Musical Encounters with Deleuze and Guattari

Pirkko Moisala, Taru Leppänen, Milla Tiainen, Hanna Väätäinen, Pirkko Moisala, Taru Leppänen, Milla Tiainen, Hanna Väätäinen

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781501316760
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music History & Criticism

This is the first volume to mobilize encounters between the work of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari and the rich developments in cultural studies of music and sound. The book takes seriously the intellectual and political challenge that the process philosophy of Deleuze and Guattari poses for previous understandings of music as permanent objects and primarily discursive texts. By elaborating on the concepts of Deleuze and Guattari in innovative ways, the chapters of the book demonstrate how musical and sonic practices and expressions can be reconsidered as instances of becoming, actors in assemblages, and actualizations of virtual tendencies. The collection pushes notions of music and sound beyond such long-term paradigms as identity thinking, the privileging of signification, and the centrality of the human subject. The chapters of the volume bring a range of new topics and methodological approaches in contact with Deleuze and Guattari. These span from movement improvisation, jazz and western art music studies, sound and performance art and reality TV talent shows to deaf musicians and indigenous music. The book also highlights such fresh ways of doing analysis and shaping the methodological tools of music and sound studies that are enabled by Deleuze and Guattari's philosophy. Their philosophy, too, gains renewed capacities and potential when responding to ethnographic, cultural, ethnomusicological, participatory, aesthetic, new materialist, feminist and queer perspectives to music and sound.

PART ONE

Elaborations

1

Unfolding Non-Audist Methodologies in Music Research: Signing Hip Hop Artist Signmark and Becoming Deaf with Music

Taru Leppänen

Music is often thought of as being an art of listening. The term ‘deaf musician’ might be comprehended as an oxymoron, but the musical practices of the d/Deaf¹ suggest otherwise (Fulford et al. 2011). Music has an eminent position in d/Deaf cultures; d/Deaf people relate to music by creating, producing and experiencing music, ‘contrary to the view that music making with a hearing impairment must be unfeasible, as some may think, it is actually quite prevalent’ (Fulford et al. 2011: 448). There are also several d/Deaf musicians and composers, such as the Scottish percussionist Evelyn Glennie and the musicians of the all-Deaf rock band Beethoven’s Nightmare. This article focuses on Deaf Finnish rap artist Signmark (Marko Vuoriheimo), whose album Signmark (2006) was the world’s first rap album by a Deaf musician.

Signmark (22 January 2015) reminisces that at seven years of age he watched his non-Deaf grandparents singing and playing carols with an electric organ on Christmas Eve. He was curious to find out what was going on. It was fun to poke the keys of the organ. He wondered what his grandparents were actually doing. Signmark’s parents were also Deaf, and his mother explained to him that this was something that belonged to the world of non-Deafs. He recalls that his grandparents were moving their mouths and hands and he felt slightly scared as occasionally this activity made it look as though they might have a seizure. As a result of this fascination with his grandparents’ actions, Signmark decided to find out what was at stake.

Signmark’s childhood memory opens up issues of listening, music and their relationship. Audism, discrimination on the basis of the ability to hear, is implicated in this memory. Because of audist notions of music, Deaf children did not study music as part of their education in Finland when Signmark was a child. Music was thought to belong to non-Deafs. This article focuses on Signmark in order to explore and develop non-audist methodologies in music research. I argue, with the help of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s thinking, that music, its production and experiencing it are more than solely auditory phenomena. Signmark’s performances as a musician and hip hop artist both bring out and challenge audist assumptions of music research.

Signmark describes his music as party hip hop that takes a stand. He raps about the experiences and history of the Deaf communities and his own experiences as a Deaf person. According to him, rap is an apt genre for expressing the anger experienced by minorities such as the Deaf. He was born deaf into a Deaf family. His debut album Signmark in 2006 included the soundtrack on CD and signed music videos on DVD. Signmark was introduced to the mainstream audience and media when he was asked to join the national Eurovision Song Contest in 2009. His second album Breaking the Rules (2010) was released by Warner Music and Signmark became the first Deaf rapper in the world to get a record deal with an international music label. In 2014, Signmark released his third album Silent Shout. In this album, he uses international, Southern Chinese, and American Sign Language. Two Hearing guests, the President of Finland Tarja Halonen and Minister for International Development Pekka Haavisto of that time, appear on the DVD included with the album as featuring and signing artists.

Signmark’s live shows are multilingual; the songs are performed with International, American and Southern Chinese Sign Language, and spoken English. He uses sign language and his collaborators Adam Tensta and Chike Ohanwe sing and rap in English. Signmark rhymes signs by ensuring reminiscent hand forms and signs, and he reinforces the signs with facial expressions. Improvisation is an essential part of the overall package. Signmark’s performances differ from more conventional hip hop artists’ musicking because he does not produce sound. He performs by signing, moving and dancing and hence, the sound of music is produced by other bodies in his performances. According to Signmark, his ‘own realm consists of lyrics, message and music in connection with the sense of touch. These include basses and vibrations’. He also hears some melodies and consequently, he tries to include these kinds of melodies, for example, mid-range register sounds played with the violin, in his performances (Mattila 2014, translated from Finnish by Taru Leppänen; Signmark 22 January 2015).

