Berio Remembering the Future

E R I N G

UTUREwvutsrqponmlkjihg

•

•

REMEMBERING lHE FUlUREmlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFE

Lucia no Ber io wvutsrqponmlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVUT

HARVARD

UNIVERSITY

PRESS

Cambridge, MassachusertsPONMLKJIHGFEDCBA I London, England 2006

© 2006 by the President and Fellows ofHarvard

Copyrighr

College

Ali righrs reserved Primed

in rhe Unired States of America mlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVUTSRQ

Libr a r y of C ongr essC a ta loging-ia -P ublica tionD a ta Berio, Luciano, Remembering p. cm.-(The Conrents:

Charles EliorPONMLKJIHGFEDCBA N o r t o n lectures)

Forrnations-c- Translaring

O alter Dufc=

1925-

the future / Luciano Berio.

music-Forgening

Seeing rnusio=Poccics

ISBN 0-674-02154-1 1. Music-Hisrory 2. Composers.

Ialk. paper) and criricisrn.

I. Tide, 11. Series.

ML60.B46852006 780--d'22

of analysis.

2005056706

music-

PREFACEwvutsrqponmlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFEDC TALIA PECKER

BERIO

Luciano Berio delivered the Charles Eliot Norton

lectures at

Harvard University during the academic year 1993-94. Each lecture was introduced

and conduded

by the performance

of

Sequenze-a series of fourteen compositions for one of Berio'smlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFEDCBA solo instruments

that cover the entire arc of his career. Berio

conceived of their presence not as "illustrations" of the lectures, but rather as "musical quotation

marks intended to protect the

audience fram the inevitable incompleteness

and factiousness

of any discourse on music made by a musician." Two dose friends and longtime collaborators

preceded Be-

rio in this prestigious series of lectures. Umberto Eco read his

Six Wa lks in the F ictiona l Wóods during the spring semester of

1993; the title ofhis book and its opening pages pay homage to Italo Calvino, who was about to depart for Cambridge

to de-

liver his Six M emos for the Next M illennium when he suddenly passed away in September

1985. The affinity of spirit and the

experiences shared with both authors can be traced within and between the lines in various passages of Berio's own lectures. It is no coincidence,

then, that he derived their title from U n r e

in a scolto-one wvutsrqponmlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFEDC of his three rnusic-thearer works with texts by

Calvino.

"Remembering

the future"

tion of the more ambiguous closing words pronounced

is hardly a literal transla-

original

"r icor do a I futur o"-the

by Prospero,

the key figure of U n r e

in a scolto, who takes his leave from life questioning

silence, turning

memory

voice and

back and forth, from and toward the

future: Ia memor ia

custodisce il silenzio

r icor do deI fittur o

la pr omessa

qua le pr omessa ? questa che or a a r r ivi a sfior a r e col lembo della voce e ti sfugge come il vento a cca r ezza il buio nella voce il r icor do in penombr a

Memory

un r icor do a i futur o.

srands guard over silence

recollection

of the future rhe promise

which promise? rhis one that now you may barely touch with the voice's extremity and that slips from your mind as the wind caresses rhe darkness in the voice the memory in the shadows a memory

for the future.

(TRANSLATlON BY DAVID OSMOND-SMITH)

VI

/

PREFACE

This interplay of past and present, of remembering

and for-

getting, is ever present in the following pages, but it is always underpinned

by an unshakable

faith in the future, and in the

power of music to cross distances, to give voice and shape to that interplay and faith. The content and sketched

and structure

of these lectures were defined

out over a long period following the appoint-

ment as Norton

lecturer, which was formalized at rhe begin-

ning of 1992. By the time we settled in Cambridge of 1993, the first two lectures were substantially

in the fall

written

out,

but work on them, as on each of the other four lectures, proceeded until the very time of their delivery, and sometimes well aíterward. AlI of thern were written English by Anthony

Oldcorn,

in ltalian, translated

and then further elaborated

into by

Berio himself ln the years following our residence at Harvard, engaged in rhe composition

Berio was

of two major works of music the-

arer,mlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFEDCBA O utis (1996) and C r ona ca del Luogo (1999), and a considerable number

of instrumental

orchestra; Alter na tim trombone

for viola, clarinet, and orchestra; Solo for

and orchestra; Kol od (C hemins

chamber orchestra); Récit (C hemins orchestra);

works such as E kphr a sis for

Sona ta

VI for trumpet

and

VII for alto saxophone

and

for piano; the last three Sequenze

PREFACE

(XII for

I

VII

bassoon, XIII for accordion,

XIV for cello), as well as mlkjihgfedcbaZY Altr a

voce (for alto Hute, mezzo-soprano,

the new Finale for Puccini's work, Sta nze for baritone,

and live electronics),

Tur a ndot.

He completed

and

his last

three male choirs, and orchestra,

a

few weeks before he left us on May 27, 2003. Thus the final revision of the Norton Lectures was constantly delayed, yet work on them was never entirely abandoned. Periodically,

between

one composition

would go back to thern, introducing

and

another,

Berio

minor changes, pointing

out passages in need of major revision, taking notes for further developments.

This "work in progress" (an important

concept

in Berio's poetics, which recurs frequently in the following pages, especially in the fourth

lecture, "O alter Duít")

involved

both the ltalian and English texts. As a result there were often multiple versions of each lecture, none of which, at the moment of the author's death, could be declared as "definire"; nor was it always possible to establish the chronological

order of

the variants. Confronted

with such a complex source situation, I decided

to follow the texts of the lectures as they were read at Harvard, correcting and integrating

thern only in those places where the

variant readings were either objectively clearer or undoubtedly approved by the author, I felt that this approach conveyed more

VIII

I

PREFACE

.oherence to the text (in contrast to a more orthodox philoI gical editing method), and PONMLKJIHGFEDCBA I was inspired as well by Robert hurnann's youthful and rornantic idea that "the first concepcion of a work is always the best and most natural."

Any attempt to acknowledge on behalf of my husband the peopie who accompanied him in the process of writing and revis-

ing the lectures would necessarily be incomplete. Oavid mlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVUT O smond-Srnith, Luciana Galliano, and Anthony Oldcorn would undoubtedly have been among thern.

I

can personally testily

to rhe constant and inspiring exchanges he had with Reinhold Brinkmann, the late Oavid Lewin, and Christoph Wolff, who, along with Dorothea, June, and Barbara, gave warmth to our eason in Cambridge with their priceless friendship. Mark Kagan and Nancy Shiffman helped in every possible way to make our !ife and work, as well as the meetings and performances at anders Theatre, srnoorh and enjoyable. Peg Fulton ofHarvard University Press patiently accompanied the long genesis of Rer nember ing the F utur e

frorn the day of Berio's appointment to

che Norton Chair down to the last detail of this edition. My personal thanks go to Reinhold Brinkmann, who provided me with the only intact printed copy rhat has survived of the full set of six lectures: at the end of each lecture, Luciano

PREFACE

/

IX

would ritually hand him a copy of the text that he had just read out. In a different

time this would

copy", I have tried to conduct economy

have been the "engraver's

my editing accordingly,

and respect that was common

with the

before the computer

era, and was lucky to have Mary Ellen Geer as an exceptionally sensitive editor. Marina

Berio had read and commented

upon

her father's lectures at the time of their delivery; she was at my side last summer

to give a loving and knowing

vision of the texto I would like-and have approved-to

dedicare

fano, Daniel, and jonarhan

hand in the re-

feel that Luciano

would

this bcok to her, to Cristina,

Ste-

Berio.

RADICONDOLl

(SIENA),

OCTOBER

2005

ONTENTSPONMLKJIHGFEDCBA

I

wvutsrqponmlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFEDC Formations I

I

2

Translating

Music

~

3

Forgetting

I

4

O Alter Duft

79

I

5 Seeing Music

99

I

6

Music

Poetics of Analysis

31

61

122

REMEMBERING lHE FUlURE

FORMATIONSwvutsrqponmlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFEDCB The honor

of delivering

the Norton

Lectures

coincides

with

my desire to express my doubts about the possibility of offering today a unified vision of musical thought mapping

out a homogeneous

developments. thread

thraugh

and linear view of recent musical

I am not even sure that we can find a guiding the intricate

musical maze of the last few de-

cades, nor do I intend to attempt the innumerable

and practice, and of

a taxonomy,

ways of coming

or seek to define

to grips with the music we

carry with uso Of course, I am not inviting you to abandon refuge in purely sensory experiences-nor music in some hermeneutic

to play games with

"hall of mirrors."

to suggest to you some points

of reference

words and take

But I would like that I have found

useful in my work, and in my reflections on that strange, fascinating Babel of musical behaviors that surrounds I like to remember

the last words that Italo Calvino wrate

for the closing of my music-theater when the pratagonist

uso

departs

work mlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVUTSRQPONM U n Re in Ascolto,

fram life, saying: "a recollection

of the future." This, I feel, sums up my concerns

in these lec-

tures. I will not concern myselfhere wirh music as an emotioriai and reassuring commodity

for the listener, nor with music as

a procedural and reassuring commodity

for the composer. Ir is

my intentiori to share with you some musical experiences that invite us to revise or suspend our relation with the past, and to rediscover ir as part of a future trajectory. Such

an exerci se in revision

oscur a -D a nte's

may lead us into

a mlkjihgfedcbaZY selva

"dark forest." But unlike Dante, we will have

to sacrifice paths, voluntarily

lost and found, and behave like

Brechtian actors with their famous Ver fr emdung: we will have to step outside ourselves, observe and question what we do. We need to question the very idea of a musical reality that can be defined or translated by words, and therefore the idea of a linear relationship

between the empirical and conceptual dimensions

of music. We also need to challenge the idea that musical experience could be compared to a huge, protective building, designed by history and constructed

over severa! millennia by countless

men (and now, finally, also by wornen). Not that we could ever get to see a floor plan, a cross-section, mense metaphorical

or a profile of this im-

building. We might wander through a few

rooms, trying to grasp the content and function of each of thern (the Ars nova room, the Baroque room, the Schubert, Mahler, and Stravinsky rooms, the Viennese,

2

/

REMEMBERING

THE

FUTURE

the Darmstadt,

the "ser

why not, the minimalist

d. .ory" rooms-and, modero

and the post-

rooms), but in doing so we would be conditioned

by

what we had already heard and known; we would then reinter-PONMLKJIHGFEDC t each experience,

p i'

modify its perspective,

and therefore also

111 • building's global hisrory, The history of such modifications b rhe history of our actions and ideas, which sometimes

seem

10

run ahead of the arrival of the actual work that will embody

Ih

.rn. If that were not so, our metaphorical

orne a homogeneous

i

and unanimous

building

would be-

space, deterministically

bjecr to so-called historical necessities, and therefore musically

~ II

. I ~ · Iss. mlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFEDCBA

Ar the same time, however, we are aware that we are only

.11,1 to know and to explain those musical experiences

that

hnv already taken place, rhose virtualities that have been fully -nlized. The history of music, unlike the history of science, is

I'

n v r made of intents

but of achievements.

It is not made of

P< I ntial forms waiting to be shaped but, rather, ofTexts I

I

npital "T" and with the largest possible

musical

(with

connota-

ions). It is made ofTexts waiting to be interpreted-conceptu-

ally, cmotionally,

and practically.

In rnusic, as in literature, I •

iprocal shifting

it may be plausible to conceive a

of focus between

the text's supremacy

,1\ • rcader and the primacy of the reader becoming

FORMATIONS

over

his or her

I 3

own text. As Harald Bloom remarked, "you are, or you beco me what you resd" and "that which you are, that only can you read." The implcatioris af these srarernents are endless. When applied to musc they have to take into account performance, that the queition of supremacy to perform

2nd interpret

so

becomes overly complicated:

a musical text is obviously not the

same thing ai to read and inrerpret a literary one. Perhaps the diíliculties

Ct)mposers encounter

when they talk about texts

arise fram their feeling that they themselves are a musical Text, that they liveinside a text and therefore are lacking the derachment necesssry to explore, with some objecriviry, the nature of the relatioo they entertain

with themselves as texto It is not

an accident that the most rewarding commentaries composers ale on other composers, ers-such

written by

and that cornposer-writ-

as 5chumann and Debussy-were

"hiding" behind a

pseudonym. I'he same may be true today, even without pseudonyms, provded rhat the main concern af the composer who 0 1 the work of another composer is other than to commentsPONMLKJIHGFEDCBA

prove that hi. analysis "works" and that it is immune from pre-

conditioning. I tend to admire "analytical listening" "analyrical pnforrners,'

4 /

REME"BERING

and the so-called

but I also believe that a delicate bal-

TI-IE

FUTURE

ance must be maintained, tion of conventions,

at whatever cost, between recogni-

stylistic references, expectations,

and, on

the orher hand, the concrete experience of giving a new life to an object of knowledge. In fact, performers,

listeners, and in-

deed composers undergo a sort of alchemical transformation which recognition,

knowledge, and conceptual

ali fruits of their relationship transformed sublimates

with Texts-are

in

associationsspontaneously

into a live entity, a "being" which transcends and technical

realities. An "intertextual"

conditioning

can become so imposing that the measure in which the speakers are themselves spoken may be the same rhat would deprive the speaker of the courage to speak.

When James Joyce said that hismlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFED U lysses would keep scholars busy for at least a hundred his Mephistophelian

years, he was of course displaying

nature. He knew that scholars would not

be able to resist the temptation

to identily references and allu-

sions, once they knew they were there. But he also knew that living with the "half-recognized" was ao important

and with deceptive identities

dimension of U lysses-a s

ir is of any form of

poetry. It is the pinning down per se-as legitimacy of a detail-that namic and still unknown

if to prove the permanent

deprives the narra tive of its dypotentials. It may happen in music,

FORMATIONS

/

5

too, that the capacity to identify, to remember, gether a network

is balanced bya willingness without

and to hold to-

of references can become poisonous

unless it

to forget and to communicate

addressees and without

a conscious

relation to specific

listening codes. We know ir in depth when we perform ate music; when we raise, even unawares, of our relationship us: a question

even

or cre-

the eternal question

with the text and the text's relationship

that music can address only through

with

the accep-

tance o f a silen t texto The attempt

to establish a dialectic between

cal and conceptual sometimes

assumed

dimensions

music's practi-

goes back a long way and has

a radical epistemological

importance.

For

this reason I propose that we pay a fleeting, non-archaeological visit to the Roman

philosopher

Severinus

to fame in rhe early sixth century theorist.

A.D.

Boethius,

who rose

He was also a musical

For him music was a silent text; it was indeed one of

the chief tools of philosophical

speculation;

it was governed

by numbers,

"harmonic."

The laws of the

as for Pythagoras

before him, laws

and was therefore

universe were, for Boethius

of an essentially musical nature. Deriving fram rhe Greeks and proposing

rhe concept of music

it to his contemporaries

to the entire Middle Ages), Boethius conceived as a means of knowledge.

G /

REMEMBER1NG

TI-IE

His evaluation

FUTURE

(and

music above ali

of beauty in its rela-

ttO I1

wvutsrqponmlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFEDCBA to art and to music is secondary. His vision stems from .isrn, a philosophy

, 'I < l i li/'

nppearances

according

and hence has a purely formal value. Although

It ls speculations

on music induced

1,1\ IIlly ofhearing, 1111111:111 soul

Boethius

passed through

bc aware of its constituent

NI'oplatonic 11$

11\ ,

for

making any reference to the

claimed that the surest path to the the ear. Of this he had no doubt.

tvtllsic, he wrote, affects human

\(

him to praise Pythagoras

tackled the subject without

11 i v i n g

111

to which beauty is a question

behavior,

and so it is essential

parts and ofits ethical value. This

view of the musical ethos reB.ects the idea of mu-

part of the medievalmlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFEDCBA qua dr ivium, together with arithrne-

g ometry, and astronomy-the

I jh ~ 'r : 1 1 arts

higher division of the seven

(the others being grammar,

rhetoric,

and logic: the

tr iuium). In

his D e Institutione

M usica Boethius

discusses the Pythag-

111' 111

rheory of proportions

and celebrates

music as a tool of

I11 ' 1111

iversallogic

in everything:

when it reílects the

lm r m

ny of the universe it is musica munda na ;

I

interior harmony

I11

1'.'11('11

it is practical

11 I rurnents 111\l8i 111

ernbedded

when it express-

of the soul it becomes musica huma na ;

and emerges in the voice and in musical

it is musica instr umenta lis.

is, above alI, pure knowledge,

According

to Boethius

whereas poetry, conceived

h, r cited or sung, is indeed an "art of sound,"

and we may

FORMATIONS

/

7

therefore

leave it to poets to com pose songs, to play thern and

sing thern. How then shall we approach of philosophical

manifesto

Boerhius's

of abstract

0 1 ' as musical functions,PONMLKJIH

a very distant ancestor of our segmented I am raising these questions to conduct

conceptual

to concrete

musical experience

ing roots. Boethius's formalize

experiences

musical world?

to remind

speculations

theoretical

teaching? As a kind

you that the need

parallel and perhaps prior

has very deep and long-standproposal

did not attempt

to

that had already taken place or a prac-

tice under way, but instead he appropriated mlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVUTSRQ in a dva nce the experience

of sound,

while conditioning

its very formation

and

development. A persistent

analysis of the links between

tice and the tendency ior is an obvious, the notion

to theorize and formalize musical behav-

universal

aspect of our culture.

of music as Text, as a document

and of an encounter

conceptual

tools,

Ir underlies

of an investment

of ideas and experiences.

we have no permanent portions,

theory and prac-

But these days

no theory

of the affects (die Affiluenlehr e) of harmonic

tions, not even of total serialization.

qua dr iuium,

and

we don't

REMEMBERING

TI-IE

live in a hornogeneous

FUTURE

func-

We don't have tr ivium or

society. Nor do we have a lingua fr a nca thar would

8 /

of pro-

musical allow us

a free and peaceful

passage fram one musical

domain

to an-

other, What

we do have at our disposal,

library of musical knowledge, inviting

us to suspend

over a century

instead,

which attracts or intimidates

or to confound

composers

is an immense us,

our chronologies.

have been taking metaphorical

For trips

to the library, to take stock of its endless shelves. I'm think-

ing for example of Brahms and Mahler, or of the mlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVUTSRQPON 1920s, when the very different neoclassicisms both

tireless

reading-roorn,"

and motivated

visitors

to an immense

"rnusic

might be seen as the two faces of the same at-

tempt at "exorcising" itself-a

of Stravinsky and Schoenberg,

the overwhelming

library that is unable

presence of the library

to offer coherence,

but can re-

ceive ir frorn the right visitors. Today that library has become boundless.

Rather

out in all direcrions; ing memories.

like Borges' "Library

of Babel,"

it spreads

ir has no befor e nor a fter , no place for stor-

Ir is always open, totally presenr,

but awaiting

interpretation. I think that the search for a "universal"

answer ro the ques-

tions raised by musical experience will never be completely fiUed; but we know that a question

raised is often more sig-

nificant than the answer received. Onlya would try to give a total explanation

Iul-

reckless spirit, today,

of music, but anyone who

FORMATIONS

I 9

would

neve r pose the problem

believe that thought and conceptualize

is even more reckless. I don't

is a form of silent speech: we can think music without

referring

to speech, Music

evades verbal discourse and tends to spill over the edges of any analytical container. This fact, and the dialectical relationship

nature of the

between the idea of practice and the practice of the

idea, have brought music analysis into the domain of signs. But the question

is, what can music analysis mean when it recurs

to semiology

(a semiology based mainly on linguistics)

to investigare

the relarion between

two dimensions

concept

which are in constant

reciprocal "betrayal"

in order

and perception-

adjustment,

and whose

is at the root of musical experience?

My view of linguistic

units may appear somewhat

sirnplis-

tic, but ir seems to me that rhe linguistic sign is not translatable into musical terrns. Let's look at the binary, pragmatic

elements

of language: signifier and signified,mlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVUTSRQPONML signa ns and signa tum, deep levei and surface levei, la ngue and parole, and also the binary use of distinctive when transposed

fearures: rhe relarionship

between

thern,

into music, turns out to be significa nt/y unde-

finable. The binary elernenrs rhemselves are not readily identifiable even in the highly structured which were the most "linguistic" natas ofHaydn

10

I

and codified classical forms in music history (like the so-

and Mozart). The semiological

R E M E M B E R IN G

TH E

FU TU R E

misundersrand-

wvutsrqponmlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVUTSR

ing stems from the fact that linguistic

categories

are applied

to a musical texture whose morphological

and syntacucal

ments cannot

ali the elements

be separated.

language-grammar, so on-have

syntax, morphology,

to work together

whereas a similar solidarity constantly

Furthermore,

reconsidered.

ory developed

lexical content,

in a way established

among

ele-

and

by culture,

musical elements

Ir is no coincidence

of

has to be

that Gestalt the-

on the basis of what you see, rather than what

you hear. In language,

a word implies and excludes many dif-

ferent things, said and unsaid, and the name of a thing is not the thing itself. Whereas the musical "word," the musical utterance, is alwaysmlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFEDCBA the thing itself. A melody by Schubert

or a musical configuration

berg are not the pieces of a musical within

thernselves

configurations,

rhe experience

chessboard;

of other melodies

and their transformations

speak, in their genetic

by Schoen-

they carry and other

are inscribed,

code. This self-sufficiency

so to

gives musi-

cal experience an enormous

associative and semantic openness,

of such an uncoded

that a semiologist

nature

come to grips only with interpretive and (more irnportant) and strucruring describes

in re-listening,

may be able to

codes implied

in listening

rather than with creative

processes. And that is why an algorithm

the significative

processes

of music

that

is still wishful

FORMATIONS

/

II

thinking.

Unlike

language,

music cannot

become

"rneta-rnu-

sic," and unless you make a very trivial use of ir, musical metaphors

and metonymies

deconstructed: tempted

simply

do not existo Nor can it be

in fact deconstructivist

foxes don't seem to be

by eating musical grapes-perhaps

they think they are

still sour. Ir has been said that each language is able to reílect on itself, to think

about

impossibility

itself

Music too is able to do so, despire the

it into terms of language. But the

of translating

point is that every musical work is a set of partial systems that interact

among

thernselves,

not merely because they are active

at the same time, but because they establish and unstable

reciprocity

rather fascinating

Without

a sort of organic

that instability

and uncomfortable

we ente r a

musical space-we

to think about it but we don't have to listen to it-as with works like Schoenberg's

Wind

Quintet

like

is the case

or Boulez's First

Book ofmlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFEDCBA Str uctur es for two pianos. We like to think

that music performs

comes to performance, it out silently meaningful

12

I

li'

/

not only because a composer

in his or her mind,

layers exhibit

and their reciprocal

REMEMBERING

itself before it ever can play

but also because all of its

conceptually

both

their autonomy

interactions.

