Musique : art, technique, savoir (10) - Karol Beffa (2012-2013)

[Music]

As I said, I have the pleasure

of welcoming Jérôme Ducros,

pianist and composer, who will be

talking to us about tonhallism. And then, in

1863, in a novel titled *

Paris in the 20th Century*,

Jules Verne paints a portrait of what

they imagined music to be. In 1960,

excerpts... "

Finally!" cried Michel, "We're going to make some

music, especially not

modern music!" said Jacques, "It's too difficult

to understand." "Yes, to play?" "No, how come?" "Let

me explain. Sit down on the keyboard." "What do you mean,

sit down?" said

Michel. He let himself fall onto the keys

of the instrument and produced a heart-

rending harmony. "Do

you know what you're doing there?" asked

the pianist. "I hardly suspect," he replied,

innocent of the modern harmony.

Then the composer himself sat down at the

piano. Under his

fingers, under his hands, under his elbows,

the unfortunate instrument makes

ideas impossible. The notes

clash and crackle like...

Hail, no melody, no rhythm, and

you're counting on that piece then, said

Michel. If I'm counting on it, replied the

composer. These two amounts, I'll be

understood,

and not see it there, the image

[Music]

years

[Music]

[Music]

Thank you. So, it's not a

film adaptation of the scene

I just read, it's not

fiction, but rather an

interpretation by Maurizio Pollini, a

very great pianist,

of an undisputed masterpiece by

Karlheinz Stockhausen, one of the

greatest geniuses of the 20th century, which dates from

1960-61, the exact year in which

Jules Verne's scene is supposed to take place

in

1970, so roughly at the time when this

text is supposed to take place and when

Stockhausen's young composers are composing the piece from which

we just heard an excerpt. The

composer Steve Reich, in a text

he titles "Some

Optimistic Predictions on the Future of Music,"

writes this:

Pulse and the requirement of a

clearly defined tonal center of attraction

will emerge as one of the

fundamental sources of new music.

I propose we see what the situation is

forty years later with this all-too-

short excerpt from

Karol Beffa's Violin Concerto, which

could cut life, life,

messages

[Music]

[Music]

1. I

apologize for cutting this off in this beautiful

concerto

[Applause]

that Jules Verne's prediction has come

true. The example we heard

first should suffice to

convince us, especially if I add that

the vast majority of music from

this era more or less reflects

this aesthetic. It may be a

little early, however, to assert here

without a shadow of a doubt that

Steve Reich's prediction will be fulfilled

with the same unanimity,

even if we have two magnificent

examples like the one we just

heard:

the struggle between those who wish to

preserve the atonal musical style of the

20th century and those who wish to abandon it. It

seems

inevitable to me

that this movement will eventually prevail,

and that is what I would like to try to

show today. To that end,

I will venture a

comparative study of the

respective characteristics of tonal and

atonal music. Why do I say

venture?

Because while there are many specific studies

of the different styles contained within each

of these languages—

for tonal music, we have identified the

Baroque style, the Classical style, and the

Romantic style; for atonal music, the

Serial style, the Post-Serial style, the Spectral style, and the

Aleatoric style (I'm surely forgetting some)—we are

not, however, accustomed to examining

the characteristics common to all

and subsets within their

respective entities: tonal and atonal.

The pitfall

of such a schematic analysis, I

prefer to state from the outset, is that I will pay

little attention to the boundary between

tonal and atonal, a boundary which is

blurred like all

artistic boundaries and which leads many

composers, particularly at the beginning of the

20th century... Unclassifiable according to this

terminology, but the porous nature of the

boundary in no way negates the

reality of the profound difference

between the entities found on either side,

and it is this difference that

interests me today.

Conversely, the advantage of such an

openly binary analysis is that it

allows us, at least in part, to explain the

divorce between the music-loving public and

contemporary music in the 20th century—a

divorce evidenced, if only

one example were needed, by the fact that even

today, in conservatories and

international

music competitions, it is necessary to impose

contemporary-style pieces to

ensure that students play them. It is

perhaps useful in this regard

to recall that

Romantic music was never imposed in the 19th century, nor was

Classical music in the 18th. Obviously,

contrary to what

all fallacious reconstructions

of art history claim, the music of the

moment has always been the favorite of music

lovers, with the

notable exception of the 20th century. Why this

divorce? This is what we will try

to understand.

I will only suggest for now that we

can no longer reasonably

attribute this divorce to a fear of the

new. First, we will see that

contemporary music has offered nothing

profoundly new for

decades, and second, music lovers

who reject contemporary music readily

go to see the latest

film and buy the latest book of the

literary season. They are not inherently

afraid of the new.

While the reasons for the shift to tonality

at the beginning of the 20th century have been

extensively analyzed, the

remarkable return of tonality in the broadest sense

in recent years has not been

the subject of such in-depth analysis.

