9

Thinking in sound

The play of the sensible

I want to write my musical thought with the greatest detachment from myself. I want to sing my interior landscape with the naïve candour of a child. Without doubt, such an innocent grammar of art will not go without opposition.¹

What is there to take hold of in the opening bars of Debussy’s ‘Jeux de vagues’? A bare open fifth rises and falls through the strings against the background of a mournful woodwind chord that presses gently to the fore and quickly recedes, the whole brief gesture edged by a glimmer of glockenspiel whose resonance hangs high over the flicker of harp and a muffled stroke on the cymbal. The two bars are repeated exactly, but this time catching, at the top of its contour, a pair of flutes which hang momentarily in the air before collapsing in a downward flurry to end in a quiet eddy of clarinets.² As the movement progresses, familiar figures come and go, remixed and recoloured, in a rapid turning of the orchestral kaleidoscope. Passages that push forwards are punctuated by moments of collapse and bright eruptions of unprepared events. A constant sense of newness is balanced with the suggestion of melodic continuity and the gentle tug of desire. But this play of movement, energy, surface, colour, and gesture, proceeds in multiple directions. The result is an astonishing study in non-arrival, a scene in which nothing takes place ‘but the place’. Taken as a whole, the movement frames a space in which mobile forms rise and fall, enacting an allusive play of desire, before disappearing back to nothing.

The second movement of La mer exemplifies an idea of play that pervades the music of Debussy and many of his contemporaries – witness his ballet score Jeux, Ravel’s Jeux d’eau, or Federico Mompou’s ‘Jeux sur la plage’ (from the Scènes d’enfants). If such titles link the idea of play in general to that of water in particular, it is less to frame musical images than to evoke a quality of movement. ‘Jeux de vagues’ might be taken to exemplify this radical playfulness and ungraspable mobility. In a detailed study, Francesco Spampinato underlines its resistance to conventional formal analysis by comparing the different formal divisions suggested by nine different analysts; apart from the start and the end, not one structural division is universally shared in his examples.³ For Jean Barraqué, this music is dominated by ‘a law of the instant’⁴; for André Boucourechliev it is ‘an open temporal field, without orientation’⁵; for Vladimir Jankélévitch it presents ‘a continuous deformation and reformation’ of possible forms. As a study in insubstantiality, a continuous process of appearing and disappearing, ‘Jeux de vagues’ challenges an analytical approach that habitually works with fixed objects. Spampinato, following Bernard Vecchione, suggests that we should think less in terms of (structural) coherence here, and more in terms of the cohesion of its materials.⁶ Or, following André Souris, that we should move from ideas of musical form to an idea of formation (formant), a key term in the vocabulary of both Boulez and the spectralists.⁷ Or, once more, following Gaston Bachelard, that we think less about the ‘imagination of forms’ and listen instead for ‘the imagination of matter’.⁸

But the case can be overstated; this is not Ligeti, or Xenakis, or Murail, and ‘Jeux de vagues’ is not without clear structural divisions. Spampinato’s own analysis hinges on the alternation of two principles, an ‘oscillating condensation’ (associated with water) and a ‘chaotic disagregation’ (associated with air), principles which can both alternate and co-exist. The alternation can be clearly heard at the beginning; after the initial ‘dive of the seabird’ (bb. 1–8), passages of aquatic continuity (bb. 9–17, 35–47, 62–71) alternate with passages of dissolution and collapse (bb. 28–35, 48–51, 72–91). This pattern, Spampinato suggests, makes for a formal scheme that one might characterise as a kind of ‘swinging’ (balancement) between the two, a sensation of bodily movement ‘evoking the passive sensation of being rocked’⁹ – a metaphor that returns us to the elision of la mer/la mère. But this alternation of suspension and release also creates, at the meridian of its arc, the sense of being ‘suspended and immobile, in an intoxication produced by the impression of weightlessness, though destined to last only an instant’¹⁰ – a metaphor that returns us to the axial moment of suspension at the centre of ‘Soupir’, or the sudden shudder of vertige at the hinge of ‘Eventail’ (see Chapter 3).

But if commentators have traced the development of music ‘after Debussy’ from one single piece, it is probably Jeux, a score that has frequently been discussed in terms of its mobility of form and material. According to the ballet’s scenario, the play of its three dancers ends as it begins, with a contingent chance event – the bouncing of a tennis ball, as aleatoric as the throw of a die (un coup de dès). The three dancers vanish and this ballet about nothing is over; as the scenario puts it simply, ‘et c’est tout’. Jean Barraqué’s assessment was that, in La mer, Debussy created ‘a new formal concept, which one might call “open form” and which finds its full flowering in Jeux and the last works.’¹¹ In Jeux, in particular:

Debussy wanted his music to be deliberately unstable and in flight, creating a tangle of motifs and structures which disappear and reappear in a manner that is sporadic and sometimes hidden. Indeed, minute analysis shows that the composer sometimes takes into account ‘absent developments’, as if the music were taking place elsewhere, following a deductive logical route, but one manifest through interruption and forgotten sections. It is in this way that the work slips into conceptual collapse, because the idea of discontinuity takes on a new sense; structurally, it has to do with an ‘alternative continuity’. Here, the structural genius of Debussy attains a level of temporal expression in music that no other contemporary work was able to achieve.¹²

For Barraqué and others, Jeux was the quintessential forbear of the idea of ‘Moment’ form in the post-war avant garde.¹³ By this account, musical parameters no longer articulate a linear continuity or progression of linked musical ideas, but work instead as ‘a proliferation of instants, determinants which allow all the amalgams, ellipses, and opposition of motor forces’.¹⁴ It was this profound shift in musical syntax that provoked Barraqué’s claim, a century after Debussy’s birth, for the composer’s definitive position in twentieth-century music, one that remains no less true a century after his death: ‘The discoveries of Debussy, which traditional analysis is no longer sufficient to grasp, bring forth a new musical aesthetic. And that’s why Debussy is certainly an artist of our time. We can even say that he was the first “modern” musician.’¹⁵

Debussy was, of course, not alone. In Ravel’s Jeux d’eau (1901), just like Debussy’s ‘Jeux de vagues’, the unbounded motion of water, potentially infinite in the permutations of its dynamic forms, is apparently evoked in music that is nevertheless bounded and shaped in time. If both pieces suggest a lack of intentionality, they do so through highly refined and crafted intentional processes – of musical écriture, of piano playing, and of attentive listening and musical experience. Stephen Zank shows that Ravel’s piece can be seen as a miniature sonata form, underlining that its play of infinitely variegated sensuous surface is allied with meticulous structural precision. The profound irony is of course that sonata form exemplifies the tonally-directed and discursive musical structures of an earlier age, so Ravel’s music here undermines the form it inherits.¹⁶ It is not that this music lacks dynamism but that it is deployed in a way that has little to do with the linear drama of the sonata. The idea of development is displaced by a set of permutational processes (repetition, sequence, variants, transpositions) to produce an alternating pattern of self-contained movement and moments of implied linearity. Like Debussy’s waves, Ravel’s music is not without a sense of implied direction, but arrival is repeatedly sidestepped by sudden structural dissolves followed by gradual processes of reforming.

