8

Writing the body

L’écriture musicale

Twenty-five years ago, Jean-Luc Nancy suggested that the body had already become ‘our old culture’s latest, most worked over, sifted, refined, dismantled, and reconstructed product’.¹ Ten years later, Don Ihde similarly noted: ‘Bodies, bodies everywhere. Philosophy, feminist thought, cultural studies, science studies, all seem to have rediscovered bodies.’² Linda Austern wrote, in the same year, of a ‘return to an epistemology of embodiment’ and went on to cite an extensive literature from the 1990s and earlier.³ Given the importance of the body to Roland Barthes, writing on music in the 1970s, to say nothing of Susan Sontag’s call for an erotics of art in 1964, the shift towards a more embodied aesthetics is already half a century old. Since then it has multiplied across the arts and humanities as part of a wider new materialism, a definitive shift away from the formalism of an earlier age. This move of the body, from its abject absence in discourse to its new-found centrality is well-known and I do not review it here. One might trace its roots to the beginning of the twentieth century, to Freud’s insistence on the presence of the body in the working of the mind, and to the origins of phenomenology in the philosophy of Husserl. But one might also look back to the exploration within music, visual art, and literature, of a new kind of embodied materiality. If it has taken a century for the body to come centre stage in the realm of theory, the latter might learn something from the findings of art.

But what are the consequences for music of this new insistence on the body? After all the urgent assertions of a sensing, breathing, and palpitating musical body, what has been said about music? One answer is that such an approach reaffirms the claims of an embodied particularity – one might say, even, the claims of our own embodied particularity – in sound. But another answer is that this rush into the acousmatic body is a rush to fill the vacuum left by idealism, less a new idea than the latest swing of a disciplinary pendulum, which risks reducing music to only sound and to the body’s experience of sound. A phenomenology of sound is not itself an aesthetics of music – at least, not for a musical repertoire that is founded on the tension between what is heard and what is not heard, between material sound on the one hand and, on the other, form, pattern, constellation, configuration, memory, anticipation, association, interval, gap. Music after Debussy exemplifies such a repertoire, in which the sounding musical body (of the listener as much as the performer) is placed in tension with musical writing.

To fetishise sound and the presence of the listening body alone, to proclaim that everything unheard in musical writing is some non-sense of idealism, is to fall directly into the trap which Derrida exposed half a century ago. Writing, he insisted, opens up a critical space of non-identity between speech and writing, prising apart the closure of a metaphysics of presence. But différance is not confined to language; it is also a condition of a musica scripta that flickers constantly across the non-identity between writing and sonorous acts of musical performance. The writing of music, in the widest sense, is not defined solely by technologies of music notation, but by intentional acts of rethinking and remaking sounds that distinguishes music from the universe of environmental sounds. Musical écriture is, first and foremost, not sound but the shaping of sound; as such, it is also the shaping and writing of time and, with that, a reshaping and rewriting of our own sonorous and temporal being.⁴

My focus, therefore, is not the body, nor our embodied perceptions of the world, nor even specifically our experience of sound. My interest is with the idea of musical écriture as a musical re-writing of the body – in the sense both of directing the body of the performer into specific material configurations, and of enabling new lexicons of corporeal being within the listener. The final part of Michel Serres’ Les cinq sens is titled simply ‘Joy’, signalling the quality of ekstasis (being outside of one’s own body) that can be occasioned by forms of bodily play (in Serres’ essay, these range from walking and swimming to dancing and trampolining). The musicking body, whether that of the performer, dancer, or listener, is undoubtedly one such form of the body at play. But musical écriture is also different to trampolining precisely because it is a writing. Neither pure materiality nor the representation of materiality, musical écriture is a re-imagining of materiality, a re-inscribing that is also a re-making.

Mallarmé found something similar in the body of the dancer. The dancer, he tells us, is not just a woman who dances, but a kind of écriture corporelle, a writing of the body, a poetry no longer confined to the page – ‘a corporal writing that would take paragraphs of prose [ . . . ] to express’.⁵ In place of the folding of pages, the dancer presents a constant unfolding, ‘like giant petals or butterflies’, of the material in which she is clothed, her skirt like a wing (aile) that writes upon the air in order ‘to create a place’.⁶ While dance may be metaphorically a writing of the body (poetry in motion, as the cliché has it), it also became scripted in a more literal way in the twentieth century, as in Rudolf Laban’s development, in the 1920s, of a graphic language for representing choreography. For Mallarmé, dance shares with music and poetry the sense of constant motion, a perpetual ‘dispersion volatile’ of anything solid or fixed: a writing of the body in order to dissolve it, to liberate it from being merely a solid thing, to enable it to take flight. As Suzanne Bernard summarises it:

Just as in music one note perpetually succeeds another, hardly appearing before it vanishes, dance offers us a succession of forms and attitudes in the course of perpetual transformation – and this incessant flight, here as in music, gives us the sense of an evanescent reality, shedding everything ‘qui pèse ou qui pose’ [Verlaine]; reality evoked without end, annihilated without end, and by the play of the ‘negative creation’ which Mallarmé sees as art’s own, reduced to its volatile essence.⁷

Mallarmé was fascinated with dancers in general, but with one in particular – the American dancer Loïe Fuller (1869–1928) who first appeared in Paris in 1892, astonishing audiences with her play of veils and light (see Figure 8.1).⁸ Mallarmé first wrote about her in a newspaper article of 1893;⁹ his account might equally be applied to Debussy’s setting of ‘Eventail’:

an unfolding, like giant petals or butterflies, all very clear and straightforward. Its fusion with the fast-moving nuances, constantly transforming their phantasmagoric-mixture of air and water, typical of dusks and caves, like swiftly changing passions – delight, grief, rage: to set them in motion, diluted with all their prismatic violence, we need the vertigo of a soul that seems to have been placed in the air through some kind of artifice.¹⁰

Figure 8.1 Loïe Fuller, photographed by Frederick Glasier (1902)

In the phantasmagorical figure of the dancer, Mallarmé found a re-writing of the body that is pre-eminently musical. His wordplay of the dancer as signe/cygne reminds us that the ballet dancer is often some kind of bird or fairy – a liminal or hybrid figure, paradigmatically a princess who has been turned into a swan. And, as with all fairy-tales, the transmigration of form is a vehicle for self-discovery – hence the theme of the double (Odette/Odile) in ballet and the enactment of the non-human body as other. If dance, pre-eminently, (re)writes the human body, so too does music: it too puts the bodies of performers and listeners in motion and thereby projects the movements of virtual bodies in which performers and listeners share. The listener may remain largely motionless, but the imaginary body takes flight with the myriad forms of movement into which music draws the listening body. Music thus creates an avatar of the human body – a virtual being which enacts new forms of motion on behalf of the motionless body.

