Antoine Hennion
email: antoine.hennion@mines-paristech.fr

Toward a New Sociology of Music chapter 22 part IV, in The Cultural Study

After a century of studies, there is no agreement on what it means to construct a sociology of music. From the beginning this "of" has been a place of tension, not of smooth coordination. If music has easily attracted social readings, there has been strong resistance to a systematic sociology of music whose aim would be to explain musical values or contents through reference to sociological factors. The most vehement prosecutor of such alleged reductionism was undoubtedly Adorno (e.g., 1976)-even though he himself became the worst reductionist when it came to popular culture (Adorno 1990); for him, only musics that are not really art deserve sociological treatment (it is difficult to know if this is more disrespectful of popular music or sociology!). By contrast, the opposite program-a positive explanation of the ways in which music is produced, diffused, and listened to-has been attacked on the grounds that, given its refusal to address "music itself," it cannot acknowledge music's specificity.

In this opposition between two programs, a part of the question is specific to the case of music, but another is common to the social interpretation of any art. To a large extent, the sociology of art has defined itself through opposition to aesthetics. The aim was both to criticize any claim of autonomy for works of art and aesthetic judgment, and to return the experience of aesthetic pleasure-often regarded as immediate and subjective-to its social and historical determinations. The two types of causality mobilized above have often been described in social studies of art in terms of a distinction between studying either "the art object sociologically" or "the art object as a social process" (Zolberg 1990, chapters 3 and 4). One approach displays the mediators of art, the other how art mediates society. The latter takes art as an empirical given reality, and provides explanations of its social conditions; it can be respectful vis-à-vis the "artistic nature of art": the task of sociology is to give an account of the social conditions of its production, diffusion, and reception. The former shows art as a social artifact, or construction, of a group-an "art world"; as such, it is more invasive (it looks for the social nature of art, as Blacking (1973) would put it, not for wider social factors), and sees the claim of art to be autonomous as problematic.

These two directions, one clearly empiricist and more devoted to specific case studies, the other more theoretical, are themselves divided into different trends. Across the board, though, sociology has set itself against a purely internal and hagiographic aesthetic commentary on artworks, "filling out" an art world formerly only including a very few chefs-d'oeuvre and geniuses. Mainstream productions and copies, conventions and material constraints, professions and academies, performance venues and markets, on the artistic side of the scene; and, on the social side, codes and rites of consumption, gender and ethnicity, and, in the specific case of music, modes of circulation in a "glocal" world: these are what have been pushed to the front of the scene. These mediations range from systems or devices of the most physical and local nature, to institutional arrangements and collective frames of appreciation

such as the discourse of critics, right up to the very existence of an independent domain called art. In so doing, scholars have given up global, abstract systems of interpretation, and produced instead a practical theory of mediation, conceived as the reciprocal, local, heterogeneous relations between art and public through precise devices, places, institutions, objects, and human abilities, constructing identities, bodies, and subjectivities.

A Sociology of Aesthetic Pleasure?

Nevertheless, the relationship of sociology and art remained problematic. For most of the classical forms of sociology, for critical theory (Bourdieu 1984), and for interactionist (Becker 1982) or constructivist (DeNora 1995) currents, the sociological analysis of art has always been less interested in creation, genius, or the works "in themselves" than in what makes these categories appear as such. For Bourdieu, who took the critical intention furthest, it means unmasking the magical role of "creation." In this view, culture is a façade disguising social mechanisms of differentiation, artistic objects being "only" means to naturalize the social nature of tastes; aesthetic judgments are but denegations of this work of naturalization that can only be made if unknown as such. This critique of taste and of its social reproduction has led to many empirical surveys of musical consumption (e.g., DiMaggio 1987;Lamont and Fournier 1992;[START_REF] Peterson | Changing Highbrow Taste: from Snob to Omnivore[END_REF]. A radical lack of concern for the works themselves characterizes most of these studies. Sociology refuses subjectivism, the cult of genius, and the self-glorifying discourse of artists, preferring to demonstrate the constraints through which artists and amateurs are unknowingly determined, the conventions through which they recognize and create their world, and the formats used to mold the social construction of masterpieces.

In these conditions, any report on artistic experience in terms of beauty, sensation, emotion, or aesthetic feeling is automatically regarded as a manifestation of actors' illusions about their own beliefs (Bourdieu 1990), or the conventional products of a collective activity. The works do nothing, and the processes involved in their appreciation lose their specificity or specialness, as has deplored Frith (1996), pleading for an evaluation of popular cultures; works and tastes-meaningless in and of themselves-are returned to the arbitrariness (a key word in any analysis in terms of belief) of a collective election based on a social, non artistic principle. The argument is a powerful one, and should not be overlooked if we want to avoid the celebration of autonomous art simply being taken literally again. But one also has to measure the limits of such a view, particularly in view of the dominant position it long had in the sociology of art. It is becoming essential to reconsider sociology's lack of interest in works of art and the aesthetic experience as, echoing cultural studies (Hall and Jefferson 1976;Grossberg 1992;[START_REF] Frow | Cultural Studies and Cultural Value[END_REF], did music sociologists DeNora (2000), [START_REF] Hennion | La Passion musicale[END_REF]Hennion ([ ] 2007[START_REF] Hennion | Pragmatics of taste[END_REF] and A. [START_REF] Bennett | Popular Music and Youth Culture: Music, Identity and Place[END_REF], moving from a constructivist to a more pragmatist position [START_REF] Gell | Art and Agency. An Anthropological Theory[END_REF]: what do we do with art or music, and what does it produce, emotionally and collectively? Other way, there is a danger, that of reinforcing the great divide between expressive comments and analytical writings: between literary, subjective, "hot" accounts of musical experience on a side, as provided for example by cultural, gender or queer studies (but with a loosened constraint of rigour-the "what allows you to say so?" syndrome); and explicative, objective, "cold" sociological analyses on the other side, with a higher requirement of evidence-but keeping too far from what art or music are about to be acknowledged by the "groups concerned" [START_REF] Dewey | The Public and its Problems[END_REF].

Understanding the work of art as a mediation, in keeping with the lesson of critical sociology, means reviewing the work in all the details of the gestures, bodies, habits, materials, spaces, languages, and institutions that it inhabits. Without accumulated mediations-styles, grammar, systems of taste, programs, concert halls, schools, entrepreneurs, and so on-no beautiful work of art appears. At the same time, however-and against the usual agenda of critical sociology-we must recognize the moment of the work in its specific and irreversible dimension; this means seeing it as a transformation, a productive work, and allowing oneself to take into account the (highly diversified) ways in which actors describe and experience aesthetic pleasure (Hennion 2007;[START_REF] Denora | Music-in-Action: essays in sonic ecology[END_REF].

For various reasons, this has for long not been the case within social studies of music. The sterile opposition between theoretical and empirical programs was not clearly superseded. In the case of literature or the visual arts, the sociological approach was prepared by lengthy debate over the merits of internal and external explanations. Even if the terms of this debate proved to be unsatisfactory in the end, the debate has at least occurred; in the case of music, the fight has not taken place. Music has always puzzled the critical discourse of the social sciences: here there is an art obviously collective but technical and difficult to grasp, and with no visible object to contest. As music had a priori no explicit "content," the opposition between internal and external approaches was difficult to mobilize. To what could one refer an opposition between a formalist and a realist interpretation of musical works? The positivistic character of much traditional musicology, with little theoretical self-questioning, has often been criticized, while a purely grammatical analysis of musical language produced its own closed sphere. With little relationship to either, a history of music could then describe all the concrete forms through which music had been created, performed, and listened to. The social status of musicians, the technical and economic development of musical instruments, changes in concerts and musical life: studies of all these elements have accumulated, producing rich insights and results, but without any possibility of relating them to musical works, languages, or "contents" in other than very intuitive or metaphorical terms. Instead of giving birth to fruitful controversies and passionate polemics, music has allowed different disciplines to grow, and to ignore one another.

In the case of the visual arts, the materiality of the works, even and especially if challenged by the artists, has allowed a debate to take place about the social production and reception of art. Music is in the reverse situation: its object is elusive; social interpretations just take it as the expression of a social group (ethnic trance, rock concert), aesthetic studies as a nonverbal language of immediacy. Music has nothing but mediations to show: instruments, musicians, scores, stages, records. The works are not "already there," faced with differences in taste also "already there," overdetermined by the social. They always have to be played again or, to say it better, performed anew [START_REF] Schechner | Performance Studies[END_REF][START_REF] Butler | Giving An Account of Oneself[END_REF].

