English translation of the French transcript, made with AI and not yet proofread — click a paragraph to jump to it. Show the French original
Opening: Mallarmé and written style 0:00 Yes, hello everyone. So, we're continuing. Musicosophie, I think this is the 11th edition. I'd rather not put a number on it, or we'll get into trouble. Exactly. I prefer the pair. There we go. Obviously, the world is made to end up as a nice book, and its videos too. We're not straying from our goal, which is to end up with a book, probably in the fall of 2021. I'll interrupt you for a moment. Yes. You made a beautiful quotation. I'll complete it with a line from Mallarmé who says, "Your act always applies itself to paper."
0:36 It's the categorical imperative, yes. "For to meditate without a trace becomes evanescent." Evanescent, yes. Yes, but they didn't know how much you'd be caught in your perverse need to make this very quotation come true. You'd be caught up by... Oh no, no. This imperative has always made me feel terribly guilty when I read it. I have the impression it's speaking to me, sometimes secretly. Your act always applies itself to paper. You're one to talk. We were talking about Hugo. When I speak of myself, I speak of you.
1:07 But actually, you managed to... When I speak, I write. But there it is. Anyway, I think. We'll get there. That said, I've often been told that in my speech, in my enunciation, to speak in Lacanian terms, or even Freudian ones, as opposed to the statement, in my enunciation I have a written style. Yes, yes. I make subordinate clauses, appositions, things like that. Anyway, there you go. But no Hölderlinian parataxis.
The more precise one is, the more mode and tone merge 1:38 There you go, there you go. You should even more... There's Heraclitus the Obscure behind you, but here it's Pagani the Obscure. I see you know your Adorno there. Or Dominique Lacani, there, it's in obscuring. Well, let's get to the heart of the matter. The only thing I understood is that you want to tackle the theme of... We had promised it, in fact. We had announced it, modal music or tonal music. Which brings us back to the evolution of the West, of the world, of the galaxy, of the universe.
2:09 Yes, yes. So indeed, seen through this opposition between modal music and tonal music, I think we can't avoid giving very precise definitions. And sorry if it's tedious for those who already know this. Yes, absolutely. What I think is that you're right to talk about precise definitions, but at the same time, there's a streak of mischief in this expression, deliberate on my part. Because as soon as we want to give precise definitions, for example to distinguish mode from tone, we get all tangled up.
2:45 But anyone, including the most learned. What I mean is that the more learned you are, in the end—and God knows there are few musicological fields with such a temporal depth and accumulation of documents, since you have to go back to Pythagoras to begin distinguishing the different modes. It's Pythagoras who, starting from... not even music actually, which is part of, in quotes, the humanities or social sciences, whichever you prefer, but of acoustics, which is part of the natural sciences.
3:27 An important distinction. Because whether it's noises in nature—here I go back to a more Lévi-Straussian distinction—noises in nature or sounds in culture, in both cases we're dealing with acoustics. But acoustics as such, as a discipline, actually grew out of physics. And this since Pythagoras. This is indeed the first time, starting with Pythagoras, that mathematical abstraction—a pure play of the mind among these people who had nothing to do with their hands—finds an application.
4:00 Greek citizens suddenly find a passage into applied mathematics, since by putting your finger in the middle of the string, you get the octave. So the geometric middle gives the auditory middle. Or the double, whichever way you want to put it, it comes down to the same thing. There, that's a little reminder. Now, as soon as we go back—and I mentioned Pythagoras, but then when we move to the Middle Ages, there are many documents, and then after the quarrels over the issues of equal temperament between the 16th and 17th centuries—the fact that the keyboard in front of me is necessarily an out-of-tune instrument in Pythagorean terms, since F sharp or G flat give the same note, whereas in principle, the flat lowers more than the sharp raises.
4:56 So it shouldn't be two—there are three basic commas in the flat, two commas—we won't bore our audience with these details. But still, I mean, as soon as you look closely... No, but it's sometimes important, because there are musical notations where you see two flats in a row. So it's important for violinists. Oh yes, of course, exactly. But one might wonder why it's written as a double flat, quite simply, since that would make a difference of a whole tone.
5:27 But actually no, it's more complicated than that. Yes, since we were talking about Pythagoras, let's stay with the pre-Socratics, with this difference you mentioned precisely between violinists and keyboard players, since the fact that it's an out-of-tune instrument holds true for all keyboards, whether organ, harpsichord, piano, etc. What you just recalled is a distinction posed by other pre-Socratics, I'm thinking in particular of Democritus, namely the one between continuous and discontinuous.
6:01 Because the violin can produce a continuous glissando, the piano can vaguely give the illusion of it. But still, it remains discontinuous, you jump from one note to another without warning. There isn't a continuum, is there, as with string instruments or the voice. Just listen to Billie Holiday—you never know exactly which note she's singing, because these notes aren't points, they're curves. Each note has a little glissando upward or downward to modalize the note, so to speak.
6:35 Well, let's be precise now. I was saying, when we want to be precise, the more precise we want to be—here's the principle I'm trying to establish—the more the difference between tone and mode fades away. Yet it's obvious at first. When I hear Debussy's whole-tone scale, I just play the scale, and already it sounds like Debussy. Now I vary this scale, but always staying on it, that is, without building a piece out of it.
7:13 I'm in Debussy—you'd think you were hearing "The Little Shepherd" from Children's Corner. So nothing else needed—you can tell right away that this isn't the C mode, that we're no longer in tonal music, for which the C mode is the rule, the scale. Which is, incidentally, the first meaning of "mode"—the scale. Major, minor, yes. There you go. Now, if we take these terms literally, we realize that what's called tonal music, based on the C mode, under its two aspects major and minor, amounts to saying that so-called tonal music is a particular case of modal music of which only a single mode has been retained.
8:04 Or two, if you count the major version and the minor version. So, as soon as you look closely, the apparently unequivocal difference ceases to be unequivocal. It's obvious to the ear, but then, where does this distinction come from that we make immediately between the two? Let me take another example, now from jazz theory. Take what are called standards. Most of the time, standards are borrowed from that inexhaustible source, the musical comedy, Tin Pan Alley, Broadway, the great composers whom poverty or antisemitism, the rise of the Third Reich, or both, give us a miraculous flourishing of great musicians who would have dreamed of triumphing at the opera, of being the Verdis, the Wagners, or the Mozarts of their own country, and who would instead become composers of musical comedy for Broadway.
Tonal standards, post-Wagnerian harmony and digressions on the West 8:58 I'm thinking of Gershwin, of Cole Porter. Their standards are of course perfectly tonal, and for good reason. They come from musicals in which each of these—what would later be called standards, once all of America was humming them—are tunes, as they say over there, melodies, notably perfectly tonal melodies, borrowed from the C mode.
9:32 Let me take, for example, a hugely famous one, since even all children know it, because every Christmas they replay the film The Wizard of Oz, in which we see Judy Garland at 14 years old—she'll never get over it, poor thing, afterward she'll become addicted, intoxicated, out of despair at never recovering the charm of her 14 years, well sorry, let's not become sexist, but anyway—and where we find this wonderful melody, Over the Rainbow, right?
10:21 We're in tonality, of course, with delicious, spicy, post-Debussyist, post-Tristanesque, post-Wagnerian chords. There we go, we've managed to roughly pin down a period there. Jazz, in its harmony, jazz harmony, uses the harmonic shifts that occurred in the late 19th century, or in its second half, if we include Tristan, which is the beginning of this process, and above all, of course, the French Impressionists—hence the affectionate investment of all jazz musicians in Fauré, in Debussy, in Ravel, and also in the Russians, in Rachmaninoff for example, which again proves a correlation between the Russian school and the French school, let it be said in passing—let's not forget, as we've already said in our previous episodes, that the great premieres of the Russian avant-garde, the Petrushkas, the Rite of Spring, were created in Paris, even if it's in the choreographies
11:33 unforgettable choreographies of Diaghilev, with Nijinsky as star dancer, and with Russian composers, but in Paris—Paris, capital of Russian music for a long time. Yes, and Paris was also the capital of jazz. As it happens. Precisely—no, but precisely, but even so, for now I'll set jazz aside, I'll come right back to it. As you very rightly pointed out last time, it's a crisscrossing exchange.
12:03 Let me recall the anecdote: people used to say to Stravinsky, well, like all the great avant-garde composers of our century, you were influenced by Debussy, and the turning point is Debussy. "I gave back to Russia what Debussy had taken from it." There you go. So indeed, when you listen to Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition, you're startled by chords that are so close to Debussy—except that at that time Debussy was only 13 years old. You have to realize this kind of thing. But his mother takes him on a trip to Russia.
12:34 Sorry, back to you. No, I think—it's an anecdote, but you have to see to what extent the Russians sometimes put patriotism into arts that are least suited for it. For instance, I'm thinking of the famous Russian opening or Russian defense in chess called the Petrov Defense. It's funny, because it imitates the fact that you sacrifice the pawn right from the start. The one who invented it, you mean... You sacrifice it, you mean? Yes, you sacrifice it. I'm just informing myself, I'm no specialist. But it's like the sacrifice of Moscow. He said he wanted to draw inspiration from the strategy methods of the Napoleonic war.
13:07 So you see how this patriotic investment shows up everywhere. Let me open a parenthesis. And here, it's more of a crossing than an exchange, apparently. But yes, that's the ardor of neophytes. When you're a recent nation, you're a nation. Historically it's a very old people, but historically recent, I mean, because as soon as you go back a bit in the past, there's a time when Russia is an annex of the Grand Duchy of Kiev. Yes.
