Music After Deleuze

Edward Campbell

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781441137593
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

Music After Deleuze explores how Deleuzian concepts offer interesting ways of thinking about a wide range of musics. The concepts of difference, identity and repetition offer novel approaches to Western art music from Beethoven to Boulez and Bernhard Lang as well as jazz improvisation, popular and sacred music. The concepts of the 'rhizome', the 'assemblage' and the 'refrain' enable us to think of the specificity of musical works as the meeting of productive forces, for example in the contemporary opera of Dusapin and the experimental music theatre of Aperghis. The concepts of smooth and striated space form the starting point for musical and political reflections on pitch in Western and Eastern music. Deleuze's notion of time as multiple illumines the distinctive conceptions of musical time found in Debussy, Messiaen, Boulez, Carter and Grisey. Finally, the innovative semiotic theory forged in Deleuze-Guattarian philosophy offers valuable insights for a semiotics capable of engaging with the innovative, molecular music of Lachenmann, Aperghis and Levinas.

1

Music, difference and repetition

Music and identity-thinking

Perhaps above all else, the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze is one of ‘difference’, in which difference is favoured over identity. There are many ways in which we can conceive of music in terms of sameness or identity. Many listeners have a favourite recording of a given piece of music, whether it be a movement from a symphony, any kind of contemporary work or a pop song. It could be Carlos Kleiber’s celebrated recording of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, Glenn Gould’s iconic recordings of Bach’s Goldberg Variations or Bob Dylan’s perhaps rather idiosyncratic renderings of his own songs. As we listen to our favoured recordings, we may do so in anticipation of the confirmation of what we know will happen right on cue, our expectations confirmed every time. With alternative recordings or performances, it may be that the arrangement, instrumentation, tempo, key or any number of aspects of style are different in some way from what we have become accustomed to. A sense of disappointment is not uncommon when listeners are confronted with a live performance, alternative recording, different version or new interpretation of a piece, when those features or qualities that were most admired in the first-heard performance are not present in other performances? In this situation, the favoured model serves to brand the work with a fixed identity against which all deviations are regarded as in some way deficient.

While Scott Burnham may be correct when he states that the notion that each listening experience reveals something new about a piece is ‘creaky’ (Burnham 1995, p. 164), he perhaps also endorses a form of identity-thinking at the heart of the listening experience when he writes:

Why do we keep listening to our favourite musics?. . . . Do we really return to experience the music we value in the hope and expectation of hearing something new each time? On the contrary, I believe we return because we hear nearly the same thing each time, because the music becomes for us a magical presence we are eager to experience again. That we are enabled to enjoy an experience repeatedly because it remains basically the same may seem a paradoxical argument, and anti-intellectual in the extreme. But the musical experience is no ordinary experience; I would go so far to suggest that it is closer to the sense of uncanny presence felt by Hoffmann than it is to the tracking of a coherent process, however compelling that process may be (Ibid., p. 164).

While Burnham is not advocating the listening experience as one which entails following the same structural trajectory through each repeated audition but rather listening as a pleasurable realm where we experience music’s ‘uncanny presence’, it is, nevertheless, always ‘the same place’ and ‘the same uncanny presence’ (Ibid., p. 165).

A tendency towards musical identity is also found in the intention of certain composers, a significant exemplar being Hungarian composer György Kurtág, who, it would seem, wishes to fix a great number of aspects of his pieces. Virtuoso performers who have worked with Kurtág tell of the almost impossibility of performing the music to the composer’s satisfaction. He has a very strong idea of what the music is, how it should be played and how it should sound, and all performers have to match up. He takes great care over the notation of his scores and works with performers in a quite insistent way, trying to get them to perform pieces the way he hears them himself. Consequently, he is often frustrated when the results are not what he imagines and desires, and he laments either his inability to make his compositions consonant with his musical imaginings or the inability of performers to respond to his imaginings. In the piece Stele, for example, there is a passage of which he says

I have told the musicians and indeed also the author of the program notes . . . they should think of the scene in Tolstoy’s War and Peace where Prince Andrei is wounded at Austerlitz for the first time: all of a sudden, he no longer hears the battle but discovers the blue sky above him. That is what the music conjures up. I keep telling the story and no one responds . . . . No one can hear it. No one sees the blue sky. There’s nothing to be done (Varga 2009, pp. 76–7).