It is mainly commented on, let's say

superficially, by those who

would like the musical style of the

20th century to remain as it is for all eternity,

and who readily label them

reactionary, revisionist—in short,

all secular equivalents of the devil

are welcome—those who, like

Beffa in particular, want to break free from the

dogmas of tonality.

Politically charged jeers obviously

aim to, and certainly have the effect of,

masking the real reasons behind this

underlying trend in the autumnal music scene, even though

it alone is of course

interesting. Indeed, there is no desire—and I

think Carole won't contradict me—

among the neo-tunnel crowd to return for the sake of

returning, to decide on principle that things were

better before, to advocate a return

to an old order simply because it is old. Of course not!

The deep reasons

for this situation are to be found in

the very aporias of tonality and

in the non-negotiable principles that gave rise to it.

Principles whose questioning, we will see,

is necessary for

the very evolution of music. This

conditions, and paradoxically,

the evolution of music towards a return

to the essential functions of tonal language.

Bart, right here in his last short piece,

where he discussed the necessity of

lineage in the creation of a

work, quoted this phrase from Verdi: "Let

us turn to the past; it will be

progress

if it is indispensable today." I

think To dismiss the notion of progress from

artistic matters has, it seems to me,

rather brought it misfortune. On the

other hand, evolving by turning

towards the past, or moving backwards, to

borrow Sartre's phrase about

Baudelaire, not only has its own

relevance, but these same approaches are

the best we have to deal with today.

And since we're going to talk about

musical language, and I have a piano

handy, I'll take the opportunity to

start by giving a few examples. First of all, let's give credit where credit is due,

a little tonal music.

[Music]

Well, let's not kid ourselves, there was

a small problem towards the end.

It's called wrong notes. There were

two. Okay, I admit it, I take responsibility,

and I take responsibility all the more

readily since, in reality, it was done on purpose, of

course, since these wrong

notes will be the central theme of

today's session, or more precisely,

the fact that you noticed them.

Because, you realize,

without having studied, certainly for

many of you, the laws of

tonal language... You are able

to hear two wrong notes in a

piece that has over a

hundred,

and pieces that you couldn't possibly

know since I composed them for

this lesson. Something else

now, something completely different: a

performance, which I hope will be honest this

time, of a

particularly interesting atonal work in that it is

the first work

written in an atonal language. Theorizing it is

the first serial twelve-tone work

written by Schoenberg in 1923.

People are playing the first page.

[Music]

Oh,

come on,

my point

[Music]

where

it went better. Well,

I must still ease my

conscience because it went very well at the

beginning.

This first measure was executed

almost perfectly,

and then measure 8. Perhaps it was stage fright;

my left hand went down a

semitone, and this continued for all the

following measures. Something I tried to

correct at measure 15, raising my

hand a semitone, but I made a mistake,

and it was my right hand

that went up. by a semitone at that point,

which meant that from that moment on, both

the notes in my left and

right hands were wrong. Through sheer

concentration, I managed to

lower my right hand

by a semitone in measure 20, but this immediately caused

my left hand to lower it by a semitone in the following measure as

well, whereas, if you've been

following closely, it should have risen normally.

And finally, by some

miracle, in the middle of measure 25, I

found my notes in their proper places

and brilliantly played

measures 26 and 27 exactly as

written.

In short, the very beginning and end were perfectly fine, but

the middle was a complete mess. I

counted, because of course it was all

planned. In the example

I just gave, I counted no fewer than 79 wrong

notes, not

one of which was even heard by

specialists.

In other words, to summarize the

situation

for non-specialists:

they spot two wrong notes in a

tonal piece they aren't supposed to

know. While specialists can't

detect 79 wrong notes in a

thirty-one-second excerpt of

nearly a century-old atonal music that's

part of the repertoire,

this premise seems quite revealing to me and

says enough about the

profound differences between totality and isthmus-atone music that

I've decided to

dedicate the bulk of

today's lesson to its analysis. Another

quick experiment, still somewhat along the

same lines, but to show that

other styles of atonal music

share the same characteristics

because we sometimes want to contrast them:

serialism, free atonal music, etc.

Today I'm talking about isthmus-atone

in general; I want to show that it

shares the same characteristics. So I'm going to

play two short examples.

Now you're going to tell me, but you

certainly don't trust me at all anymore

since I'm putting wrong

notes everywhere, so I'm going to proceed

differently. I'll take two short excerpts

of atonal music by two different composers,

more recent than Schoenberg of course, and for

each excerpt I'll give two versions, one of which

I'll tell you beforehand what will be

Honest, meaning it will respect the text,

and the other will be totally disfigured. It's up to

you, of course, to tell me which of the

two is correct, perhaps with Decarone's help.

First, Donatoni,

the expressions are clear, don't worry,

Donatoni. An honest version, a

disfigured version.