Jacques Rancière devotes a whole chapter (‘The Dance of Light’) of his Aisthesis to Loïe Fuller and her art of fictive appearing.¹¹ Key to this art, as Mallarmé underlines, is her dress as a kind of veil (voile). Rancière puts it like this:

The veil is not only an artifice that enables one to imitate all sorts of forms. It also displays the potential of a body by hiding it. It is the supplement that the body gives itself to change its forms and its function. The novelty of Loïe Fuller’s art is not the simple charm of the sinuous. It is the invention of a new body [ . . . ].¹²

For Mallarmé, Fuller’s dance found a perfect analogy in music which also uses the body to make something that does not resemble it: ‘the movement of the veil does not transpose any musical motifs, but the very idea of music’. Or again: ‘The veil is music because it is the artifice through which a body extends itself to engender forms into which it disappears.’¹³ This musical self-sufficiency of her dancing was underlined, for Mallarmé, by the absence of any backdrop or scenery and thus any pretence of representation. Instead, Fuller stepped out onto an entirely black stage to present the ‘contentless’ play of the movements of her body and dress in the light trained upon her. What Fuller made visible was thus the play of light in motion, as so often in the work of contemporary painters, and as contemporary film pioneers of the 1890s were just discovering. It was this play of appearing itself, Rancière underlines, that Mallarmé found in the folds of Fuller’s dress as much as the ‘unfolding of a fan, swaying hair, or the foam on the crest of a wave. For him all these aspects symbolise the pure act of appearing and disappearing.’¹⁴

The critical language of reception around Fuller’s performances often framed her dancing in terms of some primordial appearance or original beginning. Rancière quotes a review by Paul Adam from 1893:

She placed the original form of the planet before a thousand spectators, the way it was before it burned, cooled, covered with rain, sea, land, plants, animals and men. The dullest socialite feels a little shudder before this apparition of the genesis of worlds.¹⁵

Such an idea was cultivated across the arts in the early decades of the twentieth century – from Fauré’s settings (1906–10) of some of the poems of Charles Van Lerberghe’s La chanson d’Ève (1904) to Nijinsky’s choreography of Stravinksy’s Le sacre de printemps (1913) – foregrounding through art the elemental act of appearing itself rather than the telling of stories. If the cultivation of the primordial can be found in music as much as painting, poetry as much as sculpture, it was self-evidently in dance that this ‘re-writing’ of the body took place most palpably. Debussy’s unloosening of the pianist’s body from the strict entrainment of the five-finger exercise might thus be heard in parallel with developments in dance away from the disciplined lexicon of classical ballet to a new idea of the expressive immediacy of the natural body. One of its key pioneers, Émile Jaques-Dalcroze, began his career as a composer (studying with Fauré in Paris in 1884, and Bruckner in Vienna in 1887); another, Rudolf Laban, whose career took him between Paris, Munich, and Berlin before he left Nazi Germany for England in the 1930s, quite literally explored the idea of ‘writing the body’ in his development of a notational system for dance to parallel that of music. The key figures of ‘free dance’ overlap with those of music at every turn – Grete Wiesenthal in the Vienna of Mahler and Schoenberg; Loïe Fuller and Isadora Duncan in the Paris of Debussy and, later, Stravinsky; Mary Wigman and Rudolph Laban in the Munich of Wassily Kandinsky. Laban established a network of schools in the 1920s, and opened an Institute of Choreography in Berlin in 1927, just as Schoenberg moved to Berlin for his third and longest teaching appointment there (1926–33) and as the broader idea of the ‘Schoenberg School’ solidified around the new principles of composition enshrined in ‘The Method’.

Debussy himself may have had little affection for the way in which Nijinsky choreographed his Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faun and Jeux for the Ballets Russes, in 1912 and 1913 respectively, but there is a deeper connection between the rewriting of the body in Debussy’s music and a parallel movement in contemporary dance. Both were increasingly engaged in what Jacques Rancière describes as ‘miming the act of appearing instead of miming the appearance of characters to whom something happens’.¹⁶ What is common to both, and what Mallarmé saw in Loïe Fuller’s dancing, was ‘a new idea of fiction.’ As Rancière sees it:

this substitutes the plot with the construction of a play of aspects, elementary forms that offer an analogy to the play of the world [ . . . ] The new fiction is this pure display of forms. These forms can be called abstract because they tell no stories. But if they get rid of stories, they do so in order to serve a higher mimesis: through artifice they reinvent the very forms in which sensible events are given to us and assembled to constitute a world. The ‘transition’ from music to fabric is the recapturing of the power of abstraction, of music’s power of muteness, by mimetic gesture itself. The body abstracts from itself, it dissimulates its own form in the display of veils sketching flight rather than the bird, the swirling rather than the wave, the bloom rather the flower. What is imitated, in each thing, is the event of its apparition.¹⁷

This might be taken to be exactly what takes place in the Préludes pour piano by Debussy – a ‘veil’ of mimesis in order to stage the act of appearing itself, in myriad forms of movement. In this, Debussy’s music comes close to the quality that Michel Serres finds in the pre-vocal arts of mime and dance, which ‘say nothing but carry everything’.¹⁸ It is perhaps for exactly that reason that such an art demands a certain kind of silence. As Rancière suggests of Loïe Fuller: ‘Silent to the point where uttering a word about her while she is present, however softly and for the edification of a neighbour, seems an impossibility, because it confounds us.’¹⁹

Imaginary bodies

Debussy’s two books of Préludes for piano (1909–10; 1912–13) might be read as a kind of catalogue of such a (re-)writing of the human body. The Préludes do not describe, depict, or represent, for some passive audience, Le vent dans la pleine, Brouillards, Feuilles mortes, or Feux d’artifice; rather, they make the listening body move like wind, mist, dead leaves, or fireworks. They do not evoke the hills of Capri, Spain, or a moonlit terrace, but place the body in a new sensory environment for which these are merely associative reference points, ways of grounding something for which we have no name. Debussy might just as well have added, before each of his allusive postscript titles: ‘This music moves your body as strangely as if you were just now’ a Delphic dancer, making footsteps in the snow, lost in the movement of sails, tumbling along on the west wind. The link between the dancer and an irreal kind of bodily movement is explicit in La danse de Puck and Les fées sont d’exquises danseuses, but the fairy creature, whether of air or water, is just one way into the fantastical, of putting the body in motion in ways that seem to place that of the listener into a different element – to make us move like the wind, a fountain, or snow dancing. The ‘fairy’ pieces are simply the tip of the iceberg, a nod to the idea of representation as a cover and a diversion for a far more radical, unsettling kind of activity. In this they are like the titles Debussy appends at the end of each Prélude, separated from the music by an ellipsis. This familiar poetic conceit marks the gap between the musical and the visual. The three dots of the ellipsis make the associative image provisional, open-ended, unstable; they dissolve the fixity of the poetic and visual image to point back to the space without a name created by the music.

