Kane, Brian - Sound Unseen. Acousmatic Sound in Theory and Practice
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Sound Unseen
Sound Unseen
Acc o u s m a t i c S o u n d i n Th A Thee o r y a n d P r a c t i c e
Brian Kane
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Oxord University Press is a department o the University o Oxord. It urthers the University’s objective o excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxord New York Auckland Cape own Dar es Salaam Hong Kong Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi New Delhi Shanghai aipei oronto With offices in Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland Portugal Singapore South Korea Switzerland Tailand urkey Ukraine Vietnam Oxord is a registered trademark o Oxord University Press in the UK and certain other countries. Published in the United States o America by Oxord University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016 © Oxord University Press 2014 All rights reserved. No part o this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any orm or by any means, without the prior permission in writing o Oxord University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by license, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reproduction rights organization. Inquiries concerning concerning reproduction reproduction outside the scope o the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxord University Press, at the address above. You must not circulate this work in any other orm and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer. Library o Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Cataloging-in-Publication Data Kane, Brian, 1973Sound unseen : acousmatic sound in theory and practice / Brian Kane. pages ; cm Includes bibliographical reerences and index. ISBN 978–0–19–934784–1 (hardback) — ISBN 978–0–19–934787– 978–0–19–934787–22 (online content) 1. Music— Acoustics 2. Musique concrete—Histor concrete—Historyy and criticis criticism. m. 3. Music—Philosophy Music—Ph ilosophy and aesthetics.andI. physics. itle. ML3805.K15 2014 781.2'3—dc23 2013037100
9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed in the United States o America on acid-ree paper
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c onscience d’ d’une une situation d’écoute écoute que, pour n’être être pas pa s nouvelle, . . . la prise de conscience n’avait jamais été repérée dans son originalité et baptisée d’un terme spécifique: la situation acousmatique.
. . . the awareness o a listening situation, not new, but whose originality had never been identified or given a specific name: the acousmatic situation. —Michel Chion, Guide des objets sonores
CONTENTS
Acknowledgments xi Introduction 1 PAR ONE Te Acousmatic Situation
1. Pierre Schaeffer, Schaeffer, the Sound Object, and the Acousmatic Reduction 15 PAR WO Interruptions
2. Myth and the Origin o the Pythagorean Veil 45 3. Te Baptism o the Acousmate 73 PAR HREE Conditions
4. Acousmatic Phantasmagoria and the Problem o echnê 97 INERLUDE. Must Musiq Bee Phantasmagoric Phantasmagoric? 119 Musique ue Concrète Concrète B 5. Kaa and the Ontology o Acousma Acousmatic tic Sound 134 PAR FOUR Cases
6. Acousmatic Fabrications: Les Paul and the “Les Paulverizer” 165 7. Te Acousmatic Voice 180 Conclusion 223 Notes 227 Bibliography 277 Index 293
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Ever since I had the inkling to write a book about acousmatic sound numerous numerous people have contributed in large and small ways to its completion. I want to thank Philipp Blume, Daniel Callahan, Amy Cimini, J. D. Connor, Joanna Demers, Ryan Dohoney, Emily Dolan, Joseph Dubiel, Will Eastman, Juliet Fleming, Walter Frisch, Milette Gaiman, Evelyne Gayou, Michael Gallope, Doug Gordon, Paul Grimstad, Marion Guck, David Gutkin, Andy Hamilton, Leigh Landy, Deirdre Loughridge, John Paulson, Jairo Moreno, Alexander Rehding, Margaret Schedel, Martin Scherzinger, Stephen Decatur Smith, Gary omlinson, Andrew V. and Uroskie, and David Wessel or their conversations, questions, support, engagement, enthusiasm. Special thanks to my colleagues in the Department o Music at Yale and the graduate students in my seminar on acousmatic sound, in particular, Alexandra Kieffer or the acousmatic voice, Jennier Chu or the nuns, Kevin Koai or Apollinaire, and Carmel Raz or the French gothic literature; to Seth Brodsky and Seth Kim-Cohen, my dear riends and interlocutors; to David E. Cohen and John Hamilton or help with all things Pythagorean; to Remi Castonguay or help negotiating 18 th century French and 21st century library systems; to Gundula Kreuzer and Benjamin Piekut or their helpul comments on drafs at critical junctures; to James Hepokoski or his support, advice, editorial eye, sense o humor, and most o all, his riendship; to Whitney Davis, who has exemplified or me what it means to work in the humanities; to Ian Quinn, who has been the absolute best o colleagues; to odd Cronan or countless conversations and shared projects over so many years; to my amily, both the Kanes and the Handlers; to the editorial and production team o Jessen O’Brien, Mary Mary Jo Rhodes, and Colleen C olleen Dunham or their fine work; and to Suzanne Ryan, whose steady hand steered this book rom proposal to publication at the speed o sound. Manyy ideas in this book Man bo ok were first presented presented in talks and lectures. lec tures. I thank all those who raised a hand and asked a question. Tis book bo ok is stronger or all o your inquiry. inquiry. For the invitation to speak about acousmatic sound, I thank Joseph Clarke and Kurt Forster at the Yale School o Architecture; Sherry Lee and the members o the Opera Exchange at the University o oronto; Ron Kuivila and Wesleyan University; David Novak and the Columbia University Society o Fellows; Holly Watkins and the Butler School o Music at U Austin; the graduate students at NYU or their lecture series, “Music, Language, Tought”; the Society or Music Teory and the Music and Philosophyy Interest Group; Philosoph Group; UC Berkeley Art Research Center; Lydia Goehr and the participants in the aesthetics reading group; and the departments o music at the
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University o Chicago, Cornell, Penn, New York University, and the University o Wisconsin-Madison. Earlier versions o parts o this book have appeared elsewhere: “Jean-Luc Nancy and the Listening Subject,” Contemporary Music Review, 31/5–6 (2012): 439–447, with permission rom the aylor and Francis Group; “Acousmate: History and De-Visualised Sound in the Schaefferian radition” Organised Sound 17/2 (Fall 2012): 179–188 and “L’objet Sonore Maintenant: Pierre Schaeffer, Sound Objects and the Phenomenological Reduction,” Organised Sound 12/1 (Spring 2007): 15–24, with permission rom Cambridge University Press; and 12/1 “Acousmatic Fabrications: Les Paul and the Les L es Paulverizer, Paulveriz er,” Jou Journal rnal o Visual Visual Cultu Culture re 10/2 (August 2011): 212–231, with permission rom SAGE. For permission to reproduce images, I thank Sean Roderick and Universal Universal Music Enterprises, a Division o UMG Recordings, Inc., Annie Segan and the Arthur Rothstein Archive, Te Yale University Library Librar y, Photoest NYC and Miranda Sarjeant at Corbis Images. Additional research support was unded by the Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship in Music at Columbia University University,, Yale Yale University’s Morse Fellowship and the Samuel and Ronnie Heyman Prize or Outstanding Scholarly Publication or Research. And, as always, there is the amazing Adrienne. Tis book is dedicated to you.
Sound Unseen
Introduction
About an hour’s hour’s drive rom New Haven lies a small village vil lage near East Haddam Hadd am with an unusual name, Moodus. Derived rom the Wangunk term “Machemoodus,” meaning “Place o Noises,” Moodus possesses a peculiar soundmark. 1 Since the time o the Native Americans, residents o the area have keenly attended to the distinctive sound o tremors and underground rumblings that emanate rom a cave located near Mt. om. Tese sounds have come to be collectively known as the “Moodus noises,” and it probably saeand to say t hat no Connecticut phenome that phenomenon non has inspired more curiosity,is speculation, marvel. New Englanders have written many accounts o the Moodus noises. Te earliest, rom settlement days, reported that the Wangunks heard the voices o their gods in the rumblings and tremors. Mt. om was a site o divination and, according to olklorist Odell Shepard, those who lived in its proximity had “special access to the Divine.” In the noises, the Wangunks “heard the immediate voice o the good spirit Kiehtan and also the rage o Hobbamock.”2 Rev. Stephen Hosmore, the first minister o East Haddam, confirms this view in a letter rom 1728. “I was inormed,” Hosmore wrote, “that, many years past, an old Indian was asked, What was the reason o the noises in this place? o which he replied, that the Indian’s God was very angry because Englishman’s God was come here.”3 Hosmore’s letter also describes the nature and duration o the noises. Not only had he heard them, their presence had been “observed or more than thirty years” by settlers in the region. His vivid description is worth repeating: Whether it be fire or air distressed in the subterraneous caverns caverns o the earth, cannot be known; or there is no eruption, no explosion perceptible, but by sounds and tremors, which sometimes are very earul and dreadul. I have mysel heard eight or ten sounds successively, and imitating small arms, in the space o five minutes. I have, I suppose, heard several hundreds o them within twenty years; some more, some less terrible. Sometimes we have heard them almost every day, and great numbers o them in the space o a year. Ofen times I have observed them to be coming down rom the north, imitating slow thunder, thunder, until the sound s ound came near or right under, and then there seemed to be a breaking like the noise o a cannon shot, or severe thunder, which shakes the houses, and all that is in them. . . . Now whether there be anything diabolical in these things, I know not;
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but this I know, know, that God Almighty is to be seen and trembled at, in what has been b een ofen heard among us.”4 According to historian Richard Cullen Rath, both Native American and European settlers in early America understood natural sounds as corresponding to animate sources, “as bridges between visible and equally real invisible worlds.” 5 Te thundering sounds emanating rom Moodus could be heard by both groups as “made by some great spiritual being.” Although the religious belies o the Native Americans and European settlers led to divergent attributions concerning the divinities heard in the noises, Rath notes that this entire complex complex o animate natural sound was challenged by a shif in EuropeanEuropean-American American soundways in the 18th century century.. Due, in part, to the rise o natural scientific inquiry, modern listeners, unlike their 17th-century counterparts, attributed many supernatural eatures o the natural soundscape to more worldly causes.6 Yet, superstition persisted alongside scientific inquiry well into the 18th century. Teories concerning the noises ofen embellished natural events with ominous orces and supernatural causes. One o the stranger accounts appears in the Connecticut Gazette rom August 20, 1790. It describes the legend o Dr. Steel, a mysterious visitor drawn to Moodus by the dark enigma o the noises: Various have been the conjectures concerning the cause o these earthquakes or Moodus noises, as they are called. Te ollowing account has gained credit with many persons—It persons—It is reported that between 20 and 30 years ago, a transient person came to this town, who called himsel Dr. Steel, rom Great Britain, who having had inormation respecting these noises, made critical observations at different times and in different places, till at length he dug up two pearls o great value, which he called Carbuncles . . . and that he told people the noise would be discontinued or many years, as he had taken away their cause; but as he had discovered others in miniature, they would be again heard in process o time. Te best evidence o the authenticity o this story is that t hat it has happened agreeably agreeably to his prophecy. Te noises did cease or many years, and have again been heard or two to three years past, and they increase—three shocks have been elt in a short space, one o which, according to a late paper, was elt at New London, though it was by the account much more considerable in this and the adjacent activity.7 Like the removal o a growth or tumor that would improve the health o a patient, removal o the carbuncles would make the noises cease, but only temporarily. As ate would have it, a large tremor shook the region the ollowing May. Its effects were elt as ar as New York and Boston.8 While the tremor helped to legitimate Dr. Steel’s prophecy in the minds o credulous residents, the validity o his reasoning became ar less important than the entertaining story itsel. Te alchemical Dr. Steel and his discovery o mysterious carbuncles became a standard part o local olklore, inspir9
ingInnumerous numerou stories, poems, andtheory, ballads.less eccentric explanations o the contrasts legends, to Dr. Steel’s carbuncular Moodus noises vied or legitimacy during the 19th century. In 1836, John Warner Barber, the Connecticut historian, offered a theory: “the cause o these noises is
explained by some to be mineral or chemical combinations, at a depth o many
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thousand eet beneath the surace o the earth.” 10 Barber’s explanation was likely influenced by chemical experiments with reactive sulur and iron mixtures that were common at the time.11 In addition, Barber included a description descr iption o the sound, reported to him by a local resident: “It appeared appeared to this person as though a stone o a large body ell, underneath the ground, directly under his eet, and grated down to a considerable distance in the depths below.”12 Soon afer, in 1841, Barber’s theory was challenged by a group o Wesleyan proessors. Arguing that an explosion o mineral compounds could not produce an agitation large enough to generate tremors o the size associated with the Moodus noises, they proposed a different hypothesis: electricity. Interruptions in the natural flow o electricity in the Earth’s crust would be adequate to produce the devastations and tremors associated with the noises. I electrical orces could rattle the skies in the orm o thunder and lightning, the same phenomenon could perhaps explain the noises’ powerul underground rumblings and quakings.13 By the turn o the 20th century, William North Rice, a proessor o geology at Wesleyan, attributed the noises to minor seismic activity: “Te noises are simply small earthquakes, such as are requent in many regions o greatly disturbed metamorphic strata. . . . Te rocks are apt to be in a state o strain or tension, which will rom time to time produce such slight vibratory movements as are heard and elt in the Moodus noises.”14 Proessor Rice’s successor at Wesleyan, Wilbur Garland Foye, developed Rice’s theory, attributing the cause o the small quakes to ongoing read justments justmen ts o Connecticut’s Connecticut’s rocky crust afer the glacial period.15 Te slow process o glacial retreat released the pressure and strain on the crust underneath, leading to occasional shifs o rock masses near the surace. Foye’s hypothesis received some confirmation during the construction o Route 11, about 20 miles east o Moodus. Holes drilled into the bedrock revealed shifing and thrusting consistent with Foye’s explanations, although here the release o stress was due to manmade disturbances o the bedrock, not natural orces.16 A ar cry rom the dreadul rage o Hobbamock, “Te Moodusites o today listen to the noises with greater equanimity,” writes C. F. Price, “because science has solved the mystery.”17 And yet, when they rumble, they still have the power to shake such confidence. While I was writing this book, bo ok, the noises sounded again. On the evening o March 23, 2011, a loud boom rattled East Haddam and shook houses in the vicinity o Moodus. Te sound was thought by many to be an explosion. More than 30 firefighters searched the village and its surroundings or the source o the blast, but ound nothing. Craig Mansfield, East Haddam’s emergency management director, began to suspect that it was simply the Moodus noises. “You hear old-timers talk about eeling their house shake and hearing loud groans,” said Mansfield, “but in all my 23 years with the town, I’ve never experienced anything like this.” Te next morning, the U.S. U.S. Geological Survey confirmed c onfirmed that a 1.3 magnitude earthquake had struck the region. No damage was reported.18 Te Moodus noises acousmatic Strictly speaking, they fit the standarda definition o the term,arecited by Pierresounds. Schaeffer and others: “Acousmatic, adjective: sound that one hears without seeing what causes it.” 19 Te cause o the noises— whether seismic, chemical, carbuncular, or divine—remains unseen; its sound is
an audible trace o a source that is invisible to the listener. Yet, aside rom a ew
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vivid descriptions o the sounds themselves, themselves, discussions o the Moodus noises (mine included) tend to emphasize two notable eatures. First, most accounts ocus on speculation concerning the source o the sound through the causal ascriptions that historical listeners have have made. Because B ecause the source o the t he noises remains obscure, the desire to uncover it generates much o the interest in the sounds themselves. Second, many accounts ocus on the various effects the noises have wrought on auditors. error, curiosity, bemusement, awe, theophany, wonder—listeners have experienced these eelings, and more, beore the noises. Yet, these two aspects o the Moodus noises—concern with the source o the sound and its effects on the listener—do not squarely align with the use to which Pierre Schaeffer, and the tradition o those directly influenced by him, deployed acousmatic sound. While the canonical account o acousmatic sound is presented in Schaeffer’s massive raité des objets musicaux , Michel Chion summarized many o Schaeffer’s findings in his authorized Guide des objets sonores. Te Guide provides a synoptic and perspicuous account o Schaeffer’s thought by reorganizing his ideas into topical headings. Here is Chion’s very first entry: 1) Acousmatic: a rare word, derived rom the Greek, and defined in the dictionary as: adjective, adjec tive, indicating a sound that one hears without without seeing what causes it. Te word was taken up again by Pierre Schaeffer and Jérôme Peignot to describe an experience which is very common today but whose consequences are more or less unrecognized, consisting o hearing sounds with no visible cause on the radio, records, telephone, tape recorder etc. Acousmatic listening is the opposite o direct listening, which is the “natural” situation where sound sources are present and visible. Te acousmatic situation changes the way we hear. By isolating the sound rom the “audiovisual complex” to which it initially belonged, it creates avorable conditions or reduced listening which concentrates on the sound or its own sake, as sound object, independently o its causes or its meaning (although reduced listening can also take place, but with greater difficulty, in a direct listening situation). 20 Tere are three important aspects to consider. First, Chion notes a relationship between the acousmatic experience o sound, which is “very common today,” and the ubiquitous presence o modern orms o audio technology, in particular those designed or sound transmission, inscription, storage, and reproduction. Unlike the rare Moodus noises, acousmatic sound is here described as an everyday phenomenon, a result o our immersion in sound flooding rom elevators, radios, cars, computers, and stereos. However, it would be incorrect to claim that the acousmatic experience o sound originates in modern audio technology. Schaeffer argued that the originary experience o acousmatic sound could be traced back to the school o Pythagoras. Etymologically, the term “acousmatic” reers to a group o Pythagorean disciples known as the akousmatikoi—literally the “listeners” or “auditors”—who, as legend hasPythagoras it, heard theused philosopher rom behind crom urtain veil. According to Chion, the veil tolecture draw attention awaya curtain hisorphysical appearance and toward the meaning o his discourse.21 Te central role o the Pythagorean veil in Schaefferian tradition blocks the causal identification identification o acousmatic experi-
ence with modern audio technology in order to make a more striking claim. Modern
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audio technology does not create acousmatic experience; rather, rather, acousmatic experience, first discovered in the t he Pythagorean context, creates the conditions or modern audio technology. Radio, records, the telephone, and the tape recorder exist within the horizon first opened by the Pythagorean veil. Second, Chion emphasizes the relationship between acousmatic experience and the partition o the t he sensorium. Acousmatic Acousmatic experience entails the “isolation “ isolation o sound rom the ‘audiovisual’ complex.” Hearing is separated rom seeing (and the rest o the sensory modalities) and studied or its own sake. Tis separation is, as Schaeffer calls it, “anti-natural.” It requires effort to divide the sensorium given its “natural” intersensorial condition, where multiple senses simultaneously and cooperatively provide inormation about the environment. According to Chion, one “effect o the acousmatic situation” is that “sight and hearing are dissociated, encouraging listening to sound orms or themselves (and hence, to the sound object).”22 Te acousmatic experience o sound allows a listener to attend to the sound itsel, apart rom its causes, sources, and connections to the t he environment. environment. Just as the Pythagorean veil directed the attention o the disciples onto the meaning o the master’s discourse, the isolation o hearing rom seeing in the acousmatic experience directs the listener’s attention toward the sound as such. It allows a listener to grasp the sound itsel as a “sound object,” a term about which I have much to say in the ollowing chapters. It also affords a special mode o listening that is ocused entirely on the sound object, known as “reduced listening.” Tird, Chion claims that reduced listening is acilitated when the source o the sound is unseen or hidden, what he calls “indirect listening.” However, reduced listening can also take place, albeit with more difficulty, in a “situation where sound sources are present and visible,” called “direct listening.” What is the relationship between reduced listening and the acousmatic experience (or “indirect listening”)? Although there has been much conusion about the precise relationship o these two terms in the discourse on acousmatic sound, the two should be distinguished. By separating a sound rom its (visible) source or cause, the acousmatic experience o sound acilitates reduced listening; however, however, reduced listening can occur in situations where sources are visible and presen present—situa t—situations tions that are not, strictly speaking, acousmatic. Tis distinction is not always preserved, and many writers on acousmatic experience treat the terms synonymously. For instance, the philosopher Roger Scruton, in his Aes Aesthetics thetics o Music Music, claims that when listening to music, “we spontaneously detach the sound rom the circumstances o its production, and attend to it as it is in itsel: this, the ‘acousmatic’ experience o sound, is ortified by recording and broadcasting, which completes the severance o sound rom its cause that has already begun in the concert hall. . . . Te acousmatic experience o sound is precisely what is exploited by the art o music.”23 Even in the direct listening situation o the concert hall, Scruton claims that we are not attending to the source o the sound (this clarinet, that trumpet). trumpet). Rather R ather,, the musical listener listens to an order that is distinct rom the material world o causes, a reduced listening to musical tones irreducible to their sources. Chion’s Schaefferian account o acousmatic sound can be summarized under three
headings: technology, the division o the sensorium, and reduced listening. Te acousmatic experience is encountered in certain orms o ancient and modern
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technology (Pythagorea (Pyt hagorean n veil, architectu architectural ral screen, s creen, tape recorder recorder,, loudspeaker, etc.) that divide hearing rom the rest o the sensorium. Tis division encourages reduced listening—a way o attending aesthetically to sounds as such, apart rom their worldly causes. Te purpose o the acousmatic experience in the Schaefferian tradition is, as Chion says, to “change the way we hear,” to draw attention away rom the source o the sound (whether visually present or not) and onto its intrinsic audible properties. Te source o the sound is severed rom its audible effects, so that the latter can be studied separately, separately, placed into morphological categories or systematically integrated into musical compositions. Te separation o the senses is purposive, a way o discarding the sonic source in order to orient attention toward aesthetically appreciated sonic effects alone. While the Moodus noises are acousmatic sounds, according to the standard definition o the term, they are not typically listened to or their aesthetic properties. I anything, their sonic properties, like those described in Hosmore’s letter, are ultimately used to provide clues about the potential source o the sound. Te natural conditions at Moodus make the source o the noises invisible to a listener and thus aid in splitting the sensorium, creating an experience o hearing without seeing. Yet, the aesthetic orientation toward the sound o the t he noises does not ollow ollow.. In a case like the Moodus noises, an aesthetic orientation toward their sound is not the relevant mode o audition. Yet, I would argue that the acousmatic character o the sounds matters,, in that the enigma o their source—its invisibility matters invisibility and uncertainty—is a central eature o the experience. Tere are many cases, like the Moodus noises, where such sounds are neither heard primarily as aesthetic objects, nor capable o being made intelligible in aesthetic terms. For instance, the aesthetic orientation cannot address the central role that acousmatic sounds have played in Judeo-Christian religion, rom the invisible voice o the Jewish Jewish God to the Catholic conessional. Nor can this aesthetic orientaorientation account or the role played by acousmatic sounds in psychoanalysis; the psychic effect o the disembodied, acousmatic voice has not only contributed to the spatial arrangement o the analytic session (where, in the amous photos o Freud’s office, the analyst is tucked away rom the analysand’s view), the position o the superego in Freud’s late topographical models, and the development o psychoanalytic technique, but, in the orm o the “sonorous envelope” (the prenatal experience o sound in the mother’s womb), is claimed to play a central role in the ormation o the sub ject.24 Nor can the aesthetic orientation deal with the t he ull employment o acousmatic acousmatic sounds in the produ production ction and perormanc perormancee o music. Tis would include not only the positioning o singing nuns behind grilles and grates during the era o clausura, the setting o offstage voices and instruments in opera to produce divine effects, or the use o darkened auditoriums to produce quasi-religious effects in German Dunkelkonzerte or Georg Friedrich Haas’s contemporary compositions, but also the application o architectural techniques to hide the orchestra at Bayreuth and elsewhere.25 Nor can the aesthetic orientation make sense o the way that acousmatic sounds have comeacousmêtre to be a topic concernAbbate’s in the humanities: rom Chion’s invention o the cinematic ; too Carolyn analysis o acousmatic sounds that conjure unheard, ineffable, metaphysical events; to Mladen Dolar and Slavoj Žižek’s
investigation o the acousmatic voice as a orm o social interpellation; to recent work in literary studies—topics like “acousmatic blackness” or the use o acousmatic
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sound in Ralph Ellison’s work—which sit at the nexus o critical race theory and sound studies.26 o understand the significance o acousmatic sound in these various domains, we must listen to them anew. While, undoubtedly, the aesthetic orientation toward acousmatic sound has contributed contributed to historical and current practices o musical listening, exclusive exclusive ocus on it limits our ability to consider acousmatic listening—that is, the experience o acousmatic sound—as a cultural practice. In this book, I attempt attempt to theorize acousmatic sound differently. As an alternative to the aesthetic approach to acousmatic sound, I take the position that acousmatic listening is a shared, intersubjective practice o attending to musical and nonmusical sounds, a way o listening to the soundscape that is cultivated when the source o sounds is beyond the horizon o visibility, uncertain, underdetermined, bracketed, or willully and imaginatively suspended. Te term “acousmatic “acousmatic listening” should be understood as a rubric intended to capture a set o historically situated strategies and techniques or listening to sounds unseen. Tus, there is a double entendre in the subtitle o this book. Instead o a book that describes the use o acousmatic sound in compositional and aesthetic terms (i.e., a book on the theory and practice o “acousmatic music”), this book is written to develop a theory o acousmatic listening as a historical and cultural practice, one with clearly defined characteristics.27 o begin moving in this direction, I present a ew central propositions that I develop in the chapters that ollow. While I am aware that I must orgo offering the kind o substantial evidence and argumentation or these propositions provided later in the text, I hope that they will serve as points o orientation orientation or the reader and offer clear contrasts with the Schaefferian tradition o acousmatic sound. 1. I work with a model o sound that has three necessary components: source, source, cause, and effect. Sounds, as we know, only occur when one object activates or excites another. another. For instance, a rosined bow is rubbed r ubbed against a string or cymbal; air is orced across a cane reed or a vocal tract (then (t hen shaped by a mouth, tongue, and teeth); or a raindrop collides with a windowpane. Te interaction o a source (cymbal, reed, vocal tract, oranwindowpane) cause (rosined bow, movingstring, air, raindrop) produces audible effect.with We acan ormulate this as a proposition: Every sonic effect is the result o the interaction o a source and a cause. Without this interaction, there is no emission o sound. 28 2. Just because a sonic effect is the result o an interaction o a source and a cause does not entail that a listener is certain cert ain about the source and cause based on hearing the sonic effect alone. ypically, the environmental situation will aid in determining the source and cause o the sound.29 But, there might be cases where I cannot determine the source rom the effect, or the effect is ambiguous. For instance, as I walk across a college campus, I might hear various chirps rom above, which I know come rom rom birds in the trees, although I may not be able to see them through the oliage. Normally, I have no worries about making such inerences. perhaps perhaps, , as I walk past art school, hearrom a chirp that sounds slightlyBut, amiss. It is possible that thethe chirp I hear isI not a bird, but rom a little electronic circuit hidden in a tree—a clever piece o
sound art—designed to imitate the sound o a bird.30 I I spot a loudspeaker tucked away in the tree, near the location loc ation rom which the sound emanates,
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I will likely be satisfied that I have discovered discovered the source o the sound. Te same thing happens i I see a bird suddenly fly away rom the location o the sound. Although one might be tempted to treat this example hyperbolically, as a case o global skepticism—and thereby immediately immediately assert that I cannot know anything about the world because it may always turn out to be otherwise than what I expected—I draw a much more humble humble conclusion. An auditory effect, apart rom rom the environmental environmental situation in which it is located and our ability to explore that situation with all our senses, is ofen insufficient or determining its cause. o ormulate a second proposition: Te sonic effect, by itsel, underdetermines its source and cause. 3. Te underdetermination underdetermination o source and cause motivates a reification o the sonic effect. By bracketing an effect rom rom its source and cause, I transorm a sound rom an event into an object. Te autonomy o a sonic effect is constituted only when the gap between the effect and its source or cause is disregarded. In the aesthetic orientation o acousmatic sound, that is precisely the point. Te autonomous sound, beref o its source, is then integrated into the virtual world o musical composition; shedding its source, it can ully participate in the virtual connection o tone to tone, in the metaphorical gravity o tonal-harmonic organization, or in the expres expressive sive analogies o musical sound with emotional states. Te auto autonomous nomous sonic effect becomes a sound object. At the same time, there is a countervailing tendency, tendency, perhaps ineluctable, to find a source or autonomous sonic effects.31 Steven Connor argues that “human beings in many different cultural settings find the experience o a sourceless sound uncomortable, and the experience o a sourceles s ourcelesss voice intolerable . . . the disembodie dis embodiedd voice must be habited in a plausible body.” Te autonomous sound or voice is supplemented with an imaginary body. Connor reers to this phenomenon as the vocalic body , the idea o “a surrogate or secondary body, a projection o a new way o having or being a body, ormed and sustained out o the autonomous operations o the voice.”32 For example, we could say that the Wangunks gave a vocalic body to to the Moodus noises by imagining themrom to be b ethe thevoice voicesand o generalize Kiehtan orConnor’s Hobbamock. Furthermor can move away termFurthermore, by reerringe,towe the production o a sonic body elicited elicited by acousmatic sound. A third proposition: Acousmatic sounds encourage the imaginativ imaginativee projection o a sonic body . 4. I acousmatic listening listening is a practice, then it should be possible to trace its history.. In the tory t he Schaefferian tradition, there have been attempts to talk about the history o acousmatic sound beore, yet they have all oundered on the same methodological problem: Te history o acousmatic sound has been mistaken or a history o the word “acousmatic.” Given the rarity o this word, one ends up with only a piecemeal and diffuse historical account. One reason against privileging the presence o the word “acousmatic” as a central criterion or a historical account is that, I would argue, historical agents have not ofen recognized the extent to which they t hey employed the practice o acousmatic listening. Acousmatic listening, while audible, has not, in all cases, reached a level o explicit audibility , in the sense that it is not always recognized as part o a cul-
ture or style o listening.33 Yet, i one considers acousmatic listening as a practice—that is, a way o listening to the soundscape that is cultivated when the
Introduction
9
source o the sounds is beyond the horizon o visibility, visibility, uncertain, underdetermined, bracketed, or willully and imaginatively imaginatively suspended—it is surely the case that acousmatic listening was alive and well, even in eras when the term “acousmatic” did not exist.34 o write a history o acousmatic listening would then mean to gather significant instances o privileging hearing over seeing, o cultivating situations situations where sounds are detached rom their causal sources, s ources, and o techniques or listening to sounds unseen in order to tell a story stor y about how such practices have affected views about music, the senses, philosophy, and ourselves. Making acousmatic listening explicit should be a priority o any history or theory o the topic. A ourth proposition: Te history o acousmatic sound is not a history o the word “acousmatic.” It is a history o the practice o acousmatic listening. 5. I acousmatic listening listening is a practice, one should be able to talk about its meaning or the way that it conceptually articulates the audible world o those who employ it. While one can indeed talk about the meaning o the t he practice, one should be careul not to treat t reat its meaning like an essence. Te meaning o the practice cannot be specified apart rom the actual context and use to which it is employed. However, this is where its history becomes pertinent—or it allows us to track the replicatio replications ns and propagations o the practice rom rom agent to agent, and thus, to find central cases, c ases, norms, deviations, and patterns. One central, replicated eature o acousmatic listening appears to be that underdetermination o the t he sonic source encourages imaginative supplementation supplementation.. In many cases, the sonic body projected projected onto acousmatic sound is taken to be transcendent. Acousmatic listening is ofen deployed in order to grant auditory access to transcendental spheres, different different in kind rom the purely sonic effect—a way o listening to essence, truth, proundity, ineffability, or interiority. However, we cannot speciy precise the kind o transcendence heard precisely ly the in the sound or the t he exact meaning o the practice without appealing appealing to the specific context, culture, and experience o the agents involved. involved. In act, there is no guarantee that any numbers o agents in the same contexts employ the practice identical ways.acousmatically, Tus, although, at wea can articulate basic tions orin hearing a sound acousmatically cer tain certain point, some a theory o condiacousmatic sound must give way to the social and historical agents who employ it as a practice. Tis leads to my fifh proposition: Te meaning o the practice o acousmatic listening cannot be defined in abstraction rom those who employ it. Finally, a ew words about the organization o this book. As the subtitle indicates, it is conceived as a theory and practice o acousmatic sound. While various chapters may emphasize the history o the practice more than the theory, or vice versa, the book was written in the orm o a continuo continuous us argument, and I think it is best understood in that manner. In part 1, “Te Acousmatic Situation,” I offer a philosophical reading o Schaeffer’s concept o l’acousmatique and its special relationship with l’objet sonore,
the sound object. I outline the development o Schaeffer s thinking, rom the ini tial moments o musique concrète to the mature project o the raité . My ocus is on Schaeffer’s employment o Husserlian phenomenology—in particular his use o
10
INRODUCION
the transcendental reduction, or epoché —to —to define the acousmatic reduction and its privileged object, the sound object. Afer presenting Schaeffer’s theory, I raise a set o objections to be explored in the subsequent chapters: (1) I argue that Schaeffer’s method does not allow him to adequately characterize the history o acousmatic listening; driven by a phenomenological account o history as “originary experience,” Schaeffer’s thinking about music, sound, and technology is ahistorical and mythic; (2) I argue that Schaeffer’s theory does not give adequate consideration to the cause, the source, or even the production o sound; thus, Schaeffer offers a “phantasmagoric” view o musical material, one that occludes its manner o production; (3) I argue that there is an ontological problem in Schaeffer’s characterization o the sonic effect as a sound object. I revisit the history o acousmatic sound in part II, “Interruptions,” by way o a critique o its standard historiography. As noted above, the history o acousmatic sound in the Schaefferian tradition is ofen conounded with a history o the word “acousmatic.” Tis places undue weight on two contexts: the Pythagorean school, with its veil and akousmatikoi (or silent disciples), and the rare French term acousmate. In chapter 2, I investigate the first context by posing a simple question: When and where did the Pythagorean veil first emerge? A patient investigation into the ancient sources reveals a history o the veil (and the acousmatic disciples who sat opposite it) that cannot be reconciled with the Schaefferian account. Tis exposes the mythic use to which the veil has been employed in the Schaefferian tradition and disallows any phenomenological claims about the veil as initiating the originary experience o acousmatic sound. In chapter 3, I investigate the second context, the word acousmate. Again, I pose a simple question: Where did this word come rom and how does it relate to the Pythagorean tradition? Afer describing the context in which the word was coined and first used, I demonstrate that the word originally had nothing to do with the Pythagorean school. Ten, by tracing its dissemination into various contexts—medical, psychological, and literary—I pinpoin pinpointt the moment when Pythagorean and French contexts were first associated. In part III, “Conditions,” I move beyond the Schaefferian tradition and start to sketch account o acousmatic as listening a practice (chapte chapter r 4).anInalternative particular, historical I argue that the history o modern listening acousmatic listenin g is sutured sutur ed to a lineage o musical phantasmagoria phantasmagoria that reaches ruition with the birth o Romanticism, the aesthetics o absolute music, and Wagnerian architectural reorms o the concert hall. I consider a wide variety o evidence: rom Schopenhauer’s use o bodily techniques designed to ready the listener or the experience o music’s disclosure o proound metaphysical truths; to architectural projects (realized and unrealized, rom the grilled galleries o Italian churches to the hidden orchestra at Bayreuth) or perormance spaces where the musician’s body would be partially or entirely obscured in order to preserve music’s transcendental nature rom contamination by empirical sources; to literary and philosophical antasies where absorbed listeners shut their eyes in order to disclose and experience music’s transcendental power. In all cases, the auditory effect is separated rom its source; the latter is phantasmagorically occluded so that the ormer can be taken as transcendent, as
maniesting a virtual or spiritual world separate rom the mundane. Tese claims orm the basis o a set o theoretical conditions about the production o acousmatic phantasmagoria.