13:37 Or the reverse, where Poland dominates. Yes, or rather, actually, the issue is more that Kiev is the capital of Russia. Yes, yes, no, but I was starting from that version. But anyway, there you go. No, but I mean, as soon as you go back in the past, it's like mode and... whatever. As soon as you go back in the past, apparently well-established identities dissolve. It happens that the word Russian comes from a Germanic-Scandinavian phrase, doesn't it? The Varangians, the Varangians, the Swedes who transported—or the Danes, I don't know—who carried amber via the Volga down to Istanbul, sorry, to Constantinople, to Byzantium itself.
14:20 Let's get back to our story of mode and tone. But we're not far from it, actually, in some ways, with our little historical digressions, because we're already in history, not yet in historical materialism—I'll come back to that—but we're in the historical. It's no accident, because first we have to refer to the history of music to find our way through these differences, tone, mode, etc. And the C mode only definitively establishes itself between the 16th and 17th centuries in so-called Western music.
14:53 Everyone knows—I don't much like this term, I'm drawing a parallel here because we'll need to come back to it, so let's say it once and for all. Since the Earth is round, I no longer know where the West is, or rather, it's wherever we want it to be. I can place myself anywhere on the planet, put up a sign, mark "West" here, and it's valid. Poland is the West of Russia. And Japan finds itself in the western corner, which has always amused me. But exactly. In the Far East, we find the Empire of the Rising Sun, so truly the beginning of the Orient.
15:28 And here it turns out to be the pawn of the Atlantic Alliance in its most western aspect. It's not in the Pacific. People always hesitate between Near East and Middle East, but it's Near East for us, for the French. Middle East is the term for the Americans. Actually, that's the difference, it's just a matter of point of view. It's not that people hesitate and that one starts a bit further than the other or anything like that. That's why I remind everyone that the Earth is round.
15:59 And so, we have... These days, I think we need to defend Darwin, Galileo, Newton. It's not only Marx who needs defending. No, but you're right to laugh, because there are... Pasteur, Pasteur too, very important. But of course, there are flat-earthers. You know what flat-earthers are? Those who claim the Earth is flat and not... Ah, flat-earthers, yes, sorry. No, but it's serious. Well, it is serious. What's serious is that it exists. Still. There are flat-earthers who, quite recently, I think eight days ago, tried to reach the edge of the planet and admitted it was a failure.
16:36 I love their surprise. The edge? Well yes. If it's a disc, there must be an edge. They tried to reach the edge and then... The lure pulled them toward this dreaded edge. There you go, they could keep walking. The edge had nothing dreadful about it. There you go. So now, I get serious right away by completely changing tone and reference. I'll take a reference from the Phenomenology of Spirit.
Descartes's wax and the progress from quality to quantity 17:08 In one of the most difficult passages, near the beginning of the first part, that is, in the part... In the two chapters that follow one another, which are Perception and Force and Understanding, where everyone tears their hair out. There's one thing that's very clear. There's an entire dialectic of the relation between the thing and its properties. If we get lost in it, all we need to do to find our way is—think of Descartes' piece of wax—the thing and its properties.
17:38 "What then is this wax which I knew with such distinctness?" This wax in the singular—let's take the singular demonstrative—this wax, this singular thing, so it's one, O-N-E, this unity, splits into several properties. It's something that is white, that has the smell of honey, the smell of the flowers it was gathered from, its size, its shape are apparent; if you strike it, it will give off some sound. In short, all the qualities that can make an object known are found in this one.
18:11 Qualities. Eigenschaft, the man without qualities. Properties, same word in German. Interesting. What we call quality is a matter of ownership—of belonging to a property owner. No, but I insist. Because I'm from the generation... When we say that, we feel a mile-long beard. But anyway, of length. I'm from a generation that saw the ecological discourse emerge from the pens of the great gurus of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
18:50 In the 1950s—there, I'm going back to foundations that today's ecologists sometimes forget a little bit. Except when they refer to the famous Meadows report. I insist. Now, the first ecological notion popularized among the masses—because I take ecology seriously as a discipline, those who studied it, it comes from there, originally—came from the study of lake and river environments. There you go. But otherwise, that's disciplines.
19:22 Here, I give up—I'm not a specialist, and I take very seriously those who study, say, the conditions of habitat in marshes, for example. I mean, the zoology of marshes. On the other hand, the notion that immediately became popular among the masses—scientific or not, and therefore much more ideological—is that of quality of life. 40 years before people started telling you "well, the minimum wage isn't that important."
19:53 because there's the minimum living wage, all that, the RMI, the universal basic income—well, it depends a bit on the particular version. All that is quantitative, it's secondary. What matters is quality of life. What are you complaining about with your welfare check? Yes, yes. You're in the countryside, aren't you? So, breathe the fresh air. I'm not exaggerating. It started with quality of life. Now, one of the decisive advances of humanity at the time of what's been called the scientific revolution.
20:29 And when I say progress, I fully assume the axiological coloring there is in the word progress, and in particular in its prefix "pro," which implies a finality. I'm not going to teach a Latinist like you that "pro" is a bit like it implies an aim, let's say. A program, an aim, etc. So what is this progress? It's the one that, from Galileo to Newton, applying it to light for example, starting from qualifying adjectives such as those that characterize colors, that name colors—green, yellow, red.
21:12 In grammar, we all learn in elementary school that these are qualifying adjectives—to say "this piano is black," "this notebook is yellow." Now, since Newton, we know that these aren't differences of quality. Here I return to the discontinuous, where we would jump abruptly from red to yellow as if they were different essences or substances. But it's the same thing, the same substance, light, which, through quantitative differences—namely frequency, the number of vibrations per second—gives now red, now blue, now violet.
21:45 Like sound, it's a matter of the air. Well, precisely, before getting back to sound, since that's what I want to return to, let me move from color to weight. All right? What progress? Instead of arguing over whether this satchel or this bag is heavy or light, which doesn't mean anything, depending on whether I'm a market porter or a kid going to elementary school, "And then the schoolboy, with his satchel, and shining morning face, creeping like snail unwillingly to school," as Shakespeare admirably says in the ages of man.
22:24 Well. Obviously, for the kid, the little one—I've seen some in Africa with a satchel bigger than the little kid himself. Well. The satchel seems heavy. You can see clearly that we're not talking about the object with these qualitative terms, we're talking about ourselves, or rather about our relation to the object—to stay materialist, right?—the object colored by the subjectivity of the one it affects. When I say "this bag weighs 1.225 kg," I move into another world.
22:59 So, call it heavy, light, that's your business. All right? Nonetheless, we've created a consensus. An epistemic intersubjectivity. But once we've said it weighs 15 kg, whether it's heavy enough or not—within what Kant calls the intelligible community—and whether we're Chinese or not, there's no more post-Lévi-Straussian culturalist relativism, that's finished. There, we agree. I started with the example of light.
23:29 The differences between the qualifying adjectives that name colors are in fact variations of one and the same substance, a quantitative variation called frequency. Weight, the same thing. There have been excellent epistemological studies on this, on the history of the notion of the scale. Just the Huygens-Roberval balance alone, all that—how important it was to agree on an objectified standard of weight, if I may use that barbarism.
24:07 And even, still, to delay our arrival at sound, temperature. It's 28 degrees—is that cold or hot? Ask a Russian and a Malian, they won't give the same answer. A Russian is suffocating from the heat at that point. And as for me, I've seen throughout West Africa, it's charming, when a little wind comes from the desert making it a bit cooler, let's say.
24:43 They all have these wool things around their heads, some... Ah yes, yes, scarves. No, well, the kind we wear, at ski resorts, you know. Balaclavas, yes. Thanks, there you go. You see, the dockers of Abidjan with balaclavas between the rainy season and the dry season, you know, when it's 3 degrees less. Well. So, here again, that makes millions fewer deaths.
Song form and blues: the impurity of jazz 25:13 We no longer argue about whether it's hot or cold, heavy or light, right? Green or turquoise or blue, because turquoise, I've never known whether it was green or blue. We can say... Well, we no longer discuss it. There's, how does he put it, Leibniz, calculemus. Yes. So, the passage from quality... The exhortative optative. There you go. The passage from quality to quantity was crucial here. So I'm coming back now to the acoustic domain.
25:51 Once again, we identify like this, qualitatively, spontaneously, that a piece of music is modal, and I come back to my jazz example, from which I made this long detour. I played a melody. We can analyze it in the conservatory sense. We'll see a melody and even a well-known form called the song form, the A-A-B-A form, with two verses, a middle part.
26:25 This is it. And to come back to the middle part which culminates. And we return to the initial A. And we conclude. So, it's a well-defined A-A-B-A form. The vast majority of standards come from that. Now let me qualify what I said in the history of jazz.
26:57 The vast majority of themes, of standards, come from this old European foundation, the English song, as it's called, whereas the African contribution is the blues. Which has nothing to do with these structures. The blues is a different grid, you know, in which there's no bridge, no middle part. There you go. It's the combination of the two. I mean, someone like Bill Evans, on a theme that has nothing to do with the blues or with Africa, which is about as tonal as can be, that all American kids hum at Christmas, which isn't 'Jingle Bells,' it's one of those, but even simpler.
27:38 It's 'Santa Claus is Coming,' something like that. Anyway, that gives this. You can't get any simpler. It's really the song structure in its purity. Let me repeat.
28:10 Archetypal classical closing cadence, well, 2, 5, 1, etc. Except that when it's Bill Evans playing, he'll immediately bluesify it by adding a seventh. There you go. So the two forms aren't incompatible. On the contrary, it's the magnificent and incomparable impurity of jazz that makes its richness. I won't go back over the metaphor I often develop, but it's here like rivers. I mean, it means nothing to look, in a univocal way, for which little trickle of water, through which trickle, the source of the Amazon begins in the snows of the Andes, or, in the Alps, the Rhône, the Rhine, RH, panta rhei, everything flows.