The unreal fairy body, like music itself, connects the real human body to the elements of which it is made. When the Préludes are not evoking the movement of fairy characters like Puck or Ondine, they are often concerned with the elements – pre-eminently water and air. In place of musical saying, they explore the logic of the sensing body in relation to a world at the margins of language. As in General Lavine (Book II, no. 6), the body here is always ‘eccentric’ in the sense of being particular, individual, resisting the centricity of a conventional relationship to the world. Debussy’s music exhibits a whole menagerie of non-human or half-human forms – from Jimbo the elephant (Children’s Corner) to the collection of toys in La Boîte à Joujou, from the sirens of the Nocturnes to Mallarme’s faun. In this, his music is closely related to works of his contemporaries that explored eccentric bodies by evoking animals in music – witness Ravel in L’enfant et les sortilèges and Janáček in The Cunning Little Vixen – to say nothing of composers’ fascination with the movement of birds, from Vaughan Williams’s The Lark Ascending to the ornithological worlds of Messiaen. Debussy’s fascination with exploring a rich diversity of forms of the musical body is announced in the initial series of pieces in the first book of Préludes. There is an intriguing ‘logic of sense’ to the sequence with which Debussy links each one to the next. The movement of the Delphic dancers (no. 1) is highlighted by their veils, which as sails (no. 2) catch the breeze that becomes the wind on the plain (no. 3), but later subsides to carry the sounds and scents of the evening (no. 4), a landscape of colour, scent, and sound like that of the hills of Anacapri (no. 5). At which point Debussy introduces a hiatus: the warmth of Italy and its lively dance steps are suddenly juxtaposed with a frozen landscape and faltering steps in the snow (no. 6).

The bodies evoked in ‘Danseuses de Delphes’ (I, no. 1) are absent bodies; summoned by the slow hieratic movement of this solemn Sarabande they remain, nevertheless, distanced in time and place. The anecdote that this piece was inspired by a Greek bas-relief in the Louvre is not insignificant given the quality of moving/not moving it achieves.²⁰ It offers a valuable insight into a quality of Debussy’s music ‘in reverse’: where the bas-relief pictures movement frozen in the stillness of a static object, Debussy’s music uses movement to evoke a stillness of the body. The repetition of a narrowly defined figure is key to the sense of this ‘still movement’ – an idée fixe of the Préludes as a whole, announced thematically in its opening number. Apart from a brief moment of appearance (bb. 15–17) these are otherwise absent bodies. The evoked body is restrained, constrained even, in its movement; according to Marguerite Long, Debussy played this piece ‘with almost metronomic exactness’. This is a classicised, ideal body, which the body of the pianist enacts at the keyboard with the arms moving symmetrically outwards from the centre (bb. 1–4), later answered by their convergence back towards the centre (bb. 11–14).

This sense of the symmetrical spacing of the body is taken up, along with the sense of still movement and the B♭ pedal, in ‘Voiles’ (I, no. 2).²¹ The symmetries of pitch and register within this piece have often been noted, with the middle C of the piano acting as the axis of symmetry between the bass B♭ and the high D (see bb. 21, 33–37, 52). Once again, the pianist’s arms mark out this space either side of the middle C, the embodied sign of the centre of the keyboard, the still point of the pianist’s turning world, the white blank of C major from which the musical fantasy is spun and to which it returns. The ‘veils’ of the Delphic dancers link this prelude to the preceding one, the ‘sails’ link it to the wind of the succeeding one, the B♭ pedal links all three. There is no journey here, no movement of the body from one place to another. This is a body at rest, immersed within its own space, with only a brief single moment of breaking out in the jouissance of bb. 42–44 (emporté means, literally, carried away) only to return at once to something ‘très retenu’ (b. 45). This too is distanced, objective even, avoiding the rhetoric of subjective expression, though where the body was restrained by the held-back rhythm in the first prelude, ‘Voiles’ is to be played ‘Dans un rhythme sans rigueur et caressant’.

On one hand, ‘Le vent dans la plaine’ (I, no. 3) is a piece about the physicality of touch, about the interface between the touch of the hands and les touches (the keys of the piano). On the other hand, it evokes a quality of movement that suggests a non-human presence, something ungraspable, a piece of objective nature, as inexpressive as the noise of the wind. Its concern is the infinite variegation of a patterning of sonority, of son before sens. It might recall Vincent D’Indy’s remark about Debussy’s harmony, that it was without sens (both sense and direction), since ‘Le vent’ challenges any expectation of the sense of direction conferred by tonal practice. The directions of sonority, like those of the wind, are quite other to those of human discourse and Debussy makes no concessions to the latter as the music trills its way in apparently circular and meandering patterns, constantly in motion but going nowhere.

The title of this prelude makes an oblique reference to Verlaine’s poem ‘C’est l’extase langoureuse’, the first of the Romances sans paroles, which takes as its epigraph a phrase from the eighteenth-century writer Charles-Simon Favart – ‘Le vent dans la plaine / suspend son haleine.’ Debussy set Verlaine’s poem in 1887 and later included it in the six Verlaine songs he published as Ariettes oubliés in 1903. Similarly, the title of ‘Les sons et les parfums tournent dans l’air du soir’ (I, no. 4) looks back to the Cinq Poémes de Baudelaire, and ‘La fille aux cheveux de lin’ (I, no. 8) borrows the title from one of Debussy’s earliest songs (to a text by Leconte de Lisle). How should we read this late look back, in the piano music, to the earlier songs? One response might be to hear it as an extension of what already takes place in the songs themselves, which often frame or stage a song, at one remove, as a kind of reflection upon music and its performance. The fascination with music about music is evident in other ways in the Préludes too – as in ‘La sérénade interrompue’ (I, no. 9), a pianistic evocation of music played on the guitar, or ‘Minstrels’ (I, no. 12), which, like many of the early songs, takes the scene of musical performance as its topic.

In the case of ‘Le vent dans la plaine’ one might certainly discern some connections with the song ‘C’est l’extase langoureuse’ – not least, the sense of movement suspended in the murmuring of the wind that holds its breath for the lovers. But more significant is surely the distance between the erotic subjectivity of Debussy’s songs in the 1880s and the elemental objectivity of the Préludes three decades later. Where the song foregrounds the sense of the first two lines (C’est l’extase langoureuse,/ C’est la fatigue amoureuse), the Prelude makes more of the lines of poetry that follow which evoke, in wonderful detail, the auditory richness of the rustling and murmuring of the surrounding environment. The contained movement of the Prelude, held over its B♭ pedal, suggests an objectivity of nature independent of the presence of human subjects. Whereas, in the song, music serves conventionally as the expression of feeling and the carrier of language, the piano prelude foregrounds the body at the keyboard and the physicality of touch. It is effectively a toccata (a piece that arises from a focus on touching) and proceeds by means of a logic of the body. The opening figure is a product of the movement of the hands before it becomes material for the musical mind (see Example 8.1). So too are the later gestural ‘break outs’ (in bb. 28, 30, 31, and 33) consisting of loud full chords in both hands, converging from the outer registers back to the central space of the keyboard. The eruptive force of this gestures is a bodily spasm; without formal or harmonic function, it is a product of the gestural musical body not the logical musical mind. It foregrounds figure over discourse, gesture over syntax.

Example 8.1 Claude Debussy, ‘Le vent dans la plaine’, Préludes, Livre I, no. 3, bb. 1–6

Debussy thus foregrounds the body both by making the movement of the pianist’s body the material of these pieces and by putting virtual bodies into motion. But he also foregrounds the body by accentuating sensuous intensity over discursive order. Witness the ways in which he explores a logic of the senses in preludes like ‘Les sons et les parfums tournent dans l’air du soir’ (I, no. 4). This too is a study of movement within a contained stillness and distance (note the horn topic in the closing bars). This too has a title that links to a song – Baudelaire’s Harmonie du soir, set by Debussy in 1889. Baudelaire’s poem is a pantoum, a form in which lines two and four of each quatrain become lines one and three of the next. At the same time, however, the rhyme scheme of abba creates a closed, contained quality to each quatrain. Debussy’s song mixes this up, with the piano accompaniment forming a counterpoint of wordless reminiscences against those given by the poem itself.