The Lesson of Music

But what was a handicap for the older, formerly dominant critical approach can become an asset if the aim is to envisage a positive conception of mediation [START_REF] Hennion | La Passion musicale[END_REF] 2007). Patrons, sponsors, markets, academies: from the first undertakings of the social history of art, mediations have always had a crucial role in social analyses (e.g., Baxandall 1972;Haskell 1976). Their critical dimension has been used against aestheticism to recall that works and tastes are constructed and socially determined. But music enables us to go beyond the description of technical and economic intermediaries as mere transformers of the musical relationship into commodities, and to do a positive analysis of all the human and material intermediaries of the "performance" and "consumption" of art, from gestures and bodies to stages and media. Mediations are neither mere carriers of the work, nor substitutes that dissolve its reality; they are the art itself, as is particularly obvious in the case of music: when the performer places a score on his music stand, he plays that music, to be sure, but music is just as much the very fact of playing; mediations in music have a pragmatic status-they are the art that they reveal, and cannot be distinguished from the appreciation they generate.

Mediations can therefore serve as a base for a positive analysis of tastes, and not for the deconstruction of these tastes.

Various authors have foregrounded the specificity of music's construction, either on the basis of ethnomethodologist or reflexivist claims to take into consideration the way people themselves construct a reality that they call music (Frith 1981;Bergeron and Bohlman 1992), or to account for the fact that we find in music a very particular way of putting a social reality into a form and a practice, and need to cope with the enigma of this art, which is both very immediate, subjective, and emotive, and also highly symbolic, so powerfully able to mobilize groups and carry social identities. To make a sociological analysis of taste does not mean to acknowledge the existence of some general underlying social mechanisms responsible for the presumably stable and necessary relationship between self-enclosed works and preexisting tastes. Rather, taste, pleasure, and meaning are contingent, conjunctural, and hence transient; and they result from specific yet varying combinations of particular intermediaries, considered not as the neutral channels through which predetermined social relations operate, but as productive entities that have effectivities of their own.

One could expect that musical practices, publics, and amateurs would be privileged objects of study for sociologists of music. This is the case with changes in concert life and the development of new musical tastes (Weber 1975(Weber , 1992;;Morrow 1989;Johnson 1995). The invention of a tradition and the social production of the past has been traced for several repertories, ranging from Beethoven (DeNora 1995) to country music (Peterson 1997). From a more political point of view, Fulcher (1987) has discussed French "Grand Opera" not as a mere petit-bourgeois form of divertissement, as usual, but as a vehicle for the risky political production of the newly restored monarchy's national-popular legitimacy. And after Benjamin's much-debated essay (1973), modern media and the socioeconomic transformation of music and listening that they entail have been widely discussed; for example, in relation to the production of a new "aurality" through the early music recordings [START_REF] Maisonneuve | L'invention du disque[END_REF], to jazz [START_REF] Berliner | Thinking in Jazz. The Infinite Art of Improvisation[END_REF], and to rock and popular culture (Laing 1985;Hennion 1989;Frith and Goodwin 1990). More generally, popular music and rock have been sites for rich critical rethinking within cultural, gender, and ethnic studies (Willis 1978;Hebdige 1979;Whiteley et al. 2004;[START_REF] Bennett | Culture and Everyday Life[END_REF]): what appears to be a blasphemy for occidental music is inescapable for popular music, which is studied as a mixture of rites, of linguistic and social structures, of technical media and marketing strategies, of instruments and musical objects, and of politics and bodies. Often implicitly, social analysis refers to the power of music to establish and actualize the identity of a group, an ethnicity, and a generation, and points to the ambivalence of its political function: music both helps a social entity to access reality, and prevents it from expressing itself through more political means (Brake 1980;Frith 1981;Yonnet 1985;Middleton 1990;Wicke 1990). And after all, Max Weber ([1921] 1958) had done something similar in his much earlier essay-tentative and speculative but full of deep insights-establishing new relations among musical language, technique, and notation, and the social division of labour among audiences, musicians, and composers.

The theme of mediation as an empirical means for identifying the progressive appearance of a work and its reception is very rich; it is the means (for the sociologist) to reopen the work-taste duality, a duality that represents a closure of the analysis, with works on one side left to aestheticians and musicologists, who attribute the power of music to the music itself, and, facing them, a sociological denunciation, the reduction of music to a rite. In the next three sections I briefly exemplify such a "mediation perspective" from some of my own studies.

"Bach Today"

Bach was not a "modern composer," author of a "Complete Works," catalogued in the Bach-Werke-Verzeichnis, before musicology, the record industry, and the modern amateur. One can trace through the nineteenth century the long transformation of what was "music," and how it produced our taste for Bach as a musician, giving him the strange ability of being both the object and the means of our love for music (Fauquet and Hennion 2000). Bach is neither the solitary individual born in 1685 to whom history would ascribe an oeuvre, nor an artificial construct of our modern taste. We listen to him today by way of three hundred years of collective labour, and of the most modern mechanisms, mechanisms that we created to listen to him but also because we were listening to him. Those mechanisms keep on perfecting themselves in the desire for a "return to Bach" (thanks to musicology, organology, computerized recording, the progress made by performers, and the historicization of our appreciation). But in so doing, they invest themselves more and more in this active production of "Bach today," and the more and more modern they become! How can one analyze Bach's grandeur? To answer such a question, one cannot just study "Bach's reception" musicologically. To speak of reception is already to admit that the oeuvre is constituted. Beauty is also in the eye of the beholder: the formation of a taste cultivated for classical music is not simply an independent development that enables the "reception" of the great composer always to be more worthy of him. But one cannot just sociologically critique the cult of Bach: there was, and continues to be, a simultaneous production of a taste for Bach, of an oeuvre corresponding to this taste and, more generally, of a new mechanism for musical appreciation. The hand is not dealt to two partners (Bach and us) but to three (Bach, us, and "the music"), none of which can be separated from the others: Bach's music continually changes in the process, and reciprocally, all through the nineteenth century, Bach helped a complete redefinition of the love for music to take place.

Bach "becomes music": not only a reference, an ancient Master, the statue of the Commendatore in the shadow of whom the music of the present time is written, but a contemporary composer. But the reverse is also true: classical music "becomes Bach," it is reorganized around his figure (and Beethoven's), resting on their production. Bach is not integrated into an already made musical universe: he produces it, in part, through the invention of a new taste for music. Throughout the century, we witness the formation both of a new way to love music, as a serious, demanding activity-a development that was primarily due to the influence of Beethoven and Bach-and of a new repertoire of masterpieces that respond to this appreciation. Bach's "early adopters" in France (Boëly, Fétis, Chopin, Alkan, Gounod, Franck, Liszt, Saint-Saëns) copied, paraphrased, transcribed-not because they were unfaithful, but because Bach was a means for making music, not a composer of the past. Through the way that each incorporated the insights that they discovered in Bach's work into their own compositions, these composers gradually developed our modern form of musical appreciation. Paradoxically, their interaction with Bach's oeuvre also led to the current stipulation that the past be respected, a stipulation that calls us to reject this nineteenth century that brought Bach to us, so as to return to a more original, more authentic Bach, a Bach who is "better" understood (Hennion and Fauquet 2001).

This account reveals the "musicalization" of our taste for the music: the formation of a specific competence, increasingly well defined and self-sufficient, that makes us appreciate the works according to a regime of connoisseurship-a format that we stop seeing as we come to belong to it most naturally and intimately. This is at the heart of the paradoxes surrounding the baroque revival (Hennion 1997): the appearance of a past to listen to in a particular fashion, by respecting its modes of production, is the incredibly elaborated-and very modern-fruit of a hypertrophy of musical taste, based on musicology and the progress in recording. It is the culmination of a transformation of musical taste, not a passive and anachronistic "return to sources." Nothing is more modern than an historical approach to an old repertoire.

Jazz, Rock, Rap, and Their Media

Comparing musics and genres on the basis of the media and modes of performance they use does not mean taking their self-descriptions at face value. It is too easy, for instance, to oppose the freedom of playing together and the pleasure of dancing bodies, identified in jazz or rock, to the way written music gives itself airs, while it is suspected by its opponents to be already dead. Against the supposed rigidity of a corseted classical music-prisoner of scores, orchestral hierarchies, harmonic "laws"-jazz, which is so fond of old records, assumes its sweetest voice to sing praises of improvisation. But, busy adorning the object of her love with these praises, the jazz lover forgets that this splendid transgression of centuries of written music did not come about by going back to the oral sources of a traditional music that cannot be written down on paper, but on the contrary by going forward with the use of new means to overfix music, through a medium that no former genre could lean on: jazz has been written by recordings. Testimonies from all the jazz greats converge: they have trained, they have practiced scales, with one ear stuck at the gramophone and radio. Parker learns how to "chorus" by listening hundreds of times to Hawkins's or Young's solos on an old record player, just as previous generations wore out their eyes on old scores, and he looks for the same thing they did: to read a music he could not hear at its source, but that these recordings allow him to work and rework, to analyze and copy, and to play, note by note, faster and faster (DeVeaux 1997).