[Music] That was

the first one, here's the second.

[Music] No

idea, not

even the specialists have. So

we'll take another composer,

Kurtág. Then, then we'll stop at

Kurtág. Same thing, a good version is a

bad version. [

Music]

Second version.

[Music]

No, nobody, it's a bit

boring. One last one,

really, just

to make sure we don't get there, and

then we'll talk about all this again. Two

versions.

[Music]

and

1.

[Applause]

[Music]

Second version.

[Music]

Am I insulting

you by asking if you have...

I should point out that the disfigurements are

exactly the same in the three

examples I gave, that is to say,

roughly offset. With a hand a semitone higher, plus a

few additions according to the whim

of the moment,

it would seem, therefore, that the

discriminatory capacities of judgment are present

whenever the music is tonal and

disappear whenever it is not.

I should clarify at this point that

the fact that you recognized it as

the correct version of a

Beethoven work has nothing to do, firstly,

with the fact that you

might have known this work; it would have had

exactly the same effect with an offer

that you were told you didn't know—

sorry, that's actually what

I chose to do for the very

first example—and secondly, it has nothing to do

with an effect of habituation, the reason for which would be the

passage of time.

Mistakes were heard in exactly the

same way as today, from the very

first hearing of a work;

otherwise, no one would have noticed

the oddities that have been attributed to

this or that composer, which stemmed

precisely from the composer's intentional

wrong note, because that's where My point is that

composers of

tonal music had, and still have,

a language whose rules the public largely

understands,

even when they are unable to articulate them.

All the composer's discursive work

is based on this

knowledge of the rules.

This is, in fact, the very nature of a language,

and could be at least part

of its definition: to be a coded system in

which the sender and receiver

have consciously or unconsciously integrated and shared

the main elements. In

French, for example, and since it is

the language that unites us today,

examples abound

of rules that we respect, even though

we have either forgotten them ourselves or

never learned them. If a foreigner

asks us what tense to

conjugate the verb after "il faut que" (it is necessary that), for

example, we all proceed in exactly the same way to answer: "

remue la scion in petto" (rearing the scion in petto) of one or

more sentences beginning with "bar" (il faut

qu' - it is necessary that I come - it is necessary that

you have - it is necessary that they take - it is necessary that they take - they

deduce the rule: "il faut que" is

followed by the subjunctive mood, better with a rule

that we do not know Let's imagine the

following proposition written here: a blind scholar. There

are two ways to read this: one can

read "a blind scholar" or one can read "a blind

scholar." For a long time, good

ear... there is a difference,

two meanings between the two ways of reading it. When "a blind

scholar" is

understood as a scholar who cannot see,

when "a blind scholar" is understood as

a blind person who knows. In other

words, in the first case, without the liaison, "

scholar" and the noun "blind" are the adjective. In

the second case, "a blind scholar" is with the

liaison "blind" and the noun "scholars" and

the adjective. There is a rule that

can be found, for example, in the example of a

striker who says this: we do not pronounce

the liaison after the final consonant

of a singular noun.

Indeed, once we know this, we can

look for examples: we say "a

hungry wolf" by a missed opportunity, "hungry," "an

admirable necklace," "an interesting subject." No one

among you will say "it's an interesting subject," "

very interesting." We

say "it's an interesting subject," no

liaison, because this subject... is a

very interesting noun, liaison, because très is not

a noun; it is a

striking example of a rule that we

all use every day, even though

we most likely had never heard of

these rules in music. Like a Frenchman,

we had them, we assimilated them

through simple repetition, denounced as correct,

which we were confronted with by

dint of hearing well-formed phrases.

We know how it is formed with

the advent of tonhalle ismm. We

perhaps thought in good faith that the

repetition of nouns, c'est correct,

would do the same to simulate the

language for all listeners,

but it was not so. A

more than eminent composer who

devoted most of his life to

composing serial music told me one

day, when I had just played him on the piano

the orchestral reduction of the concerto to

the memory of an angel by Alban Berg,

serial music, therefore, that this

score, and always had,

contained a large number of mistakes,

mistakes. Fabec rolled from F sharp, and it

is that the recordings of this

concerto and these Concert performances,

without exception, repeated these

faulty notes. I seized the opportunity to

ask him, "Tell me, where are the

mistakes I just made so I can

correct them immediately in the score?" And

he replied, "I can't

tell you right now; my corrected score is at

home." What

exactly does this mean when

tonal music, like in French,

bases its rules on knowledge

and empirical practice that

allows us to feel if the phrase is

correct, if it sounds good? In

atonal music, on the other hand, being deprived of this

feeling that the note is right or

wrong—we saw earlier how much

we will rely on the rule to

know—in other words, in

tonal music, as in spoken language, we

deduce the rule from the phrase, whereas

in serial atonal music, in this

case, we deduce the phrase from the

rule. It

is now time to consider

this knowledge you have of

language, which could be defined, at a

minimum,

by your ability to predict, after

hearing—should I say, what

the music should be like in the next second?

