... the timbral pianist, timbral hedonism and the cult of sound ...

 

    There is a man in every great school of music, often the finest the building holds, who has spent his whole life perfecting sound and has, by that very perfection, walked quietly out of music without once noticing the door. I will not call him a musician. The word ought to be kept for something else, and the loose modern habit of handing it to anyone who makes a beautiful sound with skill is not generosity, it is a confusion, and the confusion has cost us nearly everything we had. He is an artist, certainly, and a technician of a very high order, perhaps a great one. But he is simply not the thing the Greeks meant by a musician, a man of the Muses, a μουσικός, and the distance between those two creatures is the whole of what I want to measure here.

    What he loves, with a real and almost devotional love, is the sound, the timbre. The bloom on the note, the halo of overtones gathered about it, the resonance weighed to the last grain, the lacquered glamour of an instrument built to glitter. He knows the ear the way a physician knows a pulse, he can make the higher partials of his own partials ring, he can flatter the nerve at the level of bare sensation, and it is genuinely, helplessly beautiful. He has seduced me, and you, if you are honest, as well. But the love of a sound for its own sake is the love of a surface, and beneath the long connoisseurship of the taster there sleeps, if we dare to wake it, a fear. I will name the thing with a deliberately ugly word, because beauty has hidden it long enough. It is a fetish. A fetish is a part adored in the place of the whole, a surface charged with all the longing that belonged to the meeting, and adored precisely because it spares us the meeting. The man enchanted by the glove is the man excused from taking the hand, which is warm, and alive, and asks something back. The cult of the sound rests on exactly this secret bargain. The player adores the bloom and the brilliance so that he need never face the demand of the line, which is the hand, which is alive, which wants of him a thing no surface can ever want. The fetish always arrives wearing the face of a gift. It hands you the pleasure and quietly relieves you of the danger.

    The relief takes the shape of an appetite, and the appetite has earned its own ugly name, what I will call timbric hedonism, gourmet sound. The ear becomes a palate, the tone becomes a delicacy, and player and listener alike turn into tasters, rolling a gorgeous sound across the tongue the way a man rolls a great wine, eyes half shut, safe, savoring. I have nothing against pleasure and would defend delight against any puritan, sound is genuinely delicious and there is no sin in saying so. But this is the pleasure of the diner, and a diner, however refined, is never once in danger. He consumes, and is not consumed. He is filled, and spends nothing. And here the whole quarrel opens, because what I find is the ontological essence of music, that is, song, is no delicacy at all and was never made to be eaten. It is an act in which somebody is spent.

    Let me give that word, song, its three faces, for it has them. The sung line is lyric, because it is always someone, a first person, a particular and perishable I, self, daring to put into the air something that was not there a moment before and will not be there a moment after. It is tragic, because it is mortal, the breath gives out, the phrase dies, the voice can crack on the very note it most wanted, and that mortality is not a flaw in the singing to be engineered away but the flesh and the truth of it, since a line that could not die could never move a living soul, the immortal having so far made no one weep. And it is poetic, because it carries a word, a meaning, an address, a wound. Melos is never naked, it always says something to someone, whereas sound says nothing and is well content to be admired. The singer does not taste. The singer is spent. He lays down a body that will fail, a breath that runs out, a phrase that is a small rehearsed death at every cadence, and of that no man can be a connoisseur. You cannot collect it. You can only do it, and stand in the open while it is done through you.

    This is why the perfected sound and music are not the same conquest, and may even be enemies. Sound is the storable thing, the acoustic event, the gleam a microphone keeps in a drawer for a century. Song is the breathed line going somewhere, leaving one body and arriving in another, and a microphone has never yet kept that, for it keeps the gleam and loses the going. A man may own the most ravishing sound on earth and hold not one note of music inside it, a tone polished until it is a mirror, and not a face in the glass. The timbral player has done precisely this. He has perfected the surface of music and strolled past the thing the surface was the surface of. He keeps the sound and mislays the line, which is exactly what a recording does when it keeps the sound and mislays the body, so that he has, with enormous labour, turned himself into a recording with hands. Between the raw sound and the living song lies the beautiful tone, and the beautiful tone is a crossroads. It can dissolve forward into the line, give up its little perfection and be spent in the movement of the phrase, and then it was a tone sung. Or it can be arrested, framed, raised on a small altar to be looked at, and then it was a tone embalmed. The fetishist stops at the altar. He has confused, in the deepest grammar of the art, a noun with a verb, the sound with the singing, the thing with the act.

