Vous constatez une erreur ?
NaN:NaN
00:00
This paper presents the results of a genetic study of Antagonisme, a chamber work composed by Xavier Darasse on a text by the philosopher Alain Badiou for the 1965 concours de composition at the Conservatoire de Paris. Darasse and Badiou began work on Antagonisme in the autumn of 1964, making it an important early work in the output of both figures. Antagonisme is Darasse’s first composition in a contemporary idiom, while its première coincided with the completion of Badiou’s first theoretical article, “L’autonomie du processus esthétique.” The sketches, manuscripts, and letters relating to the work held at the Médiathèque Hector Berlioz present the researcher with an unparalleled opportunity to consider the interaction of competing philosophical and musical priorities during a collaborative creative process.
The paper begins by presenting the philosophical and musical stakes of the composition. The former is established through a reading of Badiou’s text and letters within the context of debates around Marxist and structuralist aesthetics at the École Normale Supérieure, in particular among the group of students gathered around Louis Althusser. The latter is established through an analysis of the score and sketches that reveals Darasse’s remarkable experiments with his analysis teacher Olivier Messiaen’s technique of interversion. In his first letter to Darasse, Badiou suggests that Darasse’s music ought to contradict the narrator’s conception of music while “exceeding it each time” [en la dépassant à chaque fois]. Darasse contradicts the narrator’s image of music by obscuring and revealing the work’s two distinct tone rows through rhythm and texture, but how does he exceed it and why does it matter that it is refuted within musical rather than linguistic discourse?
The answer may be found in “L’autonomie du processus esthétique,” which is a riposte to the Marxist association of art and ideology. The article was written in the context of a seminar delivered at the ENS on Althusser’s invitation. Badiou asserts the autonomy of modes of aesthetic production, musical apparatuses such as the tonal system that are dissolved and reinvented through a series of works. When Badiou writes to Darasse that he wants the music to exceed the text, he is urging Darasse to engage in his own musical dialectic that— while proving the ideology of the narrator wrong—validates his own theory of music. Darasse appears to conform to Badiou’s “game plan” through the use of original permutational techniques derived from Messiaen’s works. Darasse explores the reciprocity between conventional dodecaphonic transformations and Messiaen’s interversions at every formal level of the work, from its large-scale form down to its precompositional materials. The lessons learnt through this analysis of Antagonisme have implications for the analysis of Messiaen’s own works.
Given the absence of any testimony from Darasse as to his intentions when composing the work, the study seems to commit an intentional fallacy that the rest of the paper seeks to address. To what extent is authorial intention important when analysing Darasse’s use of interversion in Antagonisme? The evidence does not exist to assert that Darasse’s use of interversion was an intentional response to Badiou’s text, much less a response to “L’autonomie du processus esthétique”. However, the paper argues that there is value in considering how Darasse’s music reflects upon Badiou’s text independently of his intentions. The paper does not argue that any interpretation of the work is equally valid, but that music and philosophy can be evaluated here as independent and objective bodies of thought.
The rationale behind this argument draws, perhaps controversially, on two notions from divergent philosophical fields. The notion of “situation,” drawn from Badiou’s later work, provides a model for examining Darasse’s use of competing compositional techniques as a strictly musical truth procedure. Karl Popper’s “problem situation” considers how Darasse balances the conflicting musical and theoretical priorities presented to him by Badiou and by the academic context of the work’s production. “Divergent” is the key term here, as Popper’s adoption in the English-speaking world and his absence from the French literature— occurring as Antagonisme was being composed—is symptomatic of the divergence of analytic and continental philosophy around the use of mathematics and logic. Indeed, Popper was hailed for purging analytic philosophy of Marxism and psychoanalysis precisely when Badiou was emerging as the philosophical standard-bearer of French Maoism. However, the thinkers’ common interest in music and logic may be read in their agreement on one point: The partially-autonomous existence of objective contents of thought, in particular of musical thought. Badiou will speak of “truths” and Popper will speak of “world three objects,” but they both assert that musical thought, once it is produced, has unexpected consequences for its own structure and the material world. This paper argues that philosophy partially defines Darasse’s problem situation when composing Antagonisme, while Darasse also grapples with the narrower musical situation of the Conservatoire de Paris in the mid-1960s.
This paper does not suggest that Popper and Badiou may be reduced to one another, far from it. In Popper’s perspective, influences from any number of fields may determine a compositional outcome, but musical materials themselves are incapable of radical change. But where Badiou would argue that a situation always contains the possibility of the emergence of the new, he is still committed to a hermetic view of the musical situation that forecloses any interruption from outside the musical materials—philosophical interruption included. This study of Antagonisme is presented as an example of how musicology may function as a mediator of these two ontologies of music, at once more immanent than Popper’s problem situation and more contextual than Badiou’s musical situation.