Introduction
11
I also argue that these conditions are prolonged in Schaeffer’s phenomenology o the sound object and in his works o musique concrète. But must all musique betwe en chapters 4 and 5, I consider concrète be phantasmagoric? In the interlude between an internal critique o Schaeffer’s work by his pupil, the composer Luc Ferrari. Trough a discussion o his piece Presque rien, I trace how Ferrari breaks the grip o Schaefferian phantasmagoria by sel-consciously emphasizing the materiality o recorded sound and producing an aesthetic situation that encourages reflection upon the affordances o recording devices used in the production o musique concrète. In chapter 5, I develop an alternative alternative theory o acousmatic sound, by way o a close reading o Kaa Ka a’s tale “Te “ Te Burrow.” Extrapolating Extr apolating rom rom Kaa, I advance adv ance arguments or some o the t he central propositions mentioned mentioned above. Tis chapter is the theoretical core o the book. It attempts attempts to rethink the terms o acousmatic sound apart rom the ontology o the sound object. In the t he final sections o chapter 5, I test these t hese arguments arguments and develop their implications against a variety o examples rom music, literature, film, sound studies, and philosophy. In part IV, “Cases,” I continue to test the theory developed in part III. Chapter 6 is a case study o guitarist Les Paul. Te personal motivations behind Paul’s overdubbed recordings, his unusual production and studio techniques, his relentless invention o electronic gadgets, and his challenges with live perormance provide a matrix wherein many o the book’s central themes intersect: technology, recording, subjectivity, identity, underdetermination, the uncanny, the Pythagorean veil, and the separation o the senses. I argue that Paul’s career was shaped by his encounters with acousmatic sound and hone in on a central problem: How can one perorm acousmatic music live while maintaining the underdetermination o the source by the effect that is the hallmark o acousmatic sound? In chapter 7, I ocus on the acousmatic ac ousmatic voice. aking aking my cue rom Slavoj Žižek Žiž ek and Mladen Dolar, who explicitly describe the Lacanian “object voice” as acousmatic, I argue that the acousmatic voice has played an unacknowledged but crucial role in Husserl and Heidegger’s philosophical theories o the voice. Lacanian theorists like ŽižekMore and in Dolar prolong tradition. By in closely Dolar’s A Voice Voi ce and terms o the this theory put orth part reading III, I expose a set o critical Nothing problems and inconsistencies in the Lacanian treatment o the voice. In particular, I argue that Dolar reifies the acousmaticity o the voice, making it into a permanent condition, and that his treatment o the t he acousmatic voice is phantasmagoric, phantasmagoric, masking the technique at play in the psychoanalytic session.
PART ONE
The Acousmatic Acousmatic Situation
1
Pierre Schaeffer Schaeff er,, the Sound Object, and the Acousmatic Reduction
IMPROVISED ONTOLOGY
In 1948, working in the studios o Radiodiffusion Française, Pierre Schaeffer began to keep a set o journals describing his attempt to create a “symphony o noises.” 1 Tese journals, published in 1952 as A la reche recherche rche d’une d’une musique musique concrète, portray Schaeffer’s initial experiments as anything but systematic. Anxious to compose a concrete music yet perpetually per petually dissatisfied, he roves rom conventional conventional instruments to unconventional tools, rom the recording studio to the booth, percussing and sounding object afer object to find a suitable candidate. candidate. Te list o objects is a veritable abécédaire: alarm clocks, bicycle horns, birdcalls, bits o wood, clappers, coconut coconut shells, klaxons, organ pipes, rattles, vibrating metal strips, whirligigs; then recordings o bells, buffer stops, orchestras, piano improvisations, trains, xylophones, and zanzis. Troughout his experiments, Schaeffer remains in the grip o two recurrent desires: a compositional desire to construct music rom rom concrete objects—no matter how unsatisactory the initial results—and a theoretical desire to find a vocabulary, solège, or method upon which to ground such music. In those early days, Schaeffer’s improvised compositional techniques were indissociable rom an improvised ontology, not only in search o a concrete music but a basic theoretical unit upon which to compose such music. One constant in Schaeffer’s work, rom the early days o A la rech recherche erche to his mature raité des objets musicaux and and Solège de l’objet sonore, was his fixation on the word “object.” Alhough the objects kept shifing, the term “object” persisted like an idée fixe. Te trajectory o the term over the course o 1948 is revealing. In March, an “object” reers to a physical-material thing—a source or the production o sound: “Back in Paris I have started to collect objects. I have a ‘Symphony o noises’ in mind mind.. . . .”2 By April, the object has acquired a modifier. Now a “sound object,” it still reers to the physical-material source and not the effect o the sound: “I am amongst the turn-tables, tur n-tables, the mixer, the potentiometers potentiom eters . . . I operate through t hrough intermediaries. I no longer manipulate sound objects mysel. I listen to their effect through
the microphone.”3 In early May, now working with recordings o trains made at the Batignolles station in addition to stock recordings, the sound object is supplemented with a new
16
HE ACOU SMAIC SIUAION
term, the “sound ragment.” Unlike the physical-material sound object, a sound ragment designates a bit o recorded sound, the “effect” emitted rom a sound object and engraved into a spiral groove: I lower the pick-up arm as one rhythmic group starts. I raise it just as it ends, I link it with another and so on. How powerul our imagination is! When in our minds we pick out a certain rhythmic or melodic outline in a sound ragment like this, we think we have its musical element.4 A ew days later, Schaeffer exploits the infinite repeatability o the ragment to distinguish it rom the sound object, the physical-material cause. “Repeat the same sound ragment twice: there is no longer event, but music.” 5 Repetition musicalizes the sound ragment by removing the dramatic and anecdotal traces o its original causal context. Identiying the sound ragment was an important step in breaking the grip o the physical-causal physical-ca usal source. Te recorded ragment, not the physical source, acquired the plasticity o compositional material. By removing the attack rom a recording o a bell, Schaeffer noted, “the bell becomes an oboe sound.”6 Similarly, “i I compensate or thethe drop in intensityat with potentiometer, I geto athe drawn-out and coucan 7 Te move continuation will.”the transormations “cut bell,”sound or cloche pée, produced unexpected auditory results and revealed the potential o recorded sounds when considered separately rom their physical-causal sources. By May 15th, Schaeffer’s work with both bells and trains led to a generic conclusion about the sound ragment. “For the ‘concrete’ musician there is no difference between the cut bell and the piece o train: they are ‘sound ragments.’ ” 8 Te sound ragment reduces the specific difference o the physical-material source to the generality o the sample. Yet, in the very same journal entry, the “sound object” returns, albeit transormed, to reassert its priority. priority. Schaeffer S chaeffer writes: I have coined the term Musi Musique que Concrète Concrète or this commitment to compose with materials taken rom “given” experimental sound in order to emphasize our dependence, no longer on preconceived sound abstractions, but on sound ragments that exist in reality, and that are considered as discrete and complete sound objects, even i and above all when they do not fit in with the elementary definitions o music theory.9 Te sound object can no longer be understood as the material-physical material-physical cause o the t he sound in distinction to the effect captured on disc. In Schaeffer’s improvised ontology, the sound object has leaprogged over the ragment to assume a new significance. More than simply a sample or bit o recorded sound, the sound object now suggestively appears to designate something “discrete and complete,” the ruit o a mode o “considering” “considering” or listening to the ragment torn rom the t he whole. It seems to be the disclosure o a minimal unit o heard sound upon which to ground the project
o musique concrète, a novel discovery discover y that cannot be b e assimilated into “music theory theor y.” Despite the constant drif o Schaeffer’s terminology over the course o 1948, the claim that a sound object is inassimilable into music theory is intriguing. Te earliest works o musique concrète were made using special phonograph discs with a
Pierre Schaeffer, the Sound Object, and the Acousmatic Reduction
17
locked or closed groove (sillon ermé ) to create repetitive units. Eventually, these discs were replaced with magnetic tape, where small loops or isolated segments would undergo electronic processing or be repeated without variations. variations. Tese small pieces o recorded sound, which ofen underwent elaborate manipulation, filtering, signal processing, and editing, acted as stand-ins or the motive, the smallest musical gestalt deployed to organize the surace o musical works. However, these bits o sound radically the motive, in thatontological composition with sound objectswere displaced the discontinuous note or tone aswith music’s undamental unit. By choosing to identiy his practice as musique concrète, Schaeffer was trying to differentiate his approach rom traditional practices o musical composition bound to the note.10 Abstract music, which Schaeffer contrasted with musique concrète, was music that began with the note, organized its musical thinking in terms o the note, and then draped it in the guise o acoustic or electronic sound. Abstract music gave the ideal note a sonorous body through the realization o scores by perormers or engineers. It It began silently in the head and ended in the vibrating garment garment o sound. German elektronische Musik, a child o serialism, was just such an abstract music. With its “rules . . . ormulated like l ike an algebra, algebr a,” Schaeffer Scha effer disparagingly disparag ingly reerred reer red to it as “music a priori.”11 Concrete music was to be the exact opposite— opposite—aa music that began with recordedvalues. rom the and sought to perceive in themthe (and rom sounds them) musical Teworld emphasis was placed on listening; earabstract would have to train itsel to hear these new musical values unique to the sonic materials deployed. Te “sound object,” object,” first conceived conc eived in the improvised ontology o Schaeffer’s experiments in the spring o 1948, would continue to undergo modification and explication or the next two decades—but it always retained the eatures o discreteness and completeness that characterized its initial leap ahead o the sound ragment. 12 In explicating and clariying his theory o the sound object, Schaeffer introduced the concept o the acousmatic. “Te sound object,” Schaeffer tersely states, “is never revealed clearly except in the acousmatic experience.” 13 In what ollows, I try to show why this is indeed the case. o do so, I will explicate Schaeffer’s mature theory o acousmatic experience, the sound object, and reduced listening (écoute réduite) as presented presen ted in the raité des objets musicaux . Tis theory is cast in explicitly phenomenological terms, and I argue that Schaeffer’s phenomenology is much closer to Husserl than it is to Schaeffer’s French contemporary, Maurice Merleau-Ponty.14 For without a good understanding o the Husserlian preoccupations o Schaeffer’s work, one cannot adequately characterize the relationship between acousmatic experience, the sound object, and reduced listening. Once those various parts o Schaeffer’s maturee theory have been distinctly separated, matur s eparated, the theory and practice o acousmatic listening—the listening— the real ocus o intere interest st in this book—can b ook—can begin to be b e addressed. DOING AND KNOWING
In 1966, afer 15 years o work, Pierre Schaeffer published the raité des objets musi-
caux . Te first draf, which was stolen along with Schaeffer’s luggage in urin, had been rewritten our times in those 15 years. According to Schaeffer, the text had become a veritable “thinking machine.”15 Te raité , which is extraordinarily broad in scope, represents the summation o Schaeffer’s research into musique concrète,
18
HE ACOU SMAIC SIUAION
containing reflections on the aesthetics o music, views on the nature o musical instruments and electronic studio tools, psychoacoustic findings, typologies and morphologies o sound, pedagogical recommenda recommendations, tions, anthropological and ethnological considerations o the origins o music, and a bevy o other topics too numer numer-ous to mention here. Troughout the text, phenomenology is employed not merely as a method, but also, and more importantly, as a kind o commitment that may have indeed been present rom the very beginning, only coming into ocus slowly and patiently. In the raité , Schaeffer writes, “For years, we ofen did phenomenology without knowing it, which is much better than . . . talking about phenomenology phenomenology without practicing it.”16 Rather than simply clinching Schaeffer’s avocation or phenomenology, this suggestive sentence opens a series o questions about the relationship between phenomenology and Schaeffer’s work as a theorist and composer. I doing phenomenology is distinct rom knowing it, how did Schaeffer’s actions compare with his method? When Schaeffer began to realize that what he was doing was phenomenology, in what ways did this realization alter his practice? Considering the varieties o phenomenology available to Schaeffer—Husserlian, Heideggerian, Sartrean, Merleau-Pontian—it is not trivial to inquire about what kind o phenomenology Schaeffer was unknowingly doing. More provocative than illuminating, Schaeffer’s tantalizing sentence needs urther urt her qualification. Makis Solomos argues that Schaeffer’s style o phenomenology is much closer to Merleau-Ponty than Husserl, that the Phenomenology o Perception played a “capital role” in introducing Schaeffer to phenomenology, “offering an immediate and quasi-poetic introduction” to the discipline.17 Indeed, striking similarities can be ound between the Phenomenology and the raité . For example, Merleau-Ponty writes, “o “o return to the things themselves is to return to that world which precedes knowledge”; knowledge ”; was this not also the world to which Schaeffer sought to return, a world o concrete sounds prior to the signification and sense that such sounds accrued through musical and cultural usage?18 Do we not hear the echo o Merleau-Ponty’s view that “we shall find in ourselv ourselves, es, and nowhere else, the unity o and the true meaning o phenomenology” in Schaeffer’s claim that “man describes himsel to 19 man, in the language o things”? Like the gestalt figures that litter the pages o Merleau-Ponty’s text, are we not supposed to find in Schaeffer’s explorations o the locked groove (sillon ermé ) and the cut bell ( cloche coupée) small figurations o a much larger field—namely, a field o listening understood not simply as the physiological response to an auditory stimulus but as a field o sound objects intentionally constituted by the subject through various modes o listening? Even in Schaeffer’s tantalizing sentence, one can sense him standing in the ootprints o Merleau-Ponty, who amously proclaimed “that “that phenomenology can be practiced and identified as a manner or style o thinking, that it existed as a movement beore arriving at complete awareness o itsel as a philosophy.”20 Te striking similarities cannot be discounted. But such similarities do not tell
the whole story o Schaeffer s relationship to phenomenology. Although Solomos is correct to assert that Phenomenology o Perception introduced Schaeffer and others o his generation to phenomenology, perhaps even giving it a general orientation and persuasive power, I would argue that Schaeffer’s reading o Husserl’s texts— Ideas, Formal and ranscendental Logic, and the Cartesian Meditations—was more
Pierre Schaeffer, the Sound Object, and the Acousmatic Reduction
19
significant in influencing his actual phenomenological practice. Troughout the raité , Schaeffer remains quite close to the letter o Husserlian phenomenological orthodoxy, ofen calling upon it when trying to articulate his views on the sound object, reduced listening, and the acousmatic field. Consistently, Schaeffer deploys techniques that are Husserlian in character: the transcendental-phenomenological reduction, the eidetic reduction, imaginative ree variation, and the reactivation o 21
originary experience. In chapter 15 o the raité, entitled “Objects and Structures,” Schaeffer explicitly claims his phenomenological inheritance. Te tantalizing sentence about knowing and doing phenomenology opens a subsection on “Te transcendence o the t he object.” Te transcendent object addressed here is, indeed, the sound object, first identified in the early days o musique concrète. But afer encountering Husserl’s theory o objects, Schaeffer realized that the sound object, first introduced in the improvised ontology o In Search o a Concrete Music, could be b e systematically defined. According According to Schaeffer, “only afer the act did we recognize a conception o the object which has been presupposed by our research, [a conception] circumscribed by Edmund Husserl with a heroic demand or precision to which we are ar rom claiming.” 22 Explicitly retrospective, the theory o the sound object presented in the raité is intended to show how Schaeffer’s first intuitions about the sound object were congruent with the phenomenological theory o objects. So what is Husserl’s conception o the object? An object must not be mistaken or an entity. In everyday parlance, these two terms are ofen synonymous, but there is an important distinction to be made. An entity reers to an externally existent thing. An object only comes into being when it is cognized, co gnized, when it is something capable o being apprehended apprehended by a subject. One could imagine a world ull o material entities, but it would lack objects unless a subject was to be conscious o them. Moreover, i the consciousness o the subject were simply a stream o distinct experiences, each unsynthesized and disconnected rom the last, no object would emerge rom that maniold.23 Husserl is interested interested in the t he necessary condition c onditionss under which objects are possible. One necessary condition is that there be a subject available to cognize them. A actor motivating Husserl’s theory o objects is his desire to find a single ontology that covers not only objects presen presented ted in sensuous perception but also logical and mathematical objects, which cannot be directly, sensuously perceived. A centaur, a proposition, or a ormula is as much o an object or Husserl as a horse or a man. Te difference between the centaur and the horse depends on its mode o presentation. While the ormer cannot be b e given in the mode o direct sensuou s ensuouss presentation—we presentation—we cannot vividly see a real centaur as we can see a horse standing in a field—it is available to the subject in imagination. Perception, desires, memory, antasy, and imagination are all considered different modes o presenting objects to a subject. Whether I perceive a man walking across the street, recollect it later that day, day, or use him as an example in a mathematical word problem, the objectivity o the object remains the same, regardless o the object’s mode o presentation. Moreover, whether or not enti24
ties exist—they might indeed—is irrelevant to Husserl s investigation. Afer citing Husserl’s “conception o the object,” Schaeffer poses a question about the objectivity o the object. “Wha “Whatt are the conditions which permit us, as well as others, the recognition o objectivity ?” ?”25 Schaeffer is really asking two questions. First, under what conditions can an object be identified? Second, how is it that objects can
20
HE ACOU SMAIC SIUAION
be intersubjective? In regard to the first question, Schaeffer cites “a well-known passage” rom Ideas, where Husserl uses the example o a table to explain the difference between an entity and an object. 26 Let us start with an example. Constantly seeing this table and meanwhile walking around it, changing my position in space in whatever way, I have continually consciousness o this oneTe identical table as actually existing person” and the remaining quite unchanged. table-perception, however, is a “in continually changing one; it is a continuity o changing perceptions. I close my eyes. My other senses have no relation to the table. Now I have no perception o it. I open my eyes; and I have the perception again. Te perception? Let us be more precise. Returning, it is not, under any circumstances, individually the same. Only the table is the same, intended to as the same s ame in the synthetical consciousness which connects the t he new perception with the memory memory.. . . . Te perception itsel, however, however, is what it is in the continuous flux o consciousness and is itsel a continuous flux: continually the perceptual Now changes into the enduring consciousness o the Just-Past and simultaneously a new Now lights up, etc. Te perceived thing in general, and all its parts, aspects, and phases . . . are necessarily transcendent to the perception.27 Te table is always seen rom some particular perspective. From no single point are all parts o the table visible simultaneously. In order to see those parts that are invisible rom this location, I must circle around to the backside o the table; but rom location, I can no longer behold what I saw rom this location. Perceptually, I am that location, presented with a stream o various perspectives, each unique and distinct rom the last. Husserl reers to this stream o perspectival views as a series o “adumbrations” ( Abschattu Abschattungen ngen). How is the table ever known as the same? s ame? I we take the series ser ies o adumbrations as such, we have only a series o multiple acts o consciousness—each registering the look o the table at a particular place and time, rom a certain vantage point, or under specific illumination. Yet, nothing immanent to the stream o adumbrations unifies them. Husserl argues that the identity o the object is provided through an act o consciousness, which synthesizes the stream o adumbrations. As each new percept is connected to the one just past and grasped as a whole, an object emerges that can be identified as the same across a variety o acts o consciousness. I can perceive the table-object, but I can also imagine it, narrate a story about it, or hold various belies about its provenance. In each o these acts, the object I intend is the same. I we hold ourselves to the flow o adumbrations, we have only a series o perceived qualities , but through the synthesis o these qualities, we are able to posit the identity o o the object, as something that transcends the stream o adumbrations. Te act o mental synthesis, which Husserl reers to as a noesis, is correlated with an intended object, a noema, irreducible to
any single adumbration. When Schaeffer speaks o the “transcendence o the object,” he means it in the sense that the object I intend is not immanently contained in the stream o perceptual adumbrations. Schaeffer writes, “lived particulars [i.e., adumbrations] are the multiple visual, audible, tactile impressions which succeed one another in an
Pierre Schaeffer, the Sound Object, and the Acousmatic Reduction
21
incessant flux, across which I tend towards a certain object, I ‘intend’ it [ je le ‘vise ‘vise’ ’ ] and the diverse modes according to which I connect mysel to this object: perception, memory, desire, imagination, etc.”28 Tis is Husserl’s theory in miniature. Schaeffer describes the flow o adumbrations, adumbrations, an object that comes into being rom out o this flow due to its constitution by a subject’s intentionality, and the possibility that these objects may appear under various modes o presentation. Yet, the main ocus is on the transcendence o theobject, object.like o aclariy nature o this t ranscendence, transcendence, Schaeffer compares a perceptual table,the with an “ideal object” like “a mathematical theorem.”29 In either case, the object can be recollected afer some interval o time, and my original experience and memory memory will reer to one and the same object, whether table or theorem; but the mathematical theorem is not individualized in time and space, because the theorem is not dependent upon having been encountered at some particular spatiotem spatiotemporal poral location crucial cr ucial or establishing identity. identity. All instances o the theorem are necessarily identical in a way that all instances o a table are not. Te transcendence o objects, whether ideal or perceptual, is demonstrated by the act that the subject can reer to them again and again, in various modes o presentation presen tation and at different times. Te objectivity o an object depends on this kind o repeatable reerence. Tere is a classic example involving a transposed melody that is ofen deployed to illustrate this point.30 ake, ake, or instance, a melody melo dy played on a violin and a transposed version in which none o the pitches are the same as in the original. Despite the transposition and its wholly new set o adumbrations, the two melodies are recognizable as “the same.” Te object in both cases is identical. Tus, an object is not the same as a physical-material entity, which, rom a scientific perspective, causes my perceptions. Being the correlate o an act o synthesis on my part, an object is irreducible to any particular adumbration, or even all o them taken together. o grasp the difference between the stream o auditory adumbrations and an object, an appeal must be made to the manner in which the auditory event is experienced. Melodies, cries, harmonic progressions, samples, or other sonic events are not experienced as a discrete array o auditory perceptions; rather, according to the phenomenologist, they are experienced as transcendent objects possessing distinct boundaries, durations, identiying qualities, and properties. Te phenomenologist o sound does not deny that there is a stream o auditory adumbrations; rather, the ocus is on how parts o the stream are primordially grasped as a unity—as a constituted object, or set o objects, transcending any particular adumbration. Te transcendent object grounds the possibility o hearing the same thing across the multiple acts o listening by a single subject, despite variations in location, attentiveness, knowledge, or fluctuations in the acoustic signal. Te transcendental t ranscendental unity o the sound object is a noematic correlate to a synthetic noetic act by the listening subject. Tis is the background to Schaeffer’s claim that “it is in my experience that this transcendence is constituted. . . . o each domain o objects corresponds thus a type o intentionality. Each o their properties depends on acts o consciousness that
are ‘constitutive,’ and the object perceived is no longer the cause o my perception. It is ‘the correlate.’ ”31 Schaeffer’s second question concerns the problem o intersubjectivity: Given that the object is constituted by an intentional act o the subject, how is it that multiple subjects can intend the same object? Rather then provide an argument, Schaeffer
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asserts that the transcendence o the object is shared by multiple subjects, thus presupposingg a shared objective world: supposin Te object transcends not only the diverse moments o my individual individual experience but the whole set o these individual lived experiences: it [the object] is placed in a world that I recognize as existing or all. I I direct mysel towards a mountain, it appears tothat me as same . . . across the multip multiplicity o my points otowards view ; but, view; I also admit thethe companion who marches at licity my side is directed the same mountain as I am, while I have reason to think that he has a different view o it. Te consciousness o an objective world . . . . is presu presupposed. pposed.32 What holds good or perceptual objects (like mountains) also holds or the sound object, but exactly how the sound object grounds the agreement and coordination between different listeners remains unexplained.33 Schaeffer collapses two situations into one: He conflates (1) the condition that allows one listener to hear the same object several times and identiy it as the same with (2) the condition that allows various subjects to correlate their experiences o one and the same object. Te noetic-noematic constitution o objects is conflated with intersubjective agreement. Because an object transcends the stream o adumbrations rom which it is constituted, constitu ted, and thus is bound to no specific empirical act, Schaeffer S chaeffer treats this nonempirical oundation as i it adequately guarantees, or at best permits, the sharing o objects between multiple subjects. Yet, this is a very slender basis upon which to ground an account o the intersu intersubjective bjective experience o objects. Although Schaeffer lacks a thorough account o intersubjectivity, one should not be too critical, or he lacked a good model to emulate. Husserl too was unable to give an adequate account o the nature o intersubjectivity. In the last o his Cartesian Meditations, Husserl argues or the importance o empathy as a capacity whereby the subject is able to imagine or project an inner lie onto the minds o others. Yet, Husserl spends little time addressing the question o how the objects o others can be brought to a “higher psychic sphere” where shared cultural products and ideas can be shared by a community. 34 Te problem o intersubjectivity preoccupied Husserl in his later writings and became one o the great bugbears or phenomenological philosophers. Husserl’s amous notion o the lieworld, or Lebenswelt , can be seen as an attempt to deal with the problem o intersubjectivity; but one can also a lso find this problem treated t reated in Heidegger’s (and later Merleau-Ponty’s) s) emphasis on the primordiality o “being-in-the-world,” where, in order to deeat solipsism, consideration o the subject begins by being placed, always already, into a shared world. THE ACOUSMATIC ACOUSMATIC REDUCTION REDUC TION AND THE EPOCHÉ
Afer addressing the “transcendence o the object,” Schaeffer turns toward the “naïve
thesis o the world, the epoché .”35 Tis is significant because, without the epoché , there can be no discussion o “acousmatic experience.” Just as the Husserlian theory o the object allows Schaeffer to define the sound object, the phenomen phenomenological ological epoché allows or a definition o l’acousmatique. Te two moments are sutured together. Recall Schaeffer’s statement: “Te sound object is never revealed clearly except in
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the acousmatic experience.” o show why this is the case, we must now investigate the relationship relationship between acousmatic experience and the phenome phenomenological nological epoché . Te reduction o the natural standpoint, also known as the phenomenological epoché , is one o the most amous procedures in Husserlian phenomenology.36 Husserl identifies the natural standpoint (or attitude) with a commonsense view o the world: a world immediately available or “on hand,” where I am surrounded by objects and things o which I have immediate knowledge; where I operate habitually and ofen without reflection; where things possess significance and utility in relation to my interests and goals; a world that has spatial and temporal extension, and to which I am bound through everyday involvement.37 For Husserl, the natural attitude is the given. But to become aware o the natural attitude, there must be some way o holding it at bay, so that it can be examined. Husserl, borrowing the term rom ancient skepticism, suggests that we should employ an act o “bracketepoché rom ing” or “suspending,” an act o reraining rom judgment about the exterior world in order to experience it anew. In Dan Zahavi’s description, “Our investigation should be critical and undogmatic . . . it should be guided by what is actually given, rather than what we expect to find.”38 Rather than committing to the external world by positing it to be actually given, the epoché is is a method or suspending the posited world and observing it as a startling phenomenon. Husserl ofen describes the suspension o the natural attitude as a new, presuppositionless beginning in philosophical method.39 Y Yet, et, it could also be characterized as a return to the original impulse o philosophy, as identified by Aristotle: “For it is owing to their wonder that men both now begin and at first began to philosophize.” 40 Te epoché has has implications or philosophy’s relation to natural science. For the phenomenologist, the natural sciences remain bound to the natural standpoint in that they are predicated on an unexamined belie or aith in the exterior world. In Schaeffer’s words, “Te elaborate discourse o science is ounded on this initial act o aith.”41 Tis is not to criticize the results o science as useless or mistaken. In act, as Husserl writes, “to know it [the external world] more comprehensively, more trustworthily,, and more perectly than the naïve lore o experience is able to do . . . is trustworthily the goal o the sciences o the natural standpoint. ”42 However, classical scientific method has minimized the contribution made by the observer to this knowledge. As Merleau-Ponty was quick to note, science ofen reduces phenomena to the effects o stimuli upon an organ, yet finds itsel unable to explain how those phenomena are experienced. His use o gestalt figures, visual illusions, and phantom limbs was intended to illustrate how perceptual phenomena were irreducible to collections o individual stimuli, stimuli, like retinal arrays o light or patterns o activation in the nervous system. “When we come back to phenomena we find, as a basic layer o experience, a whole already pregnant with an irreducible meaning, not sensations with gaps between them.”43 For Schaeffer, the natural standpoint must be overcome i musical research is ever
to disclose the grounding o musical practice. By bracketing the physically sisting act-world, by barring judgments in relation to it, and out by leaving us only subwith auditory phenomena, hearing can no longer be characterized as a subjective deormation o external things.44 Te epoché “completely shuts me off rom any judgment about spatiotemporal actual being. Tus I exclude all sciences relating to this natural no matter how firmly they stand there or me, no matter how much I admire world no
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them . . . I make absolutely no use o the things t hings posited in them . . . [nor] the propositions belonging to them . . . none is accepted by me; none gives me a oundation .”45 Listening becomes a sphere o investigation containing containing its own immanen immanentt logic, structure, and objectivity—one that is irreducible to the physical science o acoustics. Te introduction o the acousmatic reduction is modeled on Husserl’s epoché . By barring visual access to the source o the sound, it is intended to draw our atten attention tion to the sound’s immanent properties and objectivity. Schaeffer, ollowing the definition given in Larousse, defines the word acousmatic as an adjective, “reerring to a sound that one hears without seeing the causes behind it. ”46 Te term derives rom the ancient Greek word akousmatikoi, the name given to the disciples o Pythagoras who listened to the master’s lectures through a curtain. According to legend, the physical body o Pythagoras was hidden rom the akousmatikoi, leaving them with only the sound o their master’s voice.47 Schaeffer, working in the years afer World War II, elt the new technologies o recording, telecommunications, telecommunications, and radio to be b e continuous with the ancient acousmatic experiences o the Pythagorean students. Schaffer writes, “In ancient times, the apparatus was a curtain; today, it is the radio and the methods o reproduction, with the whole set o electro-acoustic transormations, that place us, modern listeners to an invisible voice, under similar circumstances.” 48 In Schaeffer’s application o the epoché , the spatiotemporal causes o sounds are bracketed in order to distinguish them rom the sound itsel, grasped as a transcendent object. Te epoché is is deployed to distinguish an acousmatic field o listening rom the field o acoustics. Schaeffer explicitly contrasts the acousmatic situation with the natural attitude, which is presupposed by the field o acoustics: In acoustics, we started with the physical signal and studied its transormations via electro-acoustic processes, in tacit reere reerence nce to . . . a listening that grasps g rasps requencies, durations, etc. By contrast, the acousmatic situation, in a general ashion, symbolically precludes any relation with what is visible, touchable, measurable. 49 Although the acousmatic experience o sound still allows or the possibility o speculating upon or inerring causal sources, it bars direct access to visible, tactile, and physically quantifiable assessments as a means to this end. Te translation or transcription o sounds by scientific instruments is barred. Te acousmatic experience reduces sounds to the field o pure listening, “la pure écouter .”50 By shifing attention away rom the physical cause o my auditory perception toward the content o o this perception, the goal is to become aware o precisely what it is in my perception that is given with certainty, or “adequately.”51 Afer the reduction, only the acousmatic field remains. Te distinction is clearer in French, where Schaeffer contrasts l’acoustique with l’acousmatique. (In English, we might say that acoustics gives way to acousmatics—i we could pardon the neologism.) More than a methodological distinction,
