Before Sound: Re-Composing Material, Time, and Bodies in Music 9783839468869

Table of contents :
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1 Beginnings
Introduction
1.1 Elements and Matter
1.2 Aristoxenus’ Elements of Music
1.3 Transmission and Reception
1.4 Elements, Letters, Notes
2 Matter and Material
Introduction
2.1 Dissonant Material
2.2 Sound and Composition
2.3 Given or Constructed?
2.4 Timbre, Noise, and Language
3 Time and Rhythm
Introduction
3.1 Material and Modernity
3.2 Taking Place
3.3 Aperiodic Rhythms
3.4 Quasiperiodic Forms
4 Sounds and Instruments
Introduction
4.1 Pitched Bodies
4.2 Sounds without Bodies
4.3 Reference
4.4 Agent and Reproducibility
4.5 Sonocentrism
5 Musical Bodies
Introduction
5.1 Bodies without Sound
5.2 Composing a Gesture
Conclusions
List of Works
Abbreviations
Reference List

Citation preview

Tiziano Manca Before Sound

Music and Sound Culture | Volume 64

To the memory of Anna Maria Aprile (1944–2015)

Tiziano Manca

Before Sound Re-Composing Material, Time, and Bodies in Music

Katholieke Universiteit Leuven / LUCA School of Arts, Associated Faculty of the Arts (2022)

Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available in the Internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de © 2023 transcript Verlag, Bielefeld All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. Cover layout: Maria Arndt, Bielefeld Copy-editing: William Tatge Printed by CPI -- Clausen & Bosse, Leck Print-ISBN 978-3-8376-6886-5 PDF-ISBN 978-3-8394-6886-9 https://doi.org/10.14361/9783839468869 ISSN of series: 2703-1004 eISSN of series: 2703-1012 Printed on permanent acid-free text paper.

To my mother

Contents

Acknowledgments  xi Introduction  1 Impetus · Questions · Problem · History · Aim · Structure

1  Beginnings 1.1 

Elements and Matter  11

Terminological Note · Plato on the Elements of Language and Music · Aristotle on Genesis and Production 1.2 

Aristoxenus’ Elements of Music  17

Phthongos · Protos Chronos · Synthesis 1.3 

Transmission and Reception  21

Ptolemy · Martianus Capella · Boethius · Medieval Theorists · Sound and Number 1.4 

Elements, Letters, Notes  28

Asymmetry · Vox Articulata vs Vox Confusa · Speaking without Voice · Speech, Music, and Writing · Nota

2  Matter and Material 2.1 

Dissonant Material  37

The Emancipation of the Dissonance · Obsession with Material · The Necessity of Dodecaphony · Adorno on Twelve-Tone Technique · History and Society 2.2 

Sound and Composition  43

Contradictions and Consistency · The Single Sound and its Timbre · Pitch and Duration · The Primacy of Pitch 2.3 

Given or Constructed?  51

Whose Material? · Material and Corporeality · Material, Subject, History · Material Fetishism · Creatio ex nihilo · Elements and Composition

Before Sound 2.4 

Timbre, Noise, and Language  60

Two Paths to Freedom · Adorno on Musical Language · Sound as Material of a Language · The Color of the Tone · The Emancipation of Sound · Material, Work, and Language · Any Sound is Musical

3  Time and Rhythm 3.1 

Material and Modernity  70

Control, Expansion, Exhaustion · Subjectivity vs Experiment · Subjectivity vs Material · The End of the Grand Narratives · Material and Complexity 3.2 

Taking Place  75

Matter and Time · Outside-Time Architectures · Persistence · Discontinuity · En flottant · What and That 3.3 

Aperiodic Rhythms  87

Rhythm without Melody · Non-Predictable Rhythms · Flatus vocis 3.4 

Quasiperiodic Forms  96

Non-Isochronous Meters · Non-Isochronous Forms · Nel labirinto · Retrospection

4  Sounds and Instruments 4.1 

Pitched Bodies  114

Rationalization · Sound and Movement · Aristotle on Sound, Voice, and Bodies · What is an Instrument? 4.2 

Sounds without Bodies  119

Timbre and Bodies · Emancipation of Timbre from the Instrument · Sound-in-itself 4.3 

Reference  122

Abstraction and Concreteness · Acousmatic Music and Visibility 4.4 

Agent and Reproducibility  125

Exact Durations · Reproducibility and Singularity · Noise Pollution 4.5 

Sonocentrism  128

Sound to the Exclusion of All Else · No Music without Sound

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Contents

5  Musical Bodies 5.1 

Bodies without Sound  133

Are Acoustic Instruments Obsolete? · From Instruments to Bodies: An Artistic Project · A Precedent · Tension 5.2 

Composing a Gesture  139

What is a Keyboard? · A quattro mani · Sui moti apparenti

Conclusions  159 List of Works  165 Abbreviations  169 Reference List  171

ix

Acknowledgments

This book is a slightly revised version of the doctoral dissertation I completed at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven in 2022. I would like to express my special thanks to David Burn and Paulo de Assis, members of the supervisory committee, who followed my work with attention and intelligence, also granting me the necessary time and freedom to develop the present text. Bob Gilmore, who unfortunately passed away in 2015, was also part of the team. I owe it to the generous invitation of Peter Dejans, Director of the Orpheus Instituut of Ghent, that I could devote some years of my life to this study. Working at the Orpheus Instituut has allowed me to work independently on my research as well as to organize and attend seminars and study-days useful for my investigations. I was able to discuss with other researchers and artists, even indirectly, some of the themes addressed in this book. My thanks must be extended to all of my colleagues of the Institute, in particular to Tom Beghin, Nicholas Brown, Jonathan Impett, Catherine Laws, and Luk Vaes. I am particularly grateful to Lucia D’Errico and Ellie Nimeroski, who were both attentive readers of this work. I also wish to thank other colleagues and friends of mine—musicians and not—with whom I had the pleasure of discussing the topics of this research: Patrizio Barontini, Donatella Bartolini, Gianmario Borio, Corinne Diserens, Paolo Giudici, Fabio Lombardo, Cecile Malaspina, Luigi Manfrin, Catherine Perret, Eleonora Rocconi, Xavier Le Roy, Dorit Tanay, Jean d’Yvoire, and Christophe Wavelet. My deepest and heartfelt gratitude goes to Christine Meisner. Finally, I would like to thank composer and pianist William Tatge for his invaluable copy-editing work.

xi

Introduction

Theoretical reflection which mediates intellectually between earlier and later stages of the individual or intersubjective ‘work in progress’ proves to be inescapable; and indeed reflection in a form which cannot refrain from verbal formulation and publicity, from dissemination amongst the public which is interested in New Music. A subjectivity which wishes to speak solely in sounds because words are superfluous or even misleading will perhaps at some stage come to the depressing conclusion that it has nothing more to say, even in sounds. Carl Dahlhaus (1984) 1987

Impetus. Composers have often combined artistic production with theoretical reflection aimed at systematizing and explaining the constructive principles underlying their works. Some important examples from the last century include the writings of Arnold Schoenberg (1874–1951), Henry Cowell (1897–1965), Harry Partch (1901–74), Olivier Messiaen (1908–92), György Ligeti (1923–2006), Pierre Boulez (1925–2016), Karlheinz Stockhausen (1928–2007); other examples from the less recent past could also be given. Composers feel the need to reflect on and express the reasons behind their making usually in moments of transition (real or perceived as such), moments in which a certain compositional practice is about to end while another is about to open up. Conversely, there is less need to conceptualize one’s own language or style when a certain practice is well established, and is recognized and accepted by the public; or when the general situation of composition comes to find itself historically in a moment of stagnation. The end of the avant-garde movements marked the decline of a period of intense theoretical reflection, thus giving way, in many cases, to a falling back to a sheer practice. Carl Dahlhaus (1928–89) believed that composers not only could but should express themselves publicly about their work, suggesting that those who shirk this duty do so because they have nothing to say even with sound alone ([1984] 1987, 283). I have always accompanied my compositional work with writing about my thought process and its possible implications. This theoretical activity, however, remained mostly aimed at the preparation of each specific composition, and took place in a rather private and intimate space. This research, instead, stems from the desire to rethink and share, after more than two decades of activity, some of the themes and motifs recurring in my work. In order to imagine further developments of one’s own artistic practice, it may be useful not only to reflect on its current state but also to go back in one’s mind to the moment in which it came to define itself, to the ideas

Before Sound

that animated it, and to the composers to whom it referred and from whom, at the same time, it tried to differentiate itself. Questions. My early compositional work drew on the experimental instrumental and electronic music initiated in the 1960s. During this period, composers started to question traditional music (but, in part, also serialism) not only in terms of structures or configurations but also in terms of the sound material itself, seeking to explore the timbral dimension of sound (and noise). At the end of the 1980s, that is, at the beginning of my training as a composer, this research and experimentation on sound had reached complete maturity in the work of composers such as Helmut Lachenmann (b. 1935), Gérard Grisey (1946–98), and Salvatore Sciarrino (b. 1947). Especially in instrumental composition, the research on sound material had developed to such an extent that it left little margin for further invention. Thus, I was led to ask myself if and how it was still possible to continue the investigation of sound initiated by the previous generation. Rethinking my compositional activity today requires going back to that moment in order to reflect both on the question of sound that marked the avant-garde so deeply, and on the way in which I have tried to come to terms with its liquidation since my first compositions in the 1990s. From the foregoing considerations, the fundamental questions that underlie this research project are: What is the relationship between music and sound? Or, more specifically, what is the relationship between composition and sound in contemporary art music? How has sound been conceived and interpreted in modern and contemporary music? In what ways did this conception of sound influence or determine the compositional developments which led to the problematic situation of the 1990s, and in which we still find ourselves today? How did I articulate this question at the beginning of my artistic practice? What consequences does it have in my more recent work? What perspectives does it open up for the future? What is it still possible to compose? In what follows, I will try to narrow down and detail the ways in which I understand all these questions. Problem. A research question can arise from (and for) artistic work because of an obstacle or a problem internal to the work itself or because a conflict between the work and the outside world. Thus, post-war composers (particularly Stockhausen and Boulez) justified their research and musical practice by pointing to a series of alleged contradictions between the ideas to be fulfilled and the state of the available material. In one of the first reports in which Stockhausen reflected and informed on the progress of his work, the composer motivated the necessity of research and experimentation with the quest for a new sound material suitable to a new idea of form: One can no longer count on the immediate idea of sound (Klangvorstellung). The idea of sound is determined by all music that one has previously heard. If this idea were to have validity again, then one would have to resign oneself again to classical form. To

2

Introduction think in a way that is appropriate to the material: agreement of the laws of form with the conditions of the material. The idea of new form is not compatible with the conditions of the old material. One must therefore seek a new material. Then one must strive to realize pure intellectual note-constructions with new material even despite the danger of achieving many more negative than positive results. One will have to undertake very many sound experiments and the necessary relevant studies. The acceptable results will shape a new idea of sound, which can again provide support for composition. For a long time to come, composing will have to be at the same time researching. ([1953a] 1963, 32; emphases mine)

Stockhausen seems to advocate almost for a suspension of creative activity: composing will correspond to the search for a more appropriate material, experimenting with different note combinations until the desired result is reached. Unlike for the serialist composers, the reason for undertaking the present research today is not a problem inherent in the material itself as it currently stands. Today—as at the moment when I started composing—the question about material does not arise in the sense of determining a new material suitable to new compositional ideas (we no longer have any new note combinations or new timbres to search for or experiment with), rather from the very notion of material, which has become problematic. The avant-garde composers’ aesthetic program of musical renewal reached a critical stage in the last two decades of the last century, when—as Carl Dahlhaus already noted in 1982—it no longer seemed possible to think of musical composition and innovation through the innovation of material ([1984] 1987, 279). Following the naturalization of sound material, for the first time in the history of Western music it seemed no longer possible to think of musical invention starting from sound invention. The struggle with this impossibility gave rise to the pure reaffirmation of the priority of the subject as completely independent of the material. The very notion of material no longer appeared relevant to the understanding of the latest compositional practices, and the term “material” came to generically indicate the mere starting point of composer’s activity. My music and the thoughts conveyed in this book all arise from the same problem, that is, they deal with the difficulty of thinking about the very notion of material in music today. History. Composition is a historically founded practice, that is, it is a practice determined by questions prefigured, if not fully formulated, in a more or less remote past. Composers who today want to understand their own compositional practice and project it into the future, must necessarily come to terms with the end of the avant-garde movements and their legacy, viewing these movements in turn from a historical perspective (which does not mean annulling their relevance and consequences). This is especially true of the notion of material. It was (and often still is) a widely held opinion among the protagonists of New Music that the term and the notion of material entered the discussions around music

3

Before Sound

only after the dissolution of the tonal system. French composer and film theorist Michel Chion (b. 1947), for instance, believes that the term material, designating what the composer works with when composing, appeared in Western music as soon as it was no longer satisfied with the classical elements: notes, themes, lines, arpeggios, chords. . . . As soon as music wanted to widen, as one says, its components, either by differently combining the sounds of the classical instruments (for example with the invention of the ‘cluster’), or by modifying their playing techniques, or by resorting to new sources of sound . . . these classical terms were no longer sufficient. One started to speak about sound blocks, sound complexes, sound blends, and most often of “material.” ([1991] 2009, 31–32; emphasis in original)

The opposite is true: philosophers, musical theorists, and composers of the Western tradition have always conceived of the relationship between music and sound by resorting to the notion of material: the material of music is sound. In the question of the relationship between music and its material, which was so radically addressed in the twentieth century, Western music meets again its constitutive moment. Therefore, in order to understand the reasons that prompted post-war composers first to reflect on material and then to distance themselves from it, but also in order to imagine a possible future for music, it is necessary to examine the question of material looking beyond the twentieth century, back to the moment the very notion of material was first defined. The basic assumption of this study is that it is not possible to understand the relationship between music and sound nor the idea of the materiality of sound without first addressing these issues from a broader historical perspective, that is, without first revisiting—even just succinctly—the history of the interrelation between sound and the notions of matter and material in music. Artistic research requires a type of archaeological digging that does not shrink from going all the way back to Greek philosophy of music—not in order to restore some lost original moment but, on the contrary, in order to better understand and overcome notions and practices defined in the past but still operating today. We need to return to the reflections on music that took place in Greece at least from the fourth century bc with Plato and Aristotle’s definition of material, and then investigate how this notion penetrated Western culture and reached the composers and theorists of the avant-garde. For me, this meant discovering or revisiting ancient authors (for instance, Aristoxenus, Ptolemy, Boethius) who have deeply shaped our conception of music and sound, from which I tried not so much to gather information about various musical systems or about the historical evolution of the material available to the composer, but through which I tried to understand whether the material of music is ultimately to be found in the notions of pitch, timbre, or sound-in-itself, that is, what the relationship is between musical sound and sound in a physical sense. Thus, it is not about studying the different configurations of musical material throughout history, but studying the notion of material itself, its genesis and its application in music. When reading side by side the writings of recent or contemporary thinkers and those

4

Introduction

of the ancient ones—of whom we often do not even know what music they listened to or had in mind—it soon becomes clear that we have nevertheless inherited a certain vocabulary, which we then transformed and often used to express completely different things. The elaboration of the problem of the materiality of sound involves a clarification of the concepts that we use to think of the position of sound within musical practice and, consequently, a reconsideration of the very terminology that has served throughout history to describe sound, its qualities, and its relation to form. The language we use to think about music can often shape in turn the way we compose, play, and listen to it. The need to re-examine the first formulation of both the notions of material in general and musical material in particular stemmed from some reflections that Dahlhaus ([1984] 1987) and Jean-François Lyotard ([1996] 2009) developed independently from each other—without, however, going into depth—to explain the relationship between the two notions of material on which the controversy in the twentieth century focused: material as natural sound and material as historically and socially determined. According to these authors, the latter conception of material as that which is already preformed by human action corresponds to material proper, whereas the idea of sound yet untouched by human action actually corresponds to the notion of matter. The need to develop further research in this direction is also confirmed by other more recent studies indicating that the root of the twentieth century discussions around material are to be found in classical Greece thought. According to Erhard Roch (2002, 141), for instance, Theodor W. Adorno’s (1903–69) abstract conception of material can be traced straight back to Aristotle. Moreover, Albrecht Riethmüller (1994, 148) complains that in the field of aesthetics the distinction between matter and material has never been fully clarified, and that a better investigation of it would have spared us many misunderstandings. This book is, therefore, a first step in questioning the philosophical and artistic premises on which sound has built its distinct position within music, and thanks to which music has ended up becoming the art of sound. The task I have set myself is to uncover the sonic substrate that underlies the birth and development of Western art music and contemporary music—in other words, to make manifest the relation of necessity that these musical traditions have established with respect to sound and its production. This historical approach I speak of should not be mistaken for a conservative or nostalgic one; on the contrary, I am convinced that there is innovation only to the extent that the artist—even if unconsciously—is willing to listen to the questions posed in the past. A new compositional practice becomes possible only by trying to understand the historical reasons behind the question, so dear to the avant-garde, of the foundations of music. The fortune (and, if we consider its marginal position in today’s musical landscape, the failure) of New Music is linked precisely to the radicality with which it posed the question about its own foundation, or what was traditionally thought to be its foundation, that is, its material, sound.

5

Before Sound

Aim. The question about the relationship of music to its sonic material should be considered an artistic question, in other words, a question that directly concerns performers and composers no less than musicologists or music philosophers. From the composer’s point of view, however, it should lead to imagining how to rethink sound in view of a different musical practice. The issue at hand does not arise simply from the purely theoretical need to explain something that is already in place: even more than the music that is, it concerns the music to come. This research, then, is not merely limited to understanding how music has been and is defined in relation to sound, but rather attempts to envision what music might become; its ultimate goal, in other words, is to ask how musical composition could be reconfigured in response to this problem. As a composer, whenever I seek novelty in sound, what I am really looking for is a sound not yet heard as music. In “Vers une musique informelle,” Adorno also recognized this moment of sound’s otherness: “The fundamental material . . . is not simply the subject in its own right; it also contains the element of what is alien to the subject, the element of otherness. Every musician who comes into contact with physically pure sounds is aware of the shock he experiences” ([1961] 1998, 287). In this sense, then, what I am looking for is not a (re)definition of the relationship that is universally and definitively valid. I will not describe criteria for determining how sounds should be combined or constructed; neither will I describe conclusive criteria for determining which sound is musical or not. I am not searching for new material. To inquire about music’s relation to sound is to ask not how or when sound becomes music, but when sound is instead not yet music or, if you will, how material resists form. In attempting to understand the connection between music and sound, I am actually trying to understand whether we are today still given the possibility to experience the extraneousness of sound. To reflect on what exactly links music to sound means, at the same time, to find out if there is still a distance between them, and whether it is still possible to distinguish them from one another. It is about searching through musical practice not only for structure but also for what is perhaps not (yet) structurable. The only apparently clear and obvious character of the conviction that “the material of music is sound” and the frequency with which it recurs throughout history raise a suspicion: does this formula not really prescribe, more than describe, a certain state of dependency of music on sound? It is not only a matter of understanding how the position of sound with respect to music has been and is being thought of, but whether this link is fundamental to our thinking about music, that is, whether sound is indeed the essential element for the creation of music. If postwar composers were looking for a sound that was not yet musical, today it is a matter of reflecting upon the very fact that music is made by sound and, conversely, taking into account the “musical” that is not sound.

6

Introduction

The question that such a problem poses to composers and musicians today cannot be trivially practical or technical in nature, that is, it cannot simply be what to do starting from this problematic situation, but rather how to assume and thematize the problem itself in the artistic work. In connection with the underlying theme— sound and the materiality of music—the ambition of this text is not to challenge composers’ sonic imaginations, but rather their very conception of music: to think of composition not so much as the invention of a sound yet unheard but—if it is true that sound has been completely exploited and exhausted—as the suspension of sound and the invention of the inaudible; the question is not how music could sound (or how we could still listen to it), but what we could experience. If the relationship between music and sound is not defined once and for all, but—as has been repeated from Schoenberg onwards—is instead subject to historical and social becoming, then we should also ask ourselves whether this relationship itself should be reconsidered. To say that the material has a historical character does not simply mean that it transforms over time, but that sound comes historically into being as the material of an art. In a nutshell, the purpose of this study is to turn the inherited affirmative sentence that says: “the material of music is sound” into a question: is sound the material of music? Can sound still constitute that experience of otherness that is the necessary premise of any creative practice? If not, could it be possible to imagine music composition beyond the use and exploration of sound? Structure. This book is divided into five chapters: chapters 1, 2, and 4 outline the conceptual and historical framework for the aesthetic reflection on my compositional practice and the analysis of some of my pieces, which I develop in chapters 3 and 5. Chapter 1 studies the conceptualization of the relationship between song (melos) and voice/sound (phōnē) carried out in classical Greece by Plato, Aristotle and Aristoxenus; then it examines Claudius Ptolemy’s reworking of this theory, and finally its reception and transmission in the Latin world especially through the writings of Martianus Capella and Boethius. The relevance and difficulty of this topic lie in its close connection to other subjects: on the one hand, the conceptualization of the relationship between music and sound is inextricably linked to that between language and sound (and therefore to grammar); on the other hand, the theorization of language and music takes place simultaneously with the elaboration of the concepts necessary to think about this very issue, in particular the theory of elements and compounds, and the theory of matter and form. There are good reasons to argue that these two theories have their roots, at least partially, in the attempt to think of language and music in relation to sound. I therefore seek to answer two sets of questions: (1) What does it mean for Greek thinkers that pitched sound is the element of song just as the letter is the element of speech? What is the criterion for distinguishing pitched sound from sound in general? What does it mean that voice/ sound (phōnē) is the matter of music? Clearly, to address these questions we must also tackle other, more general questions: (2) What is meant by “element”? What

7

Before Sound

does it mean that something is an element of something else? What is meant by “matter”? What does it mean that something is the matter (or the material) of something else? The chapter closes by briefly addressing the role that notation played in conceptualizing the relationship between music and sound. It is possible to argue that the notion of element and the related theorization of speech and song were developed in relation and in contrast to writing, particularly starting from the distance that separates speech from writing. Consequently, the question arises as to what role notation played alongside and after writing: that is, whether notation was also fundamental to conceptualizing music in elements. In Western thought, the relationship between music and sound—as well as composition itself—is always explained using the notions of element and compound, and of matter (or material) and form. Chapter 2 explores how twentieth-century modernist composers also employed these notions to reflect on their own practice, partially reinterpreting them in light of the new discoveries around sound and the development of new technologies to control it. In order to understand the different usage of these terms by the avant-garde and the problems related to them, I have chosen to look at three moments or issues that I consider fundamental in the history of twentieth-century music: the emancipation of the dissonance as conceived and realized by Arnold Schoenberg; the emergence of electronic sound synthesis and the composition of timbre in serialist composers, particularly Stockhausen; the debate between those—particularly Pierre Boulez—who argued that sound should be understood as the material of a musical language, and those—particularly John Cage—who instead intended to uncover sound-in-itself. The discussion of these three themes is contrasted from time to time with the positions developed by Adorno, who, as is well known, always stressed the social and historical character of musical material. After having outlined the question of the relationship between music and sound in Greek thought and its reformulation during the twentieth-century, in Chapter 3 I examine some of my early compositions, their context, and the reasons for their conception. In the late 1980s, when I began composing, the process of emancipating the material yearned for and advanced by the early twentieth-century avant-garde seemed finally to have reached its conclusion. This sense of completion stemmed not only from the feeling that anything was now possible, but also from the absolute control over sound material that composers were able to exercise thanks to technological development—a material no longer determined historically by inherited rules nor by instrumental possibilities, but by the ability to manipulate the internal constitution of sound. Contrary to what Adorno had argued, it is no longer possible for the composer to receive artistic indications from the current state of the material. In my opinion, the crux of the problem in this process of discovery and emancipation of sound lies in the distance between the composer’s material, a material that is abstract by its very nature, and the temporality of the taking place of sound. In my artistic practice, this has brought me to reflect on the contrast between

8

Introduction

the composer’s inherently abstract material and the temporality of sound, its transitory character; whether and how it is possible for the composer to try to highlight this transitory dimension of sound. That the material of music was able to achieve its full emancipation only after and thanks to the latest technological developments shows that the very way in which composers conceive of material is not independent of the instruments of sound production (and preservation). For this reason, Chapter 4 examines what kind of conception and use of bodies corresponds to the ideas of material illustrated in the first two chapters. The rationalization of music that has taken place in the West ever since classical Greece would not have been conceivable without thinking of the sound body as an instrument, that is, without subjecting the body to a purpose. In the twentieth century, the introduction and development of electronic instruments allow the absolute control of sound in all its dimensions, especially in timbre, precisely because they completely remove the traditional sounding body. Thus, the very idea of sound material corresponds to nothing but the control of the movement that produces sound and, therefore, to the control over the sounding bodies. From the critique of the traditional conception of musical material and the corresponding subjugation of bodies, an artistic project emerges: contemporary music becomes the ideal place to think not only about the materiality of sound but also about the definition and use of bodies. In the fifth and last chapter I thus return to my compositions, to the problem from which they arise and to which, at the same time, they try to give an answer. In relation to the ideas developed in this book, over the last few years I have tried to draw conclusions from the development of technology and its consequences on the current role of musical instruments. I have found stimulating a compositional perspective that consists in overturning the paradigm that has traditionally governed the relationship between sound and the sounding body in music; this perspective consists in considering the instrument not so much as a tool destined to the realization of a work composed from an abstractly defined material, but including it as the main object of compositional practice. It is a matter of thinking not so much of the sound material but of the instrument and its interaction with the musician’s body and gesture, (almost) to the point of excluding the sonic event.

9

Chapter One

Beginnings

The relationship between music and sound has always been a constant concern in the Western tradition. Since its earliest beginnings in ancient Greece, music theory on one hand grounds musical practice on the investigation and knowledge of the nature of sound, and its production and propagation, while on the other hand it makes the distinction between sound in general and a sound specific to music. I will deal with the relationship between musical sound and the sound of nature mainly in chapter 4. In the present chapter, instead, I intend to study how the philosophers and thinkers of classical Greece define the characteristics of musical sound and its organization in the melos. This conceptualization of musical sound lies at the center of a rich and intricate web of thought emerging contextually to the study of the sound of language. In order to understand how musical sound is thought of, I first examine how Plato conceptualizes melody and the elements of which it is composed in relation to his theory of compound and elements; then, I consider how Aristotle defines the notion of element, as well as his doctrine of matter and form. This set of thoughts finds a complete and new elaboration in the musical theory of Aristoxenus, who clearly delineates the elements of harmony and rhythm. I then give a succinct account of Ptolemy’s conception of musical sound and how all these ideas were received in the Latin world, particularly in Martianus Capella and Boethius. The chapter closes with some reflections on the function that writing and notation have played in the conceptualization of sound as an element and material of music.

1.1  Elements and Matter Terminological Note. Before entering into the detailed study of how melos was conceptualized, a terminological clarification is required. Ancient Greek had a wide range of terms indicating sound: in particular, it designated sound in general with the term ψόφος (psophos), while the term φωνή (phōnē) could mean both the human voice and sound in general. When referring to the elements of which a melody is composed, ancient Greek music theory used the term φθόγγος (phthongos, plural phthongoi), which is commonly translated as “note.” A phthongos could be ὀξύς (oxys) or βαρύς (barys), two adjectives that today are translated respectively as “high” and “low.” Both the translation of phthongos and that of its qualifiers deeply distort Greek thought, superimposing on the original meaning of these words another meaning

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that they would only acquire much later through musical notation. The “note,” in fact, indicates at the same time both the element of which music is composed and the graphic sign that represents it, whereas the term phthongos is to be related (as Boethius and Hucbald correctly understood) to the verb φθέγγεσθαι (phthengesthai), which means “to speak loud and clear.” The same is true of the pair oxys/barys: the modern terms high/low presuppose the ordering of notes on a “scale,” of which the notes make up the different steps. On the contrary, in ancient Greek musical theory, phthongoi were ordered according to the opposition of “acuteness” and “graveness”—a characterization that many Latin languages still preserve today and that, in fact, was also once part of the English language. For this reason, in the present text, I prefer to retain the Greek term phthongos and translate its qualities (or substitute them when quoting someone else’s translation) with the terms “acute/grave.” Plato on the Elements of Language and Music. To study how a sound specific to music was demarcated and, at the same time, to understand the sense in which sound is considered the material of music, we need to go back to Plato (ca. 428–ca. 347 BC). The philosopher deals with the idea of the composition of language and of melos in two dialogues, the Sophist and the Philebos. In the first one, the Visitor discusses with Theaetetus how things blend together or not. It is like in the case of the letters of the alphabet (γράμματα, grammata): some letters come together, others do not. Above all vowels (τὰ φωνήεντα, ta phōnēenta) ensure a bond (δεσμός, desmos). They are the specific aspect of the human voice as language: just as in ancient Greek the words phōnē and phōnēenta, and in Latin the words vox and vocalis, also in English “voice” and “vowels” are etymologically connected, vowels being the specific feature of the voice. According to Plato, the same goes for the acute and grave sounds of music: some sounds are able to join together, others are not. And, as only those who know the art of grammar know how letters merge together, so musicians are the only ones who know which sounds can be combined, generating higher units not by chance but following a precise technē (252e–253b). In Philebos, the affinity of grammar and music is developed in a more elaborate way. In reference to the question of whether pleasure or knowledge is to be preferred, Socrates discusses the ideas of “one” (ἐν, en), “many” (πολλά, polla), and “how many” (ὁπόσα, hoposa). He introduces the topic with much caution, because, despite being very simple to explain, it is not easy to apply: this knowledge is a divine gift that has reached mankind through a Prometheus. In order to clarify these ideas, Plato avails himself of the concepts of “limit” (πέρας, peras) and “limitlessness” (ἀπειρία, apeiria): “Whatever is said to be consists of one and many, having in its nature limit and limitlessness” (16c). For each thing one should first of all search for one form (μία ἰδέα, mia idea) and then for its exact number (ἀριθμός, arithmos). One has to treat every unit in this way until one has found “the original unit that it is one, many, and unlimited, but also how many kinds it is” (16d). Only then it is permitted to release each kind of unit into the unlimited and let it go. Socrates sets out to demonstrate with some

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examples how one should start from the unit and reach infinity, passing through counting the number of its instances; and, vice versa, how one can start from the limitlessness and identify the unit through the identification of the exact number. To illustrate this process he makes use of the letters. Human voice is both one and infinite. (Plato uses the locution “the sound (phōnē) that comes out of the mouth of each and all of us” [17b] to univocally indicate the human voice, since, as I said at the beginning, the term phōnē can also refer to sound in general.) Yet, true knowledge is acquired when one comes to know the exact number of the letters. The same applies to music. “Voice is also one in this art (technē), just as it was in grammar.” “We should posit grave (barys) and acute (oxys) as two kinds, and equal pitch (homotonon) as a third kind” (17c). True musical competence is acquired when one has learned how many intervals (διαστήματα, diastēmata) there are in the acute and the grave, what character they have, by what notes the intervals are defined, and the kinds of combinations (συστήματα, systēmata) they form—all of which our forebears have discovered and left to us, their successors, together with the names of these modes of harmony. And again the motions of the body display other and similar characteristics of this kind, which they say should be measured by numbers and called rhythms and meters. (17c–d)

Just as those who start from the unit should not search directly for the infinite or indefinite but first go through the exact number, those who are forced to start from the unlimited should not immediately look for the one, but for the number that determines every plurality, and only then go to unit. To illustrate this reverse case, Socrates resorts again to the letters, invented by a god or a god-inspired man— according to the Egyptian tradition, by Theuth. Although the voice is infinite, he discovered in this infinite quantity of sounds the vowels, which have a certain number, and other letters “that are not voiced but make some kind of noise” (18c); these also have a number. Finally he found a third type of letter, which we call “mutes” (ἄφωνα, aphōna). Then, Socrates continues, the god went on to determine the exact number of each of these three types of sounds. Only after doing this he gave to each of these sound and to all of them as a whole the name στοιχεῖον (stoicheion, “element/ letter”). As in the Sophist, also in this dialogue, the same concept of bond (δεσμός, desmos) returns: it would be impossible to gain knowledge of one single sound without learning all the others. Grammar was born from the link that somehow unifies all the elements. Voice is one and infinite. However, both in the voice of language and in the voice of music, a finite number of elements can be distinguished: if the minimal element of language is the gramma (letter), the minimal element of music is the phthongos. The importance and diffusion of the Platonic conception of the element cannot be overstated: in Theaetetus (202e), Socrates seems even to suggest that the elements (stoicheia) from which the world arose by composition were conceived from the ele-

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ments of language. In the same dialogue, he clearly identifies phthongos as the element of music: When you were learning you spent your time just precisely in trying to distinguish, by both eye and ear, each individual letter (stoicheion) in itself so that you might not be bewildered by their different positions in written and spoken words. . . . And at the music-teacher’s, wasn’t the finished pupil the one who would follow each phthongos and tell to which string it belonged—the phthongoi being generally admitted to be the elements (stoicheion) in music? (206a–b)

There is a perfect correspondence between gramma, stoicheion, and phthongos. As language can be analysed in letters, syllables, words, sentences, so music can be analysed in phthongoi, diastēmata, systēmata: from phthongoi, the elements of music, it is possible to constitute intervals (diastēmata), systems (systēmata), and harmonies (harmoniai). As we will see in the next chapter, the conceptualization of melos as composed of elements will cross the centuries all the way to Schoenberg, Stockhausen and electronic sound synthesis. It also will give rise to modern discussions of whether or not music should be considered a language. Aristotle on Genesis and Production. If from Plato we have inherited the theory of the elements and compounds, and thus the very idea of composition, we owe to Aristotle the notion of matter, essential to grasping how the position of sound in music was thought of. Reconstructing in all its breadth and complexity the notion of matter in Aristotle not only falls beyond the scope of this research but would also require specific philosophical and philological skills. I will limit myself to listing those aspects of the concept that are central to understanding its usage in music theory and practice, with particular reference to the Physics, Metaphysics, and On the Soul. Matter and Form. The distinction between matter and form responds to the need to explain genesis, becoming, and corruption of things. Aristotle distinguishes between generation by nature, by art, and by chance (Met. 1032a12). When things come to be not by nature but from art, their generation process is called production (ποίησις, poiēsis) (1032a14); their form resides in the soul of the creator. Generation, hence production and transformation, have four causes (αἴτιον, aition): material cause (ὕλη, hylē), formal cause (εἶδος, eidos), final cause (τέλος, telos), and efficient cause or agent (κινοῦν, kinoun). The generation process consists in being generated by the action of something, from something, and becoming something (1032a14). “That out of which [things] come to be is what we call matter”(1032a17). For example, clay is the matter of pots. “Matter,” however, is a relative term: an object, made out of matter, can become in turn the matter of something else. For example, clay is the matter of a brick, which is in turn the matter of a brick house. It would be impossible to generate anything out of nothing. Neither matter nor form but the com-

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pound (σύνολος, synolos) of these is generated (1033b17–18). Change is described as a transformation of form: matter is what undergoes a change of form. Matter and Potentiality. In Aristotle the notions of matter and form are intertwined with two other fundamental notions: potentiality (δύναμις, dynamis) and actuality (ἐνέργεια, energeia or ἐντελέχεια, entelecheia) (An. 412a). He defines potentiality as “a source of change in another thing or in the same thing qua other” (Met. 1020a4–6). Aquinas explains the difference between potentiality and actuality very clearly: “Some things can exist, though they do not, whereas others do indeed exist. Those which can exist are said to be potentially (potentia). Those which already do exist are said to be actually (actu)” (De principiis naturae, 1.1–4). Simply stated, matter is what is already given, while form is what individualizes the particular creation. Therefore, matter is potentiality, while form is actuality. Matter possesses only certain potentialities to the exclusion of others; in other words, one cannot make any possible thing with any kind of matter. Matter, Form, and Perception. Of particular relevance to discussions regarding perception and aesthetics is the relationship between matter and perception as conceived of by Aristotle. The distinction between matter and form is of a theoretical nature, neither of them existing separately: “Matter is unknowable in itself ” (Met. 1036a8–9). While matter is not knowable without form, there is no form without matter. What moves our perception is not matter but form: “In regard to all sense generally we must understand that sense is that which is receptive of sensible forms apart from their matter, as wax receives the imprint of the signet ring apart from the iron or gold of which it is made: it takes the imprint which is of gold or bronze, but not qua gold or bronze” (An. 424a17–21). While we do not have access to matter qua matter, in the perception of a physical thing, form affects our senses. Matter and Corporeality. One should not confuse Aristotle’s use of the terms matter and material with the meaning these words have taken on in modern languages. According to him, in fact, matter should not be understood necessarily as a corporeal entity, but anything (corporeal or not) from which something else is generated. In the Metaphysics Aristotle not only makes clear that matter is not by definition corporeal (1036b35–1037a5), but is also constantly mindful of specifying whether he is referring to sensible matter or not. According to Pasnau (2010, 637), the term matter takes on a “materialistic” connotation only in the Middle Ages when contrasted with the spiritual: “Matter occurs only in the corporeal realm. Hence there arose the linkage we take for granted today, between corporeality and materiality, so that to be a body (corpus) is just to have matter.” Actually, as we shall see, already in Ptolemy matter is associated with sense and form with intellect. Element. Before showing how Aristotle’s conception of matter comes to converge with the notion of element, it is still necessary to explain how he defines element. Aristotle explains the meaning of element (stoicheion) in the fifth book of the Metaphysics, immediately after defining the notions of principle and cause: element

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is “that out of which something is composed, as the first constituent not divisible in kind into a different kind” (1014a26–27). To exemplify the notion of element Aristotle first of all resorts to the voice and the parts of which it is composed: its parts in fact cannot be resolved into other sounds. He also reports the conviction of other thinkers that the notion of element consists in the sense of “one” and “small”: this is why the one and the point are also held to be elements. Matter and Element, Form and Substance. Aristotle explains the relation between matter and element at the end of the seventh book of Metaphyics (1041a6–1041b33). After having said that it does not make any sense to ask the raison d’être of simple objects, he argues that we must instead ask the reason in virtue of which “matter is something determinate” (1041b5). What we seek is “the cause of matter, that is, the form (eidos) by which matter is a given thing: and this is precisely the substance (οὐσία, ousia) of the thing” (1041b7–9). One needs to articulate the question. Beings that are composed of parts in such a way as to be considered a unit are not a mere aggregate (σωρός, sōros). They resemble the syllable BA, which is composed of two letters, A and B, but constitutes a single syllable. Now, there must be something that makes a set of elements more than a mere aggregate. This something cannot itself be a simple element or an aggregate (otherwise there would be an infinite regression). It is this something that must be considered the substance, the cause that allows this thing to be what it is. An element, on the other hand, is “that into which a thing is divided and which is present in it as matter” (1041b31–32). I summarize and simplify: form understood as that which holds elements together in a unity is the substance, the cause of this determinate being; vice versa, matter corresponds to the elements of which this determinate being is composed. The notion of element as matter is manifest in Aristotle’s explanation of the composition of speech (lexis) as treated in the Poetics (1456b20–36). He defines the parts of speech starting from the most elementary ones: stoicheion (element/letter), syllabe, connecting word (arthron), noun, verb, phrase. The stoicheion is defined as an “indivisible vocal sound (φωνὴ ἀδιαίρετος, phōnē adiairetos).” However, not any indivisible vocal sound can be considered an element of speech, but only those that are able to constitute a composite vocal sound (συνθετὴ φωνή, synthetē phōnē). There are, in fact, other indivisible sounds, those produced by animals, that are not to be considered stoicheia. Scholars have not failed to note the assonance between the Platonic conception of limit and limitlessness as set forth in the passage I recalled earlier from the Philebus and the Aristotelian conception of form and matter: “It is impossible not to recognize in the limitlessness the material cause, in the limit the formal cause” (Reale, 2000). For the purposes of our discussion, however, it is crucial to note and keep in mind how for both Plato and Aristotle the formulation of all these concepts (element, limit, unlimited, and matter) is inextricably linked to the conceptualization of language and writing, and—especially in Plato—also of melos.

