The Metronome Episode
Karine Hahn

Extract from the Part III of her doctoral thesis
“The (Re)sonant Practices in the Dieulefit Territory, Drôme:
Another Way for Making Music”

Translation from French
and General introduction by
Jean-Charles François

Sommaire :

Part I: General Introduction
Part II: The Metronome Episode

Taking a metronome out during a rehearsal, is it an accident?
The off-beat uses of this heteronomous tool
The agency of the metronome
Internal Time and External Time
The Situation of Rhythmic Work Confronted to the Sculpture of a “Soft Metronome”

Part III: Reaching Agreement, in and through Musical Practices, within a Territory

Metronome Gap Made Possible
Coordinating and Adjusting to Create a Common Ground in the Dieulefit Surroundings
A choice of observation of actions that are situated, but taken in a temporal density

Conclusion

Bibliography

General Introduction

In October 2023, Karine Hahn brilliantly defended her doctoral thesis in sociology at the École des Hautes Études en Science Sociale, on “Les pratiques (ré)sonnantes du territoire de Dieulefit, Drôme: une autre manière de faire la musique” [“(Re)sonating Practices on the Dieulefit (Drôme) Territory: Another Way of Making Music“.] Karine Hahn is a harpist, sociologist, Director of the “Formation à l’Enseignement » at the Lyon CNSMD, and a member of PaaLabRes collective since its foundation. In the perspectives of this 4th Edition, Karine’s thesis represents a particularly important text for its meticulous investigation of everyday musical practices in a specific environment, and their critical analysis. Our intention is to publish large extracts of the thesis in this 4th Edition in serial form.
 
As a first installment in this process, we are publishing here an extract from the third part of the thesis: “La mise en accord des musiciens avec leur territoire : construire en commun, une expressivité démocratique“ [“Tuning musicians to their territory: building in common, a democratic expressivity”], and more precisely “the Metronome Episode”, a significant moment when one of the ensemble’s leading members proposes the use of this tool to find a solution to the problems of rhythmic collective accuracy.
 
Karine Hahn’s thesis is focused on the history and current practices at Dieulefit’s music school, the CAEM [Carrefour d’Animation d’Expression Musicale], in existence since 1978, and its inscription in the geopolitical context of the town of Dieulefit, a high-place of resistance, and its surroundings.
 
In her general introduction, Karine describes the Caem in this way:

This music school, founded in 1978 in the small town of Dieulefit, in the Drôme department, by parents with the wish to “to welcome everyone who wants to come to make music”, was presided at its foundation by Josiane Guyon. (p.2)

The Caem displays a) a commitment for civic engagement based on an awareness of social and cultural inequalities; b) a determination to share without exclusion; c) an involvement of all partners in the everyday life of the music school; d) an absence of normativity, and the idea of a constant invention of practices. For Karine “what’s intended is (…): to provide a space, instruments, and teaching, to make accessible for all a practice that you have developed yourself” (p. 3).
 
As part of her research, Karine Hahn decided to join in 2013 one of Caem’s ensembles, the Tapacymbal fanfare [Tapacymbal: phonetically “do you have a cymbal”], “playing flugelhorn for two years, then the small tuba.” The Tapacymbal fanfare is one of around twenty ensembles within the CAEM, part of the music school’s emphasis on “the extremely strong development of collective practices” (p. 108), and an affirmed link between music teaching/learning and the various existing ensembles. Initially Tapacymbal was “a collective workshop for citizen animation” (p. 151), then evolved into a more autonomous status as the “Fanfare Dieulefitoise issue du Caem” [“Dieulefit Fanfare issued from Caem”]. Karine describes its functioning in the following manner:

In Tapacymbal, certain characteristics of a fanfare are clearly present – the importance given to a repertoire implicitly inherited from the “orphéon”[1] coupled with the development of a festive, even carnivalesque dimension. But the musical elaboration is done with other strong characteristics, some shared with other Caem ensembles and pedagogical periods: the presence of conductor is forbidden who might assume an authoritarian role; the importance for all to speak up, both musically and verbally; the handling of musical information by participants; the continual reactivation in new discussions of choices previously made; a focus on rhythmic elements. (p.152)

To introduce the third part of her thesis, Karine proposes paying attention to the description of “musical moments” in which a way of making sound is collectively fabricated:

