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Contemporary music, current music: the Socratic question 0:00 Hello everyone, we continue with Dominique Pagani on our discussions about music, and specifically its contemporary and modern aspects. We've approached the history of music from the other end, so to speak, for now. Over to Dominique to reframe this new discussion a bit. Hello Dominique. Hello Aymeric, hello everyone. You have to be careful these days.
0:30 No, I have white hair, I can say it, that I don't have the reflex, it's fine, it's forgivable. Yes, I don't know what our listeners or followers—I don't know how I want to put it—what our audience, I prefer to say, who are kind enough to be faithful to this appointment, I don't know what they picture or think, whether they'll even get as far as the act of thinking, when you say we're taking as our theme modern, contemporary music.
1:10 What's in people's heads? What gets short-circuited? Let me explain. Let's start by being really empiricist, behaviorist, down at ground level. Let's go to the Ministry of Culture, under the department of music and dance. Or rather the powerful department of music and dance, within which you have sub-departments for contemporary music, with IRCAM getting the bulk of the budget.
1:44 That, we know very well among music lovers for quite a while now. I'm not here to... that's another debate. Second, I didn't say I was against it or for it. Personally, it doesn't grate on my ears, Boulez-style music, I mean, I have a few criticisms to make, but that's not our subject. There's another sub-department, the sub-department of current music. So there, rock, pop, folk, techno... No, but that's interesting! Now we're really in philosophy.
2:15 We're in the birth, in the principle, in the double sense of beginning. But not just a beginning that happened 2500 years ago under Socrates, but one that continues perpetually every time we make a philosophical advance, quite simply. It's principle, beginning, and driving force. Like the Word in the Gospel, which was at once in the beginning—but not like a snap of the fingers, Pascal was right to mock that—but which at every instant enacts what the metaphysicians of the classical era, starting with Descartes, call the famous continuous creation.
2:51 So, what makes it? What do we call modern music? That's the Socratic question par excellence, now we're in philosophy. Does that mean, let's go now, since we've seen this poses a problem, does that mean I'm talking about rock, Boulez, or Beethoven, who is the first to make music corresponding to the new regime, historically?
3:22 Because historians made the new regime—before that it's still the wigs, the old world, all that, it was the spirit—what do we call modern music? Not to mention that in history we already distinguish the modern from the contemporary: the modern period is the 16th century, to put it quickly, and the contemporary is the 20th, the 20th, the 21st century. It's pleasant to talk with someone who studied the classics. Yes, I would say that it's... But this distinction isn't necessarily carried over into music, because precisely... You're not old enough for me to speak of you in the past tense, someone who studied the classics?
3:53 No, but there it is, in history, the modern period begins when the Middle Ages end. Right, that's certain. That is, I mean, at the moment America is discovered—that's me adding that, which isn't inaccurate—but I mean, when the printing press, heliocentrism, all that is discovered, it's from the Renaissance on, let's be clear. After that it goes very fast, the Enlightenment, the Revolution. So how do we get clarity when we talk about modern music, how do we choose among all that?
Against the chronological criterion 4:28 Between Frank Zappa, Johnny Hallyday, Madonna, Boulez, Beethoven's last quartets, it's not obvious. And so, it's worth asking the question. So, the first thing is to look at the modern/contemporary dichotomy. Contemporary in the empirical sense, right away it has to be revoked. That would mean... That would mean... Johnny, our contemporary.
4:58 Right, if modern music means the music of today, then, well, the music of today, November 30, 2020, is more modern than yesterday's, November 29. That's completely absurd. No, no, but that would mean that Boieldieu's music—I have nothing against Boieldieu, who wrote a lovely harp concerto, I say this because Boieldieu isn't often mentioned—it's the Restoration period, roughly. And then a few operas that are never performed. At a time when, really, when you look at the busts at the Palais Garnier of great opera composers, apart from one or two we know, Mozart etc., nobody knows them, the Aubers—well, specialists do, but I mean, we no longer perform either La Muette, nor...
5:43 well, those were the bestsellers of the time. It's La Muette de Portici that triggered the Belgian revolution. There you go, you know it. But even Meyerbeer, who at the time completely crushed his fellow composers. With operas—people say Wagner is endless, Parsifal, dreadful, the Mastersingers, don't even mention it. Wait, but Les Huguenots is even longer. It was the fashion for grand historical opera, the big machine, as they used to say. That's what was modern.
6:15 Yes, exactly. Those were the ones who sang 'marching, marching' while staying in place. Right, right, you know it well, they made a dreadful noise, marching in silence, the conspiracies. Marching in silence, yes, everyone stomping on stage smashing the wood, in short, it made the audience burst out laughing. So, is that music, Meyerbeer's, I don't want to—it's better than people say, Meyerbeer, careful, I've come around. But still, is it more modern than Beethoven? Now we're joking.
6:45 And Beethoven is well before that. He's more so. So already, we've made progress—it would be so simple if it were enough to say modern music is today's, and yesterday's is less modern. That doesn't work. And even those who don't quite share my tastes, the early-music enthusiasts for instance, will be the first to agree that music like The Art of Fugue hasn't aged a day today. Often people say, but listen, good grief, the canon at the...
7:17 with that blue note. In jazz, that's called a blue note. Good grief, that's really incredible. It's not only from Debussy that you can borrow to make jazz. But there you go, right from the start, yes, there's Debussy, it's jazzy for the harmonies. But Bach, there, in the melisma, it's extraordinary. Like the chromaticism. Well.
7:47 And every time, with that rhythm, it's practically contemporary, it's a modern sensibility. So we can clearly see, and yet with Bach, that's the old regime in full force. So it's good, we're drowned, we're torpedoed by... that was his nickname from Socrates, an interlocutor called him torpedo, in the Greek sense. The torpedo fish, the one that, when touched, gives you an electric shock that numbs you, and you no longer know where you stand.
People, people, völkisch 8:17 So it's good that we're a bit lost at first. It seemed simple, modern music, there you go. Except I'm sure there are plenty of young people who think you're talking about techno when you say that. I'm talking about young people who listen to nothing else, and that's a few million of them, on the planet. That is, what's involved isn't... not so much a history of music, but a geography of music, a dispersion, really. There you go. No, but now I'm very attentive to the music segment on the big popular channels. People, I prefer to say.
8:47 And it's one of your humble servant's great contributions, this dichotomy that 'People,' for me, is the negation of 'popular.' Well, that's another debate, we'll have plenty of chances to come back to it musically. I often say that People-style music, starting in the... You mentioned 'follower,' well indeed, that can't be translated as 'suiveur,' since 'suiveur' is pejorative, whereas 'follower'—so we can clearly see there's... It's still two different ways of thinking, even if of course we should... There you go. For your good French, better to use that rather than borrow an anglicism. But there, indeed, it's a different way of thinking.
9:17 And so 'People' isn't exactly the translation of 'peuple' [people/nation]. In any case I feel that especially once we imported it into French, it doesn't quite work as an anglicism. I'm quite pleased, it's all very tricky. If you follow my line of thought a bit, you'll see we can go from 'peuple' to 'People' and from 'People' to 'völkisch' while we're at it. Yes, well, that translates almost as racist now. And there we're in the far right. So I mean, what we're saying here is interesting, it's serious. What is a people? Is it biology or history?
9:47 Already, that's huge. Absolutely. Still, the work of the son—Ah, his name is Suékaé. Ah! The introduction of Nazism into philosophy, we only know him for that. Faye. Yes, thank you. The work of Faye the son compared to his father, Emmanuel, already shows the extent to which, I mean, the use of the term 'folk' and especially of the adjective 'völkisch'...
10:28 Yes, right. Is at least tendentious. But precisely, on the other hand, the word 'folk,' precisely with the völkisch connotation, was almost racializing. In any case, that's how it's interpreted. At the same time, the word Volk, like narod in Russian, has this advantage of blending nation and people. That's why Gramsci—for him, nation and people, he wants to interpret them in a Jacobin, revolutionary sense. So he starts from 'national-popular' to translate the word Volk. But that's the left-wing interpretation.
10:59 Although that's problematic if we don't take precautions. That's the thing that matters here. It's what we make the word say. It's not the word in isolation, all by itself. Of course, of course. Exactly. Quite so. There you go. So there's also a side. On the other hand, indeed, völkisch now means completely racist, we can no longer use it. For example, if someone is 'popular' in German, you don't say he's völkisch, you say volkstümlich. Exactly. That's why I won't be so bold as to teach linguists like you that Volk is a variant, immediately recognizable if you know a bit, of 'vulg,' V-U-L-G, which gives the Latin vulgus meaning people.
11:35 Yes, exactly. Quite so. So the vulgar is the people seen from the patricians' side. Quite so. Not quite the rabble yet, but not far off. Well. And Volkswagen—and there I take up a Third Reich creation, with the pejorative sense. They had to build the people's car. And there, it's not pejorative. I mean, I accept that, that means a car that's economical and popular. That means within everyone's budget.
