English translation of the French transcript, made with AI and not yet proofread — click a paragraph to jump to it. Show the French original
Lévi-Strauss and the double articulation applied to music 0:00 Yes, so, listen, hello Dominique, this is, I believe, our third session aimed at getting to the history of music. So indeed, like every good story, it isn't chronological, it isn't purely chronological, even though it doesn't deny the existence of chronology. It's just that I think we'd already plotted to talk about some very contemporary issues, really. So we're moving away from the ancient character linked to the word "history" to deal with questions that stir up a lot of debate, actually, in the musical Landerneau, at least at the level of what are called music lovers.
0:44 But I was going to say, it's actually a relatively old question because it's about, I'd say, 60 years old or a bit more than fifty years. It's linked to the position Lévi-Strauss took in the opening of his work The Raw and the Cooked. You don't need to be an expert in structural anthropology to unearth this text. It's very, very well known, indeed. As soon as one takes an interest in music, one always counts on this reflection because it's an application of a linguistic phenomenon called double articulation, used by Lévi-Strauss in a kind of polemic, actually, with the musical creation of his time.
1:26 Double articulation is the fact — this was noticed, I believe, by the linguist Martinet first — the fact that, right now, as I'm speaking, I don't produce my R exactly the way, say, Dominique does; we don't have the same throat, but simply the code. The cultural code means that, since we're used to hearing ourselves speak as French people and speaking French, that R, everyone will understand it as an R.
1:56 Even if it's the same thing, actually — I don't know, for instance, suppose we had a friend from Martinique, even his very particular way, for us, because we're also particular. Careful, you're starting to become politically incorrect. It's even ridiculous to take precautions about spending vacations in Corsica, it's even ridiculous to be so cautious, but... We find the islands again, by the way, someone might already have told me, you say that because I'm in Corsica. Yes, but I know, it's because I'm Parisian, so I've always heard Parisians say they have no accent, but of course they do, they have a Parisian accent, well, there you go.
2:28 No, no, I don't have the touchiness of West Indians. Yes, yes, but there you go, I know that indeed, contrary to what many people believe, it's not the Parisian accent that's dominating, that's taking the lead in France. There are phenomena of convention that impose themselves, notably the fact that we say "du poulet" [with a certain pronunciation] and not another way. Remind me to come back to it, very briefly, remind me to come back to it, because I need your insight to unravel something that fascinates me in an accent that's been appearing for a few years now, particularly in the Île-de-France region.
2:59 There you go, so I can't say more about that for now. Yes, in fact, we're staying in completely musical matters, but well, to take my example with the so-called "uur" R of West Indians, in any case, we understand it well within a schema that is the French R. The relevance of the language allows me to find the differences negligible. Realizations, in fact, but especially between different individuals — same thing for a Japanese R and L, there's no difference in Japanese, because in any case, it will be heard the same way.
3:29 So, there is indeed a double articulation of language, there is a natural production and a cultural code, in fact, which creates an interpretation. So there is always, in fact, a condensation of nature-culture in the production of language. And so, since music is also a language, it was tempting to understand — it obviously had to be thought through, and that's why it's so fruitful. And Lévi-Strauss uses this double articulation, nature-culture we might say, in musical production. So there are sound scales that have a completely natural character, in fact, and there is of course all of learned music, which is extremely constructed.
Musique concrète, serialism, and false neoclassical solutions 4:10 And finally, we find, at the moment Lévi-Strauss is speaking, that two trends are already developing. On one side you have so-called concrete music. It should be noted that at the moment painting is becoming more abstract, music is becoming concrete. Concrete music is the use of truly natural sounds, then combined afterward. I find this recaricatured. This remark, made in a rather amused tone, by the way, when he says, it's not a coincidence, he says, that music became concrete just as painting was becoming abstract.
4:42 There you go, that's true, that's true. And so, that's concrete music, on the one side. On the other side, dodecaphonism, serialism, which completely redo the cultural code, and move as far away as possible, since they completely reconstruct their own presuppositions. Of course he has more sympathy for the ultra-constructed, ultra-intellectualist character of dodecaphonism, but he shows quite clearly, in a way, his thesis, which is to show that we lose something, ultimately.
5:16 We think we're gaining in... Indeed, we do gain, that's obvious, in the learned character of music, in the extremely complex, craftsmanlike character of the phenomenon, but we lose in that relationship to listening. So a lot of people today, there is a... We lose the audience, above all. That's it, that's it, that's the problem. And this remark hasn't stopped fueling controversy aimed at... So, on the observation itself, there's no...
5:48 It's something that seems... It's hard to dismantle as a theory. Afterward, as for the solutions to bring, I think one can be very doubtful, because often the solutions proposed for this amount to simply returning to a neoclassicism that would use much more classical harmonies from Western music, a bit like — I believe it was Schoenberg who said we can still, after all, still write good music in C minor. In C minor? No, no, I believe he came in C minor. I checked the quote, yes, it surprised me, because I...
6:20 Generally, one comes in C minor, so you don't think it means what you think. I'll listen, we'll see, but we understand what that means. No, no, I think that precisely, Schoenberg's proposition, I believe he would have accepted, well, and yet he is entirely fleeing into C minor. That kind of chronic depressive that our good old Arnold was. There you go, it could only be C minor. He'd prefer minor, of course. There you go, that's it. I think he was caricaturing himself by saying that, actually, I think, with humor. No doubt, no doubt. With humor.
6:50 So, there you go, but indeed, it comes out that we should return to a form of neoclassicism — well, there's a somewhat deathly side to it, if we repeat that in a certain way. Afterward, the problem is that there's an issue that shows itself well in the recent impasses — recent in terms of the history of contemporary music — of minimalist music, of repetitive music, etc. We see it clearly. Yes, I'm saying that. Yes, I gave the neoclassical solution, but there's also minimalist music. There's a problem with this neo-simplification, I'd say, rather than a neoclassicism.
7:22 Yes, absolutely. Even though, well, indeed, neoclassicism is never the repetition of the same — there's even a borderline text, that fiction by Borges, about Menard, author of the Quixote, where he shows well that even if someone were to completely redo it, put themselves back into the mindset of being like Don Quixote, living in 16th-century Spain, and set about rewriting almost word for word the Quixote, our way of reading it would be totally different.
7:54 Well, the return might also allow us to rethink things. I'm not entirely denying certain contributions it can bring... One only has to think of Stravinsky, the way Stravinsky does this neoclassicism. But there, I think what bothers me a little in seeing this trend is that... I'm raising problems to allow us to develop further, and I'll let you speak very quickly. It still seems to me, in a way, that it's too easy a solution. At the same time, there is indeed a problem that arises, which is the break.
8:25 The break between music and its listening, with the audience, between what it means socially and politically. So, is the notion of music tied to its political form, to its political reception, political in the sense of the city, in the broadest sense of the term? There you go, while still keeping in mind that in any case, there is no art without research into that art, without the development of forms. Isn't it linked to an objective blockage of productive forces tied to relations of production?
8:57 I believe that... That's why I'm addressing, of course, you as a Marxist. But I believe there's a symptom here, in musicology, that's being expressed. And what I'm saying — well, the problem is indeed, when one is... for musicologists it's commonplace, it's a question that has been posed for many years. The problem is that I... It seems to me that we have too many easy answers, purely musical ones, and I think it needs to be approached at a conceptual level, which is why I need you.
Scholarly music and popular music: the gigue in Bach 9:27 There you go. Listen, that's an almost exhaustive exposition of the problem that's going to occupy us, of the problems that are going to occupy us, and which revolves around — let me sum it up this way, everything you've just said — the discrepancy, I'll say first a somewhat neutral term, and why not the conflict, a more engaged term, between learned music and popular music. Because we find this divide again. When, for instance, Lévi-Strauss puts dodecaphonism on trial, which he respects, and he sees clearly that it's something very elaborate, done by someone cultured and intelligent — that's Lévi-Strauss.
10:04 But still, he indeed laments that it comes at the price of cutting itself off from an audience, whereas a learned music, like that of Johann Sebastian Bach, at the time — even if it wasn't what the peasant of the Thirty Years' War era listened to. Still, if that peasant happened to come across the finale of the sixth Brandenburg Concerto, he would immediately recognize the gigue, a dance that was extremely familiar to him and which he might have just heard the previous Sunday at the wedding of one of his village friends.
10:51 In other words, what Lévi-Strauss laments here, rightly, or fears as a threat, is that in the case of dodecaphonism, this isn't the trial I'm making, but I'm showing to what extent Lévi-Strauss's own is not gratuitous, to what extent dodecaphonism, if it drops one of the two levels of articulation you rightly referred to...
11:22 That is to say, there is a cultural code in learned music — one cannot, when saying "learned music" emblematically, at the level of the Vorstellung, of representations, not think of Bach. That's why I took that example. Right? What could be more learned than The Art of Fugue, the Musical Offering, the trio sonatas, and so on... Even in this emblematically learned music — I'm speaking like a journalist — nevertheless, at the level of codes, I just alluded here to the dotted rhythm of the gigue, dotted eighth note, it stays in phase with popular music.
12:15 The suites are already dance suites. There you go, that's why I'm stepping back. You say this problem has existed for a long time — it may have existed for longer than we think. Perhaps the conflict between popular music and learned music has almost always existed, that's where I'm getting at. I believe last time you spoke about the conflict between Rameau and Rousseau. You're taking the words right out of my mouth. The stage after Bach, right after Bach, the following generation, is precisely Paris torn apart by the quarrel of the Gluckists and the Piccinnists.
