El odio a la música: Diez pequeños tratados

by Pascal Quignard

No podemos no oír. Oímos desde antes de nacer hasta mientras morimos. Oír se dijo en latín obaudire, que en castellano termino dando "obedecer". ¿Podemos no obedecer a la música? Hoy parece haber música en todas partes, continuamente, en los taxis, en los restaurantes, en la calle, en las casas. La sorpresa es el silencio, y el vértigo. Hoy, ademas, en el siglo veinte, por primera vez, si escuchamos música, escuchamos la de otro siglo, no la que hoy se escribe y a veces se ejecuta. Considerando lo anterior -y mucho mucho más-, Pascal Quignard indaga en las raíces de la música, en su invención, su creación, en el modo como nos afecta y se la ha utilizado y utiliza. Hace esto recurriendo a una erudición asombrosa y a una disciplina intelectual acreditada en decenas de libros publicados; disciplina y entusiasmo erudito que van acompañados -y esto es poco habitual y decisivo- por una imaginación aguda y flexible que le permite establecer conexiones inesperadas y generalmente insospechadas. El odio a la música esta construido, ademas, "musicalmente", por ejemplo con temas que se insinúan, se anuncian o se desarrollan y que posteriormente se retoman, conectan, se replican y complican. Como otros libros de Pascal Quignard, este necesita de una lectura pausada y reiterada, obliga a relectura. El resultado: todo un territorio y un horizonte olvidados, poco dichos, en rigor nuevos.

Genres: Music, Nonfiction, Philosophy, Essays, France, Art, Ebooks

296 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1996

About the author

Romancier, poète et essayiste, Pascal Quignard est né en 1948. Après des études de philosophie, il entre aux Éditions Gallimard où il occupe les fonctions successives de lecteur, membre du comité de lecture et secrétaire général pour le développement éditorial. Il enseigne ensuite à l’Université de Vincennes et à l’École Pratique des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales. Il a fondé le festival d’opéra et de théâtre baroque de Versailles, qu’il dirige de 1990 à 1994. Par la suite, il démissionne de toutes ses fonctions pour se consacrer à son travail d’écrivain. L’essentiel de son oeuvre est disponible aux Éditions Gallimard, en collection blanche et en Folio.

===


Pascal Quignard is a French writer born in Verneuil-sur-Avre, Eure. In 2002 his novel Les Ombres errantes won the Prix Goncourt, France's top literary prize. Terrasse à Rome (Terrasse in Rome), received the French Academy prize in 2000, and Carus was awarded the "Prix des Critiques" in 1980.
One of Quignard's most famous works is the eighty-four "Little Treatises", first published in 1991 by Maeght. His most popular book is probably Tous les matins du monde (All the Mornings in the World), about 17th-century viola de gamba player Marin Marais and his teacher, Sainte-Colombe, which was adapted for the screen in 1991, by director Alain Corneau. Quignard wrote the screenplay of the film, in collaboration with Corneau. Tous les matins du monde, starring Jean-Pierre Marielle, Gérard Depardieu and son Guillaume Depardieu, was a tremendous success in France and sold 2 million tickets in the first year, and was subsequently distributed in 31 countries. The soundtrack was certified platinum (500,000 copies) and made musician Jordi Savall an international star.
The film was released in 1992 in the US.
Quignard has also translated works from the Latin (Albucius, Porcius Latro), Chinese (Kong-souen Long), and Greek (Lycophron) languages.

Reviews

[Vit Babenco · Rating 5 out of 5]

There is music for everything in the world…

Mousikè – says a verse by Hesiod – pours small libations of oblivion on sorrow. Sorrow is to the soul in which memories build up what dregs are to the amphora filled with wine.

There is music to reduce sorrow and there is music to enhance sorrow…

Shamans were inspired by animals, priests by immolated humans, bards by the muses. Always victims. Works, however modern they pretend to be, are always more untimely than the times that welcome or reject them.

Pascal Quignard compares musical instruments with weapons – instruments of death… And sounds of music are similar to the sound of the bowstring…

Gods are not seen but heard: in thunder, in torrents, in clouds, in the sea. They are like voices. The bow is endowed with a form of speech, in distance, invisibility, and air. The voice is initially that of the string that vibrates before the instrument is divided and arranged into music, hunting and war.

Music is inescapable… Music unites us and music makes us obey…

Undelimitable and invisible, music appears to be the voice of everyone. There is perhaps no music that does not group together, because there is no music that does not at once mobilize breath and blood.

