Acknowledgements

This book had its origins in a project funded by a Major Research Fellowship from the Leverhulme Foundation (2014–16) titled ‘Music, Voice, and Language in French Musical Thought’. I am grateful to the Foundation for funding two years of research leave, away from the pressures of teaching and administration, which enabled me to negotiate a move from my previous work on Austro-German musical culture to the current study of French music. I am also grateful to Royal Holloway, University of London, for a period of sabbatical research leave immediately preceding the commencement of the Leverhulme Fellowship.

This book has much deeper roots however. They reach back some thirty years to an earlier part of my career when I was still a composer and when the idea of music I have tried to articulate here informed the daily business of my creative work. In this respect, I owe a particular debt to Jonathan Harvey, my teacher for a year (1988–89), subsequently a colleague for several more, and a much-loved friend and mentor until his untimely death in 2012. I would dearly have liked to discuss the content of this book with him, and I would be delighted if I have managed, in some small way, to bring into the realm of discourse an idea of music he so richly embodied in his own creative practice and life.

After Debussy is a wide-ranging book and is necessarily shaped by a host of intellectual exchanges impossible to list. Those who exerted the most direct influence on my thinking are cited in my text, footnotes, and bibliography. But for their particularly close encouragement and support, and for opening windows onto ways of thinking that I might not otherwise have come across, I would like to single out for thanks Jeremy Begbie, Federico Celestini, Jonathan Cross, Erling Guldbrandsen, Tomas McAuley, Jean-Paul Olive, Stephen Rumph, and Nikolaus Urbanek. I am especially grateful to colleagues and friends in the Music and Philosophy Study Group of the Royal Musical Association with which I have been associated since its inception in 2010 and without whom I would never have been so exposed to current debates in the fraught but fascinating borderland between our two disciplines.

I thank the two anonymous readers from Oxford University Press, the first readers of this work, who offered invaluable detailed comments and saved me from some serious omissions. I owe a special debt to Benjamin Walton who not only kindly read the whole of the typescript but also offered me a level of encouragement that is rare in academic life. His gentle but perspicacious insights saved me from errors of judgement far worse than those I have chosen to leave in.

In the course of pursuing my work on Debussy I have been fortunate enough to try out some of its materials on various groups of students – at Royal Holloway, University of London, the Liszt Academy in Budapest, the Universität für Musik und darstellende Kunst Wien, and at the Université Paris 8. I thank all of them for their engagement with the topic, their challenging questions and their insightful comments. I am also grateful for some wonderfully rich exchanges with my PhD students, past and present, in particular to Sam Wilson and Clare Brady whose wonderful theses I cite in the text.

To those unnamed friends and family who, in ways both academic and not, helped me find the re-orientation of my work reflected in this book, I offer special thanks. I am grateful, as ever, to Jeremy Hughes for the precision and musicality with which he has set the music examples. Finally, my thanks to Suzanne Ryan and her team at OUP: without Suzanne’s quiet encouragement, patience, and faith in my work, I may never have brought this book to completion.

I am grateful for permission to reuse material that has previously appeared in slightly different form elsewhere:

My discussion of Debussy’s ‘Fêtes galantes’ in Chapter 4 draws on material that originally appeared as ‘Present absence: Debussy, song, and the art of (dis)appearing’, 19^th-Century Music 40, no.3 (2017), 239–56. My discussion of Debussy’s ‘Trois Poèmes de Stéphane Mallarmé’ in Chapter 3 reproduces material that originally appeared in ‘Vertige!: Debussy, Mallarmé and the edge of language’ in Steven Huebner and François De Médicis (eds), Debussy’s Resonance (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2018). My discussion of Debussy’s Études in Chapter 7 draws on my chapter ‘Le corps en jeu: Debussy et “L’art de toucher” ’, which appears in Joseph Delaplace and Jean-Paul Olive (eds), Le corps dans l’écriture musicale (Arras: Artois Presses Université, 2019). My discussion of Debussy’s La mer in Chapter 6 appears as part of a chapter, ‘Debussy, La mer, and the aesthetics of appearing’ in Andreas Dorschel and Emmanouil Perrakis (eds), Life as an Aesthetic Idea of Music, Studien zur Wertungsforschung (Vienna: Universal Edition, 2019).

Figure 0.1 Auguste Rodin, La cathédrale (1908). Photo: Daniel Stockman

Prologue: Music and language

Music – logos – musicology

All music is pró-logos; it comes before the discourse it provokes. In that sense, music making and music listening are anterior to speaking about music.¹ But isn’t the opposite also true? Isn’t all music made and heard in a world already pervasively discursive? There is no place, neither the space of the concert hall nor that of private listening, that isn’t already saturated with language. It’s not just that we bring linguistic minds to our listening, nor that all cultures of musical encounter are linguistically framed, but that all music is made within and against a dense weave of extra-musical discourse. As Albrecht Wellmer argues, musical experience always occurs within an ‘enabling horizon of language’ that ‘precedes the immediacy of musical performance and listening’.² So, if discourse frames music before a single sound is heard, any priority we accord to musical experience is, at best, virtual. And if music provokes discourse, it is also true that speaking about music provokes new musical experience. Were it not for this reciprocity, there would be little value in speaking of music at all.

The tension between these ideas shapes this book. On the one hand, I urge readers to real-time acts of musical engagement; on the other, the words do not simply come after, by way of explication, interpretation, or translation. They are not a supplement to musical experience, neither in the sense of being additive or ancillary, nor in the sense of substituting for music, by articulating its otherwise mute content. On the one hand/on the other hand: the figure of speech is itself telling since, as figure, it marks a logic of the figural (two-handed) body present within language itself. Rodin figured this play of discursive desire in one of his best-known sculptures. La cathédrale (1908) is a larger than life-size study of two right hands, on the verge of touching at the very edge of the fingertips, a sculpture in stone that nevertheless evokes a gentle, almost imperceptible presence of the touch of another (see Figure 0.1).³ But it is the charged space, framed by the cathedral-like arch they form, that is as much the content of the work as the hands themselves. I place its image here as an epigraph, because its figuring makes tangible the productive tension between two things, the difference that joins what it also holds apart. My topic is the counterpoint of music and language – the play of two hands, two kinds of creative invention, two modalities of the mind.⁴

It is precisely the charged space between two things that enables the spark that joins them. From the firing of microscopic synapses in the brain, to the gap imaged by Michelangelo between the hand of Adam and the hand of God, it is the invisible spark across the gap that ignites us, not the closing of the difference. Such is my approach here to the difference between music and language as a constitutive gap of the embodied human mind. My focus, however, is neither the co-evolution of music and language in human pre-history,⁵ nor the similarities and differences in how our own brains process music and language.⁶ It is, rather, an exploration of music (playing, listening, writing, thinking music) as a way of continually gapping the mind – making audible and thinkable a sparking across the gap between music and language, sound and grammar, embodied actions and abstract concepts. Minding the gap, in the sense of taking care of it, attending to it and bringing it into the realm of self-reflection, is precisely what I invite the reader to do in these pages.

I am not interested in this gap as one of unbridgeable différance, perpetually deferred and unspeakable; to be clear, this is not another hymn to the ineffability of music. Neither do I repeat the romantic claim for music as somehow ‘above’ or ‘beyond’ language, nor fetishise music as an experience of sensuous immediacy that language cannot provide. I am interested instead in an embodied and dynamic interaction between things – music and language, language and the world. My interest is with their close relationship of non-identity – a play of imitation and difference, of like and not-like, a counterpoint of parallels and divergences, one compensating for the lack of the other but always bound together. To think one without the other would be like thinking Rodin’s sculpture one hand at a time.⁷ My project therefore proceeds from the idea that music is better known through its dynamic and intimate relation of non-identity to language – and vice-versa. There is no resolution of this non-identity, nor is any sought. Music repeatedly becomes the topic of discourse, but continually reasserts itself as sound in a way that discourse cannot grasp. If philosophical or musicological discourses shape our understanding of music by bringing linguistic categories to bear upon it, music no less challenges those discourses by its recalcitrance towards them.