The succession of variant returns is based on a few brief but infinitely malleable figures, typically only half a bar in length. The mechanical precision of the opening section, like a fountain, is a combination of technological artifice and the natural element it orders (water/sound). The precision derives from the constancy of its rhythmic units (quavers and demisemiquavers) presented in clear-cut metrical patterns, but the larger sense of regularity comes also from Ravel’s method of proceeding based on repetition, extension, inversion, and variants of the same half-bar units. This music is permutational rather than developmental; slight changes in register, harmony, and texture inflect what is essentially the same material (e.g., bb. 5–6). The rate of motion ebbs and flows by means of rhythmic contraction or quicker rates of change in harmony or texture (thus bb. 5–6 prepares the opening of b. 7). It makes for a complex form that speeds up and slows down, like eddies of a stream that, viewed as a whole, seems to move at the same speed.

In terms of a Schoenbergian notion of the musical idea, Ravel plays with material that might seem shockingly empty – mere ornamental decoration in place of hard, discursive Stoff. It is impossible to ignore the way in which, at exactly this time, such a tension was discussed in gendered terms – the feminine art of decoration and ornament, orchestration and colour, versus the masculine art of discursive ideas, musical argument, and strong structural forms.¹⁷ But the adherents of the latter were fighting a losing battle, because the mainstay of their musical world-view (the directedness of tonal movement towards closure) had already been undone from within: its feminine other had been gently unloosening its unidirectional obsession for at least a century – from Schubert, Chopin, and Schumann, to Tchaikovsky, Fauré, and Mussorgsky. And with it, the motivic argument and tonal discourse that had underpinned the great formal structures of Germanic practice shrunk to the geometric play of Webern’s three-note cells. It is one of the great ironies of music history that Heinrich Schenker formulated principles of tonal form at the very moment they were effectively dissolving around him. Or, indeed, that Schoenberg insisted on the constructive strength of the motivic idea just as its underpinning principle of identity (its relation as particular to the tonal whole) became unsustainable in his own music. Fundamentals of Musical Composition was thus a retrospective historical document, a manual of Classical musical thought, just like Schenker’s Principles of Free Composition.

By contrast, as Gurminder K. Bhogal has shown, a work like Ravel’s Jeux d’eau exhibits ‘a structural emphasis on ornament’ that was a wider preoccupation of Ravel’s cultural milieu.¹⁸ Ravel’s music foregrounds an idea of ornament ‘as unbounded, surface-consuming figuration’, displacing its ‘more traditional marginal role as accompaniment or transitional material’. In other words, what had earlier been background here becomes foreground, just as the erasure of boats and human figures in Debussy’s La mer shifts the focus to what had hitherto been background (the patterning of water in dialogue with the light and wind). What had been merely the figuration of accompaniment figures in Fauré’s songs becomes the material itself in the piano music of Ravel and Debussy. This focus on the musical surface gently, but radically, inverts a fundamental assumption of western classical music. In this, Bhogal argues, it parallels the blurring of figure and ground in contemporary visual art. In her analysis of Ravel’s Noctuelles (1905) and Ondine (1908), the first pieces, respectively, of Miroirs and Gaspard de la nuit, she shows how the music sets up an expectation of points of cadential closure, but then, ‘just when our expectations are about to be fulfilled, Ravel deceives us by suddenly saturating the texture with decorative flourishes, which thwart our anticipation of a structural event’.¹⁹ The ‘evanescence’ of this music (Ravel’s own term) thus arises from the constant oscillation between figure and ground:

Interruption by abundant ornament suggests a release from its restriction to the periphery; now, textural empowerment, coupled with Ravel’s formation of fluid structural boundaries, facilitates the blurring of deep-level phenomena with surface-level ones.²⁰

Unsurprisingly, foregrounding what was traditionally understood to be background was as shocking in music as it was in contemporary painting. Bhogal cites a 1906 review by Édouard Schneider of the Noctuelles that immediately recalls similar comments about the ‘nothingness’ of Debussy’s music: ‘It is always the same unintelligible babble of notes, the same stuttering without end, which becomes exasperating in the long run.’²¹ What Schneider misses in the piece is the intelligibility of a discursive form; what he resists is the erotic play of its sonic surface. Ravel’s score includes, as an epigraph, a line from Henri de Régnier’s poem ‘Fête d’eau’:²² ‘River god laughing as the water tickles him’ (Dieu fluvial riant de l’eau qui le chatouille). The verb chatouiller means to tickle, but also to arouse or excite. Since the river god is himself water, the image evokes a sense of auto-eroticism paralleled in a flood of contemporary art works exploring the self-sufficiency of a (feminised) erotic body – from Gustav Klimt’s Water Snakes to Debussy’s Sirènes. Embodied musically in a play of colour, texture, and tone, such works ignore the phallocentric ordering and linear purposiveness of goal-directed tonal structures. The pianist is necessarily involved in a constant self-touching as the two hands overlap. The musical figures are themselves developed from the hands – the opening figure in the right hand, for example, is as much a physical gesture of the hand as it is, in a technical sense, the arpeggiation of a certain harmony. The constancy of movement, underlined by the little internal runs that offset it, hangs between indolence and pleasure; without any need to move, its pleasure in the repetition of its own patterning is itself a product of the gentle sensuousness (très doux) of the hands’ movement.

