PART III

Touching

7

The art of touch

Debussy at the piano

How can one forget the suppleness, the caress, the profundity of his touch! At the same time that he slid across the keyboard with such penetrating softness, he gripped it in obtaining accents of an extraordinary expressive power [ . . . ] He played almost always in half-tones, but with a full and intense sound, without any harshness in the attack, like Chopin [ . . . ] The scale of his nuances went from triple pianissimo to forte, without ever producing disordered sounds in which the subtlety of the harmony would have been lost.

Marguerite Long¹

I saw him in a tête-à-tête with the ivories, with the look, at once absent and determined, of an explorer of the unknown. He loved to let the keys run through his hands like a miser lets his pieces of gold run through his fingers to hear their magical ringing. He questioned the keyboard with a kind of scientific seriousness and curiosity. Under his fingers, the hammer struck the string with care, in the way that the doctor, by means of light taps, studies the reflexes of an organism whose secrets he wants to discover. Debussy was interested in long resonances, and watched for their trajectory in space right up to the vanishing of their last harmonic.

Emile Vuillermoz²

He had the appearance of putting the piano to bed. He rocked it, talked to it gently, like a knight to his horse, like a shepherd to his flock, like a thresher to his oxen.

Léon-Paul Fargue³

Example 7.1 Claude Debussy, Douze Études, No.1, ‘Pour les cinq doigts’, bb. 1–15

The first of Debussy’s Douze Études (1915) begins by presenting a familiar five-finger exercise only to quickly depart from it (see Example 7.1). The opening figure, so plain, so familiar, and apparently so naïve, sounds as if it were in quotation marks. Even the performance direction (sagement) provokes an ironic smile: the performer must take care to be restrained. This, after all, promises to be an exercise in regularity, control, and rational order. The title is quite literally in quotation marks: ‘Pour les “cinq doigts” – d’après Monsieur Czerny’. Why? Because, of course, the five-finger exercise is far more than a mere exercise; from Czerny onwards it stands, for all pianists, as shorthand for years of entrainment, hour upon hour of mechanical repetition, a technical ‘Gradus ad Parnassum’ to lead the imperfect body to match the demands of the perfect machine that stands before it.

All of this is written into the first bar of Debussy’s Étude. But the listener, who knows nothing of titles and performance markings, is already arrested by the bare simplicity of such anonymous material. Its character of quotation is already dissonant, before the pianist’s right hand reaches over the left (a perverse distribution of labour) to pick out the first A♭. From b. 5, the five-finger exercise accelerates rapidly (clearly, no longer sagement) while the dissonant A♭ becomes syncopated and more insistent. The metrical regularity of the opening is thrown first by a bar of 2/4, then four bars of 6/16 which Debussy, with further irony, marks as ‘Mouvement de Gigue’. At the same time, the diatonicism of the opening gives way to a proliferating chromatic sequence. The rational order promised in b. 1 now spirals out of control – like a miniature apprenti sorcier, or a petit marteau sans maître.

The restoration of the five-finger exercise in b. 11, transposed up a fifth and now in the right hand, begins a second rotation of the first ten bars. The dissonant A♭ has turned into a striking figure on F♯. Marked ‘brusquement’, it too is a kind of five-finger exercise but collapsed into an unregulated grace-note figure – a strident and capricious gesture, disdainful of the dull regularity of the exercise. A second version of the accelerating scale fragments, now in contrary motion, leads to a more extended version of the Gigue material, marked ‘animé’ in opposition to the initial ‘sagement’. The chromatic movement gives way to a dominant preparation for the structural cadence in C major (b. 28) which closes the first section. The four bars of filled C major space that follow (bb. 28–31) are the opposite of the careful beginning; constriction here gives way to plenitude – of texture, register, sonority, and harmony. The restricted scalic movement of the five-finger exercise opens out to an expansive freedom of arpeggiation (an idea elaborated fully from b. 35). It is as if Debussy has taken the principle of regular motion and transformed it into the material of an undirected and free elaboration.

And so the piece goes on. Its capricious character includes a long parenthetical section in C♭ major (bb. 48–55), frequent fragmentation of the musical surface, and a constant transformation of the five-note exercise until it collapses into a kind of anarchy (bb. 91–96). The rapidity of its repetitions here, alternating between white-note and black-note versions, turns into a kind of noise, evoking the irrational disorder of works like Ce qu’a vu le vent d’ouest – surely the antithesis of the regular opening of this Étude. And yet this playful tumult leads to a powerful moment of formal recapitulation (b. 97) in which the rational order of C major is restored with exuberant versions of the five-note figure juxtaposed with the free arpeggiation. Somehow, what started out as the monotonous repetition of a mechanical exercise has been transformed into a moment of jouissance worthy of L’isle joyeuse.

The Douze Études foreground the entrainment of the body as pianistic technique but then proceed to take flight in exuberant fantasy – putting the disciplined body in play in order to reimagine it. The tendency of this music to exceed its own materials arises from the play of the performing body rather than being imposed upon it, its capricious figures provoked by the suggestion of the hands. In this way, Debussy’s Études might be understood as an immanent critique of the rationalised body. It is not coincidental that one often hears in them echoes of Debussy’s fairy music, as found in pieces like La danse de Puck and Les fées sont d’exquises danseuses; both sets of pieces have in common topics of imaginary, idealised, and fantastical bodies.⁴

But my interest here is not with the body itself so much as the writing of the body. The body is not just written into Debussy’s Études, it is written out, in the sense that it is remade in the act of musical invention. This is a crucial difference because it opposes a closed and static idea (‘the body’) with something dynamic and without limits (‘musical writing’). These pieces, then, are Études transcendentales on two levels: firstly, in that the capricious play is possible only by the pianist mastering and surpassing a physical technique, just as the body of the dancer, paradoxically, is freed through entrainment to let go of the barre and take flight. But secondly, this music exceeds a certain compositional technique that is bound to habitual bodily movements – hence its unrestrained rush of musical invention and the free proliferation of ideas. The character of this music, as both informelle and corporelle, has a common origin.

Debussy’s allusive titles for his piano preludes and orchestral pieces function, as we have seen, as a kind of cover to legitimate the way he stages a whole series of eccentric musical bodies, from the water-fairy Ondine to Jimbo the elephant, inviting the listener’s body to move variously like fairies, fireworks, fish, leaves, wind, water, mist, rain and snow. The Études use no such poetically allusive references, but their apparently sober titles underline that their material will be the fingers, the hands, and the body of the pianist. This too is a kind of deceit, since their real business is to stage a dialectic between the mechanically entrained body and the writing out of an imaginary body.

