BACHELARD STUDIES - ÉTUDES BACHELARDIENNES - STUDI BACHELARDIANI

Bachelard “silenciaire” or the art of hearing

Marie-Pierre Lassus — 2024-03-18

Bachelard “silenciaire” ou l’art d’entendre

Marie-Pierre Lassus — 2024-03-18

Bachelard “silenciaire” o l’arte di ascoltare

Marie-Pierre Lassus — 2024-03-18

« Points d’écoute » : de la musique naturelle à la Ville sonore

François-Bernard Mâche — 2024-03-18

The following text is a montage of François-Bernard Mâche’s writings, recomposed by Marie-Pierre Lassus (whose comments are in italics) and approved by the composer, with, at the center, the utopian Ville sonore project, little known and never realized.

Bachelard et l’écologie sonore ? Philosophies musicales et sonores du lieu : Hildegard Westerkamp et Chris Watson

Makis Solomos — 2024-03-18

Could Bachelard, a “great listener” (Marie-Pierre Lassus) of sounds, be associated with ound ecology? In order to put forward this hypothesis, this article focuses on the notions of place and dwelling. First, it works on these notions from The Poetics of Space, while calling on other authors – Edward Casey, Martin Heidegger, Augustin Berque, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. It then develops the importance of the notion of place in music and sound art by giving examples of artistic achievements in two new genres: soundscape composition, illustrated by a piece by Hildegard Westerkamp, Beneath the Forest Floor; field recording, sound composition with the example of Chris Watson’s In St Cuthbert’s Time.

La symbolique poétique de Bachelard dans la musique d’avant-garde de Takemitsu

Ziad Kreidy — 2024-03-18

The technique of the Japanese avant-garde composer Takemitsu is stimulated by extra-musical phenomena that have no obvious connection with sound. His creativity is closely tied to the contemplation of nature and is based on a metaphorical thinking that brings him closer to Bachelard’s writings on the poetic imagination. Takemitsu’s allegories of wind, water, air, dreams, the Japanese garden, circular temporality, and the positivity of silence are in line with Bachelard’s imaginative thought on water, dreams and the intuition of the moment. For both, the figurative archetype drawn from an element of nature exists only in its dynamic potential, which is infinite. The primary image is evolving and never limited to a fixed structure. It is the poetics of the ephemeral substance that prevails over the visibility of the general form. Thus, Takemitsu has synthesised the modern West and ancient Japan.

Pour un « nouvel esprit musical audacieux » : la pensée de Gaston Bachelard au service de la création musicale de Hugues Dufourt

Pierre-Albert Castanet — 2024-03-18

Born in 1943, Hugues Dufourt is both a philosopher and a composer. If his years of teaching philosophy in Lyon favored Bachelardian studies, his great musical work is no less indebted to the thought of the philosopher of Bar-sur-Aube. Entitled “For a ‘bold new musical spirit’: Gaston Bachelard’s thought at the service of Hugues Dufourt’s musical creation”, this study focuses as much on the concept of “spectral music” as on that related to “imaginary dynamology” (between matter and energy, between theoretical foundation and utopian metaphor). Finally, some scores are analyzed under a Bachelardian prism: Down to a sunless sea (1970), La Tempesta d’après Giorgione (1976-77), Plus-oultre (1990), Euclidian Abyss (1996).

Images, paysages, gestes, mondes. La dialectique bachelardienne des musiques contemporaines

Eric Maestri — 2024-03-18

Bachelard’s subtle links between the words of poets and reality open up spaces of resonance. And these spaces are central to the concerns of contemporary musicians. Indeed, recording techniques and the manipulation of sound matter create new realities, enabling musicians to compose the dialectic between reality and dream. A parallel reading of La Dialectique de la durée in particular, and the poetic and theoretical texts of certain contemporary musicians, will enable us to develop this theme. Bachelard is interpreted as a musician who listens to the silent spaces at the margins of sound events and their spatial and spiritual resonances.

