Rosalind Krauss — Grids (1979) §4 · Pierre Schaeffer — Solfège de l'objet Sonore (1966) §1

read Rosalind Krauss — Grids (1979) §4 · Pierre Schaeffer — Solfège de l'objet Sonore (1966) §1

Krauss talks about repetition instead of development — the grid, once formed, resists change, and she borrows the term etiology to describe this: not a history but a chemistry, a moment when elements combine and then simply repeat themselves without maturing. Schaeffer's problem is different but related — the ear that must unlearn its own education before it can hear the sound object at all, the "frail and mysterious passage between nature and culture" that music grooves out for itself and calls tradition.

I keep circling something about repetition that isn't stagnation. Mondrian's late canvases, Krauss says, aren't a development from the early ones — no one would plot them on a narrative arc — but this doesn't make them lesser. The grid appears and then the grid recurs, decade after decade, an antinarrative structure absorbed into a career that looks, from outside, like a plot. What if the essay itself, the note, the response, works that way — not building toward a conclusion but returning to the same lattice each time with slightly different light passing through it. The same crossed lines. A within-the-frame practice masquerading as beyond-the-frame commentary, each entry believing it addresses something outside itself while in fact only reorganizing the same few threads: the ear, the overload, the apparatus that filters.

Schaeffer's "acoulogy" — the discipline that would do for sound what phonology does for speech — never quite arrived, he admits, and maybe that failure is the more honest position: sound resists the coding language imposes, remains ungrasped by the very team assembled to grasp it, Reibel and Chiarucci and Ferreyra working for years toward examples that only gesture at the object rather than capturing it. The object of sound stays object-like, refusing full translation into the solfège meant to notate it. There's a fidelity in that refusal. A grid that keeps its blankness even while being filled in.