1The first of Debussy’s Douze Études presents a familiar five-finger exercise only to depart from it (Ex. 1). The opening figure, so plain, so familiar and apparently so naïve, sounds as if it were in quotation marks. Even the performance direction (sagement) provokes an ironic smile : the performer must take care to be restrained, to be rational. This, after all, promises to be an exercise in regularity, control and order. And the title is literally in quotation marks : “Pour les ‘cinq doigts’ – d’après Monsieur Czerny”. Why ? Because, of course, the five-finger exercise is far more than a mere exercise ; from Czerny onwards it stands, for all pianists, as shorthand for years of entrainment, hour upon hour of mechanical repetition, a technical “gradus ad parnassum” to lead the imperfect body to match the demands of the perfect machine that stands before it.

2All of this is written in to the first bar of Debussy’s Étude. But the listener, who knows nothing of titles and performance markings, is already arrested by the bare simplicity of such anonymous material. Its character of quotation is already dissonant, before the pianist’s right hand reaches over the left (a perverse distribution of labour) to pick out the first A-flat. From bar 5, the left-hand five-finger exercise accelerates rapidly (clearly, no longer sagement) while the right-hand’s dissonant A-flat becomes syncopated and more insistent. The metrical regularity of the opening is thrown first by a bar of 2/4, then four bars of 6/16 which Debussy, with further irony, marks as Mouvement de gigue. At the same time, the diatonicism of the opening gives way to a proliferating chromatic sequence. The rational order promised in bar 1 now spirals out of control – like a miniature “apprenti sorcier”, or a “petit marteau sans maître”.

3The restoration of the five-finger exercise in bar 11, transposed up a fifth and in the right hand, begins a second rotation of the first ten bars. The single dissonant A-flat has now turned into a striking figure on F#. Marked brusquement, it too is a kind of five-finger exercise but collapsed into an unregulated grace note figure – a strident and capricious gesture, disdainful of the dull regularity of the exercise. A second version of the accelerating scale fragments, now in contrary motion, leads to a more extended version of the gigue material, marked Animé in opposition to the initial Sagement (Ex. 2). The chromatic play then gives way to a clear dominant preparation (from bar 25) for the structural cadence in C major in bar 28 which closes the first section and begins the next.

4And what follows ? The four bars of filled C-major space (bars 28-31) are the opposite of the careful C major beginning ; constriction here gives way to plenitude – of texture, register, sonority, and harmony. The restricted scalic movement of the five-finger exercise opens out to the more expansive freedom of arpeggiation – an idea elaborated fully from bar 35. It is as if Debussy has taken the principle of regular motion and transformed it into the material of an undirected and free elaboration.

5And so the piece goes on. Its capricious character includes a long parenthetical section in C-flat major (bars 48-55), frequent fragmentation of the musical surface, and a constant transformation of the five-finger exercise until it collapses into a kind of anarchy in bars 91-96 (Ex. 3). The rapidity of its repetitions here, alternating between white-note and black-note versions, turns into a kind of noise – evoking the irrational disorder of works like “Ce qu’a vu le vent d’ouest”, surely the antithesis to the regular opening of this Étude. And yet this playful tumult leads to a powerful moment of formal recapitulation (bars 97) in which the rational order of C major is restored with exuberant versions of the five-finger exercise juxtaposed with the free arpeggiation. Somehow, what started out as the monotonous repetition of a mechanical exercise has been transformed into a moment of jouissance worthy of L’isle joyeuse.

6The Douze études foreground the entrainment of the body (as pianistic technique) but then proceed to take flight in exuberant fantasy – putting the disciplined body in play in order to reimagine it. The tendency of this music to exceed its own materials arises from the play of the performing body, rather than being imposed upon it, its capricious figures provoked by the suggestion of the hands. In this way, Debussy’s Études might be understood as an immanent critique of the rationalised body – a reversal, in the heterotopic space of music, of Foucault’s analysis of how the body is shaped by the technologies which it invents. The piano is certainly an example of such a social and historical technology, and pianistic technique is the means by which the embodied mind adapts to it, but in music it also finds its reformulation. The entrained body is here made the very material of the piece, the mechanical starting point of a fantastical transformation whose process is often capricious, and whose ending is a kind of joyful fullness. It is not coincidental that one often hears in them echoes of Debussy’s fairy music as found in pieces like La Danse de Puck and Les fées sont d’exquises danseuses – that is to say, these pieces have in common topics of imaginary, idealised and fantastical bodies.1

7But my concern here is not with the body as such, but the writing of the body, and these pieces of Debussy provide fascinating examples. The body is not just written in to Debussy’s Études, it is written out by means of this music, in the sense that it is remade in the act of musical invention. This is a crucial difference because it opposes a closed and static idea (“the body”) with something dynamic and without limits (“musical writing”). These pieces, then, are Études transcendentales on two levels. Firstly, in that the capricious play is possible only by the pianist mastering and surpassing a physical technique, just as the body of the dancer, paradoxically, is freed through entrainment to let go of the barre and take flight. But secondly, this music exceeds a certain compositional technique that is bound to habitual bodily movements – hence its unrestrained rush of musical invention and the free proliferation of ideas. The character of this music, as both informelle and corporelle, has a common origin.

