Perspectives of New Music

IMPROVISATION, ORALITY, AND WRITING REVISITED JEAN-CHARLES FRANÇOIS While written language may be used to exhort, and is performative in that sense, more usually it is concerned with representation. Hence the written “sciences” represent in a way that those in an oral culture do not. They are further removed from “the action.” It is that very distance that makes the written word “good to think” in a special way. —Jack Goody1 INTRODUCTION HE THESIS OF THIS ESSAY could be spelled out in the following manner : the world of electronic media has put on center stage oral cultures or immediate communication; writing, the elaboration of unheard universes, the results of reflexive rational speculation thus seems to be put in question. But the new practices, developed thanks to these media, are even stranger, since the seemingly immediate is mediated and the orality is completely written. T 68 Perspectives of New Music The concept of orality was invented by the civilization of writing. Writing is that which separates the terms, opens the gaps in temporality, manifests the absent voice, speaking from far distances, in differed times. All cultural entities are hybrid, encompassing both differed time and performance in the present.2 The influence of bookish writing is considerable throughout the world, but the circumstantial anonymous tactics, proceeding one move at a time according to situations, remain the everyday practices common to all human beings.3 In traditions, which are reputed “oral,” the voice is dissimulated, the shaman does not speak in her own name, but, through her, the spirit is heard. The voice of the officiating priest speaks in the name of someone else. Roland Barthes, in his commentary on the Russian bass singer, expresses this fundamental idea: This voice is not personal: it does not express anything from the cantor, from his soul: it is not an original voice. . . . Most important this voice transports directly elements of the symbolic domain, over and above the intelligible, the expressive. . . . The “grain” would be this: the materiality of the body speaking in its mother tongue; maybe the letter; almost certainly its significance.4 In our own written tradition, what needs to be dissimulated is the noted matter on the score. The performer, who plays only the notes, is discredited: he/she is too schoolish, respecting too much the letter of the text, in a word not a musician. One has to go beyond the notes in order—here again—to access “significance.” The notation, considered as “indication,” a piece of evidence in the fundamental contract that separates the roles of production between composer and performer, leaves to the latter the task of producing the timbre and the transcendental nature of the work in a “simulacrum of improvisation.”5 What is at issue with the electronic technologies? Dissimulated in all their manifestations (images, sounds, notations, . . .) is the sense they might convey, the signification which has to be constantly explained in terms of particular contexts or domains, if one is not to be manipulated by their magical spells, or to be excluded from the group from which they originate. Writing becomes unreadable, an infinite series of numbers, of binary combinations, of curves without flaw, of machine languages; it becomes impossible to decipher it in an immediate manner (in the way we can painlessly decipher our alphabet or system of musical notation). The complex totality of the diverse expressions of the electronic media becomes very difficult to represent with simple Improvisation, Orality, and Writing Revisited 69 signs. One has the choice between showing a very incomplete picture (and therefore in a biased manner) or using a plethora of information, which would decompose the objects into as many parts as necessary. The tools producing written matter are themselves indeterminate as to their use (computer, microphone, algorithms), the same information can be transformed to produce a great diversity of possible outputs (sounds, images, texts, . . .), and each particular production can in turn engender a great number of different perceptions. This fact renders the model of an harmonious chain of information going from producer to receptor, guaranteeing the integrity of what is to be conveyed, obsolete: who is speaking, in whose name, what is the nature of the multiple mediations, who...