The fact of a composition cannot be equated with the score any more than it can be reduced to the composer’s idea, an individual performance, recording or act of listening. In an article published in 1928, the musical phenomenologist Boris de Schloezer, drawing explicitly on Paul Valéry, stated that ‘a musical (or poetic) work does not exist outside of its performance’, and that ‘its text is only a virtuality’ (Schloezer 1928, pp. 221, 223). This was modified slightly in 1947 when Schloezer posited that a musical work has ‘no objective reality’ and, this time drawing on the philosopher Maurice de Gandillac,¹ he went on to repeat that ‘its text is only a “virtuality”’ (Schloezer 1947, p. 19). Gandillac’s text is inflected to say that the realization of a work ‘always signifies for us the putting in actual form of a virtual preexisting reality’ (Ibid., pp. 290–1), and Schloezer compares the work to a plant which ‘grows from a germ and, strictly speaking, it is this germ which is a virtuality, the potential thing’ (Ibid., p. 302). In all of this, Schloezer anticipates, in a musical context, aspects of what will be discussed in this chapter as Deleuzian difference with its opposition of virtuality and actuality.

A third manifestation of identity-thinking in music takes certain enunciations of musical ideas as privileged objects. This approach favours, for example, the first enunciation of a theme, motif or subject within a sonata-form movement, the initial exposition of a fugue subject, the initial presentation of a theme for a set of variations or of an operatic leitmotif over all subsequent enunciations. While themes, motifs and all other initial ideas are often transformed in the course of a piece of music, it is frequently the case in the common-practice era that one enunciation, often the first, is privileged and becomes the marker against which all further soundings are heard as variations or deviations.

As with the concept of the theme, it is often presumed that musical forms should primarily value unity, integration and identity over the seemingly secondary values of contrast, diversity and difference. Classical forms, such as that of sonata or rondo form, are all too easily caricatured as fixed identities, moulds or templates into which composers pour music or in accordance with which compositional ideas are forced to conform. With this kind of identity-thinking, sonata movements from the common-practice era are reduced to the formulaic succession of exposition, development and recapitulation. In practice, as Arnold Whittall makes clear, the relationship between ‘form’ and the musical work is a much more fluid and variable one to the extent that, as A. B. Marx acknowledges, ‘there are as many forms as works of art’ (Whittall 2007–13). Consequently, no composer of worth produces a stereotype or clone of some notional model of sonata form, and the great works in the genre, from those of Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven onwards, amaze us with their innovation in terms of form, treatment of thematicism, harmony and overall tonal construction, to name only some key qualities.

The existence of musical analyses that set out from a notional model, relating the specificity of an individual work or movement to a formal prototype, suggests strongly that an identitarian philosophy is at work as the analyst focuses on how each unique exemplar either confirms or evades the expectations set out by the notional model. In a similar way, it may be said that everything from folk song melodies to late-Romantic symphonies are often viewed, at a number of levels, through the prism of a principle of identity, which favours privileged enunciations and forms and highlights the confirmation of expectations and of deviations from those expectations. Of course, it would be foolish to deny that, in many cases, this is exactly how certain repertoires are intended to be listened to, analysed and interpreted.

