
The point is not only to graph, to stick, or to add
together, but to engender a recomposition of the
entire original situation. The idea is to generate a new extended situation in
which the original situation remains a single delimited region, a particular
case of what is from then on generalised. One will say that, in this phase of
extension, one passes from a simple cut-and-paste to the production of an
ensemble, that one transforms a sum into a product,
the product of a global interaction.
Remember
that to add is to construct a system with words
becoming names able to produce statements and that to extend is to
mobilise these statements to control (from the very interior of the original
situation - this is the genius of the operation) the global interaction able to
generate a situation of a completely different species: an extended situation.
*
We will see
how secunda pratica answers
to these formal characteristics of an adjunction and an extension before coming
to our terza pratica.
- First of all, the hierarchised segmentation of the tonal phrase forms the
fundamental entities which will take the place of words in the new musical discursivity: a
musical word is here an elementary melodico-harmonic
motif, perceptible and identifiable by ear.
- Then, these musical words see
themselves correlated to ordinary words (those that are pronounced by the text
set to music) in order to musically name the words said by the voice: the
musical motifs become in this way musical names,
able to name the joy or sadness, love or hate, anger or tenderness evoked by
the sung text (think about the leitmotifs of Wagner but also, more generally,
baroque rhetoric ).
- Finally, these musical names will
interact to compose musical phrases constituting
a more global musical discourse, a discourse which
will espouse and musically express the affects and actions designated by prosodised language.
In this
way, musical words, names and statements come to add to music a new type of melody (in comparison
to contrapuntal melody). This melody is endowed with the para-signifying
capacity of which I have spoken.
The
extension (to which this adjunction leads) holds to the musical generalisation
of these new expressive capacities proven around harmonised melody. Secunda pratica is
not only an old instrumental music to which could be added a new type of
melodic voice: it is a complete revision that systematically shattered what voice, polyphony, monody, melody, harmony and choir meant
until then.
In total,
this secunda pratica revolutionises
prima pratica
not just by destroying it, not by undermining its foundations to better delete
or dissolve it; it revolutionises it from the top down: by enlarging the space
of thought and relativising prima pratica, which
appears like a particular case, like a circumscribed region of the new extended
situation.
*
If you have
followed me up until now, I ask you then: can one engage the twenty-first
musical century with a terza pratica which could be to the secunda pratica what
the latter was to prima pratica?
Such is the
hypothesis at work in my compositional labour, that which guided the choral
study entitled Dido and
Aeneas, which had its premire on Wednesday evening.
We will
examine more closely this hypothesis of a terza pratica.
*
There is,
first of all, the idea that we intend to extend the properly artistic power of
music by banking anew on a musically delimited pratica: that which sets words to
music.
As Adorno suggested, [3] music has need of the heterogeneous to remain an
art, an autonomous form of thought, in order not to fade into the exercise of
simple cultural and religious functions (to amuse, to accompany dance, to
accompany images, to illustrate films, to contribute to the sociological
identifications of the youth, to participate in the sportive cults of vast
stadiums, etc.).
The heterogeneity - which I
propose to privilege for my music - will remain that of language.
It will consist then - and this
will be my first axiom - in re-examining anew what set words to music can
mean today.
In terms of words set to music,
we shall determine two principal essential points:
1.
These words
must say something about this time,
this time precisely in which music wants to be contemporary; the words set to
music cannot just be vocalises, mumbling, glossolalia, scat and other language
games; they cannot be limited moreover to quotidian babble, to the commerce of opinion;
the words set to music ought to signify a contemporary who goes there? of
thought; they ought to engage with the emancipatory aspects of this time
(against the general dumbing-down extolled by globalised capitalism – a
lateral thesis could be that globalisation is only the supreme - financial and
imperialist - stage of capitalism, and there is nothing insurmountable there!)
Our first principle will then be: Terza pratica should
carefully choose the words that it wants to set to music.
2.
The
second principle, the corollary of the preceding one: the setting to music of
these words, carefully chosen, should not efface what they say! The words set
to music should remain globally
comprehensible to the ear. To set to music should not mean to undo linguistic
prosody, to take the syntagms apart, to deconstruct the words to reduce the
linguistic discourse to a pure acoustic game of unsignifying phonemes.
Our second principle will then be: terza pratica should
globally respect the phrasing and the prosody of the language mobilised so that
the words set to music remain comprehensible - the heterogeneity to which music
has recourse should remain heterogeneous and not be musically dissolved,
assimilated or denatured: when a host invites a stranger to his home, he does
not force him to dress and speak like the natives!
There is
then the following principal idea: terza pratica should enable the extension of different types
of musical polyphony to true heterophonies.
I repeat:
the goal of all this is to extend music.