THE

FUTURE

PONMLKJIHGFEDCBA

Let's imagine a pitch-cell, that generates

melodies,

cesses. A rhythrnic

for instance,

figures, phrases,

configuration

generates patterns,

shapes

ar a pitch-sequence and harmonic

pro-

those melodies

and

time glissandos, and discontinuous

statistical distributions

namic layers, instrumental

colors and techniques,

ar enhance

characters

the individual

ture of their evolution,

parameters

tonomous

can nullify

of each process, the na-

and the degree of their independence.

At times, that independence musical

ar even

of those same melodies and figures. Oy-

can become

indifference

and the

can follow their own life, their own au-

time of evolution,

like some of the characters

from

Robert Musil's narrative. To think

out music entails separating

also, cultivating

those processes bur,

an inner, implicit dialogue among thern, a po-

lyphony made of varying degrees ofinteraction sion, can explode and absorb everything gesture. Simple, neutral, situated

Complex

timbric

and dynamíc

texture, will

events, colored by the given harmonic

and díscontinuous

relations, distributed

in a dazzling, synthetic

and periodic pítch and time relatíons,

in a homogeneous

fuse into transparent latíons.

which, on occa-

íntervallíc

among very diversífied ínstrumental

es, wíll fuse into a noíse. These explosions,

re-

and rhythmic forc-

rhese all-embracíng

FORMATIONS

I

13

gestures, are analogous

to the speeding

up of a visual sequence

in a film, where speciíic details wiU be transformed

and blend

into lines of movement. Extreme

situations,

will entail different

from the sirnple to the very cornplex,

and often comradictory

ways of listening,

from the most analytical to the most global, from the most active to the most passive. This instabiliry, spectives,

must be carefully composed

musical architecture, o(opening

and occasionally

of per-

as part of a meaningful can stretch to the point

itself to outside visitors, to strangers, to happenings,

to musical figures coherently explored

this mobility

loaded with associarions.

I have

myself in works like mlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVUTSRQ Visa ge or in the

thar possibility

fifth part of my Sinfonia . A musically

significam

meaningfullayers

work is always made of interacting

that are at once the agents and the materiais

of irs existence. They are rhe actor, the director, and rhe script all in one-or,

rather, they are like the lake of an Indian

tale,

which sets out in search ofits own source. 50 what is rhe musical Text? Is it the water itself, or the urge to seek out the source, rhe wellspring? It has been said that music changes

because its rnaterials

change. While it is true that the advent ofiron about a change in architecture,

14 I

it is also true that architectural

PONMLKJIHGFEDCBA R E M E M B E R IN G

TH E

and glass brought

FU TU R E

thought had already changed and was thus prepared to perceive how iron and glass might be used. Th~ old sound-generators in the electronic

music studios of the mlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHG 1950s did not change

the essence of music. Musical thinking the moment meaningful

had already changed

musicians began to consider the possibility of a interaction

between additive and subtractive

teria, looking, for instance, for a structural continuity

cri-

between

timbre and harmony. Those archaic packets of sinusoidal waves, or those variable bands of filtered white noise, were mostly rhe end-result of rhe extreme concentration

of intervallic functions

in rhe poetic world of Anton Webern: the three notes of his generative cells (multum in pa r vo, in a true Goerhian perspective) that are at once different and always the same. We have come a long way in the studios of electronic rnusic since those distant post- Webernian of sound-assembling

that often steered research in those days

(cri teria which have continued cornputer-assisted

beginnings. The cri teria

to influence the beginnings

of

music) had widened the gap between theory

and practice, between a thought

and its realization

that was

assigned to a magnetic or digital memory. This had an iníluence also on the notation

of instrumental

those cases where the conception

music, at least in

of a work prompted

doubts

as to whether a score should provide graphic prescriptions

FORMATIONS

/

15

for

its p e rfo rm a n c e ,

o r d e s c rip tio n s

and

s h o u ld

fa ta lis tic a lly ,

o f rh e so u n d

b e a fo rm

re s u lt,

o r, s im p ly

o f p ro g n o s tic a tio n ,

a w ay of

g u e s s l1 1 g . An

u ltim a te

e n d -re s u lt th e tic

to

a s u b s titu te

fo r th e

w hen

b lo tc h e s

o fin k ,

to m a k e

in g a n d th e

w hen

th e

th e o n ly

sc o re

u n d e c ip h e ra b le w a s re a c h e d ,

to p la y s trin g s h e a rtb e a t. Som e

I

o f d o ts ,

B u t I d o n 't

w e re v e ry a rn u s-

raots

th e y h a d th e ir

and

an aes-

e y e b e c o m in g

e x tre m e

e x p e rie n c e s .

a s a w h o le ,

a c o u s tic

becam e

trig g e rin g

o f s o r n e o n e 's

o v e r c o m m u n ic a tio n

and

v is u a lly -th e

w a s in s tru c te d

o f rh o se

v ie w e d

th o u g h t

m u s ic a l

v ie w e r. T h e

o r th e g ra p h fu n

b e tw e e n

e a r, s u p p o s e d ly in

a p ia n is t

iro n ic ;

angst

gap

b e a d m ire d

s e n s a tio n s

suppose,

w is h

o f th e

c a rn e a b o u t

o b je c t

m u s ic a l

s ig n

in th e c irc u it

b o th

in

o f m a rk e ta b le

a rt o b je c ts . T u rn in g

th e s c o re in to

to p ro life ra te .

It m a y e v o k e th e " b e a u ry "

o r th e " u g lin e s s " th a t

" u g lin e s s "

fu n c tio n s : ta c h m e n t iz a tio n

up as

16

o f B e e t h o v e n 's have

fro rn

a n y fo rm becom e

s e lf-p ro m o tin g

jingles,

/

n o th in g

a d v e rtis in g

R E M E M B E R IN G

to d o w ith

o f m u s ic a l

o f B a c h 's

a s th o s e a s in g u la r

FUTURE

b u t th a t m u s ic a l

g e s tu re s th o u g h t

a p a ra -m u s ic a l

THE

m a y a llo w

s k e tc h e s ;

th e y a re m e re a e s th e tic iz e d

in s o u n d ,

fic ia l a n d

a v is u a l o b je c t

"new

a s s o c ia tio n s m a n u s c rip ts , " b e a u ty "

and

p ro c e sse s

and

rh a t, and

in th e ir

fro m

m e rc h a n d is e , sounds"

absence

th a t

o f m u s ic a l

de-

its re a la s su p e r-

o fte n

end

th o u g h t.

Nevertheless,

there is also something

attractive in the unwill-

ingness to bridge the gap between musical gesture and acoustic resulto I am thinking

of that sacrificial and somehow

impulse

defy an object in its original function: a

that seeks to

piano becomes a gamelan or the workshop ironsmirh,

the concert

of a happily mindless

hall is filled with the amplified

of whales or the noises of imergalactic possible to see in this rejection studiedly

clownish

"careless" art ofMarcel

magnetic

sounds

storms ... It is

of the "artistic" a link with the Duchamp

(think ofhis ready-

mades, ofhismlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFEDCBA M ona Lisa with a moustache and a "hot bortorn," of his urina!, that is, his F ounta in)-a s

exemplary

as that of

John Cage, to whom I dedica te these thoughts. The removal of behavior cultural conditionings,

and the stubborn

cal defense of a persistem acoustic paroxystic sequences.

from musical functions

materialization,

gap between have produced

and somehow musical

a telling example),

had a liberating

opening

than real, for non-applied

and

not only ironic and use fui con-

effect (early Cage is

up a space, perhaps

more virtual

musical research, a research that was

not tied to specific functions cal regulatory

mysti-

thought

social gestures, but also some eminently It has often

and from

and results, nor to explicitly musi-

principies.

Ali of this occurred

a long time ago, in the "roaring fifties,"

FORMATIONS

I 17

when I personally

was busy looking

between diverse materiais,

for harmonic

in a musical context made of sounds

and not only of notes. Without

that freedom

action, my musical research imo the human ably have developed of time. During veloping

the human

degrees and modes

vocal sound-families

isolation

and a poetic text, or between

and interrelated

electronic

effect also manifested

arithmetical

mental and cathartic

organic

speculation

of acousric-musical

Schoenberg's

between

sounds.mlkjihgfedcbaZYXWV C ir cles,

and Visa ge, for voice

sounds, were the result of this developmem.

liberating

and mainly

involved in de-

of continuity

based on three poems by e. e. cummings,

That

and

in different ways and over a different span

voice, insrrurnents,

and electronic

of thought

voice would prob-

rhose years I was particularly

different

coherence

imo the separation

parameters.

experience

and

This was a funda-

which had its roots, again, in

and Webern's thinking,

musical development.

itself in procedural

and was tied to visions of

Most of Webern's works, espe-

cially after the String Trio op. 20, are no longer explicitly themaric, yet they deal with thernatic

virtualities

same time the result and the generators They could generate

18

I

thematic

R E M E M B E R IN G

of thernatic

processes.

thernes, but they stop just short of doing

so, also because they undergo That hidden,

which are at the

virtuality

TH E

a constam

process of variation.

deepens and enriches our per-PONML

FU TU R E

spective ofWebern's

music, enhancing

the notion of form, ma-

terial, and musical matter as relative concepts. In one of his seminal reminds

us ofWebern's

writings

on Webern,

own assertion rhat "the cboice of tone-

rows is no more innocent

than it is arbitrary."

be termed notion

Webern justifies

relations

that it con-

that foster a form of development

that cannot

his choice with the wealtb of structural tains-relations

Pierre Boulez

"thernatic"

because it always remains

of kernel became increasingly

important

a kernel. The to Webern to-

ward the end ofhis life, when he referred frequently

to Goetbe's mlkjihgfedcbaZYX

Meta mor phosis 01 P la nts: "The stem is already contained

in the

root, rhe leaf in the stem, and the flower in turn in the leaf: it is all a variation

of the sarne idea." Although

is hardly a scientific revelation, damental

importance

terms of the formation Carl Dahlhaus tionship

between

Coethe's

statement

the image it conveys is of fun-

in structural

and poetic terms, that is, in

of musical meanings.

pointed

out a similar idea regarding

material

and matter:

the rela-

"The brick is the form

of the piece of clay, the house is the form of the bricks, the vil[age is the form of the house." 1 would like to bring this quotation closer to my own point of view, inverting

the arder of

the images to fit a subtractive

perspective:

rather than additive

"The village is the form of the house, the house is the form ofPONMLKJIH

F O R M A T IO N S

/

19

the brick, the brick is the form of the piece of clay." And here, again, is rhe same lake which sets out in search of its sources while dialoguing

with thern. In other words,

of the cell with additive

the elaboration

cri teria can be temporarily

suspended,

and the path that leads to musical sense may move in an opposite direction,

calling upon subtractive

criteria to a heteroge-

neous, even chaotic whole of acoustical data. Like the sculptor

who extracts the sculpture,mlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHG a for za di leva r e (as Michelangelo said), from the block of marble.

Such cri teria may lead to the

discovery of a specific figure: the generating Post-Webernian those elements

serialists

extracted

celI.

from Webern's

that would give concrete

poetics

and conceptual

drive

to the break with the past. These elements were the autonomy and the equivalence indifferent

of musical parameters

permutational

procedures-so

often subrnitted indifferent

to

that mu-

sic could go on forever. Ir could not end; it could only stop. Grounded

in permutational

and equalizing

tially lacking virtual or hidden dimensions, ized by the objective evolving structures. brought

about,

procedures

I

of generating

formal

TI-IE

significandy

movement

by the very serial conceptions

that had generated

REMEMBERING

it was soon neutral-

The end of the "separatist"

oedipally,

excess of estranged

20

impossibility

criteria, and essen-

it-but

without

order generated

FUTURE

was and

complexes. The disorder-just

as

the hyper-thematization

ofWebern's

music obliterated

themes

as such. During

the fifties music went through

on homogeneity, assuming

a period of fixation

which tended to prevent each parameter

a real and expressive autonomy

part of a polyphony

of musical functions.

of development

op. 31, and Stravinsky's

of Oebussy's La

ofWebern's

Second Cantata,

fleeting meditations

on history, from

Le C ha nt du Rossignol to Agon, had not yet found attentive At one stage, the conflicting aration

led to an attempt

creativity

itself-in

source. Attempts

obsession with neutrality to separate

instance,

were made to distinguish

notion

an opposition

and sepof

the lake from its

various types of cre-

contents,

proposing,

for

between style and expr ession, where the

of style was ideologically

of the cultural

ears.

out the "pararneters"

other words, to separate

ativity on the basis of their supposed

as

Schoenberg'smlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVUTSRQPON F a r ben,

from op. 16, the ellipses and false symmetries

Mer and [eux, the "tirnbre-chords"

from

labeled as a perverted

market while, symmetrically,

sion was positively embedded

product

the idea of expr es-

in the rigorous and self-depriving

anger of the avant-gardes. The urge to split and divide, which has pervaded

the musi-

cal world for the last few decades, has also postulated position

between the empirical

musician

an op-

(who has no need for

FORMATIONS

I

21

"synthesis,"

and is subject

atic musician

to circumstances)

and the system-

(who starts with a preconceived

idea, and follows

an all-embracing

strategy)-in

tween the composer But creation chotomy:

to this unproductive

the scientific or systematic have always coexisted,

musician

they must coexist, cornple-

to be able to interact with an inductive ditive "philosophy"

vision has

vision. Likewise, an ad-

of musical creation

"philosophy,"

di-

and rhe ernpiri-

each other in the same person. A deductive

a subtractive

be-

asmlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFED br icoleur and the composer as scientist.

is sirnply not available

cal musician menting

other words, an opposition

has to interrelate

Or again, the structural

with

elements of

a musical process have to enter into relation with the concrete, acoustical

dimensions

of its articulation: thar play it.

sing ir, and the instruments 1n a significant and disruptive

ity to modify

22

/

musical itinerary, as visionary between the global

rhe real and virtual

inro a plurality

dimensions

of orbits that transform

They beco me formations

of sense that cannot

to their functioning.

An essential

ing points,

and between

projected

their meaning. be reduced

and coherent

as you please, the separation

and individual, is inevitably

with the voices that

factor of modernity perspectives,

the "tonics"

REMEMBERING

has always been its abil-

to cancel or mulriply that

THE

indicate

FUTURE

the "right"

the vanishpath,

and

to construct

something

transformed,

from the remains

sublimated,

and

even destroyed.

said that the realm of tonal music, and ali its constituem and perspective. a great number less permanem

too, launches

parts imo orbit,

of variables-were

be

its themes

moditying

their sense possessing

always part of a more or

and recognizable

physiognomy,

always tied to

cri teria: like the changes of expression

are an integral part of the human ness and familiarity

of the constituent

of historically

between

the structural

between

implicit

activated elements

functions

degrees

"physiognomic" was conditioned

and accepted

by the

elements,

and explicit features, and berween of the whole. Tonal

music was above all a vast and widely shared its participants,

musicians

alike, in a huge variety of musical relationships. cians the knowledge

íea-

relationships

and the peripheral

of transformation

rience that involved

that

face. The degree of aware-

tures and of the changes of expression

rhe different

It could

But these constituems-though

general behavioral

experience

of what has been

cultural

expe-

and listeners For the musi-

of music was similar to the knowledge

nature. The composer

produced

music

in a theoretical

bed-

rock mostly taken for granted. Theory

itself was primarily

a count

grammar

of experience.

As with

tonal

of

an

and syntax,

forms (such as the fugue, and above ali the sonata form) were

FORMATIONS

I

23

likewise analyzed and formalized mlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJ post foctum, aíter the experience.PONMLKJIHGFEDCBA Today, theoretical with consequences experienced I

outlooks

that are perhaps

by Boethius,

retical manifesto Schoenberg

tend to emerge before practice,

though

has indeed

less enduring

rhan those

no less significam.

become

a declaration

A theo-

of poetics.

was the first, of course, to carry out this idea of

II

modernity. II I1

I I

The experience

of rwelve-tone

rheory, which

had

both its heroes and its victims (especially among those who approached

it as a linguistic

malize Schoenberg's

norrn), is in fact the attempt

own poetics-one

cornplex, and dramatic

and revising the past with our

of the future, we cannot invent a new, utopian

sicallanguage, tribute

of the most generous,

of our history.

In the process of rebuilding recollection

nor can we invent its instruments.

continuously

Once, experience

mu-

Yet we con-

to their evolution. of musical instruments

oretical awareness of creativity, Instruments allowed

to for-

preceded

were the keys that

one to enter the edifice of musical

til Wagner

all composers,

composers,

were virtuoso

with the exception performers

any the-

speculation.

Un-

of some opera

in their own right. With

Mahler, Debussy, and the Viennese School there was a conspicuous shifting

24

/

away from that individual

R E M E M B E R 1N G

TH E

FU TU R E

virtuosiry,

which had

previously been synonymous with musical knowledge and professional excellence. Meanwhile, the orchestra became the "collective" instrument

of the composer. The "maestro di cappella,"

the Kapellmeister at the harpsichord, a symphony orchestra, differentiated

became the conductor

that is, the coordinator

of

of increasingly

srylistic and technical concerns. Musical creativ-

ity became gradually divorced from its specific tools, with a growing detachment

from those marvelous acoustic machines.

Musical instruments

are tools useful to man, but they are

tools that lack objectivity:

they produce sounds that are any-

thing bur neutral, which acquire meaning by testing meaning itself with rhe reality of facts. They are the concrete depositories of historical continuity buildings,

and, like all working tools and

they have a memory. They carry with them traces

of the musical and social changes and of the conceptual

frame-

work within which they were developed and transformed. They talk music and-not

without conflicts-they

ler themselves be

talked by it. The sounds produced by keys, strings, wood, and metal are in turn ali tools of knowledge, and contribute

to the

making of rhe idea itself.mlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFEDCBA Ver bum ca r o fa ctum est (the word became flesh), with sweat and technique. Musical instruments our "absentminded"

act and think with us and, at times, in

moments,

they even think

for

FORMATIONS

uso For the

I

25

composer-performer tic periods,

of the Baroque,

improvisation

time composing

(which has parallels,

por e composirion

albeit through

Nowadays

is no longer possible

of musical rhought,

dehnition

real-

different

this form ofmlkjihgfedcbaZYXW extem-

because the numerous

togerher with compositional

strategies always "in progress" between not allow the composer

and Rornan-

was a form of instantaneous,

codes, with jazz improvisation).

stratihcarions

Classical,

idea and realization,

to escape rhe conscious

do

presence and

of a musical text which in any case (even outside the

frame of improvisation)

cannot

be totally handled

in real time

with carefree spontaneiry, As depository

of tradirion

and technique,

ment can beco me either a weapon or a fetish, a sort of "stilllife," rerninder unplayed,

of a hypothetical in a roorn,

the musical instru-

against easygoing amnesias

a motionless

paradise

object, a nosralgic

lost. Even if locked away,

the image of a musical

instrument-a

powerful Steinway or a priceless Stradivarius-can bolic absolure became,

among

and provocative Instruments

value, substituting other things,

for music itself This fetish

the target of John

take a long time to transform

violin, for instance,

/

Cage's irony

suggestions.

they tend to lag behind the evolution

26

take a sym-

R E M E M B E R IN G

virtually

TH E

unaltered,

FU TU R E

thernselves,

and

of musical thought.

The

has been inhabited

by PONMLK

the history imposing

of music of the last four hundred

years. It has an

legacy, and for this reason, whichever way it is played,

it expresses that history and heritage-even

if you tune it com-

pletely differently, or interface it with a MIDI

system.

The same thing may be said for nearly all the musical instruments we know, The six strings of the guitar, for instance,

are

tuned in a very idiomatic

for

the harmonic

way which is largely responsible

colors of many orchestral

"postcards"

fram sunny

Spain, but also for other musical exploits of a less picturesque but far more subtle nature

(as in Ravel's "Spanish

several of Debussy's piano accompaniments).

music" or in

To overlook or to

ignore this idiolectic aspect of the musical instrument, host of technical details and performance it, may be an interesting but is undeniably in matching

inhabits

impoverishing.

ideas and theoretical

It is indicative reflections

(or voice) which,

and for the ways and techniques

of a difficulty

with the reality for the history

it

thraugh

it

which

history, is already expressive in itself. As always, ir is

not musical thinking

which has to submit

ment; rarher, it is thought container

sryles associated with

exercise fram an ascetic point of view,

of the musical instrument embodies

and the

for the instrument

The history

itself to the instru-

itself that must become a conscious and its physicallegacy.

of music has always been rnarked by new ways

FORMATIONS

/

27

of.engaging casionally

with instruments

and with the human

a new kind of dialogue

sider the instrumental

voice. Oc-

has been established.

inventions

that Monteverdi

Con-

generated

fram his ideas on mlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFEDCBA stile r a ppr esenta tivo. Consider Bach's solo violin partiras, which run the entire gamut of violin techniquespast, present, and future. Or the piano music of Beethoven, which the instrument am thinking

is transformed

of the "Waldstein"

and rhe Diabelli

Variations).

into a musical volcano (I

Sonata,

of op. 106, op. 111,

Later on, the keyboard-dialogue

becomes tougher but still extremely constructive. of Bartók, Stravinsky,

in

Messiaen,

Stockhausen,

Iam thinking Boulez, Carter,

Ligeti, and some of my own piano works. Now and then the instrumental

debate has generated

a sort of sly indifference,

has escalated to a real clash, to an outright the instrument

becomes,

rebellion,

or

in which

as we have seen, a fetish to be des-

ecrated. We certainly instruments, withour

have within

us a constant

need to transcend

but we also know that we cannot go beyond thern

eventually

coming

back, and setting

with them. We can never contribute treat rhern as mere sound generators

up a dialogue

to their evolution

if we

and ignore their history.

If we do that, we are just sticking our heads in the sand. Now, ostriches have never contributed

28

/

REMEMBERING

THE

significant

FUTURE

forms of evolution,

nor have they ever considered logue (however rnetaphorical)

the problem

of creating

a dia-

between "heaven" (the idea) and

earth, between the "soul" and the body (the instrumentl-c-or,

if

you think that the jump is worth the effort (always metaphorical, of course), between mlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFEDCBA musica munda na , musica huma na , and Any form of creativity that is untouched

musica instr umenta lis.

by the desire to bridge this persistent demned

and significant

gap is con-

to silence.