The ways of doing things reveal a musicians’ ability to tune into and with their territory, with modalities and according to criteria that are unique to them. The question of the rhythmic setting up offers a particularly dense means of questioning the relationship between the individuation and the collective. Moreover, these musicians are committed to making differences possible by circumscribing them, through their ways of doing things, to something that can take place in their functioning, a form of revendication (in the sense of claim, Laugier, 2004) of their common practice. More generally, the translation, and adjustment operations, the spaces for debates and the circulation of the different musical components create the foundation of a committed musical theory, which creates in the Dieulefit surroundings the conditions for a democratic form of expressivity. (p.42)

The section of the thesis entitled “Metronome Episode” which we publish below, is a particularly interesting example of tensions in the realm of practice between a) multiple levels of ability that exist in a given ensemble that need to be combined; b) a relationship to available tools that varies a lot among members of an ensemble; c) very diverse representations of music in its everyday practice by a group. On this last point, the most obvious tension analyzed by Karine Hahn can be found in the reference music education institutions dominated by “classical” music and the amateur practices more open to a variety of aesthetics that meet the expectations of those who participate in it. Karine, in her simultaneous role deliberately divided between critical investigation of the Tapacymbal fanfare practices and her committed participation in this ensemble, becomes herself one of the people to be observed and analyzed. Her own conception of musical practices (and its application in the case of metronome use) is thus only one of the possible representations within an ensemble in which each person expresses a slightly different point of view.
 
The object-metronome makes a drastic intrusion in the practice of a group that usually resists rather vehemently any external authoritarian imposition. Its sudden appearance triggers a cluster of contradictory elements, which will be positively resolved in solutions that don’t quite correspond to institutionalized norms. The metronome episode is for Karine a particularly significant moment of the encounter between a theory embodied in an object and its more or less effective influence on the practical solutions it is supposed to incarnate.
 
 

Part II: “The Metronome Episode”
Karine Hahn

The scene took place during one of the rehearsals of the Tapacymbal fanfare, in the old college hall, in March 2017. Tapacymbal was working on the rhythmic setting of Sydney Bechet’s Egyptian, in an arrangement proposed by Christian, the band’s clarinet and soprano saxophone player. To put together this piece represents for the group a certain challenge, especially at the level of its rhythmic setting. For a while these rhythmic issues occupied the essential part of the rehearsals. However, for some time then, no new materials or ideas came to me to enrich my analysis, which seems to me to indicate a stability of these ingredients and a saturation of the terrain of my field research. I had already noted that the rhythmic complexity, or the setting of polyrhythms were not impeding either the assertion of musical discourse or the ensemble cohesion. The plurality of the relationships to pulsation and the various attempts to reach a common pulsation had already definitively emerged during the different rehearsals and performances – whether as part of the fanfare’s daily practices, or in other Caem activities, such as the project with Miss Liddl.
 
But during this rehearsal on the evening of Thursday March 9, after several attempts at playing, “rien ne va plus”. And if this assessment is first expressed in these terms by Vincent, taken on by Helen on snare drum and then by several other musicians, it was also for me, at that moment, that “nothing’s going right”: Vincent, the rehearsal’s referent saxophonist, takes out his portable phone with a downloaded free application of a metronome, announcing by this gesture that a working session with this substitute metronome will take place. And, as we will not be able to hear the sound of this metronome while playing, he plugs it on the bass amp present in the room, after setting it on a table, so that the loudspeaker will be high enough that the musicians would not fail to hear it.
 
I’m bewildered by this imposition of an object that I considered representative of a music world against which the actors involved in the Dieulefit musical practices seemed to have taken a stand, and therefore suddenly seemed to me to call into question the whole theoretical construct in the process of being stabilized, stemming from my field research analyses. What I considered initially as an “accident” forced me to move once more my gaze, to pursue the inquiry starting with this “metronome” object, to realize that the use of this tool had not necessarily the same significance in Dieulefit, as the one assumed by me. As this “metronome episode” unfolds in front of me, as I observe the musicians with whom I’m experimenting how to play together not reacting as I’d expected while elaborating this piece of music, their common ground, I have to build up a new way of distancing myself once more as a musician-teacher. It requires a form of reflexivity on academic approaches embedded in me, sharpening in a new way my ethnographic concerns. And, once this distancing becomes effective, the “metronome episode” might no longer be one as such, adding a temporal density that makes its use no longer an issue of usage, but of valuation. The analysis proposed here follows the meandering path of my conceptions.

Taking a metronome out during a rehearsal, is it an accident?