It is a defining paradox of speaking about music that one of its most powerful contrapuntal moves is to insist on its own redundancy. Witness a much-quoted statement of Vladimir Jankélévitch: ‘Music has this in common with poetry, and love, and even with duty: music is not made to be spoken of, but for one to do; it is not made to be said, but to be “played.” No. Music was not invented to be talked about.’⁸ And yet we do, as Jankélévitch himself did, at great length and with great eloquence.⁹ Why should we do such a thing – to say, over and over and in different ways, that music’s saying cannot be said by language? Isn’t one answer because re-approaching music through language reframes our saying in general? Since the nonverbal doing of music engages the same mind as speaking – a patterning of neural networks in the same brain and a structuring of energies in the same body – isn’t bringing music and language into proximity, over and again, a means to de-habituate our linguistic grasp of the world?¹⁰ Musical practice, in its widest sense, exhibits this free and dynamic mixing of words and music at every turn – from words about music, to words within music.

I am not interested here in the philosophical question as to whether music is a language. Adorno warns us, in a short fragment from 1956, that: ‘Music resembles a language [ . . . ] but music is not identical with language. The resemblance points to something essential, but vague. Anyone who takes it literally will be seriously misled.’¹¹ For Adorno, it is precisely the relationship of non-identity that is definitive. That is to say, music and language are better understood through their intimate relation of difference. Both are constituted by ‘a temporal sequence of articulated sounds which are more than just sounds’. Like language, music possesses a kind of logic, but whatever is said by music ‘cannot be detached from the music’.¹² Adorno’s wider exploration of music hinges on this language-like character, rooted in the lexical units of tonality and its imitation of syntactical structures of linguistic discourse (phrase, sentence, paragraph, question, answer, idea, argument, closure). In the twentieth century, music’s deformation of such linguistic patterns embedded in tonality might seem to become all but unrecognisable; for Adorno, the relation therefore remained all the more critical.

As the editors of a volume titled Speaking About Music justly assert: ‘It is impossible not to speak of music, for language and music are inextricably linked’.¹³ In the opening chapter, Lawrence Kramer (one of the most prolific and eloquent writers about music in recent times), asks simply ‘What problem?’:

It is no problem because the problem of speaking of music is the same problem as the problem of speaking of anything. It is the same problem as the problem of speaking at all, which is not a problem that has ever caused any one in normal circumstances to stop speaking.¹⁴

Kramer’s breezy dismissal sounds reasonable and yet I want to disagree. Speaking about music is not the same as speaking about anything else – chairs or trees or cars, history or economics. Why not? Because music is itself reflective on the relation between speaking and not speaking, and on the relation between (bodily) sense and (linguistic) signification. Speaking about music, all too often, proceeds in a manner that is the inverse of music’s own way of working. It accords no voice to the music it takes up into its own discourse. To speak about a chair or a tree, or history, is of a different order to speaking about music, in the same way that it is different to speaking about a person. I can speak about all these things in the same way, but my speech is radically different if another person is present to me; since she too has things to say, I don’t treat her like the chair on which she sits, as a mute object to be spoken about. Music, where we allow it to be present to our discourse, exerts a similar claim. The meeting of music and discourse is doomed to be sterile if the former simply becomes the mute object of the latter. Or, put the other way round, we have much to learn about music and language by thinking through their relation in ways that allow both to speak.

But that requires listening. Not just the act of attending to musical sound in a more or less directed and deliberate fashion, but listening in a much expanded way – as a kind of openness to the material sense and logic of music that work in related but inverse ways to those of language. Such a listening to sensuous particularity, however, is at odds with the kind of thinking we associate with rigorous disciplinary practice. It would require a suspension of (professional) discourse that resembles a condition of naïvety. As Jean-Luc Nancy famously puts it, at the start of his book, Listening:

Is listening something of which philosophy is capable? [ . . . ] Isn’t the philosopher someone who always hears (and who hears everything), but cannot listen, or who, more precisely, neutralizes listening within himself, so that he can philosophize?¹⁵

Nancy plays here on the different resonance of two French verbs (entendre – to hear, but also to understand, and écouter – to listen). The philosopher hears, the musician listens; one orders the world according to the logic of understanding, the other allows space for a recreative disordering of that logic. Or, put another way, (musical) listening allows space for the indeterminacy of aesthetic perception whereas (philosophical) understanding hinges on the determinacy of the concept.¹⁶ If this is a distinction that reaches back to Kant (for whom the relationship is definitive of the idea of freedom), Nancy’s statement might also recall a scene in Jacques Derrida’s essay on ‘Plato’s Pharmacy’. Derrida pictures Plato overwhelmed by a kind of multiplying acoustic resonance, a proliferation of words as sound that undermines the semantic stability of language, with the end result that ‘Plato gags his ears the better to hear-himself-speak, the better to see, the better to analyse’.¹⁷ But if the philosopher, in order to do philosophy, has to stop his ears to the particularity of the world, the musicologist often proceeds along similar lines. It is not that the musicologist (a one-time, perhaps still part-time, musician) cannot listen, it is that this pleasurable but unverifiable experience of the particular, however much it may be a starting point, is generally set aside or even superseded by the requirements of scholarly and professional practice.

Roland Barthes once set out three types of listening – indexical (as an animal listens for prey or danger), deciphering (the human activity of reading signs), and ‘modern listening’ (listening for the ‘who’ within the speaking). Barthes also describes the third kind as a psychoanalytical listening – a way of attending to the world that has nothing to do with signification.¹⁸ Such is the kind of listening that attends to the human voice not for the semantic sense of what is said, but for the way the voice carries and discloses one person to another. It is an idea taken up by Adriana Cavarero in her discussion of the balcony scene in Romeo and Juliet, a play about the slippage of word and world (‘What’s in a name?’) in which everything is staked upon the authenticity of a voice heard in the darkness (Romeo as lover), even though it is at odds with all the signifiers of the daylight world of social discourse (Romeo as a Montague).¹⁹

Contra Lawrence Kramer, Barthes insists that:

It is very difficult to speak about music. Many writers have spoken well about painting; none, I think, have spoken well about music, not even Proust. The reason for this is that it is very difficult to unite language, which belongs to the order of the general, with music, which belongs to the order of difference.²⁰

For Barthes, this has to do with music’s different relation to the body. Music, he writes, ‘is inscribed within me, but I don’t know where: in what part, in what region of the body and of language?’. It provokes for him a linguistic bewilderment that precludes any simple relation between the two. Music, in the end, is simply ‘what struggles with writing’.²¹ George Steiner puts the same problem more graphically: ‘where we try to speak of music, to speak music, language has us, resentfully, by the throat’.²² And yet, in Real Presences, a book preoccupied ‘as to whether anything meaningful can be said (or written) about the nature and sense of music’, Steiner makes the astonishing claim that ‘no epistemology, no philosophy of art can lay claim to inclusiveness if it has nothing to teach us about the nature and meanings of music’.²³ We should be cautious, however, not to equate Barthes with the recent disciplinary lurch towards the body. Barthes’ insistence on music’s location in the body remains provocative, but he makes no simple equation between the two. To do so would be to take an earlier form of music’s ineffability (the romantic metaphysics by which music is ‘beyond’ language) and simply transpose it into a new form (a material aesthetics of music as somatic rather than semantic). I return to this problem in Chapter 8 (‘Writing the Body’). Far more productive, as a starting point, are Barthes’ scattered attempts, in essays resonant with the particularity of the music he discusses, ‘to displace the fringe of contact between music and language’.²⁴ For fringe one might equally read gap, overlap, threshold, margin.²⁵

In the same spirit, and at the same time, Susan Sontag famously argued ‘against interpretation’ because bringing language to artworks, in this way, so often produces a closing down of their unsettling effects: ‘Real art has the capacity to make us nervous. By reducing the work of art to its content and then interpreting that, one tames the work of art. Interpretation makes art manageable, conformable.’²⁶ Sontag was primarily concerned with literature, forever being read as an allegory of something else, but the case of music is not so different. If a popular reception of music tends towards a solipsistic activity (this music speaks to me of my own feelings), musicology often lurches to the other extreme by denying the primacy of (an always and necessarily subjective) listening without which music can hardly be said to take place. But in both cases, music is forever being taken as the vehicle for something else. Interpretation, as Sontag reminds us, wants to show that art is more than appearance, that it has meaning and significance. But the value of artworks, she argued, ‘lies elsewhere’, pointing to movements within modern art predicated on a refusal of the idea of meaningful content, from the attempt of symbolist poetry ‘to put silence into poems’ to that of abstract painting ‘to have, in the ordinary sense, no content’.²⁷ In place of interpretation, Sontag argued, we should attend to the artwork with a transparent attention: ‘Transparence is the highest, most liberating value in art – and in criticism – today. Transparence means experiencing the luminousness of the thing in itself, of things being what they are.’²⁸ Before we can interpret, we must first experience and that, she argued in 1964, can no longer be taken for granted.

