Recentrer la musique. 1. Audiotactilité et ontologie de l’oeuvre musicale : musique d’écriture, jazz, pop, rock, by Laurent Cugny, Lyon, Symétrie, 2021, 368 pages

Keywords:

• audiotactility,
• Vincenzo Caporaletti,
• musical work,
• ontology,
• music philosophy

Mots-clés :

• audiotactilité,
• Vincenzo Caporaletti,
• oeuvre musicale,
• ontologie,
• philosophie de la musique

Cugny’s book addresses many of the transformations that interested Walter Benjamin in his famous “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” While Benjamin was writing about the implications of new technologies for the future of art in the twentieth century, one might think of Cugny’s book as a detailed philosophical study of what came to pass, specifically within the art of music. Primarily by means of Caporaletti’s theory, but also through effective engagement with other theories like Lydia Goehr’s critique of the work concept (pp. 67, 254), Luigi Pareyson’s formativity (pp. 11–12, 295–297), and Peircean semiotics (e.g. pp. 177, 251), Cugny details how various musical fields such as jazz, popular music, and avant-garde improvisation differ in what they prioritize and how their practitioners conceive of music. This approach to the standard intro-body-conclusion format is worth noting for at least a couple reasons. For one, Cugny is quite consistent with it on a smaller scale, following a similar approach to each part. Thus, part 2 presents wide-reaching prolegomena spanning from 1400 BC to Guido of Arezzo to Guido Adler to Lydia Goehr; it plunges in depth into the contrasting schools of analytical and continental philosophy; and it ultimately returns to those two paradigms to synthesize and compare them with a view towards establishing important ontological distinctions from the practices in the remainder of the book. Because every part is so consistently structured, in part 2 and elsewhere, readers need not read Recentrer la musique in a linear way but can carve multiple paths along individual schools of thought or authorial approaches that most interest them, checking back for theoretical background when they reach a concept they do not understand or jumping to preview where Cugny will take the material. In fact, I would encourage readers to begin by familiarizing themselves with the summary théorie subsection that functions like an appendix near the end of the book. It will serve as a useful reference map with which to navigate the entire book. Cugny’s nested structure of background-bulk-extrapolation is also worth noting because it reveals how key the two central parts are, which is somewhat unusual in that they are dedicated to the work of his predecessors rather than his own theoretical contributions that form the extrapolation at the end of the book. Although it is by no means merely a literature review, the writings of twentieth-century philosophers and secondary literature are a combined focus throughout the book. Indeed, the two central parts of the book proceed as a succession of author names, grouping and comparing them in a way that feels much like an upper-level, undergraduate textbook. That is, while Cugny consistently maintains a research-oriented voice that draws extensively from multiple literatures and adds his own arguments, the inner parts of the book are mostly quite pedagogical in their orderly presentation of prior schools of thought and representative authors. His comprehensive coverage deals with major authors on musical ontology, as well as others he argues have been unjustly neglected (e.g. Gisèle Brelet, Boris de Schloezer), and guides readers with helpful charts, lists, and bullet point summaries. Cugny uses this literature to highlight the dominant focus of previous literature about written scores and extract theoretical principles that subsequently help him refine an ontological theory flexible enough to accommodate twentieth-century musics like jazz, rock, and pop. In part 3, the exploration of the ontological literature on rock, pop, and jazz, proceeds in much the same way, but with Cugny’s voice foregrounded more, evaluating the claims of major authors and making his own historical summaries of how recording technology changed the conception …