Raphaël
Brunner
Abstract
of the english version prepared for Music: between Style and Meaning (=Applied
Semiotics/Sémiotique appliquée), © University of Toronto.
Facing the
crumbling of artistical languages and the eclectism of styles, the
interpretative frames that are supposed to fight the dispersal of meaning
reinforce their action. The systematical approaches of the musical fact, and
notably of the musical semiotics, do not escape from this primary requirement
of meaning, that is when they lie on general conceptions to examine musical
meaning, going sometimes so far that they even forget the specificity of the
object they apply to.
The
resistance that modern music, and more specifically the one composed during the
second after-war period, opposes to such approaches, whether they are of
semiotical, schenkerian, structuralist, cognitive (etc.) allegiance is
indicative of the limits of the interpretation of the musical work, in the same
way as the aporias of the traditional contextualizations, generally of
hermeneutical inspiration. The musical production, at the end of the second World
War, applied itself effectively to a profound renewal of compositional
techniques aiming to create a languagial dynamic based on the oblique
articulation of the musical speech, but, at the same time, the underlying
individual thought processes made the foundations of the serial edifice burst
in pieces.
To the
questionning raised by the thematic of an issue dedicated to the underlining of
stylistical, individual or particularizing traits of the musical work, I shall
propose the sketch of an answer by using a first example, the Improvisation
III sur Mallarmé, which is the fourth piece of the Pli selon pli
cycle composed by Pierre Boulez. I shall try to interpret the particularisms of
musical craftsmanship as being exerted not for the benefit of the abolition of
traditional musical meaning, which has become particular, but for the benefit
of a languagial dynamic that summons in the very frame of our conventions a
more extensive meaning that the one which was originally devolved to the music
of european tradition. By way of comparison, I shall then briefly examine a
second example, the fourth piece of the Seven Haï-kaï composed by
Olivier Messiaen.
It is not
particularly the way that music is penetrated by what is external to it that I
shall focus on, but rather the way it has to dissociate itself from what takes
place within it. That is how we come to the key notion of stylization that I
shall then study not from systematical aims, but from the musical dynamics in
process.
Music:
between Style and Meaning (= Applied Semiotics/Sémiotique appliquée n° 4), Université
de Toronto, (http://www.chass.utoronto.ca:8080/french/as-sa/).
© University of Toronto (Canada) and Raphaël Brunner, Sion (Suisse).
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