The Hatred of Music is somewhere between Imaginary Lives by Marcel Schwob and Reader’s Block by David Markson and following Jorge Luis Borges Pascal Quignard continues to erase borderlines between fiction and fact, between imagination and reality, between actuality and dream.

Being born serves no purpose and knows no end: certainly not death.
There is no end because death does not finish. Death does not terminate: it interrupts.

There is music for the beginning and there is music for the end. There is music of joy and there is music of mourning.

[Jim Coughenour · Rating 5 out of 5]

The title is provocative, even disturbing. How can anyone hate music? Some types of music, sure – but music itself? Even the archetypal misanthrope Nietzsche insisted "Without music, life would be a mistake." But Quignard is serious.

The confusion coagulates when one discovers that Quignard founded the International Festival of Baroque Opera and Theatre at Versailles; that he's the author of Tous les Matins du Monde, the novel made into a film of the same name with a resplendent soundtrack. But then, in 1994 according to the translators' afterward, he "abruptly decided to renounce all his professional activities" – and two years later published this stringent, enraged little book, now beautifully translated by Matthew Amos and Fredrik Rönnbäck.

I read The Hatred of Music two months ago. I'm still not sure what to make of it, only that it's the most opaque, most fascinating book I've ever read on music. I'm tempted to call it a mystical text because it demands (or did of me) an intense participation on the part of its reader, who must allow its apophatic logic to emerge behind the words, at some cost. Call it Orphic initiation. Each chapter offers a "treatise" on some aspect of music. The third treatise- "On my death" – is very short. It begins: "No music before, during, or after the cremation." Yes, he's serious. He hates music. But this doesn't mean what it seems to mean. There is something ascetic and terrifying behind this passion.

I refuse to summarize or quote further. Alex Ross wrote a fine review for The New Yorker, but if you mean to read this book, I suggest you read the review after. Translating Quignard's meditation into a streamlined argument risks eliminating its texture and the hard insights that emerge page by recalcitrant page. He that hath ears to hear, let him hear.

[julieta · Rating 3 out of 5]

Tengo la impresión de que Quignard tuvo algún tipo de crisis con la música, algo que llega a mencionar en uno de sus "tratados" (sigo sin entender por qué los llama así), y desde el título pone la luz desde un lugar muy poco halagador para la música en general.

En realidad se trata de fragmentos, menciones a distintos personajes, libros, historias, anécdotas, en donde llega al punto: la música es un ataque a los oídos, de la cual no nos podemos defender, porque nuestros oídos están abiertos.

En lo personal, siempre he visto la música con mejores ojos, por lo cual a momentos me parecía pretencioso y exagerado, pero tiene algo entretenido, sus referencias a Homero, sus anécdotas sacadas de aquí y de allá.

Un poco fragmentado, pero al final tiene onda.

[Alejandro Teruel · Rating 4 out of 5]

I first came across the seventh treatise of this book, the treatise whose title shares the title of the book, and which is about the (ab)use of music in Nazi concentration camps. I was absolutely stunned by Quignard's apothegmatical and poetic style, and his bleak, somber and relentless tapestry of nightmarish arguments:

Of all the arts, music is the only one to have collaborated in the extermination of Jews organized by the Germans between 1933 and 1945.

In a sense the treatise transposes Goya's The horrors of war into sound. In the concentration camps, Jewish musicians were organized them into orchestras that played classical music to march Jews back from forced labor, and to march them into the gas chambers. One of these orchestras, whose conductor, Simon Laks, survived Auschwitz recalls playing at the women's "hospital":

At first, all the women were overcome by tears, in particular the Polish women, to the point where their sobbing drowned out the music. Later, cries replaced the tears. The sick cried: "Stop! Stop! Get out! Leave! Let us die in peace!"
It happened that Simon Laks was the only musician who who understood the meaning of the Polish words that the sick women shrieked. The musicians looked at Simon Laks, who gestured at them. And they withdrew.
Simon Laks said that he never thought until then that music could do such harm.

Having been shocked by the seventh treatise, I searched for the book to find out how Quignard had built up to such a grisly and repulsive indictment of music. The first treatises are an erudite ramble through forgotten etymologies, cruel Classical myths about the origins of music inexorably linking linking music and violence, and shamanism, all reminiscent of James Frazer's archaizing The Golden Bough anthropology:

To hear is to obey. To listen in Latin is obaudire. Obaudire has survived in French as obéir. Hearing, audentia, is an obaudire, is an obedience.
[...]
The musician Marsyas, having picked up the flute thrown away by Athena, was bound to a pine and emasculated, then flayed [...] Orpheus is emasculated and torn apart. Music and the marvelous voice, the domesticated voice, castration, are bound together.

