Sartre, Nietzsche, and Barthes at the Piano by

The Philosopher’s Touch: Sartre, Nietzsche, and Barthes at the Piano by François Noudelmann (review) Jonathan Dunsby Music and Letters, Volume 95, Number 1, February 2014, pp. 132-135 (Review)

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The Philosopher’s Touch: Sartre, Nietzsche, and Barthes at the Piano. By Franc ois Noudelmann. Translated by Brian J. Reilly. pp. 166. European Perspectives: A Series in Social Thought and Cultural Criticism. (Columbia University Press, New York, 2012, $26.50. ISBN 978-0-231-15394-2.) Originally published in the author’s native French in 2008, serenely translated by Brian J. Reilly, this volume will appeal most to those musicians who have read some of the writings of Nietzsche, Sartre, and Barthes. They were passionate amateur pianists. For musicians equipped to appreciate the deeply informed resonances of Franc ois Noudelmann’s meditations about their pianism as windows onto how they thought, the interrogative terrain he opens up for us seems boundless. We surely do need a guide, from this entertaining philosopher who has some musical insight and avoids some of the whacky take on fact and opinion customary from non-musicians writing about music. Whether a reader of English who is largely ignorant of that trio’s extensive output would get a great deal out of the book is hard to guess. Noudelmann is a seductive writer, yet even the well-versed native English reader may be at a disadvantage, for it is in French cultural awareness that Sartre and Barthes are such big beasts. Noudelmann’s original French readers brought opinions and expectations to his text that his less acculturated audience in English surely lacks. Cultural divides aside, there is inherent, delicious intricacy in his project. Although all three were lifelong, domestic piano players, in their public lives they were dissimilar animals. To suppose that Barthes was, like Nietzsche, a philosopher mainly, rather than a literary theorist and social commentator, an impression you may sometimes get in French intellectual circles, is fanciful; and it is Sartre alone here who can be regarded, far from fancifully, as a prolific master of fiction; even though Nietzsche’s Also sprach Zarathustra is the philosophical novel par excellence. Noudelmann’s idea is to coax these three, differently fertile geniuses into their musical intersection, gently at first, as befits his large canvas: there are three central chapters to his narrative, introduced briefly, and concluded briefly in chapter 5, and he clearly wants us to build our own connections between the musical doings of the mighty triumvirate. But en route he spells out the core of The Philosopher’s Touch: The subject who loves, perceives, and thinks, constructs itself through rhythms that are at once

followed, decided upon, and combined. The hypothesis of this book is that playing music offers a privileged time for such subjectification, a time during which the ordering and disordering of a subject’s relation to the real are at work. (p. 31)

Noudelmann presents his amateur pianists spirally rather than chronologically. In chapter 2, on Sartre, who was born in 1905 some six decades after Nietzsche and a decade before Barthes, he lays out the idea of piano playing as a previously unexplored token of spirituality among those whose spirituality we really do need to understand. There are plenty of memorable expressions here of the atemporal sublimity of music-making, but ‘that there is a purity to art that music alone can attain’ is, as Noudelmann says, an idea that had long been circulating (p. 41). The question is what this meant in particular for the Chopin-addicted Sartre. It meant ‘nostalgia’, and unlike in the ‘dreams’ of his contemporary philosophermusician Adorno, it meant ‘nostalgia exclusively’ (p. 26 ). That illuminates Sartre’s extraordinary feat in capturing ‘the very flow of thought’ (p. 34) in his long final study Critique of Dialectical Reason, ‘an almost infinite jumble of a text’ (p. 32). The Critique is like that because Sartre, as in his daily music-making, which ‘inscribes . . . a different time into the general score’ (p. 35), needed when nearing the end of his productive writing life to be ‘able to write in time . . . without any Proustian arrangement of encased subordinations’ (p. 33; emphasis original). The image of Sartre as writer/pianist is not as central to Noudelmann’s plot as a reader might wish when trying to penetrate the mind of the author of Nausea and The Age of Reason. Noudelmann has many tropes to cover: for instance, Sartre’s music-mother fixation, and ideas of human dissonance, as when Sartre the Western political hero of the Chinese communist regime, that ultimate, post- and super-Nazi deliverer of mass human death, was fixatedly playing his beloved Chopin at homeçthe Sino-proscribed, bourgeois, hateful Chopin, that is. The musical plot does thicken in that the Romantic-oriented Sartre played and absorbed contemporaneous music too. It was at a time when treasuring, say, Schoenberg’s compositionsçwhich in our century often, and some would say sadly, seem to be thought of as collectors’ piecesçmeant risking a commitment to radically new art of now legendary perplexity. Noudelmann’s scouring of Sartre’s life for its musical modernism may verge on the implausible when he states as a fact how not only did Sartre play Stockhausen at home,