The relativist's game: every avant-garde has caused scandal 12:47 Yes, that's it. It was even called the quarrel over music. Yes, and even the king and the queen — there was the king's corner, the queen's corner. At the very highest level of the State. There you go, that's it, of the couple itself. Right. Music was a source of discord at the highest level of the State. Exactly. Within the royal couple. The discord, yes, that's good, that's not purely inter-musical anymore. And the opposition of the two musics overlaps with the opposition of genders, the king and the queen. Well, really. Exactly.
13:17 No, no, no, joking aside, there is — and you said the word, you passed over it quickly, but you didn't say it by chance — there is a symptom. In the founding text of how this problem is posed today, the excerpt from the opening of The Raw and the Cooked that you quoted, Lévi-Strauss identified a symptom. Whereas disagreeing on how to apply a therapy is still something else. Yes, I believe that's the case here.
13:48 Right? Well noted. But somewhere, there's a symptom. That is to say, let's not just say, well, avant-garde music has always been criticized, and since we're talking about Rousseau, in the Letter to Malesherbes, he says clearly, ah, if you had time, you'd come here, you would have joined me — no, sorry, you'll come here to the Hermitage, right? We'll leave aside a bit the quarrels and vain agitations of Paris and we'll make some good music together, chamber music understood, which would be a change, I quote, from the modern Tintamar [din].
14:24 You'd think you were hearing the reactions of those who attended the premiere of The Rite of Spring. Yes, yes, that's true. Right? Where there were such protests — not Rousseau's protests, mind you — I'm thinking especially of the protests from the ladies of the 16th arrondissement, to whom Florent Schmitt is said to have addressed this apostrophe: silence, you whores of the 16th. I quote. It's the Hernani battle of music. Absolutely, absolutely, absolutely. So, that means, for now, I'm playing the relativist's game, for now.
14:58 Yes, people say it hurts the ears, that it's gratuitous, that it's not beautiful, that it's not... and actually, it's always been like that every time there's been an advance in the history of music. It was said of Beethoven at the time — the famous example — the Holy Roman Emperor said to Mozart, too many notes for our ears, my dear Mozart, regarding Don Giovanni, to which the musician, already modern, stung, retorted, not one too many, Your Majesty. Perhaps all this dialogue is legend, but still, if the dialogue becomes a legend, it's because it's representative.
15:39 Thank you. That means it illustrates — the legend illustrates the transformation of history into legend, expresses the symptom. Yes, there you go, the expression works perhaps even better than if the anecdote were true. Because if the emperor himself says we don't understand a thing about it, that means I'm in popular music, me, the emperor! What a reversal of roles! And Mozart, coming from nothing much, would be elitist music! What a strange reversal! Exactly.
16:10 Well, but Mozart is the subversion of the code, but of a code that is extremely, precisely, well defined by Haydn. Yes, we'll come back to it, Mozart, he's positioned exactly at the moment of the shift from the Ancien Régime to the New. He's neither in the Old nor the New, he's in the pivot. We'll come back to that, that's why... He also pleases universally, I believe that... Absolutely, that's why he's exceptional. But anyway, I'm coming back to the problem of learned music, popular music. Monteverdi was also accused of dissonances.
16:41 Monteverdi is the first to systematize the diminished seventh chord. At the time it was... what we now call the... the dominant seventh chord. Let's not be pedantic, right, in front of a lay audience, but well, it's not complicated at all, and if we do it... If we do it on the piano, like this. Often heard, one shouldn't linger on it, it's a passing chord, we hear it clearly, which needs to be resolved like this.
17:12 There, that's it, we've reached the ground. We had one leg up in the air, now both feet touch the ground. So I can also do... It's the same thing, but that's a dominant seventh chord. It's the most trivial one there is, the dominant-tonic progression is really the most trivial harmonic progression there is. Well, in Monteverdi's time, when this chord was new, they said it was dissonant, no.
17:45 It still causes a scandal. It concerns the use of chords and also the fact of not thinking in terms of such-and-such a cadence. There you go. So, now I come back to our contemporary problem, let's say, inaugurated here by Lévi-Strauss's text, from which you quoted an excerpt. Up to now, I've been playing the game, once again, the relativist's game. Fine, let's stop bothering us with stories about how it's dissonant, how it's too modern, how it's not popular enough.
18:16 It's always been like that. And now, everyone delights in listening — the music lover — to a good old Beethoven symphony as opposed to contemporary music that's supposed to hurt our ears. Still, he cites a Beethoven who has become normalized but who, when he first appeared, hurt the ears of his contemporaries. That's where I'm being a relativist. Except that... But already, for instance, it's not just the last sonatas, the Appassionata was banned.
18:49 Ah no, no, I'm talking about the truly most common Beethoven. Proof of it, I'm talking about the symphonies, I'm not talking precisely about the music that clearly announces the 20th century, like the last quartets or of course at least the last five sonatas, over almost the second half. But what about the Hammerklavier, for example? No, but without going that far, or even the ultimate bagatelles, which are pieces that appear very clear, very popular, and which have an elliptical modernity that announces Webern rather than — I won't even go there.
What is new: the two grids decouple 19:24 Yes, exactly. So, I stop being a relativist because Lévi-Strauss has this merit of telling us no, there is something new here with dodecaphonism. It's not, I was going to say, the traditional avant-garde, right? Even if it sounds a bit — what's that called in stylistics? It's not a chiasmus, it's "the traditional avant-garde," it's not an antithesis, what is it? It's oxymoron. Yes, an oxymoron, yes, that's what I was looking for.
19:57 That's not it. There, he shows clearly, and I go back to my example of Bach's sixth Brandenburg and the gigue that makes up the finale. There's still that gigue rhythm that's familiar to the peasants of the time. So, the most learned music, I repeat, at that moment, remains in phase at the level of the cultural code, because the gigue is not something familiar to the Chinese ear.
20:32 Certainly. To the Pygmy ear too — careful, there we're dealing with cultural frameworks that owe nothing to nature. Because the opposition you raised earlier between what's natural in musical expression and what's cultural covers the linguistic opposition, which you know better than I do, between phonetics and phonology, for example. Phonetics is tied to nature. It's the set of sounds that the human throat... That's why the phonetic symbols are the same for all languages, which everyone agrees on.
21:05 On the other hand, English phonology is not German phonology because it doesn't have the U — sorry, the U sound, as in French or German. So it's not at all the same. And what also seems specific to music is the dialectic between tension and release, which is also tied to dance. There's tension and release. There's presentation and freedom and presentation. There, we come back to a boundary between nature and culture, because tension and release, you have it in respiratory inhalation and exhalation.
21:36 That's it. Between cardiac systole and diastole. This may also be one of the explanations for why music moves us so particularly — one might even wonder whether the very definition of music must be to move us, to touch what is most intimate in us, not to say natural, but in any case, because the natural within us is entirely covered by an enormous layer of culture. That's exactly what we'll try to untangle, but it's no coincidence that the funeral march from the Twilight of the Gods — I'm taking one of the most famous excerpts from Wagner — begins with two timpani strokes that truly cannot be understood from within, as you just said, except by someone who has a beating heart.
22:23 Only a living being who has a pulse, who has a beating heart, suddenly recognizes there this still-silent paroxysm of emotion — something serious has just happened. It's Siegfried being murdered, even before there's a single word or a single other instrument. There you go. So he's right, Lévi-Strauss, to say there's a real breakthrough there — there has always been, in all music of all times, whether it shocks or doesn't shock, always the superposition of the two grids, the two levels of articulation, to sum up everything we've just said, of what makes it touch us because of these natural connotations — we just talked about them, breathing, heartbeat rhythm, etc., alternation, tension, release — and the cultural grid which means there are things we don't hear depending on the grid we were raised in, so we don't hear the quarter-tone interval whereas Asians, the Far East in particular, revel in it.
23:29 And conversely, those who are in the pentatonic scale, that is to say, once again, I'd say Chinese music to simplify, but also nearly all sub-Saharan African music, know nothing of the half-tone. Whereas there are two half-tones in the mode of C, so to speak, which is our own scale. He's right to say that in each era the two are superimposed, and now this coupling comes uncoupled, so there's a crisis, there's a symptom which he's trying to make us understand is a deadly symptom.
Musical pleasure: repetition and subversion of the code 24:08 The fact that popular inspiration is no longer present—I repeat, it is present in Bach's learned music—I remember an excellent 'Que sais-je' book on... titled 'I'm looking for music,' about organ music, quite simply. I was a student when I consulted that 'Que sais-je,' because I was working a bit on these issues, and it confirmed, with great erudition, that even Bach's preludes and fugues, or fantasias and fugues—really, the organ literature—isn't the most popular kind of writing in Bach, he says; but when you look closely, you find all sorts of rhythms characteristic of dances very familiar at the time, as we'd say today—I'm just saying anything—salsa, rock, etc.
25:08 Or the bossa nova, the samba. The notion of rhythm is a compromise between... The notion of rhythm, of repetition. Perhaps, so people understand, musical pleasure could be defined as repetition and the subversion of that repetition. That's exactly the most intelligent thing Lévi-Strauss says in his text. That's it. It's that once these two codes allow us to anticipate, to foresee what's going to happen, the whole talent of the composer or the improviser, the musical creator, is precisely, knowing the listener expects that, to deceive him—amicably, of course—in order to gratify him more than frustrate him, deceiving him either by anticipating, making a note heard before the moment he expected it, or afterward by delaying it—that's the case of the appoggiatura in classical music, for example.