But Ravel’s music is far more than a piece of beautiful acoustic fabric that might be cut to any length and that does nothing but shimmer in the repetition of its internal patterns. It does not take place out of time, for all that it plays with patterns of suspending time and letting it run on and turn back on itself. The purpose of such a piece is hardly to conjure a visual experience (for which a painting would surely work better) but rather to occasion a special kind of movement in the empathetic body of the listener. To describe the piece in terms of its indolent pleasure, its lightness of touch, its fluid motion, its bright glimmering, risks the idea that Ravel’s piece is simply permutational in the same way as the effect of sunlight on water – without directed form or temporal direction. The point, of course, is that Ravel’s music is not simply the play of water in a fountain; it is not some acoustic simulacrum of the real, a substitute for water that avoids, for audience and performer alike, the inconvenience of its uncontained wetness.²³

The play between representational pretext and music’s freedom from representation is found across Ravel’s works. Ondine also has a poetic epigraph (from a poem by Aloysius Bertrand) but we would be mistaken to take the poem as any kind of programme. Ondine’s cry of ‘Ecoute! – Ecoute!’ is not the start of a narrated musical tale, but simply an admonishment to listen – to listen for presence, not for saying or telling. If Ondine’s song is heard in the melody given in the left hand (from b. 3, and returning at b. 81), the point of such a wordless melody is to make present, not to tell. Ondine’s ‘voice’ emerges from the ‘water’ and dissolves back into it. The poem, after all, is about desire for presence and the failure to consummate that presence, a flickering between presence and absence caught in the constant ‘ornamentation’ of the demisemiquaver figure (a presence without substance). Bhogal suggests that ‘by endowing the thirty-second-note motif with structural and expressive value, Ravel participated in a widespread cultural movement that privileged detail and its allusions to feminine sexuality’.²⁴

Music that is like speech has to breathe; it moves in phrases with clear cadential endings and new beginnings. But the water pieces of Debussy and Ravel present, instead, a continuous surface, a constantly resonating body of sound, an immersive whole with a rhythm quite different to that of speech. Proceeding by a logic of permutation not argument, these pieces present a single material, put in motion through inflections of register, texture, tone, and harmonic colour, quite different to the quasi-linguistic opposition and development of ideas in music from Haydn to Schoenberg. Like water, this music is capricious, complex, and polymorphous – shocking for its purposeless and unproductive play. It is a material idea that joins the aquatic continuity not just of Fauré’s mélodies, but also the Barcarolles and Nocturnes, to the waterscapes of composers a century later, such as those of Jean-Claude Risset (Sud, Aqua), Tristan Murail (Le lac, Le partage des eaux, Serendib, Sillages, Gondwana), or Kaija Saariaho (Oltra Mar, L’amour de loin).

The play of music has always offered a radical version of Derridean polysemy, so too a prime example of Derridean dissemination, the profligate spilling of the seed of ‘meaning’. Intensely thoughtful and intensely meaningful, musical play nevertheless puts in motion a kind of thought in which any sense of meaning, no longer tied to the proposition or concept, is plural, proliferating, and postponed. This inclination towards polysemy has always provoked distrust – hence the rapidity with which it has been ‘fixed’ to meaning, from Plato to the Counter-Reformation, from the Baroque theory of affect to programme music, from philosophy to musicology. Part of the power of music lies in its capacity to propose itself as meaningful while at the same time refusing any definitive meaning. And in this play with the proposition and simultaneous questioning of meaning, music has exerted a powerful capacity to radically unsettle and destabilise the models of meaning on which philosophy and rational logic hinge. But does this really have philosophical consequences? Isn’t music’s play with meaning nothing more than a perturbation of logical sense, a kind of semantic fairground ride that leaves the mind slightly giddy and no more?

There are two ways of answering this. Music’s deployment of materials with multiple and transitive values is either an essentially empty imitation of the meaningful activity of language (a dumb-show, a nonsense language, a children’s game), or it is a serious game that deploys, constructs, and engages powerful kinds of meaning that stand outside of language. If the latter were to be the case (as the idea of an art music contends), how do we discuss (linguistically) a musical thought that takes place in a-linguistic terms? How do we understand better the logic of musical thought when music no longer imitates language, but insists on a kind of material thought? When Debussy expressed a desire to write works ‘with the naïve candour of a child’ he not only touched on a central topic of French aesthetics around 1900 but also the idea of an intuitive, primitive, and unrefined immediacy that was becoming a powerful current within aesthetic modernism more broadly. Nietzsche held that play, so often associated with the activity of children, was the highest form of wisdom; Fritz Mauthner expressed a similar idea at the end of his three-volume Beitrage zu einer Kritik der Sprache (1902).²⁵ A childlike vision would later inform the vision of painters like Marc Chagall and Paul Klee. Its corollary was the idea of the dream, a phenomenon of the human mind which – at precisely this time – became theorised, for the first time, as a kind of thought.²⁶

The grammar of dreams

Gaston Bachelard’s L’eau et les rêves: Essai sur l’imagination de la matière (1941) has to do with the imagination of matter in the sense of imagining through matter – the embodied materiality of thinking, of thinking in and through the materiality of the world, as opposed to in images, representations, or ideas. For Bachelard, as for Debussy, Ravel, and many others, the material properties of water seems to offer a particularly rich form of such a material imagination. One of the many scenes of dreaming to which water gives access is what Bachelard calls ‘la barque oisive’ (the boat of reverie), which he traces through many literary forms as a kind of recovered childhood cradle (‘un berceau reconquis’).²⁷ Musicians know this topic well – witness how the berceuse merges with the barcarolle, from Chopin and Liszt through to Debussy and Fauré, in works that are empty of content, in any conventional sense, and consist only of their reverie-inducing rocking, to-and-fro.²⁸ Bachelard might easily have had in mind Ravel’s Une barque sur l’océan in the following passage:

Long hours, careless and tranquil, long hours lying in the bottom of the solitary boat in which we contemplate the sky, to what memory do we return? All images are absent, the sky is empty, but movement is present, living. Smoothly, rhythmically – it is the almost immobile and silent movement of the water that carries us. Water rocks us. Water makes us sleep. Water returns us to our mother.²⁹

Art’s proximity to dream vision is popularly taken to refer to the creative state in which the artist must plunge in order to make art. A more useful idea, perhaps, is that art works upon the mind in an associative manner like that of a dream; what art and dreams have in common is less their fictional status than the fact that they both (momentarily) loosen the mind from the habitual confines of its linguistic sense-making. It is this, surely, that is evoked in the frequent recourse to dream imagery and dream thought in the music of composers like Henri Dutilleux (Ainsi la nuit, L’arbre des songes, Tout un monde lointain), Toru Takemitsu (Dreamtime, Les yeux clos, To the edge of dream, I hear the water dreaming), Witold Lutosławski (Les espaces du sommeil),³⁰ and Kaija Saariaho (From the grammar of dreams, Grammaire des rêves). If we look back, through these more recent musical dreamworks, the fascination with dream images and dream thoughts in the songs of Debussy and his contemporaries may look less like a sentimental cliché of the fin de siècle and more like a continuation of modernity’s preoccupation with rationalism’s Other rooted in Romanticism.³¹ Debussy was hardly exceptional in a French tradition in which poetry and song were saturated with dreams that designate an alternative mode of consciousness to the everyday. Contemporary with Freud’s theorisation of the dream, but completely independent from it, Symbolist poetry and music pursued its own dreamwork under the special conditions of an aesthetic écriture.