Now, let me conclude

this introductory

ethius to the guitar with one particular

journey

point.

from Bo-

I am deeply fas-

cinated by musical ideas which manage to develop a polyphony of different

formations

the possibility

of meaning-ideas

that do not reject

of dealing with specific and concrete

instrumen-

tal gestures which then set up a whole range of distant echoes and memories, presences nificant

allowing

us to establish

a dialogue

and absences: a musical space inhabited

of specific by the sig-

presence of absences and by the echo of absent pres-

ences. However,

there is a new facto r that makes this a difficult

and yet appealing and the enormous, surrounding

enterprise: pluralistic

it is rhe sheer wealth of thought diversity

of musical

uso This reality obliges us to question

even the most concrete

implications

behaviors everything:

of our intellectual

FORMATIONS

tools.

f 29

Since, fortunately, I

we don't

say a "tonalizing")

a totalizing

together

of meaning

the various

thernselves

ceived independently

of their meaning.

between

so

have to

as they can be per-

lt is precisely because of this multiplicity but even more often

way-that

vast, uncharted

doing

into processes and ideas, not into forms are often misleading,

constructive

111

and pluralism

and manners-forms

often conflicting,

ourselves

strata, the various

in our musical journey.

we should not forget that heterogeneity translate

(or should PONM

view of music, we can permit

to explore and bring formations

live with

we somerimes

domains,

of relationships-

complementary

in a

find ourselves faced with

halfway between

heaven and earth,

the mlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFEDCBA musica munda na and the musica instr umenta lis.

And then we are assailed by doubt actually venture

further

as to whether

into the domains

ated, or link up these far-flung der if music alone is enough,

points,

wherher

music can

that it has itself cre-

and we suddenly

won-

ir will succeed. But that

is precisely when we become acutely aware that music, though self-significant,

is never alone; that its potential

they are such-come continue

to question

from somewhere

problems-if

else; and that we must

it relentlessly in aI! of its aspects, in all the

folds of its tireless body and of its endlessly generous sou!.

30

/

R E M E M B E R IN G

TH E

FU TU R E

M U S I C wvutsrqponmlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVUTSRQPO

T R A N S L A T IN G

Music is translated, apparently, only when a specific need arises and we are compelled to go from the actual musical experience to its verbal description,

from the sound of one instru-

ment to another, or from the silent reading of a musical text to its performance.

In reality this need is so pervasive and per-

manent that we are ternpted to say that the hisrory of music is indeed a history of translations. the entire development

But perhaps all of our history,

of our culture, is a history of transla-

tions. Our culture has to possess everything, therefore it translates everything: languages of all kinds, things, concepts, facts, emotions,

money, the past and the future,

and, of course,

rnusic, Translation Alexandria

implies

interpretation.

who translated

herrneneutics.

The

seventy sages of

the Bible into Greek "invented"

We are well aware of the implication

ofLuther's

translation

of the Bible into the German language, the French

translation

of the American

spiritual

Bill of Rights, the cultural and

flux linking Greek to Latin, and Latin to the "vul-

gar" romance tongues in Danre's time. In all of these occasions

31

translation

was, in fact, a hermeneutic

tion of a text, and the acquisitions

practice,

an interpreta-

were by no means one-way,

frorn a language of departure

to a language of arrival. The same

multidirectional

occurs

interaction

today, in the borrowings

that take place between hegemonic

languages (like English, for

exarnple)

and national

between

langllages

and local dialects,

languages,

between

standard

national

oral and written

tradi-

tions. Can observations ogy, to translation Definitely

on literary translation

be applied, by anal-

in music, in other words to transcription?

yes, even if there is an obvious difference

written text available to all to read, interpret, a score to be performed. mon and practical literature,

Language

between a

and translate and

is an instrument

verbal communication,

of com-

but it can also be

prose and poetry. Music is always "literature,"

and its

transcriptions,

which often imply a vast and cornplex network

of interactions,

will never present their author with the dilern-

ma that the translator

of poetry must often face: whether

more faithflll to the meaning is, whether

to betray one dimension

Literature tradition

ar to the wording

techniques.

of a poem, that

for the sake of the other.

itself can be a transcription

of oral narrative

to be

of a long-standing

Ir has been argued thar

Ilia d and O dyssey are in reality collective works that Horner'smlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFEDCBA

32

I

REMEMBERING

THE

FUTURE

were handed

down, elaborated,

and gradually

a period of about five centuries. fused in poetic

format,

reminders

phrases

and their written

transcription

often

devices, such as repetition,

of the heroes' fame and accomplishments,

that fit in neatly with the hexameters,

Ulysses narrares his adventures, pectations

over

The tales and myths became

reveals the use of specific narrative frequent

crystallized

and conventions

adapting

and so forth.

thern to suit the ex-

of those to whom

he speaks. Was

he aliar? lf the mlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFEDCBA O dyssey were not the transcription of oral sources, of rhetoric would

conventions

perhaps

and narrative

not have come down

techniques,

Ulysses

to us as such an astute

hero. Art music toa can rely on transcriptions

of oral traditions;

we all know this and, having learned a lot from Béla Bartók, I am myself particularly cannot

sensitive to that experience.

But music

go very far back in time and explore creatively

tant past: its instruments as a written

and materials

page. Music

late, and discuss Homer barely imagine

is vulnerable.

a dis-

are not as permanent We can read, trans-

in depth, but we can only theorize or

how Greek music was, because we have never

heard ir. In the Middle scribed

Ages, profane

for liturgical

purposes;

melodies

transcription

TRANSLATING

were often

tran-

in music played

MUSIC

I 33

also a substantial,

rnnernoruc

role. Countless

made their way across Europe,

transforming

turning

up in the most unlikely

century

on, an increasingly

folk melodies themselves

places. From rhe thirteenth

codified

musical notation-which

is itself a form of transcription-had

profoundly

rhe spread of music, both publicly

of musical ideas from country

During

and sixteenth

sic rapidly acquired music, becoming

centuries

to country.

instrumentalPONMLKJIHG m u-

its own status as a transcription

an extension

for a solo instrument

was fundamental

birth to accompanied

of vocal

of it. The practice of transcrib-

ing parts from a vocal polyphony lute, for exarnple)

iníluenced

and privately, and favored

a growing exchange the fifteenth

and

(the

in the process of giving

melody.

Ritor nello was played by two ordinary violins," Mon"ThismlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFEDCBA teverdi writes in the score of his O r feo, documenting performance anorher

but also suggesting,

occasion

different

used. Until Beethoven, quotation

giglle was a legitimate transcriptions

with that past tense, that on

instruments

might well have been

any acknowledged

and a cornrnentary,

musical form was a

hence a form of transcription.

inhabitant

and transformations

34 /

REMEMBERING

through

from the sixteenth

THE

rUTURE

A

of a suite; the vast range of which

dance model (rhe gigue) together with its occasional (rhe suite) underwent,

the first

century

the formal container to Schoen-

berg, is very significant.

This is to say that musical transcrip-

tion, seen from a historical pretation

perspective,

but also evolutionary

The practice,

implies not only inter-

and transformational

the possibilities,

and the needs of transcription

were an organic part of musical invention step in rhe professional Copying,

development

the simplest

tant learning

experience:

processes.

and also a natural

of a musician.

form of transcription, the very young

was an impor-

Mozart

would

copy

whatever Leopold suggested, and later in his life, he transcribed Handel'smlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFEDCBA Messia h and Bach's fugues. It seems that Schubert copied Beethoven's a few of Mozart's

Second Symphony, string quartets,

Ma gic F lute, and the Requiem,

and Beethoven

parts of D on G iova nni, and transcribed

vocal fugue from the Messia h. Brahms der. Copying, fication

like transcription,

with the copied

of generosiry.

Walter

saintly

vocation

power

of a text is different

copied

out ....

copied

for himself a Schubert's

lie-

text, and also an act

said that there

in the sheer act of copying"

Copying

The

implies some sort of identi-

or transcribed

Benjamin

copied

when

is "a kind of and that

"the

it is read from when

it is

is to be the text being copied."

think that the act of copying by Schubert,

Beethoven,

and many others can be seen as inhabited

Brahms,

by rhe same erno-

tions.

TRANSLATING

I

MUSIC

/

35

Ouring

the Baroque

period,

archies were part of a rather framework, manners

vocal technique

of instrumental

the techniques

when musical

roles and hier-

stable and unif}ring conceptual

began to assimilare the modes and music. The relative homogeneity

and their highly codified notation

sible to transfer music from one set of instruments Over the centuries,

the progressive diffusion

scores, and of transcriptions,

generated

made ir posto anorher,

of printed musical

countless mysteries that

would have taxed even Sherlock Holmes. A notorious is J. S. Bach's exceedingly minor

for organ.

cent scholarship

well-known

Its authenricity

example

Toccata and Fugue in D

has been questioned

by Bach, is one of the hypotheses

gested), raising a whole range of stylistic and notational that reveal the complexity and transcription.

of the Baroque

Bach was constantly

practice

issues

transcribing

himself Bach's

from the Parti ta in O Major for solo violin was tran-

scribed dozens of times in the nineteenth and large orchestras,

a leít-hand

century-for

small

for piano, for gllitar, and so on. Schumann to it, and Brahms turned it inro

added a piano accompaniment piano study,

As in music, in alllanguages

I

sug-

of copying

as-well as Vivaldi, Pergolesi, and other contemporaries.

36

by re-

(an original solo violin piece later transcribed

for the organ, neither

Chaconne

of

REMEMBERING

THE

FUTURE

there are translations

that are

copies, translations that are "faithful porrraits," and paraphrases that are a travesty of the original. There are translations

which

germanize the French original, ar americanize the Italian, and vice versa. But this is a small price to pay for the privilege of having Goethe on French bookshelves, Shakespeare in Italy, or Praust in America. Then there are literary works which are virtual translations frorn the ourset, because they are impregnated with the stylistic, conceprual, other languages, traditions,

and rhetorical

peculiarities

or translations. This is particularly

true of children's Íiterature and of the more stereotyped of nineteenth-century

of

forms

opera librettos.

Bur there are also literary works which resist translation; they may only be interpreted, mented

paraphrased,

described, or com-

upon. These include Mallarrné's mlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJI Le Livr e and joyce's

F innega ns

Wá ke. Any attempt

at translating

these would be

distinctly difficult, if not impossible or pointless. The reasons for this impossibility

have something

sic. In F innega ns Wá ke the symbolism,

in common

with mu-

the syntax, phonetics,

iconic imagery, and gestural content create a series of semantic short circuits, a polyphony

of associations that leave no leeway

whatsoever for alternative

expressions or enunciations.

More-

over, joyce develops and exhibits a language that seems to want to assimilate the molecules of ali languages,

TRANSLATlNG

In this complex

MUSIC

/

37

and lush landscape, the old Saussurian signifier and signified tend to be one and the same. The same thing often happens in the music of the rwentieth

as it is of its past

century-aware

history, yet eager to detach itself frorn it-where

a transcrip-

tion would become an irnproper and even destructive act. To translate Joyce'smlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFEDCBA F innega ns Wa ke, Mallarmé's Le Livr e, or the poetry of e. e. cummings

would be like transcribing

Debussy's

[ eux, Bartók's M usic for Str ings, P er cussion, a nd C elesta , Boulez's M a r tea u G r uppen,

sa ns M a itr e, Carter's Double Concerto,

Stockhausen's

or most of my own works. It would be like carrying

out a cornpletely arbitrary operation

on works whose meaning

lies, among other things, in the interaction components,

of rheir acoustic

in their musical characterization

in their specific sound relationships,

and functions,

and in the "thernatization"

of those relationships. Transcription

was-and

of popularization.

still

IS,

at times-an

In the ear1y nineteenth

made known principally

through

instrument

century music was

four-hands

piano transcrip-

tions, a decidedly less passive but also less accurate equivalent of today's CDs and radio braadcasts.

Adaptations

and tran-

scriptions were part of the currency-sometimes

a counterfeit

part-in

Franz Liszt's

the big business of Italian melodrama.

piano transcriptions

38 I

REMEMBERING

and paraphrases, addressed to a cosrnopol-

THE

FUTURE

itan socialite public, contributed

immensely to the evolution of

piano technique and greatly furrhered musical exchange, even though they have Iittle bearing on the stature ofLiszt as a composer. Transcription

has often been used, at least partially, to com-

ment upon and to assimilate elements from past and foreign experiences. This is why it is so difficult, sometimes,

to assign

precise borders to the vast territories of transcription.

The em-

bittered,

Mahler's

jostling

expressive "objects" rhat populate

world and, from a very different perspective, the direct reterences to real-life sounds in the visionary musical documentaries of Charles Ives are significant examples of commentary

and

assimilation as an indirect form of transcription. Then

there is Schoenberg

who, to our great relief, tran-

scribed for orchestra his mlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFEDCBA Theme a nd Va r ia tions, op. 43 (originally for wind instruments).

He also transcribed-though

problematic

Bach, Handel,

Webern,

way-Brahms,

on the other hand, transcription

analysis-as

in a

and Mahler. With became a form of

is the case with his version of Bach's six-part Ri-

cercare from the Musica l O ffer ing and the impressive "Brahmsian" transcription

for piano quintet of Schoenberg's Chamber

Symphony, op. 9. This is a case where transcription transparent

becomes a

act of love and learning.

TRANSLATING

MUSIC

I 39

As for Ravel, his transcriptions, into the orchestra, scriptions

are ali very well known.

covered a very wide and complex

tbe different

Stravinsky's

territory. Think

transcription

(alrnost a parody)

of music history. Tbe young Stockhausen

musical coming-of-age

by transcribing

a buge, uncontrolled Mauricio

orchestra

Kagel transcription

upon everything transcriptions

of

showed his

bis Kontr a -punkte

parody,

Boulez's transcriptions

transcribes,

and re-

for orches-

forty-five years earlier) are an important

I toa have transcribed

vision.

a great deal. Except when there are

or personal

variably prompted

With

and amplifies several short

aspect of bis creative process and of bis proliferating

specific practical

from

commentary

of his own works (such as Nota tions

piano pieces written

of a large

to ten solo instruments. becomes

he encounters.

tra, where he uncovers,

reasons, my transcriptions

by analytical

considerations.

thought

that the best possible comrnentary

another

symphony,

for úa

tran-

versions ofmlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFED Les Noces, and think of Agon, whicb is

a kind of synthetic segment

wbere the piano is transcended

are in-

I have always

on a symphony

is

and I reckon that the third part of my Sin-

is the best and deepest analysis that I could bave hoped

to make of the Scherzo from Mahler's Second Symphony.

The

same is true of my Render ing for orcbestra, which is my own act of love for Schubert

40

I

REMEMBERING

and for his sketches for his last unfinished

THI'.

FUTURE

symphony

in D major (D936A),

which occupied

him during

the final weeks of his life. With

my transcription

for orches-

tra of Mahler's youthfulmlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFEDCBA Lieder , for instance, I wanted to bring to light the undercurrents

of the original piano part: Wagner,

Brahms, the adult Mahler, and the modes of orchestration

rhat

carne after him. But ler's step outside forms of transcription. situation,

the catalogue

Let's consider, for instance, a concer ta nte

in which a soloist coexists with his own image reflect-

ed and transcribed of distorting undergo

into an orchestra

and amplifying

interesting

technologies).

We can imagine

and embedded

strumental existing hidden

can

also with computer-assisted

concer ta nte forms bringing

and amplifying in a pre-existing

Iuncrions

patterns.

and sought

and self-sufficient

This attitude

curious procedure

to extract

inherent

has nothing of writing

to

which are in-

solo. It is as if one were dealing with a natural,

structure,

Schoenberg's

which may become a sort

mirror of it (this interaction

developments

the surface, transcribing, hidden

of more or less explicit

pre-

forms and

in common

wirh

a rather indifferent

piano part to his F a nta sia , op. 47, after having written

out the

violin part in ful1; but ir does, ideal1y, with the work of Paul Klee and his creative interaction stantly comments

with nature,

a work that con-

on the roots of its own becoming.

TRANSLATING

MUSIC

I 41

The series of my mlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFEDCBA C hemins for soloist and orchestra (or instrumental group) elaborate

on previous,

independent

such as some of my Sequenze. These transcription

of a solo part composed

does not in fact undergo rather an exposition hidden,

solo pieces

do not offer a

C hemins

at an earlier date-which

any modification

and an amplification

whatsoever-but of what is irnplicit,

so to speak, in that solo part. In the case of C hemins

L based on Sequenza

II for harp,

there is a very differentiated

repartee between the soloist and the added instrumental (an orchestra perspectives

and two more harps), and between of listening

imposed

natural amplification

interaction transparent

formance,

layers of articulation ali engaged

in the orches-

of the three harps keep the even in moments

density. This process of amplification multaneous

the multiple

by these new forces on the

original solo Sequenza . The linear development tra and the triangular

forces

of extreme

involves different and si-

and different

in the same sequential,

modes of perharmonic

jour-

ney Irom sound to noise. The harp in fact is often transformed into a noise generator:

it does not evoke the pretty delicacies of

the French school but, maybe, the noises of an unlikely forest. Nevertheless,

the orchestra

ist, often echoing The situation

42

/

and the two harps reply to the solo-

it in a cause-and-eíiect

kind of relation.

is reversed in C hemins 111 (on C hemins lI), for

REMEMBERING

THE

FUTURE

vi Ia, a group of ten instrurnents,

and orchestra.

Here every-

thing coexists; there is no dialogue, no cause-and-effect but duplication

and simultaneous

VI) mirrors

(Sequenza

instrumentallayers.

reinforcement.

The solo partmlkjihgfedcbaZYX

itself, rather faithfully,

in the different

There are varying degrees of fusion among

the different instrumental

forces, based on harmonic

and speed of articulation.

There is an interaction

odic and discontinuous, ent our perception

almost randorn,

patterns

of the phasing and dephasing

the orchestra are amplifying in a rather

that will oriof the various

going through

discontinuous

way, from noise to sound.

VI for viola, C hemins 11 for

and C hemins III-a r e different

group and

a global aspect of this work which

The sequence of wor ks-Sequenza ten instruments,

characters

between peri-

frequency bands. At the same time, the instrumental

moves,

relation,

subtractive

in search of a melody,

steps. When

the melody is

finally about to take shape, the work ends. Naturally. C hemins

IV for oboe and eleven strings,

quenza VII for oboe, develops a still different tion and transcription. repeated,

form of interac-

note of the oboe is

always in the same register, through

lar sequence

an almost regu-

of accents and silences. The same note is devel-

oped in the instrumental ation

A single, isolated

based on my Se-

of timbre

group,

and dynamics

undergoing

a constant

for rhe entire

duration

TRANSLATING

MUSIC

variof the

I 43

composition.

Always present

acts as a generalized

and always different,

tonic or like the vanishing

scape. Ir enables us to perceive and compare lations of color, intensity,

and intonation.

ing point is lost in a cumulative as such because ir is absorbed, part of a harmonic forgotren The

arriculations

prepared,

like an overtone,

of rhe soloist

of "mobilities"

and "irnmobilities,"

and "afters,"

of "mernories"

and "forgetfulness."

they always

stops once this process has group now functions

filled with fragments

deduced

from mlkjihgfedcbaZ ev-

that we have heard so far, while the soloist's original is cornpletely

A dialogue between erness of an added

transformed.

a pre-existing

of estrangement

THE

be developed

through

from the most unanimous

and estranged.

REMEMBERING

musical text and the orh-

text can therefore

forms of interaction,

most conflictual

44 I

and naturally

so far that the instrumental

physiognomy

moments

extended,

a dialogue

as an echo-charnber,

multiple

and remembered.

by the instrumental

look at each orher, The dialogue

erything

pirch at times is

are alternatively

They look ahead, they look behind,

proliferated

as a structural

foreshadowed

group, creating of "befores"

the smallest oscil-

process; or it is no longer heard

times is recognized

or unexpectedly

point in a land-

At times our vanish-

processo The ever-present

and at other

rhat note

But it is exactly through

that a deep connection

FUTURE

to the rhese

with the ini-

tial data, with the given material be both challenged

and justifled.

sarily mean something

of the solo instrument,

will

By "initial data" I don't neces-

that comes earlier in time. It is possible

to develop mlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFEDCBA concer ta nte situations in which the solo instrument becomes

a generator

strumental

of functions

that are entrusted

group, which in turn generates

the group generates

something

abusing structive

implies

the

possibility

the text's integrity demolition

the solo partj thus

that already existed, in such a

way that the solo is no longer a generator This

to the in-

but a resulto

of transforming

so as to perform

on it. Transcription

and

even

an act of con-

seems to get drawn

into the very core of the formative

process,

taking joint and

full responsibility

for the structural

definition

is not the sound

that is being transcribed,

of the work. Ir

rhereíore,

but the

idea. I feel that the implications quickly described,

of this proceeding,

can be quite far-reaching.

although

This is a position

that we can also adopt with regard to history, not just musical history,

in this perspective

we are invited to renew our percep-

tion of history, maybe to re-invent

it so rhat, fully responsible,

we can accept the idea of a history rhat is exploring can give ourselves, again and again, the possibility

us and we of remem-

bering the future.

TRANSLATlNG

MUSIC

I 45

The history of vocal music is ais o the history of translation of a text into music. Think been sung in different

of rhe text of the Mass, which has

ways, with different

music, who knows

how many times. Not only the Eucharist Heine,

Goethe,

or Mallarmé

but ais o a poem by

is structurally

and semantically

modiíied

and renewed, at least in part, when it is explored and

absorbed

into music by Schubert,

Schumann,

Boulez, or others. If a musical thought full in relation

known

conditioned

reotyped

that text,

by ir. This will at least prevent the wellso common

in today's cornmer-

music, of a text that becomes a pretext in a ste-

musical contexto

Vocal technique

plays a concrete

part in the transformation making

itself in

of it, while of course

transformation

and passive situation,

cially oriented

is to manifest

to a text, it must be able to modiíy

to carry out an analytical remaining

Debussy, Ravel,

Sprechstimme,

Luna ir e, is a meaningful

but somehow

ambiguous

of a text into music. Even rhe epochconceived

by Schoenberg

formlkjihgfedcbaZYX P ier r ot

and unique case of vocal ambiguity.

In

the vocal part we hear the gestures of Berlin cabaret (maybe), as well as the mannerism

of Franco-German

tainly) and the Liederkreis an exalted recitation

tradition.

melodrama

(cer-

We can listen to it also as

or as a pauperized

song-or

both.

Even in the vocal music of the highest and most subtle con-

46 I

REMEMBERING

THE

FUTURE

/onnity

of music and poetry

(I am thinking

li xl), when we seem to experience

rhe miracle of a quasi-spon-

t. neous formal and expressive agreement poetic structure,

between

we are aware of diverging

sive disagreements,

between

musical

rween musical and poetic strophes, modes and moods.

of the German

For instance,

musical and

relations,

and poetic

of expresdesign,

be-

meter and rhyme, between the journey

toward madness

and oblivion in Schuberr'smlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFEDCBA Winter r eise is also a journey toward an increasing

presence of translucent

major keys.