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butça show-stopping thought for the professional musiciançhe ‘improvised . . . in the style of . . . Webern’ (p. 44). Nevertheless, there is something comforting in knowing that Sartre, an architect of twentieth-century alienation, was so devoted to the geniuses of his creative musical present; comforting in contrast to the grim musical conservatism and error in such an anthropologically modernistic totem as Le¤vi-Strauss’s The Raw and the Cooked, which appeared in the years leading up to revolutionary 1968 when Sartre in his 60s was happy to be called a public anarchist. Nietzsche, a transcendent mind of his age who has touched us all whether we know it or not, was an incompetent, slightly self-published composer (for information on the facts about Nietzsche’s composing see C. P. Janz, ‘Die Kompositionen Friedrich Nietzsches’, NietzscheStudien, 1 (1972), 173^84; not listed in Noudelmann’s references, but then very little is, as mentioned below). When von Bu«low asked Nietzsche in a letter whether his Manfredinspired opus had perhaps been a joke, when Cosima Wagner said she would rather have heard the piece than been sent the score, and when Wagner himself wrote to Nietzsche that Liszt might offer him a more valuable opinion about his composition, we are witnessing the genteel kindness of world-class professionals. Noudelmann is somewhat on the case about Nietzsche’s dubious practical musicianship, though he is not prepared like me to condemn Nietzsche’s compositional competence. ‘One would have to be crazy to prefer Bizet to Wagner!’ as Nietzsche came to do, Noudelmann observes (p. 81), knowing that Nietzsche eventually, tragically, went clinically ‘crazy’ in general. Yet on the other hand would any open-minded musical scholar swear that Tristan is definitely, inter-subjectively at least, superior musically to Nietzsche’s later obsession, Carmen, as Noudelmann seems to assume? One empathizes with anyone trying to spear the often dissociated, butterfly brain of Nietzsche in all its transient perfection, but the issue is that Noudelmann, as he acknowledges, mostly assesses Nietzsche’s composing and his attitudes towards Schumann, Wagner, Bizet, and others, rather than Nietzsche’s piano playing. Only at the end of chapter 3 does Noudelmann come back to Nietzsche’s touch, fantasizing nicely about how the piano was ‘a vector for the feelings that went through his body and mind . . . a center and a space . . . a forge for evaluation and organization by taking the vibrations of his thoughts, dreams, and desires into its sound box’, but not clarifying how that

pouring into the piano had anything to do with what controlled the output from Nietzsche’s pen: ‘[Nietzsche’s] philosophical writing was governed by a will to assert his singularity, to overtake the herd’ (pp. 91^2). There is probably nothing wrong with the received view that Nietzsche’s music, whether he was touching it at the piano, or composing it badly, listening to it, or telling us about it with his fantastic critical insight, was what twentiethcentury psychologyçwhich it can be said Nietzsche in many ways rather inventedç would come to call a displacement activity. Perhaps what this comes down to, thinking about The Philosopher’s Touch as a whole, is that there was a difference, not addressed by Noudelmann, between Barthes’s and Sartre’s lifelong love of music and Nietzsche’s ongoing obsession with it, if that is the right word. Noudelmann will eventually arrive at the concept of displacement, in the closing chapter called ‘Resonances’ (p. 145), and explicitly writes of Barthes’s ‘exterior displacement’ when playing the piano, ‘a way out of codes, discourses, doxa, and the contemporary’ (p. 153); but he will conclude that his three philosophers’ ‘choice to live in music engaged their whole body, imagination, and feeling, beyond musical time’ (p. 154), shying away from the problematics of what it would really mean if, as he has stated earlier, ‘piano playing conjoins suspension and engagement’ (p. 152; my emphasis). One wonders whether such paradoxical conjoining in suspense and engagement was more peaceful in Sartre’s and Barthes’s minds than in those jarring cognitive domains of Nietzsche, whose penetration of the human psyche nevertheless perhaps exceeded that of his famous successors greatly, even categorically. That Barthes loved classical music is incontestably evidenced in his voluminous writings. Those who know Barthes’s biography, about which he was secretive, would not disagree for a moment with Noudelmann placing music as central to this beautiful life, nor would they cavil about the idea of piano playing as the locus of Barthes’s musical attention, other than to ask if Noudelmann could not have thought more about Barthes’s ancillary passion for the music of the human voice. The inherent deceptiveness of Barthes’s thinking may have ensnared Noudelmann into over-identification with the letter in Barthes, rather than Barthes’s meaning. He lauds his cult of amateurism, including playing at a slow tempo, without helping us to understand how musically frustrating this surely was for Barthes. If once he could have played Kreis-