‘Les collines d’Anacapri’ (I, no.5) links to the previous prelude through the idea of space but also the movement of the body within space through dance, though the languorous waltz of the previous prelude gives ways here to the bright energy of a Neapolitan tarantella (joyeux et léger, b. 14). But the vivid present of the popular song is, as so often in Debussy, presented as an act of memory. The framing gesture of the opening bars (quittez, en laissant vibrer) might recall Carolyn Abbate’s remarks about the ‘plucked string’ that opens and closes Debussy’s early setting of Verlaine’s ‘Mandolin’;²² the presence of the bright energy of ‘the hills of Capri’ is an act of deliberate recall, a making appear through music. Unlike the earlier song, however, the prelude wants to assert, with Proustian intensity, that the presence recalled through memory is more vivid and more luminous than the original. The astonishing closing section, in the highest register of the piano, concludes the prelude in a gesture of luminous evanescence, with the steely brightness of the upper strings vibrating in the air. In the final gesture, Debussy has the pianist pick out (fff, trés retenu) the three highest black notes of the keyboard, each heavily accented (see Example 8.2). It makes for a remarkable sound, as if the pianist were trying too hard to squeeze out some bell-like resonance from strings too short and too taut to deliver such a sound. Overdetermined, it thus frames this joyous energy of the dancing body as backlit by memory.

Example 8.2 Claude Debussy, ‘Les collines d’Anacapri’, Préludes, Livre I, no. 5, bb. 80–96

It is this act of memory which connects the energetic dance steps of ‘Les collines’ to the weary and faltering steps of ‘Des pas sur la neige’ (I, no. 6), two pieces that otherwise seem to make an absolute contrast and thus a kind of rupture within the sequence of the set. The body moves quite differently, but it is nevertheless the movement of the body that is the material of both pieces. As Steven Rings has shown, the constricted step motion that defines ‘Des pas sur la neige’ is contrasted with the gently expansive arabesque of recollection, with its drawn out triplet figure (bb. 3, 7, 18–19).²³ The frozen body is here also a lost body; human presence is marked by absence and emptiness, by footprints that are merely traces of presence, but that act as thresholds to the recalling of presence (expressif et tendre). It is telling that the footstep motif is a version of the ‘dotted’ rhythm that Debussy employs elsewhere as a device of musical appearing²⁴ – at the start of La mer, for example, and again in Act 3 of Pelléas et Mélisande, as Pelléas and Golaud ascend out of the underground caverns to mark a kind of return to life, a coming to presence through the return to sunlight.²⁵

If presence is attenuated in ‘Des pas sur la neige’, it is entirely displaced in the violence of ‘Ce qu’a vu le vent d’ouest’ (I, no. 7). The absence of human presence is underlined here by an exploration of musical sound that borders on noise, a kind of anti-syntactical statement distanced from anything resembling musical speech and thus a definitive kind of saying nothing. In the same way, the rolling gusts of sound from out of the bass register seem to have nothing to do with the movement of the human body. The opening six bars present no musical material in a traditional sense, but only a gestural and physical exploration of the hands, a shaped energy of the body. Even when something more like a musical ‘idea’ appears (from b. 7) it is interrupted by another bodily gesture (the sforzando figures at the start of b. 10 and b. 13). The passage from b. 15 anticipates later electronic music in that it shapes sounds as a single fluid substance rather than through differentiated parts combined into syntactical structures. The modernity of this music is not located in its dissonance as such, but in this foregrounding of the agitation of the body as the origin of musical sound. Nevertheless, ‘Ce qu’a vu le vent d’ouest’ explores a level of dissonance and violence almost without equal in Debussy’s output. Bars 35–42, taken in isolation, surely verge on the edge of ‘unmusical’ noise for many listeners, with its compound seconds crashing up and down the keyboard like a kind of angry anti-music (see Example 8.3). This is the opposite of the elaboration of contained space we so often find in Debussy’s music; it is, rather, a violent breaking out from within. The excess of bodily violence upon the keyboard suggests a level of anger that has little to do with the Hans Christian Andersen tale to which the title putatively refers. This is not just a violence of the body, but a violence against the discourse of music itself. Jankélévitch points to the use of adjacent seconds in Debussy’s piano music, especially when doubled at the octave, as breaking one of ‘the taboos of academic pianism’ in order to obtain a quality of atonal noise at the limit of the musical.²⁶ The modest reticence of ‘La fille aux cheveux de lin’ which follows hardly seems like the work of the same composer.

Example 8.3 Claude Debussy, ‘Ce qu’a vu le vent d’ouest’, Préludes, Livre I, no. 7, bb. 35–42

How does one make sense of this contrast between the ‘furious’ violence of ‘Ce qu’a vu le vent d’ouest’ and the quiet calm of ‘La fille aux cheveux de lin’ (Trés calme et doucement expressif)? The latter takes its title from a poem by Leconte de Lisle, published as part of a set of Chansons écossaises in his Poèmes antiques (1852). Debussy set that text in the early 1880s as one of the songs written for Marie-Blanche Vasnier though, as James Briscoe underlines, there are no obvious musical connections between the early song and the piano prelude written nearly thirty years later.²⁷ It is, nevertheless, another framed act of memory. Debussy looks back to an earlier period of his life and career, by reference to a poem that itself is a framed evocation of pastness; both prelude and poem are thus acts of stylistic throwback. The courtly dance style of Debussy’s music, and the parallel chordal motion, seem to anticipate the definitive stylistic archaicism of the later ‘Placet futile’ (from the Trois Poémes de Stéphane Mallarmé). The muted modal language (centred on G♭) twice promises a move to a more vivid presence, marked by the turn to E♭ major – once in b. 6, and then again, more energetically (un peu animé) in bb. 19–21, but the move is sidestepped and comes to nothing.²⁸ Musicologists, trained to recognise stylistic traits and place them in historical sequence, and mindful of the subtleties of musical intertextuality, are apt to ascribe to composers a knowing and deliberate play of self-referentiality. Who knows? Perhaps Debussy’s play with the past was in this vein. But it may also be the case that it was the hands of the pianist-composer that took him there – the memory of hands that yearn for familiar and habitual shapes. This makes sense of what otherwise does not – the sequence of the avant-garde pianism of ‘Ce qu’a vu le vent d’ouest’ and the comforting ease of the hands that follows in ‘La fille aux cheveux de lin’.

