The exponents of the serial doctrine will no doubt reply that they have abandoned the first level to replace it by the second, but they make up for the loss by the invention of a third level, which they count on to perform the function previously fulfilled by the second.
Thus, they maintain, they still have two levels. We have had in the past the ages of monody and polyphony; serial music is to be understood as the beginning of a «polyphony of polyphonies»; through it the previous horizontal and vertical readings are integrated in an «oblique» reading. But in spite of its logical coherence, this argument misses the essential point: the fact is that, in the case of any language, the first articulation is immovable, except within very narrow limits.
And it is certainly not interchangeable. The respective functions of the two forms of articulation cannot be defined in the abstract and in relation to each other. The elements raised to the level of a meaningful function of a new order by the second articulation must arrive at this point already endowed with the required properties: that is, they must be already stamped with, and for, meaning. This is only possible because the elements, in addition to being drawn from nature, have already been systematized at the first level of articulation: the hypothesis is faulty, unless it is accepted that the system takes into account certain properties of a natural system which creates a priori conditions of communication among beings similar in nature.
In other words, the first level consists of real but unconscious relations which, because of these two attributes, arc able to function without being known or correctly interpreted.
In my opinion, this long passage plays on a few sophisms. Its first argument could be restated as follows: serial music is not a language because all language rests on two irreplaceable articulations (that is, the parameters of composition cannot be freely chosen, as serial music pretends they can be; there are words, already endowed with meaning, and there are phonemes, and that’s that no other solution is possible).
Clearly, the argument could be turned around as follows: verbal language is only one form of language, since there are other forms (such as musical language) that are based on other systems of articulation—systems that are freer and capable of different kinds of organization. Pierre Schaeffer answers this argument indirectly but with remarkable acumen in his Traite des objets musicaux, when he remarks how, in the Klangfarbenmelodie, the optional variant of a previous system, timbre, can assume the function of a phoneme—that is, the function of a distinctive feature, of a significant opposition.’
The second argument of the passage goes as follows: the strict and unmodifiable relation between the two levels of articulation is based on a few constants of communication, a few a priori forms of communication—what elsewhere LeviStrauss terms «L’Esprit,» which, in the final analysis, is none other than the Structure as Urcode.
At this point, the only possible answer (which would swing the argument away from what threatens to become structural metaphysics and back within the context of a structuralist method) is this: if the idea of a Code determining all Codes is valid, there is no obvious reason why this should be so hastily identified with one of its historical messages—that is, the system of attractions resting on the principle of tonality—or why the historical existence of such a system should force one to recognize within its parameters the parameters of all possible musical communication.
LeviStrauss’s objections sound particularly convincing when they give way to emotional appeals:
Only ideologically can the system be compared to a language, since unlike articulate speech, which is inseparable from its physiological or even physical foundation, it is a system adrift, after cutting the cables by which it was attached. It is like a sailless ship, driven out to sea by its captain, who has grown tired of its being used only as a pontoon, and who is privately convinced that by subjecting life aboard to the rules of an elaborate protocol, he will prevent the crew from thinking nostalgically either of their home port or of their ultimate destination.’
On the other hand, confronted by such a cry of alarm (affecting both the listener of serial music and the lover of nonrepresentational painting). one cannot help suspecting that the lament of the structuralist—who should be the administrator of a metalanguage capable of speaking about all historical languages taken in their relativity—is that of the survivor of a historically dated linguistic usage, who, unable to relinquish his own modes of communication, makes the mistake of confusing his own private language with a metalanguage. In other words, he confuses idiolect with metalanguage, a rather awkward move for a semiotician.
But LeviStrauss does not hesitate to make this leap: music and mythology are both cultural forms that appeal to mental structures shared by different listeners. And before we have time to agree with this general principle, we are once again face to face with an arbitrary extrapolation: these shared common structures are the same ones that are challenged by serial thought—that is, the structures of the tonal system (as well as of representational painting). Once he has completed this last identification. LeviStrauss can draw his final deduction: the fact that structural thought recognizes common mental structures means that it is aware of the series of determinations that act upon the mind, and hence that it is materialistic. Conversely. the fact that serial thought wants to get rid of the tonal system (which represents common mental structures) means chat it sets itself up as a conscious product of the mind and an assertion of its liberty, and therefore that it is idealistic. Conclusion:
If in the public mind there is frequently confusion between structuralism, idealism, and formalism, structuralism has only to be confronted with true manifestations of idealism and formalism for its own deterministic and realistic inspiration to become clearly manifest.’
Of Generative Structures
For a proper understanding of LeviStrauss’s arguments and of all their emotional recesses, we must remember how linguistics and ethnological structuralism on one side, and contemporary music on the other, have come to view the question of the universality and determinativeness of the laws of communication.
After centuries of naĜve belief in the natural foundations of the tonal system (the laws of perception and the physiological structure of hearing), music (and, with it, most contemporary arts), availing itself of a more sophisticated historical and ethnographic consciousness, has reached the conclusion that, in fact, the laws of tonality are only the representations of cultural conventions—since different cultures, both in time and space, seem to have conceived of different laws.
Similarly, after modern culture surrendered (following the discovery of America) to the evidence that languages, along with other social systems, differ from population to population and from time to time, structuralism—as well as other linguistic and ethnological schools—is today aiming at the discovery of constant structures, simple, universal articulations capable of generating all the various systems that they underlie.
It is therefore quite logical that whereas structural thought tends to recognize «universals,» serial thought prefers to denounce them as «pseudouniversals,» mere historical phenomena.
At this point, one should wonder whether these methodological differences reflect distinct philosophical perspectives, or whether in fact they merely represent two different approaches to the same problem.
Let’s assume that the notion of a universal structure of communication, an Urcode, is only a working hypothesis. From an epistemological point of view, a solution such as this would eliminate all ontological and metaphysical ambiguity, while, from a heuristic point of view, it would not prevent an analysis of the processes of communication from revealing the presence of such a structure.
If this were the case, then serial thought (an activity that involves the production of forms rather than the exploration of their ultimate characteristics) would no longer be threatened by structuralist research—in fact, it would potentially imply it, though without having to be concerned with it. Permanent structures may well underlie all modes of communication, but the aim of a serial technique (technique rather than thought—a technique that may imply a vision of the world, without being itself a philosophy) is the construction of new structured realities and not the discovery of eternal structural principles.
For the time being, however, let’s accept the premises of ontolog ical structuralism. The structures of communication revealed by linguistic and ethnological research really exist: they are constant, unmodifiable behaviors of the human mind, possibly even the operative systems of the cerebral apparatus, whose own structures are identical in form to those of physical reality. But if this is the case, structural research should try to uncover the deepest structures, the Structure mitts nihil majus cogitari possit.
Why stop at the structures of tonal music when it would be far more profitable for a scientist to wonder whether in fact there are yet more general structures that include and explain tonal music as well as other kinds of musical logic? Why not think about the deepest generative structures underlying all grammar (including that of tonal music) and all negation of grammar (as implied by atonal music), as well as every selective system that aims at the definition of sounds with distinctive cultural traits in a continuum of noise?
Such research would be precisely what we all expect of a structuralist method, and it would also help explain the historical process that led from Greek, Oriental, and medieval scales to the tempered scale, and from this to the ranges and the constellations of postWebem music. Nor would it have to waste its time formulating a primary system, such as the tonal; rather, it would
