Un chromatisme africain

Music as system∗

“…"Puisqu'il s'agit d'inventorier toutes les recurrences de traits stylistics et d'en etablir la combinatoire" (Nattiez, 1972). Rouget (1961) introduced the segmentation of chants on the basis of repetition and Ruwet (1972) suggests a concise method of defining these units without ambiguity. Repetition is a means for delimiting sub-systems.…”

“…The use of repetition as a marker of semantic units is found, for example, in the work of Rouget (1961) in the segmentation of chants, Ruwet, etc. With the exception of "DA", a reminder of the 'ad hoc' quality of an interpretation, only repeated sequences of three or more alphabetic characters are accepted as significant. If we look briefly at the result this produces (Example 4) in an analysis of the beginning of Artaud's poem, the first sequence we find isolated is "ISM".…”

Musical Fact and the Semiology of Music

“…That is why we cannot, a priori, separate the musical from the acoustic: music is the sound assembled and accepted by a culture. It is to the credit of G. Rouget (1961), N. Ruwet (1972) and J.-J. Nattiez (1975) that they have put forward and perfected a procedure for analysing musical texts that is equally applicable to a Yoruba chant, a fourteenth-century Geisslerlied, Debussy's Pellias et Melisande, Brahms or Xenakis.…”

“…Too few researchers have tried to find out precisely how the concept of "music" is defined in the minds of the native population. In other words, we should find it very hard to say, no matter what population we were talking about, where music began for them and where it ended, or what line marked the transition from speech to song' (Rouget 1968(Rouget : 1344.…”