Myth and Music: The Musical Epigraphs to The Raw and the Cooked

Robert Launay

Histories of Anthropology Annual, Volume 7, 2011, pp. 83-90 (Article)

Published by University of Nebraska Press DOI: 10.1353/haa.2011.0006

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Myth and Music

The Musical Epigraphs to The Raw and the Cooked

Robert Launay

In the Overture to the rst of his four volumes on myth, The Raw and the Cooked, Claude Lvi-Strauss makes the startling remark that this book on myths is itself a kind of myth (1969:6). This remark can be interpreted as what the French call a d, a challenge: if the book is itself a myth, it can be subjected to the same methods of structural analysis it deploys in the analysis of South American mythology. Indeed, the books musical epigraphs (Figures 1 and 2) lend themselves perfectly to this kind of analysis; in spite of their apparent insignicance, taken together they expose and develop critical features of Lvi-Strausss ideas, both in the book and in general. This is not to suggest that the musical epigraphs were chosen with any such purpose in mind. On the contrary, to paraphrase a famous sentence from the book, I wish to show not how Lvi-Strauss thinks in musical epigraphs, but how musical epigraphs operate in Lvi-Strausss mind without his being aware of the fact (LviStrauss 1969:12).1 Of course the musical epigraphs also serve a deliberate purpose in the book, underscoring (or, more appropriately, scoring) the playful analogy between myth and music embedded in all the chapter titles of the book: overture, theme and variations, symphony, cantata, fugue, and so on. This analogy calls into question the salience of Lvi-Strausss earlier linguistic paradigm for the analysis of mythsfor example, by breaking them down into mythemes in the way linguists might identify phonemes or morphemes. Lvi-Strauss here suggests that music is a more appropriate paradigm than language for exploring the relationship between structure and meaning. The question What does a specic utterance mean? is, taken literally, a perfectly sensible one. However, it is utterly nonsensical to ask what a Beethoven sonata or a Bach fugue, or for that matter any specic musical passage from either work, means. This is not at all to suggest that music is meaningless, but simply that whatever meaning a work or a passage may convey cannot be translated

Figure 1. Musical epigraph for The Raw and the Cooked.

Figure 2. Musical epigraph for part 5, chapter 3 of The Raw and the Cooked.

into words. However, there exists an elaborate vocabulary for the analysis of musical structure in terms of melody, harmony, meter, rhythm, counterpoint, and so on. In other words, we cannot ever state what music means but we can specify quite precisely how it means. This is indeed how we approach its comprehension. Critics who complain that after reading The Raw and the Cooked and Lvi-Strausss subsequent volumes on myth the reader remains just as unenlightened about the mean84 Musical Epigraphs to The Raw and the Cooked

ings of South and North American myths have either missed the point of the analogy or chosen to ignore it. Seen in this light, the musical epigraphs might appear to be the frosting on the cake of this elaborate musical joke. There are three epigraphs in all: two texts set to music at the beginning and the end of the book and one text about music in the middle. These three form a symbolic triad, much like raw/cooked/rotten. The two musical passages oppose each another in virtually every respect, both musically and textually; the text about music occupies the mediating position. This is a denition of an understandably extremely rare musical genre, a double inverted canona piece that can be read upside down and backward, so that the end becomes the beginning and the bass line becomes the treble. The double inverted canon is clearly a musical metaphor for Lvi-Strausss own method of reading myths as transformations of one anothersupercially very distinct but structurally identicallike the forward and backward versions of the canon. It would not, needless to say, be a protable exercise to attempt to read The Raw and the Cooked upside down and backward, even in the original French. However, in the third volume of the Mythologiques, The Origin of Table Manners (1978), Lvi-Strauss does suggest that the three volumes can be read in almost any order: 1, 2, 3; 2, 3, 1; 2, 1, 3; or 3, 1, 2but perhaps not 1, 3, 2 or 3, 2, 1arguably as close a literary approximation of the double inverted canon as one might possibly imagine. The denition of the canon is taken from a dictionary of music by Rousseau, a minor eighteenth-century composer whose best-known composition is an opera, Le devin du village (The village diviner), a personal favorite of Louis XV that has since sunk into relative oblivion. The operas title, at least, might seem grist for the anthropological mill, and the diviner in question isas one might expecta mediator, although not between the human and the supernatural but, more prosaically, between the shepherdess Colette and the shepherd Colin. The plot qualies as pastoral romance rather than myth. Rousseau was not only a mediocre composer but also, in his day, an inuential music critic as well as a philosophera personal favorite of Lvi-Strauss, who called him the most anthropological of the philosophes (1973:390). The relationship between Rousseaus musical criticism and his philosophy is a key to his importance in understanding Lvi-Strausss thought in general, and also the texts set to music in the other epigraphs to The Raw and the Cooked. Rousseaus musical criticism was motivated by his role in one of the innumerable polemical quarrels which characterized French intellectual life in the EnlightenLaunay 85