12:05 There, it has nothing biological about it. Why not? Right. But that's what Ford was doing in the United States with the famous Model T. I don't quite remember the name of the... It's like in East Germany, they had the Nationale Volksarmee. Right. They could afford it because in any case they didn't put the same connotations on it as maybe in West Germany. There was no taboo about recycled Nazi terms, but on the other hand, indeed, there was maybe a taboo on the... You can't suppress the language.
12:36 Exactly, yes. And at the border, they had... In any case, what I mean is that the Vopos, they had the Vopos at the border. Volkspolizei. Right, exactly. Quite so. Of course. So what does 'popular' mean here? Now we're starting to see clearly. It doesn't mean contemporary in the strict empirical sense. In other words, the history of music can have lightning-fast advances and regressions or periods of stagnation followed by revivals.
Haydn, Beethoven and the break in metrical continuity 13:07 Well, I don't know, but let's take the case of Beethoven. What's striking and unique in Beethoven's case is that music before and after him has nothing more in common. That's a lightning-fast advance. Right? He starts out really by subscribing—and even dragging his feet a bit, which somewhat alarmed his teacher, good old Papa Haydn. He first subscribes to convention, the classical sonata form, which still smells—the wig, the salon, the Louis XV side table, all that—though already with occasional boldness, tremolos, small breaks.
13:46 I should specify, precisely since we're really on the subject of the sonic thing, that Furtwängler in his conversations on music makes the extraordinarily pertinent point—because Furtwängler was accused of always sticking to the same repertoire, German classical-romantic etc., Brahms, Beethoven, Wagner etc.—he says, we must do justice to Haydn, he's the one who makes the break before Beethoven. Sorry for the little but important parenthesis for those who know.
14:20 Haydn is the first to break the metrical continuity of Baroque music. Even if he does it without being provocative, courteously—but the poison, we'd see it in the fruit. Beethoven will only have to push to the extreme the logical consequences of the new Sturm und Drang sensibility. Is it true that this metrical continuity is found from Bach all the way to jazz, but that with Beethoven, on the other hand, it's not found—it's broken?
14:51 No, the first to break it is Haydn. Good grief, if I... A blank. Of course. After an Alberti bass, as they say. But we're no longer... You mean Alberti bass? Alberti bass.
Bach, conservative in metre, innovative in harmony 15:21 Sorry? Alberti. Alberti, yes, yes. I'm thinking of Mozart. Yes, that's why. But of course. There, we're no longer at all in Baroque music. Right? The break is first Haydn. That's very important. So there's that. Conversely. Right? Bach remains within the meter initiated by the great Italians, the Vivaldis, the Corellis, the Bonportis, the Geminianis—I don't mean the cyclist—and so on.
16:00 So he stays within that. That's not where he's going to be modern. On the other hand, he's incomparably more modern than all his contemporaries in his harmonic risks, as we just saw, with The Art of Fugue, or that. Yes, that's... A half-tone gap, simply, yes. That's it. Not Vivaldi, it's in the thirteenth invention. There you go. I'm skipping a passage.
16:30 There's either a whole tone gap—what is it? Even a half-tone gap. Even in... Oh yes! There you go. Yes, there, there. There. It's a major second, that's already bold. It resolves like that. But then it's worse, it's a minor second. Well. There, Bach, for him, it's all or nothing. That's the polyphony, the counterpoint pushed with a mastery he's practically the only one to have, even to this day.
17:04 If there's one exception, it's Schoenberg, he's the only one with a writing of comparable complexity to Bach's. There you go. Well, who masters a comparable complexity—to be fair perhaps—Ferneyhough, the contemporary English composer. There you go. So we can clearly see here what 'modern' means. You can be conservative in meter and progressive or innovative in harmonies. I think that's it. Well, now I'm going to start applying this warning against plain chronology, that music from 1788 is more modern than that of 1787.
Monteverdi, the Notre-Dame school: who was the most modern? 17:47 Well, I'll apply it now by proposing this statement. Isn't Schubert the most modern musician in the history of music? Nobody would think of Schubert if we really had to award a prize for the most modern musician in the history of music. Take the early-music enthusiasts, they'll say, but it's Monteverdi. Monteverdi, the guy—people were carried out on stretchers, that's how new it was, the shock of the emotion caused by the individual voice, operatic, dramatic, like that, whereas before we came from the anonymity of the individual drowned in polyphony and in the choir.
18:23 It's really extraordinary. You could say, no, the most modern of all time is Pérotin the Great. The school of Notre-Dame, 12th century. Actually, the school of Saint-Denis just as well—Saint-Denis was ahead at that time musically, the Basilica of Saint-Denis. In short, two great names, Léonin and Pérotin. But you have to listen to them in the admirable versions—sorry, we're allowed a bit of advertising between us, unlike on the big channels—by Marcel Pérès, who spent his life studying these extraordinary manuscripts, listen to Pérès, P-E-R-E-S.
18:59 I mention this in passing, as a fellow countryman who also recorded Corsican polyphonies, doing research into how islands are often isolates—it's almost a pleonasm—where traditions are preserved, just as we find in Armenia, isolated by the mountains, the first effects of what would later be called Gregorian chant. So that music, when you listen to the Christmas Mass, let me show perhaps the album from the school of Notre-Dame, I don't know if it's visible on screen.
19:44 All right? Very well. So, when you see—it's a bit moving to show this when Notre-Dame just burned down, but anyway, Mass of Christmas Day. There you go, I'll give the reference, Mass of Christmas Day, Harmonia Mundi, the publisher, and composer Léonin, pupil of Pérotin. Now, this album is very moving because it starts with Gregorian chant, so with monody, mono-ode, a single voice, a single chant, the line, no surface, no pencil, no color.
20:25 No, but I'm not saying this as a joke, because there are purists who say that the decadence of music begins when Gregorian chant is abandoned and there start to be two voices. So, precisely, what's very moving here is that suddenly you hear the voices diverge in this album. We change worlds. It's just like in Gothic architecture, seeing the ribbed vaults start to spread their branches, which Romanesque had never yet done.
20:55 Likewise, we see the voices separating, it's quite overwhelming, it's splendid, in this version. You could say, these are... Now it seems taken for granted to us, but I mean, at the time, these were changes. I repeat, Monteverdi, the guy faints; Beethoven, likewise, some had palpitations when he improvised in a dive bar in Vienna—well, dive bar, a little inn on the outskirts of Vienna amid fumes of beer, stuff, rumors, toast, not quite Heiligenstadt, but not far off, I mean, it's the scene created by the Schuppanzigh Quartet at the time, the quartets, the most avant-garde works in Beethoven's output, in taverns.
Beethoven and Wagner: lyrical drama and infinite melody 21:37 So I say, of course, Beethoven's the least—he's a candidate for the title of most modern, that is, the one where, if you measure the transformations music undergoes between before and after, I mean, that could be a criterion, for instance, already better than saying it's whatever's most recent on the calendar that's modern music. But, I don't know, Wagner—what does, I won't even say opera anymore, since with Wagner we can no longer call it opera, it's music drama.
22:12 Opera is liquidated. Luckily that's not the case, and we go on enjoying listening to Otello just as much as Così or Norma, that's not the question. But still, I mean, it's an incredible advance, the endless melody, the suppression, the fusion of the arioso style with the aria—that's a clearly identifiable tune, Handel's aria, etc., where there's Figaro's aria, pam, ta-dam, pam, ta-dam, pam, pa-dam, in Mozart.
22:45 He does away with all that, Wagner, but not by suppressing the aerial side of the aria—on the contrary, by perpetuating it, it's a kind of continuous air. So he fuses what? The aria and the recitative. The recitative is less dry, which will lead Nietzsche to make a perfidious joke, saying that, because musicologists call the Italian recitative, punctuated by a few harpsichord chords, almost spoken, they call it "secco" recitative.
23:21 There's Nietzsche who says it's still better than the "wet" recitative of the Wagnerians. Yes, that's it. Well, these are considerable advances, Wagner—I won't dwell on it, because all those who will innovate after him, from Debussy to Schoenberg, etc., will acknowledge their debt. Right? And even, it's much less known, so I'll allow myself to say it, in the New Orleans-era jazz—I do mean New Orleans—Bix Beiderbecke, the immense white clarinetist, goes to see Siegfried at the Met opera and publishes an article where he says the Dixieland musicians have a lot of progress to make when you hear the bird scene.
24:06 There you go, noted. That's one of the great stars of jazz of the time, avant-garde, a celebrity of the era who's speaking here. Yes, exactly. Even if it's now become a form of learned music. So, I continue, after the great fractures of the twentieth century, the musics. So, look, here's a term we haven't yet noted on our list. We said contemporary music, modern music, current music at the ministry, and here's also avant-garde music.
Avant-gardes: Stravinsky against Schoenberg according to Adorno 24:41 Yes. So, what are the avant-gardes? Well, it's well known, it's The Rite of Spring. Music before and after will never be the same. It's a path that leads all the way to after Messiaen, everything you like. And where Schoenberg, the Second Viennese School—not to be confused with Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven—the Second Viennese School, Schoenberg, Berg and Webern, that's to say, there too, a total break with what the public was accustomed to hearing, to put it simply.