28:54 Right? It means nothing because these rivers are always already complex. They're great masses of water. That is to say, we only speak of the Rhône once several dozen of these little streams have already merged in what's called in geography a receiving cone, where it flows from all sides, including between my legs, and whether it's this trickle or the one three meters away, it doesn't matter. It's the same for jazz. There's a European contribution, there's an African contribution without which jazz would never have existed.
29:27 There would never have been jazz without Africa, but there are more jazz clubs in the single city of Tokyo than on the entire African continent. So there are other contributions too. And among music lovers of African peoples, whether francophone or anglophone—that doesn't distinguish them at this level—Latin music is much more popular than jazz. A merengue, a cha-cha-cha, or at the time a rumba, are much more popular, and are moreover at the origin of one of the rare African jazz schools, Guinean 'hockey jazz,' you know, than North American jazz.
30:08 So I note that in jazz, there's already a crossing, in a truly, I'd say, almost genetic sense—the kind breeders talk about when I mention genetics, or those who do plant grafting—a crossing between the tonal given, the mode of C, most standards, as I just did with 'Santa Claus is Coming,' and the modality of the blues, which is, in that case, perfectly modal, the blues coming from the extra-European pentatonic scale.
The planet is modal; equal temperament and transposition 30:49 You see, we're starting to come back to a geography of music. We wanted to do a history and we're starting to be in a geography again. What is this geography? The whole planet—that's a geographical notion, the planet, I don't want to confuse things, I want to be precise. Geography, if we take the word literally, means drawing on the Earth. It's not geology, it's not the study of the Earth.
31:20 The study of the Earth presupposes that we've already put our finger vertically into its depths, with layers—that's geology. Geography only deals with what you see from a helicopter, for example, with what is at the surface, whether physical—you see the traces of erosion on mountains—or human—you see stacks of terraced rice paddies in Southeast Asia, for example. In any case, here I'm really in Kant, there are two domains, legislation by nature and legislation by freedom.
31:54 but he says the two are exercised over one and the same territory. Distinction of domain, of territory—you can clearly see we're in the era of the Cooks and the Bougainvilles. By the way, the two domains are exercised over one and the same territory, that of the totality of the objects of all possible experience. Yes, sorry. Besides, now we talk about 'territories' again, it's a bit scandalous, before we had 'departments,' now we have 'territories.' Yes, yes, absolutely, absolutely. It's part of the return to a wild state, but it's the kind you don't see.
32:24 Yes, and since, as you just said, it comes at the expense of the department, it's another way of chipping away at the Republic. There you go, yes, exactly. So, sorry, territory, geography and... Yes, yes. And then the blues, the blues, the pentatonic. No, I had gotten to the unexpected proposition, the whole planet, well, I'll say it, subject and predicate, the whole business, is musically modal.
32:56 When you look at the history of the world's music and at its geographic distribution, you find that almost all of these musics are modal. The exception is precisely this geographic zone—follow my gaze—where a tonal music appeared. Yes, but earlier you said the two were the same thing. No, tonal, meaning where all modes are excluded except the mode of C.
33:28 To stay rigorous. And moreover, this part of the planet, this localized geography where tonality triumphed, where tonality established itself—wherever it established itself, it always combined with equal temperament. That is, you leave the Pythagorean scale, the acoustic scale, you leave physics, and you replace a natural division—I'm getting a bit technical—the so-called division of harmonics.
34:05 When I do this, I play a tonic on a real piano—and this isn't the case here, it's a digital piano, precisely, there's no acoustics. On a real piano, you hear, when you hold the note down, first the octave above resonate, right, then the fifth, then the third, and you find all the fundamentals of the scale, but here in the natural acoustic order. These are the laws of acoustics that equal temperament sets aside in order to impose a much more practical formalization that allows, for example, transpositions.
34:48 Transposition is when I play a piece written in C, I can play it in G. That's transposition—it's the same melody, but a bit higher or a bit lower, in the vertical scale of pitches. There you go. That is, he transposes it, since afterward, I think he switches to minor. Yes, the young man—I no longer know if it's Saint-Saëns or which one, a virtuoso than Saint-Saëns, I'm not talking here about the composer, but the pianist, it was fabulous.
35:20 By the way, since some of you following us have references, let me say that on YouTube you can find documents, including a clip, as we'd call it today, a fairly short film in which you see Saint-Saëns performing a piece of appalling difficulty, and you don't see a finger move. You see a school of bodily stillness, of economy of gesture. I contrast that, sorry, with a young rock pianist who's wild, standing on his keyboard, you know, but who makes more movements than any animal, and what do you hear—a chord in E, and moreover the basic, fundamental thing, which poses no problem, no technical problem whatsoever, there you go.
36:12 Yes, Saint-Saëns, I think he was 11 years old, that's it, and he's presented to Beethoven, something like that. I don't know, I'd have to check the dates, but where it's... No, to Liszt, sorry. Yes, Beethoven, that's a while back. No, no, to Liszt—Beethoven had been dead for a long time. And Liszt, with Abbé Liszt, Father Liszt, with Hugo. So he's presented to him, and there you go, and he plays for Liszt a nearly unplayable passage from the Hammerklavier, the sonata people say is the most difficult.
36:50 There you go, there you go, there you go. And Liszt, who wasn't easily fooled, had been brought little fairground monsters—let me open a parenthesis—the child prodigy, through which some admire the genius Mozart in a somewhat unhealthy way, because there are always those who make fairground monsters out of them. Let me remind you it's not the exception, it's the rule. I challenge anyone to find a single great contemporary pianist—there have never been so many—and I just learned that in China alone, in the current People's Republic of China, there are 75 million piano practitioners who are basically eating up nearly all contemporary celebrities, I'm thinking especially of the extraordinary Yuja Wang, who's now nearing 28, but anyway, and I, who know all the pianists since the history of recording, even back in the era of wax cylinders, before even the record, also the 78 rpm era, I have never seen technical mastery like Yuja Wang's, I mean, there you go, you can think what you like afterward about all these interpretations, but well, Liszt, who wasn't easily fooled, to whom all these young people were brought who were well on their way
38:01 to becoming virtuosos, tells them, to weed out a bit, well, play it for me again transposing it, play it for me in G-flat major—I remind you the Hammerklavier is in B-flat—transpose it for me into G-flat major, and the other, and the other too, does it, and that's where you really see a virtuoso's talent, well. I think it was Barenboim who explained that he had learned from his own piano teacher, I don't remember who it was, but he'd had him retranscribe Bach's preludes in every possible way, but changing them into every key, that's what made him progress, yes, through all 24 semitones—well, it's funny what you're saying, that's it, the musician isn't just a performer, he's a—it's funny what you're saying, because I hadn't forgotten I'm in the middle of the jazz example, I haven't yet concluded the example I wanted to give, but since you bring up this example of Barenboim, there's exactly the equivalent with Coltrane, when he said, I started out in rhythm and blues, I wasn't in jazz—that's the period of a fairly little-known Coltrane who was quite young, a bit of a drug user,
Coltrane moves from tonal to modal; tension and release 39:11 like all those in his musical milieu, marijuana, and rhythm and blues, and who all of a sudden became practically a saint, a monk almost, drinking nothing but tea, vegetarian, for nearly his whole career, and the change—and here we're right in our subject—is when he moves, and this is where I'd gotten to, Coltrane is the one who brings us, with Miles Davis, since it's Miles who discovered him, from tonal jazz, that of the standards, to modal jazz, starting with the album My Favorite Things, where we find this, right?
39:49 I could go on like this for half an hour, and in fact that's what he does—this is where the long pieces that never end begin, over two chords, in a somewhat hypnotic way, I call this snake-charmer music, and for good reason, since this is going to become the music of India at that time, you know, Ravi Shankar, etc., which is going to become fashionable, well, it's very good, I like it a lot myself, My Favorite Things is a masterpiece, and what comes out of it.
40:32 But even in jazz, there's this passage from the tradition of standards on a tonal basis coming from old Europe, to an extra-Europeanness where America rediscovers its own foundations—America isn't Europe, right? But it's true that the end of tension, this shift to the modal, is also the end of the tension-release alternation which is nonetheless characteristic of the tonal, and so you're also stretching the music out in time.
41:02 Yes, so be careful, no confusion—I know you're not making it, but for our listeners, I mean, the criticism I often make, and I'm not the only one, in the jazz world, of forgetting what's essential in the tension-release alternation, it's directed less against modal jazz than against free jazz.
41:35 So these are pieces that would last an hour, dragging behind the beat, always on the strong beats, I don't know, a bit like a Jimi Hendrix who would always be at his peak—even though, I know I'm going to scandalize more than one person, most people say he's the greatest guitarist of all time, poor things, they've never listened, but the one who comes in thirty-fourth position, technically speaking, of a jazz guitarist—I was watching a documentary about Joe Pass recently, I particularly recommend the duets, without drummers, without drums, without bass, that he does with Ella Fitzgerald, acoustic guitar, voice, on themes that are just as twisted—standard themes, I'm coming back here to the standard—but one of those with the most modulations, I even think it holds the record, is 'Lush Life.'
42:26 etc. Well, Joe Pass is an immense guitarist, I mean, when you've listened to—I mean, Jimi Hendrix, of course, you can see he knows how to play guitar, I'm not denying that, but I mean, what he does is much more elementary, actually he's constantly going down and up the blues scale, doing variations on it, without straying too far and without venturing into modulations as unexpected as those Joe Pass can make on a theme like that, Joe Pass or Kenny Burrell or Jim Hall and Wes Montgomery, I'm not going to list all the jazz guitarists.