ment.2 The Querelle des Bouffons (Quarrel of the buffoons) pitted partisans of Italian opera against defenders of French opera (see Johnson 1992). In 1753, in the midst of the quarrel, Rousseau published Letter on French Music, in which he proclaimed the superiority of Italian as opposed to French opera (Rousseau 1998:141174). (The Village Diviner had been composed and successfully performedin French!only a year before.) His argument was that the quality of a nations music depended intrinsically on the nature of its language. Song, he suggested, was the rst musical genre, and so harmony and rhythm were ultimately subservient to melody. Of all languages, Italian, he insisted, was the most intrinsically melodic, with its open vowels and soft consonants. At its best, Italian music complemented the natural melody of the language, whereas French music all too often tried to compensate for the weakly melodical nature of the language through counterintuitive harmonies and rhythms, privileging articial cleverness over natural beauty. At the same time as Rousseau was engaging in musical polemic, he was elaborating philosophical scenarios accounting for the origin of culture and society: his famous Discourse on Inequality (1984; rst published in 1755), but also an Essay on the Origin of Languages, which was originally intended to be part of the discourse but was never published during Rousseaus lifetime (Rousseau 1998:289332).3 In the Essay, Rousseau imagined pre-linguistic humanity as living in relatively decorous primal hordes: Each family was selfsufcient and perpetuated itself through its own stock. Children born of the same parents grew up together and gradually found ways of expressing themselves among themselves; with age, the sexes were distinguished, natural inclination sufced to unite them, instinct took the place of passion, habit took the place of preference, they became husbands and wives without ceasing to be brothers and sisters. (Rousseau 1998:314) A century later, Victorian anthropologists were to nd such a scenario titillating, repellent, or both; Rousseau just found it boring. These primal hordes, in Rousseaus imagination, were pastoral. Language was born when young shepherds from one horde, watering their ocks at the well, chanced to meet young women from some other horde come to fetch water. Animated by the passions of love, young men broke out not in speech but in song. Pastoral romance, for Rousseau, was more than an operatic genre; it was at the very origin of culture, language, and exogamy. The elementary structures of kinship were meant
86 Musical Epigraphs to The Raw and the Cooked

to be sung out loud. The ur-language was pure melody; plain speech was but a degenerate echo. This, at least, was the case in warmer, southern climeslands of abundance and relative ease. In colder, sparser northern lands, such romance was a luxury. Language there was the product of need, rather than desire. In the south, the rst words were Aimez-moi! (Love me!); in the north, they were Aidez-moi! (Help me!) The melody is, of course, lost in translation. Aimez and aidez are almost identical, except for the consonant that separates the two vowel sounds. Everything hinges on the difference between /m/ and /d/. The nasal consonant /m/ does not interrupt the ow of air between the two vowels; /d/, a stop, effectively punctuates the utterance. As Roman Jakobson (1962, vol. 1:538545)a linguist whose work Lvi-Strauss deeply admirednoted, baby terms for father are quasi-universally papa, baba, or dada; terms for mother are mama or nana. In other words, Rousseaus scenario implicitly sets up a contrast between what we might call an /m/ function and a /d/ function: /m/ south hot expressive desire continuous mother Italian opera /d/ north cold instrumental need punctuated father French opera

This long detour leads straight back to the two musical epigraphs at the beginning and the end of the bookthe rst by Chabrier (Figure 1), and the second by Stravinsky (Figure 2).4 If we ignore the texts and simply focus on the musical scores, it is clear that these two snippets are different in virtually every respect. The Chabrier is in the treble clef, and scored explicitly for female voices; the Stravinsky is in the bass clef, and is sung by a male solo. The Chabrier, with dynamic markings of piano and pianissimo, is meant to be sung softly. The Stravinsky, however, is loud if not raucous. The Chabrier is in a single key (G major) and a single meter (6/8); the Stravinsky has no conventional key signature, and its meter alternates between measures of 4/4 and 3/4 time. The notes of the Chabrier ow into one another, and several syllables are melismaticthat is to say, having runs of more than one note per syllable. The Stravinsky is choppy, with pauses indicated between many of the notes and only one note per syllable. This particular piece by Chabrier is meant to sound ethereal, and that of Stravinsky, earthy and elemental. MusicalLaunay 87