25:14 but in a manner that's not only different but almost opposite to that of Stravinsky and the Russians in general. There, we're deepening the debate, it seems to me—I don't know what you think—but we clearly see the complexity of the task ahead of us, and he takes up the question: what do we call modern music? So, let's stay... Stravinsky's opposition was characterized by Adorno as emblematic—you had to choose your side, let's say, in his view. We can't not cite Adorno, it's good to have that reflex, who of course has to be thought through, but while choosing his side.
25:48 For him, Stravinsky is a false modern compared to Schoenberg. We're not even talking about the Stravinsky who returns to neoclassicism, we're talking about the Stravinsky... So yes, there, I would make the distinction, I can't lump them together. The Rite of Spring is dazzling, The Rite of Spring which still continues now to mesmerize and... That's there... Pulcinella, there, which are almost written in the manner of—in the manner of Vivaldi, in the manner of Corelli, in the manner of Rameau or Couperin—right, whereas the great innovators, the great avant-gardists of the...
26:27 Because I forgot, my mistake, while speaking—we suddenly see it, in the breaks I just listed, there—the Notre-Dame school, Monteverdi, Beethoven, Wagner, Debussy. French Impressionism in general and Debussy in particular is there too—looked at closely, we're forced to make nuances—before Debussy, before Ravel, before Fauré, the one who's always forgotten, Chabrier, who has a rhythmic audacity that none of the other three have, for example.
27:02 You have to listen to his Pièces pittoresques for piano, it's mind-blowing. Bourrée fantasque, for example. Bourrée fantasque, etc. Good. And then, every evening, people asked him to play his España, the hit of the time. Yes, yes. He'd play it a hundred times, breaking three strings, I mean, with a Lisztian technique. who said, that's music that's brashly, crisply content with itself. Well. We're not, we're really in post-romanticism, it's over, Chopin's sadness.
27:37 There. I haven't said a word against Chopin, who would also be a good candidate for certain pre-Tristanesque harmonic innovations. But let's get back to French Impressionism. I forget, I think it's the third movement of his sonata, where the harmony is completely called into question by Chopin. Wait, I'll tell you—the fourth. Fourth movement, of course, that's it, the last one. The sonata is in B-flat minor.
28:07 There, that's it, exactly. That is, it's mind-blowing because it's entirely in unison, it's ghostly. That's it, exactly. I can't play it, it's beyond me. Virtuosic. But it's at full speed, both hands doing the same thing right to the end, it's only in the final bars that, bam, there's almost a final chord and finally a vertical burst and a chord. No one had ever dared do that before. I'll allow myself to recommend, for the performance, an unjustly forgotten performer, the immense Brazilian—there's a great Brazilian school of piano, from which come, even now, the Latin American pianists first—also Marta Argerich as much as Miguel Ángel Estrella, who's less known but who had his hands crushed by a rifle-butt blow during the dictatorship era in Chile—I mean, a pianist who is a superb reference in Chopin, precisely.
29:01 of course, Claudio Arrau, a bit of—speaking of Chilean pianists, to name stars of the first magnitude—well, I won't list them all, but I'm forgetting there's an Anglo-Saxon-Brazilian name, anyway, one of the greatest. No, I'm thinking of this lady, Guiomar Novaes. I mispronounce Novaes, I don't know how to say it, it's spelled N-O-V-A-E-S, but I know of no better version of Chopin's second sonata. There, a somewhat poor recording but perfectly audible.
Homage to Rameau, Tombeau de Couperin: the return of archaism 29:35 I'll close the parenthesis. So, back to my French Impressionists. Yes, starting with them, something happens that will continue, and I come back to Adorno's critique at the same time. We're right in the middle of it. I don't quite share Adorno's critique. Again, I can't put—let me pick up my thread—The Rite of Spring and Pulcinella in the same basket.
30:05 But when I look at the pastiches—there's no other word—and there, I agree with Adorno, the remakes, if we want to be even more pejorative, of the second-manner, neoclassical Stravinsky, I notice that as early as the French Impressionists—there's the link between the two—there's a tribute to Rameau in Debussy, a tombeau of Couperin in Ravel.
30:35 It's not a coincidence, all this. Dominique, I've got an andante ostinato from my washing machine that's been beeping for five minutes. I'm going to turn it off. The washing machine won't wait. Back in a second. It's terrible for the listening experience. I hope it didn't come through. Don't worry about it. There we go.
31:06 That's part of the mishaps of listening, but I need to watch out for this... And on top of that, there's no way to stop it. So that... There. You're proving the most Nazi-like philosophers right. You're a slave to the machine. We could say that. No, no, I'm not being generous. It hasn't liberated us. It's enslaved us. Let's move on, leave it there. So, yes. This return of archaism—we alluded last time to this multiplication of neo's.
31:36 Tribute to Rameau. Tombeau of... It's a masterpiece. Careful, I'm not saying a word against it. I'm asking about aesthetic value. Tombeau de Couperin, hommage à Rameau. And even, we were talking about Chabrier in the Bourrée fantasque and all that—the bourrée itself is, after all, a reference to the dances, to the dance suites that will give rise to the sonata, and that you find in all the Baroque composers. There's always bourrée, gaillarde, pavane, sarabande. Right? So there's nothing more modern.
Modernity is born hating itself: Voltaire, Rousseau, Marx 32:07 Here's what I'm bringing now—the negation of modernity. Self-hatred of oneself as modern is fundamental. Here I'll lower my voice because we don't talk about it often. What's modern is also the massaging, the paradigms. Being modern is being ecological. It's hating the machine, industry, etc. Being modern, in that sense—I'm speaking now. Now, that goes back to the very beginning of modernity.
32:38 Wait, you're starting to wear us out. You say, how foolish is modernity. Now you say, there is a modernity. Yes, for me the only one, with precise historical markers, is the second half of the eighteenth century. That is, the two great industrial upheavals in England, political ones in France—economic revolutions in England, political revolutions in France. I'm not saying that one is the consequence of the other, that there's a link.
33:08 It's plausible. On the other hand, that would mean Rousseau is the consequence of Voltaire. That would be a total misreading. Because, precisely, in England there is no political revolution. Property isn't attacked. Right? Whereas Voltaire, in his Letters on England, begins, in the letter on commerce, by paying tribute to England, not forgetting the—well, I'm being a bit anachronistic, but I mean not forgetting an entrepreneur. There.
33:38 So he was part of it because he manufactured the... It's the famous letter where he says he brings happiness to the world through commerce. Ah, you know it well, it's the continuation of that period with an extraordinary rhetoric. It's in the Philosophical Letters. Yes, and in the one called Letter on Commerce. It's his first great publication, the Letters on England. It has to be said, it's brilliant in its praise. It's remarkable. So, here's the sentence, I'll quote it almost in full because it's basically a single sentence. In France, anyone who wants to be a marquis, and whoever arrives in Paris from the depths of some province, saying, a man like me, a man of my standing, can sovereignly despise a merchant.
34:16 Sorry, and whoever arrives in Paris from the depths of a province with a name ending in -ac or -ille—I'd say Couve de Murville, but nothing has changed—right? Can say, a man like me, a man of my standing, sovereignly despises a merchant. Yet I don't know which is more useful to his country: a well-powdered lord who knows exactly what time the king gets up, what time he goes to bed, while giving himself the airs of a slave in a minister's antechamber, or a merchant who from his office gives orders to Surat or Cairo, and who contributes—and that's the punchline—to the happiness of the world. And suddenly a thick drop of liquid gold has just fallen on the text there.
34:58 Gold in every sense. Surplus value, the merchant. Yes, we also see that globalization doesn't date from... The purse full of gold, but also champagne, the color of champagne bubbles, happiness, the keyword that unites Voltaire and Rousseau. Even though they're diametrically opposed on how to bring it about, we're no longer in religion, no longer in salvation. We're in happiness. Here and now, not after death. Besides, the one who will dialecticize them will be Marx, because at once, the Manifesto is a eulogy of capitalism as a destroyer of old values, and at the same time...
35:32 My God, how glad I am to say that. The social destructions [creative destructions]. There. I'm glad to say that because I don't want to name anyone. I could, but I mean, I hold—I find there are far too many divisions on the left of the left, and in particular among Marxists, too many useless divisions. There are agreements, agreements are fruitful. Divisions, no. Let me explain, there are those who, Marxists—well, who claim allegiance to Althusser, that narrows it down a bit, makes it a bit more precise.
36:03 Careful, because who isn't a Marxist, who isn't anti-capitalist these days? I ask you. You can't lump Victor Cousin and Georges Gastaud in the same bag. Victor Cousin—I like my slip of the tongue. Francis Cousin, sorry. I don't understand. Yes, yes, fine. Georges Gastaud. Well, no, but they all claim to follow Marx. Right, so, but here I'll be precise, in the Althusserian line, there are those who say Rousseau warned us that the beginning of industry is a threat, whereas Marx saw very clearly that the synthesis still had to be made, that Voltaire completely missed the political, and Rousseau missed the economic.
