François - Improvisation, Orality and Writing Revisited

Improvisation, Orality, and Writing Revisited
Author(s): Jean-Charles Franois

Source: Perspectives of New Music, Vol. 53, No. 2 (Summer 2015), pp. 67-144
Published by: Perspectives of New Music
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.7757/persnewmusi.53.2.0067
Accessed: 15-10-2016 23:10 UTC
REFERENCES
Linked references are available on JSTOR for this article:
http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.7757/persnewmusi.53.2.0067?seq=1&cid=pdf-
reference#references_tab_contents
You may need to log in to JSTOR to access the linked references.
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted
digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about
JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at
http://about.jstor.org/terms
Perspectives of New Music is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to
Perspectives of New Music
This content downloaded from 130.64.11.153 on Sat, 15 Oct 2016 23:10:06 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
IMPROVISATION, ORALITY, AND
WRITING REVISITED
JEAN-CHARLES FRANOIS
While written language may be used to exhort, and is performative in that

sense, more usually it is concerned with representation. Hence the
written sciences represent in a way that those in an oral culture do not.
They are further removed from the action. It is that very distance that
makes the written word good to think in a special way.
Jack Goody1
INTRODUCTION
could be spelled out in the following man-

T HE THESIS OF THIS ESSAY
ner: the world of electronic media has put on center stage oral
cultures or immediate communication; writing, the elaboration of
unheard universes, the results of reflexive rational speculation thus
seems to be put in question.
But the new practices, developed thanks to these media, are even
stranger, since the seemingly immediate is mediated and the orality is
completely written.
68 Perspectives of New Music
The concept of orality was invented by the civilization of writing.

Writing is that which separates the terms, opens the gaps in
temporality, manifests the absent voice, speaking from far distances, in
differed times.
All cultural entities are hybrid, encompassing both differed time and
performance in the present.2 The influence of bookish writing is
considerable throughout the world, but the circumstantial anonymous
tactics, proceeding one move at a time according to situations, remain
the everyday practices common to all human beings.3
In traditions, which are reputed oral, the voice is dissimulated, the
shaman does not speak in her own name, but, through her, the spirit is
heard. The voice of the officiating priest speaks in the name of
someone else. Roland Barthes, in his commentary on the Russian bass
singer, expresses this fundamental idea:
This voice is not personal: it does not express anything from the
cantor, from his soul: it is not an original voice. . . . Most impor-
tant this voice transports directly elements of the symbolic
domain, over and above the intelligible, the expressive. . . . The
grain would be this: the materiality of the body speaking in its
mother tongue; maybe the letter; almost certainly its significance.4
In our own written tradition, what needs to be dissimulated is the

noted matter on the score. The performer, who plays only the notes, is
discredited: he/she is too schoolish, respecting too much the letter of
the text, in a word not a musician. One has to go beyond the notes in
orderhere againto access significance. The notation, considered
as indication, a piece of evidence in the fundamental contract that
separates the roles of production between composer and performer,
leaves to the latter the task of producing the timbre and the
transcendental nature of the work in a simulacrum of improvisation.5
What is at issue with the electronic technologies? Dissimulated in all
their manifestations (images, sounds, notations, . . .) is the sense they
might convey, the signification which has to be constantly explained in
terms of particular contexts or domains, if one is not to be manipu-
lated by their magical spells, or to be excluded from the group from
which they originate. Writing becomes unreadable, an infinite series of
numbers, of binary combinations, of curves without flaw, of machine
languages; it becomes impossible to decipher it in an immediate
manner (in the way we can painlessly decipher our alphabet or system
of musical notation). The complex totality of the diverse expressions of
the electronic media becomes very difficult to represent with simple
Improvisation, Orality, and Writing Revisited 69
signs. One has the choice between showing a very incomplete picture
(and therefore in a biased manner) or using a plethora of information,
which would decompose the objects into as many parts as necessary.
The tools producing written matter are themselves indeterminate as to
their use (computer, microphone, algorithms), the same information
can be transformed to produce a great diversity of possible outputs
(sounds, images, texts, . . .), and each particular production can in turn
engender a great number of different perceptions. This fact renders the
model of an harmonious chain of information going from producer to
receptor, guaranteeing the integrity of what is to be conveyed,
obsolete: who is speaking, in whose name, what is the nature of the
multiple mediations, who is the one receiving the messages, what are
the conditions of reception? All these questions focus our reflection on
the structural instability of the global electronic world and on the
questioning of the hierarchies that were, up to now, the structural
features of our thinking. Is todays world an ocean of conformity,
many people manipulated by the greyness of media, or is it the
occasion for everyone to construct their own creative practices?
What is the nature of the new contract between the participants in
the art world proposed by these technologies? Is it a new, specific form
of hybridization of orality and writing which would redistribute in a
radical manner the data and the cards?
In this text, a certain number of notions concerning timbre in
relation to a diversity of supports (notation, recording, electronic
sound synthesis, performers education) are taken up again from
research papers published during the 1980s and 90s, and included in
my doctoral thesis on the Creative Instrumentalist (Paris VIII Uni-
versity, 1994).6 It appeared to me interesting to confront the notions
that I developed with the enquiry led by the sociologist of sciences
Bruno Latour on the modes of existence in connection with the
question of modernity faced with the ecological uncertainties of the
world.7 Bruno Latour is careful to place the arts in a different mode of
existence having its own procedures for accessing to a particular
conception of truth. But the question of modernity, faced with the
electronic world and the globalization of media, remains for me the
major enigma of our time.
Recent texts of mine are mostly concerned with the question of
musical improvisation, a context in which the instrumentalist or
vocalist becomes a full-fledged creator of timbres.8 It seems to me
essential today to reaffirm the important role played by practical
processes in what we could qualify as the artisanal fabrication of
sounds. Musicological research has started to be interested in practical
aspects, here and there practitioners voices begin to be heard, but

there is still a great distance to cover in order to get away from the
logic pertaining to achieved works of art, in order to turn our attention
to all the mediations that precede their existence, not to mention all
the numerous sound performances that do not claim to be recognized
as works in the modern sense of the term.
PART I. TIMBRE AND ITS REPRESENTATION
ATTEMPT AT DEFINING TIMBRE
How can we define timbre? What is at stake in this definition? In this

section, I will start by repeating the conclusions of my paper published
in Perspectives of New Music in 1991, Organization of Scattered
Timbral Qualities: A Look at Edgard Varses Ionisation, which can
be found also in its French version in my book Percussion et musique
contemporaine.
The Western system of notation tends to orient the conceptions of
its users towards the notions of separated parameters. The parameters
that can be precisely measured (pitch and duration) assume together
the principal role for determining musical works. Another parameter,
loudness, can be easily accounted for by using comparative perceptions
(louder than or softer than) ranging over a much smaller scale of
elements (pppp to ffff ). As to everything unaccounted for, it is conven-
ient to classify it under the parameter of timbre, using a negative
definition: the distinctive character of a musical sound or voice apart
from its pitch and intensity (Concise Oxford Dictionary). If two
sounds have the same pitch, the same duration, and the same intensity,
and they are still different to our ears, we say that they differ in terms
of timbre. Several notational elements can be included in this negative
definition: signs used for accentuations, articulations, ties, subjective
indications, specific effects, etc. Each of these signs could be thought
as another singular parameter, but our tendency is not to go into too
great a complexity of definitions. Consequently in the score timbre is
mainly represented on the separated staves, each accounting for a
single instrument (or group of same instruments). Clearly the
parameter of timbre is not precise, its notation does not seem of
primary importance, timbre has to be found outside the realm of the
score: that is, principally in the actions of the performer.
Analyzing timbre in a precise way only results in measurements of
pitch (frequencies, partials, registers), loudness (envelopes, attacks), or
durations (the duration affects the perception of differences in timbre).
All these measurements have no sense if they are not inscribed into their
dynamic evolution in time, and if we ignore the fact that they interact
with each other constantly to produce a given sensation of timbre.
In the Western artistic tradition, the system of musical notation
functions by putting the emphasis on pitch and duration, and to a
lesser extent on loudness, leaving timbre as an element of secondary
importance. The complex nature of timbre in this situation has to be
completely controlled mostly outside the written score. At the moment
when notation becomes almost exclusively prescriptive, a parallel phe-
nomenon of standardization of musical instruments takes place;
whereas, before that, their fabrication was very diversified precisely in
order to produce a great variety of timbre situations. No harpsichord
would sound like another. The piano, which was to assume an
increasingly important role in musical practice, from its creation to the
present day, tends to produce on the contrary the same sound all over
the world. This standardization process was directed towards a more
efficient way of projecting sounds in large concert halls, and towards
an equalization of the loudness levels within the symphony orchestra.
The art of timbre became essentially the art of combining instruments
(orchestration), the displaying of the individual characteristics of a
particular instrument a secondary preoccupation.9 Placed fairly far away
from the sound source, the ears of the audience only perceive an
overall conception of the instruments, and the necessity to project
sounds to a certain level is at the expense of very subtle sound
qualities. This does not mean that differentiations in sounds were not
present anymore to ensure expressivity, but only that the subtle
mixtures of instruments would take over, for the most part, the role of
coloring the sonority. Electric amplification would completely change
this situation by bringing forth the smallest sound particles to the
foreground: instruments and voices projecting naturally in the large
space of the modern concert hall are perceived by the ears of the
audience (placed far apart from the source) as general discrete sound
objects whose main perceivable characteristics play in favor of pitch
perception. The subtle aspects of sound, small differentiations and
noise components are perceived only if the ear is placed very near the
sound source. Amplification through loudspeakers allows sound
projection in large space as if the ear was placed very near the source,
having access now to these subtle differentiations. If the instruments or
voices are amplified, they no longer need to produce the standardized
techniques of sound production allowing proper natural projection in a
large acoustical space, and they can now concentrate on other aspects
of sound production. However, amplification creates other kinds of
problems because it tends to equalize all the sound sources and erase
in this way identification of their location in space.
When considering sound production concepts still dominant today,
it is important to note the creation at the end of the eighteenth
century of conservatories, which became more and more efficient at
forming instrumentalists capable of producing a homogeneity of sound
in all registers, a discipline aiming to establish extremely precise
instrumental sounds that would ensure orchestral unity. Last important
point concerning the rationalization of timbre: the equal-tempered
tuning system was adopted and continued to dictate its law in the
design of many instruments, including more recently the electronic
ones that one can easily access in the market place. This way of
tempering the scale into equal semi-tones has formatted our ears in
ways that are difficult to escape.
The American composer Robert Erickson (191797) addressed the
issues of timbre in a book that was remarkable for its era, Sound
Structures in Music.10 He was one of the first to be interested in timbre
as a researcher as well as musician. Erickson was an instrument builder,
a musical erudite, and he was very well informed concerning the most
advanced research in psychoacoustics of the time. He also collaborated
with performers in order to develop his reflection and to determine the
nature of some specific works (notably with the trumpet player Edwin
Harkins for Kryl, and the percussionist Ron George for Percussion
Loops). Attempting to define the notion of timbre, Robert Erickson
cautioned against any simplification of sound phenomena through
scientific methods, notably the ones used at the time for the computer
synthesis of musical instruments. For him, Clearly timbre is a multi-
dimensional stimulus: it cannot be correlated with any single physical
dimension.11 The titles of the chapters give an idea of the complexity
of defining timbre in the perspective of musical production: Pitch
(notably the issue of how we perceive timbre in channeling pitch lines,
resisting fusion, pages 1857); Timbre and Time (attacks, spectral
glides, grain, reverberation, pages 5893); Drones (pages 94105);
Klangfarben and Linear Organization (pages 106138); and
Timbre in Texture (pages 139193).
In fact, the notion of timbre does not belong to the domain of
parameters that would allow us to discriminate between a clarinet and
a flute. Timbre is rather what characterizes sound in its globality, its
great complexity. Timbre is affected when the parameters of pitch,
loudness, and duration are modified. Timbre is affected by the constant
dynamism of the parameters, the evolution of the spectrum, the evo-
lution of the intensity over time in a given envelope. Timbre is affected
by the relative harshness or softness of the attacks. Timbre is affected

by small modulations (for example vibrato) and by instabilities how-
ever small that occur while holding a sound. It is affected by the
indispensable presence of noise (breathing, bow on a string, impact
noises), without which it seems disincarnated. In a way, the irreducible
existence of timbre is independent of its representation and remains
impossible to master completely through notation. This enigmatic
entity can only be grasped within a temporality, which passes without
leaving definitive traces.
To take an example of a parametric mode of operation in organizing
sound in which the timbre dimension poses many problems, it might
be interesting to analyze John Cages Variations II. In this piece, the
performer is instructed to throw transparent sheets, with one dot or
one line inscribed on them, on a plane surface (for example, a sheet of
paper) in order to determine by these chance operations six lines and a
single dot. The lines represent six parameters: (1) frequency, (2)
amplitude, (3) timbre, (4) duration, (5) point of occurrence in an
established period of time, and (6) structure of event (number of
sounds making up an aggregate or constellation).12 The dot
represents a sound event and each of its parameters is measured
precisely in function of the six lines. In connection with the five
parameters other than timbre, the task of the performer does not
present any problem, measuring pitch will be inscribed according to
the range of the instrument or voice, the loudness will vary from the
softest possible to the loudest, etc. The performer is in a situation in
which chance dictates the impossibility to interpret, or indicates that
any interpretation (cheating on measuring the dot from the corre-
sponding line?) has no importance, since nobody will be able to verify
the truthfulness of the determining process. The performer is here
reduced either to the role of even more servile puppet than in the case
of normal scores, or to being obliged to assume the role of a cynical
criminal. In realizing the five parameters other than timbre of
Variations II, the performer will learn nothing more than what she/he
already knows. The action of throwing the transparent sheets and of
measuring the results will give the performer the impression of being
much more active than just reading a score written in the usual
manner, but it is certainly not the case, and, on the contrary, the
extreme passivity of the performer is the necessary condition to ensure
the complete arbitrariness of the order and nature of the sound events,
their disconnection, and their autonomous existence as pure sound.
The only parameter that creates a real problem is the one concerning
timbre because it cannot be reduced to linearity. What will be the
meaning of the measurements taken for each successive dot deter-

mining the timbre line? Here, suddenly everything needs to be in-
vented in relation to the context of the performer realizing the piece
and to his/her relative willingness to visit yet unknown territories. Is it
a question of measuring a scale from dark to clear? Or of defining a
collection of non-linear sound effects and classifying them in one way
or another along an axis corresponding to the distance between the
timbre line and the maximum distance on the given plane surface, in
between which a dot will be inscribed through the random method
indicated by the composer? Is it a question of classifying timbres on a
scale between the most normal sound production on the instrument
and sounds produced outside the instrument and going through a
range of sound production less and less acceptable in music schools?
Or is it a question of determining a scale of attacks from soft to hard?
Or a scale of duration as it influences timbre (the duration as para-
meter 4 being applied to the totality of the sound event grouping the
number of sounds determined by parameter 6)? Is it a question of de-
termining a scale between straight sounds (with no elements disturbing
the continuity of the held sound) and sounds that are more and more
modulated (vibrato, trills, tremolos, glissando, etc.)? Or could one
determine a scale ranging from the purest sound (a spectrum strongly
centered on the fundamental at the expense of other harmonic partials)
to the most complex one (noisy production with inharmonic partials)?
Is it question of determining for a particular event the aggregating of
several pitches forming a timbre (a single pitch, two consonant pitches,
two dissonant pitches, etc.)? The necessity for the performer to invent
the timbre realm gives the piece its major interest. But it is not the
only interesting aspect created by the timbre line: the performer has
also to solve the problem, for each sound event, of possible
contradictions between the determination of the timbre and the
determinations concerning the other parameters. For example, how to
make a very high pitch dark, how to render complex a very soft
sound, how to determine the pitch if the timbre drawing decided on
objects from everyday life, how to determine duration if duration is
inherent to timbre? The performer of Variations II becomes an
inventor, an actor of her/his production, only in the presence of the
third line of timbre, precisely because timbre is not a parameter, but
effectively the totality of the sound.
The musicologist Makis Solomos, in his recent book De la musique
au son, provides a very good history of the term timbre and of its
applications in European high art. After mentioning how the mapping
of timbre seems an impossible task, he puts in question the notion of
timbre in the following manner:
At this point in time, at the beginning of the twenty-first century,

the very notion of timbre seems questionable: we are moving
towards of the dissolution of the concept. Indeed if, according to
the classical definition, it designs the sound qualitypitch, dura-
tion, intensity, spatial position, etc. are all aspects which refer to
quantitieswe can ask ourselves if it is necessary to have a specific
word and if it would not be preferable to use simply the term
sound. In fact, in everyday language, do we not use the word
sound when we speak of Xenakis, of Miles Davis, or of Harnon-
court in order to denote this famous sound quality?13
A little further in the text, he defines three criteria necessary for the
classical parametric definition of timbre to assume plainly its function:
1. Pitch inscribed in a duration, with a given loudness, should not

only be present but has to play a primary role in order to identify
timbre as a supplementary difference;
2. The sounds have to present a relative stability, the difference in

timbre only applies when comparing discrete sonorous events;
3. The sonorities must be already familiar to the ears of the

listeners.14
He continues his demonstration:
However, music works more and more with sounds that do not
correspond to any one of these three criteria: the new sounds can
be noisy (with no determined pitch), they can evolve considerably
in time and, above all, they are not pre-determined. In electro-
acoustic music, in popular music, to a great extent, the sounds
have to be discovered by the audience. We are no longer con-
fronted with clearly circumscribed objects, of which the causality is
clearsome timbresbut with the dynamic process which con-
stitutes sound in general, not only a complex process, but also a
heterogeneous one, irreducible to a certain number of precise
physical (or perceptual) characteristics. . . . To sum up, the use of
the word timbre is less pertinent than the general term of
sound.15
With this idea of a totality of timbre found in the notion of sound

implying a diversification of the modes of perception, Solomos writes
in accordance with Daniel Charles, who noted in Le temps de la voix,

following Bateson, that dolphins have a voice, but no face.16 Dolphins,
continually moving through the oceans, do not have recourse to
paralinguistic structures such as general attitude or body language,
which are so important for humans as a means of coloring communi-
cation to enhance meaning. For Charles, the notion of Klangfarben-
melodie, inaugurated by Schoenberg, is a way of rehabilitating sound
in itself,17 compared to the way Western music strongly assumes that
musical meaning depends strictly on the stable consistency of timbre in
the structuration of sound relationships. The practice of such music is
completely centered towards the manifestation of this meaning,
notably at the level of the performer who plays the role of token
representative. Daniel Charles proposes then to proceed from sound to
timbre, implying that one can envision a diversity of practices of its
production. Timbre is no longer the secondary support of pitch
changes and completely topples the very conditions of perception.
Perception then becomes plural and pluralistic.18
For Solomos, sound is the global matter, but in this process, when
sound is not materialized in the characteristics of the Moderns notation
(organized in parameters), it is irreducible, it flows through the
presence of waves moving in the air. We could object that this presence
needs indeed to be materialized through mediations which allow us to
say that this sound by Xenakis has nothing to do with the materials
(instruments, technologies) used by Miles Davis or Harnoncourt, and
even less to do with the ways of using this material, with the social
conditions of its elaboration, with the acoustic conditions of its
diffusion and with the ones concerning its relations to the public. Even
then, it would be necessary to know which Xenakis we are talking
about, among all the diversity of supports he used (or which Miles
Davis, or Harnoncourt) in terms of practical process for achieving the
sound.
NOTATION AND MODERNITY
The specific problems of timbre production in contemporary