I return to my initial example, which...

It startled

[Music] okay, that's

not it, but what happens

when you hear that? Well, whether you

're a specialist, whether you know how to

write it or not, or whether you've simply taken up

music, you know that

afterwards

we all have the same answer to this

question:

the composer, knowing that you know this,

can decide to surprise you. For

example

[Music] that's

not bad either, it's not

necessarily what you expected, it's

called breaking a cadence, but you

consider that it's part of the realm

of possibilities, it's a surprise, a

good surprise if you will. On the other hand, if

I do it,

everyone here is sure that it's not

part of the realm of possibilities,

even less so. Let's try with

contemporary atonal music, what do we

want then?

Well, I encounter

[Music] that's

not bad, it's now, but also

possible

[Music]

credible

[Music]

I'll stop because we could spend all

day, all night, everything is possible,

we expect everything, and as we We expect

everything, we are surprised by nothing,

and we therefore enter into a form of

passive listening, at most thinking, "Hey,

he did that."

If we analyze, perhaps too quickly, the

observations we have made so far, we

could

conclude that in listening to

tonal music, there is a type of chord that we

accept as rather consonant, and

a type of chord that we do not accept as rather

dissonant.

In this case, this

discriminatory capacity that we have when

listening to tonal music would be

the expression of a recognition of the

absolute value that we attribute to

sounds. That would already be quite a lot, and it would

already be proof that everyone has

a pretty good ear, but we

'll see that reality is more

complex and your understanding much

deeper than that.

I need

to indulge in a little improvisation.

[Music]

You

[Music]

or

[Music] that's it,

you liked it,

well I'm delighted, not because

it flatters my ego as an improviser, but

because I played

that chord four times and you didn't hear a thing.

I'll show them right from

the start: I did this, it's

there, freeze frame, it's the

same one

here, that's very good,

I did this, then what is it?

Oh, it's that one,

horrible here, an email to,

except for the lady

in these jousts.

[Music]

same thing, the same one again, so here's what

becomes

extremely interesting. Why? Because it's

not certain sounds that

you dislike and not others, it's

certain sounds that you accept in

certain contexts and not in others,

which changes the dimension of your

knowledge, because then the The

notion of meaning and sounds being akin

to words, you reject a certain note in

a musical phrase not because you

dislike the note itself, but

because you judged it incoherent

within the phrase in question; it doesn't

belong, in other words, to the realm of

possibilities I was talking about earlier.

So, my initial false note

is as if I had told you, "For a

long time, I went to bed well-fed."

You immediately know that the last

word is "and it has to be"—it's a false note,

to continue the metaphor.

But it's not because it's a

horrible neologism or a dreadful

vulgarity that you reject it; it's

because it contradicts the meaning of the

sentence, whereas it would fit perfectly

elsewhere, in another context,

exactly like our agreement.

Literature, since we're talking about it,

also had its modern or

contemporary moment, in the sense of a desire for the

fragmentation of language. Subject-verb-

object—that's in the past, that's old-

fashioned. We're changing all that a bit; we've

perhaps forgotten that

literature also experienced this phase.

I'll go into it. I unearthed a small piece to

continue the parallel between music and

language, which is decidedly inexhaustible.

I'll read you a little Morse code, a short

excerpt from Tristan Tzara. It must date back

to 1916, I think. It's one of the first

Dadaist texts:

closed doors without fraternity, we

are bitter, fel vire, rend, centipede

of the Eiffel Tower, immense, think, think and think, think,

mechanism without pain, 17 98

58 555 eaeo bibeau fifi haras, my god,

oh my god, along the canal, puerperal fever,

beetles and so2 h4, tomb, mata paul and

vice-king of the nights, they lost their

arms, irregular polygon, amat, it breaks,

the ladybug is bigger than

the cerebral hemisphere, but where are the

vice-kings of the nights?

It goes without saying that by listening to this you

put yourself in a state of passivity that

resembles the state to which

listening to atonal music forces you, because

you expect nothing, because it It makes no

sense; I can make as many wrong

notes as I want. During the reading, you won't be able to

hear them. Besides, I didn't hold back.

You're starting to

know me.

And I inadvertently replaced "

lace" with "Arabs" in the

text I just read, which I

think in a text that made sense

would inevitably have posed a problem, but here it didn't. In

other words, Proust is tonal; I replace "

hours" with "goat," and everyone hears it.

Sarah is atonal; I replace "lace" with "

Arabs," and nobody hears it the

same way. I was able to use

figures and Schoenberg and Donatoni Kurtág earlier

without anyone noticing, whereas

two wrong notes in a

tonal language made you wince. We'll have to face

this obvious fact: only what is

meaningless to the listener can be disfigured with impunity.