36:47 I'm a fervent Rousseauian, for me to say that—though, and here it's the Corsican speaking—in the draft constitution for Corsica, which along with the one for Poland is one of the extremely rare attempts to translate the Social Contract, which is nothing like a constitution, into a piece of political reflection. And a unique one, and so, Poland, Corsica, taking into account—there, Rousseau says, in his correspondence, and even in his unfinished draft constitution, because when a country is no longer sovereign, Louis XV's armies having settled the matter, there's no more need to draft it a constitution, alas—when Rousseau assesses the mineral resources of Corsica, because he wants to make Corsica sovereign, independent of the powers of this world, including the Russians—we're in the full Tsarist period—circling around Corsica, saying Corsica was the strategic spot of the time, the Middle East of the Mediterranean back then.
37:48 Everyone wanted their strategic base, the English, in any case. So, there, he becomes interested in industry, exceptionally. But otherwise, there's also a bit of the rustic, agricultural—well, the small landowner is his horizon, but he can't have... the Kingdom of France divided into just as many individual property owners with an equal plot of land. Yes, that's it. Rousseau's dream, that's roughly it. It's pre-industrial, let's say the word.
38:18 There, it's immediately pre-industrial. So, we're on the right track, historical modernity, you and I—whatever differences we may have, I mean not you and me, but all of our contemporaries, arising from these different civil societies, these middle strata and classes that didn't exist before the rampant urbanization that immediately follows the Industrial Revolution.
Diderot, Gauguin, Rimbaud: the paradises are those one has lost 38:49 Now, I'm stepping back, I'm no longer getting lost in the branches, I'm stepping back and looking at the forest. That's the modern world. With the emergence of the individual in his bubble, no longer caught up in the absolute totalitarianism—that's a contribution from Clouscard—of primitive society. I'm speaking like the ancients, who have nothing primitive about them aesthetically or morally, but who, on the other hand, can be primitive on a technological level. That is, it's measured in terms of working time. So, what's more totalitarian than a Bororo village?
39:25 There isn't a square inch—I'm turning into a peddler here—that isn't hyper-coded. And there, I enter the sacred wood, I deserve death, and there, watch out, that's the women's hut. That's why Diderot, with his Supplement to Bougainville's Voyage, imagining that all these people in the Pacific were completely liberated in the almost modern, leftist sense of the term, was an optical illusion, in fact. No, but Diderot is one of the first moderns. He hates his own modernity so much that he dreams of a utopia that would of course be set in the past, and that's what Marx will call Robinsonades.
40:03 Absolutely, yes, exactly. Yes, that's already Gauguin, in fact. But of course, of course. Since you mention Gauguin and you tempt me—there, someone who is one of the avant-gardists of his time in his discipline, after all, painting, his art, sorry. Well, what's his last painting? A Breton village under snow. Painted in Tahiti. Painted in Tahiti, yes, exactly. Right, yes. He's about to die in Tahiti and suddenly—but no, but suddenly—he's alongside Rimbaud.
40:35 It's not at all explicit in his mind. It means that paradises are always the ones we've lost, in fact. "I miss Europe with its ancient parapets." He ends up firing off Le Bateau ivre. He's drunk with his escape from Europe, from modernity, from all this. He's in the gulfs with giant serpents falling with dark perfumes, and suddenly, gold, gold, gold, gold—the break is there. "Gold, oh, lost boat, I who trembled feeling groan fifty leagues away, I who, I, the I"—the hyper-inflated "I" that begins with the preface to Rousseau's Confessions.
41:09 "I, eternal spinner of blue stillnesses, I miss Europe with its ancient parapets." Good grief! But the parapet is the opposite of the flood, it's solid! It's security! The parapet protects, yes or no? Yes, of course. You mentioned Gauguin, too bad for you! We're on the ground with a land to embrace, a peasant. But there! We're not in the detour, we're at the heart... Being modern—I pick up my refrain on this, which I'll allow myself to claim for once.
41:42 Being modern is hating modernity. But including me! I invite you to take a little trip, it's my anniversary of I don't know what, I invite you and I choose for you a little mill on the banks of the Cher or the Dordogne, whatever, I mean, I don't at all want it to be a McDonald's! Even if I'm told one of the best Japanese chefs was passing through a McDonald's, that's not the point! I want to be in a somewhat archaic setting, all archaic, the beautiful stone of the Dordogne, God knows how beautiful it is!
42:17 Modernity doesn't like modernity! That's what being modern is! I think it's saying that it's not only that, of course! But you have to understand that there's always something of that at the start, as an immediate reaction: there's a wound in modernity that seeks with all its might to return to a time when the wound wasn't there! Even if it means opening up all the Robinsonades, we'll come back to that! But in music, that's the case! Tribute to Rameau, picking up our thread again, Tombeau de Couperin, they make masterpieces!
42:49 And innovative, often, in these cases, they don't just repeat, they don't just do Rameau again! Even more, we hear the anapest which is really the Baroque rhythmic motif par excellence, right? Right from the start of Ravel's Menuet antique, for example, which is called the Menuet antique! Yes, that's it! Right away! Well, so, there, we've got the wolf by the ears!
Two meanings of the modern: the unheard-of and deep archaism 43:23 Stravinsky, coming back to Adorno's critique, I'll allow myself to make a small correction, a trajectory correction in the true sense of space exploration, to Adorno's critique, which I subscribe to, if it's just a matter of saying, well, Pulcinella after The Rite of Spring is nice, I like it, an afternoon like that, you see, while I check my emails, put on Pulcinella! But still, when you listen to Petrushka, the incredible progression that goes from The Firebird to The Rite of Spring by way of Petrushka, you can't say that Pulcinella continues this.
44:06 But, generally speaking, the two great currents—I come back to this now—that make up musical modernity now, let's say in the sense of music lovers, that is, the Vienna school on one side, which will soon give rise to dodecaphonism, first atonal music then serial music, etc. And, let's say, the national schools, of which the Russian one is by far the most important, of course, but I deliberately use a more extensive term, because Bartók, touring the Mediterranean and Europe with the first tape recorders of the time to compile all the rhythms, including in North Africa, owes nothing to Russia.
44:51 It's the Hungarian tradition. You can't say the Hungarian tradition is poor. On the contrary, rhythmically, it's prodigious. Right? And such as Liszt had preserved it in the rhapsodies, for example, I mean, which are a borrowing from what I don't want to call folklore, right? But from popular musics, not yet turned into pop spectacle. Maybe it was Liszt who turned the Hungarian rhapsody into a pop-culture thing. Because there are even cartoons about it...
45:22 All the way to Brahms, in the end, who popularized it. Brahms, he used to play piano bar. Well, he had no choice. It was poverty that pushed him into making crowd-pleasing music. When you're at a piano bar, you'd better not play German Requiems. There you really have to do things that please everyone, waltzes, and I'm quite glad he did. It gave him a very jazzy feeling. It was Shaw who said, about the German Requiem, "The only one who isn't bored is the dead man."
45:52 Just like that. Who said that? George Bernard Shaw. That's British humor. Yes, indeed. There's always a mystification at the end. No, but that's it. The same man who wrote The Perfect Wagnerite, by the way. Bernard Shaw. Yes, that's true, exactly, a great connoisseur. So, there. Now, what correction would I like to introduce? It's that, here, modern music, without passing judgment now, whether it's The Rite of Spring or Pierrot Lunaire, to take up two great fractures, two works that marked a turning point between before and after—the difference is that being modern for Stravinsky, and it will be the case for Messiaen later too, that's not what I said, well, that's it, there's a lineage taking shape.
46:38 It's not only about making a music strictly unheard-of, that is to say, music that the ear had not heard until then, as will be the case with Schoenberg. It's about going, on the contrary, to look for deep archaisms. That is to say, musics that spirit, in the Hegelian sense, had already heard, but that had been completely forgotten, in particular under Romanticism. I mean that when Messiaen uses Balinese gongs, and real philharmonic ensembles of, what's it called, gamelan, I was looking for the technical term, gamelan originating from Java, well, from traditional Indonesian music, to put it in technical terms.
47:18 The pentatonic scale in Debussy, for example. There? The pentatonic scale, in fact. Exactly, there you go. No, but we could multiply the examples. Each time, being modern here means making things resonate that had become, that had disappeared from the musical scene, but which are not new in themselves, if we take universal history. That's the corrective I'm introducing to Adorno. Whereas, and here he's right on the substance, Schoenberg, for his part, starts from what was most recent, most modern, that is to say tonality completely diluted by Tristan, by the score of Tristan, right?
