Music's Immanent Future

The Deleuzian Turn in Music Studies

Sally Macarthur, Judy Lochhead, Jennifer Shaw, Sally Macarthur, Judy Lochhead, Jennifer Shaw

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317091264
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Ethnomusicology

The conversations generated by the chapters in Music's Immanent Future grapple with some of music's paradoxes: that music of the Western art canon is viewed as timeless and universal while other kinds of music are seen as transitory and ephemeral; that in order to make sense of music we need descriptive language; that to open up the new in music we need to revisit the old; that to arrive at a figuration of music itself we need to posit its starting point in noise; that in order to justify our creative compositional works as research, we need to find critical languages and theoretical frameworks with which to discuss them; or that despite being an auditory system, we are compelled to resort to the visual metaphor as a way of thinking about musical sounds. Drawn to musical sound as a powerful form of non-verbal communication, the authors include musicologists, philosophers, music theorists, ethnomusicologists and composers. The chapters in this volume investigate and ask fundamental questions about how we think, converse, write about, compose, listen to and analyse music. The work is informed by the philosophy primarily of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, and secondarily of Michel Foucault, Julia Kristeva and Jean-Luc Nancy. The chapters cover a wide range of topics focused on twentieth and twenty-first century musics, covering popular musics, art music, acousmatic music and electro-acoustic musics, and including music analysis, music's ontology, the noise/music dichotomy, intertextuality and music, listening, ethnography and the current state of music studies. The authors discuss their philosophical perspectives and methodologies of practice-led research, including their own creative work as a form of research. Music's Immanent Future brings together empirical, cultural, philosophical and creative approaches that will be of interest to musicologists, composers, music analysts and music philosophers.

Part I
The academic music machine

1 The academic music machine

Sally Macarthur

Is music academia a homogenising machine? Does it privilege particular kinds of music and exclude others? Does it treat music as a discrete category? Is music creation the same as researching music? These are just some of the questions addressed by the three authors in Part I of the book.

In the next chapter, McClary sketches the conditions of homogeneity in music academia, unfurling the territorialising processes of the machinic assemblage bound up with Austro-German music and its all-pervasive ideology. Although McClary does not explicitly engage Deleuzian concepts, in what I would argue is nonetheless a Deleuzian mode of thought, she maps a cartography of music academia and opens a space for the becoming of the music academy. In effect, McClary demonstrates the ways in which the conservatory model of training functions as a machinic assemblage. In Deleuze, and Deleuzian–Guattarian thought, the assemblage or the abstract machine is not concerned with what the thing is, or is like – in this case, the intrinsic properties or metaphors associated with institutions loosely labelled ‘music academia’ – but rather with what makes it function as a machine. McClary’s cartography explores the political and social dimensions of the academic music machine. She demonstrates how these are driven by desire, exposing, in particular, their investment in and attachment to the Western art music canon. She shows how the conservatorium territorial assemblage¹ thrives on the power of negative difference: its territorialising mechanisms establish Austro-German music as supremely superior when compared with other kinds of music. But McClary also demonstrates that in each of these machinic operations there is always a deterritorialising impulse, a movement that seeks to undo and challenge the boundaries of the assemblage. She uses the deterritorialising term ‘musicking’ from Christopher Small to shift the emphasis from what music might mean to what it can do.²

McClary’s chapter adds another important perspective to the burgeoning field of ‘new musicology’.³ Her work simultaneously shores up the new musicological assemblage while breaking apart the old assemblage. It does this through the operations of the collective assemblage of enunciation, which, for Deleuze and Guattari, are the ‘acts and statements, of incorporeal transformations attributed to bodies’.⁴ The collective assemblage of enunciation territorialises the machine by creating a set of signs that form the basis of an identity. Western art music history presents a set of markers that distinguish its music from other kinds of music. The standard history of Western art music, in a Deleuzian sense, is ‘like a system of points and positions, which operates by cuts which are supposedly significant instead of proceeding by thrusts and crackings’.⁵ Its linear narrative highlights innovative musical developments which give rise to new genres and styles. It expounds on these as significant but, in so doing, it potentially limits the possibilities for other machinic connections. McClary’s chapter points to some of these other connections. She challenges the operations of canonical fetishism, critiquing the binary relationships that underpin the deeply ingrained positivist approaches to studying music and exposing how the apparatus of power for Western art music impacts negatively on all music. She then cracks the narrative open, modelling innovative ways in which to analyse music from different traditions and different time-periods side-by-side.