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leriana up to speed, properly rasch (‘Rasch’ being the title of Barthes’s memorable essay on that work), what rapture for him, what erotic pleasure he would have reported in impeccably etched words, what jouissance. I think Barthes knew that. It drove him to imagine on our behalf the virtuosity he could not even approximate in actuality. We are lucky it did, and Noudelmann is right to remind us, eloquently, of the debt we owe to Barthes’s elevation of amateurism to something revelatory. Possibly we should see his digital frustration as a force amplifying the virtuosic velocity he could adopt when on his own firm ground as a supreme parser of prose, analysing Balzac’s story Sarrasine with his seminar students into that whirlwind of a book about it, S/Z. Noudelmann notes Barthes’s omission a' la lettre of Schumann from his list of likes in Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes. Surprisingly though, he does not consider whether, assuming that missing out Schumann was not some kind of meaningless accident or minor parapraxis, it was Barthes’s ploy to inscribe by omission the symbolic nature of any list of objects we love, love so much that our failure ever to truly possess them really hurts. In another surprise, Noudelmann is explicit about Barthes’s eroticization of piano playing (‘Piano playing comes close to onanism . . . an erotics based on his own desire’, pp. 138^9) and his taste for Ravel (for Barthes, ‘a point of intensity’, p. 132), yet not once, it seems, is there mention of Barthes’s sexual orientation, or even his gender attitudes. In contrast, Noudelmann has been entirely happy to shock us with what Sartre thought ‘one could do with a woman . . . talking about landscapes, revealing one’s emotions, spending time people-watching, and so on’ (p. 21; the shock to me lying mainly in Noudelmann’s own phrase ‘and so on’, as if I his reader am expected to know, complicitly, what other uses of a woman can be taken for granted). Finally, an over-identification with Barthes seems to me to lead to an intriguingly missed overall perspective. Noudelmann, comparing Barthes with Ravel, who ‘enjoyed trying everything: waltzes, minuets, sonatas, concertos, ballets’ (p. 134, my emphasis; an untidy comment on the composer who, like Chopin before him, never completed a symphony?), rightly and nicely reminds us of ‘just how much Barthes hijacked, confounded, and exhausted the objects and discourses he devoted himself to every time he did so . . . without nullifying them’ (p. 134). Yet what he fails to ask is why Barthes virtually ignored the entire sector

of literature called poetry. I do not have the answer to that question, but this is the same Barthes who, as has been observed elsewhere by me and others, clearly had a blind spot about musical form. Almost in passing Noudelmann has noted how Barthes, writing about listening to recordings of his own playing, ‘sidesteps the question of listening . . . and the work of analysis’ (pp. 115^16 ); anything but in passing, he notes Barthes’s ‘refusal to hear or read a structure in the music [which] indicates a clear mistrust of codes and a care to preserve a substantial and polymorphous listening’, leading to the startlingly justifiable diagnosis that ‘musical semiology did not interest him; he preferred instead to describe the sonorous transformations of his own body in order to approach a different truth about music. He did not put his personal impressions up to a formal analysis’ (p. 141). Considering how urgently Noudelmann seeks to understand philosophy via musical thought, has he missed the biggest musical clue of all in the case of Barthes, a visionary who’s cramped, nonstructural view of music nevertheless seems to reflect so tellingly his cramped, non-poetic view of literary creativity? I wish it could be said that Noudelmann avoids all ‘whacky take’ as I called it above, but musician-readers of this book will raise eyebrows. It is not only at ideas such as improvising in the style of Webern that they will be asking: ‘really?’. Consider the idea that Schumann’s second Op. 10 Paganini E¤tude ‘allows the right hand to roam, taking up the measure lightly, without having to obediently follow the melody’ (p. 104), a melody that it reproduces dutifullyçSchumann’s compositional genius here is in what he adds to the melody, lied-like, without any compromise with Paganini’s original ‘song’. Consider also for instance the solemnly delivered judgement that Chopin ‘did not seek to break with or go beyond musical conventions’ (p. 56 ) and whether Noudelmann is aware of Chopin’s titanic struggles as he sketched his way through the unprecedented formal complexities of the Polonaise Fantasie; or is aware that every student of Romantic composition learns how Chopin composed the first substantial repertory piece of piano music, the Second Ballade, to begin and end in apparently different keys. In reviewing such a determinedly hermeneutical text as The Philosopher’s Touch, focusing on strange points of merely musical fact may be easy game, but the reader needs to be on guard for other degrees of licence. Consider

