Music Lessons: The Collège de France Lectures
688
Music Lessons: The Collège de France Lectures
688Hardcover(First Edition)
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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780226672595 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Chicago Press |
| Publication date: | 10/17/2019 |
| Edition description: | First Edition |
| Pages: | 688 |
| Sales rank: | 1,069,078 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.20(w) x 9.40(h) x 1.80(d) |
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CHAPTER 1
Invention, Technique and Language (1976)
Since the beginning of the twentieth century, music has evolved so quickly that many time-honoured principles and rules that we once took for granted have been called into question. There have been periods during which musicians devoted themselves to investigating the rational foundations of musical language, systematically exploring the techniques through which they express themselves – but such periods are few and far between. The last attempt to provide such comprehensive explanation was during the eighteenth century, and the idea of tonality it established endured for nearly two hundred years. Since then, composers have charted much new ground and abandoned almost all previous constraints. But despite the publication of highly technical books that examine aspects of musical language or the implications of key works, music theory has not kept up with the progress composers have made.
Almost from the start, my own priority has been not so much to codify something that is constantly evolving as to grasp more precisely how today's music works. In my lectures at Darmstadt, some of which have been published, I tried to put everyday compositional problems in context in order to see how we could build on the work of our immediate predecessors.
Those lectures were only snapshots taken during a period of transition. Since I gave them, new and even more radical questions have been raised, forcing us to reconsider not just the musical grammar that still exists, for better or worse, but also the very material with which we work. In short, musical creativity must now be examined afresh, taking into account both ends and means.
We should perhaps begin by acknowledging musicians' deep dissatisfaction with the current situation. This is caused first of all by the frequent inadequacy of the sound material, both old and new, that is at their disposal. For all sorts of reasons, not least financial, the realm of instruments hardly ever varies – or if it does, it is only to make more money. The instrumental paradigms with which we work were bequeathed to us by previous centuries and are based on a musical language that is now completely obsolete. These paradigms, whose endurance is guaranteed by musical pedagogy, make composers impatient because they cannot supply them with the sonorous material they dream of. On the other hand, composers who use electronic or electroacoustic material often have to deal with equipment that is either rudimentary or extremely complex and yet to be fully understood. The potential is there, but it is difficult to see clearly how it can be exploited, and in particular how free and effective musical expression can be produced by mechanisms that even now remain intimidating.
Whatever the problems it presents, material is nonetheless an essential part of musical invention. Just as architects' choice of materials influences – and sometimes brutally dictates – the evolution and realisation of their ideas, for musicians, too, creativity and material are inextricably linked. In our own tradition we have seen instruments evolve towards their optimum form; once musical ideas go beyond what these instruments are capable of, those instruments fall into disfavour and are soon forgotten.
This coincidence is so striking that, just as one can reconstruct the evolution of certain civilisations through changes in their ceramics and pottery, one could almost establish a history of musical language through a history of the evolution of musical instruments. Similarly, when one observes different musical cultures, one sees that certain civilisations became attached to particular types of instrument because they expressed something about their manner of existence. Musical invention is thus directly linked to material and requires its renewal, while at the same time making unexpected demands of it. This reciprocity of invention and material is one of the most fundamental characteristics of any musical civilisation.
The way in which material is used is itself a question of technique. Sound exists in its own right, of course, but in order to become a valid element of musical language, it must be integrated into a project: once again, technique and material are closely tied to one another, as we can easily demonstrate. Musical language in the European tradition increasingly aspired to neutralise sound, removing its immediate individuality in order to incorporate it more fully into an overall conception. Our tradition homogenised sonic space, and traditional music theory has supported it by bringing elements that inherently resist integration into a logical, abstract construction, whether willingly or under duress. If they offer too much resistance, we reject them. If we can accommodate their resistance – if we can make them part of a comprehensible pattern – we can include them in the system. In such a system, a note is above all an abstract symbol, reducible to, and interchangeable with, other abstract symbols. Peripheral phenomena are either minimised or annihilated. Musical language thus establishes hierarchies by force in order to dominate its material, giving it unity and homogeneity. These hierarchies are maintained by centralising laws that codify the form of the work and direct our perceptions of it.
