S’exercer pour quoi faire ?

Résumé Fr En

Cet article cherche à préciser le sens de la pratique que Pierre Schaeffer s’efforce de promouvoir dans le Traité des objets musicaux : « s’exercer à mieux entendre ». Le problème posé est le suivant : que signifie l’idée de chercher à mieux entendre quand, comme dans cet ouvrage, et contrairement à la pratique traditionnelle des classes de solfège, les sons que l’on écoute échappent à tout langage musical établi d’avance, et qu’on ne sait donc pas ce qu’il est bon d’entendre en eux ? L’article répond à ce problème en expliquant le but des recherches présentées dans le Traité, et en montrant comment la pratique collective de l’exercice y devient une méthode de recherche expérimentale des valeurs musicales. Cette réponse est ensuite mise en relation avec l’idée que Schaeffer se fait de l’art comme exercice spirituel, ce qui suggère que l’exercice n’est pas seulement un moyen, mais peut-être une fin en soi.

The importance of practicing is often emphasized in the Treatise on Musical Objects. At the book’s beginning, Schaeffer dedicates it to his father, whose precept he transmits: “Work at your instrument.” Throughout the Treatise, he constantly invites the reader to ear training, by the way of two exercises called “translation” and “prose composition”. These exercises consist in describing recorded sounds, and trying to produce sounds fitting a given description. Moreover, he insists on composing experimental works called “studies”, referring to Czerny’s studies for the piano, which are mere exercises rather than true works of art. These scholastic names promise less musical enjoyment than patient learning. Yet a question has to be asked: what is it exactly that should be learnt by the means of these exercises? What kind of competence are we supposed to develop thanks to them? The Treatise offers itself as an invitation to “practicing better hearing”. But at first reading, this formula looks like an enigma. As a matter of fact, no musical language is presupposed in the Treatise, and the music theory developed in this book is intended to be valid for any kind of music, since it only deals with the musical material, which is sound itself, and not with any peculiar way of composing. Consequently, the properties of the sound which must be considered as musically significant are not decided a priori. On the contrary, traditional scholastic ear training is intended to develop the ability to hear some properties of the sound which are important in a given musical language: pitch, harmonic function, etc. Where the musical language is well defined, we can easily understand what better hearing may mean. Where it is not, things are completely different: if we do not already know what deserves musical attention, we can hardly say what kind of hearing is better. My point is that the Treatise itself suggests two answers to those questions. Firstly, Schaeffer states that the exercises have to be practiced collectively. Thanks to that, they are experimental research as much as exercises, and this research is supposed to uncover the conditions to which an audible property of the sound becomes musically significant. Thus, practicing is the way by which we discover what we are practicing for. Secondly, Schaeffer concludes the Treatise that art itself has to be considered as spiritual exercise, which implies that practicing could be the true goal of art. My paper develops those answers and examines some problems generated by them.