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Noudelmann’s claim that ‘Barthes did not care much for recording. We might be surprised that such a music lover . . . would not listen to albums’ (p. 105). The same Barthes who often played a treasured Panze¤ra ‘78’ gramophone record in his senior years at his semiology seminars? Barthes’s very regret about Panze¤ra, born in 1896, was that his adored singing teacher’s voice had missed being captured in the age of stereo recording onto microgroove vinyl. That is not the lament of a person who did not care much for recording. Barthes understood the significance of modern audio reproduction, indeed teaches us about it: never content to go only for the empirical, Barthes’s comment, about Panze¤ra having been born too early to sing into a cross-over stereo microphone, is that people would have been unable to appreciate the ‘grain’ of that quintessentially French voice anyway, in the modern, flattened, ‘pheno’-culture of high fidelity conformity. Admittedly, The Philosopher’s Touch is not meant to be a work of scholarship. Possibly at the insistence of the original publisher E¤ditions Gallimardçfor such is the trendçit has virtually no scholarly apparatus. You will find no footnotes, and only a short bibliography noting the source of quotations, coyly noted as being ‘where possible’ (p. 157). Earlier I called the book ‘meditations’, and in that spirit this forthright book can be recommended to readers who are interested in a musically perceptive, contemporary philosopher’s speculations about what was going on interiorly when three of his father figures were playing music. Whether in a text that is scholarly or meditative, and whether, as Barthes put it in S/Z, a text is ‘readerly’ or ‘writerly’, music and letters never did comfortably embrace each other, for all that we need them to. Kudos to Noudelmann for offering something expertly imaginative, trying to meet that need. JONATHAN DUNSBY Eastman School of Music doi:10.1093/ml/gct129 ß The Author (2014). Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved.

John Kirkpatrick, American Music and the Printed Page. By Drew Massey. pp. xii þ 205. Eastman Studies in Music. (University of Rochester Press, Rochester, NY and Boydell & Brewer, Woodbridge, Suffolk, 2013. »50. ISBN 978-1-58046-404-8.) Drew Massey’s John Kirkpatrick, American Music and the Printed Page is an engrossing, thought-

provoking, and unusual book about a most unusual man. In this delectable smorgasbord of biography, cultural and reception history, and philological review, Massey explores the life, achievement, and legacy of an editor who not only championed but challenged and critiqued his editorial subjects, in particular the American musical icon Charles Ives, the ‘rugged individualist’ Charles Ruggles, and less remembered composers such as Hunter Johnson, Ross Lee Finney, and Robert Palmer. It is a difficult to think of another editor of American music who would warrant such a book-length study. Of course Kirkpatrick (1905^1991) did more than edit, and to his credit Massey does not neglect Kirkpatrick’s monumental works in Ives scholarship. The first of these, A Temporary Mimeographed Catalogue of the Music Manuscripts and Related Materials of Charles Edward Ives (1960) remained ‘temporary’ for nearly forty years. His expansive edition of Ives’s unpublished writings, Memos (New York, 1970) which includes no fewer than twenty-one valuable appendices and a detailed ‘Chronological Index of Dates’ in the life of the composer, remains an indispensable tool for serious Ives study. Massey also devotes a chapter to Kirkpatrick’s influential role as executive editor of the Charles Ives Society in the 1970s and 1980s. Despite his achievements as an editor and an Ives scholar, however, Kirkpatrick probably remains best known today as the pianist who presented the public premiere of Ives’s Concord Sonata on 20 January 1939 at New York’s Town Hall, the concert that prompted the influential American critic Lawrence Gilman to proclaim Ives’s sonata ‘the greatest music composed by an American’ (New York Herald, 21 Jan. 1939, p. 9). Not only was this performance a major event in the history of Ives reception, as Massey writes, ‘This concert has gone on to acquire the glow of a watershed moment, both for Kirkpatrick and for American concert music at large’ (p. 26 ). In the wake of this triumph, Kirkpatrick’s unquestioned familiarity with the sonata, his significant editorial experience, and the recognized need for a second edition of the work, the logical next step was that Kirkpatrick would edit it. Why this did not happen provides the focus for Massey’s chapter, ‘Performance: Ives’s Concord Sonatas’, and perhaps epitomizes Kirkpatrick’s complex historical position as an editor. The basic problem was that Kirkpatrick wanted to base the new

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