Deleuzian difference, repetition, the virtual and the actual²

Having set out some examples of identity-thinking within a musical context, we must now look to Deleuze’s critique of identity-based thought and the philosophy of difference which he proposes in its place. It is no exaggeration to state that the entire Deleuzian philosophical project centres around what he calls a new ‘abstract image of thought’, by which we are to understand, not merely a way of thinking, but rather that which is most often presupposed in thinking, and which tacitly and implicitly conditions thought (Deleuze 1994, p. xvi). In contrast with the traditional representational and identity-based thought, which, according to Deleuze, accounts for most previous Western thinking, this new image is to be based upon a concept of difference, which no longer reduces all differences to identities.

The image of thought which is developed in the books he co-authored with Guattari arises out of a philosophy of difference which Deleuze had already worked on in his independent studies, and most fully in Difference and Repetition (1968) and The Logic of Sense (1969). While his earlier essays explored the work of a series of anti-rationalist philosophers including Lucretius, Spinoza, Hume, Nietzsche and Bergson, the last two named are of particular importance in the development of the philosophy of difference. Bergson’s philosophy, which Deleuze first drew upon in the mid-1950s, values ‘internal difference’, in contrast to the Platonic ‘dialectic of alterity’ or Hegelian contradiction (Deleuze 2004, pp. 38–40), which operate on the basis of two antithetical options, apparently oblivious to the diversity of intermediate positions made possible by a philosophy of difference.

This philosophy of difference found further support in the early 1960s in Nietzsche’s critique of Enlightenment reason, which pinpoints Kant’s failure to include the realm of values in his critical analysis, where he simply assumes the value of the True, the Good and the Beautiful. Nietzsche, in contrast, places a critique of values at the centre of his genealogical philosophy, as he attempts to trace their development to their origins. It is at this point that he discovers difference and two alternative approaches to the generation of difference, namely, affirmation and negation (Deleuze 1983, pp. 89–91; 1994, p. 137).

The history of thought in Deleuze’s Bergsonian-Nietzschean analysis is variably exemplified in the philosophies of Plato, Aristotle, Leibniz and Hegel as favouring identity over difference, a situation he sets out to reverse with the positing of a new image of thought. Drawing upon certain Nietzschean currents, Deleuze identifies Platonism as the origin of this dominant tradition, this representational thought, which suppresses or excludes difference in favour of ‘identity, resemblance and similitude’ (Patton 1994, p. 145). Most philosophers ‘had subordinated difference to identity or to the Same, to the Similar, to the Opposed or to the Analogous: they had introduced difference into the identity of the concept, they had put difference in the concept itself, thereby reaching a conceptual difference, but not a concept of difference’ (Deleuze 1994, pp. xv, 32).

For Plato, the authenticity of something is determined by the degree of identity it shares as a copy with its original, hence the inadequacy of simulacra which are judged to be merely imperfect copies of the only true realities, the Platonic Forms. Deleuze, in contrast, rejects the philosophy of identity within the theory of Forms and seeks to overturn it through a philosophy of difference, which cannot be explained in terms of representation and identity. Accordingly, he denies ‘the primacy of original over copy, of model over image’, elevates simulacra and, thereby, places difference above sameness. For Deleuze, everything is a simulacrum since there are no absolute foundations or identities (Deleuze 1994, pp. 66, 128).

It is important to understand that difference, in the Deleuzian sense, is not difference ‘from or within something’ (Foucault 1977, pp. 181–3). Where traditional thought has tended to view difference from the standpoint of sameness and unity, Deleuzian difference conceives ‘difference differentially’. Within the framework of traditional identity-based thinking, ‘global resemblances’ are found within phenomena, which are then viewed in terms of ‘differences and partial identities’. At the end of this thought process, we are left with a range of likenesses and resemblances which can be classified in terms of their degree of identity or difference from the initial idea. While dialectics recaptures every difference in a future Aufhebung (‘overcoming’), Deleuze desires to free difference, a liberation which can only be achieved ‘through the invention of an acategorical thought’ (Foucault 1977, p. 186). Such a mode of thought would no longer provide primordial unities within which differences and multiplicities can be categorized, and it is this acategorical thought or univocal being which prevents the categorization of phenomena, and which enables difference to escape ‘the domination of identity’ (Foucault 1977, p. 192).