Just as Mallarmé said that the ballerina is ‘a corporal writing that would take paragraphs of prose [ . . . ] to express’,³² so Bachelard says that, in poetry, ‘it is the pen that dreams’,³³ pointing to the conjoining, in the making of the artwork, of the conscious act of writing and a logic it deploys without being its master. Bachelard is careful to distinguish between dreaming (an involuntary activity of the mind during sleep) and reverie (an activity of the waking mind loosened from the purposiveness of the everyday). Moreover, he writes not about poetic reverie (implying a kind of daydream whose images are borrowed from poetry) but about the poetics of reverie, that is to say about a constructive process, a kind of making, a doing of the imagination, an écriture. If we read Bachelard in English, a language that does not accord a gender to impersonal nouns, his expanded thoughts on the significance of the feminine reverie (la rêverie, la songerie) versus the masculine dream (le rêve, le songe) may strike us as fanciful, but it is surely resonant with Kristeva’s exploration of how language acts stage an opposition between the body of the mother and the law of the father, and thus connects back to Freud via Lacan.³⁴

One of Kristeva’s sources was of course Mallarmé, a poet who, Mary Breatnach tells us, spent his entire creative life trying to answer the question with which he once opened a lecture: Do we know what it is to write? ‘As far as the poet himself was concerned’, says Breatnach, ‘this was the most fundamental question of all, ultimately perhaps the only one worth asking. It preoccupied him throughout his life.’³⁵ Lyotard says something similar about Freud, that his entire work ‘centres on the relation between language and silence, signification and meaning, articulation and image, interpreting or constructing commentary and figuring desire’.³⁶ Debussy’s famous statement that what he looked for in a librettist was ‘a poet who half speaks things’, predated his encounter with Maeterlinck’s plays, but came after he had already immersed himself in the poetry of Stéphane Mallarmé. The two men met in 1890, when the poet invited the composer to collaborate on a production of his L’après-midi d’un faune. Both Mallarmé’s poem, and Debussy’s subsequent musical response, exemplify the way in which a dream logic might inform the work of art; both are milestones in how, respectively, poetic and musical écriture explores a ‘grammar of dreams’.

But how? How does Debussy’s music, in the words of Jean-Yves Tadié, embody ‘a material imagination of the elements’?³⁷ Jankélévitch was one of the first to wrestle with the problem with any detailed reference to the music, pointing to the idea of an open, unstructured field in which the harmonic resonances of different chords form a series of connections (enchainements), relations between apparently distant and heterogeneous tonalities: ‘chords belonging to several heterogeneous tonalities which relate to one another at a distance, attracted one to another across the emptiness’.³⁸ It is not necessary to follow Jankélévitch’s rather mystical turn to ‘secret affinities’ in order to recognise the phenomenon to which he points as a derangement of grammatical order, of the play of sonority over grammar. This quite different logic of harmony necessarily produces a different kind of musical form – a different temporal logic. Indeed, it lends itself to the idea of a musique informelle, the term that Adorno reached for in trying to theorise an idea of new music fifty years after Debussy’s death.

Julia Kristeva characterises the semiotic chora as ‘a nonexpressive totality formed by the drives and their stases in a motility that is as full of movement as it is regulated’, ‘an essentially mobile and extremely provisional articulation constituted by movements and their ephemeral stases’.³⁹ Its ordering principle is the body of the mother (le corps de la mère). Its patterning of constant generation and negation of lack and fulfilment is of course paralleled by that of Debussy’s music and its aquatic logic (le corps de la mer). But the sea in Debussy is not equivalent to the semiotic chora in Kristeva’s theory,⁴⁰ nor are the rules of musical form and syntax equivalent to the paternal law of the symbolic order. Nevertheless, Debussy’s aquatic musical logic offers a powerful parallel to ‘the revolution in poetic language’, in Mallarmé and others, in relation to which Kristeva developed her theory of literature. My interest is not with applying Kristeva’s terms to Debussy, as if a literary theory could explain musical practice; on the contrary, it is to suggest that Debussy’s music offers a material exploration, a concrete thinking in sound that predates the literary theory by more than half a century.

Such an idea is already evident in Debussy’s work, and it is one to which Jankélévitch often points: ‘at once, unformed and multiformed, isn’t water the unformed form par excellence?’ he asks, at the start of a highly ornate passage of writing that imitates in its own use of language the fluidity which it evokes.⁴¹ Forms appear in Debussy’s music, but they are unstable and fluid; the sea fascinates Debussy, he suggests, because it embodies a static or contained mobility, the immobility of the mobile, but more than that, a kind of unformed and perpetual unrest.⁴² ‘Jeux de vagues’, for example, presents less the idea of movement than a combination of ‘unruly agitation’ and moments that are ‘oddly stationary’. These waves go nowhere; they have no destination and turn back on themselves. It is the simultaneity of multiple directions that is chaotic in the picture of the sea moved by the wind. And it is this directionless quality, that ‘excludes all progress, all teleology’, that confers a certain tragic aspect of La mer. Its abolition of sens (direction/sense) reflects the non-sense of the world of nature: ‘In the blind chance of the tempestuous, play and tragedy are the same thing.’⁴³

Compared to the mercurial play of musical material in Debussy’s La mer, the music of Fauré might often seem comfortably predictable, not least in all those song accompaniments that keep the same flowing figure (in triplets or semiquavers) uninterrupted for the entire duration of the song. But it is precisely the regularity of the repeated figure that lulls the listener into a state of reverie, one characterised by a quality of detachment, a letting go that comes from no longer having to follow a sequence of linear or dramatic events. The dissociated consciousness, freed from the logic of mere succession, expands instead into the endlessly nuanced space of the enlarged moment. This is exactly what is achieved by Fauré’s unique control of harmonic movement – lateral and tangential rather than logically sequential, Fauré’s harmony evokes a sense of light and shade, spatial proximity and distance, density and weightlessness, rather than the directed grammatical forms normally associated with tonal forms. The late song cycles, like Mirages, Op. 113 and L’horizon chimérique, Op. 118, demonstrate this in almost every song, but it is found throughout the span of Fauré’s sixty years of song composition – indeed, songs such as ‘Arpège’ (Op. 76, no. 2) and ‘Accompagnement’ (Op. 85, no. 3), both nocturnes, seem almost like a self-conscious nod to the idea. The latter fuses a whole set of dream topics – night, moonlight, the mirror of the lake’s surface, and the boat that glides into a dreamlike space: ‘Ma barque glisse dans le reve / Ma barque glisse dans le ciel / Sur le lac immateriel!’.