Taking out a metronome, even before being used, is an act. It is preceded by Vincent’s declaration that “nothing’s going right”, confirmed and relayed by other musicians, verbally or showing signs of exasperation. In summoning the tool, by taking it out of his pocket, Vincent conveys the fact that the group isn’t playing rhythmically together (or not enough). After having experimented with several working modalities, he expresses the need for outside aid – here, a technological accessory. This “metronome scene” is both an event and, taken in its temporal density, an “episode” of the Dieulefit rhythmic issues.
 
The lack of any negative reactions to this proposal, apart from a few sighs and two or three negative expletives [Oh! no…], in an ensemble accustomed to expressing its opinions almost in continuity with the notes that are being played, underlines the fact that the proposal is approved. Vincent’s initiative is even accompanied by:

Wait a minute, we’ll not hear it… take the amp, there…
Yes, you’re right… we’ll put it on the table, to hear it better… Does anyone have a cable?
Wait, there, yes, I think there is one in the cupboard.

Here’s a “metronome” application set up on a portable phone, connected to a bass amp: three objects – the phone, the metronome, the bass amp – that refer to different functionalities, uses, and representations. The use of the phone probably changes the representation of the metronome that some or the others have – you can consider, without too much fear of extrapolation, that its characteristic as a familiar and personal object decreases both its authoritarian and school-related dimensions. But this interpretation of mine at the time was not confirmed by what the actors had to say: in ensuing discussions, they always made reference to “the metronome”.
 
What’s more, the use of the object metronome was associated here to another object on which it is connected, the bass guitar amplifier, that has a different and multiple intentionality. In the fanfare rehearsal room, this amp is used in rehearsals to amplify the bass in popular music groups and in the “bœuf” [jazz jam session] workshop. So, there are also representations in the mind of the fanfare’s musicians that are linked to this use, especially on the side of freedom and creativity, that can counterbalance an authoritarian representation of the metronome. Here too, however, this interpretation refers above all to my own need to minimize the normative dimension of the metronome, both in its use and in the interactions occurring in the situation, so that I can understand how it might fit in.
 
The metronome object, to keep the focus on this object in the mentioned tryptic, confronts you with a bundle of intersecting intentionalities. On the one hand, to what extent the use of the tool, in its primarily school meaning, differs from the way it was initially thought – that is to give to the performers a reference for pulse duration in relation to indications of expressive intents through the tempo, corresponding to the wish of the romantic composer for the performer to be as close as possible to his or her intention (Barbuscia, 2021).[2]. On the other hand, the strong representations linked to the metronome, and the relationships the users have or haven’t to this tool, differ with each of the musicians in presence – which means that they find themselves in different relationships to each other with this object. As for my own relationship to the metronome, as a professional musician observing the situation, while participating in it as an amateur tubist, the metronome is like a “repository of constraint in the world”.[3]
 

The off-beat uses of this heteronomous tool

The affordance theories (Gibson 1979), by proposing to closely observe what comes from the environment when an agent undertakes an action, enable us to take into consideration the different relationships to an object that various people have in order to envision the potential meanings they might invest. In the environment in which I evolve professionally on a daily basis, the use of the metronome is for me foremost an imposition external to the playing context, that is necessarily normative. As a support object par excellence for primarily a pedagogical practice, the metronome corresponds to a propaedeutic conception of musical teaching. Extremely normative and prescriptive, it’s difficult to escape it.
 
In addition, the metronome is more than just a working tool, it carries certain values stemming from the context in which it appears. While the regular division of time is a culturally recent phenomenon[4], in music, the metronome instigates, as early as 1815, an equal relationship in musical time, which presupposes that you can divide it in a regular manner, creating the “illusion of objectivity in music” (Barbuscia, 2012, p.54). The use of the metronome soon imposed itself. “Promoted by composers as the only efficient ‘remedy’[5] to a default that the musical art had never been able to obviate, the metronome passed, without any difficulty or intermediary phase, from an accessory making a few happy to the indispensable object of any musical practice” (Ibid., p.58). This is consistent with a very strong rationalization of practices, notably towards republican equality – the revolutionary project of the Paris Conservatoire (Hondré, 2002). Equal beats organize the music. The metronome is then the egalitarian instrument par excellence: it is the physical proclamation of political equality. At the same time, it posits a relation to values: you must be with the metronome, assimilating the rhythmically normative performance to a moral issue. Aurélie Barbuscia also underlines the dimension of control conveyed by the instrument (Barbuscia, 2012, p. 63),[6] developing the idea that transgression can be found among the professionals (Ibid., p.67), as a mark of distinction, while amateurs and beginners must remain within the respect of a norm.
 
