Foreword: About Jean-Jacques Nattiez

Summary

Editors’ note: Pierre Boulez was aware of the planning for this book and indicated to us his intention to provide it with a foreword. Although this would doubtless have been elaborated from earlier writings in which Boulez had expressed his deep admiration for and appreciation of our dedicatee's scholarship, nevertheless it is a matter of regret that he did not live to complete the foreword, which we know he had begun to think about. Partly in tribute to the memory of such a great musician, instead we offer here excerpts from his letter of recommendation, now privately owned, written in support of Jean-Jacques Nattiez's candidacy for a major award in 2002.

I have followed Jean-Jacques Nattiez's career from the beginning. The novelty and originality of his very first book, Fondements d'une sémiologie de la musique (1975), did not go unnoticed by observers in our field. This book was effectively the first of its kind to use methods of investigation based on the rigorous techniques of linguistics, in order to decipher and better understand the structures of musical language. With this truly fundamental work, Jean-Jacques Nattiez paved the way for a new branch of musicology, neglected until then. But beyond this theoretical and methodological work, he had the merit of applying his theories to areas as varied as they are worthy of deep interest.

The originality of Jean-Jacques Nattiez in the world of music lies in the fact that for him, musicology does not imply a narrow specialization, more often than not directed toward the past. That type of musicology is not without its utility but often seems to forget about both the present and other cultures.

As opposed to this, when looking at a list of his publications, one notes titles referring to topics that one has a hard time imagining as being written by the same hand. This is true of his studies of Wagner and another of Proust; in these, it seems to me, he has perfectly grasped the source of the greatness of creators of large-scale works: whether it be the Tetralogy or Remembrance of Things Past, these creators display the capacity, fundamental for me, of deriving compact yet fertile matrices for rich and infinite development.