If the work of Sontag and Barthes still resonates, fifty years on, it is because we have still not resolved the challenge they laid down – how to write and speak about the artwork in a way that preserves, rather than supersedes, its material presence. In an influential study, Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht expressed this idea more recently in his call for ‘a relation to the things of the world that could oscillate between presence effects and meaning effects’;²⁹ music, he insists, resists the Cartesian attitude that thinks the world in terms of meaning and representation, which is why opera – whose first appearance is contemporary with Descartes at the start of the broad period of modernity – becomes such a vital musical form for its epiphanic reassertion of presence.³⁰ But it is hard to detect such an attitude in a good deal of musicology, despite Joseph Kerman’s lament, more than thirty years ago, about its lack of real musical encounters. Musicology today may be radically plural, but it is plurally fragmented around a shared absent centre.

A glance at the programme of any major musicological conference will demonstrate my point. The overwhelming majority of papers are not about music but the material and discursive contexts in which music takes place – historical, cultural, sociological, anthropological, political, philosophical, psychological. These are surely valid approaches for musicological research, but the almost exclusive dominance of contextual studies is based on an ideological premise that remains unspoken and unexamined – that music is somehow inaudible to the enquiring mind until filtered through the contextual. It is as if the transparence of art’s appearance, that Sontag held up as the highest goal of our attention, is the very thing that musicology refuses. Instead, like adding dye to a clear liquid the better to follow its movements, musicology insists on the contextual over the transparent clarity of the aesthetic. Or, to change my metaphor, rather than listening to the transparent sounds of music, musicology fixes its attention on the opaque contextual noise against which music is made. Sontag’s idea of the luminous transparence of aesthetic appearing is inverted into the idea of music as empty sign or blank screen, a mere vehicle for the carrying of other meanings. Witness how a recent and already tired expression of musicology is to talk of music as ‘freighted’ with this meaning or that. When did musical works become empty trucks for the carrying of semantic freight?³¹ Presumably when we stopped listening to them in order to write about them.

Musicologists thus risk becoming like Golaud in Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande. Having got lost in the forest, hunting for something he has wounded but failed to catch, Golaud comes across the traumatised Mélisande, whose beauty takes his breath away but whom, from the very beginning, he will never understand. At the end of the first scene, having agreed to accompany him out of the forest, Mélisande asks Golaud where they are going. He cannot tell her because he is also lost. We might ask a similar question: where is it that musicology wants to take music? What is it that musicology wants to do with music? Later, Golaud will ‘espouse’ Mélisande (as the French verb has it), only to become bitter because he can never be close to her, and he will take her back to the dark, sunless rooms of the ancient family home where she will perish for never being properly heard. Debussy, following Maeterlinck, juxtaposes this scene of encounter with a scene of writing, as Geneviève reads a letter from the absent Golaud describing his meeting with Mélisande. And what does the letter say? It sets out, like all writing, its failure to grasp the subject of which it writes: ‘It is now six months since I married her and I know no more about her than the day we met.’ Would that we musicologists were so honest.

For all Golaud’s laments that he is ‘like a blind man seeking his treasure at the bottom of the ocean’,³² it is less Golaud’s blindness than his deafness that lies at the centre of the operatic drama, his inability to hear what, in saying, exceeds the words that are spoken, and to hear what is given by the music aside from the words. But Golaud is no musician; he insists on the clarity of language and the straightforward nature of a world ordered by language. For him, there is no world that is not contained in words. ‘What I’m saying is very simple. I have no hidden thoughts . . . if I had, why shouldn’t I express them?’ he cries in exasperation to Mélisande (Act 4.ii), shortly before forcing her to her knees and dragging her violently across the floor by her hair. Musicology is rarely quite so violent, but it is not hard to detect an undercurrent of frustration and bitterness in the manner in which it polices the boundaries of its acceptable discourse. ‘You are like children’, says Golaud (Act 3.i), as he discover Pelléas entangled in Mélisande’s hair beneath her window. Such childlike naïvety has no place in either Allemonde or musicology.³³ Having paid lip service to the mystery of music and charted the poetic topics of Symbolism or the importance of silence in Debussy’s opera, don’t we generally carry on as before? Music, after all, is not silence, and discussing silence offends against the insistence that it should say something, and that musicologists should say something about a music that says something.³⁴

But isn’t music mute in the same way that Mélisande is mute? That is to say, powerfully expressive through its sonorous presence, but nevertheless linguistically silent. One is a condition of the other, it seems, for both Mélisande and music. It is an idea taken up by Jean-François Lyotard in an essay titled simple, ‘Music, mutic’.³⁵ Not only is music not speech, Lyotard suggests, it is not merely sound either. ‘Music struggles, it labors in the strong sense of the word, that used by obstetrics and psychoanalysis, to leave a trace or make a sign, within the audible, of a sonorous gesture that goes beyond the audible.’³⁶ Music takes place through sound, but all our readings and technical analyses of sound alone do not touch what is at stake in a musical piece – ‘namely, the enigma of letting appear, of letting be heard an inaudible and latent sonorous gesture’. Or, put another way: ‘What is audible in the work is musical only inasmuch as it evokes the inaudible.’³⁷ The problem is not simply that, for philosophy, music is a mute object. The philosopher Laura Odello suggests that philosophy is guilty of having itself muted music precisely through the discourses that it foists upon it: ‘music starts to get sick insofar as the word tries to cure it’.³⁸ Yet why, she asks, does Plato have Socrates, on the eve of his death, couch the highest philosophy in terms of music, by means of the dream in which he is urged to compose.³⁹ So what is it, Odello goes on, that music has to say to philosophy? Her conclusion is powerful:

In neutralizing music as the otherness that must be excluded in order to keep the logos unharmed, the logos not only loses music, but it jeopardizes its own integrity, since it loses the constitutive alterity that lies at the heart of its very ipseity.⁴⁰

This comes close to a guiding thread of my book. It is not the familiar complaint that music is poorly served by words, nor a thinly disguised reassertion of a romantic belief in the ‘higher’ truths of music, nor another protest against the repressive nature of language in favour of the bodily pleasures of music. On the contrary, it is the idea that since we are constituted both within language and without, our balanced knowing and being in the world hinges on a constant movement between the two. There is no simple binary here of mind and body, language and music: both are linguistically shaped and both resist language at the same time, both are duets of grammar and desire, discourse and figure. As Lawrence M. Zbikowski puts it: ‘To be human is, in part, to be defined by language; but it is also to be defined by what language is not, and it is in the resonance of this absence of language that the sonic analogs of music have their proper home.’⁴¹

