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BETWEEN AUDIATION AND EKPHRASIS: PASCAL DUSAPIN'S ‘FALSE TRAILS’

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 July 2023

Thomas Metcalf
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Abstract

This article investigates the prolific deployment of images in Pascal Dusapin's scores of the mid to late 1990s. Using Edwin Gordon's concept of ‘audiation’ and Siglind Bruhn's concept of ‘musical ekphrasis’, as well as Neal Curtis’ ideas on the agency and liveness of images, interdisciplinary interpretations of three Dusapin works are offered, using the score image as the main analytical starting point. Beginning with his Piano Études and Loop, these analyses will demonstrate how the score images, derived from the study of ‘catastrophe theory’, prefigure the control of various musical parameters relating to the relationship of variables in this mathematical concept and its forms. An analysis of String Quartet No. 4, notable for its use of both a score image (of a machine) and textual quotation (from Samuel Beckett's Murphy), will then demonstrate how the visual can interact with the verbal to construct a plurality of musical metaphors. The article concludes by positing that Dusapin's elusiveness on the role and function of the images within his work could amount to what W. T. J. Mitchell describes as ‘ekphrastic fear’: an anxiety that the composer's success amalgamating image and music might have broken down the ontological boundary between them.

Type
RESEARCH ARTICLE
Information
Tempo , Volume 77 , Issue 305 , July 2023 , pp. 26 - 43
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Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2023. Published by Cambridge University Press

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References

1 Richardson, Sidney and Dusapin, Pascal, ‘Reflections on Form: An Interview with Pascal Dusapin’, TEMPO, 72, no. 283 (2017), p. 35Google Scholar.

2 Pace, Ian, ‘Never to be Naught’, Musical Times, 183, no. 1857 (1997), pp. 17 and 19Google Scholar.

3 For a well-known example see Baude Cordier's Belle, Bonne, Sage, Chantilly Codex (Chantilly, Musée Condé MS 564).

4 Sidney Richardson, ‘Form and Exhaustion in Pascal Dusapin's Quad – In Memoriam Gilles Deleuze’ (Ph.D. dissertation, Duke University, 2018), p. 192.

5 Bruhn, Siglind, ed., Sonic Transformations of Literary Texts: From Program Music to Musical Ekphrasis (Hillsdale: Pendragon Press, 2008), p. 8Google Scholar.

6 Bruhn, ‘Musical Ekphrasis: The Evolution of the Concept and the Breadth of its Application’, in Esti Sheinberg & William P. Dougherty, eds, The Routledge Handbook to Music Signification (London: Routledge, 2020), pp 345–358.

7 Metcalf, Thomas, ‘Labyrinths, Liminality, and Ekphrasis: The Graphical Impetus in the Music of Kenneth Hesketh’, TEMPO, 75, no. 295 (2021), pp. 45–71CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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11 Ibid., p. 19.

12 Mitchell, William J. T., What Do Pictures Want? (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), pp. 49–50CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

13 Pascal Dusapin quoted in Richardson, ‘Form and Exhaustion in Pascal Dusapin's Quad’, p. 201.

14 Redgate, ‘Do You Hear What I Hear?’, p. 21.

15 Richardson, ‘Form and Exhaustion in Pascal Dusapin's Quad’, p. 204.

16 Pascal Dusapin et al., ‘Pascal Dusapin: composer avec la vie’, La Cause freudienne, 70, no. 3 (2008), p. 221. [‘La musique, elle est écrite, elle est construite sur un paradoxe qui, en fait, est qu'on la dessine. Et vous ne pouvez, au terme d'une certaine expérience, oublier le fait qu'il s'agit d'une transduction d'un monde graphique au monde immatériel des sons. Il faut donc transcoder en permanence une représentation par une autre. Quelle est alors, ontologiquement, la relation que vous entretenez avec votre pensée?’]. My thanks to Fraser McQueen for his help with translations.

17 See Dusapin and Maxime McKinley, Imaginer la composition musicale. Correspondance et entretien 2010–2016 (Paris: Septentrion, 2018), p. 107, and Dusapin's paper written upon his appointment to Chair of Artistic Creation (Chaire de création artistique) at the College de France (2006–2007), www.college-de-france.fr/media/pascal-dusapin/UPL18515_49.pdf (accessed 16th September 2022), p. 874.

18 Arnold, Vladimir, Catastrophe Theory, tr. Thomas, R. K. (Berlin: Springer-Verlag, 1984), p. 14CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

19 For a full explanation of this application, see Zeeman, Christopher, ‘Catastrophe Theory’, Scientific American, 234, no. 4 (1976), pp. 65–68CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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22 Richardson, ‘Form and Exhaustion in Pascal Dusapin's Quad’, p. 227.

23 René Thom, Structural Stability and Morphogenesis, tr. David Fowler (Reading, MA: Benjamin, 1975), p. 86.

24 Tony Atkins and Marcel Escudier, eds, ‘Hysteresis’, in A Dictionary of Mechanical Engineering (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013).

25 Zeeman, ‘Catastrophe Theory’, p. 76.

26 Roger Savage, Hermeneutics and Music Criticism (New York: Routledge, 2009), p. 75.

27 James Elkins, Six Stories from the End of Representation (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008).

28 Lawrence Kramer, Musical Meaning: Toward a Critical History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), p. 16.

29 An example might be a crank which then moves a conveyer belt when rotated.

30 Samuel Beckett, Murphy (London: Routledge, 1938), pp. 9, 252–53.

31 Rubin Rabinovitz, ‘Murphy and the Uses of Repetition’, in On Beckett: Essays and Criticism, ed. Stanley E. Gontarski (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), p. 56.

32 Ibid.

33 Jacques Amblard, Pascal Dusapin: L'intonation ou le secret (Paris: Musica Falsa, 2002), p. 244 [‘De même pour Dusapin, le Quatuor n° 4 raconte l'histoire de quarre frères (incarnés par les quatre instrumentistes) qui se « ressembient » et pourtant se « distinguent » chacun par une personnalité propre. Ainsi, leur « ressemblance » est théâtralisée par l'unisson des huit premières mesures de l’œuvre.’].

34 Gilles Deleuze, ‘The Fold’, Yale French Studies, 80 (1991), p. 232.

35 William J. T. Mitchell, Picture Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), p. 154.

36 Ibid., p. 155.

37 Dusapin quoted in Stoïanova, ‘Pascal Dusapin’, p. 186.