If the first Étude explicitly references Czerny, elsewhere Debussy evokes an older tradition and looks back two centuries to Couperin’s L’Art de Toucher of 1716. The reference is implied in Debussy’s comments at the head of the score, with its nod to ‘nos vieux Maîtres . . . “nos” admirables clavecinistes’, but also in the eighth Étude, Pour les agréments, and by association in the sixth, Pour les huit doigts, which evokes Couperin’s piéces croisés (in Debussy, the crossing of black and white keys stands in for the hands crossing the two manuals of Couperin’s harpsichord). The study for eight fingers, which closes Book One, acts as a fantastical counterweight to the study for five fingers with which the set opens. Debussy’s performance note, suggesting the thumbs should not be used, probably stems from a misreading of baroque practice (the thumbs were used in baroque technique but did not pass under the fingers as in modern practice).⁵ The result is a study in four-note scale fragments whose rapidity begins from the idea of mechanical regularity and precision but turns into something quite different.

Compared to the Préludes, with their poetic titles, it is customary to talk about the Études in terms of musical ‘abstraction’, but this is quite the opposite of what this music does. The concern with the movement of the hands is utterly corporeal, just as the result foregrounds sound over grammar, and the listener has first to respond sensuously rather than intellectually. Taken as a whole, Pour les quartes is also a study in varieties of touch – witness the extraordinary range of performance directions within a single, relatively short piece: dolce, sonore martelé, murmurando, risoluto, balabile e grazioso, sostenuto, scherzandare, marqué, leggiero, con tristezza, lointain, perdendo, volubile, estinto.

Such music provokes us to ask some key questions for contemporary musical thought: How can we think this musical body critically, without falling back into a new fetishism of the body – that is to say, without collapsing the idea of the body into something ahistorical, immediate, essentialised, and inherently fixed? On the one hand, the pendulum swing of the humanities back towards the body is long overdue in musicology. But pendulums pulled too far in one direction tend to lurch back to an extreme in the other. The shift from music to sound studies, from scores to recorded sound, and the wider shift from the composer to the performer, for all their new insights, risk neutralising the extent to which music’s relation to the body is self-reflexive, critical, and historical.

One way forward is to ask a slightly different question: How is the body written musically? There is no English equivalent for écriture; the French has a resonance that the English word ‘writing’ simply does not possess. Fifty years after Derrida’s Of Grammatology, Anglo-American musicology has not even begun to think through its consequences for music. Indeed, if anything, it has re-embraced the very phonocentrism that Derrida calls into question. But the consequence of the Grammatology is surely that, just as writing is no mere imitation of speech, musical écriture is not simply a way of remembering or recording a previously composed music, not a representation or expression of some prior idea, but instead a kind of musical thought – a speculative proposition of the creative mind. Nor is a musical écriture confined to the page on which it is rendered visible. Rather, by means of the relation between writing, the human body, and the production of sound, it puts the body in play, makes the body a player in its speculative thought. Put more simply, musical écriture is a kind of speculative thinking through the body.

There are plenty of activities that, in the broadest sense, put the body into play. Rock-climbing fuses body and mind in a highly speculative activity in which the body is most certainly en jeu (both in play and very much at stake). To live in the world is necessarily to put the body into play, but music offers us a version of this in a very specific form and one in which the writing of music – as opposed to a completely oral tradition – plays a very specific role. So we might agree with Mallarmé when he writes that the movement of the dancer is ‘a bodily writing’ (une écriture corporelle) and a ‘poem freed from the apparatus of the writer’ (poëme dégagé de tout appareil du scribe),⁶ while at the same time insisting that music, in the western tradition, is also a kind of writing in the narrow sense – as a graphic and scripted art. Its unique mediation of writing and body is central to its role in western culture – as a critical parallel to the relationship between language and writing, one it imitates in order to reconfigure.

Musical écriture thus has to do not with reproducing an existing body, but with bringing a body into play that was not earlier present. In this way, the score may be understood as a space in which real bodies blur with ideal ones, a critical space for the reformulation of bodily being. There are of course no bodies in the score, but the musical page carries the mimetic traces of bodily movement. And being fictional, these traces of the body are also transformations, which is how music allows us to experience impossible bodies (just as we do in dreaming, in ballet, or in CGI film sequences).

But how can we read such a musical écriture? To borrow Julia Kristeva’s terms, how does one locate, explore, and think the musical genotext within the musical phenotext? It is, perhaps, firstly, to look for the gaps exhibited in musical scores, the gaps between real and imagined bodies. This is far more complex and subtle than simply a matter of foregrounding sound over sign, or body over grammar. It certainly has to do with what Deleuze calls ‘the logic of sensation’ in his radically material reading of the art of Francis Bacon. But it also has a historical dimension that is often missed. For that reason, we have to look beyond Roland Barthes’ tantalising readings of musical écriture in Schumann.⁷ For Barthes, music is always a musica practica, the music one plays, ‘a muscular music’ of the body. His astonishing essay on Schumann’s Kreisleriana offers a wonderful example of a discourse on music solely in terms of ‘figures of the body’ – the body that plays, the body that composes and the body that listens.

What does the body do when it enunciates (musically)? And Schumann answers: my body strikes, my body collects itself, it explodes, it divides, it pricks, or on the contrary and without warning [ . . . ] it stretches out, it weaves [ . . . ] And sometimes – why not? – it even speaks, it declaims, it doubles its voice: it speaks but says nothing: for as soon as it is musical, speech – or its instrumental substitute – it is no longer linguistic but corporeal; what it says is always and only this: my body puts itself in a state of speech: quasi parlando.⁸

Much of what Barthes writes would apply equally well to Debussy. What he says about Schumann is borne out by a piece like the fifth of Debussy’s Études. Marked ‘Joyeux et emporté, librement rythmé’, Pour les octaves is an essay in excess and a breathless, over-reaching energy. The expansiveness of tone and gesture at the opening is produced by the wide stretching of the hands occasioned by the octave, just as the middle section, with its gamelan-like hocketing, is the product of a playful alternation of the two hands. Or again, one might hear the last of the Études, Pour les accords, as arising directly from an amplification of a physical rhythm (dum-dee-dah, dum-dee-dah) with the hands moving from the middle register, symmetrically outward in wide arching gestures that override any questions of harmonic progression or motivic development. This material is generated by the body and is written out – worked out – through the body.