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1.2  Aristoxenus’ Elements of Music Phthongos. The notion of element, as well as the theory of parts and wholes, matter and form, find a new application in the musical theory of Aristoxenus of Tarentum (ca. 375 BC–ca. 300) in relation both to harmony and rhythm. In order to determine the elements that make up melody, Aristoxenus begins by studying the “voice movement” (El. Harm. 13.7–18.21 da Rios), that which Plato defined as melos. He explains that there are two forms of movement with respect to place (ἡ κατὰ τόπον κίνησις, hē kata topon kinēsis), the continuous and the intervallic. Without studying these two distinct kinds of voice movements, it is not even possible to define what a phthongos is (7.19–20). The continuous movement (ἡ συνεχής κίνησις, hē synechēs kinēsis) is the movement in which the voice appears to perception as traversing a space (τόπος, topos) in such a way as never to stand still; this continuous movement is the movement of speech (λογική, logikē). The intervallic movement (διαστηματική κίνησις, diastēmatikē kinēsis) is the movement in which the voice, during its course, seems to come to rest on the τάσις (tasis). Tasis is the stability of the voice: “what we mean by tasis is something like the voice’s stability or standing still (μονή τις καὶ στάσις, monē tis kai stasis)” (17.3–4). The modern rendition of tasis with “pitch” superimposes on the Greek term a concept that will be developed only later in music theory: like τόνος (tonos), the word tasis is etymologically connected with the verb τείνω (teinō), which refers to the act of stretching a string (Rocconi 2003, 21–26). Since the original meaning of this word is “tension,” tasis in music is the point of tension where the voice rests after moving. This is the movement of the singing voice (μελῳδική, meloidiké). Aristoxenus adds that, because of some affliction (διὰ πάθος, dia pathos), the voice can stand still on certain taseis even when speaking. He then continues with the distinction between tension and relaxation, and between tension, acuteness, and graveness. Tension (ἐπίτασις, epitasis) is the movement of the voice from a lower region to a higher one, and relaxation (ἄνεσις, anesis) is the movement from a higher region to a lower one. Movement consists of tension and relaxation, as one can see during the tuning of strings, when the musician loosens or tightens them. Acuteness (ὀξύτης, oxytēs) is the product of tension, and graveness (βαρύτης, barytēs) that of relaxation. From these definitions it becomes clear that what is meant by the movement of the singing voice occurs between the different moments of stability, and is imperceptible: “The voice appears to do this when it sings; for it moves while it makes an interval, and stands still on a phthongos” (El. Harm. 17.15–16). Aristoxenus identifies the specific characteristic of the musical voice that distinguishes it from the spoken voice in the type of movement. He was conscious of not referring to the real movement that produces sound but to the specific movement of the singing voice. “Plato’s conception of harmonic motion must be distinguished from that of Aristoxenus. For the latter, the voice ‘moves’ from point to point in the dimension of pitch, and when singing a note ‘stands still’ at a point. For Plato, following Archytas, a sounded

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pitch is itself a movement of a certain velocity: harmonic relations are ratios between speeds of movement, not distances between points” (Barker 1989, 55n1). The concept of tasis in Aristoxenus is, therefore, linked not to movement but to a sense of stasis, that is, permanence on a certain tension: “pitch” is the absence of variation in a state of tension. The movement he speaks of is therefore not the physical movement that generates the sound, but the movement that alters this “static” situation. The originality of Aristoxenus’ thought consists in placing the movement of the voice not in pitch itself but between pitches. After having distinguished between the movements of melos and speech, Aristoxenus is finally able to give a definition of the elements of music: phthongos, interval, and system. The phthongos is “the incidence (πτῶσις, ptōsis) of the voice on one tasis” (El. Harm. 20.16–17). Aristoxenus conceives the phthongos as a point without dimension similar to unity in arithmetic and to a point in geometry. An interval (diastema) is “that which is bounded by two phthongoi which do not have the same pitch, since an interval appears, roughly speaking, to be a difference between pitches. . . . Difference between pitches lies in their having been subjected to greater or lesser tension” (20.20–21.5). For Aristoxenus, therefore, an interval is not a numeric ratio—as the Pythagorean tradition wants—between two distinct phthongoi but a difference (διαφορά, diaphora) in their tension. “A systēma is to be understood as something put together from more than one interval” (21.6–7). Protos Chronos. The notion of element is the necessary requirement for defining not only phthongos but also its minimal duration. Keeping in mind the Aristoxenian definition of pitch as stasis, it follows that rhythmos is for him the arrangement of the time durations (chronoi) in which the voice stands still on certain pitches. As in dance rhythm is the order among gestures, in music rhythm is the order among the durations determined by the different “positions.” Since Aristoxenus starts from the idea that the pitch of the voice is stasis, that is, tension rather than movement, and that it corresponds to the schēma of dance, i.e., to the stasic position in bodily movement, rhythm is the relationship between the temporal durations of sounds in a fixed position, in tension, and not between durations of movement. Aristoxenus conceives of rhythm as belonging to diction (lexis), bodily movement, and music, three rhythmizomena. The word ῥυθμιζομένον (rhythmizomenon) is the past participle of the verb ῥυθμίζειν (rhythmizein, to rhythmise) and indicates “what is rhythmized” or the “rhythmisable.” If in Plato rhythm was first understood as the form of the body’s movement in dance, in Aristoxenus rhythm becomes the comprehensive temporal form of all movements of the body, be it the body that dances, speaks, or sings: There are three rhythmizomena: diction, melody and bodily movement. Thus diction will divide time by means of its own parts, such as letters and syllables and words and everything of that sort; melody by its own parts, phthongoi and intervals and systemata;

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Beginnings and movement by points and figures (sēmeia and schēmata) and anything else like this that is a part of movement. (El. Rhyth. 6.16–21 Pearson)

Aristoxenus can then define the primary duration (πρῶτος χρόνος, prōtos chronos)— that is, the minimal duration (the element with respect to rhythm)—in relation to the movement of the voice or of the body: “The term primary duration will be used for the duration that cannot be further subdivided by any rhythmizomenon” (6.22– 23). The distinction between rhythm and rhythmized (rhythmizomenon) is operated by Aristoxenus starting from the analogy between rhythm and shape (schēma): as one can distinguish between shape and what is shaped so can one distinguish between rhythm and what is rhythmized. Rhythm is the rhythm of something in the same way as form is the form of something (2.9–11). It is this distinction between rhythm and what is rhythmized that allows Aristoxenus to generalize rhythm as the universal form of diction, melos, and dance, that is, the parts that make up the “orchestry.” The reasons and at the same time the consequences of the analogy with form are threefold. (1) The overall shape changes when the arrangement of the parts (μέρη, merē) is changed. For as one can change the form of an object simply by changing the arrangement of its parts, the same can be done with rhythm and the rhythmized: by changing the arrangement of the elements of a verse one can obtain a new verse. (2) The shape itself is not a body but an arrangement (διάθεσις, diathesis) of the parts of the body. (3) Even if the shape is distinct from the body, it is not perceptible in the absence of the matter; similarly, rhythm is not perceptible in the absence of what is rhythmized (2.12–3.18). The last point details the firm link between form and matter, which, despite being thinkable separately, cannot be experienced autonomously: form is not perceptible without the matter. The first two concepts instead recall one of Aristotle’s fundamental concepts, namely, the relationship between the whole and its parts as previously discussed. Aristoxenus develops this idea further: the unity that arises from the combination of elements needs to be ordered in a particular way. Not every arrangement of time durations is rhythmical (4.23–24). Rhythm takes shape not in any arrangement (taxis) of time durations but only when these are presented in a particular configuration (4.19–22). In his definition of rhythmos, Plato had already used the word taxis; but in Aristoxenus the word takes on a different meaning. Just as there are many ways of combining letters or musical intervals while only some of them are used, so are there many ways of organizing time durations, while only some are suitable to our perception (4.23–26). Following Aristotle’s idea of substance, one could say that rhythm is that particular way of ordering time durations that guarantees the unity of melos over time. Rhythm is, therefore, that which allows a set of durations to be not only an aggregate but a unit: according to our perception rhythm is thus the substance of music, from the point of view of time. Rhythm is the temporal shape in which motion and change become perceptible.

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Synthesis. In the tragedy Prometheus Bound, traditionally attributed to Aeschylus, Prometheus claims to have bestowed on humankind, in addition to numbers, the “synthesis of the letters” (γραμμάτων συνθέσεις, grammatōn syntheseis) (447–68) (Calame 1993, 785). Aristoxenus compares melody and speech (λέξις, lexis) using the very same expression to examine three different topics: the continuity (συνεχεία, synecheia) of melody (El. Harm. 27.16–34); how musical systems are born and the distinction between melodic and unmelodic (37.1–8); the composition of rhythm (El. Rhyth. 274–76). Particularly relevant here is the first instance in which the concept of continuity is connected to the “synthesis of the letters.” Aristoxenus is aware that a melody is not a simple aggregate of isolated sounds. The continuity of melody would be like the continuity of language in that it does not simply put in place a succession of sounds at random. This idea of continuity calls to mind the conception of technē as developed by Plato in the Cratylus, when he underlines that not every succession of letters or phthongoi is acceptable. The analytical and synthetic ability of both voice and perception are also explained in Pseudo-Plutarch’s De musica, as they are in Aristoxenus, through the idea of continuity: Three minimal items must always fall on the hearing simultaneously, the phthongos, the duration (χρόνος, chronos), and the syllable (συλλαβή, syllabē) or letter (γράμμα, gramma). From the progression (πορεία, poreia) of the phthongoi we come to grasp the melodic structure, from that of the durations we grasp the rhythm and from that of the letters or syllables we grasp the words. Since all these progressions go on together we have to direct the attention of our perception to all of them at once. Yet it is also clear that if perception were not able to separate out each of the things we have mentioned, it would be impossible to follow them individually and to attend to the defects and the virtues of each. The first task is to gain an understanding of continuity (συνεχεία, synecheia), since the presence of continuity is necessary for the exercise of our critical faculty. Good and bad do not lie in specific isolated notes or durations or letters, but in continuous sequences of them, since good and bad are varieties of mixture created by practical composition (κατὰ τὴν χρῆσιν, kata tēn chrēsin) out of incomposite elements (τῶν ἀσυνθέτων μερῶν, tōn asynthetōn merōn). (De musica 1144a–c)

The articulation of language (and music) must be understood at the same time as analysis and synthesis: in speech the elements of language distinguish themselves from one another and join together. If we conceive of language and music as explained by Plato and material as defined by Aristotle, composition can never simply mean bringing together distinct elements that exist independently from each other; composition means, literally, synthesis. Accordingly, understanding speech and melos can never mean dissecting them into independent elements, but rather understanding what holds these elements together, their unity. In the following section, I intend to show how the notions of element and matter of music elaborated in classical Greece penetrated the Latin and Western tradition with a focus on Martian Capella and Boethius, the main authors of reference

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for medieval music theorists. Before that, however, it is still necessary to outline how Ptolemy defines the notion of phthongos, the element of music, and how he conceives of the relationship between matter and form in music.

1.3  Transmission and Reception Ptolemy. The Harmonics of the Greek mathematician and astronomer Claudius Ptolemy (ca. 100–ca. 170 AD), especially its first four chapters, and the relative Commentary composed by the Neoplatonic philosopher Porphyry of Tire (ca. 234–ca. 305) are of particular interest with regard to the topics discussed here: Ptolemy, in fact, seems to have been the first to conceive of harmony not starting from the voice (phōnē) but from sound (psophos) and to expressly conceive of this as the matter of music. Ptolemy’s treatise opens with a definition of harmonics in relation to sound: Harmonic knowledge is the power (δύναμις, dynamis) that grasps the distinctions related to acuteness and graveness in sounds (ψόφος, psophos): sound is a modification (πάθος, pathos) of air that has been struck (this is the first and most fundamental of things heard). (Harmonics 3.1–3 Düring)

Ptolemy makes clear that sound is the “most general of things heard.” Porphyry observes that Ptolemy’s definition of harmonics, precisely because it starts from sound, takes on a more general character than the traditional definition of harmonics in relation to voice (Commentary 6.29–33 Düring); melody, in fact, cannot be considered an exclusive prerogative of the voice but also of musical instruments (7.8–19) since “voice is a species of sound, and word (logos) is something more specific of voice” (8.16–7). Between sound, voice, and word there would be a relationship of genus to species. Porphyry does not fail to notice the distance of Ptolemy from Aristoxenus, who instead claimed that it is irrelevant to the harmonic discipline that sound is generated by an impact of air. If the Aristoxenians begin by distinguishing between the continuous movement of the speaking voice and the intervallic movement of the singing voice, the Pythagoreans start their inquiry “from the substance (οὐσία, ousia) of sound and voice” (9.1–3). According to Ptolemy, judgment in harmonia is based on hearing and reason but in a different way: “hearing is concerned with the matter (ὕλη, hylē) and the modification (πάθος, pathos), reason with the form (εἶδος, eidos) and the cause (αἴτιον, aition)” (Harmonics 3.4–5). Thus, matter and form are to be connected respectively with perception and reason. In other words, there is a correspondence, on one hand, between sound, matter, modification, and hearing; and, on the other hand, between form, cause, and reason. Unlike Aristoxenus, who starts from the distinction of singing voice from the speaking voice, Ptolemy explains phthongos in relation to a more abstract definition of tonos, that is, the stability of sound over time. He makes first a difference between “equal-toned sounds” (ἰσότονοι, isotonoi), that are stable in respect of the tone, and

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“unequal-toned sounds” (ἀνισότονοι, anisotonoi), that are not (10.1–2). Tone “in this sense must be a genus common to both acuteness and graveness, understood in relation to one form, that of pitch (tasis), as limit is common to both end and beginning” (10.2–5). Unequal-toned sounds then are further articulated in continuous (συνεχεῖς, synecheis) and divided (διωρισμένοι, diōrismenoi) sounds. The first ones have unclear transitions between the parts of which they are composed (being similar to the colors of the rainbow); divided sounds, instead, have clear transitions, being composed of parts that are equal-toned to perception (10.5–14). It is evident that there is science only of sounds that do not change with respect to pitch for a certain time-length, because knowledge is established by numerical proportions. Ptolemy can thus define phthongos as “a sound (ψόφος, psophos) that retains one and the same tone (tonos)” (10.19). “Melodic notes (ἐμμελεῖς, emmeleis) are those which, when joined together with one another (συναπτόμενοι πρὸς ἀλλήλους, synaptomenoi pros allēlous), are acceptable to the hearing (ἀκοή, akoē), unmelodic (ἐκμελεῖς, ekmeleis) those that are not” (10.23–25). Voice (phōnē) becomes thus for Ptolemy nothing but “the most beautiful of sounds” (10.26). Even just from this cursory reading, one can infer that Ptolemy’s treatise presents very important innovations. The conceptualization of melos had previously taken place in the voice (phōnē) and not in general sound (psophos). In fact, the term phthongos, being etymologically connected to phthengestai, “to speak loud and clear,” is not just a sonic element but a vocal utterance, a specific way of speaking. Ptolemy, despite using Aristotelian terminology, interprets perception differently: the senses deal with matter, the intellect deals with form. Moreover, Ptolemy expressly defines the phthongos as a minimal element not of the voice but of sound (psophos). This marks a crucial change in the way music is conceived of: the material of music comes to be identified with sound, of which the voice is considered just a particular type. Martianus Capella. The ninth chapter of On the Marriage of Philology and Mercury by Martianus Capella (fl. ca. 410–420) is dedicated to Harmony and is of particular interest in that it shows how some technical terms from the Aristoxenian tradition penetrated into Latin culture. Capella introduces musical sound starting from the voice, the “parent of all sound.” He distinguishes voice in two categories: continuous (continuum), which is found in speech, and divided (divisum), which is used in melody (modulatio). There is another type of voice, that occupies a middle position and is typical of reading poetry (carmina) (9.937 [360.16–361.5 Willis]). The divided voice is explained as that which is reduced to distinct and fixed parts. Harmony defines the sounds (soni) where the fundamental elements of the discipline (artis elementum) lay (9.938 [361.9–10]). “We call sounds phthongi; but the term phthongus is applied to a particle (particula) of modulated voice produced on a single intentio. Intentio, which is what we call tasis, is that in which vox consists and continues” (9.939 [361.11–13]). Just as the phthongos was seen by Aristoxenus as a point without dimensions, the tone is considered by Capella the basic element

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of music, like the point in geometry or the letter in grammar: “The tone has the same significance for us that the point has for geometers and the unit for arithmeticians” (9.938–39 [361.10–11]). Capella translates rhythmos and Aristoxenus’ rhythmizomenon respectively with numerus and materia. “Rhythmus is a grouping of times that are perceptible to the senses (sensibilis) and are arranged in some orderly manner”(9.966–67 [372.15– 17]). “There is a difference between rhythm and the rhythmizable (rhythmizomenon). The latter is indeed the matter of rhythms (numeri), whereas rhythm is considered to be the artificer (artifex) or a kind of modulation” (9.967–68 [373.1–4]). Aristoxenus’ concept of chronos protos is also to be found translated as primum tempus in Capella: Primum tempus is what, like the atom, admits of no cutting into parts or particles. It is comparable to the points of geometricians or the monad of arithmeticians. . . . The primum tempus is found in words, in the syllable; in modulation, in the sounds or intervals, which are indivisible; and in gesture, in the very first movement of the body, which we refer to as the schēma. This will be the briefest point of time (brevissimum tempus), which, I said cannot be reduced. There is also the composite time, which can be divided and which, from the beginning, is either double, triple, or quadruple; for all time of rhythm extends that far. Its boundary is that which is the termination of a full proportion, and in this respect time is found to be like the tone; for just as the tone is divided into four parts or dieses, so a time is comprised of a fourfold scheme of times. (9.971 [374.1–12])

Boethius. In several respects, the De institutione musica of Severinus Boethius (ca. 477–524) falls within the typically Pythagorean tradition, its source being mainly the mathematician Nichomacus of Gerasa (ca. 60–ca. 120). Accordingly, he treats music starting from the generation of sound or, more precisely, from the production of consonance, then proceeding backward to the cause that produces it: consonance (consonantia) cannot be produced without sound (sonus); sound requires pulsation (pulsus) or percussion (percussio); these cannot exist without movement (motus). In the absence of movement there would therefore be silence (1.3 [189.15–22 Friedlein], 4.1 [301.12–16]). He distinguishes between continuous (continua) and diastematic (cum intervallo suspensa) voice adding a third difference (medias voces) (1.12 [199.2–18]). For Boethius the element of music is the sonus: But all things are ultimately composed of elements, into which things made are reducible, in turn, by dissolution, just as letters (litterae) are the elements of speech (articularis vocis), and from them arises the larger construct of syllables, which in turn find their termination in these same primal elements. For musicians, the musical sound (sonus) has the same power. (De institutione arithmetica 2.1 [77.6–11 Friedlein])

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Considering his Pythagorean approach to music, his definition of sonus is somewhat surprising, being the literal Latin translation of the Aristoxenian definition of phthongos: “Sound (sonus) is a melodic (emmeles)—that is apt to melody—incidence (casus) on a tension (intensio)” (De institutione musica 1.8 [195.1–2 Friedlein]). Boethius clearly shows the function performed by music theory, which on one hand connects music to sound, and on the other unquestionably restricts the kind of sound appropriate to music. In fact, he decidedly demarcates musical sound, the phthongos, from “general” sound: “At present we do not wish to define sound in general (sonum generalem), but only that which is called “phthongos” in Greek from the similarity to speaking (a similitudine loquendi), that is, φθέγγεσθαι.” (1.8 [195.3–5 Friedlein]). He translates Aristoxenus’ terms ptōsis and tasis, respectively with casus and intensio. It is not easy to understand in which sense one should interpret both Aristoxenus’s term ptōsis and its Latin translation casus. Usually, both terms are translated today as “fall” or “incidence.” Medieval commentators also tried to make sense of the term casus: what can it mean that the voice in its movement falls on a tension, or on a tensive position? Perhaps, the sense of these terms become comprehensible when taking into account that both words were used by grammarians to indicate the case of the declension of a name. In this sense, the Aristoxenian sentence and Boethius’ translation would read: phthongos is the inflexion of the voice on one tension. This interpretation is confirmed by the manuscript Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Lat. 10275 from Echternach containing the Glossa maior to Boethius’ De institutione musica, in which the anonymous commentator writes above the word casus: “inflexio” (Bernhard and Bower 1.164.7). In the fifth book, Boethius takes up the opening passage of Ptolemy’s Harmonics that I quoted earlier: Harmonics is the faculty (facultas) that weighs differences between acute and grave sounds using the sense of hearing (sensus) and reason (ratio). For sense and reason are, as it were, particular instruments (instrumenta) for the faculty of harmonics. The sense perceives a thing as indistinct, yet approximate to that which it is; reason exercises judgment concerning the whole and searches out ultimate differences. So the sense discovers something confused, yet close to the truth, but it receives the whole through reason. Reason itself comes to know the whole (integritas), even though it receives an indistinct and approximate likeness of truth. For sense brings nothing whole to itself, but arrives only at an approximation. Reason makes the judgment. . . . The sense is concerned with matter (sensus circa materiam vertitur), and it grasps species in those things that are in flux and imperfect and that are not delimited and refined to an exact measurement, just like matter itself is. For this reason confusion accompanies the sense. But since matter does not impede the mind and reason, the species discerned by reason is observed over and above association with the particular subject. Hence, wholeness and truth attend reason; moreover, reason amends or fills out that which is either mistaken or missing from sense perception.” (De institutione musica 5.2 [352.4– 26 Friedlein])

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It is apparent that still today, when we think of musical material as purely sensible and formally indeterminate, we still refer to this idea conveyed by Ptolemy and Boethius that divides the musical phenomenon between sense and reason. Conversely, we leave aside Aristotle’s conception of form and material, according to which matter is not necessarily corporeal and sensible but simply the substrate of genesis and creation, as well as his view that form­—not matter—is what affects the senses. Medieval Theorists. The aspects with which Plato had characterized the elements of language and music can be found recurring in medieval music theory, often in a reworked form—without, however, the original philosophical richness and complexity. The anonymous author of the Musicae artis disciplina (once attributed to Odo of Cluny) also speaks of “musical syllables.” In order to show how sounds (voices) join each other, he develops the usual parallelism between grammar and music: as the letters that make up a syllable, so can several sounds be combined to form a musical syllable (musica syllaba). The anonymous theoretician, however, pushes the comparison between grammar and music to the point of affirming that, just as a syllable composed of letters means something (aliquid significat), musical syllables, which are compounds of several tones, can similarly be regarded as “musical parts that have a meaning (musicae partes quae aliquid significant)” (GS 1.275 [143.283– 292 Ryan]). In the same spirit, Flaccus Albinus Alcuinus (ca. 735–804) writes that the melody arises thanks to the ability of the phthongoi to join together: “A musician ought to know that music consists of eight tones, by means of which any song seems to adhere to itself as by a kind of glue (quasi quodam glutino sibi adhaerere)” (GS 1.26). The Musica Enchiriadis, an important anonymous musical treatise of the 9th century, builds a parallelism between the vox articulata (articulated voice) of speech and the vox canora (singing voice) of music: Just as the elementary and indivisible constituents (elementariae atque individuae partes) of speech (vox articulata) are letters, from which syllables are put together, and these in turn make up verbs and nouns, and from them is composed the fabric of a complete discourse, so the roots of song (vox canora) are phthongi, which are soni in Latin. The content of all music is ultimately reducible to them. From the coupling of tones (soni) come intervals (diastemata); from intervals, in turn, grow systems (systemata). Tones, however, are the primal elements (fundamenta) of song. Not all sounds (soni) are called tones (ptongi) [but] only those which, by virtue of being at proper distances from each other, are apt for melody. (Musica enchiriadis 1.1–8 Schmid)

It is worth noting that, just as we saw earlier in Aristotle, in a gloss on Martianus Capella by Remigius of Auxerre (841–908) the notions of element and matter (materies) come to coincide (9.938 [361.9–10 Willis]). In medieval music theory, sound is described as the subject or object of music. Jerome of Moravia (died after 1271), for instance, writes: “The subject (subjectum) of music is sound, albeit discrete sound” (CS 1.19). The subject of music is not sound as such but the tone, the discrete sound designated by the Greek word phthongos. The

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distinction between sonus discretus and the sonus indiscretus echoes the distinction between vox articulata and vox confusa (see next section). Johannes Cotto (fl. ca. 1100), in fact, writes: “Sonus indiscretus is that sound in which no consonance can be discerned, as in human laughing or sighing, in the barking of dogs, or in the roar of the lions.” Sonus indiscretus is resolutely excluded from music, which has to do solely with discrete sound, that is, with phthongos: “Therefore, music by no means accepts that sound that we said is indiscrete, but only discrete sound belongs to music, that also is called properly speaking phthongos; for music is nothing else but the appropriate motion of the voices (vocum congrua motio). However, we have said this above all against idiots, in order to a put a stop to the error of those who foolishly deem musical any sound (quemlibet sonum)” (GS 2.234). Sound and Number. Musical sound is the phthongos because it allows itself to be organized by the number. As will be discussed in the next section, Augustine (354–430), following the Pythagorean-Platonic tradition, considers music as the association of number, a rational dimension, with sound, a sensible phenomenon. In dealing with the rationality of music, Benedictine monk Hucbald (ca. 830–930) quotes Boethius, but he explicitly equates the phthongos with the element: Those sounds through which, as elements (elementa), the ancients deemed that one should approach music, they chose to designate by the Greek word phthongi. These were not just any sounds, as for instance those of inanimate objects (insensibilium rerum), or even the cries of animals lacking reason (inrationabilium voces animalium). Only those sounds which they thought were distinguished and determined by calculable quantities (rationabili discretos ac determinatos quantitate) and were serviceable for melody—only these they set as the sure foundation for all song. These, then, they called “elements” or “phthongi.” . . . They are called “phthongi” from φθέγγεσθαι, by analogy with speaking, because just as words are communicated by speaking, so sounds enter the mind by means of these phthongi. Moreover the trained intelligence of the experts discriminates even among some unanalyzable sounds. Therefore they have chosen to define such sound—not, of course, sound in general—as follows: sound is the particular melodious (ἐμμελές) category (casus) of tone that is suitable for song, maintaining a steady pitch (una intensione), as when the voice produces any [vowel] sound, such as a, or sounds in unison with a stretched string. (GS 1.107b28–108a25)

This blend of number and sound is expressed as “numbered sound” (sonus numerosus or sonus numeratus) or as “number related to sounds” (numerus relatus ad sonos). Johannes de Garlandia (fl. ca. 1270–1320), for instance, writes that “music concerns number related to sounds, and this with respect to subiectum (subject). With respect to the opus (work, production), music concerns the multiplicity of sounds (de multitudine sonorum). With respect to the modus (practice), music is the true discipline of singing, the easy way to attain perfection in singing” (Musica plana 5 Meyer). Johannes de Grocheio (ca. 1255–ca. 1320) offers a definition of music that assembles both the cognitive aspect of scientia and the operative dimension of ars: “Music is

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the art or science of numbered sound used harmonically, intended to make singing easier” (Ars musice 5.3 Mews et al.). The concept of musical element is not conceivable without resorting to the letter, nor the order among the elements without resorting to number. Thus the Latin numerus (number)—which translates the Greek term arythmos—serves to think of the harmonic relations between the elements of the melody. Also rhythmos is either latinized in rhythmus, or, more often, translated with numerus. In this way, in Roman and medieval music theory, the numerus acquires a central position, because it guarantees at once the order between pitches and between time durations. It is possible to find this central position that the number assumes in music still in Gioseffo Zarlino (1517–90): And because musicians, wanting to find the reasons (Ragioni) of every musical interval, use sonorous bodies and relational number to know the distances that lie between sound and sound as well as between voice and voice; and to know how much they differ from each other regarding the grave and the acute; therefore putting together these two parts, that is, number and sound, and making a compound, they say that the subject of music (Soggetto della Musica) is the sonorous number (Numero sonoro). And although Avicenna says that this subject are tones and time durations, nevertheless, considered the thing in itself, we will find everything to be one: that is, time durations referring to number and tones to sound. (Le istitutioni 1561, 1.17)

In the Introduction to the 1573 edition, Zarlino explicitly refers to Aristotle’s Physics (not without partially misunderstanding it) to justify the precedence of number over sound: And before everything else, I will first account for numbers and proportions, which are the form of consonances, because, in the context of nature, matter (as it is not knowable in itself ) can not be known except through form; and in the second part I will deal with sounds and voices that are their [of consonances] matter. (29)

The very close relationship between number and sound always implies the inaccessibility of sound as such. In this way, the traditional notions of element and matter of music reach modernity.

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1.4 Elements, Letters, and Notes What is the material of music? . . . The note, isn’t it? Anton Webern 1963 In the West there appeared a system of notation making possible the composition of modern musical works in a manner impossible otherwise. Max Weber (1921) 1958

Asymmetry. In this final section, I would like to develop some reflections on the role that first writing and then notation played in the theorization of the notions of musical element and material. As explained so far, the origin and foundation of both speech and song were traditionally found in the human voice: philosophers, grammarians, and music theorists conceived of the voice of speech and song as articulation into elements. Articulation into elements means synthesis, that is, composition of distinct elements—respectively the stoicheion or gramma of language and the phthongos of music. It is possible to argue, that this theorization of speech and song in relation to the notion of element was possible only in connection and in contrast to writing: the alphabet, in fact, allowed to analyze continuous speech in a limited number of letters, displaying the distance that separates the spoken word from the written word. There would therefore be an inextricable link between the notion of element and the letter, between thinking of the word as composed of elements and thinking of it as writable. However, although they are both conceived as composed of distinct elements, speech and song do not have the same relationship to sound: indeed, while speech was conceived as eminently writable and preservable, music seems to retain a close relationship to time and memory. Thus, if until now I investigated what language and music have in common, namely the idea of articulation, now I intend to look at what sets them apart; in particular, I intend to ponder the conviction expressed by Augustine, according to which, while literae are capable of preserving speech, only memory can retain musical soni because of their ephemeral character. This fundamental asymmetry, which has traversed the thinking about voice at least since Plato, clarifies the solidarity between music and grammar; in other words, it clarifies why it is not possible to think of language without thinking of music and vice versa. Vox articulata vs vox confusa. The asymmetry between speech and melos is clearly manifested among Latin grammarians in relation to the writability of sound. Starting with Varro (116–27 BC), who refers to a Stoic doctrine, Latin grammarians defined vox (sound/voice) in an introductory part to grammar. Grammarian Diomedes (late fourth-century), reporting Varro’s doctrine, first gives an account of physical sound according to its causes and perception: “As the Stoics have it, a

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spoken utterance (vox) is thin breath (spiritus tenuis) perceptible to hearing (auditu sensibilis), in as much as it is in itself. It is produced by the propulsion (pulsus) of thin air or by the beating (ictus) of struck air”(1.420 Keil). Next, he classifies sound according to its rationality and writability: Every vox is either articulated (articulata) or confused (confusa). Articulated utterance is the expression (explanata) of rational human discourse. It is also called “letterable” (litteralis) or “scriptible” (scriptilis) because it can be comprehended in letters (litteris comprehendi potest). Confused utterance is irrational and not scriptible, produced from simple utterance (simplici vocis sono) in the sound of animals, like the neighing of horses and the bellowing of bulls. Some also add the measured voice (modulata vox) of flutes or musical instruments which, although it cannot be written, has, nonetheless, modulation in distinct units (modulatam aliquam distinctionem).

Stoic philosophers and Latin grammarians differentiated sound between vox articulata (articulated voice/sound) and vox confusa (confused voice/sound). The former was rational and writable, the latter was neither. Vox confusa is “nothing else than a simple sound of the voice”; as opposed to composite sound, simple sound indicates a sound which has been “bound only once.” Articulated sound can be comprehended in letters (litteris comprehendi potest). Later grammarians define voice mostly by the formula “air beaten by breath” (aer spiritu verberatus). As not every percussion produces an audible sound, they specify that it must be audible. Grammarian Marius Victorinus (fourth century) writes: “A spoken utterance is struck air (aer ictus) perceptible to hearing, in as much as it is in itself ” (6.4 Keil). He explains the distinction between vox articulata and vox confusa with these words: There are two types of utterance, articulated (articulata) and confused (confusa). Articulated voice is understandable and writable and therefore is called “clearly spoken” (explanata) by many and “intelligible” by some. What do the Greeks call it? Ἔναρθρον φωνήν (enarthron phōnēn). How many species does it have? Two. What are they? Musical utterance—the sound of the flute or a horn or any musical instrument—and the articulate utterance which everyone uses. Confused utterance emits nothing else than a simple sound (simplicem vocis sonum), for example, a horse’s whinnying, a snake’s hissing, applause, harsh noises, and so forth.

Vox articulata (which translates literally the Greek expression enarthros phōnē) means voice composed of parts; articulatus—past participle of the verb articulare meaning “to separate into joints” or “to utter distinctly”— derives from articulus, “a part, a member, a joint” (diminutive of artus “a joint”). The root *ar-, which indicates “to fit together,” is the same one we find in words like arm, art and harmony. Rational voice is not a continuous and homogeneous flow, but is composed by elements. There is a very close relationship between the element and the letter understood both as the (minimal) sound element of language and the sign that represents it. As Marius Victorinus explains, in fact, the vox articulata is called by some “literal”

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because the letter constitutes its minimal unit: “Some have called “literal” (litteralis) that sound that is usually called articulate (such as nouns, verbs, adverbs, and other parts of speech). The letter, in fact, is the origin (initium) of all signifying voices and an indivisible sound (individua vox) from which the articulated voice emerges and into which it resolves.” In almost identical terms he also defines the notion of element: “The element is the origin (initium) of everything, that from which it arises and into which it resolves.” As the letter is the origin of language so the element is the origin of all things. Finally Victorinus comes to equate the letter as a sound with the letter as the sign that represents it: “The letter is a simple sound, notated (notabilis) with a single figure (figura)” (6.4–5 Keil). In the letter, the sound element of speech and the sign representing it coincide. As human speech is rational and writable, it clearly belonged to the vox articulata or, rather, it was the model on which the distinction between types of voice was based. Words can be written down because their sound is composed of simple elements that can be represented by discrete signs, the letters. Progressively letters compose syllables, syllables compose words, words compose sentences, sentences constitute an entire speech. Human moans and animal sounds belonged to the vox confusa, that is, they are irrational and not writable. Bird song could not be easily categorized within this binary scheme because, while not being rational, it still has clear similarities with human melody (Leach 2007). Writability was the criterion of distinction and organization of the sound realm. The placement of music in this rigid bipartition of sound was not easy: unlike Diomedes and Marius Victorinus, not all were inclined to include music in the vox articulata since it was not possible to represent it with the letters of the alphabet. Morevoer, since Priscian associates the idea of vox articulata with the ability to produce meaning, music had to be excluded. If music cannot be considered vox articualta because it can be written down, does that mean it also lacks rationality? Speaking without Voice. The conjunction and separation of grammar and music is found in a youthful dialogue by Augustine. In the De ordine, Augustine speaks of the different arts invented by Reason, starting with grammar. Since it is considered that man cannot associate with other men unless he converses, thus transmitting his ideas and thoughts, that which is rational in us, that is, that which makes use of reason and produces or pursues rational things, found that it was necessary to impose names, that is, significant sounds on things (vidit esse imponenda rebus vocabula, id est significantes quosdam sonos), so that, since one could not hear his own intentions, he would make use of the sense almost as an “interpreter” to these sounds that matched with himself. However, the words of absent people could not be heard; therefore, reason generated the letters, after identifying and distinguishing all the sounds of the tongue and mouth. In short, Augustine says that words allow communication between humans and that writing was invented by Reason to allow communication with those who are not present: “But the words (verba)

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of those who were absent could not be heard; therefore reason, having noted and distinguished all the sounds of the mouth and the tongue, begot the letters (littera)” (2.12.35, PL. 32.1012). Augustine returns to the ephemeral nature of the sounds of language in the De doctrina christiana, where he states that the signs of words have been established because words would otherwise dissolve together with their sound: “But since they [utterances], having beaten the air, immediately pass away (transire) and remain no longer than they sound, signs of words (signa verborum) have been instituted through letters. In this way utterances (voces) are shown to the eyes, not in themselves, but through their signs” (2.4.5). Writing allows the sound of words to be preserved, it performs, therefore, a preservative function against the passage of time. Thanks to writing, words can be communicated independently from sound: Isidore of Seville (ca. 560–636), following Augustine, specifies that letters have a memorative function and allow to “speak voicelessly” (sine voce loquantur) (1.3.1–3 Lindsay). The letters of the alphabet, therefore, represent the sound of spoken words; while the latter enter the mind through the ears, the former, being perceived through the eyes, speak without sound. There is no distance between hearing the words uttered by the voice and reading words written and seen on the page. The preservative function of writing derives not only from the absence of sound but also from the absence of the speaker. Writing not only excludes the sonic signifier, but also removes the relationship of sound to its bearer and the general conditions of sound production. Writing would render words independent from sound, as well as from the moment and the place of its utterance, making them repeatable regardless of the presence of the other. In the De ordine, after having dealt with grammar, Augustine comes to discuss the invention of music: he places music in relation to the dichotomy between reason and senses, affirming that this art is the union of number, which is rational and eternal, and sound, which is sensible and ephemeral. Sound becomes music by joining number, that is, reason. While rational reality is always present because it is not affected by the passing of time, the sensible reality of sound is subject to the passage of time and is, therefore, imprinted on memory. The Muses, for this reason, were said to be the daughters of Jove, the rational dimension, and the Goddess Memory: And because whatever the mind is able to see is always present and is acknowledged to be immortal (to which category numbers appeared to belong), and because sound, on the other hand, being sensible, flows away into the past (praeterfluit in praeteritum tempus) and is imprinted on the memory (imprimiturque memoriae), it was fabled by a rational fiction, with reason bestowing its favor on the poets, that the Muses were the daughters of Jupiter and Memory . . . Hence this discipline, which participates in sense perception and in intellect, got the name of “music.” (2.14.46–51, PL 32.1014)

Augustine thus keeps music in the middle territory between sensible and rational, between singular and repeatable. Music is a union of opposites: of number and sound, of rational and sensible, of eternal and ephemeral. When Augustine speaks of numerus, he is thinking not only of numeric proportions between pitches but also, if 31

Before Sound

not more, of numeric proportions between temporal durations: numerus is rhythm. He dedicated his treatise De musica exclusively to metrics, and, just as in the De ordine, explicitely mentioned that rhythmus is numerus. If, as a rational reality, numbers are always present, sound has instead always already vanished. The temporality of music is here described as transient. According to Augustine, that music unfolds in time means that sound does not last, it fades away. Like the sound of speech, therefore, the sound of music is also ephemeral; yet, if the word of language is preserved by the litera, musical sound—being in time— can only be preserved by memory: no letter can preserve a song. In a well-known and much commented passage, Isidore repeats Augustine’s statement that music is committed to memory because sound is an ephemeral phenomenon; in addition, he makes explicit the alterity—already present in Augustine—of words and musical sounds by excluding that the latter can be written: “Unless sounds (soni) are held in human memory, they pass away, for they cannot be written (quia scribi non possunt)” (3.15.1–2 Lindsay). Why does Augustine connect language to writing but music to memory? And what does Isidore mean when he says that sound cannot be written? Are they simply attesting that there was no musical notation? Or are they rather alluding to the fact that sound cannot be written because, in addition to pitch, sound includes other, non-writable, dimensions? Blair Sullivan (1999, 10) contends that Isidore—like the grammarian Diomedes before him—simply meant to say that music does belong to the vox articulata but is illiterata, that is, it is not writable, it is not reducible to the individual letters of the alphabet. In other words, if writing fixes words, music is not in the same position of language, because it does not comprise any signifying word. Speech, Music, and Writing. Language was conceptualized on the basis of the letter, that is, of writing. Writing or, better, the phonetic alphabet, articulates the sound of speech in discrete elements. The identification of the element of speech in the gramma, the phōnē engrammatos as developed by Aristotle and the Stoics, and the Latin grammarians’ distinction between vox articulata and vox confusa explicitly lead to understand the voice of language as writable, sound organized by and in writing. Moreover, the transition from the uttered word to the written word, from the aural to the visual word, does not simply consist in the dissection of speech into minimal elements. Augustine’s distinction between vox (voice) and verbum (word), which enables the text to speak without sound (sine voce loquuntur) marks the separation between language as structure and vocal sound as material. The signifying ability of language is described not in acoustic terms but starting from its writability. Writing makes it possible to think of language regardless of its sonic manifestation. The sound of the voice is identified as the material of a signifying act only when the structure of speech can be articulated and represented by a visual instrument such as writing. Temporality belongs to sound. The linguistic structures—as the numbers of music—are non-temporal and can be represented by writing. Writing would there-

