The Hatred of Music

Ninth Treatise. TO DISENCHANT

The abode of noises and of sounds delimits in space a thin circular celestial layer whose thickness is less than one hundredth of the earth’s radius. This coat consists of 1. the surface of the exposed landmasses, 2. a fraction of the depth of the seas, 3. the aerial region that borders these two elements.

The ensemble of sounds and noises of winds, volcanoes, oceans, and life that has appeared over the lands that rose out of the waters is of such a diversity that it has compelled all the listeners of the world to resort to specific songs.

The abode of animal voices in the world is small.

The abode of human languages in the world is minuscule.

In the European world until 1914, the cock announced daybreak, the dog strangers, the horn hunting, the church carillon marked the hours, the bugle the stagecoach, the knell death, hullabaloo the remarriage of widows, flutes and drums the sacrifice of a carnival effigy. The rare violins of itinerant musicians were a sign of the annual feast and surrounded the game booths dating back to prehistory.

In order to listen to written music, one would have to wait until Sunday, at the High Mass, when organ pipes began to blow the chords that would bounce along the nave.

The listener’s back would suddenly shiver.

What used to be rare has become more than frequent. What used to be the most extraordinary has become a siege, ceaselessly assailing the city as well as the countryside. Humans have become assailed by music, besieged by music. Tonal and orchestral music has become the social tonos more than vernacular languages.

This is why, in the wake of the total war of the German Third Reich and as a consequence of the technology of reproduction of the melos, loving or hating music refers for the first time to the actual, original violence that is the foundation of acoustic control.

Fascism is related to the loudspeaker. It grew thanks to “radio-phony.” Then it was relayed by “tele-vision.”

In the course of the twentieth century, a historical, fascist, industrial, electric logic — whatever epithet one chooses to apply — took hold of the menacing sounds. Music, through the increase not of its practice (its practice, on the contrary, has become infrequent) but of its reproduction and its audience, from then on crossed the limit that separated it from noise. In the city, the diffusion of melodies produced phobic reactions, degenerating in a heroic fashion in the form of murders by rifle.

In the countryside, the rarity of assaults (airplanes, tractors, power saws, rifle shots, all-terrain motorcycles, all-wall drills and electric screwdrivers, lawn mowers, garbage dumpsters, television sets and record players more than a kilometer away, carried in surges by the wind) sometimes allows music to be recomposed little by little as a nonnoise.

In the countryside it happens that I once again with pleasure, for a moment, play this ancient, exceptional, convocative, dispossessing, fascinating thing that used to be called “music.”

Music since the Second World War has become an undesirable sound, a noise to use an old word from our language.¹

Even the reservoirs of silence that places of prayer in the Western world constituted, particularly Christian churches and cathedrals of the Catholic rite, have been equipped with soundtracks that aim to welcome the visitor and to help him avoid the dread of silence as well as, more paradoxically, save him from the eventuality of prayer.

Hesychius of Batos said: “Prayer is reflection that comes to a halt.”

The desert monk further wrote: “Prayer is a motionless wild beast surrounded by dogs.”

Finally, Hesychius said: “Prayer is death that keeps watch in its silence.”

The desert ascetics called “singing with the drum and the harp” the act of superposing the respiratory rhythm onto the heartbeat during the litanic pronunciation of the secret name of Jesus (Ichtys). To justify the incessant use of litanies, they said: “Beyond meaning is the body of the verb.”

Beyond what is semantic resides the body of language: this is the definition of music.

Maximus the Confessor wrote: “Prayer is the door through which the verb passes, is laid bare and is forgotten.”

When music was rare, its convocation was as overwhelming as its seduction was vertiginous. When the convocation is incessant, music becomes repulsive, and it is silence that hails and becomes solemn.

Silence has become the modern vertigo. In the same way that it constitutes an exceptional luxury in megacities.

The first to have sensed this was Webern — killed by an American detonation.

Music that sacrifices itself now attracts silence as the birdcall attracts the bird.

What does it mean to disenchant?