Barthes’ approach is through his own bodily engagement with music, with the way in which music is ‘inscribed’ within the performer-listener and, unsurprisingly, he has little time for a professional musical analysis that seeks ‘to annul the body’.⁹ But in bracketing out the score, and a reading of the score, in favour of his own bodily responses to the music he plays, Barthes risks merely reproducing the body he brings to the music, rather than giving space for musical écriture to open out a different body. Which brings us back to the same question: how might we read a bodily text within musical scores? How can we read between the genotext of the body and the phenotext of musical notation? How can we distinguish between the structures of musical grammar and the libidinal energy that shapes and fills them? The problem lies partly in the nature of the question, which misses the extent to which the forms of language are already pre-formed by the libidinal – the organic rhythms of expansion and contraction, the drive to closure, the insistence on agency. Musical writing and musical bodies are always encountered together: mutually implicated and mutually shaped. Which brings us back to Debussy’s Études, and to questions of musical material and history.

Debussy does not simply ‘write the body’ by means of some direct, unmediated access; rather, he engages with the historical legacy of the body as mediated in a practice of piano music. His starting point is not some notion of the natural body, but the cultural body written into the shape and design of the piano, its lexicon of possible gestures, its repertoire, its techniques, and its technical training, which is why the Études reference a history, from the exercises of Clementi,¹⁰ Czerny,¹¹ and Hanon,¹² to the musical invention of Chopin, Schumann, and Liszt. They look back to the L’art de toucher de clavecin of Couperin¹³ and forward to the Études for piano of Ohana and Ligeti, and those for pianola by Nancarrow.

In other words, before the composer writes, the body has already been inscribed – both into musical materials in general, and into the embodied habitus of instrumental lexicons in particular. It is telling that Merleau-Ponty, searching for a metaphor for his idea of embodied knowledge, referred to the intersection between the body of the musician and that of the musical instrument: ‘The body calls the keyboard to a collection of sonic possibilities, the keyboard calls the body to certain kinds of movement.’¹⁴ This mutually-constitutive relationship is played out, in the history of keyboard music, as a dialectic between mechanical mimesis and recreative fantasy, from the toccatas and fantasias of Froberger and Frescobaldi to the Études of Debussy and Ligeti. It is central to the ‘chiastic’ model at the heart of Roger Moseley’s recent study of keyboards of all kinds as the ‘digital interface’ of play where ‘musical behavior can be materialized, embodied, performed, and communicated.’¹⁵

It is not hard to demonstrate this corporeal logic in Debussy. The second Étude, Pour les tierces, is built on the close relationship between the structure of the hand and interval of a third. Conjunct movement in thirds provides another kind of five-finger exercise and Debussy starts with the familiar fingering pattern (1 and 3, 2 and 4, 3 and 5) and a clear nod to Chopin’s study in thirds (Op. 25, no. 6). Where Chopin is brightly extrovert, Debussy prefers a more introverted ‘mumurando’ texture (exemplified from b. 18). The circular figure of his study is a product of the hands’ motion rather than any harmonic logic and makes for a piece without musical narrative or drama (indeed, a piece almost without events). Like a gently rolling landscape without the punctuation of any figure, Debussy cultivates a sustained undulation that arises from the simple movement of the hand: the sense of containment is underlined by the sustained use of the middle register and the perfect symmetry of the two hands, always at ease, without stretching, without difficult leaps or sudden changes of direction. It is surely no coincidence that this study of a ‘body-at-ease’ produces, so readily, a central musical topos of the pastoral.

Nowhere in Debussy’s Études is this historically-mediated body more palpably foregrounded than in No.8, Pour les agréments – not so much because Debussy references the French Baroque, but because this piece takes as its musical material the idea of bodily comportment itself. Its topos is a set of musical figures equivalent to a set of bodily manners or figures of speech. The musical ornament, like a figure of speech, is understood as a decorative embellishment – a mode of presentation, not the content of what is said. But Debussy makes the ornament the substance, foregrounding a lexicon of bodily gestures and musical manners. Witness the pleasure of a sequence of elongated appoggiaturas in the opening six bars (see Example 7.2):

Example 7.2 Claude Debussy, Douze Études, No.8, Pour les agréments, bb. 1–6

Debussy’s music is often described as ‘sensuous’, a word that closes down a wealth of detail it should open up. This passage is a good example, nevertheless, of what such a term attempts to designate. It is the diversion of something functional into a non-functional use that lies behind the pleasure of this music and why one might speak properly about the erotic body in Debussy’s music. The sequence of ornaments are non-functional movements of the body – their indolent repetition is entirely about pleasure. Something similar can be heard in Pour les arpèges composes (see Example 7.3). The function of an arpeggio, accentuating through rhythmic means the dynamism of the underlying harmony, is side-stepped here. Surface movement once again serves to emphasise the absence of any functional movement; circling arpeggio patterns, elaborated entirely for their own sake, create a study in touch, texture, and sonority – putting in play, in sympathetic vibration, the body of the piano, the pianist, and the listener.

Example 7.3 Claude Debussy, Douze Études, No.11, Pour les arpèges composés, bb. 1–6

Rodin’s sculpture of two hands is both the product of the intelligence of the hands, the thinking of the sculptor’s body through his hands, and at the same time a palpable embodiment of the idea. A sculpture that were simply ‘of two hands’ would be a far lesser work than Rodin’s, which has to do with the intelligence of touch itself, the subtle, infinitely sophisticated but mute communication of touch, its affirmation of self-presence through that of another. In a similar sense, piano music is ‘about’ the intelligence of the hands, and therefore of touch. But the idea is as old as playing instruments at all; it is enshrined, for example, in the idea of the toccata. This can be forgotten in a musical tradition that takes on a more discursive focus – witness the foundational gap between the pleasure of touch in a Bach keyboard prelude and the working out of a discursive idea in its ensuing fugue. All piano music, written for the touch-sensitive keyboard, is an elaboration of this tension, but it is one foregrounded in music ‘after Debussy’ (notwithstanding that this idea was richly elaborated before Debussy – in Chopin and Liszt most obviously). If rehearing this music suggests a rethinking of the unfolding of music since Debussy, it thus equally provokes a reapproach to a tradition of music before Debussy.¹⁶

One might discuss a piece like ‘Brouillards’, the first of Debussy’s Préludes, Book 2, in terms of poetic representation,¹⁷ or else to show its harmonic structure,¹⁸ but isn’t it really ‘about’ the hands at the keyboard – the autogenesis of sound from the movement of the hands? Isn’t ‘Brouillards’ merely the pretext (Jankélévitch) for the self-sufficient movement of the hands that blurs the black-and-white landscape of the keyboard? The idea of bitonality here is surely secondary to the repetition of two habitual figures of the hand – the simple triad in the left hand, and the downward arpeggio in the right hand (see Example 7.4). Both move laterally, stepwise, up and down the keyboard – a gentle oscillation of the same repeated figure. Only much later does this apparently ‘subjectless’ play become the underlay for the barest of melodic appearances (bb. 18–20).

