Hatred of Music

Pascal Quignard on music's invasiveness

Pascal Quignard’s Hatred of Music is impossible to summarize. It’s divided into ten “treatises” with titles like “It So Happens That Ears Have No Eyelids,” “The Song of the Sirens,” and “To disenchant.” He examines music from historical, mythical, phenomenological, and every other conceivable angle. But the treatises aren’t really treatises; more like Twitter threads, only less coherent.

For instance: His opening treatise, “The Tears of Saint Peter,” starts with the claim that we wrap our “injured and infantile acoustic nudity” in the triple cloth of cantatas, sonatas, and poems: “That which sings, that which sounds, that which speaks.” The cloth muffles “certain more ancient sounds and groans,” just as “we try to keep most of the noises of our body from the ears of others” (1). Music exists to drown out the sounds of life, which are the sounds of pain.

Then he’s citing Hesiod’s introduction of mousike, which modulates into a digression on Shamans, Pan, and the rites of panikeas, which “consisted in putting a young man to death by tearing him apart while still alive and immediately eating him raw,” all to the accompaniment of thyrsi, pan flutes, and singing (2). That leads him off to consider the relation of music and terror (3), illustrated by Haydn’s claim “that within him were hammer blows as God heard them, nailing his living hands, hammering his joined, living feet, on a stormy day as he found himself fastened to a cross, on top of a hill” (5). They he’s telling a tale of medieval Japan before turning back to the meaning of mousike and a reiteration of the link between music and terror. All that before we reach page 10. Quignard pretty much leaves us to figure out how it hangs together.

Hatred of Music is an experience rather than a treatise. I cannot summarize. I can only hint at a few of the many, many fascinating threads.