Have you ever listened to people talk about music in a way that echoed to nothing in your mind ?
Have you ever felt that despite sharing close musical cultures with other people, your representations and perceptions of music seemed
unmixable ?
I consider music mostly by its energy, aka what tickles my guts. I represent music as pure mattered energy, such as an unsculpted piece of rock, of liquid or even a blob depending on what reaches my ears. It would be vibrating and pulsing to the rhythm
and the kicks of the music, inflating or drying out with it while its texture could come from the sound of a crystal like guitar or the warmth of a synth. When I listen to some friends of mine, they talk about music as if they were
visiting an egyptian temple. It's all about the construction, it is a path leading from one space to another, through long transitionnal corridors or brutal thresholds whith possible ranges of columns as leitmotivs. Everything works
according to what came before and what will come after, how they stand between them and how they evolve from one to another. I just boosted those different appreciations of music for the sake of my discourse (I wouldn't believe that
energy doesn't come at all to people's ears and mind when they listen to Joy Division). Still, given those different perceptions and representations of music : what ground support do we have to share and dialog upon ?
Besides being united by the science of acoustics, I believe that music and architecture are very intricate. Although this link is not spontaneous to me, I can easily understand it. The more I tried to dig into it, the manier connexions
appeared and the more convenient this parallel seemed to be. Architecture and music offer very similar phenomenons and systems of creation. We mostly represent our world visually. I believe that the human mind can hardly concieve space
without architecture as : we live mostly in build and human-made spaces and we tend to concieve human centered worlds. It's like a snake eating its own tail. It implies that we are likely to compose and concieve space according to
an order that we know since we were born, which is inherited from centuries of geometrical human architecture. We would create it “en regard” of us. On another hand, scuplpture tackles space differently with broader range of possible
forms and a more attention accorded to dimensions such as texture. Sculpture could thus tend more to the energetic representation that I was refering to in the beginning. That being said, I will refer to architecture as a general,
broad practice of creating “humanized” spaces, including architecture and sculpture and absorbing mental and virtual representations. Eventually, I don't think that we should oppose an “architectural” representation of music to a “sculptural”
one. To find a ground on which to share, this text is more about parallels, and offerings from going back and forth between those arts and the understandings that one can have of them.
I) Listening to architectures
1)Different
arts, same fathom
I believe in a “hidden core”, an unseen structure, common to music and architecture. First of all, they share the same fleeingness, they are most of the time unpossible to grasp completely. The architectural
scale and its inside/outside opposition makes it hard to apprehendtwhile the immediacy of sound keeps music slipping away. By essence, music and architecture don't include questions of figuration or abstraction, they are. A fresco
can be painted on walls or lyrics can depict a context, “real” conversation samples can occupy a space in a song. But the question of figuration usually stands on the side. It can hardly be as central as it could be in a painting or
a sculpture for instance. Besides they rarely depict reality. They are often fantasized pasts and myths. Architecture and music have no reason to depict the real as they are both in their own ways arts of the presence.
2)Different
arts, connected dimensions The dimensions of music and architecture are sound and space. They are opened and penetrate into each other. We often visit spaces as we listen to music. If one can wander in a house freely, many major architectures
such as cathedrals, temples, museums and so on are visited while following a more or less pre-determined path ( for the sake of historical conservation, or for the sake of a ritual or a scenography). Therefore, many architectures are
concieved and experienced with a linearity that reminds of the experience of music. Besides, if sound is defined by its wave, it is conditionned by its support (air, no sound in space) and thus its surrounding, as sounds echoes and
resonates. This is a major aspect of music production and recording. Even on digital plateforms, panoramic, width, echo and reverb are basic tools used to locate and give the track its presence in the song. Through sound recording,
the surrounding space becomes a part of music. As Pierre Damien Huyghe explained in “société service et utilités” the listening of music also depends on the device it's broadcasted from, the quality of the baffles, the equalization,
the shape of the room it resonnates in and many other factors. I would consider those variables as the possible steps aside one can make while visiting a monument : not changing the path but the angle, the point of view. Eventually
I don't know which language you use to talk about music but I do it mostly in french. And it appears at least in my native language that using spatial terms is convenient. They're the terms that we use anyway. Directly translated we
would say that music can go up or down or takes off. Globally the term drop is heavily and globally affiliated with electronic music. I believe that those shared vocabularies whitness a similarity between those two arts.
3)Different
arts, same phenomenons In terms of pure phenomenons and perception, think about the slight confusion when you drift from one room to another with very different proportions, such as roofs heights for instance. Do you remember this
slight vertigo, or this slight claustro-uneasiness depending on your direction ? Besides, can you reminisce any kind of space you've been in, where you felt a profound elation without understanding why ? To me, it usually occurs in
cloisters or in the alps where I was born and raised (which are somehow an absolute form of matter influxed with energy). Now have you also experienced the joy of discovering a new song that peculiarly, deeply touches you and offers
a moment of grace ? Do you reckon when this song sounded like nothing you ever heard before? When you can't even decipher it ? And have you ever been lost in a building you didn't know yet after taking too many turns ? Have you felt
this elation at the very same time ? I hope that you understand where I just tried to lead you.