Listening by Jean-Luc Nancy

Author:Jean-Luc Nancy
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Fordham University Press
Published: 2007-06-14T16:00:00+00:00

Still, timbre is not a single datum. Its very characteristic is itself to be, more than a component, a composition whose complexity continues to increase as acoustic analysis is refined and as it goes beyond mere determination of a sound by its harmonics.34 Timbre is above all the unity of a diversity that its unity does not reabsorb. That is also why it does not yield to measurement or notation as do the other musical values (which, however, can never be identified—even pitch—with strict mathematical values). Its very name differs from those that refer to measure, like “pitch”, “duration,” “intensity.” Timbre opens, rather, immediately onto the metaphor35 of other perceptible registers: color (Klangfarbe, “color of sound,”. the German name for timbre), touch (texture, roundness, coarseness), taste (bitter, sweet), even evocations of smells. In other words, timbre resounds with and in the totality of perceptible registers. In this resonance, the mutual mimesis of senses, if there is one, is not distinguished from the already evoked methexis: participation, contagion (contact), contamination, metonymic contiguity rather than metaphoric transference.36

As for the literal meaning of the word timbre, it comes from the Greek tympanon, that is, the tambourine of orgiastic cults and, before that, from the Semitic top, tuppim, also meaning tambourine.37 Strike, dance and resonance, a setting in motion and start of an echo: the means by which a “subject” arrives—and leaves itself, absents itself from its own arrival. “Timbre, style, and signature are the same obliterating division of the proper [propre],” Derrida wrote.38 How they are “the same,” however, can only be approached as a resonance between them, or as a mutual “figuration” by metonymy.

Timbre can be represented as the resonance of a stretched skin (possibly sprinkled with alcohol, the way certain shamans do), and as the expansion of this resonance in the hollowed column of a drum. Isn’t the space of the listening body, in turn, just such a hollow column over which a skin is stretched, but also from which the opening of a mouth can resume and revive resonance? A blow from outside, clamor from within, this sonorous, sonorized body undertakes a simultaneous listening to a “self” and to a “world” that are both in resonance. It becomes distressed (tightens) and it rejoices (dilates). It listens to itself becoming distressed and rejoicing, it enjoys and is distressed at this very listening where the distant resounds in the closest.

That being the case, that skin stretched over its own sonorous cavity, this belly that listens to itself and strays away in itself while listening to the world and while straying in all directions, that is not a “figure” for rhythmic timbre, but it is its very pace, it is my body beaten by its sense of body, what we used to call its soul.

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