32

Beginnings

fore bring at least two distinct consequences: separating language into elements and distinguishing voice from the word. Only writing as representation and fixation of speech allows the distinction between structure, meaning, and ephemeral material. The crucial role that letter and writing play in the conception of voice and language belies, at least partially, the position Jacques Derrida (1930–2004) has developed on this matter. According to him, the phonocentrism (and logocentrism) of Western culture would consist in considering writing in a subordinate position with respect to the voice ([1967] 1997, 11–12). With this concept, the French philosopher aimed at criticizing the centrality of the voice that produces meaning and its supremacy with respect to writing, consequently seen as mere representation or substitute. He intended, therefore, to redeem writing from the ancillary role of representing language. While it is certainly true that philosophers and grammarians conceptualize language beginning by defining voice, actually they develop a theory on the basis of the letter, that is, of writing (Irvine 1994, 29). For this reason, according to Sybille Krämer it is not a matter of phonocentrism but rather of implicit scriptism, because writing determines the characteristics of what is considered language. In particular, Ferdinand de Saussure’s (1857–1913) distinction between signifier and signified is only possible thanks to writing, which represents not sound but its signifying function (Krämer 2016, 15–16). This privileged position that writing has assumed in our tradition, made it problematic to consider music vox articulata. Like speech, melos was also conceived of as composed of elements. Yet, unlike the element of speech (gramma), the element of music (phthongos), was conceived almost as the other side, the non-writable side of the voice. By excluding that the soni belong to the vox scriptilis, Isidore excludes that music can be thought of starting from a written sign. The temporal character of music and the Muses is alternative to writing. The non-writability of music’s soni expresses the being in time of musical sound, its being entrusted to memory. To say that musical sound cannot be written means that music, despite being structured by number, is however in time, and, therefore, that it has a “performative” dimension, which would not be essential to language. In other words, differently from language, music cannot communicate to absent people neither can speak sine voce: music must be produced, that is, performed. Musical sound must take place. The distinction between letter and sound, between language and music, already relegates sound to a secondary position: in order to signify, language does not need sound, while music admits sound without meaning. The solidarity and antagonism between language and music, between gramma and phthongos, can hardly be better expressed than in the words of pseudo-Plutarchian De musica: When the usual ceremonies were completed, Onesicrates said: “A drinking-party like this, my friends, is not the time to investigate the causal basis of the human voice, since that is an inquiry which demands a more sober period of leisure. However, since the best authorities on writing define sound (φωνή, phōnē) as “air which has been struck, and which is perceptible to hearing”, and since, as it happens, we were yesterday inquir-

33

Before Sound ing into the art of writing (γραμματική, grammatikē), conceived as that art which enables us to reproduce vocal sounds in letters and to preserve them for our recollection, let us consider which of the sciences concerned with vocal sound come after this one, in second place. In my opinion it is music; for it is a pious act, and one of the highest importance for mankind, to sing hymns to the gods who have given articulate voice (ἔναρθρος φωνή, enarthos phōnē) to mankind alone.” (1131c–d)

It is not possible to talk about a subject as important as language in a state of drunkenness: grammar is that art which allows language to be reproduced and preserved in letters. The author outlines a clear hierarchy between language and music: the primacy belongs to language, a language, however, informed by the letter and its preservability. Music is also connected to voice but comes in second place: it is suitable for praising the gods for giving mankind articulate language. Nota. With the invention of musical notation the question of whether music belongs to the vox literalis or is preserved by memory was apparently solved. Contrary to what Isidore had stated, the birth and development of modern notation seems to affirm that music, not unlike language, can be reduced to signs capable of perfectly indicating its elements. At this point, however, the question arises: Did the nota play in music the same function that the gramma and the letter played in grammar? Does musical notation make it possible to think of melody regardless of its sonic manifestation? Boethius describes the musical notation in use in these terms: Ancient musicians, for the sake of abbreviation—lest it always be necessary to write out complete names of notes—devised certain written symbols (notulas) whereby the designations of the strings (nervorum vocabula) might be notated, and they distributed them throughout the genera and the modes. (De Institutione musica 4.3)

Boethius’s passage, however, is not in contradiction with Augustine’s and Isidore’s negation as to the ability of musical sounds to be written. Rather the opposite. Boethius in fact first speaks of notulae, not of litterae; moreover, he asserts that those signs notate not sound, but rather the strings that produce the related sound (Bower 2001). However, the ease of confusing sound and sound body already occurs in Boethius’ own text, when he later writes that notes indicate sounds. At the same time, using such abbreviations, they [ancient musicians] were striving to reach the point where a musician who wanted to write down some melody over a verse, set out in the rhythmic structure of some meter, could add these written symbols for the sounds. Through this remarkable means, then, they discovered that not only the words of songs (carminum verba)—conveyed through letters—but also the very melodies themselves—espressed in these written symbols—could be preserved in the memory and for posterity. (De Institutione musica 4, 3)

In the course of time other authors establish a perfect correspondence between, on one side, notating and singing musical sounds and, on the other, writ-

34

Beginnings

ing and reading letters. For Hucbald, for example, the phthongi were also assigned the names of strings: “These phthongi have usually been designated by the names of the strings (chordarum nomine), since they could be illustrated most readily by the instruments with which they were associated” (154, 6–7 Chartier). When he then goes on to discuss the note (intended as a graphic sign) he equates it with the letter of the alphabet: Let our course turn next to the written musical signs (nota musica), which, placed by each of the string names, bring no slight profit to students of music. As the sounds and differences of words are recognized by letters in writing in such a way that the reader is not led into doubt, musical signs were devised so that every melody notated by their means, once these signs have been learned, can be sung even without the teacher. (194, 1–6)

Numerous other authors can be cited who equate musical notes and letters of the alphabet. The anonymous author of the Musica Enchiriadis, for instance, seems to reply to Isidore, explicitly acknowledging the role of musical notation: “If by chance the identity of any tone is strongly doubted, then the tones in order are tested for semitones. . . . Soon it will be clear which tone is involved, since practice makes notating and singing tones as easy as writing and reading letters” (7. 7–8). For Johannes de Grocheio, the art of writing is equally necessary for the grammarian and the musician: “For just as for the grammarian the art of writing (ars scribendi) and the finding of letters was necessary, so that, by means of writing, he could preserve terms found and put in place to signify, so the art of writing is necessary for the musician, so that he may preserve diverse cantus composed from diverse concords by this means” (7.2 Mews). In his Notitia artis musicae of 1321, finally, Johannes de Muris cautions that the musician must be able to properly note the different aspects of each song: “Everything that is uttered singing with a normal, whole, and regular voice, the knowledgeable musician must write by appropriate notes (notula)” (94). The invention of the nota seems to resolve the difference between gramma and phthongos: as the gramma is at the same time the sonic element of speech and its graphic representation, likewise the nota is conceived at the same time as the musical sound and the sign that represents it. As speech was thought of starting from the litera, likewise, since the advent of notation, the cantus has been thought of starting from the nota. Now, thinking of music as writable means thinking of it not only as articulated sound but also as distinguishable from sound. The relationships between musical sounds are given autonomous and lasting existence by resorting to sign and visibility. As the voice was for Aristotle the matter of language, so sound can now become the material of music. Notation defines and shows tone in its fundamental parameters; and by showing it, notation generates sound as musical material.

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Chapter Two

Matter and Material

In Western thought, the relationship between music and sound—as well as composition itself—has always been thought of by recourse to the notions of element and material. This chapter explores how even twentieth-century modernist composers reflected on their practice by applying or partially reinterpreting these notions in light of a new comprehension of sound and the emergence of new technologies. With this in mind, I have chosen two moments that can be considered fundamental in the history of twentieth-century musical composition: first, the emancipation of dissonance as described by Arnold Schoenberg; second, electronic sound synthesis and the organization of durations in serialism, particularly in Karlheinz Stockhausen. I will then examine the very term of musical “material” highlighting its ambiguity. The chapter closes with the question, which remains open to this day, of whether musical composition necessarily uses sound in relation to a structure or whether it is capable of exhibiting sound as matter in itself, devoid of any form. The discussion of these topics will be accompanied by a look at the relative positions developed by Theodor W. Adorno, who, as is well known, followed the development of the musical avant-garde with a critical attitude (not always free of contradictions). In this context, I am particularly interested in emphasizing two key ideas of his thought that seem to me crucial for understanding the evolution of the conception of musical material in the twentieth century: the historical and social character of musical material and its limitedness. Since the end of the twentieth century, in fact, attributing these characteristics to musical material has appeared more and more problematic: musical material seems to have become potentially infinite, coming to coincide with sound in general.

2.1  Dissonant Material The Emancipation of the Dissonance. That the composer must deal with the specific characteristics of sound is clearly visible in Arnold Schoenberg’s theory and work. In the first pages of his Harmonielehre, in a long digression, the Austrian composer argues that, in order to establish a theory of consonance between sounds, it would be correct to start from the sense of hearing. However, since this is not possible, it is necessary to reject the subject and to turn to the object of sensation, that is, sound.

37

Before Sound The material of music is the tone; what it affects first, the ear. The sensory perception (sinnliche Wahrnehmung) releases associations and connects tone, ear, and the world of feeling (Empfindungswelt). On the cooperation of these three factors depends everything in music that is felt to be art. ([1922] 1985, 19)

I will return later to the assertiveness with which Schoenberg attributes aesthetic value in music exclusively to the cooperation between sound and hearing. Let us follow the argument Schoenberg develops when he resorts to the traditional theory of whole and parts to explain the relationship of consonance. Even if a chemical compound does have characteristics other than those of the elements from which it was formed, and if the impression of a work of art makes does display characteristics other than those which could be derived from each single component, it is still justifiable for many a purpose, in analyzing the total phenomenon, to bring up for consideration various characteristics of the basic components. . . . Perhaps it is indefensible to try to derive everything that constitutes the physics of harmony from one of the components, say, just from the tone. (19)

According to Schoenberg, although the impressions of the work of art do not depend on the elements that compose it, it is nevertheless useful for understanding its nature to take into consideration the characteristics of the elements. Once again: the tone is the material of music. It must therefore be regarded, with all its property and effects, as suitable for art. All sensations that it releases—indeed, these are the effects that make known its properties—bring their influence to bear in some sense on the form of which the tone is a component, that is, on the piece of music. In the overtones, which is one the most remarkable properties of the tone, there appear after some stronger-sounding overtones a number of weaker-sounding ones. (20)

Already in the seventeenth century, the discovery of the harmonic spectrum had entailed deep changes in the knowledge of sound and, consequently, in the notion of musical material (Grant 2013). Thus, in the nineteenth century it had become common to resort to the natural overtone series to explain the relationships of consonance or dissonance between sounds and the formation of chords (Nattiez 1990, 202). However, Schoenberg, by his own admission, has no ambition to found a true theory of consonance that is scientifically valid; he finds that the model of the harmonic spectrum just offers a “simple” explanation. Perhaps the first important aspect of the notion of material is that it has a primarily operational function: “whenever I theorize, it is less important whether these theories be right than whether they be useful as comparisons to clarify the object to give the study perspective”(Schoenberg [1922] 1985, 19). From this point of view, it is the compositional practice that validates its theory, not vice versa. According to Schoenberg, the relationships of consonance and dissonance can be easily explained by the order of succession of the harmonic sounds: in the series of harmonics, those sounds that have historically been recognized as the first consonances (first the octave, then the perfect fifth and major third) stand out the

38

Matter and Material

most. The interval of third minor and those of major and minor sixth would not appear among the overtones, and yet they have been historically accepted as consonant sounds, because they do relate to the fundamental, albeit in the “descending direction”: The overtones closer to the fundamental seem to contribute more or more perceptibly to the total phenomenon of the tone—tone accepted as euphonious, suitable for art—while the more distant seem to contribute less or less perceptibly. . . . The world of feeling somehow takes into account the entire complex, hence the more distant overtones as well. Even if the analyzing ear does not become conscious of them, they are still heard as tone color. (20)

For Schoenberg, this means that the relationships between sounds cannot be rigidly distinguished according to a clear duality; rather, one must imagine a gradual transition from more consonant to less consonant relationships: “The more immediate overtones contribute more, the more remote contribute less. . . . the expressions ‘consonance’ and ‘dissonance’, which signify an antithesis, are false” (21). In other words, the relationship between two sounds is not necessarily absolutely consonant or dissonant, and the difference would be one of degree, not quality. Throughout history there would have been a progressive discovery of less consonant sounds. If traditionally the relations between sounds were clearly distinguished by nature between consonant and dissonant, for Schoenberg these relations of consonance are only a provisional construction that is linked to a certain civilization and a certain period. For this reason they could and had to be overcome: it is not difficult to imagine how rethinking the relationships between sounds was the necessary premise of Schoenberg’s atonal compositions. Obsession with Material. In the first issue of the journal Melos (1920), conductor Hermann Scherchen (1891–1966) dedicates an article to Arnold Schoenberg. Referring in particular to Pelleas and Melisande and the Orchersterstücke op. 16, he writes about the role of the material in the style of the Austrian composer: The true artist must be a slave to his artistic material: what he feels becomes tones, colors, lines. . . . Few artists have been as obsessed with the material of their art as Arnold Schoenberg. In him, the hidden driving forces (Triebkräfte) work so elementarily that his work leads from problem definition to problem definition, that each solution releases new forces, demands new forms of synthesis . . . the element of sound turned in on itself. Sound (Klang) as such gives birth to forms, becomes a creative force; no longer only as an appearance of harmony and melody. As a primary element that in itself leads to creation, it enters and usurps supremacy. . . . Schoenberg is obsessed by his matter as few others are, he is so completely a musician that the movements of his matter work in him as in this matter itself. (1920, 9; emphasis mine)

This passage is intriguing for at least two reasons. First, sound itself has such a driving force that it can guide the act of composition and become form, and not only in

39

Before Sound

relation to harmony or melody. The act of composition does not impose its will on an inert material, but becomes the bearer of the potentialities inherent in the sound itself. Second, Scherchen believes that allowing this primordial aspect of music to guide the creative act leads to conceiving the composition as a formulation of problems (“from problem definition to problem definition”), posed and solved through the compositional practice. The Necessity of Dodecaphony. Rethinking the relationship of consonance and dissonance between sounds is the necessary premise not only of atonality but also of the dodecaphonic method. Schoenberg, in fact, returned to discuss this issue in a conference delivered at the University of California 1941, “Composition with Twelve Tones,” to explain the development of the dodecaphonic technique. In this lecture, he clarifies that the twelve-tone technique was not the outcome of an arbitrary choice, but the necessary result of a historical process of discovering dissonance: “The method of composing with twelve notes grew out of a necessity” ([1941] 1984, 216; emphasis mine). In this statement it is possible to detect that type of philosophy of history that will later have so much success among the avant-garde artists of the twentieth century: changes in history are produced not as a result of free self-determination, but under the pressure of necessary processes. Changes cannot be traced back to individual whims, but must be raised to the level of absolutely necessary and irrefutable events. The stages of the process that would lead to the birth of the dodecaphonic technique are identified by Schoenberg first in chromaticism and then in extended tonality: “The idea that one basic tone, the root, dominated the construction of chords and regulated their succession—the concept of tonality— had to develop first into the concept of extended tonality. Very soon it became doubtful whether such a root remained the center to which every harmony and harmonic succession must be referred” (216, emphasis in original). After Wagner and Debussy “tonality was already dethroned in practice, if not in theory” (216). To explain the reasons that led to this development Schoenberg makes explicit reference to the very passage quoted above: “In my Harmonielehre I presented the theory that dissonant tones appear later among the overtones, for which reason the ear is less intimately acquainted with them. The phenomenon does not justify such sharply contradictory terms as concord and discord” (216). The distinction between consonance and dissonance was not based on a principle of agreeableness, but on a higher degree of comprehensibility: consonances were more comprehensible than dissonances. Thus, the possibility of emancipating the dissonance meant that even dissonances had finally achieved a certain level of comprehensibility. For Schoenberg, the impulse for the invention of the dodecaphonic method is inscribed in history, and yet this necessity was already offered in the very nature of sound. In this way, the birth of dodecaphony would combine a natural principle (the series of overtones) with a principle of historical development (the progressive discovery over time of sounds that are more dissonant or, in other words, less consonant). In

40

Matter and Material

Schoenberg’s eyes, the dodecaphonic technique represented not a break with the past but a continuity with tradition. Adorno on Twelve-tone Technique. It is in relation to Schoenberg’s musical thought and practice, capable of combining nature’s permanence and historical change, that Adorno was able to develop his theory of historically determined material (Paddison 1993, 66–81). Adorno’s notion of musical material as well as its evolution have been extensively studied. After recalling some of its characteristic features, I will focus in particular on one aspect of Adorno’s conception of material—namely, its limitedness—which constitutes, in my view, an important point to understand the different conceptions of musical material in the twentieth century. Although it is articulated more maturely in the Philosophy of New Music, Adorno’s theory of musical material can already be found sketched in an early essay, “Zur Zwölftontechnik,” published in the journal Anbruch in 1929. In this essay, Adorno emphasizes that, in order to understand Schoenberg’s latest twelve-tone compositions (the first compositions entirely organized according to the twelve-tone method are the Fünf Klavierstücke op. 23 [1920–23]), it is necessary first of all to show that the birth of the twelve-tone technique is not to be attributed to the disintegration of material; therefore, it is not an attempt to establish a new order through imposed calculation. Material as such does not constitute a natural constraint (keine naturale Bindung) for the composer, and compositional choices that have tried to derive a new order from the state of the material (Stande des Materiales) have failed. This leads to a crucial conclusion: the only conditions that the material is still capable of imposing are nothing but the octave module, the division of the octave into twelve semitones, and the equal temperament. Adorno notes that, although it is characteristic of all of Schoenberg’s music to be closely related to the material, nevertheless it is not simply a fulfillment of the necessities imposed by the material, but enters into a historically dialectical relationship with it. Seen this way, the dodecaphonic technique is not the execution of a natural state of affairs, but represents the rational fulfillment of a historical constraint (der rationale Vollzug eines geschichtlichen Zwanges); thus, the dodecaphonic technique represents the removal of the last deception of order, allowing an act of freedom on the composer’s part. For Adorno, on the one hand it is a matter of complying with the indications of the material, and on the other of limiting its scope. This early text by Adorno seems to capture an aspect of dodecaphonic technique that perhaps Schoenberg himself had hesitated to highlight, concerned as he was to emphasize its continuity with the past. Contrary to what one might believe, twelve-tone technique is not a consequence of chromaticism, but represents instead the true autonomy of all twelve pitches. By making the notes independent from one other, this technique does not bring about a different order in the material, as had been the case with previous musical systems. It went further, dissolving some of the aspects of music that were considered “already given,” precisely the material, reaching

41

Before Sound

the point of questioning the note itself. It dissolved the rules that had previously held together traditional composition. Pitch material, as it was configured in Wagner, had a tendency not so much towards chromaticism, but already towards the dissolution of the links between notes. Therefore, according to Adorno, the dodecaphonic technique did not dissolve these ties in order to get to the bottom of the natural characteristics of sound; Schoenberg was not approaching the sound of nature but was pursuing an idea of autonomy in music. History and Society. In 1949, upon his return to Europe from his American exile, Adorno published the Philosophy of New Music, which would have an unprecedented influence on young composers (Zagorski 2009, 285–86). The notion of musical material, outlined in the essay published twenty years earlier, is now more defined—especially in its relationship to history and society. Adorno refuses to believe that a stable foundation for musical material can be found in nature or in psychology: musical material is the complex of qualities and attributes of sounds as well as of the relationships between them that are historically generated, and evolve following their own “laws of movement. According to these laws, not everything is possible in every age” (Adorno [1949] 2006, 31). The historical dimension of musical material excludes the possibility of it being defined once and for all in physical terms. Musical material is always an already elaborated sound. “Music knows no natural laws” (31). In the Adornian theory, the character of musical material is not only historical but also intrinsically social. Therefore, not only can it not be defined once and for all, but it is also not at the disposal of the single artist. “The exigencies of the material imposed on the subject arise, rather, from the fact that the ‘material’ is itself sedimented spirit, preformed socially by human consciousness” (32; emphasis mine). Because of its social character, composers cannot arbitrarily choose any material to construct their compositions, but instead the material itself indicates to them some tendencies to follow. Composers engage in a “battle” with the material most importantly by submitting to the material’s directives, that composers “transform by adhering to them” (32). The necessary submission of the composer to the requirements of the material entails a strong reduction if not a dismissal of the supposed artist’s self-determination. The composer “loses that grand-scale freedom that idealist aesthetics habitually attributes to the artist. He is no creator” (33). The historical and social determination of the musical material rescues it at the same time both from the static laws of nature and from the momentary whim of the artist. Since it is essentially historical, sound material is subtracted to the constant and immutable rule of nature and assigned to human becoming. Furthermore, as it is also socially determined, musical material is subtracted to the arbitrary choice of the individual and given back to its plural definition. In the historical becoming, musical material discards anachronistic artistic means and attains new levels of technique that dictate the current frame of artistic invention. The musical artwork is doomed to fail when its sounds and configurations do not correspond to the latest

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Matter and Material

state (Stand) of the material’s development: “Not only are these sounds obsolete and unfashionable. They are also false” (32). As it is often noted, the expression “sedimented spirit” echoes the expression with which Eduard Hanslick (1825–1904) had defined the musical material, starting from the opposition and conjunction of spirit and matter: geistfähiges Material ([1854] 1891, 36). If Hanslick considered sound a material able to correspond to the demands of the spirit, for Adorno the material available to the composer is the product of a process of spiritual decantation. In addition, one should not fail to note the negative form with which Adorno expresses the character of the material: the material would seem to dictate its conditions to the composer not so much as an imposition but as a prohibition, as if the potentiality of the Aristotelian notion of material were no longer capable of indicating what is possible but only what is forbidden— what cannot be. As a result, the composer’s material would not generically be sound, but only a reduced part of its possible configurations. Again, in his late Aesthetic Theory, Adorno will insist on the limitedness of the material: “Of all material that is abstractly employable, only the tiniest part does not collide with the condition of the spirit and is as much concretely usable” ([1969] 1997, 203; emphasis mine).

2.2  Sound and Composition Contradictions and Consistency. The need to reconsider the nature of sound and its organization in music becomes particularly pressing in moments of transition, when it is necessary to justify or oppose the abandonment of a certain musical practice considered obsolete in favor of new ways of construction and expression. Never was the need to investigate and radically renew the way of thinking about sound and music as urgent as it was after World War II. Post-war composers regarded themselves as being in strong discontinuity with the past, even in discontinuity with their own more recent past, even with Schoenberg, who was criticized in particular for his return to the use of neoclassical forms. In his notorious article “Schoenberg is dead” written in 1951, Boulez sees in Schoenberg’s work an irremediable contradiction between the serial principle and the forms in which this principle is applied, forms that would only be conceivable starting from a tonal material. From the conflict between dodecaphonic material and a morphology of classical heritage that they saw in Schoenberg’s work, post-war composers deduced the need to apply the serial principle not only to pitches but to all aspects of sound. Thus, Boulez concludes the article by writing: Perhaps we might . . . investigate the musical evidence arising from the attempt at generating structure from material. . . . Perhaps we might generalize the serial principle to the four constituents of sound: pitch, duration, dynamics/attack, and timbre. ([1951] 1991, 211)

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Before Sound

Building on this idea, Boulez composed Polyphonie X (1950–51; withdrawn) for 18 instruments, two musique concrète études (1951–52; withdrawn), and Structures, Book I for two pianos (1951–52). Like Boulez, Stockhausen was also convinced that the material must be arranged in a manner consistent with the overall form of the piece, the former being subordinate to the latter. It follows that in order to achieve perfect coherence, any traditional material must be discarded. Note-ordering (Tonordnung) means the subordination of notes under a unifying principle, which is conceived beforehand. And: [it means] consistency (Widerspruchlosigkeit) between the ordering in detail and as a whole . . . . Pre-existing note-orderings (such as modes and scales [Tonsysteme], themes, motives, rows, ‘rhythms,’ folklorisms and so forth) are . . . unusable.” ([1952] 1963, 18–19; emphases in original)

Again like Boulez, Stockhausen intends to bring element and form together through the application of the serial principle to all aspects of sound. Serialist composers would often refer to Messiaen’s Mode de valeurs et d’intensités as the first example of generalization of the serial principle to all parameters of sound. Although this piece was composed in 1949 (the same year that Adorno published his Philosophy), Iannis Xenakis (1922–2001) recalls that Messiaen was teaching his students to compose by applying the serial principle to all sound parameters as early as 1942 (Xenakis 1955, 2). The serial technique seemed to offer the composer a sound unaffected by any kind of preformation. Just like the non-repetition principle of the twelve-tone technique had allowed a non-hierarchical organization of pitches, in the same way its application to all aspects of sound could avoid any traditional connotation. Gottfried Michael Koenig (1926–2021), who worked in the Studio for Electronic Music of the NWDR (later WDR) in Cologne and collaborated with Karlheinz Stockhausen on several occasions, writes: “Twelve-tone technique . . . seemed to neutralize the musical material to such an extent that it could be taken over and put to any other purpose” ([1963] 1992, 149). In other words, the series should not be considered in the same way as traditional modes or tonality, but as a structure capable of neutralizing any hierarchy between sounds: the series is an order such as to neutralize any order. The Single Sound and its Timbre. The application of the serial principle presupposes the idea of “single sound,” that is, a sound subtracted from the whole, and that it is possible to describe the single sound according to certain distinct dimensions or parameters: pitch, duration, dynamics, timbre. Thus, according to Stockhausen, in order to conceive composition no longer as a connection of already predetermined elements, one must exclude preformed material and shape the single sound, which must be redefined in its four dimensions. This is how Punktuelle Musik was born.

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Matter and Material Composing has long been understood as merely putting together (Zusammenstellen). The ‘together’ is not sufficient as a definition. . . . ‘Organizing’ rather meets the relation between imagination and arrangement of the material (Materialordnung). The emergence of the individual from a whole excludes the choice of material that is already preformed, that is, prearranged (vorgeordnet). . . . The individual is the tone with its four dimensions: duration, dynamics, pitch, color. ([1952] 1963, 18–19)

This conception of composition as shaping and organizing each dimension of the individual sound led to the idea of also forging its timbre. Timbre was always out of the composer’s hands. Certainly, the composer could influence the timbre by choosing a certain instrument and even a certain register, or by specifying a particular bowing for string instruments, or particular types of emission for wind instruments. The specific characteristics of the sound, however, remained in the end the prerogative of performers and, before that, of instrument makers (who build the instrument on the basis of certain acoustic laws, conventions, and according to their own taste). The possibility and the necessity to compose not by choosing among different sounds already predetermined, but by giving shape to the timbre, to the “sound itself,” arose in the context of serial composition, that is, when composers felt the need to extend the serial principle to all parameters in order to heal the contradiction between serialism and the preformed timbre of musical instruments. In his notes written between 1952 and 1953, Stockhausen identifies the possibility of generating new material through electroacoustic synthesis. Indeed, the first question is what is a single tone. . . . The question itself arose when some composers could no longer avoid the idea of composing the timbre (Klangfarbe) of tones serially. We have been informed for some time that every tone (Ton) (a sound process of definite pitch) and every noise (Geräusch) (a sound process of indefinite pitch) can be represented as a mixture—a ‘spectrum’—of partials. That means, every acoustic phenomenon occurring in music or in nature in general is traceable to a number of simple oscillations, which can be called (with certain mathematical restrictions) ‘sine oscillations.’ ([1953c] 1963, 49)

Stockhausen evidently refers to the Fourier theorem, according to which all periodic oscillations can be expressed as the sum of sinusoidal components whose frequencies are in integer ratios (Toop 1979, 383). The sine wave became, thus, in the eyes of serial composers the element from which it was possible to configure also the timbre according to their needs. We went back to the element that underlies all sonic diversity; to the pure vibration that can be generated electrically, called “sine tone.” Every existing sound (Klang), every noise (Geräusch) is a mixture of such sine tones—we say a “spectrum.” Number, interval, and volume ratios of such sine tones make up the peculiarity of each spectrum. They determine the timbre (Klangfarbe). And thus for the first time the possibility was given to compose the timbre in a music in the real sense of the word, i.e. to compose (zusammenzusetzen) it from elements, and thus to let the universal structural

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Before Sound principle of a music become effective also in the sound proportions. ([1953b] 1963, 42; emphases in original)

He adds shortly thereafter that “this event is certainly a major turning point in the development of musical composition into the distant future” (emphasis in original). This new idea of sound synthesis thus comes to reconfigure the creative act itself: composing would not mean putting together previously constituted sound but giving form to the sounds themselves. Koenig also brings the notion of musical material back to the minimal element, going so far as to identify the element with the single phase of a sine wave. If, however, one considers the number of phases of a sinus tone as already a definition (namely of the time during which the note sounds), the aspect of material would have to be limited to the single phase. But because a frequency is recognizable only when a particular number of single phases are present, one of these manifests itself merely as a click; the absolute length of the phase cannot be determined by the ear. Thus, the concept of material is reduced still further to an event whose true property is not recognized acoustically. ([1958] 1992, 9; emphasis mine)

Only electronics could make it possible to develop such a conception of the element and material of music; in this way, one can even equate the element of music with the number of oscillations of the alternating current. This concept of material gained the clearest expression in electronic music, where even the timbres can still be broken down into their components, into color ranges and individual sine tones, which are the last elementary particles. The single sine tone is generated in the electronic studio with the help of a sine tone generator; this tone is defined by nothing more than the number of oscillations that the alternating current, which sets the membrane of the loudspeaker in motion, performs within one second. ([1963] 1992, 144; emphasis mine)

Similarly, it also becomes possible to determine dynamics and duration of the individual element with absolute precision. Likewise it is possible to exactly determine the volume of the sine tone with the help of a measuring instrument; the duration can also be determined much more exactly than in the instrumental music—yes, one can say: absolutely exactly. It is converted into centimeters and pieces of corresponding length are cut from the tape. . . . The instrumentalists of the orchestra cannot reach this accuracy. ([1963] 1992, 144)

Just as the idea of composing the timbre of sound presupposes isolating the individual sound from its musical context, similarly, in order to determine its exact duration, it is necessary to subtract the sound from the flow of the melos organized by the meter. In this way, previously unthinkable durations and ratios of duration are made available to the composer (Boulez [1952b] 1995, 290; [1955] 1958, 23).

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Pitch and Duration. The serial organization of all parameters presupposes their homogeneity, in particular it presupposes that the relationships between pitches must be homogeneous with the relationships between durations. Stockhausen set out to demonstrate this assumption in the article “. . . how time passes . . .” which was published in 1956 in Die Reihe and became a fundamental text for his compositional practice (from the ideas developed in this text the composer created pieces such as Kontakte and Gruppen) as well as for many other composers. Even as late as 1981, twenty-five years after its publication, Heinz-Klaus Metzger (1932–2009) did not hesitate to attribute an unparalleled importance to Stockhausen on the basis of the ideas developed in this text: “He alone has found the theoretical solution to the key problem of serial composing—perhaps of all composing: the relation between durations and pitches. His essay ‘. . . how time passes . . .’ is and remains the fundamental text for any compositional theory that claims to be rational” (Metzger and Riehn 1981, 4). The fundamental assumption of Stockhausen’s article is that it is possible to apply the serial principle to all parameters because the parameters are essentially homogeneous, and that they are homogeneous because at their root there would be nothing but a single phenomenon—which can then be described through different parameters depending on the temporal level at which it is observed or perceived. To demonstrate this, Stockhausen appeals to the nature of sound and, in particular, to the threshold between the perception of pitch and that of a pulsation, which is crossed when the movement that produces a sound is slowed down: the field of durations and that of pitches would therefore constitute a continuous field. From this observation the composer thinks he can derive a “new morphology of musical time” ([1957] 1959, 11). According to Stockhausen in serial music there is an important contradiction between the organization of pitches and the organization of durations. (He also mentions a second contradiction between the serial organization of pitches and the harmonic nature of musical instruments, which I will omit in this context.) In order to be consistent with the principles of serial music, an attempt was made to structure not only the pitches but also the durations according to a serial principle. (“In serial music an attempt is made to put the time-proportions of the elements in order, by means of series” [12].) There were basically two ways to serialize durations: generating twelve duration values by multiplying a minimum value, or by dividing a maximum value. Stockhausen shows that multiplying a minimum value actually yields a “subharmonic series of proportions” (12–15), while dividing a maximum value yields a “harmonic or overtone series” (16–19). Thus, these methods present a disparity between the serial organization of pitches and the treatment of durations because they are unable to organize durations into a chromatic scale corresponding to the chromatic scale of pitches. If it is true that durations and pitches constitute a continuous field, it becomes possible to rethink all the notions of traditional music theory; in particular, it is pos-

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sible to match the traditional terms of measure, accent, meter and rhythm with the fundamental sound and harmonic sounds. In the sphere of traditional metric-rhythmic relationships, the correspondences with harmonic relations are quite familiar. The whole allusive richness of pitches in cadential music resulted from the intervals of the harmonic series, and the same is the case in the sphere of durations. (19)

Metre and measure are periodic phenomena just as pitch is a periodic phenomenon, with a primary and a secondary accent. The bar corresponds (as a metrical fundamental unit) to the fundamental phase of a time-spectrum. All definitions of “accented and unaccented parts of the bar” (resulting from “main and subsidiary maxima”), of syncopations and their resolution (phase-displacement and restoration of phase-periodicity), etc., originated in the practice of “part-writing” (which gave rise to the problems of harmonic time-spectra). In it, the bar, as fundamental phase, was rendered (through time-formants) in various ways, if mainly through the “consonant formants”—the octave (duplet), fifth (triplet), later the third (quintuplet), and at most the seventh (septuplet); i.e. with up to seven formants. (19)

Rhythm relates to meter in the same way that overtones relate to a fundamental sound: meter corresponds to the fundamental sound and rhythm composes a sound spectrum. The difference between metre and rhythm is exactly that which we discern between the “fundamental tone” and the “tone-colour” of sound-spectra: the fundamental phase (metric fundamental) is defined by the periodic main intensity-maxima (the heaviest accents), and these result from the formant-structure. The relationships of the subsidiary to the main maxima (subsidiary to the main accents) define the “tone-colour,” i.e. the rhythm. “Tone-colour” is a confusing idea, that could well be replaced by “sound-rhythm,” and one should use the general term “formant-rhythm.” (19)

In tonal music Stockhausen sees a substantial correspondence between the organization of pitches and the organization of durations, and between the conformation of instrumental sound and notation. The same harmonic series of proportions (also “overtone-series”) was the standard in “tonal” music, both for the formant-spectra of the sound used, and for the intervals that connected such sounds; spectral proportions were identical with the proportions of the fundamental tones, both simultaneous (“harmony”) and succession (“melody”). (20)

The twelve-tone technique, on the other hand, introduces a chromatic organization of pitches that contradicts both the harmonic character of musical instruments and traditional rhythmic organization. Finally, in the twelve-tone system, harmonic-melodic “laws” were formulated that totally contradicted the spectral structure of the instrumental sounds used, the in-

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Matter and Material strumental sounds’ harmonic scale of perception was irreconcilably opposed to the chromatic scale of perception of the twelve fundamental tones in the octave, whose steps were serially composed. Here the earlier identity of material and composition fell completely apart. (20, my emphasis)

It is precisely this imbalance between the organization of pitches and the organization of durations that would explain Schoenberg’s return to traditional forms. This is what is really meant when the “emancipation of the fundamental tone” is mentioned. (Schoenberg’s occasional regression to tonal harmony and melody could be explained not least by the contradiction demonstrated above. His metric-rhythmic composition was always “tonal,” a classical cadential rhythm with merely a lot more unresolved syncopations, equivalent to tonal harmony with lots of “wrong notes.”) (20)

The solution to this contradiction between the serial organization of pitches and the organization of durations presupposes the construction of a temperate scale of durations. Once again we are at the basic problem of our investigation. What would a scale of fundamental durations, corresponding to the scale of fundamental tones, look like? Furthermore: how would the duration-spectra have to be structured over these fundamental durations, in order to achieve a complete correspondence . . . between the chromatic system of fundamental tones and the harmonic formant-system, in the realm of both micro- and macro-time perception? (20)

If twelve tones (i.e., twelve values) are used for pitches, it should be possible to generate and use twelve values for durations as well. Stockhausen, therefore, tries to construct a “chromatic” scale of duration values, employing the same numerical relationships that exist between the pitches of the chromatic scale. Since, however, as mentioned above, using methods based on traditional notation it would not be possible to generate a chromatic scale of durations, Stockhausen manages to build a chromatic scale of durations through the serial organization of metronomic tempos. As long as we use the traditional signs for duration, the only possibility is to take the same sign . . . for all twelve chromatic time-values and to differentiate its duration metronomically. (11)

The Primacy of Pitch. Stockhausen was certainly not the first to understand the discontinuous nature of sound nor to think of deriving from this a correspondence between the organization of pitches and the organization of durations—that is, to use his terminology, between “macrodurations” and “microdurations.” As attested by the pseudo-Aristotelian De audibilibus, the ancient Greeks already knew that, although sound shows itself to our perception in its continuous character, the motion that produces it consists of a series of pulses, the distance between which is not perceivable by the human ear: “The impacts made on the air by strings are many and separate, but because of the smallness of the time between them the ear is unable to

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detect the gaps, and hence the sound seems to us single and continuous, as is also the case with colors” (803b34–37). For the ancients, the human sensory faculties did not have access to the internal constitution of the phenomena they perceive; there is a distance between the senses and the deeper structure of reality. Removing the difference between pitch and duration reveals a typically “Pythagorean” approach to music, bringing to mind the ancient opposition between Pythagoreans and Aristoxenians. The fundamental assumption of Pythagoreanism, in fact, is to consider not the perceived sound phenomenon but the movement that generates it. As Porphyry noted (Commentary 37.21-24), when sound is traced back to the movement that generates it, there is no difference between pitch and rhythm: just as pitch is defined as the speed of sound, rhythm is defined as the ratio between long and short. Obviously, it is not a matter of denying that sound is the product of a movement—and in fact not even Aristoxenus denied this—but rather to show that there is no biunivocal correspondence between movement and sound. It would then be a matter of measuring the distance that separates the physical cause from the sensation (and the sensation from the creative and aesthetic act). Only in more recent times, however, have various theorists and composers been able to rethink the nature of sound and its temporality, imagining a perfect correspondence between the organization of pitches and that of durations. In order to relate the regularity of wave motion to the regularity of rhythm as a series of impulses, an instrument was needed, namely, the siren. The invention of the siren, due apparently to Christiaan Huygens (1629–95), showed that when slowing down the rotation of the wheel, a lower sound is produced, until the sensation of pitch itself disappears, leaving only a regular succession of clicks. The siren thus demonstrated that pitch and rhythm could be considered not as distinct dimensions of sound but as a continuum: both pitch and rhythm are vibratory phenomena. The first who noticed that this could constitute proof of a tight connection between pitch and rhythm was the German physician Friedrich Wilhelm Opelt (1794–1863). He expressed frequency as the “rhythm of the pulses” that build up a sound (Opelt 1852). From a compositional point of view, however, it was Henry Cowell who in his book New Musical Resources (with which Stockhausen’s essay has more than one incidental assonance) made use of the continuity between series of pulses and pitch to rethink the rhythmic organization of music (Cowell 1930, 45–108). Serialism’s attempt to relate frequency and duration should not suggest that a true equalization of parameters was reached. In fact, in the hierarchy of parameters, neither Schoenberg nor the serialists contradicted the tradition, which had given pitch a central role (according to the definition that goes back to Plato, harmony is “the order of voice in which acute and grave are blended together” [665a1]). Certainly, Schoenberg went so far as to consider pitch a special case of timbre (Kursell and Schäfer 2011, 27). However, already in its formulation, the twelve-tone technique arises exclusively from the emancipation of dissonance in pitch relationships. On the one hand, serial composers seem to take into consideration sound in its to-

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Matter and Material

tality, but on the other hand they consider pitch as the most important parameter and apply to each dimension of sound structures originating in the organization of pitches. As Boulez wrote, of the four parameters of sound, the first in order of importance is pitch: “We know that, in order of preponderance, the characteristics of sound are pitch, duration, intensity, and timbre” ([1958] 1995, 354). Integral serialism, the application of the series to the different parameters of sound, apparently— only apparently—makes the parameters equal. Rather, it forcibly projects onto the other parameters an order that derives solely from the relationship between pitches. Belgian linguist Nicholas Ruwet (1932–2001), in fact, condemned precisely this aspect of avant-garde structuralism: he stressed that a language is nothing more than “a system of systems” that behaves differently at different levels (1959, 88–89). Moreover, Boulez himself would eventually recognize that the use of the series had led to “absurdities” regarding the equalization of parameters with each other ([1958] 1995, 354). More recently, Justin London (2002) has argued that the difference between pitch and rhythm is a qualitative difference, so it is not possible to apply structures derived from one domain to the other. Our perception behaves differently depending on the temporal levels that are taken into account. Stockhausen (like Cowell before him) struggles with a limitation inherent in musical notation and in the human capability of the performer to execute the durations that greater rhythmic and metrical flexibility would require ([1957] 1959, 11 and 16). As traditional notation is built on a scale of multiple values, it does not easily allow for the representation of chromatic scale durations. Cowell even proposes new signs to indicate “intermediate” values. Indeed, one could interpret Stockhausen’s entire essay as a struggle with inherited material that is borne and conveyed by notation. That chromatically organized durations cannot be notated and prescribed means precisely that the material is expressing its conditions through notation . Traditional Western notation is not limited by the approximation or inability of those who came before us; on the contrary, notation has developed in a continuous confrontation with human perception and capabilities, trying to conceptualize and represent them (Treitler 2011, 148).

