Myth and Music: The Musical Epigraphs to The Raw and the Cooked

7/27/2019 Myth and Music: The Musical Epigraphs to The Raw and the Cooked

1/9

Myth and Music: The Musical Epigraphs to The Raw and the Cooked

Robert Launay

Histories of Anthropology Annual, Volume 7, 2011, pp. 83-90 (Article)

Published by University of Nebraska Press

DOI: 10.1353/haa.2011.0006

For additional information about this article

Access provided by Western Ontario, Univ of (18 Aug 2013 22:00 GMT)

http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/haa/summary/v007/7.launay.html
http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/haa/summary/v007/7.launay.htmlhttp://muse.jhu.edu/journals/haa/summary/v007/7.launay.html


2/9

Myth and Music

The Musical Epigraphs to The Raw and the Cooked

Robert Launay

In the Overture to the first of his four volumes on myth, The Raw and

the Cooked, Claude Lvi-Strauss makes the startling remark that this

book on myths is itself a kind of myth (1969:6). This remark can beinterpreted as what the French call a dfi, a challenge: if the book is it-

self a myth, it can be subjected to the same methods of structural analy-

sis it deploys in the analysis of South American mythology. Indeed, the

books musical epigraphs (Figures 1 and 2) lend themselves perfectly to

this kind of analysis; in spite of their apparent insignificance, taken to-

gether they expose and develop critical features of Lvi-Strausss ideas,

both in the book and in general. This is not to suggest that the musical

epigraphs were chosen with any such purpose in mind. On the contrary,to paraphrase a famous sentence from the book, I wish to show not how

Lvi-Strauss thinks in musical epigraphs, but how musical epigraphs op-

erate in Lvi-Strausss mind without his being aware of the fact (Lvi-

Strauss 1969:12).1

Of course the musical epigraphs also serve a deliberate purpose in the

book, underscoring (or, more appropriately, scoring) the playful anal-

ogy between myth and music embedded in all the chapter titles of the

book: overture, theme and variations, symphony, cantata, fugue, and so

on. This analogy calls into question the salience of Lvi-Strausss earlier

linguistic paradigm for the analysis of mythsfor example, by breaking

them down into mythemes in the way linguists might identify pho-

nemes or morphemes. Lvi-Strauss here suggests that music is a more

appropriate paradigm than language for exploring the relationship be-

tween structure and meaning. The question What does a specific ut-

terance mean? is, taken literally, a perfectly sensible one. However, it is

utterly nonsensical to ask what a Beethoven sonata or a Bach fugue, or

for that matter any specific musical passage from either work, means.This is not at all to suggest that music is meaningless, but simply that

whatever meaning a work or a passage may convey cannot be translated


3/9

84 Musical Epigraphs to The Raw and the Cooked

into words. However, there exists an elaborate vocabulary for the anal-

ysis of musical structure in terms of melody, harmony, meter, rhythm,

counterpoint, and so on. In other words, we cannot ever state whatmu-

sic means but we can specify quite precisely how it means. This is indeed

how we approach its comprehension. Critics who complain that afterreading The Raw and the Cooked and Lvi-Strausss subsequent vol-

umes on myth the reader remains just as unenlightened about the mean-

Figure 1. Musical epigraph for The Raw and the Cooked.

Figure 2. Musical epigraph for part 5, chapter 3 ofThe Raw and

the Cooked.


4/9

85Launay

ings of South and North American myths have either missed the point of

the analogy or chosen to ignore it.

Seen in this light, the musical epigraphs might appear to be the frost-

ing on the cake of this elaborate musical joke. There are three epigraphs

in all: two texts set to music at the beginning and the end of the book

and one text about music in the middle. These three form a symbolictriad, much like raw/cooked/rotten. The two musical passages oppose

each another in virtually every respect, both musically and textually; the

text about music occupies the mediating position. This is a definition of

an understandably extremely rare musical genre, a double inverted can-

ona piece that can be read upside down and backward, so that the end

becomes the beginning and the bass line becomes the treble. The dou-

ble inverted canon is clearly a musical metaphor for Lvi-Strausss own

method of reading myths as transformations of one anothersuperfi-cially very distinct but structurally identicallike the forward and back-