Example 7.4 Claude Debussy, ‘Brouillards’, Préludes, Livre II, no. 1, bb. 1–6

From this perspective, Debussy’s music is always, first and foremost, Pour le piano – to cite one of the oddest titles of a collection of pieces for the piano, and one that signals a direct engagement with the materiality of the instrument. Stripped of any poetic or representational allusion, or any marker of grand formal ambition (such as Sonata or Fugue), the three movements of Pour le piano (Prelude, Sarabande, Toccata) signal a look back to L’art de toucher of Couperin and his contemporaries – an art of touch, but also an art of the keys (les touches). As in the later Études, the historical model is also a pretext for a kind of unfettered play, released from any pressure to narrate, express, or say. Both the initial ‘Prélude’ and the closing ‘Toccata’ are elaborated from the hands and the hands’ memory of learned patterns, like a painter laying down a series of colours and shapes before deciding what to do with them. In all three pieces, the baroque model becomes a foil for Debussy’s own textural and harmonic modernisms, a play of history within the hands themselves that is, at the same time, a kind of celebration of the pleasure of playing the piano.¹⁹

Debussy’s piano music shows such concerns on every page. If he is certainly the inheritor of an increasing tendency of nineteenth-century piano music towards non-discursive pieces, he also marks the beginning of a century in which this approach takes centre stage – from Ravel’s Jeux d’eau²⁰ to the Études of György Ligeti, from Janáček’s On an Overgrown Path to the piano music of Steve Reich. From Luciano Berio’s series of fourteen Sequenze for solo instruments (1958–2004) to Helmut Lachenmann’s exploration of a musique concrète instrumentale, the engagement of the body of the musician with that of the instrument becomes the central material of the piece.²¹

Bathers

In his discussion of the art of Pierre Bonnard, under the heading ‘Toile, Voile, Peau’ (Canvas, Veil, Skin),²² Michel Serres focuses on Bonnard’s nudes. Bonnard, he suggests, renders the skin of his models in such a way so as to privilege a sense of touch over sight, using the visible surface (of the canvas or the skin) to render something invisible. Ranging across paintings from the 1890s through to the 1930s, he begins with Le Peignoir (1892), pointing out how the repetitive half-moon motifs on the woman’s gown recalls the contemporary repetition of little motifs in the piano writing of Fauré and Debussy. Both were manifestations of the japonisme of the 1890s and both produce a similar effect of something ‘floating’.²³ Here, and in similar works of the time, ‘Bonnard presents something less to see than to feel beneath the thin layers and membrane of the fingers [ . . . ] his art full of touch does not make the skin a vulgar object to see, but a sensing subject, the always-active subject below’.²⁴

Bonnard often painted female bathers – women in the bath, getting out of the bath, and standing before a mirror after a bath. In Nu au mirroir (La Toilette), from 1931, Serres suggests, Bonnard renders a painting of his model’s skin that recalls the surface of the gown in Le Peignoir, thirty-seven years earlier (see Figure 7.1). No longer a question of regular patterns in the fabric, here Bonnard paints directly ‘on the living gown of the skin, impressions proliferating by chance in a manner impossible to imitate’. In doing so, he not only draws us into the touch and texture of the skin, but ‘the chaos of its singularity’.²⁵ The woman applying her make-up in front of the mirror, the ostensible subject matter of Nu au miroir, becomes a kind of parallel to the painter’s own act: she applies colour to her skin as he does on the canvas. Both are involved with appearance and the action of making something appear, Serres argues, in a way that collapses the usual distinction contained in the idea of appearance. He evokes the art of appearance in the commedia dell’arte, via the fêtes galantes of Watteau and Verlaine, an art in which the painted face does not cover an identity like a mask but makes one appear: ‘By means of cosmetics the real skin becomes visible.’

Figure 7.1 Pierre Bonnard, Nu au mirroir (la Toilette) (1931), detail

This, he argues, works in the opposite way to the contemporary fascination with the mask among Bonnard’s contemporaries:

No, the woman does not put on a mask that lies, as the moralists say, nor to make up for what is irreparable, as young people claim; she draws the Map of the Offering of Touch [la Carte de Tendre du tact], with its rivers of hearing, its streams of taste and lakes of listening [ . . . ]. It makes visible its invisible identity card, or the impressionable body.²⁶

This is a long way from the role of the mask in German Expressionism, as a marker of a crisis of the subject – a sign of a distorted, alienated, or even anonymous subject. In the face of the anonymity of modern life, as Georg Simmel underlined, the subject has to exaggerate itself in order to be seen, or heard, at all.²⁷ In Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire this takes the form of grotesque distortion; in the fêtes galantes of Verlaine and Debussy it takes a form more like that which Serres finds in Bonnard – making something appear by insisting that the subject is found in the sensible, not in language. There is, Serres argues, ‘no impressionism without an imprinting force, without the pressing of touch. From his fingers of skin, Bonnard makes us touch the skin of things’.²⁸ There is common ground here with ‘the art of touch’ in Debussy’s Études but also the Estampes (1903); these ‘prints’ are taken to refer to contemporary Japanese prints but, as with Serres, there is a play between how the object is made and the impression it produces on the senses of the receiver. In his discussion of Bonnard’s Le Jardin (1936/7), Serres finds an ambiguity as to whether one sees ‘the subject of the impression or the imprinted object’ (le sujet de l’impression ou l’objet imprimé). What is presented, he concluded, is ‘the interface, a film of transition which separates and which unites the impressionant and the impression, the imprimant and the imprimé’.²⁹ Debussy’s title ‘Voiles’, we are similarly told, plays on the ambiguity of the French word that means both veils and sails. But read against Serres’ discussion of the painting of Bonnard, we might find in Debussy’s Voiles a study not only in symmetrical reflection but also in the art of touch, and an exploration of foregrounding touch itself that parallels the work of contemporary painters upon their canvases (toiles). As with the dancer’s veils (voiles) for Mallarmé, or silence for Maeterlinck, the veil makes visible. In the painting of Bonnard, Serres suggests: ‘The eye loses its pre-eminence in the very domain of its domination – in painting. At the extremity of its effort, impressionism comes, in the true sense of the word, to contact.’³⁰