It is hardly surprising that Fauré was drawn to dream-like topics for his mélodies (‘Rêve d’amour’ Op. 5, no. 2, ‘Après un rêve’ Op. 7, no. 1, ‘Le pays des rêves’ Op. 39, no. 3) but it is primarily the unloosening of directed sense, rather than the poetic texts, that achieves this quietly radical shift in focus. ‘Le pays de rêves’ is a barcarolle, its constantly lilting rhythm gently unloosening the earthbound body to put it into aquatic transport. ‘Shall we walk, hand in hand, in the beautiful land of dreams?’ (Veux-tu qu’au beau pays des reves, Nous allions la main dans la main?), asks the singer in the opening line, a line that might equally stand at the beginning of any number of Fauré’s mélodies, or indeed pieces for solo piano. The same sense of rhythmic rise and fall, under a subtly shifting harmonic current, can still heard in Fauré’s last songs. ‘Vaisseaux, nous vous aurons aimés’, the closing song of L’horizon chimérique, is also a barcarolle, and similarly longs for a heterotopic space which merges the horizons of the sea and of one’s dreams.

It was, to be sure, a familiar elision. Ravel’s setting of Tristan Klingsor’s poetry in Shéhérazade (1903) is a good example of musical transport to an imaginary space through placing the listening body in a kind of musical reverie. Shéhérazade is of course the narrator of tales (the original function of the sirens), tales designed precisely to keep the king from falling asleep by drawing him into reverie instead. At the start of Ravel’s first song the voice intones the single word ‘Asie’ like an incantation, summoning up the presence of the longed-for and fantastical space. The space that is delivered is that of music itself, marked by the arrival (in b. 11) of a barcarolle, a slower passage in 6/8 evoking the rise and fall of the sea. Self-sufficient music becomes the space for reverie. Baudelaire’s opening line, ‘Music often takes me like a sea’ (La musique souvent me prend comme une mer), echoes behind Ravel’s opening, and joins it to Henri Dutilleux’s musical reverie, Tout un monde lointain (1970), explored in Chapter 7. Or again, it might make a connection further forward to the music of Tristan Murail or Kaija Saariaho. The proximity between the aquatic, the structural fluidity of a musique informelle, and heterotopic space of reverie are everywhere evident in the work of Murail – in La barque mystique (1993), for example, which takes its title from drawings by Odilon Redon, or Gondwana (1980) whose title refers, like a kind of metaphor for Murail’s music more generally, to a mythic super-continent which breaks up in the huge timescale of geological continental drift. But, as the composer notes, the title was suggested by the sound structures themselves: ‘bells and waves, bells that metamorphose into waves, allusions to storm, to the breath of tempests, mute seismic movements – without having any descriptive intention’.⁴⁴ This dreamlike interiority is characteristic of all Murail’s music. On the one hand, as with Debussy, the poetic titles are richly suggestive; on the other hand, the music distances itself from any conventional idea of representation. For all that Jankélévitch insists, in the case of Debussy’s Préludes, that the titles are merely alibis, what is presented is precisely a play across the gap between the real and irreal, the idea of the familiar ‘object’ and the fantasy of the musical work that takes off from it. It is thus no mere convenience or convention that, from Debussy to Murail, the poetic title persists; it draws attention to this definitive play across and between the gap opened up by the art work.

The same might be said about the music of Kaija Saariaho, who has often used electronics to create a liminal exchange between a familiar acoustic world rooted in the physical presence of the musicians and a defamiliarised space of sonic transformations. Like dream sequences, her music reorders and rearranges materials in order to disorientate and derange the familiar order of things. Sometimes, to be sure, her music may be about dreams⁴⁵ but, as with Fauré before her, it is the musical language itself that works as a dream. First and foremost, and before any use of electronics, this has to do with how her music loosens itself from language and refuses musical objects mimetic of language. In her settings of Sylvia Plath in From the Grammar of Dreams (1988), Saariaho writes the voices of the two singers in such a way that the physicality of the body seems to break through the words. The noisy mechanics of the mouth, of breath and tongue and teeth and throat are brought to the fore as markers of the ‘pulsional body’ (Barthes) that presses itself through the mere signifying surface of the words. The result is a kind of corporeal assault on language in which the body’s energy is decoupled from the rational order of syntax, grammar, and sense. In the fourth of these five songs, for example, the rhythmic force of inhaling and exhaling produces a visceral sense of fighting for breath far more palpable than the mere signification of this poem about drowning. The use of two similar voices (a soprano and mezzo) allows Saariaho to create the sense of a single voice repeatedly divided, breaking apart and coming back together. The constant gapping of the voice from and within itself, creates a drama in which, by the end of the fourth song, the attempt to recover a fragile self-identity is achieved in the final whispered ‘I am’. The fifth and final song is marked ‘happy and sensual’ and is full of trills and bird-like vocalise, quite distanced from any linguistic object until the final concluding delivery of ‘I smile’.

Music as thought

In ‘Les parfums de la nuit’, the central movement of Debussy’s orchestral triptych Ibéria (1905–08), music, the ephemeral art of sound, proposes to evoke the yet more evanescent realm of scent. The nocturnal setting signals the closing of the visual realm and, with it, the distinctions between things on which rational thought depends. It is not that there is an absence of musical material in a traditional sense – analysis of the movement will produce harmonic, melodic and rhythmic motifs as required – but rather that the overriding sense of the music has to do with qualities of tone, movement, the clarity and density of sound, and the play of tone colour akin to chiaroscuro in visual art. What stand out are less the notes in terms of pitch-class (as analysis tends to deal with them) than ‘notes’ in the sense used by the expert wine-taster. In that sense, the dominant notes of Debussy’s sonic mélange are the solo oboe (leaning often towards the darker cor anglais), the muted tones of trumpets and horns, the dense block chords in the strings, and the hard edge of the xylophone. What most insistently draws the ear is the astonishing quality of sound achieved by arresting and unusual doublings – a high bassoon solo in unison with a muted solo violin (six bars after Rehearsal Figure 46), a single melodic line given by flutes, piccolos, muted trumpets, two solo violins, and two solo cellos (at Rehearsal Figure 48), or the extraordinary flickering across several octaves of a single pitch in harp, cello harmonics, viola pizzicato, flutes, and celesta (at Rehearsal Figure 43). A close reading of the score, far from dispelling the mysterious poetry of this nocturnal study, reveals the precision and the clarity with which the composer shapes each sonic event – note, for example, the close attention on almost every page to exactly how many string players are required at any one time, from solo to two players doubling, from just a few desks to the whole section. A performance of this piece is made of thousands of highly controlled and self-reflective intentional acts on the part of around seventy individual musicians, each of them written by a musical score consisting of the marks of thousands of highly selective musical choices. In other words, there is absolutely nothing vague or dreamy here. Few human products represent such a concentration of rational decisions.