Les sympathies musculaires du brouillard : Bachelard, Debussy et les sources de l’imagination motrice

Francesco Spampinato — 2024-03-18

One of the deepest aspects of the human imagination lies in its carnal, embodied dimension, rooted in a moving body, a material, physical body, traversed by the forces and tensions, the pleasures and pains of life. We will begin by examining Gaston Bachelard’s understanding of this corporeal and gestural aspect of the imaginary. We will continue by examining the imaginary of bodily movement in the music of Claude Debussy, a composer whose aesthetic lends itself to an analysis inspired by Bachelardian principles. Listening to the piano prelude Brouillards engages the imagination by awakening the the listener’s “muscular sympathies”, “tonalized” by dreamlike landscape. An analysis of the images that emerge from the reception of this piece will then take us back to the origins of the human imagination.

Bachelard et Jankélévich, philosophes de L’eau. Quelques Fragments De Philosophie De L’imaginaire

Jean-Pierre Clero — 2024-03-18

No one would think of bringing together the philosophy of Bachelard and the philosophy of Jankélévitch; so far are, at first sight, their ordinary fields of work. Yet, both have attempted a philosophy of the imaginary that runs against the grain of an ordinary way of practicing it. Indeed, most of time, the visual image is used as a reference by the authors who, at the XXth century, have tried it without they ever explain their choice. The two men, who knew each other for having been professors at the same time at the Sorbonne, who certainly read each other – at least, Jankélévitch quotes Bachelard –, take the opposite of speaking of the image as if it was necessarily visual, transcendant, and on the contrary they manifest a property of immanence of the imaginary, and therefore choose music as the principal scheme of the imaginary. This choice goes without saying for Jankélévitch who was a pianist ; it is less evident and follows winding paths in the work of Bachelard who, avoiding to take the objects of the vision as privileged referents of a reflection on the imagination, is in the presence of the elements – water, earth, fire, air – that are neither objects nor things. These elements are told and dreamed through poetry and music, which is not necessarily instrumental – pianistic – as it is for Jankelevitch, but is adapted to them for reasons that never ceased to bring the two authors together. We will try to take account of this astonishing connection and we will attempt to keep it through the notion of fiction into which neither of them sought to dig, but into which they seem to bequeath a work.

Entendre l’écriture pour écouter la sonorité. Lectures dans l’audibilité du lisible, entre Gaston Bachelard et Henri Bosco

Matthieu Guillot — 2024-03-18

Gaston Bachelard read and appreciated the stories of Henri Bosco a lot. Moreover, in their respective work we note a very close tone. The philosopher shares with the writer a propensity to examine the world of sounds within words. An avid reader of poets, Bachelard shows us how and why to listen to the poem. Bosco, for his part, is developing a whole poetic approach to listening that invites us to also focus on an auditory reading.

Barthes et Bachelard à la recherche du repos actif

Christophe Corbier — 2024-03-18

I’ll start by discussing Barthes’ last lectures, in which he summoned not the author of L’eau et les rêves, but the philosopher of La Dialectique de la Durée, to define a method of reading based on the perception of intensities (particularly in the experience of the “moment of truth”), and which relies on listening. We will show how rhythm and intensity are articulated in this method, which is based on the notion of coincidence, and how Barthes’ late theory proceeds in part from Bachelard’s analyses set out in La Dialectique de la Durée. From here, we come to the book that revealed Barthes to Bachelard, Michelet par lui-même, in which rhythm and intensity are already linked in the so-called “thematic” method of reading. Like Bachelard, Barthes conceived of text as early as the 1950s as a spatialized polyphony governed by sonic and rhythmic phenomena. Barthes’ thematic reading, and the relationship between Barthes and Bachelard at that time, will lead us to the “formal imagination” that Bachelard evoked in the 1930s, and which already linked rhythm and intensity in La Dialectique de la Durée, a book that also features the musicologist Maurice Emmanuel, whose works Barthes had also read and studied in the late 1930s.

Des sons pour de nouveaux Espaces: A l’écoute de Bachelard

Marcus Mota — 2024-03-18

In this paper, I offer a rereading of Gaston Bachelard’s L’expérience de l’espace dans la physique contemporaine (1937) in order to demonstrate how physical phenomena are constructed and interpreted in a way close to sound-oriented events. After this rereading, I present some musical experiments that explore some concepts that were discussed previously so as to provide an aesthetic counterpoint to the new concept of reality developed by new physics.

