The significance of Barthes’s “Musica Practica” in this company will later become clear.Īt first glance, the term musica practica immediately points to the way medieval theorists used the word musica to refer to related but discrete concepts: on the one hand, musica theorica or musica speculativa on the other hand, any music that one can hear, produced by any instrument including the voice, termed musica practica or instrumentalis.īut how does the term musica practica come to be used by Barthes in this essay for L’Arc? It appears nowhere else in his works and, in fact, only three times in the essay itself (not counting the titular occurrence). These essays were edited and introduced by the French composer André Boucourechliev, whose own experimental works were known for their exploitation of the choice and liberty of the performer. These were joined by a new essay by the composer Karlheinz Stockhausen on his work “ Kurzwellen avec Beethoven” (“ Shortwaves with Beethoven”), which the pioneer of electronic music issued for the bicentenary. 133) by Joseph Kerman, a re-developed extract in translation from his book The Beethoven Quartets (1967), now a classic but not itself translated into French until 1974. Among the other essays in the 1970 issue, devoted to the composer Ludwig van Beethoven in the bicentenary year of his birth, were the recently deceased Theodor Adorno’s “Le style tardif de Beethoven” (“Late Style in Beethoven,” a translation of the famous essay “Spätstil Beethovens” from 1937) and an essay on the Grosse Fuge (op.
It appears first, though, in the fortieth number of the quarterly journal L’Arc ( 1970), founded in 1958 by Stéphane Cordier, which (from 1961) devoted each of its issues to a prominent figure from literature, philosophy, or art: Barthes himself was the subject of number 56, in 1974. But his deployment of the term musica practica, which normally refers to applied music-making, and which originated in the world of medieval music theory, is only elusively explained where it is used, and its context and significance need to be more widely understood.īarthes’s essay “Musica Practica” is best known by anglophones in the translation by Stephen Heath in the essay collection Image Music Text, first published in 1977, and by francophones in the posthumous collection L’Obvie et l’obtus ( 1982). It should not therefore seem surprising that Barthes refers to music and musical ideas in a variety of his works. He certainly delighted in being a musical amateur: his forays into practical music, including playing the piano and composing works for a variety of instruments, have been documented in the excellent volume Barthes et la musique (Coste and Douche 2018). Music was a common thread that united the works of Roland Barthes and his personal activities.
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