Scholars in the field of sound studies have examined the physicality of sound in inspiring ways in connection with d/Deafness. The concept of vibration has been an eminent link between Deaf studies and sound studies, as it expands the ways to experience music beyond the realm of hearing. Steve Goodman (2012) suggests that sound studies scholars should exceed the philosophy of sound with an ontology of vibrational force. Anthropologists Michele Friedner and Stefan Helmreich (2012: 6) bring out the materiality of sound by defining sound ‘as a vibration of a certain frequency in a material medium rather than centering vibrations in a hearing ear’. Anthropologist and ethnomusicologist Veit Erlmann (2010: 17–18) also emphasizes the materiality of hearing and proposes critical scrutiny of ‘the conditions that must be given for something to become recognized, labeled, and valorized as audible in the first place’. Jonathan Sterne (2012a: 8) argues, in the introduction of The Sound Studies Reader, that these discussions within the field of sound studies which are closely related to musicking in d/Deaf cultures must be taken into account in order to write anything of substance within sound studies.

In this article, I continue these discussions in order to dismantle audism in sound studies and music research. I will trace the emerging non-audist methodologies in these areas of research. These aims will be pursued with two significant concepts in Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophy, namely molar and molecular. In their thinking, molecular connects with becoming whereas molar relates to being. Molar entities and politics work at the level of macrostructures and binaries and include identities such as d/Deaf and Hearing, women and men, and human and non-human. A molecular micropolitics ‘takes place outside or beyond the fixity of subjectivity and the structure of stable unities’ (del Río 2008: 115). Deleuze and Guattari insist on the double politics of molar (macropolitics) and molecular (micropolitics) (Bogue 2012: 103). For Deleuze and Guattari (1987: 213, original emphasis), ‘every politics is simultaneously a macropolitics and a micropolitics’. In the following, I seek to attain non-audist methodologies in sound studies and music research by expanding the concept of musicking (Small 1998), approaching music as a multimodal practice and rethinking the notion of authorship.

Deaf people prefer to categorize themselves as a linguistic minority and not as a disabled group. Nevertheless, technologies of normalization have linked granting Deaf people their fundamental rights as citizens to classifying them as people with a disability (Lane 2002: 375). The inconsistency between the Deaf as a linguistic minority and as a disabled group can be discussed with Deleuze and Guattari’s thought. For them, identity becomes constituted in and through difference. There is no dualism implied between these concepts, ‘for the two types of organization are always intermixed in any concrete manifestation’ (Mullarkey 2006). The constant fluctuation between molar and molecular, macropolitics and micropolitics, is an essential trait of Signmark’s musicking. On the one hand, he states that the Deaf ‘should not be treated as disabled but as a language minority, who have their own culture and history’ (cited in an article published by the Embassy of Finland [Washington, D.C.] 2014). On the other hand, he has been actively involved in promoting the rights of disabled people in Finland and around the world (ibid.). Signmark (22 January 2015) states that he has to tread a fine line between treating the Deaf as a language minority and as a disabled group.²

Because of my position as a Hearing person, I would like to launch the idea of ‘critical studies of Hearing’ in order to enhance non-audist methodologies of music and sound studies and to grasp the ethical and political issues in studying Deaf cultures. In my take, critical studies of Hearing are concerned with noticing and studying molecular becomings in relation to the privileged molar cultures of Hearing people. In this respect, critical studies of Hearing resemble studies on whiteness (see, for example, Fine et al. 1997), and critical studies of masculinities (see, for example, Adams and Savran 2002), because they bring into question the privileged positions involved in the categories at issue.

Studying Hearing critically means that non-Deafs recognize their privileged position in relation to the Deaf. Furthermore, critical studies of Hearing are characterized by a focus on hearing and listening as historically and contextually variable concepts and positions. Most importantly, studying, hearing and listening critically in relation to musical practices means rethinking the methodologies of sound studies and music research. This suggests that non-Deaf people would question their prioritized position in relation to Deaf people. This process of recognition and questioning ushers in a demand to define the concepts of sound and music in non-audist ways. This process would also open up musicking increasingly for Deaf bodies in addition to normative and Hearing bodies.

Vision and hearing

For Deleuze and Guattari (1987: 299–350), the concept of music is not restricted to solely music ‘itself’, or the structures of musical sounds produced by composers and musicians. They extend this concept, as Ronald Bogue (2003: 14) describes, by arguing that music is an open structure that permeates and is permeated by the world. For Deleuze and Guattari, ‘music is not the privilege of human beings: the universe, the cosmos, is made of refrains; the question in music is that of a power of deterritorialization permeating nature, animals, the elements, and deserts, as much as human beings’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 309). However, Deleuze and Guattari concentrate in their writings, when discussing music, on the composers, musical works of art, and briefly on performing. Consequently, for the most part, they perceive music as an auditory phenomenon. In broader terms, however, their thinking allows us to significantly broaden the concept of music from its conventional and audist forms to also include other senses besides hearing in the processes of music making and experiencing it.

