Reflecting forms: around a dialectical analysis of music
OLIVE Jean-Paul

The texts grouped in this volume come from a seminar held during a year at Paris 8 University. The general theme that had been proposed concerned the notion of dialectics, as we regularly meet it under the pen of Adorno is to describe certain processes observed in musical writing, or to designate certain intellectual operations related to the analysis of productions.

The concept of a musical work, conceived not as a fixed and inert object but rather as a constellation, a bundle of tensions or a force field, remained at the center of the concerns of this seminar - a concept of this kind, certainly brought about by its own evolution. This movement, which is engaged in the evolutionary diversity of art, indicates that we are dealing here with a very particular field - art - consisting of behaviors, materials and singular processes which, in order to be in close contact with the other spheres of society, are not as easily soluble in them as some would like. This is undoubtedly the very resistance that art opposes to society, which constitutes one of its important dimensions, its potential of rejection and utopia contained in the aesthetic dimension.

The work of the seminar - it will be readily seen by reading the following texts - was not intended to determine a fixed method that could have been defined as a "dialectic", but rather, by means of observations of various models. and discussions on texts and works, to identify areas of concern, fields of recurrent tension in the work of analytic musicology, and to reflect on the relationships between objects of study and methods of investigation.