The tonal composer therefore has at their

disposal a language that allows them to

constantly play with the listener's expectations.

This property is at the very

foundation of art music,

since It is certain, she

alone is certain, that the fact rests on the fact that we could have

wanted to develop discourses

in the musical language. Claude Lévi-

Strauss, who endeavored to

highlight this essential property of

tonal language, which serialism, according to

him, is incapable of reproducing,

describes it in these terms:

musical emotion arises precisely

from the fact that at each moment the composer

removes or adds more or less than

the listener anticipates, based on a

plan they believe they can guess, and they add

the aesthetic pleasure,

effects of this multitude of months and

respite, expectations deceived and rewarded

beyond the tent,

result of the challenges carried by the work.

So I will take advantage of the

piano again, this time to give you three

examples among thousands of this

capacity that the

tonal composer has to

use our knowledge

to surprise or flatter it.

First examples borrowed from Johann

Sebastian Bach in his cantata number 54,

1st, in the middle of which the singer

sings the ace 10 min at Thann Blendon Dndi

got her Shenzhen drift at a floor of the

workshops shale doesn't let

his blind aunt and quarter profane the

glory of God brings a

deadly curse. Needless to say, it takes

imagination and talent

to paraphrase such a powerful text, and

a city to say, of course, that Baky Prat will succeed.

He will, for this, use

your predictive abilities.

The singer says this phrase twice. It

is at the end of the first occurrence,

at the moment when, therefore, they sing, lift a

floor of the workshops. Son enters, brings a

deadly curse. Bac introduces

a perfectly

normal cadence until its resolution,

and there we wait, of

course, we wait for the

normal resolution on lifetime heaviness. Only hiccup,

list, here is this movement. Or Bac will

write, we

use here a chord quite

usual in other circumstances,

but rather surprising at the arrival of a

cadence, since instead of giving us

the impression that we have arrived somewhere,

they rather give

the impression that the music starts again without us really

knowing why, as if a

step had been skipped in the

formulation. In reality, this chord will

lead to a refrain from the orchestrated

to The outcome of which the singer will

say this phrase for the second time

is at the end of the phrase the second

time

on the mortal curse

new bac brings a classical cadence

at the end of which we expect this

or perhaps what he did the

first time

but which here would not make sense

since it is the last time the

singer actually said it in

place of the most consonant chord

he has at his disposal

and which is the one we expect below

that he will use the most

dissonant chord he has at his disposal

which is called a tritone chord

because it is based on

this interval

a little unpleasant to the ear which is

an interval of cards increase and which

at the time was considered the

devil's interval in music

so it is not more appropriate to the text

in question I try to sing you

the thing as a whole the hostis

caterpillars to reach us eindhoven

of the digicodes it is the young trifluvien

of the

lists refrain of The orchestrated

normal cadence

at the end of which the singer

resumes the stylistic dance recalled

the same offense, quite a few Shenzhen

Rifai cans,

dramatic effects guaranteed, it's not what

you expected and it's

extremely surprising. Another

use

of his predictive abilities, totally

different this time in Schubert, in

an impromptu that begins with

this sort of sweet, nostalgic,

and smiling gentleness so dear to the composer. In the

middle of this impromptu, Schubert

introduces a more dramatic moment

from which he will want to emerge, to take us out, to take us out

with him, by changing

the lighting and perhaps not bringing back

the lighting of the beginning, but something

much brighter, to take us

out of the darkness, in a way. How will he do it

this time? I

play first and then I explain.

The passage will arrive,

the drama arrives.

[Music]

What happens at this moment? I don't know

if you shivered with me,

but this passage, what happens at the

moment when Schubert

brings this broad commentary? So,

we use the fact that you're

expecting something else. To summarize,

Schubert will

not only know that you're expecting

a normal resolution,

which would be this one, but not content with just

knowing it, he'll give it to you twice,

the real

solution. He gives it to you twice

in the passage, and it's when it

happens the third time that they

change completely,

perhaps at the moment we least expect it. He

changes completely by two degrees, and

he surprises us with this

way of resolving the cadence. To summarize,

first occurrence,

then repeat,

second occurrence.

So he changed a very small

melodic element to justify the repetition. That's

the first time we had

[Music].

Second time,

and third time

[Music]. In

other words, to take up

Lévi-Strauss's phrase, "expectation, expectation,"

and "

tripping

is rewarded beyond the tent,"

that's what he meant. Let's

remember that for us to be

surprised, we have to have expected

something,

and that it's the same mechanism

that is triggered in you when you

You shudder with horror at the sound of my

wrong note at the beginning, or when you

shudder with pleasure at the sound of

this modulation. This mechanism is, if

I may say so, the

immediate trial of the anomaly. Only a

few milliseconds pass between the

commission of the offense, the

contradictory nature of the argument, the defense's plea, and the prosecution's indictment.