Schaeffer demonstrated thetape. practical difference acoustics and acousmatics in his work with magnetic Certain sounds,between when transposed or edited, would maintain expected perceptual eatures. eatures. For instance, doubling the tape speed would produce a perceived transposition by an octave. In other cases, the auditory results were unpredictable. Doubling the tape speed on certain inharmonic sounds would produce transpositions at intervals other than the octave. Te intentionality o the
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ear, and its divergence rom scientific hypotheses tied to acoustic experimentation, demonstrated demonstra ted the primacy o the subjective constitution constitution o the sound object, and the t he difference between the acoustic and acousmatic fields.52 Part o Schaeffer’s originality was to see a proound affinity between the phenomenological epoché and and the role played by the Pythagorean veil. Schaeffer conceived o modern sound reproduction technologies like radio, the loudspeaker, and the tape recorder as participating in53the “actuality o an ancient experience,” originally opened by the Pythagorean veil. Just as Husserl deploys the epoché to to bracket any claims about spatiotemporal actuality in order to grasp phenomena in their objectivity,, Schaeffer understands the Pythagorean veil (and its perpetuation tivity p erpetuation in the orm o modern audio technology) as a tool or bracketing the spatiotemporal actuality o the sonic source. Tis encourages two undamental changes: First, the objectivity o sound is grasped as a phenomenon, and second, attention is redirected to the particular essential characteristics o a given sound. Tis change in listening does not occur immediately upon encountering acousmatic technologies like the Pythagorean veil, tape recorder, or loudspeaker. Schaeffer offers an illustration. When auditioning a recording o a horse galloping across the pampas, visible clues are no longer available to help in the reconstruction o the source.54 Naturally, a competent listener recognizes the sound as a horse galloping and treats it as an index, pointing back toward its source. Te veil would appear, at first encounter, to encourage curiosity about what lies behind it. Te acousmatic reduction by itsel does not dismiss this possibili p ossibility—it ty—it still allows or the identification o sources and causes—but it bars access to visual and tactual means to satisy this goal. Indexical listening is still available as a possible modality. However, the acousmatic reduction disorients and redirects listening by reducing sounds to the field o hearin hearingg alone. “Ofen surprised, ofen uncertain, we discover that much o what we thought we were hearing was in reality only seen, and explained, by the context.”55 Tis is a significant realization. For Schaeffer, the acousmatic experience o sound opens up the possibility o identiying modes o listening more essential than than those that depend primarily on context. Sound is always in danger o being apprehended as something other than itsel—o possessing what imothy aylor calls “residual signification.”56 ake, or example, the recording o the galloping horse. When treated indexica indexically, lly, “.“. . . there is no sound object: obj ect: there is a perception perception,, an auditory experience, through which I intend [ je vise] another object.”57 A sound object only truly emerges when a sound no longer unctions or another another as as a medium, but rather is perceived as such. Te emergence o the sound object rom the acousmatic situation is precarious. However, the tenuousness o the situation is bolstered by the act that recordings can be repeated over and over without variation. Counteracting the overwhelming curiosity evoked by the encounter with the veil, mechanical repetition overrides desire and offers a solid ooting or the experience o the sound object.
In act, Pythagoras’ curtain is not enough to discourage our curiosity about causes, to which we are instinctively, almost irresistibly drawn. But the repetition o the physical signal, which recording makes possible, assists us here in two ways: by exhausting this curiosity, curiosity, it gradually brings the sound object to the ore
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as a perception worthy o being observed or itsel; on the other hand, as a result o ever richer and more refined listenings, it progressively reveals to us the richness o this perception. p erception.58 Schaeffer’s experience with locked-groove recordings and, later, tape loops, was oundational or stabilizing the emergence o the sound object rom within the acousmatic situation. Schaeffer writes, “In order to retrieve this ervor o listening, this ever o discovery, it is necessary to have lived through those instants, which any interested person can personally experience, when sound imprisoned on tape repeats itsel endlessly identical to itsel, isolated rom all contexts.”59 Te lockedgroove recording or tape loop, like a word spoken over and over again, halts the flow o signification and promotes, through repetition, the hearing o sounds as such. Te “ervor o listening” is inversely proportional to a sound’s unction as an index or sign. Tus, “the better I understand a language, the worse I hear it.” it.”60 MODES OF LISTENING
Schaeffer understood thepresuppositions. acousmatic reduction more than a theoretical prescription to withhold Rather, itaspromoted ansimply art o o listening. Te acousmatic experience o sounds is a concrete, c oncrete, lived experience, operating operating at the perceptual level. It must must be heard. From the very inception o musique concrète—beore he articulated his project in terms o acousmatics—Schaeffer’s desideratum was to articulate an art o listening appropriate to his compositions, a way o conveying to others how to listen to musique concrète. In this respect, Schaeffer’s journals are revealing, especially those written while he was working on his initial concrète piece, the Étude aux chemins de er . Schaeffer writes, As soon as a record is put on the turntable a magic power enchains me, orces me to submit to it, however monotonous it is. Do we give ourselves over because we are in on the act? Why shouldn’t they broadcast three minutes o “pure coach” telling people that they only need to know how to listen, and that the whole art is in hearing? Because they are extraordinary to listen to, provided you have reached that special state o mind that I’m now in.61 How can one articulate that “special state o mind” and instill it in others? It is an understatement understate ment to say that listening is a challenging field to theorize, or there is no direct material artiact produced by listening. It is ofen extraordinarily challenging to convey to others what is being heard in some stretch o sound such that they can reproduce the intended experience. Again, Schaeffer looks to phenomenology or guidance. Like Husserl, who lavishe lavishess attention on describing descr ibing the relationship between
objects and the t he various modes o presen presentation tation in which they appear, appear, Schaeffer dedi cated many pages in the raité to to the sound object and the various modes o listening that one employs when auditioning it. o put it schematically, Schaeffer addresses two dimensions o listening sorted along typical Hu Husserlian sserlian lines: the noetic and the noematic. His amous categorization categorization o the our basic modes o listening alls on the noetic side o this project; his theory o the sound object alls on the noematic side.
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Four verbs are used to divide up the field o listening: écouter, entendre, comprendre, and ouïr . Each o Schaeffer’s verbs indicates a distinct mode ( onction) o listening.62 Each mode must be understood as a unique type o intentional noetic act—a sensegiving act o listening—correlated listening—correlated with a particular part icular type o auditory object. Ouïr , which is ofen simply translated as “perception,” is the most primordial mode o listening. According to Schaeffer, “Strictly speaking, I never cease to perceive [d’ouïr ]. ]. I live in a world which does not cease to be here or me, and this world is sonorous as well as tactual and visual.”63 I am always already in-the-world, and this world is perceptually maniested or me. From this perspective, ouïr is is the most basic mode in which the auditory maniestation o the world is apprehended. It constitutes the “ ond sonor sonoree” shared by all other modes o listening or ways o attending to the sonorous world.64 However, this oundation remains hidden in our everyday attentiveness to the source and meaning o sounds. Here, Schaeffer’s thinking strongly echoes Merleau-Ponty, who ofen reflected on the rediscovery o the primordial world o perception. However, unlike Merleau-Ponty, Schaeffer spends little time investigating this ond sonor sonoree, preerring to ocus on other modalities. Ouïr provides that which is passiv passively ely “given “given to me in perception, p erception,”” but it must be contrasted contr asted with other, more active orms o attentiveness and intentionality. 65 Comprendre, which is sometimes translated as “comprehending” or “understanding,” reers specifically to the reception o sounds mediated by sign systems or languages—a type o listening aimed at getting the message rom an utterance or proposition. Michel Chion, in his guide to Schaeffer’s raité, glosses the term: “Comprehending means grasping a meaning , values, by treating the sound as a sign, reerring to this meaning through a language, a code. . . .”66 Comprendre extends beyond linguistic utterances to systems like music that employ quasi-linguistic auditory signs. Much o what gets taught in elementary harmony classes institutes this kind o listening, showing students how to compose, evaluate, and understand a well-ormed tonal phrase, one that demonstrates the requisite musical grammar, proper use o musical topoi, or correctly reproduces a given musical style. Te two remaining verbs, entendre and écouter , are commonly used to describe the active and passive modes o listening that translate into the English equivalents “to hear” and “to listen.” For Schaeffer, écouter designates designates a mode o listening that is securely bound to the natural attitude, where sounds are heard immediately as indices o objects and events in the world. Écouter situates situates sounds in the surrounding sonorous milieu, grasps their distance and spatial location, and identifies their source and cause on the basis o sonic characteristics.67 It is an inormation-gathering inormation-gat hering mode in which sounds are used as indices or objects and events in the world. For example, examp le, i we are crossing the street and suddenly hear the sound o squealing tires, our inormation-gathering listening mode could mean the difference between lie and death. In this mode, “sounds are an index to a network o associations and experiences; we are concerned with causality; it is a question o living and acting in the
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world, ultimately o survival.” Écouter isthe active, situated, positional, and indexical. It is also unreflective. When we are in is natural attitude, we immediately posit the objects presented to us perceptually as really existing—there is no reflection on the manner in which the objects are intentionally intentionally constituted or upon the variety o their modes o givenness. When listening listening in this mode, “[I am] directed towards the event, I hold onto my perception, I use it without knowing it.”69
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Écouter has ofen played a problematic role in Schaeffer’s aesthetics o musique concrète. For Schaeffer, the “musical” as such begins only when the source o sounds has been eliminated. Schaeffer consistently uses the term “anecdotal” to describe a mode o listening fixated on sonic sources or causes, a mode mo de clearly captured under the heading o écouter . While working on the Étude aux chemins de er , Schaeffer ofen despaired that his experiments were alling prey to simple anecdotalism:
Isn’t the noise o [train] buffers first and oremost anecdotal, thus antimusical? I this is so, then there’s no hope, and my research is absurd. 70 My composition hesitates between two options: dramatic or musical sequences. Te dramatic sequence constrains the imagination. You witness events; departures, stops. We observe. Te engine moves, the track is empty or not. Te machine toils, pants, relaxes—anthropomorphism. All this is the opposite o music. However, I’ve managed to isolate a rhythm and contrast it with itsel in a different sound color. Dark, light, dark, light. Tis rhythm could very well remain unchanged or a long time. It creates a sort o identity or itsel, and repeating it makes you orget it’s a train.71 Te categorical divide between the musical and the anecdotal is presented without argument, and many composers beore and afer Schaeffer would dispute this rigid division. Yet, he strongly maintained this view or his entire career. Tat aside, it should be noted that the historical and critical popularity enjoyed by the Étude aux as an exemplary piece o musique concrète is a bit surprising when chemins de er as viewed in the light o Schaeffer’s own aesthetics. For the study is hardly hardly about trains at all; rather, it uses trains to generate contrasting rhythms and tone colors. Te “trainness” “trainnes s” o the sounds, when heard in the way Schaeffer intends, is separated rom their purely musical values. In other words, the étude studies rhythms, not trains.72 Te final mode, entendre, must be contrasted with écouter. Entendre is the mode o listening to a or sound’s attributes without to its spatial location, source, cause;morphological we attend to sounds as such, not reerence to their associated significations or indices. Entendre shares the Latin root intendere, with the central phenomenological concept o intentionality. Schaeffer is absolutely clear about this connection; he writes, “For entendre, we retain the etymological sense, ‘to have an intention.’ What I hear [ j’ j’entends entends], what is maniested to me, is a unction o this intention [intention].”73 Tis connection is lost when entendre is translated as “hearing,” obscuring the close association between this mode o listening and Schaeffer’s phenomenological phenomen ological preoccupation preoccupations. s. “Reduced listening” is Schaeffer’s name or the audible act o attending to the sound apart rom its source. 74 Tis is perhaps an unortunate choice on Schaeffer’s
part, because o the t he conusion it causes: Reduced listening (écoute réduite) alls under the entendre, not écouter . It is asoisounds écouter is becomes becomes when indica75 Entendre tive mode or communicative signification reduced.entendre (orthe“reduced listening”) emerges when écouter and and comprendre are barred. When sounds sound s are auditioned under the mode entendre, “I no longer try tr y, through its intermediary intermediary,, to inorm mysel about some other thing (an interlocutor or his thoughts). It is the sound itsel that I intend [ je vise], that I identi identiyy.”76 In reduced listening, sound no longer appears as a medium or placeholder or “some other thing.”
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Entendre plays a central role in two halves o Schaffer’s work, his musical research and his composition. Concerning his research, entendre is the mode o listening that orms the basis or his Programme de la Recherche Musicale (PROGREMU). John Dack describes PROGREMU as Schaeffer’s “ultimate ambition . . . to discover the basic oundations o musical structure and meaning and that this could only be achieved once the sounds were reed rom their causal origins.”77 In order to attain this end, Schaeffer encouraged musicians “to learn a new solège by systematic listening to all sorts o sound objects.”78 Chion describes this new solège as “a kind o becoming aware o the new materials o music while distrusting preconceived ideas and relying first and oremost upon what one hears [on entend ]. ].”79 Trough the selection and appreciation o sonic attributes, it is possible to construct a taxonomy o sounds, capable o organizing and classiying not only the typical sounds o instrumental music, but “the entire sound universe.”80 On the compositional side, entendre is the mode o listening identified with Schaeffer’s aesthetic preerence or reduced listening. In this regard, the titles o Schaeffer’s various études are revealing. Unlike the Étude aux chemins de er , which identifies the source in the title o the work, the later studies remain wholly abstract: Étude aux objets, Étude aux allures, Étude aux sons animés . Rather than identiy the source, these t hese later works derive their material rom a variety o sources, and then organize it in order to bring out some shared aspect, such as its grain, its duration, its register, or its timbre. Tese eatures o the sound object are afforded by entendre. Sounds are not employed as indicative or communicative signs; rather, the object is used to ocus the listener on some intrinsic eature o the sound, regardless o its worldly reerence. I Schaeffer initially worried about the difference between anecdotal and musical sequences in musique concrète, the later studies have effaced all traces o this worry by excising the ormer. Te musical sequence alone is promoted. In the Étude aux objets, Schaeffer even deploys a plan that is based on traditional musical orms. Te opening movement, “ Objets exposés,” smartly indicates its musical unction as an exposition o musical materi-
als. Te character, first phrase,only or to lefbeloudspeaker concatenates eight sound o various ollowed byalone, a “counter-theme” or the rightobjects speaker, also ormed o eight different objects. 81 Te rest o the movement sequences and superimposes material taken rom the phrases in a manner that is loosely ugal in character. Te other movements in the étude are also based on the opening material, developing and drawing connections between sounds through the use o overlapping, mixing, and montage. Te final movement, “Objets rassemblés,” is also described describ ed as a “stretto “stretto..”82 Unlikee the purely musical études o Schaeffer in the late 1950s that efface all traces Unlik o écouter or or the sake o entendre, a work like Pierre Henry’s Variations pour une thematizes the alternation o the musical and the anecdotal in an porte et un soupir thematizes
elegant manner.83 Te title o Henry s work is telling; it is a set o variations or —not —not on— a door andlike a sigh. Tus, it is conceptually closer to a work that names,its instrumental orces, Messiaen’s Teme and Variations or Violin and Piano than to a work like Reger’s Variations and Fugue on a Teme o Mozart . Te latter is based on a well-known musical theme and (existing in both orchestral and piano versions) versions) is perhaps conceived as indifferent to its instrumental orces. In Henry’s short movement entitled “Étirement ,” ,” all sounds come rom a recording o a creaking door hinge. In the lef and right speakers, Henry begins with—pun intended—opening
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gestures. Te reerentiality o the sounds is brought to the ore by the sharp, percussive stridulations stridulations o the creaking hinge. Te listener can sense the size and hef o the door, and the physical orce required to move it. In the course o one minute, Henry transmogrifies these creaking doors into a musical duet by editing and sequencing passages that bring out dramatic melodic profiles, layered to create overlapping and unexpected entrances. Te doors lose their characteristic “doorness” and are metamorphosed into flatulent tubas, rumbling contrabasses, or honking baritone saxophones. At the moment when the sounds are most continuous, having reached a crescendo, Henry ends the piece by slowly letting the doors creak shut in a closing rallentando where each snap o the t he hinge is distinctly and clearly articulated. Te ear o the listener hovers between anecdotal reerence and musical autonomy—oscillating between écouter and and entendre. THE EIDETIC REDUCTION AND THE END OF IMPROVISED ONTOLOGY
I the only concern o this chapter were to introduce Schaeffer’s concept o l’acousmatique, I could stop right here. We have seen how the acousmatic reduction is modeled on Husserl’s phenomenological epoché . We have also seen how the acousmatic reduction brings various modes o listening to the attention o the listener. By deamiliarizing everyday practices o listening, the acousmatic reduction makes these modes perspicuous. (Or, to use less visually centered terms, we could say that the acousmatic reduction brings these modes o listening into audibility.) I Schaeffer preers entendre or reduced listening to other modes, this is not a valuation that necessarily ollows ollows rom the acousmatic reduction. reduct ion. It must be noted that all modes are available within the acousmatic situation. Te acousmatic situation is not a constraint on modes o listening; it is a way o bringing those modes into ocus. Although this is an important point, one that has been generally underappreciated underappreciated in the reception o Schaeffer’s work,project there is stillwant moretotoexplain say about the rolebehind o the acousmatic reduction in Schaeffer’s i we the reasons his claim that “the sound object is never revealed clearly except in the acousmatic experience.” I the acousmatic reduction brings the variety o modes o listening to the ore without preerence preerence or one o them, what is the special relationship between the sound object and acousmatic reduction? As I argued earlier, by barring our access to visual, tactile, tact ile, and measurable causes o sounds, the acousmatic reduction reduces sounds to the field o hearing alone. Te listener is directed away rom the physical object that causes a perception, toward the content o o that perception. Tis shif is useul not only or bringing modes o listening into audibility, but also or establishing a ew negative claims about what
cannot constitute the sound object.84 Once the content o o some auditory perception is distinguished rom its source or cause—once a split between the sonic source and its auditory effect has been established—then it is no longer possible to think o the sound object as determined by some physical thing. Tis is why Schaeffer claims that “the sound object is not the instrument that was played,” nor is it reducible to “a ew centimeters o magnetic tape.”85 Tese negative definitions might lead one to assume
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that, i the sound object is irreducible to some physical thing, then it must be reducible to some subjective state. Schaeffer anticipates this line o thought: t hought: o avoid conusing [the sound object] with the physical cause o a “stimulus, “stimulus,” we seemed to have grounded the sound object objec t on our subjectivity. But . . . the sound object is not modified . . . by the variations in listening rom one individual to another,, nor with the incessant variations in our attention and our sensibility. Far another rom being subjective subject ive . . . [sound objects] can be clearly cle arly described and analyzed.86 Te challenge or “ambiguity” o the sound object is to realize that it is indeed “an objectivity linked to a subjectivity.”87 So what constitutes the objectivity o this ambiguous object? o answer this question, Schaeffer supplements the acousmatic reduction or epoché with a second reduction, known in phenomenology as the eidetic reduction. Te motivation behind Schaeffer’s use o the eidetic reduction is simple; i the sound object is intended to ground the identification o sounds across multiple acts o listening and among multiple listeners, then the basis or its objectivity must be explained. Te use o sound objects in musique concrète may help us to perceive and appreciate specific qualities o sound objects, but a piece o musique concrète is not a philosophical argument or the objectivity o sound objects generally. Tis is where the eidetic reduction comes into play. Te eidetic reduction is a technique deployed by Husserl intended to reveal an object’s essential eatures. eatures. Starting with some particular object, Husserl encourages the philosopher to detach it rom its real situation and treat it as an “arbitrary example” that acts as a guiding model, “a point o departure or the production o an infinitely open multiplicity o variations.”88 By producing a series o “ree variants,” each o which is also imagined, “it then becomes evident that a unity runs through this multiplicity.” In the act o producing a set o ree variations, “an invariant is necessarily retained . . . according to which all the variants coincide: a general essence.” Te essence o an object “proves to be that without which an object o a particular be thought,” or in other words, an essence discloses the very condition kind o thecannot possibility o some object’s identity.89 For Husserl, such essences orm the basis o an object’s objectivity; or without an a priori grasp o an object’s essence, we could not identiy and re-identiy re-ide ntiy particulars. In the Cartesian Meditations, Husserl returns to his example o a table in order to show how “imaginative ree variation” operates as a technique or disclosing essences: Starting rom this table-perception as an example, we vary the perceptual object, table, with a complete completely ly ree optionalness, yet in such a manner that we keep per-
ception fixed as perception o something, no matter what. Perhaps we begin by fictionally changing the shape or color o the object quite arbitrarily. arbitrarily. . . . In other words: Abstaining Abstaining rom acceptance o its being, we change the act o this perception into a pure possibility, one among other quite “optional” pure possibilities— but possibilities that are possible perceptions. We, so to speak, shif the actual perception into the realm o non-actualities, the realm o the as-i.90
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Tree aspects o the process are worth noting: (1) Imaginative variation reveals properties o the transcendent object. By imagining the table in a variety o invariant properties changing contexts (changing its shape, color, structure, etc.), the essence o the phenomenon comes to be grasped grasp ed and understood. understoo d. Variation Variation is a technique or revealing reveal ing essence. (2) By undergoing the reductive test o the epoché , by bracketing all theses dependent upon the external world, imaginatively varied intentional objects are reed rom all bonds to the external world. Tus, the distinction between fiction and reality becomes moot . In the lectures on the Idea o Phenomenology , Husserl explains that when considering essences, “perception and imagination are to be treated exactly alike,” because any “suppositions about existence are irrelevant.” 91 (3) Since existential questions are irrelevant, it is no longer possible to argue that transcendent objects are merely subjective fictions. For Husserl and Schaeffer, the contents o our mental acts possess a special type o objectivity. Schaeffer writes: “No longer is it a question o knowing how a subjective hearing interprets or deorms ‘reality,’ to study reactions to stimuli; hearing itsel becomes the origin o the phenomenon to study.” 92 Hearing, whether imagined or real, presents us with indubitable evidence or data. Based on such indubitable indubitable evidence, intentional objects are both ideal and objective or,, in Husserl’s terminolog or ter minologyy, “ideal “id eal object objectivities. ivities.””93 In a section o the Solège de l’objet sonore entitled “Te objectivity o the object,” Schaeffer relies upon variation and eidetic reduction to clariy the objective character o the sound object.94 In each o his examples, Schaeffer takes the same recordin recordingg and gives it a variety o electronic variations. By taking a sound and using electronic means to alter its qualities, Schaeffer pedagogical pedagogically ly produces produces a set o variations with the aim o disclosing the sound object’s invariant and and essential eatures. eatures. Te sound o a gong gently rolled with sof mallets is played twice, ollowed by variants: by adjusting the potentiometers, the envelope o the object is varied; by using low and high pass filters, the mass and grain o the object are varied; subtle shifs in volume create an object with more allure, or internal beating; and finally, a combination o techniques produces another variant. As a listener, not only do we recognize the dierent variationsoas variations we also hear them as one and t heitssame the sound object. Te objectivity thevariations, sound object is intended to emerge across various instances. No two instantiations are exactly the same: From an acoustician’s point o view, the signal would contain measurable differences differences in each case; rom the phenomenological point o view, each variant differs in aspect rom the last. Schaeffer concludes, we must thereore stress stress emphatically that [a sound] object is something real [i.e., objective], in other words that something in it endures through these changes and enables different listeners (or the same listener several times) to bring out as many aspects o it as there have been ways o ocusing the ear, at the various levels o attention or intention o listening.95
While employing employing these examp examples les to demonstrat demonstratee the objectivity o the sound object, Schaeffer wants to deend against any reduction o this demonstration to a set o studio tricks. “Te purpose o these manipulations, these technical tricks, is purely pedagogical. It is an anticipation o the way in which the ear becomes increasingly alert, the more ofen one listens to the same object.”96 By emphasizing the pedagogical use o these “manipulations,” Schaeffer is also noting that there is nothing
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specifically technical about the objectivity o the sound object. It could have been demonstrated demonstra ted otherwise than with mechanical means; one could have simply imagined such variations or onesel. Once Schaeffer commits to the eidetic reduction, there can be no essential difference between imagined hearing and actual hearing. Te “mode o givenness” may change, but the “central core” remains the same. 97 Many o the techniques developed or producing concrète works depend upon variation. Te composer subjects recorded sounds to filtration, editing, looping, reverberation, reverberatio n, and changes in speed or direction. Te results o such processes must be auditioned again and again to determine whether these t hese variations present present us with “the same” sound object or a new sound object entirely. Each variation is an investigation into the objectivity o the sound object. Although Schaeffer clearly incubated his ideas about the sound object rom within the concrète context, one must not treat his solège as simply a method or learning musique concrète. Te point o his phenomenological project is to identiy an object capable o grounding both acoustics and our musical practices, be they concrete or abstract. Schaeffer’s desideratum is to systematize what first began as an improvised musical ontology. ORIGINARY EXPERIENCE AND THE PROBLEM OF HISTORY
Afer the eidetic reduction, Schaeffer’s musical ontology is much clearer. A sound object is disclosed as a particular type o transcendental object, the typing o a sonic token defined by the possession o certain invariant eatures. Each empirical token o a sound object is identifiable and re-identifiable based on noetic synthetic acts, just like any other kind o object; each sound object, as a type capable o having many tokens or instances, is identifiable based on the recognition o a set o invariant, essential eatures. At the level o the token, it makes no difference under what mode the sound object is heard. We need not be attending to a sound’s immanent morphological eatures eatures to grasp it as an object; we could just as well be listening to it or its source or cause. But this is not the case when we talk about a sound object as aing type. properties have beenreduced strippedand away. Afer the Here, test oall thenon-immanent acousmatically heard via undergo“reduced “red uced epoché , afer being listening,” we can start to imaginatively vary a sound object in order to disclose its essential, invariant properties. Tose invariant properties, which are always morphological or Schaeffer, identiy a sound object as a specific kind or type. A sound object in this sense is an ideal object; it inhabits an order o essences (in the phenomphenomenological sense) that guarantees repetition without difference. It insures ascriptions o identity to sounds across a variety o contexts, and thus also governs ascriptions o difference and variation, which are so central to musical composition. A sound object, in its ullest sense, is to be ontologically distinguished rom the realm o
empirically sounding events in that its ideal being guarantees infinite empirical identification and re-identification without divergence. Te eidetic reduction also clarifies the relationship between the sound object and technology. For Schaeffer, the empirical repetition afforded by technologies o recorded sound is simply a consequence o the ideality and repeatability o the sound object. echnology may be important, but it would be a misunderstanding o Schaeffer’s thinking to assume that the sound object is in any way the result o modern sound technology. Te Pythagorean veil or the loudspeaker, both o which
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encourage the acousmatic reduction and recognition o sounds distinct rom their causes, find their condition o possibility possibility in the ideal objectivity o the sound object. In contrast to Schaeffer’s claim rom May o 1948 that the sound object “does not fit in with the elementary definitions o music theory,” the ideal objectivity o the sound object is perectly music theoretical . It ollows upon and re-inscribes the ideality that was previously attached to the note: It defines a class, a type possessing tokens. Each sound object is a specific essence, an ideal objectivity posited as the ground that guarantees its repeatability. But as an ideality, this sound object does not exist in the world. It is heard in sounds, but must also be distinguishable rom the actual sonorousness sonorousness o sounds. Te sound object is not itsel sonorous. In the silence o imagined sound, where there is nothing actually vibrating, one can perorm intentional acts that depend on the sound object’s ideal stability, such as conceiving, comparing, composing, and distinguis distinguishing hing sounds. Te ontological grounding offered by the sound object challenges the claims o acoustics, or any science bound to the natural attitude. From Schaeffer’s perspective, the acoustician is mistaken to take the signal as primary. Nowhere Nowhere is Schaeffer more explicit on this point than when he writes, “One orgets that it is the sound object, 98 Tis is given perception, percept which designates designate s the signalit to studied thereore, it shouldinnever beion, a question o reconstructing onbethestudie basisd ,oand thethat, signal.” an orthodox phenome phenomenological nological strategy: strategy : By grounding the acoustician’ acoustician’s signal upon the sound object, Schaeffer considers his investigation investigation to be more originary, since it provides an ontological oundation to the merely empirical (or ontic) conclusions o acoustics. Compare this strategy with Heidegger’s description o phenomenological reduction rom Te Basic Problems o Phenomenology . “Phenomenological reduction means leading phenomenological vision back rom the appr apprehensio ehension n o a being, whatever may be the character o that apprehension, to the understanding o the Being o this being.”99 Tis ontological understanding—“the understanding—“the Being B eing o beings beings”—con”—consistently sisten tly resists the habitual tendency to gather our ontological terms rom the natural attitude.