ward versions of the canon. It would not, needless to say, be a profitable

exercise to attempt to read The Raw and the Cookedupside down and

backward, even in the original French. However, in the third volume of

the Mythologiques, The Origin of Table Manners (1978), Lvi-Strauss

does suggest that the three volumes can be read in almost any order: 1,

2, 3; 2, 3, 1; 2, 1, 3; or 3, 1, 2but perhaps not 1, 3, 2 or 3, 2, 1ar-

guably as close a literary approximation of the double inverted canon asone might possibly imagine.

The definition of the canon is taken from a dictionary of music by

Rousseau, a minor eighteenth-century composer whose best-known

composition is an opera, Le devin du village (The village diviner), a per-

sonal favorite of Louis XV that has since sunk into relative oblivion. The

operas title, at least, might seem grist for the anthropological mill, and

the diviner in question isas one might expecta mediator, although

not between the human and the supernatural but, more prosaically, be-

tween the shepherdess Colette and the shepherd Colin. The plot qualifies

as pastoral romance rather than myth.

Rousseau was not only a mediocre composer but also, in his day, an

influential music critic as well as a philosophera personal favorite of

Lvi-Strauss, who called him the most anthropological of the philos-

ophes (1973:390). The relationship between Rousseaus musical crit-

icism and his philosophy is a key to his importance in understanding

Lvi-Strausss thought in general, and also the texts set to music in the

other epigraphs to The Raw and the Cooked. Rousseaus musical crit-icism was motivated by his role in one of the innumerable polemical

quarrels which characterized French intellectual life in the Enlighten-


5/9


ment.2 The Querelle des Bouffons (Quarrel of the buffoons) pitted par-

tisans of Italian opera against defenders of French opera (see Johnson

1992). In 1753, in the midst of the quarrel, Rousseau published Letter

on French Music, in which he proclaimed the superiority of Italian as

opposed to French opera (Rousseau 1998:141174). (The Village Di-

viner had been composed and successfully performedin French!onlya year before.) His argument was that the quality of a nations music

depended intrinsically on the nature of its language. Song, he suggested,

was the first musical genre, and so harmony and rhythm were ultimate-

ly subservient to melody. Of all languages, Italian, he insisted, was the

most intrinsically melodic, with its open vowels and soft consonants.

At its best, Italian music complemented the natural melody of the lan-

guage, whereas French music all too often tried to compensate for the

weakly melodical nature of the language through counterintuitive har-monies and rhythms, privileging artificial cleverness over natural beauty.

At the same time as Rousseau was engaging in musical polemic, he

was elaborating philosophical scenarios accounting for the origin of cul-

ture and society: his famous Discourse on Inequality (1984; first pub-

lished in 1755), but also an Essay on the Origin of Languages, which

was originally intended to be part of the discourse but was never pub-

lished during Rousseaus lifetime (Rousseau 1998:289332).3 In the Es-

say, Rousseau imagined pre-linguistic humanity as living in relativelydecorous primal hordes:

Each family was selfsufficient and perpetuated itself through its

own stock. Children born of the same parents grew up togeth-

er and gradually found ways of expressing themselves among

themselves; with age, the sexes were distinguished, natural in-

clination sufficed to unite them, instinct took the place of pas-

sion, habit took the place of preference, they became husbands

and wives without ceasing to be brothers and sisters. (Rousseau1998:314)

A century later, Victorian anthropologists were to find such a scenario

titillating, repellent, or both; Rousseau just found it boring.

These primal hordes, in Rousseaus imagination, were pastoral. Lan-

guage was born when young shepherds from one horde, watering their

flocks at the well, chanced to meet young women from some other horde

come to fetch water. Animated by the passions of love, young men broke

out not in speech but in song. Pastoral romance, for Rousseau, wasmore than an operatic genre; it was at the very origin of culture, lan-

guage, and exogamy. The elementary structures of kinship were meant


6/9

87Launay

to be sung out loud. The ur-language was pure melody; plain speech was

but a degenerate echo. This, at least, was the case in warmer, southern

climeslands of abundance and relative ease. In colder, sparser northern

lands, such romance was a luxury. Language there was the product of

need, rather than desire. In the south, the first words were Aimez-moi!