2.3 Given or Constructed? Whose Material? In confronting the issues discussed so far—the emancipation of dissonance in Schoenberg, and the composition of timbre and durations in serialism—composers sought to justify, if not to ground, their artistic practice on the physical characteristics of sound. As in the past, the relationship between music and sound was conceptualized through the notions of material and element; these terms, however, were applied to different entities: element and material of music was for Schoenberg the tone, for serialists the sine wave. Moreover, depending on the authors and the context, the term “material” assumes different if not conflicting connotations: it is used to indicate both the cor-

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poreal and sensitive aspect of music and its spiritual and intelligible configuration in view of the act of composition. The term “material” takes on a corporeal or spiritual connotation depending on whether or not it is considered in relation to an operating (or perceiving) subject. From the ambiguous use of the term have arisen (and still arise) quite a few controversies around the relationship between composition and sound. Does the notion of material always indicate a physical phenomenon that exists in itself ? Is it possible to draw a clear line of demarcation between material and form conferred by the subject? In particular, should the material of music, sound, be thought of as a natural phenomenon, or is there always an operating subject,—and therefore an artificial material? And, since the subject also implies an evolution in time, should the musical material be considered in a physical or historical sense? Although these questions may be purely theoretical, they involve a crucial aspect for composition, namely whether or not it is possible to free the material of music from the constraints of history. In an attempt to clarify what is at stake in these questions, it is best to begin by distinguishing the notion of material from the notion of matter. As mentioned in the previous chapter, according to Aristotle, since it is impossible to create from nothing, the notion of matter (hylē) indicates the necessary starting point of all genesis and creation; since it is already something in potency, it influences the final object. For Aristotle, however, matter is only one of the four causes of becoming: there is no genesis or creation without an acting principle, which generates or produces a given substance by giving the matter a form. In this sense, matter is a correlative term, that is, it is always found in relation to a form, and is always involved in a productive process; for this reason, “matter is unknowable in itself ” (Met. 1036a8–9). (Aristotle, however, specifies that it is possible to distinguish between the being of things and their generation and corruption: in the first case one is looking for the final cause, in the second case one is looking for the efficient cause i.e. the agent [Met. 1041a30].) Another specific feature of the Aristotelian conception of matter plays a crucial role in our discussion: in Aristotle, the notion of matter indicates the starting point of any process of genesis and creation—that is, matter may or may not be corporeal. Throughout history, however, the notion of matter has been associated with the notions of body and sense; these three notions, finally, have been contrasted with the notions of form, spirit, and intellect, respectively: matter is corporeal and perceived by the senses, while form is spiritual and understood by the intellect. Indeed, as we have seen, Ptolemy already considered sound matter in relation to the sense of hearing, and placed this in contrast with reason and form. Like “matter,” “material” also refers to that of which objects are composed. In philosophical discourse, however, the term “material” is more directly related to the act or process of production: material is matter that is somehow already worked and ready for a subsequent operation. Jean-François Lyotard underlines the functional character of material in view of its use: “Material is the matter to which the hand and the thought of the maker come to give a form. Material is conceived essentially

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as matter that is waiting, in suspense, for a form that will complete it and which it demands, like a potentiality that has not yet been realized” ([1996] 2009, 43). Material and Corporeality. In aesthetics and music, this distinction between matter and material is very rarely made clear (Riethmüller 1994, 148), and the term “material” (literally “relating to, or composed of matter”) is often used simply as a synonym for matter—being frequently associated with the notions of “corporeal” and “sensible,” and contrasted with “formal,” “spiritual,” and “intelligible.” Thus, the notion of material is frequently used to denote the physical aspect of music. According to the German music critic Paul Bekker (1882–1937), for example, “the material of music is the air, and the tools (Werkzeuge) of music . . . the human voice, instruments of all kinds, are tools for the working of this material” (1928, 96). When the term “material” is understood in this sense, it must be concluded that the composer’s material is not sound. Othmar Reich, a young musicologist from Prague who emigrated to the United States to escape Nazi persecution, and died prematurely in a car accident, published in 1938 an article in which he introduced important distinctions around the question of the material of music. According to the author, it is necessary to distinguish two senses in which the term material can be understood: “that of which something consists” indicates a state (Zustand), “that of which something is made or composed” indicates a creative process (Schaffenspro­ zess). Reich explicitly equates the notion of material with the notion of “physical”: “For all of us, ‘material’ basically always means ‘physical material,’ or ‘still unformed, unshaped physical material’” (120). Furthermore, he believes that when considering material in relation to a creative process, one should always specify the agent in question as well. Therefore, the expression describing the creative process “to be made of something” “in the end always means ‘to have been made of something by somebody’ and indeed ‘as if made of physical material.’ Or even more clearly, ‘being made of something’ means ‘having been made by someone in the same way as a physical thing is made of physical material’” (120). Starting from this conception of material and creative process, Reich distinguishes three cases: the performer, the listener, and the composer. It is correct to speak of material only with respect to the performer, the musician who plays an instrument; his or her material, however, is not the notes but the rhythmic vibrations of the air (rhythmische Luftschwingungen). On the contrary, we should not speak of material neither for the listener, nor for the composer: the former, in fact, is not directly involved in the production process, while the latter has at his or her disposal a material only in a figurative sense. Quite simply, the composer does not “manipulate” sound, he or she does not model the rhythmic vibrations of the air produced by the performing body (neither do they model the notes); the composer creates the work “from the treasure of his musical experience and the (aesthetic, emotional as well as spiritual) effects that those musical experiences once had on him” (129).

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Material, Subject, History. At the opposite pole of this physical conception of material stands the conception of Adorno, according to whom it is not a matter of describing a sound phenomenon existing in itself, but of grasping musical activity as poiēsis. For Adorno, the expression “material of music” means solely and only the composer’s material, that from which the composer produces a work: “Material cannot be thought of except as the stuff with which the composer operates and works (das, womit ein Komponist operiert, arbeitet)” ([1961] 1998, 281). The composer’s material has nothing to do with the “matter” of sound, with the concrete occurrence of sound. It is not corporeal. Sound does not reveal itself to the composer as such, but as already prepared and organized through certain theoretical principles for its use: the composer’s material is preformed stuff. Adorno turns the traditional, corporeal sense of material upside down until it coincides with “spirit”: the material is already spirit, “sedimented spirit.” In this sense, the idea of material even implies a certain distance from raw matter. Form, then, is at once the particular arrangement of the material prepared for use and the final shape that the composer gives to this material. In the light of these distinctions, it is possible to understand more easily in what sense, from Adorno’s perspective, musical material is historically and socially determined. Musical material consists of that set of qualities and properties of sound as well as the relationships between sounds that each era inherits from its past, reworks, and transmits to the future. Duchez also confirms the indissoluble bond between the notion of musical material and the composer: “The notion of musical material is integral to the notion of composition and was probably born at the same time, in the 9th century, when polyphony was born” (1991, 53–54). In this sense, material can be understood firstly as the definition of notes and their organization in a system. Duchez summarizes the evolution of musical material throughout history in the following terms: From the formulaic continuum of the singing voice (6th–7th century) to the chromatic scale of discrete instrumental sounds, then back to the sound continuum in contemporary electronic material (20th century)—passing through intervallic sound material (9th10th century), discrete sounds hierarchized in the diatonic scale (10th–11th century), the fixed diatonic scale (11th–15th century), the diatonic scale and chromaticism (16th–19th century). This historicity concerns the conception of sound both as a natural phenomenon (physical structure and psychoacoustic reception of which knowledge is evolving) and as a cultural phenomenon (means of production, aesthetic character, philosophical valorization). (1991, 54; emphases in original)

It is undeniable that the notion of material takes on particular emphasis in music with the emergence of the modern figure of the composer. However, we should not confuse the birth of polyphony with the beginning of its notation, nor should we associate in such an extreme way the notion of musical material with the notion of composition in the modern sense: as I tried to show in the previous chapter, in fact, in music this notion already appears in Aristides Quintilianus and, more significantly, in Ptolemy and Augustine. Moreover, if by material we mean the starting point of

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the act of composition, then musical material must include not only notes and musical systems but also all those aspects of compositional practice generally shared by composers of a given historical period and of a given social and geographical context. For the composers of the classical period, for example, these indisputable and universally accepted aspects were certainly the octave module, the relations of consonance and dissonance, the functional relations within the tonality; but they included also a certain way of constructing melodies, themes, all the way up to the different overall forms of the pieces (sonata form, minuet, rondo, etc.). From this point of view, everything becomes spirit and music almost seems to lose its sensitive dimension. Material Fetishism. The question of material conditioned so deeply the debate around New Music and limited, at least in appearance, the role of compositional subjectivity that Adorno himself, in a famous and controversial 1954 radio broadcast, “Das Altern der Neuen Musik” (“The Aging of New Music”), felt the need to stigmatize what he considered “material fetishism.” For the philosopher, the application of the serial principle to all parameters entailed the complete preformation of the material, thus involving the abdication to the constraints imposed by the material and the complete rationalization of music. Schoenberg’s most recent followers, wrote Adorno, “believe that the preparation of tones is already composition as soon as one has dismissed from composition everything by which it actually becomes a composition” ([1954] 2002, 187). Boulez “and his disciples aspire to dispose of every ‘compositional freedom’ as pure caprice, along with every vestige of traditional musical idiom: in fact, every subjective impulse is in music at the same time an impulse for musical language” (187). Adorno saw as particularly problematic the application of the series to durations, because this would lead to the denial of perhaps the most characteristic aspect of music, namely temporal organization. The philosopher accused serial music of geometrizing and spatializing time. In fact, a specifically temporal characteristic of music is that what appears equal on paper sounds different when inserted into the temporal flow, and vice versa what appears different on paper can sound equal when heard. As an example, he gives the reprise in the sonata form: when the same theme returns following the development, it is not perceived and experienced in the same way as it was experienced at the beginning (188). Precisely because Adorno always conceived of musical material as the material of the composer, the serialization of durations appeared to him as a capitulation of the subject to the demands of the material. If the serialization of pitches already implied their “materialization,” the serialization of the other parameters, particularly duration, implied “the integral rationalization” of music (191); there was no longer anything extraneous to the material, and the work was completely determined at the outset. In this sense, the final realization of the score became merely the implementation of a completely predetermined material; there was no longer any difference between the source material and the subsequent compositional choices. The material

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determined the configuration of the score a priori, and the complete aprioristic determination of the form led to the removal of the choices of the subject (187–90). According to Adorno, by rationalizing all the parameters of music, young composers were submitting completely to the constraints of the material and completely renouncing their subjectivity (191–92). This condemnation of serial music was followed by a dispute between Adorno and Heinz-Klaus Metzger. In an article published in Die Reihe, “Das Altern der Philosophie der Neuen Musik” (translated as “Just who is growing old?”), Metzger ([1957] 1959) faulted Adorno for not being aware of the most recent developments in serial music and thus ignoring that composers had developed a dialectical reaction to the material. More significantly, however, Metzger rebuked the author of The Philosophy of New Music for disregarding the new developments of the material. If it is true that the material is constantly evolving, as Adorno himself had explained, then one must evidently expect that the state of the material could no longer be what it was when Schoenberg composed Erwartung. It might therefore seem a contradiction that Adorno, after extolling Schoenberg for having “submitted” to the historical constraints of the material, condemned the serialists for the same reason. If Adorno sided with Schoenberg to emphasize the power of the material against the arbitrary subjectivity of Stravinsky, who completely denied the constraining character of the material, he later saw in serial music a complete triumph of the material and an annihilation of the composer’s subjectivity. Metzger also conceived of musical material as historically determined. Yet, a close reading of one of his later articles on the notion of material reveals some divergences. He believed that the term “material” indicated something corporeal, something “tangible” ([1961] 1980, 138). Consequently he claimed that the term material is not used in music in a literal sense: first, because sound is ephemeral; second, because the musical material has a historical character. In this way he contrasted music with other arts, “whose material can be grasped and weighed” (138), and argued that in music the notion of material is used “metaphorically.” For Adorno, on the other hand, the “spiritual” character and historical dimension of the material of music had nothing to do with the ephemeral character of sound, but derived from the intervention of the subject in the process of production. Adorno’s position is much less rigid than is commonly believed (Borio 1987, 163). While in the Philosophy he conceived the material almost as an autonomous entity acting on the composer, he later softened this position, trying to emphasize the importance of the composer’s subjective intervention. For Adorno, the relationship between the subjectivity of the composer and the objectivity of the material had to remain in a state of dialectical tension, without being resolved univocally in favor of the composer (as in the case of the neoclassical works of Schoenberg and Stravinsky) or in favor of the material (as in the case of the serialists).

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Creatio ex nihilo. Throughout the twentieth century composers came, in varying degrees, to question and operate on some of the most basic aspects of music. In order to describe their heightened attentiveness more than to the end result to the very material from which a work was made, Carl Dahlhaus ([1984] 1987) used the term Materialdenken, thinking about material. The Materialdenken of the post-war generation implied getting to the very bottom of compositional practice, questioning everything that was previously considered as naturally determined and that, instead, was nothing but preformed stuff, determined historically and socially—pure convention. This compositional approach intended, thus, to make a tabula rasa of all the acquired notions of the past, to annul everything that had previously been taken for granted. Composers tried to get to the bottom of the acoustic event, of the material substrate of music; they wanted to know exactly what music, what sounds are made of—in the hope that if one has the individual components in hand, a way will also show itself to put these components together into meaningful orders. (Koenig [1963a] 1992, 149–50)

Thus, working on material meant, for these composers, attempting to redefine the very sound with which they worked. In this sense, the term Materialdenken indicates an aesthetic and a compositional approach that consciously questions what should be considered the most elementary components of music, and how to organize them in a composition. Despite Adorno’s criticism, post-war serialist composers certainly did not deny that the material had a historical dimension; unlike Adorno, however, they were convinced that the series could be the means to rid themselves once and for all of the historical import of the material. The progressive mastery of the material convinced composers that they could take complete control of sound, finally freeing themselves from the coercive power of tradition. In this respect, the distance between Stockhausen’s compositional approach and Schoenberg’s is obvious. Whereas Schoenberg had sought to rethink his own compositional practice and in particular justify the need to emancipate dissonance starting from the order in which sounds occur in the overtone series, Stockhausen appeals to an entirely new idea of sound. While in the case of the Austrian composer—at least according to Scherchen—it was a matter of “freeing” sound by believing in its creative force, of which the composer would be only a “slave,” in Stockhausen’s case composing means taking control of all aspects of the material. The necessity to control the timbre of sound—therefore the minimum element (the sine wave)— leads to the idea that it is possible to overcome the “conditions” of the material, to completely govern sound. In a letter to Goeyvaerts dated December 7, 1952 Stockhausen writes: “In the future we will use electronic sound generation. It will make it all easier, clearer, more reliable—and we will govern sounds—it will not be the material that governs us” (Sabbe 1981, 43; emphasis in original). With the “discovery” and mastery of timbre the hypothesis came to light that composers could access the

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sound itself without any mediation: sound would become directly manipulable. Many avant-garde composers more or less consciously believed—and still believe— in the possibility of shaping sound-in-itself. As witnessed in Stockhausen’s letter to Goeyvaerts, musical composition would be the demiurgical construction of a sonorous reality: composers could finally create not only the form but also their own material. The use of electronic instruments has engendered, and continue to promulgate still to this day, the belief in the possibility of making music by forging the sound itself, by synthesizing sound in the same way as chemical substances are synthesized. As succinctly stated by Jean-Claude Risset (1938–2016), electronic synthesis made possible “to compose the sound itself, not merely composing with sounds: instead of arranging sounds in time, one can play with time within the sound” (2003, 1). In consequence, it is question of focusing more on the vocabulary than on the grammar. (Hence the importance of acoustics and phonetics for a large part of composers of the last generations.) While the term “material” was employed by Adorno to highlight the mediatic and historical character of sound, in the end it acquires the exact opposite meaning of unhistorical, physical sound. Electronic composer Curtis Roads (b. 1951) can thus write: “The material of music is sound—a physical phenomenon” (2015, 48). Duchez effectively summarizes the new situation in which composers find themselves: The essential evolution of the notion of material, of the conception of the very nature of the material of music, consists in the fact that this material, long considered as given, is now considered as constructed: nowadays, the first relation between composer and material is not the discovery of a “given,” but the construction of a “possible.” The evolution of the notion of musical material corresponds to the history of the possibilities of production of music. (1991, 54; emphases mine)

In the past, the notion of material indicated somehow the extreme limit of creative action, the boundary of human making. If it is true, as Aristotle maintained, that it is not possible to create from nothing, then the material constitutes the premise of the creative act, what maker must start from, or rather, what the maker’s activity stops at. This objective status of the material in the creative process is expressed by different authors in different terms. As we have seen, Schoenberg often attributes his aesthetic choices to a historical “necessity” that manifests itself in the sound material. Adorno uses a variety of terms: the material imposes on the composer a “constraint” (Zwang), “requirements,” and points to “tendencies” and “directives,” in accordance with which one must compose. Stockhausen ([1953a] 1963, 32) and Lachenmann ([1978] 1996), on the other hand, speak of “conditions” (Bedingungen). Conversely, to indicate the removal of inherited constraints such as, for instance, instrumental limitation, the composer seeks to “emancipate” or “liberate” sound. Aristotle’s potentialities of matter become for Schoenberg necessities to which composers submit,

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and for Stockhausen conditions from which composers can and must free themselves. Finally, a complete creatio ex nihilo seemed possible. Elements and Composition. The ability of electronics to shape sound as a whole not infrequently induces a critique of traditional composition theory and practice. As we have seen above, Stockhausen criticized the traditional conception of composition, which was limited to “composing,” that is, literally, to “putting together” (zusammenstellen) sounds already given: “Composing has long been understood as merely putting together ([1952] 1963, 18).” In a more recent article, Tristan Murail also criticized such a conception of composition: Why do we always have to speak of music in terms of notes? . . . Our conception of music is held prisoner by tradition and by our education. All has been cut into slices, put into categories, classified, limited. There is a conceptual error from the very beginning: the composer does not work with twelve notes, x rhythmic figures, x dynamic markings, all infinitely permutable—he works with sound and time. . . . No, note and sound are not the same, nor is the note any more the elementary atom of music, not the “objet sonore” in Pierre Schaeffer’s sense. (1984, 157–58)

This kind of criticism of a conception of composition that starts from notes on the one hand is certainly justified. On the other hand, however, it seems to misunderstand the notion of element as a determinable (and measurable) part of a physical phenomenon and the very idea of composition. As I tried to make clear in the first chapter, at least in Plato and Aristotle, “composition” (synthesis) was never understood as “putting together” a number of disparate elements that exist in themselves. Starting from a collection of such elements, it would never be possible to construct a “form.” When Plato (followed in this by Aristoxenus) stated that not all things mix, he meant just that: some elements are capable of merging into higher units, others are not. Aristotle then explained that the letters or, better, the elements of language (stoicheia) are not definable in themselves but only in relation to the syllable, that is, to a higher unit: it is not the elements that constitute the structure, but it is the structure, if anything, that determines its elements. Thus, notes are not definable by themselves, but only in relation to an interval, and intervals then in relation to the system itself. As Koenig himself admitted (again confirming, however, his misunderstanding of the traditional conception of composition), the material is never “pure” or “unberührt” for two reasons; first, the transfer of sound from one tape to another corrupts the material; second, the gap that exists between the elements and the overall form of the piece. The second limitation that the purity of the material experiences is of a musical nature. If a tone of a certain pitch is composed, realized in the studio and used within a piece of music, then the precise measurement of its absolute pitch, its absolute volume, its absolute duration only makes sense if the precise measurements also have an effect in the piece; in other words, if the listener hears and recognizes them. But that is hardly

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Before Sound possible. . . . We hear a musical phrase, we understand its meaning, we hear its gesture, we hear the general movement of the sound, we can say approximately in words what has happened musically; but we are not able to repeat, to name in words, or to reproduce with the help of any musical or electric instruments every single particle that made up the musical phrase. . . . The exact definition of the individual and thus the purity of the material used merge into a musical-linguistic sense of a higher order. ([1963a] 1992, 145; emphasis mine)

This “limitation” of the material, whereby the element is no longer distinguishable within a higher order unit, corresponds exactly to what Aristotle had made clear: the syllable is not simply an aggregate of letters. Ignoring the interrelation between element and whole not only leads to a misunderstanding of the traditional conception of composition, but above all prevents a clear understanding of the limits and potentialities of modern music. As Murail himself recognizes, contemporary art music, thanks mainly (but not only) to electronics, finds itself in the difficult position of having to organize the sonic and temporal continuum of music: “Electronics opened our ears. But electronic music often suffers from the opposite excess: a lack of formalization, of “écriture” or writing in the largest sense, of structuring the sonic universes that it discovers” (1984, 159).

2.4  Timbre, Noise, and Language Two Paths to Freedom. Music has always been associated with language for two reasons: both have their origin in the voice and both can be traced back to the idea of composition of a finite number of elements. Identifying the element of music no longer in the pitched sound but in the sine wave (or, as Koenig did, even in the single pulse) and the consequent possibility of composing any sound or noise, calls into question the relationship between sound and music, inducing us to rethink the very idea that music can still be considered a language. Unlike pitch, in fact, it does not seem possible to articulate timbre into a finite set of discrete elements. The avant-garde composers of the twentieth century who shared, in different forms, the desire to liberate music were faced with a dilemma: From what and how does music need to be liberated? Shall it be liberated from the dictatorial rule of consonance, resorting to other organizing principles and forms? Or, rather, shall sound be freed from all organization and conditions, to finally reveal its pure materiality? In music, is sound always the material of a language, or is it possible to glimpse something like sound itself, free of all structure? Although Lyotard ([1996] 2009) proposes two composers as representative of these two different approaches of the emancipation of music—that is, Pierre Boulez and John Cage—these two possible “paths to freedom” are not always clearly distinguishable one from the other and often even coexist in the same composer’s thinking and practice.

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Adorno on Musical Language. In Adorno’s view, in music, sound could only be considered by submitting it to form. In “Music, Language, and Composition” ([1956] 2002), an article written around the time of “The Aging of New Music,” Adorno regards music as “language-like” (sprachähnlich). He accuses young composers of trying to distance from music those aspects that make it similar to language, precisely because of the consideration in which they hold sound. Adorno later mitigated his critical judgment of young composers; nevertheless, in a footnote in the aforementioned article “Vers une musique informelle,” he confirms his belief that sound as such has no place in music: The false emphasis on the idea of sonority (Klang) in the new music is the sign of the dilettante and of those people who place arbitrary interpretations on what they have failed to understand. The dimension of sonority is perhaps the most prominent element in the new music, having been liberated by it and, though newly discovered, it is less in conflict with older listening habits than anything else. However, in works which count it is never an end in itself, but instead is both functional in the context of the work and also provides an element of fermentation. Schoenberg always stressed that sonority was a mean to achieve the adequate representation of the musical idea. If the new music is at all incompatible with what preceded it, it is in the sense of sonic attractiveness (Klangreiz) as a categorical concept. This is still the most popular way into mishearing it. This has been confirmed by the most recent development, in which sonority has been integrated into the overall construction as one of its parameters ([1961] 1988, 277n4; emphasis mine).

Adorno tries to overturn the opinion of those who see in the New Music the liberation of sound as such; they are accused of dilettantism: they mishear this music. To consider sound in its pure materiality would in reality be nothing more than a legacy of the past, and would nullify the deepest significance of the New Music. The young composers, in fact, have integrated sound (Klang) in a “construction”: sound can certainly provide a moment of “fermentation” but it must be placed in an organized context. Sound as Material of Language. Despite Adorno’s initial criticism of young composers and despite the distance that separates his dialectical thinking from the structuralism of the avant-garde, both share a similar position with respect to the relationship between sound and music: sound as such is not capable of generating language and, therefore, must be integrated into a structure. Serialism and in particular Boulez’s aesthetics are linked to a structuralist view of music as language and sound as the material of language. While distinguishing within the linguistic sign signified and signifier, Ferdinand de Saussure (1857–1913) breaks the union of sound and meaning in language, considering language as independent of its sound expression. The ability to become a sign, to signify, would belong not to the sound itself but to the structure of which sound is the sheer matter. In this way, sound is demoted to a simple medium of language:

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Before Sound It is impossible that sound, as the material element, should in itself be part of the language. Sound is merely something ancillary, a material that language uses. . . . Linguistic signals are not in essence phonetic. They are not physical in any way. They are constituted solely by differences which distinguish one such sound pattern from another. . . . What characterizes [the phonetic units] is not, as might be thought, the specific positive properties of each; but simply the fact that they cannot be mistaken for one another. Speech sounds are first and foremost entities which are contrastive, relative and negative. ([1916] 1998, 116–17; emphases mine)

According to Saussure, therefore, language makes use of sound not because of its specific characteristics, but simply because sound allows differentiations to which meanings are then associated by convention. The idea that the ability to bear meaning does not belong to sound itself but to the structure is reinforced by the arbitrary relationship between signified and signifier: “The sound of a word is not in itself important, but the phonetic contrasts which allow us to distinguish that word from any other. That is what carries the meaning (signification)” (116). In the conception of music as language, sound per se can only have a purely instrumental role. Thus, Boulez reproduces the distinction between sensible element and structure in music. Speaking of timbre, he reaffirms that for him sound itself is absolutely nothing: Timbre exists aesthetically when it is directly bound to the constitution of the musical object. On its own timbre is nothing, like a sound on its own is nothing. Obviously a sound has an identity; but this identity is not yet an aesthetic phenomenon. Aesthetic identity only appears if there is utilization, language and composition (écriture). Unless one has arrived at this stage, objects exist by themselves, available, but empty of meaning. In the same way, a spot of color is definable as being blue, or red; but it does not induce in us any sense of a pictorial world. ([1985] 1987, 166; emphases mine)

From this perspective, sound is somehow only the support of a language or a composition, and music makes use of sound simply as a material. According to Boulez, sound and timbre are not able to construct a language: “The musical object in itself, or sound in itself, does not exist as a spontaneous component of language” ([1990– 2003] 2005, 655). Jonathan Goldman corroborates this interpretation: “A certain skepticism about the ability of sound itself to be a generator of musical language, and a tendency to differentiate material on all levels of structure through a series of oppositions” (2011, 58). The fact that, unlike speech, music does not have a specific meaning, should not prevent us from considering music as language too. Musicologist Boris de Schlœzer (1881–1969), who exerted an important influence on Pierre Boulez (Campbell 2010, 17), expressly excludes that the absence of verbal meaning in music should prevent it from being considered as language: “Language cannot be reduced to phonemes, it signifies, communicates. . . . But does language merely designate? . . . To claim that music is not a language, since it does not signify, does not communicate something but communicates itself, seems to us to testify to an overly narrow

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and simplistic conception of language” ([1959] 2016, 50). According to Schlœzer, music communicates not something but itself; music would be a language without verbal meaning, pure articulation that speaks without saying. For this reason, while the material of the carpenter is wood, or the material of the blacksmith is metal, the material of music cannot simply consist of sound: “You cannot say then that a musical work is made of sounds, that it is ‘in sound’ in the same way that we say that a building is made of bricks or a statue of marble” ([1947] 2009, 143). One would have to ask, then, on what basis “utilization, language and composition” are actually generated: it is clear that Boulez thinks that not timbre but only pitch and duration, the only quantifiable parameters of sound according to discrete values, are capable of enabling the act of composition ([1955] 1995, 315–30). Attributing to sound the status of “material,” on one side, places sound in a primary position, because sound, as a sensitive phenomenon, is the material foundation of music; on the other, it limits the importance of sound by contrasting it with form and spirit. The Color of the Tone. Sound as tone, discrete sound, was the only possible horizon of Western music until the beginning of the twentieth century. Before referring to a specific system of sounds deploying certain functions, tonality signifies the quality of tuned sounds, etymologically: their continuous and regular tension over time. Since most sounds of nature are usually complex and unstable, “tonality” has been and is often still identified as the quality tout court of musical sounds, the criterion to clearly distinguish music—the art of tuned sounds, Tonkunst—from non-music. The timbre (Klangfarbe) of a human voice or of an instrument emitting a certain pitch would be its specific character in comparison with other voices or instruments, in other words, the difference that emerges when other instruments or voices perform the same pitch at the same dynamic level. When we hear notes of the same force and same pitch sounded successively on a pianoforte, a violin, clarinet, oboe, or trumpet, or by the human voice, the character of the musical tone of each of these instruments, notwithstanding the identity of force of pitch, is so different that by means of it we recognize with the greatest of ease which of these instruments was used. (Helmholtz 1885, 18–19)

In this context the notion of timbre is defined negatively, in fact, it is anything that is neither pitch nor loudness. Timbre tends to be the psychoacoustician’s multidimensional waste-basket category for everything that cannot be labeled pitch or loudness, including short-term spectral changes such as onset transients, long-term spectra, those dynamic qualities which a musician would term ‘texture,’ and so on. (McAdams and Bregman 1979, 34)

Consequently, as long as composers work with pitched sounds, the only way to bring out the timbre is to “neutralize” pitch. This can easily be seen in the first measures

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of Schoenberg’s “Farben” (the second piece of the Fünf Orchesterstücke, 1909): the Klangfarbenmelodie, the “colors” of the tones come to light because two different groups of instruments alternate on the same chord. The static nature of the chord allows its diastematic dimension to become ineffective. But how can we define the timbre of unpitched sounds? In order for the definition to apply, two sounds need to be able to be presented at the same pitch, but there are some sounds, such as the scarping of a shovel in a pile of gravel, that have no pitch at all. (Bregman 1990, 92)

The Emancipation of Sound. If we want to fully understand the unprecedented project of music’s emancipation as imagined and practiced by the musical avant-garde of the twentieth century, and how this idea of emancipation was inextricably linked to the renewal of sound, it is not enough to look only at atonal music, dodecaphony, or even serialism, that is, contexts in which the reorganization of sound material was sought starting from one specific sound quality, namely pitch. If the material with which Schoenberg’s dodecaphonic technique is practiced maintained only tone as its last requirement, other composers chose to remove even this condition of the material, in order to think of sound in its totality. The twentieth century witnessed the emergence of a common artistic tendency towards the “liberation of sound,” as Edgard Varèse aptly expressed it: from the Futurists’ art of noise, to Varèse’s extensive use of percussion, to Pierre Schaeffer’s musique concrète, and to John Cage, just to name a few examples; these various musical approaches, their differences notwithstanding, radically set out to rethink sound no longer as note or tone, that is, discrete sound, but as sound-in-itself and noise. If traditionally sound was articulated first of all with respect to pitch, now noise dissolves the very idea of articulation and language, because it is not possible to articulate noise in discrete values. Noise is not articulated sound (vox articulata), has no elements, at least no perceptible ones, it is continuous, and it is irrational and not writable. If the structuralist aesthetics of music considers sound unable to independently constitute a musical language, with the discovery of timbre and the inclusion of noise, some composers—particularly John Cage—tried to think of music not as a language, and of sound not as the material of a language but as sensible materiality; they accepted sound in its acoustic aspect, as non-verbal sound. In the sixties, as a reaction to post-war structuralism, composers aimed to reach sound itself with the intention of preventing music from becoming once again language, écriture. The underlying idea was to rescue sound from the trap of the significant mechanism, from always reducing sound to the material of a signifying process. The controversial belief that composers could access “sound-in-itself ” primarily meant imagining and organizing music while avoiding articulating sound once again in a language, focusing more on a concrete, “untreated” material—often, as in musique concrète, on sounds coming from everyday life. The question of the pure materiality of sound

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and, in general, of the sensible, is ultimately the question of whether it is possible to access the pure sensible beyond the production of meaning or form. The notion of sound-in-itself intends to explore sound that does not allow itself to be ensconced in a structure. In this sense, sound is the pre-verbal or the non-verbal, that which remains absolutely foreign to language. This would mean that it is possible to access sound that is not articulated and does not become sign, sound that does not refer to anything else other than itself: pure performativity, pure non-significant presence. The idea of sound-in-itself, of sound free both from meaning and number, would then go in the direction of freeing music from its logocentric dimension. Logocentrism implies always an absence of the sonorous, non-significant aspect of the voice (Krämer 2006). Because musical notation had been the main tool for conceptualizing and organizing sound as tone, the dissolution of the concept of pitch and the emergence of the notion of timbre coincided with the experimentation and development of graphical scores. The liberation from logocentrism occurs by turning to noise and pre-verbal aspects of sound and repudiating both tone and traditional notation. In this way, sound becomes at the same time an extremely concrete entity, a craved, ever-unreachable object of desire: even a composer like Gèrard Grisey will speak of sound as être vivant, living being. If, according to Adorno, the material of music is always the material of the composer, in the radical vision of Cage sound-in-itself is nothing more than the removal of the subject and its signifying intention. Cage’s position is “exemplary” in the sense that the material no longer only dictates the conditions for the work, but instead speaks for itself. If the Aristotelian voice is sound endowed with imagination (phantasia), that is, with intention and the ability to represent (De An. 420b29– 421a1), Cage’s sound is unintentional. Thanks to indeterminacy, Cage considers it possible to achieve the purely audible and invites us to listen to sounds in nature, escaping from the conception of music as material and form. The tone, the musical sound, implies the idea of musica artificialis, that is, a music built by human beings starting from the voice or from instruments that produce a sound distinct from the sound of nature. The idea of sound-in-itself, instead, means making an art of sound not from a material preformed by human agency but from the sound of nature. Material, Work, and Language. Carl Dahlhaus questioned Adorno’s total dismissal of the natural and psychological features of musical material, arguing instead for a dialectic relationship that the musical material establishes between the steady rule of nature and the manifold transformations of history. Moreover, he contested the autonomy of musical material from the work, maintaining instead that what Adorno considers the “current state of the material . . . is nothing but the sum total of traces which earlier works have left upon the musical organization of sound” ([1974] 2006, 42). The dissolution of the concept of work (in an emphatic sense, as something autonomous and independent) in the twentieth century would not be

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the consequence of the prevalence of the musical material over the work but, rather the contrary, the concept of material has become more and more central because the work has lost its primacy. The independence of the material from the musical work is due to the dissolution of the work itself. Dahlhaus concludes therefore that Adorno’s concept of musical material “must be historicised in turn” (43). Dahlhaus underlines that the concept itself of material needs to be always considered together with other concepts like technique, language, and structure. This would be clearly visible in the different functions that the musical material has in the music of Schoenberg and Webern. While in fact in Schoenberg’s work musical language and the preformed dodecaphonic structure are opposed, in Webern’s work they finally come to coincide. In the case of Cage the situation would appear different because of “Cage’s desires to present sounds which have been ‘emancipated’ or deliberately detached from any traditionally musical context.” Musical language is “finally extinguished in Cage: music is no longer expected to speak, but merely to exist” (46–47). In a similar vein, Lyotard writes: “If sonorous matter is not waiting to be given a form, it must also be said that it is not waiting to be heard in order to vibrate or to sound. . . . This matter which eludes destination is not material, which is only the framework of a message. It is immaterial” ([1996] 2009, 44). Any Sound is Musical. The shift from tone to sound does not simply enrich the composer’s vocabulary, but brings with itself a radically different conception and practice of music. Traditionally, musical sound—the element of music—was a sound of distinct pitch, separate from noise, constituting the sensible medium of a musical language governed by numerical proportions; moreover, the elements of music were of finite number. Thus, Adorno also believed that the material of the composer is in continuous movement, that it can expand and contract, and that not any sound is available at any time. When, however, pitch is no longer the main parameter of musical sound, then any sound can be used in music. Webern had already glimpsed a “sea of unheard sounds” (Adorno [1956] 2002, 190). There is a relationship between the identification of the sine wave with the elements from which any sound is made and the expansion of the material to any sound phenomenon. In the twentieth century, the musical material on one hand is reduced more and more until it is identified with the single sine wave from which it is possible to synthesize complex sounds; on the other hand, starting especially with the 1960s, it expands infinitely to include any sonic aspect, embracing anything audible, coming more and more to coincide with sound in general. That any sound is available and synthesizable does not imply, however, that it is already to be considered music. Serialist composers, in fact, were convinced that it was still necessary to insert sound into a structure. The last, extreme step towards the complete equalization of sound and music was the one taken by Cage with his poetics of indeterminacy: after Cage, “there is no dividing line between musical sound and sound because all sound can be music” (Kahn 1990, 71). The profound sense of

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the revolution which took place in avant-garde music may be found in this implosion of the distinction between music and sound: since, at least according to Cage, any sound not only can be used in music but is already music in itself, then it is no longer possible to trace a clear distinction between musical sound, physical sound or the sound of daily life, between music and non-music. Cage’s aesthetics solicits a new relation between music and daily life as well as between music and the other arts. This means not only that sound is liberated, but that music collapses on sound. If by material we mean that from which the composer creates a work, then in Cage’s poetics sound is no longer “material,” simply because there is no more creative act —or, at least, there is no longer a creative act in the traditional sense of the term. The last condition, perhaps, that sound is still able to determine is none other than its audibility. Some composers have tried to rethink material beyond sound. If material is nothing more than what the composer chooses as his starting point to create a work, then everything can be considered material. Dieter Schnebel, while considering the expansion of serialism’s material from pitch to intensity to timbre, and the fact that composers used “sounds of all types” as their material, adds that “on the other hand, also that which is immaterial, such as relationships, connections and constellations, could become material” ([1964] 1972, 286). Koenig summarizes the expansion of material that had taken place in postwar music as a shift from the serial organization of parameters to the composition of Klang (as an example of this trend he mentions Ligeti’s Atmosphére) and then finally from this to non-sonic (he says “visual”) aspects of music. In the beginning, one’s attention was focused on pitches, durations, intensities and timbres. Then other qualities or issues became pressing: groups, which consisted of many notes; spatially conceived sound events; new musical instruments or new ways of playing old ones; liberties given to performers; musical actions. ([1963] 1992, 151)

Written in 1963, Koenig’s article seems to diagnose for the first time a departure from Materialdenken.

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Chapter Three

Time and Rhythm

While in the previous two chapters I have outlined the traditional conception of the relationship between music and sound and its reformulation by some of the protagonists of avant-garde music, I will now try to confront an issue of fundamental importance for my compositional activity: the tension between musical material as the abstract premise of the compositional act and sound as an event, as a temporal phenomenon. In order to introduce this issue and my approach to it in my artistic practice, I will first describe how the question of musical material—a question that had been crucial to modern music—seemed to enter a crisis especially starting in the 1980s, when I began composing with greater awareness. I will take into particular consideration the testimonies of two musicologists, Carl Dahlhaus and Gianmario Borio, as well as of Jean-François Lyotard, a philosopher who reflected deeply on the “postmodern condition” of society and arts: these three authors pondered the possible relationship between the decline of interest around the material question and the decline of modernism. There is a connection between the exhaustion of the question of material and my interest in the relationship between the composer’s abstract material and sound as an event, as a temporal phenomenon. I will suggest two conditions for highlighting the temporality of sound: overcoming the parametric representation of sound, and conceiving sound in relation to silence. To illustrate this kind of compositional approach, I will examine an early composition of mine, En flottant (1995–96) for clarinet. When sound is not organized according to differences in pitch or timbre, rhythmic organization can take on greater relevance and flexibility. The analysis of another of my compositions, Flatus vocis (1999) for flute, will exemplify how my compositional style has evolved by seeking a middle ground between traditional metric periodicity and total aperiodicity. The last section, finally, considers how this idea of quasi-periodicity can be implemented through the use of so-called non-isochronic meters. Through the analysis of Nel labirinto (2003) for ensemble, I will show how to extend the idea underlying this type of meters to the overall form of a piece.

