Jerome, you should have studied maths.
My dad said that to me a few months before he passed. I was 54 years old. I smiled, and I didn’t understand. Why again? Why so many times, over so many years? I walked back to my mother’s place that day still not believing he had said it. And I am only realizing now that it may have been close to the last thing he ever told me.
That argument had been running since I was fifteen, when I wanted nothing but music. My parents let me have it, up to a point. My mother encouraged the playing. My father liked listening, and thought I was wasting my time. What they refused was the job.
The maths came from my brother. He was studying it and I was a bad student who happened to be good enough at that one subject, and one thing led to another. It was in the house anyway. My dad was fast with numbers, and when I was young we used to race, him in his head and me with a calculator. He won, and it impressed me every time. None of it made me like maths. Too abstract.
So I didn’t listen. I went to the Conservatoire de Musique de Marseille, then to college to study musicology, and years later into a PhD I would almost finish.
In high school I practiced guitar two to four hours a day, in a bedroom that had once been a fashion designer’s studio. One of the long walls was still lined with fake doors, all of them mirrors, and I worked in front of them, watching my hands to correct my technique.
Studying music was not easy, but I loved it. It was a constant exploration, with more to learn than one life allows, from the Middle Ages to today, and what pulled me in was how music kept evolving, and why, century after century.
The hardest subjects were solfège, harmony and counterpoint. The one I loved most was analysis: taking a piece apart, its architecture in every sense, and putting it back together from a different angle, to reveal what the composer was trying to say in the only language that could say it, or what the music means on its own.
Take the chorale that closes Bach’s cantata BWV 60, first sung at a Sunday service in Leipzig in 1723. The melody was not his. It was sixty years older, written for a text about being ready to die, and it opens with three rising whole tones, spanning the interval we used to call “diabolus in musica”. The words say it is enough, I am ready. Bach’s harmonization never settles.
Two centuries later, Alban Berg ended his violin concerto with that chorale. He was mourning Manon Gropius, daughter of the architect Walter Gropius and of Alma Mahler, Gustav Mahler’s widow, dead of polio at eighteen. On the title page he wrote: to the memory of an angel. Bach enters like a citation, the harmonization nearly intact, given to clarinets voiced to imitate a small organ. A Leipzig Sunday, suddenly, inside a twelve-tone world.
I first heard that concerto during my maîtrise in musicology in Aix-en-Provence, in François Decarsin’s classes. He talked about the duality that runs through it, tonal and twelve-tone music holding together inside a single work, and about what that duality makes possible. It is why the piece is so lyrical, so emotional, and one of the most loved works to come out of the Vienna school of Schoenberg, Berg and Webern.
Analysis is context. The how, the when, the why. A note on a page means nothing by itself. To understand a piece, you have to know what came before it and what came after, what other composers were writing, what was happening outside the concert hall. Only then does the music begin to make sense. Without context, you can describe it. You cannot understand it.
Photos are not so different. Without context, they tell you very little. It took me thirty years to see it.
My PhD looked at music that was still being invented: mixed music, as we called it then, written for acoustic instruments and computer, two materials making together what neither could alone. Tristan Murail’s Winter Fragments. Marco Stroppa’s Traiettoria and Spirali. My first study, on Traiettoria...deviata, was advised by Decarsin, the teacher who had brought me to the Berg. Then, for a few years, I worked with Stroppa himself, studying his life and his music, until most of my thesis was about his work. Up close, what fascinated me was the urge to reinvent everything: the material, the forms, the sounds themselves.
To follow that work, I had to learn the tools: AudioSculpt, OpenMusic, Max/MSP. I had no interest in maths as such, but it was impossible to miss what was underneath. These programs analyzed and synthesized sound with mathematics, and one idea kept coming back: the Fourier transform. The principle is simple. Any sound, however complex, can be described as a sum of simple waves, and the Fourier transform is the mathematics that takes a sound apart and shows you what it is made of, frequency by frequency. Once you can see inside a sound, you can stretch it, filter it, rebuild it, turn it into something else. Analysis first, then synthesis.
I had refused maths. It had been waiting for me inside the music I chose instead.
Then, in New York, at Columbia, I stopped. I told Stroppa first. The PhD no longer felt like it was leading anywhere, and I didn’t want to be a musicologist. Musicology studies the people who create. I was not a composer, and I wanted to create my own things. I didn’t know what yet. And the city was right there, with its colors, its scale, its contrasts, its people. A whole world of possibilities, opening in front of me.
And yet I listened. Music was never my job, except for three years teaching guitar in a private music school. That was rewarding. And then never again. Why? I am still not sure. Maybe that is what the argument did to me. I refused it and obeyed it at the same time.
Today, when I think about the PhD, I feel guilty and right at the same time. I would love to finish it one day. Will I? I don’t know. Life is a series of unfinished businesses.
Savor is the reason I am writing this. I set out to build something that helps people find the details of their own lives, and it sent me back through mine. The mirrors. The races against the calculator. The day I told Stroppa I was stopping.
Tonal and twelve-tone, holding together inside a single work. That is what Decarsin taught us about the Berg. Maths or music was never the question.