To look for specific and obstinare confirmations intents between music and poetry in the romantic come a Iutile operation, themselves guarantee

since the cultural

lied can be-

cri teria involved in

a relative code of reciprocity

and music. Codes, merhods,

of common

between text

and theories are everywhere,

in a

given cultural frame. They are obviously very present and active in vocal music, where a composer

interfaces

that imply, in any case, possibilities

of logical inferences and a

substantial I think

degree of probabilities

that even in the highest

experience

(D ichter liebe

more rewarding

in relation moments

by Schumann,

to the premises.

of the German

for instance),

lied

it can be

to unglue the music from thc text rather than

relying on obvious or specious observations forming

two dimensions

a lied into a Rorschach

that end up trans-

inkblot.PONMLKJIHGFEDCBA

T R A N S L A T IN G

M U 'S I C

/

47

Henri Pousseur has achieved a deep structural complex

spiral of harmonic

bringing

to light, as he says, "a global structure

coherence uniíied

and complexity.

material

never happened

the poem. The

the cyde,

of remarkable

a varied texture

there is a

before in any form of vocal music made of dimornents."

of significant

of Schumann's

Behind

in mlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVUTS D ichter liebe,

that traverses the sixteen pieces in a way that

versiíied, collected moments

and key relations

study of the

divarication

musical

episodes

selection

to dose

But, let me add, there are also between

and

the music

the narrative

and

itinerary

of Heine's poems seem, at the end of

up and sink together,

holding

themselves

tight, with ironic dignity, in the waters of a romantic

renuncia-

tion. Nevertheless,

that stays

in the last song there is something

afloat: it is the dosing and developing musician

comment

of the piano where, evoking

the last measures

of two previous

talks directly to the poet, inviting

lent, friendly, and moving

expression,

songs, the

him, with benevo-

not to take himself roo

seriously. This way of "stepping

out" of the poet's coffin, this

brief and musically self-sufficient

meditation,

step toward transcendence

seems to imply a

of ernotions.

In 1965, right here in Carnbridge,

I had my first encounter

with Rornan Jakobson at Harvard's Faculty Club. He came toward me with those bushy, glinting eyes of his and asked me point-

48 /

REMEMBERING

THE

FUTURE

blank: "50, Berio, what is music?" After a moment

of bafRed si-

lence, I replied that music is everything we !isten to with the inten-

to rnusic, and rhat anything can mlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIH become rnusic,

tion oflistening I've

always

reply-if

been

faithful

not in practice,

Such conception,

the notion

such translation is pos-

of rnusic as Text, a multi-dirnenevolution.

in fact had already stated something

when he wrote that the entire apparatus linguistic,

phonetic,

quality

1l0W

as long as it can be translated into

sional Text that is in continuous Jakobson

spur-of-the-mornent

can beco me rnusic as long as it can

be rnusically conceptualized,

sible only within

this

at least as an ideal. I can

it by adding that anything

different dimensions.

to

phonological,

of the kind

of Ianguage=wirh

rhetorical,

its

and syntactical

dimensions-contributes

to the poetic process, not just verse,

meter, rhyme,

and so on. By this he implied that

the priorities

symmetry,

of poetic and, in our case, musical íunctions have

to be selected and recombined well-known

example

vince members

He gave the

of a missionary

in Africa trying to con-

of a local cornrnunity

not to go around naked.

"But you're naked, missionary's

each time around.

too," replied

a tribesman,

face. "But only my face is naked,"

pointing

at the

said the mis-

sionary, to which the candid reply was: "Well, for us rhe face is ali over!"

TRANSLATING

MUSIC

/

49

The

most significant

has been investigating ing and absorbing ping

vocal music of the last few decades. exactly that: the possibiliry

musically

out of the purely

of explor-

the full face of language.

syllabic

articulation

of a text, vocal

music can deal with the totaliry of its configurations, ing the phonetic gestures.

one and

meaningful:

always carries within

triggers

itself a model,

that

always a gesture.

it does, even the simplest it always

vocal

to remember

of a voice is always a quotation,

The voice, whatever

includ-

the ever-present

It can be useful for a composer

the sound

capably

including

Step-

noise, is ines-

associations

whether

natural

and

it

or cul-

tural. Music, I suppose, will never retreat from words, and neither will words retreat from music. Words on music can themselves become a sort of transcription

of musical thinking.

times music seems to be surrounded Beautiful

by a Muzak of verbalism.

and ugly, music and non-rnusic,

closed and open, formal and informal, ditional

and modern,

and conventional

is expressed slant ofbinary

50

/

tonal and atonal,

spoken

seems always

what is said about it, particularly

in peremptory

terms, with

conílicrs. The dilemmas

REMEMBERING

and sung, tra-

free and strict are certainly alllegitimate

terms. But musical experience

ready to contradict

However, at

THE

FUTURE

the rather

provoked

when this moralistic

by binary op-

positions can lead us to ask ourselves if musical experience is more significant than the argument the dimension

it prompts.

Or whether

of concrete experience and the dimension

of

the discourse which translates the experience into words are perhaps interchangeable. conflict or contradiction

But we are also led to think that a has no point because music cannot be

true or untrue the way a discourse cano Ir cannot, as a behavior, be either good or bad. Nor can it be reduced to a "thing," or to a procedure that is open to manipulation

bya discourse. Ir

is a vicious circle. Discourses on music do not perturb we wouldn't be here now-but

us-or

we know that music can occa-

sionally perturb us when, loaded with meanings, ir begs to be spoken about, questioned, Forrnerly, this contradictory

and related to an elusive mlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVUTSRQPO elseioher e. elseioher e could be identified with

a universal concept of art which also accommodated though like an unwanted

and defaulting

tion of art tends to transform

music,

tenant. But the no-

itself into the a r tistic: it tends

to recognize itself more in a diffuse cloud of feelings than in a specific work. We find art everywhere and nowhere-perhaps because it has lost one of its most powerful propellants: that of turning against itself. The musical work seems to need the constant

reassurance

of a verbal discourse that would act as a mediator between its

TRANSLATING

MUSIC

I 51

outer form and its essence. This is even more true when the direct experience of a musical work is not easily connected with that familiar and conciliatory

notion of art, or with the com-

mon belief that the music we listen to has something

to do

with what we feel and therefore could say about it. There are times when the translation

of music into words seems to sub-

stitute for direct experience. But since music's more salient and enduring contents are above all conceptual, meaningful

this substitution

only if the words actually contribute

the pracess of thought

is

to outlining

that underlies an experience that tends

to be free of verbal associations. A discourse on music can become a substitute

for musical

creativity when it strays inro areas which music itself cannot knowinglyenter.

In this way a new poetics of musical herrne-

neutics and aestherics takes shape, something

which Adorno

took to extrerne heights. Adorno's cornplex, polyphonic, polysemic discourse on music-with cells that mulriply

into lofty thought

and

his characteristic

thought

systems-Ieft

a signifi-

cant legacy of ideas and questions for two generations

of mu-

sicians. Adorno taught us how to analyze practical experience dialectically but at the same time to keep our distance fram ir, It is a bit like being tied, with ears wide open, to the mast of

52

/

REMEMBERING

THE

FUTURE

an extremely provocative

intellectual

ship, without

being lured

onto the rocks by rhe Sirens.

elsewher e of musical discourse, rather than practiIt is the mlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFEDCBA cal experience,

which has taught us that something

be more dignified "aesthetically

correct."

involves reflection, tween "irnplicit" of thought

and useful than

something

It has taught

and thar it is necessary

as a form

(I am quoting

"to what extent a thought-that

to every composition,

of composing

Carl

is, a discourse-

to the thought

'in' music

or, on the contrary,

to what

to an autonomous

pracrice

addition

which is alone in its decisions."

this I have attempted

turns of a labyrinth comprehension

combined

to describe

certain

twists and

which, in my view, offers only one way out:

implies

pages with descriptions which,

be-

"in" music, and "explicit" theory, which is a reílec-

extent it is a superfluous

With

or

to distinguish

theory, which includes composition

'on' music is useful and indispensable inherent

"beautiful"

us that every creative act

tion "on" music, and helps us to understand Dahlhaus)

"ugly" can

translation.

We could

fill pages and

of behavior and conceptual

with a detailed

paradigms

experi-

analysis of concrete

ence (exactly what type of analysis is always an open question), could perhaps contribute

to a coherently

ramified vision of the

TRANSLATING

MUSIC

/

53

translation

of music into words. But I am not toa convinced

that this operation constant

could produce

evolution

the other hand,

satisfactory

of the phenornena

the impoverishing

scene today, it is difficult

results, given the

in questiono

tendencies

Given, on

in the musical

to decide what kind of satisfaction

we could hope to gain by it. Maybe we have to make do with knowing interact

that there are structures

of thought

"on" music that

with each other (such as those of Adorno

haus): veritable

para-musical

enced

"in" music

thought

constructions,

and Dahl-

which have influ-

no less than the music composed

over the same period did. These cornplex forms of translation of musicalexperience

have their own value and irnport,

etics that create a sort of music of meanings. Adorno's Mahler

as po-

In this respect,

"The Essay as Form" and his studies on Schubert are superior

examples.

Without

overlooking

and

the spe-

cific musical details, and while evaluating

thern technically

very penetrating

an edifice of thought

way, Adorno

constructs

that reflects our (essentially spiritual)

in a

desire to go musically to

and fro across those wide spaces between social process and individual

progress,

and between

the (often seductive)

form of thar gap and its (always enigmatic) When interests

54 I

essence.

we are dealing with a ser of culturally that are familiar

REMEMBERING

THE

homogeneous

to us, we tend to identify

FUTURE

outward

ourselves

with the objects of our interest. Transcribing or analyzing the work of others, in Europe or America, is always a bit like talking about ourselves. But now and then we want to venture into distant cultural territories and explore different cultural identities. When this world of ours, with its need for appropriating everything around ir, comes inro contact with music and musical rituaIs that are fixed in time (fixed like the social structures that produced thern), then the chances of our being able to truly identify wirh thern are drastically reduced. This foray into musical domains that are heavily determined by performance techniques, harmonies, rnelodies, heterophonies, and rhythms can trigger an illusory sense of identification. The pretense of total identification is, to my mind, one of the most sterile forms of contact with another culture. Total identification implies some kind of spontaneity that, in this case, would only be superficially emotive because it would be deprived of any profound form of cultural rigor. Frankly, I would find it hard to identiíy with the behavior of a Tibetan monk, and none of you, I suppose, could quite put yourselves into the shoes of a Sicilian fisherman. But there are rare and precious cases in which identification and detachment coexist creatively hand-in-hand, Béla Bartók is one of the most significant and complex examples of musical bilingualism. Between

TRANSLATING

MUSIC

/

55

the world of melodies, rhythms,

metrics, and folk harmonies

that Bartók was exploring and the world of "cultivated" music in which he developed, there is an indissoluble relationship

and profound

that is an integral part of Bartók's creativity, In

the developrnent

of large forms, Bartók, rather than transcrib-

ing folk melodies, transcribes their inherent, implicit meaning. Therefare,

in most cases he invenrs them. Furthermore,

Bartók

develops a dialogue berween the original peasant musical materials and a formal construction

(whether an "arched" one based

on "golden section" proportions, monic procedures) logically distinct,

or one based on "axial" har-

that keeps thern organically and rnorphoyet structurally

inseparable-a

true fusion,

an amalgam of seemingly disparare strucruring

elernents, and

nor merely an emulsion ready for all uses. Bartók certainly doesn't serve up some musical sighrseeing tour of Transylvania or a postcard of the Romanian

country-

side. In many cases the source material already offers a rich and fecund seedbed of ambiguity.

For example, the first five

notes ofmlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFEDCBA M usic for Str ings, P er cussion, a nd C elesta crop up, by mere coincidence,

in Webern's Va r ia tions, op. 30; four of these

same notes rnake up the famous melodic B-A-C-H;

cell on the name

and the íirst three are the incipit of a Hungarian

folksong. 50 we have four cultural seeds, so to speak, all con-

56

/

REMEMBERING

THE

FUTURE

tained in the same five notes, seeds which germinate

tiply in the four sections ofBartók's latent and manifest teract in a wholly

meaning,

around

his apparent

with history

him, prevented

him into rheir solemn

fundamental

Theory

way. It may be that

innocence

and his com-

and with the cultural

Adorno

and Dahlhaus

intellectual

lence on Bartók is significant;

work, in which

the parts and the whole, all in-

nove! and transparent

Bartók's explicit nature, plex re!ationship

remarkable

and mul-

from accepting

architectures.

Adorno's

it reveals the dogmatic

of Aesthetics

realities

si-

side ofhis

and his difficulty in dealing

with diversities. If we step outside our cultural sphere and go to Africa, say, the scene changes

considerably.

cannot

to with the ears of someone

be listened

We come across music

that

who wants at

all cost to write it out on the staff. It is essential that Western musicians

approach

these musical

behaviors

with

and sensitive ears, in order to grasp the sophisticated

intelligent processes

behind what may seem to be mere!y blowing pipes and hitting stones and drums.

In this way we can discover some rernark-

able new things that come fcom far outside but can neverthe!ess the intellectual ter of cultural

our own sphere,

touch us deeply. Appropriating

thern with

tools of our music no longer needs to be a marcolonialism

but can be an act of awareness and

TRANSLATING

MUSIC

/

57

respect,

of love, for cultural

something

identities

which

can ais o tell us

about ourselves.

In central Africa there is a small, pacific community we would

define as "highly

community

had our notion

Banda

Linda,

was studied

musical,"

if the members

of the

of music. The tribe, known as the by the ethnomusicologist

Arom. In groups of about forty, the members long wooden

which

pipes, each of which produces

Simha

of the tribe play

a single note. Each

note is repeated

on a single rhythrnic

slight variations

that do not affect the "block" character

whole. When produce

wirh occasional

new sound-new

both complex and coordinated, of sound and an implacable the Banda Linda wooden There

to western

something

musical machine.

horns is governed

is a pentatonic

ears. It is

The playing of by an infrangible

melody which is not actually

a register of approximately

by some tacit social agreement,

they

between a cathedral

played by any one person: its notes are distributed players through

of the

all the players blow into their instruments,

an altogether

principie.

module,

nobody

among

the.

two octaves. As if plays the melody

such, yet its nature and its spirit are ever-present

as

at any point

in this fabulous sound "installation." It goes wirhout

saying rhat I studied

cedure involved not because I wanted

58

I

REMEMBERING

THE

FUTURE

and adapted

to transcribe

the pro-

the Banda mlkjihgfedcba

Lindas heterophonies

for a symphony

ano, but because I wanted into other dimensions principle forth).

or for the pi-

the principle,

the idea,

of music, and also to extend

the same

to other cultures

to transfer

orchestra

(Sicily, Slovenia, Scotland,

and so

In mlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFEDCBA C or o (the work which I derived from that cornplex

experience)

I had the Banda

way, interacting

idiom

come a very long

with the musical procedures

other cultures, adapting functions

Linda

and transforming

and techniques

the original musical

of their "sound machine."

But, without

knowing

it, the Banda Linda thernselves

already traveled a long way. That process of segmentation, division, and rhythmic

distribution

turies with

the hoquetus

rhythmic

fragmentation

voices-a

well-known

tion which

(hocket),

organization.

involved

technique

to give the melody

cen-

the jerky

of composi-

a further

It is very interesting

with

evolving

through

an important written

tradition

form of

indeed

African heterophonies

can be correlated

of performance

in the continuously

and fourteenth

which

pre-polyphonic

that the ancient, unchanging

principle

sub-

of a given melody among two or three

also tended

to an oral tradition

had

of rhe melody had already

been tried out in Europe in the thirteenth

temporal

of

to nnd

that belong an analogous

stepping-stone of European

music.

TRANSLATING

MUSIC

/

59

I do not believe that Adam, in that famous garden, ever received the divine gift of a universal musical grammar, eventually doomed to destruction

in the Tower ofBabel.

However that

may be, in closing this second lecture I would like to say that these remarks have been like putting a message in a bottle and casting ir out to sea-a

cautious,

circumspect

message. Now

and then music' sends out hesitant cues as to the existence of innate organisms which, if fittingly translated and interpreted, may help us pinpoint

the embryos of a universal musical gram-

mar. I do not think that such a discovery can be useful to musical creativiry, nor to the utopian prospect of a perfect, common musical language that will enable musicians unanimously

to speak and be

spoken. But I do think that it could contribute

to exploring musical experience as a "language of languages," estab\ishing

a constructive

interchange

between

diverse cul-

tures and a peaceful defense of those diversities. I hope so. In the meantime,

60

I

we'll keep translating.mlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVUTSRQPO

REMEMBERING

THE

FUTURE

FORGETTING

MUSICwvutsrqponmlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVUTSRQPONMLK

There are a thousand

ly interested

ways of forgetting

music, and I am most-

in the active ways of forgetting

passive and unconscious in voluntary

amnesias,

rather

than

the

ways. In other words, I am interested although

the desire to possess and re-

member the history of ali times and ali places is an integral part of modern

thought,

and the practical

means of satisfying

this

desire are certainly available in our day and age. Today, the listener has a tendency

to make use of the whole

of past music as if it were a consumer

commodity.

This makes

sense because for the listener the past is the most available resource of musical knowledge,

although

ries the signs of an unconscious is rooted

not in a plausible

way we are conditioned

often car-

ideological frustration,

since it

code of musical values but in the

by the market,

A sociology of conservation, and fetishism

this tendency

of hoarding,

has already been written

of musical avarice

by Adorno,

in a differ-

ent time, when it was the right thing to do, when an analysis of the listener and of listening

implied

a moral, if not a political,

judgment.

61

The conservation most unprepared

of the past makes sense because even the

!istener is aware that music cannot

on the wall. Music is performed, er "in progress,"

continuity

of a performer,

But conservation

between

really perma-

the musical structure

as they are heard.

of the past also makes sense in a negative

a way of forgetting

with an illusion of continuity; ing free to select what appears

music. It provides listeners

it gives thern the illusion of beto confirrn

that continuiry,

well as the illusion of being free to censure everything pears to upset it. This is why musical performance to have autonomous different

forev-

between the mind of a composer

and the levels of articulation,

way, becoming

in motion,

especially since there is nothing

nent to guarantee and the hands

is constandy

be hung

as

that ap-

often seems

life: ir becomes a sort of merchandise,

in-

to the music it is supposed

to be serving. However

these kinds of performing

life appear to be, they are

diversihed

all deeply rooted,

I insist, in a conditioning

consumer

society

rather than in the world of ideas. Performance

techniques,

musical instruments,

and perform-

ing spaces are also shrines to memory, as much and often more so than musical works in themselves. The modes and places of performance frequendy

62

I

have evolutionary independent

REMEMBERING

timings

that are different

and

of those of the musical texto The per-mlkjihgfe

THE

FUTURE

formers of the seventeenth,

eighteenth,

and part of the nine-

teenth centuries lived in the present. They had no cumbersome philological

nor were they concerned,

arnbirions,

an accumulated

legacy of technique,

instruments,

as a ruI e, with and places of

performance. The first public concert halls, built in Europe and England in the late eighteenth a confirmation

and early nineteenth

of the astonishing

century,

served as

fact that music was demo-

cratically available to everybody, but also that it had beco me a consumer

good, available to anyone who could afford its price.

The concert mulation memory

of musical properties and immortality.

able" cantatas, were fighting

whereas

and catered

Bach wrote,

the musical

works of the Romantics a guarantee

and possess history

of an obscure cultural-perhaps

it a religious-conflict: immortal

to the desire for

so to speak, "dispos-

the passing time, expecting

nity. Maybe the need to remember the expression

it allowed the accu-

hall was already a museum:

between

world inhabited

a society of immortal

is also

we might call

music as an expression

by mortal individuals,

of eter-

of an

and music in

souls dwelling in a mortal world.

Today we live with calendars at hand but, at the same time, we live with the feeling that everything

in history occurs with-

out particular

and that even music is

regard for its chronology,

FORGETTING

MUSIC

mlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVUTSRQPONML I 63

a sort of warehouse of samples, whose shelflife-whose permanence

or oblivion,

whose chronological

relative

placement-is

ultirnarely irrelevant because, when we get down to ir, ir can be pushed

around

according

as listeners, performers,

to our inner needs and desires

and composers. When

this happens,

we realize that the shelves of our musical space imply that the past and future, the "before" and "atter," are relative and even interchangeable remember

entities. The analogy may be risky, but I still

my surprise-a

high school-on

long time ago, when I was still in

reading Plutarch'smlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIH P a r a llel Lives, to see the au-

thor narrate the birth, life, thought, and death of an important figure from Greek history and compare

it, side by side, with

one from Roman history. There is no reference to dates. The figures may have lived five hundred

years apart (like Aristides

and Caesar), yet there is no reference to the calendar. My point is not to celebrate the relevance of Plurarch's values to the musical scene of our time, but to stress the fact that in order to get a true sense of musical evolution, we must detach ourselves from a linear and irreversible view of historical time. Ir is precisely this detachment

that allows us, on occasion,

to forget or to attribute different and even conflicting values to musical works that detach themselves from the passing time. The hisrory of vocal music and music-theater

64 I

REMEMBERING

THE

FUTURE

of the eighteenth

and nineteenth

centuries, after all, can be written without tak-

ing account of Monreverdi,

but that of the twentieth

cannot. The history of late eighteenth-century written without mentioning

century

music can be

Bach, but that of the past two cen-

turies cannot. The deep meaning

of Mahler's music became

evident only fifty years atrer his death. We are experiencing long-terrn

a twilight of the distinction

and short-rerrn

ter. Everything,

memory,

between

between

before and af-

in that fading light, appears to become use fui

and intrinsically complementary.

In the light of that dusk, the

most radically different options coexist: Mendelssohn

"discov-

ers" Bach; music philology is bom; history becomes a science, while composers and listeners alike begin to elaborate a selective memory that isolates single works from the circumstances of their origins. However, it is also in that light that the virtuoso performer becomes more aware of the past as something

to be ex-

ploited, and becomes more forgetful of the fact that the only form of virtuosity worthy of the name is virtuosity gence, capable of penetrating

of inrelli-

and rendering different musical

worlds. We all know by now that a pianist who claims to be a "specialist" in the Classícal or Romantic

repertory, and who is

playing Beethoven or Chopin without having had the need of

FORGETTING

MUSIC

I 65

experiencing the music of rhe rwentieth century, is just as shallow as a pianist who claims to be a "specialist" in contemporary music but whose hands and mind have never been traversed, on a profound

levei, by Beethoven or Chopin.