practices cannot be separated historically from the influence that
musical notation has played in the development of Western art forms.
Therefore, before taking up the specific question of timbre production
today, it seems necessary to evoke, through precise references, the
history of notation and its link to modernity. Concerning the act of
writing, Michel de Certeau speaks of a modern mythical practice.19
The term of myth here means for him what symbolically regroups
heterogeneous practices in a given society. For him, this modern myth
is based on the conception that progress is of a scriptural type,
whereas the opposite of writing, orality, is what does not work
towards progress. It is therefore not by chance that musical notation
has been able to play a major role in the historical development of
artistic modernity, notably in its capacity to channel practices and to
control the sound production in a singular manner. The persistence of
a floating uncertainty on the question of timbre seems to me to be
linked to these problems of its representation on other types of
support, which play the role of substitutes of its direct production.
The musical notation system we are using today developed over a
period of long maturation that followed the history of representation
in Western art. Its stabilization stage (eighteenth century?) corresponds
to the emergence from the act of performance, of the composer as
autonomous figure whose principal activity was more and more
directed to writing scores addressed to a specified public, and to be
performed by musicians who respect what is written. The musical
work, the composition, is identified with the written score. The score,
or its equivalent, the musical work, needs to be closely associated with
the presence of the institution of the concert, implying trained
performers and a public willing to listen to it silently in an appropriate
acoustical space. The concept of the autonomy of art, in relation to all
social or worldly aspects, is the direct result of the canonization of the
score as an object embodying an opus and an author.
Even if the exact date of the onset of Western modernity is difficult
to establish, one can say that this notation system is well suited to the
premises of modern thought. Max Weber considers the development
of the musical notation system as particularly important for the
evolution of Western thought:
If one considers the specific conditions of the musical evolution of

the West, one has to include above all others the invention of our
modern notation system. . . . A somewhat complicated modern
musical work would, without the resources of our musical nota-
tion, neither be able to be produced nor transmitted: without this
notation, it absolutely cannot exist in any place, or in any possible
manner, not even as the internal property of its creator.20
For Weber, one of the decisive stages in the development of the

musical notation system can be observed in the twelfth century with
measured notation, the precise indication of the durations. This
development is linked to the onset of polyphonic practices in which

several voices sing independent melodic lines, creating the necessity to
control harmonically all the meeting points along the way. What
dictates (this process of precision) (the necessity for great precision in
time notation) is pitch, since the different melodies have to be syn-
chronized according to the articulation of consonant meeting points,
and eventually the application of special rules concerning the treatment
of dissonances. As noted by Christopher Page in a chapter on
Polyphony before 1400, performance practices concerning this type
of music were centered to a great extent on the intonation of simul-
taneous vocal sounds, with a hierarchy between perfect and imperfect
consonances.21 This infers almost certainly a great stability in the vocal
production of each note, a complete control over timbre inflections by
individual singers. The timbre production thus depended for the most
part on the just intonation of the perfect consonances, and the less
precise ways of producing the imperfect ones:
Throughout the period covered by this chapter composers

explored the contrast between perfect consonances and imperfect
ones with unflagging excitement; the stillness of the fifths, octaves
and twelfths, and the almost fierce beauty of imperfect conso-
nances which could be widened . . . to the point where they
became disturbing dissonancesthese were the raw materials of
composition for musicians of the Ars Antiqua and Ars Nova. For
performers, fidelity to this counterbalance of intervals was the first
task, and from infancy their ears were trained to catch subtle dif-
ferences of pitch.22
For the same author, the use of one single singer per part in a
polyphony allowed an extreme precision in focusing on the pitch
center, and any discrepancy with this very controlled way of producing
a vocal sound would be treated as a mere ornament:
The same may be said for vibrato, a more or less rapid fluctuation
of pitch; although vibrato appears to have been employed as an
ornament in the two-part organum of the Parisian tradition, it is a
studied inaccuracy of tuning, and it is inconceivable that medieval
performers used it as anything more than an ornament.23
Already at this point of history determined by Max Weber as crucial

for modern notation, the realm of composition is in measuring pitches
over time. Timbre is mostly determined by performance practice, with
the performers main task being to concentrate on clear, uniform, and

precise pitch production over time, proper to a religious context. How-
ever, as noted by Weber, no strict separation existed between written
composition and actual performance, as the practice of improvising on
a cantus firmus was for a long time a current occurrence.
The written musical work, fully identified as an object produced by a
composer, can only be manifest when there is a clear separation
between creative production and execution, between composer and
performer. This does not seem to be fully the case before the second
part of the eighteenth century. Even then, the performers still had
intimate knowledge of the significance of the contemporary written
scores in terms of style, phrasing, and sound quality. They could easily
infer in their practice what the score did not prescribe. It is only after
the mid-nineteenth century that this separation between composer and
performer took on a new meaning as concerts increasingly mingled
scores of dead composers with contemporary ones, creating gaps
between current practices and historical and technological conditions
of production, between performing traditions and composers inno-
vations. And it is really only by the mid-twentieth century, that this
separation becomes fully accomplished, as the musical significance of a
given score becomes embedded in itself, each composer claiming
his/her own technique or even language, each score claiming its own
unique and differentiating structure.
In this context, the musical work assumes an independent status in
relation to its author, it exists in time after the disappearance of this
person, and it is continuously reinterpreted each time it is played. This
autonomy of the score and its duration in historical time puts an onus
on the composers who follow not to write the same thing, it carries in
itself the prohibition of plagiarism, and implies the necessity for
continuous evolution (modernization). It also founds the logics of
avant-garde, of musical innovations breaking with tradition, with yester-
days inventions and with the forms transmitted by ancient masters.
With its economy of means, this system of notation, elaborated
according to principles closely related to alphabetic writing, has the
admirable capacity of making it possible to sight-read written signs and
to transform them immediately into appropriate sonorities by musicians
having developed the necessary automatisms for this translation, and at
the same time of opening to the reader, as with any text, the possibility
of interpretation. The distance between the notations in relation to the
actual sonorities allows the expression of a diversity of styles through the
use of a unique, universally recognized medium. This distance allows
the composers and the musicologists to reflect on musical practices and
in so doing to gain a certain independence from tradition.
On the one hand, Western musical notation has been designed to be

distinct from tablaturea series of signs corresponding to actions
produced on the instrumentso as to ensure the structural possi-
bility of representing syntactical elements based on pitch combina-
toriality (based on discrete pitches forming scales) and on a regular
time fragmentation into very precise durations. The tablature type of
notation would not allow the development of a system that could be
read in the same way by all musicians, independently of the actions to
be realized on a particular instrument or with the voice, or with any
kind of sound devices which might be invented in the future. There-
fore one is in presence of a system that has the ambition to be universal
and, like alphabetic writing, to remain neutral vis--vis the infinite uses
that one could make of it. However, the injunction to perform an
action in a given moment when the sign meets the musicians eye
remains an essential element of the system, effectively a sign on paper
corresponds to something to be done at a certain time.
On the other hand one can notice the exact correspondence between
the way Western keyboard instruments are built and the organization
of the space in the staff in the score: white keys = naturals; black keys =
sharps or flats; translation of the horizontal layout of the keyboard into
the vertical space of the score allowing for the automatic reading-plus-
action from low (towards the left side of the keyboard corresponding
to towards the lower part of the staff) to high (towards the right side
of the keyboard corresponding to towards the higher part of the staff).
This notational system does not represent the complex reality of
sonorities, far from it. Contrary to the media developed during the
twentieth century allowing sound recording, which restores the totality
of sound and provides access to an indisputable reference for the ears,
Western music notation leaves a great role to interpretation in its
translation into real sounds. It implies therefore the parallel presence
of performing musicians capable of not only deciphering the signs but
above all able to translate them into appropriate sonorities on instru-
ments that are designed so as to correctly produce these sonorities.
Yet, this notation is grounded on the representation of sound param-
eters, which can be precisely measured both by devices (tuning forks,
metronome, for example) and by the skilled ears of the participants:
notably pitch and duration. As soon as there is the intent to visually
represent the totality of a given sound, one rapidly reaches the limits of
readability through the accumulation of signs describing actions,
through the accumulation of explicative texts, or by selecting a type of
totalizing writing impossible to decipher in an immediate manner (the
visual representation of the actual sound wave for example).
This imprecise manner of representing sounds and actions on paper,

which is nevertheless very precise on certain essential aspects of sound,
makes for a very powerful system and ensure its durability in spite of all
the attempts to change it or to find other alternatives to it. 24 The
precise aspects guarantee the identification of the work each time it is
played, and the imprecision leaves a space for freedom of interpretation
which detaches the work from its author and allows for its survival over
historical time, thanks to the renewal of its interpretation as techno-
logical and cultural changes affect society.
CARTOGRAPHY
Bruno Latour, in his project on the anthropology of the Moderns

(Enqute sur les modes dexistence), used the practical example of
mountain hiking, precisely around the Mont Aiguille in the French
Vercors, in order to question the relations of Science with rationality,
irrationality, and the materiality of objects and practices. His line of
thought is centered on the play between two elements: the topo-
graphical map representing the Mont Aiguille and the Mont Aiguille as
such. In between these two elements evolves the hiker as he/she
completes the hike. The stabilization of the hikers practice depends on
a series of mediations which have to do with the immense work
realized in producing the topographical map over many years in a
particular historical configuration, and the numerous landmarks pre-
sent on the ground (traces of paths, signposts, cairns, . . .) that artic-
ulate a different historical timeframe. Another mediation, which allows
the mountain hike to take place, has to do with the use of certain
objects geared to make it a success (hiking shoes, backpack, compass,
GPS, . . .) and other documentations (tourist guides, historical infor-
mation, . . .). The Mont Aiguille itself proposes, in the persistence of
its existence, a completely different time scale and thus affirms its
autonomy. Finally, the atmospheric conditions in which the hike takes
place render dynamically more complex the hikers sense of orientation
in an immediate and continuously changing temporality. For Latour,
and this is one of the essential points of his demonstration, the
problem of the Moderns concerns the fact that they consider that all
these scattered elements, articulating a diversity of temporalities,
constitute a united whole, a unique form, a single timeframe, notably
by thinking that the equivalence of the map and the mount conforms
to the way the map is structured, and by forgetting the realities of the
mount itself:
But this does not explain the efficiency of my map, for the Mont
Aiguille, as such, continues not to be two-dimensional, cannot be
folded in order to be carried in my pocket, does not seem to be
marked with contour lines and, in fact, today, as it disappears in
the clouds, it does not at all have the aspect of a small pile of cali-
brated squiggles, marked in black slanted letters, size 15, mont
Aiguille, which can be found on my map. How can the map and
the territory be superposed? It is sufficient to carry on as if the
Mont Aiguille itself, in its foundation, in its profound nature, was
itself also constructed in geometric forms. Hence, everything can be
at once explained: the map resembles the territory because the ter-
ritory is fundamentally already a map!25
Latour notes the discrepancy that exists with the Moderns, between
experience and its representation. With them, experience can be taken
into account only if it is broken down into so many elements capable of
being represented or rationalized in unquestionable facts, while the
global complexity of experience, made of multiple dynamically inter-
active mediations, is given but little consideration. Under the formula of
common sense, with its simplistic overtones, even if not considered as
bluntly empty-headed, experience belongs to the oral world of pre-
modernity, with its beliefs, its superstitions and implicit practices.
Can we then compare this line of thought with what is induced by the
musical notation of the Moderns? In this context also, the mediations
and the temporal specificities tend to be erased in favor of automatized
well-functioning mechanisms. However we encounter a particular dif-
ficulty when comparing the existence of the Mont Aiguille and its paths.
It is easy to consider that the musical score plays exactly the same role as
the topographical map, in its formalized representation concentrated on
a few essential concepts and leaving out most of what constitutes the
complete physical reality. The equivalence of the fixity of the mountain
is more difficult to establish in the musical context. One would be rather
in presence of a greater diversity of dynamic mediations among which
the musical instrument would be the most stable element, but in which
the essential element of the landscape, the sound, escapes in space in
an evanescent and unstable way.
It is difficult to envision that the foundation of music, in its pro-
found nature, could correspond to its representation on paper, since
the score is nothing without its transformation into sounds designed to
excite the ears of listeners. Only the sounds really matter, and the
musical work does not exist if one does not actually listen to it, hear it.
However, when musical notation changes its status of simple docu-
mentation of performance (as an aid to memory for example), to
become principally a prescriptive medium for actions to be realized in

performance, it becomes the incarnation of the works reality outside
the experience of the actual sonorities. The score is deposited in order
to guarantee authors rights or copyright, it allows an access to the way
of thinking and to the musical structures of absent composers, dead or
far away, it is the proof of the autonomous existence of the work in
history, in spite of the diverse interpretations it might generate. Above
all, the notation, which prescribes actions, syntactical patterns, and
forms, dictates the nature of all other mediations. What is precisely
notated, the contour of the pitches and their distribution in time,
constitutes the inescapable basis of perception and dictates in this way,
progressively, modes of perception impossible to circumvent. The
concepts of melody, of harmony, of polyphony (etc.)all cen-
tered on the ordering of pitch over (synchronic or diachronic) time
become, in forms of complexity specific to what notation allows, the
pillars of the relations signs/sounds for all users.
In the processes linked to the colonialist recuperation of traditional
music of the world by the Western world, in its high art version as well
as in its commercial applications, what is striking is the way melody is
adapted to the conformity of the notation system, the imposition of
the equal temperament tuning, the control over the transitory
phenomena and over any particular inflections (their eventual complete
suppression), the harmonization according to rules imposed by the
dominant culture, and the re-orchestration with standardized instru-
ments. All these adaptations constitute the technical form of socio-
centered re-appropriation based on the idea of civilizational progress.
The Western notation and its accompanying practices impose on the
whole world a particular manner of perceiving sound successions and
aggregates. The phenomenon of reification, especially present in com-
mercial music, which has been strongly denounced by European
modernists, is thus embedded in the system of notation they relied
upon, and when this system is combined with the powerful media of
the electronic era, this phenomenon reaches its maximum strength.
Music produced by notation indeed articulates ways of listening
based on the identification of already well-known sound patterns
learned in the past, allowing the prediction of possible events in the
future, and the eventual accomplishment of this prediction, or of an
unexpected surprise negating the prediction. The listener is able to
follow the narration line of the music with pleasure if there is a good
mix of familiar ground and surprising detours. A music devoid of
surprise will be boring for the listeners, a music based on too many
divergent events will not make sense for them, unless there is the
opportunity to assimilate the new syntax by repeated listening.26 One

could object that the structuration of pitch successions (melody) is
present in many musical traditions and is not specific to written music
of the Western world. But the strength of the system of notation is
centered on the possibility for the composer facing the blank page to
organize pitch in more or less complex configurations and to do this
according to his/her own way or style in complete freedom. 27 The
emphasis on a narrative content, and the capacity of a structured pre-
planning of the events create the quasi-automatic connection between
notated music and the syntactical design of quasi-languages. The
rationality embedded in the Western notation system, with its ten-
dency to tilt the stakes towards syntactical narratives and imaginative
structuration, along with the advent of the concepts of the finished
autonomous work of art, differentiated from any other work, of the
composers personal style, with the successions of personalized
languages and historical periods, all this constitutes the essential
nature of what can be considered as modern.
SONORITY OR SYNTAX
As soon as timbre in its somewhat savage instability affirms its auto-

nomous existence, thanks notably to technological progress or to new
scientific knowledge, musicians issued from modern thought think that
there is danger and quickly find ways for controlling it. Faced with the
possibility to store any sound through recording, faced with the possi-
bility to synthesize sounds through computer or electronic techno-
logies, faced with the extraordinary development during the past fifty
years of research in acoustics and psychoacoustics, it seems necessary
for them to invent new solfges or other modes of access equivalent
to the structuring power of notation on scores. In particular, the
measuring of timbre in terms of pitch (analysis of the spectrum)
becomes the favorite way for persisting in affirming the preeminence of
rational structures centered on pitch. The idea of grammar, of
language, of a succession of events making sense, relating meaning to
form, remains the dominant representation of contemporary music
thought, whether or not sound in itself becomes an object at the
center of the preoccupations of compositional structures.
In the case of a music based on syntactical complexity, the emphasis
is on the unity of relationships between discrete elements, which are
presented in succession in order to form a meaningful musical
discourse; the instable aspects of timbre have to be put on the side so
as to not interfere with this unity. In the case of a music that takes into
account the instability of timbre, the syntactical elements have, on the
contrary, to be reduced to simpler dimensions. The more the emphasis
is on syntax, the less timbre should hinder the perception of a narrative
flux; the more the emphasis on sound or timbre, the less syntax should
impose its major thread. Of course, one could consider that any music
has to be situated in between these two poles. We are again in presence
of the quarrel between Rousseau and Rameau on the subject of melody
versus harmony, apart from the fact that, for Rousseau, melody is on
the side of nature, and, for Rameau, harmony is designed as a means to
develop a language (or grammar) of affects.28 In music based on the
principle of a cycle, a same syntactical succession is infinitely repeated,
the interest of the listener is displaced towards the elements which are
oriented towards the timbre complexity, ornamentations, inflexions,
different manners of saying the same thing, instrumental or vocal
sleights of hand. In music based on phrases and the constant evo-
lution of elements, the ear functions on the pleasure of the ride: where
are we going? The ear anticipates what will follow and the under-
standing of the discourse will depend on the fact that this anticipation
is partly realized and partly denied in surprising elements, so as to
ensure the liveliness of the musical narrative.
Lets take an example: church chimes, which in older times served as
an important means of communicating information and continue to do
so today to a certain extent. When the church bells are tolling, the ear
is not attentive to the succession of pitches in time, it hears a sonorous
object, which can be perceived as tolling: Well, there are the
bells!29 In the case of the knell, the listener notices the slow
periodicity of the lower bell for a few seconds: Well, the knell! Then
the ear can concentrate on the timbre of the bell in itself, as the
syntactic level remains unchanged: Well, what an admirable bell! As
a chromatic set of bells starts to play a known melody or a melody
designed in a familiar way, the listeners attention goes towards the
acknowledgment of the melodic line, the sound of the bells becomes
only a secondary support of this melody: Well, I know that tune!30
Makis Solomos, at the end of his book De la musique au son, notes
this polarization of perception between sound and syntax:
Two moments of our history, representing in this matter opposite

poles, bear witness. The first one is centered on sound in order to
emphasize listening. The sound is often considered as matter, as
nature, and what is in question is to allow it to be freely deployed,
in order for us to (re)discover this faculty that music tends to
neglect: to learn to listen, to analyze the smallest details of a
sound, this is one of the direct accomplishments of this focusing

on sound. As for the other accomplishment, it resides in the
moment in which one talks of sound to designate constructed
entities, fabricated according to a compositional project: the musi-
cal work, in its totalityfrom micro- to macro-temporalityis in
this case completely articulated. What could be considered more
proper to art (of sounds) than on the one hand, listening, and on
the other, articulation?31
This quotation has to be understood in the context of two concerns