While my relationship to this tool is necessarily built with this background,[7] the other musicians in Tapacymbal don’t belong to the same environment, or not exclusively. They potentially refer to other kinds of metronome use, some of them considering it as a simple tool. Of course, the tool, necessarily normative because it is institutional, prescribes a certain use. The action aimed by its use is indeed, in all the different cases, to work towards achieving a common rhythm. But the way in which the actors use it, precisely in the choosing when to produce their sound in relation to the proposed beat, doesn’t necessarily fabricate the same meaning from one ensemble of musicians to another. While globally the use is the same, its application differs, and the valuation is not the same.
 
The percussionists here consider the metronome as a propaedeutic object, a tool on which to rely, but less for themselves than for others. Jean-Louis, on the bass drum, often mentions the fact that he must “play the role of a metronome”, similar to the measuring stick[8] that this new tool partially replaces, while waiting for Hélène, at the snare drum, to “gain in stability”, so that he could “drop this role and enjoy a bit more”. In this case, the physical metronome replaces the snare drum and the bass drum, allowing these musicians to concentrate on other musical aspects. Likewise, Vincent, in a deadlock over the working methods to play the piece, proposes a tool he hopes to lean on, in the sense that the other musicians will potentially be able to take reference from it. But unlike the percussionists, this doesn’t allow him after all to turn his musical attention on other things: the focus then is on appraising whether or not the musicians are in sync with this external reference. Vincent, who as the fanfare referent feels particularly concerned by the choices of working methods, finds himself in a new, self-created constraint. While he practically never plays the role of timekeeper for the group, by bringing this telephone-metronome, this object forces him to be the referent appraising whether or not the musicians correctly play the impacts of the beats at the same time with it.
 
But in fact, it’s not the way it works. For most of the instrumentalists present, their use of the metronome is neither on the side of the normative imposition of an off-the-ground pulsation, nor on the side of a tool proposing a reference for playing in homorhythm. When the group begins to work with the metronome, all the fanfare musicians concentrate in a new way on rhythmic issues, and, after about half an hour of constant trial and error with the metronome, they succeed in playing together on a common pulsation, but not with the metronome pulsation that continues its regular scansion beats out of the bass amp. Here, the musicians use the metronome to find their own way of playing this new piece rhythmically together – the application isn’t uniquely set in motion as a “make believe” pretence of playing with a metronome.[9] But they use it as a mediation tool, an external reference that helps them to focus on rhythmic issues, letting of course it play its role to the fullest, but in a certain way out of sync with the imposed norm – in a certain way that doesn’t stick to the metronome pulse, and without aiming to do so. The metronome thus has the same significance for action than in the institutional framework of a music class or an ensemble rehearsal – that is to help with rhythmic accuracy, eventually within an ensemble. And at the same time, it will be used to avoid using it. The valuation they attribute to the object and to what it enables them to do is different from that attributed to this object in a normative framework.
 
Thus, the use of the metronome, if prescribed by the object, doesn’t indicate the status and the power, the powers, granted to it – the metronome, conductor or reference point, the tool allowing to work towards being collectively with its beats, or to find a common pulse, eventually aside from the metronomic pulse. It undoubtedly doesn’t have the same significance for all the musicians present, and it can be considered as one of the playing and interacting spaces in-between the musical Dieulefit practices and the “under-layer” of the musical institutionalized practices on the national territory. This metronome implies different types of musical conceptions, which are as many constraints that are then discussed and negotiated in real situations.

The Agency of the Metronome

The metronome, with the various intentionalities it carries here, is therefore also an object that makes people do something. This tool is mobilized for its intended purpose (to provide a fixed and repeated reference point of time divisions), it also has a power of agency, a capacity to generate one or more actions.[10] By replacing the bass drum musician, the metronome assumes the function of a person. A unique and collective reference point, chiming a regular pulse from which the musicians cannot escape, the object becomes a form of embodiment of a conductor – but referring to a figure of the conductor who would act like this object, only “beating time”,[11] even as this figure of a conductor is rejected. This leads during the rehearsal time to a form of double bind, to which the musicians will have to resolve, through their playing, and particularly through their discussions. The metronome is thus able to “make the musicians to do something”, to incite them to find solutions for playing together rhythmic settings. Here, it is accepted as mediation enabling of “finding a collective pulsation”, that will allow the musicians to play during perambulation, while at the same time not appearing as an authoritarian figure who would oblige the musicians to be in time together with the metronome.
 