The parallel with Merleau-Ponty is striking, not just for the language of interface between the viewer and the viewed but also for its exploration through painting. In L’Oeil et l’Esprit (The Eye and the Mind), his last completed essay, Merleau-Ponty considered the art of Cézanne as a way of knowing the world that is instructive for philosophy.³¹ Such painting embodies a perception of the world, he argued, that does not construct an ideal or abstract representation of the world for a viewing subject but, rather, one that opens the body of the viewer to the world that is viewed. In opposition to the idea of vision at the heart of Decartes’ Dioptrique, a kind of detached ‘aerial view’ of the world (le survol), Merleau-Ponty finds in Cézanne’s painting a vision of a world in which the viewer is already immersed (englobé), a world that is ‘around me, not in front of me’ (autour de moi, non devant moi). It provides a kind of model to which philosophy might aspire: ‘that philosophy which needs to be done is that which animates painting, not when it expresses opinions about the world, but at the moment where its vision becomes gesture, when, as Cezanne said, he “thinks through painting”.’³²

In her discussion of the consequences of Merleau-Ponty’s thought for thinking about art, Jessica Wiskus focuses on an analysis of Cézanne’s Four Bathers (1888–90) in terms of its opening out to space, achieved not by the ‘strict separation between space and the bather’ but rather a kind of play, allowing them to ‘intertwine and be of one another – as the bather herself inhales and exhales, breathing of the liquid substance of the air’ (see Figure 7.2). She continues: ‘These lines do not mark an “end” to space; rather, they evoke a certain promiscuity of flesh and space.’³³ The figure of the bather, a recurrent topic in painting from classical art onwards, becomes again a central topos in Impressionist art. The act of submerging oneself in the sensuous infinitude of water exemplifies the act of aesthetic immersion itself. And, as Wiskus points out, Merleau-Ponty finds in the painting of Cézanne a quality of ‘depth’ which emerges from a concentration on ‘color and texture – rather than linear perspective’.³⁴

Figure 7.2 Paul Cézanne, Quatre baigneuses (1888–90)

Wiskus’s rich reading of Cézanne’s painting, in terms of this exchange between body and surrounding space, between the substance of the body and the substance of the air, might just as well be an account of resonance in music. What is resonance if not an exchange and intertwining between the substance of sound and the silences that mark its boundaries? Indeed, resonance calls both into question. We cannot say, as in my earlier discussion of ‘Soupir’, that sound disappears into thin air, since sound is only a disturbance of the air causing the tympanum to vibrate. We call resonance the after-life of the sound, but the distinction is blurred and the ear does not distinguish precisely between the two. It offers an auditory example of Merleau-Ponty’s central idea of the chiasm – the flesh in which the sense of the perceiver and the sense of the world conjoins.³⁵ Music offers endlessly varied examples of this since the body of the listener is necessarily intertwined with the body of vibrating sound. The resonance of music is of the world ‘out there’ but only heard when it sets the listener in sympathetic motion: the body is the tympanum between the two.

Submersion in water, explored by painting as an essay in touching the world, is thus paralleled by the submersion in sound explored in music, as an essay in listening to it (see Chapter 6). It is no surprise therefore that, in the play with the visual created by the allusive titles of Debussy and his contemporaries, images of water are recurrent. But the images of Debussy’s music are primarily neither pictorial nor symbolic: like Bonnard’s nudes or Cézanne’s bathers they are embodiments and enactments of movement and touch. This is not some ahistorical collapse back to some idealised body; late nineteenth-century Paris was neither classical Greece nor renaissance Italy, as Manet reminded his audience with trenchant irony in Olympia and Le déjeuner sur l’herbe. In Seurat’s Une baignarde à Asnières (1884) the recreational activity of immersion in water takes place against a background landscape of industrial plants and smoking chimneys; Monet, Renoir, and Pissarro similarly often picture the freedom of water against a background of industrialisation (railway bridges, factories, steam trains). Debussy’s water pieces are not dissimilar: the technological modernity of the orchestra in La mer, like the polished technique of the pianist in Reflets dans l’eau, means that human techne is always closely juxtaposed with the illusion of the elemental.

Reflets dans l’eau, the first of the Images, Book 1 (1905) exemplifies a music that explores sonic resonance (patterns of disturbance in the air) through the representational ‘veil’ of the tactile patterning of light and movement on the flat surface of water. It is a piece that parallels the immersive quality of both Monet’s Nymphéas paintings and the wider fascination with the flesh of the bather and that of the world that meets it. Debussy’s music offers an obvious parallel in terms of its exploration of colour and texture rather than the linear processes of tonal grammar. There is a difference of course, as Wiskus emphasises, since in music the line ‘moves’ whereas in painting it traditionally encloses. ‘Yet, in the work of Cézanne (not unlike that of Debussy), there is no hard edge, no finite boundary, no fixed outline. The line is freed.’³⁶

The sense of concentric rings, moving out from a central point like ripples in water, is deftly achieved by Debussy in the opening bars of Reflets dans l’eau. Over a tonic pedal, and within the containment of the pentatonic harmony, the figuration of the right hand opens out concentric patterns from the middle of the keyboard – a three-note figure (contained in a single beat) expanding across three octaves, but which adds up to a larger, cumulative figure of two whole bars. The following two bars treats the same idea sequentially (a tone higher) before the whole four-bar pattern is repeated to make an eight-bar period. Only then (b. 9) does the lateral chordal movement begin to displace the static scene with a little dialogue of lower and upper registers, soon interrupted by the convergence of registral extremes towards the centre (bb. 16–17) – an auditory reversal of the usual rippling motion from the centre outwards.