The verdict, in the first case, will be that

the performer is terrible, in the second case, that

the composer is brilliant. But

these two verdicts will be the culmination

of one and the same type of trial: the one

the listener brings against the note

they hadn't expected to hear.

A few words now on a

special use of your predictive abilities:

the harmonic progression. The

harmonic progression is a kind of logical sequence

designed to enhance your

prior knowledge of the discourse and, as such, is

obviously very popular with

music lovers.

[Music]

At the moment it arrives, you can

predict the discourse, not one note in

advance as is generally the case,

but two. Four, six, or even eight bars

in advance, and you could foresee the

unfolding, not only harmonic

and melodic, provided that the composer

introduces a melodic embryo on the

first step

[Music],

or

at the moment the march arrives, you

almost have the impression of knowing

this piece even if you've never

heard it,

or even better, the impression of having

composed it yourself or of being in the process of

composing it. It's a true gift

that the composer gives to his audience,

and as such, the march

often comes after a passage where

your attention has been particularly

engaged or your nerves put to the

test. I'm thinking, for example, of that

passage from Schubert's second virtuoso, a barren,

uncomfortable landscape;

the tension is palpable, it rises,

and when it reaches its climax,

Schubert, March 10,

we have the impression of knowing it, and

then the whirlwind of

contradictory feelings that overwhelms us at the

moment it arrives is difficult to

describe, but I think we can

extract from it the feeling of profound

gratitude. Regarding the composer who

chose this way of saying thank you

for your attention, because that's what he's saying,

Mozart does the same in his 23rd

concerto. After a passage where we're a little

lost, a very uncertain passage, the

instruments change. Here, I'm going to do everything

on the piano, but it happens between

the orchestrated piano, the key changes

every two measures. He also thanks

his audience in a certain way

with a march.

[Music]

Where are we?

[Music]

Alas, Mozart, but look where you

are!

[Music]

Ah yes, I know!

[Music]

And this undeniable listening comfort that

the march provides when it

arrives, obviously made very

popular

among popular music writers, in particular. We can't not

mention,

and it's exactly the same

principle at this point as with Mozart,

totally superimposable. It's a

song

for a hundred,

okay, even "

I love you," Schubert's. Can we subject

him to the same affront? You

remember that one?

It makes me... Oh dear,

Allah

[Music] Oh

dear,

why these provocative juxtapositions?

Far be it from me, of course, to suggest

any kind of relativism that would

suggest The Umbrellas

of Cherbourg and

Schubert's Impromptus are the same thing, or that Autumn

Leaves and

Mozart's concertos are the same thing. Of course not,

but it's to remind us of something

very important and somewhat

forgotten in the tonal world before the

atonal split: art music and

popular music spoke the same

language.

In 1934, in this regard, Schoenberg let

slip a strange flash of insight whose

full significance we haven't yet grasped: there will

always be tonal music, he said,

because there will always be a need for

popular music.

We're speechless! It's absurd,

when you think about it, that a composer develops

a language that he senses cannot

be that of

popular music. It's unfortunate, in a way, that he He didn't bother

to develop this

premonition because, after all, he had done

the hardest part by recognizing ahead of

time that popular music would

never be tonal. He only needed

to push the reasoning a little further to

conclude that

atonal music would never be popular.

The different possible states of a

language are a sign that it is a

language. Tristan and Isolde and Viens

Poupoule are written in the same language.

Julien Gracq speaks the same language as

Fernand Raynaud and Marguerite Yourcenar,

the same language as Denise Fabre. A

language that allowed only one

mode of expression would be, at best,

jargon, at worst, glossolalia, and never, as far as

I know, would allow

the emergence of a masterpiece.

One of the collateral damages of this abandonment

of an intelligible language is that, by

voluntarily depriving itself of the

possibility of astonishing its audience with something other

than gestures,

atonal music has also deprived itself of

the possibilities of evolving in depth.

It's reasonable to say that since

Berne or Varèse, who offered

truly unprecedented works to

their audiences, the

atonal style—whether called modern or

contemporary, it doesn't matter—has

offered nothing truly astonishing for

almost a century. The tricks and

strokes of genius that composers of

the tonal era used to

seduce or surprise their listeners

led them to discover

harmonic worlds, sometimes unexplored, some of which were

abandoned, while others became

schools of thought depending on their relevance.