The object-metronome, during this Tapacymbal rehearsal, also makes people do something other than just repeating the same musical phrases attempting to get as close as possible to the amplified pulsation and/or to a common pulse. On the one hand, it triggers some sense of humor, which is both a safeguard and a sign of a possible drift that shouldn’t be overlooked, particularly that of the military band marching beat. In this way, Christian comments the starts of each playing sequence with the metronome by “Ein, zwei, drei, vier!”, a trait he reinforces when the musicians succeed in playing rhythmically together by calling out “Third Reich!” Christian is beside me, the most professionalized of the musicians present, having played in improvisation collectives, and perhaps because of that, the one for whom this tool most embodies the figure of the authoritarian conductor. But during the rehearsal break, in discussing the metronome, he insists, still with the tone of a joke, that “even so, it does allow you to play with each other…” These humoristic touches symbolically mobilize a particularly evocative universe for the Dieulefit residents. The way of saying marks a limit or a vigilance. It indicates that a kind of relationships emerges to rhythmic accuracy that can be interpreted differently from the meaning intended by the musicians present at this rehearsal. They can be analyzed as a regulator of the use of the object metronome. On the other hand, the use of the metronome provokes a debate: it triggers a discussion that initially took place during the rehearsal break, and then continued into a collective debate at Vincent’s home, with the quasi-totality of the musicians.

Internal Time and External Time

[During the rehearsal break, in the same room.]
 
Vincent [reacting to a remark by a musician that I didn’t hear]: And the metronome, among other things, allows you to… to… it’s the thing that we all have experienced, you plug in the metronome and you have the impression that it’s irregular.
 
Luc : hum hum, yes, …
 
Vincent : Because we’ve integrated, we’ve integrated a regularity in relation to what we felt, and we have to adapt this regularity to the others.
 
Christian : Sometimes it’s the fault of the batteries too… [Laughs]
 
Cathie : Which means that the metronome, it’s completely inhuman…
 
Vincent : It’s inhuman, but makes you aware of your perception of time, and of the fact that it’s not always exactly the same as those you’re playing with. All the discussions where you say “but it’s you who’s speeding, but no it’s you, it’s you who’s irregular, but no it’s you”, it’s just the work to achieve a time perception that would be the same at a given moment. And after all, to make music, it’s just to get into the same irregularity. We don’t give a damn about the metronome. Except that it’s the tool that allows us to become aware of this.
 
Christian [slightly ironically, now getting out of his other parallel conversation]: but it even allows you to play with others…”

Vincent, who develops in his musical practice a strong reflexivity, is particularly interested in these kinds of exchanges. The question of an individual perception of time, in relation to a metronomic reference perceived as fluctuating and plural, according to individuals, is a subject that motivates him and that he has already discussed outside the Tapacymbal context. It can also be interpreted in the light of the tension noted by Alfred Schütz (2006 [1984]) between internal time and external time, and the forms of communication created by the fact of playing together – a musician facing a work, or potentially a group of musicians:

In our problematic, it is essential to have a better understanding of the time dimension in which music takes place. […] [I]nternal time, the duration, is the very form of music’s existence. Of course, playing an instrument, listening to a record, reading a page of music, all these events take place in an external time, the time that you can measure with metronomes and clocks with which the musician “counts” to ensure the right “tempo”. […] [W]e consider internal time to be the very vehicle where the musical flow takes place. One can measure external time; there are minutes and hours, and the length of the sound grooves that the phonograph needle has to travel. There is not such a measure for the dimension of internal time in which the listener lives; there is no equivalence between its parts, if there are parts. (p.23)

“To make music, it’s just to get into the same irregularity” is an answer to this tension.[12] Observing musicians “making music together” then consists in identifying how the flows of internal times are linked, and how their synchronization (including in a choice of heterochrony) is ordered in a external, common time.
 