raised by Solomos: firstly, the presentation of a pure catalogue of
sounds may signal a complete degradation of the notion of art to a
mere everyday practice devoid of any real stakes, devoid of aesthetical
values or any high conceptions of creative production. Secondly, the
fixation of sounds in recording creates the possibility of reifying sound
into commodity objects, a phenomenon already noted a long time ago
by Adorno in his denunciation of the fetishist-character of music
stored in reproductive technology. We will come back to this issue in
the next section.
This rationalization of perception into two distinct categories
(syntactical pitch successions versus sound in itself), however, reaches
easily its limitations. Timbre or sound is never a crude element in itself,
it depends for its perception, on the one hand, on the context in which
it appears and, on the other hand, on syntactical elements that are
absolutely determinant for the constitution of timbrearticulations,
rhythms, patterns, motifs, accentuations, modulations, intensity envel-
opes. These two conditions of perception dictate the fact that, no
matter what, sounds are always perceived in comparison with other
sounds. Syntactical pitch successions become a sound object as soon as
the ear is no longer able to follow the elements of discourse in order to
anticipate what might follow. For example, the use of twelve-tone
series, organizing for each instance a particular set of pitch relationships,
will be perceived as general timbre (one could say in this case as grey
timbre!) until the ear, through the repetition of the work, becomes
adapted to the conditions of the new syntax. It is impossible under
these conditions to confine oneself to a unique way of perceiving either
pitch relationships or, alternatively, the totality of timbre in their
inscription in time. The separation of musical perception into two
realmsdiscursive pitch successions or differentiation of sound colors
remains pertinent only in very general terms.
THE CONCEPT OF NOTE
What is noted on a score, the pitch contours and their distribution

in time, is considered as the inescapable basis of perception and
dictates perception modes that are very difficult to modify. The organi-
zation of space in an ordinance survey map, the sinuosity of the paths,
of the rivers, of the lines, of the limits or borders (elaborated in a topo-
graphical space), together with the contour lines, impose on the users a
specific rationality propos of the space that surrounds them. The rest
remains secondary because of its anecdotic aspect: signs signaling
remarkable spots, monuments, houses, springs, etc.; colors are used to
indicate roads, vegetation, stretches of water, etc.; texts serve to name
places. These secondary signs represent elements that can change over
a relatively short time (they disappear and new elements appear), while
the space represented by the map remains immutable. In musical
scores, these signs correspond to accentuations, nuances, instrumental
indications and subjective texts; they remain imprecise compared to the
immutable space of the pitch and duration mapping.
Does the concept of note correspond to a reality of acoustical
perceptions as the primary unit of any music? This seems at first sight
an established fact without any doubt possible. The perception of the
human ear is attached to successions of small units of duration, which
do not exceed the length of a breath, and that are long enough for a
minimum of sound substance to be perceived. This minimum duration
of the note corresponds most of the time to the possibility of per-
ceiving a pitch. However, one can ask if the note written on paper has
not acquired a certain autonomy in the separation of the sign in
relation to what is represented? The written note of Western art music,
in order to be notational, as is required by Nelson Goodman,32 and to
have thus the right to represent the work in historical time, must
necessarily possess a certain stability and a non-ambiguous character.
Each time the note is repeated, it has to correspond to the same
sonority. Each note has to be distinct from other notes according to
principles of clarity and stability. In this tradition, its principal role is to
represent a precise fixed pitch, which determines in practice the exact
notion of tuning accuracy, increasingly controlled by scientific tools.
The values of false and of just do not suffer any middle relative
ground, even if, in reality, relativism in tuning is often unavoidable.
The concept of the written note on a score seems particularly well
adapted to keyboard instruments, which became the dominant instru-
mental model of Western art-musical practices. What is important is
the indication of the triggering of the note, and what comes after this
attack is left unspecified as resonance. The ideal of keyboard instru-

ments lies in the fact that they can offer a homogeneous sonority over
the complete range of their pitch scale, over several octaves. This ideal
is reproduced in the way other instruments are used: those which have
the capability to sustain sound after the attack (strings, winds) will
tend to produce homogeneity in both the complete tessitura and in the
standardized stability of their envelope. Modifications can be intro-
duced in the sustaining of the sound after the attack, but in general
they consist in linear or regular evolutions (crescendo, decrescendo,
regular and not too exaggerated vibrato, legato between the notes).
The composers who, since the 1950s, have tried to move away from
this ideal by developing an interest in what is occurring inside the
duration of a note, have been obliged to invent means of repre-
sentation which could not fit into the notation system centered on the
note. The musicians who have been trained to read it and to perform
instantaneously the corresponding sound, have a tacit conception of
the note: the note does not exist outside the representation of a fixed
sound, which, apart from its specification of pitch, duration, and
intensity, does not evolve during the time of its realization.
The note becomes the sacred object to which the musicians in
training have to be confronted from the very first minute of music-
making. The sense that a given note might make when related to other
notes seems to be much less important than the necessity to recognize
it by viewing and listening, to be able to sing it or to play it on an
instrument, singly (note by note) or in typical formulas of basic
exercises, embryonic music but not yet fully constituted.
This is the situationstrongly amplifiedof stagnation and inertia
denounced by the sociologist Howard Becker. The Western classical
musical institutions impose a packaging of which it is very difficult to
be rid, or even to make it evolve:
In short, a way of making music is what sociologists of science

have come to speak of, not very originally perhaps, but certainly
intelligibly, as a package. Each piece in the package presupposes
the existence of all the others. They are all connected in such a
way that, when you choose any one of them, you find it enor-
mously easy to take everything that comes with that choice, and
enormously difficult to try to make any substitutions. Its the
package that exerts the hegemony, that contains the inertial force,
if I can attribute agency to such a conceptual creation. . . . Part of
the concert music package is an associated set of educational
organizations. Professional training schools produce the players
who can do everything the other parts of the package require:

quick studies with virtuoso skills who can adapt to a variety of
conductors.33
In these conditions, musiciansand they are in great numberwho

for one reason or another do not work within the system of Beckers
package (music not based on the Western notational system, dif-
ferent tuning systems of instruments, different social organization of
music, hybrid relationships with other art domains) find it very
difficult, throughout the world, to be integrated in official institutions
of music education. Either they accept the rules that will profoundly
modify the very conditions of their artistic practice, or they will prefer
to stay outside institutions (or create their own separate institutions),
on the fringes of official music-making. The effective and reciprocal
encounter of practices that differentiate their timbre production through
other forms of agency, procedures, human relationships, instrument
design, or transmission methods happens in effect only too rarely in
our society, which is nevertheless well known for its capacity to
broadcast through electronic media an infinite number of musical
expressions from different historical and geographical spheres.
DETOUR THROUGH ELECTRONIC TECHNOLOGIES
Is there a threat, with electronic technologies linked to sound, of

manipulating people through a very powerful worldwide cultural
industry? What is really at stake? Two elements seem to play a major
role in the present controversies. On the one hand, the capacity to
reproduce in quasi-perfect identity the sounds stored in electronic
memories tends to fix timbre into stereotyped objects. On the other
hand, the stored sounds can be easily pirated in order to be recycled in
contexts that are completely different from those linked to the original
intents expressed at the moment of their first appearance.
Theodor W. Adornowho vigorously defended structural listening,
the kind that is able to establish relationships between the detail of the
sound production, the local grammar, with the entire form of the
piece, the global musical discoursetackled the tendency of technical
sound reproduction apparatus to reify musical patterns. In a very
prescient article at the time of its publication (1934), Die Form der
Schallplatte (The Form of the Phonograph Record), Adorno discusses
this object capable of producing soundthe phonograph recordable
to carry in itself any succession of sounds reproducing exactly the
timbres of the original instruments or voices.34 For the first time,

sounds are embodied in an object that anyone can take away and play
back at home. Music, a temporal evanescent art, becomes solidified in
the wax matter of the grooves of this flat surface, not much bigger
than a book. For Adorno, the phonograph record offers not much
more than the enigmatic aspect of the groove leading to the nothing-
ness of the label circle at the center: It is covered with curves, a
delicately scribbled, utterly illegible writing.35 This writing has little
to do with the one that allows musicians to make music. The very
notion of writing is here not evident, since if it were illegible, it would
have no purpose. Peter Szendy, quoting the same text by Adorno,
stresses that the grooves of the record no longer have ground for the
reason (in the sense that musical notation does have a purpose) of what
we hear.36 For him, as a machine language, this writing is too idio-
maticthat is, according to its etymology, too idiotic.37 However,
inspired by the practice of DJs, Szendy proposes the notion of
listening with the finger tips.38 For him, this practice is not a
reading, because the ear and not the eye governs most it. If the
grooves are neither writing nor a reading, they nevertheless induce new
practices that greatly modify the listening conditions, and by extension
the conditions of musical production. We should remember that the
more one tries to represent timbre in all its complex aspects, the more
the score will be charged with signs, to the point that it becomes less
and less readable. The representation of the sound wave, which is what
Adorno calls writing in the context of the phonograph record, is the
ultimate exact representation of timbre.
Lets note in passing that the ideal of listening in musical education
remains, in classical music studies, extremely centered on the percep-
tion of sound objects in which the recognition of pitch and duration is
far more important than that of sound colors, limited to recognizing
instruments or the style of works. In order for the school exercise to be
reasonably not too difficult to pass, sounds have to lose a lot of their
complexity. Is this education or manipulation of the ears?
To come back to Adornos argumentation, sound, in its embodiment
in the grooves of the phonograph record, becomes writing in itself:
Anyone who has ever recognized the steadily growing compulsion

that, at least during the last fifty years, both musical notation and
the configuration of the musical score have imposed on composi-
tions (the pejorative expression paper music betrays this drasti-
cally) will not be surprised if one day a reversal of the following
sort occurs: music, previously conveyed by writing, suddenly itself
turns into writing. This occurs at the price of its immediacy, yet
with the hope that, once fixed in this way, it will some day
become readable as the last remaining universal language since
the construction of the tower,39 a language whose determined
yet encrypted expressions are contained in each of its phrases.
If, however, notes were still the mere signs for music, then,
through the curves of the needle on the phonograph record,
music approaches decisively its true character as writing. Deci-
sively, because this writing can be recognized as true language to
the extent that it relinquishes its being as mere signs: inseparably
committed to the sound that inhabits this and no other acoustic
groove.40
Adorno is referring to Walter Benjamin, who raised, in The Origin of

German Tragic Drama, questions about the relationship between
music and language. And Benjamin himself is referring in this excerpt
to Wilhelm Ritter, a German physicist and chemist (17761810) who
experimented with Chladnis patterns, produced by distribution of
sand on vibrating membranes or plates. For Ritter, these patterns create
the possibility to envision a form of writing directly linked to sound
and not separated from its manifestation: Every sound pattern is an
electric pattern, and every electric pattern is a sound pattern.41 For
Walter Benjamin, the divination of Ritter opens the way to a series
of issues: the possibility to bring together orality and writing, to view
music as an archaic type of writing (after the Tower of Babel) that
would be antithetic to signifying language, and to consider that
language would develop from music rather than from speech.
Adorno seizes this idea of archaic writing equivalent to music itself,
in order to describe the writing on the grooves of the record as capable
of keeping in memory the ephemeral quality of the sounds, but does
not want to consider that it could become a support capable of
creating by itself works specially designed for it. He is not able to
anticipate, in 1934, future developments in tape music, and of course
in computer music with the technological dematerialization of sound.
For him, to go beyond the preservation of what is played live in
concert would be to fall into what he will denounce in the next article
he is going to write: the fetish-character of sound in commodity
objects and their control by the cultural industry.42 Nor can he
consider possible that this new kind of support could already be a
remarkable reference tool for oral practices, and notably for jazz
(already much influenced by written notations on paper), which was
able to develop, thanks to this support, in a very short time along the
same lines as European avant-garde music.
What is the implication for jazz, a practice that mixes orality and
writing, of the major reference of recording sounds on a support, in
parallel with a deliberately not precise representation on paper (chord
charts and interpreting signs according to tradition)? How, in this type
of practice, can the principle of imitation be inscribed, consequently
opening the way for the expression of differences and divergences in
the sound production?43 I am not competent enough to be able to
answer adequately these questions. However, it seems to me that
sound recording taken as a support for a practice implies, disregarding
other elements like the transmission of a tradition through visual
gestures and direct contact, in the case of imitation, the impossibility
of completely achieving it successfully. The writing on scores through
precision on particular parameters can be precisely assessed in terms of
the successful (or unsuccessful) realization of the signs in the sonic
domain, leaving a margin of freedom in their global interpretation.
The role of assignation to perform specific actions played by notation,
not just limited to a documentation of events, is only viable if controls
allowing for an evaluation exist. The wholeness of the recorded sound
object, while remaining a strong model for a given practice, does not
allow access, through this support only, to the authenticity of the
model; this constitutes an advantage from the point of view of those
who consider that the imitative repetition of sounds, because of its
academism, is contrary to an ideal of creativity. Only electronic
sampling allows exact and immutable repetition, with a tendency to
reify tradition, and, in doing this, to kill it. Nevertheless, for Derek
Bailey, the jazz of the 1980s suffered a lot, thanks to a combination of
supports (recordings, Real Books, methods, educational programs,
direct contacts with the masters, etc.), from becoming only a servile
imitation, even in its improvisation of melodic-harmonic patterns, of
what had been in the past history a political and artistic emancipation
from traditional forms.44 With this we close this little parenthesis.
As to Adornos conception of the total unreadable writing of the
reproduction of the sound wave by analogical supports, then later by
computer digitalization, one could ask to what extent has it really been
tackled by other music theorists and historians in order to develop a
reflexive thinking that would go far beyond the tautological character
of the mere observation of the phenomenon? That is, have these issues
been sufficiently discussed in terms of what technologies imply in
relation to musical practices and not exclusively in relation to the
progress of science? Two directions seem to me important to explore,
as they are linked at the same time to the hyper-oral and hyper-written
character of contemporary societies:
1. The fact that the totality of the sound is written on the trace left
by sound waves prevents its use by only one person. To write
the sound wave, one would have to write everything. This is
different from musical notation, which allows easy manipulation
because it only represents a small specialized aspect of sound. But
nobody can alone write everything, it is necessary to have
several people to do it.
2. The writing of the totality of the sound wave has to be done by

several people coming from different specializations, not only
musicians who already have defined social roles. It opens the way
to multi-disciplinary collaborations.
3. The unreadable character of this enigmatic writing cannot

control in precise ways what the performer will do, or what the
listener will perceive. The fact that this form of writing is
simultaneously a sonic and visual object, implies a multiplicity of
perceptions and therefore of interpretations.
The total writing of the wave, and therefore of the sound, of the
timbre, vacillates between being almost oral in its immediacy and being
not completely oral in its complete fixity. It also hesitates between, on
the one hand, this rather strange form of orality and, on the other hand,
a form that glorifies visual, reified writing in objects that can be displaced
and repeated as many times as is desired. The visual, which already
dominated musical practice through scores, wins definitively its battle
with the inscribing once and for all in electronic memory of all the
traditions, closing therefore the way for them to continue through their
repetition, enclosing them forever in museums; the visual allows a
scientific approach in fields such as acoustics and psychoacoustics,
closing the long slow process in Western society towards a certain kind
of rationality; it secularizes timbre in a plethora of stereotypes. But the
visual, by winning, is also losing its battle to the advantage of the emer-
gence of the irrationality of the sound world, in the total exposition of all
its particles, in the phenomenal explosion of its great complexity.45
To take seriously Adornos notion that music is materialized into
writing in the object of the phonograph record inscribing the sound
wave, two simultaneous phenomena have to be considered. Firstly,
recorded sounds are to be taken as they present themselves, they do
not leave any space, neither on the side of writing nor on the side of
sound, which would allow a traditional approach of interpretation
(some hermeneutics); the sonic reality of this writing cannot produce
any speculative thinking on what it could mean, it cannot be denied:

this is how it is. But secondly, this writing remains blemished by the
malediction of (temporal and referential) diffrence and of mimetic
representation: it does not have access to the living exactness of the
model which is recorded; as high as fidelity might be, there is always a
residue that has to be left behind. The recorded sound wave in
electronic memories remains always a simplification (even if obviously
relative) of the reality of timbres.
In 1987 (1990), I published an article under the title of Fixed
Timbre, Dynamic Timbre.46 I tried to define sounds that can be
extracted from electronic memories in the form of an immutable
repetition of a given sound wave (notably in the case of sampling), as
trigger timbre:
Trigger timbre implies that a performer pushes a knob or a key,

and a machine and/or a vibratory body automatically produces
the sound in a fixed, prearranged manner. The performer cannot
influence the quality of the sound after it has been triggered.47
In trying not to succumb to moral considerations or to explicit

aesthetical preferences, one can envisage several levels linked to the
perception of these timbres fixed in memories and that can be repeated
in an exact manner:
1. In the first place, one could consider the sounds stored in

electronic memories that are used as a signal in everyday life,
often in a very repetitive manner: trucks going backward, church
bells, sound signals in train stations announcing something,
telephone ringing, etc. They play perfectly their role of signaling
something to the ears, but their constant repetition may become
fairly rapidly disagreeable, or even insufferable. When they are
sustained for a long period of time, we have the tendency to
erase them from our attention. The prerecorded voices (GPS,
train stations, airports, telephone answering machines, etc.) can
be very sensual; however, their exact repetition becomes quickly
artificial, then tiring, then comical, then unbearable.
2. The electronic sounds which, in a given music style, are repeated

always with the same envelope each time they are called for by
pressing a key, activating a knob, typing a command, or through
other manners to trigger them (electric keyboards, synthesizers,
rhythm machines, samples in computer memory, etc.). In
general, one classifies this type of situation as sampling. These
sounds are most often used in configurations that reproduce the

concept of a musical instrument based on a pitch scale or a series
of discrete sound objects.
3. Musical pieces or complex sound sequences fixed on electronic

support (recordings of live music). This situation is used to
constitute a fairly accurate reference to particular events from the
past: the obsolete characteristic of these dated events allows both
access to the atmosphere of an era, and also requires that the
present time be differentiated (even minimally) from the past, a
phenomenon that was already prevalent in the case of the written
score but that will now apply specifically to the timbre. The fairly
rapid succession of modes or different styles of interpretation is
the ontological condition of this storage in memory of these
moments lived at the time as experience, and which become,
when recorded, an object that can be exchanged, sold, or
ignored by most people.
4. Musical works specifically composed to exist only on electronic

supports (electroacoustic compositions, digital art), which can
exist in conjunction with other artistic domains (videos, films,
installations, dance, etc.), or recordings of live music with the
intent of creating a specific artistic object on an electronic
support (the art of the recording studio).48
How listeners grasp these situations will vary greatly according to

contexts: it is difficult to determine cases in which the fixity of the
timbres creates weariness in the ears, or the cases in which the ears are
manipulated or deformed by the sound environment to the point of
becoming alienated or addicted. I will come back to the subject.
The fact that a sound is triggered by an action and that it will
continue without any human intervening is not limited to electronic
memories. Several gradual situations can be considered: in the case of
the church bells previously described, four cases can be distinguished:
1. The bell beater can be played directly by somebody (as in the