To shield from the power of song. To wrest the enchanted from malefic obedience. To exorcise the evil spirit, the evil that is the stain of death. The choice that presents itself to the shaman is simple: either he makes the body unbearable to the spirits that have made it their abode and that have made it sick. Or he lures them out.

To disenchant is to do evil to evil. It makes the spirit come out. To enchant it elsewhere, fixate it on something else.

In the eighteenth century, Antoine Galland always uses enchanted for depressed. Depression is an evil spell — be it cast by Kirkè the Sparrowhawk or by the Sirens. Nervous depression is still in his eyes an enchantment that needs to be “disenchanted.”

Man is no longer subject to a physical obedience to the sounds of nature. He has suddenly subjected himself to a social obedience to electrified nostalgic European melodies.

The ancient Chinese were justified in saying: “The music of an era reveals the state of the State.”

To release our societies from the spell of their obedience. The taste for order and for subjugation in our societies has turned into hysteria. The cruelest wars are ahead of us. They will be the ever more gruesome compensation, the sacrificial payment for social, medical, legal, moral, and police protection in times of peace.

Endlessly multiplied music and paintings reproduced in books, magazines, postcards, films, CD-ROMs, have been torn away from their uniqueness. Having been torn from their uniqueness, they have been torn from their reality. In this process, they have shed their reality. Multiplication has removed them from their appearance. Removing them from their appearance, it has removed them from original fascination, from beauty.

These ancient arts have become dazzling mirrored scintillations, a whisper of echoes without a source.

Copies — and not magical instruments, fetishes, temples, caves, islands.

King Louis XIV listened only once to the works that Couperin and Charpentier offered to his attention in his chapel or in his bedroom. The following day, other works were ready to resound for the first and last time.

Since the king appreciated written music, he sometimes asked to hear twice a work that he had particularly appreciated. The court would be surprised by this request and would comment on it. Memorialists would bring it up as a curiosity in their books.

The occasion of music, for millennia, was as singular, untransportable, exceptional, solemn, ritualized as could be a gathering of masks, an underground cave, a sanctuary, a princely or royal palace, a funeral, a wedding.

High fidelity meant the end of written art music. We listen to the material fidelity of the reproduction, and no longer to the stunning sounds of the world of death. An excessive simulation of reality has supplanted the real sound that develops in, and is swallowed by, the real air. The conditions of a concert or of a live performance increasingly shock the audience whose erudition has become as technological as it is obsessive.

Hearing the acoustic. Hearing what we control, whose volume we can raise or lower, what we can interrupt, or whose omnipotence we can unleash at our pleasure.

Contrary to the habits of our times, François Couperin said that he used, for want of anything better (for want of having brought back the magical instrument from the land of the dead, that is, from the land where the sun sets, that is, from the farthest point, from the farthest lingua of the earth where all that is visible fades), the harpsichord. He maintained that he heard the music while writing it beyond the sounds that the instrument could produce in space.

He believed that all instruments were essentially inapt, besides merely incomplete.

In the ancient world, the statue of Memnon, in pink quartzite, despite being broken, continued to let its song be heard at sunrise. All the Greeks and all the Romans would cross the sea to hear the stone god that the inhabitants of Egypt worshiped. Septimius Severus had it repaired. It never again emitted its song.

The duration of shellac microgrooves (three minutes) imposed on modern music its exhausting brevity.

Music’s pretense to audio-analgesia, de-subjugating it from written predation, has returned it to hypnosis.

Paradoxically, vibrations produced by low-frequency noise — like formerly the bombarde of organs — found in symphony orchestras and in “techno” music with amplifiers, has made part of hearing swing over into pain.

The Alberti bass broke down the chord, making it roar or bubble beneath the melody like an oceanic and hypnotic noise. The Alberti bass has become unbearable.

The already sung enchants old people. Old people are nothing but the already sung. They are no longer humans but refrains. Never before has a century so repeated the music that preceded it as this one.

The voice of the muezzin compelled the Jews just as the bells of High Mass did the Muslims.

