Musique et décroissance. Une première approche
Résumé
This paper will explore three ways of linking the idea of degrowth to music. The two first are referring respectively to the relationship of music to society, and to music in itself; the third is a specific question.
1. The place of music in society. Today, in the frenetic productivist society of permanent growth, a great part of music and art consists either in entertainment products (commercial music) either in luxury products (art music). In both ways, music has no direct implication in everyday life, it has lost its power over human soul and body, it is just a product (very commercial or luxurious) among others. “Leaving the productivist and working system means a totally different organization, where leisure and game become values as well as work, where social relations are more important than the production and the consumption of useless and disposable or even harmful objects. Rediscovering the quality out of the market logic will make degrowth the economic values. […] Rediscovering the notion of work [l’œuvre], i.e. the creative activity of the artisan and the peasant, which are free from the pressure of fierce competition would be a good antidote to the fragmentation of tasks” (S. Latouche & D. Harpagès, 2010: p. 96-97; translation is mine). In such a society, music would recover its power of transformation. The counterpart would probably be that music and art would loose their autonomy.
2. The question of means. Inside music itself, thinking about degrowth is related to the question of means. As about musical means (musical “technique”), is it possible to make a clear distinction between an art belonging to growth and an art related to degrowth? Curiously, the American minimalist art, which could be viewed as a degrowth art in terms of musical technique, belonged to the growth society (in the economical sense) of the sixties. If there is such a possibility to speak about a degrowth art in relation to the question of means, it is more evident about technology. Indeed, today, in commercial music, technology (ways of diffusing music, for instance) is growing independently from music itself, and music tends to be a product related to growth, without any value independent of its economic value. In art music, technology is also growing independently from music and leads to situations, where art becomes more and more difficult to realize: it is the case for instance with the technologies of spatialization, which need a lot of means (an example is the Wave Field Synthesis). It is why more and more artists are working with lo-fi technology.
3. Hypertrophy of sound. A last idea of what could be degrowth in music starts from the recognition that today there is a hypertrophy of sound. In many respects, modern music can be viewed as a “liberation of sound” (Edgar Varèse). But it seems that the realization of this liberation leads to the domination of sound. For instance, there is today a kind of “aural addiction”, as says Hildegard Westerkamp (1988: p. 33): people need to have sound in continuity and everywhere; and much music today seem to be conceived as to offer a kind of immersion in sound. It is why many today artists start a critic of sound and compose music, which is attentive to what we could call an ecology of sound.
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