Music After Deleuze

Description

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. Title Page Copyright Page Contents Acknowledgements Introduction Chapter 1 Music, difference and repetition Music and identity-thinking Deleuzian difference, repetition, the virtual and the actual2 Identity, difference and repetition: Boulez, Webern and Schoenberg Athematicism: The virtual theme The open work: Virtual form Difference as ‘accumulative development’ Heterophony: The virtual line Deleuzian difference beyond modernism Gaelic psalm singing as heterophonic difference Composition, improvisation, variation and Deleuzian difference Beethoven and thematicism Schoenberg, Brahms and developing variation Conclusion Chapter 2 Producing new music: Rhizomes, assemblages and refrains Deleuze and Guattari and the assemblage Planes, assemblages and milieus Musical rhizomes and assemblages: Selective studies Dusapin, Faust and the Rhizome Contemporary operatic/music theatre assemblages Aperghis and Avis de tempête Goebbels and Neuwirth Bernhard Lang, assemblages, difference and repetition Conclusion Chapter 3 Rethinking musical pitch: The smooth and the striated Defining musical space Smooth and striated pitch space Smooth and striated space in Deleuze and Guattari Tonality as the dominant Western system for striating and organizing musical pitch Striated space: Alternative striations Equal temperament and its Western others Microtonality in music from Carrillo to Partch Striating pitch space in Indonesian and Indian music Spatial continuity (glissandi, clusters and clouds) Conclusion Chapter 4 Thinking musical time Boulez, Wagner, Proust and Deleuze Deleuze and Guattari on time Deleuze’s three passive syntheses of time Deleuze and his philosophical predecessors: Bergson, Husserl and Whitehead Music, time and temporality Debussy, Bergson and Jankélévitch Messiaen and time Boulez, Stockausen and musical time Elliott Carter, metric modulation and temporal multiplicity Grisey and a multiplicity of musical times Conclusion Chapter 5 A Deleuzian semiotics of music Hjelmslev, expression and content in recent music theory Expression and content: A Deleuze-Guattarian perspective Deleuze, semiotics and music Lachenmann, molecularity and captured forces Aperghis and a Deleuzian logic of sense Levinas, the hybridization of sound and ‘becoming-animal’ Conclusion Conclusion Notes Chapter 1 Chapter 2 Chapter 3 Chapter 4 Bibliography Index