8Debussy’s allusive titles for his piano preludes and orchestral pieces function as a kind of cover to legitimate the way he stages a whole series of eccentric musical bodies, from the water-fairy Ondine to Jimbo the elephant, inviting the listener’s body to move variously like fairies, fireworks, fish, leaves, wind, water, mist, rain and snow. The Études use no such poetically allusive references, but their apparently sober titles underline that their material will be the fingers, the hands, and the body of the pianist. This too is a kind of deceit, since their real business is to stage a dialectic between the mechanically entrained body and the writing out of an imaginary body.

9It is not hard to demonstrate this corporeal logic. The second Étude, Pour les tierces is built on the close relationship between the structure of the hand and the key interval of a third in tonal music. Conjunct movement in thirds provides another kind of five-finger exercise and Debussy starts with the familiar fingering pattern (1/3, 2/4, 3/5) and a clear nod to Chopin’s study in thirds (Op.25, no.6). Where Chopin is brightly extrovert, however, Debussy prefers the more introverted mumurando texture exemplified from bar 18 (Ex. 4). Its circular figure is a product of the hands’ motion rather than any harmonic logic, and makes for a piece without musical narrative or drama (indeed, a piece almost without events). Like a gently rolling landscape without the punctuation of any figure, Debussy cultivates a kind of sustained undularity that arises from the simple movement of the hand : the sense of containment is underlined by the sustained use of the middle register and the perfect symmetry of the two hands, always at ease, without stretching, without difficult leaps or sudden changes of direction. It is surely no coincidence that this study of a body-at-ease produces, so readily, a central musical topos of the baroque pastoral.

10But compare the familiarity of the exercise in thirds, with the next Étude, Pour les quartes (Ex. 5). The title alone is arresting, since fourths are at odds with the habitual movement of the pianist’s hands as much as with that of tonal harmony. The otherworldly character of fourths, underlined by the capricious juxtaposition of different gestural materials, lends a quality of improvisation to this piece, as if it were generated primarily from physical movements – witness the apparently directionless opening bars, or the sonore martelé figure that follows – or again, the way a repeated fourth in the bass later generates a whole march section (bars 53ff). (One has the same sense playing Janáček, that the music is generated from the movement of the hands).2 Taken as a whole, Pour les quartes is also a study in varieties of touch – witness the extraordinary range of performance directions within a single, relatively short piece : dolce, sonore martelé, murmurando, risoluto, balabile e grazioso, sostenuto, scherzandare, marqué, leggiero, con tristezza, lointain, perdendo, volubile, estinto.

11If the first Étude explicitly references Czerny, elsewhere Debussy evokes an older tradition and looks back two centuries to Couperin’s L’Art de toucher le clavecin of 1716. The reference is implied in Debussy’s comments at the head of the score, with its nod to “nos vieux Maîtres … ‘nos’ admirables clavecinistes”, but also in the 8 th Étude, Pour les agréments, and by association in the 6 th, Pour les huit doigts which evokes Couperin’s pièces croisés (in Debussy, the crossing of black and white keys stands in for the hands crossing the two manuals of Couperin’s harpsichord). Just as the study in fourths, undoes the familiarity of the study in thirds, so the study for eight fingers, which closes Book One, acts as a fantastical counterweight to the study for five fingers with which the set opens (Ex. 6). Debussy’s performance note, suggesting the thumbs should not be used, probably stems from a misreading of baroque practice ; the thumbs were used in baroque keyboard technique but did not pass under the fingers as in modern practice. The result is a study in four-note scale fragments whose rapidity begins from the idea of mechanical regularity and precision but turns into something quite different. Musicology has been apt to hear a piece like this – indeed all the Études – in terms of musical abstraction which is, arguably, the opposite of what this piece does. Its exclusive concern with the movement of the hands is utterly corporeal, just as the resulting music foregrounds sound over grammar, and the listener has first to respond sensuously rather than intellectually.

12Such music provokes us to ask some key questions for contemporary musical thought : How can we think this musical body critically, without falling back into a new fetishism of the body – that is to say, without collapsing the idea of the body into something ahistorical, immediate, essentialized, and inherently fixed ? On the one hand, the pendulum swing of the humanities back towards the body is hugely beneficial, and long overdue in musicology. But pendulums pulled too far in one direction, tend to lurch back to an extreme in the other. The shift from music to sound studies, from scores to recorded sound, and the wider shift from the composer to the performer, for all their new insights, risk neutralizing the extent to which music’s relation to the body is self-reflexive, critical and historical.

