English translation of the French transcript, made with AI and not yet proofread — click a paragraph to jump to it. Show the French original
White keys, black keys: the scale of C and the pentatonic scale 0:00 The piano lets you render everything, the whole history of music. If I play, for example, a scale using only the white keys from a low C to the next high C, without touching any black key, I get the C major scale, I come back to C after 6 steps. If, on the other hand, I only play the black notes, I only get 5 between C and C. You'll have noticed on the piano there are two black notes, then 3, then 2, then 3, then 2, then 3 — that makes 5 each time.
0:32 If you take only the black keys, there's a small gap — you'll have noticed that between the group of 2 and the group of 3 there's a gap. That means we suddenly jump a small interval. Whereas on the piano, you'll have noticed there are two spots where there's no black note between the white notes: between E and F, and between B and C. Those are half-tones, the smallest possible interval. With the black notes, we skip over them. You don't need to know how to play piano, that's fine. Just play only the black notes in whatever order you like. Suddenly it will sound like the Far East.
1:04 How strange, isn't it? Yes, because the whole musical Orient, and especially the Far East, unfolds on a sound scale called the pentatonic scale. That is, its ladder has five rungs. Pam, pam, pam, pam, pam, pam, pam, pam, pam, pam. I've just recalled the fundamental distinction — one that often seems a bit mysterious to the uninitiated, but here it's open to everyone — between tonality, using only the white notes, and modality.
1:39 The tonal and the modal. First of all, tonal music is a specific feature of what is called Western geography and history. It appears, as it happens, late in Europe. I'm not saying it's in Europe's genes, because Europe had already existed for more than a millennium, hadn't it, before tonal music began to appear. It's roughly at the end of the 16th and in the 17th century that this scale began to stabilize. So much so that Bach would devote a monument to it that he called the Well-Tempered Clavier — 'tempered' here meaning that the temperament is equal.
3:06 Tonality is like gravity for a dancer. It's the dimension of the ground, solid earth. It's the notes you speak from, the notes you return to. You feel when a phrase has begun and you feel when it has ended. As for the modal, which is harder to grasp at first, because our sound culture in Europe is shaped by tonal music, broadly speaking the modal covers almost all non-European music.
3:46 When you listen to African music, whether it's music from the West, once called Sudanese, or Bantu if it's Central Africa — if you listen to Malagasy music, Pygmy music, music of the Amazonian Indians, or the jade flute reserved for Chinese emperors, in every case, it's modal music.
The drone and modality, from before writing to our countryside 4:37 How do you recognize that it's modal? I'll tell you something very simple. Listen to the biniou, the Breton bagpipe. As I told you, tonality came late, so all traditional music, which is therefore much older, which existed before writing, before classical music, is modal, even in Europe. If you listen to the biniou, the bagpipe, you notice there's one note that never moves. After that, the player improvises all sorts of things on top of it, but there's a base note that you hear all the way through. It has a technical name in musical analysis: it's called a drone effect.
5:40 The difference between modal music and tonal music is not a difference between geographical or ethnic identities, but the difference between before and since, between old music and modern music, quite simply.
6:16 I mean that music here in Europe was modal until the 17th century in our countryside, and it still is. It's no accident that you find, in Tibet as in Switzerland, those long horns like that — that implies high mountains, where the sound needs to carry far to call the inhabitants, the villages, or the animals.
What is polyphony? 6:48 We agree, then: the modal/tonal difference doesn't necessarily mean non-European music as opposed to some essence that would be Western or European, which is entirely imaginary and fantasized. Nor have I said that the modal/tonal opposition overlaps with popular music versus learned music. One might have understood it that way. When I say it's non-European music, that is, broadly speaking traditional music, that is modal, that means it's popular music, which can be very beautiful, but which is relatively simple as opposed to learned music, which would be complex.
7:21 So listen, to disabuse ourselves of that once and for all, we're going to listen to one of the most complex forms of music there is to analyze. One of the most complex forms of musical expression is polyphony, singing in several voices at once. That's the difference from having one dominant voice — a singer, for instance — with a guitar, a piano, an orchestra accompanying it. In fact there's only one voice that carries the figure, and the rest is a background that sets it off. That's the opposite of counterpoint, of the fugue, and of polyphony.
8:18 Second example, a waltz. I play a tune with the right hand, and then there's the three-beat waltz rhythm in the left hand. We're not in polyphony here — there's only one voice, the right hand, doing the singing, the equivalent of what was the song in the previous example, and then the left hand doing a rhythmic accompaniment. That's not polyphony. Polyphony is when there are several voices, each of which is autonomous, each beautiful in itself.
9:11 And it's from their interweaving that an even higher beauty is born. It's the most complex thing there is in music. This is where, of course, the musician who emblematically represents learned music, Bach, comes to mind. When you think of learned music, you think of Bach. But that doesn't mean this only applies to written Western music, and that polyphony is absent, as was long claimed, from non-European musics. On the contrary — in the most primitive societies, and this isn't a value judgment, they're primitive technically, in terms of technological development.
The polyphonies of the Pygmies of the dense forest 9:43 There are societies which, at this very moment as I speak to you, barely master techniques for making fire. Here I'll take my sound example from the Pygmies who inhabit the forest. That doesn't mean it's their original habitat, any more than it is for the Amazonian Indians. They used to live on good land and were driven back there. Coffee planters drove the Indians back. I mention this because some people believe the forest is an ideal place to live. The Indians would gladly do without the forest, I can tell you. Well, the Pygmies, who know the forest admirably because they've had all the time to acclimatize, adapt, and live there, have a music that expresses a polyphony every bit as complex to analyze as a Bach fugue.