    And here we reach a sentence printed in every dictionary and believed by nearly everyone, that music is the art of sound, or more grandly the art of combining sounds in time, and I want to say with some heat that it is false, and that it is the private metaphysics of the timbrist wearing the robes of common knowledge, of a supposed common sense. To define music as the art of sound is to define poetry as the art of ink, or love as the chemistry of certain glands, or prayer as a discipline of the breath. In each case a true and necessary matter, the thing the act passes through, has been mistaken for the act, the body for the person, the riverbed for the river. Sound is to music what the body is to a man, indispensable and not the point, the place where the thing appears and never the thing itself. You would not define your friend as a clever arrangement of carbon, though he is undeniably that as well, and you should not define music as an arrangement of sound, though it undeniably uses it. Music is mousikē, the doing of the Muses, and of that doing sound is one limb and song is the soul, and the moment we let sound be called the whole we have signed away the soul to keep the limb. Nor, while I have the screwdriver out, is music an art at all in the old hard sense of a craft that leaves a lasting object behind it, but that is a quarrel for another evening, and the smaller scandal will serve for this one. It is enough to say that the art of sound is a definition Euterpe wrote, that Urania verified, and that Clio had notarized, and that the six exiled sisters were not in the room when it was signed.

    For there is a regime in the modern school of music, and like most regimes it governs in the name of virtues. Three of the nine sisters have seized the government and shut the others out of the chamber. Euterpe governs the senses, and under her the sound becomes its own justification, the gorgeous surface for which no further reason need be given. Urania governs number, the muse who once kept the harmony of the spheres and now keeps the spectrogram and the chart of partials and the long apparatus by which a living phrase is broken into measurable pieces and pronounced understood, the patroness of every man who believes that to analyze a thing is to possess it. And Clio governs the past, the archivist who is also the embalmer, under whom the love of the authentic edition and the historically certified tempo hardens into a dread of anything that merely lives now. Set these three upon one throne and you have the exact face of the modern conservatory, a house where a phrase can be measured, and reproduced, and traced to its source, and buffed to a high sensuous shine, every one of which can be done to a corpse, and where the single thing that cannot be done to a corpse, which is to make it sing, has quietly slipped off the curriculum. Everything in that house is measurable, everything recordable, everything explicable, everything but the one thing the house was built to shelter. And the timbral instrumentalist is the model citizen of this republic, the marriage of Euterpe and Urania celebrated under the approving eye of Clio, sensation perfected by science and certified by history, a triple mastery of everything about music except the music.

    The six who were sent out deserve to be named, for their absence is the silence under all this brilliance. Tragedy was shown the door for exaggerating. Love was asked to be more objective. Dance, the dancing body was told to sit still and stop being theatrical. Laughter was reminded that this, after all, is Beethoven. The Sacred and the mysterious were advised not to grow metaphysical. And the Word itself, the logos, the meaning a phrase is straining to say, was informed that it had wandered out of its lane, that a player is paid to play, to sound, and not to mean. What comes back when these come home is not a loss of rigour but the return of the reason rigour was ever wanted. They are not ornaments to be hung once the serious acoustic labour is done. They are the seriousness. They are the reason a creature ever opened its mouth and sang instead of merely making a tuneful noise, which the birds do better than we shall ever learn to.