13One way forward is to ask a slightly different question : How is the body written musically ? And here we reach a central question, both musicological and philosophical. There is no English equivalent for écriture ; the French has a resonance that the English word “writing” simply does not possess. Perhaps that is partly why, fifty years after Derrida’s Grammatology, Anglo-American musicology has not even begun to think through its consequences for music. Indeed, if anything, it has re-embraced the very phonocentrism that Derrida calls into question. But the consequence of the Grammatology is surely that – just as writing is no mere imitation of speech – musical écriture is not simply a way of remembering or recording a previously composed music, not a representation or expression of some prior idea, but instead a kind of musical thought – a speculative proposition of the creative mind. Nor is a musical écriture confined to the page on which it is rendered visible. Rather, by means of the relation between writing, the human body, and the production of sound, it puts the body in play, makes the body a player in its speculative thought. Put more simply, musical écriture is a kind of speculative thinking through the body.

14There are plenty of activities that, in the broadest sense, put the body into play. Rock-climbing, for example, fuses body and mind in a highly speculative activity in which the body is most certainly en jeu – both in play and very much at stake. Examples multiply because, of course, to live in the world is necessarily to put the body into play, but music offers us a version of this in a very specific form and one in which the writing of music – as opposed to a completely oral tradition – plays a very specific role. So we might agree with Mallarmé when he writes about the movement of the dancer as “une écriture corporelle” and as a “poëme dégagé de tout appareil du scribe”,3 while at the same time insisting that music, in the western tradition, is also a kind of writing in the narrow sense – as a graphic and scripted art. Its unique mediation of writing and body is central to its role in western culture – as a critical parallel to the relationship between language and writing, one it imitates in order to reconfigure.

15Musical écriture thus has to do not with reproducing an existing body, but with bringing a body into play that was not earlier present. In this way, the score may be understood as a space in which real bodies blur with ideal ones, a critical space for the reformulation of bodily being. There are of course no bodies in the score, but the musical page carries the mimetic traces of bodily movement. And being fictional, these traces of the body are also transformations, which is how music has allowed us to experience impossible bodies, centuries before film achieved this via computer-generated imagery. Note, for example, how Mozart, in the trio “Soave sia il vento” from Act 1 of Così fan tutte, puts the listening body into gentle flight long (in the same decade that actual physical flight became a human possibility, as the first manned balloon flights rose over Paris).

16But how can we read such a musical écriture ? How does one locate, explore, and think the musical genotext within the musical phenotext, to borrow Julia Kristeva’s terms ?4 It is, perhaps, firstly, to look for the gaps exhibited in musical scores, the gaps between real and imagined bodies. This is far more complex and subtle than simply a matter of foregrounding sound over sign, or body over grammar. It certainly has to do with what Deleuze calls “la logique de la sensation”, as explored in his radically material reading of the art of Francis Bacon.5 But it also has a historical dimension that is often missed.

17For that reason, we have to look beyond Roland Barthes’ tantalising readings of musical écriture in Schumann.6 For Barthes, music is always a musica practica, the music one plays, “une musique musculaire”,7 a music produced by “un corps pulsionnel, qui se pousse et repousse.”8 His astonishing essay on Schumann’s Kreisleriana offers a wonderful example of a discourse on music solely in terms of figures of the body – the body that plays, the body that composes and the body that listens.

Qu’est-ce que le corps fait, lorsqu’il énonce (musicalement) ? Et Schumann répond : mon corps frappe, mon corps se ramasse, il explose, il se coupe, il pique, ou au contraire et sans prévenir… il s’étire, il tisse légèrement… Et parfois même – pourquoi pas ? – il parle, il déclame, il dédouble sa voix : il parle mais ne dit rien : car dès lorsqu’elle est musicale, la parole – ou son substitut instrumental – n’est plus linguisitique, mais corporelle ; elle ne dit jamais que ceci, et rien d’autre : mon corps se met en état de parole : quasi parlando.9

18Much of what Barthes writes would apply equally well to Debussy. What he says about Schumann is borne out by a piece like the 5th of Debussy’s Études. Marked “Joyeux et emporté, librement rythmé”, Pour les octaves is an essay in excess and a breathless, over-reaching energy. The expansiveness of tone and gesture at the opening is produced by the wide stretching of the hands occasioned by the octave, just as the middle section, with its gamelan-like hocketing, is the product of a playful alternation of the two hands. Or again, one might hear the last of the Études, Pour les accords, as arising directly from an amplification of a physical rhythm with the hands moving from the middle register, symmetrically outward in wide arcing gestures that override any questions of harmonic progression or motivic development. This material is generated by the body and will be written out – worked out – through the body. Barthes’ approach is through his own bodily engagement with music, with the way in which music is inscribed within the performer-listener and, unsurprisingly, he has little time for a professional musical analysis that seeks to annul the body.10 But in bracketing out the score, and a reading of the score, in favour of his own bodily responses to the music he plays, Barthes risks merely reproducing the body he brings to the music, rather than giving space for musical écriture to open out a different body.

