It is difficult to reduce musical invention to a simple inventory of techniques, to explain the constitution of a language by describing a set of resources available to the composer. However, invention only exists in a tangible way thanks to this set of means of transmission, without which thought remains in the state of intention. We know that the network of verbally expressed or implied explanations linking intuition to the work is both indispensable and unimportant: indispensable because it is our only method of description, unimportant because it is beyond this description that the profound value of the finished work lies.
In past centuries, musical language existed as a common code: it was unthinkable to express oneself outside this recognized, accepted norm. We could speak of communication, operating according to defined conventions, where personality was exercised in the sense of perfection; in the oral tradition, personality even disappears in favor of anonymity.
In contrast to the past, the current evolution of Western music can be increasingly summed up as a conflict between language and the individual, between collective means of communication and individual means of self-description, between expression and self-expression. This was reflected at the beginning of this century by the abolition of a general code in favor of one whose method was still generalizable, but whose results depended almost exclusively on individual choice. Even this method was quickly challenged, and the illusion of having found a new permanence of musical language quickly and definitively dissipated. Who today would dream of working towards a collective language and being enchanted by this utopia?
Some composers, however, accept the notion of organization, choice and selection. Language, however individual, is established according to a system of coordinates to which we refer in order to grasp the meaning of the work. But imagine that, under an ideological pretext, we decide that all phenomena, sound or not, cultural or not, are material, and that there is therefore no obligatory communication between language and material. By the mere fact that language eliminates or rejects its constraint, we accept at most an unfolding function. It's not easy to contest these starting points, postulates or professions of faith if we place ourselves precisely on the terrain of faith or poetic belief. However, we may wonder whether the specificity of musical expression does not invalidate such arbitrary decisions.
The relationship between language and object, between diagram and material, between concept and realization, cannot exist according to reductive, pre-existing norms; nor can it be eliminated by a simple "poetic" decision. This relationship does not exist in the absolute: a work without a final diagram is as unthinkable as one where everything can be deciphered in the initial diagram. Diagrams and catalogs must disappear in favor of more real notions, directly related both to the act of composing and to the very existence of the material envisaged.
The first constraint not to be forgotten is the implicit existence of a hierarchy. Not: a hierarchy of what's important and what's not; a hierarchy of recognition and contempt, of the noble and the non-noble. But: what is at the center, and what is at the periphery; what is decisive, and what is relative. Much of the validity of the possibilities of musical language coincides with the accuracy of the territory in which they lie. Closely correlated with hierarchy is the problem of coherence: material refers to structure; conversely, structure chooses its material.
Hierarchy and coherence refer to an inescapable question, whose banality conceals its difficulty: what is musical, and what is not?
The musical and the non-musical exist in their own right, but they only exist in the transient. Whatever precautions we take to ensure musical coherence, whatever indifference we may display towards this problem, whatever hostility we may even feel towards considering this phenomenon as a problem, the fact remains that a judgment on a work will always imply a value judgment on something that is not a value.
P. B.