The increasing diversity of the forms of musical consumption, the evolution of techniques

and audiences, and the con-

sequent instability of possible points of reference are the product, to a certain extent, of the available means of recording, reproducing,

and conserving

noise-actual

and virrual-around

the object of a methodological sical phenomenon

music. Such is the quantity

of

us, that ir cannot be made

analysis. Ir is not so much a mu-

as a phenomenon

of acoustic amnesia that

has nothing to do with any musically valuable territory we are interested in exploring. IfWalter Benjamin were still among us, he would have nothing to worry about, he could set his mind at rest: the same means that contribute

to the reproducibility

of

the work, and hence to the crisis of its aurhority, its authenticity, its "aura," may perhaps be the very means rhat contribute in the future to a different definition

of its authority,

its au-

thenticity, its "aura." Through

new technologies, one can enter new acoustic and

1950s Karlheinz Stockhaumusical dimensions. Already in the mlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJ sen, with Zeitma sse, G r uppen, Konta kte, and the related theoretical

66 I

REMEMBERING

THE

FUTURE

apparatusmlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFEDCBA (wie die Zeit ver geht, "how time passes"), was looking for an extreme, and oíten paradoxical,

conceptual

among qualitative

and quantitative

time proportions,

frequency,

macrophenomena

and forms, in the attempt

natural, quasi-divine, quantitative

has a molecular

among

rnicro- and

to reach a quasiand

is never innocent

gies the composer

of large- and srnall-scale

because the phenomena

the new computer-assisted

have no technolo-

deals with, so to speak, "molecular,"

tized sound dimensions

where everything

where anything

ever, this fascinating

basis, while in music-vocal

integration

absolute values. Through

the computer

and timbre,

among

total fusion of alI possible qualitative

and instrumental-the

transformed,

sound dimensions,

parameters. We know, however, that in nature every

morphogenesis

phenomena

homogeneity

loses contact

can be formed

can beco me anything

field of possibilities

digiand

else. How-

is also very risky, when

with the specificity of the musical

matter. We can refuse history, but we cannot with the new technologies,

forget about it, even

when we deal with sound

"mol-

ecules," even when we digitally design new sounds or when we synthesize or hybridize thern

traces of musical

fully, new and uncharted

familiar sounds that do not carry with usage. Music territories

can explore,

meaning-

when it acts like a movie

FORGETTING

MUSIC

I 67

camera-focusing, composer,

analyzing the sound subject-and

like a movie director,

the close-ups,

the zooms,

decides the angles, the speed,

the blow-ups,

silences. And this can be done without when the sound subject is the human nature,

is overloaded

experiences

the editing, a computer,

and rhe especially

voice, which, by its very

with traces of musical and non-musical

and lived-in associations.

In the previous

lecture I suggested,

bson, that the musical potential all of its articulatory

quoting

Roman

in

features, in all of its gestures. Musically, a

aspects and behaviors,

it is also the sum of all its

frorn the most respectable

trivial, and the most estranged

fram music.

to the most

In coughing,

there is no trace of music, but nevertheless

that we can endow

Jako-

of the voice is everywhere,

voice is not only a noble instrument;

instance,

when the

daily vocal behaviors

just as everyday motions

for

I believe

with musical sense,

of the body can be developed

choreo-

graphically. Ler us imagine a sequence-a ing basic vocal gestures and so forth)-vocal

loop-of

(laughter,

stereotypes

continuously

sobbing,

chang-

crying, coughing,

that are not normally

assoei-

ated with musical experiences, They can be made to interact by the use of combinatorial niques,

68 /

cri teria involving

as well as posirioning

REMEMBERING

THE

gestures and tech-

of vocal resonance,

FUTURE

speed and

nature of the articulations,

and so forth. A woman laughing,

for example, can have something mance of a coloratura

in common with the pertor-

soprano. The vocal events on this loop

have different degrees of association, and laughter, for instance, can becorne the main generating factor in a discontinuous

vo-

cal landscape which, however, still lacks the most challenging and intense gesture: words. Therefore, let us also imagine an elementary text composed of short modular sentences, of recurring interchangeable

flashes of meaning, evocative of a poten-

tial narrative that unfolds wirh various degrees of disccnrinuiry. The text loop and the loop of vocal gestures have different lengths, and turn like two circles of different diameters which revolve at different speeds and never meet twice ar the same

point. This is what happens in my mlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJI Sequenza II! for solo voice. To control and convey musical coherence to such a vast set of vocal behaviors, it is necessary to apply to the text cornbinatorial cri teria that are analogous to those applied to the vocal gestures: it is necessary to break up the text, to demolish it (at least apparently),

to scatter the fragments

levels so that they can be reassembled

on different

and recomposed

in a

musical, rather than a discursive or narrative, perspective. Thus segmented,

broken up, and permutated,

the text will never be

perceived in its entirety. The vocal gesture, which can capture

FORGETTING

MUSIC

/

69

attention

as a coded and iconic form of communication,

ed with associations,

is contradicted

of the text and by its contiguity

by the relative indifference

with other equalty indifferent

gestures. The text is in turn "disturbed"

by gestures and by a

mode of delivery that can only simulate the text in a sort of conflictual somehow

alienated

ture (which

and the interpreter's and unarrestable fer a tragicomic

relationship.

relationship

continualty

between

destroy

desperate

an interpretation

of

This rnultiple

and

text and vocal ges-

and reconstruct attempt

vocal kaleidoscope

each orher),

to tackle the intrusive

of associations,

slant on the performance,

same time the parody and the translation something

load-

can con-

as if ir were at rhe of something

elusive,

absent.

In mlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFEDCBA Sequenza 111 there are certain curious absences. The work has no memory

of vocal music; it lacks linguistic

omy because there is no possibility

of linear comprehension

the texto It lacks a specifically musical meaning

auton-

autonomy

of

because the

of the event lies in the everyday vocal gestures; conse-

quently, it lacks a reference to the complex history of reciprocal formalizations

which, in the history of our vocal music, marks

the relationship are an invitation

between text and music. These absences, I feel, to Íisten afresh, and to witness that rniracu-

lous spectacle of sound

70

I

REMEMBERING

becoming

THE

FUTURE

sense-perhaps

a sense that

we have not encountered transirion

fram unrelated

before: an invitation

vocal sounds and gestures to a rnean-

ingful state of urgency. Something any sense, but something meaningful;

wirhout

to follow the

meaningless

doesn't rnake

that doesnt make any sense can be

this basic awareness, there would be little

point in developing,

extracting,

and inventing

ences fram the total face (to use Jakobson's

musical experiimage) of a vocal

sound body. A musical work is never alone-it

always has a big family to

cope with, and it must be capable of living many lives; it can be left to its own past, and it must be capable of living in the present in a variety of ways, at times forgetful of its origins. In the light of these and other conditions, music appears only occasionally logical sequence. Indifferent at times, to invent

the history of western

to pay attention

to the fires in its libraries, it seems,

its own calendars,

so that the distinction

berween the often vague directions

of historical

the constellation

our aesthetic

a metaphysical tachment

of works shaping dichotomy

without

along the imaginary present.

detached

that allows us to perform

our memory,

to its chrono-

having borderline

becoming

and

experience

is

from reality. Ir is this dea salutary manipulation

of

to pay duty at the roadblocks, separating

the past fram

If we accept the terms of this separation,

FORGETTING

rhe

we might as

MUSIC

/

71

well place our trust in the voice of ordinary without

having to drag Plutarch

common

sense and,

into it, recall what historians

have rold us over and over again: that failure to understand the present has its roots in ignorance useless to struggle to understand knowledge

of the past, and that it is

the past without

of the present.

The whole of musical experience, forms,

is perrneated

with

find myself in the position act a dialectical rnoralistic

even in its most concrete

this elernentary of trying,

mode of thought

division

of musical

about Adorno)

that provided

conceptual

paradigm.

I often

rei uctan tly, to counter-'

which implies a binary and

experience.

because it was this school of thought

penetrating

an adequare

I say "reluctantly"

(I'm talking

once more

us with the most far-reaching

instruments

had at its disposal in the rwentieth

that musical century-but

culture

and has

at the same

time the most dogmatic. I don't think any experience so many passionate

ideological

sicism, with its supposedly tive truths"

which,

in music has been the object of attacks as Stravinsky's

"objective"

like every emerging

falsifications truth

(I am paraphrasing

neoclasof "nega-

obliged

the "murderous

collectivity"

need oflaments

rather rhan of neoclassical masquerades.

to face

Adorno),

is in Ador-

no's dogma involves the whole of musical activity and throws a

72

/

REMEMBERING

THE

FUTURI!

problematic,

but intellectually

ent conflictuality condition

light on the inher-

stimulating,

of musical creativity, which

is an inevitable

of the work's very existence-conflictuality

the parts and the whole, between tween subject and object,

between

between

and essence, be-

appearance expression

and idea. I call

Adorno's view a dogma because it imposes these and other pairs of oppositions

(in themselves

contemporary

musical creativity)

solitary and monumental brief duration alternatives

still meaningful

and relevant to

on musical works which are

in their concentration,

(as in the case of Anton

even when of

Webern).

It admits no

to the rending conílicts which inhabit Schoenberg's

work and which are capable of raising the expressive tension to the limits of paroxysm. transformed

In this perspective,

parody is invariably

into sarcasm, and conllicts are carried to their ul-

timate consequences.

This dogma

to admit

the

of Stravinsky and that of Schoenberg

are

existence of complementary The neoclassicism

seems unable

relationships.

certainly poles apart from each other, but they are also the two very different

sides of a musical journey

that wants to exor-

cise and at the same time come to terms with memory diversities. They are also complementary ways, were Wagner and Verdi, Webern Schoenberg.

The

and

as, in their different and Debussy, Berg and

seeds of this conílicting

FORGETTING

relationship

MUSIC

I 73

with

memones

and diversities

ing conventional himself

in Mahler.

Break-

stylistic codes, he solitarily developed

within

a musical

mentary

are also present

discourse

made of contrasting

yet cornple-

forces where, in the same breath, trite melodic signals

and compelling

ideas, though

with each orher, interact. memories

in visionary

"institutionally'

Mahler transcends dimensions

incompatible

musical, anecdotal

that had never been heard

before: a vision where the specificity and the seductiveness

of

the motives seem, at times, to talk to the global, prablematic syrnphonic

architecture

fram quite a distance.

Stravinsky's often deprecated

neoclassical experience

seen, obviously, as a selective journey through tory, like a parody, but, occasionally

fragments

and constructively,

can be of hisalso as

a form in motion.mlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFED Ag o n -"Ba llet for rwelve dancers," written between

1953 and

respect, a fundamental sical itinerary

1957 for George

Balanchine-is,

work. Ir concludes

Stravinsky's neoclas-

(if that is what we must call ir) in an admirable

act of exorcism where the past is appraached uity nor as an object to be collected, speaks with the voice of another. musicological

in that

"no cornment"

neither as antiq-

and where each character

It tends to be eclipsed

because, I suppose,

in a

it is so dif-

hcult to place. As is rhe case with any music deserving

74

I

REMEMBERING

THE

FUTURE

our interest,

ali of

the constituent pretends

elements

to be closed, but only because

up the beginning is sporadically r etur ns.

ofmlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFEDCBA Agon live a manifold life. Its form

in almost literal terms, while its movement

marked

A descr iba ble

in an improvisation

by symmetrical for m

different

coIlection character

and minimaIly

can be en co u n teteá

varied

ever ywber e:

as weIl as in the shape of the clouds. But

Agon is above alI a container miniature

the final coda takes

in which Stravinsky

of precious

objects

and provenance,

has placed a

of various

kinds,

of

and of great beauty, along

with copies of the same objects. Some of thern live side by side with their reproductions-they without,

however, suggesting

are, in other words, repeatedthe idea that Agon is a cornrnen-

tary on the French r ondea u. To approach

the various episodes,

there is no need to refer to a seventeenth-century manual,

although

it undoubtedly

exerted a powerful

on Stravinsky's work with Balanchine also on the expressive character

French baIlet

and, every now and then,

of the individual

pieces.

But Agon is not a dance suite, not even a parody

Agon there's a little bit of everything:

diatonic

ic, atonal, canonic, tonal, serial, polytonal, references to Webern's Concerto sic scattered

in a large symphony

influence

of it. In

pieces, chrornat-

neo-Baroque

pieces,

op. 24, and also chamber orchestra

together. But there are also real developments

FORGETTING

rnu-

that never plays alI and proliferations

MUSIC

I 75

of the material which spill out of the polire formal ceremonials: they spread out, in other words, beyond the perimeters of the individual

pieces, placing the symmetries

and the repetitions

in an ever-new light, and not always a polite one. And then there are self-contained

events (like the Sarabande-Step

the Branle Gay) which do not communicate or with rhe rest-real

"happenings,"

with each other

short-lived

and gentle.

ThusmlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFEDCBA Agon proceeds on three different levels: reperirion, velopment,

and

de-

and the insertion of unrelated episodes. But how-

ever it may proceed, in its own meta- and hyper-Stravinskyan referentiallabyrinth,

Agon is a work characterized

Lightness, because ir communicates

by lightness.

at every moment

the sen-

sation of having stripped and reduced to the bare essentials of their functions,

to pure gesture, to a symbol of their expressiv-

ity, some of the frequently cumbersome

bodies of rhe musical

legacy. In the first of the lectures he was to have given in this very place, Italo Calvino wrote: "Most of the time what 1 did was to rake away weight; 1 tried to take away weight at one time fram the human

figures, ar another

fram the celestial bod-

ies, ar another fram cities; and above ali, 1 tried to take away weight fram the story's structure and its language." One of the conditions

76 I

of lightness, 1 would like to add, is knowing how

REMEMBERING

THE

FUTURE

to withdraw knowing

respectfully,

without

also how to voluntarily

time comes-"on

tiptoe,"

rhetoric,

from things,

and

forget them, when the right

Calvino

would have said of one of

his characters who departs headed for who knows where (as he himself sadly did, and ali toa early). lt is significant

that in mlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFEDCBA Agon, apart from the passages repeat-

ed almost exacdy, the intervals are not organized cal manner

in a symrnerri-

with the "dances" themselves. The same hexachord

may be part of two radically different velopment,

episodes. The same de-

the same process of transformation,

may involve a

succession of different episodes, apparendy

closed off in thern-

selves, in their own speciíicity,

detached

process of chrornatic

and rather

transformation.

from the

This is the case, for exarn-

pIe, of the first rhree episodes in which the lighthearted

open-

ing "fanfare"

chro-

maticism

is contaminated

which,

instrumental

however,

texture,

by an innocent gradually

spreads

unti] it corrupts

minimal

over the whole

all the figures and all

the motifs of the three different episodes. The process of chrornatizarion

is indifferent

to the nature and the division

of the

episodes. Is this a separation of processes. history,

of parameters?

In Agon Stravinsky

No; it is a separation

does not submit

but he retells it in various

different

FORGETTlNG

himself

to

ways. Agon is a

MUSIC

/

77

musical documentary it is inhnitely memory

(happily, an untrustworthy

creative) about historical

and their relationship-itself

memory

one because and structural

untrusrworthy

and tran-

sitory. And it is also a farewell to neoclassicism. Why then forget music? Because there are a thousand

ways

to forget and to betray mlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFE its history. Because creation always irnplies a certain

levei of destruction

and infidelity.

Because we

rnust become able to call up the memory

of rhat which is use-

fuI and then to forget it with a spontaneity

that is paradoxically

rigorous. Because, in any case, as Heraclitus

said, "ir is not pos-

sible to go into the same river twice." Because the awareness of rhe pasr is never passive, and we do not want to be the obliging accomplices

of a past that is always with us, that we nourish,

and that never ends.

78

I

REMEMBERING

THE

FUTURE

o

ALTER

DUFT

"O alter Duft aus Marchenzeit" (O ancient fragrance of times

past): this is the first line of the last piece ofmlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVUTSRQPO P ier r ot Luna ir e by Arnold Schoenberg. If I tell you rhar music, just like life, can also be permeated by old perfumes, it's not to announce that this lecture will be nostalgic ar sentimental. Don't be alarmed: the old perfume I will be trying to evoke is that of the "open work," an experience that profoundly marked the musicians of my generation, and which continues, occasionally, to stir up old questions. There are musical works that are finished, and works deliberarely left unfinished; there are works srill "in progress," or works involuntarily finished. Or unfinished. Or open-ended. Their finishedness and their open-endedness

may manifest

rhernselves in an inhnite number of ways, and for an infinite number of reasons. The attempt to draw up an inventory of those reasons is difficult, to say the least, perhaps even contradictory, since one can approach a musical work in many different ways which imply its state of greater or lesser openness and of its being latendy in progressoA musical work can never really

79

be "already there" asmlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFEDC M a da me Booa r y. Les D emoiselles d'Avignon, the Guggenheim

Museum in New York, or Ra shomon can; these

works alI describe to us, among many other things, the relationship between their authors' ideas and the cri teria for their realization. A musical work is never realIy ther e: it always needs intermediaries interpret

who, through

performance,

the relationship-always

help to cIarify and

somewhat

open-between

the idea and its realization. A musical idea that does not carry with itself and within itself the terms of its concrete realization simply does not exist or only exists poorly, or, as we shaIl see later, becomes something else. A musical work's so-calIed openness can be found, located, or developed in different places: in the conception

of the work, in the performance

and the listen-

ing to rhe work, ar, and this is the most likely case, in alI rhree places at once. A conception

of musical form that tends toward openness

implies the desire-if

not exactly the possibility-to

foIlow

and develop formal pathways which are alternative, unexpected, non-homogeneous, alternative

and most important,

and unexpected

with respect to what? Obviously,

mainly with respect to terms established the actual conception

not linear. But

by the composer

in

of the work. In any work that can be

defined as open, there is an obvious paradoxo In the listening

80

/

REMEMBERING

THE

FUTURE

time, though not in the space of the page written by the composer, the result-even

with its most cornplex identiry-will

always be unambiguous

and not open. The page written

the composer will always be the equivalent

of a notepad,

by of

a logbook in which different episodes of the creative process are recorded. The performer can wander through the episodes, pass from one to another, ignore some, and invent an order of succession. In doing this, if the musical substance of the ship's log is of great interest, it will enrich the performer's experience, and gratif}r his or her musical intelligence. that the idea of predisposing rise to multiple

forms-in

very attractive-is

Ir can be argued

one material capable of giving

itself intellectually

and poetically

intrinsic to any creative process, even to one

that aims at the construction

of a work that ultimately always

begins, proceeds, and ends in the same way. The problem that this kind of formal multipliciry

is somewhat

is

aristocratic

because it can only be perceived by the composer, by the performer, or by someone who has had the opportunity to two interpretations Reflections

to listen

or versions of the same work in a row.

upon "open work" and "work in progress" in

rnusic have often implied the presence of chance and of random procedures, assumed not only as the true guarantee of the openness of the form, but aiso as the signals of an ideological

o PONMLKJIHGFEDCBA A LTE R D U FT / 81

repudiation

of the very idea of form, and even of the idea of the

work itself Some of you might recall the time when composers, before the random computer dice to determine unpredictable

pitch, duration,

programs of the future, used intensity, timbre, and other

and often amusing parameters. There is certainly

no point in regretting what history has nor given us, which in any case can only be guessed, but I can't help thinking it might have been better if the repudiation

of form and work had also

masked a need for analysis and transcendence

that obviously

could not be obtained by the tossing of dice. In 1962 Umberto

Eco published

a book which since has

become a classic:mlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFEDCB O per a Aper ta (translated into English as The O pen Wor le). This book was partially inspired by "open" or reia-

tively open musical experiences such as my flute Sequenza , and

it develops, within a vast framework, some of the problems I am approaching

here. I say problems because such they really

are, especially when we avoid a proper distinction

between mu-

sical and literary concepts. Without mention

attempting

to sum up this important

book, let me

a few points. Eco says: "The form of the work of art

gains its aesthetic validity precisely in proportion

to the num-

ber of different perspectives from which it can be viewed and understood.

82

/

These give it a wealth of different resonances and

REMEMBERING

THE

FUTURE

echoes without

impairing

its original

essence."

that a musical work can be open in a tangible it can be concretely

unfinished.

hand to the performer rather unconcerned

the pieces of a construction

kit, being

about their eventual deployment. interpretation

the most immediately

striking

feature:

of the phenomenon,

it invites us to consider Eco eloquently

taking the oeuvre ofKafka

amples pa r excellence of"open"

"This is but

aspect of these musical facts is

work in this kind of direction." this happens,

auJ that

sense,

The author, Eco says, seems to

a loose and paradoxical

itself a positive

He also says

the need to explains how

and mlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVUTSRQPONML of] oyce as the ex-

and ambiguous

work. He speaks

at length about Joyce's F innega ns Wá ke and U lysses, developing Edmund

Wilson's

complex

and inexhaustible

ences to Proust,

famous

metaphor

of a city animated

life. He makes meaningful

Montale,

Mallarmé,

Eco has no longer pursued

sis." Inevitably lecture-is

this direction,

not a convenient

Frank

O per a Aper ta ,

and music has disap-

ofhis search for an "illimited

so, since music-as

refer-

Valéry, Dubuffet,

Lloyd Wright, and others, In the years following

peared from the horizons

by a

I suggested

semio-

in a previous

match for semiology:

it seems to

challenge its powers. We are talking about the late fifties and early sixties, when composers were seeking to invent new structural

principies

that

o PONMLKJIHGFEDCBA I 83 A LTE R

D U FT

would permit a complete independence determination.

frorn any formal pre-

They were hoping to watch new forms emerge

in a different manner each time, but always bearing a significant correspondence

to the cornposer's conscience, to his or her

instinct and imagination.