43:23 All right, I'll close this blasphemous digression—ah yes, but there are idol figures you're not allowed to touch, that's just how it is. On the other hand, I mean, his reputation—what's left, well, I saw Joe Pass, he was playing in a neat little suit, well-combed—don't be fooled, he did 15 years in prison, after being involved in the murder of a cop in a brawl, and no, I say it, it's important, because prisoners are always well dressed, yes.
43:55 No, but coming out of it, he proved to be the greatest guitarist of his generation, he didn't go to prison for nothing, he's good, there you go—I'm not saying that prison has any good in it, far from it, especially for a Black man in the States, but what's interesting is that Jimi Hendrix's fame is mostly extra-musical, it's the fascination with the addict, the rebel, a bit like...
44:29 Dying young, yes, exactly, the gods love those who die young, there you go, we agree, we did the same thing with Rimbaud, it annoys me when Nerval is known only for his madness—Nerval hated having his literature reduced to a pathology. Yes, it's the same for Mozart and the child prodigy, it's... The child prodigy, it's... But of course, it's the fairground monster. That happens somewhere along with rising capitalism, that means...
45:00 Yes, and the spoiled child in families. You did it faster, bravo, the tempos are respected, you manage to play like an adult, so you're already incredible, that's what you've done. Because you've minted money. But on the other hand, indeed, moreover, it's the myth I denounce, because the reality is that all professional musicians were, in any case, so immersed in music that necessarily... No, but you're speaking truer than you know, because if there's one geographic place where the spoiled child is the rule, it's the United States.
45:30 The horrible little brat, caricatured in excellent films or in tons of comedies, I'm thinking of those Christmas-time movies. No, but it's funny because in the end it's almost a structure, it's at once the child prodigy and dying young. Absolutely, absolutely. Like a James Dean-type hero, there you go. It's an archetype. So there are some who know nothing else about Rimbaud than what I call the schoolteacher's repertoire.
46:00 I have enormous respect for schoolteachers. But for those who have retained nothing of Rimbaud but what they learned in elementary school—I'm talking here about the pupil, not the teacher, who does a wonderful job—namely 'The Sleeper in the Valley,' 'My Bohemian Life,' there are some who know nothing else of Rimbaud. Everything tied to rebellion, extreme youth, etc. Whereas I'm struck by the perfection and maturity he already had at 15. There you go. He had more wisdom at times than many old graybeards.
The tonic as vertical; Hegel and the unity of the thing 46:31 I'll come back to this transition that Coltrane effects, if we were to be very rigorous. Sorry, you wanted to open a parenthesis on tension-release when you spoke of free jazz. Yes, it's in free jazz that you get these dragging sequences, as they say in jazz, with the drummer never quite landing on the strong beats. That's where I made the parallel with a certain metal rock, you might say today, where there's a lot of tension and very little release, and there's no swing.
47:04 Swing—it's no accident that literally, in English, it means 'balanced,' 'swung.' There's an up, there's a down, there's a held breath and then a release. That's it. And even in the blues, in the blues, there's the tonic, then a passing note, the flat seventh, the dominant seventh, then the subdominant, and we return to the tonic.
47:34 and here, what do we call the release? and we relax again, landing back on our feet on the tonic, like a good dancer coming back down to the ground. So this is precisely why I brought in the Phenomenology of Spirit through all these detours.
48:04 It's to familiarize ourselves with the substantialist aspect there is in the notion of tonality. I just spoke of the dancer. We had already drawn this parallel. For every dancer, there is a canonical direction, which is up and down. You mustn't fall flat on your face when you dance, after all. This is also true of ice skating, which is what I'm talking about now. What matters is still not to fall flat on your face. That's the catastrophe. So whatever movements you make, there's always the vertical as the absolute reference.
48:39 Whereas if I were writing—if I were asked to design a choreography for a dancer moving in a space capsule where there's no gravity, I'd be forced to imagine all sorts of movements I'd never thought of on solid ground. Because I no longer need to take into account the G constraint, how do you say in physics, terrestrial gravity. Where am I getting at with this?
49:09 That the equivalent of this privileged direction is the tonic. If I play 'Au clair de la lune,' there's a recurring pattern—3 times C, 4, 5—in the statement of the theme, there are already 5 occurrences of the tonic out of 11 notes. It alone makes up almost half. There's an exorbitant privilege granted to the tonic. Why am I talking about Hegel? Because there's the same relationship between the thing and its properties.
49:45 The properties are the omnidirectional side of the dancer I imagine in a space capsule who could make movements in every direction. For instance, both legs in the air and the head down, if he feels like it. Which is a bit harder on the stage of the Bolshoi or the Paris Opera. The equivalent is the unity of the thing. Hegel — and this goes back to Descartes, taken up again as Husserl would do a bit later, from that great Cartesian moment to that moment which is phenomenological par excellence, even if the word 'phenomenology' didn't exist yet, where we really stick to what we see there.
50:30 Let's take for example this piece of wax. When someone writes in that era, he has wax on his desk to light his way. And real wax, not chemical stearin, real wax — well, real wax, wax that smells of the flowers it was gathered from. It smells of honey, doesn't it? So he really starts from what will later be called, in Husserl's time and the phenomenological movement, the return to things themselves, to the immediate, a kind of feigned naivety, of course.
51:07 Hegel does the same thing when he says, in the first chapter, sense-certainty, of the Phenomenology, that we must forget everything in our heads, all our constructions, all our formalizations, and come back to grasp the phenomenon as it manifests itself. There — let me take this opportunity to recall that the phenomenon, Erscheinung, is different from appearance, Schein. Schein is passive, whereas Erscheinung — ask any German on the street, he'll say it's a ghost, an apparition, it's suddenly more active, so the thing appears to us.
51:44 Now, since we're talking about the active, I haven't gotten there yet — here's a quote that concludes the whole dialectic of the relation of the thing to its properties in the Phenomenology, where suddenly, to our great astonishment and even that of the phenomenologist, of the philosopher, Hegel says: the act of positing its different properties into a One, into a unity, we notice, falls to consciousness alone, which must avoid letting it coincide in the thing. The thing is liberated from this unification which comes from the subject.
52:16 What is given is matter. Where does my tablet end, where does its stand begin — I'm sure that under an electron microscope we'd get lost. So, so no one thinks I'm speaking into thin air. Yes, it's the inspection of the mind that allows it. There you go, exactly. So, as you just said, 'inspection' — there's a suffix like -ung, like Erscheinung, meaning it took an activity of the subject. Let's get back to fundamentals, let's not forget that Marx…
52:47 A few characteristics of Marx's theory of knowledge. There, Marx returns to Hegel starting from the Theses on Feuerbach, when he insists on Tätigkeit, precisely on the active side of the subject, of which he says it is the merit of German idealism to have developed it, and that it was neglected by vulgar materialists, as he will say later, as will be said later — not much later — among mechanistic materialists. These are major stakes today, when a mechanistic neo-positivism reigns which totally ignores dialectical materialism.
53:20 Dialectical materialism cannot ignore the activity of the subject. So let me come back to this business, to this act of positing into a One. We couldn't very well have asked Descartes, in the seventeenth century, to reach the result Hegel arrived at, one he wouldn't have reached without the path that leads from Descartes to him via Kant, for instance — namely, that what makes the unity of the piece of wax is the fact that I keep calling it wax.
53:52 Let me come back now to Descartes' text. I'll stay abstract on purpose, because sometimes one must be rigorous. Does the same wax remain after this change? When I played the fool, that is, when I tried to define the wax as it presents itself — going back to my quality-quantity business — through its sensible qualities: it is white, it has a smell of honey, if you strike it, it gives off a specific sound. I bring it near the flame of a candle, the white becomes yellow, the smell becomes a burnt smell — he doesn't put it quite like that, but it's roughly that.
54:25 Its size increases, the heat expands bodies, and no matter how you strike it, it will no longer make any sound — it has become liquid. Up to this point, anyone can carry out this experiment, of course, but where he shows himself to be an immense philosopher is that he asks the question — the one that has haunted philosophy since Parmenides, Heraclitus, Plato, Aristotle: does the same wax remain after this change? Can I still call it wax? Or would I contradict myself?
54:57 Since when I asked the question earlier, what is wax? You told me it's something that is white, that smells of honey — it no longer has any of that. Why do you still call it wax? Why do you say, in the past tense, the wax was white, it has become yellow? Why is there a substance that persists? There's only the word. We keep calling it that. We're entitled to say that, on the materialist level, I mean, we have new things. The act of positing its different properties into a One falls, I come back to Hegel, to consciousness alone, which must avoid letting them coincide in the thing.
Against relativism: objectivity according to Kant 55:29 I made this long detour through phenomenology, even through physics — well, physics revisited naively by phenomenology — to recall that this is exactly the role played by tonality. It's important to understand this, because there are always sophists who tell you, 'Oh no, there isn't one geography, there are geographies, there isn't one Marxism.'
56:00 Yes, that's relativism. There are 50,000 Marxisms, so in fact you never know what you're talking about. Relativism is the good conscience of liberalism and capitalism, each in his own bubble. That's it, exactly. And we're back to Robinsonades, each on his own island. Exactly. So in fact it's a way of forbidding the concept. If you can no longer, precisely— Of forbidding the concept and the collective. Exactly. There's Robinson 1, Robinson 2, Robinson 3, you talk like mathematicians, and in the end, Robinson N, dot dot dot. That said, even the opposite intellectual failing is what I described well through Hegel, when I say all animals doesn't make a zoology.
