Conference Agenda

John Cage’s 1949 visit to Paris, his encounter with Pierre Boulez, and the ensuing correspondence between the two iconoclasts have been celebrated by historians as a milestone of trans-Atlantic modernism. Their eventual rift emblematizes divergent trajectories of experimentalism that prevailed in the United States and France, of which they remain the respective figureheads. Despite their differences, recent scholarship has emphasized both Cage’s and Boulez’s fundamental idealization of sound as non-referential, abstract presence—what Edmund Mendelssohn has called the “myth of ‘pure sound,’” which became a widespread marker of western distinction in postwar modernism.

Against this historiographical backdrop, I offer a contrapuntal account of Cage’s reverberations in France, based on the recovery-in-progress of a series of unpublished pieces for two prepared pianos by Yvonne Loriod (1924-2010)—a classmate of Boulez and fellow acolyte of Messiaen, whom she later married. These highly experimental works are historically significant in their own right: potentially the first compositions for prepared piano following Cage’s European visit, they inspired Messiaen to describe Loriod as a leading compositional voice of the young generation. In stark contrast to Boulez’s gloss of Cage’s “frequency complexes” and “inward-looking” suppression of ‘‘external effects,” Loriod assimilated Cageian techniques to her longstanding interests in ethnographic humanism, surrealism, and nature—with rhythmic structures representing childbirth and conjugal union; timbral families associated with the body’s organ systems; and textures evoking north African soundscapes, gleaned during her own concert tours in the French protectorates.

Loriod’s resistance to the dogmas of sonic abstraction was a factor in her decision to cease composing in 1951; she came to associate her own œuvre with what Boulez disparaged as “unexportable folklore,” committing herself to her career as a concert pianist (and premiering Boulez’s two-piano monument to abstraction, Structures 1a, the same year). But Loriod’s compositions—much like Cage’s early piano preparations, in Tamara Levitz’s account—inhabit the substrate of intensely figural composition that undergirds so much of the ostensibly “pure sound” of midcentury modernism. Recovering her work, therefore, helps fill in the negative space against which sonic abstraction defined itself, while offering one touchstone for broader, more inclusive narratives and repertories of this period.

Anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss began his late four-volume work Mythologiques (1964–1971) with an extended reflection on the relationship between music and myth. He dedicated the first volume, Le Cru et le cuit, “to music” (a dedication accompanied by a notated excerpt from Emmanuel Chabrier’s À la Musique) and in the book's introduction observed an “initially surprising similarity” between music and myth first recognized by “that God, Richard Wagner.” Wagner, Lévi-Strauss claimed, was “the undeniable originator of the structural analysis of myths,” the first to discover “that the structure of myths can be revealed through a musical score.” Yet Lévi-Strauss’s reverence for Wagner and other figureheads of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century European art music markedly contrasts with his (infrequent) references to music and song in the context of his fieldwork in South America and with his structuralist account of culture writ large. In his writings on Indigenous peoples, the work of culture, instantiated in myth, resides entirely in the domain of symbols that are recognized intellectually; it is unrelated to the frequent instantiation of such symbols in ritual song.

I argue in this paper that this divergence between the significance of Wagner and the insignificance of Indigenous song in Lévi-Strauss’s thought was more than incidental. The elevation of the symbolic in French sociology and anthropology, a tendency of which Lévi-Strauss stands as a particular exemplar, was shaped in part by ideas about European art music that held wide currency at the time. Tracing the intellectual lineage of Lévi-Strauss’s conception of symbols in the work of Émile Durkheim and Marcel Mauss, I explore the tensions and incongruities between sociological and anthropological attempts to theorize ritual song and these thinkers’ own, largely untheorized conceptions of “music” inherited from such figures as “that God, Richard Wagner.” I claim, finally, that a reading of Lévi-Strauss that attends to these tensions and incongruities sheds unique light on a constellation of anthropological challenges involving experience, embodiment, and epistemology.

When Roland Barthes published his essay “Le Grain de la voix” in 1972, his idea of a vocal timbre imprinted by the forms and movements of the singing body was embraced with lightning speed, in the popular press and scholarly journals. Yet neither the phrase nor the idea was new. As early as 1946, Pierre Schaeffer had argued in the Revue du cinéma that dialogue in film was less important for its meaning than for its intonations, or “the grain of the voices” (“le grain des voix”). Spoken dialogue was, in other words, just another sound effect–one that happened to emanate from humans. The same year laryngologist Jean Tarneaud suggested that listening for “grain” should be a key determinant in the classification of the singing voice. Tarneaud was a respected scientific authority and a bit of a celebrity: a 1937 newspaper article about the fad for singing among Hollywood stars reported that Harpo–the mute Marx Brother–kept a copy of Tarneaud’s monograph on vocal nodules on his bedside table.

Barthes may have encountered these antecedents, either as a reader of the Revue du cinéma or through his teacher Charles Panzéra, who studied at the Conservatoire while Tarneaud was employed as a medical consultant. But the real significance of these pre-echoes of Barthes lies in their common genealogy. Both Schaeffer’s drive to sever sounds from their sources and Tarneaud’s anatomical view are indebted to a theory of communication derived from Saussurean linguistics and a regimen of vocal training that emphasized muscular control, as taught by actors Jacques Copeau and Charles Dullin in the 1930s. This paper will trace that history, which begins from Antonin Artaud’s ethnographically dubious plundering of Balinese theater to create a performace practice that would subordinate speech and rational language to the “vibrations and qualities” of the voice. Where we usually perceive Barthes as an alternative and unruly voice in French music writing, this paper will demonstrate that the cultivation of timbre and sonority as a refuge from both prosodic declamation and semantic meaning belongs to a mainstream of French modernism that runs from Debussy through neoclassicism to Boulez.