48:00 And by pushing it to its logical consequences, which Wagner did not do, is to abolish tonality. And so, to arrive at, we had compared this to a dancer doing a dance routine in weightlessness in a space capsule, that is to say where there is no longer a privileged direction, a constraint of gravity such that all my movements must be ordered in such a way that I don't fall flat on my face, that I control my center of gravity. This problem is very well developed in Heinrich von Kleist's Reflections on the Marionette Theatre.
48:30 Ah yes, it's true that we would have talked about, I believe, yes, absolutely. There you go, so, very well, there's no longer the dictatorship of tonality, of gravity, if I do a choreography in a space capsule, which might give a choreographer ideas for making gestures that could never have been made on the ground, with the constraint of gravity. And conversely, to spin the metaphor further, there's no longer the dictatorship of the tonic in atonal music. Very good.
49:00 That is strictly unheard-of. So here, truly, two senses of modern. It means a break with my habits, without this, Stravinsky. My habits, mine, the European, bourgeois, Western listener who delights in Beethoven's symphonies, I say it now like a conservative, which isn't the case with Beethoven, but who is lost as soon as we step outside Beethoven's symphonies, roughly speaking, and for whom? Debussy, already, is the beginning of the end. Not badly put. For that bourgeois listener, listen, Balinese gongs, gamelans, and the pentatonic scale, that's savage music.
Non-folklorized popular musics: Kusturica, the griots, turquerie 49:34 It's a daring act. Yes, but relatively speaking, I'm saying. Not for the spirit. Yes, that's a big difference. So I think we've made a bit of progress since we asked the question, what do we call modern. Here, we have to choose. It's good that in a Kusturica film, we suddenly hear all sorts of traditional music because in the Yugoslavia that is the subject matter of his work, I should say, speaking like Montaigne, roughly, of his filmography, when there's a wedding, there's not yet the reflex to have a sound system or a hi-fi.
50:15 No, there are still living musicians who come from the surrounding area. Often they're friends, moreover, cantors, griots, bards, aoidoi, whatever you want to call them, but I mean they're there and they make the music that was still made under the old regime, what were called, Musikanten in Germany, fiddlers. There was a term like wandering musicians. It'll come back to me. Anyway. So. In Africa, for example, Thursday is for baptisms.
50:45 Sunday is for weddings, and the griots go from village to village. There you go. They play music for the baptism and with that, they've earned what to eat for the week. That's it. Exactly. The musician has a social function. Kusturica keeps that, at least, because there, popular musics, I come back to this, are not yet turned into folklore. As in Slavic countries in general. What's funny is that the Serbs were the ones who most opposed the Ottoman Empire.
51:17 And indeed, their music has instruments that recall Ottoman music anyway. Of course. It's really the most exotic, whereas indeed, two hours from Paris, as we used to say recently, you can go all the way to Mostar. To the point that turquerie became a musical genre. In Bretard's time, they said a turquerie. The Abduction from the Seraglio is a turquerie. The Sonata in A major is a turquerie.
51:49 But it starts with Lully already. With the great Mamamouchi, you mean. There's even a Turkish march by Beethoven that's less well known. But yes, of course. It reminds us, it's quite topical, that the friction between Christianity and Islam is a kind of constant since the creation of Islam, practically. Yes, that's it. Yes, exactly. And that there were Arab kingdoms near Grenoble, not far from Geneva. We always believe that at Poitiers, a decisive blow was struck and suddenly the Arabs flowed back into Africa. No, they stayed in Narbonne for centuries afterward.
52:20 Well, there you go. And that's still speaking to you today. Here at home, there's Tchota de Imori, Tchima de Imori, I mean, they are omnipresent. And I'm not even talking about our flag. The Corsicans may well push it away by saying it's the Moor's head that's been beheaded, come on. Anyway, it's on the coats of arms of the kings of Aragon, in fact. Maybe... Yes, of course. But on Google, Coat of Arms Aragon, Kingdom of Aragon, Sicily, there are four death's heads exactly like the Corsican one with the headband.
Beethoven does both 52:52 There you go, the period, in short, when Corsica was Spanish. So, I come back to my story of the two senses of modernity, either going to make people hear music that is more and more strictly unheard-of, which innovates in an absolute sense, that is to say without any prior equivalent, which is what Schoenberg does, what Beethoven does. Or, you make us hear, and Beethoven does both. Beethoven also does crude things.
53:25 You see, in the peasant scene in the Pastoral Symphony, which is modal. Because in the countryside, we're in modal territory. A Bruegel wedding. It becomes interesting. Beethoven knows both. He does strictly unheard-of things in his quartets, in his last sonatas in particular, but not only. In Beethoven's second manner, take the Archduke Trio.
53:57 There's hardly anything more, almost, pop, lighter, more champagne bubbles, more Viennese than... We're in the midst of a dance, there. It's a little scherzo and suddenly, you see...
54:27 But it's Schoenberg. Suddenly, you see... a fugue! A fugue built on a motif of exacerbated chromaticism, there, in this scherzo. It's his trio, at the center. An angel passes, or a demon, we'll never know. That, that's strictly unheard-of, what he makes us hear there. And even in the early sonatas, the... Opus, I believe... Opus two, it's a bit more...
55:00 At one point, it starts turning completely around us. That's the thing. It becomes... Yes, and then there are rumblings, droning, and contrasts that we dared... They used to teach in conservatories that there shouldn't be too big a gap. You can't have, in the same measure, low notes, whatnot, and crystalline high notes. It's not proper. You have to play in the middle. Yes, it's like in the question of how you have to construct volumes through shading. But there you go! That was scandalous. Medio stat virtus, no? Isn't that the formula, I think.
55:31 Yes, exactly. Indeed! That's classicism! Beethoven is... it's like that! So, contrasts in pitch, contrasts in dynamics, contrasts of slow, fast, forte and piano, it can suddenly be a brutality, Beethoven. The multiplication of musical events, that's a symptom of... Exactly! The proliferation, absolutely! So precisely, since you're talking about the multiplication of musical events, let me take the opportunity to come back to our poor Schubert.
Schubert according to Gould and Richter: repetition or hypnosis 56:10 Well, you could tell us about Schoenberg, Monteverdi, Wagner, I'm resuming my list, Wagner, Beethoven, well, there could be a little competition, it would be incredible! who was the most moving in the whole world. But not Schubert! I mean, Schubert! It's pretty, it's magnificent, it's wonderful! It's very moving! But still, I mean, what conservatism! Right? We really see it, it's what Gould says, in his famous testimony on Richter's art, where he says, from now on, I have a confession that's a bit hard to make to you, I don't like Schubert.
56:43 One of the greatest pianists of the century who still has the courage to say I don't like Schubert. Well, I always found, implied, I won't go into it because it's another subject, before hearing Richter. I suddenly understood Schubert, but anyway, let's move on. But I'd always found there was a mawkishness, repetitions, right? So, since he doesn't want to be too harsh either, he doesn't say, but harmonically, what is that compared to Chopin? Objectively, it's so magnificent, that was practically like ending the Cold War.
57:14 That a Canadian would say that about a Soviet, by way of a German from the Romantic era, that was really, it's like stopping the missile war. There really was... You said that better than you think, because he's making one of his journeys, as if nothing were happening. Because Gould was a complete paranoid, he dressed in white because in case of a nuclear attack, he thought he'd survive by dressing in white, it would reflect the heat, whatever nonsense. That is to say, it was completely neurotic. But precisely, when he arrives in Moscow for the first time, he doesn't want to sleep at the hotel the Soviets had assigned him.
57:46 He says he'll be spied on, whatnot, poisoned, and he asks to sleep at the American embassy. There you go, the Cold War, you said that better than you think. So, for him to go so far as to say, 'But a Richter, he's the greatest medium of our time.' With him, I understood that what I called repetition in Schubert is hypnosis. And so, I'm getting there, I'm holding my thread. Come on, let me pick up on hypnosis. Yes, through repetition, it's like that.
58:24 No, that's not what he does. The resolution, that's not it. Which sonata was it again? The last one, the first movement, the longest movement sonata ever written. Right? So Gould says when Richter attacked it at a hopelessly slow tempo, I said to myself, I'm going to be bored. He doesn't put it that way, but it can't be possible. It's the longest sonata ever written. The first movement is endless, he takes it at a slow tempo, and that's when I had the revelation.
58:54 Right? But, right from the start, what's that? What's that? It's incredible, that. Me, at first, I swear, personal confession, I said to myself, what did everyone get so caught up in there? I mean, there are pianists who play things much harder than that. So there must be, maybe, I don't know the score well, I hadn't worked on it at the time. Maybe in fact we think it's easy to listen to like that but there's a very difficult finger position and everyone gets a bit stuck.
59:29 I thought they got so caught up that it's incredible, that note. Right? No, it comes back throughout the whole movement. Right? And we expect the resolution. Sorry, you see, I can't manage to... No, it's... A little appoggiatura. Before reaching the F, we wait for the dominant, there's... A minor second.
