Music arises from a hole. It can choose to cover it with harmonic beauty, and thus speculate on being, through the thrill of the promise, or that of nostalgia. Modernity, since Duchamp, has introduced another approach: that of "extinguishing the notion of beauty", seeking "an other resonance" and "making something other than sound-meaning"1.
The intrinsic qualities of sound are now taken as material. Since the development of electro-acoustics, all kinds of tinkering with 'concrete' and non-sublimated sound material have become possible. In this mobilisation of the damnable part of the audible, the hole effect blocks the effect of sense.
This hole effect ultimately comes down to resonance. This hole is less the effect of musical production than what is consubstantial with this production, identical – where it creates resonance – with its cause.
Isn't this resonance what remains of sound when the aural turns to silence, or what the ear represses in order to retain only the aural aspect of sounds? When church bells in the mountains stop ringing, the whole valley vibrates with a tapestry of evolving resonances, and after a while it is impossible to tell whether there is still reverberation. Where the aural becomes uncertain, the sonic emerges; and where silence and sound blur together, we are in the realm of the voice. Resonance is merely the effect of the hollow spaces created by the bell and the valley. Before becoming part of myth, the cavity of the shofar first produced the pure cry of the uninscribable.
Serge Cottet noted that in this new music, it is not charm but strangeness or anxiety that comes to the fore2. They do not adopt the subject but rather distance it from the sentiment that the musical Other hears and 'recognises' it.
This is because the body it appeals to is not that of the imaginary echo, but that endowed with holes around which the drive is organised, and which have their own real resonance. If the unconscious, structured like a lullaby, tempers the sonority of lalangue, what shocks can bring it out of its rut to produce this "other resonance"? Do these pieces of music, which work with densities and intensities rather than tonality or rhythm, which reject catharsis but aim for sound that pierces the auditory, teach us anything? They certainly do not aim for emotion. And even before the promise of any relation can take hold, they have already made it clear that between drive and pulsation, everything is desafinado.
[1] Lacan, J., "Vers un signifiant nouveau" [Towards a new signifier], Seminar XXIV, L'insu que sait de l'une-bévue s'aile à mourre, lesson of 19 April 1977, Ornicar ? 17/18, Spring 1979, pp. 15–16. [Unpublished in English.]
[2] Cf. Cottet, S., "Musique contemporaine : la fuite du son" [Contemporary Music: The Flight of Sound], La Cause du désir, Special Issue, "Ouï, En avant la musique", 2016. Also available online: Lacan Quotidien 752, 7 December 2017.