After Debussy

I explore this idea as exemplified in the music of Claude Debussy and a wider current of French musical thought across the century since his death. ‘After Debussy’ is merely a convenient term delineating less the work of a single composer than the idea of a watershed moment in musical history.⁴² There was no Debussy school – or, at least, those who were deemed to imitate Debussy were soon to be forgotten.⁴³ Nor did Debussy single-handedly discover or create a radically new approach to musical composition – his debts to a wide range of forbears, from Fauré, Franck, Borodin, Mussorgsky, and Rimsky-Korsakov, to Wagner, Schumann, Liszt, and Chopin, are well documented. Indeed, on the face of it, Debussy’s music was not radically new. As Jean-François Gautier insists, in Debussy ‘everything depends on the manner and not the content of the technique’,⁴⁴ a view echoed by Arnold Whittall, who underlines that Debussy’s musical language is ‘essentially traditional’, in the sense that it is not the elements themselves that are innovative but the ways in which they are combined in a new syntax.⁴⁵ Debussy’s musical revolution, if it was one at all, was a remarkably quiet one.⁴⁶ My title ‘after Debussy’ plays on an ambiguity that French clarifies by distinguishing between après and d’après, coming after in time as opposed to following in the sense of imitation; Debussy himself famously played on the distinction, while working on the Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune, insisting that while he was necessarily après Wagner it was important not to write d’après Wagner.⁴⁷ My discussion is largely focussed on the music of Debussy himself but also moves freely between French composers who came after him and those who were his contemporaries, those who acknowledged his importance and those who hardly spoke of him. It is not a history and does not address questions of influence.⁴⁸ Its focus, rather, is a particular idea of music, and thereby an idea of art, that links diverse figures across a century of music, poetry, painting, and philosophy.⁴⁹

While my theme is exemplified in a trajectory of French musical and philosophical écriture, there is nothing exclusively French about it. The same concerns are found in all sorts of composers and writers outside the French tradition and any suggestion that these ideas are confined by national borders would be ridiculous. I might equally have written a study of music ‘after’ Sibelius, Janáček, Bartók, or Ives.⁵⁰ But it is hard to conceive of much of the music of the last hundred years without Debussy, from the primacy of sound in musique concrète and electronic music, to the centrality of the body in the work of Helmut Lachenmann or Mauricio Kagel, from the imitation of natural processes in the music of Iannis Xenakis, to the exploration of the borders of silence in the work of Morton Feldman and Giacinto Scelsi. Arnold Whittall has explored the idea of a twentieth century ‘after Debussy’ in terms of composers as diverse as Elliott Carter, György Ligeti, and Toru Takemitsu.⁵¹ The editors of Regards sur Debussy, a volume that came out of a conference in 2012, marking the 150th anniversary of Debussy’s birth, included chapters on Debussy’s presence in the work of Messiaen, Xenakis, and Takemitsu.⁵²

Pierre Boulez argued for the centrality of Debussy to the music of the twentieth century as early as 1956, in his article ‘La corruption dans les encensoirs’ (‘Corruption in the Censers’) where he set out, against the prevailing centrality of Stravinsky and Schoenberg, an alternative French genealogy based on the triumvirate of Debussy, Cézanne, and Mallarmé.⁵³ Edward Campbell suggests that, in his understanding of Debussy’s historical position, the young Boulez was very probably influenced by the work of André Schaeffner.⁵⁴ In the centenary of Debussy’s birth in 1962, two separate studies argued for a belated rethinking of Debussy as the key figure for the subsequent trajectory of twentieth-century music. Jean Barraqué underlined Debussy’s unique importance to contemporary music – above all for his refusal of pre-existing formal schemes, his constant re-invention within works and between works, and what Boulez called his ‘pulverisation of musical language’.⁵⁵ In the same year, André Hodeir’s Since Debussy: A View of Contemporary Music, suggested that the ‘deeper implications of Debussy’s music and its historical significance [ . . . ] did not come fully to light until after 1945’. Only then, Hodeir argued, did Debussy the impressionist and the soft-focus painter of sound ‘give way to the real Debussy, the composer who destroyed rhetoric, invented the contemporary approach to form, and reinstated the power of pure sound, sound per se.’ ‘We have come to realize’, he went on, ‘that Debussy was both the Van Gogh and the Cézanne, the Rimbaud and the Mallarmé of music’. Indeed, to underline the importance of Debussy as a kind of watershed in western musical history, he likens his role to that of Monteverdi.⁵⁶

A century after his death, these claims for the nature of Debussy’s significance made by figures like Boulez, Barraqué, and Hodeir remain curiously timely. If we are still struggling to rethink our understanding of the music of the last one hundred years, it is perhaps because we still have not fully grasped the idea of music represented, emblematically, by music ‘after Debussy’. Thirty years ago, that idea might have been offered as a corrective to an over-narrow view of musical modernism ‘after Schoenberg’, but the need for such a gesture has long since passed. To be sure, a reading of twentieth-century music ‘after Debussy’ rather than Schoenberg, that begins with the primacy of sonority rather than pitch or motif and that frees itself from historical and generic anxieties, necessarily produces a very different picture of musical modernism. But it is not a question of backing one composer over another. Our understanding is not well served by a dialectical lurch from one extreme to the other, and a French topos is not advanced here as a belated counter-balance to Adorno’s exclusively Germanic construction of musical aesthetics (from Kant, Hegel, and Beethoven, via Nietzsche, Marx, and Wagner, to Freud, Mahler, and Schoenberg). Nevertheless, listening to French voices does expose a definitive lack in Adorno’s Der Philosophie der neuen Musik (1949) and its decisive effect on the intellectual frameworks through which twentieth-century music was subsequently understood. And while Adorno’s privileging of the music of Schoenberg and his pupils is now widely discredited, the imprint of his thinking still shapes the discourses of musical modernism.

In the decades after his death in 1969, as music took other directions, the limitations of Adorno’s model became increasingly obvious. Looking back, fifty years on, one particular ‘deaf-spot’ of Adorno’s is striking: his resistance to the embodied experience of musical sound. To be fair, for all his engagement with the Darmstadt avant-garde in the late 1950s and early 1960s, Adorno remained sceptical about the directions suggested by the abstractions of serial thought, as is clear in essays like Das Altern der neuen Musik (1955) and Vers une musique informelle (1960). But in general, Adorno’s theorisation of new music was shaped around a profound ambivalence towards its central element. In this, he represents the culmination of a long tradition of German Idealism, identifying the rational project of enlightenment, in the realm of aesthetics, with the abstract order of musical organisation over its sonorous but mute material. To privilege the latter, as Adorno heard in the music of Debussy, Sibelius, Stravinsky, and, latterly, some avant-garde music of the 1960s, was to risk a regressive slide back to the ahistorical and mythic immediacy of the body.

Adorno’s ‘deaf-spot’ was arguably personal and psychological as well as cultural and historical; for all the philosophical and historical arguments, the force with which he distances himself from musical sonority suggests a powerful level of (self-)repression. But while the discourse around new music after 1945 emphasised definitively abstract schemes of serial thinking, opposed to what Adorno dubbed the ‘culinary’ aspect of mere sound, musical practice began to move in the opposite direction. For Albrecht Wellmer, Adorno’s idea of the ‘language-like’ (sprachähnlich) character of music was critically opposed not only by directions in twentieth-century music itself, but also by the rethinking of music this necessarily provoked, and takes as a starting point for his own study the opposition to Adorno expressed in Dieter Schnebel’s insistence on sound as the central category of the new music.⁵⁷ More recently, Makis Solomos has explored a change in the basic paradigm of music in the twentieth century, as significant as the emergence of tonality in the seventeenth century, defined by music’s ‘refocusing on sound’ (recentrement sur le son) as opposed to musical tones. In the formulation of Jean-Claude Risset, ‘the composition of sound replaces composition with sounds’.⁵⁸

The history of music ‘after Debussy’ is thus one in which composers increasingly foreground the concrete particularity of sound – witness music as diverse as that of Cage, Feldman, Xenakis, Scelsi, Ligeti, Berio, Sciarrino, and Lachenmann, to say nothing of Pierre Schaeffer, musique concrète, the development of electronic music, sound synthesis, and the possibilities for composition opened up by the computer. As Hugues Dufourt suggested in respect to spectral music, such directions ‘essentially represent a change in our modes of thinking music’.⁵⁹ And as fundamental ideas of music began to change, so too did conceptions of the historical past. Viewed from a different perspective (the materiality of sound as opposed to abstract principles of musical order), the first part of the twentieth century begins, retrospectively, to take on quite different contours.⁶⁰ Which begs the question: what would an account of twentieth-century music look like that took sound as its focus rather than grammar – that took Debussy as its starting point rather than Schoenberg or Stravinsky?⁶¹

This book attempts a partial answer to that question. In doing so, it tries to avoid the crippling ‘Either/Or’ at the heart of Adorno’s philosophy of music. Nothing is gained by dismissing Adornian thought as the product of some deep-seated repression of the body only, in its place, to fetishise the body. The task is surely to steer a path between these positions, to recover the body within music without collapsing music into the body. My focus is therefore neither sound nor the experience of sound but a historical repertoire of musical écriture that arises from the writing of sound, that is to say, from the tension between the sensuous materiality of sound and its shaping in acts of speculative thought, imagination, and play. To understand this repertoire we certainly need to listen to sounds, engage the body, think with a logic of the senses, but in constant dialogue with the counter-movement of critical thought. So I concentrate here on music understood as both sound and text, as sound written by the text, rooted in the listening body but shaped by acts of musical writing. Which is why this book, for all its desire to explore a relation between music and language, theory, and philosophy, insists on returning again and again to musical works – to what they do, what they write, the manner of their appearing and the way they engage with sound and sounding bodies.

