The concept of writing - I | Collège de France

Why focus on writing and try to define the concept of writing? I'll answer straight away: as far as I'm concerned, if I have to pass judgment on a score, on a composer, it's the essential criterion that determines me. A composer may or may not know how to write: this presents itself to my mind in almost equally categorical terms. If I were asked the question: can you make such a distinction even on the most recent scores? I would answer immediately: yes. Even in the most radical, most innovative, most unfamiliar idiom, I can detect, discern this phenomenon ofwriting. (Of course, the eye can tell more immediately than the ear about certain long-term parameters. Performance, however, if effective, gives instant information on the adequacy of writing and listening). And in a work that does not use traditional means, that can scarcely be transcribed except by rough diagrams from sound documents, in short, a work to which writing on paper has not pre-existed, can you still apply this category of writing? My answer is: yes; I can base my judgment on a "document" that doesn't necessarily require a paper transcription. The unfolding, the conjunction of events and the validity of the sound phenomenon are my guarantee ofwriting. Of course, the categories are not so distinct; but such criteria indicate works where the writing is unfinished, or inadequate.

I'll be judged presumptuous; but above all, I'll be asked: how can you be so sure, and on what basis can you establish that a work is written or not? Here, my answer becomes more vulnerable. For any argument, I can present intuition, habit and experience, which short-circuit any logical development. But if we try to define the basis of this intuition, to find precise and determined criteria, I'll remain perplexed before giving them, I don't even know if I'll be able to give an adequate description. I know I can rely on the writing, but that remains both very acute and excessively vague: I'll rely above all on the sense of relationship, of sequence, of development. Moreover, as it applies to works of different character and from different periods, the word "writing" cannot have exactly the same meaning or be applied in exactly the same way. On the other hand, it covers many different notions, from instrumental writing to the manipulation of language elements. What's more, it's a word that can't be applied more directly to literature of any kind, and is used for everything, even the most insignificant of purposes. We're talking about pictorial writing, architectural writing: none of the fields of invention is spared by this invasive word which, in the end, means nothing and means everything. It can therefore be seen as a key word, but also as the most banal cliché: a key word capable of unifying the various means of expression, however far apart they may be; a cliché because it cannot be applied specifically to anything. This concept of writing, however precise and decisive it may seem from afar, is as elusive, difficult and even impossible to pin down as it is when we approach it.

However, if we always refer to writing, albeit inaccurately, it's certainly because such a concept must be central to the implementation of the imagination, to the realization of invention. It is perhaps, above all, the only means of transcription we can have, transcription of ideas, intentions and the imaginary, to whatever domain it may belong. But experience shows that writing is not just a means of decoding thought, a relatively neutral means that has no influence on thought or imagination, a means that does not participate in invention, but merely transmits its message, transcribes its information. Even if we think about it superficially, writing and thinking are not indifferent to each other, they are irremediably linked by meaning: what we say is inescapably linked to how we say it - even more so in music than elsewhere, where the state of language and the power of expression refer to each other. To arrive at a neutral element with no meaning other than its own, we have to go down to the isolated note, the pitch defined in an abstract way, derealized from any instrumental or vocal sound body, which only acquires meaning when aggregated to a context. This neutral sound acquires its personality from the very fact of its proximity to other neutral sounds, from the myriad Combinatorics to which it can be subjected. But once we've said the word "sound combinatorics", the word "writing" immediately springs to mind, for isn't writing an extremely elaborate state of combinatorics?

Before coming to this conclusion, or rather this assimilation, let's try to think about what writing music represents, and what necessity it corresponds to. First of all, we need to assert, paradoxically, that writing is not necessarily what is written, materially speaking. I include in the concept of writing the music of the oral tradition which, if not individually written, obeys laws of placement, development and responsibility of the elements between them.

So let me begin by saying thatwriting, as I understand it, goes far beyond the realm of the written sign as such. However, I'd like to add straight away that the material fact of writing influences this more general, more global phenomenon of writing. Whether we're talking about an age-old oral tradition, or a machine manipulation of sound phenomena, the Combinatorics of elements are not subject to the same constraints. The very fact that we see what we write brings with it a way of thinking that implies a complexity of a different order, if not of a higher order. It must be accepted, however, that there are not inconsiderable, indeed essential, categories beyond the written word that escape notation, that to interpret is to add to the written text deviations that will depend on a certain number of parameters due to the quality of the individuals, their personality, the acoustic conditions in which the performer finds himself, and even more general parameters, such as the given stylistic relationships that the period in which the performer is inserted maintains with the period in which the work was written. Certainly, an interpreter from the first quarter of the 20th^centurywill not have the same stylistic attitude to Baroque music from early ^18th-century Germany as an interpreter today who is trying to adhere to theauthenticity of the performance. It is perfectly futile to try, through writing, to fix all these floating categories, to try to contain, or even forbid, the deviations that make for the richness of a reading of the musical text. We know that this was the temptation of composers like Ravel and Stravinsky who, fed up with the ravages of subjective interpretation and wild deviations, advocated objective interpretation, in the sense that the text had to be performed in strict observance of written notation. But we know from the example of the pianola, to which Stravinsky was passionately attached for a time, that the objectivity of the text had limits that were infinitely too restrictive, and that deviation was cruelly lacking, to the point of paralyzing the text in pointless inertia.

Before embarking on a reflection on what writing represents, it is worth recalling the limits of the written word, since it transmits only part of the invention. This becomes abundantly clear when we go back in time. We still have written testimonies of our musical civilization from a very long time ago; and yet, as soon as we go back beyond a fairly recent period, we are unable to imagine those characteristics of interpretation which, alone, know how to give the text its character. When it comes to plainchant, or music of the Middle Ages, we are reduced to conjecture; we refer to theoretical texts, without being quite sure of knowing how to apply them correctly, hence the innumerable controversies between specialists in order to draw valid conclusions. New specialists come along and destroy the options of old specialists; and so speculations change over the years. So much so, in fact, that we may well wonder whether, despite our accumulated knowledge, we are really capable of recovering the authenticity of a text, by which I mean the authenticity of the deviations that were more or less included in the written hierarchy. Is it that, after an optimum period when interpreters and texts are in phase, there is no longer any recourse to link the written text to the interpreted text? Isn't the written work, like the oral tradition, liable to change with the passing of years, even centuries? Is the written work, in the final analysis, no more than a decoy that the search for authenticity can never restore to its original truth? And does its original truth really matter to us? Doesn't the interest of a written work, in relation to oral tradition, lie precisely in the divergences it allows not only in its relationship with individuals, but with the centuries? Wouldn't the deviation of interpretation be similar to Heisenberg's principle that, simply put, observation distorts the observed object and prevents you from apprehending it in its absolute objectivity?

Pierre Boulez

The concept of writing - I

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