It is the hands that link the latter to ‘La sérénade interrompue’ (I, no. 9) – here, the hands of the guitarist rather than the pianist. This too, is an act of distanciation – from Scotland to Spain, and from an innocent ‘serenade’ to a far more complex one. Memory is once again key, since this astonishing imitation of the guitar is generally understood to be a kind of hommage to Isaac Albéniz who died in 1909 (aged 48), and specifically to Albéniz’s own collection of twelve substantial ‘impressions’ for piano, titled Iberia, which had been published in 1908. Once again, this is a piece about music and music-making but, like some of Debussy’s early Verlaine settings (‘Mandolin’, most obviously), this is also a piece about music-making in the past, about the gap between the dream of a past music that makes present and a present music that does not. So the central idea of this prelude is not the imitation of the guitar, wonderful though it is, but the melody that does not appear. In bb. 32–40 the piano right hand (expressif et un peu suppliant) tries to sing, but cannot move beyond the same two pitches. Later, in bb. 54–72, it tries again but without getting much further. At the third time of trying, from b. 97 onwards, it settles briefly into its wordless song – fragile, distant, and haunting – before simply vanishing (see Example 8.4). The preluding of the guitar, in the end, thus frames a song that barely appears. In this, ‘La sérénade’ exemplifies the idea of a prelude in Debussy’s hands – a framing of the act of appearing.

Example 8.4 Claude Debussy, ‘La sérénade interrompue’, Préludes, Livre I, no. 9, bb. 90–112

Where ‘La sérénade’ frames appearing as a fragile and elusive gesture, ‘La cathédrale engloutie’ (I, no. 10) offers a rare and striking staging of appearance in forcefully grand and sonorous terms (making use of a thickly-scored chorale topic, fortissimo, that might recall the ending of La mer). But the ironic twist, underlined by the pianissimo evanescence of the prelude’s ending, is that not only is this act of appearing momentary, it is also fictional. ‘La cathédrale’ is one of Debussy’s most overt examples of making appear, of coming to presence through sonorous and spatial expansion. If its title references the fairytale legend of the lost city of Ys, it does so, as so often in the Préludes, to use the fiction of art to frame the act of appearing itself, not the appearance of any thing. This is one of Debussy’s most naked studies of expanding sonority outwards rather than plotting any kind of musical argument. Marked ‘augmentez progressivement’ and later, ‘dans une expression allant grandissant’, this sense of expansion displaces the usual linear functions of harmonic form to create a huge resonating space that tries to exceed that of the piano. The ancient capital of Cornouaille is of course another ‘lost world’, as distant as the Allemonde of Maeterlinck’s Pelléas, or indeed the Cornwall of Wagner’s Tristan, and it is the radiant quiet chorale with which Debussy concludes the piece (bb. 72–89), rather than the impossibly ‘orchestral’ fortissimo version earlier (bb. 28–41), which is suggestive of real presence (see Example 8.5). It is an idea implied by Michel Serres in an allusive reference to Debussy’s piece that ‘the earth is submerged in noise as, in ancient times, was once the cathedral under the sea’.²⁹ Noise – the noise of language and discourse as much as that of urban life – submerges presence as completely as the ocean depths; only in silence can presence rise imperceptibly to the surface, if the closing bars of Debussy’s prelude are to be believed.

Example 8.5 Claude Debussy, ‘La cathédrale engloutie’, Préludes, Livre I, no. 10, bb. 72–89

The aquatic gives way to the aerial in ‘La danse de Puck’ (I, no. 11). The title’s reference is less to Shakespeare than to illustrations by Arthur Rackham in the edition of Shakespeare owned by Debussy.³⁰ The evoked, fictional body of the fairy creature Puck is the ‘alibi’ here for Debussy’s capricious rewriting of the body of the pianist and the listener, one that moves between dance (the possible movement of the body) and flight (its impossible movement). As such, it goes to the heart of Debussy’s play with musical material to put the body in play. The single line of the opening bars has a built-in freedom that continually moves in and out of metrical focus. The insouciant changes of pace and character, the refusal of all seriousness or weight, and the frequent overstepping of its own boundaries, makes this piece one of Debussy’s most mercurial and light-footed. Nothing could be further from the grand chorale that marks the rising of ‘La cathédrale’ and yet, this too is about appearing – the appearing of something ungraspable and in flight, ‘rapide et fuyant’, as the performance direction has it in the final evanescent bars.

With ‘Minstrels’ (I, no. 12) Debussy returns to the figure of the musician, to the act of self-framing encountered in ‘La sérénade interrompue’. But here, even more than the earlier example, Debussy’s concern seems to be self-effacement – framing his own disappearance as the composer/pianist behind this theatrical show. It takes over from Puck the same playful quality – the opening is marked ‘nerveux et avec humour’, the passage at b. 37 is marked ‘Moqueur’, making explicit what was already clear, that this is a piece that makes fun of itself, such that the ‘expressif’ marking in b. 63 can only be taken ironically. One might search for outward referents and objects of representation – in the blackface comedians of Debussy’s Paris, or else their masked commedia predecessors in Verlaine and Banville – but the musical reference is audibly to Debussy himself via the style of his early piano pieces from the 1880s and 1890s (especially the ‘Mouvement’ passage, bb. 9–34). There is an element of Debussy’s friend Erik Satie here, of appearing only to announce the show is over, of making an entry in order to announce an exit.

The philosopher’s body

It has taken a remarkably long time for phenomenology to emerge as a real force in music aesthetics – witness how, until recently, the name of Maurice Merleau-Ponty has been largely invisible in the field. It is true that Merleau-Ponty wrote very little specifically on music and his comments on art (mostly painting and literature) appear only in the late and often incomplete writings, unpublished until some years after his death.³¹ But it is not insignificant that his late turn to art as a way of rethinking the antinomies of philosophy has similarities with other major philosophers of the twentieth century, including Wittgenstein and Heidegger. To consider what it is that Merleau-Ponty offers to a rethinking of art, one needs to ask the question the other way around: what was it in art that Merleau-Ponty sought as a way of rethinking philosophy?

At the heart of phenomenology is of course a different way of knowing the world; its opposition to Cartesian dualism lies precisely in its identification of a ‘co-constitution’ of the perceiving consciousness and the world that is perceived, an acknowledgement of the centrality of the body in the production of knowledge. This, as Amy Cimini insists, is quite different from merely reinscribing the old duality by backing the opposite side (the body), a lurch of the disciplinary pendulum for which she criticises both Suzanne Cusick and Carolyn Abbate. The latter’s ‘Drastic/Gnostic’ essay (2004), argues Cimini, ‘enforces a particularly strong distinction between mind-centric hermeneutics and embodied listening and performance’.³² Merleau-Ponty, by contrast, is concerned not with the opposition between these but precisely with their co-constitution.

Such a way of knowing the world has clear overlaps with the kind of listening that music invites, privileges, and arguably entrains. One might go even further: it is surely not just that artworks provide an ideal example of the kind of attention to the world that lies at the heart of the phenomenological epoché, but that artworks provide the model for acts of consciousness through which we engage with, and are engaged by, the world. When Husserl declared, in 1913, that ‘the phenomena of transcendental phenomenology will be characterized as non-real (irreal)’³³ he made an unlikely alliance with Mallarmé, Debussy, and a host of other artists who, by then, were already making works which occasioned radically new ways of experiencing the world by suspending the ‘natural standpoint’ with its normative empirical idea of the world.

