 |
Representations 86 (Spring
2004)
“If sound can be
translated into color, color can be translated into sound, and straightaway
into instrumental timbre. That’s the whole stroke of inspiration.” Thus
announced the Belgian poet Réné Ghil, in an essay on poetic instrumentation
that concluded his odd (and portentously titled) collection from 1885, Treatise
on the Word. The idea of color and sound fusing into a single aesthetic
experience was nothing new, of course, evoking strains of Charles Baudelaire,
Richard Wagner, and the kind of synaesthesia that has long been regarded a
central, if vague, tenet of French symbolism. But Ghil’s claims were more
specific. He linked the “stroke of inspiration” in modern poetry to a
particular quality of sound: the color, or timbre, of instruments. Writing
verse became like orchestration; vowels turned musical; and the sound of poetry
took on a strange new meaning, recalling the distinctive accents of brass,
woodwind, and strings. The literalism, and sheer conviction, of the approach
caused a few contemporaries to scoff. (Paul Verlaine wrote: “Ghil / est un
imbecile. . . .”) Today, admittedly, the idea sounds even stranger. And yet it
is precisely this conviction we need to take seriously if we ever hope to grasp
the elusive correspondences that define symbolist art. Not only does
Ghil’s dream of the orchestra put a more tangible spin on the famously
intangible “music” of the symbolist poets. Timbre itself carries a richer
resonance, as we shall see. Mediating the experience of word and tone, the
concept of timbre may help us, in fact, to rehear not just the music lurking
behind modern French poetry but also the strange imprint of poetry lingering in
modern French music.
. . .
The question is
more difficult than we might suspect—and with good reason. As any music teacher
can attest, the musical property called timbre is notoriously resistant to
definition. Usually classified in negative terms, it refers to the part of a
musical score that is not the pitch or the rhythm or the harmony.
Dictionaries tend to describe it, just as vaguely, as a quality, distinguishing
the sound of one instrument from the next. Play the same note on flute or oboe
or trumpet, we are told, and the resulting difference is the timbre. But this
will hardly do, for the difference still remains unaccounted for. Adjectives
can sometimes take up the slack but, in the end, prove no more helpful. By
calling a sound dark or warm or sweet or sharp or even pungent, we simply
displace the aural experience onto another realm, drawing on every sensory
organ but the ear, as if to condemn the concept of timbre to a permanent
state of synaesthesia.
The problem may
simply be that timbre, in music, represents a second-order concept, one whose
meaning can only be grasped by reference to a prior form. That, at least, is
what the etymology suggests. The Old French timbre comes from the Greek tympanon,
or drum (from which we get timbrel and tympani), implying a physical form, a
skin or parchment stretched across a frame. Like the sensitive skin of the
middle ear (the tympanum, or eardrum), this taut surface, ready to be struck,
is a site for both producing and receiving vibrations. The musical concept of
timbre retains some of this two-sidedness. On the one hand, it is the sonorous
property produced by a moment of impact, a sort of “vibration impression,” with
its own unique pattern of overtones. On the other, it is wood, gut, brass, skin—the
material that receives the blow. Like the tympanon from which it
derives, timbre is noise and source, both the drum and its accent.
. . .
. . . One early
and important essay, written in 1885, was in fact conceived as a preface to
that quirky volume I mentioned at the beginning of this essay: Réné Ghil’s Treatise
on the Word. We may find it strange to encounter Mallarmé in the context of
a dubious theory about instruments that speak. But that strangeness, it turns
out, is precisely the point.
Mallarmé’s preface
began, not surprisingly, by acknowledging the originality of the Treatise,
but Ghil’s notion of an instrument parlée also caused him to reflect on
broader trends. “An undeniable desire of the present era,” Mallarmé noted, “is
to separate, by virtue of different attributes, the double state of speech, raw
and immediate on the one hand, essential on the other.” This doubleness
suggested two very different kinds of exchange. Communication—the most
“immediate” form—was the crudest. Language was commerce, Mallarmé said, like
taking a bit of change out of one’s pocket and “placing [it] silently into
another’s hand.” The word became common coin; poetry went begging. From this
stark scenario arose a question: “What good,” he asked, “is the marvel of transposing
a fact of nature into its near vibratory disappearance in the play of speech if
it is not so that the pure idea, having nothing at all to pay back, might
emanate from it?”