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3.1  Material and Modernity Control, Expansion, Exhaustion. Composers who began composing between the late 1980s and early 1990s—one could conveniently say after the fall of the Berlin Wall—found themselves coming to terms with the legacy of modernism, in particular the complete control of sound and the unlimited expansion of material. In the 1980s, during my formative years as a composer, invention and experimentation with acoustic instruments had reached a very advanced stage of development. Instrumentalists and composers had uncovered a previously unimagined world of new sounds by systematically exploring unusual playing and singing techniques: very low and very high sounds at the extreme limits of the instruments’ ranges; multiphonics, alternative fingerings, and different embouchures for wind instruments; different bowing techniques and harmonics for string instruments; the instrumental use of the voice; extensive deployment of percussion; and the inclusion of numerous types of sonorous bodies capable of producing all kinds of sounds or noises. The investigation of extended techniques for every musical instrument deeply characterizes the style of composers such as John Cage, Mauricio Kagel (1931–2008), Helmut Lachenmann (b. 1935), Brian Ferneyhough (b. 1943), and Salvatore Sciarrino (b. 1947). This music required extreme specialization and virtuosity on the part of interpreters, many of whom dedicated themselves almost exclusively to this repertoire. Together with new instrumental techniques and sound material, composers had to develop an appropriate notation. Notational developments included new symbols for particular instrumental techniques, and the extreme elaboration of rhythmic articulations, such as those found in Ferneyhough’s scores. New Music scores often needed (and still need) to be accompanied by an explanatory note clarifying for the performers the meaning of the symbols used. In the graphic scores—scores meant to be seen as well as performed—the sign becomes free from any univocal reference to a sound result, existing only for itself. If instrumental sound appeared to be widely explored and exploited, electronically produced and elaborated sound seemed (and seems) potentially limitless. If further expanding the already overloaded richness of acoustic instruments seemed difficult, electronic and digital instruments promised an unlimited field of sonic possibilities. As Cage had already predicted, “the use of noise to make music will continue and increase until we reach a music produced through the aid of electrical instruments which will make available for musical purposes any and all sounds that can be heard” ([1937] 2009, 3; emphasis mine). This promise was enhanced by the latest technological advances: while composers previously had to share public institutions’ sound studios with their colleagues, the diffusion of the personal computer and the development of digital techniques and modern software finally allowed them to work autonomously.

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At least since the last two decades of the last century, composers of my generation were confronted with a situation hitherto unheard of in Western art music. The process of the “emancipation of sound,” as Edgard Varèse called it, seemed finally accomplished: there were no more aesthetic restrictions (be it consonance, tonality, or serialism) or technical limitations from which composers needed to emancipate their sound materials. Curiously, however, the increased control of sound and its consequent expansion have been accompanied by a sense of exhaustion: sound on the one hand has expanded indefinitely, on the other hand it has worn out, the audible has become saturated. As a result, musical invention as sound invention has become problematic. The issue is not simply that it is difficult to discover a new sound. If anything, it is quite the opposite: also thanks to technology, new sounds can be generated even too easily; but it does not seem possible to deduce from them any aesthetic or formal indication. Peter Cahn in 1980 concluded his review of the notion of material in the twentieth century with these words: “Adorno’s assertion of objective tendencies of the material has become questionable. In a time of pluralism of materials (Material-Pluralismus) such as ours, what could be said in a reasonably binding way about the state of the musical material? Where would objective tendencies, laws of motion and demands of the material be found?” (1982, 204; my emphasis). One might say that Aristotle’s matter has lost its potentialities, or that what Scherchen saw in the material as interpreted by Schoenberg, a propulsive energy capable of generating form by itself, has lost its “driving forces.” The increased technological control over sound and its unlimited expansion in contemporary music prevent sound from presenting that character of otherness, that aspect potentially capable of not (yet) becoming music, of resisting the act of composition, of not falling into the already structured or structurable. It is no longer easy to find in sound material something that can be considered extraneous. How can the act of composition still take shape when its material, its premise, has itself become completely controllable, when the material is no longer able to offer indications or show resistance to the act of composition? Subjectivity vs Experiment. In two important lectures both given in Darmstadt in 1982 and subsequently published in two articles, “Die Krise des Experiments” and “Abkehr vom Materialdenken?,” Dahlhaus sought to understand the radical change that had been taking place in New Music for about a decade, interpreting the current situation as a decisive distancing from what had been more typical of the postwar avant-garde. In the first lecture, given at the Institut für Neue Musik und Musikerziehung, Dahlhaus sets out to show that, while post-war composers had been driven by the idea of experiment, young composers seemed to be moving away from this category. The “diffuse” situation of New Music—a situation that makes the work of critics difficult—consists of three factors: absence of a mainstream, indifference (no longer hostility) of the public to New Music, reluctance to speculate about theory on

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the part of young composers, who, unlike the postwar generation, refuse to express themselves publicly. Dahlhaus identifies, therefore, four trends that characterize the current situation: recurrence of the formula “fetishism of the material” (which would consist, among other things, both in the refusal to confront Adorno’s strenuous thought and in the fact that “the possibilities of discovering unknown acoustic phenomena from which new and rigorous musical structures can be developed seem to be exhausted”); the abandonment of the idea of putting the substance of a historical moment into sounds; a growing skepticism in the analogy between the history of musical composition and the history of science; the renunciation of the possibility to intervene in the social (1983, 81–84). Dahlhaus sees all these tendencies as stemming from the crisis of the idea of experiment, an idea that was instead crucial to the composers of the avant-garde. This experimental attitude had resulted in turn from the crisis of the idea of the work, understood as something concluded and independent of the historical process, and involved constantly putting a certain material to the test. Dahlhaus shows how the idea of experiment replaced the idea of work by emphasizing the material. In particular, in his opinion, musique concrète and electronic music can be interpreted as attempts to aesthetically test sounds from everyday life or sounds that recall everyday life, even indirectly. The same is true for serial, stochastic, and aleatory music, due to the fact that in these compositional practices some components of the composition are beyond the composer’s control: “The composition contains an element of randomness” (87). Dahlhaus believes, in short, that it is correct to summarize the advanced music of the 1950s and 1960s under the label of “experimental,” since it operated “with experimental attempts, the purpose of which was to test the aesthetic evidence of materials and methods that were only partially subject to the composer’s control and largely either came from the external acoustic world (musique concrète) or derived from a serial mechanics that went far beyond what the composer could intend” (87–88). Characteristic of the experiment is the fact that, “in terms of compositional technique, the impulse not to commit but to keep possibilities open means that instead of the structure being created, the materials and methods being used come to the fore and attract attention” (90). Conversely, “the current situation would be characterized by the crisis of the experiment” (89). This would not mean that it is possible to return to traditional work in the emphatic sense of the word. Since both models (the concept of work on the one hand and the category of experiment on the other) have decayed, the question remains as to what partial aspects of these two models might still be valid: “On the whole, it seems that the compositional effort focuses on trying to keep all possible expressions open to subjectivity, regardless of where they come from and what associations are attached to them.” In particular, Dahlhaus concludes that “musical subjectivity and expressiveness, the true characteristics of what has been mislabeled as New Simplicity (Neue Einfachheit), are attempts at rescue through art” (94).

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Subjectivity vs Material. In the second lecture, given at the Internationales Musikinstitut on the occasion of the 31. Internationalen Ferienkurse für Neue Musik, Dahlhaus examines in depth the relation of young composers to the question of the material: if the first twenty years after the war had been characterized by research on the material, since the 1970s young composers had been distancing themselves from this question to rediscover subjectivity. Dahlhaus first takes stock of post-war modernism by distinguishing trends according to a periodization by decades: the 1950s, characterized primarily by serial composition, were followed in the 1960s by what was called Klangkomposition, composition by timbres. While Koenig thought that the question of material had already been set aside by the beginning of the 1960s, Dahlhaus sees the departure from this question as starting in the 1970s: while in the 1950s, in fact, composers were concerned with defining the minimal elements of music from a serial point of view, in the 1960s the interest shifted to thinking about material starting from the materiality of sound: “Whether it was the history ‘sedimented’ in the notes, as Adorno would have it, the ‘tendency’ of which was carried to its logical conclusion by the serial music of the 1950s, or the noise material whose suitability for music or even anti-music was explored in the 1960s” ([1984] 1987, 274). Dahlhaus disputes that the postwar composers had really acted by trying to realize the “tendencies of the material”: the “contradictions” they believed they saw in Schoenberg’s music were not objectively operating contradictions but purely subjective considerations. Thus, the later generations of the 1970s were merely substituting an explicitly subjective approach for the latent subjectivity of the avant-garde. In his view, the composers of the last generation were actually pursuing a motif that Cage had implanted in the music. The dualism that ran through post-war music is explained by Dahlhaus from the opposition between matter and material: “The difference we are discussing is most easily illustrated by the concepts of material and matter, because Adorno’s concept of material is a historical category, while Cage’s idea of matter is a natural category” (277). Dahlhaus does not hide his contempt for Klangkomposition, which he considered nothing more than “a rather harmless quest for pure discovery and montage of unknown noises” (279). Precisely because of its lack of construction and structure, this compositional approach had inevitably led to the exhaustion of Klangkomposition: “In view of the over-simplification which resulted, it is not surprising that sound and noise composition . . . soon exhausted itself ” (279). According to Dahlhaus, in fact, only pitch and duration are really capable of generating a structure, while timbre represents the typically expressive aspect of music. This is why he believes that the search for expressiveness in the so-called New Tonality was actually prepared by the rediscovery of timbre in Klangkomposition. “For there is an unequivocally close affinity between the secondary tonal properties, which have become primary, and the expressive moment of music, just as, conversely, the primary parameters, now reduced to secondary, were always considered and treated as structuring” (279). Dahl-

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haus sees the interest in the unquantifiable aspects of music, and thus in timbre, as a return to a declared subjectivity. “What was the subject of ‘research’ in the 1960s, as if the material was self-sufficient, was used a decade later as a means with which to serve expressive ends. But the musical structure, to a certain extent the backbone of form, is once again being entrusted to the primacy of pitch and duration” (280). As in the previous lecture, Dahlhaus closes the article by pointing out that the new generations, unlike in the postwar years, were not interested in theory. Beginning in the 1970s, the Materialdenken of the avant-garde was followed by a decline in the importance of the notion of material: young composers turned away from the search for new materials in favor of a revitalization of the work: “The distancing of the concept of material and the retreat into the subjective are linked to a restitution of the concept of the work, or at least to a break from the polemics against it” (283). The End of the Grand Narratives. Although naturally in more markedly philosophical terms, Jean-François Lyotard (1924–98) also tries to take stock of the musical avant-garde and post-modernism in an article published in 1996. As is well known, according to the French philosopher, the modernity of European culture has been characterized by a project of emancipation that he calls “grand narratives.” In art, this project of emancipation was expressed with the idea of emancipation of the material: “The question of what to call the material—which is the question of matter as such—is a decisive one for contemporary music, as for all the arts” (2009, 38). In particular, Lyotard does not hesitate to read the history of Western music precisely from the relationship with its material, sound: “The history of Western music may be thought of globally as the grand narrative of the emancipation of sound. It might be said that composers seek to discover what sonorous material is capable of, through the rules and customs of composition that they inherit” (38). If modernity in art is identified with the question of the material, vice versa the postmodern condition is identified with the crisis of this question: the postmodern condition would consist in the fact that these grand narratives cease to be credible. The question of the material, far from being a question like any other, thus coincides with the grand narrative that would characterize the entire history of European art—just as the departure from it would thus be the rejection of a specific feature of this idea of emancipation. Material and Complexity. In a lecture given in Darmstadt in 1992, significantly entitled: “Material – zur Krise einer musikästhetischen Kategorie,” Gianmario Borio takes his cue from the lecture that Dahlhaus had given ten years earlier in the same location, to assess the plausibility of the idea that an effective detachment from the question of material had occurred: if modernity has been marked by the question about the material of music, then the departure from this question would mark precisely the end of modernism and the beginning of postmodernism.

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First, Borio summarizes the concept of material in Adorno, pointing out that, contrary to what is often repeated, the Adornian concept of material is not to be considered in a monolithic sense, but that it was always formed and transformed in contact with composers and their works. Borio also shows that Adorno’s concept of material has influenced composers (in particular Gottfried Michael Koenig, Dieter Schnebel, Helmut Lachenmann) contributing to reinforce, if not actually engender, the conviction that the musical material is always immersed in a historical process. In his opinion, the question of the material today cannot be understood otherwise than as historical evolution. Unlike Dahlhaus, who relied on Krenek’s theory, according to which the composer is “free to establish axioms,” Borio studies the notion of material starting from the theory of communication, which establishes the very essence of the notion in an interaction between subjects, in the context of collective discourse around an object (114). Material would thus not correspond to the object-side of music—be it determined by the philosophy of history, be it physically—but to the scene of an interaction in which aesthetic norms are set, reshaped, and replaced by new ones. If one establishes this, then one gains criteria for distinguishing between a bad subjectivism that blindly reaches around in the sound reservoir of the 19th century for affect-generating turns, and intersubjectively justified procedures that refer specifically to moments of the past in order to enrich or transform the musical horizon of experience. (114)

Referring to the generation of composers who were present in Darmstadt in the Ferienkurse of 1982 (the same year in which Dahlhaus gave the aforementioned lecture), he identifies two important trends—both related to the idea of “complexity”—that can still be traced back to the question of material: complex sound (Komplexer Klang) and complex temporal relations (Komplexe Zeitverhältnisse). The important representatives of these two tendencies are indicated by Borio respectively in Tristan Murail and the circle of the Ensemble l’Itinéraire on the one hand, and in Brian Ferneyhough on the other.

3.2  Taking Place Matter and Time. In my own compositions—especially the early ones—I tried to continue the exploration of sound undertaken by Klangkomposition by making extensive use of or developing special instrumental and vocal techniques. However, this was not only brought about by an investigation of timbre and noise: in extended techniques I saw primarily the possibility of working with material that is impossible to completely control. This can be observed, for example, in the so-called multiphonics produced by wind instruments. Contrary to their name, the distinctive character of these sounds lies not so much in their delivery of several notes at once, but in their timbral quality. The notes that constitute them are rarely balanced with each other, both dynamically and timbrally. Above all, multiphonics are not easily transposable and in some cases are only obtainable within a limited dynamic range.

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Complex articulations are difficult to construct. Often two or more multiphonics cannot be easily played legato. Depending on the specific fingering position, their emission may require some preparation time in order to adapt the embouchure, and often the final result depends on the individual performer (which implies a long and patient collaboration between composer and instrumentalist). In short, they are almost unique sonic events that can be only partially determined and notated. As with other extended techniques, one could say that multiphonics are rich and intriguing sound objects despite (or perhaps because of ) the restrictions they impose on the composer. Nevertheless, since the beginning of my composing activity, the further expansion of musical material towards new types of sound and noise did not seem to me in itself sufficient to open up new horizons. The acute feeling that the sonic material had reached its limits led me—at first more or less unconsciously, later with increasing awareness—to divert my attention more toward the temporal dimension of sound and music. This temporal dimension might be easily identified with metric and rhythmic organization, with the relationships of duration. However, my attention was drawn, more importantly, to the temporality of sound in a different, more radical sense, namely that sound happens in time and in space. The temporality of music is then to be understood not only as its rhythmic organization but, first and foremost, as the concrete occurrence of sound and as the perception of this occurrence. But there is more. Sound does not survive long after the movement of the body that produced it has ceased, it quickly vanishes, leaving no trace of itself but in the memory of the listener. It is only the short life of sound—that is, its ephemeral character—that allows sounds to manifest themselves in an alternation of appearance and disappearance and, therefore, to be rhythmically organized in music. However, if sound is an essentially temporal phenomenon, how can it be considered the matter or material of music? If, as mentioned earlier, both notions of matter and material indicate the premise of the creative act—that is, that which precedes the creative act—how can sound material precede compositional work? How can sound precede its taking place in performance? If sound is an essentially temporal phenomenon, how can it be considered and manipulated out of time? Perhaps no one has felt this problem more keenly than Augustine. In the Confessions, Augustine intends to clarify the different senses in which the passage in Genesis can be understood: “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.” It is possible to interpret this phrase to mean that God first created the matter of heaven and earth, that is, the matter of every spiritual and corporeal creature. It is possible, however, to think that God created formless matter before formed matter, provided that one is then able to distinguish at least four senses of precedence: precedence according to eternity, precedence according to time, precedence according to value, and precedence according to origin. To explain these different senses of precedence, Augustine offers examples: God precedes all things according to eternity; the flower precedes the fruit according to time; the fruit precedes the flower according to value;

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the sound precedes the song according to origin. It is very easy to understand precedence with respect to time and value, but it is very difficult to understand in what sense precedence is given according to eternity and according to origin. In particular, it is difficult to understand in what sense sound precedes song, since song is a formed sound, a sound endowed with form. In fact, something unformed can certainly exist, but it is not possible to give form to what does not exist (formari autem quod non est non potest). The sound precedes the song not from a temporal point of view, for we do not first in time utter formless sounds without singing, and then tune or fashion the same sounds into a form of singing afterwards, just as wood or silver be served, whereof a chest or vessel is fashioned; such materials indeed, do in time precede the forms of those things which are made of them. But in singing it is not so: for when it is sung, its sound is heard; it is not a formless sound first, and then formed into a tune afterwards. For each sound just as it is made, so it passeth; nor canst thou find aught of it, which thou mayest call back and set into a tune by any art thou canst use: therefore the tune has his being in his sound, which sound of his, is his matter: this indeed receives a form, that it may become a tune. And therefore, as I said, is the matter of the sound before the form of the tune. (Confessions 12.29)

Who sings generates at the same time his or her own material and the form that is the song: in a way, it is the music that creates the sound. Outside-Time Architectures. In truth, strictly speaking, the temporal dimension of sound is absolutely foreign to the composer’s material. One might even say that, by definition, the composer must always deal with the impossibility to work on sound and its temporality except in its abstraction. Iannis Xenakis (1922–2001) discussed the temporal organization of music and musical material in his book Formalized Music ([1963] 2001, 155–77), and in two important essays: “Towards a Metamusic” (1970) and “Concerning Time” (1989). He distinguished three types of musical architecture in relation to time: outside-time architectures, in-time architectures, and temporal architectures: I propose to make a distinction in musical architecture between ‘outside-time’ architectures or categories, ‘in-time’ architectures or categories, and finally architectures or categories I shall call ‘temporal.’ A given pitch scale, for example, is an outside-time architecture, for no ‘horizontal’ or ‘vertical’ combination of its elements can alter it. The event in itself, that is its actual occurrence, belongs to the temporal category. Finally a melody or a chord on a given scale is produced by relating the outside-time category to the temporal category. Both are realizations in-time of outside-time constructions. (1970, 4)

Starting from this categorization, he criticized the second Viennese school because, he claimed, fixing the order of pitches inextricably tied them to their in-time architectures. Twelve-tone music would be a music “in-time,” and Western music in general would have suffered of a “progressive degradation of outside-time structures” (1970, 13). Xenakis, in fact, since he interprets irreversibility as the most typical

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feature of time, seems to consider “in-time” any musical structure composed of elements arranged in succession. The attribution of this characteristic to the twelvetone series does not seem to hold, because the pitch series is a logic, and is not yet a temporal succession of pitches—in fact, composers very often used the pitch series also to build chords, that is, simultaneous events. At any rate, the crucial point seems to me how it is possible to conceive of sound and music outside-time. Xenakis oddly asks: “What remains of music once one removes time? There remains a multitude of sensations that require time in order to be perceived, but which can exist without it” (1976, 211). According to such a view of music and sensation, musical performance would be nothing but the momentary instantiation of a work living outside time. Persistence. In music the experience of sound, while still occurring in time, is clouded by formal relations. Measuring and parameterizing sound always entails establishing a certain hierarchy among the parameters, ordering the values within each parameter along a scale, and inserting sound into a structure that relates to an idea of transformation. In short, musical form means the organization of relations among sounds (high-low, bright-dark, long-short) at the expense of sound itself and its taking place in time and space. Composer’s material is outside-time. And yet there are ways he or she can operate so as to allow, or at least not hinder, the experience of sound as an event. Giving prominence to this event, to this primal aspect of the temporal dimension, concurrently leads to reducing the importance of the two qualities of sound that traditionally have been responsible for the organization of form: pitch and timbre. Thus, sound must be somehow considered outside of the parameters and values that have traditionally defined it. In order to make the very occurrence of sound audible, it is necessary to avoid or limit the establishment of syntactical relationships between the single appearances of sounds or sound figures. In this way, composition can question and rearrange the traditional and still largely predominant hierarchy of musical parameters, which has assigned to pitch and (in modern times) to timbre the leading roles in the structuring of musical form. It is about thinking of music not only as articulation, structure, or language, but as sound coming to light. Resisting the predominance of pitch and timbre also implies resisting their transformational drive. The fact that music is to be conceived essentially as transformation was clearly expressed in the very definition of melody given by Plato and preserved through the millennia: melody is “movement of the voice,” which medieval theorists then translated as motio vocum. Boris de Schlœzer and Marina Scriabin (Alexander Scriabin’s daughter) reinforce this supposed inseparable link between music and variation: “Variation is the sine qua non condition of the musical event” ([1959] 2016, 105). Stockhausen describes the power of transformation as follows: The same thing is always sought and attempted: the power of transformation—its effect as time: as music. So there is no repetition, no variation, no development, no contrast. . . . One never hears the same thing. But there is a clear feeling that one is

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Thus, according to Stockhausen structure would be revealed in connection to transformation. One never hears the same material twice, but one hears the order that has been imposed upon it. Conversely, sound comes to light as an event especially when timbral and diastematic parameters remain constant, when it is persistent. With this aim, my compositional work has always involved reducing or restraining the development of sound qualities as much as possible: in my music, there is no principle of variety and transformation in connection to pitch or timbre. I primarily conceive my compositions starting not from the possible transformation of sound, but from its temporal articulation; I limit the transformation of sound, that is, the organization of form based on the transformation of pitch or timbre. At most, different pitches or timbres are juxtaposed without establishing a connection or assuming formal relevance. This effort to limit the development of the sonic aspect of music should not be interpreted as a tendency toward stasis. It is debatable whether or not a sequence of sounds of identical pitch, timbre, and dynamic level constitutes a steady repetition of the same sound. Sound is always new because identity is impermanent in time: every sound has its own moment and every moment has its own sound. Or, following Heraclitus’ conception of time, sound is always both new and the same. Discontinuity. What impedes the experiencing of the ephemeral nature of sound is not only musical syntax but also the very continuity of the sound flow, which obfuscates the possibility of apprehending, isolating, and retaining the happening of sound. When a melody is formed, music is separated from the context of its production. Therefore, along with the predominance of transformation, continuity itself should also be abolished. To avoid the formation of a sonic continuum, a continuous auditory stream, one needs to interrupt or fragment the musical discourse; in other words, occurrences of sound must be separated from one another, resorting to silence. To expose sound beyond its qualities, one must dismantle music to the point where a sequence of sounds is no longer configured as a sound stream. Only the disintegration of the melos allows the ephemeral character of sound to be experienced. Only silence allows sound to reveal itself in the dimension of “happening.” Breaking down musical and sonic continuity creates empty moments in which sound can finally happen and happen again. Silence can be considered in different ways. It can be regarded as a function of sound, that is, negatively, as a rest or a momentary absence of sound. In this sense, the use of silence serves to separate distinct moments of sound. Yet, one can also think of silence per se, as that situation or state where sound can happen (or not). After Schoenberg emancipated dissonance, Anton Webern was the first to under-

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stand that silence can help break down traditional syntax and, with his so-called pointillist style, was also the first to release the dimension of time in music (Boulez [1952] 1995, 154; Stockhausen [1961] 1963, 229). This idea influenced many twentieth-century composers, including John Cage, Morton Feldman, Luigi Nono (notably starting from his string quartet, composed in 1980, Fragmente-Stille, an Diotima), and Salvatore Sciarrino. However, a sound event does not intervene and vanish in a vacuum devoid of any sound. Sound as an event is change, perturbation, alteration, the disturbance of an acoustic situation already in place. Since we are always immersed in a sonic environment, sound does not happen against an empty background, but always changes and disturbs a sonic space and time. Cage wrote that what he names “experimental music” consists only of those sounds “that are notated and those that are not. Those that are not notated appear in the written music as silences, opening the doors of the music to the sounds that happen to be in the environment” ([1957] 2009, 7–8). What Cage considered an alternation of musical sound and unintentional sound, could be reformulated as an alternation between structured musical time and ordinary time. The interest in silence that several composers have shown, and also my own interest in it, could be explained as an interest in time, for only silence allows the taking place of sound in time to be appreciated. As discontinuity is possible only in the continuous situation of silence, sound reveals its nature of being an event only as long as the possibility of its non occurrence is kept open. This is perhaps more than a dialectic relationship between being and not being, between change and stasis; the containment of the qualities of sound with respect to their formal function creates a situation of tension more than of stasis, a sort of resistance, opposition, and obstinacy. En flottant. My music follows from the encounter of these two forces: persistence of sound and discontinuity. I have often chosen to work with figures that can be as minimal as a single sonic occurrence and whose diastematic contour may not always be clearly perceivable, repeating them, stretching or shortening their duration, increasing or diminishing the number of their recurrences. Exemplary of this approach is my composition En flottant for clarinet (1995– 96). The piece can be said to consist of two parts, the second of which begins with the Animato on page 3 of the score. These two parts, however, are closely intertwined, since there is actually no clear break between the two. The second part is characterized by the constant use of unstable, always fluctuating, microtonally modulated sounds. These microtonal modulations are produced by modifying the ordinary fingering of a certain note by closing or opening other holes or keys. The notation does not indicate the resulting sound, but only the fingering required to produce these microtonal fluctuations. The holes to be covered are prescribed by diamond-shaped noteheads (Fig. 1).

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Fig. 1

This second part is marked by the constant alternation between two different registers of the clarinet and two different tempos: the low and warm chalumeau register, associated with the Animato, in which the modulation of the sound is more rapid and nervous, and the high register associated to the Meno mosso. These two types of articulation have been notated on two separate staves, of which the lower staff is reserved for the chalumeau register in tempo Animato (Fig. 2). Fig. 2

Over the course of the piece the alternation between these two registers is developed until, towards the end, the higher register prevails, and only brief fragments of the chalumeau register remain (p. 5 of the score). In the last few lines, the higher pitched sounds of the Meno mosso alternate in turn with isolated, deep and loud tongue-slaps. Of greater interest pertaining to the subject discussed here—namely musical temporality in the tension between form and event—is the first part, where what is to become a continuous modulated sound is progressively constructed starting from segments of repeated, pulsating sounds on the clarinet’s low E (sounding D). The pace of this pulsation is that of 16th notes, but it is “shifted” by a 32nd rest, thus the performer is playing “upbeats”, changing the rhythmic tension within the event. The diamond-shaped notehead open on one side here indicates a blowing, airy sound of definite pitch. In the first few lines, these short sound events alternate with long silences, and are progressively lengthened by simply adding notes: the piece opens with a three note-segment followed by a 5/8 silence; then four notes followed again by a 5/8 silence; finally, five and seven notes, always separated by a 5/8 silence (Fig. 3).

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At this point, it should become clear to the listener that the pulsating sound is getting longer while the duration of the silence is staying constant. The fifth sequence then presents a slight difference, an eight note segment (taking up the duration of 4/8) is broken up into three notes (like the beginning) plus five notes, separated by a 1/8 pause, bringing the total duration of the sound event to 5/8, the same as the silences. A similar point of equilibrium between sound and silence is reached again between line three and four, albeit with a slightly different distribution: 7/16 silence, 1/8 sound, 3/16 silence, 4/8 sound. This time the pause that interrupts the sound event, being a bit longer (3/16), is “counted” (or one might say “perceived”) as silence (Fig. 4). Fig. 4

From this moment on, both sound and silence begin to progressively shorten (Fig. 5).

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Having reached this point, the duration of the pulsating sounds is doubled and the pace is correspondingly cut in half. The low E is suddenly interrupted by the first new note (D). There follows a succession of 17 key-clicks, which from this point on assume the function that silence had previously held. From these key-clicks emerges the first “melodic” line, articulated with the same kind of airy sounds of the previous pulsation (Fig. 6). Fig. 6

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Here the durational proportions between the key strokes and this newly formed pitched sequence are the inverse of those found in the initial part: the key-clicks segments progressively shorten while the pitched sequence maintains a more or less stable duration (between 5/8 and 7/8) (Fig. 7). Fig. 7

At the end of this shortening process, a continuous, held tone emerges for the first time (on D, the same note that appeared briefly in line six), in a way “replacing” the initial pulsating sound. In this held sound, now progressively emerges the microtonally modulated sound, which picks up its rhythmic articulation from the previous quick key-clicks element, leading into the second part of the piece (Fig. 8).

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Time and Rhythm Fig. 8

Summing up, the first part consists in the progressive construction of a long fluctuating sound starting from a short, persistent pulsation; the pulsation is then in a way “transferred” inside the long sound. This transformation, however, does not occur continuously, but alternates with moments of silence, like the outline of a figure occasionally emerging from the shadows. In these moments of silence the composer and the performer might appear to be relinquishing sound, that is, relinquishing what would seem to be the specific material of music. Yet, it seems to me—at least, it seemed to me at the time I composed this piece—that only in the tension between persistence and silence does sound show itself as an event. These moments of silence must be included, must be seen as an integral part of the composition itself: rhythm is regulated not by the relationships between the durations of the sounds but by the relationships of duration between sound and silence. What and That. The temporal condition of sound, understood as its ephemeral character, may only really emerge when the material composers have at their disposal is completely worn out. My compositional approach could thus be viewed as a con-

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sequence of and a reaction to the idea of sound material promoted by the different avant-garde currents starting in the post-war years; a moving away from it, if not an outright repudiation. What one should be seeking in composition today is not a new way of configuring material (as the serialists did), nor is it the discovery of new timbres or noises (as the avant-garde of the 1960s did); it could be instead the conception of form as the organization of the conditions necessary for sound to show itself in its taking place. This kind of approach represents an attempt to rethink composition and music beyond the different characterizations through which its material has been qualified in the past—be it parameters or sound-in-itself. Sound considered as a pure impulse marks a notch, opens a cleft in the continuous flow of time. In this vein, Nietzsche (1967, 322) observed that in ancient Greek music the sounds of the kithara functioned almost like a metronome. Similarly, in my works, sound matters less by virtue of its specific characteristics than by virtue of its marking function. The shift of perspective from the sonic to the temporal dimension of music can also be described as moving the attention from the sonic object itself to its occurrence and disappearance. To subjugate the sonic aspect of music is to focus not upon the timbral qualities of sound but to concentrate instead on its sheer occurrence and recurrence in time and space. In contrast to music primarily articulated in parameters, this approach to composition opens up a completely different outlook on the production and experience of music. These two different compositional attitudes correspond to two ways of listening: listening to what happens versus hearing that something happens. Jean-François Lyotard ([1988] 1991, 82) expresses the difference between these two types of aesthetic experience as the contrast between quid (what) and quod (that). These two Latin conjunctions distinguish two ways of relating to the world: in the interrogative quid an analytic, speculative attitude is implied, a search for information with which to understand the phenomenon. The question quid sonus? which has occupied Western philosophy, psychology, and music theory at least since Aristotle’s De anima, invokes the definition and delimitation of an object or an event. The exclamatory quod instead expresses a more contemplative frame of mind. In fact, we are speaking not only about understanding what sound is but, more importantly, that sound happens. Carrying it even further: it is about hearing whether anything happens at all. Moving away from listening to something happening toward sensing that it actually happens also entails a different attitude toward the creative act and a different attention to performance. Emphasizing the temporal occurrence of events means creating the conditions in which sound can come to life before becoming music; it is a matter of thinking about the singularity or the individuality of sound more than its repeatable architectures. Nevertheless, it is not about a complete destructuring of music. As we have seen earlier, if on one hand Cage believed in the ability of sound in itself to become music, on the other Boulez affirmed that without any application, without writing, sound is nothing. These two different approaches to sound and composition are less at odds than they may appear: indeed in both cases sound is not granted any form-

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ing capacity. But while Boulez’s structuralism tends toward controlling sound in an effort to impose order upon it, Cage aims to expose this linguistic incapacity as such. Unlike Cage—who resolved music into indeterminate sound without intentionality—I believe that only form allows the experience of sound as something extraneous: only in writing does sound reveal its alterity, its indeterminacy; in other words, the non-verbal is only revealed in relation to language. On the other hand, unlike Boulez—who resolved music in its linguistic capacities, in its structuring power—I maintain that only sound’s otherness permits one to even conceive of something like structure: only the inclusion of the non-verbal in the creative process can illuminate structure. This moment in which the otherness of sound appears cannot be planned within a score; a score, by its very nature, can mostly operate on the quantifiable aspects of music. If we understand noise as that which cannot be controlled, something that disturbs or resists structure, it follows that noise cannot be “composed.” Even so, the score can either suppress noise or give voice to it; in other words, it can create the conditions for (the unexpected, unintentional) noise to take place and be perceivable. Both phenomenons—ephemeral sound and noise—could be said to reveal themselves in the crevices of form.

3.3  Aperiodic Rhythms Rhythm without Melody. With very few exceptions, in Western art music, the importance of pitch organization has always prevailed over that of duration and rhythm (Mersch 2005). As Duchez notes, while it is customary to say that a note has a certain duration, it might sound peculiar to say that a duration has a certain note: “les durées sont les durées des hauteurs, alors que hauteurs ont des durées” (1979, 60n34; emphasis in original). Moreover, it is no coincidence that musical notation was developed initially to indicate pitch and only many centuries later was duration included. Pitch relationships played a dominant role particularly in twelve-tone technique, which in fact consisted, first of all, in a specific ordering of the twelve pitches. After World War II, when so-called integral serialism appeared in the works of Messiaen, Boulez, and Stockhausen, the task at hand was to extend the serial rule—a technique originally devised in the pitch domain—to other parameters, particularly to durations. When, instead, pitch relationships start loosening, rhythm takes on special importance: it becomes possible to organize and perceive it differently. Rhythmic diversification can better be enhanced while reducing the variation in pitch. This inverse relationship between pitch complexity and rhythm complexity emerges clearly in a peculiar passage from the Musicae compendium, a short treatise on music that René Descartes (1596–1650) wrote in his youth. After asserting that the object of music is sound and that the aim of music is to generate pleasure (delectatio), the French philosopher observes that pleasure is produced by the senses when they cannot perceive the object too easily, leaving their desire unfulfilled, but

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not when the difficulty of perception is too great, in which case the senses become fatigued. Therefore, Descartes recommends using only binary or ternary meters, rhythmic proportions that are in a ratio of 2:1 or 3:1, but nothing beyond, so as to not excessively strain the sense of hearing. However, when melody is absent, as for instance in the case of the military drum, more complex numerical proportions become perceivable and are therefore permitted. Time in music has such power that it alone can be pleasurable by itself; such is the case with the military drum, where we have nothing [to perceive] but the beat; in this case I am of the opinion that here the meter can be composed not only of two or three units but perhaps even of five, seven, or more. For with such an instrument the ear has nothing to occupy its attention except the time; therefore, there can be more variety in time in order to hold the attention. ([1650] 1961, 15)

Precisely because the ear is freed from focusing its attention on melody and can focus better on rhythmic variations, wider margins remain open for purely rhythmic invention. The perception and enhancement of rhythmic variety is inversely connected to the prominence of pitch. It is not without reason that Descartes explains the relationship between pitch and rhythm using as an example the military drum; percussion instruments, in fact, offer the best case in point to illustrate music devoid of melodic content. Since rhythm has always played a second-order role to pitch, the rhythmic potentiality of percussion instruments was seldom developed in Western art music. In Classical and Romantic music, with few exceptions, the typical function of percussion instruments, mostly fulfilled by the timpani, was to stress certain significant moments of a phrase or of the piece. In contemporary music, on the other hand, percussion has been rediscovered and the instruments of this class are mostly employed for their timbral, non-pitched qualities; unpitched percussion instruments abolish the melodic and harmonic component of music. In music for percussion instruments alone, especially in some non-European traditions (such as those which attracted the attention of György Ligeti), the differences in pitch or timbre between particular drums are used not to build a melody but to clearly articulate rhythmic structure. This characteristic, however, is not exclusive to percussion instruments: a piano, or even a flute, if properly treated, can be used similarly. Composer André Boucourechliev (1925–97) reverses the traditional hierarchy between pitch and rhythm, writing that “music would be then a system of differences that structures time under the category of sound” (1993, 21). Non-Predictable Rhythms. It was only when I started limiting the transformation of the pitch or timbre of sound that I could rediscover in my music the importance of rhythm—albeit with a caveat: just like diastematic relations, fixed meter, that is, a repetitive pattern, also impedes the appreciation of sound as a temporal event. This is because a constant meter gives a somewhat predictable structure to the

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sound flow, generating beat induction in the listener: “Meter involves a very general and very basic perceptual ability to entrain or attune our attention to temporally invariant aspects of our environment” (London 1999, 270; emphases in original). Grisey (2008, 28) expresses a similar idea with the term “preaudibility.” A compositional approach that resists this tendency consequently promotes a particular kind of perception: the listener’s attention is displaced from what happens to when it happens. Therefore, in order for sound to be able to show itself in its taking place, its occurrence needs to be non-periodic or, one might say, not (completely) predictable. Nevertheless, as was the case with pitch, I am not advocating the elimination of any regularity. For example, serialism, by definition, creates non-predictable series of durations, it destroys every sense of meter generating a linear temporality and actually reinforces the importance of pitch and timbre. Contrary to this idea, durations must be associated with some metrical principle: it is possible to create a “temporal dissonance” only if a sense of regularity is first induced. It is for me not simply a question of overcoming periodicity, but also of overcoming absolute non-periodicity with what are called quasi-periodic rhythms. In most of my pieces, rhythm is organized starting from the alternation between the periodic and the non-periodic, between sequences of sound events organized according to a fixed meter and instances of temporal dissonance. Flatus vocis. Composing pieces for solo instrument has been for me a sort of laboratory, an opportunity to further develop a certain technique or to test new ideas. So, some years after composing En flottant, I returned to composing a piece for solo instrument, Flatus vocis for flute, with the intention of achieving greater flexibility in managing the rhythmic relationship between sound and silence. The brevity and immediacy of this piece were the result of a long period of elaboration. The underlying idea was to explore ways of constructing forms of acceleration and deceleration (while avoiding overused options like the Fibonacci series). For this purpose I needed to devise acceleration and deceleration curves that were unpredictable (not preaudible). Before I describe how this piece is temporally organized, it might be best to examine the instrumental technique I expressly developed for it. This technique consists in the production of high-pitched sounds as harmonics generated from different fundamentals. Salvatore Sciarrino employed this technique (particularly in All’aure in una lontananza) in the form of double harmonic trills. In my piece, I applied this technique to the construction of arpeggios; this not only confers a distinct timbre to these arpeggios, but upon careful listening also creates a captivating polyphony between the high notes and the low register movement of the fundamentals which generate them. In Fig. 9 (taken from the first line of the score) the high E is produced first as third harmonic of A and then as fourth harmonic of E, while the following B is produced first as second harmonic of B and then as third harmonic of E. The

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figure ends with an E produced only as first harmonic of E, that is, the way the flute normally produces this sound. Fig. 9

Over the course of the piece I used up to the seventh overtone (Fig. 10) Fig. 10

Toward the end, a new figure based on the same technique appears: a single note is produced as a harmonic of three or more different fundamentals. The image below shows the second occurrence of this figure: the high G is produced in succession as harmonic number 3, 4, 5, 6 (Fig. 11).

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Time and Rhythm Fig. 11

Just as in the case of En flottant, the aspect most relevant from a formal point of view is not so much the sound treatment, but is rather the relationship between silence and sound. My intention was again to progressively build a continuous flow of sound starting from a sparse situation; this time, however, I wanted to find more flexible forms of progressive convergence and distancing (or acceleration and deceleration) between events, to find procedures that didn’t rely on simply adding or subtracting integers. In addition to this, another need I felt was to simplify the writing, that is, to make these temporal variations translatable into musical notation and easy for the performer to execute. Another important difference with respect to the clarinet piece is that it is not the duration of the sound event but the silence that changes by getting longer or shorter. For this purpose, I devised acceleration and deceleration curves that start from a silence lasting 6/8 plus an arpeggio lasting 2/8: the variations in duration change by subtraction and addition of silence. In particular, subtracting and then adding the same amount previously subtracted. There is no need here to describe in detail the shape of these curves; suffice it to say that the values that were deduced from them and employed in the score are those shown in Fig. 12. Fig. 12

(c)

(b) –1/20

(a) –1/16 –2/16

–1/12 –2/12 –3/12

–2/8 –3/8 –4/8

+1/12 +2/8 +1/16 +2/12 +3/8 +1/20 +2/16 +3/12

+4/8

Let’s see how the implementation of these values works in detail through the analysis of a few sections of the piece.