Alfred Shütz:

It seems to me that all possible communication presupposes a relationship of “syntony” between the one who makes the communication and the receptor of communication. This relationship is achieved through the reciprocal distribution of the experience unfolding in the internal time of the Other, through the experience of a very strong live present shared together, through the experience of this proximity in the form of an “We”. (p.27)

The Situation of Rhythmic Work Confronted to the Sculpture
of a “Soft Metronome”

After the rehearsal, the discussion continues over a drink in Vincent’s home, which is also the site of his carpentry workshop. On the upright piano, at the entrance to the living room, near some objects and an open black mechanical metronome, there is a solid wooden sculpture that represents a mechanism that seems to have the same characteristics as Dali’s “soft watches”[13] — a kind of “soft metronome”, in proportions quite similar to a traditional metronome, with a larger base. This artistic object that diverts a mechanical object, and which a certain number of the fanfare musicians know well as they fairly regularly pay a visit to Vincent, also possesses a certain agency: the capacity to propose a re-reading of the metronome, of which it is a subversive representation, just after a rehearsal animated with this tool by the one who owns and displays this sculpture to the view of all the invited fanfare musicians. This diversion repositions the metronome as an object and not any more as a tool – a parallel that could be drawn to the telephone, which, during the rehearsal, was diverted into a metronome, shifting it then from object to tool. Above all, this representation of a soft metronome, that evokes an improbable beat, necessarily irregular and nonchalant, out of time, and at the same time frozen in its fluctuating movement in wood, brings about a subversive dimension to the object it diverts.
 
In the moment of this discussion during the “coup à boire” at Vincent’s, this object doesn’t arouse much reaction, perhaps because it’s already familiar to most of the musicians. It’s also in a part of the living room a little set back from where we’re sitting. When, moving over, I discover it and exclaim, in an already high sound level ambiance, only a few react, and these interventions are relayed only by laughter – Vincent’s in particular, who quickly returns to his discussion:

Valérie: “Yes, yes, I know it!”,
Christian: “No wonder we can’t play in rhythm!”
Benjamin: “Hey, say, Vincent, that’s the one you should bring to rehearsal!”

Like Christian’s jokes, the display of this “soft metronome” can perhaps be read as an adjustment that enables the mobilization of the metronome object, but with a shift, leading either to not taking it seriously, or to breaking down rigid representations that are frequently assigned to it, and enter into dissonance with the Dieulefit “common higher principles”.
 
Thus, what the metronome makes the Dieulefit fanfare do is 1) a common work on pulsation, allowing them to “get into the same irregularity”; 2) some humor, ensuring an adjustment between what the tool imposes and its use in the Tapacymbal context (strolling together, yes, marching in step together, no); 3) a deflection of its tool dimension into an artistic object; 4) a collective discussion on what is to feel a tempo and search together a common pulsation. Besides, two characteristics of the way of making music in Dieulefit, already encountered, emerge strongly from this situation. On the one hand, discussion and debate are essential and constitutive procedures in the construction of musicality. On the other hand, even in this very constrained and situated rehearsal situation, facing a metronome, a heteronomous tool par excellence, and as the objective is to create some common ground, the relationships to the object, as well as what its use provokes, are as heterogeneous as the musical forms present in the Dieulefit territory.
 
 

Part III : Reaching Agreement in and through Musical Practices,
within a Territory

Metronome Gap Made Possible

So, at the Dieulefit fanfare, this metronome may be for some musicians “just a metronome”, for others it’s at the same time a normative object, a tool it would be a pity to do without, the possibility of a working method among others, an object that can be associated with other ones, and even deflected and subverted. If it is used here, it’s because it doesn’t represent a danger in the eyes of the musicians – who know how to protect themselves from the metronome “fateful consequence[s]” developed by Jacques Bouët (Bouët 2011).[14]
 
For all that, the use of the metronome, in the situation described above, can also be read as a gap between what engenders adhesion reactions, that is to do what Vincent proposes, and even to help him in making his proposal possible, and to realize that in a certain manner. The collective creates the possibility of this gap by circumscribing it, through their manners of doing, to something that can take place in their functioning. Group playing, humor, definition of limits, discussion and debate mark the refusal to consider the metronome as the ultimate referent and reduce it to what it also is: an object and a tool enabling a form of experimentation.
 