Here, in effect,
was the other side of the coin. The question imagined a purer language of
vibration—speech’s essence—existing apart from the immediacy of representation
or communication. Mallarmé seemed to imagine the “double state” of the word in
the very rhetoric of this dense passage, which played on the difference between
an initial (grounded) statement and a second (floating) question, isolating the
“free play of speech” from what he grimly called reportage. Then, as if
to enact this difference, he changed course. Shifting his tone of voice in the
very next sentence, he offered an example. It is the best-known passage of the
essay, perhaps of the whole Mallarmé oeuvre. It begins: “Je dis: une fleur!”
I say: a
flower! And, out of the oblivion where my voice banishes no contour, what rises
up musically (as something other than the lilies I have known) is this laughing
or perverse idea: the absent thing of all bouquets.
A long history of
criticism has tended to focus on the absence, the negation, the virtuality of
Mallarmé’s lilies, reading the “something other” in these lines as a figure for
the pure “idea” that supposedly formed the raison d’être of his verse.
Without disrupting the critical consensus, however, we might read this absent
thing in a slightly different way, taking our cue from Mallarmé’s exclamation
point, and also from his first two words: je dis. As we saw in Rimbaud’s
“Voyelles,” this verb, caught between singing and saying, suggests an object on
the musical edge of speech. But Mallarmé’s tense punctuation tells more.
Between colon and exclamation point lies a taut, stretched space, on which
another kind of “flower” will blossom: a poem. When the deed is done, what
remains of the poetic impulse is not just the page (which, like the tympanum,
can be made to sound again) but something else: an accent, an outline, a distinct
aural impression. This total sonorous imprint might also be called, more
simply, the poem’s timbre.
. . .
This scattering of
words across a blank expanse has suggested many things to Mallarmé’s readers:
the trail of a ship’s wake; the black and white of dice; nocturnal
constellations. Such impressions, of course, emerge directly from the repertory
of images within the poem. But the typographic dispersal of Un Coup de Dès
might also be read—more basically, even primarily—as the record of a moment of
impact, a blow that has produced on the page a shock, like sound waves rising
from a drum’s vibrating surface.
Mallarmé mused
about a certain “simultaneous vision” affored by the pages of his poem, allowin
the text to be perceived all at once, as in an orchestral score. Still, the
all-at-once-ness points to hearing as much as reading; not just the legible
score but an audible symphony. This perception might not be too far from
Rimbaud’s symphony, in fact, “arriving all at once” on the stage of his thought.
For there too the symphonic noise represented a kind of shock or blow: in
French, un coup. Rimbaud spoke of a “stroke of the bow” (un coup
d’archet). Mallarmé imagined un coup de dès. My point is this: the coup
inevitably leads us back to the ear, thus to the tympanum and the more
primary meaning of timbre. In physics, timbre is often described in
terms of an “impulse response,” the resonance of an initial shock that contains
all the information about the behavior of the resonating body. A force strikes
the air, then the outer ear, to produce an interior aural impression. This
physical image proves equally helpful in characterizing the ethos of modern
French poetry. If the coup is the impulse, timbre is the
response. Mallarmé’s page becomes, all at once, like an eardrum: a taut white
skin that, struck by language, strikes back—like a brass waking up the
bugler—as poetry disperses in a shock of sound.
This is not
exactly “music,” of course. And that is part of my point. The musical quality
that seems to haunt modern French verse in the last decades of the nineteenth
century is strange, disturbing, even shocking, precisely because it is “not
exactly music.” It can no longer be grasped, in all the easy ways, as the music
of poetry. Nor does it sit comfortably among those elements that usually define
the “music” of music. Timbre forms, as we have seen, a kind of negative
remainder, beginning where notions of pitch and rhythm leave off. As a
perceptual quality, it presents itself as an oblique boundary, poised at the
limit of both poetry and music, informing and receding from both, like the
“paper that intervenes,” as Mallarmé put it, “each time an image, of itself,
ceases or comes back.” In other words, like a tympan.