26:06 The appoggiatura, you mean? Yes, yes, of course. The appoggiatura—instead of resolving like this, we do like our Mozart. There. You see the resolution, or else we do the appoggiatura from below. There. I'm taking a very simple example, but that's how a good musical creator, as you said very well, uses the code in order to subvert it.
26:38 Exactly like a good cook—it's Plato who always uses that comparison. Cooking, as Plato says, a tribunal of children would condemn a doctor and acquit a cook, a pastry chef. A pastry chef, yes. That always gets a laugh. We shouldn't say we hear things the same way 200 years after Mozart's music. I play things for children—mine. Yes, it's a good exercise. And it's funny, it amuses me to get their necessarily naive point of view, but at the same time what it reveals.
27:12 And fundamentally, they prefer Beethoven to Mozart. They find it more complex. Sure. And they have the impression that... And more directly speaking, watch out. There, and more directly speaking. They have the impression that with Mozart, they already know what the next note will be. But that's because they live within a code that had to be constructed in a certain way. A code that Beethoven comes to shake up. Yes, that's it. That's exactly right. Like a rocker. Like a rocker. In fact, I remember an ad for the Kenwood brand, the brand of hi-fi equipment.
27:47 I remember that ad where you saw Beethoven's head in his surly look, with his hair all disheveled, pointing an index finger at the viewer of the poster and saying 'Kenwood, you're going to hear me.' Exactly. Shakes things up. I come back to why—to make this comparison—like a cook who adds ingredients, spices, chili peppers, without which food would be nothing but what it is for an animal: a condition of survival, and not a source of pleasure and happiness.
The meal is not eating: the triangle of me, the thing, and the other 28:21 Exactly. Watch out, because now we're getting into serious matters. In the same way, you can't live on chili peppers alone. Exactly. Because we don't eat—man, I mean, doesn't sit down at the table just to eat. That's what I'm saying. Because all you need is to be hungry in order to eat. And to feed yourself in the biological, natural sense—naturalistic, I'd say, if we reduce man to that—you need neither a table, nor guests, nor a bowl, nor a plate, nor a fork, nor chopsticks.
29:01 Which no human culture, when it has the possibility, neglects. It's no accident that in one geographic place, you take couscous with the three fingers of the right hand—never the left—in another it will be with chopsticks, in another with forks or a spoon, or a big ceremonial spoon wielded by a master of ceremonies who distributes portions to the others. But I mean, every time, all of this is extremely coded. And Germans dine starting at 5:40 pm, whereas Parisians dine at 10 pm.
29:39 And above all, don't stick your chopsticks into the rice, because that's a sign of mourning. It's shameless bad manners. So, there you have it: eating, being at table, a meal—it's not just the act of eating. But it is also the act of eating. No, but there would be no meal if there weren't hunger. Let's be clear. That's it. Right. But it's the way of fulfilling, of satisfying that hunger drive, and of escaping what is deterministic about it.
30:15 Because I can't live without eating. That's nature. That's the very opposite of freedom. It's necessity. But I could throw myself onto my plate, and I refrain from doing so, saying, 'Madam, please, help yourself first'—saying that to the woman sitting to my right, whom I'm more or less courting, or in whose eyes... you don't even need to go that far historically. She could be an important old dowager for my career, and I don't want to seem like a boor to her. But in both cases, I take a step back from my natural drive—even if it means swallowing my saliva because we've been waiting a long time for the meal to start—and I say, 'Please, go ahead, help yourself first.'
30:58 And there, I reveal that I am not only the animal within me—which will always be within me until my death—but that alongside and above that animal there is a human being, that is, one who takes distance from nature. When I say I'm having a meal, I'm not merely eating. Which means my relationship to the other counts here at least as much as my relationship to the thing, when I have the possibility of having both. I'm thinking of those who were victims of that appalling plane crash in the seventies, if I remember correctly.
31:34 It had made headlines because the survivors ended up, while waiting for a rescue that in their eyes probably would never come in those frozen, remote solitudes, eating their compatriots—the corpses. Starving as they were, so you can go all the way to cannibalism. There, we're not in the rituals of the meal, of 'please, madam, help yourself first,' of course. But that's precisely not what's human. Those aren't human situations. Obviously. Exactly. Precisely, what you're saying about the relationship to the other, I take that up and come back to music—that also justifies the necessity of an audience, purely the necessity of an audience.
32:11 That justifies the necessity of an audience. There, that was to come back to that exactly. In other words, I've just set up a triangle. Where we were on a binary segment, where there were only two elements, myself and the thing, now there is myself, the thing, and the other. Right? The peace pipe, that's it. You can always examine tobacco molecules under a microscope to understand why there's addiction and why there's a bond between me and tobacco.
32:41 But we may be missing the essential thing, which is the pipe—we pass it around. Like a joint in other contexts, right? In this Covid era, well, we're all... Like the glass of the aperitif, like the bottle, sorry, of the aperitif, we share. So each of us isn't only addicted to the alcohol—we also share the conviviality. We're not here to advertise for mundane alcoholism, but I understand what you mean, yes, indeed.
33:14 I'm deliberately taking alcohol and tobacco, the poison... We come back to the raw, the cooked, the fermented, because that... It's a little dig at my friend Clouscard's garden, but anyway, I mean, he always denounces the joint as one of the venomous things, but never the bottle of wine. Never the bottle. He has that popular tradition. He's from a generation where you'd down a liter at noon and another in the evening. That, I got an earful about.
Man begins with the superfluous; the bestiality of political evil 33:45 That was the general case. Let me come back to my point. It's very important to see that—sorry, but it's becoming a bit of a theorem in what I teach—man begins with the superfluous. When you start making paintings on cave walls, that means you're no longer content with... Neanderthal man had solved the problem of hunger. He was one of the best hunters—it's well known among anthropologists, I mean, he was a formidable hunter of food. He knew how to procure it. Yes, and Cro-Magnon too, for that matter. Cro-Magnon even more so, because he also builds pilings—it's more complicated, already much more elaborate.
34:20 And Mousterian man, since there were some at Cro-Magnon, in the Mousterian era, begins to... There's hardly a woman without jewelry. Bone, whatever you like, little trinkets. Ah, now we're in the superfluous. But no, I'm speaking against management here. When we consider it progress, 30,000 years later, progress to have just the minimum for survival—when we've come from, when we surpassed that 30,000 years ago—that's where I stand. In union demands, we should always remember that production serves desire and not only need.
34:56 Not only. We saw earlier that there's no desire without need. And you're fundamentally right to say that, because the very logic of capital is to bring wages down to the bare minimum for survival, in the very logic of profit. That's why it's nationalist. You're right to show that it's de-anthropological, it's anti-human. It's utterly inhuman. There are ontological foundations for the rejection of liberalism. I do mean ontological, in metaphysics itself. It's not simply a system that would work or wouldn't work. It doesn't function for a human being. We'll come back to it, but you've just summed up what I call, thanks to Rousseau, who was the first to see it, the essence of evil, of political evil.
35:32 Whose horrors have been unleashed. They reached their peak, for now, in the century just past, but we are less than ever sheltered from their return. I want to be very precise. I'm alluding to that passage from The Social Contract. I'm saying that it's bestial on the part of management to want to bring us back to the bare minimum for survival. Yet the animal is not bestial. The beast is not bestial. It is a beast. Period. It does not do evil.
36:02 It does what it can. Whereas reducing man to a strictly animal behavior and considering everything else to be luxury—which is what both the employers' federation and the apostles of degrowth, à la Pierre Rabhi, converge on, for example, you know, 'happy frugality.' Yes, that's it. 'Happy fool,' we used to say in French not so long ago. That in both cases—now, this isn't to reduce man to being a beast, but it is bestiality.
36:37 I'm alluding to Rousseau, who says that if the abuses of this new condition, the abuses of civil society, did not often plunge man below the state he came from—that is, political evil places man below the animal, because the animal doesn't even know evil, nor does it know good, for that matter. That has no meaning. He is not, in what Kant will call, right after Rousseau, inspired by Rousseau, the legislation of freedom that gives meaning to good and evil.
37:08 Otherwise, a hyena devouring the fetus of an antelope running across the savanna, coming out because the mother is giving birth while running—that seems atrocious to us, but it's not evil. She has young to feed too, I mean, she's not adding anything to it. On the other hand, I want to say that in the 21st century where we now are, when there are on the sidewalks of Paris—and there have never been so many, I just got today's new statistics since the measures taken under the pretext of Covid to considerably widen the number of people falling into poverty—that in the 21st century, just as the bad season is beginning, there are people dying of cold and loneliness, because that is not, once again, merely natural distress.
37:58 On the sidewalks of Paris, it is the bestiality of those who are behind this state of affairs. That's what I wanted to point out here. Because one might misread what I'm saying as somewhat idealist, in decoupling desire from need. No, no, it's quite the opposite. Quite the opposite. It's so much about materiality, because for there to be the relationship—I come back to my triangle of myself, the thing, and the other—the thing has to be there.
38:30 Yes, exactly. Quite so. We're not fools. As you said earlier, a cuisine with only chili peppers won't have many customers or demand. Quite right. You put it well. Or one with only alcohol, or only cannabis. Yes, quite so. And that scandal you're talking about reminds me of those detractors of the USSR who criticized the fact that there was no unemployment, but that people were sometimes given jobs doing nothing.
39:01 For example, three people to guard a hat in a frame. Yes, but that's better than the alternative. The great spiritualist, anti-communist souls of the time used to say that man does not live by bread alone. At best, the Soviet Union, well yes, all right, it materially gave the population enough to survive. But in man there's something else. I'm saying exactly the opposite. It's a way of framing the problem. Yes, the Soviet Union produced Sviatoslav Richter—one of the greatest pianists of his century, and the greatest cellist of his century.