What is suspended in Husserl’s famous ‘phenomenological reduction’ if not the normative way of looking at the world structured by language? The empirical consciousness is, at root, one that codes experience against the denotational terms of language. At its heart, the ‘absolutely independent realm of direct experience’³⁴ that Husserl puts at the centre of his phenomenology, is as negatively defined as the ‘no-thingness’ at which Mallarmé aims in the ‘dispersion volatile’ of his poetry. It is also the mode of attention to things which Debussy’s music requires and, at the same time, enables, when not closed down by a reduction to mere visual analogies of the world (so many audio-pictures of the sea, sunsets, fountains, and fairies).

By foregrounding sound over structure, sensation over syntax, Debussy’s music quietly insists we listen through the body. In doing so, we exceed the body. Merleau-Ponty rarely discusses music so it is significant that he reaches for it to give a sense of the enlarged experience of the world conferred by acts of heightened sensation.³⁵ Sensation, he insists, is at once particular and contingent while at the same time a particularity that ‘opens onto the whole’: ‘In the concert hall, when I reopen my eyes, visible space seems narrow in relation to that other space where the music was unfolding just a moment ago.’³⁶ Art is not Merleau-Ponty’s focus, but it affords a special case of the intensity of attending to sensing itself. His account of contemplating the colour blue, for example, might just as well have been occasioned by Van Gogh’s The Starry Night (1889), a painting that doesn’t simply provoke such a way of knowing the world, but articulates, embodies, and explores it:

Myself as the one contemplating the blue of the sky is not an acosmic subject standing before it, I do not possess it in thought, I do not lay out in front of it an idea of blue that would give me its secret. Rather, I abandon myself to it, I plunge into this mystery, and it ‘thinks itself in me.’ I am this sky that gathers together, composes itself, and begins to exist for itself, my consciousness is saturated by this unlimited blue.³⁷

This is quite different to the Cartesian opposition of body and soul, subject and object, a division made, Merleau-Ponty suggests, ‘to establish a clarity within us and outside of us, namely the transparency of an object without folds, and the transparency of a subject who is nothing other than what it thinks it is’.³⁸ Contrary to this idea, ‘the experience of one’s own body, however, reveals to us an ambiguous mode of existence’.³⁹ Once again, sound provides an ideal medium for the intermingling between the individual listening body and that of the world:

there is an objective sound that resonates outside of me in the musical instrument, an atmospheric sound that is between the object and my body, a sound that vibrates in me ‘as if I had become the flute or the clock,’ and finally a last stage where the sonorous element disappears and becomes a highly precise experience of a modification of my entire body.⁴⁰

By following the manner in which music unfolds, we too are written. We enact with the music its own comportment and way of being. It is for this reason that we can say that music offers an alternative way of knowing the world – not through signification but sensation, not through propositional statements of an instrumental language, but through the body’s engagement with the rhythm, tone and movement of musical sound. Merleau-Ponty is adamant that knowing the world in this way, finding ‘the sense of the world’ (Nancy), is not only possible, but essential:

The unfolding of sensible givens beneath our gaze or beneath our hands is like a language that teaches itself, where signification would be secreted by the very structure of signs, and this is why it can be said that our senses literally interrogate the things and the things respond to them [ . . . ] We understand the thing as we understand a new behaviour, that is, not through an intellectual operation of subsumption, but rather by taking up for ourselves the mode of existence that the observable signs sketch out before us. A behaviour outlines a certain manner of dealing with the world.⁴¹

In The Rhythm of Thought, Jessica Wiskus discusses the work of Merleau-Ponty in relation to Cézanne, Proust, Mallarmé, and Debussy, and shows how the language of philosophy is itself changed in the encounter with artworks. As Wiskus underlines, Merleau-Ponty proceeds by means of ‘noncoincidence’ and ‘lacuna’ – in other words, gaps – in opposition to the Cartesian coincidence between seeing and the seen object (a co-incidence that is enabled, enshrined, and fixed in language).⁴² Artworks gently dislodge and dissolve that fixity and here Merleau-Ponty finds resonance with his own language of non-coincidence. Neither the poetry of Mallarmé nor the philosophical prose of Merleau-Ponty throws us into the cthonic darkness of the a-linguistic; rather, both open up a gap, a dynamic space in which the relation of subject and object is rewritten. Something similar is found in the exploration of spatial depth in Cézanne and musical colour in Debussy, both of whom step back from an earlier use of line, (of linear perspective in classical painting, and the linear function of tonality in classical music).

Merleau-Ponty comes to music through Proust as, perhaps, does Deleuze too. Both are indebted to the force of ‘the sensible idea’. In the last few pages of ‘The intertwining – The chiasm’, in The Visible and the Invisible, Merleau-Ponty discusses Proust’s idea of the musical idea as a kind of model for his philosophy of the flesh.⁴³ As Wiskus underlines, the ‘sensible idea’ is not waiting for some linguistic clarification or more adequate articulation. Quite the opposite, as Merleau-Ponty insists: ‘the ideas we are speaking of would not be better known to us if we had no body and no sensibility; it is then that they would be inaccessible to us.’⁴⁴ Quoting from The Visible and Invisible, Wiskus underlines that, for Merleau-Ponty, the musical idea is ‘not the positing of a content, but the opening of a dimension that can never again be closed . . . [not a] “positive thought” [but] “negativity or absence circumscribed.” ’⁴⁵ Thus, as Wiskus concludes, ‘the musical idea is a “negativity that is not nothing” for, through this divergence or negativity, the fact that there is an unpresentable comes to presence.’⁴⁶

In the writings that mark the very last stages of his work before his untimely death in 1961, Merleau-Ponty seems to find in music a model for a philosophy that might do something similar, that works ‘in the same sense of music, that, speaking not at all, says everything’.⁴⁷ In other words, something is made present in music – it takes place – and that something which has been presented (which is the presentation itself, not some metaphysical thing that stands behind it as the object of some representation), is unrepresentable in language. It is heard, seen, makes sense, it takes place, we have a knowledge (connaissance) of it but which, at the same time, brings us to presence with it (co-naissance). If art is affirmative, in an existential sense, it lies here. It may also be why music has such an extraordinary capacity to make us weep, because in it we are, in some small way, reborn, but cannot speak of it.

Merleau-Ponty’s focus on the sensing body gives way, in the later works, to the idea of the flesh, a term whose theological overtones are impossible to ignore. The body signalled by this term is not the body closed off by the limits of my own body, but the larger flesh of the material world of which I am part through, and only through, my own body. The idea of flesh is the exact opposite of the fetishism of the body. It is, as David Abram summarises it, a term for something ‘that has had no name in the entire history of Western philosophy. The Flesh is the mysterious tissue or matrix that underlies and gives rise to both the perceiver and the perceived as interdependent aspects of its own spontaneous activity.’⁴⁸ It is, for Abram, thus the site of a constitutive participation in the world (a term he borrows from the anthropologist Lucien Lévy-Bruhl). Perception always involves participation; in Abram’s words, it ‘involves, at its most intimate level, the experience of an active interplay, or coupling, between the perceiving body and that which it perceives’.⁴⁹

It is this mutual implication of perceiving subjects and the perceived world in which they are immersed that explains the importance of empathy to phenomenology – that is, of experiencing the body of another as if, in some degree, it were one’s own. My body lurches inwardly when I see someone fall; it contracts violently at the sound of a collision; it relaxes on arriving in a peaceful landscape. In the widest sense, touching is the site of this reciprocal participation in the flesh of the world – the touching of the world through the senses that interconnects different forms of being in the world. Empathy connects us to the world because we are pathic beings – bodily, experiencing, and therefore suffering. But in modern speech, pathos rapidly becomes pathological; being sensitive bodies becomes the root of suffering, illness, and disease. What was once a sign of the capacity for experiencing and articulating intense emotional experience – the root of the sonata or symphony pathètique – falls away to something merely pathetic.