It has been a central theme of mine that music ‘after Debussy’ not only suggests a different kind of ontology but does so most overtly by reconfiguring our idea of nature. In the same spirit that Eduardo Kohn explores ‘How forests think’,⁴⁶ one might pursue the same question about music. How does music think? The question frustrates the philosopher because, for philosophy, thinking is necessarily conceptual (even, as in formal logic, where the concept becomes abstracted to a symbolic, quasi-mathematical one). But is musical écriture utterly disconnected to philosophical écriture, or even the formulas of the logician or mathematician? In each case, the text is not itself thinking (since texts have no agency) but carries the trace of thought and provokes thought.⁴⁷ Each suggests a complex dynamic system of connections through a set of self-referential terms.

Mauro Carbone’s study of the ‘a-philosophy’ of Merleau-Ponty is titled The Thinking of the Sensible.⁴⁸ Since we too are ‘sensible’, this is of course the thinking of the sensible by the sensible, through the sensible. It is not insignificant, as Carbone notes, that Merleau-Ponty located his idea of a ‘new ontology’ implicitly at work in both ‘the evolution of the concept of Nature’ and in the experience of contemporary art.⁴⁹ Nor is it surprising, for the same reason, that a parallel is often drawn between aspects of the recent expansion of nature writing and the work of Merleau-Ponty. Robert Macfarlane, for example, in bringing the remarkable writing of Nan Shepherd back into public view, compares it to Merleau-Ponty’s rethinking of seeing the world. At the heart of Shepherd’s The Living Mountain, no less than the The Phenomenology of Perception, is the radical proposition that the body thinks. The work of the distinguished Professor of Philosophy and the rural Scottish school teacher overlap in the same exploration of what it is to know the world through the body. Thus Nan Shepherd, on her lifelong engagement with walking in the Cairngorm mountains: ‘walking thus, hour after hour, the senses keyed, one walks the flesh transparent. But no metaphor, transparent, or light as air, is adequate. The body is not made negligible, but paramount. Flesh is not annihilated but fulfilled. One is not bodiless, but essential body.’⁵⁰

In 1863, discussing the painting of Eugène Delacroix, Charles Baudelaire suggested that here was an art in which ‘colour thinks by itself independently of the object it clothes’.⁵¹ It was a remarkably prescient comment, identifying a profound shift in art that was only then beginning to gather pace across the arts but which would soon define a central current of aesthetic modernism. But is this really thinking? Isn’t Baudelaire’s ascription of thought to the play of colour merely fanciful, no more than a provocative poetic metaphor? The question points to a much larger one about the nature of thinking and its relation to language. Art offers powerful evidence that thinking is not confined to working with the abstract propositions of language, though it is by no means alone in this – witness the case of chess, sport, dancing. Music ‘after Debussy’, and the parallel movements in the visual and literary arts, constitute a principal means of realising this idea, one whose consequences we have barely begun to think through. Baudelaire’s formulation similarly offers a way of understanding a current of music that runs from Delacroix’s contemporary, Hector Berlioz, via Debussy, to the works of Grisey, Murail, and Saariaho. Just as painting began to take colour as its primary material, not merely as a way of enhancing line or volume in the service of naturalistic representation, just as sculpture began to think in stone,⁵² so too did music begin to explore the potential of sound in its own right, as opposed to merely a resource for ‘colouring’ musical discourse. In the case of music, this meant the ‘secondary parameter’ of sonority or timbre finding a level of independence from the hitherto ‘primary’ function of musical grammar and discourse.⁵³

Philosophy resists the idea that music might be a kind of thought, for the simple reason that it begins with a strictly philosophical idea of thought and quickly discovers that music does not exhibit properties that would satisfy it. My point is that, if we begin by examining the sustained processes of the embodied mind involved in musical écriture – sparking across the gap between invention and deduction, system and intuition, logic and association – then we might ask the question the other way around. How does philosophy satisfy the conditions of musical thought? Judged by the standards of music, academic philosophy lacks qualities essential to embodied thought: tone, gesture, rhythm, repetition, particularity, multivalent logic, polyphony, touch, care, empathy, presence. Of course, our object is not, and cannot be, the thought process of the composer. That the composer ‘thinks’, any less than the listener ‘thinks’, may not seriously be in doubt. We might agree, therefore, that while music does not literally think (since music is not itself a consciousness) it is nevertheless both the trace of thought, and has the potential to provoke thought. And what of the performer? What is the performance of music if not a thinking through the body? The idea of a musical writing, however, which defines the western art music tradition, presents us with a peculiar problem. If the score is the trace of thought and provokes thought in its performative and auditory re-enactments, then the score is a writing of thought in the same way and to the same extent as the book which has been, for a thousand years, its model. (Mallarmé, in Un coup de dés, marks the point when the tables turned and the writing of the book turned to the writing of the score.) The book of philosophy does not itself think any more than the musical score thinks. To bridge the gap, we may need a different idea of thought.

For Debussy’s contemporary, Henri Bergson, the essence of thought is not found in concepts, words, or ideas, but in a dynamic relation between things. Indeed, one of the reasons that his work has not had more impact on philosophy is perhaps because its central idea (the durée) is essentially musical. It leads to no philosophical system, precisely because it undoes the terms on which any such system might rest. La durée, Bergson tells us, is simply ‘pure, unadulterated inner continuity’⁵⁴ and impossible to approach in a way that tries to take it as a series of broken moments, no matter how small. This is primarily a problem of language: time, change, durée, all have to do with processes of motion and transformation. Scientific knowledge and language, on the other hand, are all built around the differentiation of static entities. Fixity, Bergson concludes, is what our intelligence seeks, but ‘it is flux, the continuity of transition, it is change itself that is real’.⁵⁵ The opposition is played out in the distinction Bergson makes between intelligence and intuition, the one static, the other fluid.