Notthe onlysound is the object, hidden the oundation o the also acoustician’s as grounded upon sound object underliessignal and revealed determines our own subjectivity. According to Schaeffer, I must ree mysel created by my previous habits, by passing mysel rom rom the the condition conditioning ing created through the test o the epoché . It is never a question o a return to nature. Nothing is more natural than than obeying the dictates o habit. [Rather,] It is a question o an anti-natural effort effort to perceive what previously determined my consciousness without my knowing it.100
Te process o phenomenological reduction lends to the sound object a strange trajectory: Methodologically, one discloses the sound object only at the end o the investigation, afer a series o interlocked reductions; but ontologically, the sound object is absolutely first, a priori. Te priority o the sound object is evinced when Schaeffer writes, “I must re-visit the auditory experience, to re-grasp my impressions, to re-discover through them inormation about the sound object.” 101 Due to the danger o continually losing the sound object to habit, one must constantly become reacquainted reacquainted with it. But one can only be reacquaint acquainted ed with something with
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which one was already amiliar. Perhaps the strangeness o this trajectory becomes less mysterious, mysterious, less portentous, when we realize that it is simply teleological. Yet, only through incessant revisiting, re-grasping, and rediscovering is the sound object revealed as the “originary experience” o phenomenological investigation.102 In the phenomenological literature, an originary experience designates something quite specific; it marks the discovery o some transcendental region or field o inquiry (such as geometry, geometry, logic, technology technology,, etc.) by a ounding (noetic) act, which discloses a horizon containing all uture investigations o that region. Trough reactivation, an originary experience is available to all inquirers at all times. It is an inquiry into the propagation o essences, into the sense and structure that make some region o experience or thought possible, not into the actual circumstances or engagements o particular historical individuals or modes o apprehension. o explicate this concept, it is useul to compare Husserl’s introduction o the originary experience o geometry, as presented in Te Origin o Geometry , with Schaeffer’ Schae ffer’ss use o the concept. concept . Husserl writes, Te question o the origin o geometry . . . shall not be considered here as the philological-historical question, i.e., the search or the first geometers who actu-, ally uttered pure geometrical propositions, proposi tions, proos, theories . . . or or the like. R ather, Rather our interest interest shall be the inquiry back into the most original sense in which geometry once arose, was present as the tradition o millennia, is still present or us, and is still being worked on in a lively orward development. 103 Tis “regressive inquiry” or Rückrage avoids anything that could be called historical.104 Te question o origins replaces the question o beginnings. Although Schaeffer S chaeffer first discovers the sound object by means o a material engagement with real technical devices in the studios o Radiodiffusion Française, in his mature theory, the revelations revela tions that emerged rom the cloché coupée and the sillon ermé no no longer constitute new phenomena. Hearkening back to the time o Pythagoras and echoing Husserl’s own analyses o the origin o geometry, the disclosure o the sound object rom within the acousmatic and eidetic reductions is less a historical phenomenon than the rediscovery o an originary experience first disclosed in ancient Greece and reactivated by the technology o sound reproduction. An analogy can be drawn between the geometer and the electronic musician. Husserl writes, Te geometer who draws his figures on the board produces thereby actually existing lines on the actually existing board. But his experiencing o the product, qua experiencing, no more groun grounds ds his geometrical seeing o essences and eidetic
thinking than does his physical producing. Tis is why it does not matter whether his experiencing is hallucination or whether, whether, instead o actually drawing his lines and constructions, he imagines them in a world o phantasy. 105 Te same could be said o the sound object. Whether a sound is locked in a groove, looped on a tape, or hallucinated in antasy, the contingent and constantly varied experience o sound cannot provide a oundation or its qualitative, indicative, or communicative aspects. Te geometrical drawing, with all o its crooked lines, is
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akin to the acoustician’s signal—empirical, inessential, and contingent. As a vehicle to arrive at the sound object, the empirical phenomenon “does not matter.” However, in the drive to locate a secure grounding or aural experience, experience itsel alls away . Husserl says as much: [Te] pur are pure o all positings p ositings o matters o act; ac t; or, equiva puree eidetic eidetic sciences sciences . . . are lently: in them no experience, as experience, that is, as a consciousness that seizes upon or posits actuality, actual existence, can take over the unction o supplying a logical ground . Where experience unctions in them it does not unction as experience.106 Experience remains curiously ungrounded in phenomenology’s eyes and must be supplemented supp lemented afer the act with an ideal objectivity objectivity.. Experience becomes secondary to its role o providing evidence or disclosing essences. Trough a sleight o hand, phenomenology covertly places its ontology prior to experience, and then subsequently discloses the ontological horizon as i it it were always already present—as i its ontology made experience possible in the first place. In the Husserl passage just cited, is vulgar made explicitly clear; the “pure eidetic sciences,” i they want to remain ree this o the contingency o history, causality, or culture, must remain remain ree o the “positings o matters o act.” Such vulgar positings (i.e., history, biography, culture, act, contingency, chance, etc.) might sully the immaculate purity o philosophy as a rigorous science. In Husserl’s privileged domain o geometry, geometry, the ethical imperative to avoid contingency contingency at all costs is clearly demonstrated where the “originary experience” o geometry cunningly displaces any kind o material-historical investigation into its beginnings. Te phenomenological necessity to end-run contingency, to remove the historical rom history, is a sel-imposed blind spot, an act o hardheaded idealism. OBJECTIONS
Te motivation or this chapter was to clariy the statement “the sound object is never revealed clearly except in the acousmatic experience.” By rehearsing Schaeffer’s argument and articulating how he models his research in the raité upon upon Husserlian phenomenology,, I have tried to show the nomenology t he precise relationship relationship between the sound object and the experience o the acousmatic reduction. Tey are not the same. Te acousmatic reduction restricts listening to the field o hearing alone, by bracketing visual, tactile, and other sensory means o assessing sounds. Te acousmatic reduction is Schaeffer’s version o the phenomenological epoché . Within the acousmatic reduction, various prominent modes o listening emerge. Some modes are indicative and
communicative, where the sounds are used as signs to direct the listener’s attention to physical-causal sources or linguistic meanings; others are sel-reflexive, directing attention toward the intrinsic qualities and characteristics o sounds. Entendre and reduced listening are o the latter variety, écouter and and comprendre o the ormer. Te habitual everydayness o écouter and and comprendre is disturbed afer undergoing the acousmatic reduction. As or the sound object, it underlies all the various modes o listening, or a sound object is the basic ontological unit in Schaeffer’s account. I it is only clearly revealed in the mode entendre, this is because Schaeffer thinks
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that the additional signification added to a sound when treated as an indicative or communicative communica tive sign can be reduced away without essentially changing the ontology o the sound. Te essential qualities o the sound object are revealed in a process o imaginative variation, or eidetic reduction. Tis urther reduction brings out the invariant eatures o an object and discloses these eatures as constituting the object’s ideal objectivity. I reiterate this account because the relationship among the acousmatic reduction, the sound object, and reduced listening is not always clearly understood. Even some o our finest writers on 20th-century sound, music, and technology occasionally miss these distinctions. Frances Dyson writes, Pierre Schaeffer, or instance, taking an essentially phenomenological approach, argued or “acousmatics”—a reduced listening that would bracket sounds rom their musical and cultural origin and ocus listening on sounds “in themselves” without recourse to their visual or material source.107 Te imprecision in this sentence—which glosses acousmatics by identiying it with reduced and places an emphasis on sounds in themselves anddistinction the separation olistening the senses—may appear insignificant. Yet, without a precise between these various parts o Schaeffer’s project, we cannot really subject acousmatic experience to a thorough, honest, and clear-sighted assessment. Indeed, “the sound object is never clearly revealed except in the acousmatic experience,” but it does not ollow that acousmatic experience is necessarily beholden beholden to the theory o the sound object.108 Nor do we need to understand the acousmatic experience o sounds according to the phenomenological approach o Schaeffer. In act, there is much lef to be said about acousmatic experience in distinction to Schae Schaeffer’ ffer’ss affirmation o the sound object and reduced listening, and apart rom his phenomeno phenomenological logical method. Te chapters that ollow investigate investigate acousmatic experience in other terms than those proposed by Schaeffer. But beore moving on to those investigations, I will quickly present three objections to Schaeffer’s theory, with the acknowledgment that each objection unctions as a starting point or investigations o acousmatic experience in the chapters that immediately ollow. My three objections concern (1) the phantasmagoric effacement o technology in Schaeffer’s thinking; (2) the mythic use o the Pythagorean veil; and (3) the ontological problem that emerges when sounds are conceptualized as sound objects that reiy sonic effects, rather than events e vents that bind source, cause, and effect together. Tese three objections are urther developed in parts II and III.
The Ontological Problem
By positing the sound object as the ontological grounding o musical experience, Schaeffer commits himsel to an ahistorical view about the nature o musical material. O course, or Schaeffer, that is precisely the point; the sound object must be defined in a purely objective manner in order to ground subsequent research. Schaeffer employs phenomenology in the same way that Husserl did, as a rigorous
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science that veers away rom the naturalistic grounding o the physical sciences. However, one might object that the severe reduction required to “disclose” the sound object is not worth the effort, since it sacrifices all ties o the sound object to its context and history. Despite Schaeffer’s goals, the method used to disclose a sound object as an essence ends up denaturing the object and thus distorting the resulting essence. Tis objection ollows along the lines first proposed by Teodor Adorno. In the late 1920s, Adorno argued that “the cognitive character o art is defined through its historicall actual historica actuality ity..”109 Te compositional act is engaged, rom the very ver y beginning, in a historical dialectic presen presented ted in the orm o musical musical material. Adorno writes, It is the material which provides the stage or progress in art, not individual works. And this material is not like the twelve semitones semitones with their t heir physically patterned overtone relationships, interchangeable and identical or all time. On the contrary,, history is sedimented in the figurations in which the composer encouncontrary ters the material; the composer never encounters the material separate rom such figurations. 110 Te equivocal term “figuration” is intended to capture this dialectic o material and history: Sounds and notes do not simply constitute a realm o essence detachable rom their moment, sites o production, or reception. Rather, Rather, they need to be b e recognized as a sedimentation o historical and social orces. But such figurations are precisely the disjecta membra cast aside by reduced listening. Te indicative and communicative sign is dismissed as inessential to Schaeffer’s oundational project. In order to have an existence in the domain o the musical work, indicative and communicative communicative signs must must be reconstructed on the basis o the sound object. Tis style o reconstruction is hardly value-neutral. In act, it reveals a bias that is maniest in the phenomenological method itsel, despite its claims to be merely a descriptive science. As Adorno once wrote, “Te orm o phenomenological description borrowed rom the sciences, which is supposed to add nothing to thought, changes it in itsel.”111 Tis change is made in the name o securing an a priori ontological oundation, but the benefits o such a oundation are attained at the expense o historically sedimented “residual signification.” Schaeffer, unwilling to see his own composing and theorizing as historically conditioned, conditioned, deludes himsel into describing a sonic material that necessarily stands outside history. What Adorno writes about Husserl also holds o any oundational musical ontology: “ostensible original concepts . . . are totally and necessarily mediated in themselves— themselves—to to use the accepted scientific term—‘laden with presuppositions.’ ”112
Although the acousmatic reduction does not bar the possibility o hearing sounds in relation to their source, when combined with the eidetic reduction, it changes the way sounds are conceptualized. Tey become audible phenomena, understood as ontologically distinct rom their causal sources. Either we hear through the sound object to its source or attend to it or its own intrinsic eatures—but in either case, the sound object, taken as a phenomenon, has priority. Tis phenomenalization o sound, which is part and parcel o Schaeffer’s acousmatic epoché , encourages the listener to understand sounds as objects, not as events. An event-based ontology o sounds is not congruent with a Husserlian emphasis on intentional, transcendent
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objects or noema. Unlike an event-based ontology, where the effect o a sound is not conceptually distinguished rom its source or cause, Schaeffer’s theory assumes a split rom the outset. Tis authorizes a reification o the sonic effect and makes it impossible to accurately determine the ontological relation o effect to source and cause within a Schaefferian S chaefferian ramework. theorists who claim allegiance to Chion, Schaeffer have notpraises accepted his reification o Even the sound object. For instance, Michel who ofen Schaeffer’s work, challenges the strict separation o source and effect when he introduces the figure o the acousmêtre in Te Voice in Cinema.113 For Chion, the magical powers o the acousmêtre—the strange cinematic figure o an audible voice without a clearly visible body—depend on “whether or not the acousmêtre has been seen.”114 Te acousmêtre is never an essence, ontologically indifferent to the source rom which it is emitted; rather, the gap that separates the voice rom its source generates the acousmêtre’s strange potency. Never suspended, never bracketed, the acousmêtre depends on the parad paradox ox o the effect without a cause—a paradox that has been reduced in Schaeffer’s eidetic theory o the sound object. In chapter 5, I will return to Chion and the acousmêtre, along with literary examples rom Kaa and Poe, to show how an auditory effect always itssounds source and c ause; and cause; potency attached to suchunderdetermines underdetermined challenges anyhow kindthe o strange eidetic reduction. Phantasmagoria
Schaeffer maintains maintains an essentialist view o technology technology.. Rather than t han theorize the acousmatic reduction in its specific relationship to modern audio technology, Schaeffer conceives o it as the reactivation o an ancient telos, an originary experience presuppresupposed and retained in our practices, yet always available to be re-experienced in its ullness. He writes, Te acousmatic situation, in a general ashion, symbolically precludes any relation with what is visible, touchable, measurable. Moreover, between the experience o Pythagoras and our experiences o radio and recordings, the differences separating direct listening (through a curtain) and indirect listening (through a speaker) in the end become negligible.115 Instead o capitalizing on this difference and distinguishing the manner in which new orms o technology produce historically unique affordances or opportunities , Schaeffer conjures technology into an archetype, disclosing a realm o essence that
is always already present—and thus essentially ahistorical. Phantasmagorically, Schaeffer masks the technical specificity and labor involved in the production o the sound object, in order to present an autonomous realm o sonic effects without causes. In the “ervor o listening,” Schaeffer effaces the historical and material specificity o the locked groove ( sillon ermé ) in the name o the disclosure o an eidetic sound object. In other words, acousmatic experience is treated like a horizon o possibility that underlies certain kinds o experiences epitomized in modern audio, rather than as a field constituted through material engagement engagement with various orms o technology, both visual and auditory.
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Carlos Palombini has convincingly argued or the explicit connection between Heidegger’ss and Schaeffer’ Heidegger’ S chaeffer’ss views on technolog techn ologyy.116 In particular, both Heidegger and Schaeffer conceive o the technological domain as distinct rom its particular cultural and social maniestations. According to Heidegger, “echnology is not equivalent to the essence o technology.”117 Tis is no anodyne claim; Heidegger assumes assumes a split betweenmaterial the actual and the essential. Instead o negotiating with technology in its concrete, maniestations, it must be reconceived as an ontological perspective, a new orm o understanding or disclosing the world. Heidegger writes, “echnology is thereore no mere means. echnology is a way o revealing.” 118 Schaeffer would agree. Materially and historically specific orms o technology (magnetic tape and its possibili p ossibilities ties o editing, splicing, and playback; the phonogén phonogénee, the morphophone, analogue filters, and artificial reverberators) may have afforded the conditions or developing musique concrète, but Schaeffer views technology as something ar greater than the sum o such material conditions. More than just a prosthesis or the senses, technology discloses a “way o revealing.” Schaeffer writes, Te age o mechanism, denounced wrongly by Pharisees o spiritualism, is the age o the most inordinate human sensibility. It is not solely a question o machines or making, but o machines or eeling which give to modern man tireless touch, ears and eyes, machines that he can expect to give to him to see, to hear hear,, to touch what his eyes could never have shown him, his ears could never have made him hear, to touch his what his hands could never have let him touch. As this enormous puzzle, which knowledge o the exterior world is, composes c omposes itsel, strengthens itsel, verifies itsel and finally “sets” into shape, man recognizes himsel in it: he finds in it the reflection o his own chemistry, his own mechanisms. 119 But what is ultimately revealed? Te celebration o new possibilities or eeling and sensation is superseded supers eded by man’s recognition recognit ion o himsel, where “man” “man” is characterized charact erized wholly abstractly. abstractly. Tis is no account acc ount o historically specific persons p ersons involved involved in artisart istic or critical engagements with the technological means at hand; rather, Schaeffer presents a picture o ahistorical, existential man discovering himsel within a teleological horizon. What modern technology reveals or Schaeffer is little more than an abstract glimpse into an ancient originary experience. Where “man describes himsel to man, in the language o things,” the “voice” o technological things is silenced. In chapter 4, I will revisit the relationship o acousmatic listening and phantasmagoria and present the historical context or their close affiliation. Additionally, I posit a set o philosophical conditions that underlie cases o musical phantasmagoria phantasmagoria and propose a more productive model or understanding the role o technology, broadly
construed, in the production o acousmatic experience.
Myth
Roland Barthes once said, “Myth deprives the object o which it speaks o all history.”120 In the Schaefferian discourse, the sound object is indeed the object that has exchanged exchang ed its history or myth. Te terms o that myth are well defined: Te experience o the electronic musician in the studio reactivates the ancient originary experience o the Pythagorean disciples who heard the master speak rom behind a veil.
Pierre Schaeffer, the Sound Object, and the Acousmatic Reduction
41
Tis claim is not authorized by a patient historical account, but simply by an act o mythic identification. Te mythic identification between Pythagoras and the composer o musique concrète, initiated by Schaeffer, is prolonged in his students’ work. Tis is clearly evinced in François Bayle’s writings on acousmatic music. Bayle offers a standard account o the history o the term “acousmatic,” tracingrom its origins the legendary accounts o Pythagoras lecturing to his disciples behindtoa veil. But two extra eatures are added: First, he writes that the Pythagorean disciples were placed in the dark; second, he writes that the akousmatikoi developed a special technique or concentrated listening.121 As I will show in chapter 2, neither o these eatures has sufficient historical evidence to support it. Rather, they resemble Bayle’s own modifications to and prescriptions or the practice o musique concrète. Bayle has been instrumental in developing darkened spaces or the perormance o acousmatic music, in which an engineer at a mixing console spatially spatial ly projects sounds. Tus, a specious identification is produced between the ancient acousmatic situation o the Pythagorean disciples and Bayle’s own practice. Just as Pythagoras announced his teachings to his pupils in the dark rom behind a veil, so too to o does the acousmatic ac ousmatic music musi c composer compos er project projec t his discourse discou rse into a darkened hall while remaining obscure. Te loudspeaker and mixing console prolong the Pythagorean veil. As or the second eature, one can imagine that these special listening techniques oreshadow Schaeffer’s écoute réduite, various kinds o sonic solège, or even the link between the Husserlian technique o phenomenological epoché and and the acousmatic reduction. o say the least, historical accuracy does not motivate Bayle’s account. When the distance between our technological devices and the veil o Pythagoras becomes negligible, sadly, we are in the presence o ideology. As Marx wrote, “. . . we must pay attention to this t his history histor y, since sinc e ideology boils down to either an erroneous conception o this history, or a complete abstraction abstrac tion rom rom it.” it.”122
PART TWO
Interruptions
2
Myth and the Origin of the Pythagorean Veil
In 1977, three university psychologists perormed a simple experiment. On three separate occasions, separated by intervals o two weeks, subjects were presented with a list o plausible statements culled rom reerence works on general topics: history, politics, sports, biology, current affairs, the arts, geography, and such. Some statements were true, and others were alse, but none were likely to be known by their subjects—college students. In each session, 60 statements were presented; 40 were new each time, and 20 were repeated on all three t hree occasions. Te subjects were asked to rate how confident they were that the statements encountered were true or alse. Over the course o the three sessions, the repeated statements ranked progressively higher in terms o confidence in their truthulness than the new statements, which remained at a constant ranking throughout. Psychologists reer to this phenomenon as the truth effect : “Te repetition o a plausible statement increases a person’s belie in the reerential validity or truth o that statement.” 1 When we study the discourses on acousmatic sound, we see the truth effect at work. For whenever this strange word, “acousmatic,” is used by composers, theorists, artists, media scholars, and musicologis musicologists, ts, a set o statemen statements ts ollows in tow—state tow—state-ments about the origin, etymology, transmission, and meaning o the term. Some statements invoke the figure o Pythagoras: Tey may speak o his technique o lecturing rom behind a curtain or veil, ofentimes ofentimes in the dark; or o the division o his school into exoteric and esoteric disciples; or o obscuring his appearance in order to develop techniques o concentrated listening in his pupils; or o his secret understanding o the distinct epistemologies o the eye and the ear. Others articulate the preservation o this Pythagorean tradition in modern orms o sound reproduction and radio transmission. Tese repeated claims take on the solidity o truth—groundt ruth—ground-
ing claims, organizing conceptual schemata, and shap shaping ing practices. In the previous chapter, chapter, I raised the objection objec tion that the Schaefferian tradition persists in a mythic identification o the composer o musique concrète with Pythagoras. How best can one demonstrate the pervasiveness o this myth? Tere is no single central text describing the ounding, meaning, and transmission o the term “acous“acousmatic” rom Pythagoras Pythagor as to the present day. day. Rather, there are multiple multiple partial parti al accounts that circulate in various discourses on acousmatic sound. Te whole is nowhere directly presented; like a landscape composited rom multiple snapshots, it is only revealed by overlaying the various pieces into a complete image.