As a result, far from obeying the millennial rhythm of traditional musics that (transmitted only through collective repetition) continuously change without changing, never stop moving while thinking themselves eternally the same, jazz covered in fifty years a history classical music took five hundred years to write. Between an old blues and a chorus by Coltrane, both officially improvised, lies a transition from orality to a music that on the contrary is overwritten, even more written than classical pieces. Records have written jazz's library. Its living history is the fruit of mechanical recording.

Another example: the sudden passage from rock to rap, quite similar to the revolution of rock itself in the fifties, also displays a conflict between different media-stage versus record. Through a face-to-face confrontation between the star and the public, rock constructed its power around a mythic stage in the quest for a lost hand-to-hand clinch between idols and people. This central place given to the stage was destroyed by rap from the very start, giving way to another definition of musical truth: where you live, where you hang out. The denunciation of rock's too-sophisticated techniques, already made by punks, and the bricolage with record decks and boom boxes, exposed rock's "archaic" conception of stage performance on the basis of an unexpected promotion of recording: not as a faithful reproduction medium, but a cheap means for local creation.

By explicitly refusing to refer to a place other than where one lives-the street, the pavement, shared and invaded places, where one talks, fights, discusses-rap at its origin interrupted the very gesture of the great stage performance. It commuted rivalries and fights into an improvisatory sparring match based on a given background music, played on equipment whose quality did not matter as long as the music was loud enough, to be listened to on the spot, by buddies, equals. The truth of music is not in music itself, not in any reconstituted collective, it is in the present performance you can give, here and now. The initial hostility of rappers toward the music business, money, and the mass media is less to be interpreted as political radicalism than as the technical means to stop the move of identities toward the big stage, always in the hands of intermediaries-and of the white man. So defined, rap is not so new: bebop in its time, punk more recently, or neobaroque musicians all began by escaping from the big stage and the media, before being seized back or dying. Rap has already suffered this common fate. But before it became just another musical genre and social style-racking up huge sales for the record industry-rap had produced, besides a blow to rock grandeur, a new and lasting instrumental use of "reproduction" technology.

Figures of Amateurs

When a sociologist questions somebody nowadays on what he likes, his subject apologizes. "My family is very bourgeois, my sister plays the violin...." Far from revealing the hidden social reality of tastes thought of by amateurs as personal and subjective, irreducible and absolute, sociology has become one of the main registers in which to speak about them. Music lovers, fully aware that tastes are relative, historical, and the supports of various social rites, display them as arbitrary, socially determined signs. Strange paradox of a highly reflexive field: it is the sociologist who must henceforth "desociologize" the amateur if he wants her to speak back of her pleasure, of what holds her, of the astonishing techniques and tricks she develops in order to reach, sometimes, her joy.

Far from being the cultural dope at whose expense the sociology of culture built its critical fortune, the amateur (in the broad sense of art lover) is a virtuoso of experimentation, be it aesthetic, technical, social, mental, or corporeal. She is the model of an inventive and reflexive actor, tightly bound to a collective, continuously forced to put into question the determinants of what she likes. She is as self-aware about pieces and products as about the social determinants and mimetic biases of her preferences; about the training of her body and soul as about her ability to like music, the technical devices of appreciation and the necessary conditions of a good feeling, the support of a collective and the vocabulary progressively designed to perform and intensify her pleasure. Studying diverse amateurs, then, provides a better understanding of our attachments (Gomart and Hennion 1999;Hennion 2001).

Such a survey of classical music lovers, through all the means they can use to reach music (instruments, choirs, singing, but also records, concerts, media, and the Internet), displays the various and heteronomous moments, formats, and configurations in the careers of amateurs, their pattern depending less on past determinants than revealing the stages of a problematic relation to an evasive object (Hennion 2007). A systematic comparison between wine amateurs and music lovers puts under scrutiny the variable role of the heterogeneous mediations of taste: techniques of buying and tasting; belonging to clubs or organized groups; use of an idiomatic vocabulary somewhere between technical discourse and emotive selfexpression; the role of critiques and guides; modes of evaluation, status games, and so forth. Bodies, spaces, durations, gestures, regular practice, technical devices, objects, guides, apprenticeship: both music as a performing art and wine because of its focus on a corporeal contact with the eye, the nose, and the palate allow us to understand taste not as a recording of fixed properties of an object, not as a stable attribute of a person, and not as a game played between existing identities, but as an accomplishment. It is not about liking music or being a wine taster, but about being touched by this piece or liking this bottle, here, now, with these people: a strange activity, the conditions of which are continuously discussed by amateurs themselves. It relies closely upon moments, places, opportunities: taste is not only an activity, it is an event, oversensitive to the problematic relationship between-as they nicely say-a combination of circumstances.

A Possible Return to the Work?

A last point, about the work "itself"-this silent other side of the coin for the sociology of art. A rewriting of music from the viewpoint of mediation makes artistic creation somewhat less distant, less difficult to think of for sociology. Creation does not need to be "taken away" from the great composers and given back to society or consumers: it is just more distributed. Creation is not only on the side of the creator; on the contrary, the more there is a collective work in defining and thus creating a domain such as music, the more we will end up attributing the origins of the works exclusively to certain creators-the paradox of the "author," which the theoreticians of literature have clearly pointed out (Foucault 1969). This mechanism is profoundly circular: it takes all the collectivity's love to be able to say that everything comes from Rembrandt or Mozart. This is why Elias (1993) is caught in a double bind when he speaks of Mozart as a "socially unrecognized" genius-a paradoxical pleonasm, considering how much this "unrecognition" is a central figure of the social recognition of "genius." Highlighting the work of mediation consists of descending a little from this slightly crazy position of attributing everything to a single creator, and realizing that creation is far more widely distributed, that it takes place in all the interstices between these successive mediations. It is not despite the fact that there is a creator, but so that there can be a creator, that all our collective creative work is required.

This collective redistribution of creation is a counterpoint to the single attribution-the "all to the author"-in the preceding period. There is an optimistic note here: This redistributed creation, always out of line, has no need to be compared to the original work as if to a sort of paralyzing challenge. Creation only uses the elements that it holds to make-with a slight discrepancy-something else: a new creation. It is less a question of understanding everything (a formula whose epistemological terrorism is readily apparent) than of grasping something at work, from which a constantly changing interpretation can be presented.


Derek B Scott

Stan Hawkins

Ed Aldershot

Antoine Hennion
email: antoine.hennion@mines-paristech.fr

Anne Paterson Farina

'As Fast as One Possibly Can …' Virtuosity, a Truth of Musical Performance

Virtuosity is a concept that has the double advantage of being transverse with respect to different musical genres and of pointing at performance 2 -at music that is not fixed by the score. These are two characteristics that directly refer to approaches developed by Derek Scott, which he has done by focusing, as I intend to do, on the nineteenth century -a period when great divides were established. 3 These divides still govern current musical practices, and perhaps even more, the academic disciplines that target them. In the course of the questioning of the opposition between popular and art music as carried out by critical musicology, 4 and mirroring its focus on the notion of performance, 5 I have decided to pay respect to the way musicians themselves have taken on the constitutional ambivalence of virtuosity. Indeed, for them this refers less to the specific property some types of music or artists possess than to a distanced attraction -a dangerous temptation, an impossible injunction of which they need to be wary.

Undoubtedly, virtuosity is part of indigenous musicians' vocabulary -it signifies the height of a musician's skills or the seductive prowess of an illusionist. Used both by specialists and by amateurs, the word is powerful in its critical load, albeit positive or negative: it enables the listener to qualify and disqualify an interpreter, to honour an artist or to despise another. There is the matter of the 'virtuosity-effect', which this use of the word, accusing or laudatory, demonstrates. I would posit that this effect is able to guide us into the domain of the mysterious issues of performance. My contribution to this volume is therefore not an analytical effort to afford virtuosity a musical and sociological definition that would be as definite as possible (and that indeed is what the word definition suggests), nor to

provide it with a sense that is stable and independent of situations: for this is exactly what virtuosity, by playing with boundaries, continually seeks to bypass. It would also be somewhat problematic, considering that virtuosity tries to express just the opposite: to give voice to a sense of instability and the fleeting moment by accepting as a criterion the bliss of a performance as nothing but its radical dependence from the present situation. 6 While extending the boundaries that separate musical genres, my purpose is rather to question two contrasting definitions of virtuosity that are strongly present in debates and judgments.