case of a percussionist). This is a too costly solution and
acoustically difficult for the person who activates the beater, but
it guarantees a control on each impact taken separately and will
influence in this way the behavior of the envelope of the bell. 49
In addition, it could be possible to consider the use of several
beaters of diverse sizes and materials. The place on which the bell
is struck can also be varied.
2. A rope activates the bell. This allows the one who manipulates it
to be placed far away from the acoustical strength of the bell.
The control over the sound is less subtle, but still guarantees that
each stroke is not the exact repetition of the previous one. The
beater is activated by a mechanism that is triggered automatically
without the intervention of a person. The one who is responsible
for activating the bells is reduced to the role of correctly adjust-
ing the mechanism. The strokes of the beater are all-identical,
but remain identified as acoustical live matter coming from a
real bell.
3. The bell and the beater do not exist anymore; they are replaced
by an electronic sampling sent through a loudspeaker. Each
stroke is absolutely identical, and the ear, because of this
repetition, easily recognizes that the bell is virtual.
This graduation going from real to virtual and from control over
sound to completely prefabricated sound reproduces the history of a
progressive domestication of timbre, which aims to neutralize its too
complex wildness. This history retraces the gradual separation of roles
between individuals, their assumed specialized functions, and raises the
question of the relationships between the material and those who make
it sound. In the first case, the practitioner is the one who builds sound
with a given material (the bell fabricated by another specialized per-
son). In the second case, the technique of production has to be more
refined because of the distance between the sounding object and the
tool which triggers the sound, so as to compensate the partial loss of
control in relation to direct production. In the third case, a standard-
ization of the beater and of the place where it will impact is necessary,
the timbre is mastered; this configuration allows a musician to activate
a set of bells from a keyboard and to play pieces of music with objects
that were only used until then to signal events having nothing to do
with music. In the fourth case, the builder of the bell and the bell-
ringer disappear to be replaced by unknown forces, which liberate the
production of sound from a specific work process and the sounds of
bells from specialization in the domain of religious symbolization, or in
any other domains (including music). In this way the modern dream of
total control over the material or matter is realized, but at the same
time, what is attained is only the artifact of dynamic timbre, of the
timbre that is developed through the complexity of being alive.
Trigger timbre, or, more exactly, the one that is totally predeter-
mined before it is triggered, can be used in any kind of temporality. It
can trigger very short sound samplings, as with electronic keyboards,

or entire pieces, as with recorded music stored in memory. It is not the
nature of the sound which determines trigger timbre (natural sounds,
instrumental or electronic sounds), but the fact that the more or less
complex sound wave inscribed in a memory is always read in the same
manner. One can change the contexts in which the fixed trigger
timbres appear, or the acoustical conditions of their broadcasting, but
not at all the immutable order of their memory, except if one has the
possibility to recompose or re-elaborate the sounds in the course of
their progress in time.
Trigger timbre influences listeners in an ambivalent way: the exact
repetition of a sound universe allows one to revisit a more or less
distant past, to taste again its particular atmosphere and the tech-
nologies that are attached to it (the return to the vinyl disk can be
partly explained by this). Any change in the timbre would irremediably
destroy this reunification with the past. Trigger timbre reifies sound
and strongly favors a perception of global sound objects rather than
their differentiated progress in time. This reification creates the con-
ditions for the fetishizing of sounds, as they become clichs, stereo-
types, which if they are not hidden in complex structures, become
difficult to tolerate by those who listen to them on an everyday basis,
or are more probably erased from their consciousness.
Another aspect of the exact fixity of sounds concerns the ambivalent
question of collective identity. The sounds in their reproduction
become rather like flags capable of rallying all those who claim to
belong to a particular identity. Any modification of the timbre would
cancel the authenticity effect and, as in the case of foreign accents in
the voice of interlocutors, would immediately denote a false pretense, a
default of origin. The multiplicity of sounds and their access greatly
facilitated by media contributes, on the one hand, to a splitting of
identities into small groups, and, on the other hand, to encouraging
the daily fabrication of new identities that last only the time necessary
to mark a particular territory. The exactitude of sound makes it pos-
sible to recognize a sense of belonging and also to be intolerant of any
other forms of sound manifestation. Or else, in the same vein, it
renders possible the expression of a contemptuous tolerance towards
the sonic worlds of the others (this is commercial music, or this is
the music of the intellectuals, . . .). The relative simplicity or com-
plexity of the sounds does not play any role in this question of identity.
But the demonstrations of exaggerated identity by different fundamen-
talisms generate also, within the identities themselves, practices which
can modify in a dynamic sense the fixity of timbres, either through
sound recuperation approaches aiming to modify the way it is used or

to conceptualize alternative sound structures. The borderlines between
fixed and dynamic sounds are thin, but they are evidently essential.
Each identity produces its alternative underground that modifies or
questions its groundings.
The specificity of dynamic timbre does not lie in a refusal of
repetition, neither in its character of immediate succession of sounds,
nor in its relation to a constantly reinvented tradition. Dynamic timbre
has access to memory, be it in electronic form or in the human brain,
in order to modify it in real time actions, which will influence the
internal unfolding of sonorities. It is not necessary to have a very large
collection of timbres, but it is important to avoid the absolute literal
repetition of sound envelopes. Dynamic timbre takes seriously the
erasure of memories by continuously reinventing their unfolding
through processes that confront the producer with the material. This is
how the complexity of timbre becomes manifest, not in the constant
elaboration of new sounds.50
PART 2. POLY-TICS OF TIMBRE PRACTICE
ADORNO VERSUS BENJAMIN
The question of fixed timbre in memories brings us back to

Adornos concepts. In 1938, he stresses the relationship between the
fetishizing of sounds through technological means of reproduction,
and what, according to him, is its direct result: the regression of
listening. The sound recorded for commercial purpose becomes a pure
signalization, and the listener has nothing more to do than to identify
its origin: The familiarity of the [commercial] piece is a surrogate for
the quality ascribed to it. To like it is almost the same thing as to
recognize it.51 This implies a listening that pays little attention to the
purely musical content. Above all, this listening is centered exclusively
on the sensual attraction of the discrete sound object and no longer on
the structural dialectic of the entire work relating the detail to the
global form:
The delight in the moment and the gay faade becomes an excuse
for absolving the listener from the thought of the whole, whose
claim is comprised in proper listening. The listener is converted,
along his line of least resistance, into the acquiescent purchaser.
No longer do the partial moments serve as a critique of that
whole; instead, they suspend the critique which the successful aes-
thetic totality exerts against the flawed one of society. The unitary
synthesis is sacrificed to them; they no longer produce their own
in place of the reified one, but show themselves complaisant to it.
The isolated moments of enjoyment prove incompatible with the
immanent constitution of the work of art, and whatever in the
work goes beyond them to an essential perception is sacrificed to
them.52
For Adorno, the way the cultural industry imposes its sounds on
populations is at the detriment of a freedom of choice linked to an
enlightened individual responsibility. The result is a type of fragmented
listening geared only to recognizing instantaneously short sequences of
sounds that do not need to be necessarily linked to other entities and
that can be immediately forgotten. The audience can indulge in a dis-
tracted listening, in both senses of the word distraction: on the one
hand, half-listening, not paying much attention to the proposed
sounds, allowing other activities to take place at the same time, and on
the other hand, to be entertained, not taking very seriously any given
sequences of sounds. Above all, the particularity of this type of easy
listening is that it tends to reject anything that could be different to, or
that could come to contest, the standardized sound universe. 53 Adorno
does not seem to take into account a phenomenon that came prior to
the appearance of sound reproduction techniques and that is linked to
the appearance of the printed score: the increasing diversification of
the works presented to the audience, with a great divergence of styles,
be it their differences of historical or geographical origin, or the
product of antagonisms between musicians living in close proximity.
Just a few recorded notes played from a Mozart score are sufficient to
identify the object-Mozart, a timbral entity, as being different from any
other one. In order to face this diversification, the listener has perhaps
no other choice than to turn towards this very localized type of timbre
identification; this nevertheless still leaves the possibility that the
amateur will pay much more attention to the music of his/her own
passionate choice. Confronted with a myriad of sounds, the listener has
to elaborate a hierarchy between distracted or a sustained attention to
what is played.
As Richard Leppert demonstrated in his introduction to the
publication of Adornos article in the collection of essays he selected,
one has to replace this text in the context of an epistolary debate
between Adorno and Walter Benjamin. The article on sound fetishism
is a direct answer to Benjamins article on the reproduction of art
works published few years before.54 Indeed, Benjamin, addressing the

same type of situation of technological reproduction, but in the
domain of visual arts, notably concerning cinema, had made much
more optimistic statements on the opening of cultural practices
towards a democratic existence of art, thanks to a much freer attention
to the works. The possibility of bringing home reproductions of art
works opened completely different perspectives from the ones confined
to the contemplation of the authentic work, and called for a necessary
secularization or desacralization of art. According to Benjamin, two
poles influence more or less the way art is contemplated: one concerns
an atmosphere of cult, the other has to do with a simple exposition.55
The cult value of the artwork concerns only initiated persons; it tends
to remain secret, outside the grasp of common people. As to the
exposition value, the museum emancipates art from this dependence
on rituals. By exposing the art works, it permits them to be addressed
to all, but the contemplation remains in the domain of the respectful
meditative state. The technical reproduction, notably cinema, opens
the way to the distraction of the eye. The movement, the shock of the
images, prevents the fixation of the eye in contemplation. The eye
grasps the images in their immediate totality, leaving no room for
reflective attitudes because of their sudden disappearance and their
continuous metamorphosis.
The idea of distraction in opposition to contemplation is at the center
of Benjamins ideas on the reproduction of art works. The sense of the
word distraction has to be taken in all its complexity and cannot be
simply confined to entertainment. Answering George Duhamel, who
denounces film as an effortless entertainment, Benjamin refutes what
he considers a clich that irremediably links the necessarily ignorant
masses to laziness, and the art connoisseurs to contemplation. In the
light of the changes brought about by the reproduction technologies,
he foresees new relations between distraction and contemplation:
The opposition between distraction and contemplation can again

be translated in the following manner: the man who is contem-
plating the art work is absorbed by it; he penetrates into it as this
Chinese painter whose legend tells that, contemplating his com-
pleted picture, he disappeared into it. On the contrary, the dis-
tracted mass absorbs the work of art into themselves.56
He is referring to architecture, which, in all times, has been the

prototype of a work of art perceived both in distracted and collective
manner. Architecture is indeed a very meaningful example. The
general population has no other choice than to exist amid the

surrounding buildings, contemplation continuously oscillates between
a distracted eye, notably when the usages are linked to other
preoccupations, and an intense concentration, when there is time to do
it (for example, tourism, wandering with no particular aim, . . .) or
when circumstances come to perturb everyday life (the lift is broken,
there is a train strike, . . .). Living amidst architectural structures has to
do with the environmental landscape, which is experienced on an
everyday basisboth in the meaning given by Michel de Certeau as
invention of the everyday life and in the sense of a repeated exercise,
which tacitly builds knowledge. Urban architecture produces a mixture
of the beautiful and the ugly, richness and poverty, old buildings in all
historical layers, in all styles, and new constructions that may be
futuristic, imitative of old styles, or simply functional. Architecture,
because it cannot do otherwise than to organize public space for
everybody, is often the source of violent conflicts, which, however,
resorb themselves usually in a short time thanks to the capacities of
human beings to adapt to their environment to the point that what
was at first a shocking experience can become thereafter a particularly
appreciated object: the mass absorbs the work of art.
This focus on everyday life and on the distracted glance can be
compared to the preoccupations of the English sociologist Richard
Hoggart, concerning the reception by popular classes of the messages
delivered from above by communication media.57 According to Jean-
Claude Passeron, Hoggart describes an ambivalent attitude on the part
of media users, at the same time welcoming sensationalism by the
consumerist society and yet skeptical in relation to all the diverse
propaganda:
It is in reality an attitude which consists in knowing what to take

and what to leave, a form of reception which finds in an acquies-
cence made with little commitment to listen the means to stand
on ones own ground in front of the message, a defensive atti-
tude, which may be more efficient than intellectual argument or
moral indignation; a paradoxical attitude in any case of which I
tried to convey the subtlety by using the terms of oblique or
distracted attention.58
For Hoggart, if the working class (of the 1930s60s) resists so well
the misdeeds of publicity, of commercial publications and the
injunctions of the consumer society, it is because it functions culturally
in a predominantly oral way, centered on the family and home. This
tradition continues to play, at the time of the publication of his book

Uses of Literacy (1957), a major role of resistance to counterbalance
what Hoggart perceives as the major danger of manipulating masses:
a mean form of materialism (292), canned entertainment (295),
and packeted provision (295). Trying to understand whether this
situation endures today is not a small issue, as cultures have become so
fragmented.59 Again, the notions developed by Michel de Certeau of
strategy, as an imposition of an order coming from above or from the
exterior, and of tactics, as the use of this institutionalized imposition
applied to personal ends in order to deflect its meaning and to resist
the generalized manipulation, seem the very useful tools in order to
take account of a phenomenon, which is the hallmark of the present
time in all sectors of the population.60
In analyzing the text by Benjamin, Michael Wood, a professor of
comparative literature at Princeton, affirms that the idea of distraction
cannot be confined merely to the lack of attention. Distraction creates
trouble when, following T. S. Eliot, one can be Distracted from
distraction by distraction (Burnt Norton). Distraction depends on
energies, temptations, parentheses, digressions; it touches upon what is
completely outside subject matter. As with multiple-choice-question
tests in which false answers appear seductively plausible, distraction
leads us to transverse paths. Wood interprets Benjamins arguments as
situated in logic full of wit: distraction is not antagonistic to
contemplation (or to concentration), but not to the point of becoming
respectable. Contemplation has virtues, but also a strange gift for
missing what distraction can find.61 Distraction is a real place for
learning: reception through distraction, according to Benjamin, finds
in film its true training world.62 Wood concludes the second part of
his article with the following statement:
The point is not that we need to stop concentratingon films or

anything elsebut that we can try to tune into our distraction, to
hear some of its beguilingly plausible, mostly disorderly messages,
without making it respectable.63
Opening the way to modes of perception linked to everyday life and

to environment, distraction, according to Benjamin, has nothing to do
with Adornos regression of listening. Rather it announces enjoyable
practices that took place later in time, linked to our surrounding
environments. In music: the use of everyday life objects by John Cage
to produce sounds on them, his philosophy of including all possible
sounds without hierarchy, their juxtaposition in arbitrary forms
opening the way to a concentration on their internal matter and not on

the relationships to other sounds, or opening the way to distraction (to
be entertained), or else to distracted listening without thinking that it
is necessary to be in raptures. One thinks also of the approaches of
Murray Schaeffer (and many others after him) and his concerns for
sound environment. Or of Pauline Oliveross idea of Deep Listening,64
of sound meditations, leading to states of mind that go far beyond the
notion of contemplation, often to the point where the soundings seem
to be a pretext for other mental states (a distraction of the spirit?). One
thinks also of all the practices that recuperate what mass media
outpour, in order to appropriate it and do something else with it,
among which the practices of DJs are particularly striking. Or of those
nomadic practices, ceaselessly working over the same materials in
infinite variations.
However, one should ask if the sounds that exist in our surroun-
dings are not different from visual solicitations? Is there not in the
sonic world an insidious manipulation that is difficult either to ignore
or to endure without revolting? Adorno recognizes that the fixation of
sounds in a definitive form of writing with the phonograph record,
which tends to emphasize local events at the expense of complex forms,
can result in a fully attentive type of listening: At its most passionate,
musical fetishism takes possession of the public valuation of singing
voices.65 Vocal sensuality is the source of fascination, and conse-
quently, according to him, of bewitchment, a blindness of the ear. He
puts his finger here on the idea that the explosion of timbre, through
amplification that enhances all the sound particles, and the sensuality
of the sounds, at the expense of anything that might be narrated
besides, has been quasi exclusively inaugurated by popular commercial
music. Adorno writes (one never knows if this is to lament what he
describes): Today, the material as such, destitute of any function, is
celebrated.66 This is realized without the need for particular aptitudes
or techniques. But by the same phenomenon of the fetishist cult of
sound as such, the perfect sounds (the barbarism of perfection67) of
the orchestra conducted by Toscanini, playing live concerts as if it were
a recording, contribute also to the ears regression, which can no
longer support the savagery of interpretations that take the risk of
experimental imperfection and of incomprehensible music.
Facing this accumulation of contradictory injunctions, where then
can the poor ears of contemporary listeners be situated? Are they dis-
tracted or contemplative? For Makis Solomos, the focus on sound
(rather than on the articulation of sounds to form a language) is
directly linked to intensive listening, provided that one learns to redis-
cover its state of nature, which (cultural?) language articulation had
erased.68 Has this seductive aesthetical program any real bearing on the
tactical realities of audience perception? It certainly cannot be sepa-
rated from a certain conditioning through regular practice (as in work-
shops, for example) that establishes a strong link between fabricating
the sounds by the participants themselves and their perception by the
same. For Peter Szendy, plastic listening (coute plastique) involves a
praxis in which other means, other mediations than the simple contem-
plative listening, make it possible for the auditor to perform tactile
actions and in this way to also become an author: words, annotations,
reading scores, manipulating recordings, etc.69 This is an historical de-
velopment that neither Adorno nor Benjamin could foresee: the
capability today for the audience to manipulate recorded sounds in
many creative ways, using the techniques of their choice. This changes
completely the ways we listen to the floating sounds of our saturated
environment, towards a diversification of the modes of perception.
Thus, it is nowadays impossible to envision cognitive perception in a
linear logic indicated by arrows, starting with a competent composer
and leading to the enlightened auditor, passing through a series of
well-organized mediations. Listening today unfolds in a dynamic of
contexts, in which all the possible mediations can play simultaneously
contradictory roles and in which catastrophe is merrily seen alongside
the sublime.
THE QUESTION OF THE INEFFABLE IN THE NATURE OF MUSIC
What cannot be represented through notation is left to the subjec-

tivity of the performer-interpreter through a certain number of media-
tions, which are considered as being part of the nature of the musical
practice. These mediations seem self-evident, and, consequently, they
remain non-explicit and outside any reflection leading to interpretation:
control over corporal gestures and building postures through a slow and
long education, automatisms of the relations between the signs and the
actions necessary to produce the corresponding sounds, reproduction of
the masters interpretations, eventual contributions from musicology,
mythology of masterpieces, etc. . . .
For Bruno Latour, this manner of conceptualizing things, which is
specific to the Moderns, of leaving to the subjectivity of the users
anything that remains beyond the objectivity of the representations
produced by science, is the source of a strong dichotomy between
theory and practice:
In order to designate the mountain, the real, invisible, thinkable,

objective, substantial, and formal, Mont Aiguille, seized by cartog-
raphy, from which the practice has been erased, it was habitual
during the seventeenth century to talk about its PRIMARY
QUALITIESthe ones that most resemble the map. In order to
designate the rest (almost everything, we should remember), one
would talk of SECONDARY QUALITIES: these are subjective,
experienced live, visible, in the realm of the senses, in short, sec-
ondary, since they have the serious defect of being unthinkable,
unreal, and not part of the substance, of the ground, that is, of the
very form of things.70
Thus, to come back to music, when it is practiced in the reality of