(Love me!); in the north, they were Aidez-moi! (Help me!)The melody is, of course, lost in translation. Aimez and aidez are al-

most identical, except for the consonant that separates the two vowel

sounds. Everything hinges on the difference between /m/ and /d/. The

nasal consonant /m/ does not interrupt the flow of air between the two

vowels; /d/, a stop, effectively punctuates the utterance. As Roman Jako-

bson (1962, vol. 1:538545)a linguist whose work Lvi-Strauss deeply

admirednoted, baby terms for father are quasi-universally papa,

baba, or dada; terms for mother are mama or nana. In oth-er words, Rousseaus scenario implicitly sets up a contrast between what

we might call an /m/ function and a /d/ function:

/m/ /d/

south north

hot cold

expressive instrumental

desire need

continuous punctuatedmother father

Italian opera French opera

This long detour leads straight back to the two musical epigraphs at

the beginning and the end of the bookthe first by Chabrier (Figure 1),

and the second by Stravinsky (Figure 2).4 If we ignore the texts and sim-

ply focus on the musical scores, it is clear that these two snippets are dif-

ferent in virtually every respect. The Chabrier is in the treble clef, and

scored explicitly for female voices; the Stravinsky is in the bass clef, and

is sung by a male solo. The Chabrier, with dynamic markings ofpiano

and pianissimo, is meant to be sung softly. The Stravinsky, however, is

loud if not raucous. The Chabrier is in a single key (G major) and a sin-

gle meter (6/8); the Stravinsky has no conventional key signature, and

its meter alternates between measures of4/4 and 3/4 time. The notes of

the Chabrier flow into one another, and several syllables are melismat-

icthat is to say, having runs of more than one note per syllable. The

Stravinsky is choppy, with pauses indicated between many of the notesand only one note per syllable. This particular piece by Chabrier is meant

to sound ethereal, and that of Stravinsky, earthy and elemental. Musical-


7/9


ly, the Chabrier falls squarely within the domain of the /m/ function, and

the Stravinsky just as dramatically belongs within the /d/ function.

Not surprisingly, the texts of the epigraphs expand the dimensions of

the contrast. The poem set to music by Chabrier is an invocation to the

goddess of Music, beseeching Her to preside over the house of a friend

for whose housewarming it was composed and where it was initially per-formed with Chabrier at the piano. As a perfect example of how to do

things with music, the piece enacts bourgeois domesticity. The English

translation of the text, Mother of memory and feeder of dreams, Thee

would we fain invoke today beneath this roof! adequately conveys its

flowery and rather stilted rhetoric, although the French original is not

nearly as ungainly. However, translating nourrice des rves as feeder

of dreams is unfortunately imprecise. Nourrice is nursemaid, lit-

erally the person who gives her breast to an infant to suckle. The imagevividly reinforces the metaphor of music as a nurturing mother, the em-

bodiment, as we have seen, of the /m/ function.

The Stravinsky text comes from Les noces, a ballet in the form of a

Russian peasant wedding; this explains why it is the epigraph of the final

chapter ofThe Raw and the Cooked, The Wedding (simply Noces

in the original French), the third movement of part 5 of the book, a

Rustic Symphony. Once again, the English translation, If, if she were

to have a child, she could be worth twice as much does not quite cap-ture the original French. Si on lui faisait un enfant is more crudely If

we got her with child. The passage is part of a saucy toast to the cou-

ple from one of the grooms friends. The remark that the bride would

(not could) be worth twice as much follows the comment, Cellla

vaut dans les dix sous, cest pas beaucoup (That ones worth about ten

cents, not a whole lot). The ribaldry is absolutely deliberate, and takes

place while a man and a woman from the bridal party are literally warm-

ing up the bridal bed. The curtain closes on the ballet at the moment

when the newlyweds take their place in the newly warmed bed. In other

words, the Stravinsky epigraph represents a literal peasant bed warming,

whereas the Chabrier enacts a metaphorical bourgeois housewarming.