Small’s concept of ‘musicking’ – in which music is conceived as an activity rather than an object – is proposed as a useful ‘thinking’ tool. As a verb, ‘musicking’ shares features with Deleuze’s concepts, which are similarly active in conception. For Colebrook, Deleuzian ‘concepts testify to the positive power of thinking as an event of life. We create concepts in order to transform life’.⁶ Deleuzian concepts are not focused on what life means but rather on what it does. In McClary’s hands, Small’s concept of ‘musicking’ has the potential to activate a series of productive encounters with both canonical and non-canonical musics. In her teaching, she analyses Sardinian hymns and medieval organum together, juxtaposing sound clips (rather than scores) of Sardinians singing hymns in parallel triads with that of Notre Dame organum, and she shows that there are similar juxtapositions between Indonesian gamelan and Debussy. In so doing, she establishes a relationship between the sound of the music and the inaudible forces of the cosmos from which the music is actualised. Classical music begins to take on the character, to borrow from Hulse, of a ‘pan-global environment … in which the connections and separations run along pathways too jumbled and multifarious to be understood in terms of structural positions or identities’.⁷

As with much of McClary’s other work, she treats music as both a signifying system and a set of socio-political practices. McClary avoids the conception of music as a pre-determined, structural representation, taking into account the multiple ways in which it might be encountered by anyone in any given moment. This understanding of music as an activity or as an encounter lies at the heart of all her work. Beyond the pages of this book, her work has had far-reaching effects and, as I will elaborate below, it, too, functions like a machinic assemblage.

In a similar vein but with a slightly different orientation from McClary, Shaw addresses the issue of music as a discrete category, suggesting ways in which the divide between music and the other arts might be bridged. While Shaw, like McClary, does not directly engage with Deleuzian philosophy, her work holds out the prospect of escaping fixed positions, the already known and repetitive thinking. She canvases the work of recent post-structuralist theorists to address the focus on the great canonical works by most traditional music institutions and goes on to demonstrate how this focus might be disrupted by an awareness that music is always an encounter with multiple, multi-faceted, mediated and interpretative contexts.

Shaw takes up Kristeva’s concept of ‘intertextuality’, which is tendered as ‘an open discursive space’, in order to resist the hierarchy of reading relationships within a given text. There has been a tendency in traditional accounts of music, such as opera, to privilege music over its lyrical content and other extra-musical parameters. Shaw posits the concept of the ‘threshold’ as a site of temporal connection, a spatial point of contact, and a site of social and political activity, suggesting that all the content – musical and extra-musical – is pertinent to the experience of the work.

In the third chapter in this part, Williams tackles the question of whether the practice of music can be regarded as a form of research. Creative artists often find it difficult to convince the more scientific-orientated disciplines that their research outputs generate new forms of knowledge. According to Smith and Dean, the relationship between creative practice and research is problematic because of the nature of the conventional definitions of research.⁸ How do you measure the value and impact of so-called creative work? How do you answer social scientists who claim that their work is creative too? How do you answer the question that playing or composing music is not ‘real’ research? Williams puts forward the concept of the ‘assemblage’ from Deleuze as a model with a practical function, which, he argues, can be put to work by practitioner–researchers to connect their creative work to the problems they are attempting to solve and thus serve to validate their work.