Tantalizing but elusive tidbits are flushed out from Quignard's dense allusive forest of knowledge, but it is heavy going -this is that very French conflation of philosophy and classical studies wrapped up in prose so rich in metaphors that it is more akin to poetry, hinting at meanings and logics beyond those of strict reason. I do not claim to understand such conflations but I confess to finding them strangely bewitching.

I would recommend reading two treatises first, the seventh (The hatred of music) and the ninth(To disenchant), which is a splendid fulmination against the overblown pervasiveness of music in contemporary life:

Humans have become assailed by music, besieged by music.
[...]
Fascism is related to the loudspeaker. It grew thanks to "radio-phony". Then it was relayed by "tele-vision".

In the course of the twentieth century, a historical, fascist, industrial, electric logic -whatever epithet one chooses to apply- took hold of the menacing sounds. Music, through the increase of [...] its reproduction and its audience, from then on crossed the limit that separated it from noise,

In my opinion, these two treatises are the heart, crux and culmination of the book and only if you find them interesting should you venture into the rest of the book -and then reread these two treatises duly armed with whatever spoils you have been able to wrest from the rambling introitos and excursus.

[Ignacio Irulegui · Rating 4 out of 5]

¿Qué puede la música? Bajo su halo seductor, desde el inicio de los tiempos, el sonido se ha mostrado como un fenómeno de atracción: no podemos renunciar a él porque su insistencia invasiva es irrenunciable. Pascal Quignard aprovecha este motivo argumental y lo traslada hacia sus diez 'tratados': breves ensayos que analizan los matices, las variaciones del oír en la tiranía de la música; cómo nos conquista, qué efectos produce en nuestras psiquis, qué usos se le ha dado y se le dan aún: tal es el interés exploratorio del autor francés.
Sus armas son una profunda erudición de la tradición clásica y el trabajo delicadamente poético de su prosa. Quizá una de las características más destacables de este libro (hay varias) sea el método de pensamiento de Quignard, cuya gracia intelectual se luce por la calidad de las conexiones inesperadas que crea, relacionando conceptos en base a su origen etimológico para componer, así, el trazado de una significación peculiar donde las palabras se emparentan unas con otras y engendran el vigor semántico del des/ocultamiento.
Ensayo de intensa vocación creativa, articulado en múltiples referencias a la cultura grecolatina, El odio a la música es un tejido de voces que, convocadas por la poética intelectual de Quignard, logran provocar una iluminación sagaz y novedosa sobre el fenómeno que aborda.

[Tomas Serrien · Rating 2 out of 5]

Mmm this is a highly speculative book about music. Some interesting thoughts, but in general it sounded more like a frustrated man writing difficult sentences. Off course music can be used in different violent contexts. He said ‘music was the only art to have been an instrument in the Nazis’ extermination of the Jews.’ Okay but does that proof anything about the ontology of music? And 'oh wait, what about Riefenstahl?!

Music is a meaning in human experiences. If you want to understand so called ‘violent’ tendencies in sound/music, you have to focus on the context where it was experienced and on the particular human being who is processing the sounds. Telling some random stories and myths about how music was misused in the past and connect this with some linguistic statements about hearing as a fundamental servile activity isn’t enough to make a provocative statement that ‘music is evil in itself’. An advice: read the excellent/summative review of Alex Ross in The New Yorker instead of slogging through this book. But still I want to thank mister Quignard for the inspiration he gave me to write something about evil satanic music! Mayhem!

[L'aura · Rating 3 out of 5]

Granted, you won't be spared some weird shit at first. But if you can get through the first contemptous, erudite, obscure and overlong essay, which I honestly can't promise you will, the rest of it is worth the struggle. The book's concept is fairly simple, so simple in fact that most of us barely ever thought about it: ears don't have eyelids, so music just sort of happens to us. It's aggressive and inherently inegalitarian, which means it has a power that men (and other animals) can't resist nor protect themselves from. Some very bad people have known and taken advantage of this since the beginning of time: A few fairly disturbing essays deal with the use of music concentration camps made, and those are definitely the mostr striking pages this book has to offer. Ultimately, you won't have to agree with Quignard. But he'll sure make you think for a while.