39:33 That's not a coincidence either—that's how Soviet it is. Whether they stayed or emigrated like Horowitz, they took their training with them. Soviet culture. No, but afterwards, there are ridiculous things. For example, Alfred Schnittke was repressed because he was asked for tons of film scores, for, I don't know, Mosfilm or whatever. And since film music is supposedly more vulgar than concert music, allegedly. That's what Boulez used to say, too.
40:03 A way of saying that it was... And so he was repressed. That's still an idea of Stalinism. Hollywood isn't in the Urals, after all. Yes, exactly. Sometimes it becomes quite grotesque. These paradoxes are still significant. No, but precisely, the musical example brings us back also to the nature-culture difference, and above all, failing to see their dialectical articulation leads to, not only contradictions, but above all aberrations.
40:39 One of the characteristics of fascism, especially in its Nazi, biologizing version—where it's catastrophic—is a reduction of man to natural, animal instincts, whereas culture—he explained this well, the man named Patrick Tort, precisely about the inversion of... Exactly. The reversive effect, as he calls it. The reversible effects, that is, no, it's not the struggle for survival, including within humanity.
41:09 Humanity, precisely, developed because it developed, for reasons of survival, the notion of... Altruism. And altruism. Exactly. Of course. That altruism is as necessary to survival as egoism. As egoism, there it is. So that's why, if we dig into this nature-culture problem within music, it becomes very, very, very important. But... That's it. There. Don't we get a bit stuck in that, though, and how do we resolve this problem, at least musically?
Matter, finality, and Furtwängler's analysis of Nietzsche 41:39 At least... Did you say... So, precisely, we come back to the heart of the musical expression of the problem, if I may say so. Being, of course, in order to conclude our long nature-culture parenthesis, that there's a word absent from all this: matter. Because we talk about nature so as not to talk about matter. So, so as not to make a mistake, to remain materialist, we must say that only matter exists, whether it be natural or cultural. Yes. A hammer is no less material than a pebble.
42:12 Of course. Quite so. So culture is matter given form. To take up an Aristotelian dichotomy of matter and form. It remains like a social acquisition, we might say, or a social gain. There. And when Marx says what distinguishes the most skillful bee from the clumsiest architect right away, it's that the architect has the house in his head before realizing it outwardly. My translation is fairly loose. But I mean, when Marx says that, he is rehabilitating the notion of finality.
42:47 Because on that point—we'll come back to it, let's not waste time—but the modern critique, the modern contempt for teleology in post-modern thought, takes unjustified advantage of finalism in the order of nature, a discredit dating back to the 16th century, to the Galileo-Cartesian trauma. Let me open a parenthesis. So, to come back squarely to the heart of the musical problem, Furtwängler, in his Conversations about Music with Abendroth—finalism regarding Nietzsche, who would have thought, yes, Furtwängler, the conductor.
43:30 He was born into a privileged, cultured milieu, I don't know. And Nietzsche was a reference point in German circles, like Thomas Mann, etc. Now, what does he say? He speaks of Nietzsche as a symptom. That's right after the war, these Conversations. That's important to know, especially in Furtwängler's case. He says that the trauma of the appearance of the new physics was so serious for European humanity of the time that it never stopped repressing it, overcoming it.
44:07 He says that Nietzsche's call to the Übermensch is a completely irrational way of trying to ward off the fact that man has become, on Earth—anthropologically—a speck of dust in a universe that is no longer centered. Superb! A little bit off in feeling, it's true, sensed. No, but he's making a small historical analysis. We know Einstein, but... Nietzsche—whom our postmodernists consider a great debunker—not at all. Nietzsche too is the victim of a fantasy.
44:38 That's what he's saying. There's a resentment against the Galilean break, against the disenchantment it's supposed to entail. There, I say that because... I'll stop this parenthesis there, but I mean that in the Nazi era, there were researches by Nazi, German scholars to try to call Galilean physics into question. I mention it in passing. Because this isn't entirely irrelevant today. And Einstein, because 'Jewish physics,' so that fits perfectly with the little...
Beethoven's Ninth: the voice emerges from instrumental silence 45:10 Here we are. So let me come back to our subject in order to take up the musical expression of the problem. I'd like to link up with what we said last time—well, one element from last time—which is the appearance, the reappearance of the word at the heart of instrumental music in the finale of Beethoven's Ninth. That's where we need to resituate everything we've just said, the relationship of learned music to popular music.
45:45 Because after all, if you take the Ninth Symphony, what could be more popular than the Ode to Joy? Everyone knows it. Everyone knows it. I don't know. The anthem. Everyone knows it. It was imposed on me as the anthem of a certain institution. No, don't mention it, don't talk about that, it's dreadful. Let's stick to Beethoven for now. I'll say—no, but I'm the only one among you, among us, who was employed by the European Union, dare I admit it? Oh yes, here we go. No, but they asked me in Niger, first, sending me the score, mind you, on the anniversary of the Founding of Europe.
46:24 So, let's not go back over my traumas. It's very popular, and for good reason. It's easy to memorize. It's a melody. It has the arioso form. Let's get back to the musical analysis. Yes. Well, this part of the Ninth is much more familiar to the public than the first and second movements, which are by far the most prized by cultured, seasoned music lovers. The first and second movements of the Ninth are of a staggering modernity.
46:58 The very beginning of the first movement—but who could speak of... For once, matter takes on form. Chaos. An accumulation of energy that hasn't yet exploded and given shape to the universe. Big Bang, yes, that's it. Ah no, but the very beginning, and we see it very clearly in... it served the recording very well, and it was an admirable version, but anyway, the famous 1951 version by Furtwängler at the reopening of the Bayreuth Festival is stunning at that level.
47:30 the tension that he manages to create with this accumulation of energy right from the start… where you can just hear the fundamental intervals, the fifth… But all that in the middle of… natural intervals par excellence, tonic dominant. Exactly. With tremolos, strings. Pythagorean intervals as they're called. There you go. So it's interesting to see that what's popular is the finale and they haven't…
48:02 But there's also the return of the text, which is popular. You can sing it. It inevitably makes you think of the Hegelian progression. Well, that's exactly why I want to get there. It's been commented on. That's why I'm dwelling on this example. Right? Wagner, in his study on Beethoven, of course pulls things a bit toward himself. He wants to show that Beethoven was a first step toward what would become musical drama.
48:32 We've seen it all along. Well, that's fair enough, but he's not wrong to say that this emergence of the voice is like a sea creature that would finally lift its head out of the water and reach the aerial element, breathing. Oxygenated breathing, if I may say so. It's an ascension toward another order, a new order, a resurrection. As for the strength of the voice, he's more careful. In his study, in this same passage, he says that if you look closely — and here Wagner doesn't dwell too much on this aspect — he says that if you look carefully, the melody of the Ode to Joy, first in the instruments, before the chorus takes it up, arrives exactly at the moment that should be the recapitulation in sonata form.
49:21 So there's a purely musical logic here, in the way Beethoven brings it forth, and it comes from his instrumental music. That's extremely interesting. The last sonata, it's indeed the Arietta that emerges like that out of chaos. Exactly. That's why I speak of the Arioso form. There, that's it. And you're alluding, I presume, to the second movement of Opus 111 — yes, that's it — to which Beethoven, almost out of mockery and tenderness, this piece which is gigantic in its variations, gives the title Arietta, little air, a tiny little tune, nothing much.
49:58 The most trivial side... It's incredible. It's the complete opposite of a Schubert or a Mozart, two great Viennese composers who, when they present a theme, it's a marvel, it's a song you never forget. Whereas... this isn't a song. But it's effective. And what's going to be extraordinarily complex, on the other hand, is the variations and the avatars these apparently very simple structures will go through, in these musical cells.
Feminine music, virile speech; lyric drama and song 50:32 So, but let me come back to this mix of instrumental and vocal that the emergence of the voice in the Ninth expresses. And why is that? Because this is going to be the problem, right up to today, of the relationship between the learned and the popular. Let me explain. Because here, we're really at the heart of clearing the ground on problems you set out very well earlier. I'm not saying we're solving them, but clearing the ground before any possible solution.
51:02 Namely, the different modes of resolving this union — I'll say almost incestuous — between word and music. I say incestuous because there have been studies precisely on the obsession with incest in the plots of Wagnerian works. The fact that Siegfried's parents are twin brother and sister doesn't sit very well with the Victorian or Wilhelmine morality of the time.
51:39 No, we're not exaggerating. Right? No, no, but it's interesting. And the analysis... On androgynous Wagner, actually, I believe. There you go. I'm alluding to exactly that title, where very skillfully the author shows clearly — the author who is both a musicologist and an anthropologist — he shows clearly that music is the feminine instance in Wagner's mind and the word is the virile instance. Right? And we find, an unexpected connection, Hegel, who in his analysis of the tragedy of Antigone assigns woman to the inside, to darkness, to the world of night, to poison.
52:19 If someone has to kill, the man will slit a throat where the woman will poison — Medea, right? Or Phèdre, whom Racine has say, 'I wished, by a slower path, to descend among the dead.' Well. So there's this relationship between day and night, between speech — that is, what happens in broad daylight, what is explicit, what is 'offenbar' as they say in German, 'open source' as we'd say today, which hasn't been said — and what is hidden, nocturnal, dreamlike, the Queen of the Night facing Sarastro, her husband.