On the one hand, virtuosity has been considered rather negatively as a performance aimed at a public that outwardly demonstrates exception agility in terms of instrumental or vocal technique, especially as related to speed of execution. Such displays are both admired as demonstrations of a divine gift and condemned as a diabolical perversion of musical performance. On the other hand, pushing things to their limits is a pressing need in musical practice, which implies that virtuosity is a more complex issue. This involves an internal musical urge from within. It is perceived as a corporeal and risky litmus test of the mysterious power of music and musicians' talents in a way that forces them to extreme points where they not only reveal their drive, but also topple a music event into states whose boundaries are less easy to determine. This refers to states that words are less capable of defining: primary emotion, collective intoxication and moments of trance. 7 As is evident from this very formulation, these two ways of describing virtuosity are not as contradictory as they might seem. Sorting them out ('virtuosity for its own sake' vs. 'virtuosity in the service of a work', to coin a cliché) is easier to do ex post, once a concert has ended, than during the course of performance when the status of what is at stake at the moment is nothing but obvious, nor is the very fact of evaluating whether it is a success or a failure: how, why, and to what end are we to distinguish between the emotion caused by incredible skills and one's fascination with a rare talent, or by that sense of being carried away by a whirlwind of music, an intense 'breakaway' when music finally no longer exists as a score or a 'piece', but rather as an emotion; when it emerges from the moment as a flicker? It is not what is played, but what comes out of fingers and bodies in motion, uncontrolled, the speed and contrasts of which make the material of sound crack, stripping the screen of its notes.

If You Have to Ask What It Is … Theoretically, there is a great difficulty in finding the right register through which to address intermediate words, such as virtuosity (as is the case for words such as 'grace' or 'presence'). They accompany and describe a common experience with which they are familiar. Then, it is impossible to determine whether they help in analysis or whether they are directly involved in its accomplishment. They serve in analysing the phenomenon they refer to, but at the same time they put things in shape, they allow a grasping of it in some way that contributes to bringing it out. Certainly, this applies to all our categories, something ethnomethodology has taught us. However, what is interesting here are not the basics of the way any qualification operation runs. These are not the limits of any effort to put things into words insofar as, partly constituting the reality they are designating, they are reciprocally called to evolve with it. It is the peculiarity of certain odd words, such as virtuosity, that are suggestive but indefinable, resistant to formalization, as if they only made sense through their own uncertainty and, far from giving them additional weight and efficiency, the effort made to find a more analytical or general basis for these ideas caused them to escape like water in a creek, leaving us void.

Such evanescence -the way in which wear and tear takes its course -is in fact particular in every single case, although it is not necessarily the usual destiny of such musical categories. Instead, many other categories have provided musical performance with a framework that has been reinforced precisely because it gave rise to an intense collective task towards its definition, stabilization and clarification: genres and forms, and, of course, concert programmes and concert hall repertoires, as well as less institutionalized variables, such as the features of tempi, alternating moments of tension and relaxation, typification of instruments and timbres, postures and expressions expected from soloists, and so on. By contrast, this partial list suggests the strange and fragile position occupied by those other more synthetic but less precise words that seek to capture the 'spirit' of what is happening and not to delineate the elements that make it up. They are both more important and less self-confident, as if describing all at once the heart of a phenomenon and the impossibility of achieving it. 'If you have to ask what jazz is, you'll never know', Louis Armstrong reportedly said. Soul or inspiration, feeling or virtuosity, saudade or 'blue note', prodigy or genius: while vocabulary changes with genres and musical styles, there is still a persistent need to pin down things beyond what is describable, and to put a word to those utterly unspeakable but decisive feelings. What we face here is the specific problem raised by these empty words that try to designate without designating, to indicate a question more than to mean anything whatsoever. 8 A Truth of Mechanics? While words such as swing or genius create a strong polarity between the letter and the spirit and between technical means and emotion, reinforcing this dualism, the paradox of virtuosity is that it aims to posit something about the 'spirit of skill'; it suggests a part of the truth that exists in mechanics. Far from opposing art and its means, it speaks of what the art itself could be from within its means, or making the means an art itself. It thus recovers the older sense of the word art, which verges on technique: art is always in the art of making, in the art of doing, something which magicians and clowns remind us of in performances that are primarily a sideshow. There is yet another more historical path that emerges here: this involves a virtuosity that, in opposition to the aestheticism of art, sustains the skill and craftmanship that is central to a performance. Art is a bodily gesture, and not just a mental projection or the expression of one's soul. In their oppositional directions, such dualistic formulae nevertheless miss what, in my view, the word virtuosity signifies: as I have already said, it is not as viable to isolate, separate or analyse performance trends as to hedge one's bets on their secret junction; playing the game of an unlikely rapprochement in the alchemy of the moment.

'To hide art by very art'. 9 One of the first tensions worth noting indeed draws the issue of virtuosity close to that of improvisation, of risk taking, of being on stage; all these unevenly mixed ingredients, taken together, are what constitute the power of a performance. This relationship is a reminder of an aspect I have only touched on so far; a strong constraint that weighs on the bliss of the sequences of breathtaking virtuosity as they determine the success of a brilliant improvisation: the fact is that they move forward only when they are slightly concealed, producing their effect when they seem to arise from a moment. 10 If they hint at too much sweat, if they seem too prepared, and if they give the impression of having been heard a hundred times, they rapidly lose their charm, dwindling to nothing short of pointless exercises. Furthermore, the speed that defines virtuosic quality is bound to be looked down on as soon as one becomes afraid of affording it too much importance: while it has little else to show but its acts to prove its point, these acts themselves are subject to assessments that cannot be grounded.

Olympia the Doll …

This prerequisite is severe; it forces virtuosity to break away from both the work that makes it possible and from the device that makes it attractive. One must receive it without entirely seeing it for what it is; the audience must not be overtly sensitive to the staging required by the performer. The problem is not so much the tedious side of a performance, which offers itself as fluidity incarnated, but rather its predictable aspect -seeing it from a mile away with the performer's intention of knocking the socks off the receiver. One can observe strong but risky contiguities, which virtuosi sustain. In particular, two characters emerge as natural friends:

1.

Magicians, from whom virtuosi borrow many of their stage tricks, learn to know the ropes as well as peddlers' tricks, which are so good at capturing attention; classical interpreters draw from tavern fiddlers, balalaika players, accordion dance musicians or bar pianists threading their devilish ragtimes. In so doing, they find out things that go against everything they have ever learned -the glamorous side of scales and arpeggios played one after the other on simple and repetitive canvasses at a frenetic pace, faster and faster, triggering the frenzy of the audience itself, quite unable to say whether it is carried away by the flood or whether it enjoys pretending to believe it is being carried away; these two states are hardly distant from one another! 2.

Automatons, whose virtuosi seem to seek mechanical perfection while fearing to be mistaken for being automatons -because the only appeal in the way they play resides in the fact that they perform features one might think only a machine could do, whereas they are human beings like you and me.