The sixth Moment musical: the clearing 59:59 The worst of dissonances in our scale of sounds, there's nothing smaller than the half-tone. Well, that's why I say Schubert is modern, because that, in almost every composer, we saw it in Bach earlier, there. We also saw it because it seems, yes, that's it. Passing, incidental. No, it's not just that. True, yes, absolutely. Yes, there, it's recurrent. It's the dissonances. There you go, there you go, it's not just that. I'll take as an example now the sixth Moment musical of Opus 94.
1:00:29 It's incredible. There, I'm going to, I'm removing two fingers and keeping the others. That is to say two, E-flat and two D-natural. Deal with that.
1:01:00 Well, so in this sixth Moment musical, I counted four fundamental ruptures over two pages, on one sheet. There, here's the sheet. There you go. Here's the first page. Right? It's not long. There aren't many notes. And here's the second. Right? Up to here at the end. Through which we pass, I'll quickly go through to the end.
1:01:34 and afterward, two lines later. But what's this? It wasn't a key that the opening led us to expect at all. Not at all. And afterward? What's this major, what is it? Well, it was in full minor, desperate. Without warning, without preparation, in conservatory terms, a preparation.
1:02:07 A preparation is that before making such a break, you make a passing chord to warn us. No, no, here, we're in minor, right, it's dark. Already, there's a chord of a second. And there, and there, major. In a few seconds, the two modes are brought together, major, minor.
1:02:40 And it's like that the whole way through, at the end, well, afterward, there's this turn of events. I'll start again. And I go on. What's this E major, what's it doing here suddenly? Yet another modulation, a third episode. And there, it ends like that.
1:03:31 I skipped some passages. These are incredible modulations. In just, all that, in a tiny number of measures. Right? And it keeps going. It keeps passing from major to minor right up to the end of the episode. In this sense, this piece has neither precedent nor sequel. It's the famous clearing I talk about in Schubert, there. I end up at this clearing and they never leave it.
1:04:02 So it's like a black hole, except that I'm calling it a clearing. It's a bit paradoxical. You can't get out of it, just as light can't escape when trapped in a black hole. But here, no, it's a plus of light, not a minus. Light so paradisiacal that we never leave it. But it's also deadly. As Rimbaud would say in A Season in Hell, but its sweetness too is deadly. But you mean, we lose the Beethovenian agogics? Exactly. What's missing, it's such a summit of lyricism, Schubert.
"One must attempt to live": from the lyrical to the dramatic 1:04:36 It's perhaps, without a doubt, the most modern of the lyricists, that's where I'm going to end up, that as a result, we lose what is vital, the dramatic element. Drama means action. So I want to say with respect to... I don't want to say a word against Schubert. Right? It's fatally attractive, this quasi-supernatural beauty at the summits of Schubert's music. But, beware the song of the sirens. It comes at the price of wrecking the ship on the rock, and the Lorelei.
1:05:08 Sirens or ondines. I mean that we want to answer like Valéry, the poet. No, no, standing in the succession of eras. One must attempt to live. And there, Valéry is reacting to a whole decadent, symbolist poetry, moonlight, the impalpable. I'm being a bit hard on it. But the posterity of Mallarmé, Mallarmé has genius. But when it becomes Henri de Régnier or Albert Samain, there are very beautiful things.
1:05:40 My parents conjured up the prestiges by fleeing again into remakes. It's a homage to Versailles. There you go. All that Chinese porcelain that the young Rimbaud, arrived in Paris, finds in Banville's house, which had taken him in, and which he smashes to pieces by leaving a foul-smelling gift in one of them. I mean, there's something, I'm going far here.
1:06:13 there's something vital that demands the return of the lyrical to the dramatic, that is to say, to action. One must attempt to live, standing. Standing! Whereas what's characteristic of Romanticism, the first expression of modernity, is that one often lies down on the mountain in the shade of the old oak at sunset, sadly, I sit down. That's how Lamartine's Isolation begins. And it had already begun with Rousseau. When evening approached, I would come down from the heights of the island and would gladly go sit by the edge of the lake, on the shore, in some hidden refuge.
1:06:46 There's something that makes one tired. It would take a bold engineer to pick up the torch again and return to action. It would take a Tondrama, a lyric drama in Wagner, at the moment we had reached, let me shift a bit, not toward the decadent side of the symbolists, because there is still the advantage of being somewhat avant-garde, but toward a bel canto operatic style where we marveled at the vocal feats of the prima donna without paying much attention either to the libretto, which was preposterous, or to making the audience weep, or to the harmony, which was meager, or to the melody, which, apart from summits like Bellini and so on, was often stingy.
1:07:42 It's true that what you're describing there, to come back to Valéry, is a conception of classicism as Romanticism overcome. There's a classicism that doesn't just latch onto Romanticism. His exact word, I believe, is tamed. Classicism is a tamed Romanticism. No, but that's it. That's it. Overcome, moreover, translates exactly, perhaps, the famous Aufhebung. Yes, exactly. Yes, it's a way of... Since it also means to lift up, of course. To rise. Exactly. Well. One must attempt to live.
1:08:12 To the point, I had a friend who had proposed, whom you know, Salim, who had proposed 'the relief' [la relève], which isn't bad for Aufhebung. It's Derrida who did that, but it's a very good... Yes, the changing of the guard. In the sense of the term, when you relieve a soldier of his duty and you lift something up. on the theme. There you go, even Buckingham Palace, the changing of the guard. Exactly. So, there you go, I mean, there's still a conflict, there, between being buried in the lyrical instant.
Schubert and Debussy want to stop time 1:08:43 Here, I'll get more and more precise about our elements of music history. things as different, even opposed, as a Moment musical by Schubert, a prelude by Debussy. Really, they have nothing to do with each other. It's really the harmonies of Debussy. You see, Debussy, you could find Schubert a bit like, whatever you want to call it, TQQ, mawkish. Well, we're not yet at the rediscovery of Schubert as with the great performers of the 20th century. But, what's common to both is that we want to stop time.
1:09:14 As for me, I'm on time, yes, that's it. And there we go. Debussy is searching for the absolute chord. Yes, that's certain. A chord so velvety that you never want to leave it again. Yes, it hadn't been done like that yet. And there, one must be fair. Ravel is more agogic. Ravel, Caval. Caval, and he's criticized for being motoric. As will be said later about the Russians. Precisely, the motoric was also a trap, one that corresponds so well moreover to this modernity.
1:09:48 Personally, I find that Debussy goes a bit further. For now, I don't want to back that up. When I say personally, I don't mean I'm not sure. I mean, I don't want to prove it. But Debussy — I quote Richter. Richter said there are three who went further than all the others. Ah, who is that? What's Richter's top three? Of all the composers. He's talking about composers. There are three who went further than all the others. So, guess — as chosen by a pianist.
1:10:18 Chopin, my word, it's the height of gratitude that a pianist puts Chopin in his... Chopin, Wagner, Debussy. What kind of thing is that? The choice of a pianist, Popov, is Soviet. Wagner, Debussy, Chopin. It's extraordinary. And we understand what he means. Because it's no doubt... I wonder if it isn't — setting aside Gieseking, who is the reference for Debussy and whom I still find unmatched today.
1:10:48 Still, Richter's version of Debussy's Preludes is stunning. Let's say there are three versions. I don't want to hold forth as a record critic. But anyway, there's Michelangeli with his hyper-maniacal side for Debussy's Preludes, playing to not a hair's breadth but a thousandth of a hair's breadth. I mean, the nuances of pedaling, of things, I don't know. There's Michelangeli, Gieseking, and Richter, whom I'd rank perhaps. Careful, there's Samson François, all you want, Marcelle Meyer.
Beethovenian agogics and the pitfalls of action 1:11:20 These three, it seems to me, stand above the rest. Let's leave it there. This is for those following us, in case they want to illustrate the point. And all this is easy to find. So it's a matter of freezing music in an absolute instant. It's the opposite of logic, as you said. That is, of the permanent relaunching of action.
1:11:50 This is very important, what we're seeing right now. Because Beethoven is going to be exactly — you see my slip — exactly the opposite. When you look at this sonata, it begins like this. There's nothing innovative. There's no beautiful melody like in Schubert, a beautiful lied. Right? It's someone waking from a daydream, yawning.
1:12:25 It sounds like an improvisation throughout this sonata movement. The whole way through. Because it's constantly relaunched by an agogic. As soon as a little motif appears, it clings to it to launch an agogic, what in analysis is called a progression. So here we have a new dichotomy between being modern on the lyrical level and being modern on the dramatic level.
1:13:05 And which I've connected to things that are at stake in modernity — between succumbing to deathly temptations, which is one aspect of romanticism, because when Valéry says one must try to live, careful, that's romantic too, careful, he wants to be anti-romantic. But that can lead to fascism. There's enough of these apartments, I saw that in Drieu La Rochelle, of this bourgeoisie shutting itself away with its trinkets, one must strike a great blow into the anthill.
1:13:38 So instead of action, of true action, there can be the conviction — inseparable from value. And yes, I come back to the practice of morality, I mean of the good. It's not just activism. Logic mustn't be, it's not activism. We see there are formidable stakes lurking around this issue in the history of music.