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Sequence 1. The piece begins with a succession of very rapid arpeggios suddenly and violently interrupted by a multiphonic sound in ff. This figure is followed by a silence whose duration is already reduced with respect to the basic period of 6/8. The first sequence, in fact, applies the first set of values. First 1/12 is subtracted from the basic period, then 2/8 are subtracted, bringing the duration of the silence to 4/8 (which added to the duration of the sound corresponds to a total period of 6/8). Then the duration of the silence is lengthened by first adding 1/12 and then, in the following sequence, 2/8 (Fig. 13). Fig. 13

Concerning ease of performance, contrary to what one might imagine, durations such as 12ths and 20ths are not so difficult to execute in this context. It is sufficient for the flautist to internally feel the necessary rhythmic subdivisions while he is “counting” the rests. For example, to play a figure that occurs after a series of rests from which 1/20th has been subtracted, it is sufficient to think of a quintuplet subdivision (20ths) over the rest(s) leading up to the “truncated” beat and then be ready to cut off the silence at the right moment, “anticipating” the sound figure.

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Sequence 2. The second sequence applies the value series (b). Here we can see that it is possible to apply the series of values both to silence and sound, as long as the overall duration of the period matches the series used. Thus, we start with a silence of 6/8 from which 1/16 is first subtracted; from the following silence we should be subtracting 1/12. However, this value is not taken away from the silence but from the figure. Then the basic period follows the curve regularly by subtracting 3/8 from the duration of the silence while the figure returns to its usual duration of 2/8. Moving forward, the distance between figures expands again by adding first 1/16 and then 2/12 of silence (Fig. 14). Fig. 14

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Sequence 5.  Finally, let’s examine sequence five: even more than before, it will be possible to see how this mechanism leads to an ever-increasing extension in the duration of sound events, ultimately leading to a continuous flow. The sequence begins with 6/8 of silence, subtracts 1/20 from the figure, then goes back to subtracting silence, first 2/16, then 3/12 (1/8); it finally reaches the point of maximum proximity between sound figures, now separated by silences lasting only 2/8. At this point the figure is lengthened by adding the values previously subtracted: first 1/20, then 2/16, and finally 2/8 (1/16 of silence and 3/16 of sound). Here, for the first time, we see a figure that is radically different from the others, since the direction of the arpeggio, previously always descending, is now reversed (arpeggio over the overtones of C # ) (Fig. 15). Fig. 15

The diagram in the next page shows the overall shape of the piece, its back and forth fluctuations between sound and silence: gray lines indicate the duration of silence, black lines indicate the duration of sound.

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Time and Rhythm Fig. 16

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3.4  Quasiperiodic Forms Non-Isochronous Meters. In the idea behind the two compositions examined, regardless of their aesthetic success, I saw two limitations: one of a syntactic nature and the other of a formal nature, both of which are connected. If the non-predictability of the event from a rhythmic point of view is the necessary premise for sound to show itself as an event, then it must be admitted that non-periodicity obtained through the progressive convergence or distancing of events does not determine their non-predictability. In fact, although they are not periodic, processes of acceleration or deceleration are nevertheless directed in time, and because of this, they become easily predictable. The Fibonacci series, so popular among avant-garde composers, is a typical example. In those and other pieces of that period, I also found another limitation with regard to the overall form: their unfolding, in fact, often consisted in the gradual construction of a continuous flow of sound from an initial state of discontinuity and fragmentation. (In truth, one can see these forms not as the construction of a continuous flow but, conversely, as the progressive “letting happen” of sound events, or a diminishing of the control exerted upon them.) Compositions like En flottant and Flatus vocis clearly exhibit this process of formation, this passage from initial rarefaction to greater density and continuity. In other pieces—such as Limen (2003–04) for tenor saxophone, guitar, and marimba—I constructed a reverse formal process, one of destructuring, going from a continuous flow to a final state of discontinuity, from density to rarefaction. Both approaches, however, resulted in a somewhat directional form, a more or less progressive transition from one stage to another, giving the pieces too much of a sense of linear evolution, a teleological character. To overcome what seemed to me to be a limitation from both a syntactic and a formal point of view, starting from Nel labirinto (2003) for ensemble—which constitutes a turning point in my compositional work—I configured the overall form not as a transition from a stage of rarefaction to a denser one, but as a persistent lingering in a vacuum of sorts, where moments of rarefaction and density come and go. The constant and irregular alternation of sound and silence never grows into a continuous flow. In order to realize this idea of form, I resorted to so-called non-isochronous meters. Non-isochronous meters are usually defined as the opposite of isochronous meters, that is, as “meters with non-isochronous beat patterns” (London 2004, 100). The five beats composing a 5/8 meter, for example, can be grouped either into a quarter note plus a dotted quarter note (2-3) or, vice versa, into a dotted quarter note plus a quarter note (3-2). Even a simple ternary meter, if it is articulated as 1-2 (or 2-1), could be considered non-isochronous. Furthermore, non-isochronous meters are not necessarily odd: 4/4 can be non-isochronous if articulated as 3-3-2. While these meters are commonly found in Eastern folk music (in Turkish music they are called akzak, i.e., “limping meters.”), they have been rarely used in Western music.

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Few but significant exceptions include the music of Stravinsky, Bartók, Ahmet Adnan Saygun (1907–91) and that of Ligeti’s last period. A rare earlier example of the use of such meters appears in the first movement of Haydn’s Symphony No. 58, in which the composer writes the tempo indication “Menuetto alla zoppa” (“in a limping manner”). Curt Sachs called these meters additive rhythms opposing them to divisive rhythms, considered more common in the Western tradition (1953, 24–26 and 168–73). “The regular recurrence on which such patterns rest is not a certain duration to be divided into equal parts, but rather a grouping (in poetry: foot) composed of longer and shorter elements (in poetry: syllables), such as 2 + 1, or 3 + 3 + 2 units, or any other arrangement of shorts and longs. These rhythms are additive.” (25) The specificity of these meters is instead explained by Justin London (2004, 103–06) by resorting to the principle of Maximal Evenness (a principle developed in pitch set theory), according to which a measure is subdivided in the most symmetrical way possible. Underlying these two different ways of characterizing (and naming) these meters are two different ways of understanding them: while the designation of “additive” conceives of these meters as the addition of beats, the second designation arises from dividing the measure into non-equal parts. There is perhaps a third way to interpret these rhythms. In the Western tradition, the duration of sound is traditionally measured starting from the long/short opposition. Yet, an interesting passage in Plato testify to another possible way of understanding it starting instead from the opposition slow/fast (Symp. 187b–c). In my opinion, this alternative way of understanding the relationship between sound durations is the result of a different way of conceiving rhythm: in one case, sound duration is thought of in relation to language and poetry (that is, to the short or long duration of syllables), in the other, it is thought of starting in relation to body movement (that is, to the slow or fast movements in gestures). In this second case, both sound duration and rhythm are related to the speed of the movement that produces them. As a consequence, a 5/8, for instance, would be a binary meter whose two beats have different tempos (fast/slow). This would explain why such meters were perceived as akzak, limping meters: they hold a very strong connection to body movement, more specifically to a somewhat impeded motoric activity. A limping body is a body in distress, and non-isochronous meters/rhythms can convey this kind of physical discomfort. A measure can thus be said to contain different speeds. (This is why the custom developed of gesturing the dynamic of the tactus with a two-speed hand movement.) This characterizing element, the inequality of the beat, implies in some way that time is reducible to moments, to atoms that are not equal to each other, indeed not even comparable to each other (Grant 2014, 44–90). Long durations would thus not equal two short durations, but merely last longer than the short ones, and would not be divisible. This would also explain why Sachs writes: “Another consequence is that these aggregates of dissimilar elements cannot be called ‘striding.’ Their physiological equivalent

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is rather the tension and relaxation that we experience in breathing in and out—a motion to and fro which is under normal conditions regular but hardly equal” (25). Non-Isochronous Forms. My interest in non-isochronous meters stems neither from a desire to allude to the folk traditions from which they originate, nor from the corporeality they entail. In my music the use of these meters originally arises from syntactic and formal questions tied to a specific idea of temporality, and from the need to organize temporal flow according to quasi-periodic quantities. (The opposite could also be said: as we will see later, it is through the use of these meters that I have been able to rethink the relationship between sound and corporeality.) In popular traditions these rhythms are somewhat neutralized by being cyclically repeated, thus reintroducing periodicity at a higher level. The resulting overall rhythm is composed of unequal groupings, but still remains cyclic. How could the principle on which these meters are based respond to my need to organize also form in a quasi-periodic way? What does it really mean to transfer the non-isochronous principle to higher temporal levels, i.e., the morphological and syntactic levels? In order to achieve this, we would have to configure according to this principle the internal subdivision of the measure as well as the relationship between single measures and between groups of measures, thus applying to measures the same kind of relationship that exists between beats (Fig. 17). Fig. 17

The alternation between non-multiple time intervals is not constant, but always varies. What remains constant is purely the alternation between long and short measures. It is important not so much to construct a form that strictly replicates the form of the measure but a form that interprets the sense of difference, dilatation, contraction, of the non-isochronous meter (Fig. 18). Fig. 18

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Transferring the principle of inequality to the formal level, we obtain a process that is not directional, but goes instead through moments of dilation and contraction, expansion and compression, a form made of differences. The result of this way of thinking can be a music that is both regular and irregular at the same time. Nel labirinto. As mentioned above, I developed these ideas regarding the use of non-isochronous meters during the composition of Nel labirinto with the aim of creating a continuous fluctuation between moments of rarefaction and condensation. Nel labirinto was composed between 2002 and 2003, and was commissioned by the Ensemble Ascolta Stuttgart, which premiered it in 2003 at the “Bludenzer Tage zeitgemäßer Musik” in Austria. The unusual combination of instruments (trumpet, trombone, two percussionists, guitar, cello and piano) was not my choice, but was due to the history of this specific group of musicians. The disposition of the instruments in space calls for the piano to be placed in the middle (with its keyboard not visible to the audience), serving as an axis of symmetry: trumpet, guitar and first percussionist are situated on the left, while trombone, bass drum and cello are situated on the right. This way, a relation of symmetry is established between the two brass instruments (trumpet and trombone), between the two string instruments (guitar and cello) and between the two percussionists. As will become evident in the course of the analysis, this arrangement of the seven instruments is motivated by the function they carry within the piece. The syntactic and formal organization of the piece combines two principles that are somehow opposite: regularity and flexibility of durations. The duration of measures is not fixed, but the alternation between long and short measures is regular. I applied the same principle of regularity/irregularity also to a higher temporal level: four shorter measures of alternating lengths (articulated in sixteenths) are therefore contrasted by one longer measure (7/8). The measures themselves are here not determined by the relationship between strong and weak accents but simply by the time elapsing between different pulsations (usually marked by the bass drum). As mentioned above, the rhythm of these durations is based on the binary pattern Long-Short (or, as I prefer to say, Slow-Fast). The opening succession thus consists of four measures assembled according to the pattern L-S-L-S (where Long and Short do not indicate any fixed value). Each recurrence of the impulses is separated, at least initially, by a suspension constituted by the aforementioned 7/8 measure, what could be felt as an almost “timeless” duration (m. 5). The ensemble’s action is reduced to a few basic gestures. The sound and gesture of each instrument were chosen to articulate these temporal relationships as clearly as possible. Great caution must be exercised in the selection and use of sounds, as any misplaced element could easily compromise the balance between the temporal relationships. The instruments and their timbre have a specific role, which is connected to the point in which they make their appearance. One could even turn the tradition-

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al relationship between sound and rhythm upside down, stating that the function each instrument performs is actually determined by the point in which it appears. In the analysis that follows, I will limit myself to examining the temporal relationships and how they are articulated by the instruments, intentionally ignoring the organization of pitches. I will call “sequence” any succession of shorter measures (in sixteenths) separated from the following ones by a longer measure (initially in 7/8), which I will call “suspension measure.” Clearly, it would also be possible to think of the sequence as starting with a “suspension measure” followed by a certain number of short measures. Fig. 19

Sequence 1 (mm. 1–5, Fig. 19). Metric pattern (according to 16th note values): 5-3-4-3-14. The muted bass drum plays dead-strokes, a percussive gesture in which the mallet maintains pressure on the drum’s skin after striking it, thus preventing it from continuing to vibrate. The resulting sound is therefore stifled and ex-

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tremely short, one could almost say “without duration.” To this sound are associated two different piano sounds which, at least initially, are played contemporaneously with it: a very high-pitched note (starting with G7) and a cluster in the extreme low register. Due to their brevity and dryness, also these sounds are practically without duration. The low cluster is played as softly as possible; the score calls for it to be “hidden in the bass drum” (nascosto nella Gr. C.) which means that it should be basically inaudible, barely discernible from the bass drum stroke. This way the unpitched sound of the bass drum is slightly transformed, gaining from time to time not so much pitch, but “color.” It must be added that, when listening, what becomes more consciously associated to the bass drum is not the low piano sound, but instead the high one, which appears in the initial two impulses, first forte and then piano. The short sounds of the bass drum (and of the low register of the piano) mark time, sectioning it into intervals, separate temporal fragments in some ways incomparable one to the other. During these time intervals, initially only in the longer ones, other sounds appear, never lasting more than the interval itself, and never crossing over into the next one. These sounds are assigned to the trumpet and trombone. Just before the last impulse of this sequence, the piano’s sostenuto pedal is actioned to undamp a group of strings, allowing the short cluster to release sympathetic vibrations. Thus, while the cluster still remains “hidden”, its resonance is now briefly uncovered (m. 5). The function of suspending the progression of impulses is assigned to the cello, which emerges from within the piano resonance with a slow descending half-tone glissando starting on A4, the same pitch as the trumpet.

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Sequence 2 (mm. 6–10, Fig. 20). Metric pattern: 5-3-4-3-14. The second sequence is essentially an almost identical repetition of measures 1–5, with a few subtle but important changes: the high-pitched piano sound is now played pianissimo (ppp); in the first time interval (m. 6) the duration previously covered by the trumpet’s A4 (m. 1) is now divided between trumpet and trombone; lastly, the second high piano note is shifted from the second to the third measure of the sequence (m. 8) creating a symmetry, highlighting the longer measures of the pairs. When we reach the second “suspension measure” (m. 10) the cello’s glissando maintains the same duration as before, but moves slightly faster, this time covering a full tone (A4–G4).

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Sequence 3 (mm. 11–15, Fig. 21). The metric pattern retains the same overall profile (L-S-L-S) but the duration of the longer measures (mm. 11 and 13) changes a bit: 6-3-5-3-14. In the first measure of the sequence (m. 11) the cello takes the position previously held by the trumpet, and the trumpet is shifted to the position that was the trombone’s in measure 6. The third measure of the sequence (m. 13), now extended to the same length as the opening measures of the previous sequences (m. 1 and 6), presents exactly the same configuration as measure 6. In this section we first encounter instances of dissociation between bass drum and piano cluster. First the cluster is removed (m. 12), also because in this case the bass drum is suddenly projected “far away” (ppp); then it is shifted forward (m. 15), thus becoming audible, and creating ambiguity as to where the measure really starts. For the first time measure and time marker are disconnected. Almost as a consequence of this disorienting event, the cello glissando in the suspension measure accelerates its movement even more, and alters its direction (down-up-down).

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Sequence 4 (mm. 16–20, Fig. 22). The metric pattern retains the length of the longer measures but expands that of the second measure (m. 17): 6-4-5-3-14. The cello’s short utterance in measure 17 constitutes the first appearance of sound within one of the shorter intervals, and can thus be seen as being “allowed to happen” by the temporal expansion. Measure 19 instead maintains its length and “emptiness.” The overall melodic outline of the sequence, determined by the wind instruments and the cello, and which up until now has been generally a descending one, now inverts its direction. The cello figure in the “suspension” measure, instead, returns to being a simple descent (m. 20).

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Sequence 5 (mm. 21–27, Fig. 23). This sequence, unlike the previous ones, does not lengthen the duration of the single measures, but instead returns them to their original length, while increasing their number: 5-3-5-4-5-3-14. The opening bass drum and piano impulse is notably omitted, and, as a consequence, the trumpet and trombone start this sequence in a more “suspended” state. The impulse reappears once in the second measure (m. 22), but the remainder of the pulsation, which is this time longer due to the increased number of measures, is completed by the bass drum alone in pp, without the timbral contribution of the piano cluster. The cello makes an appearance in the third measure (m. 23) with an unexpected insertion, before returning in the final measure of the sequence (m. 27) for its descending figure, which this time is contracted and becomes a tremolo. Here, for the first time, another instrument intervenes during the “suspension”: the trumpet answers the “altered” cello descent by playing a previously unheard wah-wah tremolo at the very end of the measure, just before the impulse that opens sequence 6.

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Sequence 6 (mm. 28–34, Fig. 24). Metric pattern: 14-4-7-5-6-4-14. The configuration of sequence 6 comes in a way as a repercussion of what occurred in Sequence 5. The impulse that opens the sequence is “colored” once again by the piano cluster, and is highlighted by the return of the piano’s high note. This time, however, the impulse triggers what appears to be another 7/8 “suspension” measure, which includes an additional cello descent. This measure in a way performs two functions, creating a situation of ambiguity: while, on one hand, it fulfills the role of “long” measure (much longer than in previous sequences) in the L-S pattern, on the other it is perceived as a repetition or extension of the previous “suspension” measure, and therefore as a response to the increased number of measures and impulses in sequence 5. This impression is reinforced by the presence of the trumpet tremolo at the end of measure 27, which at the same time separates and links the two cello descents. The ambiguity is even stronger because the second cello descent is long, once again occupying most of the measure, and without tremolo (m. 28). Therefore, the opening measure of Sequence 6 actually sounds like what ought to be the “real”

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closing measure of Sequence 5. The guitar makes its first entrance in measure 30–31 with an irregularly descending figure in thirty-second notes. This is the first time a single figure crosses over the bar line and occupies two consecutive measures, thus indicating the possibility of higher aggregations. Sequences 7–10 (mm. 35–56). The sequences we have examined up until now constitute all together a first expansion cycle in duration and number of measures. Starting with Sequence 7 (Fig. 25), the values of the previous sequences are repeated, starting over from the beginning: Sequence 7 (mm. 35–39), shown above, repeats the values of Sequence 1 and 2 (5-3-4-3-14), Sequence 8 (mm. 40–44) repeats the values of sequence 3 and so forth. The guitar’s interjections become longer and longer, occupying first two measures (mm. 42–43), then three measures (mm. 46–48), and finally four measures (mm. 52–55).

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Sequence 11 (mm. 57–63, Fig. 26). This sequence, which repeats the same values of sequence 6 (14-4-7-5-6-4-14), marks the end of the second expansion cycle. After the first two rather dense measures of the sequence, the sound events between bass drum impulses are performed exclusively by the guitar. Having reached this point, which constitutes a first acme, the piece seems to empty out completely. While previously the duration and number of measures kept increasing, now we are suddenly left with only two or three measures separating the various suspensions (mm. 64–73). While in the beginning the situation is fragmented, moving forward a certain continuity is gradually established. While, initially, the interjections emerging between the bass drum’s impulses were performed alternatingly by different instruments, later, one particular instrument takes over: first the guitar (mm. 30–95), then the cello (mm. 95–132), and, finally, the bass drum itself (mm. 135–45).

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Figs. 27 and 28 (mm. 108–15) show a critical passage of this process toward instrumental continuity. The high piano notes, that we have so far encountered only in single units, occasionally appearing in conjunction with the low cluster and the bass drum, can be heard throughout the entire sequence. The “hidden” cluster is no longer present, and, in measures 113–15, the high notes also detach themselves from the bass drum, gradually descending to the middle and low register of the piano, and giving rise to a new quickly articulated figure. It is now clear that the possibility of dissociation (first hinted at in measure 11) between the different components constituting the time-marking impulses will yield further developments. Toward the end of the piece, in fact, the bass drum impulses themselves shed their initial role, becoming a regular and continuous pulsation interrupted only by single rests, which now mark the beginning of each measure: the relationship between sound and silence has been inverted. The overall form of the piece consists in a transformation that is progressive but does not develop in a straight line: it can be described as a series of rhythmi-

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cally irregular impulses/gestures that slow down, moving further and further away from each other, in a long, intermittent process of rarefaction. The silence occurring between these events consequently expands more and more until, in the end, the monotonously regular pulsation of the bass drum appears within the long pauses. Starting with Nel labirinto, working on time has meant for me thinking of time in a non-directional way, and developing a special technique connected to this way of thinking. As can be seen even from a partial analysis of some of my pieces, form is understood as a non-directional evolution of the temporal relationships between sounds and instrumental gestures: what at first appears fragmented, directing attention to single events, in the course of the piece creates higher aggregates and greater continuity of development—yet without ever reaching an uninterrupted flow. Retrospection. Let us summarize what has been said so far with regard to sound temporality and rhythm. First of all, we should not conceive of musical temporality only as the rhythmic organization of sounds, but as the ephemeral character of

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sound. In order to let the temporality of sound emerge, some adjustments must be made, and some precautions must be taken. Although sound always occurs in time and space, its transitory character remains somehow hidden when sound becomes an element of a musical system. For in a system, an element is seen not in its individual occurrence but in relation to its function within the system itself (as is the case of tonal music). Moreover, sound’s transitory character remains hidden because of another, perhaps more fundamental feature of music, that is, continuity: the uninterrupted flow of the melos annuls the primary temporal aspects of sound, its taking place, and its decay. Both restraining transformation and the use of silence prevent the formation of a musical language, allowing us to sense sound as a temporal phenomenon, not as an element of a system. Composing in such a way as to expose sound in its taking place in time and space, means trying to restrain the formation of a structure, to suppress the constitution of a form. It concerns awakening one’s attention to the fact that sound may not be—opposing the continuous and ubiquitous presence of sound with its occurrence and its ephemeral character. There is a bond and a conflict between the temporality of sound and the syntactic aspects of music, between the experience of the sound event and the understanding of the linguistic sign. Sound as an event and sound as an element of musical language must be seen as opposite sides of the same coin. The more sound is treated as an element of a system ordered by parameters, the less sound appears in its sensible occurrence, and vice versa. In my compositions, however, syntactical organization hasn’t been completely removed. Rather there is a constant alternation between more structured passages and silence, between precise descriptions of sound and moments of indeterminacy. I have tried to work at the very edges of musical language. The bond and the conflict between organization and sound temporality must be assumed within the composition itself: sound reveals its ephemerality most clearly in the alternation between structure and silence. For me, tying sound to its individual occurrence was an attempt to react to a situation that seemed to be stuck. As explained at the beginning of the chapter, my pronounced interest in rhythmic organization and temporality can be traced back to the difficulty of reinventing music through pitch and timbre. This difficulty stemmed from the extreme pervasiveness of sound and noise in modern urban life as well as from the intense exploitation and wearing out of instrumental possibilities in contemporary music. If, on the one hand, research on sound and timbre has extended the composer’s vocabulary, on the other, it has also led to such an excessive focus on sound material that the possibilities—at least in acoustic instrumental music— are nearing exhaustion. There is something only seemingly paradoxical about all of this: sound wears out just as it becomes virtually infinite through technology. The search and sense of wonder for the “sound yet unheard” (as the rhetoric of some contemporary music circles still likes to repeat today) has ultimately generated a feeling that any sound has been already heard.

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This question, to which my compositions were attempting to give an answer, ultimately emerges as the result of technological development, and can therefore not be posed simply in “formal” terms—that is, within an approach to composition that only takes into account its syntax and formal processes. For this reason, any poetics of composition that wishes to come to terms with this issue must necessarily examine and incorporate questions relating to instruments and technology. To inquire as to what kind of role instruments play not only in how we conceive of sound, but also in the fact itself that we think of sound as being the material of music will be the concern of the remainder of this book.

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Chapter Four

Sounds and Instruments

Up to this point, I have looked at the relationship between music and sound from three different perspectives. In the first chapter, I studied how musical sound was considered on the basis of the notion of element. In the second chapter, I examined the emancipation of sound taking place in twentieth century music: on the one hand, the minimal element of sound is identified in the sine wave, on the other hand, the sound material of music expands indefinitely. In the third chapter, finally, I took into consideration some of my works in order to highlight the tension that exists between the abstract material of composition and the temporal dimension of sound. This chapter intends to expand the discourse to understand how the different modalities of conceiving sound in music relate to the instruments of sound production. More specifically, in correspondence to the two ideas of material outlined in the first two chapters, I will attempt to answer the following questions: (1) How was the relationship between pitched sound (that is, the element of melos) and the musical instrument conceived? (2) Do the notions of timbre and sound-in-itself presuppose a different relationship with the sounding body than that established by pitched sound? Thus, it will first be necessary to consider again the idea of material as illustrated in the opening chapter in order to ask what kind of conception and use of bodies corresponds to it: the rationalization of music that took place in classical Greece would not have been conceivable without thinking of the sound body as an instrument, that is, as a body serving a purpose. Next, I will indicate how electronic and digital instruments allow absolute control over sound in all its dimensions by abandoning the traditional bond between sound and sounding body. In the third section, I will consider musique concrète and acousmatic music as theorized by Pierre Schaeffer, because they constitute perhaps the most striking instance to reflect on the relationship between the idea of emancipation of sound in music and the detachment of sound from the body that emits it. As I will show in the fourth section, thinking about sound in all its complexity involves the emancipation of sound not only from its source but also from the human gesture, thus achieving the highest degree of rhythmic accuracy and perfect repeatability. The chapter concludes by summarizing the implications of the notion of material with regard to the conception and use of bodies. In music the conceptualization of sound—first, the theorization of pitch in ancient Greece and, later, the emancipation of sound in the twentieth

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century—could only have taken place by attempting to exert control over sounding bodies: first by reducing them to instruments, then by removing them altogether. If this is true, the very idea of sound material does not correspond to anything other than the control of the movement that produces sound and, therefore, to the control exerted over sounding bodies—resulting in a sort of sonocentrism.

4.1  Pitched Bodies Rationalization. In ancient Greece, sound was thought of first and foremost in relation to the body that emits it, and in particular in relation to the human voice. It is no coincidence that the Greek word phōnē meant at the same time “voice” and “sound”; moreover, phthongos indicates “a sound clearly uttered by the voice.” The same can be observed in the Latin tradition: vox meant at once “voice” and “sound.” In ancient Greek music theory, moreover, the names of the notes did not originate from their position within an abstract system but were derived from the arrangement of the strings of the kithara. For example, the note mesē (μέση, middle) was named after its central position on the instrument; the note lichanos (λίχανος) was named after the index finger (λιχανὸς δάκτυλος, lichanos dactylos) for it was this finger that plucked the corresponding string. The same applies to the names of intervals: for example, diapason (meaning “among all strings”) meant “octave” because this was the interval embracing the whole range of the strings. In Latin musical theory, the terms vox, sonus, and chorda all indicated the note; in Guido d’Arezzo, for instance, the notes are called voces. The relationship between sound and the sounding body was so close that sometimes it is even difficult to discern whether an author is referring to the acoustic phenomenon or to the body that produces it (Bower 2001). The process that gave rise to the distinction between sound and sounding body (as well as the distinction between sound in general and musical sound) was not rectilinear and continuous. The first moment of this process can be glimpsed in the founding myth of Western music, namely Pythagoras’ “discovery” of the numerical ratios between notes. According to the testimony of Nicomachus of Gerasa (ca. 60–ca. 120), who provides the earliest surviving account of the myth, Pythagoras was looking for a principle and an aid for the ear that could be free of error as those available to other senses. He discovered the numerical relationships that govern the musical scale while incidentally hearing the sounds of hammers coming from a blacksmith’s workshop (Enchiridion 245.19–248.26 Jan). The veracity of the story has been disputed for several reasons. It has been pointed out that the pitches would not depend on the weight of the hammers but of the anvils. Moreover, as first noted by Vincenzo Galilei, the ratio between the weights should not be in double proportion but in square proportion. Finally, in more recent times, it has been also asked why the fifth hammer, the dissonant one, has been excluded (Heller-Roazen 2011). I would like, instead, to point out two other elements that, although present in almost every version of story, go often neglected.

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At first, suspecting that the differences among the sounds of the hammers could depend on the different blacksmiths’ strength or on the different pace at which they strike, Pythagoras asks them to swap their hammers. He needs to make sure that the human body has no influence on the sound produced. That intensity and speed play no role in the production of a consonance clearly indicates that pitch can be defined regardless of dynamics and rhythm. Only after having excluded any human influence on the resulting sound, Pythagoras takes into account the weight of the hammers, discovering that the consonance depends indeed on the numerical ratios between these weights. In order to verify that the ratios applies to sounds produced by any sounding body, he goes home and tests his hypothesis on all kinds of musical instruments: strings, winds, and percussions. The harmonic proportions among pitched sounds do not depend on the material of which the instruments are made. Boethius, reporting the story of the Pythagorean discovery, emphasizes several times that the philosopher was looking for something stable and that he did not want to rely on the sense of hearing, “changeable by nature, for extrinsic causes, as well as by age” (196.22–23 Friedlein), nor on instruments “because they are too subject to variation” (197.7–8), referring, for example, to the way their tuning can change depending on air humidity. This myth, which traversed the entire history of music theory to the present day, corresponds to the first conceptualization of the relationship among sounds: starting from Pythagoras, harmonia is conceived as the numerical relation between pitched sounds independently of the agent and sounding body that generate them. Pitch is body-indifferent. Sound and Movement. The rationalization of musical sound is mirrored, in turn, by the rationalization of its production and perception. For the thinkers and philosophers of ancient Greece, the primary condition of sound was movement (κίνησις, kinēsis). As the Pythagorean Archytas of Tarentum (fl. 400–350 BC) explains, sound (ψόφος, psophos) is generated by the impact (πληγή, plēgē) of things upon one another. As the impact itself is caused by the movement of things, there can be no sound without movement (Porphyry, Commentary 56.11–13 Düring). Thus, the compiler of the pseudo-Euclidean treatise Sectio canonis describes silence as the lack of movement: “If there were stillness and no movement, there would be silence (σιωπή, siōpē): and if there were silence and if nothing moved, nothing would be heard. Then if anything is going to be heard, impact and movement (πληγὴ καὶ κίνησις, plēgē kai kinēsis) must first occur” (148.3–6 Jan). In Plato’s Theaetetus, Socrates, while discussing Heraclitus’s thesis according to which all things are in movement, explains that movement is to be intended not only as translation in space (φορά, phora) but also as alteration (ἀλλοίωσις, alloiōsis) (181c–d). In the Timaeus (67a–b), Plato describes also sensation (aisthēsis) as being caused by the movement of bodies: sound (φωνή, phōnē) is the impact of air that penetrates the body through the ears, impinges on the brain and the blood, finally reaching the soul; hearing is then the movement caused by sound, which starts in the

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head and ends in the liver. The sensation varies depending on the different speed or type of movement: “The kind that is swift (ταχύς, tachys) is acute (ὀξύς, oxys), and the kind that is slower (βραδύς, bradys) is grave (βαρύς, barys). The kind that is homogeneous is even and smooth, while the opposite sort is rough. A large amount is loud, the opposite kind quiet” (67b–c). Movement was the basis not only of physical sound and sensation but also of choreia. In his last work, the Laws, Plato explains that “the choric art (χορεία, choreia) as a whole consists of dance (ὄρχησις, orchēsis) and song (ᾠδή, ōidē)” (654b). Dance and song are both movements: while schēma (body posture) is peculiar to body motion, melos is peculiar to vocal motion (672e–673a). The name for the order of movement (κινήσεως τάξις, kinēseōs taxis) is rhythm, and the order of voice, where acute and grave are mixed together at once, is given the name harmonia, while the combination of the two is called choreia. (665a)

Both harmonia and rhythmos are kinds of order. Harmonia is the specific order of vocal movement between “grave” and “acute.” Grave and acute depend on the speed with which bodies move in space: large bodies move slower generating grave sounds, while small bodies move faster generating acute sounds. Rhythmos, instead, is the order of the body’s movement. But, as dance and song are both movements, rhythm is a common feature between them. Thus, melos, the movement of the voice, consists at the same time of harmonia and rhythmos. Traditional music theory conceived of the temporal articulation of sounds, the rhythm of the audible, starting from the orderly and regular movement of the sounding body and of the human body. For this reason Plato defines rhythm as “order of the movement” and harmony as “order of the voice’s movement.” Rhythm is thought of as timing, the body’s ability to move with a certain regularity (walking, marching, breathing, tapping), in accordance with a rational principle. In Plato, as Nietzsche clearly understood (Günther 2008, 20–95), rhythmos is not the Dionysian rhythm but the Apollonian rhythm regulated by number. Aristotle on Sound, Voice, And Bodies. Such a conceptualization of melos as “the movement of the voice,” also requires a precise distinction between voice and sound in general—which in turn entails a distinction between living beings and inanimate things. Aristotle deals with sound, voice, and the sense of hearing in the On the Soul while treating the subject of sensation (αἴσθησις, aisthēsis). Life is what distinguishes animate beings (ἔμψυχος, empsychos)—that is, beings endowed with soul—from the inanimate (ἄψυχος, apsychos), and implies one of the following features: intellect, sensation, spatial motion and rest, and motion concerned with nutrition, decay and growth. Plants have life but no sensation, which is what characterizes animal beings (ζῷον, zōion) (An. 413b1). Sensation is caused by a movement external to the soul, provoking an alteration: “Sensation consists in being moved (κινεῖσθαι, kineisthai) and affected (πάσχειν, paschein), for it is held to be some sort of alteration

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(ἀλλοίωσις, alloiōsis)” (416b33–35). As sensation consists in being moved, senses cannot produce sensation without an external sensible. Some sensibles are considered common (κοινόν, koinon) because they can be perceived with different senses: motion, rest, number, figure, size. For each sense there is a specific (ἴδιον, idion) sensible object (αἰσθητός, aisthētos) that cannot be perceived with any other sense. Consequently, each of the five senses has to be investigated proceeding from its own specific object. The specific object of hearing is sound (psophos). As not all bodies produce sound, it is necessary to distinguish between sonorous bodies and non-sonorous bodies, and, as with all other sensations, to distinguish between sound in potency and in act (419b4–9). Sonorous bodies always possess the faculty to generate an acoustic phenomenon, and yet they can be distinguished only when they are actually producing a sound (420a26–27). Aristotelian sound comes out of a triadic relationship between things: “Actual sound is always of something against something and in something; for it is generated by an impact (plēgē)” (419b9–11). “What sounds does so by striking against something else, and this is impossible without a movement from place to place (phora)” (419b13). The impact takes place in the medium, be it air or water, reaching the ear without interruption: “What has the power of producing sound is what has the power of setting in movement a single mass of air which is continuous up to the organ of hearing” (420a3–4). After having defined sound, Aristotle can now define voice: Voice is the sound of an animate being (empsychos). No inanimate thing has a voice (φωνεῖν, phōnein), though it may by analogy be said to have a voice, as in the case of the aulos, the lyra and all other inanimate things that have pitch (ἀπότασις, apotasis) and tune (melos) and articulation (διάλεκτος, dialektos): for these qualities, it would seem, the voice also possesses. (420b26–33)

Voice is sound produced by animals; yet, not by all animals, for fishes do not have voice. As sound is caused by the impact of the air, to produce voice animals need to be able to inhale air. However, not every sound produced by an animal can be considered voice; in fact, animals cough and produce noises that cannot be properly considered voice. To utter voice, what produces the impact must be animate and must be accompanied by an act of imagination (φαντασία, phantasia), for voice is a sound with a meaning (σημαντικὸς, sēmantikos), and is not the result of any impact of the breath as in coughing; rather with this air the animal strikes the air in the windpipe against the windpipe itself. (420b26–33)

This passage will have an unprecedented impact on the conception of voice in music and in Western thought in general: voice is certainly sound, but exclusively a sound to which is associated an act of the imagination. As a consequence, only animals can utter voice, because they are the only ones who are capable of accompanying sound with an act of imagination. Inanimate objects can emit sound, not voice.

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What is an Instrument? Melos is the movement of the voice. But if things like the aulos or the lyre possess voice only by analogy, how is it possible to make music with them? Can musical instruments sing? In a passage common to Physics (194a16– 195a3) and Metaphysics (1013a24–b3), Aristotle lists the four senses in which the cause (aition) of change can be understood: (1) that out of which a thing comes to be and persists (material cause); (2) the form or archetype (formal cause); (3) the primary source of change or rest, that is, the agent (efficient cause); (4) the end (τέλος, telos) or “that for the sake of which” (final cause). Between the agent and the end, he places everything that contributes to achieving the purpose: “All these things are ‘for the sake of ’ the end, though they differ from one another in that some are activities (ἔργα, erga), others instruments (ὄργανον, organon)” (195b). Therefore, for Aristotle, the instrument is that which contributes to an end. In fact, he often resorts to the instrument and particularly to the musical instrument to exemplify the concept of purpose (Belis 1986, 60–64). Of special interest in this regard is a passage from the Eudemian Ethics, in which he mentions the instrument to illustrate the relationship between master and slave. The concurrence of the saw and the art that uses it is of another sort; for it is not for some end common to both—it is like instrument and soul—but for the sake of the user. It is true that the tool itself receives attention, and it is just that it should receive it, for its function, that is; for it exists for the sake of its function. And the essence of a gimlet is twofold, but more properly it is its activity, namely boring holes. In this class come the body and a slave, as has been said before. (1242a13–19)

In the Aristotelian view, the servant or slave differ from the instrument only in that they are living beings (i.e., beings endowed with soul), while the instrument is not and, therefore, is not capable of performing a task autonomously—hence the necessity to have servants or slaves, which are living instruments capable of putting into action lifeless instruments. Now instruments are of various sorts; some are living (empsycha), others lifeless (apsycha); in the rudder, the pilot of a ship has a lifeless, in the look-out man, a living instrument; for in the arts the servant is a kind of instrument. Thus, too, a possession is an instrument for maintaining life. And so, in the arrangement of the family, a slave is a living possession, and property a number of such instruments; and the servant is himself an instrument which takes precedence of all other instruments (ὄργανον πρὸ ὀργάνων, organon pro organōn). For if every instrument could accomplish its own work, obeying or anticipating the will of others, . . . if, in like manner, the shuttle would weave and the plectrum touch the lyre without a hand to guide them, chief workmen would not want servants, nor masters slaves. (Politics 1253b27–1254a1)

In this light, we can understand why Aristoxenus, a student of Aristotle, criticizes both those who seek the objective of the harmonic science in the notation of melodies, and those who “locate it in the study of auloi, and in the ability to say in what

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manner and from what origin each of the sounds emitted by the aulos arises” (El. Harm. 49.1–5 da Rios). Aristoxenus does not hesitate to compare even the different body parts (hands, voice, mouth, breath) to inanimate instruments (apsycha organa) (51.14–16). The greatest and most preposterous of errors is to make the nature of harmonic attunement depend on an instrument. It is not because of any of the properties of instruments that harmonic attunement has the character and arrangement which it does. It is not because the aulos has finger-holes, bores, and other such things, nor because it admits operations of the hands, and of other parts naturally adapted to raising and lowering its pitch, that the fourth, the fifth and the octave are concords, or that each of the other intervals has its own appropriate magnitude. (52.4–15)

No knowledge about the nature of the melody can be derived from the instruments. “It is clear, then, that it is no more correct to say that excellence is inherent in auloi than to say that what is bad is so” (52.20–21). In rebuttal he points out that “no instrument tunes itself, but that perception is the authority in this matter” (53.16– 54.1). Just as Aristotle had denied instruments any form of agency, since they are not capable of setting themselves in motion, so Aristoxenus denies musical instruments any role in characterizing melody, since they are not capable of tuning themselves. The material of music was not dictated by the conformation of musical instruments, rather instruments were constructed according to the rules established by musical theory. As Schlœzer and Marina Scriabine write: “If at the origin this material (matériau) was undoubtedly conditioned by the matériel, by the instruments (and it could be any object: stones, tools, weapons), it has long since freed itself from this state of subordination, it has obtained its autonomy and now in turn conditions the materiél” ([1959] 2016, 76). When music is conceived starting from a predetermined musical system, from sound—or from the perception of sounds as in Aristoxenus—defined as tone and organized in intervals, the musical instrument is but a tool to produce a melody. Sounding body and musician were both tamed by musical theory.