56:38 Absolutely. Starting from a legitimate critique of amalgamation, of the false universal, of the one who wants to impose as universal what is only a particularity. Obviously, defining man on the basis of the white adult European is not exactly reasonable. It's a bit reductive for the concept of man. And that's the whole problem of the sixteenth century and the result of Europeans' contact with other civilizations thanks to the compass and the great discoveries, which gives us the immortal problems posed by Montaigne, who says: aren't we the savages after all?
57:18 There you go, I mean, there's a legitimate relativism there. A singularity had been posited as universal. But some wanted to throw the baby out with the bathwater, and that's typical of capitalism. So then there's no universal at all. Whereas someone like Kant — it's a shame this went unnoticed, but among all these problems we still discuss today, there's one whose resonance we don't sufficiently appreciate: his new definition of objectivity and subjectivity.
57:50 Up to Kant, objectivity, the object — for those who know German, it's Gegenstand — is the piece of wax, the object placed before me. Gegen means against. There you go, it's what is facing you. As we say 'obstacle' in French — object, obstacle, it's the same prefix, what stands there in front, what comes to oppose. Exactly, there's Objekt and Gegenstand. There, that's exactly where I was getting to. So Gegenstand is the object in the empirical, sensible sense, in the ordinary sense. Right. Kant reserves the word Objekt — the Latin root, you know how Nordic languages play on both registers, making important distinctions.
58:29 The Objekt, he says, is not what is external to an individual subject, like the piece of wax or ice or fire, but what is common to all subjects. There's a shift of the objective — not into the idealism of the individual subject à la Berkeley, into solipsism, but into the collective subject, that is, into human understanding. Watch out! For instance: if A equals B and B equals C, then A equals C — Kant says that's objective.
59:04 That means all subjects agree on that. And there, we don't care about cultures, about relativism, about north and south, about the Papuans, about 'that's valid for us but not for the Bantus.' I had already understood that there was a shift of the subject, the famous hupokeimenon, what lies underneath, which becomes in fact the protagonist of the eighteenth century, of human liberation, in fact. Exactly. But I hadn't seen that inside the object itself there is this same shift.
59:34 Exactly! Exactly, it's very interesting to see that for there to be true objectivity — as in the case of the scientific community — there must be consensus among subjects. And that is true objectivity. For instance, if I let go of this body, it will fall. So I could make a law: all bodies that are not held in my hand fall. No! No, no, that's only valid on Earth, in the little suburb we're used to — 'used to,' a term from Hume, who woke Kant from his dogmatic slumber.
1:00:08 It's in this suburb, where there is terrestrial attraction, that bodies fall, wanting to reach the center of the Earth. But the moment I go, well nothing, just a little hop, 80, 100 kilometers into space — as the Soviets did first — and I let go of it, it floats. That's not a law. A law is the objective connection of phenomena. There, it's me making the connection, it's my subjectivity, because I'm used to, where I am, seeing bodies fall. It's like saying 'tomorrow the sun will rise' as if it were a universal truth.
1:00:38 No, not in Lapland — there it will be six months before day breaks in Lapland. That's how it is. It's an exercise I do a bit with my beginners. I say, I'll give you five statements, tell me which is the most certain, the surest. So I say, the whole is greater than the part. Everyone agrees. A house is always bigger than one of its windows. No — because how big is the set of natural numbers? Infinite. Take a part, the even numbers — how big is that? Infinite too, you see? There, the part equals the whole.
1:01:09 What do you want? I can't help it. You have to be careful. So let me come back to my business about tonality from there, and the subjective-objective distinction. I don't forget this Kantian shift, which even leads Hegel to say that since Kant, ontology is no more than a part of logic. It amounts to about the same thing. Yes, it's the Kantian shift.
1:01:42 We must not wait for being to speak for itself. There you go. And above all, not confuse this with — this would be idealist — the idea that there's a dilution of objectivity into the subject in the sense of individual consciousness. It's quite the opposite. Yes, there's a scope. What is universal for all subjects imposes itself on the individual subject as an objectivity. Yes, there's an ontological scope to knowledge, and above all a primacy of matter, such that we couldn't…
1:02:12 There you go. In any case, not without matter. There. So what is objective for a physicist, or a fortiori in cutting-edge fields like cosmology or microphysics, has no relation whatsoever to what in everyday life we call objective. For instance, that this feels solid when I touch the piano or the table, whereas for a physicist it's full of emptiness — there's more emptiness than fullness in there.
1:02:44 There. So if tonality plays that role, I mean, the West — what we call the West — going back to my critique, doesn't exist, is no longer an objectivity, since ever since we've known the Earth is round, the West is wherever you want it to be. So let me open a political parenthesis. I do my little Socrates, my little maieutics. So the interlocutor says, 'Oh no, you're not going to play with words, I meant, you know very well that refers to the European countries.'
1:03:16 Oh really? So I thought the leader of the West was the United States of America, which isn't in Europe. Oh yes, darn, oops. That's not it either then. So it's neither the West geographically, which no longer means anything, nor the European countries. Well, listen, it's the industrialized countries. Roughly speaking, let's say. So then Japan is a Western country. Oh darn, that doesn't work either. You see? In other words, there are concepts made not to reveal a reality but to hide it.
1:03:46 It's so as not to say capitalism. Yes, quite simply. No, no, but there are naughty words. I was told, when I started working in the private sector, after having sold out, after leaving teaching — which was the stupidest thing I ever did, I earned much more, but well, I ate the drum and drank the cymbal, as the apparently meaningless phrase of the Eleusinian initiates goes. But I was already told, when I said that was a purely capitalistic constraint, 'You know, Pagani, we don't much like that word around here.'
Debussy, extra-European modes and the Tristan chord 1:04:21 It's the Hachette group, no point hiding it, though it would have been the same in any group, you know. Better to say 'liberal' — liberalism being the fig leaf that hides capitalist obscenity. It's a naughty word. So let me give an example of why I don't like that word, 'the West,' to get back to my point, why I avoid it: because it's in the countries designated by this term 'the West' that tonal music appeared and developed.
1:04:58 Recently, in historical terms, relatively speaking, since it dates from the sixteenth, seventeenth century, what historians call the modern age — after all, it's later than the beginning of modern times — and for a determined period. I mean that by the end of the nineteenth century, and I return to my Debussy, we come back — yes, and not only that; there it's the whole-tone scale, but sometimes he uses the pentatonic scale too, doesn't he, Debussy. When I play La fille aux cheveux de lin, I'm in Chinese music.
1:05:34 Exactly, and it resembles the Hommage à Rameau a great deal, by the way. But of course, more than an analogue — deliberately, because I tell everyone who plays piano, especially beginners, if you want to say in a drawing room, 'I'll play you a Chinese tune,' it's easy to do, you just play on the black keys, look. Yes. And I'm in the Temple of Heaven in Beijing. Completely, yes. There you go. So, modal music — you alluded to the whole-tone scale, or the extra-European modes, Chinese, but also Arabic via Spain, and that's Debussy, Ravel — in Debussy there's La Puerta del Vino, there's Iberia, Alborada del gracioso, which is fabulous, I recommend Dinu Lipatti's interpretation — you'll tell me, oh no, Lipatti is too tender, too gentle to play that — well, listen anyway, it's in any case the fastest, the wildest,
1:06:44 the most Dionysian, the most Stravinsky-like one could imagine. There, I recommend it, hands down, and moreover, not too badly recorded, for Dinu Lipatti. So there are the Arabic modes via Spain — let me recall here that Rousseau, in his entry 'Music' in the Encyclopédie which Diderot had commissioned from him — Diderot had approached Rousseau to write everything relating to music in the Encyclopédie — even back then, going back to your point, yes, one shouldn't be Eurocentric, after all, among the Bantu it doesn't happen that way — Rousseau was already not Eurocentric, for there are admirable developments on Arabic, oriental, and Chinese musical modes in the entries on modality among Rousseau's articles for the Encyclopédie.
1:07:35 Look it up, all of that is easily found online. So let me return to my point: it's in this geographical zone designated by the term 'the West' that tonality appears relatively recently, so in the sixteenth, seventeenth century, to sum up, and not for very long — meaning it starts disappearing again, or being called into question, at the end of the nineteenth century, the very beginning being the dissolution of tonality in the chromaticism of Tristan.
1:08:20 And there we are in [18]53, 54. We're barely into the second half of the century. There you go, because when you play, right, the famous Tristan chord — well, thousands of pages have been written about that chord, so I won't get into that and lose myself in it, but just to tell you: are we in what? Are we in A minor, are we in this? In any case, from that point classical tonal analysis cannot predict how it's going to be resolved.
1:08:54 It's not atonal music, contrary to what's been said. It prepares atonal music, but in fact Wagner resolves it, since it's delayed and then the B natural arrives here — one has to show that he resolves it. So where am I getting at? We're told that what's modern is the modal. Look, it starts with Debussy, and as for Coltrane, he plays 'daddy's jazz'
The modal is not modern: from Monteverdi to sonata form 1:09:27 like everyone else, with the good old standards everybody hums — Over the Rainbow, Summertime, etc. — and then suddenly he creates something absolutely unheard-of. Like that moment. Yes, exactly. Literally unheard-of. That is, we hadn't heard it, never heard it, right? Unheard-of, unprecedented, and that's where I come back to historical materialism. Rat-a-tat-tat, it's quite the opposite — we go back to what is oldest in music and most widespread. The most widespread geographically, and I'm making no value judgment.
1:09:59 Give me a mode to improvise on, and I can do it badly, I can do it well. There are admirable modal pieces of music and modal pieces of music that aren't worth a dime. Of course, the same goes for tonality. There's an analogous case. No, but nobody dares say that. I mean there's an exceptional quality. What happened in the West? That's the question I put to researchers of historical materialism. What happened in the West for there suddenly to be a place where the geography of music becomes history?