There is no more brilliant idea than that of Offenbach's librettists to stage a double play in the first of the Tales of Hoffmann with the doll Olympia: the confusion between a diva and an automaton is first used literally in the scenario. The poor Hoffmann is in love with the singer whose virtuosity he admires without knowing what everyone else knows -that she is only a doll. However, this confusion is also used by Offenbach metaphorically quite precisely because Olympia is played by a real singer, whereby her very skilful 'performance' is applauded as the performance of an artist imitating an automaton, and not as that of a doll imitating an artist! In the background, even deeper in terms of metaphor, Offenbach is actually engaged by bitterly criticizing the prowess of coloratura singing with a dose of talent and humour: constantly playing around with crossing the boundaries between the automatic aspect and the virtuoso aspect of the soprano's shrill notes, he presents the audience with a real bravura, which indeed exists in all coloratura-sopranos' repertoire (at least for those who are able to deliver it). And in the same gesture, a comic parody of these operatic arias -a parody whose plot entirely rests on the mechanical and artificial character of these arpeggios that shatter before starting off again once the key in the doll's back has been rewound. Finally, with no solution of continuity besides that of the robotic qualities of the virtuoso doll, the stage reveals its magician, and evil one at that. For behind the doll there is its creator, the shady magician who amazes the complicit audience, deceiving the all too poetical Hoffmann. [START_REF]'Les oiseaux dans la charmille' at the Bastille Opéra in 1992[END_REF] Rascher und rascher … Velocity, a path of large intervals within very short periods of time, escalations of ornamentation and variations, notes doubled an octave apart … those processes, fully exploiting the characteristics of each instrument or its limits, demonstrate virtuosity that is necessary for its display. They also constitute what reveals vanity, quickly toppling it into its opposite, pointless acrobatics, soulless agility. The case of classical music is interesting in that it has greatly increased in tension, in terms of this ambivalence of virtuosity; whereas popular music has managed it with good nature and indulgence: 'come on, minstrels, just play for us!' The Romantic aesthetic expression of the subject, however, amplifies the discomfort aroused by virtuosity, whose illusionist facet articulates poorly in a quest for truth in works that are demanding. The obvious use of artifice, which was no problem as related to classical aesthetics, 12 has to be thoroughly reworked; it has to be contained in order to be made endurable. Yet, once it is perceived as being 'dedicated' to art, is virtuosity a protective barrier against its excesses, or a comfortable denial behind which one can, without scruples, give oneself up to it? It is difficult to decide. But for sure, it was at the very moment the theme of the necessary subjection of virtuosity became commonplace that it took on far unknown dimensions, particularly through the development of the modern piano in the early nineteenth century: that was the moment when in high society circles and on the stages all over Europe Czerny, Moscheles, Chopin, Thalberg, Alkan, and eventually Franz Liszt (the one who was to become the very epitome of an evil and brilliant virtuosity) took their places.

In depending on genres and instruments, it seems to me that these Romantic artists used two different approaches to deal with virtuosity. The first involves mainly the aesthetic. The contempt that Schumann could not help feeling towards Liszt -despite the generous support Liszt gave him -perfectly exemplifies this attitude. Schumann, the man for whom there were no laws in art other than those of morality, [START_REF] Cf | The moral laws are also those of Art'. 14 'As fast as possible[END_REF] had a hard time coping with exhibitionism, seduction, taste for popular success, pursuit of the brilliant effect, indeed all the features he perceived in Liszt's character and in his music. The problem is far from simple, because it is not a matter of pushing away the difficulty of writing and performing works, which composers such as Chopin or Schumann did take to an extreme as much as Liszt (barely had Schumann written Als rasch wie möglich 14 at the beginning of a piece than the same Schumann had added, a few staves later, Rascher und rascher …), but rather it is to obey to the letter the absolute injunction of 'may the interpreter serve the work, not the work serve the interpreter'.

Declined in a thousand ways, this rhetoric of the means and the goal -or for that matter the master and the slave -becomes an indispensable topos when it comes to virtuosity. Arthur Rubinstein used it cunningly while reaping all the benefits of fame and success, repeating 'with modesty' that performers only had talent while composers had genius. This reminder rapidly sounds like a somewhat handy alibi, a position with no opposition that each and every one ensures he occupies himself while accusing others of giving in to the easy way. Nevertheless, this complex topic cannot be reduced so simply: at the very heart of composition, it refers to a very strong requirement -in the great Romantics' works -to that of a maximum coherence among all musical parameters. This is the first response of classical music to virtuosity, and however difficult they may be, Schumann's pieces or, in a less unambiguous way, those of Chopin 15 are not virtuosity pieces.

So, what does this mean? I have no intention of taking this statement for granted, but rather to see if it leads to the possible illustration of technical differences in the form of pianistic writing itself. The idea has a relevance, even though I will not endeavour to prove or develop it in this context. It is that which the word composition, taken literally, expresses well: the opposite of a virtuoso piece is not necessarily an easy piece, or a work that foregoes exploiting the resources of techniques, but more an integrated piece, a piece whose various elements closely respond to each other and constitute one another.

It is this vital distributed aspect of music that makes inappropriate the vocabulary of virtuosity. However, this vocabulary can be deployed without embarrassment in a musical space where, on the contrary, the variables are clearly separated: an easily recognizable melody on which one can make all imaginable variations (plus a few others …), a fixed harmonic grid on which one can improvise, a basic rhythm on which, say, Liszt could indulgently superimpose chromaticisms and demisemiquavers. Referring to Bach and Beethoven, Schumann would often insist that a melody is much more than what one can imagine: in more modern terms, one might say that to him, a melody is indeed distributed between (and no longer on) harmony, rhythm, figures that respond to one another. Conversely, harmony or form are not separable, but arise in successive layers by amplification to constitute one another and to com-pose one another: then there is no place any longer for the left hand droning an Alberti bass or striking its chords while the right hand spins in all directions! To say it in other terms, there is no longer a way to isolate a virtuoso line from its harmonic well-established framework, nor to hear it as the ornate variation of a given theme. In my opinion, this is precisely what undermines the idea of virtuosity, both under the composer's pen and in the amateur's ear. 16 All said and done, this should not force one to be fooled by art history, which is constantly rewritten ex post like the long and difficult path towards the demands, purities and autonomies that aesthetic conformism has become. The idea is only to note how, as ideals, this ascetic, puritan repression of effects for effects had an effect, which, in turn, deserves to be recognized and analysed: ideals such as these have made possible the invention of a new language, characterized by coherence, by maximum integration that, in 15 Eigeldinger (2000). 16 To get a musical idea of the point, one can compare György Cziffra playing Liszt's Hungarian Rhapsody No. 3, and Martha Argerich in the ending of the third movement of Schumann's Fantasy in C major Op.17, which is very difficult not because of Liszt's lines, but because of everything occurring at once: a very fast and repeated rhythm jostling large arpeggio chords with both hands . The same 'à la Schumann' non-virtuosic virtuosity can be heard in 'Aufschwung', his Phantasiestucke Op.12 No. 2, and also in pieces by Chopin, such as the Study Op. 25 No. 11 in A minor, for instance played by Sviatoslav Richter. Chopin is of interest because he is somewhere between Liszt and Schumann: if there is obviously a clear opposition between chords and lines as in Liszt, his lines are closely linked and stress the percussive power of chords, which are not of the sort 'in' which twirling passages can be played.

depriving virtuosity of much of its relevance, shifts the issue towards that of the overall difficulty of interpretation. The more popular or hedonistic aesthetics that these stringent requirements have repressed have no need to be defended, given their success. But neither can they be reduced to easy exploitations of existing processes. They also have to be elaborated through multiple channels. Incidentally, the continuities between art and popular musicians are striking as regards this matter. Virtuosity itself is so aligned with technical excellence that, when pursued, it never goes very far away. In the case of one of the more 'serious' composers, Brahms, one never ceases, for instance, to hear the gypsy accents of the violin, which the skill of classical quartets had managed to erase and disembody till nothing was left but a heavenly voice. Conversely, when Ravel methodically runs counter to the canons of Modernism, when he rehabilitates waltz, descriptive music, programmes and the 'gypsy' violin (inadvertently reasserting the value of virtuosity), it would be problematic to infer that his only aesthetic concern lies in the pleasure of impressing his public.