46
INERRUPIONS
Since writings on acousmatic sound are usually intended or specialized and distinct audiences (composers, film theorists, opera scholars, theorists o vocality, etc.), I cannot assume that the reader is amiliar with all o the pieces that comprise that image. Tus, I present a set o statements selected rom the writings on acousmatic sound beore offering a synthesis o these statements into a “key myth”—to borrow a phrase rom Levi-Straus Levi-Strauss. s.2 Tese statements contain a collection o mythemes: indi vidual, repeated units o mythological mythological narrative, narrative, o various various sizes and compre comprehensive hensive-ness, deployed or a variety o purposes. Te mythemes are not directly stated as such but discerned through replication. replication. Teir presence is marked by the act that they are repeated again and again. I ask the reader to ocus on both the variations and similarities among the mythemes. o acilitate my construction o the key myth, I introduce a notational convention: Each mythic statement (or source rom which I construct the key myth) is preaced with the letter “M” and a number, so that I can reer to them explicitly and efficiently later in the text. Te first set o statemen statements ts contains overviews intended as schemata or thumbnail guides or tracing a comprehensive account o the origin and transmission o the term “acousmatic.” M1. Michel Chion, Te Voice in Cinema:
Let us go back to the t he original meaning o the word acousmatic. acousmatic. Tis was appar appar-ently the name assigned to a Pythagorean sect whose ollowers would would listen to their master speak behind a curtain, as the story goes, so that the sight o the speaker wouldn’t’t distract them rom the message. . . . Te history o the term in intere wouldn intereststing. Te French word acousmate designates “invisible” sounds. Apollinaire, who loved rare words, wrote a poem in 1913 entitled “Acousmate,” about a voice that resonates in the air. Te amous Encyclopédie o Diderot and d’Alembert (1751) cites the “Acousmatiques” as those uninitiated disciples o Pythagoras who were first obliged to spend five years in silence listening to their master speak behind the curtain, at the end o which they could look at him and were ull members o the sect. It seems that Clement o Alexandria, an ecclesiastic writing around 250 B.C., may be the sole source o this story, in his book Stromateis. Te writer Jérôme Peignot called this term to the attention o Pierre Schaeffer.3 M2. François Bayle, Musiq Musique ue acousmatiqu acousmatiquee: a. acousmatic—Situation o pure listening, without attention being diverted or
reinorced by visible or oreseeable [ prévisi prévisible ble] instrumental causes.4 b. Pythagoras (6th cent. B.C.) invented an original device [dispositi orginal ]
or attentive listening, by placing himsel behind a curtain [rideau] when lecturing to his disciples, in the dark, and in the most rigorous silence. Acous Acousmatic matic is the word used to designate this situation—and the disciples who thereby developed their technique o concentration. Moreover, this philosopher, mathematician and musician lef no writings.5 c. During the birth o the first “musiques de bruit ,” ,” described by Schaeffer in his first methodological treatises, t reatises, writer and poet Jérô Jérôme me Peignot declared in 1955 in Musi Musique que animée animée, a broadcast o the Groupe de musique concrète: “What words could designate this distance that separates sounds rom their origin. . . . Acous Acousmatic sound means (in the dictionary) a sound that one hears without revealing
Myth and the Origin o the Pythagorean Veil
47
[déceler] the causes. Ah, good! Here is the very definition o the sound object [l’objet sonore], this element at the base o musique concrète, the most general music there is. . . .”6 d. In his raité des objets musicaux . . . P. P. Schaeffer reclaimed the term “acousmatic” by attaching it to the phenomenological reduction or epoché , and to reduced listening.7 M3. Anonymous [Francis Dhomont], “New Media Dictionary,” Leonardo 43(3): Acousmatics—Derived rom the name o a disciple o Pythagoras who listened to his lessons rom behind a curtain so he would not be distracted by the physical presence o the master and could give his ull attention to the content o the message. In the early twentieth century, the French word “ Acous Acousmate mate” (a noun rom the Greek Akoum heard”) ”) could still be ound in Akoumaa, “that which can be heard the two-volume Larousse pour tous. Tere it is defined as “an imaginary noise, or a noise or which no cause or author can be ound.” But in 1955, when musique concrète first appeared, writer and poet Jérôme Peignot started using the French adjective acousmatique to mean “the distance that separates sounds rom their origin,” reerring to could the impossibility speakers reconstitute visu visual al eleme elements nts that be rela related ted toothe thpenetrating e sounds sounds.. In Inthe 1966, 1966, Pierreeto Pierr Schaeffer Schaeff er conconsidered calling his raité des objets musicaux “raité d’acousmatique.” Finally, around 1974, to distinguish between and avoid any conusion with electroacoustical perormances or transormed instruments (Ondes Martenot, electric guitars, synthesizers, real-time audio-digital systems), François Bayle introduced the French expression musique acousmatique to reer to music “that is shot, that is developed in the studio, that can be projected to an audience, like film.”8 M4. Francis Dhomont, “Is there a Québec Sound?”:
By shrouding “behind” the speaker (a modern Pythagorean partition) any visual visu al elements elements that could be link linked ed to perce perceive ivedd soun soundd events (such as instrumental perormers on stage), acousmatic art presents sound on its own, devoid o causal identity, thereby generating a flow o images in the psyche o the listener. 9 In these overviews, the ounding, history, and transmission o the term “acousmatic” divide into two periods. Te first, spanning the school o Pythagoras through his reception in the Greek, Roman, and early Christian world, ocuses on the origins and meaning o the word “acousmatic.” It touches on various mythemes o the Pythagorean school and its divisions, the invention and deployment o the
Pythagorean veil, and the separation o the eye and the ear as a pedagogical tech nique. Te second period spans rom the time o Diderot to Apollinaire’s poetry, then to Schaeffer, Peignot, and the age o musique concrète, and finally to François Bayle and musique acousmatique. It also encompasses the expansion o the term into a modern “acousmate .” Maintaining these periods as thematic, I present another set variant, o statements grouped in the first period, exclusively addressing the Pythagorean origins and meaning o the term. M5. Diderot, L’encyclopédie :
o understand the Acousmatics, it is necessary to know that the disciples in the school o Pythagoras were divided in two separate classes by a veil [ voile]; that the
48
INERRUPIONS
first class, the most advanced, who underwent five years o silence without having seen their master at the t he rostrum, and having always been separated rom the others the entire time by a veil, were finally admitted into the space o the sanctuary where they could hear and see him ace to ace; they are called Esoterics. Te others who remained behind the veil were called as Exoterics or Acousmatics. Acousmatics.10 M6. Mladen Dolar, A Voice Voice and Noth Nothing ing More More:
[Acousmatic] has a precise technical meaning: according to Larousse, “acousmatic” describes “the noise which we hear without seeing what is causing it.” And it gives its philosophical origin: “Te Acousmatics were Pythagoras’ disciples who, concealed by a curtain, ollowed his teaching or five years without being able to see him.” Larousse ollows [the Lie o Pythagoras o] Diogenes Laertius (VIII, 10): “[His pupils] were silent or the period o five years and only listened to the speeches without seeing Pythagoras, until they proved themselves worthy o it.” Te eacher, eacher, the Master behind a curtain, c urtain, proffering his teaching teachi ng rom there without being seen: no doubt a stroke o genius which stands at the very origin o philosophy—Pythagoras was allegedly the first to describe himsel as a “philosopher,” the first ound a philosophical Te advantage this mechanismand wasalso obvious: thetostudents, the ollowers, school. were confined to “theiroMaster’s voice,” not distracted by his looks or quirks o behavior, by visual orms, the spectacle o presentation, the theatrical effects which always pertain to lecturing; they had to concentrate merely on the voice and the meaning emanating rom it. 11 M7. Jérôme Peignot, “Musique concrète”:
o try and finish in good time with the expression “musique concrete” why not use the word “acousmatic,” taken rom the Greek word akousma, which means “the object o hearing.” In French, the word “acousmatique” already describes those disciples o Pythagoras who, during five years, only heard his lessons hidden behind a curtain, without seeing him, and keeping a rigid silence. Pythagoras was o the view that a simpl simplee look at his ace could distract his pupils rom the teachings that he was giving them. I one gives the word an adjectival orm, acousmatic, it would indicate a sound that one hears without being able to identiy its origin.12 M8. Beatriz Ferreyra: a. Te term “acousmatic” comes rom Pythagoras and his method o teach-
ing: he taught behind a curtain so s o that his pupils could only hear his voice without seeing him, without visual support, without recognizing the sound source. s ource.13 b. [Pierre Schaeffer] also introduced the idea o “reduced hearing,” a sort o
acrobatic exercise that pushed the composer to hear the t he sound without examining the cause o its production, to hear the sound out o its context. Tis abstraction o causality is now one o the oundations o electroacoustic musical composition. Tat’s why our music is called acousmatic music. It comes rom Pythagoras’s technique o teaching philosophy to his students behind a screen, so his students listened to his voice without seeing him. Tey were called the Acousmates. Acousmates.14 M9. Carolyn Abbate, “Debussy’s Phantom Sounds”:
Schaeffer invoked the figure o Pythagorus, recalling how one o the cults o disciples surrounding the great mathematician listened to him teach rom behind a curtained arras, the better to ocus their thoughts on the content o his speech,
Myth and the Origin o the Pythagorean Veil
not be distracted by his body or his gestures. Power accrues to the utterance and not the person; words are also reer, something more than the speech o a human being; they point not merely to Pythagorus and his earthly orm, but become symbols that detach entirely rom an agent o utterance to take on other meanings. 15 M10.
Pierre Schaeffer, raitédictionary des objets tells musicaux : “Name given to the disciples , the Larousse us, is the: Acous Acousmatic matic o Pythagoras who, or five years, listened to his teachings while he was hidden behind a curtain, without seeing him, while observing a strict silence. ” Hidden rom their eyes, only the voice o their master reached the disciples. It is to this initiatory initiato ry experience that we are linking the notion o acousma acousmatics, tics, given the use we would like to make o it here. Te Larousse dictionary continues: “ Acousmatic, adjective: is said o a noise that one hears without seeing what causes it.” Tis term . . . marks the perceptive reality o a sound as such, as distinguished rom the modes o its production and transmission. Te new phenomenon o telecommunications and the massive diffusion o messages exists only in relation a act that has been rooted in human experience rom to and as a unction o a the beginning:return natural, is why can, without anachronism, to sonorous an ancientcommunication. tradition which,Tis no less norwe otherwise than contemporary contem porary radio and recordings, gives back to the ear alone the entire responsibility o a perception that ordinarily rests on other senses. In ancient times, the apparatus [dispositi ] was a curtain; c urtain; today it is the radio and the t he methods o reproduction, along with the whole set o electro-acoustic transormations, that place us, modern listeners to an invisible voice, voice, under similar condition conditions. s.16 A final set ocuses on the modern transmission o the variant term “acousmate.” M11. Marc Battier, “What the GRM brought to music”: a. Tis term [“acousmatic”] . . . has to be extended through the t he notion o “acous-
mate,” which gave a mystical dimension to the phenomenon o hidden sound. Sound technologies have increasingly reinorced reinorced the idea o acousmate as a number o great mystics have given witness, supporting our listening to voices without bodies. Voices without bodies: this addresses itsel to the idea that with sound technology one can transport or reproduce sound without its being associated with the material that produced it.17 b. Here is what the Dictionary o the Académie rançaise says in its fifh edition o 1798: “ACOUSMAE. Noun singular. Noise o human voices or instru-
49
ments that one imagines one hears in the air.”. . . [Tis definition] can be ound copied exactly in the notebooks o the t he young Apollinaire. Apollinaire. Te poet gave this title o acousmate to two o his poems.18 By overlaying and comparing the various statements, it is possible to construct a synthetic key myth. M . Te key myth: ′
Te term “acousmatic” reers to the disciples o Pythagoras who heard the philosopher lecture rom behind a screen, curtain, partition, or veil (M1, M2b, M3,
50
INERRUPIONS
M4, M5, M6, M7, M8, M9, M10). Te reason they remaine remainedd on the ar ar side side o the veil was to promote a orm o concentrated listening (M2a, M8b) or to emphasize the master’s message (M1, M3, M6, M7, M9) undistracted by the visual aspects or physical presence o the speaker (M1, M3, M6, M7, M8, M9). In addition to keeping a vow o silence or five five years (M1, M5, M6, M7, M10), M10) , this exoteric ritual ormed part part o an init initiation iation into the Pythagorean Pythagorean school where pupils would then then see the master (M1, M5, M6). From the experience o the acousmatics, we derive the adjectival sense o the term, meaning a sound that one hears without seeing or being able to identiy the originating source (M2a, M2c, M3, M4, M6, M7, M8a, M8b, M10, M11a). Te term was trans transmitted mitted by Diderot in the Encyclopédie ( M1, M1, M5) and in the pages o Larousse Larousse ( M6, M6, M10). A rela related ted term, “acousma “acousmate te”” (M1, M3, M11), M11) , was ound in the Dictionnaire o the Académie rançaise ( M11b), as well as Larousse ( M3). M3). Apollinair Apollinaire, e, a lover o rare words, words, used “acousma “acousmate te”” as the title o two short poems (M1, M11b). Tese poems tell o voices heard in the air (M1, M11b). Te writer Jérôme Peignot was the first to employ “acousmatic” musique concrète ( M2c, as a term or describing musique M2c, M3). Schaeffer learned abou aboutt the term rom Peignot (M1) and, by attaching it to the phenomenological epoché, epoché, developed a concept o acousmatics that ormed a significant part o this theory in the raité ( M2d). M2d). Modern Modern audio audio technology technology preserves preserves the the ancient ancient acousmatic acousmatic tratradition o the Pythagorean veil (M10) or its mystical variants (M11). Acousmatic music continues the tradition o musique concrète Pythagoreanism by veiling sounds, through the use o the loudspeaker, o all causal and contextual associations (M2a, M4, M8b).
Based on M′, it is possible to throw some o the most unusual and idiosyncratic statements into relie. 1. Some o these statements simply contain mistakes, but do not appear to intentionally acts in concerning the name othe some particular purposedisor aim. ake, ormisconstrue instance, thethemytheme name o the exoteric ciples o Pythagoras. While the majority o the statements claim that “acousmatics” designates a group o disciples in the Pythagorean school, M3 traces the name back to a single disciple. M8 preserves the group, but claims that they were called the “acousmates,” not the “acousmatics.”19 O course, this claim is not externally supported by the classical sources, nor does it internally agree with other mythemes.20
2. Some o the statements omit inormation in order to promote a particular set o interests. For example, five o the statements address the mytheme concernconcer ning the initiatory aspects o Pythagoras’ teaching and the five-year vow o silence (M1, M5, M6, M7, M10). Four o those statements mention that this vow was ollowed by a promotion whereby the initiated were entitled to see the master ace ace to ace. One sample (M5) rom that set o our explicitly names the class o initiated disciples the “Esoterics. “Esoter ics.”” Te only sample that mentions the vow without discussdis cussing the latter initiation is M7, an important text by Jérôme Peignot. Explicitly stated in M1, but implied in M2c and M3, Peignot was the first to use the adjective “acousmatic” to describe musique concrète and he is the figure rom whom
Myth and the Origin o the Pythagorean Veil
51
Schaeffer was introduced to the term. (I have more to say about Peignot’s role in the ollowing chapter.) His omission o the esoteric side o Pythagoreanism is noteworthy, or it portrays the acousmatics as listeners trained in a certain attentive mode—a listening that is unconcerned with the physical source rom which the sounds are emitted—rather than as a competing sect in the Pythagorean school. Peignot’s intellectual milieu, his set o particular interests, his institutional role within Schaeffer’s organization, his work as a poet, and his influences clariy the meaning o M7. For Peignot, the adjective “acousmatic” was intended to replace the term musique concrète. Schaeffer, by originally calling his music “concrete,” was trying to position it against the “abstract” music he heard coming rom Germany and invading the borders o France afer the war. However, concrete music was not intended as a reactionary term; rather, rather, it was chiasmically allied with abstract painting, in that both art orms sought direct encounters with their material conditions— on one side, sound unmediated through the note; on the other, a direct experience with color and line unmediated by the figure.21 Peignot’s insistence on “acousmatic” as the proper descriptive term, rather than musique concrète, emphasizes the dictionary definition o the term more than its Pythagorean connotations. Te experience uniquely afforded by musique concrète, in contrast to other orms o electronic music, was that o a “distance which separates the sounds rom their origins.”22 Peignot is not describing the esoteric act o composition; he is interested in offering an aescontent to hold itsel to the ar side o the thetic o musique concrète, one that is quite content Pythagorean veil. Peignot, Peignot, as a critic and advocate or musique concrète, takes his seat with the audience, acing the loudspeakers, not behind the mixing board. 3. Some o the statements augment or embellish mythemes with new details, and thus appear idiosyncratic in comparison to M′. François Bayle, the author o M2, embellishes the standard mytheme that the “acousmatics” heard the master lecture rom behind a veil by claiming that Pythagoras lectured in the dark. O course, raiseshis a puzzling question. I Pythagoras was already behind a curtain23 in orderthis to hide appearance, why did he also require the cover o darkness? Pragmatically, this seems a bit overdetermined. But the puzzle is solved when one realizes that this embellishment is strategically placed with a goal in mind—to set up a mimetic identification between the ancient philosopher and Bayle’s own practices as a composer. Bayle popularized the term “musique acousmatique” (a term that Schaeffer did not use to describe his compositional work) to describe his particular brand o musique concrète, which employs arrays o loudspeakers to
create complex patterns o sonic diffusion and projection. Tis usually requires the creation creatio n o a special hall, called an acousmonium, in which to perorm these pieces. He reers to his compositional practice as “cinema or the ear,” 24 encouraging the propagation o mental images by placing listeners in darkened rooms and exposing them to evocative sounds moving through space. Francis Dhomont (M3) inscribes Bayle into that history, as the inventor o a sound art akin to cinema, in which sounds are “shot and developed in the studio, [and] projected in halls.”25 Tus, by placing Pythagoras’ lectures in the dark, Bayle can orge a mimetic identification between the philosopher and himsel that authorizes his own cinematic practice o musique acousmatique. Pythagoras’ darkness is really Bayle’s darkness, a penumbra
52
INERRUPIONS
that hides the loudspeakers to acilitate the promotion o images in the listener.26 Bayle’s ashioning o the Pythagoras legend should be read as a cipher intended to ground his own practices. Additionally, Bayle deploys what is perhaps the most central mytheme in M′—the tale o the Pythagorean veil. It is present in all but one o the statements (M11). Within the tradition o musique concrète, the Pythagorean P ythagorean veil is most ofen used to organize a set o mimetic identifications, by binding ancient terms to their modern counterparts. Te composer occupies the position o Pythagoras, unolding a musical discourse or projecting a sonic message into the dark while remaining hidden. Te audience occupies the position o the akousmatikoi (t (the he “hearers, “he arers,” “listeners, “ listeners,”” or “auditors”) who—like Peignot—receive the discourse while remaining outside the veil, listening with concentration concentration to the emissions o the invisible master. master. Te loudspeaker, the mixing console, and the technical tools o the studio occupy the place originally held by the Pythagorean veil. By describing Pythagoras as the inventor inventor o an “original device [dispositi original ],” ],” Bayle (M2b) grants to the ancient philosopher the aura o an engineer, one that fits well with the extensive use o recording devices (editing stations, signal processors, etc.) in the production o musique acousmatique. Tis claim echoes Schaeffer (M10), who first described the Pythagorean veil as a dispositi while making the identification o ancient and modern outright: “In ancient times, the apparatus [dispositi ] was a curtain; today it is the radio and the methods o reprodu reproduction ction . . . that place us, modern listeners to an invisi invisible ble voice, under similar conditions. conditions.” In addition to recuperating the technical aspects aspects o the veil to the practice o musique concrète, Bayle also draws out its aesthetic consequences. In M2b, he claims that the veil was employed by Pythagoras as a device or developing the technique o “concentration,” and in M2a, he calls this a situation o “pure listening.” One assumes that these special listening techniques are underscored in order to oreshadow Schaeffer’s écoute réduite, various kinds o sonic solège, or even the link between the Husserlian technique o phenomenological epoché and and acousmatic listening Te strength o this(M2d). mimetic configuration depends on the degree to which these identifications bind together the ancient and modern terms into a sel-supporting structure. Past and present are stitched together in a pattern that effaces historical, cultural, and technological difference. As I argued in the previous chapter, Schaeffer’s thinking, as well as those who ollow him closely in their theories o acousmatic experience, promotes promotes an ahistorical view o technology, sound, and listening. As an
instrument or the obliteration o time, Levi Strauss claims that myth overcomes the contradiction between historical, enacted time and a permanent constant.”27 In the end, these historical contradictions are effaced because they obscure the transmission and arrival o an ancient heritage. An acousmatic horizon, originally disclosed by the ancient technology o the Pythagorean veil, is relived and reanimated by the loudspeaker. loudspeaker. Being modern, we have rediscovered rediscovered that we were always already ancient. o put it bluntly, the primary role o this tale o the veil is mythic. Although I have borrowed aspects o Levi-Strauss’s structural analysis o myth, my particular usage o the term is ar more indebted to the work o Jean Luc-Nancy.28 In Nancy’s analysis, presented in Te Inoperative Community , myth acts as a “ounding fiction,
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or a oundation by fiction” deployed to organize the interests o a community. 29 “Concentrated within the idea o myth is perhaps the entire presentation on the part o the West to appropriate its own origin, or to take away its secret, so that it can at last identiy itsel, absolutely, around its own pronouncement and its own birth,” Nancy writes.30 Tis applies to the mythic discourse on acousmatic sound. For the Schaefferian tradition, rather than squarely address its historical and cultural origins, the Pythagorean veil becomes the origin o the acousmatic horizon— or in Schaeffer’s strongly phenomenological terms, its “originary experience.” Te invocation o Pythagoras is an attempt by the practitioners o musique concrète to determine their own origin. It is an act o autopoiesis, or sel-oundation. Te tale o the Pythagorean veil is the primal scene o electroacoustic music, organizing its sel-appropriation, retroactively ounding an arché, and projecting a telos. “All myths are primal scenes,” says Nancy, “all primal scenes are myths.” 31 A scene like other scenes, the tale o the veil possesses many trappings o theatrical fictions: curtains, offstage voices, a darkened auditorium, and the imposition o silence. And, like all primal scenes, its veracity is as dubious as its grip is powerul. In addition to operating as a ounding fiction, Nancy indicates two other eatures o myth relevant or the acousmatic discourses under examination. First, myth need not only operate on speculative or fictional material, but unctions even in the accounts one gives o the transmission o that material . “Te scene is equally mythic when it is simply the apparently less speculative, more positive scene o the transmission o myth.”32 As we move rom the depths o ancient Pythagoreanism and the birth o philosophy to the crisp, clear, clear, and distinct prose o Diderot or the disembodied and ambient poetry o Apollinaire, we cannot say that we are moving rom the discourse o myth to the discourse o Enlightenment or modernism. Te account o the transmission o myth—who told what to whom, when, and why?—is still the warp and woo o the myth. It authorizes the modern-day acousmatics to give an account o their patrimony, the survival o their knowledge, and to position themselves as the appropriate (i on notmaterial singularly recipients the been myth.invented, Second, myth operates indifferently thatsuited) may or may notohave since its main concern is the unction to which this material is put to use. “We know that although we did not invent the stories (here again, up to a certain point), we did on the other hand invent the unction o the myths that these stories recount.” 33 When Bayle authorizes his practice by constructing a set o mimetic identifications with Pythagoreanism, his myth operates on material that is both partially discovered
and partially invented. Te Pythagorean veil was available or appropriation while simultaneously simultan eously being modified or particular ends. However, one should not single out the Schaefferians or abricating stories about Pythagoras on such scant evidence or or such autopoietic purposes. People have been telling stories about Pythagoras or a very long time, ofen or the purpose o deending positions with little concern or historical accuracy. Indeed, one constant in the reception o Pythagoras is that it necessitates the creation o a stockpile o stories about him. Since we know so little about Pythagoras, he unctions as a nearly blank slate upon which to inscribe acts o personal and institutional Nachträglichkeit , where the past is rewritten in accord with the demands o the present. Pythagoras is the perect figure to anachronistically authorize some latter day privileged claim or position.