The goal is not to musically welcome the heterogeneous, as though the point was
for music to make propaganda for this heterogeneity (by mobilising the existing
repertoire of conventional musical effects): to welcome the heterogeneous, to
set a contemporary discourse to music, this should be for music the occasion to
invent new properly musical alterities for itself: in order for the global
heterophony between the two types of discourse - musical and lingual - to be a
true heterophony, not a simple superimposition or a pure collage, it is in fact
necessary that this bringing together also mobilises a heterophony intrinsic to
each discourse.
As one
doubts, this extension (of polyphony towards heterophony) will correspond to a
profound modification of the notion of voice:
it will not be completely the same voice that can make music heterophonic;
one will not play with alterity as one played with
alliances (counterpoint) or (melodico-harmonic)
complementation.
The voice
susceptible to compose a heterophony will not be a voice susceptible to be
repeated and varied as in contrapuntal polyphony - we will say: this will not
be the singular of a plural. It will not be moreover an indivisible and unrepeatable
entity as is the melody of secunda pratica - this will not be an individual voice. The
voice of heterophony will be itself composite,
that is to say interiorly marked with intrinsic alterity:
this is the endogenous condition that allows this voice to participate, in a
non-accidental manner, in a more global heterogeneity - this will be an dividual voice (that is to say
interiorly multiple, without prerequisite or guaranteed unity).
With this
condition, heterophony will be something other than the new disparate and
arbitrary assemblage of ancient polyphonic voices.
Our first
compositional principle will then be: a heterophony will incorporate
intrinsically composite, dividual musical voices (but this, certainly, does not
prohibit some secondary incorporation of such or such voice of a more classical
type).
Our second
compositional principle will be: in the setting to music of words remaining
words, in the disjunctive duality between music and language, we need a third
element. This third element will not come to synthesise disjunction from the
top down; it will not moreover mediate it from the bottom up; it will rather
create the conditions of a participation between
disjunct orders (think of the manner in which Plato speaks about a
participation between intelligible and sensible). The third element will favour
the constitution of a resonance between musical and lingual voices.
This third
term will be a chorus. I suggest then
- the second principle will guide me here - that we need a heterophony of two
distinct choruses, susceptible however to share the common characteristic of
being a choir. We need then an instrumental and a vocal choir.
The
addition of this term, chorus, involves already a nominal displacement: one
passes from the primitive duality of the musical
and of the lingual (that of our pratica consisting of setting words to music)
to the choral duality of the instrumental
and of the vocal. We have in this way
begun to make immanent an exogenous contradiction in the music. Certainly, one
is not yet finished with the level of lexicon and of names, but we will return
to the importance of these instances in the process of adjunction.
So then, two choirs.
1. We will have, on the one hand, an
instrumental choir: we must then treat the orchestra (or any other more restricted
instrumental formation) like a choir made of composite voices. One senses that
this will imply diagonalising the traditional
instrumental families (woodwinds and brass; bowed, plucked or struck strings;
skins with or without defined pitches; etc.). One will orient oneself instead
towards an extended formula of chamber music (think of Farben) where each instrument
configures by itself its own little chamber music, interiorises a specific form
of heterogeneity. In such an instrumental choir, with a heterophonic vocation,
it will then be difficult to tell exactly the number of voices!
2. On the other hand, that of the
vocal, we will have what I propose to call a Babelian choir, that is to say a choir simultaneously speaking different
languages. They will not say the same thing under different simultaneous translations,
but synchronically state different ideas. The difficulty will be in ensuring
that this heterophony does not degenerate into cacophony (we could say into chaos-phony / chaophony).
The stake of the vocal composition will rest on this point: how do we
simultaneously set different properties of different languages to music? To do
this, the idea will be to play with proto-musical properties of each language:
what is the rhythm of its syllables (long/short, accentuated/non-accentuated, agglomerated
or equally distributed?), what is the prosody of its accents (syntactic/semantic,
word for word or by syntagm?)? The idea will be that a Babelian
chorus, musically prestructured according to these
different types, will be able to more spontaneously interact with an
instrumental choir.
In my own music, I expect to work with six
languages (French, Latin, Arabic, German, Russian and English) regrouped into
four categories according to which the prosody is syllabic or not, according to
the pre-eminence or not of a lexical mode of accentuation - see the following
diagram. My Dido and Aeneas began
with only three of them.
Remark
Does such a Babelian chorus sustain a
discourse? No, without doubt.
Take the example of
spontaneous political gatherings that constitute themselves as the principal
sites of affirmative, emancipatory politics. Such were the recent gatherings in
Kasbah (Tunis), Tahrir (Cairo), and Puerta del Sol Squares (Madrid), in Zuccotti
Park (New York), Taksim Square (Istanbul) until - why
not - Madan Square (Kiev). Each gathering declares
without exactly discoursing. They declare for example Down with Ben
Ali/Mubarak! or We are the 99% but the sum of the discourses effectively
held on each square at the same instant could not constitute by itself a
discourse (in this way, the gathering distinguishes itself from the protest
that, even spontaneously, is unified around some common words that tend to add
up diachronically to a continuous discourse).