The ‘quasi cadenza’ passage that follows (b. 20) might be heard to link all the way back to the recapitulation of the beginning (b. 36), suggesting that the larger part of the music heard so far is somehow a structural parenthesis. The glittering upper-register figures, traversing circular motions, up and down, in rapid but flexible runs, are utterly self-sufficient. It is only the middle register voice (pianissimo, doux et expressif) that introduces a gentle tonal tension over the sustained dominant pedal that will eventually produce the quiet resolution back to D♭ (b. 36). The latter creates the sense of a still larger concentric ring – that of a closed ABA form, though it is one hijacked by the disturbance of a rising chromatic bass (en animant, from b. 44).

The tactile pleasures of this music are both of the ear and the hands. The pianist relaxes into the close proximity of the parallel chords just as the listener is absorbed by the rich tone of the pentatonic wash of the piano in its low to middle register. Similarly, in the bright upper register runs, Debussy the pianist-composer allows the shape of the hands to produce the sense of supple ease afforded to the listener. With the en animant section (from b. 44), the indolent pleasure of Debussy’s sonic touch takes on a more urgent character that presses forward to a powerful climax (b. 57) with the cadence into E♭ major, articulated by a fulsome arpeggiation. The affirmative assertion of presence is short-lived, however, and quickly turns to tristesse. Debussy’s eroticism here, as so often, is playful rather than a matter of life and death; as in Jeux, it is a game of protracted appearing and disappearing rather than the assertion of full presence. The final section of Reflets (marked Lent, dans une sonorité harmonieuse et lointaine) is a study in the gentlest of touches – once again, both that of the pianist controlling the rippling resonance of the spread chords, and the listener caught between the deep sustain of the bass and the frisson of the lightly struck upper notes in bare octaves.

Towards an erotics of music

It is over fifty years since Susan Sontag made her famous stand ‘against interpretation’, arguing instead that we should afford a priority to the sensory experience of artworks:

What is important now is to recover our senses. We must learn to see more, to hear more, to feel more. Our task is not to find the maximum amount of content in a work of art [ . . . ] Our task is to cut back content so that we can see the thing at all. The aim of all commentary on art now should be to make works of art – and by analogy, our own experience – more, rather than less, real to us. The function of criticism should be to show how it is what it is, even that it is what it is, rather than to show what it means. In place of a hermeneutics we need an erotics of art.³⁷

Her call has all the rhetoric of a manifesto, and has all-too-often been dismissed as one, explained away as simply the product of a particular historical moment (1964). But the resonance of Sontag’s words today might suggest otherwise. And her argument that, ‘at least since Diderot’ the problem with art criticism is that it ‘treats the work of art as a statement being made in the form of a work of art’ connects not only back to Mallarmé but also forward to contemporary materialist theories that insist on the material specificity of art: ‘Art is not only about something; it is something. A work of art is a thing in the world, not just a text of commentary on the world.’³⁸

Why has Sontag not been taken more seriously? Christopher Norris, writing in 2013, summed it up thus:

Every so often – and with increasing frequency of late – the arts and humanities disciplines, musicology included, take a militant turn ‘against interpretation’. Around thirty years ago [sic] Susan Sontag sounded one such offensive in a famous essay under just that title, while Roland Barthes put a broadly similar case first from a structuralist and later – more engagingly – from a poststructuralist standpoint.

More recently, Norris points out, the suspicion of interpretation has been from the point of view of ‘the body – the living, sensing, feeling, erotic, vibrantly responsive human body’. But, as he goes on, ‘the upshot of this was a whole lot of talk – sophisticated talk at that – about the body and its various modes of sensory-libidinal-erotic stimulation, rather than some strictly impossible appeal to the immediate, preconceptual, unspoken (indeed unspeakable) register of inchoate drives and affects’.³⁹

Norris neatly summarises the problem: if a discourse on art is displaced by one on the body, then the real object would have to become something strictly ‘unspeakable’. My own approach is different, which is why it grazes rather than engages with the flood of recent literature on the body. My focus is on that which takes place in musical works not, primarily, what takes place in the listening body. I am suggesting that we might listen more attentively to the ways in which the body is written through music, put in play and imagined, not just with the actual body of the listener that experiences music. The latter would be a topic for psychologists, biologists, and even neuroscientists, but which is confined to telling us about the body in general and in relation to music in general, whereas thinking about how the body is written in this piece tells us about something in particular.

Fifty years on, how do we use Sontag’s insight? It is not, I think, a matter of representation (which music does rather badly) because representation has to do with language and, as Jung reminds us, eros is a counterpart to logos. Nor is it simply a case of music’s proximity to the body and its rhythms. The libidinal body may have its own codes of corporeal communication, but its erotic potential far exceeds that of representation; ‘erotic intelligence’,⁴⁰ like music, has to do with the work of the imagination. As the product of desire, erotic intelligence arises as a discourse between the body and the imagination, an apparently infinitely inventive and fantastical realm occasioned by absence. Played out in all forms of social life, art and music have always provided a privileged site for exploring this gap. Kierkegaard recognised this in a famous essay on Mozart’s Don Giovanni, an opera that stages the definitively erotic quality of music itself as the spirit of sensuality – dynamic, temporal, and immediate.⁴¹

So I am interested here neither in musical evocations of the erotic nor of the representation of some state outside of music. To recapitulate some earlier themes of this book, my focus is a music that has little to do with the communication or encoding of messages, and that distances itself from the idea of music as a kind of quasi-linguistic discourse. This music says nothing in order to foreground a coming to presence of a vibrating body of sound. Debussy’s pleasure on hearing the gamelan for the first time was no doubt related to this idea and it is this quality, rather than any specific technique, that can be heard in the piano music of both Debussy and Ravel. This music still uses tonality, but it does so to undermine the assumptions of tonality, opening an erotic gap between its self-sufficient pleasure and the teleology of tonal desire, climax, and closure.