'Vissi d'arte'

There is a second way that classical musicians accommodated virtuosity that I wish to mention. As early as the nineteenth-century, well before the artists of the twentieth century's ironic or iconoclastic posturing, Romantic composers were able to turn to other means than pure aesthetics to confine the virtuosity, to exploit it without allowing it to decimate the music: and the most important approach, in tandem with the previous, involved a resistance to this 'virtuosity-effect' by opposing the mixed richness of emotion, the never-ending quest for the expression of feeling, as in opera, rather than the uncompromising autonomy of a work. A priori, as a virtuosic development material, the voice had every reason to compete with the violin or the piano. It did not deprive itself of so doing. 17 Vocalizations, arpeggios, sostenuti, endless ornaments and cadenzas, singers rival each other in skill, stripping the works of composers who are powerless in limiting their excesses: here we are again facing the very words of the argument about virtuosity. However, in contrast with chamber or orchestral music, opera has never been under the influence of autonomous aesthetics, of which it is the absolute antithesis. 18 Wagner's revolutionary pretensions, which were to favour his Modernist annexation, targeted a total art, which was quite different: only a deaf person would not to hear the heterogeneous diversity of the effects that saturate his writing, both on stage and in the pit. As for other composers, from Mozart to Debussy, from Gounod to Verdi, from Mussorgsky to Strauss or to Berg, they all instinctively accommodated opera within another space, which consistently reversed the representations of 'pure' music: a mixture of ambiguity, entertainment and dance, where the bodily pleasure of voices, projection and identification eroticized characters, the place where the plot, the stage play and the words attempt, with variable success, to marry singing with the orchestra. 19 One can understand that such an unlikely union can only last if it is armoured with conventions. The Modernists themselves, fascinated by this anti-model that opera 17 There is a profusion of examples here. See e.g. Rossini's 'Una voce poco fa' ('A voice has not much power'!) in the Barber of Seville: 65 years before Olympia, already a 'mise en abyme' lesson, Rosina's contest, sung for instance by Maria Callas in 1959. Or, again in the Barber, 'Largo al factotum', for instance by Thomas Hampson in 1992, for Rossini's 200th anniversary, in which he acts as a clown and adds notes. 18 Fulcher (1987). 19 Hennion (2007a).

shows them, have repeatedly promised its death, before rushing into its arms at the first opportunity. 20 And yet, also on this stage -a stage that is so far away from purifying asceticism and from art for art's sake, so conducive to spectacular excess -virtuosity has had to surrender. The never ending fragility of Norma's melodic ascent, the spellbinding power of Isolde's complaint, Carmen's sarcastic accents or La Traviata's bloody tears: while requiring from singers an inordinate performance, they hardly evoke the idea of virtuosity. Just as Chopin's Etudes, straight as an arrow despite their chromatic descents, or Schumann's Fantasy, whose rhythm is impossible to maintain, it is not so much that these lyrical summits stand beyond the diagnosis of virtuosity, but rather that they make it obsolete, useless, that they outstrip it from itself. But they do it in ways that are contrary to those of the great Romantic piano composers, not by the rigour and coherence of a musical form, but through the tentative mobilization of an emotion that is both intimate and collective, leaning on all the age-old techniques of performance: the mythical narrative, the drama of love and death, the exposure of bodies and the painful tension of extreme performance. Then there is the impossibility of love profiled by the backdrop of a tragic chorus: from Orfeo to Lulu, we might ask which opera is the exception to the process? At the same time, this ageless canvas, this endless da capo is an opening that has no boundary, no background and no horizon. Is it still even music? What pleasure is there in hearing a long, shrill note, to listen to a tune for the thousandth time that one owns ten versions of, or to observe the accents and impetus of a voice with a magnified potential through extraordinary technical developments? Who can say what that 'emotion' exactly comprises -another of these intermediate words impossible to define.

A well-tempered virtuosity

Nothing prevents an amateur liking both nineteenth-century piano sonatas and Romantic operas. The abstraction of a musical language pushed to its limits, and the sensual and projective ambiguity of the great lyrical machine, do not exclude one another. Moreover, these genres are all laden with a thousand virtuoso feats. Nevertheless, in both cases, virtuosity has been pushed back to the fringes, or confined to a closely observed enclosure. While virtuosity is certainly present, the genre unfolds against it in a double sense, where the genre in question both leans against and opposes virtuosity. This founding gesture, which defines virtuosity by default after having stripped it of any aesthetic value, also disqualifies it in other genres, as if by contamination. Two centuries of Romantic then Modernist aesthetics have managed to turn it into some kind of primary background for our musical and dramatic instincts, which any self-respecting artistic practice has a duty to surpass.

My point is that there is no reason for this to be so. It is quite possible to elaborate on the rigour of aesthetics, not in spite of virtuosity, but for it. By not relegating virtuosity to the margins of the definition of quality, but by making music arise from its effects, by starting from the virtuoso gesture to make it express what it can bring. This is worth repeating, I think, with an entire aesthetic tradition in mind: our frayed vision of virtuosity is not a necessity; it is first and foremost the effect of the dualistic vision of Romanticism, further amplified by Modernism. The more we adamantly oppose idea and matter, means and ends, mind and body, the more we impose a dichotomized musical space; between art and technique, between the truth of an inner feeling and the artifice of the notes that express it. On the one hand, the work bequeathed by the genius; on the other hand, a humble servant who deciphers the composer's mysterious 'intentions'. This entire topology, which is so paradoxical when talking about the art of playing and performing, goes against a conception that is, instead, connected, continuous, articulating gesture and effect, confounding the work and its interpretation, unable to dissociate means and ends, and refusing to separate body and emotion. Yet, is that not that exactly the positive programme that one can build virtuosity upon? The assumption is not at all crazy; rather, it's more a reassuring return of the repressed. When playing, the majority of classical performers continue to live what they deny, and keep connecting through their bodies what their minds believe they have severed. What they seek is the flexible, subtle articulation of a gesture that is to be made over and over again; this strives towards a music that is never there, which is far from the blinding clarity that too aptly separates the 'score'21 from its 'interpretation'.

Giant Steps

Which brings us to aesthetics. What happens if we leave the temples of classical music? Just think of flamenco, open-air dance music and the intoxication of accordions, or African drums: an intense emotion may occur -not beyond the prowess of the bodies, but within them. Flamenco is nothing but virtuosity, that of fingers on strings, that of the improvised melisma of a husky voice flying away and stroking the breaks of the rhythm, that of tapdancers' heels slamming and speeding up, that of busts and bellies that swirl and arch, constantly bounced from the broadest movement to immobility lying in wait, and that of hands carving the air. Everything concerns the body in terms of deftness and difficulty, but who would have the idea of turning away from this physical tension to search for the source of the pleasure, and of looking instead for it in the intimacy of an inner soul or in the absolute beauty of a work? The moment, the place and the performance are there at centre stage. Music and emotion are but the same words made to express a single event, that which gives the present its density.

My purpose in referring to flamenco is not to isolate a genre, which, like Asterix's little Gallic village resisting the general invasion of form and pure emotion, would have preserved the rare cult of the virtuoso gesture, but rather to suggest from real examples that an aesthetic of virtuosity is possible; a positive, contemporary aesthetic that creates new worlds rather than an aesthetic by default. And this would not be to assign it exclusively to one music rather than another: but instead, to regard it as surreptitiously adhering to the noblest, the most sublime and the most sensitive genres. But dwelling on the flamenco may be too easy an example to prove the possibility of a bodily aesthetic: does the flamenco not typify the music of 'the other'? one might say that I am just extending the dualism I wish to oppose between 'them ' and 'us', 22 between the popular and corporeality of popular music on the one side, and classical music, made of written works, on the other. Everyone seems content now to grant exoticism opposite qualities to those championed by the Christian West -the power of trance, the vitality of rites, the mobility of bodies, the intensity of a people, as reflected in music. Is the unsettling question really about wondering whether this 'other' music is beautiful? Who still doubts it? But what if this music did do what scholarly music does: what if 'other' music were also constructing a work of art, and were doing so by stressing even more the etymology of the word -working at having the 'art work', so to speak?

To provide a positive answer, albeit without concluding, I want to make my point by turning to jazz -a genre that is partly other, at least when compared to the classical tradition. Yet it is an 'other' with its origins at the heart of our culture, and not its periphery. 'Mozart played by blacks', people claimed when referring to ragtime. This is probably what resulted in jazz becoming a concentration of divergent forces. Jazz could be considered as representative of African Americans, and under the aegis of an illusory radicality, filed a few decades later on another shelf in the store of folklore or at the museum of ethnicities. Instead, jazz has incorporated all the ingredients of modern Western music, both in its forms, harmonies and instruments, and processes of mediation. Rapidly, jazz became radio and recorded music rather than music from plantations. It was black music played for white men, first for their entertainment, then as music approved of by the Europeans. 23 Its accelerated history became the result of a succession of renunciations (of whatever could reduce it to a particularistic music) and adoptions (of anything that could integrate it into time and space). It only remains identifiable through a few, minimal but decisive traces: the blues, the improvised choruses, a frenetic pace.