ly, the Chabrier falls squarely within the domain of the /m/ function, and the Stravinsky just as dramatically belongs within the /d/ function. Not surprisingly, the texts of the epigraphs expand the dimensions of the contrast. The poem set to music by Chabrier is an invocation to the goddess of Music, beseeching Her to preside over the house of a friend for whose housewarming it was composed and where it was initially performed with Chabrier at the piano. As a perfect example of how to do things with music, the piece enacts bourgeois domesticity. The English translation of the text, Mother of memory and feeder of dreams, Thee would we fain invoke today beneath this roof! adequately conveys its owery and rather stilted rhetoric, although the French original is not nearly as ungainly. However, translating nourrice des rves as feeder of dreams is unfortunately imprecise. Nourrice is nursemaid, literally the person who gives her breast to an infant to suckle. The image vividly reinforces the metaphor of music as a nurturing mother, the embodiment, as we have seen, of the /m/ function. The Stravinsky text comes from Les noces, a ballet in the form of a Russian peasant wedding; this explains why it is the epigraph of the nal chapter of The Raw and the Cooked, The Wedding (simply Noces in the original French), the third movement of part 5 of the book, a Rustic Symphony. Once again, the English translation, If, if she were to have a child, she could be worth twice as much does not quite capture the original French. Si on lui faisait un enfant is more crudely If we got her with child. The passage is part of a saucy toast to the couple from one of the grooms friends. The remark that the bride would (not could) be worth twice as much follows the comment, Cellla vaut dans les dix sous, cest pas beaucoup (That ones worth about ten cents, not a whole lot). The ribaldry is absolutely deliberate, and takes place while a man and a woman from the bridal party are literally warming up the bridal bed. The curtain closes on the ballet at the moment when the newlyweds take their place in the newly warmed bed. In other words, the Stravinsky epigraph represents a literal peasant bed warming, whereas the Chabrier enacts a metaphorical bourgeois housewarming. It might be objected that the opposition between bed warming and housewarming does not work in French as it does in English, and that such a play on words, ignoring problems of translation, is precisely the sort of sleight of hand that critics have often found objectionable in Lvi-Strausss work. In fact, the French expression for housewarming is pendre la crmaillre, literally hanging a hook to suspend a cauldron over the re to cook a meal. The image thus evokes warmth as well as the mothers role in nourishing the family, as opposed to the sexual
88 Musical Epigraphs to The Raw and the Cooked

heat of the marriage bed. In short, the Stravinsky epigraph highlights the literal, sexual father (if we got her with child) whereas the Chabrier evokes the metaphorical, nourishing mother. Stravinsky and Chabrier thus orchestrate the male and female gures of the opossum in South American mythology, as Lvi-Strauss depicts them. The male opossum is an oversexed rapist with a forked penis; the female is the best of wetnurses [nourrices] but it stinks (Lvi-Strauss 1969:183). Finally, it must be noted that the language of the Stravinsky epigraph would clearly be categorized in French as cru: crude, blunt, direct, but also raw. By implication, the orid metaphors of the Chabrier epigraph must be cuit, cookedan implication strengthened by the French assimilation of a housewarming to a hearth warming. The musical epigraphs signicantly enrich our understanding of The Raw and the Cooked. They show that raw is to cooked not only as Nature is to Culture, but, more important, as the /d/ function is to the /m/ functionand by implication, as speech is to melody, sex to nurture, literal to metaphorical speech, male opossums to female opossums, peasants to bourgeois, and Stravinsky to Chabrier, to name only a few of the oppositions in question. Indeed, they demonstrate that the key to the entire book is G major (Figure 1), and that the book itself could perhaps better be entitled The Sharp and the Flat. Notes
1. As usual, the English translation does not do justice to the elegance of Lvi-Strausss formulation in the original French. 2. The most famous of these was the Quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns, provoked by a poem read to the French Academy which trumpeted that the achievements of France under Louis XIV had surpassed those of the Greeks and the Romans (see Levine 1991; Dejean 1997). 3. The Essay is the subject of a lengthy analysis by Derrida in Of Grammatology (1976:165268). 4. Ideally, the reader should listen to performances of these two extracts: BBC Proms 2009: ChabrierOde la musique, YouTube video, 10:30, posted by Elgar1907, September 29, 2009, www.youtube.com/watch?v=b0xI7I8mfwo (the passage in question starts at roughly 2:50); Stravinskys Les NocesThe Royal Ballet, Part 3/3, YouTube video, 6:33, posted by TheGreatPerformers, July 1, 2007, www.youtube.com/ watch?v=0-ni8XUOqdM (the passage starts at roughly 2:32).

References
Dejean, Joan. 1997. Ancients Against Moderns. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. Launay 89

Derrida, Jacques. 1976. Of Grammatology. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, trans. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Jakobson, Roman. 1962. Why Mama and Papa? In Selected Writings, 1:538545. The Hague: Mouton. Johnson, James H. 1992. Musical Experience and the Formation of a French Musical Public. Journal of Modern History 64(2):191226. Levine, Joseph. 1991. The Battle of the Books. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Lvi-Strauss, Claude. 1969. The Raw and the Cooked, John and Doreen Weightman, trans. New York: Harper and Row. . 1973. Tristes Tropiques. John and Doreen Weightman, trans. New York: Atheneum. . 1978. The Origin of Table Manners. John and Doreen Weightman, trans. London: Jonathan Cape. Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. 1984. A Discourse on Inequality. Maurice Cranston, trans. London: Penguin. . 1998. Essay on the Origin of Languages and Writings Related to Music. John T. Scott, trans. Hanover, NH: University Press of New England.

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