‘Neither culture nor its destruction is erotic; it is the seam between them, the fault, the flaw, which becomes so.’⁴² Roland Barthes reminds us that the erotic has to do with the tremor set up between forms of culture and their transgression, returning us once more to the gap, the hinge, the border. Jouissance is the ecstasy that arises from a loss of the subject, a loss of its boundaries, a condition that relates the sexually erotic to a condition of writing – hence the idea of ‘textasy’ in literary studies.⁴³ One might point to something similar in music that writes this blurring of the edges of the body, that puts the subject in play in order to take it to the edge of itself, to risk its own loss – a loss of the subject (a shipwreck) that is also an access of to a greater whole (the constellation). Georges Bataille thus locates the erotic in a dissolution of the confines of the body that opens momentarily to the whole of existence. This places it close to death, which is why he hears the scenes of terror in Pelléas et Mélisande, notably Act 4.iv, as key to its eroticism.⁴⁴ ‘We are discontinuous beings [ . . . ] but we yearn for our lost continuity [ . . . ] Along with our tormenting desire that this evanescent thing should last, there stands our obsession with a primal continuity linking us to everything that is.’⁴⁵

Jean-Luc Nancy, like Kierkegaard and Barthes before him, locates this gap explicitly between the body and language. ‘Coming [jouir] occurs – or opens up [fraye] an access – only when the signifying or symbolic order is suspended. When it is suspended by an interruption that produces no voice of sense but, to the contrary, a fullness and indeed an overfullness: an “absent sense” or the eruptive coming of the sense that is older than all signification, as it were its truth as sense.’⁴⁶ A similar idea is found in Jean-Luc Marion’s ‘saturated phenomenon’ – an experience of the world marked by ‘the excess of intuition over the concept’,⁴⁷ the inadequacy of language to experience, an excess of the body to the word, of being to signifying. For Marion, the saturated phenomenon is not only exemplified by the artwork but is, necessarily, erotic – hence the constellation of ideas in his work that includes ‘the erotic phenomenon’, ‘the saturated phenomenon’, the artwork, and the sense of an excess of being over signification.⁴⁸

Robert Fink has shown how, in both popular music and American minimalism, a shift towards non-teleological repetition produces a cultivation of what he calls ‘nondiscursive jouissance’.⁴⁹ But repetition was always key to the erotic aspect of music. ‘Cara sposa’, Rinaldo’s great aria of lament and desire in Handel’s opera of the same name, consists largely of the same two words, repeated, inverted, repeated again. This is not discourse but incantation in the face of absence – a repetition provoked by the pathetic body (the body that suffers), not rational analysis or discourse upon the situation. Such repetition by the singing voice, foregrounding the sensuality of the voice over any discursive content, momentarily evokes the presence whose loss it mourns. This pleasurable and erotic dissonance of all song, between the sense of the words (absence) and the sound of the voice (presence), exemplifies how music relates to saying but differs from it. The musical voice is the site of mediation, but also the activity of mediation, between language and the body, a dynamic field in which the music sets in play (en jeu) the subject that is both in language and in the body, but exclusively neither.

Ravel’s Bolero (1928) presents a fascinating case study in the pleasures of repetition. In some ways it is a shocking piece for the way it so blatantly disdains the idea of music saying something, of having content, or developing any kind of idea. Ravel himself is quoted as describing the piece as ‘orchestral tissue without music [ . . . ] no contrast, and practically no invention’⁵⁰ and, as having confessed to Arthur Honegger: ‘I have written only one masterpiece. That is Bolero. Unfortunately it contains no music.’ Bolero flouts the self-imposed ban of modern music on simple repetition, of ‘saying’ the same thing over and again. But at the same time, it flouts music’s dangerous capacity to do just that, to do the same thing but each time slightly different, celebrating the power of musical repetition and insisting on the erotic pleasures of its dance-like returns. The deliberately louche deformations of its theme combine to flaunt a sinuous and sensuous quality in the face of the mechanical time of the side-drum rhythm.⁵¹ To re-quote Barthes, it is precisely in the gap between the two that the erotic arises.

Debussy’s bon mots on pleasure are well known: ‘French music desires, above all, to give pleasure’ and, most often, ‘Pleasure is the law’,⁵² yet the erotic aspect of Debussy’s music has been remarkably neglected by scholars. One exception is Julie McQuinn, who considers the erotic in La demoiselle élue, the Chansons de Bilitis, Pelléas et Mélisande, and the song ‘C’est l’extase’, in the wider context of Debussy’s cultural milieu.⁵³ One of the central metaphors of the idea of the erotic, across the arts at this time, was that of ‘la chevelure’ – a term for which the English word ‘hair’ is a very inadequate translation. Baudelaire’s poem ‘La chevelure’ or the rendering of the hair of female figures by the Pre-Raphaelites or, later, in the work of Gustav Klimt, gives a sense of the intensity of this cultural fascination. McQuinn considers this as a case of fetishism, a term first used in 1887 by the French psychologist Alfred Binet.⁵⁴ Katherine Bergeron similarly approaches the question of Mélisande’s hair against a cultural backdrop of a similar fascination in the work of Puvis de Chavannes, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Baudelaire, and Pierre Louÿs.⁵⁵ It is a key idea in Pierre Louÿs’s Bilitis poems and ‘La chevelure’ is the second of the three poems set by Debussy in 1894. But it is the tower scene in Pelléas et Mélisande that the idea is explored most fully in Debussy’s music.

Act 3.i takes place at night; the tower housing Mélisande’s room is seen against the night sky and lit only by the rising of the moon over the sea. It renders spatially the gap of desire between Pelléas and Mélisande, between her at the open window and him on the path below. Debussy’s music moves between the desire of leaning out (Mélisande) and that of reaching up (Pelléas) towards the sensuous plenitude which is the object of desire. One might talk here of an erotics of falling because, between the two, is a perilous and vertiginous gap (‘Vertige!’, we might hear, as a pre-echo of Debussy’s later setting of Mallarmé’s Éventail). The gap, made visual in this scene, is erotic (in Bataille’s sense) because it has to do with the charge between two individual identities seeking to fuse into one.⁵⁶ Its enactment of desire is played out in terms of saying and touching: ‘Give me your hand, your little hand on my lips [ . . . ] I can’t lean out any further [ . . . ] My lips can’t reach your hand’. In the end, it is Mélisande’s hair that falls. The stage direction states: ‘Her hair suddenly falls loose [ . . . ] and envelops Pelléas’ (Sa chevelure se révulse tout à coup . . . et inonde Pelléas). The French verb inonder means to flood (as in ‘inundation’). We are back with drowning the tone (noyer le ton) and the fate of Mallarmé’s poet/mariner.

