twentieth-century music 3/2, 281–283 © 2007 Cambridge University Press

doi:10.1017/S1478572207000503 Printed in the United Kingdom

Jean-Jacques Nattiez, The Battle of Chronos and Orpheus: Essays in Applied Musical Semiology, trans.
Jonathan Dunsby (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), ISBN 0 19 816610 9 (hb)

This book is subtitled ‘Essays in Applied Musical Semiology’. But it is really a collection of
standard essays on a range of subjects, most of which have appeared before in French (here
efficiently translated by Jonathan Dunsby). The exception is the opening chapter, ‘Musical
Semiology: Beyond Structuralism, after Postmodernism’, in which Nattiez seeks to contex-
tualize his theory within recent intellectual history. For readers of Fondements, or Music and
Discourse, there is nothing new here. Historically, what the essay does demonstrate is how far
the French model of ‘semiology’ has fallen since its heyday in the 1980s, in comparison with
the rise of Anglophone semiotics in the work of Robert Hatten, Raymond Monelle, Naomi
Cumming, David Lidov, and Kofi Agawu, and the Greimassian Tarasti circle in Northern
Europe. A better title might have been ‘The Battle of Semiology and Semiotics’, were the
latter writers not air-brushed from the story so completely. Not a single reference to any of
them, despite the author throwing rocks, in passing, at new musicologists such as Lawrence
Kramer and Susan McClary, whom Nattiez deems to be methodologically naive – having
‘simply failed to recognize the complexity, and the consequences, of the concept of musical
meaning’ (29). By ‘restoring a little more rigour’ (39), Nattiez means his own brand of
paradigmatic analysis, a technique once in vogue but whose ‘objectivity’ has been judged by
history to be disproportionate to the triviality of its results (‘profoundly tautological’, in
Agawu’s concise epitaph).1 With no irony or self-consciousness, Nattiez cites Boulez’s
verdict on analysis: ‘Inferences that are false but full of future possibilities are more useful
than those that are correct but sterile’ (76).
Boulez is the contemporary cultural figure with whom Nattiez most identifies, and
the collection includes two homages: ‘Boulez Structuralist’, and ‘Boulez in the Post-
modern Era: The Time of Répons’ (the final chapter). The flow from Structuralism
(= Orpheus) to Time (= Chronos), epitomized by Boulez’s rejection of early integralist
experiments such as Structures pour deux pianos for the more listener-friendly road to
Répons, implicitly parallels Nattiez’s own advance from structuralist analysis of the neutral
level to the ‘poietic’ and ‘esthesic’ concerns of his recent writings, Nattiez taking care not to
draw the analogy himself. The parallel is intriguing, but false. Nattiez never repudiates the
neutral level (whether it is ‘structuralist’ is another matter). Instead, he accommodates
‘Time’ (always capitalized theatrically) simply by hedging the neutral level with the
‘poietic’ and ‘esthesic’, categories to which Nattiez arrogates the entirety of (‘postmodern’)
performative and hermeneutic orientations. These are blunt tools – it is like triumphantly
demonstrating that the world has three dimensions – except that Nattiez’s gambit is queasily
self-serving. Everything with which he agrees is held to vindicate his theory of tripartition.
Thus a dense chapter critiquing Hanslick’s formalism, which makes heavy weather of
Kant (while overlooking the likelier debt to Schopenhauer), trisects Hanslick into
poietic-immanent-esthesic, and casually, yet confusingly, refers to ‘the empirical level
of semiological observation’ (113). Why must feelings be ‘semiological’? Lidov2 and

1 Kofi Agawu, Playing with Signs (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991), 12.
2 David Lidov, ‘Mind and Body in Music’, Semiotica 66 (1987), 69–97.

https://doi.org/10.1017/S1478572207000503 Published online by Cambridge University Press 281