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By stepping back rom these legendary tales and abrications, I hope to inquire into the word “acousmatic” rom a position outside the Schaefferian tradition. With the awareness that one cannot outwit myth by pretending to shatter it with the orce o history—or documents and archives never speak or themselves—I will, at the very least, try to “interrup “ interrupt” t” it, as Nancy Nancy suggests. Te orm o that interruption interruption will involve the comparison and investigation o our mythemes against a series o ancient sources. (Note: As I develop the comparison, I will mark ancient sources with the prefix “S” to differentiate them rom our initial mythic statements that are marked by “M.”) I want to give the reader air warning that this interruption will involve quite a lot o detailed investigation into the extant sources. But that is always the case when working diligently with a corpus o texts as old and ragmentary as those in the ancient world. For readers less concerned with the historical origins o the term “acousmatic,” simply leafing through this and the ollowing chapter might be good enough to satisy their curiosity without w ithout taxing their patience. But or those who are interested intere sted in the transmissi t ransmission on o this term, the contexts in which it was used, and the meanings has accrued, patient required, investigations presented willthan be ediying. I haveittried to provideI hope all thethe evidence and nothing more what is required, to answer the ollowing questions: Who were the akousmatikoi? What was their relation to the mathematikoi? How was the division o the Pythagorean school understood? What were the roles o seeing and hearing or the Pythagoreans? When and where does the Pythagorean veil emerge, and or what ends? How was the word “acousmatic” transmitted, and what was its reception? What is the relationship between acousmatic and acousmate? When, where, and why did the latter term emerge? In posing these questions, I am tracking more than the word “acousmatic” and the legend o the acousmatic veil; I am also investigating three related terms: first, the Greek word akousmata, the “things heard” or oral saying o Pythagoras; second, word akousmatikoi , theorclass o Pythagorean disciples whose name rom the their status as “auditors” “listeners”; and finally, the unusual Frenchderives word acousmate, meaning the “sound o voices or instruments heard in the air.” In this chapterr and the next, I divide this constella chapte constellation tion o terms into two t wo large phases: first, a phase that investigates the classical literature or inormation on the akousmatikoi and Pythagorean akousmata, tracing usage and transmission up to the revival o Pythagoreanism in the Renaissance; second, a phase that begins with the baptism
o the word acousmate in the French Enlightenment, and traces its reception by Apollinaire, Peignot, and eventually Schaeffer. Although the impact o this interruption may diminish the efficacy o using acousmatic acousmatic sound in its current c urrent mythic role, role, it may also have the effect o clariying clariy ing the articulation o the processes o autopoiesis and appropriation operative in acousmatic myth. At the very least, we will know more about how the Pythagorean veil and its related mythemes unction as a ounding fiction and as the fiction o a oundation. AKOUSMATIKOI AKOUSMA TIKOI AND MATHEMATIKOI TIKOI AND MATHEMA
As demonstrated in M′, a basic set o mythemes promotes the view that the acousmatics were a group o Pythagorean P ythagorean disciples disciples positioned on one side o a screen, veil,
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or curtain, unable to see the master’s ace but able to hear his lectures. Iamblichus (c. 245–325 C.E.) is the most influential source o evidence concerning the acousmatics (akousmatikoi) and the Pythagorean veil—the uncited source or Schaeffer’s account (M10), as well as Diderot’s entry on the l’acousmatiques in L’encyclopédie (M5).34 Te Iamblichan Iamb lichan account divides the Pythagorean school into two classes o disciples separated by a veil: Te mathematikoi, seated inside the veil close to Pythagoras, were not only able to see the master lecturing but were entitled to witness demonstrations demonstrations o his theories; the akousmatikoi, seated outside the veil, were only entitled to hear the master’s propositions and were not given the privilege o seeing the demonstrations. Te Greek term mathematikoi is ofen translated as “the students,” while the term akousmatikoi, which literally translates as “those who hear” or “the auditors,” derives rom the belie that they heard the sayings (the akousmata) o Pythagoras rom outside the veil. Te mytheme concerning the rigorous silence o the disciples (M1, M5, M6, M7, M10) also derives rom rom the Iamblichan Iamblichan account. Beore B eore entering entering into the Pythagorean school, Iamblichus describes the extensive examination undergone by hopeul students. Pythagoras, afer examining their relations with parents and kin, (S1) watched them or untimely laughter, and silence and chatting beyond what was proper. Also, he looked at the nature o their desires, the acquaintances with whom they had dealings and their company with these. Most o all, he looked at the leisure occupations in which they spent the day, and what things gave them joy and pain. He observed, moreover, their physique, manner o walking and their whole bodily movement. Studying the eatures by which their nature is made known, he took the visible things as signs o the invisi invisible ble character traits in their souls.35 Following this initial inquiry, Iamblichus claims that potential disciples underwent a three-year probationary period to seeprobationary i they were disposed to athen “trueollowed love o learning” (alethines .36 Te period was by an philomatheias) initiatory initiato ry period during which the t he new pupils, in order to test their t heir capacity or selcontrol, were compelled to observe a vow o silence or five years. “Te subjugation o the tongue,” writes Iamblichus, “is the most difficult o all victories.”37 During the period o silence, akousmatikoi participated in Pythagoras Pythagoras’’ discourse, (S2) “through hearing alone, being outside the veil and never seeing him.” 38 But,
afer passing the period o initiation, (S3) “the candidates themselves, then, i they appeared worthy o sharing in his teachings, having been judged by their way o lie and other virtuousness, afer the five year silence, became ‘esoterics’ and heard Pythagoras within the veil, and also saw him.”39 Consistently, Iamblichus describes the position o the disciples as exo sindonos (outside the veil) or entos sindonos (inside the veil). Te word sindon (σινδων) means “a fine cloth, usually linen,” but40 also “anything made o such cloth,” such as a shroud, winding sheet, or a napkin. Because the word sindon can reer to both b oth a curtain curt ain and a veil, standard accounts use both terms, ofen interchangeably.41 Whether veil or curtain, the sindon that hangs between the two camps within the Pythagorean school does not unction primarily as a means or demarcating spatial locations or separating vision rom hearing. Rather, the veil is emblematic o two different kinds o pupils, representing two
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different orientations within Pythagoreanism and, ultimately, representative o competing views o Pythagoras P ythagoras within the ancient world. Te real difference between the t he akousmatikoi and mathematikoi is not simply, or even primarily, determined by the physical position o the students inside or outside the veil.42 Rather, it is a difference o kind and orientation—a difference between Pythagoras as teacher o scientific wisdom and Pythagoras as “shaman,” to use Walter Burkert’s handy phrase. Most scholars do not dispute that there were distinct types o Pythagorean disciples, tracing the distinction as ar back as Aristotle.43 Rather, the challenging questions emerge when one inquires into the central eatures that distinguish the akousmatikoi rom the mathematikoi. Which group represents the oldest, most original orms o Pythagoreanism? Who were the authentic disciples? Te akousmatikoi , or exoteric disciples, are typically described as religious Pythagoreans. (S4) “Te philosophy o the Acousm Acousmatics atics [akousmatikon philosophía],” according to Iamblichus, “consists o oral instructions without demonstration and without argument: e.g., ‘In this way one must act.’ act.’ ”44 Since the acousmatics do not have access to the proos and demonstrations o the master, they have become the inheritors o45a Following motley assortment doctrinesand andproscriptions, sayings ( akousmata ) that lack explanation. the master’os precepts they scrupulously sc rupulously observe a series o taboos and rites concerning bathing, diet, and other matters o everyday lie and worship.46 In many respects, the akousmatikoi are the disciples who treat Pythagoreanism as a “way o lie,” or what is ofen reerred to as the Pythagorean bios. One unusual source o inormation concerning the akousmatikoi comes rom the middle comedies (middle–late ourth century B.C.E.), such as those by Alexis or Aristophon, in which grubby and dimwitted Pythagoreans are satirically depicted with a variety o unsavory personal characteristics: as bareooted, oddly dressed, clothed in ragged and dirty garments; as covered in filth due to their taboo on bathing; as adherents to the doctrine do ctrine o vegetarianism; as believers in metempsychosis; as prohibited rom eating beans and drinking wine; and as drawing undue attention to themselves by their conspicuous habit o keeping silent. Jokes played at the expense o these akousmatikoi are plentiul and derisory, designed to expose the hypocrisy o their ascetic liestyle. For example, Alexis targets the Pythagorean taboos on eating meat. Afer it is mentioned that Pythagoreans are prohibited rom eating anything animate, someone objects that Epicharides, who is a Pythagorean, eats dogs. o this, the response ollows: “yes, but he kills them first and so they are 47
not still animate. In contrast, the mathematikoi, or esoteric disciples, are characterized as scientific Pythagoreans, Pythagore ans, ofen identified as the genuine disciples o the group. Unlike Unlike the akousmatikoi, who do not have access to the proos and demonstrations o Pythagoras, the mathematikoi possess knowledge in the fields o learning grouped under the rubric o mathemata—such as arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy.48 In the history o philosoph philosophyy, especially through t hrough the filter o the Academic tradition, the great majority o writers have emphasized the “scientific” aspects o Pythagoras’ teaching, rom the Pythagorean theorem to his discovery o the basic harmonic proportions o music, to his rational cosmology and ounding o the word “philosophy.” Te mathematic Pythagoras has also been transmitted in the history o music theory as a thinker t hinker who discovered principles capable o associating cosmological motions and musical proportions.49 However, since this view is shaped by the Platonic and
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Academic tendency to view Pythagoras as a natural scientist, rational philosopher, and mathematician, the claim or its authenticity must be closely scrutinized. scr utinized. WHO ARE THE GENUINE PYTHAGOREANS?
Within Pythagoreanism, a debate rages over which group, the acousmatics or the mathematics, are the genuine disciples. One way to track this debate is to ocus on the figure o Hippasus o Metapontum (end o sixth cent. B.C.E.–early fifh cent. B.C.E.). Hippasus is one o the earliest Pythagoreans discussed in the ancient literature, appearing in Aristotle’s writings on the Pythagoreans. 50 Aristoxenus (370–300 B.C.E.) claims that Hippasus undertook musical experiments with bronze discs o various sizes and thicknesses.51 In contrast with the experiments attributed to Pythagoras, some modern scholars claim that Hippasus’ experiments actually produced scientifically verifiable results concerning the numerical proportions involved involved in musical concords.52 In addition, he is ofen described descr ibed as discovering the harmonic mean.53 In light o these descriptions, one could see in Hippasus the epitome o a mathematic Pyt hagorean. Yet,oinPythagoreanism Yet, the story o Hippasus’ death, the tension betwe en the religious andPythagorean. scientific aces is legible. According to between Iamblichus, Hippasus Hip pasus committed the “impiety” o “having disclosed and given a diagram or the first time o the sphere rom the twelve pentagons [i.e., a pentagonal dodecahedron],” and was thus put to death by drowning.54 Ostensibly, the secrecy and silence that are hallmarks o acousmatic Pythagoreanism also held or the mathemata, which were not to be carelessly disclosed to the uninitiated.55 Hippasus challenged acousmatic secrecy with his disclosure o mathematic knowledge. A controversy between the two camps arose over Hippasus’ disclosure. On one side, the acousmatics disavowed the significance o Hippasus’ impiety by arguing that his mathematical work was his own original invention and could not be traced back to the figure o Pythagoras. For them, Hippasus’ mathematical inventions initiated a new and inauthentic line within Pythagoreanism—a mathematical strain— that departed rom the religious, social, and communal practices to which they were dedicated. Tus, they argued, Hippasus’ mathematic Pythagoreanism was not genuine. On the other side, the mathematics claimed that the work o Hippasus could not be admitted as original and derived rom the figure o Pythagoras himsel. I they were to admit Hippasus’ Hippasus’ contributions as original, they would undermine their claim
or the priority o mathematical and scientific knowledge in the Pythagorean school. For mathematikoi to be the genuine disciples, Hippasus must have been little more than a plagiarist.56 Te dispute is not easy to resolve. I we take our evidence rom Iamblichus, himsel himse l a prominent Neoplatonist, one would expect the Academic interpretation, which supports the mathematikoi, to hold the day. Concerning the dispute, Iamblichus writes, (S5) “there were two kinds o philosophy, or there were two kinds o those pursuing it: some were acousmatics and others were mathematics. O these, t hese, the mathematics are agreed to be Pythagoreans by the others, but the mathematics do not agree that the acousmatics are Pythagoreans.”57 Te argument is predicated on the gif o recognition: I the akousmatikoi recognize the mathematikoi as Pythagoreans, but not vice-versa, then the mathematikoi must be the genuine disciples. Iamblichus supports this argument by claiming that Pythagoras himsel identified the mathematikoi
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as his “true ollowers” oll owers” and “decreed” “decreed” that t hat the akousmatikoi “show themselves as emulators” o the mathematikoi.58 Yet, Iamblichus’ strategy is quite transparent: Put the argument into the mouth o the master in order to make it so. Although an authorial proclamation would help to settle the question, naturally, no evidence or this Pythagorean decree exists. However, Iamblichus contradicts his own argument a ew paragraphs later. Citing the evidence o “a certain Hippomedon . . . a Pythagorean o the acousmatics,” Iamblichus offers a different tale about the origins o the acousmatics and mathematics. Iamblichus claims that Pythagoras originally gave demonstrations and explanations or all o his precepts; but because these explanations were passed down through a series o intermediaries, they were eventually omitted or lost, while the bare precepts remained. Yet, these ancient precepts, even without explanation, preserve wisdom that can be originally attributed attributed to Pythagoras. Because o the t he ancient patrimony o the akousmata, (S6) “they who are concerned with the mathematical doctrines o the Pythagoreans (the mathematics), mathematics), agree that these (the acousmatics) are Pythagoreans, but they th ey claim even more strongly, that what they themselves thems elves say is 59
true.” Here the argument rom recognitioneven is reversed: Te mathematikoi recognize the akousmatikoi as genuine Pythagoreans, i they have lost the demonstrations and reasons or Pythagoras’ precepts. By granting this concession, Iamblichus’ weakens his argument or the mathematikoi as the genuine disciples. Te overemphatic claim that the precepts o the mathematikoi are nevertheless true is small recompense or abandoning their stake on the direct historical lineage. acked onto the end o this passage, Iamblichus reasserts his mathematic position by countering the acousmatic claim concerning the originality o Hippasus’ inventions. He states that, although Hippasus became publicly amous or his disclosures, when it comes to mathematics, “all the discoverie discoveriess were o that t hat man . . . Pytha Pythagoras. goras.”60 Tis strange contradiction in Iamblichus’ text has not escaped notice. Walter Burkert, in his magisterial Lore and Science in Ancient Pythagoreanism, places great emphasis on the passages in question: §81 and §§87–89 (S5 and S6). 61 Burkert’s book offers the most comprehensive and detailed survey o the literature on Pythagoreanism, in order to assess to what degree Pythagoras’ teaching was mathematical and scientific, or shamanistic and religious. Te origins o the acousmatics and mathematics within the Pythagorean school is a central issue or Burkert, because his project is intended to offer a precise characterization o the t he earliest prac-
tices o Pythagoras and Pythagoreanism. Burkert tries to resolve the contradiction by citing an additional passage rom Iamblichus’ De communi mathematica scientia: (S7) O these, the t he acousmatics are recognized by the others as Pythagoreans, but
they do not recognize the mathematics, saying that their philosophic activity stems not rom Pythagoras P ythagoras but rom Hippasus. . . . But those o the t he Pythagorean P ythagoreanss whose concern is with the mathemata recognize that the t he others are Pythagoreans, and say that they themselves are even more so, and that what they say is true. 62 Tis passage repeats Iamblichus’ second reading (S6) by granting recognition to the akousmatikoi as genuine Pythagoreans. Burkert argues that both S6 and S7 are “correctly reproduced” rom Iamblichus’ ancient source—likely Aristotle. For Burkert, the Platonized reading o Pythagoras has lef us with a distorted view, turning the
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historical figure o Pythagoras rom a shaman and miracle-worker into a proto-scientist. Aristotle’s reerences to Pythagoreans present a greatly contrasting picture. His conjecture that Aristotle is Iamblichus’ source is supported by the act that S6 and S7 are congruent with other evidence concerning the early Pythagorean school 63
in Aristotle’s the extant literature by Aristotle. account suggests that both groups subscribed to the akousmata—as the argument rom recognition implies—but implies—but that the t he two differed in the manner in which they implemen implemented ted Pythagoreanism in practice. Here is Aristotle, as copied by Iamblichus: (S8) Pythagoras came rom Ionia, more precisely rom Samos, at the time o
the tyranny o Polycrates, when Italy was at its height, and the first men o the city-states became his associates. Te older o these [men] he addressed in a simple style, since they, who had little leisure on account o their being occupied in political affairs, had trouble when he conversed with them in terms o learning (mathemata) and demonstrations (apodeixeis). He thought that they would are no they knew ware hat no to do, evenwhen i they lacked theadditionally reason or it,hear justthe as peopleworse underimedical carewhat worse they do not reason why they are to do each thing in their treatment. Te younger o these [men], however, who had the ability to endure the education, he conversed with in terms o demonstrations and learning. So, then, these men [i.e., the mathematikoi] are descended rom the latter group, as are the others [i.e., the akousmatikoi] rom the ormer group.64 Glossing this passage, Philip Sidney Horky has argued that the distinguishing difference between the acousmatics and the mathematics concerns the “type o knowledge knowledge”” employed. “Te acousmatic Pythagoreans only have knowledge o ‘the act’ o ‘what one is to do,’ but the mathematical Pythagoreans, whose knowledge is advanced, understand the ‘reason why they are to do’ what they should do.” 65 One can trace the distinction between the “act” (to oti) and the “reason why” (ti dei prattein, literally, “what one is to do”) in Aristotle’s other writings—textual evidence that helps to establish the authenticity o this passage. 66 In Aristotle’s view, the undamental dierence between the acousmatics and the mathematics is not a difference in belies; rather, the difference depends on the latter’s use o demonstration to provide argu-
ments or their ideas. “While acousmatic Pythagoreans apparently simply accepted the acts as they were, mathematical Pythagoreans engaged in investigations that employed the principles o mathematics in order to makes sense o the world they experienced.”67 But or Aristotle, the explanations o the mathematikoi were flawed. In the Metaphys Meta physics ics, Aristotle critiques mathematical Pythagoreans or relying too heavily on homology as a mode o explanation. Te mathematikoi “were the first to take up mathematics” and began to believe that “its principles were the principles o all things.”68 Because numbers were considered the principles o principles, principles, the mathematikoi would find homologies between numbers and natural phenomena, such as musical harmonics and astronomy. Tese homologies provide poor grounds or analyzing natural phenomena and were ofen extended ar beyond whatever useulness they may have possessed. When their homologies ailed to account or the acts,
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Aristotle charges the mathematikoi with making additions to preserve the coherence o their theory. A telling example comes rom the application o number theory to astronomy: “As the number ten is thought to be perect and to comprise the whole nature o numbers, they say that the bodies which move through the heavens are 69 ten, but as rth. the.’ ”visible bodies are only nine, to meet this they invent a tenth—the ‘count counter-ea er-earth How much aith should we place in these Aristotelian sources? Although the authority o Aristotle is great, and the uniqueness o his account helps to dierentiate it rom the Platonists—who were much more partisan in their high estimation o Pythagoras—the reception, as always, must be measured. Aristotle has an argument to make with the Pythagoreans and writes about them rom a philosophical, not historical, perspective. Although Burkert’s oundational work argues or the priority o the acousmatics as the genuine disciples o Pythagoras— Py thagoras— whom he characterizes as a religious figure or, in his terms, a shaman—he summarizes the basic question concerning the division o the Pythagorean school in a passage that bears repeating:
Modern controversies over Pythagoras and Pythagoreanism are basically nothing more than the continuation o the ancient quarrel between acousmatics and mathematics. Is there nothing more in the doctrine o Pythagoras than what is indicated by the akousmata, with which the Pythagoras legend and the theory o metempsychosis are o course closely connected? Or was there rom the beginning, behind these religious and mythical eatures, whose existence cannot be denied by the modern scholar any more than it could by the mathematics, a new, scientific approach to philosophy, mathematics and the study o the world’s nature?70 We should note that Schaeffer’s reception o Pythagoras, which selectively emphasizes some aspects o the legend at the expense o others, prolongs the very ancient quarrel o the acousmatics and the mathematics. (Perhaps it is only this this prolongation o the ancient debate, o putting Pythagoras at the origin o one’s practice in order to authorize it, that makes Schaeffer a Pythagorean.) One cannot be but struck by the very unusual image o Pythagoras in Schaeffer’s raité , one that is quite distinct rom the typical mathematic reception o Pythagoras in the history o music
theory. Schaeffer’s Pythagoreanism (i one can indeed call it that) is neither bound to the monochord, to the natural science o harmonics, string lengths, tuning, the mathematics o musical proportions, nor to the inaudibility and omnipresence o the music o the spheres. Viewing the situation with a very broad lens, Schaeffer’s Pythagoreanism is acousmatic in the sense that it is primarily ocused on listening; it veers away rom mathematic explanation or scientific demonstrations o phenomena. It is a metaphysics o sound objects, not numbers. Schaeffer, at the very end o the raité , criticizes his ellow composers and musical researchers, “anatics o a digital catechism,” or their “mathematical bigotry.” 71 Schaeffer’s reception o Pythagoras as teacher o techniques o listening—an unusual view in the history o music theory—has, surprisingly, gone almost entirely unnoticed.72 Yet, i emphasis on listening is what aligns Schaeffer with the acousmatics, then we must press on and investigate how the mythemes on acousmatic listening compare with what is attested
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in the ancient sources. What do the ancient sources say about acousmatic listening? Is there any basis or the claim (M2a, M8b) that the acousmatics developed a technique o concentrated listening? What was heard on the ar side o the veil, and how was it auditioned?
THE ACOUSMAT ACOUSMATA A
Unlike the modern-day acousmatics o Peignot or Schaeffer, the Pythagorean akousmatikoi heard nothing rom the ar side o the veil resembling bells, trains, or creaking doors, or even the music o the spheres; rather, the acousmatics attended to the akousmata, the “things heard,” the maxims or “oral sayings” o the master. Aristotle’s lost treatise, On the Pythagoreans, contained a list o Pythagorean akousmata that was widely transcribed and thus preserved in the ancient sources. oday, it affords the reader a motley assortment o curious c urious maxims: —what are the Isles the Blessed? Tethe sun and the moon; —an earthquake is aomass meeting o dead; —a rainbow is the reflected splendor o the sun; —one must put the right shoe on first; —do not walk on roads travelled by the public, or wash onesel in bathing houses; —do not join in putting a burden down, but join in taking it up; —the most just thing is to sacrifice; s acrifice; the strongest, insight; the most beautiul, harmony; —do not speak in the dark; —do not have children by a woman who wears gold jewelry; jewelry ; —do not sacrifice a white cock, or it is a supp suppliant liant and sacred to the moon; —a bronze ring, when struck, releases the voice o a daemon; —abstain rom beans; do not break bread; do not pick up ood that alls rom the table, or it belongs to the t he Heroes; put put salt on the table as a symbol o righteousness; —spit on your nail and hair trimmings; —do not look into a mirror with help o artificial light;
—do not stir the fire with a knie; —do not urinate acing the sun. Iamblichus, ollowing Aristotle, divides the akousmata into three different groups: those concerning what a thing is, those concerning what is the best in any category, and those concerning what it is necessary to do in various situations. 73 Although Burkert describes this threeold division as “artificial and inconsistently ollowed,” it provides some orientation in trying to parse out different unctions served by the akousmata.74 Starting with the final group, one might describe these akousmata as delineating rules about the perormance o sacrificial rituals, how to show honor to the gods, dietary restrictions, and prescriptions or everyday behavior.. Te mixture o maxims shows the intercala ior intercalation tion o sacrificial and ritual practices, basic medical and biological concepts, and a “religious awe beore the elementary
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orces o nature.”75 Te second group, concerning what is the best in any given category, approaches various topics o concern or the Pythagorean school, rom medicine and religion to number theory and philosophy. “What is the most just? o sacrifice. What is the wisest? Number; and in the second place is that which gives names to things. thingsWhat . What wisest o? Insight.” thi ngs among things us? Medicine. Whatsays, is the est? Harmony. is the tishethe strongest strongest? Insight. ”76 As Christoph Riedweg “inlovelitheir brevity these sayings are simultaneously enigmatic and suggestive,” offering up bits o wisdom in a orm that lacks clear explanation. Te implication implication is that such bits o knowledge about the best in any category category will act as directives or leading an ethical lie.77 Yet, these riddles, though not wholly opaque, are presented in a orm that lacks supporting reasons and demonstrations; thus, they leave each inquiry underdetermined by preserving an explanatory gap between question and answer. Te remaining group, akousmata concerning what a thing is, is perhaps the most mysterious o all. Porphyry (235–305 C.E.), a Neoplatonist contemporary o Iamblichus and author o a lie o Pythagoras, reproduces akousmata o this variety: Te constellations are “the tears o Kronos,” Ursa Major and Minor are “the hands o Rhea,” and the planets are “Persephone’s dogs.” Riedweg describes these akousmata as “early examples” o allegory; they “decode the true, real meaning in a (figurative) mythical mode o expression.”78 Te answers provided are ofen nearly inexplicable. I there was indeed a vow o secrecy within the Pythagorean school, then one might speculate that t hat such answers or explanations explanations were internal secrets o the school—perhaps relying on tacit knowledge to understand what kind o interpretive or allegorical ramework was being employed. Such procedures were not oreign to other ancient ceremonies or initiations into the mystery cults. As Riedweg notes, these orms o initiation ofen had a didactic purpose, whereby initiates were “introduced to the relevant cultic myth and its correct interpretation.” 79 Such a procedure would correspond well to the division o the t he Pythagorean school into exoteric and esoteric groups. In this way, the Pythagorean school may have been continuing interpretive practices rooted in older orms o archaic Greek lore and oracular practice. Burkert identifies the akousmata with griphos, or riddles, which were used in the “promulgation o oracles,” in order to argue that “the akousmata are, rather than simple, commonsense wisdom in abstruse orm, ancient magical-ritual commandments.” 80
Whether the Pythagoreans themselves understood the akousmata as literal, figural, ritual, or practical is an open question. What What is perhaps p erhaps more important important or my purposes is that the later traditions o Neopla Neoplatonists, tonists, early Christians, and Gnostics certainly did take such maxims as allegorical, especially around the time when Iamblichus’ Vita was composed. Burkert writes, “Te prevailing view in antiquity was that what was desired [in interpreting the akousmata] was not compliance to the letter but comprehension o the deeper meaning.” 81 Since the akousmata lacked definitive explanations, transmitted as a list o sayings in Aristotle’s lost text, philosophers who wished to indulge in speculation about Pythagoras and Pythagoreanism could try tr y their hand at either offering explanations and allegorical interpretations interpretations o the sayings or accounting or their t heir superficial appearance.82 Porphyry claims that the philosophy o the Pythagoreans died out because it was “enigmatical” and was written in “Doric,” which was an “obscure dialect.”83 Because these teachings could not be ully understood, they were misapprehended and suspected as spurious by later
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generations. Moreover, he argues that the best parts o the Pythagorean wisdom were appropriated by Plato, Aristotle, and their various ollowers, who then maliciously characterized whatever was lefover as “Pythagorean” in order to cast contempt on Pythagoreanism.84 Androcydes, an earlier source than Porphyry Porphyry (and a Pythagorean o whom littleinis unintelligible known), also language.” regards the85 About akousmata ainigmata , which “clothe lofy wisdom this aslater reception o the akous-a mata, Burkert writes, “allegorical interpretation, here as elsewhere, was the necessary means o adapting ancient lore to new ways o thinking, and thus preserving its authority.”86 VEILED UTTERAN UTTERANCES CES
Te Pythagoreans, according to Iamblichus, Iamblichus, “protected their talks with one another and their treatises” tre atises” by the use o “symbols,” casting the t he akousmata in a cryptic orm.87 Such encryption remained in accordance with their vows o silence and method o instruction, which orbade the transmission o Pythagorean wisdom to the uninitiated. Tus, Iamblichus argues, the akousmata are only properly disclosed through a proper method o exegesis exegesis:: (S9) I someone, afer singling out the actual symbols, does not explicate and
comprehend them with an interpretation ree rom mockery, the things said will appear laughable and trivial to ordinary persons, ull o nonsense and rambling. When, however, these utterances are explicated in accord with the manner o these symbols, they become splendid and sacred instead o obscure to the many . . . and they reveal marvelous thought, and produce divine inspiration in those scholars who have grasped their meaning.88 However,, this method o encryption was not equally available to all the Pythagorean However disciples. As is typical in Iamblichus’ text, there is a great division between the acousmatic and mathematic understandings o the akousmata. Te acousmatics justiy the obscurity o the akousmata by claiming that, originally, (S10) “[Pythagoras] declared the reasons and gave demonstrations o all these precepts [i.e., the akousmata], but because they were handed down through many intermediaries, who became pro-
gressively lazier, the reason was omitted, while the bare precepts remained.”89 But the mathematics have a different story to tell. Citing the Aristotelian account presented above (S8), Iamblichus argues that the obscurity o the akousmata derives rom Pythagoras’ practice o withholding demonstrations rom those unpr unprepared epared to ully understand them. Te difference between the akousmatikoi and the mathemat he kind o philosophical study one makes and the t he aptitude one has tikoi depends on the or “scientific lessons. lessons.”” Te mathematikoi, knowing the demonstratio demonstrations, ns, hold the key to the proper allegorical exegesis o the akousmata. Immediately ollowing this account, the veil appears. Tis is significant indeed, or Iamblichus moves rom the question o veiled utterances utterances to the meaning o the veil itsel. Te veil differentiates “two types o philosophical study study..” (S11) “Tose who heard Pythagoras either within or without the veil, those who heard him accompanied by seeing, or without seeing him, and who are divided into the esoteric and exoteric groups,”90 are all ways o describing the undamental distinction
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between acousmatic and mathematic Pythagoreans—that is, those who know how to properly interpret the master, and those who do not. 91 Yet, that distinction is not developed in terms o the difference between seeing and hearing, or between the spatial locations o the various disciples. Afer committing to the view that the akousmata areseeing coded,the as master? Iamblichus does, benefit could possibly be in 92 I the seeing or not keywhat to unlocking the there depends akousmata on the degree o initiation o the receiver, knowledge o the demonstrations, and the gif o allegorical exegesis, then the visual aspects o the speaker would be simply irrelevant. Te Pythagorean veil is in excess o the hermeneutic situation; how the akousmata are decoded is indifferent to the issue o whether one does or does not see the speaker. Yet, in the Schaefferian myth o the Pythagorean school (M ′), which borrows generously rom Iamblichus’ text, the veil is taken as a physical divider or screen, a dispositi or device that serves a host o purposes—none o which are specifically hermeneutical. It spatially divides the Pythagorean school and separates the auditory effect rom its physical source; it distinguishes the eye rom the ear in order to reduce the visual contributions to audition; it creates new
conditions o listening that rely solely on the ear and not on the visually overdetermined context. Indeed, the more we look into the ancient sources or the Pythagorean veil, the more we find its literal and physical status questionable. In Book V o the Stromateis, Clement o Alexandria (c. 150–c. 215 C.E.) contrasts the akousmatikoi and mathematikoi and then introduces the veil only afer treating the question concerning the proper interpretation o the akousmata.93 For Clement, the akousmatikoi and mathematikoi are separated not by spatial location but according to their level o “genuine attachment to philosophy,”—the akousmatikoi aligned with the curious multitude, and the mathematikoi aligned with the genuine students o philosophy.94 Te veil, although present, hangs nowhere in Clement’s account. Simply put, Clement’s veil is allegorical. In Book V, §58, Clement cites examples rom Greek philosophy where allegories were used to conceal esoteric wisdom: (S12) It was not only the Pythagoreans and Plato then, that concealed many
things; but the Epicureans too say that they have things that may not be uttered,
and do not allow all to peruse those writings. Te Stoics also say that by the first Zeno things were written which they do not readily allow disciples to read, without their first giving proo whether or not they are genuine philosophers. And the disciples o Aristotle say that some o their treatises are esoteric, and others common and exoteric. Further, those who instituted the mysteries, being philosophers, buried their doctrines in myths, so as not to be obvious to all. Did they [the ancient philosophers] then, by veiling (katakrupsantes) human opinions, prevent the ignorant rom handling them; and was it not more beneficial or the holy and blessed contemplation o realities to be concealed ( epekruptonto)?95 Both the words katakrupsantes and epekruptonto share a common root, the verb krupto (κρυπτω)—the root rom which we derive the word “cryptography”— which means “to hide, cover, cloak; to cover in the earth, bury; hide, conceal, keep
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secret.” 96 Te veiling, hiding, or coding o the akousmata preserves the meaning o the discourse rom the uninitiated or ignorant. For Clement, the wisdom o Greek philosophy was transmitted within a rhetorical economy o covering and uncovering, revealing and concealing—a strategy o encoding messages to ensure their appropriate by the into initiated. Te common trope the akousexegesis is reworked a generalized tradition o athat cryptographic mata requireunderstanding hermeneutics. Clement’s key sentence about the Pythagorean veil appears immediately aferward. Pythagoras and Plato concealed many ideas, things that (S13) are to be expounded allegorically, not absolutely in all their expressions,
but in those which express the general sense. And these we shall find indicated by symbols under the veil o allegory (ηυπ (ηυπο παρακαλυμματι τῃ αλληγοριᾳ). Also the association o Pythagoras, and the t he twoold intercourse with the associates which designates the majority, the akousmatikoi, and the others that have a genuine attachment to philosophy, the mathematikoi, hinted that something was spoken to the multit multitude, ude, and something concealed rom rom them.97 Te word used to describe the veil in this t his passage, parak parakalum alummati mati, means “anything hung up; a covering, cloak, curtain.” 98 It could be reerring to an actual veil, were it not or its connection to allegory; rather than sounding orth rom behind a veil, the akousmata are themselves veiled—they are presented under the veil o allegory . Unlike the physical veil that hangs in Iamblichus’ account, Clement’s veil is woven rom figural language. Moreover, Moreover, the veil not only unctions as an allegorical figure, it becomes the figure o allegory. As the figure o figurality—the icon o the hermeneutical power o meaning to be concealed—the veil o allegory figures the power o language to be simultaneously communicative and opaque, encoded or the initiated, but banal or the multitude. A comparison o two passages in Clement and Iamblich Iamblichus us (S13 and S11) S1 1) interrupts the transmission o the Pythagorean veil in the history o philosophy and should give us pause. On the one hand, considering that t hat Iamblichus Iamblichus tells his story o the separating veil immediately afer describing Pythagoras’ use o allegorical b eing encouraged to read this akousmata , is it not possible that we, as readers, are being
tale o the veil as being itsel figural? What reason prevents us rom considering that Iamblichus himsel is not acting like Pythagoras, presenting the auditor with a riddle that, unless un less suitably explicated, remains “laughable and trivial to ordinary persons, ull o nonsense and rambling?” 99 Perhaps Iamblichus would find laughable our dogged literality and lack o interpretive skill, envisioning the master hidden behind a screen s creen rather than understanding the t he point o the figure. Perhaps our inability to read these subtleties in Iamblichus’ text maintains our exoteric position. (We might say the same about Schaeffer and the Schaefferians who, being no less literal than Diderot [M5], unhesitatingly accepted the Pythagorean veil as real rather than figura figural.) l.) On the other hand, consid considering ering that Cleme Clement nt introduces the juxtaposition o the akousmatikoi and mathematikoi at the same moment he mentions the veil o allegory, is it not possible that he tropes upon pre vious accounts ac counts o the t he literal litera l veil? Could C ould it be b e that his account a ccount o alle allegoric gorical al veiling veil ing knowingly replicates and reashions an older convention o a literal dividing veil,
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by transorming it into a figure in homage to Pythagoras’ own excessive use o figurality? I there is an ancient Greek source or the Pythagorean veil, we are lacking evidence in the historical record to prove it. I can find no extant trace o it earlier than Clement’s Stromateis. Moreover, given Clement’s encyclopedic reading and constant reerencing o other sources, it seems reasonable to assume that he might have mentioned such an account. Te only potential candidate I can find is imaeus, the historian o Southern Italy (350–260 B.C.E.).100 Since Pythagoreanism had a long tradition in that part o the ancient world, imaeus is a significant and authoritative source o inormation.101 Although imaeus’ historical works are no longer extant, Diogenes invokes him as an authority in a passage that th at touches on the topos o seeing see ing and hearing Pythagoras. (S14) According to imaeus, [Pythagoras] was the first to say “Friends have all
things in common” and “Friendship is equality”; indeed, his disciples did put all their possessions into one common stock. For five whole years they had to keep silence, merely listening to his discourses without seeing him, until they passed an examination, and thenceorwards they were admitted to his house and allowed to see him.102 Tis passage is similar to Iamblichus (S2), with the veil substituting or the house. However, in a second passage that is uncited, Diogenes claims that Pythagoras was so greatly admired that (S15) “not less than six hundred persons went to his evening lectures: and those who were privileged to see him wrote to their riends congratulating themselves on a great piece o good ortune.”103 Here the penumbra o evening and the size o the gathering preclude the auditors rom seeing Pythagoras. Tis new passage complicates things tremendously. Was Pythagoras obscured by the darkness, or did he lecture rom inside his house? R. D. Hicks, in the Loeb edition o Diogenes’ Lives, skates over the question by adding a critical ootnote to the end o S14, claiming that Pythagoras was heard but not seen since he lectured at night, and reerring the reader to S15.104 But these two accounts cannot be so quickly reconciled. Is Pythagoras obscured by darkness or by some physical device? o posit both would 105
be overdet overdetermined. ermined. Philological evidence, based on replications o vocabulary and grammatical construction in extant texts, shows that imaeus was indeed a source or both Diogenes and Iamblichus.106 extual analysis can be used to establish imaeus as the source concerning common property property in the t he Pythagorean school, the period o five years o silence, and initiation afer a test or trial. Yet, it does not establish him as a source or the Pythagorean veil. On that point, i there is an ancient source, we are lef with a 107
lacuna. At the very least, though there is Pythagoras evidence t here there may have there been an older tradition concerned with whether Psome ythagoras was that visible or obscured, is no evidence or the veil as a central part o this tradition. THE METHOD OF CONCEALMENT
Lacking an ancient source, it appears sae to say that the veil is something o a latecomer to the Pythagorean Pyt hagorean legend, a product o late antiquity appearing in the literature
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no earlier than the second se cond or third century C.E. C. E. Moreover, Moreover, I would conjecture that the topos o the Pythagorean veil, based on the available evidence, begins with Clement as a figural veil, operating as part o his interpretive strategy o hiding and revealing known as the “method o concealment.”108 According to this method, some piece o knowledge or divine wisdom, rather than being spoken literally and disclosed to all, is concealed in figural language. Te coded co ded utterance can transmit its content to those prepared to receive the message, while avoiding misinterpretation by those unprepared. Te method o concealment allows or the same utterance to be available to esoteric and exoteric listeners, while being properly understood only by the ormer. Henny Fiska Hägg offers three reasons why Clement employs the method o concealment: First, Clement holds to the position that not all students can be taught in the same manner, so that the teacher must adapt his or her message to the appropriate situation; second, language is itsel inadequate or expressing divine truth in a literal manner,, so symbolic or figural manner figura l language is required to convey its sense; third, Clement believes that the authors o scripture and Greek philosophical works employed this method and is thus authorized to ollow afer their model. 109 Additionally, Clement’s method o concealment is motivated by a suspicion toward writing—one that is consistent with his emphasis on vocality and logos (discussed below)—and has many o the eatures o classical logocentrism.110 According to logocentric premises, oral transmission is always superior to writing because the teacher is in the position o directly assessing how his discourse is being understood. Te teacher can distinguish “the one who is capable o hearing rom the rest,” by keeping an eye on their “words and ways, their character and lie, their impulses and attitudes, their looks, their voice,,” and so orth. voice orth.111 Writing, reduced to being an aide-memoire, is merely a necessary evil.112 Having none o the saeguards that privilege oral speech, written texts are open to misinterpretation. Citing Plato’s Second Epistle, Clement claims that “once a thing is written there is no way o keeping it rom the public” where it can “make no response to a questioner beyond what it written.” Te written wr itten text is destitute, possessposs essing “no voice,” relying on support rom its author or some external deender ollowing in the ootsteps o the author to deend its claims. 113 Given the ease with which the written text is open to misinterpretation and misuse, the method o concealment is a strategy or transmitting knowledge to only those qualified to interpret the teaching.