52:58 Yes, entirely. Solar. There's no need to… No, it's to show that I'm not confining myself to Wagner, or to… This goes well beyond, all these sessions. Now, what am I in the process of showing? I'm showing that this union of word and music, which still comes up today when people ask themselves whether… whether Léo Ferré added something to Aragon's poem or not. To show, you see, the different modalities on a gigantic scale. The whole Wagnerian musical drama strives to be one, the solution to this problem of the union of word and music, but so too does the chanson à texte, to take a genre that's specifically French.
53:41 But so too is the popular song, and here, I'll allow myself to refer those kind enough to listen to us, if it interests them, if they want to dig into this problem, to an exceptional… a lecture of exceptional relevance. And here, I don't refrain from using superlatives, especially since the person giving this lecture is so simple, so self-effacing, and so humble that I feel obliged to counterbalance that with superlatives.
Nerval and the Chansons et légendes du Valois 54:19 I'm thinking of Jean-Nicolas Illouz, I-l-l-o-u-z. I'll ask our listeners to search on Google — we're in an era where I don't need to spell things out. But Jean-Nicolas Illouz gives a lecture to young women preparing for the entrance exam to the École Normale Supérieure on Rue d'Ulm, and he was invited by the school — he's a literary scholar, a specialist in the period running from the school of disenchantment, to speak of Paul Bénichou, up to Mallarmé in particular, and he knows Nerval very well in particular, and he gives them a lecture precisely on the genres that intersect in Nerval's novella Sylvie: the idyll, the elegy, irony, satire.
55:08 I would appear at the theaters dressed to the nines as a suitor — there's a bit of satire of the Romantic hero there. He wrote it, he's giving a lecture in Nira. I don't want... But here he says, look closely, after Sylvie, what do we find in Les Filles du feu as an appendix to Sylvie — and Nerval indeed says as an appendix to Sylvie, we're still within the novella Sylvie — Chansons et légendes du Valois. Good. In which Nerval takes up a series of texts he never stopped publishing throughout his life, because it's an obsession, where he asks why we don't have more consideration for popular songs.
55:47 Here we're at the opposite end from the learned resolution of the relationship between voice and instrument. I started from Beethoven's Ninth. I went through musical drama, and now here I am at 'À la claire fontaine.' Besides, in his poetic work there aren't only Chimères, there are also simply songs. Exactly, and moreover he wrote texts for Berlioz's La Damnation de Faust. No, he knows what he's talking about, but what's excellent is he says: why is it that in Germany, in the Nordic countries, they made collections — he's alluding of course to the Wunderhorn, to the survey done by the Brothers Grimm on a heritage of traditional German songs, just as the Germanic tales would give rise to Schneewittchen and to Hollywood's Snow White.
56:41 I'll mention in passing that Snow White was Hitler's favorite film. I don't know why, I don't know what we can make of that. No, but I have nothing against Snow White, I'm not saying that. No, of course, I think I've understood that it was a... I note that it was so German, it was so German — we always forget this, we think Walt Disney is American, yes, but an American, white WASP, white Anglo-Saxon Protestant — he is first and foremost Germanic and not only English; it's a French illusion to say 'the Anglo-Saxons,' it's a term that leads us to believe — no, it's an essentially Germanic settlement, essentially, if you look at the statistics, the white population of the United States is above all Germans, Austrians, Dutch, Scandinavians, so let's say Germanic in the broad sense, it's fairly wide. That said, it's true that in those regions, very early on, precisely at the moment when national sentiment awakened, before it became nationalist, there were, quite legitimately I think — I'm thinking of Klopstock, I'm thinking of Herder — attempts to rediscover popular sources. Right, that's important.
The Rhine daughters, babbling, and bel canto 57:51 What we're seeing here is why there's often a demagogic — you might say populist — appeal to this popular assent among the most reactionary people. Absolutely, we find it again in our neoclassicism, in minimalist music, etc. And conversely, there's a misinterpretation of Jacobinism that could make us forget that Fabre d'Églantine is also the one who composed 'Il pleut, bergère.' Yes, that's true, yes, absolutely. So he came to a bad end, but anyway. So, back to my three-part division: the relationship between text and music, that's the invariant. This relationship can be treated as in Beethoven's Ninth, as a resurrection, a reappearance of the word, of vocal music, to speak precisely in terms of genre, within the great, the great instrumental ocean — and when I say ocean, it's not a metaphor chosen at random, because beneath the surface of the ocean we're in instrumental silence, where there's no voice. Yes, so just as the very first words of the longest musical undertaking ever, the longest work...
59:01 ...ever undertaken — I'm thinking of course of the Ring cycle — the very first words are three daughters of the Rhine emerging from the depths of the water and suddenly releasing what is not yet language but is already the beginnings of speech: 'Weia! Waga! Woge, du Welle,' basically a kind of babbling — we're not exaggerating — a whole play of alliteration, assonance, etc., which are visibly in keeping with what child psychology specialists call infant babbling. All of us who have children know very well that there's a decisive stage, not far from speech, where the child no longer settles for spitting, coughing, gurgling, or making noises to express pain or discomfort or enthusiasm the way an animal cry does, but articulates — babbles — which is much more melodious, but doesn't yet have the linguistic code to convey meaning through it. This intermediate stage is exactly what corresponds to the scene, the emergence of the Rhine daughters, and Wagner is right to place it at that stage.
1:00:11 ...which is primordial, still archaic. All these problems revolve around the union of word and music. I haven't finished showing the different treatments of this problem — it's true it's also part of the problem of music and language, or in what way could music lose its characteristic feature of language, that is, its double articulation? Well, you're anticipating what comes next, that's exactly where I wanted to get to, but before posing that problem again, let me continue my list of the different treatments. I spoke of the popular song as a form of union between word and music — not the least important, far from it. I'll come back to Nerval and his fascination. Wagnerian musical drama, bel canto, which is yet another way — I mean, really, where the text is very secondary, since you can do a vocalise lasting a whole minute on a single syllable to highlight the virtuosity...
The hierarchy of the arts in Hegel and the music of poetry 1:01:21 ...of the prima donna or the tenor. So there you go, but yet another way of bringing them together is in Hegel's aesthetics — why is it poetry and not music that occupies the summit, when you were speaking to me earlier about, of course, the summit of the gradation of artistic expressions in Hegel? Because in Hegel there is indeed a hierarchy of the arts, going from architecture, the art most engaged in three-dimensional exteriority — it's not a military hierarchy, it's a hierarchy within the concept, thank you for saying that — that is, it doesn't mean our arts are more important than Monet's. As soon as I mention hierarchy, I hear furious people say 'that doesn't surprise me from Hegel, that totalitarian' — total misreading. Hegel is quite right: it's better to be a good painter than a bad musician. Yes, exactly, that's it. But it's a hierarchy within this path of man from necessity toward freedom — I come back to what I was saying earlier — that is, from total engagement, from being buried in exteriority, to interiorization...
1:02:32 ...and mastery, and the problems, right. And it's true that music is much more interiorized than architecture or sculpture, to the point that — there are three dimensions in sculpture and architecture, length, width, and depth — there are only two left in painting; in other words, all painting is abstract well before cubism, insofar as one of the real dimensions of concrete space is suppressed and replaced by what's called the illusion of perspective, especially from the 16th century onward. Right. So we abstract away the real depth found in sculpture and architecture, and when we get to music, there's no spatial dimension at all anymore, there's only time. All of this matters. So here too, here too, one could argue: music would come second-to-last, as the penultimate stage, and the last, the crowning achievement, would be poetry. Yes, except that here — it's rare that I throw a stone into Hegel's garden, but still — except that poetry is born... we call speech...
1:03:43 ...we say it's poetic and not, like a newspaper article, prosaic, from the moment it makes musical elements resound — 'Captive, a stranger to myself, / Could you wish Andromache to love you?' — there's a kind of haunting incantation with triplets, ta-ta-ta-ta, and here it's independent of the meaning of the words, it's no longer purely linguistic, there's a musical part that the poet has played with masterfully — 'sovereign of the seas which must bear you' — with the alliteration of the V — and this justifies Verlaine's art poétique when he says, with his bow stroke, 'music before all else,' otherwise it's not poetry, because he concludes, the last line: 'all the rest is literature.' So it gets complicated: we thought we'd moved from music to a stage even higher than poetry, so we'd definitively left the world of sounds for that of words, of language. Ah, but no, no, because poetry is precisely words that speak as much...
1:04:54 ...to the ear as to the eye, as to thought, in the blood — here we feel we're holding the wolf by the ears with this whole problem, and what then can we say about opera, about cinema? In cinema you have the visual, you have the auditory, right, there are films whose reputation was built solely on their music — yes, yes, absolutely — and conversely, excellent films from a purely cinematic point of view — I'm no specialist, but my cinephile friends assure me it's an excellent film — that I can't stand because they have music that's terrible. That happens too. Yes, yes, I think we have the same problem, that is, I think films whose soundtrack speaks are in fact... right. And I'm not too surprised either that in an emblematically futuristic world like the opening images of Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey, we hear a Strauss waltz — yes — a bit of Ligeti afterward, of course, but for the monolith, but at the beginning, there, to express the comfort of this sanitized, spatial world.
1:06:04 It's interesting to compare Kubrick's spaceship to that of — what's it called — Solaris, Tarkovsky, no? Ah yes, that's a different level. No, no, but it's interesting to compare the look of the two ships: one is spotless, German, sanitized, clean, right, Protestant, puritanical, right — you only need to see the coffins in the cryogenics, all white and smooth, scrubbed for three hours before the film even starts — whereas in the Soviet film it's guys in sweaters, it's a bit grubby, the rocket, you know, it's like they're missing a cleaning lady since they left Earth, it creeps in a bit — it's extraordinary. Anyway, I'm moving on — back to this story of the circular passage between word and music, because we're at the heart of the problem. Child psychologists keep on — I'm speaking in broad terms, it could be...
