EMS Proceedings and Other Publications

Analysis, grammatization and organology

Bernard Stiegler

Musical destiny of mankind is distinctly and intrinsically connected with his technical and mnemotechnical destiny - with the instrumental and nmemotechnical exteriorization as an effective reality of hominization, which is also characterized by its essential incompletion (mankind is constantly evolving what could have been called its structural neoteny).

Like in technical destiny is contained mnemotechnical destiny, which specifically appears as notation systems with the arrival of the Great Empires after the Neolithic, progressively mnemotechniques of music are extricating from the instrumental subtract supporting musical practices and are changing drastically those practices and re-booting regularly musical roles. That’s how, after "l’artifice d’écriture dans la musique occidentale" (Hugues Dufourt), analogical and digital recording methods occur, which reposition and reformulate profoundly major issues - in particular, conditions of analysis that made score notation possible. Analysis of mnemotechnical destiny in music, but also in other domains, can be done through the grammatization concept proposed by Sylvain Auroux in 1993.

We will try to show how this concept and, in particular, the one of successive "technological revolutions of grammatization", allows both the imagination of new discretization currently in progress in the musical world of today and coming forth from its technological destiny. Also, we will try to show how in this way it will be possible to formulate organologic perspectives where today’s musical mnemotechnique, which has become mnemotechnology, initially is present.