Clement finds authorization or this method o concealment in texts that predate Christianity—in Egyptian, Hebrew, and Greek writings: (S16) In accordance with the method o concealment, the truly sacred Word,
truly divine and most necessary or us, deposited in the shrine o truth, was by the Egyptians indicated by what were called among them adyta, and by the Hebrews by the veil. Only the consecrated—that is, those devoted to God, circumcised in the desireaccess o thetopassions or Plato the sake love to that tithatnot which is alone divine—were allowed them. For alsoothought lawul or “the impure to touch the pure.” Tence the prophecies and oracles are spoken in enigmas, and the mysteries are not exhibited incontinently to all and sundry, but only afer certain purifications and previous instructions.114 Clement’s method o concealment was a central textual strategy in the rise o Christian Clement’ philosophy in late antiquity. Literary theorist Frank Kermode has explored orms
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o early Christian concealment in his work on literature and secrecy. 115 According to Kermode, Jesus’ parables are designed as riddles or allegories or the initiated. “When Jesus was asked to explain the purpose o his parables he described them as stories told to them t hem without—to outsiders—with outsiders—with the expres expresss purpose o concealing a mystery that was to be understood only by insiders.”116 A thematic passage rom the Gospel o Mark supports Kermode’s claim. Jesus says to the apostles, “o you has been given the secret o the kingdom o God, but or those outside everything is in parables; so that they may indeed see but not perceive p erceive,, and may indeed hear but not understand.”117 For Kermode, such parables are at the t he very origin o hermeneutics— a discipline named afer the god Hermes, the patron o “heralds and what heralds pronounce, their kerygma. He also has to do with oracles, including a dubious sort known as kledon, which at the moment o its announcement may seem trivial or irrelevant,t, the secret sense declaring itsel only afer long delay irrelevan delay,, and in circumstances not originally oreseeable.”118 Te method o concealment also possesses another side—revelation. Just as Clement describes the need to encode the transmission o divine knowledge, he also addresses its manner o unveiling. Te voice o the divine logos, which maniests itsel most completely completely in Christ, can c an also be demonstrat demonstrated ed in the harmony that exists exists between Christian, Greek, Hebrew, and Egyptian texts—a harmony that is predicated on the idea that a single divine logos speaks in all and utters a single truth. 119 When these ancient authors spoke, the resulting voice was not their own, but that o the divine logos. In essence, these ancient authors were involved in an elaborate act o ventriloquism. According to David Dawson, Clement’s “voice-based hermeneutic” allowed him to produce acts o “revisionary reading” that were intended to intervene in the cultural and religious situation o early Alexandria, with its complex and ragmented overlapping o Christianity, Gnosticism, and paganism. Trough this strategy, the “authorial specificity o [Clement’s] precursors is irrelevant to the act that when subjected to his revisionary revisionary reading, they t hey express the same underlying voice or meaning. meaning.”120 Te figure o the veil appears regularly in Clement’s Stromateis, especially in Book V where he discusses Pythagoras and the use o allegory as a technique within the method o concealment. o understand the pervasiveness o this figure
in Clement’s discourse, I present a ew cases where the concealment and revelation o the divine logos are read back into Greek and Hebrew texts and associated with figures o the veil. Paradigmatically, Clement identifies the figure o the veil with the method o concealment: “All then, in a word, who have spoken o divine things, both Barbarians and Greeks, have have veiled the first principles o things, and delivered the truth in enigmas, and symbols, and allegories, and metaphors, and such like tropes.”121 Te ancient Greek poets—such as Orpheus, Linus, Musaeus, Homer, and Hesiod—a Hesiod—are as veiling theirstyle discourse in order convey theor divine logos only re toalso the understood initiated: “Te persuasive o poetry is ortothem a veil the many.”122 Te Pythagorea Pyt hagorean n akousmata, which possessed a venerable tradition tradition o allegorical interpretation even beore Clement’s time, are appropriated by Clement to this same model. While the veil unctions tropologically as the generalized figure or allegories, metaphors, symbols, and other orms o figural language, Clement also discusses literal veils. Describing the tabernacle that houses the Holy o Holies, Clement draws
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upon biblical sources where literal veils are present to create a consecrated space that distinguishes the proper realm o the priests rom the multitude. (S17) Now concealment is evinced in the reerence o the seven circuits around
the temple, which are made mention o among the Hebrews. . . . In the midst o the covering and veil, where the priests were allowed to enter, was situated the altar o incense, the symbol o the t he earth placed in the middle o this universe; and rom it came the umes umes o incense. And that place intermedia intermediate te between the inner veil,, where veil where the high high priest priest alone alone,, on prescr prescribed ibed days, days, was was permitted permitted to to enter enter,, and the external court which surrounded it—ree to all the Hebrews—was, they say, the middlemost point o heaven and earth. . . . Te covering, then, the barrier o popular unbelie, was stretched in ront o the five pillars, keeping back those in the surrounding space.123 Yet, in both cases, literal and figural, the unction o the veil remains the same. Namely, the veil separates the initiated rom the uninitiated, the exoteric rom the esoteric. But the emphasis differs when the veil is treated as literal or figural. When the veil is figural, Clement highlights the linguistic act o concealing truths in obscure language; when the veil is literal, it becomes the “barrier o popular unbelie.” Te emphasis shifs to the difference between the authentic and inauthentic recipients recipie nts o the encoded enco ded message. Te method o linguistic encryption is sof-pedaled in avor o addressing the techniques o reception that distinguish the various grades o disciples. Iamblichus’ deployment o the literal veil emphasizes the act o reception. Such an emphasis jibes well with the particular exigencies o Iamblichus’ own political and religious situation. For Iamblichus, who comes rom a Neoplatonist tradition that had already canonized Pythagoras as an important precursor to Plato and had emphasized (even to the point o abricating) the authenticity o the mathematics as disseminated through Plato’s works and the Academic tradition, the stakes o Pythagoras’ reception in late antiquity were great. Against the Christian appropriation o Pythagoras as a precursor o Jesus, the Neopythagorean emphasis on mathematic esotericism allowed them to differentiate between an authen-
tic and inauthentic reception o Pythagoras’ legacy. For the pagan Neoplatonists, like Iamblichus, it was important to emphasize the singularity o o Pythagoras as a thinker who transmitted philosophy and the mathemata rom Egypt to Plato and on through the t he Academy, Academy, rather than t han assimilate Pythagoras’ voice to ventriloquism o the divine logos. One way o legitimating Neoplatonism Neoplatonism against the Christians was to ocus on the role o Pythagoras in the transmission o the mathemata. In Clement, the mathemata are absent; Pythagorean harmonia, mathematics, music, and natural sciencenoticeably play no role in the transmission o the divine logos. While Clement produces interpretations interpr etations o Pythagorean akousmata (alongside those o Hebrew and Egyptian symbols), there is little emphasis on the symbolism o numbers, on the role o geometrical knowledge, or on the primary principles o the one and the many. Yet, these remained central and distinctive aspects o the Pythagorean tradition or Iamblichus. Iamblichus. In De Mysteriis, writing under the pseudonym “Abamon” (an Egyptian priest), he articulates the first principles o “Egyptian” cosmology—principles that bear a
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striking and obviously intentional resemblance resemblance to Pythagorean doctrines associated with the mathemata: (S18) And thus it is that the doctrine do ctrine o the Egyptians Eg yptians on first principles, principles, starting
rom the highest level and proceeding to the lowest, begins the One, and proceeds the Many, the Many being in turn governed by the One, and at all levels the indeterminate nature being dominated by a certain definite measure and by the supreme supr eme causal principle which unifies all things.124 Te musical aspects o the Pythagorean mathemata are also not neglected. Again, in De Mysteriis, Iamblichus outlines the role o “musical theurgy” in terms that are clearly Pythagorean and Platonic.125 (S19) Beore it gave itsel to the body, the soul heard the divine harmony. And
accordingly even when it entered the body, such tunes as it hears which especially preserve the divine trace o harmony, to these it clings ondly and is reminded by them o the divine harmony; it is also borne along with and closely allied to this harmony, and shares as much as can be shared o it.126 Te particular emphasis on the Pythagorean mathemata—such as the connection between metempsychosis and anamnesis, the audibility o divine harmony to the soul, and its echo in earthly lie and the principles o the one and the many—carve out Iamblichus’ brand o Pythagoreanism in sharp contrast to Clement’s appropriation o the master. Rather than subjugate subjugate Pythagoras to the unity o the divine logos, Iamblichus attempts to place him as a singular figure figure within a tradition—an initiate and teacher o ancient hermetic wisdom—o which he himsel is a part. races races o the agon with Christianity appear in the texts o Neoplatonic authors like Iamblichus and Porphyry.127 By emphasizing Pythagoras’ wonder-working and coded knowledge, the ancient philosopher begins to resemble a pagan saint in order to compete with the miraculous workings o Jesus and the martyrs. Historian Peter Brown argues that the period o late antiquity saw the beginnings o the Christian Church and a style o religious experience marked by the rise o
the “riends o God,” individuals who could claim dominance over “earthly” orces by possessing a special, direct relationship with heaven. Te rise o Christian martyrdom and texts like Te Acts o the Martyrs placed emphasis on the “riends o God” and the new orm o religious power that was implied in their experiences. According to Brown, “Over against the secular hierarchy o an increasingly ‘pyramidal’ society there stood, in clear outline, a spiritual hierarchy o ‘riends o God,’ the source and legitimacy o their power in this world held to rest unambiguously on a 128
heavenly Te candidate shadowy origins and shamanistic Pythagoras made himorigin.” an attractive or revisionary readings, practices where he o could occupy the position o a pagan riend o God. Pythagoras became a figure ripe or spiritualspiritualization, capable o challenging the new crop o Christian martyrs and saints. “Late in the [third] century, in the circles o Plotinus, Porphyry, Porphyry, and in the early ourth century, with Iamblichus, the image o the ‘divine man’ takes on firmer outlines among pagan philosophers. Te appearance within one generation o two major lives o Pythagoras is the symptom o this change.” 129 It is perhaps no coincidence that the
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miracles o Pythagoras, as they appear in the pagan literature, resemble those o Jesus, with Iamblichus’ On the Pythagorean Lie ofen assuming “characteristics o a pagan alternative to the Gospels.”130 DISSOLUTION AND FUSION IN RENAISSANCE PYTHAGOREANISM
Te eventual Christianizing o Europe would resolve the battle between Christian and pagan over the status o Pythagoras. However, the pagan mysteries, which were closely associated with the figure o Pythagoras, Pyt hagoras, did not disappear; in act, they underwent a great revival in the Renaissan Renaissance. ce. Broadly speaking, or Renaissan Renaissance ce thinkers, Pythagoras had become assimilated into the Christian tradition. Tus, one might say that Clement won the argument, although victory was Pyrrhic. Not only is he a ar less important interlocutor or Pythagoreanism than Iamblichus—whose works were translated by Ficino and widely circulated—but the basic Renaissance reception o the Pythagoras legend ollowed along the lines o Iamblichus’ account. 131 Rather than consider Pythagoras to be speaking—or rather spoken by—the divine logos, he became significant as a node in the t he transmission o ancient knowledge. For instance, scholars like Pletho (c. 1355–1452), an important figure in the rise o Renaissance Platonism, argued that Pythagoras transmitted Zoroaster’s learning and knowledge o magic to Plato. Pletho’s student, Cardinal Bessarion (1403–1472), emphasized that Plato learned his method o secrecy and the importance o exercising memory and discipline rom Pythagoras. Te role o secrecy was to keep divine doctrines away rom the hands o the masses. Tis method was eventually adopted adopted by the Christians C hristians and incorporated into their doctrine. Tus, Pythagoras, in the eyes o Bessarion, is a significant figure in the transormation rom ancient philosophy into Christianity, not only as a precursor but also as a source o Christian inspiration. 132 In a more surprising move, move, Ficino (1433–1499) (in his introduction to Pimander ) traces a line 133 Johannes o Pythagoras—at venerable ancient theologians Moses, toPythagoras Hermes rismegistus, Orpheus, to one point evenrom claiming that was Jewish.to Reuchlin (1455–1522) gave Pythagoras a prominent place in his argument that the Kabbalah was a prime source or Christianity. In his letter to Pope Leo X, Reuchlin
takes up the idea that Pythagoras was an inheritor o Mosaic wisdom, and that it was he who rescued the t he mystical Hebraic Hebraic texts and incorporated them into his doctrines. Te Kabbalah, which Reuchlin understands as an ancient oral tradition o secret and esoteric doctrines, doctr ines, presented presented in the guise o symbols, numbers, and enigmas, was first presented to Moses and then revealed to the Greeks by Pythagoras. According Accordi ng to Reuchlin, “Pythagoras drew his stream o learning rom the boundless sea o Kabbalah [and] led his stream into Greek pastures rom which we, last in the line, can irrigate our studies.”134 Tus, Pythagoras is imagined to be the central node 135
in Although the transmission o the Kabbalah to thetoRenaissance Renaissance. the centrality o Pythagoras Renaissance. thought is unquestionable, or our purposes, we must note that interest interest in the details o the Pythagorean school— in the akousmatikoi and the mathematikoi, in the specific nature o the akousmata, and in the topos o the Pythagorean veil—diminishes veil—diminishes by the time o the Renaissance. Rather, these eatures o Pythagoras’ legend were assimilated into a generalized generaliz ed reception o Pythagoras as a node in the transmission o esotericism, Orphic mysteries, Egyptian knowledge, Jewish Kabbalah, and such. In the Renaissance Platonists, Platonists, one
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can see the usion o Clementine and Iamblichan strains. Pico (1463–1494) evinces this usion when describing Pythagoras’ Pythagoras’ use o allegory: al legory:
(S20) Pythagoras had the Orphic theology as the model afer which he molded
and ormed his own philosophy. In act, they say that the words o Pythagoras are called holy only because they flowed rom the teachings o Orpheus: thence as rom their primal source flowed the secret doctrine o numbers, and whatever Greek philosophy had that was great and sublime. But, as was the practice o ancient theologians, Orpheus covered the mysteries o his doctrines with the wrappings o ables, and disguised them with a poetic garment, so that whoever reads his hymns may believe there is nothing underneath but tales and the t he purest nonsense.136 I can find no sentence better than that final statement to demonstrate the combination o the two strains, as i Pico has intercalated sentences rom Clement and Iamblichus. We see Clement’s trope (S13) o the akousmata being covered in the veil o allegory—in this case, doctrines being wrapped in a poetic garment—concatenated with Iamblichus’ claim (S9) that, to the uninitiated, the akousmata appear “ull o nonsense and rambling.” Te Renaissance may have given birth to the revival o Greek knowledge—and knowledge—and the prolong prolongation ation o pagan mysteries—but it also spelled the dissolution o the specificity o the akousmata and the divisions in the Pythagorean school as a living tradition. Although the akousmatikoi persevere in volumes on the history o ancient philosophy, we will have to wait a ew centuries to discover the rebirth o the term akousmata in an unexpected place and in a oreign tongue— without a trace o Pythagoreanis Pythagoreanism. m.
3
Thee Baptism Th Ba ptism of the Acousmate Acousmate
When Pierre Schaeffer premiered his Cinq études de bruits on uesday, October 5th, 1948, no listener would have have associated the sounds filling the airwaves with the ancient word “acousmatic.” Te link would take nearly 20 years to orge. In 1954, Schaeffer lef the studio and was put in charge o France’s overseas radio network, developing radio stations, programming, and a media theory appropriate or the French colonies in Arica. Te Groupe de recherche de musique concrète (GRMC) was placed in the administrative hands o Philippe Arthuys, with Pierre Henry as the artistic director. When Schaeffer returned to take back the reins o the GRMC in 1958, he was disappointed disappointed in what the t he organization had become. In particular, he was critical o the GRMC’s emphasis on individual works over collective research. “ Musiq Musique ue concrète has not, in effect, made great progress,” Schaeffer lamented, “[it] has not produced a great work, nor yet confirmed a theory.”1 In his letter to Albert Richard, which opens a special volume o La revue musicale, Schaeffer S chaeffer bluntly stated his dissatisaction: I dreamt o a return to collective involvement with procedures and systems, like those o the Conservatory, atonalism or cybernetics. At last, in place o concerts and estivals where snobbism is the law . . . I dreamt o an honest app approach roach to the
phenomenon o listening, o experimentation on diverse publics and an ethics o listening in which the musician would rediscover . . . his rules r ules and his standards. Nothing like that has happened.2 Schaeffer decided to dissolve the GRMC and reorm it as the Groupe de Recherche Musicale Musi cale (GRM), which would place a larger premium on musical research by attempting to consolidate and systematize the results o the first decade o compositional and technical work.3 During the change o the institutional name, the moniker musique also dropped. I thecould ocusmeet was the no longer concrete these musicnew but rather onconcrète musical was research, what name task oon describing objectives? Schaeffer preerred the term “musique expérimentale.” 4 In 1960, Jérôme Peignot, a poet, critic, commentator, and collaborator o the GRMC, offered his recommendation in an issue o Esprit dedicated dedicated to new music: (M7) o try and finish in good time with the expression “musique concrète,”
why not use the word “acousmatic,” taken rom the Greek word akousma, which
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means “the object o hearing.” In French, the word “acousmatique” already describes those disciples o Pythagoras who, during five years, only heard his lessons hidden behind a curtain, without seeing him, and keeping a rigid silence. Pythagoras was o the view that t hat a simple look at his ace could distract his pupils rom the teachings that he was giving them. I one gives the word an adjectival orm, acousmatic, it would indicate a sound that one hears without being able to identiy its origin.5 Originally, Peignot’s suggestion was stillborn. But afer the publication o Schaeffer’s raité , with its exploration o the connection between the acousmatic situation and the phenomen phenomenological ological epoché , the term began to stick. François Bayle would eventually champion it during his tenure as the director o the GRM in order to differentiate his style o tape music rom other orms o electroacoustic practice. Dhomont and Chion, and then (rom Chion) Dolar and Abbate (M1, M4, M6, M9) would also prolong Peignot’s suggestion by repeating his embellishment to the Pythagoras legend—the claim that Pythagoras used the veil so that the disciples would not be distracted by the look on his ace. However, it was not the first time Peignot had used the term “acousmatique” to describe the strange sounds heard when listening to the works o the GRMC. Five years prior, prior, he had employ employed ed the term in a 15-minute radio broadcast, in collaboration with GRMC composer Philippe Arthuys: What words could designate this distance that separates sounds rom their origin. . . . Acousm Acousmatic atic sound means (in the dictionary) dict ionary) a sound that one hears without revealing [déceler ] the causes. Ah, good! Here is the very definition o the sound object [l’objet sonore], this element at the base o musique concrète, the most general music that there is. . . .6 Here, Peignot deploys the term without its typical train o Pythagorean justifications. Here, Rather, the word “acousmatic” emphasizes the distance between the sonic source and its audible effect. Tis idea o acousmatic sound—a sound that is disembodied,
autonomous, and separated rom its sources—will have a long and varied reception, both within the Schaefferian S chaefferian tradition and beyond.7 For the moment, I want to hold that reception at bay, in order to pursue a historical question: How did Peignot discover this term? Surprisingly enough, the key myth (M′) is not explicit on this point. Just beore the turn o the century, Apollinaire wrote two poems entitled “Acousmate.”8 Under the heading “acousmatique, history o the word,” François Bayle reproduces a stanza rom each o these poems po ems in the lexicon o his Musiq Musique ue Acousma Acousmatique tique (the source or M2). Since Peignot was himsel a poet, the implication is that he discovered the term rom reading Apollinaire. Marc Battier also cites the “Acousmate” poems in order to suggest a line o transmission rom Apollinaire to Schaeffer by way o Peignot. Although neither Battier nor Bayle unequivocally makes this claim, the connection is quite plausible. Apollinaire’s ideas would not have been oreign to Peignot, who grew up in an environment saturated in French modernism. His ather, Charles Peignot, an important figure in the development o typography in the 20th century, owned the type oundry Deberny et Peignot. Charles associated with intellectuals and artists
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75
like Cocteau, Gide, and Le Corbusier, and was a great supporter o typographical experimentation. He ounded two influential journals in the history o graphic design: Divertissements typographiques and Arts et métiers graph graphiques iques.9 Jérôme, in his own typoèmes, pursued typographical experimentation along lines opened by Apollinaire’s Calligrammes. Yet, Apollinaire’s “Acousmate” poems are quite immature works. Tey display neither the daring typographical avant-gardism avant-gardism o the Calligrammes nor the radical montage o the conversation conversation poems. Tey are not undergirded by a commitment to cubism, and they do not demonstrate Apollinaire’s aesthetic o Simultanism. Instead, they reveal the poet as a young man whose imagination was set ablaze in the rarified air o hermeticism. hermet icism. Te “Acousmate “Acousmate”” poems, like much o Apollinaire Apollinai re’’s writing in the period beore he came to Paris, cultivate their subject matter rom “the ruins o the past.”10 In notebooks rom the period, Apollinaire ofen transcribed definitions o rare and unusual words rom the dictionary, like “acousmate,” “dendrophones,” and “Argyraspides”—in 1899, the word “acousmate” was quite a rara avis indeed. Tis homemade glossary o hothouse words seemed to serve Apollinaire well, or he used them in poems rom the period, as well as mining the quarry in poems rom much later dates.11 Bayle and Battier are likely correct to imply that Peignot’s discovery o the word was due to his amiliarity with Apollinaire; however, there still remains a glaring question: Aren’t “acousmate” and “acousmatique” different words? Te statements that concern the word “acousmate” (M1, M3, M11) seem to treat the pair as i they were simply synonymous. Although I am not disputing the possibility that Peignot may have discovered the word “acousmate” rom reading Apollinaire, there should be some accounting or their difference. What is their relation? ACOUSMATE AC OUSMATE VERSUS VERS US AC ACOUSMATIQUE OUSMATIQUE (S21) ACOUSMAE, noun. Te noise o human voices or instruments that one
imagines hearing in the air [ ACOU ACOUSMA SMAE, E, s. m. Bruit de voix hum humaines aines ou d’instruments qu’on s’imagine entendre dans l’air.]12 Tis definition rom the Dictionnaire o the Académie Française is transcribed in Apollinaire’s notebooks. Like the definition o “acousmatique” ound in Larousse (and cited by Schaeffer), an “acousmate” could be understood as describing an audible sound produced by invisible sources. Te potential invisibility o an acousmate is amplified by the definition’s modal characterization—it is a sound that one imagines hearing. I the source is imagined, as in an audito auditory ry hallucinatio hallucination, n, one might simply assume its invisibility. But by definition, an acousmate does not require the criterion o invisibility. One could plausibly imagine visualizing the source o the sound while hearing it in the air. Furthermore, there is perhaps something supernatural about an acousmate, acousmat e, like hearing the t he voices o angels, or o extraordinary natural events, like the sound o thunder. I an acousmate does possess this supernatural or extraordinary character, it may contrast with acousmatic sounds, which (again, taken at the letter) are ofen said to be b e ubiquitous ubiquitous in the era o mechanically reproduced sound.