1:14:08 Must one make music so beautiful that one doesn't want to go beyond it, shutting oneself in like — and the virgin rose closes again, jealous, over the pearly hornet it intoxicates as it dies. That's Musset's Nuit de Mai, it's not bad. I find that elsewhere. Nobody reads Musset anymore, whereas all schoolboys used to read that, somewhere between masturbation and tears, in an earlier era. Isn't that so?
1:14:38 Well, Rimbaud mocks it somewhat. But Baudelaire called Musset the languorous mortician. But there are masterpieces like Nuit de Mai: and the virgin rose in spring closes again jealous, thus like a venomous trap. That's why I say deathly. Over the pearly hornet it intoxicates as it dies. Both die. The rose because the other stung it to death. The hornet is trapped by the petals. It's extraordinary. Yes, that's what I was saying — the dying couple.
Hölderlin, Rousseau and the reverie of Lake Biel 1:15:13 There is this temptation in romanticism. It's not an aesthetic critique. It's a moral critique in a very ethical sense. It's like Tristan and Isolde. That's really it. But there. I say beware. Beware. We're heading toward what Freud calls the death drive. Returning to primitive inertia. What does Hölderlin say? But forward, backward, we do not wish to see ourselves rocked like a wavering skiff upon the sea. And by the way, I was thinking, this break, it is...
1:15:48 It's also the break of the French Revolution because it's a political break. There were those who were caught in nostalgia and those whose... drive pushed them all the way from Valmy to Waterloo, precisely pushing... the Great Intermission, what I call the Great Intermission, where we're no longer in the Old Regime, and not yet in the New one, which will be Anglo-Saxon after Waterloo. We're in between, where the die is not yet cast. Yes, it's... It's funny that you mention the Revolution, that you trace it back from my...
1:16:18 forward, backward, we do not wish to see — because that's almost exactly what Hölderlin says, word for word, what the earlier Rousseau says in the Fifth Walk. We are always ahead or behind in life. We're never in the present moment. To justify his reverie on the lakeshore, which is a kind of self-annihilation. We mustn't forget though. There's no Valéry beside him saying no, no, get up, one must try to live. No! No, no, because the poor old man, in his life, people came to tear down his house, the laundry, sorry.
1:16:52 He came fleeing in haste, barely saving his skin, onto the island, entrusting his last manuscripts to good — I've forgotten his name — Roguin, I believe, in Neuchâtel. He keeps with him on the island only the Confessions, which had just begun, and the Constitutional Project for Corsica. He has every right to doze off by the lake, poor old man, to catch his breath. Right? Without either Thérèse's shrieking, or the rather monotonous conversations, sorry, and so on.
1:17:23 Now, what does he say? From time to time arose some faint and brief reflections on the instability of the things of this world, of which the surface of the waters offered me the image. So here he becomes a bit active again. I think, I reflect. From time to time arose some faint and brief reflections, even if faintly. Well, there's a small return of active mental thought, and all of a sudden, but soon — these impressions, that's a much more modern term than reflection, pictorially — but soon these light impressions themselves faded away, and I quote, word for word, into the uniformity of the continuous motion that rocked me and which, without any active participation of my soul, did not fail to hold me so that I could not tear myself away without effort.
1:18:11 Now, end of the sentence, we can close it there — what does 'without effort' mean? It means someone is calling me? Ah, it's dinner time, a horn, a bell, I don't know, so that, called by the hour and the agreed signal, I could not tear myself away from there. I was in the process of annihilating myself, passing from reverie into dream, into sleep. Rocked by the hypnosis of the waves, the ebb and flow of that water, its continuous sound but swelling at intervals and so on. So, since the very birth of modernity, we learn it at its source — that's the case to say it — it's the water of Lake Bienne.
From Rousseau to Proust and Nerval: between the Enlightenment and romantic night 1:18:47 Musical modernity — yes, I do mean musical — Rousseau's prose, as much as Rousseau, in competition with Rameau, doesn't measure up in terms of notes and scores, let's be clear, as much as through his prose he is far more modern than Rameau — what does modern mean? We bounce right back to it. Rousseau's prose announces Proust. Rameau's music. Right up to that drowsiness where everything is told to us, it begins with...
1:19:17 I see you're drawing the parallel, it really pleases me to talk with someone who has that reflex, because the very beginning of the Search — and God knows how long it took him to find its beginning, since he started over five hundred times before finding it, anyway — what was written last is what all of the Search begins with. 'For a long time I used to go to bed early.' There follow nearly three pages where he stays in bed, saying it seemed to him he was dreaming, when in fact it was just that his leg, his thigh had folded — he's in exactly, exactly the state Rousseau is in, which Nerval will characterize as a half-drowsiness.
1:19:55 When you consider that a drowsiness is a half-sleep, there's nothing more — that's Nerval's language — meaning it's a quarter of sleep, right, a half-drowsiness. 'Plunged into a half-drowsiness,' says Nerval, 'all my knowledge passed again through my memories.' It's the same state, this state that inaugurates modernity, where one hesitates between night and day — you'll see, I'll be very precise — between night and day, between waking and sleep, between Germany and France. And I come back to Rousseau — we're in Switzerland. We're almost right at the linguistic border.
1:20:26 What do you mean, right at the border? I went there, I was seventeen, hitchhiking, it was my first big hitchhiking trip, my goodness. Right? I set off from La Neuveville, that doesn't sound Boche. No, not too much. Right? You take a boat, in less than ten minutes you land at Erlach. With a nice CH, right. There, we took a tour there when we shot the DVD in tribute to Rousseau. Erlach — how Germanic it was, everything, the houses, the details — whereas La Neuveville, look, you can see it right there, across the way, on the opposite shore.
1:20:59 So it's not a coincidence. If the text that inaugurates modern prose, which will herald Chateaubriand, Flaubert, and Proust — modern music, well, music metaphorically, in prose, but still, it's not far off, it's something made to be heard too — the topos where this modern music appears is a path between the French Enlightenment and the German romantic night of Novalis, for example.
Rousseau, the only synthesis of the lyrical and the dramatic 1:21:31 As for me, I don't believe in coincidence. A tribute to Switzerland, to our Swiss friends indeed, for having as a fellow citizen a figure who managed to hold onto the lucidity of the Enlightenment. And there, I thank Castoriadis for putting the word 'lumière' [light] in the title of his major work. 'Lumières communes.' Because he makes clear that it's a tribute to the Enlightenment and to the Paris Commune, of course, but to the Enlightenment.
1:22:04 against which all the resentment of nineteenth-century bourgeois modernity is exercised. It's Voltaire's fault, it's Rousseau's fault. Of course. And it's not only the bourgeois frightened by the barricades in Paris who will think that. The one Hugo caricatures — that's not it. It's also the whole of intellectual modernity, even someone like Thomas Mann in his youth, before the catastrophe of the Reich, was a conservative, etc., who thought that…
1:22:37 And even Hegel, in a way, when he says that the fault of the Revolution was to have made a revolution without making a reform. There is, in a way, a critique of the abstract side of the Enlightenment, of its somewhat one-sided side, the side of the understanding. Abstract universalism, in fact. There. I'm nodding to philosophers of a linear progressivism. And even Marx, in a way, takes a little swipe at the Enlightenment when he replaces d'Alembert's mechanistic materialism — perhaps the most exhaustive expression of Enlightenment thought.
1:23:16 Exhaustive, I mean — read d'Alembert's Preliminary Discourse to the Encyclopédie and you truly have the manifesto of the mechanistic empiricism that will govern all of positivism up to today, up to cognitive science. Namely, that all reality is divided into simple elements, simple things, and composite things. There we are. It's generalized atomism, it's civil society.
1:23:46 We can see the stakes here. Now, when Marx replaces this mechanistic materialism with a dialectical materialism, he too shows that there was something unfinished in the Enlightenment. Except... Even if that also passes through Kant, German idealism, which is itself a defense... Precisely, except for Rousseau. Rousseau is the only one who holds — I pick up my thread — who managed to write, at the same time, the Fifth Walk and the Discourse on the Origin of Inequality.
1:24:18 Julie, or the New Heloise and The Social Contract, the lyrical and the dramatic, the individual and the collective. Our Rousseau. Which means that when Clouscard wrote — and you had a really good idea to redo the title, because it was a bit enigmatic for ordinary mortals — of modernity, 'Rousseau ou...' — Sartre... Or Sartre, yes, it's 'A Critique of Libertarian Liberalism,' yes. But that was with his consent. He used to spend his time telling me, to explain how it started. It's true that this title is very beautiful and ultimately very illuminating.
1:24:49 Yes, but it's a bit for insiders. But let's go ahead, precisely. He used to say, damn it, we had Rousseau, why did we go looking for Sartre? When you see, with Rousseau, where we could have started again, rebounded at the Liberation, for example. And... thanks to the greatest sacrifice a people — several peoples, in fact, the Soviet Union — ever made for humanity, it's the sacrifice of the Red Army and the Soviet people, but it's a civilian one too.
