Last year's lecture was dedicated to Claudel's Le Soulier de Satin . Since this year's theme is once again Memory and Creation, I'd like to use the same quotation as an exergue:
"I hate the past! I hate remembering! That voice I thought I heard just now, deep inside me, behind me,
If it were behind me, it wouldn't be so bitter and so sweet!"
In this way, the creator's memory must not reassure him in the illusory immobility of the past, but project him into the future, perhaps with the bitterness of discomfort, but even more so, with the attraction of the unknown ("How can one live without an unknown in front of one?" René Char).
Even the most self-confident autodidact cannot escape this network of influences. The quarrels about schools and independents are nothing new. School implies accepted learning, continuity of knowledge transmission, submission to the discipline or doctrine of a specific group. We speak of the school head with a certain admiration, inevitably mingled with suspicion, that of wanting to submit weaker personalities under his yoke - either because they are weaker by nature, or because they are still too young to defend themselves from an invasive influence. The schoolmaster will overload the disciple's memory and prevent him from blossoming in his own creation. It goes without saying, moreover, that he will exert this influence through direct readings, a customary pedagogy; his impact operates through his works, his writings, his example, without personal contact, by the sheer force of imitation. The memory of the voluntary or involuntary disciple is so irrigated by the master that it is incapable of the initiative necessary for real creation. As for the disciples, the " schoolchildren ", there are no words harsh enough to blame them for allowing themselves to be subjugated in this way; they lack originality, it is said, and the excess of direct memory kills off any individual inventiveness they might initially possess. They've learned too well and, in the end, only know how to imitate the model, copy the original, which proves to be both useless and uninteresting: in the end, memory will have properly liquidated them. On the other hand, we exalt the independent, the one who has fought victoriously against all the temptations of the school, to let himself be regimented. While this exaltation of freedom can be healthy and invigorating, it sometimes applies to any subject, and all too often its dithyrambs serve the most visible and painful dilettantism. It's as if learning becomes not just a danger, but a blemish. Clumsiness is seen as a mark of genius, and lack of craft - in fact, lack of culture - as the very hallmark of personality.
Would useful memory, then, involve learning a trade? And how can memory and craft be part of an assimilation process that is indispensable to creation? It will be objected that many composers have learned the necessary craft, but that doesn't make them creators; and that it's better to have originality without discipline than discipline without originality. Of course, I have no quarrel with this objection; still, this precedence cannot be regarded as an absolute criterion, and we would have to consider that craft and originality can, and must, go hand in hand. If we wanted to take up the kind of title that delighted the moralists of yesteryear, we'd have to write a book entitled: Du bon usage de la mémoire!
P. B.