Recent musical history attests to the struggle against this state of affairs. Increasingly anarchic procedures and choices have progressively undermined the highly organised musical hierarchy. Moreover, constantly renewed perceptions broke down the former symmetries and did away with classicism's cherished neutralisation of sound. Not only did elements of language regain an individuality of function that had long since been lost, but material became increasingly heterogeneous. Let us first consider the instrumental domain. To begin with, instruments were chosen for their individual character. We systematically explored the various playing techniques an instrument offered, and we used them in heterogeneous combinations to ensure the distinctiveness of the musical entity. When traditional methods of playing an instrument did not permit the individuality we sought, we used 'eccentric' means instead, defying the assumptions of the instrument's inventors. As for the electroacoustic realm, it is still too rich and unexplored to be codified hierarchically; it has a chaotic character that composers exploit as a means for liberation. In that realm, laws are made up from decisions made in the moment: when an instrument can be altered electroacoustically, it suggests that secular taboos have been cast aside or destroyed. Unpredictability prevails, requiring today's musical language to evolve in two directions at the same time: that of global rigour and that of freedom in the moment.
These upheavals in technique led to a complete reassessment of musical language. Notions that were once believed to be eternal are now seen as transitory. In truth, the investigation of musical language has barely begun. By comparison with spoken or written language, music remains unexplored. Its current evolution obliges us to examine it, since even the signs that are used to transcribe music are increasingly called into question. The notation that evolved many centuries ago became a precise, nearly perfect tool for all of the 'neutral' phenomena that it purported to transcribe. But now, the complex – and often highly individual – nature of sound phenomena means that notation has become overloaded with symbols, and consequently nearly every score uses its own code. Until recently, notation was analytical, accounting for each component of sound phenomena and their context: pitch, dynamics, duration, timbre and absolute or relative speed. The intersection of these various fields of notation provided an extremely precise idea of the sonic result. But from the moment we sought to describe more individualised phenomena, or even events not intended for transcription in this form – as when electroacoustic music was notated – traditional notation failed to capture the music's essence, for reasons that are all too easy to imagine. Thus, a problem that at first appears to be purely one of transcription ends up highlighting a fundamental limitation of our present resources.
Today, these problems are bound together, making it interesting to study them simultaneously. The future of music is richer than it has ever been. But the period we are living through encourages us to examine problems that in other periods could have been resolved intuitively. In this respect, music is simply following language. Of course, a theoretical approach will never be enough on its own, and will never replace artistic creation. But composers are justified in feeling frustrated at seeing their ideas nullified by a musical practice that lags behind them, and that is itself not daring enough in its analysis of the current situation. I propose to move forward by exploring how invention, technique and language interact in the field of musical composition, and I believe that this exploration could be of great importance to contemporary music, helping it to enlarge its scope, develop its resources and place itself in the position it should occupy in today's world. Music should not be allowed simply to muddle through the process of its own evolution, trailing behind other art forms. It must be given a chance to become as integrated as possible into contemporary consciousness and to play its part in global endeavours.
CHAPTER 2Invention / Research (1976)
Invention/research: a problem of constant concern that lies at the very heart of creative activity today.
Creative invention in music is often the object of prohibitions and taboos that we transgress at our peril. Creativity is seen as the private and exclusive property of genius, or at least of talent. Of course, it cannot be explained in strictly rational terms, since it eludes analysis by producing unpredictable results from nowhere. But is that 'nowhere' really like a conjuror's hat, a void from which objects magically appear? And is the context from which these 'unpredictable results' emerge really so unpredictable? Creativity does not come from nowhere but is nurtured by contact with music of the past (sometimes the recent past), and emerges through reflection on antecedents, immediate or remote. This reflection will naturally focus on the philosophical underpinnings, the mental mechanisms and the intellectual journey evident in works that have been chosen as models, but it nonetheless deals with sonic material itself, since music cannot exist without this medium. Musical material has evolved through the centuries, providing each era with a characteristic sonic profile that will constantly be renewed – slowly, perhaps, but inescapably.
Nevertheless, creativity today finds itself grappling with certain problems concerning the relationship between composers' conception or vision and the sonic realisation of their thoughts. For some time now, composers have indulged the opportunity for 'wild' invention, exploring ideas quite different from those that the physical medium – the sound material – can realise. The divergence of these paths has created obstacles to the creative process significant enough to threaten its natural character: when either material or thought is developed on its own, with no regard to the relationship between them, a profound imbalance sets in, to the detriment of the work, which is tugged between these distorted priorities. Of course, these obstacles originate from causes beyond the composer's own will, over which there is little control, but one should remain conscious of them in order to try to find a remedy.