This oblique
threshold of the manual printing press is in some ways a perfect metaphor for
our experience of musical timbre. Site of an initial blow, the tympan allows us
finally to think about timbre differently, obliquely. It makes clear that this
elusive property is not a third term, as we tend to imagine it in the sequence:
pitch, rhythm, and timbre. It is more like a third way, properly mediating the
other two. Like the “paper that intervenes,” timbre represents the negative
space of the imprint, a space that nonetheless performs and important function.
The piece of parchment that lies stretched between the type bed and the platen
actually makes the impression stick. In much the same way, timbre figures into
our most basic perceptions of sound, enabling both the production and reception
of sound “types.” Indeed, it is at the level of production that we begin to see
how the notion of timbre collides with another important dimension of poetic
performance, itself stretched obliquely across language and music: what the
French call diction.
. . .
There are less
extravagant examples, of course. I am thinking of one in particular, a song
composed by a slightly older mentor of Debussy, Ernest Chausson, to words by a
younger disciple of Mallarmé, the poet, essayist, and critic Camille Mauclair.
The work represents a very different sort of artistic collaboration, a study in
reciprocal hearing that forms an unusually fitting conclusion to this essay. As
the story goes, Chausson asked Mauclair to write him a text on a repeated
rhyme. The poet returned in a matter of hours with “Les Heures.” four quatrains
of ever-so-free verse.
Les pâles heures,
sous la lune,
En chantant,
jusqu’à mourir,
Avec un triste
sourire,
Vont une à une
Sur un lac baigné
de lune,
Où, avec un
sombre sourire,
Elles tendent,
une à une,
Les mains qui
mènent à mourir;
Et certains,
blèmes sous la lune
Aux yeux d’iris
sans sourire,
Sachant que
l’heure est de mourir,
Donnent leurs
mains une à une,
Et tous s’en vont
dans l’ombre et dans la lune
Pour s’alanguir
et puis mourir
Avec les Heures,
une à une,
Les Heures au
pâle sourire.
The poem was almost unimaginably
modest. It evinced no violent coup, no stroke scattering words across
the page. And yet the text was about that sort of repercussion, one that
stretched across a vaster space. It evoked a tolling bell and the canonical
“hours” sounding on a dark pastoral landscape. This melancholic noise, a sharp
and resonant klang, recalls one other, ancient meaning of the word timbre—and
puts a finer point on our subject. In Middle French, a timbre referred
to a bell struck by a hammer.
Mauclair’s versus
evoked the sound through repetition. The four quatrains are organized not so
much around a repeated rhyme as around four repeated words, two pairs that
chime across the utterly simple form: lune/ une, mourir/ sourire.
But, here, two and two actually make one, for the doubled syllable of the
second pair cleverly produces the single one of the first. To put this in other
terms: the vowels of mou-rir—sou-rire contain two
musical timbres, ou and i, each producing a distinct feeling (sad
or smiling, as Mauclair suggests). The ou was obviously the sad tone,
formed by an actual pout, the literal “moue” of mou-rir, where
lips fall rounded and forward. The i of rir(e) was the
laughing second syllable (recalling, once again, Rimbaud’s laughing red
mouths). To make this sound, tongue must rise; lips draw back. Put pout and
smile together and—as every first-year French student knows—you have a new
thing, a uniquely French timbre: the u of une and lune.
Mallarmé may have once joked that the French mixed up day and night, making jour
a dark timbre and nuit a bright one, yet in this poem Mauclair seems to
resolve the contradiction. The quartet of rhymes fuses to form a solitary,
resonant note, a bright-dark color like moonlight.
The text, in
effect, is all about that color. There is no speaking subject, only a sound, an
eerie noise vibrating in the darkness. It was as if the poet were hearing his
own words in the slightly alienated manner described by Rimbaud or Ghil: as an
“other” sort of resonance, one that captured the poetic image only in its “near
vibratory disappearance,” to use Mallarmé’s apt phrase. He heard his verse, in
other words, as if it were already ringing or singing: “En chantant
jusqu’à mourir,” he writes. This image of “singing unto death” recalled the
slow, dying envelope of a bell. Yet it also pointed to the sort of oblique
hearing that was essential to symbolist verse, as I have been arguing.
Mauclair’s lines did not so much express this tolling as locate it elsewhere,
in the space of one resonant timbre: l’une, l’une, l’une, l’une.