Debussy’s music offers plentiful and rich examples of a rethinking of musical sense. I have singled out a few works for more detailed discussion – Pelléas et Mélisande, the Nocturnes and La Mer, the Prélude à l’après midi d’un faune, the song settings of Verlaine and Mallarmé, the Préludes and Études for piano. What is found in these works is certainly to be found in other works not discussed here and, of course, Debussy’s music has many other voices – the ironic play with historical genres, the enjoyment of dance forms and character pieces, the close alliance of music to storytelling, all of which constitute other facets of Debussy’s compositional persona. But this book is not a study of Debussy’s music; it is the study of an idea of music exemplified in some of Debussy’s music. I am not interested in lines that construct a genealogy of composers in a diagram of evolutionary progress. I am interested in a related set of ideas, common ways of thinking about musical sound, time, and form, and a shared migration from older ideas of musical grammar to a newfound space shaped by a logic of the senses.

My concern is a writing of musical sound that plays across the borders between sensuous knowing and linguistic sense, thus loosening the distinctions (in ways both pleasurable and unnerving) between the embodied self and the resonant environment in which it finds itself. To have traced all the forms of this idea across the century since Debussy’s death would have resulted in a book ten times the size. Instead, detailed musical discussion is here confined largely to a selection of works by Debussy, but these are used to suggest ways of hearing a repertoire of music stretching across more than 150 years, from Fauré and Ravel to Varèse and Messiaen, from Dutilleux and Boulez, to Risset, Grisey, Murail, and Saariaho. There are some unlikely neighbours here, including composers usually claimed by other historical accounts. In the preface to his Aisthesis, Jacques Rancière sets out his intent, by focussing on some less familiar scenes, to offer a kind of ‘counter-history’ of aesthetic modernism, one which ‘aims to capture the occurrences of certain displacements in the perception of what art signifies’.⁶² I share some of this ambition but might reword the last expression; my own book aims to illuminate displacements in the perception that art signifies at all and to explore, instead, a kind of musical art that foregrounds the how of its appearing over the what of its saying.

Music and the margins of philosophy

Jacques Derrida published Marges de la Philosophie in 1972.⁶³ I allude to his title both to signal an idea of exploring the edges of a discipline and to reference a tradition of French thought key to my own study.⁶⁴ In ‘Tympan’, the opening essay, the margins of Derrida’s text are quite literally the site of another writing – passages from Biffures by Michel Leiris, which fill the spaces normally left blank at the outer edge of the page. Here, poetry and philosophy share a margin, each one a writing at the edge of the other, tangentially related but visibly gapped. The Leiris text elaborates a language suffused with images of organic forms – ‘everything that is wreathed, coiled, flowered, garlanded, twisted, arabesque’ – as the proliferation of the underground realm of Persephone, a subterranean kingdom of the ear rather than the eye.⁶⁵ It borders the edges of philosophy uncomfortably, since the latter ‘has always insisted upon assuring itself mastery over the limit’, as Derrida’s own text puts it.⁶⁶ Philosophy, after all, is founded upon the idea that ‘it thinks its other’, it masters what is not philosophy. Derrida’s wrestling with this problem is thus drawn into a kind of dialogue with the Leiris text it borders/is bordered by. The membrane of the ear (tympanum) becomes a metaphor of the passage between the two, a hinge between two systems, between sound and thought, the sung voice and the spoken voice, music and language.

Derrida’s strategy is not adopted here, though the interleaving of music examples (so often left unheard) marks the presence of a different kind of writing. Nor have I imitated the radical disruption of E. T. A. Hoffmann’s Kater Murr, whose editorial preface explains that two separate tales have been accidentally mixed up and bound as one volume. But I do move repeatedly between two different tales, one of music and one of language, in an attempt to stitch into a single book two parallel but quite different texts. In that sense, I borrow another idea from Derrida, that of the ‘Double Session’ which famously begins by laying out two texts on the same page, one a Socratic dialogue from Plato, the other a passage from Mallarmé’s Mimique.⁶⁷ For Derrida, this is a key historical juxtaposition in which Plato stands ‘for the whole history of Western philosophy’, above all for its metaphysics of presence and the idea that ‘what is imitated is more real, more essential, more true, than what imitates. It is anterior and superior to it’. Mallarmé, on the other hand, stands for a very modern challenge to such an understanding, questioning whether the image, the copy, the double, necessarily implies an originary presence. Art, Derrida reads from Mallarmé’s text, might work differently, such that ‘through the liberties it takes with nature, art can create or produce works that are more valuable than what they imitate’.⁶⁸ By this view, it is precisely the image that brings the truth to appearance; only in the doubling does the thing appear to itself, produce and unveil itself.

Though it brings together questions of music and philosophy, After Debussy does not aspire to form part of the philosophy of music, understood as a sub-division of academic philosophy. I am not a philosopher and this is not a book on philosophy. It is, rather, a book that begins from the thinking that music provokes – a thinking that grazes the margins of philosophy but is not enclosed by them. How could this not be the case? Music, after all, is the result of thought, the product of minds that do not stop being linguistic when they work on music, and is possessed of many of the characteristics we associate with rational thought. At the same time, music is the product of vibrating bodies, both the sounding bodies that emit patterns of disturbance through the air, and the receiving bodies set in motion by them. This relationship to language, of similarity and difference, is key to my discussion. While music possesses logical properties, it also foregrounds an idea of play, as Kant remarked over two hundred years ago, a multivalent and polyphonic logic without any extraneous function, quite different to the unitary notion of the concept. So, rather than trying to render this polyphonic and embodied logic into the concepts of philosophy, this book starts from music to ask questions of philosophy. What is it that philosophy lacks that music affords? What might philosophy’s logic of the concept learn from music’s logic of particularity?⁶⁹

Unphilosophical and beginning from music, this book nevertheless explores the idea that the substance of music traces the working of a highly sophisticated and elaborated non-linguistic thinking.⁷⁰ It investigates the capacity of music to act as a kind of sense-making and thus a kind of knowing that both differs from and relates to language. In other words, it takes seriously the idea that music ‘makes sense’ in a manner that affords us a different way of knowing the world. Music ‘after Debussy’ foregrounds sound over syntax, sense over signification, and desire over discourse. In doing so, it poses a question about all music as a mode of knowing the world – a connaissance sensible that compensates for the losses incurred by linguistic ways of knowing (from science to theology, history to politics). Since it has to do with knowledge, it is a question that borders on philosophy, but it is one that philosophy cannot grasp because it is asked, and answered, in terms other than those of philosophy.