the presence of sounds, one prefers to state that it proceeds from the
ineffable and that it cannot be explained. The performer has to respect
the notes of the score but should not do it in a rigorous mechanical
way. In order for the music to be live, for the magic to operate, the
interpreter has to go beyond the notes, in forgetting that they exist.
There is on the one hand the formal side constituted by the score and
on the other hand the world of dreams that cannot be explained, that
is, in fact, the reality of the practical experience. Latour speaks of
bifurcation: the Mont Aiguille is split in two between the formal
reality of the representation on the map and an ensemble of features
left to the unthought of the hikers experiences on the walk. For
Latour, this is the foundation of the modern: This multiplied
bifurcation will render infinitely difficult the reconciliation of modern
philosophy with the common sense; its genesis will in great part allow
us to explain the opposition between theory and practice, which is so
characteristic of the Moderns.71
Concerning the musical practice of those who respect the formal
order of notation on a score, there is a small complication: the subjec-
tive, the ineffable, the unheard of, are very soon inscribed in the
solidity of beliefs imbedded in the ears. The amplitude of mimetic
reproduction, of a tradition that changes all the time, but that is trans-
mitted from generation to generation, forbids in music education
institutions any divergence from the well-worn paths familiar to the
ears, yet without the need for them to be explicated. Mozart, ac-
cording to the canons of those who evaluate musicians, has to be played
this way, and not otherwise. Nevertheless, nobody can explain why this
has to be done in this way, and why less respectful interpretations of
this non-written order would not have the right to exist.
CHAINS OF REFERENCE, MATTER AND MATERIAL
The global sonority, in this paper called timbre, in the action of its
real production, not represented on a score, remains, in its complexity,
dynamic in essence. This dynamic has to do with the local temporal
unfolding of sound in all its most micro-sonic aspects, and it affects
several parameters at once in an independent manner. Timbre chal-
lenges any attempts to master it through canonic principles or specific
methods. One can only grasp the sound material through an infinite
series of measurements or experimentations, each one of them tackling
a limited aspect of sound: the attack, the spectrum, the temporal
envelope, noise components, the micro-events that modulate sound,
the acoustical nature of the object or instrument producing sound, the
relationships between the acoustical aspects of sound with its per-
ception by human ears, the relation of sound with its acoustical
environment, the manner by which sound waves move in space, etc.
Each of these measurements or experimentations implies, in order to
be understood, specific and different representations, that are special-
ized in scientific terms. These measurements and experimentations,
what Latour calls mediations, form a chain of reference which is
constantly enriched by current research, but which can never com-
pletely reflect global sonority in the real time of its production.
Another important chain of reference pertaining to sound is consti-
tuted by the development of techniques for building objects or
instruments destined to produce sounds and for the efficient use of
these objects or instruments. And the artisanal development of these
techniques is itself sustained by scientific research pertaining to ma-
terials used in instruments, the behavior of human bodies in the most
efficient use of these tools, the psychological conditions of physical
acts, the medical knowledge that can make these manipulations more
efficient, the social conditions of sound production, the political
history of sound production, etc. The theory of music in the realm of
harmonic studies, instrumentation, and orchestration contributes also
to the determination of timbre. All this marvelous apparatus still fails
to seize sound in its global dynamic complexity; on the contrary, it can
blind those who think they have seized it. Moreover, the multiplicity
of the hyper-specialized disciplines makes it difficult to construct a
general understanding of sound phenomena.
For Latour, to access the apprehension of the material, it is necessary
to proceed with minute care by a whole series of mediations, which
have been developed over a long and difficult history. The established
network concerning hiking in the Vercors Mountains, all the objects that
are necessary for it to exist, from the pathways to the walking shoes,
the history of the philosophy of wandering, can lead to the emotion of
the hiker. But this still does not produce the knowledge of the material:
No mediation, no access. But nor would this pathway be clarifiedthe
symmetry is importantin introducing the notion of known thing.72
The practice of deciphering notations implies numerous back-and-
forth moves between what is represented and the representation:
It is absolutely true that at the beginning we have in front of our

eyes, as soon as I unfold the map and refer it to the landscape
never directly of course but through path markers and all the
rest of ita form of transubstantiation: the signs that are inscribed
on the weatherproof paper become progressively loadedas I am
making a sufficient number of back and forth observationswith
certain properties of Mount Aiguille and allow me to come closer
to it. Not with all of them . . .: not its weight, not its odor, not its
color, not its geological composition, nor its dimension at the
scale of one to one; and this is fortunate, because if it were not so,
I would be crushed under its weight.73
The problem of the Moderns according to Latour is that, when

everything functions extremely well in the relationship between the
material and its representation, the mediations tend to be erased, the
experience becomes ordinary, invisible to the eye of the scientist, the
common sense is depreciated as simplistic, and the sign on paper,
the equation, becomes synonymous with reality itself. What really
counts is not the reality of things in their complexity, but it is the
manner by which they are represented, this becomes the very matter of
reality. When the map is unfolded, the good hiker, doing a happy walk
around the Mount Aiguille, forgets the mediations that have allowed
the map to exist and the autonomous path of existence of the
Mount Aiguille, in order to concentrate exclusively on the formal
aspects of the correspondence between the representation and the rep-
resented: the map resembles the territory because the territory is fun-
damentally already a map!74
For Latour, the materialism of the Moderns consists in the accu-
mulation (a network, a continuous chain of transformation) of the
unveiling of matter as such by a punctual and distinct series of experi-
mentations, which ensure continuity, and which give the impression of
having seized matter itself. Each element of the network corresponds
to a viewpoint, to a discipline, to a situation created in a laboratory. All
the elements put together give the impression that the reality of the
material is grasped in continuity. However, each grain of knowledge:
comes precisely because the map does not resemble in any way the
territory, although maintaining at the same time through a contin-
uous chain of transformationscontinuity constantly interrupted
by the differences of the nested materialsa very small number of
constants. It is through the loss of resemblance that the formi-
dable efficiency of the chain of references is gained.75
Consequently, he makes a distinction between matter, which is a fic-

tion of the Moderns claim to a materialistic knowledge, and material,
which keeps its autonomy of existence, its own truth.
In spite of the chains of reference and the point-to-point represent-
ations they generate, the material continues its autonomous existence.
Latour proposes to replace the notion of construction by the notion of
institution [instauration]. In scientific domains the idea of construction
is negatively linked to what cannot be real truth in itself. If a fact is
constructed by a human mind, it is the result of imagination and there-
fore is not an indisputable scientific fact: if it is constructed, it is
therefore probably false.76 In this statement, the mediations are dis-
credited and the artifacts necessary to the laboratory production of un-
deniable facts are negated.
In order to rehabilitate construction in the less violent term of
institution [instauration], three elements common to all construction
have to be explicated (Latour gives as examples the construction of a
scientific fact, a house, a theatre piece, an idol, a group77):
1. In the action of construction, the identification of the author is

lost, because one is in the presence of a making others do.
Somebody gets someone else to do some actions. Who is the one
who does the construction?
2. The action is not only in the fact that an individual builds

something in imposing her/his power on the material; the
material itself exerts its influence on the individual. The vector of
the action is reflexive, it goes in two ways. Latour gives the
example of the puppeteer who both manipulates puppets and is
manipulated by them.
3. The construction implies a value judgment: is it well built?
In taking into account these three elements of construction, we

would be in presence of a perfect ready-made research program that
would try to render explicit musical and artistic practices in their
differences, notably in the diverse manners of producing timbre: what

is happening in the processes of the making others do? What is the
role of those who do in relationship to the one who makes them do it,
how does it happen? What are the processes of manipulation of the
materials by artists and artists by the materials? What values are
expressed through the action in these processes?
The second point of Latours demonstration on construction can be
applied to the principal preoccupation of this article: the question of
timbre. In the production of sound, the producer has to confront the
material in a reflexive manner. Actions are oriented in order to draw
forth controlled sonorities, but the material also in return dictates its
conditions. The instrument resists by its inertia. The repeated failures
determine future behaviors by trial and error. Repeated successes dic-
tate ways to continue, here also by trial and error. Slowly a repertory is
established, the body learns the appropriate gestures to produce par-
ticular sonorities, and the material is eventually modified by new ways
of elaborating it. Instrument builders may be invited, appendages are
invented (mutes, microphones, . . .) or cobbled together, etc.
In his analysis of amateur practices, Antoine Hennion develops the
idea that the participants in a given activity have no other goals than to
deploy that desired activity. In these conditions, reflexivity is embed-
ded in the activity itself, in the inscription in contextualized pathways
that are not pre-determined. Taking the example of rock climbing, he
observes that the goal of those who do this activity is not at all to go to
the summit, but is constituted by the climbing in itself. What is at
stake is to be confronted with the rock, to start climbing it according
to modalities that are determined as the action unfolds:
Are we following a plan? Nothing happens the way we want it to

happen, the movement is defined with the gesture that realizes it.
One could say that the purpose of rock climbing is the successful
realization of the pathway itself. But even this . . . the efforts that
one makes fail, and all the pleasure lies in this. A climbing route
already done is a route forgotten, in favor of the next, a harder,
different one, that another climber has just tried to do in vain.
Strange action indeed, in which failure is more interesting than
success.78
In this context, says Hennion, the means become the object, the
object the means. What we usually think of as essential to action then
matters little: the subject matter, the goal, the plan. What counts is the
interaction between the climbers body and the rock, in a global mode
of operation which continuously deploys its meaning as that of

climbing, an activity which then becomes akin as much to sport (the
technique, the performance) as to art (the elegance of the figures).
If we translate Hennions statements about climbing in terms of
musical practice, we could say that, for practitioners of music, the
methodical organization of time in very precise notations has much less
importance for the meaning of the activity than the global situations in
which the instrumentalist is confronted with the instrument (or the
vocalist with her/his own vocal apparatus, or for the techno-person
with technology) in order to make sounds that make sense. If, as it is
often the case, music is from the beginning designated as unreachable
in its transcendental perfection, then clearly the summit (and not the
practice of music) is designated as the only purpose of the activity. If
achieving this goal is the only thing that counts, then there is no
music-making on earth. For music to exist, it is necessary above all
to make music, to musicmake.
Instauration (rather than construction) for Latour implies taking
into account the three elements described above: the collective make
others do, the reflexivity in the manipulation of the material, and the
risky research, without prior model, for an excellence that will be
(provisionally) the result of action.79 Is this a definition of
improvisation in the musical domain? According to him, instauration
implies the presence of beings (here in the sense of materials, of
living or not living entities) that are capable of answering to it in a way
that worries us by the fact that they do not involve pre-determined
results and that, consequently, are presented to us as enigmas:
There is the need for beings that escape these two kinds of
resources: creative imagination on the one hand, raw matter
on the other. Beings, of which the continuity, the prolongation,
the extension would have to be at the price, one might say, of
enough uncertainties, discontinuities, worries in order to make it
very clear all the time that their instauration could fail if one did
not grasp them according to the right interpretation key, accord-
ing to the proper enigma they pose to those on whom they come
to weigh; worrisome beings always appearing at the crossroads.80
The materials that are not determined by ingenious construction nor

are lacking a complex existence can answer to the practitioners (have
some teeth in their bite, offer them some substance), are capable of
interacting with them and in this way participate in the instauration of
meaningful events. Here we are in presence of a critical image,
which emancipates both the timbre in its complexity and the practi-
tioners who produce it: emancipation, in particular of notation (this
complex material), from sound production and emancipation of the
instrumentalists/vocalists from the exclusive use of notation on a score
for producing a kind of music truly recognized as worthwhile.
The figure of the instrumentalist actor of his/her own sound pro-
duction acquires consistency. One can contemplate the possibility of
musical practices worthy of interest that occur outside the interpretation
of writing by composers in the form of notation on paper. The ability to
write music is no longer the obligatory pathway for the composers who
choose to produce their sonorities with electro-acoustic means. The
production of timbre becomes a recognized creative activity.
But in return, the one who writes sounds using a notational system
continues, nevertheless, to be a practitioner of sound production. The
back-and-forth movement between the act of writing and the act of
listening to the result of the writinglike that of the hiker between the
map and the reality of the mountainpermits one, in the long run, to
anticipate this result and to experiment with new combinations. In an
artisanal manner, the act of writing reproduces indirectly the
interactive confrontation with the material, the pen (or the computer
keyboard) guiding thought as well as the thinker guiding the pen,
through a practice exercised over a long period of time. The composer
is as much a theoretician as a practitioner, these two aspects being
completely mingled together. Even the most conceptual imaginings
have to result in sound realities. However, those who stay faithful to
writing on scores have to face great difficulties in changing the
conditions of the mediations necessary to the transformation of the
signs into sounds: the conservatism of institutions, performers inertia,
instrumental design imposed by what the cultural industries are
prepared to put on the market; they also have to take into account the
limitation imposed by the space on which signs on paper can be
inscribed, the limited dimensions of plane surface representation, and
the readability of this inscribing if one aims to render a faithful
translation of its spirit.
WRITING TIMBRETHE IDEA OF DISPOSITIF
Computer technologies demonstrate that synthesized timbre implies

the definition of a fairly impressive number of parameters that have to
dynamically interact. Writing, which in its final version is equivalent to
a complex sound wave, becomes total (everything has to be defined by
humans or by algorithms of human origin), which makes it very dif-

ferent from traditional musical notation that represents sound only very
partially. The reading of this electronic writing can only be done via
stages of partial notations (spectrograms, graphics showing envelopes,
etc.), otherwise it cannot make sense outside machine language.
Writing which produces sounds directly now takes precedence over
reading. For the instrumentalist (or vocalist), timbre also constitutes a
total writing of an extreme slowness, which controls the corporal
behavior of the human being. It involves a process of acculturation
linked to this embodiment over long periods of time spanning several
years. This acculturation/embodiment depends both on a particular
environment and on the repetition of gestures and corporal attitudes
producing sonorities through the mediation of material objects. This
type of process is manifest with particular efficiency in institutions
specializing in practical music education. This writing on the body is
readable only in the resultant totality that can be observed when we see
(hear) the result of an accomplished musician producing sounds ac-
cording to a conventionally accepted manner. The numerous medi-
ations remain invisible, either because they are too complex in their
number and meanderings, or because they could threaten to erase the
beauty of the result by the tribulations of the sinuosity of pathways and
the very high number of irremediable failures.
The alternatives to institutions, notably autodidactic study courses,
are still instituted but in a different way through scattered elements of
acculturation and embodiment. They tend to be less efficient in
technical performance, but, because they depend to a large extent on
the personal initiative of the actors themselves, they have the property
of not separating meaning and sound production.81 That some kind of
manipulationnotably through mass mediaof the actors of these
approaches might be at the origin of their learning is certainly the case,
but this is not different from official public institutions, which at least
are very explicit about their objectives.
If the act of composing would not be limited to the elaboration of a
succession of sounds, but would now be concerned with compos-
ingor buildingthe body of the performer, his/her total incorpor-
ation with the intention of producing a particular set of sounds, this
could be considered as an unbearable imposition in its dehumanizing
dimensions ( la Frankenstein). If this were the result of the actions of
a single composer, this would not be acceptable. But the phenom-
enon of incorporating performers in a collective context, because it is
the result of the actions of a society united by a particular culture,
would seem suddenly very natural. To take up again Latours notion
o f instauration (rather than construction), it would be possible today

to envision within the incorporation processes, emerging chains of
diversity in the context of reflexive confrontation between human
bodies and sound materials. This diversity of gestures and of corporal
attitudes vis--vis the instrument (or vocal apparatus) would serve to
understand the intentions of musical expressions notated on scores,
keeping alive strongly constituted traditions, but it would also give the
participants the chance to choose their musical pathway in the determi-
nation of their sonorities, that is most often the chance to choose an
already constituted musical expression.
In the absence (luckily) of a direct access controlling the long-term
incorporation processes, what are the mechanisms that would open
music practitioners to a diversity of ways for producing sounds over a
relatively brief temporality? As the anthropologist and jazz pianist
David Sudnow showed when he described the learning processes of his
hands in order to produce jazz improvisations, sound and visual
models, although essential to the definition of objectives to attain, are
not sufficient to produce real results through simple imitation. 82 Some
apparatus of tinkering about [dispositif de bricolage] is necessary to
allow the participants to achieve their purposes through heterogeneous
detours of their own.
The idea of dispositif (apparatus, plan of action) associated with
tinkering about corresponds to the definition found in Le Petit
Robert, an ensemble of means disposed according to a plan. One can
refer to the definition given by Michel Foucault to explain his own use
of the word in his publications, as opposed to the notion of structure:
What I am trying to identify under this word [dispositif] is . . .

firstly a resolutely heterogeneous ensemble, comprising discourses,
institutions, architectural amenities, regulatory decisions, laws,
administrative arrangements, scientific enunciations, philosophical,
moral, and philanthropic statements, some explicitly stated, some
implicitly unsaid, these are the elements of the apparatus
[dispositif]. The apparatus itself is the network that can be estab-
lished between these elements.83
In applying this idea to timbre production in the domain of musical

practice, the institutional elements of this definition are indeed present,
but the emphasis is here directed towards the network of elements
created through everyday action, which is contextualized by given
agents and materials. Thus, the means are defined here as concerning
at the same time the persons concerned, their social and hierarchical
status within a given artistic community, the materials, instruments,

and techniques that are provided or already developed, the spaces in
which the actions take place, the particular interactionsformalized or
notbetween participants, between participants and materials or
techniques, and the interactions with the external world outside the
group. The dispositifs are more or less formalized by charters of con-
duct, protocols of action, scores or graphic images, rules pertaining to
the affiliation to the group, evaluation processes, learning and research
procedures. To a great extent, however, the dispositifs are governed on
an everyday basis in an oral manner, in contexts that can change
radically according to circumstances, and through interactions, which
by their instability can produce very different resultsmore or less
convincing according to the evaluation by the actors themselves or by
external persons.84
Concerning the questions of technique, Latour stresses the disconti-
nuity and the heterogeneity of the actions in each of the arrangements
that make them work. He talks of technical trajectories of which the
complex sinuosity is difficult to grasp:
Everything in the practice of artisans, of engineers, of technolo-

gists, and even of the weekend handymen makes evident the mul-
tiplicity of transformations, the heterogeneity of combinations, the
proliferation of tricks, the delicate assemblage of fragile know-
how. If this experience remains difficult to record, it is that, in
order to remain faithful to it, it would be necessary to accept its rar-
ity, its stupendous invisibility, and its profound and constitutional
opacity. The reason for this is that it always oscillates between two
lists of contradictory elements: rare and ordinary, unpredictable and
predictable, fleeting and constantly repeated, opaque and transpar-
ent, proliferating and mastered.85
The mechanisms of timbre determination remain opaque because of

the detours that each musician has to do in order to arrive at this end.
But they can be problematized in systems of constraints, which place
the musician in an experimental posture in the very thick of the contra-
dictory terms, like the one proposed by Latour. In each of examples
that follow, a problem is presented followed by a range of possibilities
opening experimental perspectives:
1. Questions related to stereotypes or clichs, which are inscribed in

between repetition of the same and new ways to do the same
thing.
2. Pre-determined fixed elements in relation to the non-fixed ones

that may emerge in the course of performance; they are inscribed
in between what is absolutely imposed by tradition and what it is
permissible to vary within the tradition.
3. Repetition of gestures to produce through minute variations

some accidents that are inscribed in a play between the known
and the unknown.
4. Production of the same type of sonorities transposed on different

instruments or sound materials and that are inscribed between
differences and similarities.
5. Translation of imprecise signs notated on a score (articulations

and accents for example) into particular sonorities and that are
inscribed in between the play of what is presented as being part
of tradition and what is allowed by more theoretical translation
of the written signs.
6. Re-creation of tradition in order to maintain it alive in a

changing world, which is inscribed in the necessity to confront
new technologies and the new manners of perception they
impose on the listeners, etc.
In the elaboration of these kinds of agency, the sound result remains

