English translation of the French transcript, made with AI and not yet proofread — click a paragraph to jump to it. Show the French original
Baroque and rock: the same regular meter 3:07 those were the great years of the Jean-François Paillard orchestra, or even the piece that sold the most, Albinoni's Adagio, which was really a hit almost as much as AC/DC and the Beatles — well, that's nothing, it's a fake, it was written in the twentieth century by a guy called Giazotto on a bass line now attributed to Albinoni. Right, where am I going with this? I mean, what is there in common, musically speaking, let's be serious now, between rock music and Bach's music, and I'll extend this, even jazz music — I want to take very different genres, genres that are often even opposed to each other.
3:46 What they have in common is the meter. Now that's not an opinion, it can be measured, for any music analyst — I mean the meter is regular, binary if you prefer. All the way through Bach's pieces, you feel like... it swings, you'd think it was jazz. Which means it grooves. So somehow, it's the need to resort to this reassuring metrical rhythm, where each segment of time that begins renews identically the preceding segment of time at regular intervals, as opposed to a Beethoven who veers left, right, without warning, where you never know what's going to happen.
4:23 A Beethoven who is contemporary with the French Revolution and with liberty. There, it's a music... they say a place for everything and everything in its place. How reassuring is that for a modern person? It's the ancien régime, it served in my modern second home. It's my beautiful antique. I have nothing against it — above all let no one put words in my mouth that I haven't said — and I'm not speaking for one second against the repertoire, the works of baroque music. I'm on my knees before Monteverdi, who doesn't have this meter, by the way, incidentally, who is closer to Wagnerian recitative — I'll make some people howl — and to the connection between words and music.
5:06 But anyway, let's say, as far as the most strongly asserted regular rhythms go, Vivaldi, Telemann, and Corelli, and so many others, they're countless at that time — it's the Italians who do the bulk of the work, but all of Europe imitates them. Bach starts out, to train his hand, by copying, note for note, all of Vivaldi's concertos — what humility! Bach, whom we recognize at first hearing, his originality, he built it through imitation, a fine dialectic, what humility! Well, so Handel too, of course, all these baroque giants, it's this meter.
5:38 So already, there's a link, there's a double external link: they appear at the same time, in the fifties, in the postwar period, they spread. Baroque music, for the repertoire of music lovers, rock, for an essentially young age group — so there's this external link, there's an internal, musical link, which I've just spelled out, which is a constant, regular meter. Now of course, there's nothing laudatory or pejorative in what I'm saying. It depends on how this music is made.
6:08 If, on top of this relatively poor rhythmic framework, which is the least developed element in baroque music — it doesn't change, just as in rock, once you've heard one bar of a piece, all the bars that come after will be identical and won't take you by surprise, no more than the jolts of the TGV, or even of an older train, where you were shaken even more, at a very regular interval corresponding to the length of the rails. So this framework has to be balanced by a much more complex development of harmonies or melody.
The rhythmic canvas must be offset by harmony 6:40 With the rhythmic element being the constant one, the development is where — and this is what Bach does admirably — he takes harmonic risks, notes on the verge of dissonance, second intervals, which sometimes make you think of Schoenberg, I mean, there you go. So this isn't pejorative at all. On the other hand, when there's only this framework, with no melodic development on top, let alone harmonic, and when I hear all these so-called popular music orchestras, as they say in... in the classification of genres at a record store — classical, jazz, popular, world music, hacked up like that — when you see that this rhythm is on top of that combined with two chords that haven't changed since '51, which incidentally are vaguely the chords of the blues, and reduced even further to their simplest expression, I tell myself there's a problem.
7:26 There, I said baroque, R-O-C-K, deliberately, to show that there's a complicity between a certain bourgeois bohemian class, which I'm partly part of, I mean, not just through my generation but through my social background, which loves listening to the music of the ancien régime and which it does good, and for good reason. There you go. And which, moreover, in my opinion, listens to it better in light of the music that came afterward. You see Bach's extraordinary originality better when you listen to Beethoven and Bartók, even later.
7:58 And then there's the miracle of jazz, which escapes all these contradictions and manages to synthesize them at a higher level — jazz, the most learned of popular musics, the most popular of learned musics, as a very good formula puts it. And which, precisely, on top of this rhythmic regularity to which it is bound, by definition, as jazz, builds a melodic development called improvisation, which likewise takes risks. I won't dwell on Parker, on Monk, harmonically and melodically, who enrich the material enormously.
8:32 And so we're at an impasse — young people especially have been held hostage for almost 60 years now in a sonic ghetto which could have merits if it existed alongside other repertoires, but which diverts them from a heritage they're entitled to, which is the heritage of earlier popular musics and earlier learned musics. Let me just add one last observation, precisely about popular and learned, because that's the heart of the problem.
Learned music and popular music 9:03 If I think of the expression 'learned music,' the reference to Bach comes to mind immediately. What could be more learned than counterpoint — it's the higher mathematics of music — or the hyper-complex counterpoints of The Art of Fugue or the Musical Offering, of course. But the learned pieces that Bach writes are titled — I'm thinking of the pieces written by Bach — gigues, bourrées, gavottes, minuets, sarabandes: there we're in the popular realm. I mean by that that the peasant of the time didn't listen to Bach, let's not have any illusions.
9:35 But when, if by chance, he happened to hear his music, it was in tune with his ears at the level of refrains, of fundamental dance rhythms, which the peasant knew very well. So there's a continuity. Just as the kid who's never listened to jazz, who only knows rock, but who listens to Parker and so on, will suddenly recognize the blues harmonies that are also at the root of rock. So there is, in a good popular-learned relationship, a way for learned music to dig indefinitely and grow more complex on a foundation that stays in tune with the popular ear.
10:13 What's serious is when the learned isolates itself, cuts itself off definitively from popular music, as was the case with a certain contemporary music at the beginning of the twentieth century. Not all of it. That's not the case with Bartók, for example, who on the contrary did an extraordinary job as an ethnomusicologist, walking around with the huge tape recorders of the time under his arm, all the way to the Maghreb, to record all the... popular music with which he needed to stay in contact. So there you go, I mean, that's above all the decisive element, in my opinion. We need to recover, we need to give young people back their heritage, so that with this heritage, both classical and jazz, they can refound a popular music enriched by certain excerpts and connections, and not reduced to the bare minimum.
10:59 Just look at the evolution from rock 'n' roll, where there was still a little rhythmic subtlety insofar as there's an offbeat in rock 'n' roll, an afterbeat as they say, a breathing space between the strong beat and the weak beat, which disappears with the disco fashion where it's just ding ding ding ding, or with rap, for example. The rhythm and the meter is recorded even separately on a drum machine before... There you go, I do pay tribute to the rapper, though, for the subtlety of their... I'm not... I'm being fair, of their rapping. The lyrics, though, are very subtle in the way the words come to settle onto this rhythmic framework.
11:30 I dream of a rapper who would rap over a jazz drummer. There you go.