Once this dialectic was abandoned, it

was inevitable that music would no

longer evolve in depth, since one can only

naturally change the

parameters one uses. Hence a

very striking paradox: for the last

hundred years, we have never

focused so much on the evolution

of music, yet it has never

evolved so little. Pierre Boulez himself

makes this very apt observation: "It is claimed," he says, "

that the 20th century

evolved a great deal, but this is false. There are

fewer differences between today's trends

and Stravinsky." that between concrete and Wagner, it was

perfectly just a matter of trying to make

leaps of about 60 years in

the history of music. It's edifying,

for example, the St. John Passion, the

St. Matthew Passion, pardon,

The Magic Flute, Lohengrin, and The Rite

of Spring. Bach, Mozart, Wagner,

Stravinsky—these are leaps of about

sixty years. We're

so hardened to the status quo that it

seems astounding. Let's see what happens

with tonhallism by listening

now to four very short excerpts

of four atonal pieces by four

different composers.

[Music]

Yes,

where is the

second excerpt? That was a string quartet,

yes.

[Music]

1.

Third excerpt

[Music]

[Applause]

[Music]

And last excerpt, string quartet

[Music].

Could someone say which of these

excerpts is clearly much more

modern than the others? In other words, the

chronological order is

flawed to the naked eye. Surely not,

all four could have been

written yesterday afternoon by a

composition student from one of our

national conservatories of music, and if so,

they would all have been

approved by the professor, so perfectly do they

meet the stylistic requirements

imposed by contemporary academicism. As such, they

could easily appear,

without a shadow of a doubt,

in the contemporary music sections of

our record stores. And yet, these four

excerpts date, respectively,

in the order we listened to them, from

2010,

1985,

1923, and

1627.

I admit that including the last

excerpt in this small

anthology is a bit of a joke on

my part, but I wanted to take this

opportunity to remind everyone that, just as

monochrome existed before

Malevich, tonality existed long

before Schoenberg, often in

experimental works attempting to imitate

the sounds of nature. Here, it is Carlo

Farina, a composer who must have been born around

1600, who created this work

entitled and a capriccio stravagante

and in the passage in question he imitates

the meows of cats and the

barks of dogs,

which is to say that the demand for novelty

that is generally opposed to the composer,

dinner by the barrel, isn't that right Carole,

is only a rhetorical reflex here if we disregard

the 17th-

century piece that concludes this overview,

the gap between the two most

distant pieces was Varèse for the more

recent and Ferney for the more varied,

for the older, pardon is closed,

or for the more recent,

the gap between these two pieces is 87

years, that is to say the same as between

Schubert's Impromptus and The Rite of

Spring, the least we can say is that

the stylistic difference is

a little more striking in one case than

in the other, why then this

relative stagnation for so many

years, that is to say since the shift

to analysis, well it is quite

simply because the similarities

between The different currents that the

tonhalle ism has generated, and which are

always presented to us as

distinct languages, even contrasted with one another,

these similarities are in fact much

more important than the divergences, and

all the positive definitions

that have been attempted to be given of these systems,

listing those found within them,

have never succeeded in describing them with as much

acuity as the simple statement of

their negative properties, which lists

those not found within them and which are

very clear: absence of tonality, absence

of regular pulse, absence of

melodies, absence of harmony. These are the

only points common to all the systems in which

taunoa is authorized. This being admitted, it

is obvious that we cannot go

further in terms of the 20th list; we cannot

go further than an absence in the

same way that we cannot descend

into... below absolute zero,

this explains why, while the

most romantic composers are

found at the end of Romanticism,

the most modern composers are

found at the beginning of Modernism. This is because

the Romantic ideal was amplified throughout the

19th century, whereas the

modern approach, by

constantly repeating it, can always be enhanced. One can always

add notes to scales, and

when listening, one

can always invent new

electronic noises, a new way of

playing the English horn or the bass clarinet, and

quarter tones can always be cut

into 8 or 16. In

any case, one will never produce the same effects that

Berne and his contemporaries produced for

the audiences of their time. Whatever

innovations

one boasts of having invented, one

can only reproduce this

contemporary style, which is no longer

new and is known by heart. This

means that those who are obsessed with this approach, both

in their

reconstruction of

music history and in their production, are obsessed with this approach.

The evolution towards ever greater

modernity

is now entangled in a choice

that would make them shudder with horror if they were to pause for

a moment:

either they repeat the modern gesture, which

is a century old (need we remind you?), or they

regress, that is to say, either they do

as before, or they do as before.

In both cases, whether they repeat or revert, they

are reactionary, nostalgic, or

revisionist; they are exactly what they have been accusing

their enemies of being for so many years. It turns out that

many are simply repeating the

retrograde modern gesture, but very timidly, very gently.

The recantations of both sides

are now so

numerous, especially in recent years,

that listing them would be tedious.

Let's simply note that the embryonic

melodic and harmonic patterns, the

occasional returns of the regular pulse, are

increasingly frequent, although

extremely timid among

contemporary artists—patently, and those that would have made them

shudder with horror

only a few years ago. So, if

reversion seems to be the only solution to this extent,

even its fiercest

opponents... They indulge in it against their will.