Coordinating and Adjusting to Create a Common Ground in the Dieulefit Surroundings

In Dieulefit, the issue of “reaching an agreement” among musicians appears to be really central. It’s done in ways, and according to criteria, that are specific to the actors involved in these practices. The desire of “reaching agreement” between musicians to play together cannot be taken for granted. While it can be considered as a musical necessity arising from the musical contexts played, or as social evidence in certain contexts of normative practices, some collectives defend playing contexts that allow for an absence of reaching agreement, at least prior to periods of common artistic practices.[15] Moreover, the way Tapacymbal operates that makes it possible to join a group before knowing how to play, or to perform an instrumental solo without having mastered its rhythmic framework, indicates that it’s neither the musical stakes of the repertoires played, nor the norms implicit in group formats, that animate this desire of “reaching an agreement”, to find an adjusted manner of practicing music in Dieulefit.
 
My hypothesis is that musicians here decide to reach agreement, and on what they might agree, not only according to the modalities that fit them, but according to the ones that enable them to put into practice and to nurture “what they hold on to” and “that holds them on” (Bidet & al. [Dewey], 2011). These practices participate notably to give substance to some “common higher principles” identified in this article as the manners of making the Caem, Tapacymbal, the Festival 4th Résonnants, and which can also be found in spheres other than musical, particularly in the Dieulefit residents’ relationship to history, and in a few various tales told here and there. Reaching agreement among musicians is therefore done in and with their territory. The choice on which the musicians coordinate together to create a common ground, the modalities of adjustment, debate and circulation, are a way of building a territory of the music of Dieulefit surroundings, while at the same time fabricating some musical practices.
 

A Choice of Observation of Actions that are Situated, but taken in a Temporal Density

What remains to be seen, then, as close as possible to musical fabrication, is how and what is at play in this agreeing process among musicians as they construct their music. The profusion of musical practices in Dieulefit, paired with a terrain that developed over several years, provides a very dense analytical material that I treated in the two first parts of this thesis. Because this way of reaching agreement is dependent on actions that are situated (Ogien & Quéré, 2005), but situated in dense temporal layers, this third part draws on situations that are described and then analyzed as events chosen among other possible actions, identified at the end of my analyses as characteristic to the ways of making music in this territory.
 
Let’s pause for a moment to consider the temporal density of situated actions. Each situation, very closely observed, reveals “events” – as for example the fact of taking out a metronome. The metronome is an event in relation to my observations, because from where I stand in the understanding of how the group functions at this precise moment, coupled at the same time with the density of my representations of the tool, the metronome is for me unexpected, out of step with the identified and expected ways of doing things. While working on the rhythm has been a constant feature of the fanfare at least since I joined it, the first approaches to rhythmic work methods were far from the normativity of this tool. During my first interview with Jean, before joining the fanfare, he told me[16] how he and his drummer friend Nico had spent at least one hour with Dédé to turn around an iron barrel hammering in rhythm, getting this trumpetist to feel the rhythmic turn that he had to play in Libertango.
 
Bringing out the metronome in a rehearsal is also an event, because it can be identified as triggering certain actions. Bringing it out during rehearsals is not part of the group’s habits, and the gap with the normal proceedings provokes exchanges that are themselves transformed. But rhythmic preoccupations on the one hand, and discussions on musical preoccupations on the other hand, are part of Tapacymbal’s usual way of doing things. To analyze the scene with the metronome as an “episode” is therefore above all a construction of the onlooker, due in part to the constitution of my own eye, to the intermittence of the ethnographic eye, and to the form of the setting of the enigma. But this reading of events is articulated with a very thick temporal density, brought to light by at the same time the duration of the field survey, the diversity of the contexts in play I was able to observe, and the indices that really occurred during the rehearsals.
 
So, whether it’s Egyptian, which Tapacymbal has been working on for a few months, here with the help of the metronome, or even more so Oye Como va, which the fanfare has been playing for several years, and which was often experienced in concert situations, the rhythmic issues have been structuring the rehearsals since their first reading. Moreover, the pieces are constantly revisited, with a concern for finding together a common rhythm that is constantly retried and tested. Likewise, the Thursday night’s rehearsals only show intermittently the musical practice of the Tapacymbal’s instrumentalists. The playing time between rehearsals, that varies a lot from one instrumentalist to another, can be very substantial – the working session at Valérie’s home, described in the first part of the thesis, shows that there are procedures in operation that only take place during this actual time, and impact the playing during collective rehearsal. In another rehearsal, Christian addresses the group to suggest a rhythmic element that had not been identified on the score, because he feels he can do so in view of the way the ensemble is playing the piece: a manner of playing that “functions” becomes a problem because he feels it’s possible to institute it as such. In these situations of synchronization, the issue of listening is central – both for the musicians playing, and for the description that can be made of them in observation situations (Weeks, 1996).
 