in the domain of unpredictability, it emerges from a process, it builds a
particular system of values in the course of this process, but at the same
time it manifests itself in a well-defined context of models and practical
situations, which inscribe the sonorities in the framework of a tradition
anchored in its own value system.
CRITICAL EXAMPLE OF A DISPOSITIF
Starting with a very remarkable apparatus, set of circumstances,

process, or dispositif, we shall attempt to grasp all the problematic
aspects of timbre production through the perspectives of an ecology of
practices. In this waywith the section that follows on the concept of
praxisthe final part of this paper deals with the political aspects of
sound production.
How can we define ecology of practices? This concept was
developed by the philosopher of sciences Isabelle Stengers in the first
volume of Cosmopolitiques. Stengers notes the capacity of capitalism to

constantly redefine its power by playing a game of delocalization and
relocalization (or, to take up the terms of Deleuze and Guattari, of
deterritorialization and reterritorialization): the brilliant ability of
capitalism to parasitize things without killing them.86 Refusing the
moralistic aspects that this recognition might generate, Stengers
remarks that none of the great contemporary causes escapes the
accusation of being compromised with capitalisms dynamics. For her,
the idea of resistance is found inside the live practices themselves,
even if none have escaped the generalized parasitizing implied in all of
them.87 The practices are haunted today by instability, which is
incarnated in the disturbing figure of the sophist, carrier of lucidity or
creator of illusion,88 and by the presence of the pharmakon, both
simultaneously beneficial remedy and poison leading to disaster: a
drug, the effect of which can mutate into its opposite, according to the
dosage, the circumstances, the context, any drug having an action that
offers no guarantee, that does not define any fixed point from which
one could confidently recognize and understand the effects.89 The
practices can at any time shift into contradictory, deadly aberrations;
they have to maintain a precarious balance on a mountain ridge in
between two precipices.
For Stengers, the meaning of the term ecology, borrowed by
analogy from the sciences, to be used in the political realm, concerns
human groups in the framework of practices:
By analogy, one can say then that the population of our practices,
whatever the immanent mode of existence of each one of them
and the ingredient that constitutes for each one the existence of
the others, lies as such in an ecological staging. . . . For ecologists,
all the ecological situations are not quite the same, particularly
when members of the human species are involved. The (political
in broad terms) practice of the ecologists, then, has to do with the
production of values, with the proposition of new modes of evalu-
ation, of new meanings. But these values do not transcend the
already given situation, they do not constitute its truth that at last
becomes intelligible. What is at stake is the production of new
relations to be added to a situation already produced by a multi-
plicity of relations. And these relations are also readable in terms
of value, of evaluation, of meaning.90
The ecology of practices is declined in the mode of a continual

emergence of new practices from those already in existence and the
disappearance of other practices. At their onset, as in the case of

technical inventions, it is necessary to foresee the dangers that these
practices present to those that they have the power to destroy, and to
foresee therefore the possibility of their coexistence. The extraordinary
diversity of practices that emerge and disappear, through the very
varied content of the meanings they express, results in the challenging
of normalization processes leading to truths that are universally
recognized and imposed. Stengers speaks of notions of symbiosis in
which each protagonist is interested in the success of the other for
his/her own reasons,91 and of in-between-capture [entre-capture],92
in which the relationship between the protagonists involves radically
different identities while maintaining the necessity to co-exist or else
disappear together. These notions become essential in order to under-
stand that to ideas, source of the imposition of undeniable facts, is
opposed the resistance of practices which confront the instability of
real life and of their values dependent on contexts.
Consequently, the idea of ecology is here not only concerned with
the contents of the artistic works or approaches in relation to an ecology
of sound productionthat is, on the one hand, issues related to noise
pollution in our societies and, on the other hand, those related to the
enhancement of diversified sonic environments. The ecology of practices
implies a complex ensemble that gravitates around the notions of the
interactions between human beings, between humans and non-humans,
in particular with inert objects and technologies. In this context,
artistic practices are confronted, as with other types of practices, with
difficult dilemmas, such as, for example, the unauthorized copying of
data, respect for copyright laws, the publicity power of the media, the
economy of the cultural industry, and the poverty of means given to
alternative practices, to free (or not) access to information, to facili-
tated access to learning (especially to specialized techniques) and access
to critical thought, and access to employmentin short, anything that
contributes to influence the environment, its unstable and uncertain
future and the existence of the beings in its midst.
Lets now come to the description of the apparatus [dispositif] chosen
for analyzing what might be implied in the production of timbre
through a global process. The selected piece is Karlheinz Stockhausens
Mikrophonie I. Written in 196465, the piece can be described in the
following manner:
In Mikrophonie I two percussionists play a large tam-tam with a

variety of implements. Another pair of players use hand-held
microphones to amplify subtle details and noises, inflecting the
sound through quick (and precisely scored) motions. The last two
performers apply resonant bandpass filters to the microphone out-
puts and distribute the resulting sounds to a quadraphonic speaker
system.93
We are here indeed in the presence of a remarkable apparatus, a

dispositif in the sense given by Michel Foucault (see above):
A resolutely heterogeneous ensemble: around a principal

instrument placed at center stagethe huge tam-tamwhich is
at the same time impressive and symbolic in its theatricality as
well as in its musicality, musicians representing a diversity of
disciplines evolve interactively, some using heteroclite objects
and disparate technologies.
Comprising discourses: the score that defines the unfolding of

sound events in time is only one element among others of the
composers specification statements; the explanations about
processes, situations, descriptions of objects, striking-places on
the tam-tam, have a place of considerable importance in the
definition of the types of sounds determined by the composer;
some photos are provided to help this definition and moreover
the performers have access today to videos of the pieces
performance.
Some institutions: the piece implies the presence of essential

institutions, even if they are not specifically mentioned; principal-
ly they are educational institutions which determine performers
specialties, research institutions that develop technologies, insti-
tutions that finance the concert, calling here for a substantial
budget to buy expensive materials and to pay the working hours
of the performers.
Architectural amenities: the necessary spaces for experimen-

tations, rehearsals, and public presentations.
Regulatory decisions, laws, administrative arrangements: what

is pertaining to authors rights, copyright laws, respect of the
instructions given by the composer.
Scientific enunciations: the presence of sophisticated tech-

nologies and of acoustic and psycho-acoustic laws that apply in
this case to the framework of a particularly unstable system.
Philosophical statements: one is here in presence of, at the

time, a very new philosophy of signal processing in real time
during the concert itself.
Some explicitly stated, some implicit, unsaid: on the side of

the explicitly stated, the score specifications, on the side of the
implicit, unsaid, the realization of the instructions in the realities
of the manipulation of the objects in order to produce the
adequate sonorities; contrary to the usual scores, the sound result
can never be reliably predicted.
Indeed, all these elements constitute a network of possibilities to be

put into interactive action through a fairly long temporal process
designed to produce a public performance of the piece. Contrary to
the performance of a usual composition, none of the elements of the
network can be executed automatically in a normal way, one has to
reconsider them anew in the light of the composers requirements in
an interactive ensemble.
The performance of this piece implies three thorny issues:94
1. The materials used when the piece was created have since
considerably evolved. Above all this concerns the electronic
technologies, and the materials used to excite the tam-tam. We
should not forget that the access to the original tam-tam is
problematic and that all tam-tams are different.
2. Stockhausen, having himself tried to define very precisely the

actions realized during the creation of the piece in specific descrip-
tions and data, found this solution too complex, and he chose
instead to use a series of words (for example, croaking or quacking
[quakend], rustling [knisternd], cackling [gackernd], moaning
[winselnd], etc.) that the performers have to translate into sounds.
This implies a fairly long time of experimentation, of collecting
objects, of developing appropriate playing techniques.95
3. The experimentations cannot be done purely from the point of

view of a personal preparation by each performer separately, they
have to be done with the totality of the group in interaction in
order to take into account the final sound result.96
If the score provided to the percussionists is very precise, notably in

its relation to distributing sound events in time, it requires above all a
process of experimentations prior to collective rehearsals. The par-

ticular tam-tam to be used will be different from any other one in its
capacity to produce combinations of partials when it is excited at
different places on its surface. The exact place of impact of the objects,
mallets, or beaters specified by the composer has to be determined
according to a meaningful sound result. The selection of metal, wood,
glass (etc.) objects can only be made according to results tested on the
tam-tam, and the experimentation of the objects according to
Stockhausens specifications implies that the performers have to
develop particular techniques in order to successfully produce sounds
corresponding to the composers ideals.
One might think that the role of the performers manipulating the
microphones and the electronic filters is traditionally more passive:
obey the noted instructions. But the nature of the microphones, of the
loudspeakers, and above all of the filters can vary greatly, as much as
the tam-tam itself. So, the given numeral indications on the score have
to be largely interpreted in relation to the acoustical and technological
context. What is absolutely certain is that the performer is no longer
just an obedient person but has to take full measure of his/her
responsibilities in the creation of the sound result in a given acoustical
space. The inscription of the work in a long process is clearly claimed
by Stockhausen himself. At the origin of the piece, the composer
began by making experimentations on his own tam-tam and by impro-
vised trials of amplification and electronic filtering. In a lecture on
Mikrophonie I, Stockhausen describes how the musicians who created
the piece were obliged, taking the list of given words, to go and
purchase objects and then to experiment for a long time with the
sonorities:
Thats how we did it: for weeks meeting every day or every other
day for several hours, trying out a lot of material on the tam-tam
and deciding which would be the best.97
The composer is aware of the unstable nature of his score in relation

to the effective sound result: I cant predict what the result of this
interference of the three players will sound like, because you dont
know until you hear it.98 He recognizes the importance of the
collective work in the experimentation process: In many cases we
found better solutions by working together than the original sug-
gestions I made from the experiment.99 He imagines with evident
pleasure what a performance of this piece could be like in a distant
future, thinking that it would have nothing to do with the sounds
realized during the creation of the piece. And finally, he himself also
suggests the possibility of realizing the piece on other sound materials
different from the tam-tam. He thinks in particular of an old Volks-
wagen, which it would be possible to explore according to the
methods used in the score. The piece, the apparatus o r dispositif, the
process consequently bear a brandStockhausenbut all this
depends on a collective which will collaborate in its expression. In
order to guarantee the authenticity of the brand, of the label, it
becomes necessary to create a collective entity initiated by the master
or by those who are his direct heirs. Otherwise one would risk letting
the concept Mikrophonie fall to multiple usages in which the results can
no longer be guaranteed.
Is it possible to envision extending the use of the apparatus
Mikrophonie by letting musicians be free to use it to their own ends?
To use the apparatus in concert without the specifications of the
Stockhausen score would appear without any doubt to be a vulgar
plagiarism. Nevertheless nobody can claim to have exclusive rights on
combinations conceived like the symphony orchestra, the string
quartet, or even the ensemble that Schoenberg designed for his Pierrot
Lunaire. The emergence of timbre as a compositional element in itself
in the production of composers at the end of the twentieth century
creates problems when the instrumental ensemble conceptualized by a
composer becomes intellectual property. The artisanal collection of
instruments built by Harry Partch is the very example of a dispositif
that is not really favorable to the elaboration of a different kind of
music than the one he specifically composed for the sonorities that the
collection is able to produce. With Partch, there is a non-separation of
the diverse constitutive elements of any creation: the building of the
instruments by the composer himself in perspectives that were both
visual (instruments forming a theatrical dcor) and sonorous (thanks to
the careful selection of materials); the elaboration of a theory of into-
nation, universal in its principles, but applied here to a system of scales
giving each instrument its particular timbre and used in an idiomatic
fashion specific to this composer; the option taken of refusing abstract
music, evident in the compulsory presence of texts, dramaturgy, and
corporeal presence of the performers. The proposed system has such
autonomy that it becomes very difficult to extract from it certain
aspects without implying the whole of the sound and theatrical refer-
ence to Partch.
The same applies to Mauricio Kagels Zwei-Mann-Orcherster : the
building by the composer himself of a remarkable scenic space consti-
tuted by heteroclite sound objects that are manipulated by remote
control by two musicians demonstrates the primary importance of the

concepta theatrical and sonic totalityover the musical language
used. Indeed, any sound combination produced on this apparatus is
going to be connected to its scenic outlay and to its production modes
invented by the composer, as with the case of sound sculptures. Any
later attempt to develop sound combinations invented by other mu-
sicians in their own name thus becomes impossiblein addition, by the
way, to the prohibition to do so made by Kagel himself. The same
phenomenon can be observed in the case of Mikrophonie I, in which the
conceptual apparatus as such, the instruments and technologies, the way
they are used, strongly dominates grammatical aspects: the extraordinary
sound universe that it allows takes primary importance over the detail of
the time organization. It is this universe which defines the piece as a
concept invented by Stockhausen.
One can imagine several cases, all unacceptable from the point of view
of copyright laws but still capable of producing other types of meaning
than the one elaborated in the score that defines the work, in which
the performers, already creative when playing the score, become full
actors of their own production. Firstly, during the experimentation
process for choosing adequate objects and techniques to manipulate the
tam-tam, the microphones, and the filters: one can envision, on the one
hand, that this phase would take place in a collective manner with all
the musicians together; and, on the other hand, one can also imagine
that in the course of experimenting the participants might wander
from the beaten track trying out other possibilities than those exclu-
sively centered on the authors specifications (in order to come back to
them having gained new ground). Secondly, after the public perfor-
mance of the piece, the group of performers, taking advantage of this
first experience, would have the possibility to develop their own version
of the sound universe of the conceptual and material apparatus. Thirdly,
there would be the possibility, keeping the apparatus as is, to make an
investigation of all the sonic possibilities of the system having nothing
to do with Stockhausens detailed specifications and to develop a
completely separate object, either by designing a new score defining
the detail of the unfolding of sounds in time, or in an improvisation of
which the protocol would be the combination of the Mikrophonie
apparatus and the reservoir of possibilities explored during the planned
experimental process. We should note that these three possibilities
would seem acceptablebecause they would take place outside the
public space of the concertin the framework of a pedagogical project
with the objective for the participants to discover how to produce a
wide range of sounds through working from highly structured
constraints and to discover also how one can build such a collection.
But the boundaries between experimentation, learning, and produc-

tion, as can be observed in these examples, are thin: these three types
of activity are intertwined in any conceptual apparatus. Thus the
notion of dispositif corresponds to a new situation, both in economic
and aesthetical terms. At the time of the first performance of
Mikrophonie I, in Europe, the experimental processes carried out by
the performers that were necessary to the realization of the piece were
completely integrated into the concert budget, thanks to public
support subsidies and the presence of institutions such as radio
stations. This kind of support has been gradually reduced since the
1980s, a fact that corresponds also to the transfer of the remunerated
activities of musicians towards educational institutions. This movement
towards education and the academic world had already been the case in
the United States since 1945 because of the absence of important state
and federal support grants for non-commercial musical activities. And
it is through this notion of apparatus regrouping in the same
framework of teaching/learning, research, and production that the
presence of musicians in conservatories and universities takes on an
aesthetic meaning beyond the necessities of economic survival.
Without the space, the stimulation for research, the salaries, and the
tools made available by the institution, the experimentation described
by Christopher Burns in the elaboration of a high quality version of
Stockhausens Mikrophonie I could not take place. But this emigration
towards places of education also produces perverse effects on the kind
of music addressed to limited and highly specialized audiences or that
bases its existence on providing an alternative to cultural industries:
while the educational costs are constantly increasing, the culture of
gratuity, of free access, is gaining importance in the sector of public
concerts. If making accessible to the general public the work done in
the anonymous space of the institutions becomes a necessity at any
price for ensuring visibility, if career advancement for a teacher/
researcher necessitates publications (in the case of performers, public
concerts) and participation in conferences, then it becomes acceptable
to do it free of honoraria, even to pay for doing it. This is linked to
another phenomenon, generated in this case by Internet communi-
cation: an increasingly affirmed tendency to demand free access to
cultural productions that comes in addition to the impunity enjoyed by
those pursuing diverse forms of cyber piracy. The world of under-
ground productions becomes poorer and poorer and moreover more
and more crowded, that of the super-stars richer and richer and limited
to a very small number of professionals. It is in this political context
that the ecology of practices takes on a particular meaning.
Another political aspect created by the notion of a dispositif of

timbre production involving the triangle teaching/learningresearch
production has to do with copyright. Copyright, as it has been de-
veloped at the end of the eighteenth century, takes on all its sense
when, given a situation of sound production shared by all authors (or
composers)the book, the score with standardized notation, the
learning of written language in schools, the music schools training
classical musicians, etc.it becomes possible for differentiations to
be expressed. But when these shared tools of sound productionthat
is the presence of a stable supportdisappear in favor of the elab-
oration by the artists themselves of the conditions of production of the
supports, through sound concepts that group materials, techniques,
and human interactions, complications arise: the evident, necessary
presence of collectives of individuals participating in creative elabo-
ration, the potential usages of conceptual apparatus in configurations
that differentiate themselves from the original work, contribute to
question the supremacy of a single author, reducing her/him to a
brand, a controlled appellation of origin, or to a publicity label.
In France, from the instigation of authors rights laws at the time of
the French Revolution, the question arose as to whether ideas can be
considered as the property of an author, or if intellectual property is an
inalienable right.100 This balance remains unstable according to the
diverse historical contexts in which it is inscribed. Confronted by
computer culture, this balance becomes more and more difficult to
achieve. In these conditions, one must ask if the issue of timbre, to the
extent that its production concerns at the same time technological
supports, musicians education, and details of acoustic creation, would
not also, given its fundamental unstable nature, join the issue of the
impossibility for ideas to become personal property. Nothing seems
clear in this affair.
The manipulation of timbre opens the way to numerous issues,
notably the one implying that ethics prohibit the appropriation of timbre
for oneself in order to win prestige or commercial success. However, if
we take for reference the historical context of the composition of
Mikrophonie I, the invention of this particular system of relations (or
dispositif) is inscribed in an approach in which the innovations of the
European avant-garde in terms notably of electroacoustic production
have a profound meaning. One cannot deny Stockhausen the credit of
being one of the pioneers of live electronic music (in real time). Today,
in the world of computer information and its ambivalent character
oscillating between catastrophic implications for the professional world,
exaggerated concentration of powers of diffusion, and the happiness of
amateur researchers, the stakes have changed profoundly. In their

conclusion, Benhamou and Farchy place us in a dilemma concerning
the accessibility of everyone to information and the defense of the
creators interests:
The extension of copyright to new territories, even though they

are threatened from all sides, is a paradox, which no analyst can
avoid. It poses the question of the future perverse effects of the
temptation to extend copyright towards functions that are not
appropriate to it. If the field is too widely enlarged, is it not the
case that one runs the risk of ruining its meaning?101
Timbre production seems to be situated at the limit between

legitimate acknowledgement of sound objects that are characteristic of
a composer and indeterminate collective utilizations. To come back to
the example of Mikrophonie as conceptual and material apparatus, any
conceivable sonorities that can be extracted from it will certainly sound
like the expression of Stockhausens domain. Nevertheless, the score in
itself limits the sound universe to but a few possibilities, leaving un-
explored an infinite world.
All these preoccupations, even if they are far from being proportion-
ally equivalent, can be related to the eminently political issues of
patents concerning technical innovations, notably in the domain of the
manipulation of living organisms. As with the case of timbre, the copy-
right laws pertaining to the patents are directed towards the supports
of the life system itself (and the survival) of living species, with the aim
of creating objects of property with an exclusive monopoly on their
use. It is obvious in all this that timbre production and control does
not have the economic impact of patents, and it does not threaten in
any way our environment, apart from the possible noise disturbances
affecting the ear. But we should adopt in this matter an ethical posi-
tion, which is essential in the perspectives of the ecology of practices.
In the case of Genetically Modified Organisms, for example, one of
the major controversies concerns the free development of new varieties
of organisms from varieties that are protected by international law. Ac-
cording to the report of the French Conseil Economique et Social on
GMO, patent laws do not favor an open innovation.102 Once genes
and gene sequencings are patented, certain varieties covered by a
patent cannot be used anymore by others for pursuing innovation,
which is harmful for agricultural biological diversity.103
Concerning sound production, we are very far from an absence of
freedom and arbitrary prohibitions, which would come to muzzle the
emergence of a great variety of practices. But the issue we are con-