In aesthetic modernity, especially modernist art, literature and music, Deleuze finds a world which is defined in terms of difference and simulacra (Deleuze 1990, p. 265). He writes of the ‘permutating series’ and ‘circular structures’ of modern art, which direct philosophy away from representation, since with representation, every unique viewpoint must have a corresponding ‘autonomous work with its own self-sufficient sense’. He looks instead to works such as Mallarmé’s Livre or Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, which challenge and invert the notion of a model or pre-eminent position, as ‘the identity of the object read really dissolves into divergent series defined by esoteric words, just as the identity of the reading subject is dissolved into the decentred circles of possible multiple readings’ (Deleuze 1994, pp. 56, 68–9).

Deleuze relates the concept of difference to that of repetition, which he also believes to have been subject to thinking in terms of ‘the identical, the similar, the equal or the opposed’ (Deleuze 1994, p. xv). He posits a repetition, no longer subject to identity and sameness, but rather to difference and variation, and which, he suggests, is best exemplified in Nietzsche’s notion of the eternal return. This is not the return of the same, in the sense of history repeating itself, the same thing occurring again and again in the same way, nor is it to be understood in its moral sense as an affirmation of life. It is a return of the same which is ever different (Ibid., pp. 13, 40–1, 115, 126), and in which each return is a unique manifestation of a virtual, which is inexhaustible in its possibility, and which has no primary term (Ibid., p. 17).

The concepts of the virtual and the actual were taken up by Deleuze from his reading of Bergson, who had introduced the opposition in Time and Free Will (1889), developing it in Matter and Memory (1896), where he theorizes that memory starts out:

from a ‘virtual state’ which we lead onwards, step by step, through a series of different planes of consciousness, up to the goal where it is materialized in an actual perception; that is to say, up to the point where it becomes a present, active state; in fine, up to that extreme plane of our consciousness against which our body stands out. In this virtual state pure memory consists (Bergson 2004, p. 319).

Again, Bergson reflects that ‘the localizing of a recollection’ does not ‘consist in inserting it mechanically among other memories, but in describing, by an increasing expansion of the memory as a whole, a circle large enough to include this detail from the past. These planes, moreover, are not given as ready-made things superposed the one on the other. Rather they exist virtually’ (Ibid., p. 322). For Deleuze, Bergsonian virtuality involves the ‘possible coexistence’ of all of the degrees or nuances within something (Deleuze 2004, pp. 28, 44), and in Difference and Repetition, where the virtual and the actual are discussed more comprehensively, he makes clear that the virtual is not opposed to the real, that it is fully real and ‘completely determined’, and that it must not be confused with the possible (Deleuze 1994, pp. 209–11). Indeed, the real includes the virtual, the actual and their ‘reciprocal determination’ (Williams 2003, p. 164).

It is from this principle of the virtual that the eternal return operates, designating return, ‘not of being and the same, but of becoming and difference’, and the flux and multiplicity which it engenders result in the production of innumerable permutations of forces (Bogue 1989, pp. 28–9). Recognizing the aesthetic valency of the concept, Deleuze writes of artworks as ‘immersed in a virtuality’, a phrase which he exculpates from all vagueness in defining it as ‘the completely determined structure formed by its [the work’s] genetic differential elements, its “virtual” or “embryonic” elements’. Furthermore, these ‘elements, varieties of relations and singular points coexist in the work or the object, in the virtual part of the work or object, without it being possible to designate...

Table of contents

• Cover-Page
• Half-Title
• Series
• Dedication
• Title
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Music, difference and repetition
• 2 Producing new music: Rhizomes, assemblages and refrains
• 3 Rethinking musical pitch: The smooth and the striated
• 4 Thinking musical time
• 5 A Deleuzian semiotics of music
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Copyright