Georges Molinié — President of the Sorbonne, Paris IV
Mr Molinié observes that this is a thesis based on a body of work, apparently taking the form of a dossier whose components should be listed: a detailed curriculum vitae, a synthesis, four articles, scores, four “libraries”, audio material and a book. This is a great deal. The “libraries”, scores and recording may be considered technical and artistic achievements that constitute both the experimentation and the creative content of the theoretical thesis. This is essential and considerable—indeed, consubstantial.
All the written material is composed directly in French or translated from Italian, in language that is generally impeccable and precise.
The subject of the thesis, which is in fact a kind of explicitly developed and illustrated meta-theory, is therefore set out chiefly in the synthesis, the four articles submitted and the book [300 pages]. These elements should be related to the many contributions JBS has made in musicological and artistic settings throughout the world. Together, they constitute a body of work in two aspects that are almost as inseparable as the two-sided nature of the sign according to Saussure. For a reader who is not a musicologist but simply a semiotician, it is an advantage to encounter a macro-text that extends and develops a single speculative discourse, at once methodological, epistemological, aesthetic and hermeneutic.
The articles submitted here, very judiciously chosen, each focus more closely on a particular point; the book elaborates the arguments of the whole; and the synthesis—which is a model of what a synthesis for an HdR should be [I am not confusing the categories]—clearly puts the development and stakes of the researcher’s thinking into perspective, while bringing out forcefully and clearly the main lines of his theoretical advances.
One might have the impression that JBS addresses several different problems, whereas fundamentally he pursues a single aim: to establish an aesthetics founded on an encompassing theory that generates specific practices. The approach is at once broad, powerful and profound. It rests on precise contemporary knowledge, intelligently assimilated, in semiolinguistics, anthropology, general aesthetics, the theory of science, cognitive science and computing, as well as, of course, music and musicology. From a socio-aesthetic description of what may or may not be called contemporary music, through reflection on electroacoustics and, above all, computer-aided composition, JBS ultimately builds a twofold undertaking, represented by the descriptive designation “hyper-systemic music”, effectively linking theory and practice in the spirit of aesthetic thought, with the constantly stated aim of preserving the freedom of art through the judicious distinction between creation and generation.
The whole is remarkable in its treatment of many essential questions: the problem of the new; taste and its relationship to beauty, in connection with thymic, orgasmic/orgasmatic effects and the sensation of energy; the interactivity of models; the problem of thinking about the real in relation to visual and sonic arrangements, writing and representation, analysis and morphology, and reflection on rewriting and variation; and the issues of the metamorphic and of precision in the quality of aesthetic intention.
This is an undertaking that is, without any play on words, meta-systematic. It presents both the difficulties and the brilliance of all meta-systematic thought, such as that of Hjelmslev [one often thinks, particularly in certain chapters of the book, of his formidable Résumé]: great intelligence, broad culture, sound judgement and a strong semiotic drive.
Undoubtedly, a major scholarly contribution.
Professor Georges Molinié