Obstacles of a social nature are immediately apparent. At least since the beginning of the twentieth century, our culture has been oriented towards historicism and conservation. As if from a reflex for self-preservation, the more technology progresses and subjugates, the more culture feebly hides behind what it considers to be the immutable and imperishable values of the past. Meanwhile, the consumption of music increased considerably, since a larger (though still quite limited) section of society had the leisure time and purchasing power to access musical culture more easily, and since the means for its dissemination became more numerous and more affordable. Ongoing consumption generated boredom with music that was heard too often. Searches took place for a replacement repertoire, located in the same stylistic tradition as established works but providing a diversion from them, albeit short-lived and inadequate. Consumption all too rarely leads to a genuine extension of the repertoire, one that breathes new life into works that have become the exclusive property of libraries. Another strategy to avoid boredom, for those who throw themselves into it, is research into the historical particularities of earlier performances. Musical life thus assumes the character of a museum, with its almost obsessive concern with reconstructing the conditions of the past as faithfully as possible. This phenomenon of historicism reveals the dangers courted by a culture that so openly admits its weakness: it spends its time not creating models, or destroying them to allow new ones to grow out of them, but rather reconstructing and venerating them like totems, emblems of a long-gone golden age.
Among the consequences of this culture of historicism has been an almost complete cessation in the evolution of musical material. For both social and economic reasons, the development of instruments has suffered a fatal stall. The major channels of musical consumption almost exclusively promote works from the past, and therefore rely on outdated means of transmission, those that proved most effective at the time the pieces were composed. This state of mind is, of course, faithfully mirrored in musical pedagogy, which chooses works from a narrow period of history for study. This limits the techniques and sound materials available to musicians right from the start, which has the pernicious consequence of inspiring a narrow-minded outlook that considers what is learned in class as a definitive judgement. Musical-instrument manufacturers are not likely to commit financial suicide, so they merely respond to the demands made of them, fine-tuning commercially established models without any thought for innovation or transformation. Once market forces and economic demand come into play, such as in the realm of pop music, where the constraints of historicity do not exist, we see how manufacturers of instruments, like their colleagues who make cars or household appliances, have an incentive to develop prototypes, which they then adjust minimally in order to find new markets and hitherto unexploited opportunities. By comparison, the economic power of so-called serious music is, of course, feeble, offering slender potential for profit and therefore attracting little interest from manufacturers. Thus, two forces come together to paralyse the evolution of musical material, trapping it in a territory conquered and explored by other musical eras for needs that do not necessarily coincide with our own. A civilisation admires itself complacently in the mirror of history, no longer creating the demands that would make renewal an economic necessity.
In another sector of musical life, one with little connection to the 'historically informed' clan, musical material has in the last thirty years taken on a life of its own, almost independently from musical invention. As if in revenge for negligence and intransigence, this material has appeared like a gift that one sometimes wonders how to exploit. Its urgent importance is apparent even before it becomes integrated into thought, into strictly musical invention. In fact, technological research has often been the work of scientists who, while interested in music, stand outside the usual circles of musical education and culture. Of course, here too there are obvious points of contact with the economic processes of a society that depends on and ceaselessly demands technological evolution in order to store and preserve information: the secondary functions of this technology can sometimes be used to surprising ends, perhaps far removed from the initial research. The economic processes were driven by the goal of reproducing pre-existing music that was part of our cultural heritage; ever more advanced and accessible technology consolidated both the manufacturers' grip on the market and the rigid supremacy of this heritage. In time, however, the technologies of recording, reproduction and broadcasting – microphones, loudspeakers, amplifiers, magnetic tape – developed to the point where they became unfaithful to their initial goal, which was to reproduce without intervention. Over time, techniques of reproduction showed an increasingly irrepressible tendency towards autonomy, supplying their own image of pre-existing music rather than reproducing live listening conditions as faithfully as possible. It is easy to justify the rebellion against non-recorded reality: creating a trompe l'œil reproduction makes no sense when one considers the very different conditions and purposes of listening that motivate its manufacture, and the different perceptual criteria that are consequently applied. This is a musical version of a controversy that is already well worn in relation to books and films: why provide a false picture of reality by giving an exaggerated importance to detail, by using lighting in an unusual way, by introducing movement into a static universe? Regardless of this tendency towards technological autonomy in the world of sound reproduction, whatever its reasons, it is easy to see how unrelenting market pressures drive rapid change and development.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Music Lessons"
by .
Copyright © 2005 Pierre Boulez.
Excerpted by permission of The University of Chicago Press.
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