These are, in part, historical questions, as the portmanteau ‘after Debussy’ also signals.⁷¹ It might be helpful to imagine that this volume is the second part of a two-part project, the first of which had already demonstrated how the imitation of language is key to the development of tonal music from the sixteenth century onwards, reaching a high point in the classical style of the late eighteenth century, evident in both musical surface and structure.⁷² Indeed, the early history of music aesthetics was similarly a history of the relation between music and language, from Plato to Luther, and from the Counter-Revolution to the Enlightenment. The anxiety occasioned by music without words seems to be as old as music itself,⁷³ such that the definitive rise of Viennese classicism in the late eighteenth century was itself predicated on the imitation of language and its rhetorical structures, as the work of Mark Evan Bonds has persuasively shown.⁷⁴ The subsequent trajectory of romanticism to modernism can be understood as a series of deformations of that idea, with the abandonment, in much twentieth-century music, of the quasi-linguistic structures embodied by tonality, resulting in a challenge to normative ideas of musical language that has not dissipated with time.⁷⁵ The real shock of modern music was not new sounds or techniques in themselves, but the underlying refusal of structures based on the imitation of linguistic grammar. The problem, which persists in a musical culture whose normative mode remains quasi-linguistic, is not simply that this music does not seem to work ‘like a language’ in terms of its surface, but that it appears to refuse the communicative function that this normative view takes to be essential to music and musical value. To the frustration of the listener, not only does this music appear to make ‘no sense’, it seems to do so quite deliberately. ‘After Debussy’ denotes just such an idea of music – one that has nothing to do with communication or representation that makes no statements and carries no messages. This is a musical repertoire which, as Katherine Bergeron puts it, ‘has almost nothing to say’.⁷⁶

The writers and philosophers on whom I draw discuss music rarely. But they meet my musical discussion half-way, because they elaborate linguistically the gaps in language, its lacunae, its aporias, and its margins. I focus on texts contemporary with music ‘after Debussy’ but the literary and philosophical self-critique of language is obviously much older; the adequacy of language to the world, after all, is a central and perennial question of modernity. Derrida famously engages with a lengthy critique of Rousseau’s idea of language, but Rousseau’s purpose was really to say something about music, not language; this Derrida acknowledges but then ignores.⁷⁷ What Derrida has in his sights is the idea that the speaking voice affirms a metaphysical presence of which writing can only mark the absence or lack. But music offers a different view upon the non-equivalence of signs and presence; it offers a kind of inversion of the relation that pertains in language. Words (as Saussure made clear) generally have only a conventional or arbitrary relation to the objects to which they refer,⁷⁸ but in speech acts (as Barthes, Kristeva, and many others made clear) they are deployed through a speaking body which affirms presence through tone, rhythm, and energy.

Music presents this relation in reverse: it foregrounds the sonic, sensual, rhythmic, and bodily while nevertheless projecting a trace of meaning as if in a linguistic manner. The power ascribed to music, in a predominantly linguistic culture, has its origins here; compared to the abstract authority of language, which signifies precisely but without making anything appear, music seems to make present, to speak with the authority of presence, while apparently not saying anything at all. In Rousseau’s terms, whereas in writing ‘language becomes more exact and clear, but more sluggish, subdued and cold’, in speech, as in music, ‘it is the sounds, the accents, the inflections of every sort, that constitute the greatest part’.⁷⁹ Derrida refuses this ascription of presence to speech, challenging the ‘apparent transcendence’ of the voice which purports to make ‘the signified, which is always essentially ideal [ . . . ] immediately present to the act of expression’.⁸⁰ But music is not speech; however close its relation to the voice, its relation to language is tangential at best and often antithetical. So it is odd that Derrida largely ignores the case of music, which reworks and reorders the key terms of the equation that so fascinates him, between absence and presence, signs and signifieds, voice and ideality.

Rousseau sets out a familiar myth of origin and decay, a perennial cultural narrative by which an originary plenitude is subsequently lost. In the Christian doctrine of the Fall, the plenitude of presence is lost precisely through the acquisition of language – or, rather, with the bifurcation of words and things, language and the world. Music, for Rousseau, seems to promise a means of recovering that lost fullness precisely by reversing the losses of language. But not just for Rousseau; the age of Debussy saw a recurring fascination with originary myths, with the often violent breaking of aesthetic forms and languages to better access the immediate, the primitive, the childlike, the pre-reflexive and the pre-linguistic – from Gauguin’s journey to Tahiti to Picasso’s encounter with African masks, from Kandinsky’s faith in inward, intuitive vision to Stravinsky’s use of Russian folk culture or Debussy’s experience of the gamelan at the 1889 Paris Exhibition. Everywhere, the refined languages of European art sought to break open the hard shell of learnt techniques in order to make room for the authenticity of immediacy.

But, as Derrida insists, there is no ‘prehistory’, the myth of fullness is precisely a myth. There is always and only a state of separation and the projection of an imaginary origin to compensate for it. Song, Derrida goes on, was always shaped by this ‘fissure’ – ‘the necessity of interval, the harsh law of spacing’.⁸¹ Music as a whole arises from this fissure, gap, and separation. This is an important caveat because, from Rousseau to Schopenhauer, and Wagner to Jean-Luc Nancy, writing about music rarely avoids the danger of ascribing to it the very plenitude that writing seeks but cannot embody. Music thus quickly becomes the fetishised Other – the body, the voice, the absolute, the world, the pure presence for which the absences of language can only long. Derrida therefore serves us well in deconstructing Rousseau, not in order to reject music’s promise as a kind of lie, nor to revalue language as somehow more true, but to make us more self-aware of their relation – to foreground both the counterpoint between music and language, and the counterpoint that constitutes each one separately. He warns us of the danger, much evident amid the new materialism and the rush back towards the immediacy of the body, of reinscribing old dualities simply by reversing them.

My reflection on language and philosophy, in counterpoint with music, is no more restricted to French thinkers than it is to French composers. French writers provide a parallel focus for my study, but represent merely part of a much larger intellectual field. One can hardly discuss Merleau-Ponty or Derrida without reference to Debussy’s contemporary, Edmund Husserl.⁸² If Husserl, then also Heidegger, whose earlier work was so closely imbricated with Husserl’s and whose later fascination with art chimes with a similar late turn in the work of Merleau-Ponty.⁸³ Indeed, it is hard to ignore a whole series of intriguing synchronicities. Husserl’s work on the consciousness of internal time was pursued in the years 1893–1917, contemporary with the late work of Mallarmé and the principal work of Proust, Bergson, and Debussy. It was not published until 1928, as On the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time, two years after the completion of Heidegger’s Being and Time. Husserl’s famous reduction (epoché), the suspension of cognitive judgement of the perceiver, as ‘a shift of attention away from what she experiences and towards the way that she experiences it’,⁸⁴ suggests not only an overlap with Bergson, for whom intuition ‘represents the attention that the mind gives to itself, over and above, while it is fixed upon matter, its object’,⁸⁵ but also with the experience invited by Mallarmé’s poetry or Debussy’s music. All of them point to a sidestepping of propositional statements and instead, a focus on attending to the experience of taking place, of appearing rather than saying.

It is, nevertheless, in relation to a broad current of twentieth-century French thought that I locate much of my discussion. There is nothing systematic about this and I make no attempt to survey a set of key thinkers in terms of how their work might shed light on music.⁸⁶ Instead, I explore a set of resonant encounters between music and philosophy. My interest is not with theory in and for itself, but always with the relays between the rethinking of language and the parallel recherche that takes place within music over the last hundred years – a parallelism of ‘music and letters’ that runs from Mallarmé and Debussy to Derrida and Grisey.⁸⁷ There were few aspects of work in the humanities and social sciences unaffected by the explosion of theory in the 1960s and 1970s – a flood of intellectual energy that linked a re-questioning of our relation to language in structuralism, semiotics, psychoanalysis, and deconstruction, to its underpinning of the politics of the self and others, from post-colonialism to feminism, post-capitalism to environmentalism. A political question in the widest sense therefore, the ‘time of theory’ questioned a world view enshrined in the idea of the ‘transcendental signifier’ and the autonomous subjectivity that rests upon it.