1:10:37 Because from the moment it appears, tonal music evolves with incredible speed. Right? From Monteverdi, who is still often modal but has the first tonal accents, particularly in opera — it's no accident that it's the arioso form that will impose tonality. From Monteverdi to Bach. Bach — Monteverdi doesn't yet have equal temperament. There you go, and with Bach, well, in Bach's time, equal temperament...
1:11:08 Yes, yes, yes. No, no, but it's a bit before Bach, before Rameau. With Bach — Bach is seventeenth, eighteenth century. Rameau is definitely eighteenth century, even the second half. So it's more advanced. And besides, Rameau knows these problems well, he's one of the great musicologists in history. He wrote a treatise on harmony that still stands as an authority on tonal harmony precisely. Then there's the Vienna school, Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, which was a whole new musical planet compared to Rameau, Bach, compared to the Baroque, for example.
1:11:45 That's what's called classicism. Careful not to confuse it — in music, it's not our classicism, the seventeenth-century one. On the contrary, it dates from the end of the eighteenth century, extending well into the nineteenth, even Beethoven. Then this classicism — sorry, this musical classicism — invests itself in a privileged form, the sonata form, which animates a concerto for a large orchestra plus a soloist, or a solo instrument, a piano sonata — here 'sonata' means genre and not form, but the piano sonata is organized by the sonata form, that is, with a slow movement, a fast movement, a slow movement, a fast movement, the slow one being in the middle, with bi-thematism — a first theme, generally called 'virile' because of its connotations, followed by a more tender, more inward, more 'feminine' theme, etc.
1:12:50 That's what sonata form is, all of it. Right? And classicism — Haydn first, after all, 104 symphonies. So, that the sonata form should come to organize a concerto, a piano sonata, a sonata for piano and violin, or for piano and cello, or for flute and harpsichord, or a symphony, with Haydn, Mozart, and of course Beethoven. Let me remind you that Haydn wrote 104 symphonies, Mozart 41, Beethoven 9, and from that point the number becomes fateful, since Schubert will also write 9, and Mahler, having reached that 9th, hurries to sketch a 10th so as not to die after the 9th.
1:13:34 With Schumann and Brahms, it's reduced too. There you go, it's 4. Ah yes, that's it. There's the club of 4 — Schumann, Brahms, the club of 4. There's the club of 9. Well, there's Dvořák, there's Schubert, the Great, the 9th, there's Schubert, there's Beethoven — it's funny, isn't it — and Bruckner, 9, Mahler, Mahler's 9th. There's no club of 8, that's odd, isn't it, or a club of 6.
1:14:04 There isn't one. There's the group of six in music, but there's no club of six. Right, let's go on. So, a prodigious evolution of habitus—to borrow a Bourdieu theme applied to music—between the appearance of tonality in the 16th and 17th centuries and its evolution which gives rise to the baroque style, then the classical style, the first Viennese classicism, Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, then musical romanticism, which makes enormous use of sonata form, wanting to do Beethoven, but that's not really his thing—we've already seen this when we talked about Schubert—who subverts sonata form either through the lied, which is Schubert's specialty, or through the so-called cyclic form in Schumann.
1:14:57 Schumann has themes heard in one movement that were already present in the previous movement, which is forbidden in classical sonata form and which Beethoven uses only once, in the finale of the 9th Symphony, which begins by recapitulating all the themes of the previous movements—that's the first time cyclic form appears. So you see, there are several ways of subverting the sonata organization, which was historically the formal masterpiece of tonal music.
Schoenberg, the twelve tones and the weightless dancer 1:15:34 And which leads a Prokofiev or a Schoenberg to say: we can still write music in C major. Even after tonality has been liquidated, we can still do it—meaning that even now, in the concert repertoire, concertos and symphonies built on sonata form, no longer classical, are among the most frequently played pieces, by the way. Why this history?
1:16:07 There's no equivalent. I mean, when you look at Hindu music, for example, classical Hindu music—I should say, small cinephile aside, this isn't my field. I envy the cinephile culture of many of my friends. But I'm crazy about the films of… Satyajit Ray? Satyajit Ray, thank you. Satyajit Ray—some musicologists today who are Western specialists in Indian music resort to Satyajit Ray's films for certain pieces of music that have disappeared, that were orally transmitted, and fortunately there are, in the soundtracks of these films, ensembles that have disappeared, particularly in the repertoire of what's called North India, from North India roughly up to Rajasthan.
1:16:59 There we go. Let me close that parenthesis. But this music doesn't evolve the same way as the lightning speed with which we go from Monteverdi to Wagner in a few generations, passing through different things—Beethoven, Schubert, I mean, Brahms—until it all collapses or disappears, first with French Impressionism. After the blows Wagner dealt to tonality, French Impressionism has little left to do—historically speaking, musically it's a superb elaboration—little left to do to finish off what remains, pulling tonality toward the modal, and then with Schoenberg, not to mention, it's tonal norm itself that disappears in so-called atonal music before it gets reorganized through the twelve-tone technique.
1:18:01 Twelve-tone music, where none is privileged, whereas earlier I showed that in Au clair de la lune the tonic note occurs five times out of eleven notes—that's what's called a privileged direction, a privileged note in my scale. The fact is, one of the rules of serial music, of the series prescribed by Schoenberg, is that when you expose the series—that is, a theme with twelve notes—none of the twelve may repeat a previously stated note.
1:18:43 But there can't be, as in Au clair de la lune, two of the same note. Right? Avoiding that—well, that's exactly the sonic equivalent of the hypothesis I made about a dancer in a space capsule in weightlessness, for whom all directions are equal and who only has to orient his choreographic creativity in whichever direction he wants, none of them posing any more problem than another. Yes, sorry. The arbitrary part is that we kept the division into twelve, which are the twelve notes of the piano—in fact we could have subdivided further into quarter tones, we ultimately stayed a bit more…
1:19:22 Very good point. What remains of the West is that the smallest part, the atom, the indivisible part—atomos, if my Greek serves me—the smallest part of our auditory perception is the semitone, that is, two consecutive notes on the piano keyboard. Now a semitone, which is an enormous interval for a Japanese or Chinese person, who works with quarter tones and eighth tones, meaning I can't even reproduce it for you…
1:19:54 Besides, musical pleasure is also determined by playing with that, whereas for us it seems... But of course, he delights in it because it's audible to him; we find it monotonous, we hear only one sound, he hears four—obviously there's a problem, our perception is coarser. If you'll allow me, I can't give you two quarter tones on the piano, but there's another way to do it... It was Wyschnegradsky who had detuned a piano for... Yes, of course, with the string. But no, we can do it, we can do the continuum with the flute, and for that, the sound just has to—that's why the feat of all wind players, trumpeters, flutists, oboists, is the steadiness of the breath, because as soon as it weakens a little, if the breath weakens or on the contrary strengthens, the note goes up or down; you have to maintain an equal pitch accuracy, and that's why you understand why the great jazz vocalists, evidently, are all trumpeters.
1:21:06 Armstrong, singer and trumpeter; Chet Baker is trumpeter and singer; Gillespie, trumpeter and singer—it's interesting, I point out in passing—it's a very difficult instrument to play, the trumpet, unlike the saxophone; even Bill Clinton manages to blow a few notes on it. It only takes the saxophone—well yes, because you see, it's much simpler, because as it happens the problem common to singers and trumpeters is my reserve of air, my column of air. You understand why Gillespie has cheeks like a snake charmer—it's an extraordinary technique where he manages to blow while breathing in at the same time; try inhaling through your nose while blowing through your mouth. We'd kill ourselves training with a bowl and a straw, but eventually you get there—anyway, that's what gives him that reserve of air, you just have to see his cheeks swelling. So I come back to this question that nags at me, that should—
Music of substance, music of the subject; musics of the world 1:22:16 —concern us: what accounts for it, a bit like when we spoke of Rimbaud, who was a meteor like that in the sky of poetry and of our language—what accounts for the fact that tonality appeared and blazed at a dazzling speed, diversified to produce incomparable repertoires, such that even cultures as un-suspect of allegiance to the European norm as China or Japan are crazy about this repertoire, since there may soon be more performers of Schumann and Brahms in China than here—it's becoming extraordinary. Ever since I learned there were 75 million piano practitioners in China, and that's just a beginning—in China; in Japan it's already been going on for a long time. So what happened? I think—I'll put forward the hypothesis—that it's linked to a certain destiny of the concept of freedom in Europe. Yes—
1:23:27 —certainly, and of creativity too. All this is still hazy, but I mean there's, let's say, a music of substance and a music of the subject. When earlier I said that when you look at the ball, as you put it, the arioso form, which is determined—it could even be measured, I dare say, down to its precise dimensions in opera—of course, 'Il pleut, bergère' or 'À la claire fontaine' are ultra-modern acquisitions compared to millennia and millennia of modal music. I wasn't there when Cro-Magnon man held ceremonies, and there must have been strange choruses or at any rate auditory manifestations in the caves, but I'm certain it was more modal than tonal. Here I recommend an album, or several, but an extraordinary CD box set produced by UNESCO.
1:24:37 Sorry, by UNESCO, in the Auvidis collection, which is an ethnomusicological collection—this is serious work, not shoddy exoticism with an amp or a synthesizer; I've nothing against those blends, but I mean this is scientific, recorded in situ. You can hear both the polyphony of the Solomon Islands and Pygmy counterpoint, or music—it's incredible, you have to listen to it, it's quite moving—created by women in forested Africa. I say 'forested' so it's a well-defined geographical zone, green and humid, equatorial Africa, not Sahelian, Muslim Africa—so, very animist. The women who are doing laundry in rivers, in backwaters, fairly far from the village, right, created—invented a new musical genre by going 'plouf' with their hands, and they noticed that in pools of unequal depth in rivers with rocks, it made 'blong blong blong blong blong,' and they play with that.