This, at least on the surface, did not

always happen. With chance-a

sort of a well-educated

becomes a private affair that concerns

chaos-openness

essentially the person

who tosses the dice, either metaphorically

or not, taoistically

wondering whether the sound of the rain is or is not preferable to a Beerhoven quarteto Composers

in those years occasion-

ally allowed chance to choose for thern, often with remarkable and hilarious imagination,

entrusting

chance, or the praducts

of chance, with some sort of aesthetic dimension. introduced

But chance

music into a different cultural sphere, where rhe

works themselves (as open, virtual, or informal

as they may

have been) could not undergo any transformation

because they

simply did not exist anymore; they had disappeared. Ir is true that a systematic and fanatically numerical procedure may turn out to be analogous, in its perceptible results, to a random pracedure. It is equally undeniable that the awareness of this relative similarity of results is at rhe root of many significant musical achievements of the last decades. On the other

84 /

REMEMBERING

THE

FUTURE

hand, thismlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFEDCBA coincidcntia oppositor um, this perceptive coincidence of opposites, has been responsible for a number of disasters in both camps; ir has become something of an alibi, both conceptually and behaviorally, It led composers-both

the obsessively

systematic as well as the rigorously random-not of rheir perceptive responsibilities:

to assume all

the combinatory

of the former and the chance operations

processes

of the latter gener-

ated, each in its own way, a similar statistical distribution

of

intervals, durations, register, and so forth, This is how, in some cases, any sense of form or structure-as

open and complex as

you wish-seemed

to have vanished, and in order to bring the

collapsed structure

back to life some brutal formal interven-

tions were needed, leading, more often than not, to incoherence and to the renouncing

of something

vague that was not

really there. The number

total serialists invested every note with an elevated of combinatory

should have quantified

functions

and determinations

that

and developed, according to identical

procedural cri teria, schematic musical elernents. The result was occasionally expressive (any form of renunciation

is somehow

expressive on its own), but the project of a formation of musical meaning was reduced to mere functioning: crostructure

a selí-styled rni-

could not be identified, nor could it interact, with

o

ALTER

DUPT

I 85

a nonexistent

macrostructure.

Serial procedures

tied to the crireria of non-repetition,

were strict1y

yet made a rather cumber-

some use of all possible canonic and proto-contrapuntal

forms.

They were tied to the idea that a form had to die out spontaneously

when its combinatorial

themselves,

yet they were denied,

es~ing rhetorical

potentialities

had exhausted

for exarnple, another

inter-

artífice (which we have come across earlier in

a different context):

that ofhaving

a work stop without

having

it end. The orher group, the "stochastics,"

the "aleatorisrs"

certainly had more freedom of movement

terms of density, dynamics, their indifference

profiles,

and variable tempos.

to detail and to history,

ing, looking at a stopwatch, the support

and their near-relatives,

and comfort

work may gain in connotation the overall characteristics

taking on

and relentless natural

evento Works of this kind (usually entrusted could be described

but without

In a case like this, the

but loses denotation,

of an attractive

to an orchestra)

as if they were clouds, the wind on the sur-

frogs in summer fields-while

the author could legitimate thern

in terms of the calculus of probability, mathematicallogic, Fibonacci

86 /

series. Sound-events

REMEMBERING

In

they were explor-

a sort of macroform,

of microform.

in

THE

as metaphor,

FUTURE

or the

in other words.

In either situation-that indeterminacy

and chance-it

of the generalized series or that of

is always mlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIH deta il that falls by the

wayside: the very detail thar, more than any other tàctor, accounts for the completeness,

the meaningfulness,

and rhe dig-

nity of a musical work. In the Iirst case the fetishism of the detail, saturated with information, and listening almost impractical;

often makes performance in the second case indiffer-

ence with regard to detail transforms the work itself imo one abnormally

bloated detail whose result in terms of sound may

here and there be rather involving on account of the associations it evokes (clouds, wind, sea, summer Iields). It is nonetheless a fact that this disparity of purposes, criteria, and behavior has served to liberate musical thought

from

thernatic conditioning

(from the idea, for example, that the

series is a hypertheme

of twelve notes); it has helped to open

up musical processes to the totality

of acoustical processes,

to stress the need for complementarity

among possible choices

and segmentations, form-however

and, finally, to make any idea of musical

open-ended and temporary it may be-insepa-

rable from the reality of performance Is it possible to promote tween systematic procedures

procedures

but non-tautological.

a relationship

of reciprocity

on the one hand

on the other? If such an encounter

be-

and random is to become

o PONMLKJIHGFEDCBA A LTE R D U FT / 87

significant,

it must be possible to locate it on a structural

form capable

first of ali to endow

essentially local functions,

the various behaviors

distinct

platwith

from each other but open-

ended. They must relate to each other in a way similar to that among which

harmonic

elements

can be approached

take on and contribute musical construction, able to interact

and those of tempo

locally, but at the same time they

to a more general, global meaning. local and momentary

wirh equally temporary

nies, recurrences,

and timbre,

and symmetries-just

disorders

regularities,

In a

must be synchro-

as, in language, sounds

on the one hand and noises on the other, vowels and consonants, periodicity terpenetrate

and statistical

distribution,

interact

and in-

with each other. Just as, finally, the idea of open

form must be able to compete, idea of closed formo Certainly,

not to say alternate, rhey are conflicting

but they are also complementary, are inseparable,

with the

experiences,

for better or for worse they

and, more often than might be expected,

they

may need each other, The "unfinished" tory dimension.

in music is an ambiguous

Maybe it doesn't existo It is contradictory

cause it conflicts with rhe desire to complete at least, to conclude though

88

REMEMBERING

THE

FUTURE

be-

and, temporarily

a musical work. It is ambiguous

it may be the child of chance,

I

and contradic-

though

because,

it may dwellmlkjihgfed

within an "open form," it cannot dispense with the experience of "closedness." It is no longer possible to fit the "unfinished" into rhe utopian

aspiration

musical knowledge

to retrieve that common

which once brought

former pragmatically

composer

store of and per-

together, and which made it possible for

Antonio Vivaldi to write that he had not finished the bass line of one of his concertos because, when all was said and done, even a dunce could work it out. Can we get any help from Michelangelo's

"unfinished"

works, still so meaningful

for us

roday? I think noto Michelangelo was in a titanic hurry, and, once the concept had revealed itself to him, he no longer had the patience to complete the statue in every detail. "You cannot work on one thing with your hands"-he

himself wrote-"and

another

thing with your head, especially when ir comes to marble." In literature,

the "uníinished,"

which is aesthetically

and

poetically rooted, does not exist, and if ir appears to exist, it is often a question

of missing pages. The great literary works

(Proust, Joyce, Musil, Faulkner, Beckern-e-open-ended as an amazing

number

of questions

as far

and layers of meaning

are concerned-suspend

or develop various narrative tempos

(thernselves open-ended

and interwoven

but they are all as finished as cathedrals monumental

one with another), (as is Robert Musil's

"work in progress").

o PONMLKJIHGFEDCBA ALTER D U FT / 89

The

"uníinished"

may otten

assume

preparation

in music is signaled functions

analogous

for a trip, which is full of implications,

of silent de-

in the waterways,

the roads, the density of the vegetation,

er aspects, depending

on whether

which

to rhose of a map in

tails. In one region we may be interested mountains,

by notation

the

or still oth-

we plan to cross ir by boat,

on foot, or by caro A map, then, in any case implies choice and a hierarchy of functions,

conditions,

larly, if we enter an extremely territory, it may sometimes

and representations.

variegated

low the performers Alternatively,

map-that

cri teria and with proportional

absolute time-relations.

musical

be advisable to supply the perlorrn-

ers who have to cross ir with an incomplete flexible articulatory

and complex

Simi-

The composer

to adapt

is, with rather than

may, in other words, al-

the work to their own abilities.

if we are entering

an extremely

diversiíied

and

gestural vocal territory, we may perhaps dispense with extrerne-

ly detailed dynamic

and pitch values since this information

already implicit in the contours gesrures that inhabit is given local freedom

of the vocallandscape

is

and the

ir. These are cases in which the performer to interpret

influence certain morphological

the text, freedom

that may

aspects of the work but not its

physiognomy. The

90

idea

/

of the

R E M E M B E R IN G

"unfinished,"

TH E

FU TU R E

then,

concerns

the way PONM

in which the work is represented-its work-but

map, the spirir of the

not the itinerary, not the territory.

The notion of the unfinished can be taken even further, not so much because more and more extensive yer specific responsibilities may be assigned to the performers and their intuition, but because the map itself (the musical score) may become more and more essential and laconic; it may confine itself to suggesting

the envelope of a virtual and vaguely descriptive

form, inhabited

by long or short presences, long or short si-

lences, rapid interjections

or slow afterthoughts,

very high or

pia nissimi and scarce flr tissimi. The text thus very low notes,mlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFEDCBA becomes a renunciation, tualized-it

ir becomes impoverished,

even spiri-

becomes, in other words, the wistful parody of a

voyage toward silence. We hear much talk of silence: of the silence of rime in a time of silence, a silence empty and open to the point of pseudomystical delirium;

we are told how to be in silence, how to

feel and inhabit silence, how to be inhabited

by silence. 50,

silence becomes a mental space, open to everything, also to an impulse toward death. But silence is nor an absolute. Musically and acoustically, it does not existo Ir can be inhabited erything and nothing; consciousness.

by ev-

it is a sort of retinal grayness of musical

Sounds, even the most conceptualized

sounds,

o PONMLKJIHGFEDCBA A LTE R D U FT I 91

are

always

concrete,

they

even those of Webern,

cannot

be

dematerialized-not

who knew something

about inhabited

silences. A musical text, in the mind of its composer, shape of a perfectly an interprerer,

closed and conceptually

may take the

sealed entity. To

the same text may on the cantrary

appear open-

ended and fraught with structurally

significant alternatives,

a text may aIso appear open-ended

to its composer

to its interpreter.

Over and above the author's

But

and closed

intentions

and

the listener'smlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFEDCBA a pr ior is, the performer's intentions and a pr ior is also converge in the music. They are the most relevant, but, as we know alI toa well, the performer

is the not always legitimate

heir to a terribly complex and burdensome case is by no means relarive openness

rare of a performer

history. In fact, the who transforms

of a work imo behavioral

musical behaviors

freedom,

that were once productive

the

imitating

of musical sense.

But listeners end up having to take what they are offered on faith, not being in a position of the camposer

or the performer,

been open-ended, choice,

because

to ask whether,

the work was or might have

closed, or what have you. Listeners have no they have no point

of reference:

they hear for the first time is invariably are concerned.

92

I

in the intentions

everything

closed as far as they

They could in fact rnake a choice, and form an

REMEMBERING

THE

FUTURE

opinion, only if different interpretations

of rhe same text were

to be presented alongside one anorher; or if, in the case of"mobile" works, the order of rhe components

were to be modified;

or if the extempore choices made by the performer were to be explicitly signaled-I

wouldn't know how-while

the audience

has a good laugh. Every form of musical creativity is, by its very nature, openended. The fascination of the studies that analyze the creative itineraries

of great musical minds

(Beethoven,

for exarnple)

does not lie simply in the account of the creative choices made, but above alI in the description

of the composer's

ability to

discover one thing when he was looking for something

differ-

ent. This magniflcent ability is fostered bya frequent but momentary detachment

between the cells, the details of a musical

itinerary, and its overall shape-a

kind of brief estrangement

between form and thernatic material, between macrostructure and microstructure,

such as would beco me substantial

nineteenth

in Schubert,

century,

Schumann,

in the

and especially

Mahler. Motifs of grear beaury seem at rimes to enter into a form which receives thern with a certain detachment, somewhat unwelcome and cumbersome ceive thern at alI.

In

the hyper-structural

like

visitors. Or doesn't re-

the Andante of Mahler's Sixth Symphony E-fIat major, as ir sounds for the last time,

o PONMLKJIHGFEDCBA ALTER D U FT / 93

appears like an empty room, no longer inhabited

by melody.

The melodies have just departed ("sie sind nur ausgegangen"). A different situation

presents itself when there are no for-

malmlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFEDCBA a pr ior is. This is the case with Stravinsky's Rite of Spr ing: the form is substantially

episodic and entirely invented-an

accumulation

of powerfully and autonomously

characterized,

non-recurring

events. The ordering, the "assembling," the edit-

ing of part of the episodes was done, so to speak, "on the field," in keeping with a strategy of maximum

articulatory

contrast

and a virtual openness made up of closed forms. You will recall Mahler's .torment

when he experimented

sible orders for the movements

with different pos-

of his Sixth Symphony. This

was not the case with Stravinsky, of course, because-whatever order he might have given to the episodes-the

material put to

work by him is, for all its diversity and cornplexity, miraculously homogeneous.

And also because he intervenes,

connecting

a poster ior i episodes very different among themselves through alliterative

procedures

that are extremely

same time display great penetration

sim ple but at the

and great formal astute-

ness (consider, for instance, the "Introduction" ses des Adolescentes," Printanieres").

and the "Dan-

or the "]eu du Rapt" and the "Rondes

These alliterations

confer added vastness upon

the outlines of the Sa cr e, which, as we all know, contains within

94 /

REMEMIlERING

THE

FUTURE

itself an enormous

number

of organically

bur also levels that are quite indifferent which places the relative autonomy in a wide-range

perspective,

interwoven

factors,

to each other-all

of the individual

of

episodes

dialectical and deterministic

at the

same time. The mlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFEDCBA Rite o/Spr ing, in other words, lives many lives in one. This is its deepest meaning. From a cornpletely sible meaning

different

point of view, this is also a pos-

of the open work and of open forms-and

this

is as precise as we can be, because we know that our desire for closure or openness, be identified

for order and disorder, cannot

with the actual perception

necessarily

of that openness,

of

that order or disorder. Listening

to "openness"

event may present diversified

sound

is always a dilemma.

us with extremely situations

eo-clip commanded

cornplex,

(the musical

by a random

certainly point

of view has been established,

extreme,

(the equivalent stimulate

and

of a vid-

This willlead

us

aspects, and we will

find some, given rhe already stated fact that, once a

by analogy, continuity, other

chaotic,

equivalent

program).

to look for and single out their common

A musical

and similarity

a homogeneous

everything

can be related

to everything

and immobile

else. At the

musical

of a face that never changes its expression)

event wiU

us to pick out the slightest differences and variations.

o PONMLKJIHGFEDCBA ALTER D U FT I 95

It is obvious

that the greater the number

and diversity of the

elements at play, the greater will be the need (and also the difficulty) to identify the reason for their coexistence-even the author's intentions. number

and diversity

despire

Ir is equally obvious that the fewer the of the elements,

the more specific and

discrete will be the details useful for a possible interpretation. We have on the one hand a virtual and indecipherable form," and on the other an easily perceptible

"rnacro-

and segmentable

"rnicroform. " Let

llS

imagine that it is our intention

pie superposition,

those two distant

worlds which are governed ine, on the one hand, of the homogeneous croform;

the macroform

hand,

frenetic pace of the video-clip face. Among

and

with the help

details

imposing

of the mi-

the chaotic

on the microform-that

the various imaginable

there is one which promises

indifferent

by chance. Let us imag-

segmentations

and on the other

the impassive

and mutually

internally

reading

to relate, not by sim-

to be more interesting

and is, on

outcornes, and more

expressive than the others: by means of the exchange of the two temporal

dimensions,

the two worlds,

lar, meet and join hands, openings

and closings,

not in the least simi-

giving musical sense to temporary

confirming,

if it were necessary,

that

entente, in the meeting, the musical sense lies above ali in the mlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVUTSRQPO

96 IwvutsrqponmlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFEDCB REMEMBERING THE FUTURE

even if entrusted

to chance, between macro and micro dimen-

srons, The implications

of this perspective

are far-reaching,

and

they bear the scent, the mlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFEDCBA D ujt, of things new. They relieve chance of irs stopwatch,

they rob it of its stolid indifference

versiry, leading music forward into unexplored

to time di-

territories.

In closing, 1 would however like to suggest that good old, vast, and indeíinable iry, provided

open form may have some practical

ir is approached

ample, it can educate

as a pedagogical

children

toward purposeful

util-

too!. For exlistening;

ir

can give thern practice

in making choices, in reacting sponta-

neously, in distributing

the bricks and mortar of music, which

can be transformed

and combined

ria. And this experience

according

brings us an ancient perfume,

a lter D ufi, since "open form" can become for or a complernenr harmonization, provisation.

to different cri te-

to the ancient

or an extension

another

a useful substitute

exercises of keyboard

of certain

bass

aspects of jazz im-

1 am not saying this as a provocation

or out of a

tas te for paradoxo 1 believe that the experience of "open form," of the "work in progress,"

of the "uníinished"

may only contribute

ing an ephemeral,

lucid, and transitory

experience-setting

aside ali aspiration

dimension

to recoverof musical

to an idea of eternity-

o PONMLKJIHGFEDCBA A LTE R D U FT / 97

and educating

us instead to think of the work as an agglomera-

tion of events, without nonetheless nections,

98 /

any prearranged

Iind, locally and sometimes

center; events which surprisingly,

their necessities, and, occasionally,

REMEMBERING

THE

FUTURE

their con-

their beauty.

I wvutsrqponmlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFEDCBA 5 I

SEEING

MUSIC

When someone asked him how he envisaged the stage production cf his dramas, Wagner replied that he thought as musical action becoming visible. The profound tionary coherence ofWagner's tifies this affirmation,

and revolu-

musical dramas more than jus-

by no means as sim pie as it may seem,

which involves narrative

dimensions

endows the visual dimension

To Mozart

of a non-visual

nature,

with an open emblematic

tion, and implies a certain detachment G esa mtkunstwer k.

of thern

fram the ideals of the mlkjihgfedcba

the same question

tainly have seemed extravagant,

func-

would

even incomprehensible.

cerBut

not to us. Mozart's operas strike us, among other things, as visualizations

of classical thought,

of the sonata and concerto

forms. Debussy seems to give visual substance to the ellipses of his musical thought has no foreplot,

in an opera, P elléa s et M élisa nde, which

which emerges frorn nothingness

solves into nothingness,

and dis-

neither eliciting nor resolving moral

conflicts. The succession of the scenes of P elléa s seems in fact to evoke the images contained

in "a book of memory," whose

pages are turned, I like to think, while remembering

the future.

Alban Berg, with Wozzeck, seems to synthesize on the stage the 99

intensiry

and rigor of his musical

complexity

is visualized

sufficient

and condensed

whose structural

in a sequence

of self-

scenes. The scenic gestures seem like episodes

an imaginary These

examples-and

others

could

us how the profound

ing of musical theater

by the musical thought

conceptions

similar. They

over a long time perspective, of the narrative,

are generated with the

must be identifiable

in the overall design, and in the

while the individual

thernselves.

rnean-

fulfillment

analogous

moments

may

The music may express, even de-

scribe, the scene; or it may be indifferent conflict with it. The inventions

ofKurt

other respects, are exernplary

to it; it may even

Weill and Bertolr Bre-

cht and those of Alban Berg, so different

exemplary

be cited-

and long-lasting

and are structurally

music, but not necessarily

among

of course

seems to achieve complete

only when the scenic and dramatic

structure

from

film, skillfully edited by the music.

serve to rernind

conflict

thinking,

from each other in

from this point of view. Equally

was Verdi. In rhe first act ofmlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVUTSRQPONM Rigoletto, for instance,

we hear a kind of musical jukebox

that is cornpletely

indiffer-

ent to the drama which is taking shape; and then we have the final quartet,

significantly

drama that is coming descriptions

100

I

and temporarily

to a head, naturally,

and identifications

REMEMBERING

THE

of emotions

FUTURE

removed

from the

there are also many and situations.

The transferal of a musical vision onto a stage, and the establishment

of a coherent

dialogue between musical thought

and visible action, is a topic open to all kinds of speculations. There are also countless factors that may disturb or dilate it: moments

of spectacular vocal virtuosity, for instance, or tech-

nical scenic interferences, which may be more or less meaningfuI, yet they always carry with them the weight of their history, of their own usage and customs. This dialogue tends to resist theoretical analysis, which can nevertheless be applied separateIy to each dimension:

the music and the dramaturgy, what we

listen to and what we see. Musical time, the time when we listen to music, is mobile and irreversible, while the perception of what stands before our eyes, on the scene, is instantaneously

global and selective. In

a dialogue between these two modes of perception, perception

of the music that conditions

images: the music permanently

ir is the

the perception

of the

analyzes and comments

upon

what we watch, and not the other way around. But let us get back to Wagner. During his next to last trip to Italy (he was orchestrating

ParsifaL at the time), he stayed

for three rnonrhs in the countryside Siena's magnificent

cathedral,

near Siena. On a visit to

as soon as he entered, he said:

"This is the Grail of Parsiíall" And in fact the stage design for

SEEING

MUSIC

/

101

the opening of the Grail in the third act, at the premiere performance ofmlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFEDCBA P a r sifol in Bayreuth, was a fairly accurate reproduction of the cathedral in Siena. There

is nothing

monument

unusual

about

seeing a famous

ltalian

on the Wagnerian stage in Bayreuth. lndeed, írorn

Wagner's own point of view, this is perfect!y consistent meaningful, citations

especially when we bear in mind the plethora

of historical

places, villages, castles, cathedrals,

pyramids that have inhabited

and of and

the scenes of the operatic stage.

But it is also significant that in the setting of P a r sifol, the cathedral of Siena was in fact optional and was not necessarily used in later performances,

just as in practice all of the visual aspects

of all operas of all times are optional

choices. The music and

the text, on the other hand, have their own autonomy not easily be substituted.

and can-

Nevertheless, what we see in an opera,

which ought to substantiate

and confirm the alliance between

words and music, between the meaning of the music and the meaning

of rhe discourse, can also render unstable and even

contradictory

that alliance: this is what happens

nowadays in some re-exhumations

frequent!y

of rightfully forgotten

op-

eras. A staging that aspires to something tion may contribute

102

/

R E M E M B E R IN G

more than mere decora-

to the realization of an opera not so much PONM

TH E

FU TU R E

by providing

a specific visual setting for the events and actions,

as by suggesting musical

their emotional

and poetic situation,

give the illusion

context,

the mlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVUTSRQPONM Stimmung of a

"We will not try any more to

of a forest," wrote Adolphe

speaking ofhis production

Appia in 1895,

of Siegfr ied, "but rather the illusion

of a man in the atmosphere

of a forest." Appia was the first

opera director to criticize radically the traditional manner

of staging Wagner. He maintained

"Wagnerian"

that the Wagnerian

stage had not kept pace with the newness of the music, and he was the first to distance himself from scenographic ism, doing away with painted scenery altogether: other words, of the Siena cathedral. that must dictate

the conditions

scêne must present

natural-

getting rid, in

Ir is the music, said Appia, of the image. The

to the spectator

mise-en-

only what belongs

in the

space evoked by the musical texto What

frequently

occurred,

precisely the opposite. geme is historically irs characteristics

especially

Ir is common

before Wagner,

was

knowledge

that the opera

variable. Over the centuries,

it has changed

and its relationship

to the outside world-we

have only to think of the radical changes in singing styles, or of how in the seventeenth

and eighteenth

stage and its machinery

could be authentic

els of architectonic

centuries

the operatic

experimental

rnod-

research, or projects for works to be carried

SEEING

MUSIC

/

103

out far beyond the confines of the theater. The raw materiaIs of opera-lighting,

voices, costumes, texts, scenic architecture,

instruments-have

evolved and been transformed,

but, in one

way or another, they have carried with thern and on them, and continue

to carry, the memory

and the traces of the uses to

which they have been put, uses that in turn led to their transformation and decline. We have always tended to see the stage as the result of a convergence between a calculated perspective and effect that were in harmony with rhe accepted moral and civic perspectives, and the intended

emotional

effect of the operatic narrative. The

presence of a story to be told, with words spoken and sung, and the acceptance

of theatrical

conventions,

which tended little

by little to be reduced to a matter of mere routine, exerted a powerful influence upon the music and took precedence over ir, eventually leading to an already programmed between eye and ear. This conditioning to justify a theatrical representation

relationship

was significant enough

even when the music was

essentially made up of mere mannerisms

and stereotypes, even

when opera made no more sense outside of itself, outside of its pertinacious

singing.mlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFED C a no er go sum: I sing, therefore Iam.