Except music. Until recently, music has been almost entirely left out of this account. There are familiar reasons. Music is a ‘language of its own’⁸⁸ closed off, technically, to the non-specialist, or else, it is semantically ‘slippery’. There is also, until recently, the institutional conservatism of professional musicology, its cautious suspicion of theory and its anxiety about aesthetic experience that underpins a turn to a new positivism (from the empirical approaches of history, sociology, and the anthropology of music to the digital analysis of sound objects). But I want to suggest another reason: that music ‘after Debussy’ has not only explored its own version of this destabilising of the relation between language and subjectivity, but has also anticipated within its own embodied logic of particularity some of the most radical conclusions that theory has achieved within the realm of language. Let me be clear: it is not that music reflects, recalls, evokes, or in any other vague way summons up a feeling similar to that occasioned by reading recent theory; I do not mean that at all. I mean that music, as a practice of embodied thought, as a highly sophisticated écriture, explores the ground that theory arrives at only belatedly. The shift in philosophical paradigms of late twentieth-century thought, from a metaphysics derived from language to one shaped by the experience of the sensible body, is pre-figured and pre-thought in music. The fractures and fault lines of the mobile subject, located between phenotext and genotext (Kristeva), between the Imaginary and the Symbolic (Lacan), between discourse and figure (Lyotard), between body and text (Barthes) – these are so many attempts to theorise the tension between energy and form already played out and explored in music, from the opposite direction.

So my focus is neither theory nor philosophy in themselves, but the challenge that music brings to them in the particularity of individual acts of musical écriture. The French term implies something more than the English ‘composition’; its insistence on the notion of a musical writing marks a refusal to be collapsed into questions about either composers or listeners. It suggests the writing of music in the widest sense, an act of invention in which the musical subject is made, put in play and destabilised. It is here, I suggest, that music challenges philosophy and its logical orders. Above all, music refuses the priority that philosophy accords to the concept; it refuses to subsume sensuous particulars under the abstract rubric of the general while, at the same time, being more than the sum of its own contingent particularity. In this, it works counter to the habits of language and all its discourses. As Michel Serres sums it up: ‘There is only one science, that of the general; there is no creation, but of the particular’.⁸⁹ Henri Bergson’s entire philosophical system was based on a similar idea – that while philosophy, science, language, and a practically oriented intelligence have to do with the fixed entities conferred by generality, intuition, art, and the creative durée of experience have to do with the fluidity of particularity. One makes us fixed and stable subjects who perceive fixed and stable objects, the other arises from a relationality which plays across the margins between the ‘I’ and what the ‘I’ perceives.⁹⁰ Our habitual mode of perception, Bergson argues, is designed for a kind of practical mastery of the material world around us. It ‘shows us less the things themselves than the use we can make of them. It classifies, it labels them beforehand; we scarcely look at the object, it is enough for us to know to which category it belongs.’⁹¹ Or, in the olfactory formulation of Michel Serres: ‘The victory of reason: the apricot has no other taste than the word which enters the mouth to speak it.’⁹²

My purpose, however, is not to denigrate linguistic discourse in order to advocate for immediate musical experience. It is, to repeat, to explore the margin between two modes of the same embodied mind.⁹³ The two meet across the gap between the making of art on the one hand, and the discourses that it provokes on the other. Key among the latter is philosophical aesthetics, a branch of philosophy that, in the view of Martin Seel, has remained ‘quite marginal’ to the academic organisation of the discipline despite being, historically, ‘very central’. What links this area of thought across more than 250 years, from Alexander Baumgarten’s Aesthetica (1750) to contemporary philosophy, is ‘an affirmation of the conceptually and practically indeterminable [ . . . ] a sensuous consideration of what is indeterminable in things’.⁹⁴ What could be a more troubling problem for philosophy than what is ‘indeterminable in things’? Art is troubling to philosophy, both because it too seems indeterminable in this way, and because – still worse – it appears to propose itself as a kind of knowing of the indeterminable. Baumgarten referred to such a knowing as a cognitio sensitiva – a sensuous knowledge, a connaissance sensible, a compensatory mode of being in the world that offers a counter-balance to the abstract thought that produces conceptual and scientific knowledge. Kant, famously, stopped short of calling aesthetic judgment a kind of knowledge; instead, he characterised it as a suspension of determining the world by means of concepts. But such aesthetic perception, whereby the object is ‘perceived solely in the presence of its appearing’,⁹⁵ was nevertheless very highly valued by Kant, precisely because he understood it as involving the mind in a kind of ‘free play’ which he saw as one of its most distinctive activities.

But what might be the consequence of this suspension of our habitual ways of thinking (linguistic and conceptual) occasioned by aesthetic experience? Such a suspension of normative modes of knowledge, practical frameworks of thought designed for action within and upon the world, has an unsettling effect. It momentarily displaces us from our active attitude – witness the effect of the aesthetic contemplation of landscape, art, or music. Such displacement unsettles the normal epistemic order of the world; in Martin Seel’s words, ‘indeterminacy flares up’.⁹⁶ It is unsurprising, therefore, if what follows is an unsettling, if not a derangement, within the orders of language through which we attempt to make sense of such experience. We encounter this in two ways – firstly, in the material modes of artworks themselves and, secondly, in the language of discourse surrounding art, including that of philosophy. Michel Serres characterises this relation in terms of a margin, a gap/overlap at which language either closes back towards its habitual manners, or opens out towards something foreign to it:

Language closes itself at the edge of language, closes by its exactitude, precision, rigour, its qualities; it opens at the edge of the world, inchoate and inexact, hesitant and fecund. The teacher, critic, theorist and politician live at the closed edge, the writer takes up residence along the open fringes [ . . . ]⁹⁷

Jessica Wiskus observes something similar about Merleau-Ponty, suggesting that his later work reads as if he ‘deliberately employs words in such a way that they work not so much to convey an explicit meaning as to articulate the empty space upon the page: as space – as an opening – for a continuous reinitiation to philosophical thought’.⁹⁸ This edge of language, uncovered by artworks and the experience they provoke, seems to have fascinated and frustrated philosophers in equal measure. More recently, what was once deemed marginal seems to have become key to the central philosophical questions of how we know the world and the manner of our being in it. It is hardly insignificant that key figures in the recent history of philosophy have turned to art in the face of the aporias of philosophy, not as a late capitulation to immediacy or irrationality, but for instruction in the logic of particularity. Witness Heidegger’s late turn to art (especially the poetry of Hölderlin),⁹⁹ Wittgenstein’s late fascination with music, Bergson’s discussions of melody and the painting of Turner and Corot, Merleau-Ponty’s musing on visual art (especially the painting of Cézanne),¹⁰⁰ Michel Serres’ writing on the paintings of Pierre Bonnard, the recurrent importance of painting to the thought of both Jean-Luc Marion and Jean-Luc Nancy, Roland Barthes’ essays on music (the voice, the piano) and visual art (Cy Twombly), Gilles Deleuze’s study of the painter Francis Bacon, or the centrality of Mallarmé and Proust for the thought of Kristeva, Derrida, and Rancière.