[Tony · Rating 1 out of 5]

The Hatred of Music has an irresistible back story. The author, Pascal Quignard, was renowned in the field of baroque music when "in 1994 he abruptly resigned from all of his professional administrative activities, both musical and literary." He proceeded to write Hatred "in the wake of this resignation."

You'll forgive me for taking the editor at his word and expecting an explanation, won't you? Here it is – here is why this early-music maestro called it quits: "Lips that tremble from cold in winter. Consul Marcus Tullius Cicerco's trementia labra. Words themselves tremble when the lips that pronounce them tremble. The little doll of hot breath itself trembles in the cold of winter. Lips, words, and senses. Sexes and faces. Breaths and souls." (22)

Got that?

When I gave up reading Hatred, I was satisfied that Quignard quit a good job less because he had had some dreadful epiphany about music and more because he is a supercilious, strange, French man. This book is unmetered, unrhymed, unthemed poetry. In other words, it is gibberish. It's none of my business, but I will venture that a nonzero number of the ecstatic reviews of Hatred are inspired by the same species of self-regard that inflicted this weird assortment of words on us.

Some things may be better left in French.

[Eulate · Rating 4 out of 5]

El odio a la música, un título que denuncia hasta qué punto la música puede volverse abominable para quien más la ama. Otro, no recuerdo ahora quién, aseguraba que el infierno no es una hoguera eterna, sino una estancia cómoda y agradable que tiene por techo y paredes un panal de altavoces con músicas encadenadas y sinfín.
Tan melindrosos con todas las formas de contaminación y nadie parece reparar ni apenas se queja de la contaminación musical, como si la consideración implícita de "arte" no ensuciara o como si lo que afecta sólo al oído fuese cosa menor en comparación con lo que agrede a los demás sentidos: desaliño, basuras, cochambre, pudrición, fetidez, pestilencia... Pues así con la música ambiental: un guarreo constante e ineludible, no solo en bares y restaurantes, sino en casi todos los establecimientos comerciales: supermercados, grandes almacenes, gimnasios, tiendas de todo género, las mal llamadas zonas de ocio... No se comprende por qué está tan desprestigiada la amabilidad del silencio, como si los ambientes desprovistos de banda sonora fuesen perjudiciales a cualquier tipo de negocio. La música como ruido innecesario es una cruzada personal en la que me encuentro muy solo, en la que, afortunadamente, Pascal Quignard me acompaña.

[Imelda · Rating 5 out of 5]

Este es otro de los libros a los que he llegado gracias a que me gusta leer los artículos de una Revista.

Es un libro fabuloso. El tema a tratar (nada más y nada menos que la amada música), invita a la curiosidad, desde el título ¿"El Odio a la Música"? ¿cómo alguien podría odiarla? es sin duda como un pellizco que nos dice no debemos dejarlo pasar.

La música, nuestra amada música, nos la muestra desde varias perspectivas, algunas que ni siquiera se nos hubiese ocurrido porque ¿cómo se puede odiar a la´música? Algunos no soportamos ciertos géneros, pero de ahí a odiar la música en general nos parece descabellado, bueno, este libro nos abre un panorama que quizá jamás pensamos podría existir.

Una gran obra.

[GilbertO CJ]

Creo que hay una propuesta muy radical y muy necesaria cuando Quignard habla acerca de desembrujar la obediencia. Y es que la música, en tanto sonido, tiene una capacidad fundamentalmente fuerte para invadir, para acompañar a la crueldad, incluso para enfatizar el horror. Lo que más da miedo es que la música persiste, porque es canto emulado del mundo. Quizá lo más sorprendente es que él mismo empieza desde el ejercicio de escritura, en el aforismo que marca un ritmo y respeta el silencio. Real que leer a Quignard es aprender a escuchar, a dejarse integrar a un sonido original, antes del ruido y antes del lenguaje que nos escinde. Un duro la vdd

[MaryEllen Clark · Rating 3 out of 5]

A series of ten treatises, free-form meditations on the dangers of music in our time. I'm not sure I really understood it all, in fact I know I didn't but I was fascinated by the basic premise. The Ear has no Eyelid, thus we are constantly bombarded by music/sound whether we want it or not. Music in earlier times happened once, not present on-demand in many formats everywhere, it was looked forward to, existed once then not again. The hum of electricity, ever present...how the Nazis used music in the death camps, going back to the Sirens who tortured Odysseus.

[York · Rating 3 out of 5]

Un libro con fragmentos brillantes, pero que se reparten entre destellos muy separados entre sí por una serie de "tratados" que no llegan a ensayos y se sienten más como soliloquios.