From 2004 to 2015 two research centres funded by the (UK) Arts and Humanities Research Council – which represented successive stages of the same project – provided a focus for research in musical performance. Whereas the first (the AHRC Res
10 octobre 2015 55 min
The French literary criticism movement, critique génétique, is an attractive interdisciplinary model for the study of music sketches because of its staggering amount of varied scholarship published during its forty-year history, its conce
10 octobre 2015 32 min
This paper will present the core role of improvisation groups in the late Sixties / beginning of the Seventies in the process of building the new status of music material in the post-serial context. Analysing some “Gruppo di Improvvisazione
10 octobre 2015 33 min
In previous conference presentations and writings I have discussed Henry Brant’s process of “prose-report composition,” which became his primary working method in 1945. The process, which is heavily documented in his sketch manuscripts at t
10 octobre 2015 27 min
My paper centers on the compositional manuscripts of Dmitri Shostakovich (1906-75), the Soviet Union’s leading composer of art music. Opening a window onto the composer’s creativity, fragmentary passages, rejected movements, revised manuscr
10 octobre 2015 29 min
In recent years, the increased availability of recorded music in the instrumental teaching studio as part of performers’ routine for familiarising themselves with musical works they will then go on to perform, has meant that performers are
10 octobre 2015 30 min
The paper is an attempt for reconstruction of coding (creative) and decoding (reading) process, both dependent on temporary collective imaginative patterns, which funded the historic-ontological status of two significant works of the Czech
10 octobre 2015 26 min
When Adorno characterized the introductory measures of “Entrueckung” in Schoenberg’s Second String Quarter as something “never yet heard,” he pointed to a caesura that was both a breakthrough and also a rupture in the history of music. A de
10 octobre 2015 28 min
The present conference aims to study the creative trajectory of the Brazilian contemporary opera confection and also how the creation networks of opera work, within a communicational and semiotical approach. It also aims to explore the ind
10 octobre 2015 26 min
This paper theorizes and investigates the role of new music festivals, currently among the leading institutional impulses for the creation of contemporary art music. During the last few decades those festivals have gained increasing promine
10 octobre 2015 30 min
Charles Ives began formulating literary and musical ideas that would evolve into Concord Sonata as early as 1902. The piece was first published in 1921, and significantly revised to the point of being “re-written” in 1947. Throughout those
10 octobre 2015 30 min
In his book The Economics of Creativity: Art and Achievement under Uncertainty (2014), the distinguished sociologist Pierre-Michel Menger offers an analysis of artistic creativity that seeks a middle path between two equally unsatisfactory
10 octobre 2015 01 h 13 min
In my presentation I will elucidate the interplay of several forms of knowledge in composing process in art music. As a general term, “knowledge” includes forms of explicit, propositional knowledge as well as several forms of implicit, embo
10 octobre 2015 23 min
Faced to a more and more digitalized world the interest in artists manuscripts is still growing. Sometimes it is the mystic rising of an idea and its often unexpected development, sometimes it is a surprising simple reason that can be seen
10 octobre 2015 26 min
New things are made with old things. In this sense, all creation is basically a combinatorial process – though not just that. It also implies novelty; but novelty comes into play in a dynamic space between random indeterminacy and routine r
10 octobre 2015 36 min
The concept of "mistake" is antithetical to jazz's spirit of uninhibited creativity. But jazz, like any musical style, conforms to a system of rules and conventions; indeed, this is what defines the style—what makes it sound like jazz and n
10 octobre 2015 26 min
In jazz research and performance practice, emphasis has long been awarded to musicians who exhibit virtuosity or mastery of solo improvisation. Whether Louis Armstrong’s assertive solo cadenza on West End Blues or John Coltrane’s blazing ac
10 octobre 2015 24 min
Since sociology has been historically concerned with the question of how social order is possible, its main focus has been on exploring (the imposition of) conventions, rules, norms, every day routines, etc. As a result, the study of creati
10 octobre 2015 29 min
Vers le milieu des années 1980 à l’IRCAM, le compositeur français Marc-André Dalbavie a pris conscience de l’importance de l’espace dans l’existence du son, notamment à travers son contact avec l’acousticien Jean-Marie Adrien. À parti
10 octobre 2015 32 min
From 2004 to 2015 two research centres funded by the (UK) Arts and Humanities Research Council – which represented successive stages of the same project – provided a focus for research in musical performance. Whereas the first (the AHRC Res
10 octobre 2015 55 min
From their compositional and philosophical perspectives, the works of Elliott Carter and Luigi Nono share very little in common. Carter, a true American modernist, strongly opposed the method of twelve-tone music, which was becoming prevale
10 octobre 2015 27 min
The question of whether Henri Dutilleux was a pro- or anti-serialist can be difficult to answer. However, in the 1960s, the composer evidently participated in the serial movement when he composed his two seminal works called Métaboles and
10 octobre 2015 26 min
Vous constatez une erreur ?
1, place Igor-Stravinsky
75004 Paris
+33 1 44 78 48 43
Du lundi au vendredi de 9h30 à 19h
Fermé le samedi et le dimanche
Hôtel de Ville, Rambuteau, Châtelet, Les Halles
Institut de Recherche et de Coordination Acoustique/Musique
Copyright © 2022 Ircam. All rights reserved.