    It would be a comfort to believe that this regime is old, that the cult of the sound is simply what music has always quietly been, for then we could call it nature and stop arguing. But it is young, and its youth is the most damning thing about it. For the greater part of the history of this art the sound was the servant and never the sovereign, a thing so taken for granted that no one thought to perfect it in isolation. A line written for voices could be bowed on viols or blown on shawms without scandal, the color of the thing was the color of whatever bodies happened to be in the room, and what travelled from the page was the line and the word and not the gleam of any particular instrument. The composer wrote melos and left the timbre to the weather. The promotion of the sound to a throne of its own is a matter of the last two centuries, and we can very nearly date the coronation. It begins when Berlioz sits down to write the first true grammar of the orchestra and treats color not as the dress of the music but as a substance of it, a thing to be composed as deliberately as the notes themselves. It deepens when Wagner sinks his orchestra into a covered pit at Bayreuth so that the sound may reach the listener without the embarrassment of a visible body making it, blended and sourceless, a warm tide rising out of an abyss, and the listener is no longer a man addressed across a room by players he can see but a man submerged, bathed, dissolved into a continuum that issues from nowhere and asks nothing back of him. The first great engineering of immersion is also the first great hiding of the body, and the two are one act, for to drown a listener in sound you must first take from him the face the sound was coming from.

    What was practice in Wagner became doctrine within a single lifetime. Hanslick writes his small and confident book in the middle of the century and gives the fetish its philosophy, announcing that music is sounding form set in motion and nothing further, that it means nothing and refers to nothing and addresses no one, and that the search for any content in it beyond the play of the tones is the soft error of sentimental amateurs. This is the logos shown the door a half century before I dressed the eviction up as a parable, the word and the address and the wound pronounced no part of the art, and the eviction is carried out not with regret but with the cold pride of a man who believes he has at last made music respectable by emptying it of everyone it was ever for. From there the surface is promoted by stages toward the place of the substance. Schoenberg names a thing he calls Klangfarbenmelodie, a melody made of tone colors, and proposes in all seriousness that timbre might one day carry the structure that pitch has carried until now, and Webern takes a single fugal line of Bach and splinters it across a handful of instruments so that what was one voice becomes a spray of colors, the line dissolved into the surface, the moving thing arrested into the gleaming thing. Varèse presses further and asks only to be called a worker in frequencies and intensities, music for him being organized sound and the organizing the whole of it. And then the reification goes literal and loses even its shame, for Schaeffer, cutting recorded sounds free of their sources on tape, gives the thing the frank name it had long deserved and calls it the objet sonore, the sound object, and raises upon it a whole discipline he calls écoute réduite, a reduced listening drilled precisely to attend to the sound and to forget its cause, to bracket away the body that made it and the meaning it bore and the one who was spent in it, and to dwell on the bare acoustic event alone. He even reaches back for an old and exact word and names such sound acousmatic, after the disciples who were made to hear Pythagoras from behind a veil so that they might attend to the doctrine and not the man, and the veil is the whole of it, the veil drawn across the body so that the surface may be adored in peace. This is the fetish raised into a method and taught out of a treatise. And the method finds its cosmos at last in the spectral composers of the nineteen seventies, who take Urania at her literal word and quarry their music out of the analysis of the sound spectrum itself, dwelling inside the overtone series as though it were a law handed down from the universe rather than a phrase breathed up out of a chest, and in Xenakis, who models his masses of sound on the kinetics of gases and the distributions of chance and dreams aloud of a music that would be a fact of nature with no mouth behind it. Here is the deepest face of the thing, and I will give it the name it has earned. It is an ensimismamiento, a turning of the sound in upon itself and away from the face it was once meant to reach, and the music born of it is an-anthropic, abstract, cosmist, and formalistic, a sound that has expelled the person from it, that no longer goes out from a mortal throat toward a mortal ear but aspires instead to the condition of the spectrum and the spheres, deathless and sourceless and addressed to no one, in love with its own physics. It is the harmony of the spheres rebuilt at last without the longing that once made men look up at them.