Sign language is visual whereas spoken language conveys meaning by using sounds. Sign language uses hand signs, spatiality, facial expressions, gestures and movements to communicate.³ In Signmark’s creative processes he spends a lot of time looking for rhymes which fit songs in sign language. He usually starts the music making process by writing about the topic that the song will deal with. After this, the texts and signs are composed in collaboration with Hearing artists. Then Vuoriheimo and Deaf actor Dawn Jani Birley, a native American Sign Language speaker, try to find rhymes which fit the texts when translating them into sign language. Signmark has worked with Alice Hu in the songs that are performed in Southern Chinese sign language. According to Signmark, the most important guideline in this process is to maintain the flow in the song. In order to achieve this, the team sometimes has to change the order of the words or signs. Nowadays the process of composing is more variable than at the beginning of his career; composing begins from texts, signs or music and there is a continuous flow between these components in the processes of music making. In addition, Signmark has created new ways of signing that have spread to the Finnish signing community. This style of signing is characterized as fast and contains rap culture features (Stenros 2008: 107–108; Signmark 22 January 2015).

Paying attention to the visuality of musical performances is a significant means of making music more accessible also for d/Deaf audiences. Sound studies and music research scholars might undo audist notions of music by examining practices that include seeing in addition to hearing music (Friedner and Helmreich 2012: 75). Signmark’s albums include a DVD that makes music visual and more accessible for d/Deaf audiences. To make music accessible to these audiences it is essential that Signmark’s signing is visible most of the time. Signmark’s live performances include often a screen to make the visual aspects stronger. He also considers the stage lightning design of live performances. The instruments on the stage have, if possible in the respective performance venue, different colors within the lightning, for example, drums might be white and violins blue. In the processes of music making, Signmark (22 January 2015) also observes visuality in terms of the interaction between signs, sounds, lights and the visual aspects of videos.

Signmark (22 January 2015) states that he learnt how different instruments affect people in different ways by watching them:

It is impossible to produce sound without movement. When you move, emotion is always involved in it. I can see the different speeds in musicians’ movements, how they move their bodies and variations of their facial expressions. And so, it is not only about sounds in musical performances. If you look at a musician as a whole, you can see actually lots about his or her attitude and way of thinking. In a way, it is possible to get to know a lot about the process of making sounds by watching him or her.

When Signmark watched musicians he learned that different instruments have a different effect on listeners. He observed the speed of movements, gestures and how bodies are involved in the sound-making processes. The knowledge Signmark has gained by watching the movements of musicians is crucial in his composing processes. For example, every now and then he asks the producer to make a sound that looks and sounds like a sign that he uses in the signed lyrics of the song. Signmark did not participate in the scoring of his first album, but he engaged in the scoring of the second and third albums (ibid.).

The molar definitions of the senses as separable and distinctive become questionable in Signmark’s musicking processes. Deleuze and Guattari (1987: 492–499) write about the inseparability of the senses in connection with visual art, specifically nomad art, and in connection with the concept of haptic. However, the relationality of the senses such as hearing and sight can be discussed and developed further with the help of their definitions of the concepts of molar and molecular. The senses can be understood, instead of being molar entities that entail separable and distinctive qualities, as molecular becomings. Modifying philosopher Jean-Godefroy Bidima’s (2004: 179) statement, the composition of sounds that are music becomes a composition of senses; in the above described acts of musicking, it is the sight and the hearing that are at play. When musicking is considered as a multimodal participatory space (Rebelo 2006), Deaf bodies are also allowed to participate in the processes of music making and experiencing music.

Musicologist Christopher Small’s concept of musicking is a powerful tool for approaching music in non-audist ways. According to Small (1998: 9), ‘to music is to take part, in any capacity, in a musical performance, whether by performing, by listening, by rehearsing or practicing, by providing material for performance (what is called composing), or by dancing’. The concept of musicking widens the concept of music by allowing it to include all kinds of processes, either auditory or non-auditory, relating to musical phenomena. The capacities of a Deaf and signing body allow lines of flight from the pre-given meanings of the concept of music.

Vibrations

A Deaf percussionist Evelyn Glennie’s (1993) description of hearing opens up the connection between touch and hearing with the concept of vibration:

Hearing is basically a specialized form of touch. Sound is simply vibrating air which the ear picks up and converts to electrical signals, which are then interpreted by the brain. The sense of hearing is not the only sense that can do this, touch and do this too. If you are standing by the road and a large truck goes by, do you hear or feel the vibration? The answer is both. With very low frequency vibration the ear starts becoming inefficient and the rest of the body’s sense of touch starts to take over. For some reason we tend to make a distinction between hearing a sound and feeling a vibration, in reality they are the same thing . … Deafness does not mean that you can’t hear, only that there is something wrong with the ears. Even someone who is totally deaf can still hear/feel sounds.

Musicking contains bodily sensations that go ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Contents 
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Musical Encounters with Deleuze and Guattari
• Part One: Elaborations
• Part Two: Events
• Part Three: Experiments
• Contributors
• Index
• Imprint