Many of these thinkers have found it necessary to develop new modes of writing. The Anglo-Saxon tendency to mock the language of continental philosophy as literary self-indulgence is sometimes sobering and valuable, but it often masks a refusal to consider that restricting thought to only one mode of language merely guarantees the repetition of one kind of knowledge (as Nietzsche put it, in extremis, ‘we are not rid of God because we still have faith in grammar’.)¹⁰¹ The different registers of writing found in Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Derrida, Nancy, or Serres, are ways of writing oneself out of the enclosure of an everyday language (the vehicle of everyday ‘common-sense’), or crossing boundaries of thought to reformulate what might be thought. It is telling that, in his introduction to a special issue of Contemporary Music Review devoted to philosophy and music, Martin Scherzinger drew attention to ‘a new body of work that turns the tables on the relation between music and philosophy. Instead of bringing philosophy to musicology, this work critically analyses how music inhabits philosophy itself’. In Derrida, Deleuze, Guattari, and others, he suggested, a certain movement in philosophy exhibits a kind of sonotropism – an ‘aspiration towards the condition of music’.¹⁰² It is a tendency, one might argue, that not only looks back to Bergson, Husserl, and the work of Mallarmé, but much further still, to a defining moment of modernity around 1800 when philosophy and music acknowledged their peculiar asymmetrical interdependence.¹⁰³

It also makes for some strange bedfellows. If the Wittgenstein of the Tractatus, concerned with the rigorous demarcation of a logical use of language, might seem to be the exact opposite of such writing, let alone the poetry of Mallarmé, we might remember that Wittgenstein once suggested, in a letter to Ludwig Fricker, that the Tractatus might have been prefaced by two highly suggestive lines: ‘My work consists in two parts: the one presented here plus all that I have not written. And it is precisely this second part that is the important one.’¹⁰⁴ The result of a retreat from the world into logical relations, with its attempt to eradicate any gap between language and thought, is that all the important business of human life – the relations to others and to the world – are excluded. Truth, as a function of language used in a purely logical fashion, shrinks into self-referentiality, largely irrelevant to lived relations. Wittgenstein’s later fascination with art and music, conversely, has to do with his realisation that language use is plural and a means for making a creative relation to the world. As A. C. Grayling puts it: ‘In the Tractatus there is a single, strictly uniform calculus underlying the whole of language; in the Investigations there are many different language-games whose “grammars” lie open to inspection.’¹⁰⁵

In Wittgenstein’s notebooks from the 1930s and 1940s, we find a collection of intriguing observations about music as a kind of thought and its relationship to language.¹⁰⁶ Much the longest entry in Culture and Value is Wittgenstein’s note on what it is to ‘understand’ or to be able to explain music, given that all attempts to do so remain separate from the music.¹⁰⁷ It is striking that this fascination with art and music as a kind of thought, and a kind of language, forms part of his wider questioning of philosophical language. ‘We are engaged in a struggle with language’, he noted in 1931;¹⁰⁸ ‘We keep repeating the same philosophical problems because we have the same language.’¹⁰⁹ One wonders how serious he was when he jotted down the thought that ‘philosophy ought really to be written only as a poetic composition’,¹¹⁰ but it nevertheless forms part of a series of reflections on ‘the odd resemblance between a philosophical investigation [ . . . ] and an aesthetic one’.¹¹¹ His reflection on colour, for example, might almost recall lines from Merleau-Ponty, a very unexpected similarity: ‘colour spurs us to philosophize [ . . . ] Colour seems to present us with a riddle, a riddle that stimulates us – not one that disturbs us’; ‘I cannot explain what “colour” is, what the word “colour” means, except with the help of a colour sample’.¹¹²

Such coincidences are not themselves proof of any collective shift and there are plenty of quite different currents in art and philosophy. Nor am I suggesting any simple equivalences between such disparate figures. What interests me is the shared fascination with an intellectual, creative, and critical space opened up between ‘music and letters’ as two different modalities of thought. The counterpoint may be defined by the interaction of two lines, converging and pulling apart differently across philosophy and the arts in the twentieth century: firstly, a critical distancing from language, a tendency to see its limits, to observe the gap between world and word; secondly, a new priority accorded to the body as a way of knowing the world, a cultivation of ‘sensible being’ in the world. It is precisely this counterpoint that brings art to the forefront of recent enquiry as a medium of embodied thought and embodied knowledge. If philosophy attends to art anew it is because, in phenomenology, philosophy attempts to discover a level of particularity in our knowing of the world that art cultivates as its fundamental activity. Philosophy turns again to artworks, because artworks offer highly articulated and sophisticated examples of a kind of perception of the world, a kind of sensuous knowledge not only of objects but also of ourselves.

But here, surely, we approach the margins of philosophy. When Bergson suggests that the goal of the philosopher should be the same as that of the artist (‘to lead us to a completer perception of reality by means of a certain displacement of our attention’) he also concedes that this lies beyond the ambit of philosophy. What would be needed, he suggests, is a radical empiricism that would adapt itself to each new object, but ‘a concept appropriate to the object alone’ is ‘a concept one can barely say is still a concept, since it applies only to that one thing’.¹¹³ Derrida dwells on this moment as ‘the originary violence of language which consists in inscribing within a difference, in classifying, in suspending the vocative absolute’. He goes on: ‘To think the unique within the system, to inscribe it there, such is the gesture of the arch-writing: arch-violence, loss of the proper, of absolute proximity, of self-presence.’ For Derrida, the philosopher of language, such self-presence is not recoverable (in language) because it never existed (in language). The loss of self-presence is ‘in truth the loss of what has never taken place, of a self-presence which has never been given but only dreamed of and always already split, repeated, incapable of appearing to itself except as its own disappearance’.¹¹⁴

If, on the other hand, the writing of Bergson, Merleau-Ponty, Serres, Nancy, or Marion suggests not only that self-presence is possible, but is the goal of philosophy, it is because they are no longer seeking for it within language. Their turn to art is the flipside of Derrida’s deconstruction of the presence promised by language. Because, if the philosophical problem on which all these figures converge is the impossibility of thinking the particular, art does otherwise. To return to Martin Seel’s formulation, from Baumgarten onwards, the cognitio sensitiva of art proposes a way of knowing ‘what is indeterminable in things’. Such an idea is asserted in Hugues Dufourt’s recent study of spectral music, subtitled ‘une révolution épistémologique’.¹¹⁵ Its thesis is not just that new music can be related to a new epistemology, but that music is itself a key means of its exploration. In other words, the gap between compositional thought and musicological thought reflects a wider philosophical tension between ‘sense’ and ‘signification’, embodied knowing and linguistic discourse – in short, nothing less than the definitive gap of western epistemology, between the knowledge of the senses and the body on the one hand, and the truth claims of language and its conceptual logic on the other. Musical écriture and its linguistic theorisation thus offers a rich field for an enquiry into the interaction of these two kinds of knowing.

But how is this to be explored without collapsing the very particularity one seeks into the generality of language? In his study of the painting of Francis Bacon, subtitled The Logic of Sensation (1981), Gilles Deleuze produced a close-reading of a group of paintings as a way of exploring a mode of thought through the material particularity of art. In its way, it thus offers a kind of physiognomy of Bacon’s art, in the sense that Adorno signalled with the subtitle to his late monograph on Mahler.¹¹⁶ After Debussy is written in the same spirit, as a reading outwards from the material categories of a specific musical repertoire. Just as Deleuze points to a break with figuration (with representation and signification) in Bacon’s foregrounding of the figure (the body),¹¹⁷ so music ‘after Debussy’ distances itself from narrative and representation in order to foreground the materiality of sound and the embodied logic of its dynamic processes. What I have in mind, then, is a similar kind of reflection on music that arises from a thinking through music – not thinking about music, after the fact, but bringing to the realm of articulated language something of the material processes of music. This is predicated on the fact that music and language are not antithetical; they exhibit not only gaps but also overlaps and shared margins.

Søren Kierkegaard reflected on the same problem in 1843, imagining music and language as ‘two countries bordering on each other’, one familiar and the other unfamiliar, divided by a border one cannot cross. Nevertheless, he concluded, one might be able to form a conception of music by working at the boundaries and margins that divide it from language. ‘I would travel to the boundaries of the kingdom I knew and follow them constantly, and as I did so my movements would describe the contours of that unknown land; in this way I would form a general idea of it even though I had never set foot in it.’¹¹⁸ In thinking the margins of philosophy, more than a century before Derrida, Kierkegaard thus listens for music. This is not to suggest that music provides some kind of revelatory content that language cannot; on the contrary, Kierkegaard is at pains to underline that he is not interested in exposing the ‘impotence of language, the more so since I do not regard this impotence as an imperfection in language but as a high potency’. Instead, it is precisely the productive margin between the two which he wants to demarcate and explore, an oscillation as unending as that of the tides across the shoreline between our linguistic minds and modes of musical knowing. I cannot think of a better way of summing up what I am trying to do in After Debussy:

to illuminate the idea from as many angles as possible, and its relation to language, and in this way constantly encompass more and more of the territory in which music has its home, scaring it into breaking cover, as it were, though without my being able to say more about it, once it can be heard, than, ‘Listen!’ . . .¹¹⁹