One can rightly argue

that the real difference between the neo-modernists and

the contemporary modernists is that, in a

convergent approach, the former are

simply much more radical than the

latter. Since radicalism is an

inalienable pillar of modernism, the

anti-modernists are therefore more modern than

the modernists.

This irresistible aporia highlights

the constitutive weaknesses of

modernist thought, whose theorists, to

my knowledge, did not foresee that it

contained within itself the terms of its own

denial. If being modern means rejecting

the norm, what should I do when

modernity has become the norm?

My professor

orders me to be modern while

explaining that being modern means

disobeying my professors. What should I

do? In

conclusion, in attempting to answer

these seemingly insoluble questions, I would like to

cite two

troubling testimonies that are, if I may say so, at opposite ends of the spectrum from the

modern misunderstanding,

and which come from two men of roughly

the same generation, each, in his own way, an

inventor. of the

aesthetic modernity that still prevails

in their respective fields—

I'm referring to Marcel Duchamp and

Arnold Schoenberg—Schoenberg, in 1947,

lamenting the poor reception

of one of his last works by

musicians, wrote to a friend, a conductor: "

The understanding of my

music always suffers from the fact that

musicians do not consider me a

normal, ordinary composer expressing

his new themes and melodies in a

musical language that is not

completely inadequate, but rather an

experimenter in modern,

dissonant dodecaphony. In fact," he continued, "there is

nothing I desire more ardently than to be

taken for a kind of

improved Tchaikovsky, or even for people to

know my melodies and hum them."

A few years later, in

1962, he wrote to Hans Richter: "I

threw the bottle rack and

the urinal in their faces as a

provocation,

and now they admire their aesthetic beauty.

In other words, the one who wants to be a

respectable successor is complaining."

To be mistaken for a revolutionary, and

he who aspires to be a revolutionary

complains of being mistaken for a

respectable successor; he who already aspires to be an icon laments

still being mistaken for an

iconoclast, and he who still aspires to be an

iconoclast laments already being mistaken

for an icon.

The fact that these two lamentations are

thus perfectly contradictory should

not obscure the unity of the

phenomenon of which they are the distant

consequence. For ultimately, whether this

20th-century art was created to continue the art

of the past (Schoenberg version) or to

take a brutal leave of it (

field version), in both cases it has not

succeeded. A hundred years later, one

still doesn't hum Schoenberg in the street,

and no one is

shocked by an industrial object displayed

in a museum anymore; it has become the norm.

Why then were these

opposing bets lost?

Simply because they were

based on one and the same

postulate: the abandonment of the language of the

past.

God laughs, wrote Bossuet, at those who

deplore the effects while cherishing

the causes; here the effects are

different and all deplorable, but the

cause is unique and doubly cherished:

the theoretical will to do away

with the mother tongue. The more

time passes, the

harder it will be to ignore the need to

revisit this abandonment of language,

since it is to this, and this alone, that we

owe all sorts of checks, of which these

two lamentations are but two

unfortunate testimonies. Since it is to this

abandonment of language that we owe,

in music—I hope I have at least partially

shown this—on the one hand, this

remarkable halt in the evolution of style, and on the

other hand, and concomitantly, the

massive and unprecedented disaffection

of performers and music lovers for the

contemporary repertoire.

In matters of art, we must not be afraid

of appearing reactionary if we do not want to

appear outdated tomorrow. It was Claude

Lévi-Strauss who wrote this. I propose

that we try to understand him, to

understand what he means by this,

perhaps with the help of Nietzsche, who

said Fertile, and the past engendering

the future—that, for me, is the meaning of the

present. Let us no longer

fear vice or the

ghosts that Pierre Boulez once

castigated, both saying that

music must not be tainted by

any stylistic reminiscences or

rents, nor by any patronage of the past.

So let us invite them back to our table to screw in

their ghosts and the pleasures that

go with them, chased away by an art so

obsessed with dusting off that one

might call it hygienic.

Will we ever, moreover, measure the

improbable fortune of the notion of

dusting off in

contemporary artistic apologetics? Let us then step back, yes, step back to leap forward,

and we will

see in a few years—I take

the bet here—that what still seems

today, in the eyes of some, to be

a reverse evolution will finally be taken

for what it truly was: a

revolution in the right direction. Thank you.

So I can take advantage of the fact that it

is a little late to say that I I didn't

ask any questions, a player from the crawl stroke.

The reason is actually very simple: I

completely agree with everything that has just been

said brilliantly and with a great deal of

humor. I thank him once again

for accepting my

invitation to come to this seminar. There weren't supposed to be any

courses or seminars

for a few sessions. I'll see you on

January 10th. I'll

talk to you about the noise

and music course and about the seminars.

I'll have the pleasure of welcoming Marie

Madeleine Mervans, who will talk to us

about sound in the theater. Thank you, I

wish you a good holiday, and first of all,

[Applause]