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It is easy to imagine that Peignot, upon finding the word acousmate in Apollinaire, picked up his copy o Larousse and ound, right next to it, the word acousmatique. Although many modern (and abridged) editions o Larousse do not contain both words, older editions place “acousmate” and “acousmatique” in successive entries. (S22) ACOUSMAE, masculine noun (a-kouss-ma-te—rom Greek
akousma, that which one hears). Imaginary sound, a sound where one does not see the cause, the author [ACOUSMAE s. m. (a-kouss-ma-te—du gr. Akousma , ce qu’on entend). Bruit imaginaire, bruit dont on ne voit pas la cause, l’l’auteur.] auteur.] ACOUSMAIQUE, adjective (a-kouss-ma-ti-ke—root, acousmate) Pertaining to a noise that one hears without seeing the instruments, persons, or real causes behind it. [ACOUSMAIQUE adj. (a-kouss-ma-ti-ke—rad. Acous Acousmate mate). Se dit d’un bruit que l’on entend sans voir les instruments, les personnes, les causes rée-
lles—noun. dont il provient.] Name given to the disciples o Pythagoras, who, or five years, would listen to his lectures hidden rom behind a curtain, without seeing him, and observing the most rigorous silence [—Subst. Nom donné aux disciples de Pythagore, qui, pendant l’espace de cinq années, écoutaient ses leçons cachés derrière un rideau, sans le voir, et un observant le silence le plus rigoureux].13 I Peignot slid rom acousmate to acousmatique, Larousse Larouss e acilitated it. Te Académie makes no mention o the visual status o the object imagined imagined to be heard in their definition. Larousse, on the other hand, adds a clause to acousmate concerning the visual status o the sound’s source, and thus effaces what might be a crucial sensory s ensory difference between an acousmate and an acousmatic sound. Additionally, Larousse provi provides des anrom etymology that makes it appear i the adjectival orm o acousmatique is derived acousmate. (Shortly, we willassee why this is incorrect.) By altering the Académie’s definition and tying together their roots, Larousse makes it appear
that the adjective acousmatique and the noun acousmate are really two orms o the same word, alternately describing and reerring to an audible sound lacking a visual source. In constituting the key myth, Bayle, Battier, and Chion (M1, M3, M11) all tacitly accept Larousse’s identification o acousmate and acousmatique. In his brie history o the term acousmatique, Bayle cites a ew lines o Apollinaire’s poems, preceded by this terse clause: “Note in the Poèmes retrouvés o Guillaume Apollinaire, 1913, this ‘rediscovery’ [re-trouvaille].”14 Punning on the word retrouver , the implication is that the real find in Apollinaire’s collection is simply the discovery o the word acousmate, and thus, acousmate, t hus, the rediscovery o an ancient acousmatic tradition. Apollinaire Apollinaire becomes a crucial node in the transmissio transmission n o this ancient horizon by prolonging the term acousmatique through its synonym acousmate. Tanks to Apollinaire, Peignot can pass the term onto Schaeffer. Yet, i acousmate is not synonymous with acousmatique, then what exactly did Apollinaire rediscover? Why not ocus the attention on Peignot? Isn’t he the one who makes the more significant retrouvaille by giving Schaeffer the word acousmatique and initiating its mythic icon, the Pythagorean
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veil? I we are are truly being presented presented with a historical historical account, then Apollinaire Apollinaire’’s role can be little more than accidental, or at most, incidental. BATTIER’S ARGUMENT
Te musicologist Marc Battier, in a recent essay on the GRM, makes a case or keeping Apollinaire in the story. He argues that the central experience o phonography has less to do with the mechanical reproduction o sounds than with the separation o sonic sources rom their effects. Te splitting o sources rom effects takes place at two levels in recorded sound: First, the source is separated rom its effect and the effect is captured as a “physical inscription”; then, separation o source and effect is evident at playback, when the listener is given the responsibility or “reconstituting the sound image which traces the sound o [the] origin.”15 It is in these two tendencies, inscription and reconstitution, that “one finds the sources o the creation o phonographic sound.”16 Battier does not conceive o phonography as initiating the the separation o auditory sources rom effects; rather, rather, the experience o such separation predates preda tes the inven invention tion o recordin recording. g. He contests the technologically determined association o acousmatic sound with mechanically reproduced sound or “schizophonia,” because the separation o sonic source rom effect can already be detected in the word acousmate. Tis is why Apollinaire is such an important figure or Battier; the sel-named poète phonographis phonographiste te o the 1910s gives voice in his “Acousmate” poems to pre-phonographic experiences o “voices without bodies” and “sounds without their causal source.”17 Battier considers three moments in Apollinaire’s career that can be read as anticipations o Schaeffer’s theories: 1. In Le Roi-Lune, Apollinaire imagines the Moon-King sitting at a keyboard where, theRunning use o microphones, he the transports thethe sounds the aworld into histhrough chamber. his fingers over keyboard, king o plays “symphony, made by the world.”18 Battier cites the phrase to evoke Schaeffer’s
early works o musique concrète and his dreams o a symphony o noises. 19 2. Battier describes a trip Apollinaire made in December o 1913 to the Archives o the Voice, where he recorded himsel reciting three poems. Upon hearing these recordings, Apollinaire Apollinaire experienced the uncanny effect o hearing his voice played back to him. “Afer the recording, they played my poems back to me on the apparatus, apparatus, and I did not recognize my voice in the slightest.”20 Battier describes this moment in strongly Schaefferian terms. He calls Apollinaire’s uncanny reaction an experience o “blind listening,” perhaps overdetermining overdet ermining the invisi invisible ble character o that experience.21 3. Battier cites a passage rom André Salmon, who, upon hearing recordings o Apollinaire, noted that they made “very proound and delicate [aural] perceptions” o the voice available, perceptions that are stifled when the voice is heard in its usual context, emitted rom the mouth o the poet. Salmon writes, “Tus at the second hearing we heard ourselves . . . or the first time.” Battier intends the reader to understand this phrase as anticipating Schaeffer’s claim that the acousmatic situation creates new conditions or listening—that we are ofen deceived about what we hear because o the context. By alienating and
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separating the voice rom its contextual and causal situation—by blinding us to the source o the voice—the voice returns to the ear anew. When the poet René Ghil went into the studio, Apollinaire experienced a similarly chilling and uncanny effect upon hearing Ghil’s disembodied voice, describing it as “aerial music.”22 Battier places great emphasis on this little phrase, or “aerial music” links the pre-technological world o Apollinaire’s early “Acousmate” poems—where shepherds listen to angelic voices or a melancholic poet hears the quiet voice o the absent—directly to the alienating disembodiment o modern phonography. Identiying the experience o an acousmate (the sound o voices or instruments that one imagines to hear in the air) with that o phonography, Battier argues that the essence o both experiences inhabits inhabits the horizon defined by the separation o source and effect. Te experience o recording prolongs prolongs (and reinorces) the pre-technological pre-tech nological experience o an acousmate acousmate.. Battier writes, (M11 complete) Tis term [acousmatic], henceorth used in reerence to the
musical work o the GRM, has to be extended through the notion o “acousmate,” which gave a mystical dimension to the phenomenon o hidden sound. Sound technologies have increasingly reinorced the idea o acousmate as a number o great mystics have given witness, supporting our listening to voices without bodies. Voices without bodies: this addresses itsel to the idea that with sound technology one can transport or reproduce sound without its being associated with the material that produced it. Historically, the idea o “acousmate” is linked to mysticism.23 In the past, shepherds may have heard angelic voices, but or us, “this is the role now played by phonography, to make voices without bodies or sounds without their causal source heard.”24 Apollinaire’s poetry prefigures a technological experience yet to come.25 In addition to the argument that recording and the experience o an acousmate
both inhabit a horizon o auditory effects split rom their sources, Battier develops another argument concerning music and mysticism. By emphasizing the mystical connotations o the word acousmate, connotations evoked in Apollinaire’s early poems, Battier makes a claim about the centrality o the term to musical experience generally.. While canvassing the history o the generally t he term, Battier exposes a tantalizing passage on St. Cecilia, the patron saint o music. Te passage appears appears in a volume rom 1807, in which various definitions rom the Académie’s Dictionnaire are selected, critiqued, and commented upon. Battier cites the ollowing: (S23) have o written St.which Cecilia, readyher or title her martyrdom, within Biographers hersel the songs angelsthat rom derives as the patronheard saint
o music. I this historical point is correct, St. Cecilia was in a state o acousmat acousmate, e, or o enchantment, or these two words in the language o learned metaphysicians are essentially synonymous. Both designate a mental condition, which ew physiologists know how to distinguish. Te condition is rarely morbid, sometimes endemic; but those who suffer rom it, when they are not saints, have have ofen imputed it to witchcraf.26
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What could be more mystical—and more acousmatic—than the moment when St. Cecilia hears the angelic chorus while turning her eyes rom the earthly musicians? By connecting St. Cecilia C ecilia to the t he term acousmate, Battier establishes a myth o musical listening that is predicated on an essential trait, the separation o sources and effects—in this case, the splitting o audible music rom invisible choristers. Tis horizon o auditory severance, in which Battier had already inscribed the experience o recorded sound, is now extended back to its ounding moment; St. Cecilia unctions as the icon o that tradition. Paralleling Schaeffer’s use o an “originary experience” to situate the loudspeaker in the horizon o the Pythagorean veil, Battier can now locate his own originary experience o acousmatic listening inside the iconic ear o St. Cecilia. ACADÉMIE ÉMIE FRANÇAISE ACOUSMATE AC OUSMATE AND THE ACAD
O course, making claims about St. Cecilia is a venerable strategy in the history o 27
music Kleist, Schopenhauer, or Nietzsche could attest. As theaesthetics, apotheosisasoWackenroder, the musical listener, claims about Cecilia resonate across the whole o music, or the terms o her mystical listening become an ideal standard to which the rest o us mere mortals aspire. It would indeed be symbolically powerul i a tradition supported the notion that Cecilia heard an acousmate. But that is not an acousmate but is in a state quite what Battier argues; rather, Cecilia does not hear an acousmate. Tere is a subtle swerve in the meaning o acousmate rom an object— o acousmate. the sound o o voices and instruments heard (or imagined to be heard) in the air—to a mental state, a particularly auditory orm o mystical experience. Great weight is placed on the idea that one can be in a “state o acousmate, or o enchantment,” to cite the author o S23. Battier’s usage o the term acousmate, most ofen appearing without a definite or indefinite article, demonstrates a shif in the term away rom being an object heard toward toward a state o enchantment within hearing. (Tis occurs in both instances o the term in M11 and in Battier’s habitual phrase “the idea [or notion] o ‘acousmate.’ ”28)
Upon closer examination, Battier’s source (S23) cannot sustain the weight he places upon it. Te passage comes rom a volume entitled Remarques morales, philosophiques, et grammaticales, sur le dictionnaire de l’académie rançoise, which Battier incorrectly attributes to Antoine-Augustin Renouard.29 Te author is not Renouard but rather Gabriel Feydel, who published the work under the pseudonym P* P* P* with Renouard’s Renouard’s press in 1807. Te volume is organized organ ized alphabetical alphabe tically ly,, and it systematically reproduces entries rom the Académie’s Dictionnaire in order to challenge and question particular definitions. In the case that concerns us, Feydel detects a logical error in the Académie’s handling o two words dealing with mysterious mental afflictions, acousmate and incantation. I reprodu reproduce ce the entire passage: (S23 complete c omplete)) Acousmate. Masculine noun. Sound o human voices or instru-
ments that one imagines to hear in the air. Incantation. Fem. noun. Name that one gives to the absurd ceremonies o swindlers who pose as magicians. Remark. Biographers have written that St. Cecilia, ready to receive her martyrdom, heard inside hersel the song o angels; whence she has been given the
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title, patron saint o musicians. I this story is true, St. Cecilia was then in a state o Acousmate or Incantation; or these two nouns, in the language o learned metaphysicians, metaph ysicians, are essentially synonyms. Both designate a mental affection that ew physiologists know how to distinguish distinguish;; affections seldom s eldom morbid, sometimes endemic, but or those who suffer rom it, when they are not saints, ofen ascribed to the power to witchcraf. When Sganarelle, Sganarelle, the lumberjack posing as a doctor doctor,, threatens to give a peasant a ever, he boasts o a power that makes the peasant apprehensive, and o which the academicians happily do not believe. But the academicians, whose duty is at no point to believe that a man can give a ever to another by looking at him askance, have nevertheless committed an inexcusable allacy, i they contradict the existence o the ever. Te Académie rançaise has implicitly done this, by the manner in which they have written their entry on incantatio incantation. n.30 In Feydel’s first paragraph, concerning St. Cecilia, he argues that acousmate and incantation are essentially synonymous—they both reer mental that cannot be effectively distinguished distinguished. . I Feydel can establish thisto point, thenstates he can accuse the Académie o offering a definition o acousmate that does not question its veracity as an intentional state while simultaneously offering a definition o incantation that does. In other words, i the terms are synonymous, how can they possess dierent valuations? o illustrate the allacy, Feydel selects an example rom Molière’s do ctor,, lacks the t he ability to give a ever Le médecin malgre lui. Sganarelle, posing as a doctor to a peasant, because a ever is not the kind o thing that can be transerred by a crooked glance. But just because Sganarelle lacks such powers, p owers, it does not ollow that one should deny the existence o evers altogether. In Feydel’s analogy, Sganarelle occupies the same place as a magician; and, to complete the analogy, just because the Académie is skeptical o the t he power o a magician to invoke a state o incantation doesn’t mean that they should deny the reality o such states. Tat same year, Feydel’s publication evoked a bitingly witty response by André
Morellet, a member o the Académie and phil philosophe osophe. Morellet s response is worth quoting in ull: (S24) Te critic claims that these t hese two terms acousmate and incantation are essenessen-
tially synonymous; and that one did not recognize this claimed synonymy. Te Greek term “acousma” signifies the thing, the noise that one hears. Incantation employed by ake sorcerers, can have many diverse and different ways o producing sounds or those upon which they practice their art. Afer this grammatical observation the critic speaks to us o St. Cecilia, who hears inside hersel the songs o angels, and passes rom that, one knows not how, to speak truthully: when Sganarelle threatens to give a peasant a ever, he boasts o power o which the academicians happily do not believe; but they have nevertheless committed an inexcusable allacy i they contradict the existence o the ever,, which is impl ever implicitly icitly done by the mann manner er in which they have written their entry on incantation. Te Academy has not spoken o Sganarelle or o any ever given by magicians. On does do es not know [how] . . . afer this article, the Academ Academyy could c ould appear to deny the existence o a ever.31
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As Morellet implies, Feydel is a bit everish in his critique o the Académie. First, the term acousmate is related to the Greek noun acousma, “the thing heard,” and does not describe the act o hearing. It reers to a sound heard in the air, not the mental state o the listener that sound. Fedyel elides And this difference assumes a synonymy that washearing never claimed by the Académie. Morellet isand correct; the peculiarity o Feydel’s thinking is brought into relie when one looks at the historical usage o the term acousmate acousmate,, or I have been able to locate no other passage that invokes being in a “state o acousmate” other than Feydel’s. Second—and similarly— the association o St. Cecilia with the term acousmate is idiosyncratic and unsupported by historical usage as well. Again, there is no other locus than Feydel or the attribution. 32 Tese findings contest Battier’s symbolic identification o St. Cecilia with a tradition o sounds severed rom their causes and grouped under the term acousmate. In act, an acousmate has little to do with music, St. Cecilia, or mystical unions; rather, it is much more closely associated with extraordinary visual spectacles like eclipses, meteor showers, and thespectacles northern lights. It auditory is supposed to transpose o the supernatural effect o such into the register. I it weresome not an oxymoron to say so, perhaps the term acousmate could be defined as an “auditory phenomenon.” PHI LOSOPHY LOSOPHY,, PHYSICS, AND THE BAPTISM OF ACOUSMATE
Since acousmate is such a rare word in the French language, it is possible to trace many o its appearances—even its baptism. It first appears in the pages o the Mer Mercure cure de France, in December o 1730. Te word is coined in an article by M. reüillot de Ptoncour, the Curé d’Ansacq, that concerns an extraordinary, supernatural auditory event. Ansacq is a small village in a hilly, wooded region o France, about 40 miles due north o Paris. According to the Curé, on the evening o Jan January uary 27th and 28th, 1730, an “extraordinary noise like human voices” was “heard in the air by several
people in the parish o Ansacq. 33 (S25) Saturday, Jan. 28 o the present year, the noise pervaded the parish o
Ansacq, near Clermont en Beauvoisis, that the preceding night several Individuals o both sexes, having heard in the Air a prodigious multitude like human voices voi ces o differen differentt sounds, sounds, sizes and brightne brightness, ss, o all ages, ages, o all sexes, speaking speaking and crying all al l at once, without the Individuals being able to distinguish what the voices voi ces said; that among this vocal conusion, conusion, one recognized recognized and disti distingui nguished shed an infinite number who emitted lugubrious and lamentable cries, like distressed people, others cries o joy and peals o laughter, like persons amusing themselves; several added that they clearly distinguished among these human voices, allegedly, the sound o different instruments.34 In the article, written in the orm o a letter, the Curé displays his initial skepticism toward the event, arguing that he was “quite pyrrhonian” toward tales o spirits and witches’ sabbaths, or such tales circulate and terriy “coarse and ignorant minds, like those o most country-olk.”35 Afer speaking with ear-witnesses to the extraordinary event, and especially with townspeople described as men o “honor and probi probity ty,,
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quite enlightened enlightened and incredulous” (2809), the Curé begins to take the events more seriously. Afer a second set o strange sounds on the evening o May 9th and 10th, he decides to initiate a series o depositions in order to inquire into the nature nature o the event. majorby portion o the article is comprised o transcriptions o these sitionsTe ollowed a series o reflections upon them—and this is where the depoword acousmate is introduced. Troughout, the Curé maintains a position o neutrality, offering his inquiry inquiry to the readers o the Mer Mercure cure as a curiosity and amusement: (S26) What happened, whether Spirits, Goblins, Sorcerers, Magicians, Meteors,
conflicts o vapors, or battles o elements, I leave to the curious to choose or to find other causes: it suffices me to assure [the reader] that the witnesses o this alleged wonder, appear to me to be in good aith, and that they have been interrogated several times, and having been given the chance to contradict themselves by orgetting in their second, third and ourth depositions, that which they conessed in the first, they nevertheless support such wonders and they have never 36
varied vari ed in the least least circu circumsta mstance. nce. Whether the Curé is indeed as neutral as he claims is another question—or the strategy may be to eign neutrality in order to report evidence o some kind o miraculous event, one that the Curé knows well will not be easily explained. But, given the amount o detail in the article—which includes depositions, reflections, and even topographical descriptions o the town environs—there seems little reason to cast suspicion on his motives. Details about the mysterious sound emerge rom the villagers’ testimony. Te first set o depositions come rom Charles and François Descoulleurs, two middle-aged laborers heading back to Ansacq late on the evening o January January 27th rom the neighboring village o Senlis.37 Charles details the t he progression progression o the t he sound, attesting that while traveling along the north wall o the town, he “was suddenly interrupted by a 38 terrible voice, which appeared in the area o five paces. . . .” Another voice resem-
bling the first could then be b e heard at the other end o the village. Following upon that dialogue, a conusion o voices broke out in the space between the first two—voices o elders, children, men, and women, all speaking in an unintelligible jargon and accompanied by the sound o instruments. Although some voices appeared to come rom quite high in the air, “about twenty or thirty eet,” others were emitted rom about the height o an ordinary man or even rom the ground. Te whole event ended in “peals o delicate laughter, as i there had been three or our hundred people who began to laugh with all their orce.”39 Te volume o the noise was so loud that the brothers report struggling to converse with each other. On the opposite side o the village, Louis Duchemin, Duchemin, a glove seller, seller, and Patrice Patrice oüilly oüilly,, a bricklayer, bricklayer, were traveltraveling rom Ansacq to Senlis and report hearing the same event as the Descoulleurs brothers. Afer stopping briefly to listen more closely, they hastily continued onward to Senlis, determined to keep their t heir distance rom the noise. Villagers saely inside the town walls also reported hearing the noise. Sir Claude Descoulleurs, the retired guard o the town’s gate, reported hearing the events o both January 27th and May 9th. Te sounds were loud enough to rouse him rom a slumber. By the time the aged Sir Claude dressed himsel and headed out to his courtyard, he reports that the “Aerial roupe” was already quite distant. When asked
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about the sound, Sir Claude C laude offers one o the more colorul descriptions, comparing comparing it to a “Fair” or “demonstration,” where “two or three thousand persons orm a kind o chaos or conusion o human voices, o women, o elders, o young people, and children.” draws comparison the port o Hales in Paris onSt. theGermain day o ain great march, theHe halls o a apalace beore atogreat audience, or the Fair o the evening, “when it fills an infinite world.” (S27) Doesn’t one hear in all these places . . . a dreadul racket, in which one
understands nothing in general, while each one in particular speaks clearly and makes himsel distinctly understood? Add to that the sound o Violins, Basses, Oboes, rumpets, Flutes, Drums and all the other instruments that one plays in the House o Spectacles, and which blend themselves into this conusion o voices, voi ces, and and you you would would have have a good idea idea o o the noi noises ses that that I hear heard. d.40 Alexis Allou, a churchman, reports being awakened by his wie and heading downstairs to see about the noise. Afer opening the door, he hears “an innumerable multitude o persons, some pressing out cries o bitter words, others cries o joy,” accompanied by the sounds o instruments. Te sound travels along the road, passing by his house, beore heading toward the town church. Afer being seized with a shiver and overcome with ear, he heads back upstairs to comort his wie. Nicolas Portier, a laborer, reports a similar experience o being roused by the noise. It was so loud and terriying that his dogs were also disturbed and threw themselve t hemselvess at the door in terror terror.. Other depositions rom townsolk report experiences o being b eing rudely awakened, noting the movement o the sound along the road toward the church, and describe a similar composition o voices and instruments. In the series o reflections that flank the depositions, the Curé balances his trepidation about publishing such a report—and the skepticism with which the general public may receive it—with the potential interest it holds or the scientific community. Perhaps a touch sel-serving, the Curé imagines that this extraordinary sound
might capture the attention o the populace and the scientific community in the same way that an astronomical appearance had done a ew years earlier. In 1726, the aurora borealis could be seen in a spectacular display all across Northern Europe. Te display was so remarkable that it caused a panic among some crowds in France, triggering the government to commission an investigation by Jean-Jacques Dortous de Mairan into its causes. Mairan’s book became the most widely known treatise on the subject o aurorae in the first hal o the 18th century.41 Even in England, where there had been remarkab remarkable le displays o the aurora in the previous decade, the t he phenomenon merited an article in the ransactions o the Royal Society , describing the prismatic color o the lights and their ormations into “Coronas,” “Canopies,” “Arches,” and “Streams.”42 While the popular imagination saw portentous and ominous oracles in the displays o the aurora, they gave burgeoning natural scientists an opportunity to hypothesize explanations and dispel olk anxieties. Te Curé had phenomena o this variety in mind when w hen publishing publishing his account in the t he Mer Mercure cure. For just as he characterizes himsel as an enlightened man o good aith, distrusting the superstitious and overactive imagination o the townsolk, he encourages the Mer Mercure cure’s readers to explain the extraordina extraordinary ry sound through the applica application tion o skillul reasoning. o o that end, he even attaches a “topographic description” o Ansacq to aid “those who
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believe themselves to be able to explain this by natural causes and to exercise their Physics and their Philosophy.”43 In presenting so much material about the acousmate d’Ansacq, the Curé was participating a typical practice in earlyshared. 18th-century science, o whereby sci44 Just asnatural entific datainand accounts were widely the circulation eyewitness reports o the aurorae aided Mairan’s work in establishing a history o such phenomena and discerning recurrent cycles that would acilitate prediction o uture aurorae, the Curé was disseminating inormation to those who might be interested in investigating extraordinary sonic events. Similarly, the Curé coined terms to aid in the identification and specificity o such events. According to Patricia Fara, “Natural philosopherss developed a new vocabulary or providing detailed accounts o aurorae, philosopher thus consolidating their claims to intellectual possession o a phenomen phenomenon on governed by the laws o nature.”45 Te baptism o the word acousmate ulfilled this unction. (S28) Everyone knows that Phenomenon [Phénomène] is a Greek word, which
has been Gallicized as much as any other, because one cannot find in our language ull o terms a signification energetic enough, to express by itsel objects that appear extraordinarily in the air. Our language does not urnish us with many expressions to designate the extraordinary noises that exist, nor those, which might be heard [où qui pourraient se aire entendre ]. But as the latter [i.e., extraordinary noises] are less common than the ormer [i.e., Phenomena], no one has been shrewd enough thus ar to Gallicize a Greek word to express it. Doesn’t the event in question authorize me to do it mysel, and to appeal in the same way to what the Ancients called Phenomena [Phénomènes], the extraordinary objects that appear in the air; can’t I, or the same reason, designate the surprising and prodigious noise heard with the word, Akousm Akousmène ène, or to speak more properly Greek in French, Akous Akousmate mate? Te first (i.e., Phénomène) signifies a thing that appears extraordinarily; the second would signiy a thing that makes itsel heard extraordinarily.46
Te word “akousmate” is intended as an auditory parallel to the visual phenomenon. Etymologically, phenomenon is derived rom the Greek verb phan phanein ein, which means to cause, to appear, or to show. Although philosophical use o the term generalizes it to cover any kind o sensory perception, traditionally, the word has a visual basis and cannot be easily applied to auditory events.47 In the Curé’s case, there was an established tradition o using the term to speak about natural appearances, appearances, especially astronomical astronomi cal events. Eudoxus had used the word in the title o his treatise on astronomy, and his usage continued in the natural scientific journals o the 18th century.48 Moreover, the Curé’s justification or his coinage clarifies one odd eature o the word. Te “-ate” ending is uncommon in French, which helps to make akousmate such a rare word in the language. But it is apparent that the Curé knows his Greek grammar and is simply transcribing the plural Greek noun “akousmata,” the things heard, into French. Naturally, the vowel sound at the end o the Greek becomes silent when transcribed. So, akousmate is really just a revival o our old Greek riend, the word akousmata. akousmata. Or is it? In act, the word suddenly reappears without without a trace o the t he Pythagoreanism that had been attached to it at the time o Clement or Iamblichus. Te Curé’s acousmata, although perhaps portentous or supernatural, are definitely
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not coded utterances or allegories. Tey encrypt no esoteric wisdom, participate in no ritual initiations, and conceal no Orphic mysteries. Te only thing mysterious about them now concerns their cause. c ause. When reborn in the 18th century century,, acousmata areAfer unexplained effects. coining the term, the Curé appeals to the intere interest st o scientists by addressing the specifics o each sense modality, seeing and hearing. Te nature o each modality moda lity differentiates differen tiates the kind o extraordinary events that will be perceived. Te appeals o the Curé challenge the nobility and privilege o sight in the name o equal treatment: (S29) In effect, i the extraordinary aerial phenomena which appeared five years
ago greatly excited great minds and has given material or several assemblies o the Members o the Academy o Sciences, why shouldn’t an event which alls under another sense, which is no less real, no less essential to man than the sense o sight, merit as much attention and curiosity rom the same scholars? . . . Tis principle established, established, I claim that i the Phénomè Phénomènes nes are pricking the curiosity c uriosity o the scholars, the Akousmates, should do no less. . . .49 Te first objection to be countered concerns the wide availability o aurorae to a whole hemisphere o viewers, in comparison to the miniscule reception o the acousmate by a ew auditors in Ansacq. One might argue that the greater number o witnesses to the aurora gives more credibility to the event. No one can doubt the veracity o its appearance in the sky with so many witnesses to veriy it. Te Curé rebuts that since “the Sphere o activity o vision is much more extended than that o hearing, Phenomena and Akousmates do not require the same number o witnesses to yield authenticity.”50 Because vision and hearing differ in their modes o operation and spheres o activity, different criteria must be applied to the eye and the ear. Next, the Curé turns the argument around, claiming that despite the smaller sphere o activity o the ear, it is a more reliable witness because “the sense o vision
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