How is writing related to ideas? How can the idea shape, or transform, writing, not only in its mode of transcription, but also in its priorities and hierarchies? In what way, and how, are writing and form, and formal structures, linked in invention? How, in the final analysis, do we recognize a composer's individual profile through his or her writing? And a subsidiary question: at what stage, what habit, or even what degradation, can we recognize a composer's tics and mannerisms all too easily? What is it that makes us, through certain particularities, but beyond certain traits common to an era, however individualistic it may be, recognize a particular language? And what common traits still exist in our time, and can they really exist, in a latent, uncodified state, or in the form of a diluted, adaptable code? All these questions are being asked today, and perhaps they're not being answered in the most satisfactory way. Perhaps there's no need to give them circumstantial answers. Nevertheless, I think it's worth asking them, because they probably touch on the most insurmountable aspect of a personality.
First of all, let's remember that writing doesn't spring spontaneously, but is the fruit of both training and reflection. We are familiar with the works of the past, albeit more intuitively than rationally. However, this listening, spontaneous at first, leads us to a certain way of hearing, of course, but also a way of grasping the world of sound in a fairly precise form of coherence. From the nursery rhymes of our childhood to our first contacts with the elaborate world of our musical tradition, everything settles us in a universe whose logic invades us, soaks us. If we devote ourselves to studying them, discovering the mechanisms of coherence only confirms our intuition. We had grasped a set of codes and laws acting in all fields - that of pitch and duration, in particular - and then, through study, we came to understand their mechanisms to the point of being able to imitate and reproduce them. This period of mimetic learning binds us to a particular heritage, while at the same time freeing us from it. At the same time, we realize that musical language is not a fixed set of codes, laws, constraints and grids, but that it has evolved according to a complex process that is both deterministic and unpredictable. There is certainly a general flow, but there are also divergences, breaks and uncertainties. After imitative training comes, if one has the need, reflection on the necessity or gratuitousness of language evolution. What is perhaps most striking is that the enrichment of one category is almost always at the expense of another; that increasing complexity often leads to a drastic reduction, which in turn initiates another process of complexity, of densification. So it is with the balance between rhythmic complexity and harmonic richness, between counterpoint density and melodic richness. There's no shortage of examples of these mutations through which language continues to evolve.
A musical idea - whatever it may be - is not born out of a context. It proceeds, even in its most elementary form, from a form of vocabulary. Nowadays, this vocabulary doesn 't exist, so to speak . There are intervals, a universe of intervals that no pre-established rule can guide. Or if this universe of intervals is oriented, it owes it to our memory: memory of other models, or memory of our own models. If I say that a universe of intervals is not oriented at the moment when we are going to use them, this is only partly true; for, within us, there is a whole system of references that enables us to orientate ourselves, even if we don't consciously call on them. It's certain, to speak only of pitches, that the further we move away from common universes, from the semitone (the one we're most familiar with) to complex synthesized objects (the one that's most invented, and therefore the least learned, the least known), the more difficult it will be for us to invent spontaneously; with reference points increasingly lacking, the idea remains vague, in the state of utopia, not knowing how to manipulate the tools capable of realizing it. The idea depends, therefore, on the intuition we are able to derive from the material. The more we know about the material - and by that I mean the raw material - the quicker we'll come up with the idea, i.e., the way in which we put together, however primitively, the elements that our experience of the material provides us with. It should be added straight away that, when it comes to a known and assimilated material, the idea still depends - even at the outset - on the functions we intend to attribute to it and the extensions we wish to give it.
But first, we need to ask ourselves what a musical idea is, and how invention proceeds. Does it need to have a vocabulary of some kind at its disposal in order to come into being, or can this vocabulary first emerge without the support of a real grammar? I'd like to make a distinction between a virtual idea and a real idea, i.e. the projection of a general idea that will find the tools to realize itself, or a precise, limited idea that will proliferate to expand into a general concept. I'd say straight away that these two limit cases seem to me to be equally valid, and that the idea can make the journey in either direction: from the particular to the global, from the total to the cell. The global, virtual idea doesn't necessarily need a precise, determining vocabulary: it can be the idea of a trajectory, the evolution of an envelope, the sequence of transitions necessary to pass from one state of musical matter to another. In this case, it's possible that the vocabulary is the last thing to be found in the detail of how it works, because to transcribe into reality the idea of a trajectory from one state to another requires a very specific tool. But the opposite case is just as obvious: if a musical idea has revealed itself to be rich in potential, the work will be carried out in the opposite direction; by developing the various seeds of potential, we'll have to find a global profile to put them in order, and the form will be the result of a work of expansion and proliferation. In the latter case, of course, the musical idea must be placed within the framework of a sufficiently explicit vocabulary; otherwise, the development of potentials runs the risk of being chaotic and incoherent.
