The Stone and the Ivy: Music and Philosophy in Antagonisme by Xavier Darasse, on a Text by Alain Badiou

Abstract

This thesis asks how music and philosophy interact in Antagonisme by Xavier Darasse. Antagonisme is a chamber work for piano, marimba, vibraphone, violin and narrator composed for the 1965 concours de composition at the Conservatoire de Paris on a text by Alain Badiou. Through the first ever study of correspondence, sketches and scores relating to the work, the thesis argues that Darasse responded to Badiou’s text through an unprecedented confrontation of serial procedures with Messiaen’s technique of interversion. Through original analyses of Messiaen’s writings on and uses of interversion, the thesis argues that Messiaen and Darasse used order, as sequence or ordinality, as a distinct musical parameter alongside the conventional serial parameters of pitch, duration, dynamics, timbre and articulation.

By comparing Alain Badiou’s notion of a musical “situation” and Karl Popper’s “problem situation,” the thesis argues that the methodology best suited to studying the interaction of music and philosophy in Antagonisme takes into account both the immanent, musical problems at stake in the work and the broader contextual problems that Darasse and Badiou faced. This methodology integrates critical editing, music analysis and contextual criticism as distinct and equally important parts of the study.

The thesis shows how Badiou’s text reflects its philosophical context, including structuralist debates around subjectivity and formal autonomy in serial works. The text also reflects the transition from Jean-Paul Sartre’s existentialism to the Marxist structuralism of Louis Althusser in Badiou’s early work and that of his contemporaries.

Darasse’s musical response to Badiou’s text is first considered from a semiological perspective. After unravelling layers of ironic text-music relationships, it is argued that the relationship of text and music in Antagonisme must be considered as more than word-painting. Darasse’s innovative use of fundamental musical materials must be examined in its relationship to Badiou’s first theoretical article, completed in the same month as Antagonisme’s première, “Autonomy of the Aesthetic Process.”

The issue of musical autonomy is both immanent to the work and essential to the tasks required in its study. The critical edition provided in an appendix of this thesis is an organ of thought in this regard. An edition representing the music’s most complete response to the text differs greatly from any extant version of the manuscript or the composer’s final intentions. The editor must make significant interventions, including material from the sketches that were never included in the manuscript or performance scores. In concluding the thesis, Badiou’s mature philosophy is convoked once more to argue that musicology can actively affirm the musical novelty of Darasse’s score. Show more