Le Compositeur, son oreille et ses machines à écrire: Déconstruire les grammatologies du musical pour mieux les composer by Fabian Lévy (review)

Every text worth its salt is an invitation to a maze, French post-war letters have insisted in rare unison, and a reader of this ambitious theoretical collage by Fabian Lévy, progeny of Dufourt, Grisey, and Risset, might well enter it from the elucidatory epilogue: ‘It is not until 1996 that I sought to translate musically and consciously the notion of musical inflection, i.e. a musical tension in which the action would remain sensible but unintelligible, non-analysable, and in particular non-reducible to a functional transformation of one or the other parameter of the music’ (p. 244). In two substantial prefaces by godfathers of spectralism and computer music respectively, Dufourt warns that the book eludes common categories, with Risset adding that its ‘recourse to the semiotic vocabulary of Jacques Derrida may intimidate’ (p. 17). Both assessments are justified, even though, as it turns out, Lévy’s direct quotation from Grammatologies, figuring as an epigraph to chapter 2, is one of his few references to the controversial French philosopher: ‘a science or philosophy of writing’, Derrida claims, ‘is a necessary and difficult task in which thought [pensée] on the problem of différance … should point beyond the field of epistémè’ (p.71).

Appropriately, the significance of Lévy’s quotation lies less in the words than in his manner of rewriting their letters on his own page: his cunning shifting of Derrida’s original italics from pensée to différance [sic] is, perhaps, a minor transgression of bibliographic protocol, but also indicative of an authorial thrust that is predominantly rhetorical—towards têkhne, we might say, naming this supra-scientific ‘beyond’ by opposition, as Derrida himself would not do. If Dufourt and Risset are in intimately familiar territory, a reader of less Continental inclinations may feel uncannily ill at ease, redolent as the monograph is of a genre typically shunned, despite its cardinal position in the history of the discipline: the scholarly manifesto. If for no other reason, then, Lévy’s expertly polemical discourse, for which tight-knit French is a fitting medium, warrants the attention of music’s professional dialecticians on both sides of the Atlantic.

Central to Lévy’s edifice is a cognitive concept of listening that operates according to a combinatorial and integrative logic, establishing, to borrow Dufourt’s crisp description, ‘relatively indeterminate connections’ (p. 10). Roland Barthes, whose influence on Lévy’s thought is unmistakable despite the striking avoidance of references, comes to mind as the first to draw attention to ‘the vague as a phenomenon of structure’ (‘Rasch’, in his The Responsibility of Forms, trans. Richard Howard (New York, 1985), 301)—a provocation to which composition and music theory have been reluctant to respond, firmly clinging onto the dominant philosophical tradition of post-Pythagorean logocentrism. It is specifically these music-philosophical foundations and, concomitantly, the Western ‘primacy of analytical speculation to the detriment of musical experience’, that Lévy undertakes to criticize.

At a technical level, Lévy focuses his critique on what he calls the ‘separation and discretization of the parameters’ of Western composition (p. 88), which reduces difference to ‘pitch combinatorics’ (p. 57) and is premised on formal taxonomies, hierarchical archetypes, the Cartesian independence of rhythm and pitch, and their manipulation according to finite and ordered ‘alphabets’ (p. 11). While acknowledging the benefits of such economical and fecund representation, Lévy is adamant that it renders Western music numb to the radical différance of the sonorous phenomenon and oblivious to the frontiers of perception.

Lévy’s undertaking is a negotiation of fundamental and, from a traditionally systematic standpoint, intractable contradictions, exemplary of which is his problem statement: ‘It is, in other words, about constructing the musical presque rien and je...