Only atheists extol silence, which they cannot impose.

I would probably not have enjoyed Roland’s olifant, but I detest the sound of the telephone.

In Cusanus’s words: “We are like green wood. Fire in us emits more smoke than it produces light. It crackles more than it casts flames or warms. Humanity is closer to the suffering of hearing than to angelic vision.”

For the first time since the beginning of historic, which is to say narrative, time, people avoid music.

I avoid the unavoidable music.

The sonata of an old house, unaware of the generations, is of a slowness that passes down the memory of its successive inhabitants. The floor creaks. The shutters bang. Each staircase has its key. The door to the closet squeaks, and the springs of the old leather sofas respond. All the wood in the house, when summer has made it dry, forms a both regular and disordered musical instrument, which interprets a composition of distress, elaborated by a destruction all the more menacing because of its effectiveness, even if its slowness does not always make it entirely perceptible to the ears of its human inhabitants.

An old house sings a melos that, without being divine, is not on the scale of those that have been raised and that have died in it and that one has known, and who have only added their songs to daybreak, or to evening. It is a slow dirge that speaks to the family seen as a mass of several generations, in actuality, which none of the inclusive elements or private and provisional molecules truly grasps, and that moans without end about its own ruin that it announces.

When did words adapted to a set melody split from words adapted only to the rules of a language?

Words, songs, poems, and prayers arrive late.

Twenty thousand years ago, the small packs of humans who hunted, painted, and modeled animal forms would hum short phrases, execute music with the help of birdcalls, resonators, and flutes made from marrowbones, and dance their secret stories while wearing masks of prey as savage as themselves.

Vimalakirti lived at the time of Buddha, and Buddha lived at the time of Cyrus the Great. Athens had not yet founded the tragic contests of the Dionysia. Aeschylus was still a little child. Vimalakirti lived in Vaisali. He was rich. One day when a beggar monk reproached him for his wealth, the wise merchant responded that illusion is no smaller in a dreadful hermitage than in a beautiful palace.

A layman, he surpassed the monks in his understanding. He said:

“Neither the layperson’s white robe nor the monk’s kesa can be seen because everywhere everything is invisible.

“In the presence of the god no statue rises and no musician sings. When he tunes the three strings on his lute, nothing has ever resounded. Everywhere everything is inaudible.

“I do not know any statues in the temple, for there is no appearance for something so invisible. I do not know any voice for the sermon, for there is no preaching for something so silent. There is no way.”

The merchant Vimalakirti said:

“The word listener is a gratuitous affirmation. Where do you see a listener?

“There is no language that speaks to us. There is no silence that keeps it quiet.”

The merchant Vimalakirti said:

“Where is the tradition of the triple gem? It is the red ball chased by that child.

“Where is the statue of Buddha? The statue of the Delivered is like the feces coming out of that woman squatting in front of the thicket and whose facial wrinkles express her effort.

“Where is music? Music is like the word farewell in the mouth of an old man.”

The merchant Vimalakirti continued:

“What ripens music in the musician’s heart? What makes the man’s sex swell when he looks at a woman? It is not the areola and the volume of the breasts that he looks for when he watches her. It is not the scent that rises from her armpits and from her hair that attracts him when he is near her. It is not the oil of her sex that surrounds the lingua that the man seeks when he penetrates her.

“Man does not know what object he seeks in women.

“It is an illusion; that is what it is. That is what he begs for.

“This is why lovers hold hands: they hold out their hands to each other because they are begging.

“It is barely visible and it is not even tangible. It is barely audible, but impalpable. It is something tenuous, comparable to the gender agreement of adjectives. It is as delicate as a difference in timbre or register of the voice. It is a high-pitched voice, heard long ago, which characterizes all children and that male children lose, and that female children do not altogether preserve. It is a surviving high-pitched voice. Such is the illusion of the characteristics of the oral voice, taken from the lips of boys whose voices have changed and transported into musical instruments. Such is the illusion of music. Such is the mirage before the eyes of those who are lost in the desert and who still believe in man and woman. Such is the dream beneath the closed eyelids of those who are convinced of the difference between what lives and what dies, who give credence to the existence of their ancestors and who think that there is underground another world where those who go away drink, eat, sing, wail, and cry.