No es terrible el resultado final y algunas reflexiones son verdaderas perlas para quienes vivimos obsesionados con la música.

Pero no es una lectura recomendable para el lector casual. Ni remotamente.

El eje esencial de la música es la obediencia, con esta alma en el compás del acompañamiento, como experiencia íntima y grupal. Son lindas reflexiones. Y ya.

[Ed Jefferson · Rating 4 out of 5]

all these essays contain an absurd amount of knowledge, of human thought. the language with which quignard scrutinizes the nature of sound is erudite, dizzying, almost primitive, and carries with it a timeless wonder that can be felt, for example, through the descriptions of the nocturnal, of silence, and of the human traditions that have long been buried in the sands of history.

[Desirée · Rating 5 out of 5]

Si la vergüenza nace con este crepúsculo de la noche que es el alba, entonces el silencio es lo que llega con el día.

Te amo Quignard y te amo Sergio por motivarme a leer cosas densas, retenerme entre paredones amarillos en Morelia y desafiarme a analizar cada rincón del mundo

[Michael Cervantes · Rating 3 out of 5]

I assume this guy is a fan of Cage

[Carlos Torres · Rating 4 out of 5]

Una delicia. Lo encontré y leí traducido al español. Gran ensayo de vasto conocimiento y delicado lirismo a lo largo de la historia y la mitología. Grande Quignard.

[Alain · Rating 2 out of 5]

sans doute pour ceux qui n'arrivent pas a mettre le bouton off a une musique qu'ils entendent? pas inintéressant comme réflexion mais lassablement negative?

[Pablo López Astudillo · Rating 5 out of 5]

un gozo leer eruditos, un gozo

[Asmodey · Rating 3 out of 5]

Сборник заметок, с расплывающимися чернилами. Автор заинтересовал своими мыслями и познаниями в мифологии. Рука не поднимается поставить 2 звезды.

[Alexandra · Rating 3 out of 5]

no me gustó tanto como pensé que me iba a gustar <\3

[Neen · Rating 5 out of 5]

A difficult read. Quicnard is hermetic in his way of writing. Though I found his message profound and it resonated with me a lot

[Zak · Rating 3 out of 5]

A treatise of good essays and maxims written by a surly musician on why music is an insidious, persistent, and existential threat. Ears have no eyelids.

[Claire Binkley · Rating 3 out of 5]

Haters are going to hate and you can't let that let that take that away from your good life. That is what I learned from this book.

[Phèdre · Rating 2 out of 5]

thought it was an essay. well. I'm disappointed.

[Chris]

Quignard's ten treatises on his hatred of music, after a lifetime of loving it. It consists of stories, legends, aphorisms, and thoughts on society and culture.
Though not entirely, the author expresses often that, given the ubiquity of music, everywhere in our lives, it has become meaningless.
Reading many of these treatises, I thought of my reading of Kundera, who, like Quidnard, will state a condition that has occurred occasionally as if it is an absolute and then, expound on the philosophy engendered by that now absolute state.
There is a lot of interesting comments on music, listening to music and playing music in this book.
I read the first two treatises and was totally baffled as to the authors purpose or approach before I skipped ahead to the Afterword which put the author's life and language in sharper focus. It was much easier to comprehend after reading the afterword.

[Dolores · Rating 1 out of 5]

The date listed is not when I finished reading this book…rather it is the date I gave up on it. I was intrigued by the title, “The Hatred of Music”, and thought the description sounded very interesting, especially when it mentioned the role of music in the Nazi concentration camps. However I’m afraid I overestimated my intellectual capacity. After reading a few pages, I sadly realized the content was incomprehensible to me. I received my copy from Goodreads First Reads program at no cost….and I’m sorry I let them down.

[Tony · Rating 4 out of 5]

He's serious, but this is a difficult read. The ten treatises are made up a various quotations and assertions. Many can give rise to worthwhile thinking, but the book is not, and apparently not, intended to make a smooth whole. The style or format seems to be what the author and translator call "speculative rhetoric"--an intriguing notion which upon looking it up seems deeply lost in lit major rhetoric itself.

[Brenda · Rating 5 out of 5]

Increibles reflexiones sobre la musica, el mundo sonoro, el silencio y todo lo vincular que lo rodea. Diez ensayos alucinantes... me lo lei en un solo dia, porque no podia soltarlo.

[Rand]

Perhaps.