cerned with here is whether timbre, which has been at the center of
the inventive thinking of the European avant-garde since at least the
compositions of Edgar Varse, is an object whose creation can be con-
sidered as the property of any person, or, in the best case, belongs to a
heterogeneous collective as part of a particular apparatus. Who can
pretend to a monopoly in the invention of timbres? Is it situated on
the side of concepts or on the side of practices, on the side of the
pragmatic composers or of the performers with well thought-out
projects?
POESIS OR PRAXIS?
Before concluding this long text, lets go back to the question of the
electronic society and the status of the artwork, using the reference in
the last section to the notion of a slow writing of timbre qualities.
Western modernity is centered on the sacred nature of the masterwork
identified with a single author. The work is embodied in an object,
which guarantees a timeless stability and puts the accent on the person
who produces it, an identified author, leaving to all the others a
secondary role of interpretation. Each work has to be different from
any other and is inscribed into an historical temporality.
However, a great deal of traditional music of the world cannot be
defined in terms of identified final fixed products, but involves
processes in which community participation plays a very important role
on an everyday basis.104 The practice is determined by more or less
tacit social rules, which are translated into improvised acts in the spirit
of the moment and which never repeat exactly the past performances.
The production is determined by the amalgam of past collective
productions that happened under the critical scrutiny of the com-
munity. One has the impression that this instability of the artistic act is
inscribed in an immutable formalism completely conforming to its
origin. There would be apparent no explicit history, while in reality the
collective production demands a permanent adaptation to the con-
ditions of the participants.
The stakes are here articulated on the opposition between the
concepts of poesis, which refers to a fabrication producing a specific
object, and of praxis, which implies an action that has no other end
than itself. These concepts issued from Greek antiquity take on a
particular meaning today.105 The works as productions, according to
Hannah Arendt, dominate modernity, mostly through the infinite
fabrication of objects and tools, in logical systems in which the final
product is of primordial importance in relation to any elaboration

processes, which have to remain hidden as mere means to achieve ends:
The implements and tools of homo faber, from which the most
fundamental experience of instrumentality arises, determine all
work and fabrication. Here it is indeed true that the end justifies
the means; it does more, it produces and organizes them. . . .
Because of the end product, tools are designed and implements
invented, and the same end product organizes the work process
itself, decides about the needed specialists, the measure of cooper-
ation, the number of assistants, etc. During the work process,
everything is judged in terms of suitability and usefulness for the
desired end, and nothing else.106
One can easily hold the view that there is a connection between the
productivism of the modern era, the development of a consumerist so-
ciety, and the generalized commoditization of goods. But for Arendt,
works of art, although they might correspond perfectly to this emphasis
on the achieved object, remain by their transcendental characteristics
outside any immediate utilitarism: In the case of the art-works,
reification is more than mere transformation.107 They are capable,
through the embodiment of some form of thought, of ensuring the
modern world with permanence and stability:
The man-made world of things, the human artifice erected by

homo faber, becomes a home for mortal men, whose stability will
endure and outlast the ever-changing movement of their lives and
actions, only insomuch as it transcends both the sheer functional-
ism of things produced for consumption and the sheer utility of
objects produced for use.108
The works of art of the European modernist movement are

considered by many as being outside the domain of a simple com-
modity or utility exchange. The guarantee of authenticity of categories
and styles is considered as the only efficient defense against the general
commodification of cultural productions that is facilitated by electronic
media. The objects that in the performing arts identify the author of
the work (scores, texts, diverse notations) have the particularity of
being distinguished from utilitarian objects in a strangely hybrid form:
they are the place of reference where the essence of the work is fixed,
and at the same time this reference is nothing without its realization
on stage; it remains a hidden element, still part of the means to achieve
an endthat is, the act.
However, all todays practices have to be confronted with the elec-

tronic storage of information, which comes to change the name of the
game in a subtle fashion: recordings, disks, electronic memories, . . . .
The fixity of electronic memories tends to a general reification of both
the works inscribed on scores and the ritualized actions fixed in the
collective memory of the participants. The recording fixes definitively a
particular moment of time, but, in the very process of solidification of
the real, it can make even less claim to represent an authentic tradition:
this was done in this way at a certain moment, it is one example among
others of a type of practice (see above concerning Adorno and phono-
graph records). Nevertheless, these fortresses turned towards the past
risk disappearance if they are not able to allow within them diverse
manners of respecting tradition. Besides, digitalized memories can be
easily pirated and modified for ones own profit. Recordings fix real
events, but they are precarious in their virtuality.
The exact nature of electronic memories recording some specific act
in its totality tends to dematerialize the object as one instance among
many others, a referent of what it is possible to do, but not exactly
what it would be appropriate to do in order to follow the source
faithfully in the authenticity of its origin. The process of exact fixation
guaranteed by electronic memories favors the general commodification
of practices in all domains. In order to escape it, there is no other
choice than to smartly ensure that each event would not be simply the
exact repetition of a preceding version. Here lies the necessity to
develop the capacity to treat sound signalsthe timbrein real time.
Also influenced by the exact memories of technologies linked to
electricity, European traditional art in its highest manifestations finds
itself under the obligation to reinvent its everyday practices: one only
needs to examine all the different ways of playing older music or of
historicizing the works of the repertoire, notably in reintroducing
improvised forms that had been abandoned. A certain number of
experimentations since 1945 have profoundly modified the position of
the composer: open-ended works, indeterminacy, use of randomness,
electroacoustic music, experimentations with intonation and scales, the
building of new instruments, the collaboration between composers and
performers in order to develop extended techniques, improvisation,
etc. All this diversity of practices, based on a mixture of materials
fitting particular contexts, on different manners of envisioning
creation, of presenting the works in public, and of determining
different possible roles for the participants, all this comes to confuse
the issue of the monolithic path of Western art.
One could take the view that the new technologies, far from calling
into question traditions, have the capacity, thanks to their power of
information storage, to promote them for aficionados who are becoming

more and more expert.109 However, these technologies also open the
way to the serious questioning of the pretension to exclusivity exercised
by traditions, and through this, of their aura. They favor the differen-
tiation of practices in all domains and therefore put the emphasis on the
collective processes of praxis.
Let us return to Hannah Arendts text, in which the word praxis is
replaced by action, something linked most of the time with speech.
For her, the condition of action depends on a group of both equal and
different human beings. In this sense, action and speech characterize
the political act in its highest manifestation: to do something together
while recognizing our differences:110
Action, as distinguished from fabrication, is never possible in isola-

tion; to be isolated is to be deprived of the capacity to act. Action
and speech need the surrounding presence of others no less than
fabrication needs the surrounding presence of nature for its mate-
rial and of a world in which to place the finished product. Fabrica-
tion, is surrounded by and in constant contact with the world:
action and speech are surrounded by and in constant contact with
the web of the acts and words of other men.111
The interactivity between participants in the notion of praxis does

not allow the prediction of what will happen exactly and what the
shape of the final product will be. This final product is no longer in a
position to pretend to be a creditable production to be sold on the
market. What is inscribed in praxis is the instability of the relationships
between human beings: one deed and sometimes one word, suffices
to change every constellation.112
Arendt compares the political, interactive systems of Greece and
Rome. In Greek antiquity, the laws are designed to allow subsequent
actions of the citizens: not Athens, but the Athenians, were the
polis.113 In Rome, on the contrary, the political genes were completely
turned towards an art of the legislature and of the founding of insti-
tutions. This same opposition can also be found in, on the one hand,
improvisation framed by rules allowing a multiplicity of possible
actions and, on the other hand, the structural formalism of written
scores aiming at predictable and precise results.
Modern society, more influenced by Rome than by Athens, has com-
pletely degraded the idea of action by reducing it to a simple exe-
cution, which according to Adam Smith (quoted by Arendt) is in the
same category as menial services, the lowest and most unproductive
labour.114 Arendt then notes:
It was precisely these occupationshealing, flute-playing, play-

actingwhich furnished ancient thinking with examples for the
highest and greatest activities of man.115
It is clear to me that the issues we have to face today in terms of

timbre production belong to the side of praxis, not only in the sense
of emphasis on processes (as with John Cage), but also as collective
actions connected with political questions (as with George Lewis).
What needs to be reinvented on an everyday basis is the practice and
not the productive result. It does not follow that there is no
production anymore, but it loses its definitive emphasis. In this era of
world-wide electronic technology, rehabilitating praxis reinstates the
flute player as the actor of her/his own practice in a context of
relational instability, actions that are ephemeral, and unpredictable
aims.116
CONCLUSION
This text hesitates between, on the one hand, the side of writingthe
impossibility of representing timbres through notation, which heralds
the impossibility of a total hegemony of composers over musical pro-
ductionand on the other hand, the side of oralitythe impossibility
of a pure production of timbres free from any external constraints
imposed on those who produce the sounds, which heralds the impos-
sibility of the mythologies surrounding what is classified as improvi-
sation. It is necessary to work between these two abysses and to avoid
falling into one or the other. Working on timbre replaces practical
experience in the orbit of dignity, to which it had been denied by the
Moderns in the name of rationality and of the refusal of superstitions
that it no doubt promotes.
Reflection on timbre cannot leave out scientific research that has
contributed to finding a closer determination of its reality, nor artistic
works which place its arbitrary determination outside sonic mani-
festation, in musical composition written on scores, and which have
also contributed in their own ways to the emancipation of timbre from
traditional idiosyncrasies. But what this text tries to establish is that the
fiction that timbre as a structural element in itself has been exclusively
invented by Arnold Schoenberg, Edgar Varse, and few other com-
posers of euro-logical tendency (to use a term invented by George
Lewis117), and that in this respect the musical expressions created at
about the same epoch by instrumentalists or vocalists did not play any
role, is completely unacceptable. The same thing applies to the dis-

paragement of the role played in the exhibition of new, different
timbres by popular music in the very commercial (and therefore
problematic) context of the cultural industry. The importance of the
relatively new support constituted by the recording of sounds in
memories (at first analog, then electronic and digital) should be
stressed, as should the essential role that it assumes in the elaboration
of the sonorities of the different musical practices of our time.
The electronic world gives easier access to anyone to create sounds
and opens the way to an emphasis on action in the political terms of
Hannah Arendt. The collective dimension of this fairly new situation
implies, in my view, the necessity to create institutions that not only
promote and permit collective interactions, but at the same time would
bring together different forms of cultural expressions and also be a
space for resisting the capacity of the media for manipulation.
In addition, the present text, in following Latours thinking in his
Enqute sur les modes dexistence, translates its words in a subversive
manner, without a full understanding of the totality of its content, but
above all in completely changing the direction of its finality. For
Latour, the anthropology of the Moderns, in bringing to the
forefront the contradictions that characterize them, has to be able to
rehabilitate them in a pacified manner in order to face the catastrophes
announced by the programmed destruction of the earth and its in-
habitants. The pacification of the Moderns pertains to recognizing that
truth does not belong exclusively to the sciences, but that other types
of truth are expressed in other modes of existence, in which the arts are
included (classified in his book as fictions). In order to support this
assertion, Latour undertakes the presentation of a constitutive
asymmetry between sciences, which by definition belong to the
Moderns, and other modes of experience, which, it seems, would not
belong to them, each mode having its own conditions of hiatus, of
trajectory, of felicity and infelicity, of being to be instaured, and
of alterations.118 On one side, the undeniable facts of science, which
are not constructions of the human mind, and on the other side all the
other possible constructions or fictions, which human beings can
elaborate in heterogeneous truths and languages. In attempting to
remedy the difficulties linked to this asymmetry, the error is on the side
of science and of its undeniable facts, which deny that any truth could
exist in other modes of existence and which tolerate them in a fairly
contemptuous way. The high European arts, seen as fictions in this
picture, would escape any such critique, they would have absolutely no
tendencies to colonize other cultures, to tolerate them with conde-
scension, or even to deny them the right to be qualified as part of it.
My particular fiction, far from contradicting this independence of

truth in relation to modern sciences, determines that there are also,
inside the artistic world, some relative truths, of which one in partic-
ular is inscribed in the fiction of modernity in the same terms
employed by Latour concerning sciences. The unfolding of the con-
frontation of artistic practices, each with their own system of justi-
fication in a globalized world, creates the conditions of a pointed
critique directed against any form of hegemony. How could the
Moderns recover themselves119 by the seizing on modes of existence
having their own truths, if these modes of existence are tarnished by
the same illnesses as the one noted on the subject of the undeniable
facts of science concerning their elucidation by procedures completely
constructed by humans? How could they recover if the arts of Western
modernity did not have the same certitude as the sciences in
considering that the other worlds construct their gods from scratch
and, moreover, that they believe in them as if they were undeniable
facts? Do the same contradictory injunctions within the other modes of
existence themselves (outside science) prevent the asymmetry between
modern and non-modern, and the end of the bifurcations of the
forked tongues?
Is the critical analysis of representation, here in the form of musical
notation, the proof of a fundamentalist, iconoclastic position, which
consists in burning the idols of the others and in refusing, for
(protestant and puritanical) moral reasons, any materialization of
divinities? Latour wonders: Are we now capable of replacing the ir-
reparable cracks between what is constructed and what is true, through
the deployment of trajectories that distinguish different modes of
veracity?120 To this question, he definitively answers no, while re-
gretting the triumph of fundamentalism and of criticism, which need
one another to continue to exist in the fiction of the modern, in
burning, each in turn, their fetishes. Or perhaps, another scenario, is
the position of this analysis to be placed within the collateral victims
experience of the contradictions of the Moderns as beings of fiction
who are only worthy of consideration by charity? Would the
experience then be rehabilitated in the reconciliation of representations
with things?
***
In his autobiography, the Orkney poet, Edwin Muir, writes that he had
been aware of religion chiefly as the sacred word, and the church itself,
severe and decent, with its touching bareness and austerity, seemed to cut
off religion from the rest of life and from all the week-day world. . . . It
did not tell me by any outward sign that the Word had been made flesh.
In his commentary on Muirs Orkney background, George Marshall
comments: The outward sign is necessary to the poet. Ultimately, it was
for its rejection of the image, of the Incarnation in its fullest sense, that
Muir found the Church of his youth wanting. He saw its faith as one of
abstraction and rejection of life.121
NO T E S
1. Jack Goody, Representations and Contradictions: Ambivalence

Towards Images, Theatre, Fiction, Relics, and Sexuality (Oxford:
Blackwell Publishers, 1997), 15.
2. For a study of problems linked to orality and writing, see Jack
Goody, The Interface Between the Written and the Oral (Cambridge
University Press, 1987).
3. See Michel de Certeau, Linvention du quotidien, I: Arts de faire
(Paris: Union Gnrale dEditions, 1980).
4. Roland Barthes, Le grain de la voix, Musique en Jeu 9 (Novem-
ber 1972), 58. Cette voix nest pas personnelle: elle nexprime
rien du chantre, de son me; elle nest pas originale . . ., surtout
cette voix charrie directement le symbolique, par dessus
lintelligible, lexpressif. . . . Le grain ce serait cela: la matrialit
du corps parlant sa langue maternelle: peuttre la lettre; presque
srement sa signifiance. My translation.
5. Daniel Charles, La musique et lcriture, Musique en Jeu 13
(November 1973), 3.
6. See JeanCharles Franois, La note musicale et la synthse digita-
lise de londe sonore, Traverses 26 (October 1982); Timbre fig,
timbre dynamique, Revue dEsthtique, special issue on Cage (1987
88); Percussion et musique contemporaine, chapters 2 (Contrle
direct ou indirect de la qualit des sons) and 4 (La percussion et
la question du timbre. Une tude sur Ionisation de Varse)
(Editions Klincksieck, 1991); Writing without Representation,
and Unreadable Notation, Perspectives of New Music 30/1, 620.
7. Bruno Latour, Enqute sur les modes dexistence, une anthropologie
des Modernes (Paris: Editions La Dcouverte, 2012).
8. Jean-Charles Franois, Dialog des Hochbegabten des Ver-
standes, in Vinko Globokar, 14 Arten einen Musiker zu beschreiben,
ed. Werner Klppelholz and Sigrid Konrad (Saarbrcken: PFAU
Verlag, 2008), 1135 (English version published in Open Space
Magazine 11, with this title: Dialogue of Deafening Gifted
Eavesdroppers [Autumn 2009], 223). Jean-Charles Franois,
Oralitimprovisationcriture, in Thories de la composition
musicale au XXe sicle 2, ed. Nicolas Donin and Laurent Feneyrou
(Lyon: Symtrie, 2013), 13151336.
9. For example, in his Preface to his orchestration treatise, Rimski-