It might be objected that the opposition between bed warming and

housewarming does not work in French as it does in English, and that

such a play on words, ignoring problems of translation, is precisely the

sort of sleight of hand that critics have often found objectionable in L-

vi-Strausss work. In fact, the French expression for housewarming

is pendre la crmaillre, literally hanging a hook to suspend a caul-dron over the fire to cook a meal. The image thus evokes warmth as well

as the mothers role in nourishing the family, as opposed to the sexual


8/9

89Launay

heat of the marriage bed. In short, the Stravinsky epigraph highlights

the literal, sexual father (if we got her with child) whereas the Chab-

rier evokes the metaphorical, nourishing mother. Stravinsky and Chabri-

er thus orchestrate the male and female figures of the opossum in South

American mythology, as Lvi-Strauss depicts them. The male opossum is

an oversexed rapist with a forked penis; the female is the best of wet-nurses [nourrices] but it stinks (Lvi-Strauss 1969:183).

Finally, it must be noted that the language of the Stravinsky epigraph

would clearly be categorized in French as cru: crude, blunt, di-

rect, but also raw. By implication, the florid metaphors of the Chab-

rier epigraph must be cuit, cookedan implication strengthened by

the French assimilation of a housewarming to a hearth warming. The

musical epigraphs significantly enrich our understanding of The Raw

and the Cooked. They show that raw is to cooked not only as Na-ture is to Culture, but, more important, as the /d/ function is to the /m/

functionand by implication, as speech is to melody, sex to nurture, lit-

eral to metaphorical speech, male opossums to female opossums, peas-

ants to bourgeois, and Stravinsky to Chabrier, to name only a few of the

oppositions in question. Indeed, they demonstrate that the key to the en-

tire book is G major (Figure 1), and that the book itself could perhaps

better be entitled The Sharp and the Flat.

Notes

1. As usual, the English translation does not do justice to the elegance of Lvi-Strausss

formulation in the original French.

2. The most famous of these was the Quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns, pro-

voked by a poem read to the French Academy which trumpeted that the achievements of

France under Louis XIV had surpassed those of the Greeks and the Romans (see Levine

1991; Dejean 1997).

3. The Essay is the subject of a lengthy analysis by Derrida in Of Grammatology

(1976:165268).4. Ideally, the reader should listen to performances of these two extracts: BBC Proms

2009: ChabrierOde la musique, YouTube video, 10:30, posted by Elgar1907,

September 29, 2009, www.youtube.com/watch?v=b0xI7I8mfwo (the passage in ques-

tion starts at roughly 2:50); Stravinskys Les NocesThe Royal Ballet, Part 3/3, You-

Tube video, 6:33, posted by TheGreatPerformers, July 1, 2007, www.youtube.com/

watch?v=0-ni8XUOqdM (the passage starts at roughly 2:32).

References

Dejean, Joan. 1997. Ancients Against Moderns. Chicago and London: University of Chi-

cago Press.


9/9


Derrida, Jacques. 1976. Of Grammatology. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, trans. Baltimore:

Johns Hopkins University Press.

Jakobson, Roman. 1962. Why Mama and Papa? In Selected Writings, 1:538545.

The Hague: Mouton.

Johnson, James H. 1992. Musical Experience and the Formation of a French Musical Pub-

lic. Journal of Modern History 64(2):191226.

Levine, Joseph. 1991. The Battle of the Books. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

Lvi-Strauss, Claude. 1969. The Raw and the Cooked, John and Doreen Weightman,

trans. New York: Harper and Row.

. 1973. Tristes Tropiques. John and Doreen Weightman, trans. New York: Atheneum.

. 1978. The Origin of Table Manners. John and Doreen Weightman, trans. London:

Jonathan Cape.

Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. 1984. A Discourse on Inequality. Maurice Cranston, trans. Lon-

don: Penguin.

. 1998. Essay on the Origin of Languages and Writings Related to Music. John T.

Scott, trans. Hanover, NH: University Press of New England.

Documents

Myth and Music: The Musical Epigraphs to The Raw and the Cooked