Le rythme de Bachelard est-il sonore ?

Pierre Sauvanet — 2024-03-18

Is Bachelard's rhythm a sound?

In The Dialectics of Duration, Bachelard distinguishes between the plane of lived life and the plane of the psyche, the latter making it possible to 'resume' the former, in every sense of the word (sewing, repetition and mastery), to give it both coherence and identity. What is interesting here is the way in which Bachelard uses the term rhythm to define this kind of resumption: the rhythm of existence is not real life made up of a succession of moments (because life itself is not rhythmic), it is life lived psychologically, as it is resumed afterwards in the form of a mental rhythm that totalises and organises past moments in the present. But what is the exact status of this mental rhythm: a simple sound metaphor, a more musical reference, or the concept of a purely mental, silent, interiorised rhythm?

Rhythm. Time. Duration. Music. Resumption.

En réponse à Pierre Sauvanet : Le rythme de Bachelard est-il temporel ?

Elie During — 2024-03-18

Bachelard's main philosophical contribution in Dialectics of Duration is not the anti-Bergsonian claim that time is essentially discontinuous, but rather the rationale behind that claim, namely the idea of a causality of forms and structures operating at a distance, according to a principle of deferred action. The reference to rhythm, particularly in the musical realm, takes on its full meaning from the perspective of this 'formal causality'. But if rhythm is indeed the Bachelardian scheme of duration, a Bergsonian might want to raise a critical question: what is properly temporal about rhythmic schemes? To answer this question, one must return to the central intuition of ‘vertical’ time, the time of simultaneities.

Rhythm. Time. Duration. Simultaneity. Formal causality. Music.

La Forge Céleste. Gaston Bachelard et Giacinto Scelsi

Blanca Solares — 2024-03-18

Our culture, focused on sight rather than sound, has set aside listening as a human faculty of knowledge and sound as a sphere of significance. The result has been the homogenization of listening, the growing pollution of the auditory environment and the regrettable reduction of music to musical pastiche, cacophonic backdrop or entertainment media and commercial spectacle. It is in the light of this devastating social and ecological auditory crisis that the work of Gaston Bachelard opens up an unusual field of research in the field of human sciences. We are going to link here his ideas on the sound imagination of matter with the investigations on the sound of the brilliant Italian composer Giacinto Scelsi.

Bibliographie autour des milieux sonores de Gaston Bachelard

Marie-Pierre Lassus — 2024-03-18

La musique comme poétique de l’espace et du temps : une exploration à la lumière de Gaston Bachelard

Maria-Ying Durand — 2024-03-18

In the contemporary context, music, with its acoustic waves, moments of silence, and auditory landscapes, serves as a unique mirror reflecting Gaston Bachelard’s philosophical concepts of spatial intimacy and the dialectics of time. This study delves into the intersection of music and Bachelardian philosophy, exploring how music encapsulates and expresses these profound ideas.
We embark on an intellectual journey to investigate whether contemporary musical movements such as spectral music, minimal music or ambient can be analyzed through the lens of Gaston Bachelard’s philosophy. This inquiry leads us to question how music, with its multifaceted dimensions, embodies and transmits the intricate interplay of space and time, as delineated by Bachelard’s philosophical framework.

La musique des oiseaux

Simeon Pease Cheney — 2024-03-18

Autour de l’imagination sonore et énergétique. Invention à deux voix

Marie-Pierre Lassus — 2024-03-18

Gerardo Ienna, Genesi e sviluppo dell’épistémologie historique. Fra epistemologia, storia e politica, Pensa Multimedia, 2023, 342 p.

Giovanni Fava — 2024-03-18

Entretiens avec Bachelard quartet. Propos et extraits sonores recueillis par Gilles Hieronimus

Gilles Hieronimus — 2024-03-18

Portait de Carolyn Carlson par elle-même

Carolyn Carlson — 2024-03-18

En Souvenances – vers une poétique de la voix

Juliette Kempf — 2024-03-18