Of all the qualities of a professional musician that an amateur wonders about, the ability to imagine the sound without the aid of an instrument—simply by reading a score—ranks first. How can they mentally transcribe the written code and hear, in absolute terms, not only what it means but what it represents? Are they so certain of this mental representation that they can refer to it without any possibility of error, without reality coming to contradict it in any detail—or even to refute it entirely? When we begin learning music theory, we learn to listen analytically in order to be able to transcribe a musical object presented to our attention; this involves copying a reality, comparable to a basic drawing lesson: we reproduce melodic intervals and chords in the same way that we reproduce a cup or a spoon; The notation system works differently, but it is the same type of operation. Later, when taking composition classes—harmony, counterpoint, fugue—the first recommendation, if not an obligation, that one must follow is to avoid relying on the sound itself: “Don’t use the piano to help you, or you’ll never be able to hear.” You must first remove that reference. Hearing, moreover, is not limited to this single negative injunction; it means much more than imagining a hypothetical musical object: it means visualizing the network of precise or satisfactory relationships that must be established between a given element and the consequences that must be found and correctly defined. If you’re given a melodic line, you’ll have to find a harmonic accompaniment that fulfills the functions implied by that melodic line: since these functions are simple, it’s relatively easy to decipher the code they follow and from which they derive; when they’re more ambiguous and complex, various solutions may present themselves, which you must invent and hear in absolute terms. Although the composition technique taught is intended to be vocal, in fact, these exercises take place in a sort of sonic vacuum, ultimately verified by the teacher at the piano, who will sometimes reward you with a “didn’t hear it”—a damning remark that makes you realize just how little your inner hearing has yet to grasp reality. You have not heard the object or the relationship between the objects; it does not hold up when embodied in sound. After training of this kind—rigorous in its virtual representation of objects—one is certainly inclined to agree with Mallarmé when he conceives of the flower as the one absent from any bouquet. The musician might refer to the note absent from any object.
Such training may seem absurd and appears to deny what is most essential to the musician’s gift: knowing how to engage with the sonic material, since the exercise in abstraction imposed upon them does not seem to lead them in the most direct way to this inevitable confrontation. Behind this training, however, lies the ambivalence that will be the composer’s lot throughout their life; he writes in a coded language that refers to a reality he understands and masters. When the notation does not reflect a perfect accuracy in the relationships between sounds, one realizes that the musician’s perception is, in some way, flawed, for one reason or another: the deficiency lies either in a mistaken assessment of the objects themselves or in a misjudgment of their relationships. In any case, the imagination involved in perception has not functioned correctly. One must therefore refine the experience and identify the reasons for the failure, until imagination and reality coincide completely through a correct projection of perception. Yet at this stage of learning, we are speaking only of very limited acoustic relationships. Listening is entirely dominated by the codes of language; no element that might disrupt this absolute order is permitted. Musical dictations are based on classified, recognizable objects, using a perfectly refined musical instrument—in this case, the piano. The ear becomes accustomed to hearing through a certain prism; it may be unsettled, hindered, or even completely thrown off balance by the presentation of sounds that no longer allow it to orient itself according to its usual reference points. In fact, if you shift from analyzing a chord played on the piano to analyzing a multiphonics sound produced by a wind instrument, or a sound produced by any percussion instrument, you will experience difficulty adapting due to the very nature of the sounds presented to you. Some belong to a relatively well-defined category, where the instrument plays a lesser role compared to the code; others tend to elude any system whatsoever due to the extremely individual nature of their components, with the means of production being stronger than the hierarchy—or tending to dominate it. There is a huge difference between abstract relationships and concrete relationships.
I call abstract relationships those that we truly wish to dematerialize, and concrete relationships those that are, strictly speaking, inseparable from the material. Could we say that the former obey a hierarchy and the latter escape it? The problem is sometimes as simple as that. A perfect chord on the piano is the most obvious example of a musical object that is easily grasped, instantly dematerialized, and immediately linked to a hierarchy, to a set of functions. Hierarchy and set of functions need not be expressed: they lie underlying, evoking in us a multitude of resonances—both emotional and theoretical—the proportion of which depends as much on education as on imaginative impulse. Of course, this classified object is presented to me through the piano’s timbre, but when heard in isolation, it is not its timbre that matters to me, but its structure: I perceive it as a whole or analyze it without further regard for its presentation. At most, what might bother me is the inadequacy of the instrument conveying it: if the piano is out of tune, the discrepancy between the real object and the immaterial object could be felt as a barrier to the perception of the ideal object enshrined in its hierarchy, and if my ear is sufficiently trained, I might note the specific flaws that violate my imagination; the reality I perceive will be conceived as a deviation of the concrete from the perfection of the hierarchy. This deviation may also carry emotional connotations: enough has been said about out-of-tune pianos—and their so-called perverse charm has even been exploited, as by Berg in Wozzeck, among others—for me to refrain from adding to this list. But let’s return to the perfect piano and that no less perfect chord presented to me through it: I have thus instantly dematerialized it. Now, I take any old tam-tam, preferably a low-pitched one. Suppose I strike it with some force; I will produce a sound whose complexity will, of course, be perceived as a whole, but whose analysis will prove infinitely more difficult. Returning to the perfect chord, I think of the stability of its elements, which allows me to perform a quick and complete analysis. With the tam-tam, a complete analysis is difficult; and a rapid analysis is even more difficult: the sound is composed of partials of varying importance, whose instability tends to elude me, and whose internal hierarchy resists simple categorization. Of course, these acoustic phenomena also occur in piano sounds, but the class of the object takes precedence over its individual acoustic properties; On the contrary, I must make an effort to identify the purely acoustic characteristics of such a chord, whereas its perception as an element of the musical vocabulary is immediate. As an element of the musical vocabulary, I have absolutely no idea, upon first listening, how or into which category I might classify the sound of the tam-tam; the acoustic properties strike me first, and present an almost insurmountable obstacle to identifying it as a lexical element other than one superimposed within a hierarchy to reinforce, decorate, or create a sense of confusion in relation to clearer elements—in short, to identify an aggregate function for it. With patience and attention, I could analyze the components of this tam-tam sound, but they are so distinct, so individually grouped and blended, that I can only acknowledge this individuality, which inevitably defies any generalization: which compels me not only to reflect on issues of perceiving more or less complex objects, but also leads me to observe the disparity—even the incompatibility—of the sound objects that the most commonplace world makes available to us. The abstract relationships that our education teaches us to conceive will have to contend with concrete relationships that are anything but simple, that are fluctuating, and to which an order—not to mention a hierarchy—will have to be imposed with a certain amount of difficulty.
P. B.