Returning to the central theme of this chapter, I would like to suggest that jazz may have invented something unique due to its intrinsic qualities: like classical music through its material, its format, its performance, but with only one small entity that makes all the difference -its emphasis on performance, not on the work. 24 This has come about through a historical shift resulting in its transposition and transformation into a contemporary mould. Bebop is not flamenco precisely because of this internal resumption: it is played and dressed up in a Western manner. Moreover, it meets the requirement of the clean aesthetic carved out by Western music, concentrating on itself and aiming at the production of differentiated works. In this sense, it is obvious that jazz is a form of modern Western music, and not a traditional or ethnic music. Nor is it a popular music with a common cultural or social identity fixed by stable codes. Virtuosity in jazz is neither the proof of a collective performance made indistinct by the body through dance and ritual in the form of entertainment, nor is it the basic starting point from which music evolves. Let me say things again in a different way: whereas the mapping of the music of Western culture is granted by original scores, jazz privileges the act of playing, of engaging through exhilarating pleasure virtuoso sequences of scales and chords, and, as with flamenco, it is located in the here and now, in the collective heat of a public that is beside itself with joy. Yet, unlike flamenco, its sole concern is in the making of music: 25 for jazz is a dedicated Western style -it has not so much rid itself of the notion of work as it has emphasized the work as being the performance itself. Take Coltrane, an artist in the modern sense of the word: he does not play 'jazz', but rather takes the risk of offering a separate version of the standard each time he performs.

The issue I leave open is: in listening to Giant Steps (what a nice summary of the history of jazz, that title is!), what I hear is an aesthetic of virtuosity -a formula that has a meaning only provided one gives equal weight to both words. Jazz is music that has succeeded in making virtuosity itself the very subject of aesthetics. 23 Gumplowicz (1991). 24 Berliner (1994). 25 Or 'being music', to say it in a perhaps more accurate way.

A first version of this chapter was published in French in an online journal: http://ateliers.revues.org/8764(Hennion

2011). The chapter has been translated by Anne Paterson Farina and Stan Hawkins. 2 I note that the English word 'performance' is far more relevant than the French usage, which expresses interpretation, or worse, execution.3 Scott (19893 Scott ( , 2008)).4 This theme was introduced in the 1980s by scholars, such as J. Kerman and A. Durant, gaining momentum in size and content through an alternative promotion of popular culture (e.g.Leppert and McClary 1987[START_REF] Frith | Performing Rites. On the Value of Popular Music[END_REF], Whiteley et al., 2004).5 Typically, performance studies are divided because of the dual meaning of the word: a reference to theatre taken as a model of self-expression[START_REF] Jackson | Professing Performance: Theatre in the Academy from Philology to Performativity[END_REF]; and the idea of the necessary performativity of a social identity[START_REF] Schechner | Performance Studies: An Intro[END_REF]. This opposition -'life as performance' vs. 'performance as life' -seems less an ambiguity that requires resolving than a founding ambivalence that makes the word interesting. All depends on whether one takes theatrical performance just as a case study or, conversely, as Judith Butler did, an interest in performance as the production of oneself or of collectives that, in that way, we allow to exist, we realize, we produce -all the words filled with the same dual meaning, referring both to the world of performance and to a pragmatism of existence and identity[START_REF] Butler | Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative[END_REF](Butler , 2005)).

[START_REF] Sudnow | Ways of the Hand. The Organization of Improvised Conduct[END_REF].

[START_REF] Rouget | La musique et la transe. Esquisse d'une théorie générale des relations de la musique et de la possession[END_REF].

[START_REF] Jankélévitch | La musique et l'ineffable[END_REF].

The formula is by Rameau, in the letter he wrote in 1827 to Houdar de La Motte in order to convince the playwriter to write a libretto for him (it has been published in Le Mercure de France, 1865).

See the issue of Tracés (2011) dedicated to improvisation.

The music score is, so revealingly, named 'partition', in French!


Contexts. N. H. Hornberger C Baker

Buffalo Ed Bristol

Michel Lafon
email: lafon@vjf.cnrs.fr

Rethinking Bilingual Education in Postcolonial

 for a detailed study of Algeria). However, with the possible exception of

Tanzania and erstwhile Madagascar, most African countries south of the Sahara with no significant literate tradition in a language they could claim their own have refrained from such ambitious political statement.

Rather, they have maintained the former colonial language throughout a generally expanding formal education system. When they feature, local languages are usually restricted to the early years [START_REF] Alidou | Medium of Instruction in Post--Colonial Africa[END_REF]) and their use remains highly controversial among many stakeholders [START_REF] Qorro | Parents' and Policy Makers' Insistence on Foreign Languages as Media of Instruction in Africa: restricting access to quality education --for whose benefit?[END_REF].

In his case study of Mozambique which draws its argument from fieldwork in two sites of the southern Gaza province, Chimbutane demonstrates the intrinsic link between attitudes towards language choice in education proper and in society at large. Since 2003 an experiment in bilingual education, offered in a handful of rural schools, has proved so popular regardless of the many challenges it faced and continues to face that communities outside its planned scope have requested to be included. Thus the experiment has embraced 16 or 17 languages over the 7 initially considered and circa twice more classrooms and pupils [START_REF] Lafon | Mozambique, vers la reconnaissance de la réalité plurilingue par l'introduction de l'éducation bilingue[END_REF](Lafon & 2012a & b) & b). This undeterred popularity has led the political leadership to change drastically its ideological stance. It is this dialectic that the book highlights, illustrating, given local circumstances, the 'emancipatory force' of the experiment (p167) (see also Chimbutane (2012). Whereas African languages, hardly recognized in the present Constitution (Governo de Moçambique 2004) had little space in public discourse, they are now part of a revamped concept of Mozambicanhood (p161) which appears as a mix where modernity blends with what Stroud aptly calls a "retraditionalisation" of society (2007:42, quoted p126). Emphasis is placed on retrieving and revitalising cultural roots, at times bordering on folkorisation as evidenced by the prominence given to dance and artefacts rather than language in the 2006--2010/11 Education plan (Governo de Moçambique 2006).

And this new framework may reach far beyond education. A reflection on language policy was launched in 2008 by the Ministry of Culture and the shift in thinking was echoed in the Carta de Maputo emanating from the 2011 PALOP (Países Africanos de Língua Oficial Portuguesa) meeting (Esteve Filimão, interviews, July 2010, October 2011; http://www.iilp.org.cv/; Lafon 2012b). Whether the programme itself was cause or consequence of this change is of course hard to decide but I would contend that its launch was, probably unwittingly, the determining factor behind it.

Chimbutane's book is thus an invitation to reflect on issues pertaining to education in a very specific postcolonial setting. On the whole Chimbutane has succeeded in turning an academic degree -the book is based on a PhD elaborated at Birmingham in Great--Britain -- into a readable and most useful volume. I will not deal here though with the main topic of the book. My contribution is meant as complementary rather than critical (or laudatory). I am concerned here with the historical background. I will present in some details aspects which, I contend, have been omitted, forgotten or underplayed in Chimbutane's otherwise thoughtfully managed study. This is not intended merely for the sake of setting historical records right but because, on the one hand, past policies of cultural denial are crucial to understand the dynamics of today's situation, and on the other, literary developments during the early assimilation period may offer cues to the much needed promotion of African languages, which is one of today's most rehearsed but less heeded leitmotivs.

Frelimo's protracted denial

One of the central points of Chimbutane's thesis is to highlight the positive impact that bilingual education in Mozambique, limited though its scope remains, has had on the speakers' own perception of the value of their language and culture (p 13 & 15 & 106), triggering a dramatic turn about of the dominant ideological discourse.

It is undeniable that part of the programme's popularity in rural areas stems from the novelty that it represented, after a protracted history of negation of African languages and values and might be taken as an illustration of the tendency to adhere to policies adverse to what was propounded during the colonial or pre-independence period, demonstrated à contrario by the example of South Africa [START_REF] Lafon | L'Envers du Décor. Les Politiques Coloniales relatives à l'usages des Langues africaines à l'école continuent de commander les attitudes. Contrastes entre Afrique du Sud et Mozambique[END_REF]. However Chimbutane passes very briefly (p3 & seq.) over the Frelimo pre--1990 policy of modernism which attempted to relegate African languages to (at best) families (for instance Matusse 1997:545), conversely emphasizing the anecdotal use of African languages by President Samora Machel himself (p44, 160). Still this legacy, which invites itself inadvertently in a later passage (p124), is crucial to gain an understanding of attitudes which remain dominant, namely its popularity with rural communities and the reluctance of the administration to fully embrace the programme, which, if this were a clue to Chimbutane's discretion, would only prove my point further.