1:25:48 —to make a work song, to cut through the drudgery of the repetition of gestures in utilitarian labor, just like those who worked in the cotton plantations in the United States—the work song is the work song. There, they do it not with the voice, right, as a percussion, but with the resonance of water at different depths—thus rediscovering the oldest of all keyboards, which is the hydraulis, H-Y-D-R-A-U-L-I-S, or 'Orgue de Barbarie,' the water flute. That's what you see in the paintings of the Lady and the Unicorn, right—in the magnificent originals at the Musée de Cluny in Paris—but put 'the Lady and the Unicorn' into Google Images and you'll see this magnificent tapestry where you see this instrument, which is an organ, but only about 25 cm wide, with what, an octave and a half at most—but it's columns of water that produce the pitches as they lower—
1:26:58 —or rise, before it was done with air, right. There you go, and it's also called the Alexandria organ, since it's been perfected since the 4th century AD. So you see, the African continent is much more fertile than one thinks when it comes to sonic matters—women doing laundry producing different pitches with different water depths, and likewise the Alexandria organ—after all, Alexandria is on the African continent. And I could go on, but to be thorough, before closing this parenthesis on keyboard instruments, let me recall that the oldest keyboard ever found, 10,000 years old, dating from the Neolithic, is a lithophone. Ah yes, on stone, that is—these are stones, found in Vietnam, but Neolithic Vietnam, that is, tuned stones, yes, from the Cham period exactly, or probably—you'd have to ask someone whose site I recommend, one of my compatriots, I'm speaking here as a Corsican.
1:28:08 Jean-Michel Filippi, who, at the time I'm speaking, teaches linguistics in Phnom Penh, where he's lived for decades, in Phnom Penh, in the Khmer language; he teaches, he speaks some fifteen languages, right, and he's one of the most cultured compatriots I've ever met. He knows the musical world admirably well, and the whole history of music, so go to his site—and besides, he's a great comrade who knew Lukács, mind you—I mean he lived in Hungary at one point—well, an interesting path, let me reopen the parenthesis—and I salute here my comrade Jean-Michel Filippi, our comrade, and who, yes, a great specialist in the Cham cultural world among other things—he studies other things too—he knows the lithophone well; you were talking about the lithophone—this lithophone is made of stones, each of which produces a different sound with a scale of pitches.
1:29:19 This is the first time—and this is philosophically interesting—that the discontinuous appears in musical material, because all the other ancient instruments work in the continuous. One of the oldest is the famous musical bow, very early on, the Neolithic hunter's—as soon as the bow, which is relatively recent in prehistoric terms, was invented, the hunter, as soon as he'd shot his arrow, would hear that there was a vibration of the string; he soon noticed that by putting it between his teeth he could modulate it as he wished, and that later gave rise to the jaw harp and so on—but I mean, there we're in the continuous, right, the string, it's the Pythagorean string, you move your finger along the string and it goes up or down. So I come back to my recurring question: what happened for this variability, this historicity—which isn't historicism, mind you—to suddenly emerge—
Liquidators of tonality and the tonality of nursery rhymes 1:30:29 —how, how to call it, and the speed at which, from the moment it appears, it proceeds at an accelerating pace, the path that leads once again from—let's say from Monteverdi to Stravinsky, because starting from Stravinsky, Schoenberg—I take two liquidators, not only in the negative sense, they left masterpieces—but two liquidators of this tonal music, one by doing away with tonality, the other by creating what's called polytonality, right, the same very tonal melody, but with another superimposed on it in another key at the same time, and not successively, right—either polytonality, or the extra-European modes that Stravinsky often uses, especially in Russian music, and even our own—popular music is modal, so—
1:31:40 —Yes, quite so. So it's interesting to see that tonal music only becomes popular quite late—do we need to go back to the Middle Ages, I don't know—there are melodies like 'Il pleut, bergère,' very tonal, etc., it seems that with Fabre d'Églantine we're in the 18th century, it's a song that was fashionable at that moment—it would be interesting, and I don't want to—most children's songs, because it plays on nursery rhymes—counting rhymes, exactly, we agree—a song from the 18th century, roughly speaking—more or less, well there you go, yes—that is, as if from the moment it appeared, because in the 18th century tonal music had a temporal thickness that wasn't very thick, I mean it was historically quite recent—why does it spread all the way into the popularity of nursery rhymes? Look at that speed, how it caught on instantly, that's what I'm getting at. Now that's the problem posed with incredible lucidity by Gérard de Nerval in his chapter on music—look carefully in Wikisource at his complete works.
Nerval, popular song and tonal languages 1:32:50 There's a chapter, 'Music'—well, an entry, excuse me, 'Music,' I say an entry, not a chapter, because Nerval—and this is typical of him—reuses it across several different works, not according to editions, compilations, and so on, but you find an admirable development, much easier to find, in the sequel to Sylvie—let's not forget Sylvie is followed, in Les Filles du Feu, everything is very calculated, by 'Chansons et légendes du Valois,' and there we're in nursery rhymes: 'La belle était assise près du ruisseau coulant, au jardin de son père, trois cavaliers l'ont pris'—the words, the tunes—he says, I can't render the tunes, the memory of them stayed in our ancestors' graves. I recommend here the incomparably clear, precise, and erudite work of someone who studied this recourse to popular song in Nerval, who is a contemporary of this romanticism that seeks to break out of tonality.
1:34:00 Popular song and, at the completely opposite aesthetic pole, the endless melody, the Wagnerian music drama, have in common that they come to subvert the tonal organization—it's curious, popular song is tonal, but it comes to subvert sonata form, excuse me, I understand, of course, that is, to confine tonality within what perhaps earned it immediate popular success—what you very aptly called, and what fascinates Nerval, the nursery rhyme. So he says very rightly, I can only speak to you about the texts, and you, with your fine linguistic culture, will notice that he raises what today we'd call phonological problems, after Saussure, when he cites a song from the Directory period that goes 'J'ai un coquin de frère'—z, apostrophe, i, n, u, n, sorry—'j'ai un coquin de frère,' he says, obviously you have to pass through—to avoid a terrible hiatus—
1:35:11 —you have to go through this 'z' sound which was very fashionable during the Directory, but why was it dropped, Nerval asks with regret. So there are considerations like that, phonological ones, very interesting. So these are all the stakes that collide in the tonal-modal dialectic—sorry, there's an analogy that comes to mind precisely with the subject of linguistics, that I believe that of the roughly six thousand languages that have been recorded, most are tonal languages, and the majority—ah, well there you go, it's funny, it's the same analogy—Vietnamese, for example, is the case—but actually it's the majority of languages, and what's funny is that the languages which, because of colonialism, are now the most widely spoken today in terms of number of speakers—not number of languages, in terms of speakers—like Chinese, are non-tonal languages—well, obviously it seems there's tone in Serbo-Croatian or in some that have survived, or in Swedish too, but that's still marginal—so, and there's a similar opposition here too, that we find, I don't know if there's an analogy, but visibly—
1:36:22 —the world of tonal languages is very close to the modal, precisely, but in any case there's a—ah, no, there is a correlation, I confirm there's a correlation between tonal languages and the modal; I'm not a linguist, at the same time I mean, that would be too quickly dismissing a lot of historical, quite precise, quite material considerations—but I wouldn't want to fall into naturalism or biologism—very good connection you made earlier, so there's no confusion, I pointed out, as it happens, this is where we see it's no accident: Billie Holiday—you can't represent her notes with points. You might think notes are points, that the melody is the line joining these points—no, because she doesn't produce one note, she produces several at once, for example she sings 'The night is cold,' she does a glissando on 'cold'—'cold' isn't on the same horizontal line, 'cold' goes like this, for example—you were saying that maybe the Chinese and Japanese hear 4 notes where we hear only one, but for example what's typical is a Chinese person coming to France, say, at some point wondering, when told 'bonjour' or 'bonjour,' whether he thinks—
1:37:33 —these are two different things. Yes, yes, yes, that's normal, because it's necessarily an acoustic impression, when you come back to acoustics, which is simply, precisely, another dimension, another way of carving up the world. Absolutely—that reminds me, for the anecdote, of a friend of my father's—it's a very colonialist anecdote, archaeo-colonialist I should say, meaning less guilty than neo-colonialism—the aid worker who thinks he's anti-colonialist—yes, and who lorded it over—yes, yes, I've known some who didn't tell their houseboy they were leaving for good, so as not to owe him seniority compensation—I mean, but who on the other hand would scold me for using 'tu' with my houseboy; I pointed out to him that the tramp used 'tu' with the peasant over there anyway, well, let's move on, and that Roman soldiers addressed Caesar with 'tu'—'te salutant'—let me reopen the parenthesis—so in this not-so-sad archaeo-colonialism either, a friend of my father's had scolded one of his drivers, whom he'd dismissed, for saying, instead of 'merci, seigneur, patron' etc., something else, and it's dirty—
1:38:44 —the Vietnamese man believed the other didn't understand, you see—I didn't know Vietnamese—he says what, are you calling me a pig? Oh no, that's not what I meant, no of course. I understand that an Asian ear in Paris hesitates sometimes according to the pitch of the utterance. Good, and we come back to what we saw together once, that as it happens linguistics—I come back to the differences between speech and music and their incestuous union in the music drama—I'd like to set aside any ahistorical consideration, because I think what really matters in what you're saying about the emergence of tonality and the dissolution of tonality—because in my opinion it's completely linked—is the adventure of what we call the West, in the sense of Western thought from Plato to Marx. Yes, yes, but what does it—it definitely exists, it does exist, there you go, there is a West there, but we'd need to change the name, because it's not because it's in the west that it has an identity—what I notice is that this appears at the moment—that's why I went a bit fast in speaking of freedom—