“There is no other world because there is no world.”

They chop wood with keys. They open doors with axes.

They have callused ears.

Human life is uproarious. We call uproars, or cities, the large conglomerations of cubes where humans accumulate. Noise² is their particular scent. Naples, New York, Los Angeles, Tokyo, they are the terrible music of this age.

The raucous noise of Beijing. The immense and raucous, creaking, rusty, carting, slow, braking noise of the great avenue that crosses the city of Beijing.

Bazaar and vacarme are the same word.³ The Persian word bazaar comes from wescar. The Armenian word vacarme can be traced to wahacarana. They both designate the market street (word for word “the place where one goes to buy,” the city).

Sumerian texts say that the gods of Akkad could no longer sleep, so intense was the din made by the humans. They slowly lost their influence over the course of time as well as their splendor in the heavens. So they sent a flood to exterminate the humans, in order to silence their songs.

The prey that performers pursue is the silence of their audience. Performers seek the intensity of this silence. They seek to plunge those who give them their full attention into an extreme state of empty listening, preceding the making-yourself-heard.

Penetrating the preceding background noise in order to make place for the hell of a particular silence, of human silence.

In Clara Haskil’s words, after she had interpreted Mozart’s sonata in E minor at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées. She confided to Gérard Bauer:

“I’ve never encountered such a silence. I don’t know if I will ever find it again.”

Six days later, Clara Haskil fell head first down the stairs of the Brussels-South railway station, the handrail slipping from her fingers.

Every man who works is righteous.

How is the artisan justified by his art? The man who works on a still nonexistent thing is justified by the unexpected emotion that sometimes overcomes him when he looks at what he has made in the past.

When we invent, the surprise of our invention eludes us, since we prepare it and adjust it. But time passes. And, when we have not retained the memory of its laborious production, it surprises us. This fate in which sources mix brings us closer to the impetuosity of the source. This proximity to chaos is what judges us. It is our only judge. We cannot truthfully make a virtue out of the joy it brings us in return. What comforts us in what we have made is neither the recognition by others, nor the moment of sale and the profit that results from it, nor the admiration of some, but the expectation of these unpredictable returns. It is not another world or posterity through centuries that motivates us: it is forgetting what we have done and which comes back to us as a new light, that destines our life to a short circuit of astonishment and annihilation of ourselves. These are ecstasies. We delight in losing ourselves in our works. Days then pass at the speed of falling lightning. Then we cry tears that are no longer our own and that mix with the first Flood that was sent by the deafened gods. We are swallowed up.

Works frighten codes. The open sea frightens seagulls like rats prefer the sewers of densely populated cities.

Those who pass judgment always remain on the shore.

Shouting, they provoke the shipwrecks for which they call with their good wishes.

The shrill cry of seabirds that fly above the white foam of the black waves of the sea. This cry is full of distress. They are searching for refuse to eat. They are searching for wrecks on which to land.

Why did the word siren, which designated the legendary birds of Homer’s epic, come to denote the piercing and terrifying call of industrial factories in the nineteenth century and the convocation to accident scenes of fire engines, police cars, and ambulances?

They are searching for wrecks on which to land.

It must be said: “Death is hungry.”

It is the business⁴ of failure.

The guardians of moral, esthetic, political, religious, social conditioning are always right: they take care of the symbolic control of the group.

Anna Akhmatova called newspaper critics and humanities professors “prison guards.”

I have noticed that all the people I have hated looked like men standing at attention.

I will never know when exactly music broke away from me. Everything acoustic suddenly, one fine morning, left me indifferent. Hardly did I come close to instruments by routine, or because of their visible beauty. Hardly had I opened a score, the melos no longer sounded, or dwindled, or I would recognize it as always similar to another, weariness ensued. Reading written books persisted in all its eagerness, its rhythm, its deprivation in my depths, but not the desire for song.