10:27 Vocal polyphony, fascinating to hear because it seems to imitate the sounds of the forest. You know, it's extraordinary to listen to an equatorial forest at night. There are slow voices, fast voices, all happening at once, walls of bronze made by billions of insects, and over the top a few soloists — a monkey here, a bird there, a predator, a prey. For now, I'm not in art, I'm in nature.
11:22 It becomes music, it becomes art, when these noises are ordered into sound, and when the Pygmies wonderfully organize this extraordinary soundscape of the tropical night. You find this in Gabon as well, in Congo, a little in Cameroon, of course in Zaire, in the Central African Republic. These are the countries of dense forest where you can have the joy of hearing these polyphonies, which are audible only among the Pygmies.
The learned and the popular run through every genre 12:34 The false divisions I've just alluded to allow us to say that there aren't, on one side, genres of popular music and, on the other, genres of learned music — with classical supposedly being the genre of learned music par excellence, and, I don't know, jazz, pop, rock, chanson, and even more so traditional musics being supposedly non-learned, popular musics.
13:14 No, we've just seen that it's actually the opposite in the case of the Pygmies. What I'm saying is that in jazz you have popular or learned elements, take your pick. In chanson too, you have popular or learned elements, take your pick — try reproducing what Brassens does on guitar. You'll see whether it's simple. It looks simple like that, because it's chanson. And as for classical music, it's no doubt the genre in which you statistically find the greatest number of learned works, especially with the accumulation of centuries.
14:03 But on the other hand, classical music is riddled with forms and genres that are deeply established in classical rhetoric and yet are extremely popular. Waltzes — waltzes by Mozart, waltzes by Beethoven, waltzes of course by Chopin — even in music as elaborate among the Russians as that of a Stravinsky or a Prokofiev, there are few works without a sudden Cossack dance sequence. Let's be clear: the differences between classical, jazz, and popular music are much harder to establish once you stop basing them on such simplistic divides.
Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven improvised 15:01 So we've put a bit of order into the separation between popular music and learned music. On the other hand, where it seems much easier is classical music versus jazz. There, it's very simple, people will tell you: jazz is improvised, classical music is written down in scores. False. That, too, is an image still going around. Because the general public isn't told that Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven were famous for their extraordinary improvisations.
15:32 There was no tape recorder, there was no way to record or download at the time what they did, unfortunately. But we have the testimonies. When Beethoven improvised, people fainted. Some were carried out on stretchers from the emotion. Bach, who was a minor German musician — minor in terms of fame — was obscure. He did his little job every Sunday, he had his cantata to compose for the church service. He was forbidden to write operas, he wasn't famous. Until word got around about this prodigious fellow who improvised at the organ, and so on.
16:05 And so he was brought up to Berlin to see the king, the King of Prussia, who was himself a musician, a fine musician, who played the flute well and who gave Bach a theme. Bach improvised a fugue in however many voices. We have all the testimonies — everyone was astonished. As for Mozart, he never played one of his concertos the same way twice. He always improvised a different cadenza. It was around the 19th century that this tradition of improvisation began to be lost, with the establishment of concerts, written music, and so on.
The arranger and collective improvisation on a double scale 16:39 But conversely, one could show how much writing there is in jazz. So it's not the fact of improvising or the fact of writing that justifies the divide between classical music and jazz. Of course, there's no jazz composition that's entirely composed the way a quartet, a symphony, or a fugue is composed in classical music, from the first note to the last. If jazz is based on improvisation, what does composing even mean here? This is precisely where we need to turn to the greatest jazz arrangers.
17:09 An intermediate status — the term 'arranger,' typical of jazz, lies between pure improvisation and total writing from the first note to the last. Someone like Duke Ellington, to take one of the greatest arrangers, John Lewis much later, Charlie Mingus in avant-garde jazz, know very well how to write a few parts — the introduction, so everyone shares roughly the same arrangement at the start, which gives a sense of the feel of the piece — the ending too, so that everyone lands back on their feet at the close — and in between, everyone improvises as they like.
17:42 There are improvised stretches left free like that, and a few written passages, which can be either at the beginning and end, or return at regular intervals. You see, it's actually much more complicated than one might think. So what, then, is the difference between jazz and classical music? It's that jazz is a collective improvisation — that wasn't the case for Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven, even though they too are said to improvise — and it's the only musical genre to do this on a double sound scale: the scale of C, which I spoke of earlier, coming from old Europe, and, in parallel, always simultaneously, not first one then the other, the blues scale, which African Americans, via the slave trade, carried across the Atlantic from Africa to the United States.
Popular Bach: the finale of the Sixth Brandenburg Concerto 18:23 The blues scale, a very specific sound scale, where the two half-tones of the C scale are absent. All right, you're going to think I'm being terribly perverse — because to illustrate the most complex music, I went digging among the so-called most primitive peoples, deep in the dense forest, in Pygmy polyphonies, and now I'm going to use the musician reputed to be the most learned — I'm thinking of Johann Sebastian Bach — as a sample of thoroughly popular music. Out of Bach's immense output, more than a thousand works, there are nonetheless a few peaks that dominate the whole Himalayan massif of Bach's production — I mean the finale of the Sixth Brandenburg Concerto, the most festive of weddings, in the most learned writing.
19:11 It's a gigue — and the gigue is perhaps the most popular of the popular dances of the time; it generally ends the suites, and it was one of the favorite dances at celebrations. The gigue, it's... That's the gigue. I've just played the theme that serves as the finale, because in the music of that time, out of courtesy to the audience, one must always part on a happy note — the finale of the Sixth Brandenburg Concerto.
19:44 The most learned writing placed at the service of the lightest music, in the best sense of the term, but in any case the most spirited and lively.