19Which brings us back to the same question : how might we read a bodily text within musical scores ? How can we read between the genotext of the body and the phenotext of musical notation ? How can we distinguish between the structures of musical grammar and the libidinal energy that shapes and fills them ? The problem lies partly in the nature of the question, which misses the extent to which the forms of language are already pre-formed by the libidinal

20the organic rhythms of expansion and contraction, the drive to closure, the insistence on agency. Musical writing and musical bodies are always encountered together : mutually implicated and mutually shaped. Which brings us back to Debussy’s Études, and to questions of musical material and history. Debussy does not simply write the body by means of some direct, unmediated access ; rather, he engages with the historical legacy of the body as mediated in a practice of piano music. His starting point is not some notion of the natural body, but the cultural body written into the shape and design of the piano, its lexicon of possible gestures, its repertoire, its techniques and technical training, which is why the Études reference a history, from the exercises of Clementi,11 Czerny12 and Hanon,13 to the musical invention of Chopin, Schumann and Liszt. They look back to the L’Art de toucher de clavecin of Couperin14 and forward to the Études for piano of Ohana and Ligeti, and those for pianola by Nancarrow.15 It is telling that Merleau- Ponty, searching for a metaphor for his central idea of embodied knowledge, referred to the intersection between the body of the musician and that of the musical instrument.16

21Nowhere in Debussy’s Études is this historically-mediated body more palpably foregrounded than in No.8, Pour les agréments – not so much because Debussy references the French baroque, but because this piece takes as its musical material the idea of bodily comportment itself. Its topos is a set of musical figures equivalent to a set of bodily manners or figures of speech. The musical ornament, like a figure of speech, is understood as a decorative embellishment – a mode of presentation, not the content of what is said. But Debussy makes the ornament the substance, foregrounding a lexicon of bodily gestures and musical manners. Witness the pleasure of a sequence of elongated appoggiaturas in the opening six bars :

22Debussy’s music is often described as sensuous – a word that closes down a wealth of detail it should open up. This passage is a good example, nevertheless, of what such a term attempts to designate. It is the diversion of something functional into a non-functional use that lies behind the pleasure of this music and why one might speak properly about the erotic body in Debussy’s music. The sequence of ornaments are non-functional movements of the body – their indolent repetition is entirely about pleasure. Something similar can be heard in Pour les arpèges composés (see Ex. 8). The function of an arpeggio, accentuating through rhythmic means the dynamism of the underlying harmony, is side-stepped here. Surface movement once again serves to emphasise the absence of any functional movement ; circling arpeggio patterns, elaborated entirely for their own sake, create a study in touch, texture and sonority – putting in play, in sympathetic vibration, the body of the piano, the pianist, and the listener.

23Touch – the coming together of musician and instrument, the threshold at which the body of the performer meets that of the piano, both a place and an action – is the invisible link between bodily energy and sonorous tone. It is also the location of a central philosophical question about the manner in which we know the world. If music, literally and figuratively, amplifies touch, it also provides a rich example of how the action of our touching is shaped by the resistance it meets. The violin bow responds to the resistance of the string, the wind player to the resistance of a reed or a column of air, the pianist to the weight of the hammer transferred through the key.

24I introduce this idea, at the close of my essay, not to wax lyrical about the erotics of musical touching, but to point to music as a space formed by this two-way process. Music does not discourse on touch in general (as philosophy might) but offers a series of highly particular sites (scripted, but performative) in which the chiasmic reciprocity of the touching body and the sounding world are explored in embodied dialogue. Although Merleau-Ponty’s comments on art are, for the most part, on the visual arts of Cézanne and Rodin, it is striking that, in his later writings he was increasingly drawn to the case of music, not as the positing of an idea or content, but precisely as the performance of a relationship to the world centred on the body in play.17

Fig. 1. Debussy, Douze Études, No.1, bars 1-15.

Fig. 2. Debussy, Douze Études, No.1, bars 16-31.

Fig. 3. Debussy, Douze Études, No.1, bars 91-97.

Fig. 4. Debussy, Douze Études, No.2, bars 18-23.

Fig. 5. Debussy, Douze Études, No.3, bars 1-10.

Fig. 6. Debussy, Douze Études, No.6, bars 1-4.

Fig. 7. Debussy, Douze Études, No.8, bars 1-4.

Fig. 8. Debussy, Douze Études, No.11, bars 1-4.