Music provokes a pathic response in its participants, necessarily, through the body (the discussion of music and emotion in terms of semiotics makes it merely a representation of emotions and therefore intellectual, not bodily). My body ‘suffers’ in some way in the Pathétique Sonata because it feels the suffering contortions of the musical body (the painful intervals and stilted movement) as if it were my own. But this brings us back to what takes place in Debussy’s Préludes. The touching, empathetic body does not simply suffer – it takes flight, dances, plays, swims, floats, sparks, appears, and vanishes. The joy of this bodily engagement provoked by the music comes, in part, from the sense of being liberated, momentarily, from one’s habitual bodily comportment. The rush of empathetic engagement that music and dance can elicit is addictively affirmative, as most of human experience testifies, because it restores a quality of connectedness with the world (other people, the environment, the divine) that a certain kind of language-use erodes – not phatic language to be sure, not the kind of everyday exchanges of speech that affirm the connection of one person to another, but the instrumental use of abstract language that, as Bergson and many others insist, has to do with separation and control. It is precisely for that reason that the rise in the status of music in western culture was coterminous with the height of rationalism in the eighteenth century. And in this, music enacts what theory arrives at only belatedly. David Wellberry, summing up the paradigmatic shift that takes place within post-structuralism, might just as well be talking about the collection of pieces that make up the two books of Debussy’s Préludes:

One widespread reading of post-structuralism claims that it eliminates the concept of the subject. It would be more accurate to say that it replaces that concept with that of the body, a transformation which disperses (bodies are multiple), complexifies (bodies are layered systems), and historicizes (bodies are finite and contingent products) subjectivity rather than exchanging it for a simple absence.⁵⁰

What speaks is nevertheless also what touches and feels. The body is also a speaking body, and there is no speech without a body. The historical moment marked by Freud (and thus, too, by aesthetic modernism) has to do with a recognition that the body is also conditioned and coerced by language, and that language can be, in the modern sense, pathological – it makes us ill (witness both Derrida and Michel Serres).⁵¹ If neurosis is one response to the pathogen of language, art’s rewriting of the body is another. In the widest sense, art is a mode of speaking and writing, making and moving, in which the body challenges, opposes, wrestles with, or gently reworks the language imposed upon it. Julia Kristeva’s ground-breaking Revolution in Poetic Language (1974) argued exactly that, showing how the self-critique of language in poetic writing around 1900 was at the same time an eruption of the body in language, a crisis arising from ‘the heterogeneity of biological operations in respect of signifying operations’, leading to a ‘fracture of a symbolic code which can no longer “hold” its (speaking) subjects’.⁵² In this way, however, modernism reasserts something ancient; Rousseau argued, in the eighteenth century, that while the corporeal origin of expressive speech is gradually attenuated by abstraction it is nevertheless preserved in speech acts and heightened through music.

Derrida devotes a significant part of On Grammatology to discussing Rousseau’s Essay on the Origins of Languages. Famously, he critiques Rousseau’s assertion that only in speech is presence manifested, as opposed to the absence occasioned by language. The critique is deftly accomplished, not least because it is accomplished by using Rousseau’s own discourse (the Confessions) against himself. In the latter, Derrida shows, it is precisely writing that restores the presence that Rousseau found himself unable to achieve in speech, ‘of presence disappointed of itself in speech’.⁵³ Unable to express himself truly in speech, Rousseau distances and absents himself from society in order to write, the better and more truly to be present to himself. Only by bodily withdrawal (from speech) is he true to himself (in writing). Hence it is that Derrida discusses writing as a ‘dangerous supplement’ in Rousseau’s eyes, playing on the twofold sense of a supplement as both addition and substitute. For Rousseau, presence ‘ought to be self-sufficient’ while his writing suggests otherwise. Writing, Derrida suggests, is as much a ‘dangerous supplement’ for Rousseau as the shameful secret of his own masturbation, precisely the means by which he deals with his obsession for Madame de Warens (known to him as ‘Mama’). Marking both her absence, while conjuring a presence that her proximity in daily life does not deliver, this is a supplement that is not only a substitute, filling the absence or lack that it marks, but at the same time an addition.

Derrida’s point is not really about masturbation. It is, of course, to deconstruct a metaphysics of presence that determines the supplement (of writing) as ‘simple exteriority’, as ‘pure addition or pure absence’.⁵⁴ The difference to which he points is essential and constitutive in the case of art works. The still life painting, according to the logic Derrida deconstructs, would be merely an empty supplement to the bowl of fruit it depicts: ‘What is added is nothing because it is added to a full presence to which it is exterior.’⁵⁵ It is not, of course, that the bowl of fruit is not physically present, but that the work of art is a special way of making present, of bringing it into our gaze. As Jean-Luc Marion has it, painting is a case of looking away from the totality of the visible that besieges us the better to look: ‘in order to see, it is enough to have eyes. To look demands much more.’ The looking engendered by the painting is of a different kind to everyday seeing; it offers us a ‘supersaturated phenomenon’ in which ‘the ontic original’ (a lemon, say) is displaced by the intensity of appearing in ‘the phenomenal original’ (the painting of a lemon – as in Manet’s Le citron, Figure 2.2).⁵⁶

It is not insignificant that it was musically sensitive writers like Roland Barthes, rather than musicologists, who reasserted the presence of the body in discourse about music. In Barthes’ collection of essays on music from the 1970s, grouped under the title of ‘Music’s Body’, he famously insisted on a physical particularity that stands outside musicological discourse: ‘no matter how much you classify and comment on music historically, sociologically, aesthetically, technically, there will always be a remainder, a supplement, a lapse, something non-spoken which designates itself: the voice’.⁵⁷ In ‘Rasch’ (1975), an essay on playing Schumann’s Kreisleriana in terms of the pianists’ body, Barthes offers his most corporeal reading of music. Music here is understood as the actions of the ‘pulsional’ body that has nothing to do with language. ‘It speaks but says nothing: for as soon as it is music, speech – or its instrumental substitute – is no longer linguistic but corporeal.’⁵⁸ The piano ‘speaks without saying anything, in the fashion of a mute who reveals on his face the inarticulate power of speech’.⁵⁹ The passion with which Barthes pursues his manifesto against the apparent repression of the body in professional musicology, might well be taken up in the belated corporeal turn by disgruntled musicologists: ‘no more grammar, no more musical semiology: issuing from professional analysis – identification and arrangement of “themes”, “cells”, “phrase” – it risks bypassing the body; compositional manuals are so many ideological objects, whose meaning is to annul the body.’⁶⁰

One of the consequences of this division is that music has tended to become fetishised as pure immediacy (ineffable, ideal, beyond language, irrational, feminine). Even some of the most insightful writers on music and language have fallen into this trap – Proust, Jankélévitch, Kristeva, Barthes. The danger is that, in listening so hard for ‘the body’, Barthes missed its rewriting in each new piece of music. To repeat, music is not some pure unmediated genotext, a direct speech of the body; it is, in any culture, shaped by its own grammar of sense-making and its own lexicon of sonic materials. So, just as Julia Kristeva points to a spectrum of language-use running from scientific writing (mostly phenotext) to modernist poetry (more genotext), so different musics show quite different mixings of their sensible and grammatical aspects. Roland Barthes points to something similar in drawing, from the function of architects’ plans to the materiality of artworks. Consider the difference between the discourse of a Haydn String Quartet and the movement of sonic ‘atmospheres’ in the orchestral music of Ligeti or Xenakis. Eighteenth-century music rested on a code sufficiently formulaic that Mozart was able to construct a game for the writing of Menuets by throwing dice, whereas music of the late twentieth-century avant garde often seems ungraspable because of its distance to the formulas of language which had shaped music throughout the tonal era.