The West as a moment of logic 1:39:54 —I shouldn't say that until the end, but what's certain is that there's, for example, a secularism that emerges, a conflict that begins with Montaigne, as it happens, between individual conscience and collective religious substantialism—yes, but even in Averroes, for example, of that people—he's precisely, he's maybe well, no but among the Arabs you already find all these schools developed—of course, but well, there's an interesting example, Averroes proves that these words, 'Western,' etc., 'modern,' 'ancient,' don't designate determinate periods, there for history, nor determinate places, there for geography, but moments of logic—I'll go that far, it's very Hegelian, I admit—right, and logic here doesn't mean abstractions, quite the opposite—one can say I'm sure that in Sumer there was an archaic period, a classical period, and a decadent period, in the bas-reliefs or in the music made there, I'm sure we'd find all three—so let no one say—
1:41:05 —that the classical is only our 17th century, no, there's a classicism in every era. For example I can give an indisputable example in African art—I mean African sculpture—it seems the polar opposite of any classical ideal, and well, look, especially on Google Images, for those who don't know it, at what's called Ife art, I-F-E, originating in Nigeria, or the art of Benin—careful of confusion, I mean historical Benin, the Benin empire, the kingdom of Benin, which has nothing to do with today's small Benin—well, nothing to do in the sense that it's not reduced to the small Benin of today in terms of area, since Nigeria's main university is located in, is called, Benin City—Benin was the whole region, the Bight of Benin runs from Togo, Benin, Nigeria, Ghana—well all that's in the Bight of Benin. There you go, look at the Ife masks, there's an extraordinary classicism—
1:42:16 —that we see, unique in African art, right, and which some even think might not be unrelated to what's called there—you see to what extent purity of identity is a stupidity, and mixtures are more fruitful—to what's called Luso-African art. There was a reciprocal influence with Portuguese art, the Portuguese being the first Westerners, Europeans, to land on the West African coast, and there are ivory sculptures from Nigeria or Ghana that show the influence of Portuguese sculpture, and vice versa. So there you go, we'd need to know—since I say these are moments of logic—what these moments are: the emergence of the individual, of freedom, of secularism—what are these moments, these articulations of modernity that correlate with the development of tonal music? There's a big stake here—I'm not—
So What and My Favorite Things: a modal that keeps the memory of the tonal 1:43:27 —defending tonal music against modal music, no, definitely not—what I'd like us to conclude from what I've just said is that there's no difference in value, and that we can go back to modal music, and even abandon the tonal hierarchy for good—but jazz doesn't do it the same way as Schoenberg. If Schoenberg moved away from the general public, it's for reasons that aren't found in 'My Favorite Things' with its haunting modal quality, where there are two chords you can graft variations onto and go up and down the fourths, with talent or with inspiration—or without inspiration, that depends on the individual musician. But I note that here there's—it's a modal that still carries a memory of the tonal, it's very curious, there you go.
1:44:37 The proof is that there's a modulation in the middle—that's also why, by the way, it's a transitional record between the two Coltranes, 'My Favorite Things,' it's the first—to be entirely honest, it's said that the first modal piece is on the Miles Davis album where Coltrane is part—he's very young—of the quintet; there are two: 'So What' and 'Milestones.' 'So What,' for example, would be the very first. So, for those interested, there's a striking document: the studio recording, the very first recording of 'So What,' in black and white but very well filmed, in a CBS studio, if I remember correctly, CBS, sorry, in the United States, where you see Miles smoking in the studio—
1:45:47 —talking with the technicians, and Coltrane is taking his solo after Miles. Coltrane—you see a tall fellow of about 17 years old, a teenager who's grown up almost too fast, still a bit shy, awkward—not at all instrumentally, far from it, but socially, if you will—and who suddenly launches into a solo, and all the technicians turn to look at this young man—who's this guy? I remember, because at the time I was in my final year of high school when these records first came out, in Bastia, I remember the fishmonger—to whom I pay tribute here, well, the former fishmonger who is also an Egyptologist, a painter, I'm thinking of Louis Schiave, right, who was a great companion of Clouscard—I remember he'd burst into the only nightclub that livened up the winter, well, one that was emblematic of Bastia, U Pozzu, for those interested, 'the hole'—he'd arrive with the latest, he'd get them, he was the very first in Bastia to have the latest records released—
1:46:57 —of avant-garde jazz, and he'd come and say, in his Bastia accent, 'Come listen to Coltrane, come listen to Coltrane, it's extraordinary,' as something new, right. So we see a Miles almost irritated, with his narcissism, right, almost annoyed to see the interest aroused by his sideman, as they say in jazz English, right, by his sideman—well, who's the boss here, it's me. We must credit Miles with the genius of ferreting out those who would matter in the history of jazz—he's the one who discovers a Bill Evans, a Ron Carter, who at 17 will become the bassist of his generation, a John Coltrane, a McCoy Tyner, who will give a whole generation of pianists a complex—for the first time there's something new since Bud Powell, because for 40 years pianists had been trying to do Bud. So there you go, we have to acknowledge that, but I place there, when you see what Coltrane does with his passage—Miles's passage—into the modal—
Critique of "modal equals modern" and ternary conclusion 1:48:07 —to be honest, that's why I made this digression—even though it's 'My Favorite Things,' the album that will definitively inscribe him in the ears of jazz audiophiles, it remains that it's under Miles Davis's name that, for the very first time, there were these two haunting chords that replaced the much more varied number of chords and the modulations—meaning the key changes, by definition, that can occur in standard tonal jazz. So that's what I'd like us to retain: what I'm criticizing isn't modal music, it's the idea that saying 'modal' means 'modern.' There you go, I make an entire philosophical, critical approach out of the radical M-O-D.
1:49:00 If you look closely, 'modulé,' 'modale,' 'modulé,' that is, changing key—'mode' in the everyday sense—I don't forget that in Beethoven's Ode to Joy, in Schiller's text—right, in the text—and Wagner noticed it, Wagner who has an almost racist, xenophobic, anti-Parisian resentment, because he has such a cult of Paris—he has, there's a very fine text where Wagner says German orchestras are worthless next to the French orchestra, I mean—but he didn't succeed in Paris, he was blocked by that Jew Meyerbeer, damn it, who ruled the roost, so to speak, in what we'd today call the classical showbiz of the time, opera in particular, and so he became a virulent anti-Semite, he was a bit like all the German petite bourgeoisie, you see, without it going beyond that—but then, from the way he was snubbed—to speak in Clouscardian terms—he was snubbed, the guy was snubbed socially by the Paris—
1:50:10 —of Meyerbeer, to speak as he would. In fact he had others—as you said last time, just wanting to force through an opera with a Venusberg ballet shows to what extent he wasn't in step, worldly speaking, with Paris; it wasn't only Meyerbeer who snubbed him. So, again, it's from that moment that he says, in his essay on Beethoven—of which Nietzsche said, rather intelligently, that it combines the best and the worst of Wagner—but there's the best, agreed, in particular a passage on Goethe—well, let's not digress—and it's in Beethoven that he recalls that passage from Schiller: 'was die Mode streng geteilt,' except that he has Schiller allude to Paris, right—'your charms'—speaking of joy—'your charms,' thanks to Beethoven, understood, forcefully reunite what insolent fashion—understood, Parisian—had separated, that is, music here, voice there—
1:51:20 —instrumental music elsewhere, right. On top of that, when you see the German resentment about Richelieu, who divided Germany—because that's really the story, financing the Protestants abroad while repressing them at home, precisely so that Germany would be even more divided—that was French policy. Since you're on that subject, let me nonetheless recall a historical carnage the public generally knows very little about: the Sack of Magdeburg. It's little known—20,000 civilians, for a city of that era that's enormous—20,000 women, children, and old people massacred without mercy by the Catholics, a coalition that we were part of—well, not you and me, but Richelieu's world, Richelieu's state apparatus was part of it, allied of course with Austria, with the whole Catholic power—they massacred that Protestant city. I mean, to be fair, it was appalling; the resentments left by the Thirty Years' War in the German world are never properly assessed. Let me recall that—
1:52:31 —Colbert had to import Hungarians into Alsace to repopulate the Alsatian plain, it had been so decimated. And it's no coincidence—I'll conclude on a slightly happier note—that's why there's Tokay wine in Alsace. Yes, I believe that's certain, there you go. Listen, let's stop there I think, and we'll pick up again at the start of next week with great pleasure. Do you want a different specific conclusion, because I really think there is no conclusion to this adventure, tonality and modality, except perhaps—let me sum up my conclusion—there has always been and everywhere the most ancient, most widespread thing on the planet: traditional, substantialist modal music. It was interrupted by a historical parenthesis, the great arch of tonal music, from the 17th century roughly to the beginning of the 20th century, to make a rough but relatively pertinent cut. What should follow that—there I'm not giving—
1:53:41 —prescriptions to composers, they have the right to write as they wish—is once again a modal music freed from tonal constraint, but a modal music that no longer has anything to do with the original, that isn't substantialist, that incorporates the gains of individual freedom. We come back to your Hegelian concern to think of reality no longer merely as substance but also as subject. I thought you were going to say—which would be a rather musical conclusion—this Hegelian concern to restore reality in three stages. No, that's perfect, in a ternary manner. Yes, roughly speaking, that's it, that'll be my conclusion. Perfect, see you next week, I'm cutting off, but I'll pick you up on the app—it's—