One will pose then
– provisionally - that heterophony declares without exactly forming a
discourse.
But we will return to
our musical focus.
In total, the system envisaged will place in global,
heterophonic resonance on the one hand an instrumental choir made of composite
voices, on the other a vocal choir of a Babelian
type.
I will not detail
here a point that merits a more detailed expos: the most pertinent mode of
composition for such a global heterophony arises perhaps from the category of montage [4].
The stake could then be to constitute a specifically musical version of this
category, which could distinguish it from its native cinematographic usage: how
to compose a properly musical
montage?
Such could be a possible horizon for the terza pratica that
I have in mind.
The difficulty is that we are speaking of a horizon,
that of an extended musical world: it remains to be seen through which type of
adjunction, here and now, it will be possible for us to prefigure it.
To return to the proposed formalisation, with which
new types of properly musical words, names and statements will we be able to construct, patiently, step by step,
the adjunction able to extend our Music-world? [5]
This point
opens other compositional problems that concern not so much the intended heterophonic
expressivity than the musical system susceptible to produce the new objects
that will serve us for words, names and statements.
To recap: secunda pratica enlarged
prima pratica through
its new conception of voices, but it was able to do this because it subsumed
the old modality in the new tonality. In its turn, a terza pratica can enlarge the secunda pratica only
by associating its new heterophonic orientation with a new type of musical
system, extending the old musical systems (modal and tonal, serial and
spectral).
To detail
this new group of compositional tasks could be the sole object of an entirely
different lecture. I will content myself to indicate here the manner in which, for
my part, I envisage these more technical tasks.
It is first
of all clear that it could not be done by the simple enlargement of serialism:
the serial path was necessary and fecund; it is today saturated as is the tonal
and, a fortiori, modal paths. Spectralism, even more so, could not show the way.
For me, I
try to implement a system that articulates the following dimensions.
- In the first place, it tries to
reconfigure a functional harmony around vast structures of pitches that I call rainbow chords.
- In the second place, I try to
globally frame each work around a vast polyrhythmic Metre, and it is around
this point that the experience of Mallarm in his Coup de ds
(such as has been recently laid bare by Quentin Meillassoux) interests me.[6]
- In third place, I start from there
to frame the development of the work through a global Matrix (obtained by blending
the rainbow harmonies and rhythmic grids that follow from the two preceding
points).
- Finally, I animate this vast matrix
from the inside through a network of gestural figures - of local Gestalts - which come to enlarge the
older leitmotivic system.
In total, I
try then to exceed the triple subtraction at the foundation of the twentieth
century - no tone, no metre, no theme! - without, for all that, returning,
full of remorse, with my head hung low and with a downcast gaze, to the old
system of tonality, metre and thematism.
*
What we
understand well - and this will be my last point - is that the passage to a terza pratica can
be today only a fight on two fronts (and no longer on just one, as at the time
of secunda pratica):
against a certain modernism (which advocates fleeing before an indefinitely
renewed electro-acoustic technology) and against a certain traditionalism
(which advocates a pure and simple return to the naturalist identities of the
good old recipes: those of the acoustic tone, of the dancing metre and of the
psychologically identifiable theme). So we have, on the one hand, an active
nihilism (we want perpetually-updated
technique at the fault of wanting new ideas!) and, on the other hand,
passive nihilism (all desire entails
risks; so we should content ourselves with managing the long-proven natural!).
Against
these two figures of the same nihilism, the music that wants to continue to be
a contemporary form of thought can prolong its old pratica under the form of a terza pratica that seeks the creation of choral heterophonies
by assuring the musical composition of its new voices with new harmonic,
rhythmic and gestaltic systems.
If prima pratica promised
contrapuntal fraternity, if secunda pratica magnified the figure of love between dissimilar
individualities, terza pratica could
contribute to implementing, at the heart of the new century and within its
unique world, a justice here and now.
Music could then be the carrier not of hope in the future, but of the hope that
justice is already here, in such a withdrawn and circumscribed place, and that
it counts then already, universally, for all!
I thank you
for your attention.
[1] Clestin Delige : Le duel de limage et du concept. Essai sur la modernit musicale (1994) in Invention musicale et idologies 2 (Mardaga, 2007 ; pp. 219-254)
[2] Madrigali guerrieri e amorosi (1638)
[3] Kunst bedarf eines ihr Heterogenen, um es zu werden.
(1966).
[4] film editing
[5] Franois Nicolas: Le monde-Musique (Aedam music; Paris; 2014).
[6] Quentin Meillassoux: Le Nombre et la Sirne (Fayard)