Barthes’ physiognomy of music nevertheless remains productive, half a century on; his listening for ‘Schumann’s body’ in Kreisleriana, as a proxy for the encounter with ‘other’ and irreal bodies to which musical writing gives access, has rarely been bettered. More recently, however, Gilles Deleuze offered an equally intriguing, and more extended study of the body in regards to painting – specifically that of Francis Bacon – in a book subtitled The Logic of Sensation.⁶¹ Bacon’s work, argues Deleuze, foregrounds the figure instead of the figurative – which is to say, he presents the figure (of the body) in its materiality instead of in terms of representation, signification, or semantics. The body/figure takes place; it does not stand for, mean or say. It has to do with presence: ‘Painting directly attempts to release presences beneath representation, beyond representation.’⁶² There are two ways of getting beyond the figurative (representation), Deleuze suggests – one is abstraction (one thinks of Mondrian or Webern perhaps), the other is by way of the figure. In this, the work of Cézanne is definitive for modern art. The importance to Cézanne of ‘sensation’ and a ‘logic of the senses’ is one that parallels a central concern of music ‘after Debussy’ – including many composers outside the French tradition (one thinks of Janáček or Lachenmann). But the eruption of materiality within art is everywhere in the age of Debussy and the ensuing decades – from the materiality of the written page in Apollinaire, to the foregrounding of the dancing body over the formulaic lexicon of its classical moves – in Loïe Fuller, Isadora Duncan, or Mary Wigman.

The violence of Expressionism has its roots here: in its refusal of signification in order to uncover the presentness in the presentation of the bodily figure. To do so often required a kind of destructive stance towards the codes of signification, to allow presence to break through the signifying codes that cover its nudity. Deleuze, building on the idea that Bacon presents the body like meat on the slab, refers to the painter as a ‘pulveriser’.⁶³ This is a term often used by Pierre Boulez, whose most violent music was more or less contemporary with Bacon’s canvasses in the 1950s; both men may well have borrowed the idea from René Char and the Surrealists. It is an odd contradiction in our reception of Boulez’s music, with its emphasis on the abstract aspects of his compositional thought, that we have ignored the physicality and visceral violence of the music (the very thing from which audiences recoil). The astonishing disparity between the cool and objective discourse around the music and what takes place in the concert hall is precisely what we should be addressing rather than perpetuating; the objective and abstract discourse is a cover, a vessel, a frame – the flipside of the untrammelled violence of the music towards discursive order.

Boulez is perhaps an extreme example of the attempt to work out, anew, the constitutive tension of all music between its sonic materiality and its abstract organisation. Music is bodily, Deleuze insists, but it also ‘disembodies [ . . . ] it strips bodies of their inertia, of the materiality of their presence [ . . . ] in a sense music begins where painting ends [ . . . ] it is lodged on lines of flight that pass through bodies’.⁶⁴ Where painting inclines to ‘hysteria’ (a logic of the senses), music inclines to schizophrenia (a fracture of the identity between body and not-body – the condition of modernity). Music, by this account, is predisposed to an aesthetics of non-identity, since it is always in flight between the body (whether my body or that of the wider world) and the play of forms that exceeds the body. Which brings us back to Debussy’s Préludes and the idea of writing the body. ‘Let there be writing, not about the body, but [of] the body itself,’⁶⁵ demands Nancy, who proceeds to wrestle with what this might entail. The body, he suggests, is ‘what in writing is not to be read’⁶⁶ (a reworking of Lacan on the voice as ‘what in saying is other than what is said’). The musician knows this well. The toccata arises from touch, from the hands on the keyboard, from the body – precisely ‘what in music is not to be heard’ but which informs the whole.

Until recently, philosophy has generally had no interest in speech and voice (‘what in saying is other than what is said’), only in the logical consistency of propositional language. Wittgenstein stated this in exemplary fashion in the Tractatus only to then conclude that all that was of urgent and existential interest to human life lay outside such language-use. Its opposite would be a language that preserves a corporeal relation to the world rather than a merely arbitrary or conventional one. But, contra Saussure, David Abram points to more recent moves towards ‘an ecology of language’,⁶⁷ a model of language not as arbitrary but shaped by landscape, place, and the body that dwells within it.⁶⁸ He cites powerful examples of indigenous oral cultures in which that close link between place and language is preserved, in a ‘synaesthetic association of visible topology with auditory recall – the intertwining of earthly place with linguistic memory’.⁶⁹ In alphabetic writing, by contrast, the graphic sign is detached from the mnemonic thing that it originally stood for, hence the development of the abstract space of a language no longer bound to place. As Abram has it: ‘In order to read phonetically, we must disengage the synaesthetic participation between our senses and the encompassing earth. The letters of the alphabet, each referring to a particular sound or sound-gesture of the human mouth, begin to function as mirrors reflecting us back upon ourselves.’⁷⁰ Language thus became the means by which modern society severed itself from place and landscape – and, Abram goes on, ‘if alphabetic writing was an important factor in the emergence of abstract, homogeneous “space,” it was no less central to the emergence of abstract, linear “time.” ’⁷¹ Abstract written language is thus central to the trajectory of modernity – the source of both its huge gains (the control over nature afforded by the detachment of abstract thought) but also its losses (the sense of being alienated from the whole of which one used to be part).

We cannot reverse the trajectory of modernity, spun out across millennia; we cannot simply decide, once more, to become an oral culture. But in the face of the losses of abstract language and, indeed, its real dangers, modernity has fostered material, embodied, empathetic, chiasmic modes of being in the world through art. The wider idea of music signalled by my loose term ‘after Debussy’ may be a tiny moment within that historical process and a tiny space within the diverse cultures of modernity, but it points to a larger faultline in modern culture and modern thought that exceeds the name of any one composer or philosopher. The turn back towards the body, from the philosophy of Husserl, Bergson, and Merleau-Ponty through to the current interdisciplinary proliferation in theories of embodied materiality, attempts to re-write, from language, the body’s relation to language. But without listening to the parallel move made within art and music over the last hundred years, the embodied exploration of ‘the identity between body and not-body’ (Deleuze), such proliferation of linguistic discourse will surely remain the sound of one hand clapping.