We all know that miracles and last-rninute surprises, in op-

era, were perfectly at home. The events narrated always reached PON

104

/

R E M E M B E R IN G

TH E

FU TU R E

their destination.

If, for reasons of social class, it was not ac-

ceptable for Violetta Valéry to marry Alfredo or for Gilda to

leave happily with the Duke, along would come death, thatmlkjihgfedcbaZYX

deus ex ma china which provided dilemma,

however unsolvable,

a solution

to every moral

to the tears and satisfaction

of everyone present. Srill, in the nineteenth

century, ltalian

opera, as much in its most elevated and original moments in its crudest manifestations, a form

of collective ritual,

cultural

meeting

tity

and

belonged

a facile emotive

to the people; it was

and could

point providing

as

therefore

become

a

a sense of collectivc iden-

instrument

of social awareness,

almost as much as popular songs, marches, hymns, and Iireworks. It remains true even in our own day that any imaginable conception

of musical theater or visualization

necessarily Wagnerian)

must contend

of music (not

with the countless as-

pects of a general stage convention, which in turn is made up of a number of specific conventions-narrative and musical. lt is as if these conventions

and poetic, scenic continue,

from time

to time, to assert their claims, their right of asylum in the temporal are of a night at the opera and the proscenium institutionalized

arch of an

theater, I am not the first to insist that they be

dismembered.

SEEING

MUSIC

/

105

Stravinsky was one of the first to propose a prudent nonetheless

significant separation

rhe representation,

with a tendency

of the component

but

parts of

toward a certain disjunc-

tion, onstage, between the itinerary of the music and its figurative organization.

The narra tive planes of the music and its

staging display friction and conflicts. Stravinsky himself spoke of musical bigamy-with

the scenic gesture on the one hand

and the word on the other, The role of the narrator in mlkjihgfedcbaZ O edipus

Rex or L'H istoir e du Solda t is, at least in part, to free the characters from the burden of a literal and tautological-in words, useless-representation way, and to permit

other

of what is being narrated any-

them to express a healthy and somewhat

cynical indifference. In Rena r d and Les Noces the parts mimed onstage and the parts that are sung do not correspond

to a sin-

gle stage presence but are divided between two. And then there is the well-known

neoclassical tendency toward "estrangernent"

between musical invention lows invention

and musical convention,

which al-

to gain the upper hand over convention

at any

point and to measure the distance and meaning of that overpowering and the gap thar ensues. Is it still possible today to speak of opera as a genre? Could it be that opera as a genre continues to exist today only because

we have opera theaters that feed on ir, and because, as BertoltPON

106

/

R E M E M B E R IN G

TH E

FU TU R E

Brecht remarked, whatever else happens, the curtain must go up every night-like

the morning paper, which must be out on

the streets every morning-and

the theaters need a supply of

material to meet their needs? Could ir be, as Brecht suggested, that the so-called worthwhile far as they are worthwhile

works are worthwhile

only inso-

in the context of the theatrical ap-

paratus as it exists today? And that if they are worthwhile,

rhis

means that they do not pose a threat to that apparatus and that their worrh can be measured by a standard tion of marketability? remptory

based on the no-

Many years have gone by since these pe-

and somewhat sententious

affirmations

There can be no doubt that they contributed awareness in the handling operatic production,

to a heighrened

of the separate ingredients

of the

as well as to sabotaging the psychological

accretions of traditional theatrical commodities to unmasking

were made.

in general, and

the dulling effects of so-called high expressive

values. The kind of critical rationalism

that Brecht's epic theater

imposes on the stage and on the stage/audience

relationship,

against the idea of illusionistic

theater, im-

plies the autonomy

and consolatory

of the various levels of expression and of

ali the elements that make up the representation. a fundamental

Music plays

role, especially when, by reason of its autono-

SEEING

MUSIC

I

107

my, it serves to interrupt

the development

alienate

costumes,

ir. Text, music,

citational

character,

and together

settings,

tor-in

of the whole,

Brecht's own words-a

outcome

and tableaux,

leading

in the specta-

tension directed not toward the of the acrion, which, as

we know, was meant to be politically Brecht

a performance

and creating

but toward the development

What

lights: all have a

they produce

made up of a series of separate situations to an epic dilation

of the action and to

instructive.

never gave us, however,

is an evolutionary

view of the means and cri teria that govern music theater, His ideological

apparatus

("Do

not build

on the good old days,

build on the bad new ones") did not allow him to evaluate the historical

fact that, in the meantime,

been transformed upon themselves, Theater,

into very complicated

ideal-as

museums,

closed in

and cut off from the changing world outside.

with or without

break out ofitself,

opera and its tem pies had

music, must preserve the tendency

to speak to a world outside-whether

to

real or

must be the case with all feelings and ideas, which ac-

quire meaning

only when they refer to the reality within which

they take shape. Ir has been said that a genre is among cial convention, expectations

108

I

and, like ali conventions,

on the part of the addressee,

REMEMBERING

THE

FUTURE

other

things

it produces

a so-

its own

the "theatrical

con-

sumer." For this very reason, the opera gente has been subjected in recent years to dose scrutiny; it has been completely dismantled,

and its component

parts, with their burden of

memories, have been sorted through, transformed,

reassembled, discarded,

and, frequently, eliminated.

Was this necessary?

For me the answer is easy, because that is exactly what I have tried to do myself Or not to do. Ler's see. I would be the first to recognize the countless difficulties one encounters

in trying

to make music theater on a crumbling stage, a stage which does not allow one to create characters capable of living out their improbable

tragedies, a stage, in other words, thronging

with

the ghosts of opera history. In mlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFEDCBA La Vér a Stor ia (The Tr ue Stor y), a musical action in two parts, I was partially and ideally dose to Brecht, but also to Italo Calvino, the author of the texto Ours was an ambitious project. We wanted to approach the essence of opera theater in its prime elements, and we also wanted to suggest that a "true story" is always different from the way ir appears at first sight and that in back of it there may be another story that is even truer. As in a folktale, the first part of La Vér a Stor ia presents the main outlines

of an elementary

plot, within

the conceptual

frame of the feast as sacrifice, of carnival as a parody of sacrifice

SEEING

MUSIC

I

109

(a therne developed by Mikhail Bakhtin). Ir does not go deeply into psychological conflicts, but transfers thern into a musical paradigm

capable of encompassing

orher conflicts and other

details. There is a general air of indifference with regard to the characters-who attention,

are not really characters-but

on the other hand,

a great deal of

is given to the narrative

tions they explicate. In fact, the non-characters

func-

in the first part

ofmlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFEDCBA La Ver a Stor ia could wear another story and could be placed somewhere else. The narrative is treared like an object which changes and in its turn modifies its subject. The acoustical and visual oppositions call "teatro all'italiana"

imply a well-tested

of what we usually agreement

among

all its elemenrs. For us, all of those elements have already been rhearricalized

to start wirh. They are "operatic,'

rhey already

"sing," they have already had opera experience.

Indeed, they

are the product of that experience. This is why ir may be difficult to take rhat agreemenr for granted, and it may be more useful, in a Brechtian manner, to separate the elements of rhe performance

in such a way that a harmony and an alliance can

be rediscovered on a new footing, in the same way rhat by discovering new connections

we give meaning and value to music

while we listen to it. That same way allows us to travei from

opera to music theater. To do this, we must invent an open PONM

110

I

R E M E M B E R IN G

TH E

FU TU R E

time relationship

between what we see and what we hear, in

a space that must be discovered, since it is part of a process and not an mlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFEDCBA a pr ior i-a n open space but not an empty space. A prearranged chronization

coincidence

and unanimity

and an uncritical syn-

between musical, scenic, and textual connections

tend to downgrade the discourse. As I said earlier, in the first part of La Ver a Stor ia , as in a folktale or an opera, the participants

are identified according

to their roles and their vocal speciíicities. Tenor-ness, sopranoness, and popular-narrator-ness

are treated like pseudo-char-

acters. As such, however, they are not prisoners of a libretto: it must be clear that they are there by chance and that they could get out at any momento And in fact in the second part they have all gone away. But Calvino's text has remained-it

hasn't

gone away, it is still there, more or less the same as it was in the íirst part. Ir has simply been cast differently. The second part becomes a transfiguration

and an analysis of the first, in an en-

tirely different musical and dramaturgical

perspective. The two

parts develop the same text in different ways-as

if a narrator

were to propose two different versions of the same evento But while the first part tends to display the images and the shapes of a folktale, the second part does not seem to narrate a thing. Ir "thinks" about the first part. In the first part there are vocal

SEEING

MUSIC

/

III

protagonists,

in the second part there is a vocal collectivity. The

nrst part is concrete,

the second part is dreamed. The Iirst part

does not ignore the operatic

stage; the second

part rejecrs it.

The nrst part is "horizontal,"

bright, outdoors,mlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVU en plein a ir ; the

second part is "vertical," wintry, set in the city, nocturnal.

The

second part is an obscure parody of the íirst. This transferal

and re-reading

of the same text in a differ-

ent space and time certainly has its roots in popular but ir also responds

narration,

to a need to forget and to make up for an

absence: the absence of a srory. Lyric opera, especially when it was not dealing with divinities and the marvelous men and women,

had a rendency

but with real

to take place in the present,

to the point that when a foreplor had to be narrated, ten became twisred if not ridiculous. motives,

melodic

dramaturgy

and orchestral

onstage. These unforgettable nrst appearance, specific characters Without

But opera had melodies,

formulas

of their own, parallel

things of-

which

developed

to the events taking

motives were marked,

place

from their

by a very visible and tight relationship and situations

with

onstage.

all this, where does the true story of La Ver a Stor ia

lie? In the nrst or in the second part? 1 don't know. Someone warching

and listening

might well come up with the hypothe-

sis of a third part, truer than the other two perhaps, and maybe

112

/

a

REMEMBERING

THE

FUTURE

similar to those invisible cities and gardens of Calvino, whose terraces overlook "only the lake of our mind."

From this point of view,mlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFEDCBA La Ver a Stor ia deliberately intends to raise a number

of questions,

but I prefer to think that the

only answers possible are the experience of the theater itself-a bit like questions about music which, when you get right down to it, only music itself can really answer. Leaving the experience responsibly open, it is my hope that the musical theater can continue to be, also today, a terrace overlooking the world. Is this a utopia? Then long live utopia! It is a privilege to be protected,

especially when we are searching for something

we

are not sure of finding, when we are searching for things rhat do not yet exist because they do not have a name. And perhaps never will. At this point, the "expectations"

of "theatrical consumers"

may no longer be worthy of our interest. If we wish to engage in a dialogue with thern, we must frustrate thern and, above alI, we must attempt to educate thern to separa te and analyze the different elements of the work. We must create favorable-but not necessarily pacific-conditions sis rhe musical performance

so that by means of analy-

can assimilate the setting and the

words, and be totally assimilated

itself into the stage perfor-

mance. The whole becomes one.

SEEING

MUSIC

I

113

A continual watching

shifting

of our

attention

and back again to listening

and put constructively maligned

fram

to

can act as a provocation

to the test those notorious

"expectations."

listening

For their part,

and rnuch-

the "theatrical

con-

sumers" will have no respite, precisely because, ali toa often, consumers perhaps

are ali they are, and only with difficulty

be persuaded

to appreciate

ing eye or a seeing ear-an

the advantages

can they of a listen-

eye that listens to a host of different

things fram the same point of view, and an ear that sees a single thing in different Outside become

lights and fram different points of view.

and away frorn opera, a musical performance

a nonspecific

form of theater. Watching

may

the actions,

gestures, effons, and acrobatics of musicians who are doing unusual, chaotic,

even comical

things,

and to round out our listening. how unusual

and attractive

no doubt

Ir is certainly interesting

sounds are praduced,

if these sounds are part of a coherent has generated

concrete-in

to see

particularly

musical organism

which

thern. There is no reason for alarm if strict!y mu-

sical organizational transferred

serves to assist

cri teria, which organize sound in time, are

also to behaviors

outside

of music, but visible and

time. The distant roots of this possibility of trans-

feral can be found in popular

traditions,

in the often unexpect-

ed relationship,

between

music and work in the

114

/

for exarnple,

REMEMBERING

THE

FUTURE

fields. Dance too, with its rigorous choreographic be seen as a sublimated

cri teria, can

expression of the same relationship.

The need to coordinate

the various modes and timings of

visibility of strictly functional musical behaviors with non-rnusical behaviors has been encouraged in part by past experiences of electronic music-heard

through lonely loudspeakers-and

by rhe need it created to make up in some way for rhe absence of visual referents. sounds-or

Performers

sounds produced

and the spatialization

interacting

with

and controlled

by a machine-

of sound are examples of conventional

ways, certainly open to new developments, performing

prerecorded

space, of stimulating

of inhabiting

and

a dialogue between what we

hear and what we see, or could see ar would like to see, given the fact that whenever we listen to any intentionally sound we have the irrepressible tendency

musical

to look for connec-

tions with some human action. There are instrumental

ar vocal theater experiences which

may find their center and expressive coherence native directions-in

operations,

that is, that I would like to

define as either additive or subtractive. participant functions

is involved

In the first case, each

in an exorbitant

and relationships

gether, find their justification

in two alter-

number

which, organically

of musical

added all to-

and refuge in gesture, in a sort

SEEING

MUSIC

/

115

of "stage mlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFEDCBA wor d"-pa r ola scenica -of listening. 1n the second case, the musical work is tampered formance

details which,

an autonomy without

with, reduced to a few per-

isolated in this way, tend to acquire

on their own (breathing

producing

in different

sounds, for example)-a

in danger of falling prey to the anecdote,

ways but

situation

which is

to facile parody and

to kitsch. I have myself experimented

with the first case, that of per-

formers saddled with more work than they can handle, in other words, with an excessive number interested

of musical funcrions.

ar that time in exploring

ing experience

devoid

the possibilities

of a prearranged

pr ior i in the musical structure, duced from and generated

dramaturgy

but instead

I was

of a listenrooted

a dramaturgy

a de-

by the musical processo

This was the case, for instance, 1961 and 1962, in the territory

with my own first steps, in

of musical theater, which I had

nor yet explored but for which I had been refining the instruments-once through

again like a memory

Monteverdi's

C lor inda , the Eighth tions-more

of the future-especially

O r jeo, his C omba ttimento di Ta ncr edi e Book of his M a dr iga ls, and the implica-

than the actual realizations-of

the M a dr iga li r a p-

pr esenta tivi, the "theater for the ear" of the Late Renaissance. am thinking

I1G

/

of my already mentioned

REMEMBERING

THE

FUTURE

C ir cles, based on three

I

poems by e. e. cummings, for female voice, harp, and two percussionists; ormlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFEDCBA Visa ge, for the same female voice-that of Cathy Berberian-and

electronically produced sounds; or P a ssa ggio,

for soprano, orchestra, and two choruses, one onstage with the orchestra and the other spread out among the audience. Let me saya brief word about C ir cles, which was performed at Tanglewood in 1960 with Cathy Berberian and the soloists of the Boston Symphony Orchestra. The exorbitant number of musical functions and relations in C ir cles can briefly be described as follows. The three poems by e. e. cummings, of increasing complexity, are repeated twice: I, 11, III and I1I, 11, 1, in an ensemble of five episodes. Poem number 1 is taken up again at the end wirh musical elements of the second episode. Poem number 11is taken up with elements of the first episode, while poem number 111,in the third episode, repeats itself backwards. The harp reproduces and expands upon the modes of attack of the voice and the percussion instruments; e. e. cummings's text, interpreted by the voice, is then developed musically and extended acoustically by harp and percussion. The three cummings poems take 011

the role of generators of musical and/or acoustical func-

tions. There is a continual oscillation between periodic figures, bounded by specific constellations of intervals, and complex

SEEING

MUSIC

I

II7

gestural events characterized

by a notable degree of indeterrni-

nacy. The choice and use of the percussion instruments the harp are dictated by specific phonetic

and of

models: the instru-

ments play, so to speak, the voice and the words. They play different

modes of attack, vowels and consonants

sibilants, plosives, and so on). The instruments

(fricatives,

translate and

prolong the vocal behaviors, insisting upon thern, in a sort of onomatopoeia relationship strained

or, rather, vocal-instrumental

bilingualism. The

between a female voice and two frequently

percussion

players can present problems

unre-

of balance.

The singer must therefore move around, following an itinerary which will allow her, in succession, to be accompanied instruments,

by the

to be like them, and, in the end, to be completely

absorbed by rhern. This very intense dialogue between the musical dimension,

the phonetic-acoustical

spatial dimension

is maintained

ticular coordination

dimension,

and the

and developed through a par-

assigned to musical signals and mainly to

the gestures of the singer's hands; she seems to be celebrating a rite of total identification signals are assimilated

to the musical process, making mlkjihgfedcbaZYXW C ir cles

a theater of over-abundant comes a multilayered

with the other performers ..These

relationships.

protagonist

The score itself be-

rhat is evoked, realized, and

translated in visible and diversified musical behaviors.

II8

/

REMEMBERING

THE

FUTURE

I would

like to mention,

notation

are themselves

Without

the development

sic would problem

incidentally,

that the criteria

a way of seeing and thinking of notation

of an empirical

criteria

of the world;

for rhe quantitative

and qualitative

experience

would

culture):

never have

(as we understand

there would never have been and there

not be musical

nor, I suppose,

the

description

would

arisen; there would have been no polyphony it in Western

ruusic.

in the Middle Ages, rnu-

never have beco me an encoding of devising

of

experimentation

a notion

or ongoing

of the uniqueness

research,

and originality

of

the musical work itself. Instrumental

or vocal theater may find its center in opera-

tions of a subtractive

nature.

Any single detail,

decontextualized,

becomes

something

else and

autonomous

different

functions.

What

ly unnoticed

and

(the breathing

isolated

and

may acquire

went

previous-

of the musician,

for instance),

and was taken for granted

as part of a coherent

overall behav-

ior, is now foregrounded

and tends to become

and of itself. Since it does not cornpletely

significant

lose contact

in

with

the overall behavior of which it is a part, it becomes a parody. If one eliminates

alI the consonants

sizing maybe the inílections left by themselves,

in a discourse,

and the intonations,

beco me something

else, and

SEEING

MUSIC

ernpha-

the vowels, produce

/

119

a

"little

theater"

of paradoxical

and humorous

effects. Parody

if only because of its etymology

and its ancient

again! However,

history, parody

is not always the amusing

and minor

form of

disguise and often comic escape from reality which invades theatrical forms. Instrumental

theater sometimes

presents us with

a quite serious, even tragic, form of parody. This is true, for example, of the instrumental Kagel and his extremely

and vocal metatheater serious, talmudic

section of what existed-has the truth,

Oíten,

is something

simistic ghost of Samuel Beckett's Music theater,

parodies.

been suggested-does

it reveals nothingness."

listening to his meta-music

His "disnot reveal

what one mlkjihgfedcbaZYXWV sees while like the tragically pes-

The U nna ma bLe.

seen from that point of view, is not always

explicit and it does not necessarily produce thought.

of Mauricio

action but, rather,

In practice ir tends to be self-referential.

When its ex-

perience expands beyond the boards of the stage, this does not occur by means of an illusory psychological

extension

stage space, but by means of our processes of thought. of miracles, it offers fascinating . The

impulse

and ongoing

to seek a union

between

of the Instead

research . image and sound

comes to us from very far back, and is rooted in an ancient syn-

esthetic vision of the world. Let me recall Exodus 20: 18: ''And PONM

120

/

R E M E M B E R 1N G

TH E

FU TU R E

all the people saw the voices ... and the sound of the shofar." The link between light and sound, between light and word, is common

to all narratives of origins, of primordial

rnyths and apprehensions

events, of

of the world; and music often ap-

pears to be rhe most powerful mediator between the eye and the ear, between the mobile and extreme points of a space that has still to be explored and interrogated. A space that seems at times to lead us to the threshold of a mystery. A space whichwith stage sets, lighting, costumes, voices, and instrumentswe insistently endeavor to secularize, but which despire ali our efforts always seems to contain an intangible, perhaps a sacred, core.