4.2  Sounds without Body Timbre And Bodies. If pitch could be thought of and organized independently of the musical instrument, timbre was instead impenetrable, and was necessarily linked to a body. Especially since Baroque instrumental music, the composer’s material is, if not determined, certainly increasingly conditioned by instruments. Their nature not only determines the timbre of individual sounds, but also requires a specific type of writing. Working on instrumentation and orchestration means directly conditioning the sound articulations in relation to the range of the instruments, their organological characteristics, and their interaction with the performer’s body. The fact that sound depended so strongly on instruments also explains why composers such as Ferruccio Busoni, Luigi Russolo, Edgard Varèse, and Henry Cowell repeatedly ex-

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pressed the desire to invent and build new musical instruments suited to their ideas. And it is not by chance that, in order to handle the parameter of “timbre,” even serial composers initially had to deal with the sound of the instruments, not with timbre in general (Koenig [1963b] 1992, 227). The dependence of timbre on the instrument is even more evident if one considers the realm of extended techniques, in which the sounds available to the composer are directly determined by the instrument’s technical possibilities, its actual construction, and by the ability of the individual performer. For this reason, Andy Hamilton (2010, 160–61) claims that “timbre comprises those qualities of a musical sound which relate it most directly to its source.” “Attack and noise,” he adds, “are the least acousmatic elements of timbre” (162). Timbre has the capacity to indissolubly tie a sound to the body that emits it. If pitch “forgets” its origin, timbre is the quality of sound that keeps track of its material source. Emancipation Of Timbre From The Instrument. In order to manipulate sound in its entirety, including timbre, it is therefore necessary to conceive and manipulate sound independently of the sounding body. Cage tells of a meeting with Oskar Fischinger who spoke with him about “the spirit which is inside each of the objects of this world.” Fischinger said him: “All we need to do to liberate that spirit is to brush past the object, and to draw forth its sound.” (Cage and Charles 2009, 72–73; emphasis mine). Technology meets exactly this need. The emancipation of sound in its timbral dimension was made possible and stimulated by advent of new technologies for the production and manipulation of sound. Unlike acoustic instruments, electronic and digital instruments increase the ability to control sound because they are able to make sound independent of a specific body. Sound is no more the quality of a specific sounding body, but something that can be replicated and reproduced at will even in absence of the physical body; it thus ceases to be sound in an Aristotelian sense, that is, the sound “of something against something in something.” If a certain multiphonic performed in a live setting can be said to belong only to that oboe, recording allows us instead to divorce it from its source. Furthermore, electronic instruments make it possible to shape sound unrestrictedly in virtue of their capability of producing what is considered its basic element, the sinus tone. Thanks to sound synthesis, new sounds can be devised whose sources do not exist in nature. Therefore, as had happened before with pitch, in the twentieth century also timbre finally came to be conceived independently of a specific sound source. The much celebrated “liberation of sound” meant not only liberation from traditional aesthetic rules, but also from the limits of the sound-producing body. The use of technology in sound control drastically expands the sound field and leads us to think of sound beyond an instrument’s fixed conformation or the material of which it is made. Duchez summarizes this long process of emancipation of sound by highlighting how the modern electronic production of sound is moving further and further away from an immediate intuition and representation of the sound phenomenon itself:

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Sound-in-itself. Technology allows sound to be thought of “in itself,” instead of in relation to a body. Musical sound becomes a special kind of event in itself, an event independent of the conditions that generate it. For this reason, it becomes possible and necessary to separately study the audible and the limits of audible, acoustic perception and acoustic illusions. Canadian composer Raymond Murray Schafer (1933–2021) speaks in this regard of schizophonia ([1977] 1994, 88–93; Bonnet 2012, 123–27). Yet, it would be wrong, in my opinion, to pit the new electronic and digital technologies against traditional instruments, in the belief that prior to the emergence of electronics, sound was truly one with the sounding body. As I have tried to highlight above, already in ancient Greece, musical sound was set apart by trying to make it independent from the sounding body: at least since Pythagoras, musical sound was always, in a way, a “disembodied” sound. Through technology music is freed not just from the body but from the rationalized body that is at the basis of the traditional conception of harmony and rhythm. Likewise, it would be wrong to believe that with the aid of electronic instruments, composers today handle and preserve the “sound itself,” sound finally unencumbered by any meaning and representation. Such a belief is fostered by the conviction that, contrary to the past, composers and sound artists today would not need to resort to notation. According to Christopher Cox, for example: The invention of the phonograph challenged musical notation as a recording apparatus, replacing the mute, static score with a form of recording that restored the aurality and temporality of sound. It captured not an idealized visual representation but actual musical performances. (2011, 154)

This strong contrast between traditional compositional practice and notation on the one hand and today’s compositional practice and electronic instruments on the other rests on a profound misunderstanding of the nature and purpose of traditional notation. Certainly, musical notation and, therefore, traditional compositional practice stem from a very strong reduction and interpretation of both the sound

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phenomenon and the musical performance. However, even those who make electroacoustic music mostly rely on graphical representations of sound built into the software they use. Yet, the real point is a different one: even though in the past (and still today) some composers and authors certainly understand notation as a recording of sound reality, the score should be seen as a prescription that precedes and structures the performative act. In this sense, it makes little sense to compare two technologies as different as notation and recording. But there is more. In my opinion, such a sharp opposition between notation and electronic instruments also derives from a widespread misunderstanding of the nature of electronic instruments. Cox draws on media theorist Friedrich Kittler (1943–2011) to clarify the distance between electronic instruments and human perception: The phonograph does not hear as do ears that have been trained immediately to filter voices, words, and sounds out of noise; it registers acoustic events as such. Articulateness becomes a second-order exception in a spectrum of noise. (Kittler [1986] 1999, 23)

Electroacoustic devices would not interpret or manipulate a sound event but preserve it as such. Cox adds that “audio recording registers the messy, asignifying noise of the world that, for Kittler . . . corresponds to ‘the real’—the perceptible plenitude of matter that obstinately resists the symbolic and imaginary orders. ‘The real’, Kittler concludes, ‘has the status of phonography’ ([1986] 1999, 16).” There are good reasons to challenge this understanding of the “real” and of its “materialistic” character. First of all, as I mentioned above, there is no absolute opposition between antiquity and modernity: electronic devices realize the dream of Pythagoreanism, which was always to understand and handle the sonic event through numbers and prior to its perception—which would be fallacious by its very nature. In truth, even the most faithful audio recording always presupposes a more or less implicit interpretation of the place and moment in which a sound event takes place. But—and this is the point I would like to emphasize above all—what is the “real” obtained through the separation of sound from the body that emits it? Musique concrète and acousmatic music provide perhaps the best case to address this question.

4.3 Reference Abstraction and Concreteness. Musique concrète and acousmatic music were developed initially by Pierre Schaeffer (1910–95) and later by other composers such as Bernard Parmegiani (1927–2013), Pierre Henry (1927–2017), Luc Ferrari (1929–2005), and François Bayle (b. 1932). The term “concrète” was given with the intention to mark a distance from the traditional way of composing, tying this music to the elaboration of “concrete” sounds, often sounds of everyday life. Pierre Schaeffer explains his idea with these words: “Instead of notating musical ideas on

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paper with the symbols of solfège and entrusting their realization to well-known instruments, the question was to collect concrete sounds, wherever they came from, and to abstract the musical values they were potentially containing” (Reydellet 1996, 11; emphases mine). It is on this basis that Michel Chion distinguishes three modes of listening: causal listening, semantic listening, and reduced listening ([1990] 1994, 25–34). “Causal listening . . . consists of listening to a sound in order to gather information about its cause (or source)” (25). In everyday life, sound is not an object or an event in its own right, but finds its origin outside of itself. It is precisely for this reason that a sound, in being traced back to its cause, can become the signal of an event. Thus, in common language sound is identified in relation to the body or event that produces it: we speak of the sound of a train, the neighing of horses, the sound of footsteps, the sound of rain. Sound was often thought of as a secondary quality of a body (Cox 2011, 156). Semantic listening, continues Chion, “refers to a code or language to interpret a message: spoken language . . . as well as Morse and other such codes” (28). Certainly, we can use causal and semantic listening at the same time: we can simultaneously hear who is speaking and listen to what is being said. Finally, reduced listening, so named first by Schaeffer, is that “listening mode that focuses on the traits of the sound itself, independent of its cause or meaning” (29). Reduced listening therefore consists in listening to sound not in reference to its source or to the event that produces it, nor to the meaning it carries through language: “Reduced listening takes the sound—verbal, played on an instrument, noises, or whatever—as itself the object to be observed instead of as a vehicle for something else” (29). What set these genres apart from electronic music was the use of recorded sounds from everyday life. In opposition to the Elektronische Musik first developed in the studio of Cologne in the sixties, musique concrète often induced the audience to associate the sounds heard to the image of a known object or event. It is precisely the use of these “non-musical” sounds referring to “non-musical” objects that requires the separation between sound and sound source. Yet, the causal relationship between noise and source is often so strong that, in order to “liberate” timbre, it is not enough to simply separate it from its source through recording, it is also necessary to deprive it of its referential function, of its indexical capacity. In musique concrète, sounds have, by definition, a clear reference to something known, but they are treated in such a way that the reference is ultimately severed. Sound no longer refers to its body. The sign is transformed into a denotatum. Musique concrète is the transition from causal listening to reduced listening. In this music, composers ask for a strict form of reduced listening. The audience should attend the performance with a readiness to aesthetically appreciate sounds they would normally hear only in an indexical (or causal) way. A crucial means for the composer to decontextualize such sounds is repetition, because when sounds are repeated, the listener’s tendency to associate them with the outside world diminishes, and she or he begins to listen to the sounds in themselves. The use of

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traditional musical instruments and manipulated sounds in combination with recorded “daily” noises is not a contradiction, but rather underscores the significance of the latter as pure acoustic material. Musique concrète and reduced listening are founded on an assumption: sound can become the object of aesthetic apprehension only when it is freed from its function of reference: The composer of musique concrète does not take the sound back from where it came, for he has done with mourning the presence of the cause and, above all, he knows that cutting the sound object from its real source—in order to hear, if necessary, imaginary sources or even no longer a source at all—is the very founding act of musique concrète. (Chion 2009, 24)

In truth, the divorce between sound and its source seems to be the premise not only of musique concrète, if other authors whose aesthetic positions are far removed from this kind of music can write: There is music for me only insofar as I hear not sounds that add up, but a becoming, and only music is capable of revealing to me this becoming to me in the dimension of sound. Otherwise, the sonorities that affect me are only signs and signals. Undoubtedly, I can ask myself who produces this music that I listen to, what is the cause of it; but then, instantaneously I lose the music, that is to say “something” that is born from itself. (Schlœzer and Scriabine [1959] 2016, 74)

According to this conception, while in everyday life we make use of sound to identify an event or to communicate, in music the relationship between cause and effect would be turned upside down: there can be musical experience of a sound only when that sound is considered in itself, not in reference to the sound source and the process that has generated it. Following this vision sound can be aesthetically experienced only as long as it is separated from its source. Acousmatic Music and Visibility. In acousmatic music, the separation of sound from its source is guaranteed by the absence and, therefore, the invisibility of the source itself. As Schaeffer has often pointed out, acousmatic music was conceived for an audience that could not see the source; concerts usually took place without any traditional instruments or performers on stage, with sounds only being diffused over loudspeakers. Why should the sound source not be seen? As mentioned above, sounds and noises normally generate visual or tactile associations that reduce, or perhaps eliminate, the possibility of perceiving the acoustic event per se. Naturally, these associations would only be reinforced if the sound source were actually present and visible at the moment of perception. The non-visibility of the source thus seems to be a necessary condition to avoid the interference of the other senses, and to attempt to experience sound—any sound—as such. The term “acousmatic” refers to Pythagoras’ alleged custom of speaking to his pupils from behind a curtain during the first five years of their apprenticeship. In

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reality, the acousmatic experience of sound is radically different from this supposed Phythagorean practice: while in acousmatic music sound is concretely separated from the source, in the Pythagoras’ classroom the body of the master would have not been absent, but only hidden, actually strengthening his corporeal presence. Yet, the point of interest lies elsewhere: that the audience does not see the source does not mean, obviously, that it does not see at all. In a typical performance of musique concrète the audience sits in a concert hall looking at loudspeakers: the non-visibility of acousmatic music results from the removal of the sound source, not from the actual obstruction of vision, i.e., from darkness or blindness—with the result that the listener is not distracted by the view of the performer but by any other possible object or occurrence in the environment. This must be the reason why Spanish sound artist Francisco López (b. 1964) stages his performances in the dark or requires his audience to wear blindfolds. A full aesthetic enjoyment of sound prohibits the visibility of the sound source and, in general, any interaction or conflict of the senses. Consequently, the presence of any synaesthetic element would compromise this enjoyment. Christopher Cox writes: “On the one hand, the synaesthesia paradigm recognizes sound as an aesthetic element. On the other, the paradigm still privileges the old order, conceiving sound under the hegemony of the visual and thwarting the development of a genuine sound art” (2005, 239). Today musical experience is predominantly acousmatic.

4.4 Agent and Reproducibility Exact Durations. Technology allows us to separate sound not only from the sounding body and more generally from its context, but also from the performer, generating at least three interrelated consequences for the temporality of music: the accurate composition and reproduction of sound durations, the secure preservation of the composer’s work, the perfect reproducibility and repeatability of sound at any place or moment. As we move beyond traditional musical instruments, sound also becomes free of the inaccuracies that human control of those instruments always entails. In this way, sound becomes perfectly ductile even from a temporal point of view. Just as there is a very close connection between conceiving of the timbre of sound in itself and its separation from the body, so is there a connection between thinking about the duration of sound and the emancipation of musical articulation from the meter of language or the rhythm of gesture. Simply put, only with the advent of electronic and digital instruments is the composer in a position to shape the timbre and duration of sound with absolute precision. The dominant variable of sound and the musical relevance of its sensible properties have changed; after the millennial primacy of pitch, timbre, which is now detached from instrumental permanence and whose relevance has been confirmed thanks to

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The adjective “inhuman”—as well as that of “posthuman”—is always questionable, especially when employed in an artistic or aesthetic contexts. (How are technique and technology to be considered if not human?) Nonetheless, Duchez rightly points out that in electroacoustic music duration is taken away from the articulation of language and musician’s gesture. Actually, the possibility of precisely controlling the duration of sound had already emerged with the invention of certain mechanical instruments. Conlon Nancarrow, a composer so engrossed with the precise control of sound duration, could in fact realize his works only by relying on the player piano, that is, by renouncing the intermediation of the interpreter. With the player piano, sound is unambiguously defined and produced while the instrument is deprived of its agent: the audience sees the mechanical production of the sound without an actual performer. The more sound becomes independent from the body that produces it, the more the function of the human agent really comes to the fore. For this reason, as acousmatic music poses the problem of the sounding body, the work of Nancarrow calls into question the role of the performer. Reproducibility and Singularity. The consequences of the introduction of electronic instruments on musical composition should be considered not only in reference to the composer’s initial sound material but also in another way: in addition to the possibility of conceiving sound independently from the sounding body, thinking about sound in itself also implies the ability to re-produce sound at will independently from the musician. The gramophone moved sound away from the moment of its production, allowing the preservation of the work as well as its automatic reproduction. The extraordinary consequences that this new condition of music entails become clear if we think back to what Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831) wrote about the relationship between musical work and musician. According to Hegel, the specific quality of the sound material, its temporality, place the musical work in a particular relationship to its maker. Also in the other arts, of course, the work must be produced, but nevertheless, after being created, it acquires its own independence. In music, by contrast, the work always remains tied to its production process: “Unlike buildings, statues, and paintings, the notes have in themselves no permanent subsistence as objects; on the contrary, with their fleeting passage they vanish again and therefore the musical composition needs a continually repeated reproduction, just because of this purely momentary existence of its notes” (1975, 909). As a performative art, music requires not only to be produced but also to be re-produced. Music—unlike painting, sculpture, or architecture, but similarly to dance and poet-

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ry—could be seen as the production of a never completed work, that, for this reason, always requires the subsequent intervention of the performer. By subtracting sound from the body and the gesture of the musician, audio technology, allows the perfect reproducibility of sound, and thus reconfigures the question of time in music. Rhythmic articulation certainly becomes more controllable at the expense of the singularity of sound. Recording, sound transmission, electronic synthesis, and electronic instruments alter the temporal character of the musical event, making it reproducible to infinity. Technology makes sound perfectly repeatable, that is, it subtracts sound from the uniqueness of its moment. The telephone and gramophone allowed the separation of sound respectively from the place and the moment of its production—the latter even allowing us, as Thomas Edison (1847–1931) put it, to listen once again to “the voice of the dead.” A conflict opens up between the singularity of the sound that is not repeatable and perfect repeatability (Stockhausen [1959] 1963, 148–51). The incorporeal condition of technological sound leads to experiencing music as non-temporal—if we understand temporality as singularity or individuality of the event. This power of technology was clear since the beginning of the development of sound devices: the voice of recording artist Len Spencer (1867–1914) advertising the Edison Phonograph insists that the phonograph will put music (any music) and language (any language) at everyone’s disposal always and everywhere. The passage is worth quoting at length: I am the Edison phonograph, created by the great wizard of the New World to delight those who would have melody or be amused. I can sing you tender songs of love. I can give you merry tales and joyous laughter. I can transport you to the realms of music. I can cause you to join in the rhythmic dance. I can lull the babe to sweet repose, or waken in the aged heart soft memories of youthful days. No matter what may be your mood, I am always ready to entertain you. When your day’s work is done, I can bring the theater or the opera to your home. I can give you grand opera, comic opera or vaudeville. I can give you sacred or popular music, dance, orchestra or instrumental music. I can render solos, duets, trios, quartets. I can aid in entertaining your guests. When your wife is worried after the cares of the day, and the children are boisterous, I can rest the one and quiet the other. I never get tired and you will never tire of me, for I always have something new to offer. I give pleasure to all, young and old. I will go wherever you want me, in the parlor, in the sickroom, on the porch, in the camp or to your summer home. If you sing or talk to me, I will retain your songs or words, and repeat them to you at your pleasure. I can enable you to always hear the voices of your loved ones, even though they are far away. I talk in every language. I can help you to learn other languages. I am made with the highest degree of mechanical skill. My voice is the clearest, smoothest and most natural of any talking machine. The name of my famous master is on my body, and tells you that I am a genuine Edison phonograph. The more you become acquainted with me, the better you will like me. Ask the dealer. (Wurtzler 2007, 77)

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There is obviously a tight connection between the novel condition of accessibility, promised by the phonograph, of any sound or noise at any given place or time and the expansion of musical material to include any sort of sound, as outlined at the beginning of the previous chapter. This also explains why my artistic project, which attempts to interrogate the relationship between the composer’s abstract material and the taking place of sound, must necessarily take into account the technological context from which the composer’s material arises (as I will do in the next chapter). Noise Pollution. If one wants to understand the position of the composer at the end of the last century, it is no longer possible to limit oneself to the strictly musical field (assuming that this was ever sufficient); one must instead also take into consideration the presence of sound and music in our daily life, a consequence of the widespread diffusion of electronic devices. Indicatively, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe (1940–2007), a philosopher particularly attentive to the fate of music, has lamented the ubiquitous and obsessive presence of music in our cities: “In our societies, music has invaded everything, it is present everywhere” (2015, 31). Lacoue-Labarthe ([1991] 1994, 115) coined the term musicolatrie to describe modern society’s inability to inhabit spaces devoid of music: contrary to common opinion, modern civilization would not be so much (or exclusively) a civilization of the image, but a society of musicolatry, with the aggravating factor that while it is possible to look away from the image, it is not easily possible to escape the presence of music in public places: Since we managed to reproduce music electronically, record, and broadcast it, we live as if we were in a movie. In the past, listening to music was a rare thing: you had to wait for parties or go to a concert (or church); or do it yourself. Today we walk around with headphones and pirate CDs on the Internet. . . . In truth, it is of this fact that he who still practices philosophy a little has some reason to be surprised. (2015, 32)

Lacoue-Labarthe does not hesitate to assign to philosophy the important task of understanding this new situation. At least since the last few decades of the twentieth century, noise pollution of our cities has led to a loss of enthusiasm for those mechanical noises with which Futurist Luigi Russolo hoped to overcome the vocabulary of traditional music. One could say that the new task of composers and musicians today has become not so much the invention of sounds yet unheard, but the production of silence.

4.5 Sonocentrism Sound to the Exclusion of All Else. At this point we must ask ourselves how it was possible for musical production to be completely taken away both from the sounding body (making sound completely controllable) and from the control of the performer (rendering music perfectly repeatable). As I have often pointed out, this separation of the music from the sound body and the musician is obviously

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made possible by modern technological developments; however, this possibility, I maintain, was inscribed in Western music from the very moment that sound was assumed as the material of music. When a music theorist or a composer writes that “the material of music is sound” it can either be understood that music is mainly sound—which implies that it is not reducible to sound alone—or that music is exclusively sound. Either way, to posit sound as the material of music is to implicitly diminish—if not exclude—everything that is not sound. Music has often undergone radical changes, being considered at times a science, a theoretical and practical discipline, or an art, and being seen as involving cognitive, ethical, or aesthetic values. In spite of all these changes, however, sound has always maintained a distinct position in music. With the term sonocentrism I would like to indicate the central role that sound plays in music. Even when it is admitted that sound can be connected to other dimensions, sonocentrism conceives of music and musical performance mainly starting from sound. In particular, the sonocentric vision of music consists in attributing to the sounding body and to the musician’s body only functional roles in the production of sound, or (thanks to modern technology) even in expelling them from it altogether. Sonocentrism means the pure audibility of music, the separation of sound from the context that produces it. In a nutshell, sonocentrism implies: (1) subduing or removing the sounding body, (2) removing or marginalizing silence, (3) setting apart music from the other performative arts. In concluding this chapter, I would like to focus primarily on the first two points, while I will touch on the third point in the next chapter. As already said, the problematic nature of the relationship between music and the production of sound does not emerge only with the advent of technology, but is etched in music theory and in Western thinking in general. To the best of my knowledge, prior to the twentieth century, only a scant number of writers cared to consider sounding body and musician’s gesture as musical material alongside sound. A notable precedent is Aristides Quintilianus (lived between 1st century BC and 5th century AD), who defines mousikē as “knowledge of what is appropriate in sound and movement of bodies” (4.22–23 Winnington-Ingram), even adding shortly thereafter that “the material (hylē) of music is sound and bodily movement” (5.19). Another significant example is offered by Roger Bacon (1219/20–ca. 1292). According to him, Abu Nasr Al-Farabi (c. 872–950/1) in his book De ortu scientiarum says that “the gesture is the root of music” (Communia mathematica 51.31–35 Steele). Bacon, however, hastens to limit the significance of Al-Farabi’s statement: “The subject of Music, he adds, is not only sound, although it is the main subject, so Music will involve in similar proportions everything that conforms to sound and come to a unique complete end” (52). Conversely, one could refer to an unlimited number of authors who treat sound material by more or less explicitly subjugating if not ignoring the sounding body together with the musician. Throughout this chapter I have already provided some important examples of this line of thought, for example how the Pythagorean

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tradition conceived harmonia outside of the influence of the sounding body and the musician, and how Aristotle considers the (musical) instrument as a “slave.” An example closer to our time, and a particularly illuminating one, is offered again by Hegel. His aesthetics bases the distinction between the arts on the difference between their materials; the further the material is from corporeal reality, the closer the spirit is to itself. During the production of sound, the oscillations of the sounding body are transmitted through the air, while the body itself strives to regain its previous condition of rest: “The result of this oscillating vibration is sound (Ton), the material of music” (1975, 890). For the inner life, music occupies a higher position than painting precisely because the process of producing sound would involve the cancellation of space: “every part of the cohering body not only changes its place but also struggles to replace itself in its former position.” According to Hegel, then, music would be closer to the inner life than architecture, sculpture, or painting, because in the process of sound production the body first sets itself in motion but then regains its stillness and retreats. Even in the twentieth century, the assumption of sound as musical material often also implied minimizing the non-sonic aspects of music; indeed, at certain moments, avant-garde composers seem to downplay the non-sonic aspects of music even more resolutely than in the past. Let us return to the passage from the first pages of Schoenberg’s Harmonielehre, where he defines musical material as sound: The material of music is sound (Ton): what it affects first, the ear. The sensory perception releases associations and connects sound, ear, and the world of feeling. On the cooperation of these three factors depends everything in music that is felt to be art. ([1922] 1985, 19; emphasis mine)

Like all the attempts to define music, the more self-evident and simply descriptive Schoenberg’s statement strives to be, the more it forcefully prescribes how music should be regarded. To state that “everything in music that is felt to be art” depends on sound, ear, and the world of feeling, implies the exclusion of other possible characterizations of music. Everything that is not functional to the production of the abstract, autonomous sound is expelled or placed hierarchically in a secondary position. Although the making and experiencing of music affect senses other than hearing, this does not undermine the conviction that what is aesthetically relevant in music is mainly, if not solely, conveyed by sound. In the conflict between the two strains of sound emancipation that characterized the twentieth-century musical avant-garde (and that have been associated with the names of Boulez and Cage), there was common ground on one point: both conceived of the material of music as sound and of music as audible. The divorce between musical sound and sounding body takes place not only when sound is thought of as the material of language (as in Boulez), but also—if not more—when sound is thought of as materiality per se (as Cage did). Could it be that the idea of the eman-

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cipation of music is necessarily problematic because it has been conceived as the liberation of sound while remaining within the indisputable horizon of sound itself ? In order for music to be only audible, and for sound to be its unique territory, it must be possible to consider sound apart from its conditions, sound must be configured as autonomous, in particular autonomous from the body that emits it and from the presence or the action of the performer. In fact, it is possible to only listen to music, only if sound is thought of disregarding the performers’ presence, its relation to the musical instrument, and the general conditions of sound production. All of these elements are not audible, so they are considered to be non-essential or even as disturbing the exclusively aural apprehension of the event. The independence of hearing from the other senses rests on the supposed autonomy of sound from the conditions of its production. And, conversely, only the separation of hearing from the other senses allows imagining sound as autonomous from its production conditions, that is, allows conceiving the musical experience exclusively from an acoustic point of view. Sound, therefore, becomes the unique or primary domain of music, suppressing or rendering irrelevant its other aspects, even though those aspects actually generate and determine it. One might conclude that the musical “audible” alludes to the subordination of the other senses to hearing—if not to their exclusion. No Music without Sound. The centrality that sound occupies in music—what I have called the sonocentrism of music—is even more evident when considering silence: does silence have a place in music? If so, is it only because it is the absence of sound (Sorensen, 2009)? In his Forerunners of Modern Music, written in 1949, Cage included silence alongside sound in the material of music: Structure in music is its divisibility into successive parts from phrases to long sections. Form is content, the continuity. Method is the means of controlling the continuity from note to note. The material of music is sound and silence. Integrating these is composing. ([1949] 2009, 62)

His famous experience in the anechoic chamber, however, led him to reject the possibility of silence: the world is always populated by sounds—sounds that are often discarded by classifying them as noise. Cage describes the premiere of 4’33” with these words: They missed the point. There’s no such thing as silence. What they thought was silence, because they didn’t know how to listen, was full of accidental sounds. You could hear the wind stirring outside during the first movement. During the second, raindrops began pattering the roof, and during the third the people themselves made all kinds of interesting sounds as they talked or walked out. (Kostelanetz 2003, 70)

For Cage, silence does not exist because he conceives of silence as the absence of sound, of any acoustic stimulus; and since sound is always present—even when not intentionally—there can be no silence.

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Precisely in relation to Cage’s composition, Jean-Jacques Nattiez offers perhaps the clearest formulation of musical sonocentrism. He raises the question of whether it is fair to talk about music in cultures that do not have a term for it. After discussing 4’33”, he defines the “universals” of music stating that (1) sound is an irreducible given of music. Even in the marginal cases in which it is absent, it is nonetheless present by allusion. (2) The ‘musical’ is any sonorous fact constructed, organized, or thought by a culture. (1990, 41–43)

Actually, in Cage’s piece, sound is neither absent nor present “by allusion,” but consists of the concrete sounds unintentionally produced in the environment. Be that as it may, I think the more important point to emphasize is a different one: Nattiez considers sound a necessary, an “irreducible given of music.” In his conception of music, there is no music without sound, and there is no silence except in reference to sound. In other words, it is never called into doubt that the musical material can be anything other than sound. Realizing the limits of an aesthetic based on reduced listening, Seth Kim-Cohen tries to overcome the notion of sound-in-itself in sound art by criticizing the classical concert, extending the field of sound to conceptual elements, showing the correlations between sound and society, politics, gender, race, economy. He proposes to overcome an aesthetic evaluation of music (using Duchamp’s idea of ready-made) through the idea of extended listening. In this context, Kim-Cohen mentions Nattiez’s text in order to underscore that sound is but a sufficient cause: “We find ourselves wondering, along with the musicologist Jean-Jacques Nattiez, about the minimal condition of something we might reasonably call music. Sound is an irreducible given of music. Even in the marginal cases in which it is absent, it is nonetheless present by allusion” (2009, 174). With the separation of sound from its source and the removal of the performer, the question that arises, however, is not whether sound is sufficient to define the “musical,” but whether it is necessary. Even when sound art seeks to consider sound in connection with the world, it always retains its starting point in the “sound-in-itself.” There are two ways of understanding the question of sound in music. First, it is a question that could be posed alluding to the possibility of making music without sounds. (Truth be told, if silence is not considered to be the absence of sound, it is not correct to speak of “music without sounds”—to quote the title of a series of pieces by Peter Ablinger [b. 1959].) Second, the question could suggest that the starting point of making music lies elsewhere—regardless of whether there is sound or not. The final chapter of this book will be devoted to imagining the conditions for conceiving of such a music.

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Chapter Five

Musical Bodies

In this final chapter, I will turn again to my compositions with the intent of showing how the considerations made in the previous one can affect artistic practice. In particular, I will address a question concerning the current state of musical instruments: if it is true that, thanks to electronic instruments, sound is conceivable regardless of the physical limits of acoustic instruments, were avant-garde composers right to consider them completely obsolete? If so, could the state of obsolescence into which acoustic instruments have fallen allow us to rethink contemporary music as that artistic practice capable of exploring the boundaries of the very idea of corporeality? As a result of the possible answers to this question, I have found stimulating a compositional perspective that consists in overturning the paradigm that has traditionally governed the relationship between sound and the sounding body in music: instead of considering the sound body as an instrument destined to the realization of a work created from an abstract material, compositional practice could assume the sounding body as its main object of attention. In other words, the creative act could start not so much from the sound material but from the instrument itself and its interaction with the musician’s body and gesture, (almost) to the point of excluding the sound event. To exemplify this different way of thinking, I will describe some aspects of two recent pieces of mine, dedicated to investigating the interaction between performer and piano keyboard. I will first explain the genesis of A quattro mani (2015), a short piece for piano in which I tried, so to speak, to multiply the pianist’s hands. Subsequently, I will take into consideration Sui moti apparenti (2014) for two pianos, the pianistic gesture from which it originates, as well as the transformations of this gesture over time.

5.1  Bodies without Sound Are Acoustic Instruments Obsolete? From a typical Modernist perspective, if sound is the very object of music, electronic devices can replace acoustic instruments, because they bring more accuracy and diversification to the production of sound. In a conference held in 1939, Varèse explicitly deemed musical instruments obsolete, comparing the use of string instruments to transportation by stage coach (1939, 190–91). Instead, he wished to have available for his conceptions an entirely new medium of expression, a sound-producing machine that would be able to

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execute the composed music simply by the push of a button. In his early writings, Karlheinz Stockhausen often expressed the need to heal the contradiction between traditional instruments and new formal ideas: only music composed by means of electronic tools would allow the composer to control sound as a whole ([1953b] 1963, 39). In a similar vein, Swiss architect Paul Gredinger, who in the 1950s worked with Stockhausen and Herbert Eimert at the Cologne Studio, wrote in the first issue of Die Reihe: “The instruments are so different that they cannot be related on the basis of any common denominator. . . . A disparity of means must always be eliminated. Thus the traditional instruments must be eliminated, and in our electronic music we do so. We work only with the smallest basic element in sound, the sinus tone” ([1955] 1958, 40–41). If, traditionally, bodies were reduced to instruments, now they could be completely removed. Not every composer viewed the dismissal of traditional acoustic instruments enthusiastically. In an essay written in 1937, Béla Bartók expressed extreme concern about the possibility that, in the near future, what he called “mechanized music” would take the place of music performed by human beings. For Bartók, mechanized music could only be a surrogate (an Ersatz) for live music, because the qualities of sound are too complex to be produced or reproduced by a machine. But even if technological development were to make it possible one day to reproduce sound exactly, we should still hope that mechanized music would not replace live music: in fact, while the former “hardens into something stationary”, the latter, by definition, changes from performance to performance. Varèse himself, in a conference held twenty years after the one mentioned above, tempered his condemnation of acoustic instruments. He would not have wished at all, as he had been accused of doing, for the destruction of all musical instruments and even the elimination of all performers. “This is, to say the least, an exaggeration. Our new liberating medium—the electronic—is not meant to replace the old musical instruments, which composers, including myself, will continue to use. Electronics is an additive, not a destructive, factor in the art and science of music” ([1959] 1966, 202). Referring to Bartók’s essay, Bernard Stiegler (2004) recommended to adopt a more cautious attitude on this subject, eschewing both a technophobic and an excessively technophilic attitude. Such an admonition surely should not go unheeded. But even before that, another recommendation should be made, namely to avoid thinking of acoustic instruments as instruments of nature. Music has never (and is not) faced with a dichotomy between natural, acoustic instruments and artificial, electronic instruments, between nature and technology: as shown in the previous chapter, both acoustic instruments and musicians are not found in nature, but already belong to technique as a specific human ability. Today’s sound technology does nothing but further develop the traditional rationalization of the (human) body in music. The truth is that, today, acoustic instruments are indeed no longer needed to produce music—or, at least, they are no longer needed to produce sound. According

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to a frequent argument in defense of traditional acoustic instruments, their sound is considered to be richer than electronically produced sound (which is one of the arguments supported by Bartók). This and other similar arguments only pose a question that can and will be easily answered through further technological and digital improvement. In confronting the issue around the obsolescence of acoustic instruments—what Stiegler calls the “de-instrumentation” of music (35)—a more fundamental question comes to light, a question that interrogates the very role of sound in music, challenging our conception of music itself. At least in traditional terms, while in other arts what is presented to aesthetic contemplation is the result of workmanship, an “object” occupying a certain space at a certain time, in the so-called performing arts (such as music, dance, or theater), what is contemplated is not an object, but a human agent, someone who acts. In musical performance this action would not be an end in itself but would aim to produce sounds: “The primary goal of most of the movements that musicians make is to produce or modify sound” (Dahl et al. 2010, 37). Following Aristotle, every action is a movement, but not every movement is an action; and, if the gesture is an action without purpose (Agamben 2017, 100–39), we should conclude that in music there are movements and actions, but no gestures, for the musicians’ movement is always aimed to producing sound. On this basis, instruments were (and are) still considered as an extension, often a natural extension, of the human body for the production of sound (Nijs et al. 2013). By removing the need for acoustic instruments and performers, new technologies actually make their role more evident than ever, leading us to rethink the nature of the musical instrument as well as the identity itself of the performer. We can now finally consider acoustic musical instruments from a different perspective, as bodies not finalized to the production of sound. Electronic and digital devices actually free bodies from their instrumental character, from their external purpose—to use Aristotle’s words, from their state of slavery. Similarly, by loosing their functional role, the musician’s actions can become gestures. From Instruments to Bodies: An Artistic Project. At the heart of my artistic project over the last decade, following and accompanying the ideas developed in this book, the intention emerged to include in the creative process, before sound, the action of the musician who produces it. In my eyes, however, the body and the action of the musician are not configured in advance of sound production but emerge in relation to the instrument. As a consequence, the traditional understanding of the instrument as an extension of the musician should be overturned, considering instead the musician’s body in relation to the instrument. If the action of the musician, at least in instrumental music, is determined by the organological characteristics of the instrument, my idea consists in placing the technical characteristics of the instrument before sound. As seen in the previous chapter, the perfect reproducibility of music is only possible by subtracting the production of sound from the acoustic instrument and

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the musician’s body. Consequently, by rethinking the role of the sounding body and the identity of the performer, composers and performers are offered today the opportunity to rethink the temporal character of music and its reproducibility, that is, the conflict between the singularity of the live musical performance and the repeatability of the technē. Thus, the overall meaning of my recent compositions consists in thinking and composing starting from the temporality of the performer’s gesture. There are some cases in which a certain position of the hand, a certain fingering, a way of breathing or moving are prescribed in the score. These prescriptions modify, influence, shape a particular rhythm. In my conception of music, sound is not imagined and temporally organized within a certain abstract structure that requires a certain physical action on the musician’s part; rather, it is the action in relation to the musical instrument that generates sound in time. Certainly, in my music there can still be a specific sound material and organization, but they are subordinated to the bodily movement of the musician. The temporality of music itself results from the interaction between the musician’s body and the musical instruments. Such an artistic program rests on a major premise: the great merit of technology is that of revealing that music can be something other than sound. Precisely the technological condition of sound, its disembodiment, offers the possibility of including in the compositional process not only sound, but the relationship between sound and its production, between sound and its source, between sound and the presence (or absence) of the performer. Musical composition could involve not only (or not so much, or not at all) the elaboration of sound, but could embrace the whole performative context. In this way, I aim to articulate a criticism of music as a principally (when not exclusively) sonic fact in favor of a conception and practice of music that also take into account visual, tactile, and motoric aspects. Sound may well remain an important element of music, but this does not imply that it must be what characterizes music. What can composing mean today? Is it a question of continuing to explore this infinite sound territory, or is it perhaps time to imagine how music can emancipate itself from the limits of sound? Is it possible to think that music could essentially consist of non-audible components? Is it possible to imagine that sound, be it present or not, is not the necessary condition of music to come? Does music need to be (only) heard? A Precedent. There are already significant examples in musical literature that go in this direction. Later I will consider some important reflections that Frédéric Chopin (1810–49) developed on the conformation of the hand in relation to the piano keyboard. Another example, perhaps one of the most significant in all of piano literature, is Webern’s Variations for piano op. 27. Let’s examine the first few bars of the second movement (even though we could take any passage of the composition) (Fig. 29).

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The pianist’s arms constantly cross over each other without any practical reason. Actually, it would be absolutely possible and undoubtedly more comfortable or “natural” for the pianist to play this passage without having to move both hands along the entire width of the keyboard, as shown in the following transcription (Fig. 30). Fig. 30

By prescribing in the score the precise movement of the hands, the musical articulation is directly influenced by the pianist’s body conformation and by the gestures that produce the sound. The intensity of the composition certainly does not derive from the serial organization of pitches, nor from its rhythmic or formal structures, but from the physical effort with which the pianist exposes his body. The audience can now see the gesture actually shaping the sound, and not simply by putting the piano into action, or expressively accompanying the music. (For this reason, Webern’s composition would make no sense if it were performed, for example, by a player piano, which can only play the notes.) The gesture brings forth a dimension of music that is not perceivable in simply acoustic terms. The gesture and its visual perception can expand, clarify or disturb the apprehension of sound with further information. Modern research, therefore, hypothesizes that the timbre of the piano, although not physically modifiable by the performer, is actually shaped in the pianist’s and audience’s perception by the gesture that produces and accompanies it (Parncutt 2013). What we often consider “expressive,” secondary actions, are necessary, indispensable components of the aesthetic experience.