Man sang before he wrote: Nerval against the Fortoul plan 1:07:14 ...psychoanalysts, it could be behaviorists, it doesn't matter to me here for now, I'm not taking sides — but all of them note, more and more as research advances, the importance of auditory imprinting as being formative for the child, to the point that some say the fetus can't see anything yet, it's in the world of the Queen of the Night, in darkness, but it already hears sounds. And since everything is connected — let me just finish this — I can tell you, if I asked that we refer to it, and truly it's an exhortation on my part, watch this lecture by Jean-Nicolas Illouz called 'The Literary Genres in Nerval's Sylvie' — apparently a course for an exam, but it goes far beyond that, because with a modesty and clarity that I envy him — it's my pedagogical dream that he realizes — so truly, if only I could come close to that level, the way he manages to handle the most complex things, when he says — and here I come back both to the musical...
1:08:24 ...and to the political: Nerval was contemporary with a movement prescribed by the government of Prince Louis Napoleon to organize a French heritage. We know, for example, that it's thanks to Mérimée that the Corsican megaliths were discovered — Corsican shepherds paid them no attention — and the same was done for music: there were orders to survey and record it. And Jean-Nicolas Illouz says, but this seems to go exactly in the direction of what Nerval wanted: well, we're doing like the Germans, we're taking an interest in our popular sonic heritage, we're going to do — it's the era of the Gauls, well, Napoleon III, that dates from around then — you're right in the middle of it — and here Illouz says: but good God, Nerval not only doesn't rejoice at the Fortoul plan — Fortoul being the official appointed for the songs — not only does he not rejoice, he worries about it. Why?
1:09:29 We even speak of sonic heritage, ultimately, because we're in the process of moving from something that was oral — and here Nerval, who says quite plainly, well before writing, man sang before he wrote — and here I raise a problem: literature contains multiple genres, we won't list them all, it would take too long, but there's one that is the most emblematically literary, to the point that the Prague Circle itself, in linguistics, made it one of the fundamental functions of language — the poetic function. Poetry is, after all, the literary genre par excellence. Well, as a philosopher, I say there's a problem: if poetry is the literary genre par excellence, what does 'littera' mean?
1:10:23 Common sense says it means letters, it refers us to writing, to the engram, to the spatial trace — we're no longer in sonic time, in fugacity, to the point that we say history begins when there is writing, which stabilized something, whereas Rimbaud says that to understand my word, it must flee and fly, and writing, which is nevertheless tied to a class society, to slavery — well exactly, the cattle — what a paradox that the literary genre par excellence, poetry, was without any doubt for thousands of years oral before being written. In other words, when a Homer appears, quite some time had already passed since the exploits of Achilles or Hector had been recounted by griots, bards, aoidoi, rhapsodes — depending on the place — and in this case, in the Homeric world, by rhapsodes, that is, 'stitchers' — literally, that's what the word means — rhapsodes, yes, exactly, stitching together pieces, formulas, including, because otherwise there was no way to create, hence the Homeric epithets.
1:11:33 There you go, and then the audience wanted variations each time on the same themes — there were aoidoi too, sometimes one was both aoidos and rhapsode at the same time, but anyway — what a paradox: the literary genre, the letter par excellence, is not written but oral. We come back to the problem deeply, and Nerval indeed says: before writing, man sang. And he says, look closely at the passage — Nerval adds, following Sylvie, with a new autobiographical resonance, the Chansons et légendes du Valois. We're no longer in autobiography, but in an anthropological interest, let's say almost geographical, sociological, whatever you like — collective musicology. And here he begins — he adds to this text, which he had already published a few years earlier in specialized journals — he adds, when he incorporates it into Les Filles du feu, a little autobiographical introduction: 'I remember, every time my thoughts turn to this province of Valois, I remember with delight the songs...'
The feminine voice in Nerval; solitude and the collective 1:12:43 ...that lulled my childhood.' So here's the childhood of humanity, with the auditory relationship to speech, here recaptured by Nerval on an individual, singular level rather than a collective one — this time: 'I remember with delight the songs of my childhood,' he says, 'for I was surrounded by servants who came with us from Valois to the Rue Saint-Martin in Paris and who carried on...' And he shows that Nerval reaches here a kind of impasse, for it is likely that the importance of the female voice — obsessive throughout his whole work, all specialists know this — I haven't left the musical matter, we're right in the middle of it, for the high point of Sylvie, well known to all who have studied the text, if we had to quote one extract, is the famous song of Adrienne: 'I pictured a château from the time of Henri IV, with its pointed slate roofs, and a great lawn framed by elms and lime trees, in the setting sun, pierced by the foliage with its fiery rays, and on this lawn' — I'm skipping some passages — 'young girls were dancing in a circle on the lawn, singing old airs handed down from their mothers, and in a French...'
1:13:56 '...so naturally pure that one felt truly alive in this old land of Valois, where for more than a thousand years the heart of France had beaten.' And suddenly autobiography broadens into something gigantic and collective — it's the opposite of Proust, it's almost the motherland, it's the matrix in any case — we're right in the middle of it. But I'm not exaggerating, because Jean-Nicolas Illouz says, look closely: the songs are passed down from mothers to daughters, there's no intervention from the father — 'she alone whom I love, still your novel' — so here we're at the junction: if we stay only with music, without the word, we risk locking ourselves into the deathly grip of archaism. That's what I've been saying — we had to go through that. I think we're also — we take detours, but in fact I keep saying the same thing, it's almost the opposite of detours — last time I told you we had to go through instrumental music, through the interiorization that the piano facilitated in homes, starting with the bourgeoisie, civil society of the 19th century, with the appearance of individuality. Well, what is civil society if not a collection of individuals?
1:15:06 Well, and we had to go through that, through instrumental silence, vocal silence, which by definition is what instrumental music expresses, in order to dig deeper, to refine, to show how far the complexity of the writing could go. But then Beethoven suddenly recalls us to our collective destiny, to the Zoon Politikon, by making the popular anthem ring out — a mere few years after, as if in echo of the storming of the Bastille. So here we have two poles, the solitary and the collective. I'm not privileging one over the other — I'm saying that each of the two can be deadly if it neglects the other, because the collective without the individual is the dictatorship of a part over the whole — I'm not going into that rant, it's the opposite, not at all — over the poor part, but rather a dictatorship of a class, a family, a clan — and conversely...
1:16:16 ...the isolated individual — and the other day I spoke of Schubert reaching a point — this may be where he's at his most modern and most disorienting, it's fitting to say disorienting, there's no more road in the clearing — but it's a dead end, a dead end of incurable melancholy or of paradisiacal ecstasy — I'm thinking of the second movement of the Unfinished Symphony, a kind of paradisiacal clearing — but it's a dead end, it's almost too beautiful, we shouldn't stop there either. And so I come back to my Nerval, who has shown us many things. If I come back to Nerval, it's because he's exemplary of our modernity, he's contemporary with the emergence of our modernity, including socially speaking, because I could date our modernity from Chateaubriand or from Senancour, the first pre-Romantics — but watch out, there you have two aristocrats. Nerval, he committed suicide because a night shelter refused to open its door for him when it was minus 20 in Paris — so this is the first appearance...
Modernity: the artist breaks with power 1:17:26 ...as with Mozart in music, and the first one who, saying 'to hell with you' — excuse my French — to his employer, the bishop, broke the pact that had existed since the dawn of time between griots and the African chief, between the bard and the barbarian king, whatever — I mean between political power and the artist. By cutting those ties, Mozart condemned himself to being buried, as is the case today, in a mass grave — I'm not conflating everything, I'm saying that death catches up with us also through poverty, I mean in modernity, I'm saying that none of this could have appeared under the Ancien Régime, when there was a place for everything and everything in its place, and those who never leave Baroque music, which I revere, which I salute, especially when Rameau and Couperin are played — horribile dictu — on the piano by a Marcelle Meyer — no, no, that's not the question, Monteverdi is in no way inferior to Wagner or Mozart, both as a musician and as a musical dramatist, that's not the question.
1:18:36 But those who only know this repertoire, and for whom the piano is already the beginning of the end — not to mention those who say that after Gregorian chant, polyphony too is the beginning of the end, there are diehard purists like that — well, I'll note here that it took precisely the emergence of the new order and a collision of social classes for the issues I'm discussing to begin to appear. And I come back to Nerval: this isn't a detour — those servants of his who come back from Valois singing — we mustn't forget that his mother, I say this for those who don't know, he never knew her, because when he was two years old she went to follow her husband on the Napoleonic campaigns, where he was a doctor in the Grande Armée; she died there, he never saw her again, he only knows she's buried somewhere in what is today Poland, dead of fevers supposedly caught while crossing charnel fields left by the Napoleonic battles. And so, during his very first years, the years of youth, of individuality, his mother, for him, was letters...