It was a sound
that naturally suggested music. According to Mauclair, Chausson sat down at the
keyboard after hearing the lines just once and improvised the perfect musical
translation (fig. 4). The song “Les Heures” thus offers us a rare occasion to
contemplate this not-quite-musical poetry from the other side. What appealed to
Mauclair was not, it seems, the directness but the obliqueness of Chausson’s
response, a perfectly skewed setting that encourages us to listen back across
the lines of verse, and recognize (as Derrida might say) the poem’s limit. It
begins simply enough. Four offbeat octaves, “slow and resigned” in the piano’s
treble register, reduce the poetic subject to a single tolling note. And yet as
it continues—through all twenty measures—the effect is different: the mimetic
character of the sound fades. The repetitions turn the octave A into a mere
vibration, the sonic equivalent of the poem’s l’une. And this, in turn,
becomes the background for another sort of blow, that of the poem’s diction.
This, too, is
unassuming, and significantly so. For one thing, the diction produces (or,
should I say, is produced from) a melody whose utterly modest motion mimes the
tonal “accent” of spoken French. It was a trait that became more and more
typical of French songs after 1896, offering another sense in which French
composers—like poets and phonologists—were tuning into the timbres of the
mother tongue. The speechlike melody was, of course, also an effect of rhythm.
The naturalism of the diction depended as much on the piano’s continuous
offbeats (unhinging the text from tonic accent) as on the vocal line’s evaded
downbeats. In performing the notated rhythms we begin to sense, in fact, how
much the meter (4 / 4) is almost arbitrary, less an actual rhythmic
representation than a graphic convenience.
But that
convenience hides a more oblique truth: an odd musical detail, audible at the
beginning of the song, just as it rounds the corner of the first suspended
quatrain. In fact, this opening musical period could easily be rescored not as
four measures but as five, in a deliberately telescoping form (fig. 5). For
that is how the text is declaimed: an initial measure of five beats yields to
another of four, then to three, then two, at which point the slowly descending
vocal line reaches its lowest note. Here, a sonic disturbance. The melodic Eb
rings out conspicuously as the one-syllable verb (vont) lands for the
first time squarely on the downbeat. Swelling to fill almost two beats, the
dark nasal timbre of this verb, with its initial fricative, sounds for a moment
like an exotic gong. Yet the phrase will resume with a very different stroke.
As we continue along the ever-narrowing progression—indeed, just at the point
where the two-beat measure should collapse into one—Chausson gives us something
else, a sort of musical pun. Instead of one beat we get one word, which the
voice delivers, clear as a bell, in unison with the piano’s pinging A. It
sings: une . . .
It was no doubt
this kind of convergence that caused Mauclair to judge Chausson’s piece a
“model of musical translation,” with its “identity of feeling, and rhythm,, and
syllabic chant.” But most striking about this musical translation is what we
might call its slant. As we hear the poem’s une rising to the surface,
we perceive the extent to which the song’s expression—like the poem’s—was
seeking to locate itself “elsewhere.” Just as Mauclair’s verse manages to merge
with its own vibration, the song becomes equivalent to its accent. To put this
in another way: the total musical expression of this song turns out to be
nothing more (and nothing less) than its diction. Nothing more than a stroke of
the tongue that will yield, in the end, a whole absent bouquet of French
timbres.
This linguistics coup
makes me think, once again, of the tympan: site of an initial blow that leaves
no ink. And that, in turn, brings to mind an oddly apt description of Roland
Barthes, who once described the modern art of French song, and its diction, is
strikingly similar terms: he called it the site “where language works on itself
for nothing.” Was this not the same negative remainder we have
encountered before? Barthes’s comment encourages us, in any case, to contemplate
one last feature of Chausson’s song: the relative muteness of its melody. This
represented a very different kind of “singing unto death,” a death of singing
that fairly invaded musical settings at century’s end, accounting for the most
oblique, and strangely affecting, development of the modern vocal art that came
to be known as la mélodie française. In the years just before 1900,
French song did conspire to think an “other” sort of music, and in doing so it
produced, like French poetry, an uncommon musical result. It made its own
language less expressive than simply expressed: inhaled, exhaled, tasted, felt,
dit.
|
|