 282 Reviews

Cumming3 explain why and how with great care; the least the Nattiez of 1975 (the essay’s
original date) could have done is unpack the issues. Breathtakingly, the Répons chapter carves
up the post-war avant-garde between an ‘electro-acoustic music, locked into its esthesico-
centric orientation’, and the ‘poietico-centric obsession of serialism’. In so far as Boulez
reconciles these extremes, he succeeds ‘in re-establishing not just a meeting but actually a
fusion, according to the modalities specific to different parameters, between the two poles
characteristic of any symbolic form, the poietic and the esthesic’ (275).
By no means everything here is bad. An essay on ‘Lévi-Strauss and Brăiloiu’ (a little-
known folklorist) traces the structuralist’s ‘denial of time’ (60) to the assumptions of the
Berlin School of ethnomusicology – particularly the latter’s prejudice against the composer.
Two chapters on Glenn Gould throw up some arresting ideas; for instance, comparing
Gould’s control-freakery and idiosyncratic tastes (e.g. the preference for Orlando Gibbons
over Beethoven or Mozart) with the aesthetic issues implied by Van Meegeren’s Vermeer
forgeries and Strauss’s Four Last Songs – all phenomena that are ‘out of time’. Two chapters
on Wagner show Nattiez’s scholarship at its best, and an ‘intermezzo’ on ‘Memory and
Forgetting: Wagner/Proust/Boulez’ puts together an amusingly whimsical conversation
between the three artists. Whether these essays add up to a discourse on structure versus
temporality is another matter. The figures of ‘Chronos’ or ‘Time’ pop up at the ends of
sections or chapters rather portentously: ‘. . . the musical work [. . .] succeeds in thwarting
Chronos’ (53); ‘. . . the inexorable march of Time’ (71); ‘Time abandons them to the
disquieting vicissitudes of posterity’ (83). Just as extrinsic, if not intrusive, is the precious
superstructure mapped on to the chapter plan: ‘Prelude’ (Chapter 1), Allegro con brio
(Chapters 2–4), Allegretto (Chapters 5–7), and so on.
Overall, the collection suffers from the occupational hazards afflicting many semiotic
(or ‘semiological’) approaches. The principal danger is that the structuralist high ground
spatializes everything the semiotician surveys into so much bricolage. Pieces, styles, compos-
ers, schools of thought, philosophical ideas, historical periods – all these phenomena are
reified into ‘facts’, susceptible of being schematized by the theory. Does Hanslick’s Vom
Musikalisch-Schönen really ‘up-end Western aesthetics’ (108)? Is it truly the case, as Nattiez
claims, that Gadamer’s hermeneutic method overstates the ‘continuity of tradition’ (132)?
Can we believe, with Nattiez, that ‘in the positivist tradition of long standing among
historians of literature and music a work has one meaning, that of the writer or the
composer’ (133)? Where is this ‘positivist tradition’? Most serious is the category of ‘struc-
turalism’ itself. Chapter 1 derives it, correctly, from phonology. Yet the paean, in Chapter 3
(‘Boulez Structuralist’), to Répons as a work ‘organized at every level, morphological and
rhetorical’, as well as to the heroic purposefulness of Boulez’s stylistic ‘evolution’ (80),
celebrates a Romantic organicist topos. Structuralism and organicism comprise very different
takes on formal unity. Despite setting up a ‘hard’ definition of the former in his expositionary
‘Prelude’, Nattiez seems happy to let the categories slide from chapter to chapter. Strangely,

3 Naomi Cumming, The Sonic Self: Musical Subjectivity and Signification (Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
2000).

https://doi.org/10.1017/S1478572207000503 Published online by Cambridge University Press

 Reviews 283

a similar slippage is observed by Georgina Born in her study of IRCAM (a text cited by
Nattiez, but not actually engaged with).4 Born remarks that artists and technicians at
IRCAM, including Boulez himself, tend to lapse into old-fashioned biological metaphors of
unity and evolution when describing their music, terms wholly out of kilter with the centre’s
aggressively modernist, computer-driven discourse. Such disjunction is one thing within the
practices of an institution, quite another within a book with any claim to intellectual
responsibility or coherence.
These contradictions are not an issue for Nattiez. Having set up his system, he is content
to let the cultural units rattle around the box, treating ideas in the same mechanical manner
he counts features within analysis of the neutral level. Thus Nattiez’s surprising late embrace
of cognitivism – drawing on Irène Deliège’s theory of ‘extraction of indices’ (cues) to explain
Répons’s ‘perceptual functionality’ (274) – is explained as an extension of esthesis, irrespec-
tive of the huge methodological chasms between semiology and music psychology. Perhaps
all these problems flow ultimately from Nattiez’s curious reluctance to confront tonality,
which is why his paradigmatic method – gauged to monophony or motive – has been eclipsed
by the suppler techniques of Agawu and Hatten. Boulez is a master of harmony and timbre,
and yet Nattiez’s technical contribution in his last chapter is a paradigmatic analysis of the
introduction of Répons, tracking the focal pitches of Boulez’s ‘overall line’ (265). The author
of The Battle of Chronos and Orpheus should now go away and write The Marriage of Cadmus
and Harmony (apologies to Roberto Calasso).
Recommendation: of interest only to those with a taste for wordy essays in the grand
French style. ‘Applied semiology’ this is not.

Michael Spitzer

4 Georgina Born, Rationalizing Culture: IRCAM, Boulez, and the Institutionalization of the Musical Avant-Garde
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995).

https://doi.org/10.1017/S1478572207000503 Published online by Cambridge University Press