Here, the process of reaching agreement among musicians in and with their territory is negotiated for the most part around rhythmic adjustments, in situations that were transcribed and analyzed in the first part of this article. These rhythmic adjustments produce something other than a simple rhythmic set-up. They say something of the relation to a norm, to some outside references, whether or not carried out by a conductor. Apart from the fact that these musicians consider the musical parameters in the way they interact (the flutist in Miss Liddl changes the attack of a note, then its pitch to match what is rhythmically expected), the rhythmic question, like the metronome, is solved in such a way as to allow for discussions and circulations and the possibility of a strolling that draws the audience into this process of reaching agreement.
 
Moreover, the process of reaching agreement through musical practice with and within its territory is achieved here through circulations – of musical elements, of roles, of voices – and through translation operations and adjustments, so that each voice counts and can be heard, carried, claimed (in the sense of claim, Laugier 2004), and participate in the common way of doing things. Some of these operations are described in the second part of the thesis, the analysis of which has made possible to throw some light on these ways of doing. The analysis of these musical practices shows that these ways of doing things concern and are supported by a committed music theory, which creates in the Dieulefit surroundings the conditions and the sound of democratic forms of expressivity.
 
 

Conclusion

(Extracts from “In Conclusion – Renewing One’s View to a Situation of Rehearsal”, p. 397)

To understand Tapacymbal through the logic of Dewey’s inquiry enables to consolidate us in our view of musical practices as an opportunity for investigations and experimentations, as instrumentalists, at the same time, fabricate music in ways they define in the course of their practice. Here, the constant problematization puts musical constructions back into play on a daily basis. Ways of coordinating and adjusting are elaborated in such a manner that plurality is guaranteed and visible, thus working through music on meanings that are what the musicians hold on to, and what holds them.
 
Observing and analyzing the implementation of Tapacymbal practices while participating in them, led me in the second part of the thesis to consider the actors of the Dieulefit’s musical practices as a community of investigators. The constitutive elements of their way of doing things, identified at the time, can be found here in the very precise forms of musical constructs, caught up in very dense temporal thicknesses. The way they are committed in structuring their music school, their ensembles and the festival, is also constitutive of their musical practices, and at the same time reinforce them. To identify these manners of doing things in closely observed musical practices, at the core of the fabrication of music wasn’t immediate, and referring to Dewey allowed me to strengthen an intuition that could not easily get rid of a reading of the situation as a simple problem of rhythmic setting up[17]. Thus, the duration and recurrence of my participation to Tapacymbal’s rehearsals and performances enabled me to consider anew these ways of doing things and their meaning, especially as I saw questions that, as a musician in the ensemble, seemed to me settled, being constantly brought back into play opening up new lines of investigation – something I wouldn’t have been able to identify in a shorter time span. The difficulty in sharpening my eye mainly resided in the strength of the highly integrated rhythmic isochrone approach, which constituted a screen for listening to rhythm other than in relation to a normative reference, with time sliced in isochrone pulsations. While this didn’t prevent me from thinking beyond various time organizations, as in this case by patterns and polyrhythms, nor from theoretically making it possible to consider them otherwise, it remains for a long time in my feelings and in my playing, and therefore in my listening, a background that was difficult to ignore, and I had to draw on my musician’s experiences to get rid of it. (…)
 
This music-social isochrone representation doesn’t only correspond here to my musician’s profile trained in specialized music education institutions: it’s also effective within Tapacymbal, as constitutive of one part of their repertoire. But it’s only one of several conceptions at work. A clearly differentiated practice would undoubtedly have obliged, and therefore allowed, to find other ways of observing rhythmic issues.
 
The idea there was to both listen with an isochronous approach, partly constitutive of the practices, and to construct the hypothesis that these musicians perhaps also had other manners of considering their own rhythmic set-up, opening ways to other kinds of listening. The “metronome episode” was in this sense a turning point[18] in my own investigation, leading me to consider that isochronous, or even heteronomous, pulsation was for these fanfare musicians one way among others to envision rhythmic issues, but that, with safeguards in place, it didn’t exclude other ways of doing things and should therefore be considered in the midst of a plurality. What I read as a double infringement of the technical object, that is summoning the metronome when nobody is forcing them to use it, and not to obey to the regularity of the metronome even though they do use it, is a form of hijacking of the object and appropriation of the tool.