What was for me the world’s end has become an unbearable distraction.

We are also curious, climbing enigmas that plunge their roots into the future and that spread out toward the sky of the past.

It is possible that we are haunted more by our origin than by death. We are visited more often by the cave, the dark water of the amnion, the piercing voice of infancy than by the cadaverous body and the putrefied silence.

My fingers are empty.

I cannot bear order, meaning, peace. I gather the aftereffects of time. I rip to shreds the rules of the past and the present, which I have never understood.

Logos once meant “collection.” I collect rubble, patches of fugitive light,

“dead intervals,”

the intruder and the lost,

the sordidissima of the cavern: night is the bottom of the worlds. Everything goes toward nonlanguage. I have attempted to bring back things that were without code, without song and without language, and that roam toward the source of the world. It was necessary to think the lack of exit of an empty predatory function. Had I wanted to revive the anachoretic epidemic of the ancient Romans, when Augustus bloodily imposed the empire, or the baroque exile of the Recluses that Rome, the ministry, and the king hounded and sought to eradicate, perturbing the images that historians had constructed, I would not have done any differently. I would like to have plunged everything back into a sort of mythical activity.

Being born serves no purpose and knows no end: certainly not death.

There is no end because death does not finish. Death does not terminate: it interrupts.

The dead interval is the hand that time extends to us. If death interrupts, this interruption is within us; it is in our sexed bodies, in our birth, in our cry as in our sleep. In our breath as in our thought. In our walking on two feet as in human language.

The dead interval, of which we are a precarious dependency, explodes in everything.

Light has its songs.

It is because of their cry that I like fires.

Whereas candlewicks crackled for centuries, electric wire buzzes.

Everywhere one finds this buzz specific to electric light in the world.

It is the “tonality” of the world.

Television programs are interested in writers like high-tension wires are interested in birds: that is, both by chance and in order to kill.

The human melody of northern Europe invisibly and continuously besieges every place where humans assemble, like the stridulation of cicadas summoning the summer long ago.

The birdcall song of the summer.

The solar tarabust.

Plato named them the Musicians. The ancient Greeks loved the singing of the cicadas so much that they would put them in cages and hang them in their house.

Tithonus, son of Laomedon, Priam’s older brother, was the most handsome man to be found on earth.

Aurora saw him. She took him. She loved him. She begged Zeus to grant immortality to her lover. Zeus granted it to the most handsome of men. But while formulating her request, in her haste, Aurora neglected to specify youth. Consequently, while his lover remained the same, Tithonus aged and shriveled. Aurora was forced to put him, like a gurgling baby, in a wicker basket. Then, when her very old lover was no larger than a finger, she transformed him into a cicada. Hanging him from a branch in a cage, she would watch her tiny husband, who would sing without end.

In the morning, as she was unable to satisfy her desire with the minuscule doll her husband had become, the goddess would cry. Aurora’s tears form dewdrops.

Leonidas of Tarentum, disciple of Epicurus, wrote:

At the end of the string hangs the worm, stretched

Toward the dark water. Like the sound of a harp

The string unravels. The bait is drier than a

Fly mummy in the hands of a spider.

Man, from dawn to dawn, of what reed are you the flute?

Frogs (the edible frog, rana esculenta), our ancestors, used to live in stagnant water, or in rivers whose current is weak, perched in the sun on floating plants. I remember how pleasant it was.

Hoarse was the singing-bellowing of male frogs, in the wide croaking, the cracked mouths, and the inflation of their resonator sacs. Hoarse, in a word, the noisy coupling.

I understand why Spallanzani would dress male frogs in taffeta underpants every morning before beginning his decisive experiments on electricity.

It is the birdcall of rain.

Who does not enjoy eating sperma ranarum, which surpasses caviar in flavor?

Boars consume frogspawn as the greatest delicacy that the earth has to offer recluses.

The water rail prefers frogs themselves.

