Of all the qualities of the professional musician that the amateur wonders about, the ability to imagine the sound result without an instrumental intermediary, simply by reading a score, comes to the fore. How can he mentally transcribe the written code and hear in absolute terms not only what it means, but also what it represents? Is he so sure of this mental representation that he can refer to it without any possible error, without reality invalidating it in some detail, or even denying it in its entirety? When we begin to learn solfeggio, we learn to listen analytically in order to be able to transcribe a musical object proposed to our attention; here we are copying a reality, comparable to an elementary drawing lesson: we reproduce melodic intervals, chords, in the same way as we reproduce a cup, a spoon; the transcription code functions in a different way, but it's the same type of operation. Later, when taking the writing classes - harmony, counterpoint, fugue - the first recommendation, if not obligation, to which one must adhere is to avoid relying on the sound object itself: "Don't use the piano to help you, or you'll never get to hear." We must first remove the reference. Hearing is much more than just imagining a supposed musical object: it means imagining the network of exact or satisfactory relations that must be established between a given and consequences that must be found and correctly defined. If you're given a melodic line, you're going to have to find a harmonic accompaniment that realizes the functions this melodic line presupposes: these functions being simple, it's relatively easy to decipher the code they obey, from which they derive; when they're more ambiguous and complex, various solutions may be offered, which must be invented and heard in the absolute. Although the writing taught is intended to be vocal, in fact, these exercises take place in a kind of sound vacuum, verified in fine by the teacher at the piano, who will sometimes gratify you with a "not heard": an infamous notation making you feel how little your inner hearing has yet got a grip on reality. You haven't heard the object or the relationship between objects; this is not verified by sound incorporation. After such a rigorous apprenticeship in the virtual representation of objects, we are certainly in a position to ratify Mallarmé's concept of the flower as the absentee of any bouquet. The musician could refer to the note absent from any object.
Such an apprenticeship may appear absurd, and seems to deny what is most essential in the musician's gift: knowing how to confront sound material, since the exercise in abstraction imposed on him does not seem to lead him in the most direct way to this inevitable confrontation. Behind this apprenticeship, however, lies the ambivalence that will be the composer's lot throughout his life: he writes in a coded language that refers to an understood and mastered reality. When, behind the writing, a perfect accuracy of sound relationships does not emerge, we may realize that the musician's perception is somehow invalid, for one reason or another: the deficiency lies either in an erroneous estimation of the objects themselves, or in a false appreciation of their relationships. In either case, the imaginary of perception has not functioned properly. It is therefore necessary to perfect the experiment and realize the reasons for the failure, until imagination and reality coincide completely, thanks to a correct projection of perception. At this stage of the learning process, we're still talking about very limited acoustic relationships. Listening is totally dominated by the codes of language; no component that could disturb this absolute order is admitted. Musical dictations are based on classified, recognizable objects, using a perfectly polished sound tool, in this case the piano. The ear becomes accustomed to hearing through a certain prism; it may be disturbed, embarrassed or even completely disrupted by the presentation of objects where it will no longer orient itself according to the usual coordinates. In fact, if you switch from the analysis of a chord played on a piano to the analysis of a multiphonic sound played by a wind instrument, or a sound produced by any percussion instrument, you will find it difficult to adapt to the very nature of the objects presented to you. Some belong to a relatively well-defined category, in which the tool plays a lesser role than the code; others tend to escape any system whatsoever by the highly individual nature of their components, the means of production being stronger than the hierarchy, or tending to dominate it. There is an enormous difference between abstract and concrete relationships.
I call abstract relationships those that we really want to dematerialize, and concrete relationships those that are, strictly speaking, inseparable from the material. Could we say that some obey a hierarchy and others escape it? The problem is sometimes as simple as that. A perfect piano chord is the most obvious example of a musical object that is easily grasped, instantly dematerialized, and immediately attached to a hierarchy, a set of functions. Hierarchy and set of functions don't need to be expressed: they're there underneath, awakening in us a multitude of emotional as well as theoretical resonances - which proportion depends as much on education as on imaginative impulse. Of course, this classified object is presented to me with the timbre of the piano, but heard in isolation, it's not its timbre that matters to me, but its constitution: I perceive it globally or analyze it without taking its presentation into account. At most, what might bother me is the inadequacy of the instrument that transmits: the piano being badly tuned, the divergence of the real object and the immaterial object might be felt as a barrier to the perception of the ideal object enclosed in its hierarchy, and if my ear is sufficiently educated, I might note the precise defects that do violence to my imagination; the reality I perceive will be thought of as a deviance of the concrete from the perfection of the hierarchy. This deviance can also have affective connotations: enough has been said about out-of-tune pianos - and their so-called perverse charm has even been used, as in Berg's Wozzeck, among others - for me to dispense with extending this list. But back to the perfect piano and the no less perfect tuning it presents me with: I've instantly dematerialized it. Now I take a tam-tam of some kind, preferably a low-pitched one. Assuming I hit it with a certain force, I'll produce a sound whose complexity will certainly be perceived globally, but whose analysis will prove infinitely more difficult. If I return to the perfect chord, I think of the stability of its elements, which enables me to make a rapid and total analysis. In the tam-tam, the analysis is hardly total; quick, it's even more difficult: the sound is made up of partials of varying importance, whose instability tends to escape me, whose internal hierarchy repels a simple categorization. Of course, in piano sounds, these acoustic phenomena also occur, but the class of the object subordinates its individual acoustic properties; on the contrary, I have to make an effort to trace the properly acoustic characters of such a chord, whereas its perception as an element of vocabulary is immediate. As an element of vocabulary, I don't at all see, on first hearing, in what way and in what category I can classify the sound of the tam-tam; the acoustic properties strike me first, and are an obstacle, almost insurmountable, to finding in it an element of vocabulary other than superimposed on a hierarchy in an effect of reinforcement, decoration, disturbance brought to clearer elements, in short to finding in it an aggregated function. With patience and attention, I could analyze the components of this tam-tam sound, but they are so individual, so individually grouped and fused, that I can only take note of this individuality, which inevitably disassociates itself from any generalization: which not only obliges me to reflect on problems of perception of more or less complex objects, but also leads me to note the disparity, even incompatibility, of the sound objects that the most common world places at our disposal. The abstract relationships that our education teaches us to conceive are going to have to confront concrete relationships that are nothing less than simple, that fluctuate, and to which an order, not to mention a hierarchy, is going to have to impose itself with a certain number of difficulties.
P. B.