1:19:46 ...read aloud by female figures, cousins or servants: 'Here, your mommy is writing to you, she says...' So it's the feminine voice that is constitutive of his sensibility. I'm showing here a relationship to the musicality of speech that goes well beyond simply the meaning of the words — he probably didn't understand much of the sentences, as a child, but he heard a tone, a tenderness, a babble that marked him forever. There you have the two deathly and collective poles, forgive me — what Illouz was saying about transmission from mother to daughter is also heightened by twenty years of war, of the Revolution and the Empire — this relationship too, but of course, which made Musset say — he belongs to the same generation as Nerval, really, to a whole generation, and to the one after too, in fact — and Musset, from that generation, said: our fathers were in the Grande Armée, and we drag ourselves through cafés — and he called himself the café prince — yes, exactly — but that, of course, we know well, he's not being serious, he illustrated Hegel, who said humor is the last stage of Romanticism, and its death — we know this well.
1:20:57 The relationship precisely — the virile problem of son to father — 'My father, that hero with the gentle smile,' etc. — but you see very well, as you say, what we see less clearly, precisely, is this relationship, I'll say, exacerbated in the end — it's interesting that you cite an example of a positive relationship to the father, Hugo par excellence, a negative relationship, that of Nerval, which begins by eliminating him — total castration, counter-castration — the father is eliminated from the transmission of the songs, they pass exclusively from mothers to daughters, firstly, and secondly, the only moment he alludes to the first meeting with his father, whom he hadn't known since he was in Poland, at the gates of Moscow, when he himself was still a babe in arms — one day three riders stopped in front of the house in the countryside at Mortefontaine, 'the tallest one embraced me with such fervor that I cried out' — and these are Nerval's first words to his father: 'Father, you're hurting me.' That's interesting — there's the representation of Hugo.
Hypnotic repetition and humor: Schubert, Chopin, Ligeti 1:22:08 shows that it is indeed the generation of sons who have a relationship to the father — exactly a symbolic relationship, in fact, to the paternal figure. To go back a bit to this hierarchy, which is only apparent — 'hierarchy' may be the wrong word, but it's rather this dialectical evolution, in fact, of the arts within the rhythm of the concept — and in Hegel there's another problem, very specific to art, which is the problem of dramaticity — we spoke about this for Beethoven — and the fact too that we move almost chronologically — you see this among the Greeks, and you see it again in many civilizations — from tragedy to comedy, that is, comedy comes to resolve, in fact, often an aporia — or rather, it distances itself from it — and maybe, to connect this a little to what we said about the aporia we're living through today between learned music and popular music, that is, the inaudible character — or rather, judged inaudible — of learned music, and the deathly repetition of music that loses, generally, because it's done with formulas, right up to repetitive music...
1:23:18 ...which is the caricature of that, since it presents itself as such. Sorry, let me interrupt you just for a moment, on repetitive music, a small parenthesis: it's all the more damning for this repetitive music that whatever might be defensible in the concept — which has a haunting, hypnotic side to its repetition — is entirely acceptable, and moreover much better achieved in Schubert, always with a small variation, in fact, in Schubert — right, with the small variations, but small in the Leibnizian sense, which changes everything, like Leibniz's petites perceptions. I'm glad you say that about Schubert precisely, because it's never an exact, identical repetition, exactly, it's a small modification, but nonetheless there is far more repetition in Schubert, to the point that Glenn Gould was the first to say — that's what long kept him away from Schubert, it seemed a bit repetitive and monotonous to him — until he heard him through Richter, where he understood that these were hypnotic effects, and that it took a mediator of genius like Richter to penetrate Schubert, which he did, belatedly. So there you go — let me close the parenthesis — the point I wanted to make is that what's even more damning is that if we were to keep the positive side...
1:24:28 ...of repetition, it's been done far, far better, whether in Chopin's berceuse — the lullabies, by definition, need to be repetitive, it's not with hard rock that you're going to put a child to sleep — and then, as you already noted, of course — not just a little contemporary piece that's already dated, without necessarily being resolved, but moreover these issues had obviously already arisen in the history of music — but precisely, one of the resolutions, which is not resolutive, which is not definitive, expresses itself through the emergence of humor — and I'm thinking of humor, as someone said — I'm thinking of someone like Ligeti — ah yes, yes, absolutely — because writing études again, in the manner of Chopin, I mean piano études, at the end of his life, is obviously a form of distance — there's really a pastiche, parody side, but of course on other terms, with what it takes up — I'm thinking of the Musica ricercata, where you have twelve pieces, well, each time you add a note, up to the twelfth, and twelve is no accident — and there you go, and of course by mixing, ultimately, this whole issue, that is, both the supremely learned and the totally simplistic, and almost the 'people'...
1:25:39 Yes, absolutely — ah no, but precisely, right up to — and moving from one to the other, there's an effect, I think, even a certain return to polyphony, throughout his work there's a relationship, there's a distance — I'll say comic, but not in the crudely comic sense, but rather that of comedy, of a kind of preparatory resolution — it also expresses itself as a symptom, I think this can be seen at different moments in his relationship to music. Pasolini said something quite profound: he said he saw traits in himself, traits of 'humorism,' as they say in Italian, 'humorismo,' to mean traits of humor — though it should really be called traits of humor — which is in him, and he held it against himself, and here we sense a kind of ascetic puritanism, saying it's a legacy of bourgeois culture — but he saw clearly: my smirk comes from my bourgeois upbringing, from a relationship of detachment — but at the same time it seems, how should I put it, a bit exaggerated, a bit self-accusatory, and at the same time it's quite true.
1:26:50 That is to say it's also a blocking of productive forces within the bourgeoisie that allows precisely this relation to humor, this detachment, but also at the same time a lack of involvement — but we're far from that. The example of Pasolini is very instructive, because laughter — and God knows Clouscard decoded that — is one of the snobberies of class: one mocks the beggar, one looks at how he's dressed, this yokel. And moreover it's often said that the people come up on stage, meaning the people in the sense of the Third Estate — we're not in the negation of the negation there, which would be the dictatorship of the proletariat, which would make another passage toward a classless society, since that's not at all the problem — it's the quiet revenge of the one who had been mocked. Yes, that's true too, quite right. Look at how, when the knights see Perceval for the first time in Chrétien de Troyes, they mock him — he has a bow, weapons that aren't even noble, he's a Welshman anyway, which at the time meant a 'negro,' a negro in the racist sense moreover — he's black, black-skinned like those who work
1:28:00 in the sun, in short he's a 'pébourg,' a peasant, they mock him — he doesn't forget, Perceval — and, sorry, still on Pasolini, I'm commenting: he would have been interested, perhaps — perhaps he even knew it, it's even likely — this fragment of Hölderlin from the period of his madness where he says: the laughter of men afflicts me, for I have a heart, the laughter, one might say, of men afflicts me, for that laughter I compare, without error, to doves wandering among the tombs. Yes, yes, quite so. No, but he's not against humor, Hölderlin, because he does have some, but simply there, there's a class laughter. Yes, quite right, there's that, and at the same time I mean it's also a solution to endure the era, as with the Enlightenment for instance, and to improve happiness through humor, like Rossini's humor when — yes, yes, but perhaps let's try precisely — could music change with an evolution and a productive force? Will music change in the 21st century?
The music of the future: Clouscard's noumenon and dancing in weightlessness 1:29:10 How — do you think — what are the possible, conceivable evolutions, could something manage to catch up and change? I'm not dodging the question, but sorry for this somewhat naive side of it, well, it's only a pretext for — no, but it's an enormous question, you're giving me a horoscope reading on the music of the future! Let's put it simply, to speak as in the era when this made headlines. But I'll start by answering with a detour concerning love — love, music, all that isn't very far apart. It's no accident that the reflection on the beautiful in the Symposium is a reflection on eros; at the same time eros is at the heart of aesthetics. Now why do I make this detour? Because Clouscard used to say, when people told him: 'But Michel, I understand if you say, well, a classless society, fine, but what will become of love in a classless society?' — it's roughly the same question you're asking me.