    And all of it, the immersion and the doctrine and the sound object and the inhabited spectrum, comes to rest in our own day in something far more ordinary and far more total than any of its makers foresaw, the consumer of recorded sound. The student now learns his instrument by chasing a gleam he first met on a disc, the listener gathers pressings and worries over the air around the instruments and the depth of the soundstage, the engineer buffs the document until it is more flawless than any room of living people could ever be, and the whole apparatus schools every ear that passes through it to prize the storable gleam and to mislay the going, to crave the sound a microphone can keep and to forget the line it never can. And over all of it stands the institution that houses the cult and lends it the dignity of age, the thing we have been taught to call classical music, which presents itself as the immemorial high tradition of the West and is in sober fact a tradition invented, recent, and costumed as ancient in exactly the sense the historians meant when they coined that hard phrase. The very notion that music is a museum of finished works, fixed objects to be conserved and faithfully reproduced rather than acts to be done and undergone, is barely two centuries old. The silent darkened reverent hall, in which one may not speak or stir or applaud until the relic has been shown entire, is younger still, and not so long before it was raised the audiences of Europe talked and ate and clapped between the movements and took the evening for a meeting among the living. We have taken a young and contingent arrangement, a museum built around the reproduction of objects, and mistaken it for the nature of the art, and within that museum we have spent our finest labour upon the most outward layer of the object, the gloss of its tone, taking the polish of the surface for the life of the thing. Clio swore to preserve the music and has embalmed it instead, and the cult of the sound is the bloom of color the embalmer lays along the face so that the dead thing may pass, for the length of an evening, for something that still draws breath. This, and not the private failing of one player or another, is the sign of our times, the consummate form our age has discovered for its long refusal to be spent, and it is the reason the quarrel was never in the end about music at all.

    What is finally at stake in all this is not a question of musical taste, it is a picture of the human being, and the timbral cult carries a picture I think we are right to refuse. Strip away the talk of overtones and you find a man who has decided that music is something one enjoys and not something one risks, and who could wholly blame him, the enjoyment is real and the risk is frightening and the wine is very good. But he has bought the pleasure at the price of the thing itself, the wager, the finitude, the presence of someone who might genuinely fail in front of you, and so he has turned music into a luxury good. A luxury good is the perfect emblem of his whole posture toward the world, for a luxury good is exactly a thing that costs a great deal of money and costs you nothing, that is acquired and never suffered, possessed and never undergone. He is the connoisseur who owns everything and is reached by nothing, the collector seated in the middle of a vast hoard who has somehow never once been touched. And this travels far beyond music, for it is the modern manner with the whole of experience, to convert every encounter into a consumable and every consumable into a possession, to taste the world with the eyes half shut and to keep oneself, at all costs, out of danger. It is the difference between a perfume sealed in its bottle, collected, flawless, never worn, and the same perfume on a warm skin, mortal, already fading, giving itself away to a room. The one is possessed and the other is spent, and only the thing that is spent ever arrives at anyone. The fetish of sound is at bottom a fear of being spent, which is a fear of being mortal, which is a fear of being, in the only fashion a human creature is ever any good, given away.

    The Greeks, who had the wholesome habit of building their wisdom into their grammar, kept a word for the whole and undamaged thing, and by whole they meant the marriage of word and sung line and moving body in a single act, the téleion melos, the complete song. Bare instrumental sound, sound with no word and no body that speaks and walks, they were content to call exactly that, bare, psilē, the lesser and unfinished mode, the music with a limb gone. For more than two thousand years the playing of instruments was understood to be music in its incomplete condition, and there is a fine and bitter comedy in the fact that we have taken that already incomplete thing and, inside it, lovingly refined its most outward layer of all, the mere skin of the tone, and crowned the skin as the soul of the art. It is the dream of a beauty that need not die, and a beauty that need not die is a beauty embalmed, which is why the perfected tone, for all its glamour, carries the faint chill of the museum upon it. Urania would give us a music as deathless as her stars, and the gift is poisoned, for the price of never dying is never having lived, and a line that cannot break cannot move us, having nothing in common with the creatures it is sung to.

    So I will say at last what I think a musician is, having said at such length what I think he is not. A musician is not the man with the most beautiful sound, he is the man willing to spend a less beautiful one, the one through whom the line passes on its way from a body to a body, who serves the going and not the gleam, and who would rather be the imperfect throat of a thing alive than the perfect mirror of a thing dead. The artist of sound may sit beside him at the same instrument and beat him in every measurable particular and remain, for all that, in a different trade, an admirable trade, a trade I honour, and not this one. And I must break off here before I commit the very sin I have spent these pages prosecuting, for a man who hammers a single truth past its hour becomes the mirror image of the fetishist he scorns, one more lonely voice persuaded that it is the choir, and such a voice deafens a room as thoroughly as any beautiful tone. So I say it once and let it fall. Give me the line that may break over the sound that cannot, for only the thing that can break was ever alive enough to sing....