Korsakoff writes: Our epoch, the post-Wagnerian age, is the age
of brilliance and imaginative quality in orchestral tone colouring.
Berlioz, Glinka, Liszt, Wagner, modern French composers
Delibes, Bizet, and others; those of the new Russian school
Borodin, Balakirev, Glazounov, and Tschaikovskyhave brought
this side of musical art to its zenith; they have eclipsed, as colour-
ists, their predecessors, Weber, Meyerbeer, and Mendelssohn, to
whose genius, nevertheless, they are indebted for their own
progress. His treatise is almost exclusively centered on instru-
mental distributions in varied registers. Nikolay Rimsky-Korsakov,
Principles of Orchestration (New York: Dover Publications, ed.
Maximilian Steinberg, trans. Edward Agate, 1964), 1.
10. Robert Erickson, Sound Structure in Music (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1975).
11. Ibid., 4.
12. John Cage, Variations II (New York: Edition Peters, 1961), 2.
13. Makis Solomos, De la musique au son (Rennes: Presses Universi-
taires de Rennes, 2013), 39.
14. Ibid.
15. Ibid.
16. Daniel Charles, Le temps de la voix (Paris: Jean-Pierre Delage,
1978), 276.
17. Ibid., 275.
18. Ibid., 276.
19. Certeau, Linvention du quotidien, 23435.
20. Max Weber, Sociologie de la musique (Paris: Editions Mtaili,
1998), 117.
21. Christopher Page, Polyphony before 1400, chapter 5 in
Performance Practice: Music before 1600, ed. Howard Meyer and
Stanley Sadie (New York, London: W. W. Norton and Company,
1990), 79104.
22. Ibid., 80.
23. Ibid., 84.
24. One could cite the diverse propositions of Arnold Schoenberg in

his 1924 article, A New Twelve-Tone Notation, in Style and
Idea, ed. Leonard Stein (London: Faber and Faber, 1975), 354
62; the propositions of Henri Pousseur for differentiating between
natural notes and sharps; the proportional time notation by
Luciano Berio; and the numerous experimentations with graphic
scores by Sylvano Bussotti, Earl Brown, Morton Feldman, John
Cage, Mauricio Kagel, Dieter Schnebel, etc.
25. Latour, Enqute sur les modes dexistence, 121.
26. See Leonard B. Meyer, Emotion and Meaning in Music (Chicago:
Chicago University Press, 1956).
27. See Certeau, LInvention du quotidien, especially chapter 10,
LEconomie scripturaire.
28. A controversy concerning drawing and color also runs through the
history of pictorial arts since at least the sixteenth century. It
would be interesting to compare this to the musical quarrels
concerning grammar and timbre.
29. This phenomenon of sound cloud, in which the ear does not
perceive the succession of discrete elements (the notes) but a
global sound event, has been used frequently in the contemporary
music of the last sixty years, in particular by Ligeti and Xenakis (see
Solomos, De la musique au son, 35273). The repetitive music of
Steve Reich, superposing the same figures in constantly changing
phases, can also be classified in this category. The music of Brian
Ferneyhough, which treats the complex rapid successions of notes
as grouped sound particles in order to form objects that are
perceived as global timbre, uses somehow the same concept.
30. This phenomenon of the dichotomy between meaningful succes-
sion and sound in itself was already noticed by Robert Erickson in
Sound Structure in Music. He compared this phenomenon with
similar ones in the visual domain in which a same combination of
lines can be perceived in two different but incompatible manners.
31. Solomos, De la musique au son, 49495.
32. See Nelson Goodman, Languages of Art: An Approach to a Theory
of Symbols (Indianapolis; New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1968).
33. Howard Becker, The Power of Inertia, The Open Space
Magazine 5 (Fall 2003), 5152.
34. Theodor W. Adorno, Gesammelte Schriften 19, Musikalische Schrif-

ten VI (Frankfurt sur le Main: Suhrkamp, 1984), Die Form des
Schallplatte, 53034. I am using here the English version:
Theodor W. Adorno, The Form of the Phonograph Record, in
Essays on Music: Selected, with Introduction, Commentary, and
Notes by Richard Leppert, trans. Susan H. Gillespie (Berkeley, CA:
University of California Press), 27782.
35. Ibid., 277.
36. Peter Szendy, coute: Une histoire de nos oreilles (Paris: Les
ditions de Minuit, 2001), 100. My translation. les sillons du
disque ne rendent plus raison (comme le fait la notation solfgique)
de ce que lon entend.
37. Ibid., 99.
38. Ibid., 164.
39. See Walter Benjamin, Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels, in
Gesammelte Schriften I (Frankfurt am main: Suhrkamp, 1974),
387; translated by John Osborne as The Origin of German Tragic
Drama (London: New Left Books, 1977), 214; translation slightly
modified by Thomas Y. Levin.
40. Adorno, The Form of the Phonograph Record, 27980.
41. Johann Wilhelm Ritter, Fragmente aus dem Nachlasse eines jungen
Physikers: Ein Taschenbuch fr Freunde der Natur (Heidelberg:
Mohr und Zimmer, 1810), 227. Quoted in Benjamin, The Origin
of German Tragic Drama, 214.
42. Theodor W. Adorno, ber den Fetischcharakter in der Musik
und die Regression of Hrens (1938), in Gesammelte Schriften 14
(Frankfurt sur le Main: Suhrkamp, 1984), 1450. I reference here
the English edition: Theodor W. Adorno, On the Fetish
Character in Music and the Regression of Listening, in Essays on
Music, Selected, with Introduction, Commentary, and Notes by
Richard Leppert, trans. Susan H. Gillespie (modified by Richard
Leppert) (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press), 288315.
43. On the ambivalence of jazz in relation to recordings and notation,
see David Borgo, Sync or Swarm: Improvising Music in a Complex
Age (New York, London: Continuum, 2005), 64.
44. The tendency to derivativeness and the prevalence of imitative
playing in all idiomatic improvisation seems to have produced in
jazz a situation where increasingly the music became identified with

the playing style of a handful of musicians. . . . The performing
style of . . . the majority of players, is invariably identified by
association with or reference to one of the great players on his
instrument. . . . In fact it is common in jazz to find exact, identical
in every detail, replicas of well-known stylists. Derek Bailey,
Improvisation: Its Nature and Practice in Music (London: The
British Library National Sound Archive, 1992), 5253.
45. See Franois, Writing without Representation, and Unreadable
Notation, 621, notably 18.
46. Jean-Charles Franois, Fixed Timbre, Dynamic Timbre, Perspec-
tives of New Music 28/2, 112118. Original in French Timbre
fig, timbre dynamique, op. cit.
47. Ibid., 113.
48. See Franois Ribac, Cultures techniques et reproduction sonore
dans la musique populaire, Enseigner la musique 8, Education
permanente, action culturelles et enseignement: les dfis des
musiques actuelles amplifies, Actes des rencontres Lyon, les 2 et
3 mars 2005 (Cefedem Rhne-AlpesCNSMD de Lyon), 97
114.
49. See Franois, Percussion et musique contemporaine, chapter 2, 45
67. This chapter is devoted to a comparison between percussion
(direct control) and piano (indirect control).
50. In Sound Structure in Music, Robert Erickson notes that the
composer will discover the paradox that the more he tries for an
infinity of timbres the more he will tend toward non-significant
contrasts (9). Clearly, his preference goes toward a unified
selection of sounds from the infinity of possibilities.
51. Adorno, On the Fetish-Character in Music, 288 (English
version).
52. Ibid., 291.
53. See ibid., 303: The counterpart to the fetishism of music is a
regression of listening. This does not mean a relapse of the
individual listener into an earlier phase of his own development,
nor a decline in the collective general level, since the millions who
are reached musically for the first time by todays mass com-
munications cannot be compared with the audience of the past.
Rather, it is contemporary listening which has regressed, arrested
at the infantile stage. . . . Whenever they [the listening subjects]

have a chance, they display the pinched hatred of those who really
sense the other but exclude it in order to live in peace, and who
therefore would like best to root out the nagging possibility. The
regression is really from this existent possibility, or more concretely,
from the possibility of a different and oppositional music.
54. Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical
Reproduction, in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry
Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1969), 21751. I am working
from a French translation from German, published in Walter
Benjamin, uvres III, trans. Maurice de Gandillac (Paris:
Gallimard), 269316.
55. See Benjamin, uvres III, 282: lun des accents porte sur la
valeur cultuelle de luvre, lautre sur la valeur dexposition.
56. Ibid., 311. Lopposition entre distraction et recueillement peut
encore se traduire de la faon suivante: celui qui se recueille devant
une uvre dart sy abme; il y pntre comme ce peintre chinois
dont la lgende raconte que, contemplant son tableau achev, il y
disparut. Au contraire, la masse distraite recueille luvre dart en
elle. My translation. See also Adorno, Essays on Music, 239; com-
mentaries by Richard Leppert, 242.
57. See Richard Hoggart, The Uses of Literacy: Aspects of Working-Class
Life with Special Reference to Publications and Entertainments
(London: Chatto and Windus, 1957).
58. Jean-Claude Passeron, Portrait de Richard Hoggart en socio-
logue, Enqute (August 1993), para. 19, http://enquete.revues
.org/175, accessed November 16, 2005. My translation.
59. Hoggart asked at the time: The question, of course, is how long
this stock of moral capital will last, and whether it is being
sufficiently renewed. Hoggart, The Uses of Literacy, 295.
60. Certeau, Linvention du quotidien I.
61. Michael Wood, Distraction Theory: How to Read while Thinking
of Something Else, Michigan Quarterly Review 48/4 (Autumn
2009), http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.act2080.0048.410.
62. Benjamin, uvres III, 313. Quoted in Michael Wood, Distrac-
tion Theory.
63. Wood, Distraction Theory, last paragraph of the second part.
64. See Pauline Oliveros, Improvisation in the Sonosphere, Contem-

porary Music Review 25/56 (2006). See http://www.deep
listening.org/pauline/.
65. Adorno, On the Fetish-Character in Music, 294.
66. Ibid.
67. Ibid., 301. The official ideal of performance, which covers the
earth as a result of Toscaninis extraordinary achievement, helps to
sanction a condition which, in a phrase of Eduard Steurmann, may
be called the barbarism of perfection.
68. See Solomos, De la musique au son, 495.
69. See Szendy, Une histoire de nos oreilles, 155170. In particular,
162: Cette poque de lcouteil ny a rien de fortuitest aussi
celle o les auditeurs deviennent auteurs. (This era of listening
it is not at all fortuitousis also the one in which the auditors
become authors.) One also finds this kind of idea with Antoine
Hennion in his studies on music amateurs and their practices. See,
for example, Antoine Hennion, Rflexivits. Lactivit de
lamateur, Rseaux 153/1 (2009), 5578.
71. Ibid., 124.
72. Ibid., 88.
73. Ibid., 8889.
74. Ibid., 121.
75. Ibid., 88.
76. Ibid., 160.
77. Ibid., 163.
78. Hennion, Rflexivits, Lactivit de lamateur, 12. My translation.
80. Ibid., 167.
81. See Lucy Green, How Popular Musicians Learn: A Way Ahead for
Music Education (Aldershot, England and Burlington, VT:
Ashgate, 2002).
82. David Sudnow, Ways of the Hand: A Rewritten Account (Cam-

bridge, MA and London: MIT Press, 2001). When I looked at
my teachers hands, I looked past them to the places they went,
not how they were going about, but where (18). When my teacher
said, now that you can play tunes, try improvising melodies with
the right hand, and when I went home and listened to my jazz
records, it was as if the assignment was to go home and start
speaking French. There was this French going on, streams of fast-
flowing strange sounds, rapidly windings, styles within styles in the
course of any players music (17).
83. Michel Foucault, Entrevue. Le jeu de Michel Foucault, Ornicar:
bulletin periodique du champ freuden 10 (1977), 63. My translation.
84. See Jean-Charles Franois, Eddy Schepens, Karine Hahn, and
Dominique Clment, Processus contractuels dans les projets de
ralisation musicale des tudiants au Cefedem Rhne-Alpes,
Enseigner la Musique 9/10 (2007).
86. Isabelle Stengers, Cosmopolitiques, 1, La guerre des sciences
(Paris: La Dcouverte/Les Empcheurs de penser en rond, 1996),
22. parasiter sans tuer. My translation.
87. Ibid., 23. Mme si aucune na chapp au parasitage gnralis
qui les implique toutes. My translation.
88. Ibid., 52. Vecteur de lucidit ou crateur dillusion. My
translation.
89. Ibid., 5253. Drogue dont leffet peut muter en son contraire,
selon le dosage, les circonstances, le contexte, toute drogue dont
laction noffre aucune garantie, ne dfinit aucun point fixe partir
duquel on pourrait avec assurance, en reconnatre et comprendre
les effets. My translation.
90. Ibid., 59. Par analogie, on pourra donc dire que la population de
nos pratiques relve en tant que telle, quels que soient le mode
dexistence immanent de chacune et lingrdient qui constitue
pour chacune lexistence des autres, dune mise en scne colo-
gique. . . . Pour un cologiste, toutes les situations cologiques
ne se valent pas, en particulier lorsquelles font intervenir les
membres de lespce humaine. La pratique (politique au sens
large) des cologistes a donc trait la production de valeurs, la
proposition de nouveaux modes dvaluation, de nouvelles
significations. Mais ces valeurs ne transcendent pas la situation

constate, ils nen constituent pas la vrit enfin intelligible. Ils ont
pour enjeu la production de nouvelles relations venant sajouter
une situation dj produite par une multiplicit de relations. Et ces
relations sont lisibles elle aussi en termes de valeur, dvaluation, de
signification. My translation.
91. Ibid., 64. O chaque protagoniste est intress au succs de
lautre pour ses propres raisons. My translation.
92. See Ibid., 6566. One speaks of in-between-capture when a
double process of identity construction is produced: on one mode
or another, and usually on completely different modes, the
identities which are co-invented integrate each for its own account
a reference to the other. In the case of symbiosis, this reference
happens to be positive: each of the beings co-invented by the
relation of in-between-capture is concerned, in order to maintain
itself, that the other also maintains itself in existence. [On parle
en revanche dentre-capture lorsque se produit un double processus
de constitution didentit: sur un mode ou sous un autre, et
usuellement sur des modes tout fait diffrents, les identits qui se
co-inventent intgrent chacune pour leur propre compte une
rfrence lautre. Dans le cas de la symbiose, cette rfrence se
trouve tre positive: chacun des tres co-invents par la relation
dentre-capture a intrt, pour se maintenir, ce que lautre se
maintienne lexistence.] My translation.
93. Christopher Burns, Realizing Lucier and Stockhausen: Case
Studies in the Performance Practice of Electroacoustic Music,
Journal of New Music Research 31/1 (March 2002), 63.
94. These three problematic aspects have been well described by
Christopher Burns in his article on the processes of implemen-
tation of the piece in a recent performance. Ibid.
95. Ibid. Throughout our rehearsal period, we were continuously
expanding our arsenal, buying, borrowing, and building as we
needed new tools.
96. Ibid. No single player can assume complete authority over a
particular sound event; the trios of percussionist, microphonist,
electronic operator (and often the complete sextet) have to work
together to produce each individual sound.
97. Karlheiz Stockhausen, Microphony, in Stockhausen on Music:

Lectures and Interviews, compiled by Robin Maconie (London;
New York: Marion Boyars, 1989), 85.
98. Ibid., 82.
99. Ibid., 85.
100. See Franoise Benhamou and Jolle Farchy, Droit dauteur et
copyright (Paris: La Dcouverte, 2007), 7. Condorcet and Sieys
express the view that a literary property without limit would be
unjust because it would lastingly institute a monopoly on ideas that
belong entirely to the common good and are useful to the progress
of humanity: ideas could not be considered as one persons
property, they are the result of a collective process of creation.
101. Ibid., 112.
102. Avis du Comit conomique et social europen sur Les OGM
dans lUE (supplment davis), rapporteur Martin Siecker, 2012,
4.3, alineabyluxia.fr.
103. Ibid., 4.4.
104. In a recent paper, I use the example of Bl, a music, theatre, and
dance from Martinique, to characterize a form of interactive social,
artistic, and participative on-going activities mixing people of all
ages and all abilities. Jean-Charles Franois, Que deviennent les
valeurs dans la liaison globalisante entre pratique, recherche et en-
seignement dans le domaine de la musique? in Priphriques vous
parlent 28, www.lesperipheriques.org./article.php3?id_article=589.
105. I will here use as a reference the book by Hannah Arendt, The
Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958). In
this book, Arendt does not use much the terms poesis and praxis,
but her text, which is centered on three essential elements of the
human condition, working, production, and action, gives impor-
tant clues for understanding what is at stake in todays world.
106. Ibid., 206.
107. Ibid., 168.
108. Ibid., 173.
109. See Hennion, Rflexivits.
110. Arendt, The Human Condition, chapter V, Action, 175247.
111. Ibid., 188.

112. Ibid., 190.
113. Ibid., 195.
114. Ibid., 207. Arendt quotes Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations,
vol. 2 (Everymans ed.), 295.
115. Arendt, The Human Condition, 207.
116. See MarcO, Thtralit et Musique (Paris: Association S.T.A.R,
1994), 86. We have said that, in its wide meaning, the term of
actor is related to the produced activity more than to a social status
(an identity). Ideally, the actor, author of his/her acts, is an author
who verifies, acts. Through her/his acts, be it on the stage of work,
on the social, family stage or anywhere else, he/she tries to
understand what she/he is essentially lacking. Only the action can
help him/her to understand what he/she is lacking. And what is
lacking, it is precisely that which is her/his way of life. As such,
he/she can have a goal in life. Through this, he/she has a destiny,
she/he contributes to develop culture. He/she makes history.
My translation.
117. See George Lewis, Improvised Music after 1950, Black Music
Research Journal 16/1, 91122.
118. See Latour, Enqute sur les modes dexistence, 48485. The chart
that recapitulates the state of the inquiry. . . . [le tableau qui
rcapitule ltat de lenqute prsente. . . .] My translation.
119. Ibid., 183.
120. Ibid., 181.
121. Quoted in Goody, Representations and Contradictions, 1920.
From Marshall, In a Distant Isle.

François - Improvisation, Orality and Writing Revisited

Uploaded by

Document Information

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

François - Improvisation, Orality and Writing Revisited

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

Improvisation, Orality, and Writing Revisited

Author(s): Jean-Charles Franois

While written language may be used to exhort, and is performative in that

could be spelled out in the following man-

The concept of orality was invented by the civilization of writing.

In our own written tradition, what needs to be dissimulated is the

aspects, here and there practitioners voices begin to be heard, but

PART I. TIMBRE AND ITS REPRESENTATION

ATTEMPT AT DEFINING TIMBRE

How can we define timbre? What is at stake in this definition? In this

by the relative harshness or softness of the attacks. Timbre is affected

meaning of the measurements taken for each successive dot deter-

At this point in time, at the beginning of the twenty-first century,

1. Pitch inscribed in a duration, with a given loudness, should not

2. The sounds have to present a relative stability, the difference in

3. The sonorities must be already familiar to the ears of the

He continues his demonstration:

With this idea of a totality of timbre found in the notion of sound

in accordance with Daniel Charles, who noted in Le temps de la voix,

NOTATION AND MODERNITY

The specific problems of timbre production in contemporary

If one considers the specific conditions of the musical evolution of

For Weber, one of the decisive stages in the development of the

development is linked to the onset of polyphonic practices in which

Throughout the period covered by this chapter composers

Already at this point of history determined by Max Weber as crucial

the performers main task being to concentrate on clear, uniform, and

On the one hand, Western musical notation has been designed to be

This imprecise manner of representing sounds and actions on paper,

Bruno Latour, in his project on the anthropology of the Moderns

become principally a prescriptive medium for actions to be realized in

opportunity to assimilate the new syntax by repeated listening.26 One

As soon as timbre in its somewhat savage instability affirms its auto-

Two moments of our history, representing in this matter opposite

sound, this is one of the direct accomplishments of this focusing

This quotation has to be understood in the context of two concerns

THE CONCEPT OF NOTE

What is noted on a score, the pitch contours and their distribution

attack is left unspecified as resonance. The ideal of keyboard instru-

In short, a way of making music is what sociologists of science

who can do everything the other parts of the package require:

In these conditions, musiciansand they are in great numberwho

DETOUR THROUGH ELECTRONIC TECHNOLOGIES

Is there a threat, with electronic technologies linked to sound, of

timbres of the original instruments or voices.34 For the first time,

Anyone who has ever recognized the steadily growing compulsion

Adorno is referring to Walter Benjamin, who raised, in The Origin of

2. The writing of the totality of the sound wave has to be done by

3. The unreadable character of this enigmatic writing cannot

any speculative thinking on what it could mean, it cannot be denied:

Trigger timbre implies that a performer pushes a knob or a key,

In trying not to succumb to moral considerations or to explicit

1. In the first place, one could consider the sounds stored in

2. The electronic sounds which, in a given music style, are repeated

sounds are most often used in configurations that reproduce the

3. Musical pieces or complex sound sequences fixed on electronic

4. Musical works specifically composed to exist only on electronic

How listeners grasp these situations will vary greatly according to

1. The bell beater can be played directly by somebody (as in the

can trigger very short sound samplings, as with electronic keyboards,

sound recuperation approaches aiming to modify the way it is used or

PART 2. POLY-TICS OF TIMBRE PRACTICE

ADORNO VERSUS BENJAMIN

The question of fixed timbre in memories brings us back to