SEEING

MUSIC

/

121

161 POETICS

OF

ANALYSISwvutsrqponmlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVUTSRQP

In this lecture I would like to present a few ideas on rhe various ways in which poetics and analysis may coexist-ideas imply the ambitious op a relationship

and maybe unfulfillable

of interdependency,

not of ideutiry, between

which

desire to devel-

of cornplementariry,

if

the crearive and the analytic levels of

rnusic. We are alI aware-because time and time again-that very nature condemned tia! indeed, myselfin

we have been reminded any discourse

the position

ably be refuted

on music is by its

to be partia! and incomplete.

and so incomplete,

50 par-

that in this Iinal lecrure I find

of making statements

by an a!ternative

of it

discourse

which cou!d probwhich maintained

the exact oppositelPONMLKJIHGFEDCBA I do mlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFE so, not our of homage to the notion of open-mindedness

(the mind

is in any case open),

or of a

"work in progress" of the spirit, and not even as an homage to dia!ectics-aimed, dictions-but

122

that is, at developing

ideas through

out of an inner need. This time

I

contra-

will be ta!king

about things that are implicidy bound up-more has usually been the case until now-with

closely than

my own work, trust-

ing that it is free from an excess of contradictions. The two terms-poetics

and analysis-could

lumped together in a single definition-"music

perhaps be criticism"-by

analogy with "literary criticisrn" or "art criticisrn." But I must confess that I have some trouble with such a formulation, because it would force me to assume-and cult-apparently

this might prove diffi-

objective attitudes, which could only partial-

ly turn out to be musically useful. In fact, to use the synthetic and tactful expression "rnusic criticisrn" would amount to the same thing as saying "analysis of poetics" -which

is almost the

exact opposite of what I want to talk to you about here. To begin with, I would like to subrnit for your consideration a somewhat oversimpliíied and perhaps prerextual idea of poerics and musical analysis-the

first of course being an

extremely ancient term, while the latter is a relatively young one. Today, the notion of a musical poetics is no longer a subject for discussion and has no need of adjectives. A first na me and a last name are generally sufficient. We can talk, in fact, without fear of being misunderstood, about the poetics of Anton Webem, ofOlivier Messiaen, ofIgor Stravinsky, ar ofBéla Bartók, thereby implying a diversified and consciously original

POETICS

QF

ANALYSIS

/

123

vision of the making of music. It would, on the other hand, strike people as somewhat strange if we were to talk about the poetics of Bach, Haydn,

or Mozart, since their works, for all

their complexity, tend to incorporare

objective historical and

aestheric values which, at the time those works were composed, had an existence of their own, quite independent vidual works themselves-values, tive permanence The notion implied

of the indi-

in other words, whose rela-

was not easily altered by history and events.

of poetics, however general the term, has always

self-awareness,

and an evolutionary

view of rnusic-

making and of the cri teria that guide ir. Whenever description enters imo the specilic details of a given work, poetics gives way to analysis. Two thousand been considered

years ago, the idea of analysis could have something

so-called theoretical

akin to "logie," derived from the

sciences (such as physics and mathernat-

ics). This reflection may produce nostalgia and forbidden sires in some modern neo-Aristotelians,

de-

but the fact is that to-

day most musical analysts seem to need all the adjectives they ean 6nd-maybe

too many. Thus we have formal analysis, se-

miologieal analysis, structural analysis, harmonic meneutic

analysis, rhythrnic

phenomenological

124

/

REMEMBERING

analysis, her-

analysis, neo-positivist

analysis, qualitative and quantitative

THE

FUTURI'.

analysis, analy-

SIS,

statistical

analysis,

melodic

and

stylistic

analysis ... you

name it! If, on the orher hand, the analyst is a composer,

there

will be no need to choose and specify the categories and cri teria he or she intends

to adopt

because, whatever

the circurn-

stances, the analysis wil1 always be self-analysis: composers not be able to help projecting

themselves,

their own poetics,

into the analysis of the work. The composer the couch of someone generosity

will

reveals himself on

else's work. Even in cases of the greatest

and aloofness (Schumann's

analysis, for instance,

of

Berlioz'smlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFEDCBA Symphonie F a nta stique) or of extreme far-sightedness and objectivity

(Pierre Boulez's analyses of Wagner,

and Berg) the chief analytical instrument

Debussy,

at the composer's

dis-

posal will always and in any case be his own poetics. Indeed, is fortunate

it

for us that this should be so (enernies thar we are of

the hyporhetical-and iry), and fortunate

soporific-notion

of musical objectiv-

toa for anyone who believes as I do-I've

said it once and 1'11say it again-that, and done, the most meaningful

when everything

is said

analysis of a symphony

is an-

orher symphony. Common

sense would

analysis are synonyms,

seem to suggest

and completely

that

finds confirma-

with, the harmonic,

POET[CS

and

overlap with one anoth-

er: that the poetics of Stravinsky, for instance, tion in, and is to be identified

poetics

OF

ANALYS[S

rhythrnic,

/

[25

and metrical analysis ofmlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGF The Rite of Spr ing, while a structural analysis of Les Noces will coníirm another phase in Stravinsky's evolution. But a composer's poetics is always something different from its analyzable aspects-like something

a form, which is always

more and different than the sum of its parts.

A text is always a plurality of texts. Great works invariably subsume

an incalculable

number

identihable on the surface-a

of other texts, not always

multitude

of sources, quotations,

and more or less hidden precursors that have been assimilated, not always on a conscious levei, by the author plurality constantly

himself. This

imposes fresh points of view on the anal-

ysis. An analysis which is committed

to describing

minute details and the microstructure

of a work-considered

deterministically structure-is

as a function

the most

of its overall form and macro-

only possible provided that the alliance berween

the two dimensions is immanent

and their interconnection

be taken for granted perceptually

(as it is, for exarnple, in the

analysis of a classical form). There are works characterized extrerne concentration sification,

can

by

and at rhe same time by extreme diver-

This is rhe case with Stravinsky's Rite of Spr ing or

J eux by Debussy: they are works where a tendency

toward au-

tonomy of character and structural relations, on the one hand, coexist with independent,

126

/

R E M E M B E R IN G

deductive, and generative processes,PONM

TH E

FU TU R E

on the other, Harmonic,

timbric,

trices, on the one hand, on the other; complex

and discontinuous

other works of comparable

ma-

articulations

cells, coexist

events. In works such as these, or complexity,

sible is a sectorial analysis-an

segmented

and rhythrnic

coexist with evolving thernatic

with repeti tive and immobile

the tendency

metric,

the only analysis pos-

analysis, that is, which reflects

of the listener to perceive the various strata in a

way. But to choose a possible segmentation

of the

musical process and to tailor rhe analysis to the specific characteristics of the work under scrutiny

does not necessarily mean

building

a bridge toward

general theories,

grammar

of analysis. If this were the case, so much the better

if the analyst is also a composer:

his poetics, about the speciíic and concrete

component

a universal

there would be a better likeli-

hood that his analysis would have something

compositional

toward

process, the manifold

to teach us aboutmlkjihgfedcbaZYX production

of the

ways of existing of their

elements and their segmentation.

Like all experiences which tend ta produce value judg!!lt::nts, any form of analysis, if it is to play a musically significant must be capable ofbeing

reflected in a historical

if for no other

reason

than

and the practice

and instruments

that

perspective-

compositional

techniques

of music are historical

ables.

POETICS

OF

role,

ANALYSIS

I

127

vari-

We frequently Iind today that, even in the case of the most penetrating

and, so to speak, scientihc analyses, the analyst is

not very concerned

to place the work under examination

the context of the composer's chronological

in

development-in

the coutext, in other words, of his ar her poetics. It is precisely this tendency toward aternporaliry that makes musical analysis an open and creative experience which, however, may become pointless when the analyst is struggling with the conceptualization of something

that does not existo

Analytical creativity is in danger of becoming aesrheticized elegance, it pursues a relationship

when, with procedural identity

between

the form and the meaning

of

of the analysis.

In order to perform an analysis of the meaning of a work, the analyst hnds himself obliged to guarantee at all times that the analysis is meaningful,

not merely as an instrument

more frequently the case, as a theoretic conhguration.

but, as is Conse-

quently, his poetic vision and the analytical procedures he applies will be inevitably determined itself, which frequently

by the cri teria of the analysis

have little or nothing

to do with the

poetics of the composer examined. The analyst who applies to the work a previously elaborated theory-compatible with itself-becomes

a parody of the composer who has the

sacrosanct need to be able to construct

128

/

R E M E M B E R 1N G

above all

TH E

FU TU R E

a sound architecture PONM

compatible

with the structural

it-

criteria of the composition

self. In fact, we can think of analysts who, in the course of their investigations,

seem to evince an ill-concealed

tagonism

with regard to the composer-with

someone

who analyzes music by making

feeling of an-

regard, that is, to it. Their creative im-

pulse thus takes on a negative turn: rather than search for the meaning

of a work, they use the work to clarify the meaning

their own analytical guarantee

procedures.

enclosure,

The analysis then becomes

of the analyst's objectivity

ture ofhis or her instruments,

of

and of the non-biased

a

na-

and the work enters an analytical

like a Trojan horse.

Analysis, as I was saying, implies creativity and may develop as an independent

activity, indifferent

to the composer's

tions and to the work itself (clear manifestation

inten-

of those inten-

tions), which is treated as organic matter predisposed

by some

biological divinity. In such a case the analyst resembles a fisherman who, knowing what he wants to catch, throws his specially made net into the sea and catches only what fits the net that he himself has woven. There is one name we can't avoid rnentioning

in this context-that

of the musical experience enon.

ofHeinrich is preordered

He casts his three-layer

Beethoven

deprived

Schenker. His vision like a natural phenorn-

net and fishes out a boneless

of any metrical

or rhythrnic

POETICS

OF

component,

ANALYSIS

/

129

reducing the thematic dimension

to a symbolic phantom;

but

he is reluctant to venture into the troubled and ever-changing waters where a Debussy lurks, or a Stravinsky, or a Webernali Schenker's contemporaries-or,

alas, even a Wagner!

There are cases in which analysis is brought to bear on experiences which do not easily lend thernselves to linear and numerical description.

In such cases the creativity of the analyst

may experience some difficult moments, ing with something

especially when deal-

that has no immediate

doodle or an accidental and indecipherable can be made to mean somerhing.

meaning

(a sound

noise) but which

Even within

the frame of

the most self-referential analytical strategies, a constructive and adventurous

fl.exibility in the relationship

analyst wishes to demonstrate, demonstrable,

between what the

and what is analyzable but not

can be developed.

Analysis, like music itself, makes sense when it confirms and celebrares an ongoing dialogue between the ear and the mind. This is why 1 have always felt some detachment dodecaphonic

from the old

analyses which sought out the rwelve notes in

the various forms of the series in ali their possible combinatorial operations,

forgetting

that, while the notes may be the

sc:ews that help hold the wood rogether, they are not the table. 1 nurture

130

the same feeling of suspicion for the theories whose

/

REMEMBERING

THE

FUTURE

main concern seems to be building shelters against the incursions of the diversitied,

noisy concreteness of the world as ir is,

in rhe process of becoming, or as we would like ir to become. Metaphors

apart, we are talking about she!ters which preclude

a dialogue between the substance of sound and the substance of rnusic, between the ice of rigor and the heat that lies be!ow ir, between the sound of sense and the sense of sound. At their worst, such theories take the form of authoritarian tolerant and dogmatic-which, the e!imination

systems-in-

in their own lirtle way, preach

of the outsider. The poetics of analysis thus

becomes the politics of analysis-a

search for procedural pedi-

grees. Ir is at this point that the history of music comes in and hands over the check, which the analysts, predictably-especially if they are a bit of a Schenkerian or a neo-positivist-e-find thernselves unable to pay. At times the composer-analyst to provide an apparently statement

objective-that

rnornents,

there is safety in numbers.

in this universe can be reduced to mathematical

rnodels. What a mathematical in common

is, mathematical-

of what he is up to. This is perfectly understand-

able, since, in dif6cult Everything

may give in to the temptation

is the reduction

mode! and a musical work have

of a vast 6e!d of possibilities to a mlkjihgfedcbaZ

unicum, whether it be an algorithm or a musical texto The dif-

POETICS

OF

ANALYSIS

/

'3'

ference, however,

is the following:

the basis of an algorithm, generated

Whereas

not always peaceful,

reconstruct,

the vast field of possibilities

a musical between

on

which

of where ir carne from; it is deaf

it. It has no memory

and dumb.

we cannot

text-which

proposes

a pact,

senses and intellect-bears

with

it and upon ir the traces of the trajectories

that formed ir, of the

roads taken, of a host of previous texts. The sense of emptiness

rhat is transmitted

ical systems and cri teria that are particularly late comes from the vast inhabited

by certain analytdifficult to assirni-

space, from a "no-rnan's-

land" that lies between

the analysis of the organization

notes and the musical

substance

and the sound),

and between

retical speculation perturbable

passive musical

the idea of an imformo I wish that

form (a new kind ofmlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVUTSRQPON musica munda na ) and

thar no-man's-land concrete

the notes, that is,

the analysis itself and the theo-

that seems to promote

and essentially

ideal of absolute

(between

of the

could open up and communicate

and creative trajectories:

poiesis) of analysis. The ultimare

through

through

a true poetics

sense of these trajectories

(or can

be revealed in the traces of those already covered and of those yet to be covered. It is our duty to keep tracing and retracing new paths: in the words of an old Spanish saying, there are no roads if nobody

132

/

is walking.

REMEMBERING

THE

FUTURE

Musical listening,

experience

seems at times to want to go beyond

I have already said, ir gets transand in such cases, asPONMLKJIHGFEDCBA

lared into words. Today we can find examples of complete trangement

between

the conceptual

the practical

and sensory dimension

esand

one, berween the work listened to and the pro-

cess that generated

ir. The more pronounced

is from the experience

of listening,

this detachment

the more intrusive

is the

presence of critical discourses which claim to explain how this or that piece by Bartók

or Beethoven,

works-as

if these composers

experience

oflistening.

pear "Harnletic,"

or Webern

themselves

had transcended

Such commentaries

not so much

"leses the name of action."

Ia vérité"

context, Wittgenstein

incornpre-

it is reduced to "words" and

As the epigraph

to mlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVUTSRQPONM Rea l P r esences,

George Steiner quotes Georges Braque's dictum fatiguent

the

make the work ap-

because it becomes

hensible, but because, like Hamlet,

or Wagner

(proofs tire truth),

"Les épreuves

while, in quite another

has claimed that "what we cannot speak

about, we must pass over in silence." I would like to propose a paraphrase

which seems suited to the present

truth we cannot

instance:

the

speak about, we must sing, we must say it in

music. In the past, semiology seduced logue everything

us. With their urge to cata-

and their breathless

POET1CS

search for an unlimited

OF

ANALYS1S

I

133

semiosis, semiologists often seem to be on the run. But music is not in a hurry: rnusic's time is the time of the trees, of the forests, of the sea, and of the large cities. Musical semiology was an attempt

to go beyond the dualism implicit in musical

pracedures and to lessen the distance between music and analysiso In the Iirst lecture I alluded to the kind of musical semiology that derived fram linguistics, in the 1970s, and that was significantly

commented

upon by Nicolas Ruwet and David

Osmond-Smith. Successively, there have been other attempts more attentive to the functional ticular, drew my attention

which were

strata of music. One, in par-

but raised in me irresolvable doubts.

In order to give an account of music's "syrnbolic specificiry," Jean-Jacques

Nattiez

developed

a semiotic model that "takes

account ofits triple mode of existence-as object, as a praduced

an arbitrary isolated

object, and as a perceived object." Thus

the musical textmlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFEDCBA in itself is to be seen as something separate fram the musical text as the praduct

of the composer's inten-

tion, and fram a perceived text which takes shape in the ears and mind of the listener. I feel that it is a question, a somewhat

unrealistic division of responsibilities.

here, of

The inten-

tions of the composer are a rather abstract and often contradictory compound

134

/

to explore. We can insist on the fact that the

REMEMBER1NG

THE

FUTURE

sketches ofBeethoven

or Schubert

are fascinating

because they

throw light on their creative processo But semiology only with the notion

can cope

of a fully realized work, when the inten-

tions of the composer have been, in one way or another, already fulfilled and are made available for a constant questioning

that escapes an "intention"

relation. In that triple semiological becomes

an abstraction.

context,

he or she is required

ness of alI possible level"-the

Partially removed

musical

"produced

this kind of tripartite

we should

similating

FinalIy, the "neutral to re-

immaterial. can be contained,

vision. Given the rather diversi-

with our own work-that

instruments-the

diversities.

possibility

Otherwise

is, with

of analyzing and as-

we might just as well return,

indeed, to Boethius and take refuge in the sumptuously Greco-medieval quote Umberto

today,

and glossolalic world in which we opera te,

try to provide,

our heuristic

of

a global aware-

object," namely the score-tends

I don't see how musical experience

fied, heterogeneous,

the quintessence

to approach

experiences.

even the listener

from any concrete

to embody

duce the musical text to something

within

versus "result" binary

perspective

alI possible textual interpretations,

and diversified

theory

of music which

confirms

ascetic

the idea, to

Eco, that "rhe more the system explains experi-

ence, the more ir prescinds

ir."

POETICS

OF

ANALYSIS

I

135

It was Saint Augustine

who said that in order to find truth,

man must not only look inside of himself but he must go beyond himself

And it was, again, Severinus Boethius who, with

his idea of musical

knowledge,

rhe accessory character

gave his seal of approval

of sensible perception

to

with respect to

truth. A number

of composers,

in a more secular intellectual

to declare that they have no

text, of course, have been known interest mance

whatsoever

in the technical

of their music,

in knowing it should is certainly

practice

like. What

Professionally

a daring position.

at least fourteen

centuries

of music

psychologically

became

inseparable.

tion, since this distance

problems

thern is how this

Ir is above all a new one, since

have gone by since the theory

and

technically,

anthropologically,

and

Ir may aIso be an interesting

posi-

between

of pleasure.

interests

and socially speaking,

thought

poses an idea of music as a instrument an instrument

of the perfor-

and that they are not even interested

what it sounds

be written.

con-

Knowledge

pleasure? The colors of Matisse, analyzed with a light-frequency

and matter

ofknowledge

presup-

instead of

of what? What kind of

Pollock,

and Rothko

meter, and the perfume

can be worn

by an attractive woman is subject to chemical analysis. In good weather and bad, the moon and the stars are variously observed

136 /

REMEMBERING

THE

FUTURE

by poets, farmers, businessmen

on holiday, and astrophysi-

cists. Perceptual space can be analyzed on the basis of concrete acoustical and musical experience, or with the instruments

of

neurophysiology. Once again, we are faced with an empty space. We could attempt

to cross it and to fi11it with meaning,

if it were not

bounded by an algorithm on the one hand and unperformable clouds of sounds on the other, by algebraic speculations on one side and tautological tintinnabulations

on the other.

Does this represent a flight from colors and perfumes, moon and the stars? And from musical reality-granted

the rhat

we can define it without having recourse to rhetorical figures? Of course it does. Not even the parascientific called musical conceptualization meaning,

language of so-

can give that empty space a

because, however minirnally, ir has itself had a hand

in creating

it-with

its stubborn

sound processes independently or on separating,

insistence

on considering

of the way they are perceived,

in a formalistic way, the so-called "param-

eters" of music (pitch, dynamics, timbre, and time, rhat is, the morphology

of sound), things that our perceptive abilities are

not capable of separating.

If it is impossible

nomenological

between sound and noise, how can

distinction

to make a phe-

we ever hope to separate, for instance, pitch fram timbre or

POETlCS

QF

ANALYSIS

/

137

timbre from dynamics?

Neo-positivist

analyses rnake frequent

appeals to science, but it is significant

that they seem to dismiss

rhe science of acoustics

(I am not talking

about

Helrnholtz's

acoustics, which explored musical sound as a stationary riodical-and

therefore as an abstract-phenomenon,

correct it may be mathematically,

at the Bell Laboratories,

at IRCAM

on the diffuse instability

at Stanford

transformations

for the conceptualization

pleasure or a theoof music; when it

of the coming

into being and the

it can make a profound

and concrete

to the creative processo

The composer

can give every pertinent

double or a triple life. Or a m ultitude a polyphony

na-

of sound forms (and not only by means of the

new digital technologies), contribution

or

sound phenornenon).

Analysis is not just a form of speculative

to a topology

University,

and the developmental

ture of every aspect of every significant

contributes

however

but about the recent research

conducted

retical instrument

and pe-

of different

sound

musical element

a

of lives. He can develop

behaviors.

History

fram this point of view, is a teacher of developmental We call (or we once called) a succession

of different

of music, processes. pitches a

"melody," a "therne," a "motif," a "row," or a "subject." Each of these terms has enjoyed,

as we ali know, a variety of complex

vicissitudes. Their expressive identity, and the presence or rela-mlkjihgfed

138

I

REMEMBERING

THE

FUTURE

tive absence in thern of structuring

facrors, are in the hands

but they are ar the same rime the result of

of the composer;

those same vicissitudes, made up of theoretical subjectiviry, techniques,

orientations,

and of expressive, evocative, and even

descriptive codes. A melody, an identifiable

series of pitches,

is therefore the meeting point for a number of functions

of a

primary nature (harmony, relative dynamics, timbre, rhythrn, and meter) or a secondary nature (for example, a vocal or instrumental

melody). A melody always carries with it the trace

of these functions, or of part of them: it evokes thern in a more or less explicit way, or it contradicts

them. Polyphony was built

and held togerher on the melody of the mlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVUTSRQPONM ca ntus fir mus or of the tenor, A symphony harmonic

was constructed

relations which

on its thernes and on the

rhey signaled and embodied. Arias,

lieder, canzoni, and cabalettas were made out of tunes. Fugues were guided by subjects and counter-subjects,

The implications

of what I am saying are obvious and far-reaching at the same rime. But the point I want to make-in

a nutshell-is

that the

theme or motif, overloaded with investments and structural experiences and expressive codes, has become transformed

into

somerhing new. Ir has rnutated. Ir has become hyperthernatic, If previously, as late as Brahms, the theme was generated and conditioned

by specific harmonic,

POETICS

rhythrnic,

OF

ANALYSIS

and rnetri-

I 139

cal funcrions, funcrions,

ir now becomes irself the generaror

of analogous

and of others besides. Ir becomes a generarive nucle-

us, a cell made up of a few elernents, a regulator of musical processes. The therne in itself has disappeared; mented,

hidden,

though

ir pervades

ir has become frag-

ali the textures,

them with its colors: ir is everywhere

and nowhere

time. But rhe process is not irreversible.

coloring

at the same

Led on by the gener-

ating nucleus, we can retrace our steps and make possible the emergence different,

of a new theme, a new figure-surprising even alien, but nonetheless

generated

perhaps,

by those nuclei,

by those textures, and destined

to transform

be absorbed

once again. The timings

and to disappear

continuous

process of transformation

alrernarion

of birth and disappearance

main inscribed

on our memories

itself in its turn, to

and substitution,

of this of this

of the figures which re-

in ali their specihcity, help to

create the varying degrees of fusion of the whole and a greater or lesse r identifiability

of the figures.

Ar this point we could talk about the harmonic tic space in which

these figures, thernes,

and nuclei succeed

each other, bur this is not the right occasion have been speaking of demonstrative

to you, instead,

but of operative

processes, or formations.

140

/

R E M E M B E R 1N G

for doing so. I

of possible

forms,

FU TU R E

forms-not

in other words,

Not forms of development

TH E

and acous-

of

but forms

wvutsrqponmlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVUTS

which mlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFEDCBA a r e, which gaze within thernselves as they come into being. Not passing forms but forms which r ema in, which observe themselves in their continual internal self-renewal. Forms which stir and question memory but at the same time deny it. Silent forms which tend to make us forget the processes that generated thern and which hide the vast number of"vanishing points" that inhabit thern. Forms, finally, which live in harmony with analysis and its poetic reasons. And having said this, I must regretfully bid you adieu. I am grateÍul for these one-sided encounters of ours, becausc they have led me to formulate thoughts (and thernes) that might otherwise have remained concealed in the folds of my music.

POETICS

OF

ANALYSIS

I

141