1:25:21 Well. When... it's thanks to this, in part, that we owe, together with the French Resistance, which was, I should say, complicit, as good comrades, that we owe the advances of the greatest government there ever was here, in France, with what? The Popular Front and then the Liberation government. There aren't 36 of them, there were times like that. Pay-as-you-go pensions, Social Security, health insurance. But wait, what am I recalling here?
1:25:53 That, in a way, it's a fruit of history — that at the Liberation, we could have gone back to Rousseau, who is uncompromising on equality, who is uncompromising on property. He doesn't yet talk, Rousseau, about means of production and exchange. Well, Rousseau wouldn't have systematically nationalized your toothbrush or your wife. No, no, people were frightened with talk of communists who would take your... First it's the community of women, that's true, that was in the early nineteenth century.
1:26:25 And then afterward, yes, it was the community of toothbrushes. I look at all the heresies, all the people burned as Cathars, as Vaudois, as Hussites. And, a bit less known, in Corsica there was an offshoot of that, the Giovannali. All burned, in a church in southern Corsica, in the Alta Rocca — I mention it as an anecdote — all of them, likewise, each time accused of sodomy, it goes together, of community of women — which really means community of goods, since the first good, according to Marx himself, is woman. Yes, absolutely. In the 1844 Manuscripts, the first division of labor is man and woman.
1:26:58 Well, so there we are, it's serious, the stakes involved. With Rousseau, we could have set off on a modernization, a modernity strictly unheard-of before Rousseau — that is, there is the immense advance of the Enlightenment which pulls us out of barbarism, let's be clear. But with what the Enlightenment lacked, good grief — the unconscious, reverie, half-sleep, music, the Germanic side of Switzerland, or the Protestant side of Rousseau, however you want to put it.
Does a music of synthesis exist? The young Schoenberg, Sibelius 1:27:31 It's the concrete universal, there, we're getting at... But there, we could have started again. So, I hold to that a great deal. I mean, there isn't much music that holds both together. Right, yes, I understand. Rousseau achieves the synthesis — is there a music of synthesis to match Schubert? Is there a music as modern as Rousseau's work, to the point that it remains still unconquered? Almost still ahead of us.
1:28:04 I was about to say, well, that makes for a fine program, in the end, if one wanted to be modern, absolutely modern — it would finally be the synthesis of the lyrical and the dramatic. Let me think — there are the works of the young Schoenberg. Of course, I think there are many candidates, but at the same time... But what is more romantic than the Gurre-Lieder in the history of music, from a musical point of view? The most romantic work in the whole history of music is probably the Gurre-Lieder, or Verklärte Nacht, well, that whole period.
1:28:34 It's paroxysmal, even, at that level. Right? So maybe there, there are... The early Schoenberg, ultimately, that's it. Yes, who doesn't go back on the gains of a Debussy, very good, right? But who takes no account at all, on the other hand, of the national revolutions, that is, of the other form of modernity. Let me recap what we've said. Essentially Russian, not only — Grieg, Bartók, the other one, in Romania, the master of Lipatti, Enescu, an immense musician, too little, not enough...
1:29:11 Who did you say? At the Russian school, we went off to the Russian school. Sorry? We set off toward the Russian school, quite simply, but... As for the Russian school, let's not even discuss it — but there, there's not a single name, whereas elsewhere there's generally one name — there's Grieg in Norway, there's Sibelius in Finland, right, with a special mention. Sibelius stands out. The Czechs, obviously, yes. No, but let's dwell a moment on the case of Sibelius, because he occupies a singular position, he doesn't settle for... Grieg, I like Grieg very much, but often it's very pleasant, he brings out an old Norwegian theme for you, a dance, Anitra's Dance, there.
1:29:50 What's funny is that they say it's Norwegian, and I forget the name — 'Morning Mood' from Peer Gynt — it's supposed to depict him waking up in Morocco. One might think it was exotic, when in fact, we're always refined about it. It's there — it's become popular beyond belief. Yes, of course. As a jingle, whatever you like, on cell phones. But as you say, precisely because it travels everywhere. There's nothing specific to it. On the other hand, there are quite a few turns of phrase. Whereas with Sibelius, there's no compromise at all.
A music at once unheard-of and popular: Hegel's ladder 1:30:22 Sibelius uses all the advances that existed in his time. There's no regression at all. That's interesting. All while making music that sounds classical. Why? Because he draws heavily on popular material. And that's the dimension that was missing, and I'd like us to conclude on this — that every time, the modern risks becoming deathly when it cuts itself off definitively from popular listening. Careful, I'm not saying that music isn't good when it isn't popular.
1:30:58 I'm going to say the opposite of what I want to convey. Otherwise, Madonna would be the greatest musician of our time. No. I say Madonna, or I am [sic], it doesn't matter. It can range from rap to techno to Sinatra. Just look at the sales of something like 'Strangers in the Night.' Well. But what I'm saying is that there mustn't be a rupture either. And there, I come back to it — we touched on this last time thanks to our reflection on Lévi-Strauss, a critical reflection.
1:31:31 is that you have to stay in tune with a scale in the musical sense. So we're in the domain of the code, not of the message. A scale that allows a listener who has no musical culture to climb up. Exactly. And to reach the summit. That's an image I borrow from Hegel, in the preface to the Phenomenology, when he criticizes the esotericism of Schelling and company, that the absolute isn't made for everyone.
1:32:06 It has to be reserved for an elite, truth, etc. And Hegel is... The intellectual intuition reserved only for an elite of... That's Schellingian intellectual intuition. That's where... Those who prized it in art and all that, well, I won't go back over it. Hegel is furious about it. Here he's magnificent. And by saying... Like Descartes with good sense being the most equally shared thing in the world. Exactly. And that's why he rehabilitates Descartes's philosophy of consciousness. And that's why I jumped on Kant when he alluded to it, but we'll have to come back to it, because it goes through Kant, the thing opened up by Descartes before arriving at Hegel.
1:32:41 But I come back to it when Hegel says that... The task of philosophy is to raise common consciousness to philosophical knowledge and to bring philosophical knowledge down to common consciousness. And for that, it has to give it the ladder. It's he who says "the ladder." That it gives the ordinary reader the ladder that allows them access. Well, that's a good one — there's nothing more unreadable, sorry to speak bluntly, than a text by Hegel.
1:33:12 Yes, except that when you look closely, it's a bit strange. There isn't a single technical word. That's very rare. In Kant, there's nothing but that. Ask a first-year philosophy student what the apagogic is, and they'll stammer a bit. In Kant, there's nothing but that — the apagogic, the ostensive, the synthetic judgment. There are technical terms all the time, very democratically. Kant, precisely, gives you the ladder, he says "I call this the apagogic." There, he gives you the rule, the definition, before using it.
1:33:42 But really, it's teeming with them. Whereas when Hegel tells you "the pure porosity of matters," you understand nothing. But each word taken separately is ordinary. Pure, porous, matter — all of that is very concrete. There. I'll close the parenthesis, but it's still our same problem. Right? A piece of music has to be both unprecedented and popular. That's a strange dialectic, a strange tension. It has to break with the public's habits, right?
1:34:12 But excite it at the same time. Well, that's not easy! At the same time, I thank you, because I see we've moved out of this business of taking music, obviously, cum grano salis, and we're heading toward an aesthetics — without of course substituting ourselves for the creators, but in any case, it amounts to seeing an art of poetics after all. You mean sell? Toward an art of poetics, in fact, toward a new one.
Petrushka and collage; modernity hates modernity 1:34:43 Oh yes! I mean... These are markers and... It's a norm, so to speak! Well, more a suggestion, I think that's how it should be taken, but it's absolutely fascinating. We can't give it free rein. Exactly, right, quite so. Not very constraining. But maybe it also comes out of a repetitiveness and a certain stagnation of the period too. So there, that gives... When you listen to Petrushka, you hear at the start the barrel organs in the great fair at Nizhny Novgorod. You hear "She Had a Wooden Leg," you hear that tune played by the orchestra.
1:35:19 And that's the very modern technique in the visual arts of the period, the technique of collage. Over avant-garde, post-Debussyist harmonies, you paste in a song that runs through the working-class districts. Of course. Yes, it's cubist, exactly. So, there, I'll leave the problem for now — not unexplored, because we've cleared quite a bit of ground, but I mean it remains pending. It's that something has happened.
1:35:49 In the world — I still maintain, though, something, well, allow me to insist because we don't hear it often, so I'm driving the point home. Let's never forget this dimension of modernity, to which it isn't reducible, and to which it's desirable that it not be reduced, but which, empirically, sticks to its skin: modernity hates modernity. Its first reflex is to flee modernity. That's what being modern is. There. I'd like us to conclude on that today. Dialectical shift.
1:36:20 Ecology, early-music enthusiasts, same struggle, regionalism, right. We can talk about that next time. I'm going to stop the recording, and then I'll get back to you. Okay. I'm cutting the recording. I'm going to stop the recording.