Intelligence starts ordinarily from the immobile, and reconstructs movement as best it can with immobilities in juxtaposition. Intuition starts from movement, posits it, or rather perceives it as reality itself [ . . . ] Intelligence ordinarily concerns itself with things, meaning by that, with the static, and makes of change an accident which is supposedly superadded. For intuition the essential is change; as for the thing, as intelligence understands it, it is a cutting which has been made out of the becoming and set up by our mind as a substitute for the whole.⁵⁶

Intuition is the attribute of the creative mind, for Bergson, because it gives access to ‘an uninterrupted continuity of unforeseeable novelty’, as opposed to intelligence, which understands the world in terms of an arrangement of fixed and separated objects. But he goes further, anticipating Merleau-Ponty in the way in which intuition offers an access to the world denied to intelligence: ‘Intuition, then, signifies first of all consciousness, but immediate consciousness, a vision which is scarcely distinguishable from the object seen, a knowledge which is contact and even coincidence.’⁵⁷ This is the opposite of the practical and social function of intelligence, which ‘aims above all at making us masters of matter’ – a view of language as will-to-power that joins Bergson back to Nietzsche and forward to Iain McGilchrist’s analysis of the relation between the two hemispheres of the brain.⁵⁸ Such a language-use renders us powerful but cut-off from the rest of the world – in Bergson’s words: ‘The things that language describes have been cut out of reality by human perception in view of human work to be done.’⁵⁹

While Bergson may protest ‘against the substitution of concepts for things’⁶⁰ he does not step outside of language. Intuition still speaks, he insists, but it prefers a language of concrete ideas and metaphor. At times this takes him to the very margins of what might be called philosophy – as when he calls for ‘a need for recasting and sometimes completely setting aside conceptual thought in order to arrive at a more intuitive philosophy.’⁶¹ In order to do so is not a simple task; it will require us ‘to turn aside from the social vision of the object already made; it will ask us to participate, in spirit, in the act which makes it. It will therefore turn us back, on this particular point, in the direction of the divine.’⁶² This essentially re-creative act, a recasting of our apprehension of the world through intuition rather than the language of the concept, might almost be a manifesto for the ‘turning aside from the social vision’ of the world practised by aesthetic modernism during Bergson’s lifetime – witness the work of Mallarmé, Debussy, Cézanne, Kandinsky, Schoenberg. The two realms overlap in an attitude to the world that joins Bergson’s intuition with the notion of aesthetic attentiveness to the appearing of the world. Intuition, Bergson tells us, ‘represents the attention that the mind gives to itself, over and above, while it is fixed upon matter, its object. This supplementary attention can be methodically cultivated and developed.’⁶³ And how should it be cultivated, if not by the kind of aesthetic contemplation that art both affords and entrains – an idea that joins Bergson to Merleau-Ponty, Michel Serres, Jean-Luc Nancy, and Martin Seel. As Bergson himself sums it up: Art is ‘a preparation for the art of living’.⁶⁴

Anticipating a whole century of philosophical self-critique, Bergson puts his finger on why the discourse of philosophy is necessarily interminable. At the heart of philosophical thought, he suggests, is a single point. ‘In this point is something simple, infinitely simple, so extraordinarily simple that the philosopher has never succeeded in saying it. And that is why he went on talking all his life’⁶⁵ – thus Jankélévitch, Nancy, and many others. The discourse of the philosopher is an endless series of corrections, commentaries, glosses, and reformulations because of ‘the incommensurability between his simple intuition and the means at his disposal for expressing it’.⁶⁶ What would be the alternative? How could philosophy move in the opposite direction to the closing down of particularity? ‘Suppose’, Bergson conjectures, ‘that instead of trying to rise above our perception of things we were to plunge into it for the purpose of deepening and widening it’.⁶⁷ His answer to his own rhetorical question is worth quoting in full:

It will be said that this enlarging is impossible. How can one ask the eyes of the body, or those of the mind, to see more than they see? Our attention can increase precision, clarify and intensify; it cannot bring forth in the field of perception what was not there in the first place. That’s the objection. – It is refuted in my opinion by experience. For hundreds of years, in fact, there have been men whose function has precisely to see and to make us see what we do not naturally perceive. They are the artists.⁶⁸

Bergson’s passionate defence of artistic vision hinges on the opposition of two ways of knowing the world at the centre of his philosophy. Since these are, to some extent, cultural and individual choices, they introduce an ethical question about human relations to the world that, in turn, becomes an ecological one. Habits of mind and perception, designed for action and practical living produces a mindset, Bergson argues, that ‘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’.⁶⁹ Art, habitually sidelined as peripheral to the important practicalities of human life, is by this account central precisely because of its tangential status. While everyday life requires a narrowing of our apprehension (‘the more we are preoccupied with living, the less we are inclined to contemplate’), artists like Turner or Corot ‘show us that an extension of the faculties of perceiving is possible.’⁷⁰

What is remarkable here is less that Bergson accords high value to the heightened experience afforded by artworks, but that he takes this as a model for what philosophy should aspire to. This suggests a reversal of the power relations between two opposing ways of knowing and relating to the world (recalling, once again, the model of the divided brain explored by Iain McGilchrist). It is a tension that not only runs through a century of philosophy since Bergson, but is met, from the other direction, by the eruption within music ‘after Debussy’ of the particular against the abstract grammar of its organisation. Talking about the apprehension of the world through intuition, Bergson sounds exactly like Jankélévitch or Barraqué talking about Debussy’s La mer: ‘There are changes, but there are underneath the change no things which change: change has no need of a support. There are movements, but there is no inert or invariable object which moves: movement does not imply a mobile.’⁷¹ Or again: ‘There do not exist things made, but only things in the making, not states that remain fixed, but only states in process of change.’⁷²

This is, perhaps, unsurprising, given that it was music that afforded Bergson his most memorable metaphor for intuition. In a musical melody, he asks, ‘do we not have the clear perception of a movement which is not attached to a mobile, of a change without anything changing? This change is enough, it is the thing itself.’⁷³ Of course, as he acknowledges, notation and the visual approach to music that it inculcates, means that we can divide up the melody and ‘picture notes placed next to one another upon an imaginary piece of paper’.⁷⁴ Contemporary with Bergson’s work was not just the late work of Debussy, but the founding systems of musical analysis based in the divisions made possible by the musical script. Bergson might almost have been thinking of music analysis in his assessment that: ‘In its eternally unsatisfied desire to embrace the object around which it is condemned to turn, analysis multiplies endlessly the points of view in order to complete the ever incomplete representation, varies interminably the symbols with the hope of perfecting the always imperfect translations.’⁷⁵

While the effort to reconstitute the whole from the parts is endlessly frustrating, because frustratingly endless, the opposite is not only possible but the occasion of an excess of being:

But the truth is that our mind is able to follow the reverse procedure. It can be installed in the mobile reality, adopt its ceaselessly changing direction, in short, grasp it intuitively. But to do that, it must do itself violence, reverse the direction of the operation by which it ordinarily thinks, continually upsetting its categories, or rather, recasting them. In so doing it will arrive at fluid concepts, capable of following reality in all its windings and of adopting the very movement of the inner life of things.⁷⁶