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The instrumental gesture, however, even in compositions that try to exploit it, is always in danger of remaining or returning to being an action functional to the production of sound. It is as if the gesture tends to disappear or recede with respect to the presence of sound. In fact, Webern’s Variations can also be simply listened to, without any knowledge of the pianist’s action. It is a music in which the gesture of the musician is inscribed in the music itself. The question, therefore, is not whether the gesture of the musician can be heard, but whether the gesture of the musician must be seen. How to free the musician’s action, how to make sure that the actions of the musician become gestures central to the performance? How is it possible to deprive the musician’s action of its sound-producing purpose? Tension. Such an artistic project is not about trying to regain a lost unity between sound and body following some form of nostalgia. It is not about trivially imagining how the musical gesture could once more harmoniously bring together visibility and audibility. After musical sound has been made independent from the human agent, it is not possible to merely rediscover the ideal unity of body and sound, identifying in the action or gesture of the performer the unique origin of sound. I am not advocating to overcome the perfect reproducibility of technological sound or its lost aura by regaining a unity between the sound and the gesture of the musician, between the temporality of the audible and the rhythm of the body. One possible way to accomplish such an artistic program (to include in the score performative elements beyond sound) is to show and highlight the body in front of the instrument in uncomfortable situations. Instead of trying to regain a lost unity—a unity that was always already lost—the composer should try to accept, appropriate, and expose this conflict. It is a matter of showing the musician’s body as presence, discomfort, physical fatigue, and in its relation to the instrument; thinking about music and musical sound starting from and in contrast to the conditions, the gesture, that do (not) produce it; showing the presence and gestures of the musician as absolutely useless. The question is how to consider and render perceivable the conflict between the singular gesture and the reproducible sound, the infinite virtuality of the disembodied sound. The bodily movement becomes all the more evident if it is impeded, forced. The idea is therefore to consider the alignment and the tension between the temporality of the audible and the temporality of the visible. In the next two sections, I will briefly examine two pieces that I composed while writing of this work: A quattro mani for solo piano, and Sui moti apparenti for two pianos. Both of these two compositions are attempts to implement in my practice the idea outlined above: how is it possible not only to conceive of the instrument as an extension of the musician’s body, but also to imagine the musician’s body as determined by the organological conformation of the instrument, in this particular case, of the piano? In order to better frame this question, we must ask ourselves what distinctly characterize the piano or, more specifically, the keyboard.

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5.2  Composing a Gesture What is a Keyboard? Let’s start by considering in what sense one can say that instruments such as the organ, the harpsichord, the piano, the accordion, or even some synthesizer are keyboard instruments (one could add to this list also the typewriter, the stenograph machine, and the cell phone). Of course, on all these devices the keyboard works differently in accordance with the mechanism, but here I am interested in understanding what all these instruments have in common. Generally speaking, the keyboard is a set of keys arranged in a certain order. Order per se, however, does not seem specific to the keyboard; on the marimba, for example, the bars are arranged in the same way as piano keys, but this does not mean that it can be considered a keyboard instrument. One could also propose that the specificity of keyboard instruments consists in the possibility of playing multiple sounds simultaneously: “This large group of instruments has assumed great importance because the keyboard enables a performer to play many notes at once as well as in close succession” (Ripin, Clutton, and Libin 2021). But even this feature, shared by other instruments such as the guitar and the harp, does not define keyboard instruments unambiguously. Their distinctive feature must therefore lie neither in the order in which the keys are arranged nor in the possibility to play multiple notes at once, but in the function of the keys themselves. What is a key? Both the English term “keyboard” and the French “clavier” preserve the memory of the original shape of the key, namely that of a key that was rotated. Instead the Italian “tastiera” and “tasto”, the German “Tastatur” and “Taste,” and the French “touche,” owe their name to the way the hand acts on the key, that is, “touching” it. The keys are an interface between the hand, or rather the fingers, and the mechanism that generates sound: they represent at once the boundary and the connection between the musician’s body and the sounding body. Unlike on a string instrument, on a keyboard the fingers cannot produce, for example, a vibrato or influence the timbre as they can on the harp. (This is not to say that instruments such as the piano have no timbre, but that its timbre is not influenced by the performer, despite the contrary opinion of most pianists and listeners.) Moreover, as the keys are similar in size and shape, the difference between the fingers is eliminated or, rather, reduced. A characterizing feature of the keyboard, and one of the reasons for its success, can thus be identified precisely in the reduction, in the limitation of sound control and the consequent uniformity in sound production. The uniformity of the piano keyboard, however, is only partial. For various reasons it was necessary to organize the keys on two levels: the white and black keys. Frédéric Chopin realized that the difference between these two levels of keys as well as the specificity of each finger could and should constitute, instead of an obstacle, a resource. In his Projet de méthode, he develops several interesting observations in this regard:

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Before Sound For a long time we have been acting against nature by training our fingers to be all equally powerful. As each finger is differently formed, it’s better not to attempt to destroy the particular charm of each one’s touch but on the contrary to develop it. Each finger’s power is determined by its shape: the thumb having the most power, being the broadest, shortest and freest; the fifth as the other extremity of the hand; the third as the middle and the pivot; then the second [illegible], and then the fourth, the weakest one, the Siamese twin of the third, bound to it by a common ligament, and which people insist on trying to separate from the third—which is impossible, and, fortunately, unnecessary. As many different sounds as there are fingers. (Eigeldinger 1986, 32–33)

Unlike other piano teachers of the time, he believed that the piano student should not aim to standardize the fingers but rather to exploit the difference between them for expressive purposes. In particular, he remarks that one should start studying piano not from the C major scale, but from a simpler scale, such as B major. “It is useless to start learning scales on the piano with C major, the easiest to read, and the most difficult for the hand, as it has no pivot. Begin with one that places the hand at ease, with the longer fingers on the black keys, like B major for instance” (34). Chopin’s recommendations clearly show a conflict between music theory (for which the scale of C major is the reference point) and the physiology of the hand as it relates to the keyboard. These reflections on the nature of the keyboard led me to consider its organization specifically in relation to the human body, providing the initial idea for my composition A quattro mani. The piano keys are arranged one next to the other in ascending order from the lowest to the highest note. As a consequence the keyboard is oriented transversely with respect to the body of the pianist. On the other hand, however, the body and the hands of the pianist are instead oriented with respect to a central axis. This implies that, when the same finger movement is performed by the two hands, it produces two different, symmetrical movements in the keys. Because of the unidirectional orientation of the keyboard, these movements result in the contrary motion of pitches (Fig. 31). Fig. 31

Vice versa, in order to achieve the same movement of the keys one must invert the movement of the fingers (Fig. 32).

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This dissociation between the orientation of the keyboard and the symmetrical arrangement of the human body has already been noted. In 1876 the Parisian piano makers Édouard and Alfred Mangeot, apparently picking up an idea of the Polish violinist-composer Joseph Wieniawski, built the “double piano with mirrored keyboards” preserved today at the Musical Instrument Museum of Brussels. This piano is constituted by two overlapping keyboards; while the lower keyboard is the commonly used one, in the upper keyboard the order of the keys is reversed: the highest pitches are to the left and the lowest to the right. A quattro mani. How can these almost trivial observations be of interest to the composer? In other words, how could they be made productive? Let us consider, instead of a scale, a series of overtones (Fig. 33). Fig. 33

If we distribute segments of this overtone series between the two hands and apply the aforementioned concept of symmetrical fingering, as shown in the following example, the resulting gestures are still moving in opposite directions, but are now quantitatively different. This creates an interesting contradiction between the spatial arrangement of pitches and the body movement. While the action of the fingers remains the same, again generating a counter movement, the differing distance between the overtones causes the interval relations between the two voices to be altered (Fig. 34).

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The situation becomes even more intriguing if we superimpose two distinct overtone series (Fig. 35). Fig. 35

The figure or, better, the pianistic gesture that characterizes A quattro mani originates in fact from such a procedure. The superimposed overtone series are then rhythmically articulated in a constant but aperiodic alternation of segments made up of five and seven eighth notes, which are in turn phrased according to non-isochronous meters: and 2-3 and 2-2-3 (See Chapter 3). The measures also alternate between 5/8 and 7/8, but the segments are placed straddling the bar lines in such a way as to determine another level of non-isochronous meters (3-2 and 3-2-2). The two and three-note cells are also defined by the fact that, with the exception of the opening cell of each segments, they begin with the note that concluded the previous one, leading to the pervasive presence of repeated notes (Fig. 36).

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As all pianists know the piano action is such that, were it not for a special mechanism called “double escapement” (or “repetition lever”), one would have to wait until the key goes back to its original position before pressing it again. This would result in excessive waiting time, preventing the execution of rapid repeated notes. Obviously, the piece we are examining draws largely upon the use of this mechanism. But despite the aid of the double escapement action, and especially considering the tempo indication “as fast as possible”, the duration of the repeated notes will inevitably be slightly different from that of the other notes. An interesting discrepancy, therefore, arises between what appears on the page, the notation of constant eighth notes, and the actual duration of these notes in performance. The basic figure, as we have seen, is really a double figure. It comprises two segments (respectively of five and seven notes) in which the hands move in mirror-image, first approaching each other, then away from each other. The contrasting movement of the segments is accentuated by the jumps that occur in between them: the converging segments are followed by a diverging jump, and the diverging segments are followed by a converging jump leading to the next double figure. As can be seen in the diagram, this continuous movement of the hands gives life, so to speak, to a piece for four hands. The idea of multiplying the player’s hands is not new. One can recall some compositions for three hands by Jean-Philippe Rameau, Sigismond Thalberg, Ferruccio Busoni, or more recently Mauricio Kagel. Of course, no pianist really has three or four hands, but the constant rapid alternation between different positions can create this impression. The jumping hand movement continues with few interruptions for the entirety of the piece; throughout its many reiterations, the range covered by each hand varies in a complementary way: while the left hand’s range tends to contract, the right hand’s range tends to expand, and vice versa. These movements are harmonically governed by two distinct successions of overtones series. Let’s analyze the first page of the score to understand how the articulation of the harmonic material and its progressive transformation structure the gesture of the four hands. As in the previous-

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ly analyzed pieces, I will identify “sequences,” and within these sequences different successions of figures. Nevertheless, it should be noted that, precisely because of the progressive way the sound material evolves, it is problematic to determine clear-cut portions. It should also be noted that, although the basic figure is considered for harmonic reasons to be composed of five plus seven eights, most of the successions, including the one that opens the piece, start with the seven eights segment. In a way, one could say that the successions start with the “upbeat” portion of the double figure. In the first four measures of the initial sequence, the superimposed harmonic spaces progress the following way: the left hand starts with a descending segment built on F1 (overtones 6–2), then moves on to a double figure built on E1 (overtones 8–11 and 7–3), and finally ends with a segment built on E b 1 (9–12). The right hand, conversely, starts with a segment built on the extreme overtones of G b 1 (11–15), continues with a double figure built on G2 (9–6 and 10–14), and concludes with a segment built on A b 2 (8–5). After a 5/8 rest (across bars 4 and 5), the sequence continues with a repetition and further advancement of what previously occurred: the left hand reaches overtones 10–13 of D1, while the right hand expands to overtones 7–4 of A2 (Fig. 37). Fig. 37

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In the next sequence (mm. 12–23), the left hand repeats part of the previous succession, taking it to an even more compressed stage: it starts with a segment on overtones 7–3 of E1, then moves to a double figure on E b 1(9–12 and 8–4), and to two consecutive ascending segments on D1 (10–13); then it returns once again to the descending segment figure on E1 (7–3), moves to E b 1 (9–12 and 8–4), to D1 (10–13 and 9–5), and finishes on D b 1 (11–14). In parallel, the right hand starts from overtones 10–14 of G2, then moves to a double figure on A b 2 (8–5 and 9–13), and to two consecutive descending segments on A2 (7–4); then it returns again to an ascending segment on G2 (10–14), moves to A b 2 (8–5 and 9–13), to A2 (7–4 and 8–12), and finishes on B b 2 (6–3) (Fig. 38). Fig. 38

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The diagram below visualizes the two spaces in which the “four” hands move. The horizontal axis displays time, each small square corresponding to an 8th note; the vertical axis displays pitches, each small square corresponding to a semitone. The two thicker lines outline the central octave of the piano. As can easily be seen, each space gradually transforms complementarily with the other: while the left hand’s space shrinks, the right hand’s space expands, and vice versa (Figs. 38–40).

Fig. 39

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Fig. 40

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Sui moti apparenti. Sui moti apparenti for two pianos is characterized exclusively by one gesture. This fundamental gesture consists of a compound movement, simultaneously performed by the two pianists using both hands: descending chromatic movement in the lower register, large jump towards the opposite register, ascending chromatic movement in the high register, return to previous position, and so on. Throughout the piece, the two arms always move in parallel, quickly alternating the left and right hands, almost as in a tremolo. In order for the flow to be as uninterrupted as possible by the jumps between registers, it is necessary that the hand engaged in the last note or chord of one figure not be required to start the following one; this way the free hand has more time to cover the distance. The patterns characterizing the basic figures are therefore constructed with this in mind: LRLRLRL for the low register, and RLRLRLR for the high register. The overall gesture therefore involves a continuous lateral movement of the arms along the keyboard, constantly switching direction and register. Since arms and hands move downward in the low position and upward in the high position, the direction of the movement is always “outward” with respect to the center of the keyboard and the sagittal plane of the body. As the hands are always kept close together, and the alternating figure jumps between distant, sometimes extreme registers, the performers’ torso sways side to side. Considering that some pedaling is called for, and the feet are therefore not free to provide balance, the performers find themselves in a quite uncomfortable situation. The minimal unit corresponds to the basic alternated hand figure just described, and coincides with the measure, marked by a dotted bar line. The complete compound movement, including the change of register, is thus contained in two measures (Figs. 42–43). (To better visualize the hand movements and register changes, each fragment of the score is accompanied by the corresponding section of the diagram I used to compose the piece. In this case, each small square on the time axis represents a 16th note.)

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Fig. 43

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This gesture is articulated into higher units—which I will again call sequences. Usually a whole sequence lasts fourteen measures and is separated by a solid bar line. Successions of sequences are grouped in turn into higher units—which I will call sections—generating the whole composition. Except for the first one, the beginning of each section is marked by a capital letter. Until now I have described this composition starting from the gesture that characterizes it; only at this point does it become necessary to consider the sound material and its organization. For it is thanks to this that it is possible to further determine the sequences. As in A quattro mani, also in this composition the pitches are organized following the order of the overtone series, from the fundamental to the twelfth overtone. Of course this gives the piece a certain kind of sonority, especially considering that this time there is never a superimposition of different “spectrums”; yet the choice of such a material also promotes readability and ease of performance (and obviously has nothing to do with spectral music, which is based on natural overtones and not on the tempered sounds of the piano). Every time the basic figure is played, there is a shift with respect to the overtone series. Since these shifts proceed by one degree per repetition, and the two hands combined usually cover six sounds, the ascending transition from overtones 1–6 to 7–12 is accomplished in seven steps, generating a sequence of seven figures, as is the descending transition from overtones 7–12 to 1–6 (Fig. 44). Fig. 44

12 11 11 10 10 10 9

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Because of this constant shifting in the overtones covered by the figures, the fundamentals are actually played only at the beginning or end of a given sequence. Therefore, when I will refer to the “movement of the fundamentals,” this movement

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must be understood to also include the instances in which these fundamentals are only implied. Section 1. Sequence 1 (mm. 1–14, Figs. 45–46). Piano II plays a chromatically descending succession of chords in forte, each chord encompassing overtones 1–6; piano I also plays a descending chromatic segment but in pianissimo, using overtones 4–9 of the same overtone series as Piano I. After a large jump towards the high register, the relationship between the two pianos is now reversed: piano I plays an ascending chromatic segment in forte using overtones 7–12 (practically a cluster), while piano II plays an ascending segment in pianissimo on overtones 4–9. The two pianists then return again to the initial register. In the following descending segment, however, while piano I remains on the same central portion of the overtones series (4–9), continuing exactly the chromatic descent established in the beginning, piano II shifts one degree higher in the overtone series, thus playing a chromatic descent using harmonics 2–7 (m. 3). Therefore, the relationship between the two pianos is such that they both perform the same movement, but using different portions of the overtone series (based on the same fundamentals), and with opposing dynamics: in the low register, Piano II performs a sequence of chords that, even though it is harmonically descending with respect to the fundamentals, progressively rises towards higher and higher overtones, while piano I remains constant. Conversely, in the high register, Piano I performs a sequence of chords that, although harmonically ascending with respect to the fundamentals, progressively descends towards lower and lower overtones, while piano II remains constant. The title of the piece, Sui moti apparenti (“On the apparent motions”), refers precisely to this dissociation between the movement of the fundamentals and the movement of the overtones. Everything in the piece is thus characterized by movement (true or perceived) and alternation: the pianists’ oscillating torsos resulting from the bouncing back and forth between registers, the dynamic contrasts that bring to the sonic forefront first one piano and then the other, and the constant shifting within the overtone series. In sequence one, the horizontal pitch relationships within the same register are organized starting from the upper notes of the chord segment in forte, which remain the same throughout the sequence: B3–B b3–A3–A b3 for piano II in the low register, and A5–B b5– B5–C6 for piano I in the high register. This produces a rather compressed form of the sequence compared to the others that follow.

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Musical Bodies Fig. 46

Sequence 2 (mm. 15–28). The different sequences that make up the piece are distinguished from each other not because of a different profile (the articulation of figures remains constant throughout the piece) but because of the changing distance between the two registers, the consequent different amplitude of the jump required to move between them, and also the way the movement within each register is constructed. Thus, even though the first measure of the second sequence (m. 15) corresponds to the first measure of the piece, albeit a semitone lower, maintaining the same distribution of overtones (piano II on overtones 1-6 and piano I on overtones 4-9), what follows shows that the relationship between registers has changed. In m. 16, as in m. 2, piano I plays a forte ascending segment using overtones 7-12, but this time projecting it an octave higher, thus making the upper register more distant. The horizontal movement within single registers has also changed: if previously it was built on the harmonic reinterpretation of the upper line, here it is built simply on the continued chromatic movement of the fundamentals (descending in the low register, ascending in the high register). Sequence 3 (mm. 29–42). In this sequence the distance between the two registers is increased even more. The movement of the fundamentals within the same register does not change anymore: the low register remains on the chromatic descent from D1 to B0, the high register on the chromatic ascent from C4 to Eb 4. Only the portion of the overtones changes. Sequence 4 (mm. 43–56) and Sequence 5 (mm. 57–70). Sequences 4 and 5 do not present any major novelties with respect to what has already been explained. Sequence 4 corresponds to sequence 2 but takes place a minor seventh

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higher, and sequence 5 corresponds to sequence 1 a twelfth higher. In this way, the entire movement has moved almost two octaves toward the top of the piano as have the pianists’ bodies. This marks the end of the first section (Fig. 47). Fig. 47

Section 2 (letter A). The first two sequences (mm. 71–84 and 85–98) that make up the second section are simply a repetition of the two initial sequences half step lower. The next sequence (mm. 99–114), on the other hand, presents a major difference, which is prepared first by a change in dynamics (m. 106) and then by a measure of silence (m. 108), a true caesura after about a minute and a half of uninterrupted flow. When the action resumes, while the low register movement picks up from where it left off, the upper register starts again from the top of the descending overtone movement, that is, from overtones 7–12 (m. 110). For the first time, the lower and upper spaces are no longer “in phase”: this means that at measure 115 the lower space starts the new sequence from the lowest harmonics as usual, while the transition in the upper space has still to come to an end. The two spaces go through this sequence (mm. 115–128) out of phase, but finally come together again at measure 137, after an eight measure sequence (mm. 129–136) in which the high register transition is completed, while the low register movement is cut off, thus “correcting”

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the asynchrony. After another complete sequence (mm. 137–150), part A concludes with one more truncated sequence, this time composed of six measures, which can be said to make up for the temporal shift caused by the earlier eight measure sequence (8+6=14), maintaining this way the overall periodicity Section 3 (letter B) and Section 4 (letter C). The first two sequences of the third section (mm. 157–84) are similar to the first two sequences of the second section. Half way through the third sequence, a radical change happens (m. 195): the harmonic movement of the fundamentals in the two registers, which up to this point has always been centripetal, now becomes centrifugal. This is best seen in the following sequence (mm. 199–212) that starts section 4 (letter C). The chromatic descent or ascent of the fundamentals is treated as ideally continuing “behind” the interruptions caused by the alternation between registers. In a way, one could say that here movement overcomes sound. As a consequence, the figures quickly come to the point of reaching beyond the very limits of the instrument. The next sequence (213–30) still presents this configuration. As can be seen even from this partial analysis, there is a continuity between my early compositions and the later ones with regard to the management of the form. Even when it comes to organizing gesture rather than sound (and gesture through sound), the overall form of a piece is conceived as an evolution in time: evolution in time of sound or gesture, of the relationships between gestures, and in this way evolution of the listener’s or spectator’s attention. While initially a sound occurrence and/or a gestural event present a certain stability, allowing the listener to better understand the relationships between elements, as the piece progresses higher levels of organization become involved. On the other hand, the endings of my pieces are characterized not by a return to a state of stability, but by the reconfiguration of the initial sound material or gesture, a renewed situation that is often not fully developed, but only hinted at: my pieces do not really conclude, but only point to possible further developments that remain unpursued.

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Fig. 49

Fig. 50

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Fig. 53

Conclusions

Assessing what repercussions the reflections developed in this book may have on my future compositional work is neither easy nor perhaps desirable. Research can certainly suggest answers to specific questions of the artist or even inspire artistic practice; however, it is not advisable to deduce unambiguous indications for one’s own work from the research itself, because in my opinion there is no deterministic relationship between research and artistic practice. In the following final thoughts, I will therefore limit myself to summarizing what has been said so far in order to grasp the unity of the topics addressed in this study and in my work as a composer. This research has sought to articulate and elaborate the basic question that I have dealt with in my compositional practice since its inception: whether and how it is still possible to continue the exploration of sound (and noise) initiated particularly in the avant-garde music of the 1960s. This question about the material of music does not arise from a supposed wear and tear of the material itself, but rather from the fact that, differently from what Adorno had argued, starting from the end of the last century the material no longer seems able to impose or even indicate perspectives to the composer. If it is true that the composer’s material is historically and socially determined, this means that today’s society has stopped indicating perspectives to the composer, unable to set a limit or exert a constraint on his practice. Thus, the process of emancipation of sound as advocated by Edgard Varèse seems to have ended: there are no technical limits or aesthetic impositions from which the composer must still emancipate sound. In order to comprehend the profound sense of this problem, I had to investigate the way in which twentieth-century avant-garde composers conceived of the emancipation of music through the emancipation of sound, relating these conceptions to the traditional idea of sound material that they had inherited. In other words, it was necessary to undertake a journey back in time, an exploration around the very notion of musical material aimed at understanding what the traditional formula “the material of music is sound” has meant throughout history. Hence, the first task of this research was to study how the relationship between music and sound was conceived in classical Greece. The relationship between music and sound was conceptualized along with the relationship between language and sound beginning with the notion of element. According to Plato, speech and song are composed of a limited number of elements, respectively letters and pitched sounds (phthongoi); these elements are capable of joining together to form higher units: syllables and words in the case of speech, and intervals and systems in the case of music. Aristotle

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later clarified the non-additive character of language: it is not possible to derive the essence of the syllable from its elements, that is, from the letters; these, consequently, are to be considered the matter of which the syllable is composed. Aristoxenus specified the meaning of the musical element (phthongos) in relation to the movement of the singing voice, and the continuity of the melos as the “synthesis of the letters.” Subsequently, Ptolemy and Boethius unequivocally associated sound—considered matter—with sense, and form with intellect. Only reason is capable of grasping the relationship of consonance between (discrete) sounds, while hearing merely registers sound matter still in an indeterminate state. This conception of the relationship between music and sound starting from the idea of composition of elements—the idea that music is articulation—has certainly been subject to various reformulations throughout history but has remained for centuries the central core of Western musical thought. Similarly, the distinction between sense and matter on the one hand and intellect and form on the other has remained substantially unquestioned: often even today, the notion of material is associated with corporeality and perception. I then considered how the modernist composers of the twentieth century also made use of the notions of element and material to reflect on their practice, choosing three topical moments: the emancipation of the dissonance in Schoenberg, the composition of timbre in serialist composers, and finally the contrast between Boulez and Cage around the question of whether music is a language and sound the material of this language. The birth and development of acoustics had made it possible to acquire a new understanding of sound: any tuned sound—what was traditionally considered the element of singing—can be analyzed into further elements, into a sound spectrum. Thus, Arnold Schoenberg overcame the strict distinction between consonance and dissonance precisely by taking into account the overtones most distant from the fundamental. However, the analysis of sound in a sound spectrum played a fundamental role above all in the analysis and synthesis of timbre. The possibility of forging the timbre of sound first appeared in serialism when composers, particularly Stockhausen, in order to extend the application of the series to all musical parameters, imagined that it was possible to compose the timbre of a sound from individual sine waves. The ultimate element of musical language is no longer the “note” but the sine wave. By foreshadowing total control over sound, electronic instruments made it possible to imagine a new way of understanding material and composition: composing not by putting together timbrally predetermined sounds, but by giving shape to one’s own material. If in the serialist perspective a structure capable of managing the organization of the material was still sought, the focus on noise led other composers, in particular the Futurists, Edgard Varèse, and Pierre Schaeffer to resolutely question the concept of music as an articulated language; John Cage, finally, renounced any control over the material, considering any sound as already music. In this way, sound was freed from its role as the material of musical language. The notions of element, material, and composition can be seen as the contested terrain in which the duality between music as language and music as pure sonic “materiality” manifests itself.

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Conclusions

In my compositional practice, particularly in my early works, I have tried to rethink the tension between musical language and the emancipation of sound as a tension between the composer’s abstract and static material and sound in its taking place in time and space: how to reduce the distance between the composer’s material and the performance? I have indicated two conditions for showing sound in its “happening.” First, conceiving the composition not as an organization of the differences between its elements but as an exploration of the characteristics of the single sounds; the taking place of sound occurs as a discovery of non-parameterizable sound, that is, of sound which is not primarily articulated in the dimensions of pitch, duration and timbre. Second, placing sound in relation to silence: silence can no longer be interpreted as the absence of sound or as a “rest” within an uninterrupted discourse, but rather as that from which sound emerges: sound is a non-silence. Silence is the potentiality of listening. (If it is true, as Cage argued after his experience in an anechoic chamber, that silence does not exist, the composer’s most arduous task is to create silence.) In this attempt of mine to approach the performative dimension of sound, it becomes perhaps possible to hold the tension between language and material: just as there is no language without irrational sides, so there is no sound material in the absence of a structure, be it even a minimal one. The composer’s practice includes not only an abstract definition of her or his sound material at the expense of its temporality, but always establishes, often tacitly, a certain relationship to the body that produces it. In fact, the pitched sounds that traditionally constituted the elements of musical language, the conception of timbre of serialist composers, and the indeterminate noise of Cage’s poetics, all involve a certain technology that produces these sounds and a certain conception and use of bodies. For this reason, this research has considered what kind of relationship the idea of material as originally developed in classical Greek thought established with respect to the body. If sound was originally always thought of in relation to a body, as a secondary quality of a body, it is also true that an opposing tendency can be noticed throughout the evolution of music theory: in order to define a certain sound material that the composer can manipulate abstractly, it is necessary to disregard the body that produces it. Starting from Pythagoras, the tuned sound of music is sound that can be defined numerically, independently from the body that produces it: the “note” ignores the musical instrument and the musician who produces it. Consequently, Aristotle considers the organon, that is, the musical instrument, as a “slave” because its purpose does not lie in itself but in the production of sound. The development of instrumental music and especially the research on extended techniques have sought to consider the characteristics of sound as specifically determined by the sounding body. In fact, unlike pitch, timbre is the dimension of sound that leads back to the instrument. However, even timbre becomes manipulable after the introduction of new technologies, which allow to dissociate the “color” of a sound from the body that emits it: electronic production and reproduction of sound make sound independent from the body that generates it. Not only is sound no longer the quality

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of an object (as it was for Aristotle), but electronic instruments are able to create sounds that cannot be traced back to any existing object. In this way, new technologies call into question the very idea of body and thinghood as we have known it so far: whereas previously, thinking and imagining sound necessarily had to start with the movement of the body, now the audible is finally thinkable in itself. The question of the material of music must be considered not only in relation to how sound is understood, but also in relation to what the process of identifying the material in sound excludes. Claiming that the material of music is sound implies that in music bodies are either subordinated to sound, that is, that the musical instrument is nothing but a tool aimed at the production of sound; or, in the last century, that the body can finally be removed from music altogether. This is what I consider as the sonocentrism of Western music. Only when the temporal and performative dimensions of sound are taken into account does it become clear that sound is necessarily determined by the technical and technological devices available. Thus we see that technological reproduction has allowed not only the emancipation of sound and the rediscovery of noise, but the separation of sound production from the sound source. In other words, technological instruments not only allow for better manipulation of sound material, but also induce to rethink the relationship of sound to the body. The new technological condition of sound makes it possible for us to conceive musical instruments and the presence of performers under a new light, thinking of them no longer as simple producers of sound: electronic instruments and, even more, digital devices free both the performer and the instrument from their productive functions. In this way, the characterizing element of the musical performance becomes, rather than the sound, the relationship between a human body and an instrument. For this reason, in my latest compositions, I have been working on elements of musical performance, even those that are not directly involved in the production of sound and that become invisible when only considering sound. It is not a matter of rediscovering the “sound embodiment” but, on the contrary, of conceiving the (musical) performance beyond the sound element. Just like the sounding body, also the human presence is no longer conceived in a functional sense, that is, as a mere means of generating sound. In this way, the music I imagine challenges the definition and delimitation between the performing arts: music is neither sound art, nor theater, nor dance, but something in between. It relates the presence of the performer as found in dance to a body capable of (not) producing sound. In my compositional path it is possible to glimpse a continuity, a link between my first works, in which I tried to conceive of music as the taking place of sound, and my last ones, in which the sounding body is seen as not finalized to the production of sound. In fact, as I tried to show in the third chapter, in order to exhibit sound in its taking place it is necessary to place it in relation to silence. At this point one could understand silence not in relation to sound: silence would rather indicate those moments when performers and instruments lose their functionality to reveal

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Conclusions

themselves as bodies. Consequently, experimental music could be conceived not so much, as Cage did, as that music which alternates organized sound and unintentional sound, but as an alternation between sound and non-sound, as a relationship between sound and bodies. This music would be a crossing of the senses and the sensible, and composition would ultimately become invention and notation of gestures.

163

List of Works

En flottant (1995–97) for clarinet Premiere: November 27, 1997, Reggio Emilia, Teatro della Cavallerizza, Di Nuovo Musica, Massimo Carrozzo (clarinet). Deserto colore (1998) for soprano and piano Texts by Federico García Lorca Premiere: April 27, 1998, Parma, Teatro Regio, Gabriella Sborgi (soprano), Raffaele Cortesi (piano). Ondine (1997–98) for chamber orchestra Premiere: September 8, 1999, Amsterdam, Beurs van Berlage, Gaudeamus Music Week, Esprit Orchestra, Alex Pauk (conductor). Flatus vocis (1999) for flute Premiere: December 17, 1999, Anvers, Ars Musica, Mario Caroli (flute). Deux épigrammes amoureuses et une intimation (2000) for soprano, clarinet, violin, cello, percussion, piano Text by Marguerite Yourcenar Premiere: September 30, 2000, Paris, Abbaye de Royaumont, Elizabeth Yañez (soprano), Nouvel Ensemble Modern, Lorraine Vaillancourt (conductor). Narcisse (2001–02) for two baritones Text by Paul Valéry Commissioned by Fondation Royaumont Paris Premiere: April 7, 2002, Paris, Abbaye de Royaumont, Laurent Alvaro, Jean-Christophe Jacques (baritones).

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Epigramma muto (2002) for clarinet, bass clarinet, percussion, violin, viola, cello, celesta Premiere: November 19, 2002, Stuttgart, Akademie Schloss Solitude, Ensemble Surplus, James Avery (conductor). Voce d’ombra (2003) for choir Fragment of Psalm 87 Commissioned by ADIAM Val d’Oise, France Premiere: March 28, 2004, Paris, Abbaye de Royaumont, Rachid Safir (conductor). In principio (2003) for baritone, flute (also bass flute), clarinet (also bass clarinet) Text by Lucretius Commissioned by Compagnie Françoise Murcia Premiere: December 3, 2003, Cannes, Théatre La Licorne, Festival international de danse, Jean-Christoph Jacques (baritone), Mario Caroli (flute), Massimo Carrozzo (clarinet). Nel labirinto (2003) for trumpet, trombone, percussion, bass drum, guitar, cello, piano Commissioned by Ensemble Ascolta Stuttgart Premiere: November 20, 2003, Stuttgart, Akademie Schloss Solitude, Ensemble Ascolta. Limen (2003–04) for tenor saxophone, guitar, marimba Commissioned by Ensemble Cattrall, Zürich Premiere: March 10, 2004, Zürich, Fraumünster, Ensemble Cattrall. La gabbia (2002–04) Opera in one act Libretto of Alejandro Tantanian Premiere: March 30, 2004, Stuttgart, Theaterhaus, Neue Vocalsolisten Stuttgart, NewEars.ensemble. Ein Streichquartettsatz mit Nachwort (2004–05) for string quartet, baritone, piano Text by Uljana Wolf Commissioned by Literaturwerkstatt and Konzerthaus Berlin Premiere: June 23, 2005, Berlin, Konzerthaus, Dietrich Henschel (baritone), Kairos Quartett, Axel Bauni (piano).

166

List of Works

moi, Daniel G. (2005) for countertenor, violin, baritone saxophone, piano Text by Samuel Beckett Commissioned by Festival Klangwerkstatt Berlin Premiere: November 6, 2005, Berlin, Ballhaus Naunynstrasse, Festival Klangwerkstatt, Daniel Gloger (countertenor), Ensemble Mosaik. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart / Tiziano Manca Die Zauberflöte (2005–06) Transcription for Chamber Ensemble Commissioned by Fundação Calouste Goulbenkian, Lissabon Premiere: June 2006, Lisbon, Fundação Calouste Goulbenkian, Felix Krieger (conductor). Solitudini (2006) for oboe, clarinet, baritone saxophone, violin, cello Commissioned by Festival Klangwerkstatt Berlin Premiere: November 5, 2006, Berlin, Ballhaus Naunynstrasse, Festival Klangwerkstatt, Ensemble Mosaik. Nell’assenza dei venti (2006) for chamber orchestra Commissioned by Festival Tage für Neue Musik Zürich Premiere: November 3, 2006, Zürich, Tonhalle, Tage für Neue Musik Zürich, Collegium Novum Zürich, Mark Foster (conductor). Defining (2007–09) for flute, clarinet, vibraphone, violin, viola, cello, piano Commissioned by Christoph Delz Foundation Basel Premiere: September 19, 2009, Lucerne, Lucerne Festival, Ensemble Recherche. Signification (2010) for three voices Text by Gaunilo of Marmoutiers Premiere: July 17, 2010, Stuttgart, Theaterhaus, Neue Vocalsolisten. Stur (2007–2010) for guitar Commissioned by Mats Scheidegger Premiere: Mai 27, 2011, Zürich, Galerie Hauser & Wirth, Mats Scheidegger (guitar).

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Attimo e storia (2011–12) for large orchester Commissioned by Deutschlandradio Kultur Premiere: January 27, 2012, Berlin, Haus des Rundfunks, Ultraschall Festival, Rundfunk-Sinfonieorchester Berlin, Peter Rundel (conductor). Sui moti apparenti (2010–14) for two pianos Premiere: October 1, 2014, Ghent, Orpheus Institute Ghent, Orpheus Research Festival, Geert Callaert (piano), Yasuko Takahashi (piano). Parlando (2015) for oboe, clarinet, violin Premiere: September 29, 2015, Ghent, Miryzaal, HERMESensemble, Paulo de Assis (conductor). A quattro mani (2015) for piano Permiere: October 1, 2015, Orpheus Institute Ghent, Orpheus Research Festival, Jean Michiels (piano). You shall not turn (2016) for choir, trumpet, trombone Premiere: November 13, 2016, Orpheus Institute Ghent, Musa Horti (choir), Sander Kintaert and Rubén Zapater Maestre (trumpets), Gert-Jan Schoup (trombone), Peter Dejans (conductor). Haben Sie Moderne gesagt? (2016–17) An exhibition in collaboration with Xavier Le Roy and Christophe Wavelet Premiere: January 28, 2017, Frankfurt, Frankfurt LAB, Festival Positionen, Ensemble Modern. Unschärfe im Möglichen (2020) Sound composition for Christine Meisner’s art installation Unschärfe im Möglichen – Episode 1, 11th Berlin Bienniale, 2020.

168

Abbreviations

CS

Scriptorum de musica medii ævii nova series. Edited by Charles Edmond Henri de Coussemaker. 4 vols. Paris: A. Durand, 1864–76. Reprint, Hildesheim: Olms, 1963.

GS

Scriptores ecclesiastici de musica sacra potissimum. Edited by Martin Gerbert. 3 vols. St. Blaise, Typis S. Blasiensis, 1784. Reprint, Hildesheim: Olms, 1963.

PL

Patrologia latina. Edited by J. P. Migne. Paris, 1844–65.

El. Harm. Aristoxenus, Elementa harmonica El. Rhyth. Aristoxenus, Elementa rhythmica Conf.

Augustinus, Confessiones

An.

Aristotle, De Anima

Met.

Aristotle, Metaphysics

NE Poet.

Aristotle, Nichomachean Ethics Aristotle, Poetica

Phys.

Aristotle, Physica

Cra.

Plato, Cratylus

Leg.

Plato, Leges

Phil.

Plato, Philebus

Sph.

Plato, Sophist

Symp.

Plato, Symposium

Tht.

Plato, Theaethetus

Ti.

Plato, Timaeus

169

Reference List

Translations of Plato are adapted from those collected in Plato: Complete Works, ed. John M. Cooper (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1997). Translations of Aristotle are adapted from those collected in Complete Works of Aristotle: The Revised Oxford Translation, ed. Jonathan Barnes, 2 vols. (Bollingen Series. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press 1995). Unless otherwise noted, all other translations of Greek authors are taken or modified from those available in Barker 1984 and Barker 1989. Adorno, Theodor W. 1929. “Zur Zwölftontechnik.” Anbruch 11 (7/8): 290–94. ———.  (1949) 2006. Philosophy of New Music. Translated by Robert Hullot-Kentor. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. ———.  (1954) 2002. “The Aging of New Music.” In Essays on Music, edited by Richard Leppert, 181–202. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. ———.  (1956) 2002. “Music, Language, and Composition.” In Essays on Music, edited by Richard Leppert, 113–126. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. ———. (1961) 1998. “Vers une musique informelle.” In Quasi una fantasia: Essays on Modern Music, 269–322, translated by Rodney Livingstone. London: Verso. ———.  (1969) 1997. Aesthetic Theory. Edited by Gretel Adorno and Rolf Tiedemann. Translated by Robert Hullot-Kentor. London: Continuum. Agamben, Giorgio.  2017. Karman: Breve trattato sull’azione, la colpa e il gesto. Turin: Bollati Boringhieri. Aquinas, Thomas. 1976. De principiis naturae ad fratrem Sylvestrum. In Sancti Thomae de Aquino Opera omnia: iussu impensaque, Leonis XIII P. M. edita, 43: 1–47. Rome: Editori di San Tommaso. Aristides Quintilianus. 1963. De musica. Edited by R. P. Winnington-Ingram. Leipzig: Teubner.

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Aristotle. 1995. Complete Works of Aristotle: The Revised Oxford Translation. Edited by Jonathan Barnes. 2 vols. Bollingen Series. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Aristoxenus. 1954. Aristoxeni Elementa harmonica. Edited by Rosetta Da Rios. Rome: Typis Publicae Officinae Polygraphicae. Aristoxenus. 1990. Elementa rhythmica. The Fragment of Book II and the Additional Evidence for Aristoxenean Rhythmic Theory. Edited and translated by Lionel Pearson. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Augustine. (1981) 1990. Sancti Augustini Confessionum libri XIII. 2nd ed. Edited by Martin Skutella and Luc Verheijen. Corpus Christianorum. Series Latina 27. Turnhout: Brepols. ———. 1991. Confessions. Translated by Henry Chadwick. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ———. 1995. De doctrina christiana. Edited and translated by R. P. H. Green. Oxford: Clarendon Press. ———. 1947. On Music. Translated by Robert Catesby Taliaferro. New York: CIMA. ———. 2007. On Order [De ordine]. Translated by Silvano Borruso. South Bend, IN: St. Augustine’s Press. Bacon, Roger. 1940. Communia mathematica. In Opera hactenus inedita Rogeri Baconi, 16 fascicules, edited by Robert Steele and Ferdinand M. Delorme. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Barker, Andrew. 1984. Greek Musical Writings I: The Musicians and His Art. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 1989. Greek Musical Writings II: Harmonic and Acoustic Theory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 2015. Porphyry’s Commentary on Ptolemy’s Harmonics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bekker, Paul. 1928. Organische und mechanische Musik. Berlin and Leipzig.

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