Ovid affirms that males, shouting their desire at their spouses in vain, tear their throats to the point of croaking. Ovid affirms that such was the origin of the male voice change, the females making themselves forever hoarse in a cry of refusal.

Trimalchio tells that he went to Cumae when he was a child. He saw the dried remains of the immortal Sibyl conserved in an urn suspended in the stone angle of the temple of Apollo.

Ritually, the children would walk forward in the shadow of the temple. They would suddenly cry out below the ampulla: “Sibyl, what do you wish?” A cavernous voice would come out of the urn, in the form of an echo out of the rocky angle, invariably responding: “I wish to die.”

This is song.

Apothanein thelō.

The ways of silence of the night.

Tymnes of Crete describes in a very short poem that he dedicates to a bird devoured by a raptor:

The trills and soft ornamentation of your breath

They went on the ways of silence of the night (

siōpèrai nyktos odoi

).

Silence is to ears what night is to eyes.

Two years after the hermit Xu You had refused to accept the empire from the emperor Yao, Xu You threw away the gourd that had been given to him in order to draw water. As he was asked why he had thrown it away, he responded:

“I can no longer bear the moaning of the wind that rushes into it when I hang the gourd from the branch of a tree.”

Several years later Xu You declared that to any music he preferred the sound of the hand that hung from the end of his arm for drawing water. He would bend his knees. He would arch his upper body over the bank. He would curl up his hand like a shell.

After Hans Andersen’s little Mermaid has given her voice to the witch, after she has become dead, become the foam of the waves, she mysteriously recovers it in order to say:

“Toward whom am I going?”

Ishtar took a harp and leaned on the rock before the sea.

Up came a great wave from the sea that stopped and said to him:

“For whom are you singing? Man is deaf.”

I no longer remember where I read the myth in which a mute man, seeing his mother in a dream, cannot communicate to her his distress.

I have let the strings on the cello loosen. I no longer climb up to the organ loft. I no longer direct the winds. I no longer sit before the yellow keyboards.

I have put down this book I am writing on the plastic armchair on which I had rested my feet and which I had placed before me on the grass. Now only my head is below the juniper.

Silence is a sort of deafening racket.

White, thick, slow, burning light has invaded my legs. The heat of the light is such that it covers them in water.

I move the plastic chairs back on the grass. Life is exhausting. My head turns, but it is true that I turn my head. The garden has fewer flowers.

The season progresses.

On the rosebushes along the old wall, the last flower heads are sprouting, but the leaves hanging on their branches are withered. The dense hazelnut tree at the bank’s edge is no longer intensely green: it has turned black. The river flows more slowly at its foot. One cannot even tell whether it is flowing. Neither its movement nor the wind creates the slightest wrinkle on its surface. One cannot even tell whether the sea still attracts the waters. Two very long white dead-nettles lean over the river. They stretch their faces toward their reflections glimmering in the black water. A dragonfly sits on the ring for the old scows. The word that designates them no longer carries even a memory of transport at the end of its chain. It was an old transport, a silent transport. The ducks are sleeping in a line along the dry grass that goes down to the river. Besides the honeysuckle under the porch (actually one can smell it only near the small house), there is not a single scent in the garden. One feels only the heat of one’s body. It is true that sometimes, once or twice an hour, from who knows where, there comes an odor of decay and almost of death. Nothing moves.

Nothing, nothing moves any longer.

I no longer hear even the breath that animates me. The wind no longer exists. The vast bamboo grove shakes more than it trembles. In front of it, the broom cracks its black and dry husks, abruptly dropping its seeds on the short, yellow grass. Nothing human has ever mattered to this world. Nothing human has ever excited the interest of rivers or flowers. Everything fades away in the specks of this blurred haze that the fire of the sun has added to the heat of the light. The midday sun begins to decline. The river of the dead itself has fallen asleep. Nothing human has ever mattered to the water that stagnates and no longer refreshes. Nothing human has ever mattered to the dreams that visit the sleep of men. Nothing human has ever mattered to the visions that dazzle them under their closed eyelids and that violently erect their sex while they watch them, ignore them, and sleep.