The further we move away from classifiable objects, "derealizable" as I've called them, the less we can apply those writing categories that are a legacy of the past, given the definition of musical objects to which our Western tradition has applied itself. Even pushed to their maximum extension, these notions end up having no relation to what they claim to master. Certainly, a different type of writing must be developed if we are to cope with the demands of setting up, not to mention logic. But linking together unclassifiable objects, embarrassing in their individualism as well as their heterogeneity, requires something other than an easy dismissal by claiming that, since height is no longer the major criterion in the sense in which it used to be understood, it would be a matter, indeed it would suffice, of emphasizing other types of linkage, in particular temporal structures, formal structures of an external type such as mise en place, repetition. But that's chasing the problem, not solving it. Perhaps we need to tackle the writing of the objects themselves, and try to find solutions that guarantee both the nature of the objects and the network to which they belong. When I speak of establishing a network of coordinates for given heights, the acoustic problem itself is excluded from the search for a coherent organization, because we are dealing with ideal objects, a kind of blueprint of reality, just as in geometry we speak of a point, a line or a plane without concrete reference. These objects have no other characteristic than their name, and they are likely to be incorporated into acoustic phenomena that are very different from one another. When we're dealing with objects that can't be easily reduced, or when we invent, by synthesis, complex objects whose structure refuses to be encased in a simple ideogram, whose individuality is such that it hardly admits of classification, tidying up, with which words like hierarchy, transition lose their meaning, is it necessary or even possible to establish this network of coordinates? Doesn't this give writing a totally different meaning? In order to establish relationships - if not hierarchies as such, for however individual these objects may be, even if they're only placed side by side, they maintain relationships or indicate ruptures in relation to this or that characteristic - we need to introduce acoustic writing, if I may put it that way, which is totally absent in the case of "ideal", derealized musical objects. Everything that is taken into account afterwards in the latter case - profile, dynamics, components - must then be included from the outset. Networks apply to a more organized level of writing, and allow freedom in the relationships between objects only to the extent that a minimum of correspondences between complexes can be established. This remains difficult to assess, given the difficulty, if not impossibility, of establishing truly audible and convincing relationships. It should not be forgotten, however, that such phenomena, more or less unclassifiable and therefore unusable as elements of an established hierarchy, may well serve, from another perspective, as moments of articulation, breaking points and other exceptional data. At that point, they depend solely on their own function, integrating on another level with a different type of writing, can play with it a role of punctuation, of explanation. They integrate in such a way that they can retain their particularity without damage, and that this particularity will even justify their presence in a script that is otherwise foreign to them. In this way, two types of writing can refer to each other and reinforce each other, while being fundamentally opposed in nature: one based on hierarchy and transition, the other on individuality and exception.
As I've often said, the intuition of a work can arise from extreme points of view. It can emerge from an ordered intuition, just as it can emerge from chaos. Writing can be a fundamental component from the outset, just as it can be the fruit of a difficult search for a convincingly armed idea. The composer's memory is a kind of reservoir; at the beginning of his existence, he is above all the repository of the writing of others; the further along his trajectory he advances, the more he becomes the repository of himself, and, despite his protests or efforts at renewal, he is confronted with his own genetic heritage, a heritage for which he is responsible since it is he who has created it along the way. By a mechanism that is only paradoxical in appearance, the more spontaneous the composer feels, the greater the danger of drawing - even unconsciously - on his own heritage. The writing skills he has acquired in the course of his previous experiences enable him to identify a "spontaneous" idea more easily than an unusual one, which he will only really become aware of once the writing has extracted it from its gangue.
But instead of developing from a concrete or rapidly concretized idea, or even, naturally, from a set of ideas that will have to be amalgamated into a coherent whole, the work can be conceived from the outset, like an architecture, like a great structure, whose trajectory and evolution we can see, whose phases we can imagine, and even certain more precise characteristics, but whose real components are not imagined at all, or hardly at all. It is to justify this structure that musical ideas will have to emerge; or sometimes musical ideas that had remained unexplored, untapped, latent in a kind of imaginary catalog, will suddenly find there an appropriate framework for their development. These encounters are, for the most part, unpredictable; they follow a subterranean path of which we ourselves are largely unaware; they appear or disappear before finding an outcome in reality. But we can see that while writing inevitably gives rise to form, form can also give rise to writing itself when it needs to. If we speak of form, we might imagine that ideas arise in a certain order: order of importance, hierarchy, time, an order imposed by deduction. On the contrary, we have to recognize that ideas can appear in the greatest confusion, that they are transcribed in an appearance that is sometimes quite simple, far removed from what their final appearance will be. These transformations of the idea that we observe - looking, for example, at sketchbooks - between the first transcription and the final transcription stem from the fact that the raw idea has generally been found without context: without insertion into a context, but also without consequence for the context. Hence, in some cases, the inadequacy that needs to be remedied. The writing is still rudimentary, designed to capture a first approach; the more the work needs to appropriate the idea, to perceive its consequences, the sharper the writing needs to become, rich in possibilities for development. The composer's intuition must move forward, projecting itself into the unknown through the proliferation of writing.
Whatever the trajectories and sources of invention, it's always writing that we find as the ferment of invention.
P. B.