In Mozambique, not only were local languages systematically denigrated from the 1930s during colonial rule to the extent of being called 'dog's languages' according to a testimony (p110), but, as in few other places, they were further marginalized for a good 20 years after Independence, when they were referred to, as they still are, as 'dialects', thus denying them the status of a language. This came as a consequence of the Portuguese 'assimilation' policy, by means of which a small minority of Black and mulattoes (mixed--blood people, mestiços) were elevated almost to the level of the Portuguese settlers in terms of rights and privileges, including access to education, provided they adhered to Portuguese Christian values and attitudes [START_REF] Mondlane | Mozambique, de la colonisation portugaise à la libération nationale P[END_REF]. At Independence in 1974 Frelimo adopted a Marxist discourse that espoused many ideological tenets of 'assimilation' for the sake of national unity and 'progress'. 'The project of national unity' (p99) echoed the 19 th century 'classical ideal of a centralised nation state' (Kamwangamalu 2008:174) in its Stalinist embodiment, which required one unique language for a nation to exist (Rocha 2006:19). If such concern in a country with no common history except that of suffering under the same colonial master (Mondlane 1979:96) is self--explanatory, especially as, due to the geo--political environment, it combined with a fear of being overpowered by English [START_REF] Rothwell | The phylomorphic linguistic tradition: or, the siege of the Portuguese in Mozambique Hispanic[END_REF]), the obsession with the pursuance of 'progress' is not. Progress implied, for the Frelimo leadership, bringing forth a 'new man' (Mugomba 1980). For this to happen, it was deemed essential to relinquish the very same African practices deemed 'pagan', 'barbarian' or 'backwards' in the previous age and replace them by so--called 'modern' (viz., European--centred) ones, moreover uniform across the country. Language--wise, this meant the abandonment of the local languages seen as divisive in favour of the proclaimed national one, Portuguese, that extensive education programmes were disseminating. Local languages were prohibited in official places (Firmino 2006: 142). This strategy however was self--defeating: how could the new revolutionary schools attain "a rich interaction with surrounding peasant communal villages" (Mugomba 1980: 216), a condition for their sustainability, without interacting with them in their own language and acknowledging their values? Since

Geffray's 1990 pioneer study, this scenario has been widely exposed. Such disdain for time--tested engrained practices already encroached upon by colonial rule nurtured support for Renamo, an armed opposition movement triggered by the neighbouring racist states of Rhodesia and South Africa. I argue elsewhere [START_REF] Lafon | Mozambique, vers la reconnaissance de la réalité plurilingue par l'introduction de l'éducation bilingue[END_REF](Lafon & 2012b) that one underlying reason for Frelimo's attitude culture--wise lies in the appropriation of the assimilation ideology by cadres most of whom emanated from this very minute strata as, with very few exceptions, only former assimilados and mulattoes had had access to secondary schooling, and/or were fascinated by its trappings and had longed for the status. The administrative unification of the whole indigenous population in 1961 with the rescission of forced labour and other vexing measures resulted, in urban areas, in further spreading assimilation as a desired model.

It took the promulgation of a constitution allowing for multiparty democracy in 1994 in the wake of the peace agreement to give clearance to adult education programmes relying on local languages; and another ten years to see them considered, with extreme caution, in formal education.

Early literacy developments in Mozambique -'assimilação uniformizadora'

One step deeper into the past, Chimbutane also underplays a unique episode in Mozambican history which may be of significance to--day. Even though he pays tribute to the important role played by Protestant churches in the instrumentalization and maintenance of African languages through biblical translation and other edifying texts, Chimbutane places the beginning of education for Africans in the 1930s, that is, when the state-supported Catholic Church was allowed to exercise a near monopoly over it (p46). Still, in the South, by the 1880s the Protestant Missions had already incepted a bilingual education of sorts, which was rapidly to bear fruits. This episode has been extensively described by Cruz e Silva (2001) and Harries (especially 2007). By 1896 there were already 900 'educated' Africans (Rocha 2006:99) most, it can safely be assumed, literate in their own language(s). The figure may seem small but in the conditions prevailing at the time this was not negligible.

The Swiss Mission had started to print biblical translations in local languages (Cruz e Silva 2001:50), a feat which implied local agency. For example, from 1890 father Robert Ndevu Mashaba published religious works in Ronga and by 1908 the Bible was translated in Tswa. Moreover, Chimbutane sets the inception of the assimilation policy when it was officially promulgated in 1917 (p34). But, prior to the date, colonial policy had held promises of racial integration through 'assimilação uniformizadora' ('uniformising assimilation') (Rocha 2006:124). 'Educated' blacks and mulattoes, referred to as Black or African Portugueses or 'filhos da terra'

(children of the soil), set apart from the mass of 'indigenes', enjoyed theoretically the same privileges as white

Portugueses and some even occupied relatively high offices (Rocha 2006:40, 71). This subsided gradually after the influential Antonio Enes' 1893 report on the administration of the colony (Penvenne 1989:266), especially when the Republican administration in charge from 1910 tried to lure new settlers from the home country whose main qualification lay in their skin colour. Regulations were passed to establish job privileges for white

Portugueses by containing 'assimilated' non--whites, leading to the 1917 assimilado status which compelled them to carry a document and was largely perceived as a drawback. Portuguese took uncontested precedence in their practices and discourse -they pledged loyalty to Portugal (and hence to the language) even though they were harsh critics of its policies --they commonly and unashamedly used African languages in their bulletins. O Africano, The African, O Gremio's mouth--piece, founded in 1908, and its sequel O Brado Africano from 1918, were bi--, if not multi--lingual, as O Africano's subtitle in Ronga illustrates (facsimile in Rocha 2006:115). The 1917 status which the Gremio vehemently and constantly opposed was published in Ronga (Rocha 2006:148, 151, 197). Granted, the Gremio's position on language was somewhat ambiguous. In an acceptance of the assimilation rationale, they demanded education and the teaching of Portuguese for all Africans as a step towards their improvement and equality with Whites, and looked down on African language literacy, criticising the Protestant missions' orientation in that regard

(Cruz e Silva 2001; Rocha 2006). In the 1920s a splinter group published for some time Dambu dja Africana, The African Sun, purely in Ronga. As the split seems to have emerged from a cleavage between mulattoes and Africans, the language choice was probably a political statement [START_REF] Honwana | The life history of Raúl Honwana : an inside view of Mozambique from colonialism to independence[END_REF][START_REF] Penvenne | We are all Portuguese!' Challenging the Political Economy of Assimilation[END_REF][START_REF] Moreira | Os Assimilados, João Albasini e as Eleições 1900[END_REF][START_REF] Lopes | Universities and research : papers from Maputo : II UEM Research Seminar[END_REF][START_REF] Rocha | Associativismo e Nativismo em Moçambique --Contribuição para o estudo das Origens do Nacionalismo Moçambicano Maputo[END_REF]; infopedia http://www.infopedia.pt/$o--brado--africano, accessed July 2010).

These developments evoke a similarly divided attitude among the South African mission--educated black elite of the same period, represented by the likes of Jabavu, Plaatje, Dube, etc (see [START_REF] Ndletyana | African Intellectuals in 19th and early 20th century South Africa Cape Town[END_REF], who, if with misgivings, expressed themselves both in English and in their own languages.

These facts underline the literary tradition local languages, mostly Ronga, can boast, which contradict categorical statements such as the absence of "any prior tradition of bilingual education" in Mozambique (p1).

Such silence is regrettable. Limited as it may have been, with to--day's situation in mind, this remarkable episode, constantly underplayed in official history --Albasini's pieces in Portuguese and Ronga are yet to be compiled and studied --may be pregnant of a promising future. Then was a time when the main non--white intellectuals published in a truly bilingual fashion, not shrinking from writing in their own as well as in the colonial language. This reminds us of the responsibility of intelligentsias in matters cultural and linguistic. The school may well start rehabilitating African languages, but, for their written use to outgrow school manuals, it has to be adopted and become common practices. If the opportunity presently opened in Mozambique for linguistic transformation is not to be wasted, what the early assimilados did in terms of vernacular writing must be emulated by Mozambican intellectuals of the day. In that respect, the recent celebration of Bento Sitoe's achievements as an academic and an inspired Ronga novelist and play--writer is encouraging, and it is reassuring to see, after a timid start, that shelves in Maputo's bookshops display new helpings of books in local languages.

  After the 1917 coup in Portugal which paved the way for Salazar's Estado Novo, eventually established in 1933, educational endeavours of Protestant missions, suspect of instilling dangerous ideas into native minds, were curtailed, their use of African languages being a ready excuse to target them. Still, prior to this closure, from the early 1900s, emerged, among the 'filhos da terra', a political movement christened 'nativismo', known mostly through O Gremio Africano de Lourenço Marquès (The African Guild of LM, the name of the Portuguese settlement in the Maputo area). It was created and guided by the Albasini brothers, themselves mulattoes and widely seen as the founding fathers of Mozambican nationalism. If