As we read the three chapters in this part, it is possible to ‘hear’ Deleuze in the background, as in the work of McClary and Shaw, and to read his work foregrounded, as in Williams. In the remainder of this chapter, I want to think about how the three chapters bring together a collection of ideas and subject matter, coalescing around the music academy, that point to a series of becomings. What ties these chapters together are the workings of assemblages and the abstract machines that produce them. These chapters are not simply a series of reflections on themes relating to the curricula and research outputs of the music academy. As assemblages they themselves carve out territories while simultaneously engaging in deterritorialising processes. The Deleuzian concept of territory, as Message points out, is always a malleable site of passage. It is always in process, continually transforming itself.⁹ The assemblage of the next three chapters, then, emerges through the processes of their connections and inter – (and ‘intra’¹⁰) actions: with each other, and with the other assemblages into which they come into contact or are interlinked.

With this in mind, the present chapter performs the dual function of critique and multiplicity. It comments on some of the ideas of the three authors and introduces a plane of consistency conceptualised as the ‘academic music machine’. In Deleuzian thought, the abstract machine is rhizomatic in conception. For Deleuze and Guattari, ‘a rhizome ceaselessly establishes connections between semiotic chains, organizations of power, and circumstances relative to the arts, sciences, and social struggles’.¹¹ As a concrete example of this process, all of the chapters in this book can be understood as rhizomatic and machinic. To adapt an idea from Hickey-Moody and Malins, they are designed to function in practical, material ways, and to generate changes in the music academy.¹² Characterised as an assemblage, these chapters are at any point a rhizome connected with other assemblages, each characterised by diverse modes of coding (for example, political, musical, economic and social). There is a similarity between the assemblage in this part of the book and the book as generative object in the world. Deleuze and Guattari state that the book:

necessarily acts on semiotic flows, material flows, and social flows simultaneously … There is no longer a tripartite division between a field of reality (the world) and a field of representation (the book) and a field of subjectivity (the author) … there is a collective assemblage of enunciation, a machinic assemblage of desire, one inside the other and both plugged into an immense outside that is a multiplicity, in any case.¹³

The assemblage of the book is produced by an elaborate machinery. According to Deleuze and Guattari, machines are everywhere, ‘machines driving other machines, machines being driven by other machines, with all the necessary couplings and connections … we are handymen: each with his little machines’.¹⁴ This book, then, connects with those who read it and those who produce it, each with their different machinery to make it function as a book: the writing and editing machines, the marketing and publishing machines; the economic and political machines; and the reading machines, with their ever-changing, diverse perspectives, that couple with the book, producing it as a multiplicity.

The machinery of this book plugs into the McClary-machine, which is an apt concept that I have coined for considering how extensively her work has been taken up across the world.¹⁵ In turn, the McClary-machine plugs into the assemblage of this book. As a dynamic instrument of possibility, the McClary-machine produces its own assemblage, emerging from the territorialising activities of the collective assemblage of enunciation. As an assemblage, the McClary-machine is simultaneously driving while being driven by the academic music machine. Her critique in this volume, deterritorialises the stable and seemingly unchanging large-scale assemblage of the conservatorium. It simultaneously shores up the sides of the new musicology assemblage, which sits inside the large-scale assemblage of the conservatorium. The conservatorium is viewed as a monolithic institution for which the wheels seem to turn very slowly. As Deleuze and Guattari point out, ‘assemblages may group themselves into extremely vast constellations constituting “cultures” or even “ages”’.¹⁶ One aspect of the conservatorium assemblage, then, as noted above, is that it makes the canon core to its educating role. However, focusing only on this facet of the assemblage means that we are likely to miss the larger connections and the criss-crossing between it and other assemblages. McClary draws attention to these other assemblages and the ways in which they point to becomings. For example, the audience for Au...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• List of music examples
• Notes on contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• PART I The academic music machine
• PART II Deleuzian encounters
• PART III Materialities of sounding
• PART IV Immanent listening
• PART V Deleuzian ontologies
• Bibliography
• Index