Jankélévitch is explicit in linking Mélisande’s enveloping hair with the immersive infinitude of the sea: ‘not only does this mystery encompass and capture consciousness, but it leads it towards the infinite depths – because it is deep and attractive like the sea’. He goes on: ‘Not only does the unloosened hair submerge Pelléas under waves of sensual pleasure (volupté), but it carries him away on its tidal wave towards the depths of a fathomless pleasure.’⁵⁷ The erotic dimension is clear; volupté implies a definitely sensual if not sexual pleasure,⁵⁸ and was quite explicitly referenced in contemporary accounts of female sexuality. Jean Marestan’s L’Education Sexuelle of 1910, for example, makes use of a familiar maritime metaphor:

It very frequently happens that the woman is much slower in arriving at the climax of (sexual) pleasure [volupté]. In this amorous journey to the land of tenderness, things do not advance together, and one lover is already reaching port while his friend is only just appearing on the horizon.⁵⁹

Her hair now in Pelléas’s hands and mouth, Mélisande protests dreamily, ‘Let me go, you’re going to make me fall’. On the final syllable the harmony takes a chromatic sidestep and the orchestra re-enter with a gently undulating figure that sounds what she has not spoken (see Example 7.5(a)). For a second time she interrupts Pelléas’s rhapsody with a half-hearted ‘Let me go’. When he refuses again, she responds simply by whispering his name in a falling phrase, part of the drawn-out cadential progression that ‘falls’ as it opens out to the plenitude of the G♭ major passage that follows (see Example 7.5(b)).

Example 7.5(a) Claude Debussy, Pelléas et Mélisande, Act 3.i, bb. 114–17

Example 7.5(b) Claude Debussy, Pelléas et Mélisande, Act 3.i, bb. 157-61

The release of ‘La chevelure’ is a threshold moment – a transformative inundation of presence which, as Katherine Bergeron has it, opens up an ‘entirely new temporal register’.⁶⁰ The music settles into the dynamic containment of a rich orchestral sonority rocked in gentle motion. Reaching across the gap now gives way to holding, as Pelléas, with a repeated line about her hair in his hands, affirms through his body (Je les tiens dans les mains).

That such a move is key to a wider idea of music ‘after Debussy’ is underlined by a work like Henri Dutilleux’s Tout un monde lointain (1970), for solo cello and orchestra. Each of its five movements has an epigraph taken from a different poem of Baudelaire’s Les fleurs du mal, but the title borrows a phrase that appears in the poem ‘La chevelure’. In this, one of Baudelaire’s most intensely erotic works, the poet-lover discovers the dark wonders he had thought to be ‘a world away’, in the touch, feel, and scent of his lover’s hair. The recurrent imagery is that of the open sea and coming into port: ‘Un port retentissant où mon âme peut boire / À grand flots le parfum, le son et la couleur.’ The poem might equally be read as an erotic exploration of music through the metaphor of the lover’s hair, and in the wordless sonorities of Dutilleux’s music the two are of course indistinguishable. The poem’s vocative mode of address and ecstatic tone is mirrored in the way the music similarly evokes the presence of a ‘wholly distant world’ through a piling up of sensual materials. The same erotic quality pervades all five movements of Dutilleux’s work, blurring the boundaries between body and landscape, self and other.

Its opening movement (Enigme/Enigma) presents the solo cello emerging from nothing (a mere hiss on the cymbals and a harmonic haze of string clusters), only gradually coming to appearance and expanding to find a voice. This is music that cultivates a sense of being in process, still forming, that is briefly rapturous, and then evaporates into the nothing from which it emerged. It draws on the fairy-like evanescence of Debussy’s music and anticipates the ‘precarious rapture’ of the Cello Concerto (1990) and Advaya (1994) by Jonathan Harvey.⁶¹ The epigraph to the second movement (Regard/Gaze) points to the absolute particularity of the lover’s gaze and eyes – ‘lakes where my soul trembles and sees its own reflection’. The original title of this movement was Vertige, a sense of which is caught in the ecstatic solo cello lines in the uppermost register of the instrument, both ethereal and sweet, but also with a quality of aching intensity. The third movement (Houles/Waves) opens up a rapturous space that, by means of the lines from Baudelaire’s ‘La chevelure’ quoted in the score, connects it to the immersive world of the lover’s hair which, like the sea, transports the poet (‘ebony sea, you bear a brilliant dream / of sails and pennants, mariners and masts’). The fourth movement (Miroirs/Mirrors), marked ‘slow and ecstatic’, opens the erotic space of two identities held in a mirror relation, enclosed but moving constantly between each other. The fifth (Hymne/Hymn), restless and unpredictable, takes its cue from a poem (‘La voix’) that affirms both the rapture and pain of art’s dreaming (‘keep your dreams, the wise have none so lovely as the mad’).

The musically erotic has too often been conceived solely in terms of nineteenth-century tonal music and the teleological forms it privileged – as a drama of tonal desire, condemned to a repetitive cycle of climax and collapse. But for all Debussy’s early fascination with Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde, his music explores a quite different idea of the erotic. Where the Wesendoncklieder demarcate the emptiness of longing that defines Act 3 of Wagner’s later opera, songs like Debussy’s ‘C’est l’extase’ set out a space that is already fulfilled. In this, Debussy is far closer to Fauré, whose mélodies frequently define a space of sensuous containment, enveloping the listening body in a gently flowing sonic environment. His settings of Verlaine, for example, in the Chansons de Venise, Op. 58, include not only his own version of ‘C’est l’extase’, but also the languorous stasis of ‘En sourdine’. In ‘À clymene’, a song about ‘your’ presence (your eyes, your voice, your sense, your whole being), Fauré uses the topos of the barcarolle to merge the rocking of the water with the satiety of the erotic body.

In music, the erotic touch of another body fuses with that of the environing landscape. In both cases, touch is the chiasmic point of exchange between self and other, touching and being touched – as Merleau-Ponty sets out. Music enacts this in powerful form, since the sonic landscape is palpably both external and internal; the listener moves between going outwards into the sonic space and drawing sound within the body. The vibrating body, put in motion by music, is an organ of erotic pleasure because it is the vibration across the gap/overlap between self and other, body and world. Sense, as Nancy insists, is never ‘in general’, as is the case with signification; it is always and necessarily particular and located in a particular place and body: ‘pleasure does not take place except through place, touch, and zone. It is local, detached, discreet, fragmentary, absolute. A nonfractal pleasure, a pleasure without limits, fragmentation, arrival, or falling due, is not a pleasure at all.’⁶² Sense interrupts the logical sequences of the signifying orders of language – as can be heard in those moments in Debussy that linger on the sensuous moment at the expense of musical argument or discourse: ‘By means of the touch of the senses, pleasure surprises and suspends the enchainment of signifying sense. Or, rather, what one calls in French the “touche des sens” (touch of the senses) consists precisely in this suspension and being-taken-by-surprise of signifying enchainement.’⁶³