1:30:21 And he would answer: I cannot answer you, it's the noumenon. We are so determined in our phenomenality by class society that if there is one thing we cannot imagine, it's precisely the affect, the nature of the affects — to use a fashionable term from the neo-Spinozist fashion — of a classless society. So I'll start by telling you the reasons I might have for saying 'I can't answer' — I start with Clouscard's quip, but it's to give importance to the subject, not to set it aside, agreed, it's enormous. And second reference now, second comparison — it's more than a comparison this time — it's, I believe we mentioned it informally last time, off the record, the relation, a comparison between the constraints of music and those of dance, of choreography. We had compared the constraint of the tonic in tonal music, if I take
1:31:31 'Au clair de la lune,' there are, I believe, 5 or even 6 times — 5 times I think — the tonic out of 11 notes in the theme already, 3 times C, 4th, 5th — right from the exposition, the first part of the theme, there are already 5 occurrences, literally half, half the notes of the melody bring us back each time to solid ground — that's where I'm going to talk about dance — that is, the tonic is the moment when tensions are resolved, etc., we come back each time to the main direction, it's imposed, as you said earlier, owing to constraints both natural and cultural, to the alternation tension/release. When we move away from the tonic there's tension, and when we return to it, it makes a release. And the good composer is the one who knows how to alternate the two. Sorry, but I see I have to go get my charging cable because I'm being warned the battery is running low — I'll just grab my cable, it'll take three seconds, and while I'm at it
1:32:44 I'll also say — I took the lecture for 2 hours, so we're going to have to stop around 11 o'clock. Ok, fine, so I'll take that, we'll stop around 11. You say yes, in 20 minutes — but exactly, let's finish precisely on that. That's true, I remember what you were telling me, perhaps to let you pick up the thread afterward — you were talking about a choreography in weightlessness, that's exactly where I want to get to, of course, the cosmonaut, precisely, which would be detached from — the analogue of the tonic in the tonal system is downward direction in choreography, that is, there's still a direction imposed on us, which is privileged and imposed by gravity — hence the question you just raised: what would a choreography look like in a spacecraft, in weightlessness? The dancer would no longer be obliged to take that privileged direction into account, there's already
1:33:54 a skater's waltz — but then obviously, the Strauss waltz in the spacecraft — yes, that's exactly why, it was the allusion, it was to throw a little pebble and come back to it with another text: Kleist's reflections on the marionette theatre, which raises the problem, because marionettes are held up by strings in the air, and he says this incredible paradox: the absolute dancer is the little wooden statuette — ah yes, well yes — which has no soul, that's the absolute dancer, precisely because it doesn't think — ah well, that's the whole problem, it doesn't have what Nietzsche calls the spirit of gravity, and it's the paradox of Diderot's actor, against Brecht, the man of the street, exactly — right, ok, I'm charged now, so, I'm answering your question in two steps: first Clouscard's, to show the importance of the stakes — you're asking me to transgress the Kantian prohibition, why not, I'm not Kantian, and even less neo-Kantian — but that is, to speak of the noumenon: after Kant, one can think it but never know it
Love, classes, and commercial music: Mendelssohn against Adorno 1:35:04 and because we cannot know it, we must think it — on the contrary it's already something that we're given permission — it's still always about speaking of it, I never speak, it's already something that we're given permission to think it. So when Clouscard says, love in a classless society — love is so — this would scandalize bourgeois feminism, what I'm about to say — love is so determined by class relations, by the status given to women for millennia, having to choose between the mother and the whore, to borrow a famous title — yes, quite right, we're far — Clouscard was right to say that the little Breton girl who fled Breton poverty and arrived at the Gare Montparnasse in the last century, meaning the late 19th century — and I say that because the Rue de la Gaîté isn't entirely a coincidence, there are quite a few little brothels there — the Breton girl, Clouscard says, found a way to escape the worst of it, the working-class condition. When you see what it already was for a man
1:36:14 slaving away in the factory of the last century, imagine when it was the woman or the child — the best way to get around, not to be in the hell of the factory, was to have a powerful protector, to try to hit the jackpot — a private mansion in Montmartre, a fantasy, and soon, why not, that leads me to Monte Carlo on the Côte d'Azur, starting out like Odette de Swann — one had to wait until 1841 for a law limiting child labor to age 8, and everyone knows it wasn't even respected. So indeed — this text, chapter three of primitive accumulation, an extraordinary text that shows the extent to which, tooth and nail, employers fought every time to get around it, even though — well, it wasn't observed — so, to escape that, which feminist would dare reproach these women for walking the streets, or for trying to be — because it's not pleasant to walk the streets, that's the least one can say — to be a demi-mondaine, a grisette, agreed — but let's get back a bit to music, because unfortunately we have a quarter of an hour
1:37:24 to conclude on this grave question — we're right in the middle of it, because music is rather whorish too, in its own way — that's true — no, but it's true, when we say, but that's commercial music — we'll come back to that chapter — yes, yes, agreed — someone like Sinatra, I think, really the epitome of commercial — there are few singers who've sold as much as Sinatra, our national Johnny Hallyday is all very nice, but he's unknown in New Zealand — Sinatra, across the whole planet, agreed — well, those are the successes — I'll remind you that it was Mr. Quincy Jones who produced Sinatra at the time, and a generation later produced Michael Jackson — there are people who know how to make bank, to make music, and I pay tribute to the immense musician that he is, it's not for nothing, he's no fool — so, for me it's a false problem: music can work perfectly well commercially and be excellent. It's not because Mendelssohn was happy, celebrated, and his family had money that, as was thought at the time — especially since he was Jewish, which didn't help matters, and especially since his music was too happy — that it must necessarily be worse than that of other Romantics
1:38:34 — nonsense, isn't it. And here's a little hat-tip to Nietzsche, who has the merit of defending Mendelssohn, even if it's a bit to annoy the Wagnerians — it's Adorno who thought that even the fact that music was festive and joyful showed indelibly the servitude of the musician toward the court, because this Feierlich, courtly side — you have to admit it. I'm glad you cite Adorno right after I cited Nietzsche, because there Adorno is further to the right than Nietzsche — that's it, because there it's Nietzsche who defends Mendelssohnian happiness, happiness equal to his first name, Felix, and this sort of puritanism — there's no other word for it — of Adorno's, uptight — I know I'll scandalize those who think he's a great debunker, careful, Adorno knows music admirably, but there he shows ideological blindness: that music which makes an audience happy, and what's more, aggravates our case, crowds, masses — where are we going with this?
1:39:39 Yes, no but that's — he never understood anything about jazz — yes, no but that's the terrible thing, one has to distinguish his extreme knowledge, such that when you open any page it's dazzling, and what one retains of it, which is totally different, because his judgments are so off-the-cuff, they're practically ukases in fact — it's the same blindness. It's worth more than what one can actually retain — exactly, since you're here, I said it's the same ideological blindness that makes Adorno condemn jazz — to take a metonymic shortcut from what we just said about his judgment of musics that had popular favor at the time — and it's the same blindness that doesn't stop at the antithesis but moves to synthesis, because it's a bourgeois compromise — you must always stay in revolt and not in revolution, in contradiction, in leftism — let's be clear, in leftism — it's the famous negative dialectic, but there, the analogue is that — I'm never in the negation of the negative, maybe that negative, yes, yes, that's it, exactly, it's exactly what Hegel calls the misdeeds of the abstract self, there you go
Recapitulation and conclusion: a simplicity that is not simplism 1:40:50 It's obvious that we'd need — that, again, opening it up, could be the subject of a future conversation, I think — yes, let's close the Adorno parenthesis. But there, let me come back — I'd like to recap before we finish, all the same recap the whole set of different possible realizations of this pairing language-music, words, texts, scores, whatever you want to call it — depending on whether one refers to the solution given by opera in the ordinary sense, Italian opera, the Wagnerian music drama which is supposed to be the negation of opera — let's not forget the Lutheran chorale, which will serve as a model, of course, a whole Germanic tradition, right down to the American spiritual — Black Americans created the spiritual because it was a Protestant country in which they had to sing in the temple, I mean, and Luther had decided that Frau Musica is the principal divine service right after theology — let's not forget popular song
1:42:02 the song with lyrics, poetry pure and simple, which always has a bit of a song-like side. People used to say to Verlaine, all the same, your poetry is magnificent, what a great poet you are! You know, he'd say, I've only ever written songs. And indeed there's a naivism — not naivety — an affected naivism in this decadent poet — I say that as a compliment — which leads him to have almost childlike turns of phrase, almost clumsy but very calculated, with his famous enjambments, whose secret he holds. Yes, that's done, that's done — your concept of naivism, does that mean a naivety? — yes, one speaks of a naive painter, a naive employer — he isn't himself naive in the sense — there's, I believe, a primitive painter in the sky and on top of that it's really naive paintings, almost — in that, agreed — in which he's brought back, by his situation in the prison at Mons, but besides that the little childlike turns — you'll do well, hard at work, to make the rhyme a bit more sober; if one doesn't watch out, where will it go — a little almost popular turn of phrase
1:43:12 from the working-class outskirts — very calculated, agreed. So all this to show — listen to 'La chanson bien douce' — it's discreet and light, a shiver of water over moss — it's actually an aesthetic, it's actually an ars poetica, it's his own — but of course, so when he says 'song,' he also manages to have his poems take on the shape, so to speak, they turn a little, often, like a rondo of a song — hence the very popular quality of 'Il pleure dans mon cœur comme il pleut sur la ville,' or else 'les violons de l'automne blessent mon cœur' — that this became an emblem of the Resistance is not entirely by chance. Well, since we're speaking of resistance, let me take the opportunity to say that this tradition of poetry as song, where poetry recovers the spirit of song after passing through episodes — I'm thinking of art for art's sake, or Parnassianism — through learned and virtuosic research, it comes back to simplicity, rediscovers it, and not to the simplism of song
1:44:22 I find it again after Verlaine in Aragon — it's a rather particular evolution, more surrealist, right up to this poetry — exactly, Aragon, who speaks of the opposite, the most surrealist, the least popular of the avant-gardes, the most elitist — that was presented as a regression, whereas on the contrary it's a dialectical enrichment, and that's precisely why I mention it, and his defense of Hugo, the same thing — it was fashionable at that time to run Hugo down, it's a tradition going back to Baudelaire — Hugo, he's a socialist, full stop, so he's worth nothing — well listen, I'm very pleased, because it really feels, for me at any rate, conclusive, I'd say, if only that our conversation, at the moment it concludes, concludes on something which is precisely this return to that simplicity which isn't one really, but this original popular simplicity, reworked, through your example — do you want to conclude? — that suits me, because it's my last point, the last moment through which I answer your question, what will be the music of the future — I think it will have somewhere a relation to that simplicity, which is not — which is the very opposite of simplism, and which presupposes infinite meanders and complexities
1:45:32 There you go, well listen, that's wonderful. It's true one might have thought that you'd get into the ultra-technical question regarding musical creation, whereas instead you bring it back — that's even rather surprising for me, but in the end I think it makes me reflect, so yes, we'll need to — and I hope we'll have the chance to come back to this, and for our next conversation — and there you go, you have the right questions, that reassures me, otherwise I wouldn't dig deep into my answers. Well, let's end there then, on this note, thank you — this is Vélao on Odevam, I'm going to end the recording — well, thank you a thousand times for giving me the chance to make explicit these things which wither away when left unformulated — there, I'm cutting the recording, that's why we're cutting the discussion — careful — thank you