This is one of the finest and most succinct explanations of aesthetic modernism that I know. The problematic violence of modernist art, often understood as a kind of self-negating of hard-won technical skill and achievement, is here recast as a reversal of the ‘direction in which it ordinarily thinks’ the world – to which one might add, ordinarily feels and experiences the world. Modern art quite literally recasts its own categories and, ‘in so doing’ moves to something more fluid. If, ideally, ‘to philosophize means to reverse the normal direction of the workings of thought’,⁷⁷ then philosophy may have something to learn from this astonishing turn within the arts around 1900. Gilles Deleuze finds the same idea at the heart of the work of Proust:

The ideas of the intelligence are valid only because of their explicit, hence conventional, signification. There are few themes on which Proust insists as much as on this one: truth is never the product of a prior disposition but the result of a violence in thought. The explicit and conventional significations are never profound; the only profound meaning is the one that is enveloped, implicated in an external sign.⁷⁸

From Debussy’s La mer to Murail’s Le partage des eaux or Saariaho’s L’amour de loin, music ‘after Debussy’ is shaped by a similar focus on movement over the presentation of (musical) objects. As Jean-Yves Tadié insists (in a book titled Le songe musical) Debussy’s principal theme is often movement itself rather than movement of any thing.⁷⁹ Borrowing from Bergson the idea of a ‘theatre of change’, Jean-François Gautier similarly suggests that, in La mer, Debussy abandons classical form and harmony for the sake of a kind of infinite variation: ‘nothing concludes, everything recomposes, disperses, moves away as if suspended’.⁸⁰ The real subject of La mer, Gautier insists, is not the sea ‘as violent or noisy, aquatic or oceanic, in other words simply as wet, but as an example of the general law of movement which governs nature; inaccessible to concepts, which enunciate static truths, this law-become-music speaks more directly to the imagination, beneath the symbolic’.⁸¹ The same could be said of the Nocturnes. The few lines that Debussy wrote about these might be read to suggest that Debussy is, after all, suggesting his music has a representational function, as if he were saying, simply – look, this is what my music pictures. But even these lines, Debussy’s concession to the audience at sea with pure music, make clear that it is not specific objects which are of concern here, but precisely the manner in which the scene makes visible the quality of movement of which each piece consists. Thus, Nuages has to do with ‘the unchanging appearance of the sky’ (l’aspect immuable du ciel), Fêtes with ‘the movement, the dancing rhythm of the atmosphere’ (le mouvement, le rythme dansant de l’atmosphère), and Sirènes with ‘the sea and its unnumbered rhythm’ (la mer et son rythme innombrable). Exactly the same is true of the orchestral Images or the Préludes for piano.

It was not only the arts in which this idea was explored during Bergson’s lifetime – key to the birth of modern physics in the work of Einstein and Planck was an understanding of matter as motion rather than fixed entities. In the music of the later twentieth century enabled by the computer, the two realms might seem to come together. The spectralists’ concern with dynamic processes, so often reflected in a Debussy-like fascination with the movement of water or light, is equally a product of the digital capacity of the high-speed processor. This is the productive paradox at the heart of contemporary electro-acoustic music, that it cultivates flow, change, and flux, but by means of the affordances of digital processes, which is to say making sound through the addition of tiny but discrete particles of information. It was exactly a century after the year of Debussy’s birth that Max Matthews discovered the potential of computers for the creation of music. By then, Jean-Claude Risset had already turned his back on the debates over integral serialism to pursue his own recherche into the ‘vocabulary of sound, in a search for a new material permitting a greater grasp of the interior of sound, on its interior structure, harmonic or inharmonic, its sound substance, in short, on the composition of sound itself’.⁸² Risset’s entire career, and the movement of musical écriture he embodied, might be summed up in the title of a collection of interviews with the composer – Du songe au son (From dream to sound).⁸³

The essence of spectralism, applied as a broad label to an idea of music from the 1970s onwards, is less the analysis and instrumental synthesis of the overtone structures of sounds which gives us the technical label, than the exploration of an idea of musical sound in a continuous process of transformation, of sound as dynamic process rather than as sonic objects or events. As Jean-Luc Hervé underlines, in relation to the music of Grisey: ‘Reflection on time was always one of Gérard Grisey’s major preoccupations and since Talea and above all Le temps et l’écume (1988–89) he was interested in the “déroulement” of musical discourse according to different temporalities.’⁸⁴ In the end, spectralism is a research into new forms of musical logic – a way of making sense in music that is not based on a mimetic relation to grammatical structures of language but to the senses. Such a music is a research into ways of knowing sensibly, but one conducted by highly rational means making use of the most sophisticated digital tools. The question of perception remains key to this exploration of new sonic possibilities opened up by digital technology for sound analysis, synthesis, and transformation, which is why Hugues Dufourt links this movement to a new epistemology. It has to do with our perception of the physical world (thus our bodily being) but in relation to highly complex operations and aesthetic structures (thus of the mind). What is heard as a single sound and what is heard as a composite? This has to do with the harmony and relation of whole and part. Paradoxically then, the digital turn, for all its technological tools, moves us from a logical, rational, empirical, positivist conception of experience to a phenomenological one.

In philosophical terms, Bergson’s idea of a ‘fluid concept’ may be essentially unthinkable; in musical terms, however, it is realised in the temporal unfolding of sound. Music affords no concepts or ideas (however much we try to foist these upon it), but at the same time it is more than a random or incoherent collection of dissociated sounds. Like Bergson’s idea of the melody as the moving curve of the durée, the unfolding of musical sound in time is a continuous whole shaped from within by its own musical sense. The principle of that continuity and coherence is not a concept but a logic of sense which arises from a network of associative connections between sounds, a constellation of purely musical gestures. Like Adorno’s ‘logic of the judgement-less synthesis’,⁸⁵ like Mallarme’s ‘cygne/signe’,⁸⁶ like Deleuze’s logic of sense in the painting of Francis Bacon,⁸⁷ like Bergson’s durée, music enacts, embodies, and sounds forth in a way that gathers its particulars into a coherent whole without subsuming them in an overarching concept. Compared to the fixed unanimity of the concept, the musical work is a patterning of a dynamic and polyphonic space of possible relations. This is the challenge of musical thought to philosophical thought, a challenge foregrounded not only in music ‘after Debussy’, but in painting and poetry and dance – a thinking, through sound, colour, movement, of the particularity of our embodied being in the world.